The Teeth. Your in-house agency outside

This post is sponsored by The Teeth.

Only five years into operation, The Teeth has built up an enviable portfolio of campaigns, working with some of the most famous brands in the region, including Tiger Beer, Guinness, Johnnie Walker, M1 and Air Asia.

While the initial success of the early years could have been attributed to sheer hard work and word of mouth recommendations, growth can now be put down to its solid understanding of clients’ businesses and brands, complemented with a fresh and unique perspective only possible from outside the walls of the clients’ organisation.

The result? Disruptive and distinctive work that gets noticed and delivers real business results.

The distinctive work

Although pre-pandemic, the Air Asia “Holiday Quickies” campaign was a great example. The Air Asia team came with a simple challenge – to drive awareness of Air Asia’s short haul routes and a proposition – “short but shiok”. This, along with an insight that Singaporeans were overworking and had poor work-life balance, fuelled the creation of Holiday Quickies – a cheeky repackaging of Air Asia’s short haul routes and a call out to Singaporeans to refresh and rejuvenate themselves with shorter, and more frequent holidays on AirAsia.

Within weeks the campaign achieved 10 million total reach and impressions and a slew of user generated content on #AirAsiaHolidayQuickies.

Another more recent example was in November, where The Teeth brought the popular annual “Guinness Great Grill Out” online for a month-long digital-first campaign, collaborating with the best grillers and chefs to provide Guinness-infused dish inspiration, culinary videos and COVID-friendly experiences with key partner outlets.

What was run as a purely offline experience for the past two years was successfully transitioned online, reaching out to a more youthful and diverse adult audience.

Ben Agnew, managing partner of The Teeth, believes there are three key elements behind the success of the agency’s model.

“We really sink our teeth into our clients’ business.”

The commercially minded leadership team is hands-on across every project, working side-by-side with clients, similar to how it would be done in-house. This enables true collaboration and helps to really understand clients’ brands, which is key in distinctive brand building. It also helps to nail the brief the first time, [almost] every time – saving time, energy and cost.

“Our plug and play approach addresses each brief’s specific needs.”

The Teeth is built around a core team and extended team of expert partners, each with a different role to play. The extended team model means that clients have access to some of the best creative and strategic talent from all around the world, with each being a trusted and like-minded partner. Because the plug and play model is on an as-needed basis, clients get more value for their investment with a curated team built specifically around their project, as opposed to a team bolstered with unnecessary additional senior talent and expensive overheads.

“Our work has bite.”

The Teeth isn’t afraid to push the status quo and sitting outside the client’s walls gives the agency licence to do so. The team can push comfort levels with bold new ideas while ensuring that everything still makes commercial sense, and most importantly, can be executed with confidence.

The agency’s positioning has become even more relevant in the past year as we see a rise in clients building in-house teams as they structure for volatility, seeking better value and speed to market. But a criticism of the in-house model is the stifling of creativity through the loss of an outside perspective, and this is even more critical now as brands strive to achieve distinctiveness in a post pandemic marketplace⁺.

The Teeth is successfully hitting this sweet spot – offering the key benefits of an in-house team while delivering disruptive and distinctive work that gets noticed and sells.

For more information, reach out to Ben Agnew, managing partner at The Teeth.

With operations in Singapore and Malaysia, The Teeth is an award-winning boutique creative agency specialising in integrated marketing campaigns, experiential marketing, branding and content creation.