A year ago, leaders from the agency and production studio mOcean were having a drink and discussing some of the company’s goals for the next 12 months.

“We had six achievable goals,” said Candace Reid, VP of broadcast for mOcean, “and one crazy one: that we were going to be PromaxBDA’s Agency of the Year… Which we all kind of laughed about and then went about our work.”

The work paid off. Approximately one year later, mOcean was named North America Agency of the Year at the 2015 PromaxBDA Promotion, Marketing and Design Awards ceremony on Thursday evening. One imagines they felt something like this:

With a thriving theatrical department that has helped launch some of the world’s biggest films (including Marvel movies such as Thor, Captain America and Iron Man 3), mOcean has been crafting award-winning trailers and promos for years. But 2014 marked a new stage in an evolution that has seen the company “develop a really interesting connection between our theatrical and our broadcast side,” said Greg Harrison, executive creative director for mOcean. “We’re tearing down the creative silos within the company. We’re taking editors, writers, designers that normally think in the theatrical space and applying them to broadcast creative. That’s yielded really interesting results.”

For years, one of mOcean’s steadiest broadcast clients has been FX Networks (which perhaps not coincidentally took home this year’s PromaxBDA In-House Marketing Team of the Year honor), and the last year has been no exception. This year saw mOcean help create stunning, evocative campaigns for shows such as Fargo, The Americans and Justified.

But perhaps the greatest highlight on their impressive list of FX projects was “to be part of launching FXX’s Simpsons marathon,” said Harrison. “It was such a massive undertaking and such an incredible property that we all grew up with and that kind of set the bar for comedy… Trying to come up with creative that does right not only by The Simpsons but by the high standard of FX and FXX’s marketing was one of the biggest challenges we took on last year.”

In the end, the marketing for the “Every. Simpsons. Ever.” marathon was assembled from many different sources, but mOcean’s contributions were some of the most memorable. In addition to conceptualizing the shots (or, as Harrison put it, figuring out “the narrative economy”) that make up the above powerful anthem spot “Kitchen Sink,” mOcean produced a highly entertaining promo positioning Homer’s head and signature “D’oh” alongside the unfortunate real-world individuals inhabiting a popular YouTube compilation of stunt footage gone wrong.

Coming up with the concept for the idea stemmed from “riffing on ideas in the room that didn’t feel like marketing at first,” said Harrison. “We were really just making each other laugh and showing each other videos that we thought were entertaining.” One of those videos came from Harrison’s own personal YouTube collection and offered the perfect opportunity to extend what they’d done with Homer toward neighbor Flanders:

Both spots are textbook examples of creative thinking and editing, turning pre-existing footage into on-brand narrative gold. mOcean makes the act of doing so appear effortless, as though the footage were always meant to do what they make it do. A remarkable instance of this ability popped up in 2015 in FX’s campaign for Season 5 of Louie, which features a series of beautifully composed vignettes that, boldly, elect to leave the star out entirely.

mOcean did not direct the above spots. Rather, the Louie Season 5 campaign serves as a “story of the power of our editorial team,” said Harrison. “[FX wanted authenticity, they wanted humor, they wanted pathos, and so they said, ‘okay for this season we’re not going to show Louie. We’re going to go out and shoot interviews on the street asking real people about Louie.”

Their camera crew sent mOcean more than 16 hours of raw footage, and “allowed us to translate that into specifics,” said Harrison, whose team decided on the narrative structure of the spots, determined pacing, supplied the evocative music, and “developed the black and white look of the color timing of the footage.”

It’s impressive editing and post-work, but then with its thriving theatrical department, that’s nothing new to mOcean. More recently, the company has worked hard to invest in its writing side as well, said Harrison, because “we’re really interested in the kind of work that FX has pioneered, which is making what are essentially original short films based on the show. This original concept creative that may not even include the cast from the show. It might have its own aesthetic. It might be more metaphorical. But all of them are very cinematic… Being able to write in that direction is key because we have to have the narrative turn or the right image juxtaposed with the right song that creates that compressed, dense shorthand that really gets the story across in 15, 20 or 30 seconds.”

mOcean’s push toward crafting original work from writing through post has paid dividends over the past year. To cite just one example, few spots in 2014 more effectively paired concept with execution than mOcean’s fake PSA for Chiller, featuring the one and only Robert Englund.

Penned by frequent mOcean contributor Matt Hubball, the PSA was a response to a brief from Chiller “that wanted to be real about their pedigree of hardcore horror but also wanted to be funny,” said Harrison. “Taking all these very real things about the psychos and hardcore scary stuff and then putting this spin on it…nailed those two aspects of the brief in one comedic conceit.

“When you think about writing in the entertainment space,” he continued, “a lot of people think of copywriting or, ‘what does someone say?’ But we’ve worked really hard to go above that before we write the words and go, ‘what is the concept? What is the setup? What is the theme? What is the metaphor? What is the purpose of this spot?’ And then we write in the concept space first… With the idea that we were going to do a PSA to help psychos, just writing in that space and knowing that was going to hit the brief correctly, and then going into execution and writing a great script around that – that’s the part that we really have invested in.”

Being named PromaxBDA’s Agency of the Year in North America caps off a year for mOcean that has seen the company connect its internal creative resources in new and exciting ways.

“Not just having departments that deal with one specific thing, but bringing everyone together to work on everything, has really opened up the level of our creative,” said Danielle Lafortune, mOcean’s SVP of print and broadcast.

It’s been the kind of year where hard work has paid off in “fantasy becomes real” type moments, she continued. Like when AMC called and asked mOcean to create a special one-off Better Call Saul music video starring country singer Junior Brown. And proceeded to get them on a call with producers Peter Gould and Vince Gilligan, who told them, “‘I looked at your website and you guys are just incredible. I’m so excited you want to work on this…’ And we were all just like, ‘What!?’ It was a great moment.”

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