First off, let’s get one thing straight. Our name has nothing to do with the Soviet Union or communism. Quite the contrary. We’re diehard capitalists with a capital K.

Why the Soviet-looking K at the end of your name?

Truth is, when we named ourselves The Republik, we originally spelled it with a “c” just like everybody else. And there’s the rub. Turns out everybody and their mothers seem to have a business called “The Republic.”  There are literally thousands and thousands of them including a few Republic ad agencies. So to trademark our name and get a decent URL, we had to change the spelling to The Republik. (Now there’s even another agency in New Zealand called The Republik - copycats.)

So if you guys are so creative why didn’t you come up with a more unique name?

Ah, good question. When we were formulating how the world’s greatest agency would be organized and managed, we looked outside the ad industry for inspiration. We scrutinized business plans and org charts from all types of successful companies, groups and institutions.

Then it hit us. Why not model our agency on the greatest business plan that’s ever been written? The United States Constitution. No other document in the history of the world has inspired so many companies and individuals to be so wildly successful in so little time. So in honor of the US Constitution, we named our agency after the type of nation it was created to form – a republic. See, told ya we weren’t a bunch of commies.

So how are you organized?

The short of it is this: The Republik is 100% employee-owned which means every employee is personally vested in the success of each of our clients. (That’s one of the things that allows us to arrange performance-based compensation agreements with our clients.)

And speaking of our clients, each is placed at the center of a multi-disciplinary team composed of expert strategists, creatives, analysts and project managers. This team works together on everything we do for a particular client from strategy to execution to analytics.

I’ve never heard of you guys. How come?

We’re not surprised you don’t know who we are. Our entire focus has and always will be on our clients. Not on publicizing The Republik. Direct referrals from our clients account for over ninety percent of our new business. 

What have you done?

We have decades of experience executing innovative ideas covering every facet of integrated marketing communications from corporate ID packages to multi-million dollar television campaigns. In addition to developing internationally acclaimed business-building concepts for clients such as Triumph Boats, Fayetteville Area CVB and Consolidated Shoe Company brands like nicole and Palladium, our partners have also helped create and grow some of the most successful brands of the last two decades.

Brands like Pepsi, Lipton Brisk, RCA, Aetna, Absolut, Bermuda Tourism to name just a few.

The Republik partners have also been behind some of the most successful new product launches in the last decade. These include, RCA’s Digital Satellite System, Smirnoff Ice (the most successful new product launch in UDV’s history), Frito-Lay’s Wow! Chips and Lifesavers Holes.

So why’d you quit working on those big, glamorous brands?

The infrastructures of the agencies we were working for would never allow our work to be as good or effective as it could be. So instead of trying to turn these Titanic agencies around, we jumped ship.

In 2001, with steely resolve, our rag-tag team of like-minded partners struck out on our own to launch our antidote to the status-quo – The Republik.

What we believe:

The success of our clients is intrinsically and proportionally linked to the success of The Republik.

Accountability is a two-way street where both agency and client hold each other responsible for the other’s success.

Everyone working on a brand should be financially and emotionally vested in the success of that brand.

Clients should have direct access to those working on their accounts.

Advertising must build the brand and simultaneously boost the bottom line.

Our creative executions will meet or surpass any reasonable objective.

Creativity is not limited to the creative department. Media buyers, strategists, analysts, account executives and project managers must be as innovative as our copywriters and art directors.

The basis of all great creative is an equally great strategy.

Pull advertising trumps push advertising every time.

What do you mean by “Pull” vs. “Push” advertising?

We believe an agency's job is to deliver big business-building ideas to its clients – not just advertising. In fact, some of the most powerful and effective ideas we've developed and implemented don’t resemble anything within the traditional definition of advertising at all. (To see what we mean, just click here to check out any of the work we’ve created for our clients.)

With pull advertising, the objective is to create executions so compelling, informative or entertaining, targeted consumer groups find them so irresistible and attractive, they go out of their way to find or participate in them. This is diametrically opposed to the old school way of marketing where “target” consumers are identified and media is purchased to “push” interruptive messaging on them. 

So far, it’s been our experience that pull ideas, when executed well and delivered through the right communication channels, are much less expensive and much more powerful and effective than “push” ones. Pull ideas not only attract people to buy more of a brand's products or services, they also create a long-term bonds with them.

Not surprising when you consider the fact that traditional advertising is geared around disruption – breaking up a TV or radio show with commercial pods, interrupting articles in magazines with print ads, disturbing the enjoyment of a web page with pop-ups and banners, etc., etc.

Our philosophy is and always has been, advertising at its worst is just another form of pollution that’s tolerated because people understand it’s paying for their entertainment. At its best, it can be better than the programming or medium in which it appears.

To find out how we can create pull ideas for you, click here to contact us.

So why aren’t more agencies producing “pull” ideas?

The simplest answer is they can’t. To create “pull” ideas and make a profit, they would have to fundamentally change their compensation models to ones based on idea generation and performance – instead of mark-ups and commissions.