Ad Age’s Agency A-List: Mindshare

We could not be prouder of #TeamMindshare for being named number five on Ad Age’s Agency A-List. Teamwork is at the heart of everything we do; together our people can make a real impact for our clients, our teams, and the world around us.

You can check an excerpt from Ad Age’s feature below, and read the full in-depth profile here, including insights from Adam Gerhart, U.S. CEO, and touching on everything from campaigns that have made a difference, to some of our most impactful industry firsts, to how our previous years’ work has helped lead to this. As Ad Age said at their virtual toast on Monday night, "It's not every year that a media agency makes the top 10 on the A-List. But Mindshare has earned a place here, by rethinking the role of media."

Ad Age Excerpt: The project is just one example of how Mindshare set out in 2019 to push the industry and its clients to rethink the role of media in an environment where agencies are increasingly being threatened by commoditization.

"It's not every year that a media agency makes the top 10 on the A-List. But Mindshare has earned a place here, by rethinking the role of media."

Ad Age

The agency introduced a neuroscience capability, called the NeuroLab, to uncover what drives the relationships between brands and consumers. Mindshare says it leaned on findings from NeuroLab to assess one new business prospect’s emotional targeting strategy. The unnamed brand wanted its ads to evoke joy, so the agency tested in what media environment ads can elicit happiness. The answer was, surprisingly, fear. People who were watching something scary before viewing the ads experienced happiness the most, the agency found. Mindshare won that pitch. 

Mindshare says it was the first media agency to hire a chief data officer in 2013 and today has more than 180 data and analytics roles nationwide. The shop created the first Amazon solution for brands in 2017 and today its shopper marketing capability, called Shop+, runs thousands of campaigns for clients across Amazon, Target, Kroger and other retailers. Mindshare also was the first agency to develop a LGBTQ private marketplace to reverse a discriminatory practice that caused words like “gay” to land on keyword exclusion lists.