The ad agency's brain trust, from left, Chuck Carmone, Alec Beckett and Brian Gross in their Providence office downtown.
Fun, offbeat Providence ad agency offers clients ‘brand magnification’
NAIL
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Owners: Brian Gross, Chuck Carmone, Alec Beckett
Type of Business: Advertising agency
Location: 77 Eddy St., Providence
Year Founded: 1998
Employees: 12
Annual Sales: About $15 million (gross billings)
By Marion Davis
The moment the elevator doors open, you know this is not corporate America. There’s no receptionist, no cubicles, no pastel-colored carpeting – just a big, bright loft with a bare wood floor, two long rows of industrial-looking desks, and a Ping-Pong table.
An old black dog tethered to a desk starts barking, and his boyish-looking guardian, Alec Beckett, stands up to greet their visitor. He’s wearing an oversized sweater with NAIL embroidered on it. Everyone else is dressed just as casually.
“Our clients don’t wear suits and ties, either,” he says later, sitting at a conference table in a corner of the loft with commanding views of Downcity.
When Beckett and his partners, Chuck Carmone and Brian Gross, first moved into this third-floor space at Westminster and Eddy streets, many of the buildings around them were vacant. Now there’s construction everywhere, a trendy salon and cafes.
“We’ve watched downtown Providence really come alive, and it’s been thrilling,” Beckett says. “It’s good for us, because we try to recruit national-caliber talent, and the city helps us, where at first it used to hurt us.”
How NAIL came to be in Providence is a bit of a fluke. None of the partners is from Rhode Island, or even went to school here. All three came from major ad agencies; Gross and Beckett had met at Grey Advertising, in New York; Gross had then worked with Carmone at Kelley/Dexter Advertising in Boston, and Beckett moved to California.
In 1998, Providence adman Bruce Leonard, who had closed his shop and gone to work with LBC Communications, recruited Gross and Carmone to work with him. Within months, however, LBC pulled out of advertising, leaving them jobless.
While Gross and Carmone looked for new posts, they freelanced for a few clients LBC had been working for, including the Roger Williams Park Zoo and Alperts Furniture, for whom they conceived the “Time for new furniture?” campaign. They liked their newfound freedom so much, they decided to start their own agency.
Beckett, who was working in California, joined the pair in 1999. Soon the old LBC office they were renting on Dorrance Street was too small for them, and they moved into the loft. They had no money for fancy furniture, so they bought “tank desks” from a used furniture store – cheap, indestructible and retro-cool – and had them painted silver at an auto-body shop, along with some matching cabinets.
“A lot of advertising agencies are terrible work environments, with back-stabbing, politics …” Beckett says. “We wanted to set up the kind of place we’d like to work in.”
“The nice thing is, there’s crossover and cross-pollination,” says Gross. “Some of our best ideas we can’t even trace back to who came up with them, because everyone keeps building on everyone else’s ideas.”
From the start, the partners say, they’ve had plenty of work, though it’s continued to grow over time, to about $15 million in gross billings this year. But while at first, a lot of their work was unpaid or underpaid (they even did some ads in exchange for free pizza), they’ve gradually built up their profitability. Now they try not to take clients who can’t spend at least $500,000 in media – for about $75,000 in agency income.
“When we started, we really wanted to change the world,” Gross says. “We were kind of young and naïve and thought if we did good work, the business would come. As we’ve matured, we realized it is a business.”
Some of NAIL’s best clients are long-timers whom they’ve helped to grow, such as family-owned Berkshire Blanket, which was struggling in a fairly generic market.
NAIL redesigned the blankets’ packaging, produced a Web site and point-of-sale materials, and created a visually striking ad campaign that places the blankets in unexpected settings: as a dollop of “whipped cream” under a strawberry, as a yellow rose, as stove burners. Since 1999, the company has added distribution in Target, Wal-Mart, and Bed Bath & Beyond, and grown its revenues from $15 million to $80 million.
“We got the best compliment from them,” Carmone says. “They said, ‘When we’re meeting with our clients, they actually think we know what we’re doing’” – despite being just a mom-and-pop.
“It’s classic brand magnification,” says Beckett. “Act like you’re big, and you eventually become big.”
