The industry gets Rowdy

At last year’s AADC Awards, you’d have to say the star of the show was the quite shitly named BlackBocksJamShopSomethingOrOther agency… the coming together of local agencies blackbocks and Jamshop a while back.

At the time, you could only assume they were so busy producing kick arse work, they’d completely neglected the task of coming up with a decent name for their own agency. Well, that’s now been well and truly rectified with the launch of The Rowdy Group.

Agency names always seem to go through cycles… for a while it’s all serious and let’s just use the founders’ names, then it’s let’s get wacky and call our business things like ‘Aubergine Testicles’ or some shit, then everyone kind of pulls their heads in and it’s back to Wanker&Co, and so it goes.

We think it’s fair to say we’re back in the phase where it’s all bets are off… and to be fair, we’re fans. As an industry we’re supposed to be different and interesting and creative and dynamic and for our money ‘Boring&Boring’ has never really made the cut. Unless you’re a financial adviser stealing millions from your clients.

But back to The Rowdy Group. We’re not going to regurgitate the standard PR here because, fuck. that. You can read that shit anywhere. What we will say is they launched with what is possibly one of the greatest 360 staff photos of all time. You can check out the whole thing in all it’s glory on Facebook.

Creative Director Johnny Velis is obviously pretty fired up about it all, and rolled out the old ‘New Zealand punches above it’s weight creatively so why can’t South Australia’ gem which we’ve heard one or two thousand times but hey, who knows? It would certainly be cool if that happened. Although New Zealand have lots of things we don’t – including a decent prime minister so time will tell.

In the interest of being vaguely official, we’ll also quote Agency Principal Brenton Bock who said “awards are all well and good but the real reward for us is seeing the continued success of our clients” which as we all know, is up there with “the coach has the full support of the board”.

Anyway, along with the new name, the 30 or so Rowdy staff who work there have now moved into new digs at 52 Gawler Place in the city, right next to Brash’s.