Copper Giants Is Bringing Radical Joy to the Client/Agency Relationship

One of the first things you’re greeted by when you land on the homepage of Copper Giants is a mantra. “We are out to destroy the current client/agency working relationship,” it reads, “and replace it with something radical: Joy.”

Copper Giants is a full-service agency that operates within Liberty Mutual, the US insurance provider. Initially a small creative studio working primarily on below the line work for mid-level funnel initiatives, it gradually evolved into the organisation’s lead creative partner across the entire advertising media funnel. 

“Most of us here at Copper Giants come from the traditional agency world and it’s no surprise that the agency industry we grew up in has lost its joy,” says Warren Marenco Chase, VP, managing director at the agency. According to Warren, that’s been driven by a combination of “holding company financial pressures, endless pitch cycles, broken client relationships, mergers and acquisitions, overworked talent.”

He reveals that he and the team built Copper Giants to achieve three things, all of which will likely resonate with fellow in-house leaders. To get ideas to market more quickly, ensure brand consistency across all channels, and achieve overall efficiencies internally and for the client. While doing so they discovered new ways to work with their internal stakeholders that broke down unnecessary steps and “useless barriers” that got in the way of good work. 

Copper Giants has a distinct look and feel, tone of voice, and, of course, a name of its own, separate from Liberty Mutual. Interestingly, and unlike many other in-house creative agencies, Cooper Giants is a separate standing LLC, which allows it to contract with external clients. “This gives our team an opportunity to flex our creative muscle to work with other categories of products outside of insurance and an opportunity to generate revenue from that work,” says Warren. “This benefits Liberty Mutual as a way to stay up to date with marketing trends across other categories.” 

Likewise, Liberty Mutual has optimised its agency ecosystem and aligned on a more flexible model where it relies primarily on in-house - Copper Giants - but has the flexibility to bring in external agency partners on a project basis for specific assignments or tackle a market opportunity. 

Copper Giant’s ability to work with clients on top of Liberty Mutual is also potentially an antidote to a problem that many in-house agencies encounter: attracting talent. An issue for any creative agency, the problem can be exacerbated for in-house teams because creatives are used to working with many different products and brands, and can see going in-house as being stuck in category and limiting their portfolio. 

“Our unique agency model allows for our creatives to work on external brands, making it more appealing to external talent,” says Warren. It also brings opportunity, he feels, for everyone at the agency to learn and grow. “This is not just for creatives, it’s for everyone. Experience that people may not be as able to so quickly gain on our Liberty work can be gained here,” he says. “That could be in the strategy or brief phase, client relations, production, post production, everything.”

What’s more, working on different clients also has the potential to keep brains fresh for Liberty Mutual work. “The ability to work on something totally different activates different parts of one’s brain,” he says. “Neurons start firing. Perspectives change. Ideas blossom. New ways of looking at things and doing things are created. We then bring all that fresh energy to our Liberty projects. It’s truly better for everyone.”

“The opportunity to influence an idea much further upstream pops all the way to the top,” he adds, offering further points of appeal for potential talent. “For folks who have been in the advertising space for a while, we yearn for the power to influence creative outcomes more effectively. A very close second is the opportunity to have a life outside work. Rarely you’ll see an in-house agency team burning the midnight oil or working on weekends. In this day and age, this has become a very valuable perk of working in-house.”

The relationship between Copper Giants’ creative team and Liberty Mutual’s marketing stakeholders is unique in numerous ways, says Warren. To explain, he uses the analogy of agencies as Michelin-star restaurants. 

External agencies, he says, welcome their clients to their beautiful space and curate a fabulous meal experience - but they are not allowed into the kitchen. “This is the traditional model many agencies and clients still rely on,” he adds. “This is the old way of doing business and not conducive to how fast marketing moves today.”

With an in-house setup, both client and agency are not only in the kitchen “looking at the sausage being made” but actively contributing to the recipe. “Because we are all peers and part of the same company, we are in a unique position to push back in ways that external agencies seldom do. We are able to influence the brief even before it comes through the door,” he says.

When it comes to production, Liberty Mutual has a small production studio complete with stage, a couple of edit bays and a recording booth. This is all backed by its talent - Copper Giants’ “superpower”, says Warren. “We have an amazing design team and the fastest, best editor/animator you could ask for. Social algorithms are hungry for variation, and we always want to stay ahead of that by being quick and iterative.” 

They handle everything from social campaigns to BTB videos to design and branding - “and a lot more!” - in-house. That said, Warren feels lucky to have deep existing relationships with “the best production partners in the business” and most of their video production is done externally. “Using external partners allows us to stay fresh and consistently find new, diverse voices,” he says. “Anyone who touches a piece of content leaves their fingerprints on it, and we value the creative power our external production partners bring to the table.”

Operating under a ‘one team’ model, stakeholders and agency folk move together as one to ensure that this works in practice. Copper Giants does not have ‘account people’ per se, so its project managers are “an essential cog” in the system to bridge that gap between marketing and creative. 

“We are uniquely positioned to create a bigger impact to the organisation due to our proximity to insights and our stakeholders,” says Warren. “We have more unobstructed access to data than any external agency ever would. We also sit right next to our stakeholder partners, and can very quickly propose and vet an idea.

“We are all Liberty Mutual employees and abide by the company values that make this a great place to work. That said, we strive to be an agent of change, so we have our own set of values that make us unique here. Our biggest responsibility is making sure the brands we work on are not ignored. We take our work very seriously, but we don’t take ourselves too seriously.”