MAD ACTS 
OF AGENCY

Hot damn, yes! Farley Oil is open in the Motor City (and most everywhere else reachable by land, air, or decent bandwidth).

Our team couldn’t be more excited. We’ve been doing this advertising thing for awhile and watched the entire business change, grow, shrink and grow again in completely different ways. Everyone has the future on their brains. We’ve seen our friends and colleagues get the absolute shakes from every thumb scroll past influence peddlers predicting the end of advertising as we know it. Now to be clear, we totally agree that it is - but in a really good way.

It’s messy out there. Digital clutter. Privacy laws. Elusive audiences. We have no choice but to get back to our roots in the art of persuasion. And with new technologies, we can do it better than ever before. It really is the best of both worlds.

It’s ok to be skeptical. We get it. Enthusiasm and experience have a way of being at odds with each other. A pro pays their dues, puts in the time and then, suddenly, harsh realities come crashing in. Cynicism appears disguised as pragmatism. But there’s a solve for that: Invention. That’s why we came together with purpose, in finding new meaning for old words. To create for today and tomorrow. Optimism is a very nice byproduct of that.

The original Farley Oil was founded by my grandfather Don in 1955 as an asphalt company. That story is long over, but I held onto the name. Not because I wanted to start an oil company (apologies to the SEM crawler currently keyword scraping this site) but because oil can mean a great many things. To us, it means a more fluid way of thinking about data, strategy and creativity. It means understanding how human psychology flows into action. 

It means removing friction from the relationship between brands and their consumers.

The same can be said for the word ‘agency’. It’s easy to say that the world doesn’t need another agency. But maybe that’s because we’re using a poor definition. We need to think of agency, not as what we are but rather what we provide: Empowerment. A measure of control. A path forward.

So here we are, writing new definitions. This approach is not without its risks. But nothing risked is nothing gained. So, we’ll take the heat. Because nothing moves forward without pressure, and we’re happy to live where the pressure is on.

Be seeing you out there,

Greg Farley & Team