bounce: Taking a Leap Forward
In order for a ball to bounce, it has to go down before it can come back up. For the bounce agency in the heart of Greenville, the downward trend was difficult, but the upward trajectory is that much sweeter for it.
The agency was founded in 1959 by Bill Leslie, who worked from his garage before moving Leslie Advertising to the outer edge of Greenville Tech’s campus. The firm prospered over the years, its development on track with the city’s progress. By the early eighties, with a dream of growing the agency, Leslie approached Carlos Jimenez, inviting him to come to Greenville and consider taking the agency in a more creative direction.
It was an invitation with a good chance of being declined. Jimenez, who had moved with his family from Cuba to Miami in the late 1950s, had grown up in the advertising business, literally. Coming from a background of artists and craftsmen, he interned with his first agency at 14, and spent subsequent summers before college applying his artistic skills in Miami shops, groups run by talents who had fled bigger markets. By the time Leslie’s letter reached his hands, Jimenez had graduated from the Art Institute of Pittsburgh, worked in New York for six years, and honed his skills at several well-respected Miami firms including international creative leader Crispin, Porter & Bogusky. But he had also married and, with plans to start a family, realized Miami was a great place to do business but not necessarily the right place for a child.
The visit to Greenville was scheduled, and Jimenez found a future home he hadn’t known was waiting. He liked Bill Leslie, he liked the fact that the agency had just landed South Carolina’s tourism account, and he liked the people in Greenville, huggers like his parents.
The first request he made upon arrival was that Leslie Advertising make a move into an environment that would allow him to recruit top talent from Atlanta, Cleveland and New York and grow the agency. So in 1984, Leslie Advertising built headquarters on Pleasantburg Drive across from Sara Collins Elementary, and as Jimenez had promised, they did come. Jimenez hired people with a passion for creative work and like-minded account service people, positioning the firm to compete effectively with shops in Atlanta, Nashville, and Dallas.
Around 2006, Leslie was thriving, and Jimenez, its chairman and CEO, was in a position to coast professionally, but his work ethic and desire for improvement got in the way. He started asking prospects, clients, new hires, and anyone who would answer what they thought of Leslie. And the answers were uncomfortably bland: great shop, honest, good work, nice people. He came away from that informal research with a bland tag line: Leslie Advertising, a swell advertising agency. Fine for some people, but Jimenez doesn’t do bland. Or swell. He wanted to be in tune with the growth taking place in Greenville at that time, the coming of age of the city he had grown to love so much. So he got his executive group together and told them, against their best advice, that it was time for a change. The name bounce came forth, Jimenez says, not because there’s any magic to it, but because he wanted people to question the label. That inquiry would open the door to an explanation that described a leap forward with the energy to move.
Bounce created a new home across from the Lazy Goat with a view that includes the Peace Center, the Liberty Bridge and Falls Park. While the building was going up, Jimenez tied a huge red balloon similar to the red ball in the bounce logo to one of the pillars, making people wonder for weeks what that balloon signaled. The staff moved in five years ago, around 50 people at the time. Along came 2008, a year Jimenez describes as the biggest hiccup in an otherwise great ride. The business world came to a halt, and clients stopped spending. But bounce was able to hang in there by downsizing to about 30 people, sticking by clients even when they couldn’t afford to pay, and deciding, Jimenez says, to do what they did best and not compromise.
Today, the agency roster includes clients of very long standing such as Belk, Conde Nast, Daniel Island, Laura Ashley, Inc., and Greenville Literacy Association. Along with those names are new ones, several added in just the last three months including Frederica, Woodruff Companies and Tindall Corporation. Significant, says Scott Ziegler, general manager, who returned to the agency in February after seven years away, is the fact that these new clients did not come as a result of an agency search. They called, bounce answered, and the account was awarded based on the strength of the agency’s body of work. These additions to the client roster have led bounce to add eight new full-time staff members in the last quarter.
Bounce has retained the South Carolina tourism account since 1979 with a level of creative thought and placement that comes to the audience in unexpected venues and literally stops them in their tracks. In 2008, faced with soaring media costs in the Chicago market, bounce went into the city’s high traffic parking garages, installing wraps that transformed pillars into golf tees, phone kiosks with conch-shaped receivers that greeted callers with the sounds of ocean waves, buttons that battled the windy city’s chill with warm South Carolina breezes, and a windsurfer scene on an otherwise cold stairwell, all of which created tremendous buzz in an industry striving for buzz worthiness.
Last year, in similar fashion, the agency took over malls in Washington, D.C., Pennsylvania and Atlanta. When mall managers offered tame little spots for advertising displays, the agency showed that they had something much more arresting in mind. Permission was granted to create the illusion of an enormous pool in a mall’s circular interior with a cannon balling kid coming from overhead. At another mall, a golfer drives an enormous golf ball through a huge poster and breaks through the clutter of advertising messages. As an escalator carries shoppers up, a wrap on its side carries rafters on a wild ride down river.
These are visuals too compelling to be ignored, and clearly, shoppers were engaged. “The mall campaign, I can say with certainty, was part of the best ever overall campaign South Carolina has had based on our advertising awareness research so far during my tenure with SCPRT…which has been a while now,” says Beverly Shelley, director of sales and marketing with the South Carolina Department of Parks, Recreation & Tourism.
Work on this project has been recognized not just by consumers but has also been judged as outstanding by the Outdoor Advertising Association of America, which awarded bounce a gold OBIE, one of only 11 such awards presented nationally and one of only two in the travel, tourism and transportation category. The agency also recently received two gold national ADDY awards for the mall campaign, the only national ADDYs awarded in South Carolina.
The campaign, Shelley says, still has lots of legs, and SCPRT’s long-standing relationship with bounce is also going strong. “Clearly, they understand tourism in South Carolina,” Shelley says. “When they develop a campaign, such as the current South Carolina Made For Vacation campaign, they dig into the research and find meaningful details about the consumer – what she wants, what she’s responding to, how she’s feeling, where and how she’s being influenced – and they let those findings inform the creative process from messaging to design. They are creative. They aren’t afraid to take a risk, and that’s paid off for them.”
Jimenez, ever energetic, is pleased with where the risks have taken his group. “Today, the dream of five years ago is realizing itself as we compete on the national and international level, not necessarily for big clients, but in doing work that is as good as agencies in New York, Paris and London,” he says. “Dreams are never ending, so this is just the beginning.”