How Iris Became The Agency Of The Brave

At the heart of global creative network Iris's new identity is a brazen boar. It charges forward, ridden by a horn-blowing classical figure. She's confident, focused and fearless.

Launched in May and timed to coincide with the agency's 25th anniversary, the redesign signals a new direction centred on one clear aim: to sharpen its strategic edge and express creative confidence.

It reflects Iris’s ambition to help brands thrive in a media landscape increasingly defined by caution and fragmentation.

"The wild boar symbolises us. The rider is the client, optimistic, curious, steering. And then the horn represents marketing", explains Iris London CEO Zoe Eagle.

The identity also marks a statement of intent from Iris’s new leadership team. Zoe Eagle joined as London CEO in November 2024, followed by Menno Kluin from Ogilvy New York in October. They join global CSO Ben Essen, who’s been with Iris since 2007.

"I really want Iris to be a force that passionately advocates for the value of what we do in an industry that is really struggling to have any confidence or self-belief," says Eagle.

The team believes that hesitation has become a creative handicap. As Kluin puts it: "Too often clients are told to choose between brand and performance. That's a false illusion - and it leads to the erosion of both."

A history of disruption

Founded by a group of seven co-founders in their twenties in 1999, Iris was born out of frustration at big agency politics and a desire for better.

None of the founders had led an agency before which allowed a sense of freedom and space for experimentation. One of the agency's co-founders Ian Millner remains as chair, helping to continue that legacy.

Famed moves include having Jamiroquai play a gig in the sky for Sony Erickson, launching the London 2012 Olympic mascot, and more recently their live experience work with Samsung.

And Eagle is keen to maintain the agency's position as an industry wild card - "We're not a sweet spot specialist but we're also not a big machine. That makes us quite special," she says.

The team view technology, coupled with a bespoke approach, as the key to channeling that energy.

"We obviously need to change. We obviously need to embrace technology - but fundamentally the thing that we offer as an industry is really valuable," Eagle explains.

She hopes that the approach will help highlight the importance of marketing investment in boardrooms, but in a way that is "right for the environment that people are actually operating in".

The Grim Reaper: What happens if you don't?

At the core of Iris’s new positioning is a blunt warning: 'Participat Aut Peri' - Latin for 'Participate or Perish.'

It puts the risk of inaction front and centre, challenging brands to stop playing it safe and start putting out work that actually moves people.

“Cultures are built on language,” claims Eagle. “Having things we say and stand by is so important - to inspire, to focus, and to define what good looks like”.

Essen explains that the motto helps to create deathly clear strategic clarity.

"We’re like the agency’s grim reapers - for strategy, everything starts with all the ways our clients might ‘perish’. We know how hard it is for risk-averse clients to leap from old-world marketing models, so we flip the perspective and show them the risk of not making that leap," he explains.

"The threat of losing a key audience, or of losing their marketing budget if it’s not working hard enough. There are so many ways to perish in marketing these days. But once we’ve identified them, it sets the context for our creative strategy: how should the brand participate in people’s lives in a way that genuinely solves this problem".

This emphasis on participation has helped the agency adapt to the age of TikTok, and has been crucial to the success of works like Drop In With Samsung.

"The way our brains work hasn't changed but the way we infiltrate them perhaps has," says Essen.

He argues that it's an example of how "pure brand work" can be done in small, fragmented spaces, despite social being being too often dismissed as an afterthought, and Gen Z painted as too hard to impact.

For Essen the success of this approach is especially evident in their work with Samsung: "We modelled the multi-year drag on revenues if they failed to win over Gen Z. That threat of perishing unlocked the investment case for audience-specific marketing beyond the usual launch cycle comms," he explains.

"It led to a wide-ranging strategic exploration of the best way to participate in Gen Z lives - which ultimately drove a long-term investment in skate culture and content, designed with the community, powered by Samsung’s flip phones, called ‘Drop in with Samsung’".

It is certainly evidence of the success the agency's model can produce. And the Iris team is steadfast about continuing to play a role in culture, and defining the future of brands.

