Former Flock Freight Top Marketers Orlando Baeza and Andrew Teague Debut Brand Studio

Agencies can offer brands a great outsider perspective on their business, but having unique insight from former brand executives is sometimes lacking in the relationships.

A new brand studio, started by former client-side marketing executives, is offering direct access to top-level strategic thinkers to help brands uncover their needs and jump-start their efforts.

The studio, Unentitled, is led by veteran marketing team Orlando Baeza and Andrew Teague, both of whom have worked at agencies but ultimately made their names as in-house executives, Baeza as a chief marketing officer and Teague as a creative. The two have been working with several clients under the radar for a few months while Unentitled worked out the kinks of being a new business, but the studio is now ready to unveil itself and take on more work.

Unentitled got its name because its founders don’t believe ego should get in the way of a good strategy or campaign.

“It’s not feeling like we’re entitled to your budget, entitled to the work, entitled to do an above-the-line ad campaign,” Baeza told ADWEEK.

What Unentitled does offer is solutions that the networks might not, from figuring out consumer behavior, return on investment articulation, finding out pain points and the challenges a brand needs to solve, all from a client perspective. It serves as a kind of out-of-house, in-house marketing agency, able to converse about the ins and outs of day-to-day operations while seeing a business from the outside to make fresh decisions on what marketing needs may be.

“The majority of what we’re interested in is brand strategy and that side of the business,” Teague told ADWEEK, adding that this could be through a campaign, a rebrand, a brand jump-start or a refresh.

Teague said that being in-house at brands let him know more about the pain points of brands that they might hide from agencies.

“You’re hearing every dimension of the business, more so than you do in the creative brief that you might get at an agency,” said Teague, adding that he hopes Unentitled is able to go deep with brands because they’ve been there and know those pain points firsthand.

A background of client-side expertise

Baeza has built a reputation on helping startups as a marketing lead for companies including Kajabi, BuzzFeed and, most recently, Flock Freight, where he headed up the Steve Burns campaign for the logistics brand. He has also held marketing roles at global brands including Nike, Adidas, Activision and Paramount Studios.

Teague has worked as a creative director at numerous brands and several agencies, including Apple, MeUndies, Nike, Kajabi and Flock Freight.

The two met at Kajabi, where they took a company from a $150 million valuation to $2 billion over the next couple of years. They kept the relationship rolling through several companies and found that they both had some disconnects with external agency partners. That led them to see their strengths as client-side marketers.

“We come from a really different perspective … and we can offer a very unique point of view and approach to the work,” said Baeza, who added that the two have access to networks and talent that will help them scale their work.

They see their current work as a co-creation between Unentitled and the companies they work with.

“We’ve made an intentional decision to avoid the ‘ta-da’ moment of the agency-client relationship and actually co-create with our partners, so it allows for more insights to come in more organically from the client side, from the business perspective throughout the engagement,” said Baeza.

Satisfied clients

While its client list is currently short, those clients are singing Unentitled’s praises, including getting to work with the founding team of C-level talent that knows the objectives of businesses and can execute at a reasonable price.

One current client is TeraWatt, a company at the forefront of the electric vehicle industry, with a series of charging stations for trucking companies, fleet vehicles and passenger transportation. Justin Turner is the chief commercial officer for TeraWatt, and he was looking for an agency that would make sure the brand spoke to a progressive buyer who sees that the world needs change.

After talking with numerous agencies, he felt like a lot of the costs he was quoted were based off bloated teams trying to justify spending, quoting “significantly more hours than it probably should have taken, [with] incredibly bloated timelines like six to 12 months.”

But after talking with Baeza, whom he had known previously, Turner found that Unentitled could do the job at not only a fraction of the cost, but that it was able to execute the scope of work in less than 90 days.

“They’re highly experienced. They’re all former CMOs and creative executives themselves, so they were able to run really tight and lean,” said Turner, adding that the team gave really honest, direct feedback, helping drive success through branding and messaging that stands out from the rest of his industry.

Other clients come from previous relationships Baeza and Teague have had in the past, plus word of mouth. Unentitled is currently building its website and communications, but it does have a sizzle reel, featuring some of the work currently being done and highlights from their careers past.

Unentitled hopes to continue to scale its client base and work, building on the business model and providing all of the functionality that the modern CMO requires, as well as leveraging artificial intelligence to help maximize dollars spent and streamline processes.