Highnoon redefines full-service ad agency

The founders of two top marketing agencies in Arizona, Bigfish Creative Group and Lucid Agency, launched a new larger company last week to take the concept of full-service to a higher level.      

The company — Highnoon — is bringing a “holistic” approach to marketing for today’s new generation of customers, said the three behind the award-winning agencies: Ken Bonham and Scott Kaufmann of Lucid and Joe Pizzimenti of Bigfish.

Lucid and Bigfish boasted clients like Cisco, Oregano’s, Take Charge America and the Better Business Bureau. But in the past few years, clients are asking for more help in reaching across different channels to consumers. 

“A lot of our clients have been asking us to solve holistic business problems that intersect with marketing, communications and technology in different ways,” Kaufmann said.  

Shift in how customers interact with brands 

They began to envision a new kind of full-service agency. One that would directly address consumers’ shifting interactions with brands, he said. 

“There is this kind of democratization of ways that consumers are interacting with their favorite brands now. They can tweet the CEO directly, they get in touch with the shipping department, they look at the packaging design and tweet pictures of it when they’re opening a package for the first time, maybe communicate it on social media,” Kaufmann said.

“We had to be able to service all of these areas, from communication to technology to marketing to strategy.” 

All under one roof  

Instead of the traditional full-service approach of offering two or three services such as public relations, advertising and technology, Highnoon incorporates everything under one roof: creative, technology, performance, data, analytics, public relations, online and offline marketing, and consulting.

Analytics compares data and vendors

For analytics, they built an analytics and reporting platform, Monocle, that allows large organizations to compare their data across a gamut of different channels in social media and traditional advertising. The platform also allows clients to compare different agencies, vendors or other providers.

Home is downtown Tempe 

Headquartered in Tempe, Bonham, Kaufmann and Pizzimenti launched the company in the city that brought them together as alumni of Arizona State University. Through the years, the three have won dozens of awards in their respective companies, including the Community Impact award from the Phoenix Business Journal’s Corporate Philanthropy Awards and AzCentral’s Top Companies to Work for in Arizona. 

For more information about Highnoon, visit Highnoon.