Participate - or watch relevance slip away. That's the message.

In conversation with Creative Salon , the leadership team discuss how they have been fostering that culture, creating a legacy born of bravery and integration - and share what they hope to achieve as a true collective.

Creative Salon: What does "participate or perish" mean for you?

Menno Kluin: It means we have to do something interesting, something that truly stands out. Participation in a branded conversation or narrative means going beyond the norm; otherwise, we’ll be ignored. 

In most cases, participation happens when a brand does something that screams "this brand gets me." The old approach of hammering the same message into a collective consciousness still exists - but hopefully, we’ve evolved beyond that now.

Zoe Eagle: There’s a higher bar for marketing these days, driven by the fact that consumers are more empowered than ever. If they don’t want to hear what you are saying, they’ll simply screen you out. In most cases, broadcasting brand messages just won’t work.  

Instead, brands need to invest in making meaningful connections in people’s lives, cultures, and communities. That’s what we call "Participating". It’s a higher bar, but it’s a reality. And when brands do connect with this empowered consumer, the potential impact is far greater. People can advocate for brands more authentically and powerfully than any brand or agency could alone - and our Participate approach is designed to help clients leverage that people power. 

Delivering on this promise means being true specialists in integration. The depth and breadth of expertise here is amazing, but it’s our culture that brings it together and keeps us genuinely channel agnostic.  

Part of that comes from a spirit that "charges headfirst into the unknown", a behaviour so embedded in the business that it inspired our fabulous new logo. Iris people are curious, experimental, and love to try new things.  

And part of it comes from our roots- seven 20-somethings founded Iris 25 years ago as a sales promotion business. That makes us naturally commercial, obsessed with real behaviour change, and firmly grounded in the real world rather than an industry ivory tower.  

You can see this across our client work, but my favourite example is an old one called: ‘Queue Jump Condom’. Big agencies had tried foryearsr to persuade teenagers to carry condoms, with very little success. When Iris took on the brief, the answer was to partner with local clubs across the country, where having a condom allowed you to jump the queue. A socially acceptable reason to carry one that avoided embarrassment and gave the audience something they really wanted. It barely counted as marketing at the time. But yep, it worked. That’s Iris.  

Ben Essen: The gap between long-term brand building and the short-term participation is shrinking fast.

We’re living in the era of live - where everything from inspiration to gratification happens instantly, all at once. 

This is being driven by the new media landscape. TikTok isn’t just the sharp end of culture; it’s also the business end of the funnel, where discovery, search, and purchase all happen instantaneously in one compressed journey. At the same time, some of the most powerful brand building happens around the product experience itself - at the moment of trial or unboxing. 

That’s why we’re focused on creating ‘full stack’ ideas that weave brand, product, and performance into one seamless story and experience. The best ideas should help a brand stand apart, ride culture, and move behaviour simultaneously. Rather than treating these as siloed activities, we ensure that any one idea can bridge the gap between them. The Samsung skate example is a case in point: through one lens, it’s pure brand; through another, it’s one giant product demo. 

This thinking is reflected in how we do strategy. We have a world-class search intelligence team whose insights don’t just inform SEO and retail media but also fuel our cultural trends studio. And we call our planners ‘integrated strategists’ because their job is to weave classic brand strategy with the behavioural and social science of what it really takes to get people to do things. 

What's the most distinctive stand-out edge that Iris has?

BE: One word: integration. A single, organic, tightly formed strategy unit that stretches from commercial consultants to CX innovators, cultural mavens, brand strategists, and even pricing experts.

Sure, the big networks have these skillsets too, but the best strategy happens when they collide with intense creativity - and that's how we've been doing strategy for 20 years. Nothing cookie-cutter, always innovating.

A recent proud moment was winning the APG special prize for 'broad strategy' for Formula E Attack Mode. Nowhere is the benefit of our "small enough/big enough" model clearer than in these strategic leaps.

