What makes Athletics unique as an agency, what do you aim to achieve, and who do you work with?
Founded in NYC, Athletics focuses on brand transformation that gets to work. Great ideas have to be made real and have to empower client teams. Looking toward the future while solving the realities of today is what makes great work move businesses forward.
Integrating the high touch impact of a boutique studio with enterprise agency firepower requires senior leaders working alongside strategics, designers, and creative technologists with exceptional skills.
Matt says: “You have to engage every client where they are in their internal and external brand maturity. To be successful you have to help build solutions that make sense for the nuances of each client's business goals and the unique makeup of their team and processes.”
Athletics client relationships span across categories: technology, sport, finance, higher education, healthcare and beyond. Their work with the likes of IBM, Major League Soccer, Okta, New Museum, and Google Chrome comes from a commitment to deep collaboration and a drive to empower client teams and equip them with the brand tools to succeed.
How did Athletics get here?
Born in Williamsburg Brooklyn and an old boxing gym, a group of friends that cut their teeth working within and alongside larger agencies joined forces to take the best parts of their experiences to build something new. Athletics’ Executive Creative Director Malcolm Buick spent close to a decade at Wolff Olins as a creative director before joining as a partner.
“We put our hearts (and brains) into doing world-class work. But what we really love? Seeing clients take what we’ve built and run with it, and not a deck gathering dust — but a living, breathing brand system they believe in and build on.” Malcolm Buick. ECD, Athletics
What makes Athletics different from other agencies?
For Athletics it's about having the adaptability to meet the needs of modern brand building. Brands are so much more than a logo. Creative technology, sound, motion, 3D, and AI are all ingredients to create a cohesive whole. Brand systems are multisensory, dynamic, and understandable.
Building off of there work developing Otto for Square, Athletics have created Sesame, a platform purpose-built to super-charge client’s brand identity systems, Sesame allows for teams to integrate and templatise graphics, motion, sound, and other brand and campaign creative in an easy to use application to accelerate ideation, production, and iteration.
The result is rigorous brand governance, increased speed-to-market, and higher engagement. It's through innovations like Sesame along with AI integrations with Adobe Firefly that Athletics is forging the future of brand systems.
Athletics brings decades of deep expertise developing brands across every touchpoint - from button to billboard — encompassing strategies, systems, products, and campaigns. By embracing the inherently dynamic nature for modern brands, Athletics are able to build strong brand operating systems that empower entire teams to contribute.
Why brand systems matter more than ever
As our world continues to transform at an unrelenting rate, what separates great brands from the rest is their uniqueness and individuality and their ability to understand what they do in holistic and interconnected ways. As economic and technological forces continue to transform markets and categories, every brand experience matters.
Athletics believes that brand principles should drive creativity over rigid brand rules. We should equip brand teams to do amazing work, not limit them. Great brand systems are an investment in your values as an organization and embody who you are and where you want to lead as a business.
As AI tools become normalized and fully integrated across all aspects of modern work what remains true is your unique story and expression and how your narrative and brand translate into trust for audiences and customers and empowerment for internal teams.
As all dimensions of what we do continue to evolve at pace, It's the unique combination of boutique agility and enterprise execution that makes Athletics a powerful brand partner. For the team at Athletics it's the creativity and craft of how you show up in the world, what you do, and what you say that gives great brands the tools to tackle what’s now and what’s next.
Matt Owens is the Chief Design and Innovation Officer at Athletics.
