Top Agencies: gyro | B2B Agencies Top Agencies

Major 2011 campaigns: Heathrow Express, “If You'd Taken the Heathrow Express, You'd Be There by Now,” online, out-of-home; Hobart, “Get Back to Scratch,” online, events; FedEx, “Live to Deliver,” TV, print, online, events, out-of-home

Comments: Increased revenue 25%, to $98.8 million; added new clients, including ADT, EMC, Lincoln Financial and Newell Rubbermaid; opened office in Singapore; 80% of business is b2b.

Rick Segal, worldwide president and chief practice officer at gyro, has a clear vision of what the b2b marketing category should be: more creative, more strategic, more digital and more global.

The New York-based agency made significant strides last year toward achieving those goals, executing high-impact campaigns for clients targeting audiences all over the world. The messages the agency created—and the way it distributed those messages—reflect Segal's belief that boundaries between work life and home life have changed,or even vanished.

“We're taking a more emotional, humanly relevant approach to business communications, and there's been great receptivity to that approach,” he said.

For example, the agency created an event and online marketing campaign for food equipment manufacturer Hobart that kicked off with Buddy Valastro of TLC's reality TV show “Cake Boss” showing off a 600-pound cake in the shape of a Hobart mixer at the National Restaurant Association Restaurant, Hotel-Motel Show last May in Chicago. The campaign, “Get Back to Scratch,” also included a peer-to-peer community site that had an average of 32,000 unique monthly visitors and a social media component that garnered 550 Twitter followers and 700 Facebook “likes,” along with 30,000 monthly Facebook post views.

Social media helped Hobart reach small neighborhood businesses it might not have otherwise reached, Segal said. “The typical restaurant or foodservice trades that we might historically have used weren't going to reach far enough,” he said.

For client FedEx, gyro created a similarly attention-grabbing campaign that took an alternate approach to traditional sports sponsorship. With the “Live to Deliver” campaign, gyro set out to link the FedEx brand to the dedication, preparation and commitment exemplified by professional tennis players at Wimbledon—even though the global delivery company was not a sponsor of the tournament. As part of the integrated campaign, FedEx “transformed” the Wimbledon and Southfields train stations into tennis courts. Traffic to FedEx's business site increased by 89% during the campaign period, and the number of unique visitors rose 102%.

Big ideas such as those are more important now than ever before, Segal said. “Ideas [have to be] big, and viral and incendiary,” he said. “They have to not just move to the marketplace but move around the marketplace as well.”

The agency had a number of significant account wins in 2011, including ADT, EMC, Lincoln Financial and Newell Rubbermaid. It also opened an office in Singapore to serve client Hewlett-Packard Co., which last year consolidated its commercial printer advertising at gyro.

The agency's 2011 revenue reflected its rapid growth, increasing 25% to $98.8 million, up from $79.0 million in 2010. Segal said that boost came in large part from the U.S. market. “We're very happy with the growth we've achieved,” he said. —M.E.M.

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