NERD OUT WITH US

CULTURE

LEAST GLAMOROUS

IT'S NOT ALWAYS PRETTY BUT IT'S WHAT WE DO

When we started Block + Tackle in 2014, it was to solve one specific problem we’d seen over and over again in our careers: the business was saying one thing, and IT was hearing something different. Things get lost in translation, and then, ideas — even the best ones — break down. We speak both of those languages, and we set out to help connect the dots between the two so nothing could fall through the cracks in the process.

We still do that. But we've evolved. Today, we bridge the often confusing, sometimes scary gap between the grandiose vision, and the tactical steps necessary to bring it to life. You can have an arsenal of brilliant, innovative marketing ideas, but ultimately, not even the most groundbreaking concept can go very far when there’s a fissure between vision and reality. When you neglect building that idea on a foundation of so many seemingly small, but deeply necessary, details, things fall apart.

So, what is it that you say you do here, exactly?

We take lofty visions of ideal customer experiences — the kind that feel impractical, even impossible — and distill them into a series of tactical, functional solutions that actually make it real. We give brilliant creative a functional, technical backbone that makes it feasible in real life, not just cool to talk about in a keynote. We have a razor-sharp ability to break a concept down into the actual technical, analytical nitty-gritty necessary to achieve that vision. Right down to the blocking and the tackling.

We’re the tactical special-ops team that clients deploy to set an idea in motion. We’re the crew that comes in after an organization-wide digital transformation, when everything you know in order to do your job has been leveled to the ground, and helps you rebuild. We’re the ones doing the work, talking you through it, holding your hand and maybe holding your hair back (no shame). We’re building things with an eye toward the future. And we’re sharing everything we know with you along the way, so you can be the kind of marketers we are.

MICHELE GRANT

FOUNDER + CEO

It’s perfectly timed, precisely targeted, and pulls at all the relevant strings: she’s thirsty, it’s hot, and you know, sipping a cold Sprite at a soccer game on a sunny afternoon in France really does sound refreshing. Lucky for Lola, and for Coke, there’s a vending machine just up the road.

It’s the kind of marketing idea that’s equal parts idealistic and totally unrealistic — at least until we come in.

We were tasked with taking this idea and identifying, then solving, every single tactical need in order to make it happen without a trace of bullshit or fakery. To do that, we determined every question we’d need to answer to bring it to life. And then, we answered them. “How do we know where Lola is?” We enable her mobile device to share that information. “How do we know where the billboard is, in proximity to Lola?” We create a database that holds all of the latitude-longitude data of each billboard, so we can match them to the data shared by her device. “What about real-time weather data?” Well, weather data is stored by zip code — so, we  create a reference for all the zip codes, and correspond that to what we know about billboard location and Lola’s location. “We have 17 million billboards; does this mean we need 17 million pieces of content?” Nope, we just need to make a handful of decisions: is the weather hot or cold? Are we pushing Sprite or Coke? Do we talk about soccer or baseball?

You get the idea.

With big ideas like Lola, there’s a crucial moment where things tend to fall apart: when the person who had the vision passes it off to the person tasked with executing it. There’s a “wait, how do we actually do this?” moment. Panic sets in. Brilliant ideas disintegrate into maladaptive marketing Frankensteins. Before that moment can happen, we’re there to coach and strategize a marketer through the nitty-gritty, without compromising the creative integrity of the idea. Because you know what? We actually care about Lola. But we also have the expertise to understand — functionally, creatively, logistically, operationally — what has to happen, and how those things have to happen, in order to get that content to that billboard at the right time.

Whether it’s executing a campaign like Lola, or helping a marketing team make sense of their jobs after a “digital transformation” blows everything they know to smithereens, or maximizing an organization’s investment in data by making their database actually legible to human beings, we’re here to solve problems that non-technical marketers will inevitably have.

What we aren’t? We’re not a creative agency, and we don’t do creative. We’re not in this to sell you another consulting project. We’re in this to show you how truly great all these ideas you have can be. Ultimately, we want to fundamentally transform you, to help you build new capabilities, and to learn a better way to execute your ideas with the level of technological sophistication that they — and most of all, your customers — deserve.

Never in human history have marketers had the means to accomplish so much. For the first time, we have the database power, the tools, and the content to make something outstanding for customers. Block + Tackle is here to help you actually do that. Because if you don’t do it, who will?

WHAT WE’RE GOOD AT AND HOW WE DO IT:

  CUSTOMER STRATEGY

Okay... what does that actually look like?

When it comes to turning an idealistic creative concept into something tangible, functional, and real, we like to talk about Lola. During our work with Coca-Cola, they decided they wanted to harness data and technology to maximize their millions of smart billboards and interactive vending machines. Their marketers dreamed up Lola: a French woman who drinks Sprite and rides a mo-ped. On a hot day, Lola’s zipping off to watch a soccer game when she sees a targeted ad for Sprite on a billboard.