Scrum50 Mantra: “Do Things Twice as Good in Half the Time”

SOUTH NORWALK, Conn., May 11, 2015 — Founded in March 2015 by digital marketing and “360-degree thinking” advertising agency veterans, Scrum50 is a new agency that is powered by “agile marketing” thinking and practices. “Our mission,” Scrum50 CEO & Managing Partner Michael LeBeau explained, “is to do smart work that is twice as good in half the time.”

Agile marketing has evolved out of the methodology originated by software and technology development whose goal was to promote collaboration, speed to market, and cost efficiencies.

True agile marketing has been recognized for its ability to produce stronger creative work faster, LeBeau said, noting that Scrum50’s key agile drivers are:

• Better — “We don’t vet ideas through the ‘dreamcrushers’ at an agency or client who turn everything to vanilla,” LeBeau said. “We incubate hypotheses which we then grow and field test. We let customer behavior be the final arbiter.”
• Smarter — “By quickly getting an idea into the field, you’re relying on the marketplace to validate your concept,” he said. “You improve it with each iteration. It’s like placing a lot of small bets rather than one big high-risk one.”
• Faster — “Agile is inherently quicker not just because the team is smaller and more nimble, but because you’re not waiting months to gather input.”

“Agile modernizes old school marketing and advertising habits,” LeBeau said. “Instead of the traditional campaign development cycle in which you’re briefed by a client, go through a lengthy planning process, formulate ideas, mull them over, and finally present a concept, agile identifies a selection of smart ideas and quickly puts those concepts out into the marketplace to validate which ones really work.”

LeBeau noted that the goal of agile marketing is to deliver better client solutions early and often. Agile methodology stresses rapidity, flexibility, communication, and collaboration. It places great value on feedback from the field versus relying on traditional market research. “Such field testing may seem radical, but it’s the fastest, most direct method for proving what works,” LeBeau added.

“We started Scrum50 because in our former agency lives it was taking too long to do good work,” Scrum 50 Managing Partner Chris Parker said. “If you asked a client how many of their big ideas became big paydays in practice, the answer was, not many. That’s because the process is fundamentally flawed. Agile delivers fresh ideas fast and lets market behavior rather the consensus of an internal team vet those ideas. We don’t seek consensus. We seek success.”

“We live in an age in which brands have trouble keeping pace with the new velocity of life,” LeBeau added. “Traditional agencies were built for a time that was slower, less dynamic, and more predictable. Scrum50 was built with the speed to lead.”
LeBeau noted that Scrum50’s agile model “takes the nonessential people out of the agency, and leaves it lean because we’ve removed the layers. A traditional agency has five layers of approvals; we have one. Our model is compact, streamlined, and productive. It’s why smaller agencies are getting more work.”

“The cornerstone of Scrum50 is that the solutions we deliver to our clients are super-creative, super-smart, and super-fast,” Parker said. “Each team member brings to the table multiple skills sets — ‘polymath’ is the term once used to describe that concept — which is what enables us to move so much more expeditiously. It’s a culture of doing. You can see a project grow to fruition in just a few weeks, not months or years. It’s what clients increasingly are demanding.

“Agile agencies are the skunkworks of the marketing world,” he added.

About Co-founders Parker and LeBeau
Parker was one of the first employees at one of the first digital agencies, Modem Media. He then become the first digital editor and producer at PC Magazine. Returning to Modem Media in 1994, he spent 10 years in leadership positions overseeing clients like AT&T, J. C. Penney, Kodak, AOL, and HP. In 2005, he partnered with Michael LeBeau at Byte Interactive, and together they grew the digital production shop into a full-service strategic digital agency and more than tripled gross revenue in two years. In 2007, Byte merged into Story Worldwide, where, as COO, he helped pioneer the content-focused, social and mobile “always on” brand ecosystem.

LeBeau is a serial entrepreneur. His first company straight out of college sold premiums to the beverage industry. After landing Miller Brewing and Pepsi-Cola as clients, he parlayed that success into management positions at several marketing agencies where he directed clients that included Pepsi-Cola, Guinness (now Diageo), Cadbury Beverages, IBM, and UST. In 1994, he formed an interactive division at Creative Alliance. In 1997, he founded Byte Interactive. Byte was acquired by Story Worldwide in 2007, and LeBeau stayed on for two years as CMO. In 2010, he founded digital shopper marketing agency WELD media, which featured The Path-Through-Purchase™. WELD was acquired by Marketing Drive in 2012, and shortly thereafter both were acquired by Match Marketing Group, where LeBeau became managing partner, digital initiatives, for five offices in North America.

About Scrum50
Scrum50 is a new kind of agency, dynamic as the agile methodology which drives it. Scrum50 lives at the intersection of technology and marketing. It’s a place where brands are jostled and challenged by our 24/7 social world of news, views, and customer feedback cycles. Change is the only constant. It’s a scrimmage image in which ideas are packed closely together, as in a rugby scrum, where only the most effective rise to the top. Scrum50 adapts the new agile marketing paradigm to accelerate your brand’s time to market. Staffed by industry veterans, informed by agile best practices, Scrum50 is smart, flexible, nimble — the marketing agency transformed. Scrum50 is currently working with American Express, Schwan Food Company, Stamford Health, Save the Children, and Spark Modern Fires. Please visit www.scrum50.com.

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