In the summer of 2018, the advertising business still loved its little kingdoms. Public relations people earned coverage. Digital people bought clicks. Brand people discussed purpose in rooms with thick markers. Then Next 15 took two of its agencies - Text100, a technology communications veteran, and Bite, a digitally minded creative shop - and put them together. By early 2019, the combined firm had a new name: Archetype.
The logic was almost embarrassingly plain. Marketing and communications had converged. Technology was no longer a sector off to one side; it was becoming the operating system of nearly every sector. A bank had an app, a car had software, a mattress had sensors. Telling these companies’ stories required more than a press release, yet a parade of disconnected specialists could turn one idea into six incompatible versions of itself.
Archetype’s founding proposition was that the org chart had failed before the craft did. Bring reputation, brand, creative, content, media and digital under one roof. Keep the technology fluency Text100 had accumulated over decades. Add Bite’s speed. Then make local offices responsible for local judgment instead of treating translation as strategy.
The product is translation
Archetype calls itself a communications agency “and a whole lot more,” which is both a slogan and a problem statement. The firm sells strategy, PR, media relations, crisis support, brand positioning, creative production, social, paid campaigns, search, digital experiences, analytics and executive visibility. That menu resembles plenty of global agencies. Its sharper distinction is the kind of translation connecting the items.
A technical company usually has no shortage of facts. It has a shortage of useful meanings. Engineers explain what a product does; buyers wonder why their Thursday will improve. A headquarters team writes a global message; a reporter in Munich, Mumbai or Melbourne hears a phrase that does not quite fit. Archetype sits between those parties. It turns internal expertise into a public argument, then adapts the argument without sanding away its point.
Its customer list makes the specialization visible: Shopify, Ai2, EA SPORTS, Mailchimp, Icertis, Chainalysis, Asana, Hinge Health, Arm, IBM and Cisco. These are not companies selling self-explanatory objects. They sell infrastructure, systems, platforms and new categories. The buyer may need persuasion; the journalist may need a usable example; the public may need reassurance. One campaign has to answer all three.
“We want to become an archetype for the agency of the future.”Archetype’s recurring internal ambition
A newsroom hiding inside an agency
The most revealing Archetype case is not a glossy launch. It is a machine. For EA SPORTS, the agency built a 24-hour editorial operation spanning 14 countries and multiple languages. It mixes live match reporting, video and gamification, and now produces more than 1,000 stories each month. A soft launch became something closer to a multilingual sports desk.
That scale explains the business better than an adjective can. Archetype is not merely hired to dream up a line. It can research the audience, define the narrative, make the assets, place the story, operate the publishing system and measure the response. The commercial model follows: project fees for bounded work and retainers for ongoing programs. There is no public rate card. Clutch, an outside agency directory, lists a minimum project of $5,000 and an hourly range of $200 to $300, but a 14-country newsroom is plainly a different purchase from a messaging workshop.
Make the expert useful before making the brand famous.
Archetype built a consumer program around clinicians’ practical advice, supported it with a medical-experts hub, and reported a twofold increase in share of voice against competitors.
Hinge Health shows the quieter version of the same model. The digital clinic wanted consumers to see a different approach to chronic pain. Archetype did not begin by demanding that people admire the product. It made Hinge Health’s physical therapists useful to health reporters, with practical material on stretching, strength and pelvic health. It then worked with the client’s clinical, design and PR teams on a medical-experts page that gave coverage somewhere credible to land. Archetype says share of voice doubled against competitors.
The first failure, in other words, is often the instinct to lead with oneself. Archetype’s better work begins with an audience tension: pain relief that feels inaccessible; “work about work” that nobody has named; contracts treated as dead paperwork rather than live business intelligence. The company’s role is to find a phrase or behavior that makes the tension portable.
The useful contradiction
Archetype promises “startup agility with global agency strength.” Those qualities are natural enemies. Global networks accumulate approval layers; startups accumulate mistakes. The agency tries to hold the contradiction together by sharing standards globally while leaving offices tuned to their markets. More than 600 people across 21 offices is enough capacity to run campaigns across North America, Europe and Asia-Pacific, but small enough that the handoffs still matter.
Ownership complicates the startup claim. Archetype is wholly owned by Next 15, a public company. In 2024, Next 15 placed Archetype, Outcast and Nectar into Marker Collective, a coordinated group meant to bring their capabilities together in a more product-led business. This gives Archetype access to sibling expertise and group resources. It also means clients should ask the unglamorous questions: Who owns the brief? Which office does the work? How many teams attend the status call?
The culture pitch attempts the same balance. Archetype names ambition, curiosity and kindness as its values. It describes global all-hands meetings, open leadership AMAs, flexible work, office collaboration days and travel support for remote colleagues. Its UK company became a Certified B Corporation in February 2024 with a score of 87.5. More interestingly, the UK team says it rejected two significant, profitable opportunities in 2023 because they conflicted with its ethics policy. Values become legible when an invoice disappears.
A second front: who gets seen
Archetype Ascend, launched for BIPOC founders, executives and investors, is the agency’s clearest attempt to turn a cultural point of view into a service. Its team offers positioning, executive platforms, media training, funding announcements, design and community engagement. It won Gold in The Drum Awards in 2024.
The premise is that achievement and attention are separate systems. A founder can build something important without possessing the networks, narrative practice or institutional familiarity that make importance visible. Ascend applies the agency’s distribution machinery to that gap. The idea avoids charity language. Communications is treated as business infrastructure - a competitive advantage that has not been evenly available.
What to borrow from the machine
The copyable part of Archetype’s method does not require 21 offices. Start with one tension the audience already feels. Find an expert who can be genuinely useful on that tension. Build a durable place for the proof to live. Then adapt the expression to each channel instead of resizing one asset until it squeaks. Strategy supplies the spine; local knowledge supplies the joints.
If your campaign sentence cannot survive a skeptical customer, a hurried reporter and a colleague in another country, it is not yet a narrative. It is office copy.
The method is less convincing when the product cannot support the story, when leadership wants attention but withholds access, or when “global consistency” really means headquarters refuses local judgment. Integrated agencies also create their own risk: one partner can become a single point of mediocrity across many disciplines. A company with a narrow, local task may be better served by a smaller specialist. The Archetype model earns its overhead when the problem truly crosses markets, audiences and channels.
Lately, that problem includes machines as an audience. Archetype’s UK team has described combining earned media, structured content, SEO and executive authority so brands appear not only in search results but in AI-generated answers. The tactic is new; the instinct is old. Find out how information travels. Earn trust in the places doing the carrying. Make the complicated thing clear enough to repeat without making it false.
That is the wager inside the merger. Text100 and Bite did not disappear because storytelling stopped mattering. They disappeared because a story could no longer remain in one department. Archetype’s work begins at precisely that inconvenient border - the place where a company’s facts become somebody else’s reason to care.