At 11:59 one morning, more than 10,000 people were waiting online to buy a handbag from Lidl. At noon, the bag appeared. Fifty-five seconds later, it was gone. The object was tan leather, shaped around a croissant and designed with the provocateur Nik Bentel. It was absurd enough to photograph and familiar enough to explain in six words. That combination is the operating system of The Romans.
The London agency calls its approach earned-first creativity. The phrase can sound like conference carpeting. In practice it means making the headline before asking anyone to write one. A press release says a supermarket understands culture. A croissant handbag gives culture something to argue about. The Romans reported 262 pieces of coverage, 12.3 million social impressions and a combined reach of 811 million for the campaign. Those are agency numbers, best read as directional. The sellout, however, is pleasingly stubborn. A shop either has bags left or it does not.
The press release was demoted
Joe Mackay-Sinclair and Misha Dhanak founded The Romans in 2015 with minority backing from advertising agency Mother. Their complaint was simple: PR too often received a finished advertising idea and the instruction to make noise around it. The new firm wanted public relations involved while the thing itself was still being invented. Dhanak left in 2019; Mackay-Sinclair remains founder and CEO, with longtime partner Lucy McGettigan among the senior leadership.
That founding irritation changed the shape of the agency. It did not stop at media lists and press offices. It built an in-house creative team across design, motion and CGI, then added social, sports and entertainment, and corporate communications. Consumer PR is still the accent, but not the whole vocabulary. By 2024, corporate affairs made up a reported quarter of the work.
“We started The Romans because we were bored of boring PR.”The agency's origin story, in its own seven words
The customer list now ranges from Lidl, Dove and Nationwide to Amazon, Netflix, Meta, OpenAI, Nespresso and OnePlus. Some pay for a project, others for continuing retainers. They are buying strategy, creative development, production, social work, experiences, media relations and corporate reputation. In other words: the old PR agency fee model, attached to a wider workshop.
Make the claim touchable
The method becomes clearer when the jokes are removed. For digital-health service Livi, The Romans investigated the gender health gap and made Miss Diagnosed, a textbook developed with medical advisers and doctors. The agency says more than 2,500 medical professionals attended its free sessions and the book was downloaded more than 8,000 times. The prop was useful before it was newsworthy.
For Dove, research about Black and mixed-heritage women changing their natural hair for school portraits became Reclaiming School Picture Day. Eight women retook those photographs on their own terms. The campaign travelled beyond coverage: it was cited around UK guidance clarifying that school rules banning natural Afro hairstyles can be unlawful. That is the high end of the model - communication as evidence, then evidence as leverage.
At the sillier end sits Wimbledon, North Dakota. Betway was not an official sponsor of the London tennis tournament, so the agency took Andy Roddick 4,018 miles away and created another Wimbledon. Residents of the 144-person town became groundskeepers, officials, spectators and opponents. The constraint was no longer a problem to disguise. It was the plot.
A wobble, then thirty retainers
Creative agencies love a straight growth graph. The Romans' recent one has a useful dent. Its UK business absorbed budget cuts and account losses early in the latest reviewed year. The response was not philosophical. It accelerated new business and reportedly won 30 retainers, including Meta, Netflix, Primark and PepsiCo. UK revenue rose from £10.6 million to £15.3 million, a 42 percent increase.
The international expansion is similarly practical. New York grew to 23 people and $8 million in revenue in 2024, according to PRovoke, helped by Amazon and Pernod Ricard work. Dubai, Amsterdam and Berlin joined London and Brooklyn. This is not a single global machine stamping out the same gag. The agency argues for “global ideas, local swagger”: a common appetite for conspicuous ideas, interpreted by people who understand the local conversation.
The bit worth stealing
A small brand should not copy the handbag. It should copy the compression. The Croissant Bag works because product, joke, photograph and headline are the same thing. The OnePlus campaign recruited Finnish monster-rock band Lordi to record Made of Metal for a metal-bodied phone. The Romans reported a 13 percent sales increase, a 387 percent surge in web traffic and 100,000 Spotify streams in the first week. You can disagree about attribution and still admire the neatness of the sentence.
The repeatable sequence is modest. Start with a product truth or a real audience behavior. Find the conflict inside it. Build one thing that makes the conflict visible. Ask whether a stranger can retell the idea accurately after seeing one picture. Then pick a measure that records behavior: a sale, download, account opening, policy change or search lift. Coverage is distribution, not the ending.
This approach has conditions. It needs a brand willing to surrender some control to the public's interpretation. It needs production money and enough time to make the object credible. It needs genuine cultural knowledge; otherwise “local swagger” becomes a tourist buying slang. And it works poorly when the subject demands quiet, precision or confidentiality. A crisis is not a croissant. Corporate counsel will not always enjoy the joke.
There is another risk. Once every brief becomes a stunt, surprise becomes house style, then wallpaper. The durable work avoids this by solving something beyond attention: a textbook doctors can use, a campaign that enters policy, a student offer that opens 10,186 accounts. The Romans is most interesting when the funny object is not decoration. It is the argument, made portable.