As the Super Bowl approaches each year, teams across the country huddle up. So do the creatives inside Kansas City–based VML. The agency gathers its people to figure out how to score when the big game pauses and the ads take over.
Whether the Chiefs make it to the Super Bowl or not, a breakout commercial counts as a touchdown. VML has delivered them for Progressive and the Foundation to Combat Antisemitism. It even reunited Billy Crystal and Meg Ryan to show a little extra enthusiasm for Hellmann’s mayonnaise.
“We’re working on connecting with consumers nonstop,” says Beth Wade, BA ’95, VML’s global chief communications & integration officer. “A Super Bowl spot is still the showcase of traditional brand advertising. That said, there are a mind-boggling number of different ways to experience a brand today.”
Take VML’s most audacious success story, for example. Starting in late 2016, the social media team began shifting Wendy’s presence from a polite corporate fast-food monotone to a sharp, quick-witted persona that treated the internet like a place to spar, tease and actually have a little fun.
The shift crystallized a few months later when McDonald’s posted a promotional tweet with a broken link on Twitter (now X), prompting Wendy’s to reply with the line that defined its new voice: “When the tweets are as broken as the ice cream machine.”
Among the world’s largest creative advertising agencies, VML boasts more than 25,000 employees across 64 international markets. Among its thousands of high-profile clients are Colgate-Palmolive, Ford Motor Company, Microsoft, The Coca-Cola Company and Wendy’s. Beyond the big names and eye-popping numbers is an amazing, multibillion-dollar Mizzou-built success story. Although bustling ad agencies are typically associated with bluebloods in silver skyscrapers on Madison Avenue, this one bleeds black and gold.
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