Business Spotlight: Agency Yin, Yang

Chris and Nicole Jarratt are the yin and yang of the advertising and marketing agency world.

The couple own and operate Revel Advertising and have developed a balanced approach built on roughly a decade of industry experience each.

“We think completely differently,” says Nicole Jarratt, who left a marketing job with Springfield mattress seller MYA LLC in 2010 to launch the firm with her husband. “Where he’s creative, and I like to say up in the clouds a lot, I am always grounded.”

To steer the business of Revel, Jarratt handles bookkeeping, invoicing, project coordination and media placement, as well as human resources and information technology tasks.

“She’s more that analytical side of things,” says Chris Jarratt, the firm’s creative guru, who also serves as lead generator and client-relationship manager at the five-employee agency. “We are a small business, so there is a lot of hat-wearing around here.”

Jarratt knows a thing or two about juggling projects. He ran a freelance design shop for six years before launching Revel in late 2010 with his wife and a business partner, Emily Johnson. The Jarratts bought out Johnson’s share in January and have since hired Adam Bowlin from Marlin Network as art director.

While a handful of clients have remained from the Jarratt Design days, Revel now claims roughly 40 active clients. About 15 companies order work weekly, such as print campaigns for Barnett-Davis Dental Group and brand development pieces for Missouri State University athletics. “If it says athletics on it, we probably did it,” Chris Jarratt says.

A month ago, the Jarratts moved Revel to larger space at the corner of Boonville Avenue and Phelps Street – steps from the 214 W. Phelps St. office where the agency launched.

The purple ram
While it seems every ad agency needs a funky mascot, the conversation-starting symbol for Revel is a purple ram. One hangs like a deer mount in the couple’s IDEA Commons office, overlooking business meetings in the modernly designed conference room.

The Jarratts say the purple ram wall decor is a welcome gift from landlords J. Martin and Nathan Taylor.

But it’s more than a fixture on the wall. The Jarratts’ holding company is Purple Ram LLC, organized in mid-2010 when they were struggling to settle on a company name. The clock was ticking to finalize the legal paperwork and upon visiting Taylor and Martin’s Obelisk Home decor store, the Jarratts spotted a purple ram above the checkout counter.

“We just went with it,” Nicole Jarratt says.

A few months later, the dba Revel Advertising was born.

“Clients were needing more advertising and marketing services. I was recommending them to other people in town,” he says. “They kept coming back to me asking, ‘Can you do those things?’”

Today, the tasks have become more marketing minded, moving from direct-mail and brochure designs to brand consulting that includes email and social media strategies.

“We want to make brands better. There are a lot of different ways we can do that,” Jarratt says, noting the average consumer views 3,000 to 5,000 marketing messages a day. “If you can’t break through that clutter, you’re going to have to spend a ton of money to get your message heard. If you can do something unique, you might not need to spend as much money.”

Outside the box
Earlier this year, Revel created a campaign for Paragon Architecture Inc. to connect owner Brad Erwin and crew to area school superintendents. With Paragon’s niche in FEMA safe room design, and in preparation of attending the Missouri Association of School Administrators spring trade show, Revel mailed oversized Lego pieces to superintendents in their school’s colors and covered with the Paragon logo. Inside each was more custom-color Lego pieces and a challenge to build a Lego structure representing their school for a $500 prize toward the local chapter of charities Care to Learn or Bright Futures. With photo submissions posted on Revel’s and Paragon’s Facebook pages, the Cassville school district’s yellow-and-black wildcat mascot designed by middle school students was selected as the winner.

Erwin says three out of 40 districts took the Lego challenge – what he considers an average response rate – but the superintendents now have the large Legos with Paragon’s logo hanging around their offices.

“The districts that did not participate in the competition talked to us at the conference and recognized the Lego and our name and asked questions about it,” he says. “That helped cement one [client] for us and led to a prospective client calling us on a different project.”

Nicole Jarratt says the campaign goal was not to sell a safe room. “The ultimate goal,” she says, “was to warm up the contact at the MASA show.”

Chris Jarratt says he advises clients to think differently about trade show efforts.

“It’s not really what you do with the trade show, so much. It’s what you do before and after,” he says.

One of Revel’s most involved projects yet was for New Jersey-based Ansell Healthcare. Connected by former Mercy Research & Development executives, Revel was hired to produce trade show materials promoting Ansell’s international Gammex brand of surgical gloves.

“Getting familiarized with that brand was a task in itself. I think they had a 100-page brand guidelines packet,” Chris Jarratt says.

Revel developed three fold-out brochures at roughly $1,850 apiece showcasing Gammex’s infection protection hand dressings – each a stark contrast, he says, from the company’s standard one-sheet product specifications.

“We broke a lot of those rules,” he says, noting the process took 10 client revisions and Revel went over its budgeted time by 75 percent without additional charges to the customer.

The Jarratts say they are among an industry shift to bill clients by the project rather than by the hour.

“It’s on us to get it done in that amount of time,” Nicole Jarratt says, noting quality remains paramount in the process. “It’s our name on that piece as much as it is theirs.”