Allison Checco Has One Year to Make Latitude Twice as Big - Without Making It Ordinary

Minneapolis, Minnesota

Allison Checco took the chief executive job at Latitude with the sort of brief that looks handsome in a press release and becomes complicated by Tuesday morning. Grow the Minneapolis creative agency toward nearly twice its workforce. Push farther west. Enter new categories. Keep the place independent, agile and recognizable. And preserve the unusual promise at the center of the business: half of its profits go to organizations serving women and children.

That is a lot to hold in two hands. Expansion rewards standardization, while creative culture resists it. New offices need systems; good agencies need nerve. Revenue asks to be kept; purpose asks to be funded. Checco's first chapter as CEO is compelling because none of these tensions can be resolved by a clever tagline. The answers will turn up in who gets hired, which work gets pursued and what Latitude is willing to decline.

Her promotion came in December 2025, only about a year after she joined Latitude as executive director of accounts. Founder Krista Carroll moved into the chair role. Eric Husband became chief creative officer, James Robinson executive creative director, Aaron O'Keefe executive director of accounts and Lucy Murphy remained the finance lead. It was less a single coronation than a rearrangement of the bridge while the ship kept moving.

“I get to work alongside an amazing team who shows up with curiosity, creativity and an incredible sense of ownership. Every. Single. Day.”Allison Checco, on Latitude's leadership change

She began the announcement with a thank-you

The first name in Checco's public response to the appointment was not her own. It was Carroll's. She thanked the founder for her leadership and called her “the very best partner in this new venture.” Only then did she turn to the team and the future. This is a small piece of rhetoric, but leadership transitions are composed of small pieces. A successor can enter by erasing the old handwriting or by adding a new paragraph. Checco chose the paragraph.

There is precedent in her career for being noticed through the work rather than by standing apart from it. In 2010, the Twin Cities consumer-marketing agency Fast Horse promoted her to senior director. Her remit included brand-building campaigns, launches, events, social media outreach and media relations for clients including Blue Cross Blue Shield of Minnesota, Creative Memories and Insight Schools. The agency's president praised her leadership and client results. This was account work in its full, untidy form: ideas, schedules, constituencies and consequences.

A colleague's office farewell the next year supplied a more colorful character reference. The post jokingly imagined Checco appearing with a switchblade to police an unflattering description, then landed on the sincere point: people who had been victimized or had little were fortunate to have her championing them. It is the kind of affectionate workplace roast that tells you two things at once. She could take a joke. Her protective streak had become office knowledge.

The account leader becomes the account

Account people live at the border. They translate the client's business problem for creative teams and the creative team's conviction back to the client. They know when an audacious idea is ready, when it is merely loud and when everyone needs lunch. The best of them are not diplomatic furniture. They are operators of trust.

Checco's visible work at Latitude offers a neat example. She was credited as executive director of accounts on Caribou Coffee's “Dream Date,” a short-form dating-show spoof built around the launch of energy drinks. The campaign mixed TikTok-native episodes, an influencer, paid distribution and active conversation with viewers. It treated a product introduction like entertainment instead of a lecture about flavors.

The numbers were unusually cheerful. Sales surpassed the goal by 170 percent. The campaign generated 742.5 million earned impressions and 23.1 million video views, with four in five views coming from people who did not already follow the brand. Store visits topped the goal by 256 percent, and reported sentiment was 99.9 percent positive. Checco did not make those results alone; the published credit list is long, properly so. But the work shows the commercial setting from which Latitude chose its next chief.

Now the account is the agency itself. The audience includes clients, employees, recruits, nonprofit partners and a founder who has moved one seat over. The deliverables are culture, margin, work and momentum. There is no final presentation in which everybody claps and the project gets archived.

Growth with a number attached

Checco's plan has unusual specificity for a new agency leader. Latitude intends to move toward nearly twice its workforce, strengthen its presence on the West Coast and explore categories including alcoholic beverages. Existing small outposts in Oregon and Florida provide the first coordinates. Recent client additions have included Caribou Coffee, Post Consumer Brands and Target. Work around a Lionel Messi and Major League Soccer retail experience in Miami led to further assignments from Adidas connected to Formula 1 and the 2026 World Cup.

A nearly doubled team would not simply mean more desks and Slack channels. Every batch of hires changes the ratio between people who remember why a ritual exists and people who experience it as a rule. Agency folklore dilutes quickly. A leader can write principles down, but culture travels most reliably through decisions: which behavior gets rewarded, how candidly bad news moves and whether “ownership” means permission or merely responsibility.

Checco has already supplied her preferred vocabulary. Curiosity, creativity and ownership were the traits she praised in Latitude's team. The trio forms a useful operating loop. Curiosity opens the question. Creativity proposes a response. Ownership stays for the result. Remove any one of them and agency life becomes research without action, invention without accountability or administration without imagination.

The half that leaves the building

Latitude's most arresting business fact is not a head count or campaign statistic. Since Carroll founded it in 2009, the agency has given 50 percent of its profits to organizations working against poverty and domestic abuse affecting women and children. By late 2025, more than $8.5 million had supported education, hospitals, meals and family services.

Checco has described the practice as built into Latitude's DNA. The biological metaphor is familiar corporate language, but the percentage makes it real. Half is not loose change discovered after a successful quarter. It is a structural decision about what profit is for. Clients become part of the mechanism because their fees produce the earnings that produce the gifts.

“In the ad/mktg world, its rare when the work we create also creates good in the world. But at Latitude, its built into our DNA.”Allison Checco

Growth should enlarge that mechanism. It can also strain it. More employees add opportunity and fixed costs. New markets create reach and travel. Bigger clients bring more revenue and more leverage. The promise will be tested precisely because the plan is working, not because it is failing. Purpose is easy to preserve in language. Preserving its arithmetic takes discipline.

A local operator faces the next machine

On October 20, Checco is scheduled to join a Minneapolis panel on how artificial intelligence is redefining marketing. The subject arrives at a convenient moment. AI can speed production and research; it can also make competent work plentiful and sameness cheap. For an agency selling strategic creative judgment, the challenge is not simply adopting tools. It is deciding where human taste, accountability and client understanding remain nontransferable.

That question rhymes with the larger one Checco faces at Latitude. Scale is useful. Scale without distinction is a commodity. Technology is useful. Technology without judgment is a button. Her mandate is to add capacity without producing beige abundance.

Minneapolis remains an important part of the story. Checco studied at the University of Minnesota and built a visible stretch of her career in Twin Cities agencies. Latitude may be adding pins to the map, but its leadership transition is rooted in an ecosystem where colleagues, clients and causes have long memories. Reputation here is not an abstract score. It is who returns your call after the launch, who follows you to the next company and who trusts you with a brand they love.

Checco once described the pleasure of the Caribou account in plain terms: “It's so much fun working on a brand you love with amazing people!” The exclamation point earns its keep. It is not a theory of management. It is a reminder of the emotional fuel beneath the spreadsheets.

Her next year will offer fewer tidy moments. Hiring will arrive one person at a time. Geographic expansion will be measured in relationships before revenue. The giving model will have to remain a habit under pressure. Somewhere in that accumulation, the new Latitude will emerge.

Checco has called this a new chapter. The phrase is conventional; the plot is not. She has inherited an agency with a founder still present, a clear social promise, recognizable clients and a public appetite for growth. Her task is not to make the company hers by making it unrecognizable. It is to prove that stewardship can be ambitious, that an account leader can run the whole account and that getting bigger does not require becoming ordinary.