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For me, Bandits & Friends started with a text from an old colleague. For my partners, Danny Gonzalez and David Suarez, it’s been in the works for 20 years.
There’s plenty to discourage people from breaking out to do their own thing. New business is dry. Pitching is expensive. The dilution of focus to satisfy so many mediums and channels and “keep up with the speed of culture” but also “build me a recognizable brand viable for the long term” makes it difficult to staff. The debate over whether there is even a way to differentiate a new agency offering.
But then I remembered—advertising should be fun. And I remembered the adrenaline I used to get the night before a launch, and wanting to feel that again.
So, I responded to the text. After a few meetings with Danny and David, I jumped in.
Starting with a name and identity
We started with kicking options around for a name. It feels like a natural place to begin building your identity and, practically, you need some version of it to file official paperwork.
After a few hiccups, like names that would pose trademark issues and a close call with a defunct Belgian boy band, we landed on Bandits & Friends. What made us embrace the name is that it communicates our ethos: In a world full of distractions, attention cannot be bought—it has to be stolen with entertaining work. And as project-cased contracts have become the norm, we didn’t want the transactional relationships that come with them. We believe clients should be treated like friends.
Again, advertising should be fun.
As Danny and David had already been partners for 20 years, they already had a shorthand. They have an innate sense of each other’s values and expectations. What was important to me as a next step was sorting through what would become shared agency values.
We needed to be able to describe our offering, as we didn’t yet have a body of work that could speak for itself. Danny and David made a conscious decision to go outside of their immediate network to bring in a third founder who could manage the business side of things. More importantly, they wanted representative perspectives and a complementary set of capabilities that would signal our modernity.
