Our agency got its start in 2006, back when the iPhone didn’t exist yet, Flash was the king of the internet, and our co-founder and CEO, Michael Watts, had just dropped out of the University of Michigan after exactly two weeks of realizing a formal degree couldn’t match his hands-on creative spark.
He teamed up with co-founder Aaron Schwartz, and after designing for local businesses, they cold-emailed every major agency they admired. The legendary creative shop Crispin Porter + Bogusky emailed back and trusted us with a high-stakes Coke Zero brief. We built Rooftop Racer, a Flash game that blew up, and we were officially on the map.
Rooftop Racer, 2008
We didn't have a five-year plan, venture capital, or an executive board. We just had a shared obsession with figuring out how things worked and making things with our own hands. Looking back, our unconventional approach didn't hold us back. It was our secret weapon. That project taught us a foundational truth that still guides us today: execution is strategy.
Two decades later, our duo has grown into a team of over a hundred people that still believes that same foundational truth. We’ve been incredibly intentional about how we grew, deciding to remain nimble and organizing ourselves into cross-disciplinary teams where designers, creatives, animators, and producers sit together from day one. There is no handoff, no game of telephone, and absolutely no ego. It is, and has always been, truly about the work we make, and who we make it with. That grounded, no-nonsense approach is exactly why our clients stick around.
Creative built to last
In an industry notorious for account churn and fickle relationships, over 70% of our business is built on long-term retainers, with partnerships spanning over a decade. We’ve collaborated with dozens of Google brands to solve for everything from complex display ad mechanics to massive global campaigns. We’ve created tens of thousands of assets for Stripe, partnered with Amazon across music and entertainment, embedded with Mailchimp's internal teams, and helped both Indeed and Discord turn technical product updates into authentic, community-driven narratives.
And we’ve picked up some fun, shiny hardware along the way: Shortys, Webbys, FWAs, Gold Lions, Silver Pencils. But some of our most remarkable milestones were winning AdAge’s Small Agency of the Year and their Best Place to Work award. The recognition serves as validation that you can build an agency around great people, ego-free collaboration, and a relentless focus on the craft—all without sacrificing world-class results.
Why the future still needs makers
What does the next chapter look like? Right now, our industry is understandably obsessed with automation, efficiency, and generative AI, and we aren’t cynics running away from the future. Instead, we’re actively shaping it, blending advanced generative tools with our own internal automated pipelines to produce high-volume, bespoke creative content. But as an agency of makers, our perspective is clear: technology should always elevate the craft, never replace the soul. You can automate a workflow, but you can’t automate perspective, taste, or the intuitive spark of a human being who brings their real, messy life experiences to work every day.
So over the next twenty years, we’ll keep doing our part to keep Craft + Creative at the heart of advertising. We’ll keep dismantling the invisible barriers in our field through our Sandbox U mentorship initiative, giving young talent from underrepresented backgrounds a direct path into creative marketing without requiring an expensive art degree. We’ll keep pushing hard for inclusive workplaces through our Equity Council and in-house initiatives, taking cues from our own internal conversations to ensure our agency structure adapts to our people, not the other way around. And we’ll keep empowering our teams to push the limits on creativity, giving them tools and opportunities to experiment with emerging tech, and unlock new ways to solve old problems.
At the end of the day, our ultimate goal hasn't changed since 2006: we simply want to be your favorite agency. We want to be the most trusted partner our clients have ever worked with, and the absolute best job our employees have ever had.
To the clients who trust us with their wildest ideas, to the teams at CP+B who took a chance on two kids with a dream, and to every single maker who has brought their unique voice to our sandbox: thank you. Here’s to 20 years of throwing away the templates, ditching the egos, and making things we love. <3
