“There’s A New Way To Scale An Agency & We’re Here To Prove It”: Born’s Radically Different View On Brands, Work & Agencies
Born, founded by Jenny Lennon and David Coupland in 2023, has an unapologetically bold vision about changing the way agencies function. And it’s working.
The pair met while they were working at Chello, Lennon serving as an associate creative director, Coupland as strategy director.
“We really hit it off as a creative pair,” Lennon told B&T in the agency’s relatively new office on Surry Hills’ Crown Street.
“David is what I would class as a creative strategist and I would class myself as a strategic creative. We bonded over creative, the industry and the meaning of brands and basically storytelling. We were very successful together working as a pair and it made us realise that, perhaps, we want to go off and do this by ourselves,” she added.
The pair are disarmingly charming, relaxed and unpretentious—something that many would do well to learn from in the industry. But they’re also fiercely attached to a set of values that make them stand apart from most in adland. They’re set on doing the work differently (and better) and forging a different relationship with Born’s small but growing staff. While that’s something many agency bosses would claim, they’re living those values.
That combination of being and doing different (and generating impressive client results), as well as their personal charms, that saw them win B&T’s Emerging Agency of the Year beating new agencies founded by more established industry faces to the punch, and deservedly so. The Emerging Agency title has found itself with some of the most important agencies in the country. There’s plenty of reasons to think that Born will join those ranks sooner, rather than later. Akcelo, now our overall Agency of the Year, won it in 2021, for instance.
It’s also well worth noting that, at a time when much of industry is wondering where all the top female creatives are, Lennon leads Born’s five-strong creative team, four of whom are also women.
The Start
Everything with Born comes back to the idea of storytelling. It’s not a unique idea in agency land but the way the pair articulate it, and how they went about winning their first client, is.
“We got really interested in the narrative theory. Brands are a collection of stories that add up to a narrative. When you start to think of a brand like that, it changes the way you consider what a brand is and how it creates campaigns,” said Coupland.
The pair began exploring the idea at Chello and it gained traction with clients.
“We started picking up accounts and winning work. We thought either we’re going to scale this idea on our own terms or we’re going to be a nightmare to employ because we’re going to keep agitating whatever agency we’re at, saying ‘We think it should be like this’. So we decided to go out on our own and we knew from the very beginning that we could win. We knew that we could win work talking to brands in this way,” said Coupland.
Born’s office on Crown Street. Click to expand.
Lennon and Coupland said they spent a year planning their own venture, talking to potential clients, testing the waters and dipping their toes into this new way of working. But the pair also said they were tired of the “performative” nature of agencies.
“We’re a bit what you see is what you get. We’re the same here as we are there,” said Coupland, gesturing to the Trinity Arms opposite the Born office. B&T is happy to confirm that, indeed, they are.
“We were just tired of it. I don’t really love the word ‘authentic’ but there must be a more real way of doing it,” said Coupland.
Born’s work for G’Day Parks.
Emails, Emails, Emails
Most agencies—especially creative agencies—enjoy luxuriating in a rags-to-riches story. They started in a garage, maybe a co-working space, and rapidly outgrew their surroundings as their blue-sky thinking attracted blue-chip clients, so the typical story goes.
For Born, that story starts in a similar fashion. Lennon and Coupland were working out of a library but were sending cold emails to potential clients, spinning intricate stories to grab their attention in a hope to get themselves some work. It isn’t the whirlwind of major pitch success that some nascent agencies have experienced—think the likes of Howatson+Company and Today The Brave (Emerging Agency in 2023) to name but two. But, as Coupland said earlier, it was slightly more real and less theatrical.
“We were sat in that library [Green Square, if you’re interested], cold emailing people six days a week, 20 emails a day, all custom, just trying to get meetings in and tell people who we were. It was hard,” said Lennon.
Those emails were unconventional, long and designed to pique the interest of marketing managers rather than point to the agency’s creds deck.
“We think about our relationship with that brand and we just mine our memory of what that was. I was telling a story recently to McCain. I remember what it felt like [as a child] to get out of the car and put them in the microwave and have my face up against the microwave. I did it so many times I had to go to the doctor because my mum thought my brain was in trouble. The second you remember a brand or a product and you can tell that story in an engaging way, before you know it, they get that you want to work with them,” he continued.
