We are not an advertising agency. We are Hoodwink, a collective of artists, dreamers, poets, storytellers, digital wizards, regular old magic wizards, free-thinkers, freeloaders, disrupters, gambling addicts, misfits, misfit toys that have creepily come to life and refuse to die no matter what we do, and one lone gunman.
We cultivate. We think-o-vate. We adver-tain. We make up words. We are sad a lot. We weep every single day.
We do things our own way. Which you’ll first encounter in our welcoming conference room that contains neither tables nor chairs, but instead houses a giant nest of human hair harvested from each and every one of our thoughtfully curated employees. It’s a metaphor for our process and the way our ideas are hatched off the top of our heads. Aren’t the egg pillows cute? Yes, of course they’re stuffed with hair — that’s why they’re so soft.
We’re certainly not right for everyone. When you have a business problem, we don’t come back to you with the kind of practical, realistic “solutions” you’d expect to see in the played-out agency world. We don’t make print ads, we produce visual anarchy. We don’t write copy, we craft maddening, inescapable verbal labyrinths, creating a sense of wonder that compels your audience to ask “What does this even mean?” and “Why do I hate your brand so much now?”
Our presentations aren’t just your run-of-the-mill, same old same old advertising campaigns. Instead, we invent presentation experiences. Innovative, unconventional juxtapositions of creative content in the form of imagery, feelings, loud noises, unusual smells, a smattering of poorly formatted Adobe Acrobat documents, and several real acrobats dangling from our in-office high wire. You’d better brace yourselves, because you’ve never seen anything quite like it. Also, for safety reasons we recommend bracing yourself against a wall and covering your neck and skull with a hardback book during the performance. Due to the lack of traditional office snacks and lunch breaks, our main acrobat has grown quite thin, and his bony body feels like a bag of knives when it falls on you. Which is both a warning and another unique insight you’ll only get from working with our company.
The idea of thinking outside the box and breaking all the rules is so important to us, it even applies to our building. Specifically, California’s earthquake architectural codes as well as most standard asbestos regulations are the rules that we break. Pregnant women are advised to avoid coming within 500 yards of our office, which is fine with us, since we don’t really buy into such an expected procreation method. Our company prefers more modern, innovative reproductive concepts like asexual budding, ripping off an arm and hoping it will grow a new person, and however marsupials do it.
Admittedly, we are still working out a few kinks in the loose, unregulated way we structure things around here. None of our employees have ever been paid real money, and the hair nest has recently developed a bad case of lice. Also, there is an actual killer roaming our office. Remember the lone gunman from our introduction? That wasn’t a joke. He is a very real and present danger. Why did we even hire that guy? It’s not like it was some kind of secret. In his interview he was very upfront about the whole murder thing. He has designed some of our most successful coupons, though.
We’ve been trying to spin these horrible problems into some kind of benefit for our clients, but the only thing we’ve come up with so far is the idea that you should “do something that scares you every day,” which is very easy to do here. We live in constant fear of being buried alive beneath a pile of asbestos-laden rubble, and all of the rats in our building are covered in bulbous tumors. Maybe one of them will inspire the shape of your new logo?
But as an advertising agency that’s not an advertising agency, but has instead transcended definition, these are just some of the challenges we face here at Hoodwink. Some may call us renegades. Others may call us innovators. And a select few health inspection authorities will call us exactly what we are — a huge pile of dirty hair littered with cancer-ridden vermin and human rights violations. But one thing is clear: The work we do here is impossible to copy. One of the tumor rats has gotten trapped inside the copy machine, so now it just spits out gross inky blobs.