We built Guesthouse to get rid of all of the annoying parts of traditional ad agencies. We keep things simple, helping brands get to great creative quickly, from strategy to concept to production - no handoffs. We’re staffed by senior talent with a track record of results, who work directly on your brand. And rather than use your budget to fund a showcase office and fill it with employees who may or may not be right for your project, we bring in the exact right creative partners for your project, for exactly as long as you need them. We work closely with your in-house team, rather than try to replace them. We offer creative training for brand teams, in-house, and agencies. Chances are, if there’s something you don’t like about agencies, we agree and have found a better, kinder way to get to great work.

There are two reasons we’re called Guesthouse. First, we’re a guest of your brand. We fit in right alongside your in-house team, filling any needs you have, while working well with the people you have in place. Second, we’re called Guesthouse because we bring in the best Guest talent to build the exact right team for each project. Our experience in the industry means we have a pool of amazingly talented Guests we’ve worked closely with for years. Our Guests are expert in their fields, including design, art direction, copywriting, UX, project management, production, photography, brand planning, strategy, community management, content creation - anything it takes to develop and produce great, effective creative. 

We work with brands big and small, startup through Fortune 500. The thing they have in common is kindness, a belief that great creative is an important part of breaking through the clutter and earning attention, and a disregard for outdated, adversarial ways of working.

Two things are true about creative strategy. First, it’s 100% needed and determines the success of your campaign before a single headline is written. And second, many agencies make their strategy process incredibly complicated so they can charge you enough to pay for their overgrown strategy departments. At Guesthouse, we have great, shockingly simple tools we use along-side our brand partners to get to smart strategies quickly. Your brand and category knowledge, plus our expertise and fresh eyes are a powerful combo. Rather than taking months and hundreds of thousands of dollars, we can often get to a breakthrough strategy in a week, and begin actually concepting the work and testing it in real time. All for less than it costs to get other agencies to tell you that your strategy is wrong and you need to start from scratch.

You’ll be working with Mitch, Wes, and Jeff. For bigger and on-going projects, we tap support Guests to take care of project management, design support, and production roles, but your core team will always be senior leadership. For retainer and ongoing partnerships, you’ll be able to interview and select the Guests on your team. We can’t wait for you to meet them.

We designed Guesthouse so that the founders are also the core creative team on your business. We limit the number of projects we take on to make sure of this. We supplement the team with Guests who expertly support you with account management, project management, production, design, or whatever makes the most sense for the project. When it comes to big productions, the team grows to up to 100 people working on a shoot day, then scales back to the core team. That helps our brand partners not pay for full time staff they don’t need. It also allows us to use the exact right person for the job, and not whoever happens to be on staff. 

All of the above. We work with teams that know what matters, value a nimble, collaborative, and mutually respectful process, and are ready to move.

Guesthouse is both a faster, simpler way to get to great brand creative and platforms, as well as a full production partner. As an agency and production company that does strategy, concepts, directs, and finishes campaigns, we meet brands and marketing teams where they are in the process and help them sprint from strategy to concept to production.

The part of the process where good campaign ideas get ruined is production. We grew tired of working with our clients for months on a campaign, then handing off the production to a Hollywood director in-between films, who didn’t care as much as we do about the objectives and results of the work. Wes left the agency world in 2019 to become a director. With work on Checkers & Rally’s, Five Guys, CG Insurance, Blue Cross Blue Shield, Magic Spoon, and Miller’s Ale House, he became one of the go-to directors in the Southeast. (He asked us to point out that he didn’t write that sentence, but we said, ok, but it’s true.) Now he’s able to direct the work we write for our clients, and the effect is productions where the jokes work, the emotions actually emote, and we have time to shoot social on the side.

We’ve eliminated the overlapping layers of agency approvals, and the people creating the work are senior talent. We deliver the same or higher quality work, in a simpler, faster way than mid-size and large holding company agencies. We find that even on urgent projects, we tend to move more quickly than most companies can keep up with. And we never skimp on quality, because this is more than a trade for us. This is what we love to do, and we take incredible pride in the work we do with our brand partners.

The founders of Guesthouse are also some of the most awarded radio and audio creatives in the country. And while we don’t care about awards, we do love writing and producing breakthrough digital streaming audio, radio, and podcast creative that doesn’t feel or sound like what you think of when you think “radio ad”. Check it out for yourself at guesthouseaudio.com. For brands who want to treat the dollars in the audio budget with the same respect as their other dollars, Guesthouse Audio is for you. BTW, we have stats that show how truly effective low-cost audio advertising can be. Hit us up!

