There is a wonderfully odd detail in an old campaign for Peirce College. The students have no backpacks. No canvas straps. No cheery collegiate costume. The omission was deliberate. Peirce was trying to distinguish itself in a crowded market of for-profit schools, and Backe, its agency, had concluded that the ideal Peirce student found returning to school difficult but would work ferociously to get there. A backpack might have made that person look like a kid. Backe wanted determination instead.
So the agency built a campaign around adults who looked as if they had somewhere important to be. The palette signaled competence and accomplishment. The media plan moved across terrestrial and internet radio, transit, newspapers and banner advertising. In under three years, Peirce reported a 300 percent increase in unaided awareness. The missing backpack had acquired a number.
That pairing - an observant creative choice beside an unforgiving metric - is the most useful way to understand Backe. The privately held shop in Radnor, Pennsylvania, called itself a digital marketing and brand communications agency. Its capabilities covered nearly every shelf in the agency pantry: research, positioning, message development, copywriting, design, media, analytics, UX, programming, e-commerce and hosting. At roughly 11 to 50 employees, it was not selling scale. It was selling the connections between those disciplines.
Three rooms, one brief
Backe organized the work into three rooms: strategy, creative and technology. Strategy began with three blunt questions. What are we trying to do? Whom are we trying to reach? How will we measure success? Creative turned the answers into a piece of language, an image or an experience. Technology made it function in the inconvenient world of systems, screens and maintenance.
The sequence worth stealing
The order matters. Many marketing meetings begin at step four. Someone asks for a website, a campaign or a social plan, and an industrious team starts producing nouns. Backe’s method made the deliverable wait. Tactics had to connect back to an original intent. For a client, that meant fewer disconnected specialists to referee. For the agency, it meant the copywriter, media planner and developer could disagree inside the same argument.
A directory puts Backe’s service rate at about $70 to $150 an hour. That is an estimate, not a rate card, but it locates the business model: project and retainer work for small and mid-market organizations that wanted a joined-up team without building one internally. The client list ranged from Airgas and GSK to universities, professional associations, bridal fashion and a loading-dock company. The category changed. The sequence did not.
The university that needed more than a new name
Beaver College had a practical problem. It had become a university, and the old name no longer fitted the institution’s next chapter. Renaming a 150-year-old school is the kind of assignment that attracts logo debates the way porch lights attract moths. Backe’s research pointed somewhere more useful: students were drawn to a stimulating academic environment with a strong international component.
The new Arcadia University identity was therefore built around academic standards, global perspective and a nurturing culture. Those are broad ideas, but the outcome was not vague. In less than a year, freshman inquiries increased 44 percent and deposits rose 50 percent. Average SAT scores among incoming students increased by 30 points. The name changed; the composition of attention changed with it.
The Project Management Institute assignment reveals the same habit in a different outfit. PMI was entering business-analysis certification. Backe identified a convergence between requirements management and project management, then aimed a five-month lead-generation campaign at business analysts, project managers, software analysts, engineers and requirements managers in the United States and Canada. Banners, newsletters, solo emails and webinar downloads supplied the machinery.
PMI campaign / benchmark = 100
The campaign reached 246 percent of its click-through benchmark and 210.9 percent of its conversion goal. Notice what Backe did not do: confuse the channel with the idea. Email and banners were distribution. The idea was to position PMI at the seam where two professional practices were merging.
A specialist in complicated rooms
Backe’s market position was less “agency for one industry” than “agency for organizations with several constituencies and limited room for error.” Higher education has students, parents, alumni, faculty and accreditors. Pharmaceutical work has patients, clinicians, regulators and legal review. Professional associations must recruit newcomers without alienating experts. Each is a room full of people using the same words to mean slightly different things.
That helps explain the breadth of the service list. Market research found the disagreement. Message development made a choice. Design made the choice visible. Development carried it into an interface. Analytics checked whether anybody behaved differently. The integrated model works best when those handoffs are the expensive part of the problem. A client needing only a logo, a media buy or a commodity website may prefer a narrower specialist. Backe’s advantage grew with the number of decisions that had to remain coherent.
The company also cultivated an unforced sort of creativity. Gary Kopervas, identified as a chief creative strategist at Backe, summarized brainstorming with a line later repeated in a sales-leadership textbook: “Don’t be perfect; be prolific.” It is good advice because it separates two kinds of work that people habitually muddle. Generation benefits from volume. Selection benefits from judgment. Trying to perform both at once produces a room full of cautious half-ideas.
By 2016, Backe said it had two decades of experience and was known for creating the Philadelphia area’s first in-house interactive department. “Digital” has since become an almost decorative word. The more durable achievement was organizational: putting strategists, designers and programmers close enough that a promise made in a concept meeting could survive the build.
The useful artifact is the reasoning
Agency portfolios age quickly. Banner dimensions change. Social networks change their names. A fashionable interaction becomes a small gray button nobody notices. Backe’s strongest work has survived because its logic is still inspectable. The Peirce student is serious, so remove the costume of campus life. Arcadia wants academically ambitious students with a global outlook, so make that identity the center of the rename. PMI sees two professions converging, so occupy the seam and measure the response.
This is also what a prospective customer could do with Backe: bring an untidy institutional problem and ask one team to turn it into a research question, a position, a campaign and a working digital experience. The competition was every full-service Philadelphia agency, every collection of boutiques and, increasingly, an internal marketing department. Backe’s answer was not that it could make more things. It was that the things could share a reason.
The old case files leave one final, pleasing impression. The numbers do not flatten the creative work; they make the small choices more interesting. A missing backpack becomes evidence of a precise view of adulthood. A university name becomes a recruiting instrument. A banner becomes one part of a professional category bet. The ruler, placed carefully beside the idea, shows us where the imagination landed.