ZE: We’re big enough to offer all the capabilities a client needs. We’ve got grown-up talent with real experience. We’re not a start-up. We weren’t just born yesterday. We’ve got 25 years of experience and 15 years of data around participation. That means we can attract top-tier talent across a range of disciplines.

But we’re actually pretty small. We’re 200 people in London and 500 globally. So when it comes to building teams that can approach a client problem in an agnostic way, it’s all fairly straightforward. We don’t have separate P&Ls to navigate, and there’s no departmental-itis. It’s easy to walk around and bring different people into things.

There’s a genuine agility here - and that really comes down to our scale being just about right.

Creating teams that that can look at client problems in a way that's quite agnostic is reasonably straightforward for us. We don't have departmentalitis. It's quite easy to jump around and pull different people into things.

Our integrated model is a real super strength. While we’re seeing more and more integrated asks, many clients tell me that genuine integration is still hard to find. And it’s true - advertising agencies have often struggled to diversify effectively. Probably because they are built around large teams delivering a few expensive assets with huge media support.  

But technological development, media inflation, and fragmentation in, well, everything, now mean that great marketing requires a huge number of touchpoints, experiences and channels to be brilliantly choregraphed together. And that requires very different muscles from the ones most of the industry has honed.  

Iris's background in sales promotion is a great antidote to this. Iris diversified because it was the best way to deliver both commercial and cultural impact, and our brand of slightly unhinged creativity was honed because it genuinely worked. So, diversification and integration has always felt quite natural for us.  

MK: Our creative philosophy is 100 per cent shaped by the needs of our clients. A true, high-standards integrated offering is essential and in my experience, it’s what drives success and growth.

I was once on a call with Marc Benioff from Salesforce, and he said simply: “Build the organisation your clients will need five years from now”. That’s exactly what we’re doing - building the best agency our clients will need in what will continue to be challenging circumstances going forward. The mid-size challenger-type clients we’re after need that integrated way of thinking. Too often, clients are forced to choose between performance or brand. But that is a false choice and will lead to erosion of brand and sales over time. We like to say: “big enough to be dangerous, small enough to be creative”, so we can deliver every tool they need.

This exact question is what drives me: How do you create a creative organisation where different disciplines truly thrive? Often, it means putting our leadership egos aside. It’s about letting different processes unfold, and not forcing, for instance, rigid conceptual thinking onto social creativity.

Each discipline makes the other stronger. Any type of creativity that has ever moved us forward has come from two elements meeting in balance to create something new. So why repeat the same singular paths over and over? Be Influenced. Be Inspired. Listen to others. The work will become richer and more interesting because of it.

Creative Swagger

Menno, having worked at some of the world’s top creative shops, what feels creatively different at Iris—and how does that difference show up in the work?

MK: The outsider spirit, mixed with entrepreneurial thinking, is what makes the difference. We are an open organisation where people are empowered to shape the work in whatever way best serves the project. Our clients should never feel weighed down by bureaucracy when their goal is to make the biggest impact. The best agencies will be fluid - building teams that shift and evolve based on the needs of the project. 

Creatively, there is an almost weird desire to do unhinged things. Iris has so many great amazing stories in its history - moments that I do a double-take to when I hear what was done. I would love to continue to do that and be true to the real Iris legacy and DNA.

Which recent pieces of work best embody the creative spirit you’re trying to build at Iris?

For California Pizza Kitchen's 40th anniversary, we gave the full brand a “midlife crisis” makeover - intentionally bad, which made it great. For Pizza Hut, we sponsored Dominoes, as in the game… and their competitor. Also fun. We built a skatepark for Samsung that changed lighting throughout the day to match the conditions for each piece of content. Stuff like that, where it feels like we are getting away with something, doing something fresh and new. 

At the moment, we are building that spirit out to be complemented by stronger storytelling - because full-spectrum creativity is the goal. Any media, any type of creative, as long as it's at the highest levels and standards.

Right now, we’re working on a robotics project for a global tech client and… a tombstone for another. It's the variety that makes this interesting to me. The kind of work where we all say: “I am not sure how to do it, but let's try.”

