YY&Y: Madison Avenue for the Little Guy
Start spreading the news… Madison Avenue has another player in the world of features and benefits: Yoder Yoder & Yoder. A new fangled advertising and marketing agency that combines the sophistication of big city branding and the inspiration of fresh country air to arm challenger and small-budget brands with the ideas and strategies they could otherwise not afford from an agency of that stature.
So where is this “Madison Avenue” agency located?
900 miles west of Manhattan, give or take a mile or two, just outside of Milwaukee. Yoder Yoder & Yoder is actually closer to Madison, Wisconsin than Madison Avenue, so you can understand getting a cab here is tough any hour of the day. Nonetheless, YY&Y is in the thick of it everyday doing the Mad Men thing, just in the Dairy State:
Holding client meetings, positioning brands, creating ads, developing websites, executing social media strategies, designing packaging, and launching new products — those work things the Roger Sterlings, Bert Coopers and Don Drapers do on a daily basis, whether surrounded by skyscrapers or, you know, spruce trees.
A one-man partnership with three times the Street smarts, know-how and conviction.
Obviously no one confuses Milwaukee for the Big Apple. The masterplan at YY&Y, however, is to produce the level of work one could easily confuse for a Madison Avenue agency: smart, simple and sophisticated — with one glaring distinction. Price.
Agency Founder and Creative Director, Steve Yoder, puts it like this, “If you listen to your typical agency creative, no budget is ever big enough. When you can only afford a small shop, the level of talent and expertise dramatically falls off. So what we’re doing is making that highest level of thinking affordable to clients with smaller marketing dollars, or those who click with our way of branding and marketing.”
According to Yoder, it’s one thing if you’re a challenger brand like Ally Bank with deep pockets to go up against US Bank nationally, but it’s another if you’re a Landmark Credit Union competing against them in the Milwaukee market.
“For Landmark to take on US Bank, they needed to look like a big bank…with that level of credibility,” says Yoder. “But it’s more than that, because we still didn’t have a US Bank marketing budget, so we had to go beyond conventional financial thinking to call attention to them in a meaningful way.” Yoder spearheaded the Landmark Credit Union branding makeover in 2003, which had 11 branch locations at the time. Today they have 32 in Milwaukee and surrounding communities.
The secret behind Yoder Yoder & Yoder’s incredible value and offer to the marketplace is its structure. YY&Y is a full-service crowdsourced advertising agency. Clients pay only for the talent and expertise their project warrants. “We’ve eliminated every cost aspect of operating an agency that has no direct association with the work being performed,” shares Yoder. “This is about employing the bare minimum to achieve maximum returns, which is sometimes groundbreaking creative for less or just maximum bang for you marketing dollars.”
To learn more about YY&Y and the unique opportunities it offers you, get in touch with Steve. He not only is the agency’s founder and creative director, he’s the receptionist.