Adams & Knight is not in a business known for serving up subtleties.
For a testament, take a peek at its award-winning advertising work for clients like Hartford HealthCare, Mystic Seaport, and the Council for Disability Awareness.
However, there is a nuanced message in the full-scale diner that greets visitors to the ad agency’s offices in Avon: in a marketing world gone increasingly virtual, face-to-face collaboration remains at the top of the menu.
That is the case at lunch (employees eat free at the diner) and throughout the day as strategists, account managers, programmers, social media specialists, and creatives team up on various campaigns.
For Jill Adams, who launched the agency 25 years ago with Bill Knight, underpinning that collaborative spirit is a culture of respect.
“It has to do with energized employees who are passionate about the work they are doing and the impact they are having on clients and their organizations,” Adams said. “It’s about feeling that this is a place where their ideas are heard; where they’re making a difference; where they can accomplish something together that they couldn’t do alone.”
Brian McClear was working on his own, freelancing as an illustrator to produce concept storyboards for TV spots, when he joined Adams & Knight nearly two decades ago as one of the first five employees.
“It’s funny — even when we were in a much smaller building, we had a little two-booth diner,” said McClear, who today is senior vice president of marketing technology. “Though we didn’t have a full-size diner, there was always this kind of idea of the sense of collaboration, the sense of working with people. It was always there.
“Even though so many things have changed over the 17 years I’ve been here, that little bit has remained unchanged — the focus on the employees, the focus on providing a great environment to work, and that sense of collaboration,” McClear said. “That sense has carried through over the years even as we have grown.”
Adams & Knight continues to hire, with new employees including Emily Pangakis, who parlayed an internship into a full-time job last summer after graduating from UConn, focusing on public relations components of marketing campaigns.
If the entrance diner is the most striking visual element in the building, there are many other design elements intended to unleash outside-the-box thinking, Pangakis said, including interiors that eschew straight lines and a liberal peppering of iconic logos from bygone days.
While Adams & Knight plays up its diner in virtual marketing — for instance, it posts “AKTV Counter Talk” videos regularly in which employees discuss their strategies on various campaigns while seated at the counter — it gives equal billing to its employees, including their personal interests (in her own online profile, Adams confesses a weakness for theater and the movies, which in January spurred her first visit to the Sundance Film Festival in Utah).
For Pangakis, Adams & Knight has set the bar very high as far as expectations of any employer for the rest of her career.
“Honestly, you notice right when you walk in the door that we have a little bit of a different culture and approach,” Pangakis said. “We’re laid back and we’re fun and we’re creative, because that’s the basis of what we do here, but we’re also all about the results. Day-to-day, walking around, it’s people having brainstorms — images and creative and taglines and photos, Post-its up on the wall … It’s a great feeling.”