David Yale Kippen is the CEO of Evviva Brands (based in San Francisco, California) listed on 50Pro as a top 50 firm in Marketing Strategy, Branding & Brand Strategy, Naming Strategic, Consulting, and Market Research.
In this Q&A, David shares his in-depth perspective, unique background, and insightful tips.
I hated advertising. When I was a kid, my grandfather was passionate about how billboards were ruining highways. He tried to hire me to vandalize them. (I never did.) I hated how ads intruded into the things I wanted to see, to read, to experience.
But two projects in my early working years really changed my thinking. I was working on my PhD and doing a side-hustle at a small management consultancy. The consultancy won a fantastic UNDP project. The principal and I did research in Brazil, South Africa, Tanzania, Russia and China, then presented recommendations at the UN building in New York. They were all implemented. That taught me a huge lesson about the impact of business insight.
At the same time, I was working on what turned into a PhD on rhetoric. I won't go long and deep here--that's what the dissertation's for--but I learned how deeply vested we all can be in ideas, even if they're demonstrably bad for us, once there's emotion attached to them.
That gradually changed my thinking about advertising as an industry. I had a strong background in fine arts, so once I could see past how the industry interrupted what I cared about, I started to see both that there were a lot of things it made possible--ad revenues subsidize a load of things I care about--and to see that some advertising was really interesting. It knew what its job was, from a communication standpoint, it did that job, and it did it in a way that was clarifying, memorable, engaging, and sometimes, it changed the way I thought about things.
I eventually realized that I cared less about ads than about the brands behind the ads. And that's what led me into the space I'm in today.
The great recession of 2007-2009. Like everyone, I knew it was going to be bad. But dramatic recessions hit agencies harder and faster than most industries. Big budgets turn into table scraps, there are layoffs.
It's awful. But work still needs to get done, so recessions can also be a great time to launch a specialized agency.
The marketplace always gets a vote on your business.
During a recession, the vote comes fast. In our case, we launched with one client then landed an account with Marriott International a few months later. That gave us room to breathe and to grow.
I have played French horn since I was a boy. That was my original career path--I wanted to be a professional horn player. I got pretty good, worked professionally for a few years, but at the end of the day, I just wasn't good enough. I still play and enjoy it, but it's a sideline, not a mainline.
Among his many mini-careers, which spanned singing opera in Vienna and farming in Vermont, my father fished commercially when I was a boy. I grew up on the water, so in adulthood, I have had a number of boats. I hold a current USCG 100 ton unlimited merchant mariner credential (aka "captain's license").
Our current boat, a 44' motor yacht, is my second office and where I go when I need to be creative--or to get away. And I ride a racing bike--a lot, every day--in the hills around where we live. But let me respond to the premise of the question. I don't have a life outside of work.
This company is a creative project. It's a self-expressive project. It's an intensely creative project. I call it work, but it's not work. It's what I do and who I am just like playing horn, being at sea, riding or writing.
Let me start with what I wish clients knew. I wish clients understood how much their agencies cared about their success. Agency leaders can get cynical. But agency staff generally genuinely fall in love with their client organizations. They feel very much a part of the client team--so much so that sometimes, they forget who signs their check.
I think if clients knew how much their agency cared, they might open up sooner, open up more, and trust more that when we talk about being partners instead of vendors, we're saying something important and sincere. What I wish people knew about our industry is that it's a lot like the oil and gas industry. You may hate it, but it makes a lot of things you love possible.
This is a tough one. Our industry is under so much pressure to share the latest bright and shiny that I tend to be skeptical about new technologies until I see good use cases. But there are huge exceptions, like the advent of LLMs. That doesn't mean I ignore them. My team and I spend a load of time doing research and trialing new things when they come out. But most of the time, we decide they're over-hyped and only offer marginal improvements. Whenever a truly disruptive change happens (e.g., the web, mobile tech, social media, it creates disruption and opportunity for agencies and our clients.
So in brief, we don't adopt for the sake of adoption, but we lean in to disruption.
The number 1, 2, 3, 5, 7, 11, 13... issue is establishing trust. Branding is always about change. And change is almost always resisted. (Dilbert got this exactly right: "Change is good. You go first.") In our industry, that resistance plays out in interesting ways. Most client organizations like the idea of improvement, but your idea of improvement may not align with any of your colleagues.
So the idea that an external agency is going to get this right can be hard to accept. But if your client trusts you, two magical things happen. The teams connect and collaborate like one team. And the quality of the feedback is fantastic. Great feedback allows the agency to do what it does best--create, and ideate.
I came into the industry at about the same time as the world wide web (remember that?), so I've seen loads of incredible change. I've seen the web go from quirky and optional to essential. I've gone from pagers to iPhones and seen out of home marketing shrink from billboards to mobile devices. I've seen print die, be reborn, and die again at the local level.
Most importantly for my corner of the industry, I've seen the idea of brands become universal. When I began, I had a standard spiel I'd give at every intro meeting on what brands were, what made a great brand, and so on. There's still a lot of mystery around how to make a brand great, brand identity, brand purpose and so on, but the idea of "brand" has gone completely mainstream. And I'm very happy about that.
I'm convinced that LLM technology will transform our entire ecosystem and I think it's going to happen much faster than most of us expect. That will create chaos and opportunity for agencies and clients. Initially, the chaos will be destructive, as in-house creative teams are able to do more things more quickly at a higher level of quality than they could before.
That will be rough for agencies--particularly for agencies that do easy to automate things, like media planning--but I don't think this will be a long winter.
Before long, the uncertainty facing clients around incredibly basic fundamentals--like "what do I do when customers are using LLM agents whose search process bypasses most of my website (and my entire brand identity) entirely?"--will create a lot of space for the kinds of non-linear, creative responses agencies like ours are designed for. So, who has a competitive edge? Strategy agencies, agencies who deeply integrate LLMs, deeply creative agencies, and agencies who learn how to find the new differentiation in this new landscape.
Do we have a strategy problem, a design problem, or an experience problem?Do we need a partner to integrate with our team or a vendor to augment our team?Do we have internal alignment that the project is necessary and a dedicated budget?
We try hard to make that easy. Just fill out our online contact form to schedule a briefing call. We'll have a 45 minute call to understand the project--and we'll be honest about whether we think your project's a good fit for our agency. We try to adapt our work cadence to meet our clients where they are, whether that's informal catch-up calls or scheduled project meetings.
Almost all our business is referral based, so it's a big part. And yet, we do very little active networking in terms of events, conferences, etc.
I'm proud of our client portfolio and our delivery footprint. As we say in our boilerplate, we've worked with some of the world's most admired brands, including Amazon, Atlassian, Blackrock, Chevron, Cisco, City National Bank, DocuSign, Delta Air Lines, Google Fiber, Intel, Kaiser Permanente, HSBC, Marriott, Microsoft, NTT, Omron, Providence, Tencent and The Ritz-Carlton to name a few.
We've also helped many newer brands get their start. Along the way, we've had a chance to do field research in more than 35 countries, including all of the world's most important tech hot spots.
And our work has been covered by USA Today, The Washington Post, San Francisco Chronicle, The Times of London, the Financial Times, the Times of India, and hundreds of other national and international outlets.
Two things. First, every brand has a job to do. Many agencies don't understand that, but we do. And we know how to get the job done.
Second, we're an evidence-based, strategy-led agency. That means we do our creative briefs much later than many other agencies, the briefs are much tighter (more prescriptive), and our creative evaluation is based less on "is it beautiful/fun/interesting, etc." than on "will this creative give the brand the tools it needs to get the unique job it needs to do done?"
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