There is a scene that plays out in conference rooms everywhere. A company has a problem. The executives know the customer, or believe they do, and so they begin suggesting advertisements. Someone wants a new tagline. Someone else has seen a clever video from a rival. The whiteboard fills before an actual customer has said a word.
OBI Creative has built a business by reversing that scene. The Omaha agency’s preferred opening move is not a campaign. It is an inquiry. Who buys? Why? What almost stopped them? What did the company promise, and what did the experience deliver? Only after those answers are collected does the familiar machinery of an agency - positioning, design, public relations, media, social, lead generation - begin to turn.
That order is the interesting thing. Plenty of firms sell research, and plenty sell advertising. OBI sells the seam between them. Its proposition is that the interview transcript and the media plan should belong to the same conversation.
The cow-box beginningA project becomes a company
Mary Ann O’Brien founded the agency in 2001 for a project with Gateway Computers, the PC maker whose spotted shipping boxes once made beige electronics look as if they had arrived from a dairy farm. Gateway was a fast-growing consumer brand, and the assignment was large enough to become OBI’s origin story. What survived the client, however, was not cow-print nostalgia. It was O’Brien’s conviction that companies are dangerously fluent in their own assumptions.
She formalized the antidote as the O’Brien Voice of the Customer study, or O.VOC. The method mixes qualitative and quantitative research to examine motivations, behaviors, the path to purchase and the gap between how a company sees itself and how customers experience it. A companion Voice of the Employee practice brings the same curiosity inside the organization. In 2023, O’Brien published Ask & Deliver, a book that turned the premise into a public playbook.
“The secret to more sales has never been in knowing how to better hawk your products and services. It’s in understanding what makes your customers tick and what ticks them off.”Mary Ann O’Brien, founder and CEO
The product hiding inside the services
What they actually sellThe research report is only the first domino
OBI today is a full-service professional-services business. Clients hire it for discrete projects or continuing agency relationships spanning business and marketing consulting, brand building and multi-touch marketing. That can mean stakeholder interviews and surveys; a new position and identity; a website; paid search and social; public relations; content; connected television; out-of-home media; lead nurturing; or reporting and attribution. The agency does not publish a rate card, and no reliable public engagement cost is available. The honest price is therefore the unfashionable answer: it depends on the research, production, media and time involved.
Its customers range from nonprofits and regional institutions to national financial, insurance, industrial and healthcare businesses. Public work includes GuideOne, Miller Electric, Nomi Health, Artemis Health, Opportunity Scholarships of Nebraska, the Pinnacle Bank Championship and an executive brand for Mark Williams of Brokers International. This is enterprise agency work, sold on expertise and labor rather than a software subscription.
The useful failureWhen the original media mix loses the argument
The cleanest demonstration came from Opportunity Scholarships of Nebraska. The organization was new, recognition was close to zero, and it needed 2,500 leads in a month from families interested in private-school tuition scholarships. OBI assembled a campaign using connected TV, drip email, traditional media and digital advertising. Then the first plan encountered the evidence.
Attribution showed that connected TV was doing the best work at the top of the funnel. On Meta, native lead-generation units produced 300 percent more leads than other Meta formats. The lesser formats failed first. OBI redirected money toward the channels that were earning it. In under two months, the campaign generated more than 4,000 leads. A Hulu video completion rate of 98.6 percent beat the 82 percent benchmark cited in the agency’s case study. During a final four-day push, the campaign added 97 leads and reached 89,305 unique users.
The campaign won Chief Marketer’s Best Lead Generation Campaign for 2024. Awards are pleasant; the budget movement is more instructive. OBI treated the plan as a hypothesis rather than a monument. Instrument the path from exposure to response, find the channel doing the actual work, and give it more responsibility. This sounds obvious. Many marketing plans are built precisely to avoid discovering that their authors were wrong.
Attention has an addressThe biggest screen was not the best screen
For Artemis by Nomi Health, the problem was lost share of voice in health-benefits analytics. The stage was a major industry conference in New York. OBI built a retro campaign for a largely Gen X audience and bought synchronized Times Square displays. Yet the telling choice was spatial, not stylistic: it prioritized boards conference attendees could see from inside their hotel over the grandest screens outside.
The work produced a reported 250 million impressions and 60 percent more leads than prior events, with the highest conference lead volume in Artemis’s history. Media efficiency, in this case, meant thinking like a guest who had already reached the lobby. The lesson travels well: map where the desired audience will pause, not where the photograph of the campaign will look most expensive.
The same pattern appears in quieter assignments. For Miller Electric, field employees were not engaging with company email or social posts. OBI shifted the subject of the content toward those employees - their photographs, work sites and stories. The agency reports that social engagement rose 76 percent and LinkedIn followers grew 40 percent in eight months. The channel did not change. The identity of the protagonist did.
The copyable partWrite down what would change your mind
A small company cannot copy OBI’s staff, media relationships or buying power. It can copy the sequence. Start with a business decision, not a general desire to “know the customer.” Decide what evidence would alter that decision. Speak to the right population. Ask follow-up questions that explain the score. Keep the raw data. Turn each finding into an owner, an action and a measure. Then watch the campaign closely enough to move money while the result can still change.
OBI occupies a crowded middle of the market, where integrated agencies compete with specialist research firms, brand consultancies and performance shops. Local alternatives include Bailey Lauerman, Bozell, Swanson Russell and Emspace + Lovgren; national buyers have hundreds more. OBI’s answer is integration: the people interpreting the customer are near the people writing the message and buying the impression.
That integration helped the company report more than 150 percent growth between 2019 and 2022 and reach the 2023 Inc. 5000. It has also produced a long awards list, including AMA Omaha’s inaugural Agency of the Year honor in 2019 and three recognized campaigns in the 2025 Pinnacle Awards. But the more durable achievement may be conceptual. OBI has made listening feel less like preliminary homework and more like the actual product.
In the usual conference-room scene, confidence speaks first. OBI’s wager is that curiosity should get the opening line. The agency asks the client to tolerate a brief and productive discomfort: the customer may not confirm the story everyone came prepared to tell. Then, finally, the ideas begin.