We love helping brands define who they are, why they exist, how they see the world, and because of that, how they act. Whether your brand is as established as The Home Depot, or a total startup, we’re here to help with tone, voice, look and feel, and brand guidelines. From there, everyone knows exactly how the brand should behave and respond to the world around it, and the creative ideas and brand successes get a lot easier.

We find that a quick conversation with you and your team can help get to a consensus quickly. We can help find the gold in all the possible messages and points of view the brand is considering. When needed, we have great research, media, and strategy partners to tap as well.

Agencies love a big reveal. We do not. We want our clients as involved as they would like to be. We love to work right in your Slack channel and have conversations in real time. We don’t like to hide the “big idea” for an unveiling months from now. We like to move quickly, iterate with you, and respect your opinion and thoughts as we go along, together.

Item descriptionExperience is the key here. We can move quickly - rejecting ideas that won’t generate talk value or attention, or that aren’t right for the brand. Our production model approach of instantly growing teams as we need, then shrinking them back down helps us stay nimble, with work that’s always well-crafted. 

Guesthouse handles strategy, creative concepting and development, design, digital production, and video and photo production. We also do creative training and audio. We work in all media - digital, social, TV, OTT, Amazon PDP, email, outdoor, ambient, brand acts. Anything that helps your brand participate in your consumers’ lives.

We love to start with a project that helps you and us evaluate the fit. We find that most times, we end up working together again. Sometimes with another project, often with an ongoing retainer. Wouldn’t you love to avoid an agency review and just fast forward to the part where you have a great campaign?

The Guesthouse model lets us work with any budget. So we can produce high end TV with a crew of 100, or we can literally create fun social-ready content on an iPhone, the same day. 

Yes

Yes. Guesthouse often works with brands whose in-house teams are just getting off the ground, or who just have a handful of people. We take care of any needs you have, and we work well with the people you have in place, so there’s no duplication. We even help you place team members you need on staff permanently. We’re all one team, working together.  

Both. We love to start with a project, though many of our clients are happy to be on ongoing retainers. Here’s the secret to getting the most from Guesthouse: tell us your actual budget for a project. We scale the team to get you the most value for the money. Whether it’s a simple social campaign or a complicated digital video buy, our model lets us make the most of any budget.

Creative advertising is subjective, and that’s the basis of most disagreement. We find that by communicating simply, and with no layers and no handoffs, we’re almost always on the same page as our clients. When issues arrive, we’re a zoom or Slack message away. Since you’re working with the senior founders of the company, we’re able to listen and react in real time. And while we have immense experience and great success in doing this, we have no ego about it and prioritize listening over arguing. If that sounds different than your last agency, we know. We used to work at places like that, too, and it drove us crazy.

Guesthouse has worked across a pretty wide range of categories, usually with brands that care about craft, clarity, and culture.

That includes consumer brands in food, beverage, personal care, CPG, and retail. Financial services and banking, especially community and mission-driven institutions. Utilities and energy. Technology and SaaS. Automotive and mobility. Hospitality, restaurants, QSR. Sports and entertainment. Travel and airlines. Education and nonprofits.

We’ve partnered with both well-known national brands like Coca-Cola, Delta, The Home Depot, Microsoft, French’s, Goodyear, Volvo, AT&T, as well as smaller, scrappier organizations, often helping them punch above their weight. The common thread isn’t the category. It’s brands that want smart strategy, strong creative, and work that actually connects with people. All without the hassle, attitude, and turtle-y slowness of traditional agencies.

Our brand partners choose Guesthouse because they don’t like the slowness, egos, bloat and cost of big agencies. They want simple. They want the same or better level of creative, with senior talent that treats them as partners, not “clients”. The main thing we hear from brands is “Wow, Guesthouse really listened and really gets us.” One CMO said, “I’m so glad we found you.” 

There’s an insecurity in the marketing and advertising space that leads to egos, rudeness, and an inability to listen and entertain the idea that the other person might be right. At Guesthouse we find that being nice is a secret weapon. It helps us avoid working with unkind people and brands that don’t have a purpose, or who want to go through the motions of old-school advertising. And it helps good people find us, who simply want to make great advertising that makes their employees and customers proud to be part of the brand. 

The only awards we care about are the ones you care about in your category. We’ve won all the creative awards and don’t care about them much, other than they helped us get to the point where we could open our own agency that cares more about brand results and earned media attention.

Guesthouse believes that people hate advertising. We know this, because we hate it too. People do love when brands do interesting things - whether it’s a commercial, a digital campaign, or a brand act in the world. We make the kind of advertising that makes people into fans. Rather than making them want to throw up.