The entire Artemis Ward team, all three of them, used to work at Weber Shandwick, a much larger ad agency. “We all resigned on the same day,” remembers Jackie Titus, who’s both a partner and head of strategy. “We had a going away party on a Tuesday and on Wednesday we signed a lease with WeWork, opened up our laptops and got to work. It’s funny. People were asking me, “So, are you taking time off before this crazy venture?” And I responded, I don’t think I’ll be taking any time off again.”
It’s a good story, which makes sense considering Artemis bills itself as a group of “modern-day storytellers”. It’s also illustrative of an important difference: the one between being a cog in a workplace environment and your own boss, of course. In a larger environment, it can be easier to relax knowing other people are working just as hard as you. When you’re in charge, and especially when you are in charge of a three-person time, there very often is no one else.
Getting a spot in a WeWork office helped. On Day One, they were able to present instant legitimacy to potential clients. “We were only two weeks old, and we had one of our clients over in DC and they had no idea this kind of place existed. They were awestruck just from walking in and feeling the energy and then us being able to take them into an office room and have an official meeting was a huge help for us. We’ve been in this long enough, we’re not twenty-somethings starting a business, we’ve been this for a while, we have established contacts. So we wanted environment too, to bring people to. Legit from the start.”
Although they’re not twenty-somethings, the Artemis Ward gang likes to hang out with that age-range when they teach college courses at Georgetown. “We look at how people and companies use varying media. We take them on a bit of a world tour, seven different regions around the world: Brazil, Russia, India, China, Africa, and then we go abroad for one week to end the course. We’ve done The Hague, the Netherlands, and this past summer we took them to London. We pair them with real clients. They get a brief from a client that’s somewhere else in the world and they have to come back that Friday and pitch them on a digital creative strategy.” The two worlds aren’t so different: “In some ways, students are just like clients”, Titus says with a laugh.
“One thing smaller brands can fall victim to,” Titus says, “is the kitchen sink approach”. The need to do everything at once can seem appealing to companies just starting out, but it’s far wiser, Titus advises, to focus just on a few things and build from there. The quality of your following versus the raw numbers, narrowing the focus. Take the example of Artemis Ward. “We have a website, a Twitter, and Instagram. That’s it.” And it’s worked out pretty well for them so far.