Top 5 Innovative Digital Marketing Agencies

From Mashable:

Behind every great digital campaign is a great agency. Thanks to the Internet and its growing role in our lives, agencies have come a long way in the past decade, and they’ve begun to hone in on and innovate in the realm of digital marketing.

Whether the agency is a dozen people or 500, or was founded as a traditional agency or a digital agency, every creative group brings its own flair and aesthetic to its work. Here’s a look at five interactive agencies behind some of 2010′s best digital marketing campaigns, which promoted a new TV show, a community giving project, gum innovation and more.

1. Breakfast

Conan O’Brien’s team came to Breakfast on September 14, 2010, with a blimp that was to be in the air by October 1 to promote Conan’s debut on TBS. Breakfast concepted for 24 hours and decided to turn the orange blimp into Foursquare’s first constantly-moving target. (The team hacked some hardware so that the blimp would automatically update its location periodically.) The blimp was supposed to fly for just one month on the East Coast, but it ended up flying cross-country, and people drove across state lines to check in and earn the Conan Blimpspotter badge on Foursquare.

More than 18,000 people followed the blimp on Foursquare, and the blimp garnered more checkins in that 60-day span than the Empire State Building and Statue of Liberty combined.

Breakfast was also the brains behind Precious the Tweeting Bike and the recent Instaprint device, which was developed to make use of Instagram’s API and take advantage of the photo sharing that was bound to happen at SXSW.

Andrew Zolty, the shop’s creative director, says Breakfast is “not quite an ad agency, not quite an interactive agency, not quite a product company.” What they are is a trio of innovators that creates and develops new digital products and custom technology for each project and brand they service. “We’re kind of all over the place,” Zolty says. “But we try to connect the online world to the physical world.”

2. Razorfish

The 2011 Super Bowl was more than a Packers-Steelers showdown — it was also the centerpiece of an innovative auto campaign. After competitors deemed Mercedes-Benz to be old and dodgy, the German car company enlisted Razorfish to liven its image. The Razorfish team, led by Frederic Bonn, launched the first-ever Tweet Race. It was like any other race, except that the amount of gas each team could use was directly proportional to the volume of tweets it was generating. Four teams (pairs who had extant Twitter followings) competed, each with a Twitter-savvy “celebrity coach” — Serena Williams, Pete Wentz, Nick Swisher or Rev Run – who leveraged their own Twitter followings for the race. The race and the #MBTweetRace hashtag were also marketed via promoted tweets and promoted trends on Twitter.

The campaign generated more than 150,000 tweets from 21,000 users. It’s too early to say whether Mercedes sold more cars because of the campaign, but the goal was more about brand perception, and Mercedes embodied a cool, sleek and cutting-edge vibe in the eyes of consumers. “The cost we would have had for paid media to get those impressions would be very big, but we got that through earned media instead,” says Holly Mason, a program director at Razorfish.

Other prominent Razorfish campaigns include the Axe One Night Only campaign in August — which garnered 44,000 contest entries and saw more than 105 million impressions on Facebook — and the redesign of The Hollywood Reporter‘s website.

Razorfish was founded in 1995 and rapidly embraced digital media. One of its founders, Jeff Sachis, once prophesied that in the future, “Everything that can be digital, will be.” The company now has 21 patents to its name in digital marketing technology.

3. Huge

When Pepsi forwent a multi-million dollar Super Bowl buy in 2010 to host a community improvement initiative, the marketing and ad worlds were stunned. After all, “can a soda really change the world?” The Pepsi Refresh Project (PRP), designed and executed by Huge in Brooklyn, was one of the most-watched digital campaigns of 2010. The keys to its success were a “brand-agnostic platform for doing good and cause marketing” and making the project immensely “shareable,” says Kate Watts, the PRP account lead at Huge.

