A year after changing ownership hands, America’s Finest News Source has opened America’s Finest Creative Agency.
As of today, The Onion is offering copywriting and creative strategy services to brands under its new agency moniker. That includes help with everything from stunt marketing to email copy to social-first vertical video.
“We are certainly not a one-and-done shop,” CMO Leila Brillson exclusively told Marketing Brew. “The concept here is that we are going to give you the tools that you need for a really entertaining and human-feeling campaign.”
Marnie Shure, who previously was managing editor at The Onion from 2012 to 2017, and Howie Kaplan, who currently works as a marketing consultant for The Onion, will run the agency internally and oversee a lean team of copywriters, most of whom have experience writing for The Onion and many of whom have written for events like awards shows, Brillson said.
“We are hoping to make a brand’s content as smart and entertaining as our content,” Brillson said, “like having a little writer's room in your pocket or a writer's room on speed dial.”
Funny business
Brillson, who previously ran her own agency and worked in brand and social marketing for companies like Bumble, TikTok, and Disney before joining The Onion, said that the inspiration for America’s Finest Creative Agency came after she watched the editorial staff write hundreds of headlines each week and analyze the ones that don’t work—something she called a “PhD in copywriting.” It’s a skill that she thinks brands can benefit from.
It also doesn’t hurt that many Onion writers already have experience writing ads—or at least the fake ones that run in the paper.
“There’s nothing that makes a brand feel more authentic or connected than comedy,” Brillson said.
Opening an agency will allow The Onion to move beyond display ads and subscriptions as its primary revenue sources. When the Onion changed ownership, it debuted a membership model that Brillson said has proven to be sustainable in the last year, but if digital media’s infamous “pivot to video” saga taught Brillson anything, it’s that the need to diversify monetary streams is very real, she said.
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Opening a marketing arm isn’t an entirely new concept for The Onion. Some may remember Onion Labs, the publication’s in-house advertising and marketing team that existed under the publication’s previous owner, G/O Media. According to Brillson, while Onion Labs was made up of 20 to 30 people, the goal for the new creative agency is to operate with a smaller headcount and limited overhead costs so as not to contribute to agency bloat.
Some agencies and brands have leaned on generative AI tools for copywriting, or have scrapped copy roles altogether, but Brillson said she isn’t worried about competing with robots. That’s not only because of the agency’s scrappy and tiered service costs, she said, but also because by and large, AI is not very funny.
“AI is not set up for those nuances,” she said. “It’s set up to flatten something into the broadest and most middle-ground content it can.”
Prior to the official launch of America’s Finest Creative Agency, The Onion had already started working on social campaigns for entertainment and advocacy clients like Project Liberty, the nonprofit founded by TikTok bidder Frank McCourt to advocate for a decentralized internet. For Project Liberty, the publication threw a “Good Party for Bad Times” earlier this spring and previously created “Onion Talks,” a video parodying TED Talks about the (completely theoretical) drawbacks of data mining.
As Brillson and her team set up for an influx of new clients and campaigns, she said she remains hyperaware of what The Onion can offer brands—and what it can’t.
“You want The Onion to think about and write your Super Bowl ad,” she said. “You don’t want The Onion to shoot it.”