Broadway did not need an introduction. It had famous faces, familiar songs and an audience that had spent months missing the experience of sitting in a theater. When the industry prepared to reopen in 2021, the harder problem was getting that affection to turn into a decision: choose a show, pick a night, buy a ticket. Resolution Agency worked on the machinery between those moments.
- Resolution brings search, social, commerce and media planning into one performance-marketing brief.
- Its roots are in a Chicago search agency acquired by Omnicom in 2005.
- The Broadway reopening campaign shows how audience insight can change both an ad and the route to purchase.
The distinction matters because advertising can be very good at producing an intermediate result. Somebody watches. Somebody clicks. A dashboard turns green. The customer still has a question, or an obstacle, or no compelling reason to act today. Resolution’s work becomes interesting at that awkward point, where the brand has earned attention and now has to do something useful with it.
A click was the beginning
The business began as Resolution Media in Chicago in 2003. Matt Spiegel was its original chief executive; Lance Neuhauser and Jeff Campbell are also publicly identified as co-founders. Search advertising offered an unusually direct proposition: reach people while they are expressing a need, then follow what happens after they click.
Omnicom bought the company in 2005. By December 2007, trade reporting put its headcount above 80, up from 25 at acquisition, with Bank of America and Chicago Tribune among its clients. New offices in New York and San Francisco brought the specialist closer to customers and sibling agencies.
The expansion eventually became organizational. In 2012, Omnicom united search agencies across roughly 40 countries under the Resolution Media name, announcing more than 700 search experts. Those figures describe the historical international network, not today’s U.S. agency. A dedicated social practice followed the same year. Search and social were becoming intertwined; the services followed the customer.
“We don't outspend; we outsmart.”
Resolution Agency’s public tagline
The work between the channels
Resolution Agency now presents itself as an integrated performance marketing business. Its service menu covers paid search, SEO, social, programmatic advertising, eCommerce, content, media investment and consumer analytics. The useful word is integrated: an advertiser can hire people to plan the audience, buy the media and interpret the response within the same engagement.
Consider a retailer with a good product and an expensive acquisition problem. Search can capture existing demand. Social can introduce the product to somebody who has never searched for it. Commerce work can improve the connection to shopping. Analytics can help decide which activity deserves more money. Coordinating those choices is the agency’s practical proposition.
It sits in the services market alongside performance specialists such as iProspect, Performics, Tinuiti and PMG. Its particular combination is search experience, a broader media remit and an Omnicom background. Those ingredients give an advertiser a reason to consider it; they still have to be matched to the actual assignment.
The business sells expertise and execution to advertisers. A media budget pays for distribution; agency compensation pays for the work around it. Anyone evaluating the relationship should keep those numbers separate and agree on the business outcome before debating the channel mix.
Broadway needed buyers this week
For This Is Broadway, Lucky Generals built the creative campaign and Resolution handled media alongside The Broadway League. Oprah Winfrey narrated an anthem assembled from 99 shows. The campaign connected large-scale storytelling to a website that helped visitors explore productions and continue to official ticket sellers.
Then the conditions changed. The campaign’s case study describes Delta-related disruption and a need for near-term buyers. Nearly 80% of engagement was mobile. A younger audience loved theater but had often relied on somebody else to buy the tickets. The team’s problem had become more specific than reminding people Broadway existed.
Resolution and The Broadway League partnered with Emodo on the holiday Show Globe. Aircards and 8th Wall contributed immersive technology and production. On a phone, the experience opened a snowy Times Square, with show content, celebrity greetings and routes toward tickets. The creative invitation and the shopping task occupied the same small screen.
About $100,000 in media, roughly 10% of the campaign’s media budget, went to this activation. That is a placement allocation, not Resolution’s fee. The case study reports an average engagement time of three minutes and 12 seconds. Digiday’s subsequent awards account says 90% of people who clicked the ad engaged with the experience, and 22% shared it.
These are partner-reported campaign results. Engagement among clickers is a narrower measure than engagement among everyone shown an ad. Neither statistic, by itself, establishes incremental ticket sales. The defensible lesson is the decision: follow observed behavior, identify the person ready to buy, and make choosing easier.
Porsche found an adjacent audience
The same instinct appears in Resolution Media’s Porsche work. A Cayenne appeared in Carpool Karaoke with Adam Levine. Resolution distributed the content across Facebook, Instagram and Twitter, targeting automotive enthusiasts alongside music fans and viewers of the show. A familiar entertainment property supplied a reason for a new audience to pay attention.
The Shorty Awards entry reports 14 million impressions and 57,000 unique users sent to YouTube. It received the Audience Honor in Auto. These are distribution and viewing results, not a count of cars sold. They show a different piece of the agency’s craft: finding likely interest outside the customer category’s usual boundaries.
Copy the question before the format
A marketer can borrow this approach without commissioning augmented reality. Ask who already cares, who actually pays and where those groups diverge. Inspect the step immediately after the ad. Test a format that suits observed behavior, then measure an outcome close enough to the commercial goal to guide a spending decision.
The approach depends on a workable offer, a usable purchase route and an audience with some ability to act. More engaging media cannot repair unavailable tickets or remove a public-health concern. Resolution’s Broadway work is useful precisely because it brings those constraints into view. The interesting question is how much easier the company made the customer’s next decision.