What does it take to start an agency? The Stable has been speaking to the creative founders of some of the world’s great creative start-up success stories. Episode 1 featured Micah Walker, who founded Bear Meets Eagle on Fire in 2019, Vince Lagana, who co-founded It’s Friday in 2021 and Greg Hahn, who co-founded Mischief @ No Fixed Address in 2020.
Ant Melder, who co-founded Cocogun in 2019, has given The Stable a striking story. A real feeling for the excitement, anguish, and ambition needed. Australian agency, Cocogun, is also genuinely doing good – not (just) with campaigns, certainly not just with promises – with money; with part of its profit for people in need. Nice point of difference isn’t it?
Here is Cocogun’s story:
Picture the scene: 5pm on a cold Friday evening in May 2019. Four exhausted people crowd around an incongruously lavish cheese platter and an ice bucket of drinks in a small, draughty room above a garage in Paddington. In each corner of the room is a trestle table/makeshift desk with a laptop. On a cheap Officeworks flip pad on the far side of the room is a scrawled list with the heading “Potential Clients”.
Humble beginnings, so why the fancy cheese platter? That was down to my partner Chiquita King aka CK who had then, as she has now, an unshakeable belief in doing things “properly”. “How you do anything is how you do everything” are words she lives by – including how you put a full stop on the end of a week, whether you’re working at a 300-person network agency or a four-person indie start-up running on fumes. I have to admit that, at the time, I questioned the wisdom of this ethos. But, having spent the last six years building an agency alongside CK, I’ve witnessed first hand how her uncompromising passion for getting the smallest details right is the foundational bedrock on which Cocogun’s biggest triumphs have been built.
I mention this to illustrate two important things I’ve learned about founding and building an agency. Firstly, that without the right partner you’re not going to get very far; with the right one, you can achieve more than you ever imagined possible. In this regard, I got ridiculously lucky. Beyond being a world class suit, CK is a brilliant thinker, leader, human being. And beyond our partnership, we wouldn’t have got anywhere without inspiring clients who believed in and put their trust in us.
Secondly, great agencies don’t just sell ideas, they’re built on them. We had an idea for what an agency could and should be, and we stuck to it. We launched with a vow to deliver audacious creativity and a promise to do good in the world. To positively impact culture, people’s lives, and companies’ bottom lines. To create ideas that truly matter. That add something meaningful and valuable, rather than just adding to the constant noise. Be that inspiration, information, entertainment…or all of those at once.
And we’ve spent every day of the last six years trying to deliver on that. We don’t get it right every single time, but we’ve had our moments and, more importantly, we’ve never wavered from that ethos.
As co-founders, one of the key ideas we spoke a lot about from the start was Bill Bernbach’s maxim that “A principle isn’t a principle until it costs you money“. With that in mind, we vowed to give away 5% of our profits to people in need, from day one, in perpetuity. This led to the founding of the Cocogun Creative Scholarship for Indigenous Students, in partnership with University of Technology Sydney. It remains one of the initiatives we’re most proud of.
Along the way we’ve strived to build a culture that’s unique and authentic. And we’ve worked with amazing brands, companies, organisations and production partners. It’s led us to open a supermarket selling human beings…
create the branding for a world-leading health-tech company that’s using AI to diagnose cancer at scale, encourage parents to have awkward conversations with their teenage kids about sexuality, release a rap song protesting the Melbourne Cup…
create a new punctuation mark to celebrate the craft of writing…
…and even reimagine what death could and should be.
It’s been such an invigorating, inspiring ride so far. And I’ve loved every minute of it. Even the tough ones. The challenges are as precious as the wins, because they’re ours. Ours to wrestle with and overcome in our own unique way. In fact, I remember, before we launched Cocogun, I reached out to Paul Domenet, an old Saatchi London friend/amazing thinker/writer/creative leader, who’s now running a brilliant independent agency in London. I told him we were excited and shitting ourselves in equal measure. He told me to embrace that fear. “Enjoy shitting yourselves,” he said. “The smell’s bad but it gets you out of bed quickly in the morning.”
It’s not a polite metaphor, but the idea of relentless pursuit of the growth that lies outside of our comfort zone has always driven us. And while it gives me a warm glow to look back on the successes so far, we’re not done yet. In fact, we’re just getting started.
Cover image by Sincerely Media on Unsplash
