The year is 2019 and the marketing & advertising industry is in turmoil. Brands are moving their marketing efforts in-house, agency retainers and preferred vendor contracts are becoming less commonplace and even established agencies are complaining about client ghosting, too many ad-hoc projects, expensive RFP pitch battles, and high employee turnover.
Are these natural market changes? Or have the madmen agency owners of the past dug their graves all by themselves? David Nickel and his wife and Co-founder Liubov are trying to change the status quo when it comes to agency management. In their opinion, a lot of the problems in today’s industry can be traced back to the fact that toxic agency work culture fueled by greed, sexism and lies has been the standard for decades. Clients don’t trust agencies anymore and neither do their creatives.
To reverse this trend of decline David & Liubov have created Jadewolf Marketing, a niche boutique digital marketing agency focused exclusively on luxury travel clients (hospitality, yachting, aviation, tourism, etc.) with a couple of unique features: Jadewolf Marketing has no physical office locations, no dress-codes, and no military-inspired management hierarchies. Everybody works from their laptop, home office, or favorite co-working space. Profit margins are listed on client proposals, salaries and fees are openly communicated internally with freelancers and staff and for the most part, there are no official office hours except for all-hands on deck conference calls and client meetings.
“The whole focus lies on the results and deliverables that we create for our clients. If our client is getting more high-net-worth leads, bookings or sales then our team is doing their job and as agency owners having a team that is happy and motivated is all that matters at the end of the day.” said Liubov, Co-Founder of Jadewolf Marketing.
At this moment the agency is less than 6 months old and client acquisition is still priority number one at Jadewolf. But future expansion plans include providing additional benefits to team members like annual agency retreats, individual training allowance and additional paid leave for volunteering and charity work.
