There is a wonderfully unfashionable fact at the center of one Flynn Wright campaign: people like cheap gas. Not carbon arithmetic. Not a lecture about domestic energy. Cheap gas. South Dakota Corn, which represents the people who grow the ingredient in ethanol, knew every advantage of blended fuel. What it did not know was which advantage would get a driver’s hand to move from one pump handle to another.
So the agency asked. Its research found price was the primary driver at the pump. This was convenient because ethanol blends were already the lowest-priced option. It was also awkward because many people who said they wanted to spend less were still buying the expensive stuff. The problem was not a missing benefit. It was a gap between stated preference and habitual behavior.
Flynn Wright’s answer was cheerful permission: go ahead, get the cheap gas. On March 29 - the 88th day of the year - the agency, South Dakota Corn and Kwik Star sold Unleaded 88 for $1.88 a gallon. Sales of the blend multiplied more than sixfold that day. The decimals matched, the date matched, and the audience did not need a glossary.
The cheapest insight won
Advertising people are paid to make the ordinary sound interesting. The danger is that they can make the interesting sound complicated. The SD Corn work ran in the other direction. Research removed possible messages until the simplest one remained. Then creative work made that plain fact socially comfortable. “Cheap” stopped feeling suspect and started feeling savvy.
This is Flynn Wright in miniature. The company is a privately held, full-service agency formed in 1984 when Peter Flynn Sr.’s Flynn Advertising Agency merged with Celia Wright Advertising. Today more than 100 employees work from Des Moines, Sioux Falls and Portland. The service list is broad enough to sound like the contents of several companies: qualitative and quantitative research, strategy, brand identity, campaigns, media planning and buying, public relations, direct mail, photography, video, animation, web development and UX/UI design.
But the more telling list contains just three things, always in the same order.
“Research before strategy, strategy before action.”Flynn Wright’s operating mantra
A full-service agency is only useful if the services talk
“Full service” can be an agency euphemism for a long menu. Flynn Wright’s public work is more convincing when it shows why the pieces belong together. When Mediacom entered mobile service, for example, the launch had to reach more than one million customers across 22 states. It also had to prepare an internal audience of more than 4,000 employees. Flynn Wright built direct mail, digital, outdoor, television, point-of-sale material and a public-relations stunt at the Drake Relays around the same low-price proposition.
For LCS, which serves more than 40,000 residents in 140 senior-living communities, the job was different. Flynn Wright developed “Experience Is Everything,” unified a family of brands and traveled across the country to photograph and film residents and employees. The resulting library was not merely campaign decoration. It became a reusable asset for internal teams - a small operational detail with a long shelf life.
The agency also knows when an object can do what a screen cannot. Colorbiotics sells industrial mulch colorant, not backyard mulch. Flynn Wright worked with the company’s research and development team to create custom-cut, colored cubes and arranged them in a box like chocolates. Buyers could see and touch the range. A technical liquid became a physical palette.
The succession campaign took ten years
Agencies like to describe brands as larger than any one personality. Doing the same to themselves is harder. Clients attach trust to founders, senior strategists and creative directors. When one leaves, a piece of the agency can walk out too.
Flynn Wright’s 2026 leadership change is therefore part of the product story. Paul Schlueter became CEO. Sarah DeKock became president, the first woman to hold the role. Aaron Kennedy moved from CEO to chairman. Kyle Prendergast became chief operating officer, Bridget Proctor chief creative officer, and Jeff White executive vice president and partner. Kiersten Maertens, who arrived as a public-relations intern in 2006, had become a partner the previous summer.
The transition had been in preparation for a decade. Schlueter described the ambition as building something that could exist beyond the tenure of strong individuals. That sounds like corporate continuity. It also sounds like brand strategy applied inward: decide what must remain recognizable while the people on the door change.
The culture pitch supports that idea. Flynn Wright says many employees have stayed longer than ten years. It advertises five weeks of paid time off, a 401(k) match and a share in the upside when the agency wins. Its move from a team of about 30 when Maertens joined to more than 100 today suggests that the internship-to-partner story is not presented as an exception. It is the proof of concept.
What a marketer can borrow tomorrow morning
The copyable part is not $1.88. A copied stunt is merely a rerun. The transferable move is to separate what an organization is proud to say from what gives a customer a reason to act. South Dakota Corn knew many good things about ethanol. Drivers cared first about price. Flynn Wright let the audience choose the hierarchy.
A brief before the brief
- List every benefit the organization wants to advertise.
- Ask the audience which one changes a real decision.
- Look for the gap between what people say and what they do.
- Build one offer that makes the new behavior easier.
- Choose channels only after the proposition is clear.
This method has conditions. It needs access to customers, permission to hear an inconvenient answer and enough operational flexibility to change an offer - not just its typography. It is weaker when the buying cycle is too long to observe, the audience is too small to research cleanly or the client has already decided which tactic must be purchased. Evidence cannot rescue a strategy that nobody is allowed to alter.
Flynn Wright also sits in a crowded middle market. In Iowa alone, buyers can choose among integrated agencies such as Strategic America, Meyocks, Trilix, Lessing-Flynn and LS2group, specialists in digital and search, or their own in-house teams. The agency’s defense is not that it invented research-led creative. It is that it houses the chain - researchers, strategists, makers, media buyers and publicists - close enough to keep the finding intact as it travels toward the customer.
That is the quiet trick of the $1.88 campaign. The research answer survived. It was not decorated beyond recognition, softened into a committee slogan or bent toward a fashionable channel. It reached the billboard and the pump in the same plain language in which a driver might explain it to a friend: I bought it because it was cheaper.
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