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Happinest: Astronauts, Power Slaps, AI Peeps and More Lawn-Care Weirdness
Rival, the company's lead agency, just launched its 10th seasonal campaign for the brand
I was assembling a reel recently and said to one of my producers “Let’s look into the Happinest archives.” Going back through the work, it dawned on me: I’d just completed my 10th year working with Happinest (Lawn Doctor, Mosquito Hunters, EcoMaids and Sparkle Squad). It’s now, in fact, the longest client relationship of my advertising career.
In this piece, I’ve included some examples from our newly launched campaign.
It’s hard to win clients. And with relentless competition (human and bot alike) coming from every angle, it’s even harder to retain them. So, I thought a decade’s worth of work might be worth a moment of reflection.
First off, Happinest is built different. They’re not a “what else could it be?” kind of client. They buy stuff. In the first round. Almost always.
Some might say that makes them an “easy” client. But it’s quite the opposite. And here’s the Jedi mind trick they’ve mastered: If the agency knows you’re going to buy something, with minimal changes, you get a totally different kind of deck. You get everyone in the department fighting to work on it. It’s not half-baked, blue sky, fluff. It’s ready to go, figured out, free of vague “ad-lobs.” The work is campaign-able and ambitious. It maximizes the budget.
When you’re an open-minded and trusting client, it puts all the pressure back on the agency— no excuses. “We said yes. We took your recommendation. Now, it’s on you to deliver.”
I’ve always thrived off this energy. And I think the client can feel that. I’m thankful for the effort the client puts in to foster that positive, creative atmosphere. And I’m proud that—even working with tight budgets–nearly every creative who’s worked with me over the last decade has a Happinest campaign in their portfolio that’s earned press, shortlist nods or hardware.
Also, in a marketing landscape that’s so fragmented and project driven, clients are less incentivized to foster a deep relationship with a creative partner. But here’s the thing: When an agency isn’t always on its heels, or paranoid about the next scope … again, you get different behaviors.
When we whiff, we talk openly about how to improve and move on without finger-pointing. That deep knowledge of what works and doesn’t work, accumulated over time, has real value.
We’ve become a well-oiled machine, but not territorial. We partner well with their teams and agencies. We text and pick up the phone, not in the sales-y, distracting, box-checking way. But to solve things, in real time. We adapt and remain open-minded (I cannot describe how much has changed in our business over the last decade. It’s seismic.)
In our time together, the Happinest portfolio has added several new brands, franchise territories have boomed and ad efficiencies have been finely honed.
When I asked our client Christina Schmidt—who’s risen through the ranks over the last decade to become their newly appointed VP of marketing—for her POV, it was simple:
“Ten years in, and it’s still effortless. They bring big ideas without the big egos, making collaboration feel easy and creativity feel natural.”
Clients are under incredible duress. And your staggering genius as a creative person can only take up so much of their time and attention. In one quote, Christina used the words “effortless,” “easy” and “natural.”
Yes, but no.
For a decade, Happinest had made it “easy” and “natural” for us to do our best work, improve and evolve.
The “easier” it feels, the harder we want to work on their behalf.
