When Old Navy recently moved a hefty chunk of its advertising from Deutsch (part of Interpublic) to the new New York office of StrawberryFrog, a small Amsterdam-based agency, it was yet more evidence documenting the shift away from old guard conglomerate advertising behemoths toward smaller, independent, more flexible and boutique agencies.

This is definitely a trend we have seen firsthand in the naming and branding arena as well, where giant multinational corporations that used to only hire other giant multinational companies are now lining up to hire smaller, more creative advertising and branding agencies such as Igor.

Reports the New York Times, in A Mainstream Brand Tiptoes Toward the Quirky:

Old Navy is the first well-known American client for StrawberryFrog, which was founded in Amsterdam six years ago by Scott Goodson, a Canadian. Mr. Goodson, president and creative partner at StrawberryFrog, has been evangelistic in his belief that new types of agencies – more nimble and Web-based, less bureaucratic and hierarchical – are needed to help mainstream marketers reach consumers in new ways.

“I’ve been talking about it for years,” Mr. Goodson said in an interview. “There’s definitely an understanding now that there’s a changing landscape.”

“It’s not the soup du jour,” he added. “It’s a fundamental shift, both in what clients are looking for and how agencies are working.”

StrawberryFrog was among the first in a new wave of smaller, mostly independently owned agencies remaking the advertising landscape. They specialize in campaigns that are distinctive creatively, often quirky, and that typically extend beyond traditional media like television commercials. Some of the agencies, like StrawberryFrog, bear distinctive names meant to signal their different approach; others in that vein include Amalgamated, Mother and Taxi. Other new wave agencies carry more traditional names, like Crispin Porter & Bogusky, McGarry Bowen and Shepardson Stern & Kaminsky.

Whatever they are called, the new agencies have a couple of things in common. One is their focus on business as unusual. The other is their growing success, often at the expense of mainline agencies that find themselves sharing clients with the upstarts – or worse yet, losing assignments to them.

The names of many of these new agencies – Amalgamated, Mother, Taxi and even internety random pairings such as StrawberryFrog – are another clear sign of business as no longer usual. Sounding like an old-guard agency by naming the company after the founders will quickly become baggage even an upstart will have to overcome. Because, fundamentally, this business is not about the ego of the agency, but servicing the needs of the client, and we all know how much fun servicing is.

The article continues:

“We’re a challenger brand in our space and StrawberryFrog is a challenger brand in its space,” he [Charles N. Piermarini, president and CEO of HarrisDirect, another StrawberryFrog client] added. “In a cluttered space, we wanted to make sure we’re working with someone with the ability to help set us apart.”

This is a key point we’ve been advocating for years, that if an agency is claiming to set your company apart from the competition, shouldn’t they be able to demonstrate that ability by first differentiating their own brand? Otherwise they risk ending up like so many others fighting it out in the lower left corner of this taxonomy of naming and branding agency names.