We are an organisation that will never “arrive” at any fixed destination, because we’re always changing, evolving, tinkering, and experimenting.

But the goal is clear: to create work that transcends “a job”. Something that feels like a life experience. Stories worth telling. The kind of work you look back on and say, “damn, that was great."

It's my job to clearly articulate the best possible outcome of any project - at any level, in any type of media. In most cases, those outcomes are intangible like emotion or share of voice. When there’s clarity on the end goal and emotional need, the work becomes an exercise of focus, curating the right team, and nailing the logistics. 

You’ve described yourself as "a New Yorker with global ambitions". What perspective does that bring to leading a creative department in London - and how does it shape the kind of work you champion?

MK: I have always tried to build creative cultures rooted in UK principles. The shops I admired early on were agencies like AMV, DDB London, and BBH - the greats. What I love about UK creativity is that the best of the best transcends pure commerciality. It sits somewhere between advertising, storytelling, and art - more so than American work.

Over time, my creative philosophy has evolved, shaped by years of working on HBO and absorbing more entertainment-driven principles. I’m hoping to bring that merged perspective back to the UK and offer something fresh and different. And maybe, after all this time in the US, I’ve become more of a maximalist than a minimalist.

Blocks And Cement: How Iris Is Building Brands (Externally And Internally)

Ben, you talk about "pure brand work in a fragmented world". What does that actually mean in practice—and can you share a recent example where it made a tangible impact? 

BE: Our job as an agency remains the same: to create ideas with disproportionate scale and impact that act as a multiplier on revenue and profit. But the context in which we must do this has transformed. The mass market has fragmented by a factor of five in the last 15 years (Sinan Aral, Hype Machine), and the cost of buying your way into mass culture has become so inflated that it’s now very hard to achieve with any decent ROI.  

So the new approach to scale is to build brand ideas that bridge into and across multiple audience cultures and communities.  

Six years ago, we sold in a simple creative strategy to Pizza Hut: the best way to win market share was to become the ‘alternative pizza’ for people tired of the market leader, Domino’s. And the best way to achieve this: troll them. This brand idea has acted like glue, connecting a prolific output of disruptive ideas aimed at different moments and audiences.

From the AR filter that let people scan any Domino’s promotion to reveal a Pizza Hut one, to this year’s move hacking Domino’s search by making Pizza Hut ‘the official pizza of Dominoes’ with our sponsorship of the World Dominoes Championship.

Our post-Covid ‘Ready for Sport’ campaign for Adidas would be an example of this. It was the only time Adidas has ever run a brand campaign across all its sports categories - from football to running. Unified by a single insight about the desire to get back on the court, pitch, or track, but activated through specific communities in ways that reflected the language and culture of each sporting genre, it became one of Adidas’s most impactful campaigns ever.  

I’d also point to our work on search for NIVEA (Beiersdorf) as another strong example.

We’re helping the brand show up in the places where people most want to find it, through a long tail of content focused on audience concerns that are often big, specific, and emerging. Increasingly, we’re doing this with a distinctive cultural edge and a clear brand point of view - one that ties it all together and makes the whole greater than the sum of its parts.  

How has the rebrand landed so far, and have there been any stand-out responses?

ZE: The rebrand landed brilliantly - honestly, better than we expected. It came from Iris fans (new starters like me and Menno), colliding with Iris loyalists (Iris veterans like Ben Essen, now in his 18th year, and of course, founder Ian Millner). That collision sparked a kind of magical reaction where we realised Iris’s unique spirit and culture was best summed up by... a charging boar! So, we went with it.

The rebrand was really for our people and clients. We didn't expect much attention beyond that – after all, how interesting can an agency rebrand really be? But it made a proper splash, described as a ‘rallying cry’, maybe because it carried a confidence and creativity that’s a bit missing in the industry right now.    

And we’re having fun with it - boar-shaped vodka luge to branded whiskey, beer, salami and hot sauce. Iris has always done things its own way, and this new brand just inspires us to keep charging.