Big Fuel

Consumer Engagement Agency

Only 14% of consumers trust advertisements. Big Fuel opened its homepage with that number — an agency leading with the statistic most agencies were hired to hide. Its answer was the tagline on the masthead: From Content to Commerce. Don’t interrupt people with ads; make things they actually want to watch. In the mid-2000s that was a contrarian thesis with a name nobody else was using yet: consumer engagement. Arguably, Big Fuel was the first consumer engagement agency — and this studio’s founder was its seventh member.

Outright Mental served under Marc Calamia, a brilliant creative director whose own career began in the original Broadway cast of CHICAGO, dancing for Bob Fosse, before he joined NBC as a producer. That’s the kind of shop it was: showmanship upstream of strategy.

The record

Marc’s own account of the tenure:

While at Big Fuel, we co-directed and animated a public service announcement that aired nationally. As the post-production supervisor, Nick efficiently ran the entire editing and animation department, demonstrating his exceptional managerial and technical skills. Nick also demonstrated a remarkable ability to lead and develop the craft of the younger creative staff, taking a keen interest in enhancing their day-to-day work experience. Later, as senior art director, he flawlessly supervised all digital art execution, thus bolstering our team’s productivity, our creativity, and the overall vibe.

The nationally aired PSA he describes is in this portfolio: “Know Where They Go”, a :30 for the U.S. Department of Justice that ran on NBC, CBS, Fox, and Oxygen. So is the era’s biggest platform build: the Stetson “Made of America” website and community, designed during the Big Fuel tenure in partnership with the 150-year-old brand’s CEO.

The napkin sketch

One more gem from those years: one of the first brand-sponsored influencer consumer-engagement campaigns, produced for Colgate. The opening frames of the campaign video display a literal napkin sketch from the pitch meeting — drawn by this studio’s founder, sold in the room, then produced for national distribution. The distance between a napkin and a shipped campaign is the entire agency business; it’s rarely documented this honestly.

Epilogue

The contrarian thesis aged well: Publicis Groupe took a majority stake in Big Fuel in 2011, by which point “make content people want” had stopped being contrarian and started being the industry.

The manifesto says courage is creative muscle, practiced and strengthened through craft. Three years inside a first-of-its-kind agency — running the edit bay, teaching the younger staff, art-directing everything that shipped — is a lot of repetitions. The brands were the clients; the muscle came home with the founder.

Brand work in this lineage is commissioned today through Branded Play.