Former W+K Leaders Founded Opinionated. To Grow, They Tapped an Agency Vet With a Crispin Mindset

In the early to mid-2000s, Wieden+Kennedy and Crispin Porter + Bogusky were kings of creative. CP+B was winning with campaigns like “Subservient Chicken” for Burger King and Mini’s “Counterfeit,” while W+K was going global with Nike, Old Spice and Coca-Cola.

Now, former executives from both those storied ad houses have come together at Portland, Ore.-based independent shop Öpınıonated, as Kate Higgins has joined the six-year-old agency as its first chief growth officer.

Higgins was formerly a vp and account director at CP+B during its heyday, while Öpinionated founder and creative director Mark Fitzloff rose at Wieden+Kennedy, creating memorable campaigns for Old Spice and eventually becoming the executive creative director and partner at the agency before launching Öpinionated in 2017. Fitzloff is joined at the agency by other former W+K colleagues, including president Trish Adams and creative director Rob Palmer.

Higgins’ hiring has brought two distinct schools of thought together and hopes to be a boon for Öpinionated, which has already done smart work for Seventh Generation, Adidas, Nature’s Way and Drumstick. The addition of Higgins is something that Öpinionated hopes will help the still budding agency blossom.

“We’re so excited to get an outside perspective and different opinions to help shape the agency moving forward,” Adams told Adweek.

Passion for great work

A shared passion for great creative brought Higgins to Öpinionated. She saw the Seventh Generation work the agency did and was impressed. After finding out about Fitzloff’s work and knowing the success the W+K team had over the years, she knew that it would be a good fit.

“Great brands are needed today more than ever because of the absolute dumpster fire that is the media landscape,” Higgins told Adweek.

Higgins is more than just her CP+B past, however. She was most recently with Erich & Kallman as the agency’s chief growth officer, her second time with the agency. She also had stints as a president at MullenLowe, partner and chief client officer at Made, founder of consultancy Youngest Child, and account positions at Fallon and Carmichael Lynch.

After five years of building and finding some success, Fitzloff said that the agency is now “ready for its close-up,” with Higgins steering growth, Dave Daines leading strategy, Fitzloff and Palmer leading creative and design, and Adams leading the account team.

“In Kate we see a co-leader pushing us to be even more evolved and better at what we do, but also, more practically, to be a partner who brings her own network and her own world experiences into this mix to collectively get us onto that bigger stage,” said Fitzloff.

Deprogramming the cults

Fitzloff said that the shared focus on the work at both Wieden and Crispin back in the day was coupled with the fact that both shops at the time were “cults,” meaning they had a following and did things in a very specific way.

Fitzloff and Adams admitted that starting a new agency, especially after coming from such charged backgrounds, involved getting out of the singular W+K mindset while applying the best of what they had learned.

“In the interest of growing personal growth, as well as professional growth for ourselves and for the agency, it had to be about meeting new people and embracing alternative playbooks,” said Fitzloff, adding that accepting different approaches, especially those brought by Higgins, will only help Öpinionated grow.

Growth is matchmaking

Fitzloff sees what Wieden did for brands like Nike and Old Spice and he wants Öpinionated to help bring that success to the brands they work with, those that have thoughtful, deep human purposes and insights.

“A lot of our competitors are very much in in the business of short-term buzz and moving on to the next thing. We love a lot of that work and we respect a lot of those agencies, but we see them as short term sugar hits for those companies and not long term protein,” said Fitzloff.

Higgins will help with the growth of Öpinionated in several ways. One of them will be to help the agency get recognized and promote itself with smart branding. While nothing is ready to share, the team promises the agency will smartly bring its story to life. The other way she will help is with finding the right brands for the agency.

“I don’t think of it as sales, I think of it as more of matchmaking … because it’s not about trying to shove our way onto someone. It’s really about like mindedness,” said Higgins.