“I don’t think any of us really expected how powerful it would be,” says Watts. The project garnered 3.3 million “likes” on Facebook and 75 million votes, more than 60% of which were generated through referral traffic. Pepsi granted more than $20 million to 400 ideas, and the success of the campaign led PepsiCo to launch PRP once again. It was also a huge success for Huge, which earned a Social Media Agency of the Year award.

“PRP is a great example of what Huge is at its best — it’s a combo of creating a best-in-class user experience and marrying that with effective marketing to create utility for our users and drive business goals for our client,” Watts says.

She adds that the differentiator between Huge and other agencies is its eye toward simplicity and a “user-friendly approach.” Its clean aesthetic in web design is what has drawn big brands like JetBlue, Ikea and iVillage to the agency, which was founded in 1999.

4. Firstborn

Firstborn gave Twi-hards something to tweet about when it branded Eclipse gum with the stars of Twilight: Eclipse. The agency created a microsite that — when you flash the specially-branded Eclipse gum package in front of a webcam — unlocks exclusive video content. And when Wrigley was launching its 5 gum brand, Firstborn created 5react.com as an online destination for an augmented reality experience and got the product in front of consumers before it even hit the shelves. 5React started the promotion with 890,000 Facebook fans, but Firstborn’s campaigns have helped to grow the fanbase to 4.3 million fans in less than a year. The promotion was effective in part because of its utilization of Facebook Connect — 5react.com pulled in people’s Facebook photos and contacts, which created a highly personalized user experience.

Personalization guides the entire ideation process at Firstborn, which has a 65-person roster. “Our strength is being involved with the client as early as possible in the strategy and creative development phase,” says Dan LaCivita, Firstborn’s senior vice president and executive director. “We talk about business objectives, and we’re able to understand what our clients’ problems are. Then we come up with ideas and execute them.”

To improve efficiency and overall quality of work, Firstborn has grown and built out departments in-house to streamline a multi-platform production process under one roof. The next department to be built out is mobile tech and dev, showing Firstborn’s commitment to digital marketing.

Its marketing expands beyond the gum industry, too. Firstborn’s initiative for Sobe — including Skinsuit 2.0 videos and an iPad app with Jessica Szohr — was also a marquee campaign that created a lot of buzz in 2010.

5. Victors & Spoils

Perhaps the most important part of a digital agency is its creative brain trust. After all, great campaigns are born from great ideas. Victors and Spoils has that in spades — it was founded in 2010 on the premise of crowdsourcing, and it enlists a database of 5,200 freelancers around the globe, with varying degrees of experience in advertising. Each project is spearheaded by one of its 14-person staff so that there is a layer of consistency and creative direction for each project. Though V&S isn’t explicitly a digital agency –- it’s an ad agency that works in all media platforms -– it has achieved success with its digital efforts, and its innovative methods are worth noting.

When Virgin America was launching its first international route to Toronto, its Creative Director Jesse McMillin contacted Evan Fry, V&S’s Chief Creative Officer to brainstorm ways to build buzz and find a local brand ambassador in Toronto. They came up with the Virgin America Toronto Provocateur. The website V&S created — with a video of Sir Richard Branson himself — received 1,500 contest entries, which were narrowed down to 20 candidates (this seems like a small number, but candidates needed to live in Toronto, be able to do the job and submit a video, which limited the applicant pool). The site received 46,000 unique visitors and V&S helped Virgin find its cheeky new ambassador, Casie Stewart, who still functions as the provocateur.

Fry maintains that V&S is not a digital agency, but “an ad agency that does any media,” and no matter how media evolves, V&S will stay true to its crowdsourcing roots. “Technology is allowing this abundance of interested and creative people, whether they’re amateurs or professionals, to actually contribute,” Fry says. “The reason we exist is that we creatively direct and curate all the work.” This model allows V&S to let its database of freelancers to work on accounts when they’re right for the job or are interested — they can enlist people in Steamboat Springs and Jackson Hole for an outdoorsy brand, for example — and that passion creates admirable work.