At Day One Company, Creativity And Credibility Collide In The Creator Period

Day One Company has constructed its repute on the premise that focus can’t be purchased – it needs to be earned. On the helm is Josh Rosenberg, a communications strategist who co-founded the agency in 2014 to reimagine how manufacturers join with audiences in an setting the place each creator, influencer, and platform competes for relevance.

Josh’s early profession at M Sales space & Associates formed that imaginative and prescient. Over 12 years, he helped information shoppers by the trade’s first wave of digital transformation, establishing the company’s inaugural social media division. “Again within the day, we had been at all times handed promoting and instructed to ‘PR this,’” he says. “However we needed to ask, why will a client care? Why will they share?” These questions, rooted in earned storytelling reasonably than paid visibility, grew to become the inspiration of his philosophy.

By the early 2010s, social platforms had been reshaping the foundations of communication, and Josh noticed a gap for a mannequin that merged creativity with credibility. “We noticed a possibility for an company that basically understood creativity and understood earned, and the way we may put earned on the heart of that creativity,” he says.

When he and his two co-founders left their earlier company, they’d no shoppers, no workers, and no title. Then Josh got here throughout an article concerning the “Day One mentality,” which emphasised curiosity, contemporary pondering, and the vitality of beginning over. “That’s us,” he recollects. “We’re at all times desirous about what’s new, what’s subsequent, the way to keep contemporary.” The founders registered D1A.com that very same day.

Greater than a decade later, Day One employs greater than 180 individuals throughout New York, Los Angeles, Chicago, and Portland, serving shoppers together with Chipotle, Nike, Converse, American Specific, and e.l.f. Magnificence. The agency’s progress has been guided by a single perception Josh typically repeats: “Good work begets extra good work.”

Storytelling as Technique

Day One Company’s deal with creativity has produced campaigns that always transcend advertising and marketing into popular culture. “Narrative is every little thing,” Josh factors out. “We take a really robust editorial strategy right here, as a result of journalists know the way to take the advanced and make it easy, and that’s what it’s essential attain customers.”

In 2024, Day One Company partnered with Pacifico on “Discover Your Personal Manner,” a world marketing campaign celebrating creativity, self-expression, and outside exploration. The social-first sequence invited audiences to embrace their very own path, which aligned with Pacifico’s surf-inspired heritage and ethos of discovery. Developed to resonate throughout social and digital platforms, the marketing campaign exemplified Josh’s perception that “what connects with a human is one other human story.”

One other standout was “Spirit Halloween x Chipotle Boorito Costume Drop,” a collaboration with Spirit Halloween that reimagined Chipotle’s annual Halloween promotion for digital advertising and marketing. The partnership launched limited-edition costumes impressed by viral menu gadgets, merging creator storytelling with experiential and digital activations. The marketing campaign generated greater than 9.2 billion press impressions, 68 million owned impressions, and three.4 million engagements, marking one in all Chipotle’s most profitable Halloween occasions to this point.

For Josh, the success of those campaigns lies in figuring out what he calls the “intersection between model reality and fan reality.” In keeping with him, “When you can join the cultural perception to the patron perception, that’s the place you win. It’s about understanding your viewers higher than they know themselves, and incomes the best to be a part of their story.”

Day One’s strategy to influencer work follows the identical logic. “We don’t have a look at creator work as media; we have a look at it as inventive,” Josh explains. “Manufacturers are hiring creators due to the belief they’ve constructed with their audiences. If you take them too removed from what their audiences anticipate, you lose that credibility. The candy spot is when it’s model proper and creator proper.”

Scaling Tradition and Creativity

When the pandemic hit in 2020, Day One’s dedication to creativity was examined … and strengthened. Months earlier than lockdowns, the company employed a workers photographer to launch an in-house manufacturing arm. “Then COVID hit, and immediately that photographer’s studio condo in LA grew to become our manufacturing hub,” he says. “We didn’t miss a beat when different companies couldn’t shoot.”

That scrappy pivot grew to become Day One Studios, a full-fledged manufacturing division now creating every little thing from TikToks to nationwide tv campaigns for manufacturers like e.l.f. Magnificence and Pacifico. The LA studio just lately expanded as a part of a broader push to combine content material manufacturing with cultural technique.

“Being laser-focused on creativity has been how we’ve been capable of scale,” Josh says. “We hold asking, ‘What new providers assist us ship the work in another way, however nonetheless nimbly?’”

Listening to the Subsequent Technology

Whereas many companies speak about youth tradition, Day One has made finding out it a part of its core enterprise. In 2023, the corporate relaunched Ask Gen Z, a program connecting strategists with younger customers to grasp their values and media habits. That initiative has since matured into Group Chat, a panel of 75 Gen Z members throughout the U.S. who share real-time insights on tradition, merchandise, and model notion.

This summer time, Day One used the panel to conduct its “Enjoyable Cash Talks” report, handing every participant $100 to spend on something that mirrored how they categorical themselves. “It was fascinating to us. It wasn’t about purchasing or eating,” Josh says. “It was hobbies and private improvement. Somebody took guitar classes. Somebody purchased a chunk of meat to discover ways to prepare dinner it proper. It helped us perceive how this technology thinks about self-growth.”

The company’s analysis additionally informs consumer technique. “We had a consumer launching a world advert marketing campaign who wished to check their tagline,” he says. “We requested our Gen Z panel, and the suggestions helped form the ultimate inventive that went to management.”

This yr, Day One partnered with tradition author Casey Lewis on a brand new report titled “Tweenfluence,” exploring how Gen Alpha (the cohort following Gen Z) is shaping family buy selections. 

“What shocked us most was how a lot affect they’ve on their mother and father’ shopping for selections,” Josh says. “Magnificence merchandise had been huge. ‘Sephora youngsters’ got here up lots. For boys, it was extra about gaming: ‘Fortnite,’ ‘Minecraft.’ It’s fascinating to see how early digital affect begins.”

From Earned to In all places

For Josh, the creator economic system hasn’t rendered companies out of date; as a substitute, it’s made inventive management extra important. “Being a creator at this time is a grind,” he says. “They’re writing, producing, modifying, scaling. We will help them take into consideration the way to develop, the way to discover new audiences, and the way to make their work sustainable long run.”

As creators acquire extra enterprise acumen and self-management instruments, Josh sees company worth shifting towards strategic creativity. “We’re going to proceed including worth within the inventive hook and the marketing campaign,” he says. “That’s what helps scale tales and attain audiences meaningfully.”

Internally, Day One holds two non-negotiable ideas: empathy and curiosity. “It’s worthwhile to be curious to succeed at this time,” Josh says. “Change is a given, as is chaos. The way you navigate that ambiguity is thru creativity and empathy.”

That philosophy has guided the company’s constant transformation. “We’ve needed to reinvent who we’re each six to 9 months,” he says. “The media panorama strikes that quick.”

Even with AI altering content material manufacturing, Josh’s focus stays on distinctly human creativity. “There’s loads of AI slop on the market,” he says. 

Day One’s purpose for the longer term, he provides, is straightforward: to maintain listening, studying, and creating concepts that earn consideration all over the place. “Each consumer desires an concept that connects to an viewers,” Josh says. “For us, it at all times comes again to creativity and curiosity. These are the issues that hold us at day one.”