The Agency That Put a Birthday Candle on a 75-Foot Rocket

At the South Carolina State Fair, there is a 75-foot rocket that does not go anywhere. In 2019, it had a more useful assignment: become a birthday candle. The fair was turning 150. National grandstand concerts were out; a free daily circus was in. Flock and Rally wrapped the rocket, helped turn a roaming ticket booth into a mascot named FRED, and built the campaign around “Prize-Winning Memories.” Every circus show filled for all 12 days. Advance ticket sales nearly doubled.

The giant candle is irresistible, but it is also a decoy. The harder work happened in meetings, plans, media schedules and production calendars. A beloved institution had changed a piece of its identity. The agency had to make the change feel less like subtraction and more like a party. That is Flock and Rally’s real trade: taking an organization with many constituencies and giving it one story sturdy enough to travel.

The actual productOne idea, fewer seams

Flock and Rally calls itself a full-service, women-owned creative agency. The description is accurate and a little too tidy. Its menu covers research, brand strategy, naming, identity, websites, copywriting, advertising, media buying, public relations, social media, email, photography, video and reporting. But a list of outputs misses the point. The firm earns its keep when those outputs cannot be separated without making the assignment worse.

Consider a transit system. It may need riders to understand a route, residents to see a public service, journalists to grasp a policy, and staff to use the same language. For The COMET, Flock and Rally has worked across brand messaging, awareness advertising, service campaigns, media buying, newsletters and staff guidance. One campaign honored Sarah Mae Flemming, the Columbia civil-rights pioneer who challenged bus segregation before Rosa Parks. History, service information and civic identity had to occupy the same seat.

The agency begins with an audience-first question: what would make someone choose, trust or act on behalf of the client? Research might mean interviews, surveys, a buyer persona, a communications audit or secondary data. Then comes the less glamorous question: what can the client deliver within its budget and team capacity? That second question keeps the first from becoming theater.

“We are connectors who love to work collaboratively.”Flock and Rally’s description of its team

The home-field advantageGovernment is not a niche for the impatient

The client roster reads like a map of public life in South Carolina: Riverbanks Zoo & Garden, the State Fair, Columbia Metropolitan Airport, the state departments of Mental Health, Revenue and Consumer Affairs, transit agencies, universities, libraries, tourism offices and workforce councils. There are restaurants and law firms too, but the recurring assignment is institutional. These clients answer to boards, procurement rules, internal experts, public audiences and budgets that invite scrutiny.

That environment rewards a different sort of creativity. A campaign has to be interesting, but also approvable, accessible, reportable and possible for the client to maintain. Flock and Rally is approved on South Carolina’s Statewide Term Contract for Marketing Services. The procurement credential is not glamorous. It is, however, a moat: the agency knows how public work gets bought and how it must survive after the launch event.

The work crosses into tourism and economic development naturally. For OneSpartanburg, the brief bundled destination marketing, talent attraction and investment. The team spent months on interviews, visits and immersion before launching “Take a Bite out of the Burg” in 2025. In a different workforce campaign, “Asphalt Works!” recast a labor shortage around family, advancement and pride, then carried the message through television, radio, social media, billboards and a job-search website.

Leadership changeThe founders built the network; the CEO widened the brief

Debi Schadel and Tracie Broom founded Flock and Rally in 2010. Both had the habits of community builders. Schadel helped start initiatives including TEDxColumbiaSC, One Million Cups Columbia and Crafty Feast. Broom came from writing and editing, including work in San Francisco during the dot-com era. The company’s name turns their shared instinct into a pair of verbs: gather people, then move them.

Merritt McNeely joined in 2018 as vice president of marketing, became executive vice president in 2020 and took over as CEO in September 2022. Her resume fit the next phase. She had run the Five Points Association, marketed the South Carolina State Museum and co-led the regional effort around the 2017 total solar eclipse. That eclipse campaign, built with tourism and civic partners including Flock and Rally, helped draw roughly 400,000 visitors and produced an estimated $48 million in regional economic impact.

Under McNeely, the agency says it restructured around staff empowerment and more collaborative client service while moving toward larger organizations with wider audiences. The pattern shows up in Riverbanks Zoo. What began in 2021 as an advertising agency-of-record relationship expanded into strategy consulting, earned-media monitoring, brand research, staff tools and launch support. A small agency grows not only by adding accounts, but by becoming more useful inside the accounts it already has.

Proof, not confettiWhat the outcomes say

Agency awards are an imperfect currency. Flock and Rally has a lot of them - more than 85 by its count - but the revealing ones connect craft to a thorny assignment. Its public-relations work for Riverbanks’ Aquarium & Reptile Conservation Center opening won a Best in Show Mercury Award in 2024. The fair’s live Instagram work won another top honor that year. In 2026, five American Advertising Awards recognized campaigns for the fair, OneSpartanburg, PalmettoPride and 5210 SC.

The better evidence is behavioral. The circus filled. Advance fair ticket sales rose. The Riverbanks remit grew. The Open Studios relationship lasted from 2011 through 2019. A campaign for the Green Book of South Carolina turned more than 300 African American cultural sites into a mobile travel guide with national media reach. These are not identical measures, and they should not be blended into one magic score. Together, they show clients returning to the same operating idea: understand the audience, make one useful promise and give every channel a job.

The best small agencies do not win by pretending to be large. They win by making the distance between disciplines unusually short.YesPress

The copyable partBorrow the sequence, not the rocket

A 75-foot prop is memorable. It is not the lesson. The transferable part of Flock and Rally’s approach is procedural, which is fortunate because procedures fit into smaller budgets than rockets do.

1. Begin with a choice. Define the action the audience should take before commissioning the billboard, video or website.
2. Invite the constraints early. Budget, staff capacity, procurement rules and approval paths are design materials.
3. Give the campaign one center. If PR, social, paid media and events cannot repeat the same core idea, the strategy is not finished.
4. Build assets the client can keep using. Message guides, image libraries, templates and training extend the useful life of a launch.
5. Measure the behavior that matters. Ticket sales, applications, attendance and qualified attention say more than a pile of impressions alone.

This model has conditions. It works best when the client lets the agency see inside the organization, when decision-makers participate in research, and when channels share a goal. It is less persuasive for a buyer who needs only a quick commodity deliverable or who keeps the media team, public-relations team and leadership in separate rooms. Integration is not a bundle discount. It is a management choice.

Flock and Rally’s market position is therefore more specific than “full service.” It is a regional agency with national reach, a deep South Carolina network and a bias toward assignments where communications must do public work. The firm sits between a specialist shop and a national agency: broad enough to coordinate a campaign end to end, small enough for senior people to remain close to it, and local enough to know why a bus, a fairground rocket or a county slogan carries more history than the brief admits.

The rocket still does not go anywhere. That was never the requirement. For twelve days in 2019, it gave a complicated change a simple shape. Sometimes the cleverest work in marketing is not inventing a new object. It is noticing the one everyone already knows and giving it a better job.