Racing ahead: How Dark Horses is winning the business of sport
In a landscape dominated by legacy thinking and traditional sponsorships, Dark Horses stands out by doing things differently. Cat Tyler, Head of New Business, shares how the agency blends creative excellence with a deep-rooted passion for sport to drive change, build unique characters like “Blake the Shake,” and redefine what brand storytelling looks like in the world of sport.
Please provide a top line view of your agency’s structure, scale and capabilities.
Dark Horses is The Disruption Company for Sport. Backed by Omnicom Advertising Group, we take the best of creativity and apply it exclusively to sport. This means clients get the resources and quality of a top advertising network, but channeled into a lean, specialized and fast-moving team. We work across a wide variety of clients from large global businesses, to governing bodies, to sports brands. Our services cover everything from business strategy to sponsorship to traditional advertising and social content – and anything in-between!
What most inspires you most about your agency?
Hands down the people I work with. As well as being brilliant creatives, strategists, account people, designers and editors they are genuine experts in sport. They don’t just like it, but live and breathe it and in many instances practice it to a high level. One of my colleagues has just completed The Speed Project (if you haven’t heard of it, it’s worth looking up). Another is about to take her brown belt in kick boxing having only taken it up after lock-down. When you’re surrounded with talent and enthusiasm like that it’s hard not to be infected by it.
We’d like to hear about a new business win that you’re particularly proud of.
We’ve just launched some work for Optimum Nutrition’s McLaren Partnership following a competitive pitch last year. The strategy here was to break away from focusing on the machines and cars of the F1 world and hero the people behind them.
Instead of writing a traditional sponsorship line to bring this to life, we created a whole new character – Blake the Shake. Blake is a non-speaking ‘Super Shaker Maker’ who secretly fuels the McLaren employees to success behind the scenes using Optimum Nutrition.
We’re proud not only of the strategy and creative quality of the final assets, especially considering the very short timeframes you get with prominent talent like Oscar and Lando, but also our way of working throughout the process. We worked incredibly closely and collaboratively with the client from the first pitch meeting right up until supply of the final assets
How do you stay nimble and adapt your agency’s strategy as new technologies or platforms emerge? Where do you see most opportunity for brands?
Our positioning as the Disruption Company for Sport doesn’t come from the technologies or platforms available to us but from our belief that we can use creative thinking to make real changes in the industry. This doesn’t mean that we don’t embrace new technology, one of our most talked about and awarded pieces of work was creating a female FIFA president candidate – Hope Sogni – using AI. Rather than just scraping the internet for detail on football governance and beyond, we trained her specifically on a female perspective, using hundreds of articles from brilliant senior women in football, alongside active conversations we dozens of these women, who corrected her knowledge and perspectives. This means that users who spoke to her got a completely different perspective from the prevailing opinion. However, while tech was the tool that brought the idea to life, disruptive thinking was the inspiration and driving force behind it and that’s where the biggest opportunities lie.