How I Helped Build an Agency Inside a Fortune 100

When I joined Liberty Mutual's internal creative department in 2017, I came in with a clear point of view: a well-run internal team can outperform external agencies on almost every dimension that matters. Speed, brand knowledge, cost, culture.

I joined a team of about eight and helped build it into something different. We rebranded the department as Copper Giants, restructured the org, and scaled to sixteen people. Agency-quality talent, inside the brand. The results: $3.5M in annual savings, unaided brand awareness grown from 17% to 30%, and a nationally recognized team. Here's how we got there.

How I Ran It

Building Copper Giants: As part of the leadership team that built Copper Giants, the goal was clear. Deliver the strategic capability of a top-tier external agency, with the institutional knowledge and speed you can only get from being inside. That meant building from scratch: org design, hiring, culture, workflows, all of it.

Managing the Mix of In-House and External: We weren't trying to eliminate external agencies. We were trying to use them better. I managed the balance between our internal team and external partners so the brand stayed consistent and high-performing across every touchpoint. The internal team owned the day-to-day. The best outside partners came in when we needed a specific lens.

What It Did to the Business: My job was as much about the P&L as it was about the work. By insourcing 80% of our creative, we didn't just move faster. We fundamentally changed the cost structure of the marketing department.

Getting a Giant to Speak With One Voice: Liberty Mutual's brand had been fragmented across dozens of teams and vendors. Working with lead agencies and internal partners, we unified the visual system across all business units. National TV, local agent storefronts, social, everything.

Copper Giants

Liberty Mutual's creative had been spread across too many external vendors for too long. The work was inconsistent. The brand was losing coherence at scale. We built the alternative: a multidisciplinary in-house team focused on high-craft, high-volume work, agency-quality, with the institutional knowledge you can only get from being inside the brand.

$3.5M saved annually from insourcing 80% of creative work

17% to 30% unaided brand awareness growth

Getting a Giant to Speak With One Voice

Modernizing a 100-year-old insurance brand for a digital-first world is a particular kind of challenge. The brand equity is real and worth protecting. The visual identity needed to evolve without losing that credibility.

We directed a comprehensive visual refresh with top-tier brand partners, then built the tools to make it stick. A modular design system and a self-service brand portal that let every team across the organization maintain consistency without needing to come back to us for every asset.

Brand Personality

LiMu and Doug were handed to us as a concept. We gave them a personality. My team defined their voice and presence for the first time, turning visual mascots into the narrative heart of the brand.

Once the jingle had become a cultural earworm, we leaned into it. We cast actors to perform it like they were doing karaoke, off-key and enthusiastic, turning one of the most recognized sounds in insurance advertising into a short-form format built for digital.

13% lift in unaided brand awareness

Earning Attention

The insurance category is loud. Paid media alone doesn't cut through. We attacked that problem two ways. The Emu Egg drop was a hidden-camera stunt built to earn coverage: organic, shareable, impossible to ignore. The YouTube integration was a different kind of idea entirely: we filmed multiple scenes and paired them with contextual copy based on the viewer's geolocation, so the message matched where people actually were. Two different strategies, same goal: get attention without just buying it.

Performance

$3.5M saved annually by building a team that could do the work ourselves

13% lift in unaided brand awareness for a Fortune 100 brand

$40B+ scale of the enterprise managed

The Full Story

The full story of building Copper Giants, from org design to nationally recognized work.

Read the full case study