A selection of work for Born’s clients, not all won through cold emails. Click to expand.
“We enter into a relationship where we’re a big fan, we understand the emotional benefit of that brand and we’re professionals in this space, so let us show you how we can translate that emotional feeling into today’s context. Let’s show you the story arc that we’ll take you on. So when we come to something like an Unyoked or a Flight Club, we’ve already approached it from ‘Why do we love it?’ and then how can we translate that into a modern context. It’s vulnerable and real and honest, always.”
The pair didn’t pay themselves for two months—and remember they weren’t starting out from previous CSO and CCO roles—and were regularly racing members of the public to get seats next to each other in the library.
“The moment we got our first client, we were off to the races. It’s amazing the stability that knowing you’ve got one client actually brings. I remember going home and saying to my wife ‘How embarrassing would it be to never sign a client?’” said Coupland.
“But the second we signed Unyoked, I remember thinking ‘You can never take that away from us’. Even if it lasted three weeks, four weeks, we were an agency for four weeks. We emailed them, and five other clients, when we won Emerging Agency of the Year to say ‘You’ll never know what that meant because it’s nothing without you.’”
Now, the agency is plotting an expansion into Adelaide and plans to open its South Australian office this year.
“If You Live At Work, You Become Boring”
Born growing number of clients, around half of whom are on retainers. It has found a particularly happy hunting ground, purely by chance, with challenger brands. Just this year, it picked up MaxiNutrition, Love-To-Dream, Designer Eco Tiny Homes, CABN and Bridgit. Its UI/UX work has also seen interest since launching in November, with two clients—incluing one sizeable auto brand—signed up.
“About 50-60 per cent of the clients we have, we’ve outreached and said we want to work with you because of X, Y, Z or we’ve resonated with that client and we have a story to tell, we want to help them tell a story or we think their story could be told better,” said Lennon.
“The rest have come to us and we find the interesting thing. We always say there’s no such thing as a boring business, just boring agencies. We’ll find the interest and fun whatever it is.
“Some of the clients we’ve got, I would have dreamed about working in previous agencies because they’re all doing something that means something or they’ve got interesting stories or points of view. We work with a lot of challenger brands, for example our work with Bare Funerals. We’re working with a property developer and they want to be a challenger developer,” Lennon added.
That initial non-stop hustle has subsided, however. Again, it’s tempting to think that the founders of small agencies need to be hard chargers, driving their teams in pressure cooker environments to produce against rapidly approaching deadlines.
At Born, all 12 of its staff—though some are freelance—are out the door by 5pm. It’s very rare to receive emails past 5.30pm. That’s something B&T’s seen with our own eyes. When we’ve previously stopped by, the office was quite by 5.15pm. Even when having a drink with Coupland over at the Trinity, a client called. He didn’t answer, despite our insistence that he should, saying they could talk in the morning. Turns out, in fact, that the call was nothing urgent.
Click to expand.
“It comes down to excellent project management,” said Lennon.
“We’re incredibly accurate on timelines and deadlines and how long things take. We’ve been very good at scoping work, we plan everything really, really well.”
Even as the business grows, Born are confident that they can continue scoping work correctly, so that staff aren’t chained to their desks. It’s not only because it’s the right thing to do, either.
“I came from big agency in the UK and there was a feeling that you had to stay in the office, even if you’ve run out of ideas and you’ve hit the wall, just for the performative nature of it. The creative director needs to see that you’re working late. If you’re not, then you don’t care about the client,” said Lennon.
“We don’t confuse passion with the length of hours in a day. It’s such nonsense,” agreed Coupland.
“We reject the premise that an agency that is working at its fullest is staying through the night. It feels anachronistic. Of course, we all know what it’s like, our team will leave here and they’re still thinking about work but you actually get that sense of distance that allows an idea to formulate, it allows you to work on it in a more elegant way and you come in an discuss it in a fresh way. Also, if you live at work, you become boring. We need people out there in the world.”
Have you got your CV polished? We’d try to get in now before it’s too late.
Read more:
‘Doing Something Differently Was The Right Call’: Why Akcelo Could Be Your Next Agency
‘I Had No Tolerance For Talk About Legacy Brands’ – Inside EssenceMediacom’s Award-Winning Merger
