There is an odd marriage ceremony in the history of St. Louis advertising. A late-night television host stands before a frozen pizza and, for the purposes of a campaign, marries it. The pizza is made by Dogtown Pizza. The agency behind the stunt is Think Tank PR & Marketing. The wedding is ridiculous, which is precisely why it works. People remember vows more readily than value propositions.
The gag was one piece of a larger assignment. Dogtown wanted growth with shoppers and retailers as it entered new territories and product lines. Think Tank combined social media, video, publicity, design, point-of-sale material, media buying, and vendor management. Another promotion, “Win Pizza for a Year,” collected nearly 5,000 email sign-ups. Think Tank says the brand's social following rose by more than 200 percent, while the company's output eventually climbed from roughly 30,000 pizzas a month to more than 75,000 amid broader business and marketing changes.
The useful detail is not that the campaign was funny. Plenty of funny campaigns disappear. It is that the joke connected to an owned list, retailer interest, and a product expansion. The ceremony earned attention; the system gave that attention somewhere to go.
The idea is a ninja. The business is a workshop.
Think Tank dates its ninja identity to 2006. Founder Trish Cheatham had grown up as a self-described military brat, learned the vocabulary of public relations from her father, and appeared on the syndicated Bob Braun show at age ten to discuss a letter-writing campaign she had organized for Marines in Beirut. Years later, she saw room for a boutique agency serving small and mid-sized businesses and nonprofits without adopting the manners of a conventional agency.
The ninjas began as a silly joke inspired by the movies Cheatham loved as a child. But jokes can become operating systems. Think Tank's explanation is that ninjas do difficult work out of view. Its public-facing phrase is even shorter: “Think. Create. Solve.” Both ideas point to the same preference - the agency is meant to disappear into the client's result.
“We're the power behind the scenes.”Think Tank on its ninja philosophy
What sits behind the curtain is unusually broad for a boutique firm: brand positioning, identity and packaging; public and crisis communications; social media; search optimization; website design and development; graphic design; commercial photography; and video from concept through post-production. The company says it handles work in-house, a choice that gives it more control over both consistency and cost. The latest addition is generative engine optimization, an attempt to help clients appear when AI systems recommend products and services.
First, find the commercial sentence
Think Tank's best briefs can be reduced to blunt sentences. Fazio's Specialty Foods wanted more market share and shelf space. Katie's Pizza + Pasta Osteria, fresh from a Kickstarter funded by 240 backers, wanted diners. Church on the Rock wanted to reach millennials. The Lifestyle Center needed a distinct voice and better search visibility. Marcoot Jersey Creamery needed a new product during the pandemic to help keep the lights on.
Each sentence describes a bottleneck, not a deliverable. That distinction matters. If the problem is shelf space, the job is not simply to draw a prettier box. The box has to communicate with shoppers, reassure distributors, survive beside competitors, photograph well for social media, and give the sales team a reason to reopen a retail conversation. For Fazio's, Think Tank paired research with new branding, packaging, messaging, and social work. The agency says the reception led to packaging assignments for other brands Fazio's co-packed and helped the company connect with a new distributor.
Kräftig offered the clearest version. Think Tank helped rebrand the lager, introduced the line “Get Back to Beer,” and rolled out new packaging in 2017 as the brand entered new territory. A year later, a collaboration with Realtree put camouflage on the cans. Think Tank reports that initiative increased sales by more than 25 percent. In 2019, the work acquired another layer: limited-edition outdoor packaging supported a Kräftig partnership with the Missouri Conservation Heritage Foundation around clean water and youth education.
A can had become a recognizable object, a retail signal, a partnership vehicle, and a reason to talk. This is the particular advantage of an integrated shop. The packaging designer, publicist, social strategist, photographer, and video producer are not solving five separate riddles. They are repeating one answer in five dialects.
The failure arrives before the cleverness
The Dog-O's story begins with the least glamorous force in business: inventory under pressure. During COVID, Marcoot Jersey Creamery needed another revenue path. The raw material was close at hand - farm-fresh cheese. Think Tank helped turn it into an all-natural dog treat, developing the name, a mascot based on the family farm dog Tiny, the identity, packaging, website, and promotional video. The finished product made its way into grocers, pet stores, PetSmart, Amazon, and other online retailers.
What failed first was the assumption that a dairy could keep doing business in the old pattern while the world had stopped behaving normally. What changed the decision was survival, not a trend report. The pivot worked because Marcoot possessed a credible ingredient story, manufacturing knowledge, and a product adjacent to what it already made. The agency did not invent those advantages. It made them legible.
That distinction tells you where Think Tank fits in the market. A specialist PR firm might earn coverage. A design studio might make the package. A production company might shoot the spot. A large network agency could coordinate all three at a different scale. Think Tank competes by keeping the chain short for organizations that need the whole sequence but do not want a parade of vendors.
The part worth stealing
- Write the problem as a behavior: visit, subscribe, stock, try, return.
- Choose one campaign object or phrase that survives every channel.
- Give attention a destination you own, such as an email list or landing page.
- Measure the action nearest the business result, not merely impressions.
This approach has conditions. It is strongest when the product is sound, the bottleneck is specific, and the client can act on new demand. It weakens when distribution cannot expand, operations cannot fulfill, the audience is vaguely defined, or the only success measure is attention. A pizza marriage can open the door. It cannot bake the next 45,000 pizzas.
A local accent with a longer reach
Think Tank is emphatically a St. Louis company. Its portfolio is crowded with regional food, beer, restaurant, university, church, medical, cannabis, and service brands. Its current office is on Locust Street. It speaks the language of frozen ravioli, toasted pizza, lager, and neighborhood recognition. Yet the work travels wherever clients sell, and the company describes its reach as national and even international.
The agency says it has been named St. Louis's Best Marketing Firm for fourteen consecutive years and lists recognition including a St. Louis Business Journal Best Place to Work, Telly Awards, Communicator Awards, and TAM Awards. Those laurels explain reputation. The case studies explain the business. They show an agency whose favorite raw material is not content. It is a stubborn, ordinary constraint.
A freezer needs more doors. A dining room needs more people. A congregation needs younger faces. A dairy needs a product it can sell in a crisis. Think Tank's work gets interesting at the moment the vague request for “marketing” is translated into something a customer can actually do. Somewhere in St. Louis, a whiteboard fills up. Then a can changes clothes, a dog gets a mascot, and a pizza walks down the aisle.