HORSEFLY GROUP, LLC
HERNANDO, FLORIDA

It started off with an obsession for speed and adventure, combined with a talent for marketing. Airplanes! Horses! Marketing! But it became so very much more. A passion to bring entrepreneurial and company team dreams to life – it’s truly the American dream, is it not? If you have a great product or service that deserves to thrive, especially in the double handful of key industries in which we have particular experience, we are interested in talking. Give us a shout. program, her professor insisted her student portfolio must have things like “Tampax and Toothpaste” to be successful. In other words, packaged goods, because those types of products are insanely numerous, and it’s only the extraordinary and lucky who get to work on accounts like Apple or Mini Cooper. While Holly listened to her professor and worked on faux campaigns for Goldfish snack crackers and the like, she dreamed of working on products she had a passion for – things like airplanes, avionics, tack and trailers. The professor told her those jobs didn’t exist. From 1995 to 2004, Idea Flight was a bricks and mortar, traditional ad agency on the outskirts of Washington DC. It had the usual beastly overhead, from payroll and health insurance to building lease and 401Ks. During that time, our team produced consistently award-winning work for some of the best brands in both equine and aviation, along with a good number of local businesses in the fields of medical/plastic surgery, consulting, banking, hospitality and high tech. It was full service, offering not only a full suite of creative services, but also media planning, research, PR, and webdev for those early days of harnessing the internet for marketing. When the dot-com bust hit in earnest, we found that all those small-to-medium size businesses that could afford topflight talent suddenly couldn’t, and “the beast” of overhead was breaking Idea Flight’s back. But as they say, crisis merely opens up larger opportunities. Idea Flight building (circa 1883). It was Germantown's (MD) first general store, then... er... a "house of ill repute". Then an ad agency. Everybody selling, apparently. As Horsefly moved through the last of the aught years, we noticed that clients were still hiring digital firms to build their websites – and that most of them were not creatively inclined. Branding was lost in translation between gorgeous ads Horsefly was doing, and the (where-did-those-brand-standards-go?) website. Likewise, when clients hired Horsefly to build sites, while the early days were successful, it was rapidly becoming too complex with the rise of Google algorithms and rapidly swelling e-commerce. We worried that Horsefly was not able to match the level of website creative with equally great “behind the scenes stuff” like SEO, and Ux (usability), that is so critical to an effective website. A similar revolution was happening in media, with print media planning tanking in favor of paid search and social. To answer this seachange challenge, Horsefly Creative became Horsefly Group with the opening of a digital side manned by digital specialists. This division is led by CJ Millar, an extraordinary digital strategist with massive chops earned on Madison Avenue, launching such iconic brands as Mac cosmetics, Esteé Lauder, and more on the digital spectrum. Today we provide completely integrated creative and digital services, looking at everything through the lens of strategy, as we always have, but now ambidextrously applying the best mixture of both creative and digital, something that is still uncommon. (Not unlike our metaphor – how many people do you know who write equally well with right and left hands? It’s similar with small agencies and the creative/digital split). Horsefly is a dynamic mashup of creative advertising + digital marketing agency, a liquid group of creatives and digital specialists who come together to provide business strategies and brand growth for quality products and services. We’ve won prestigious awards (and more importantly client accolades) for our branding, creative, and performance. Our creative side makes your media dollars effective amid a sea of competing messages, with brand authenticity that engages customers and compels them to interact with you. Our digital side sets programs for success, continually analyzing results to fine-tune performance. Today we have the most information we’ve ever had in terms of ROI tracking, and we make the most of it with strategic programs backed by team members with big experience and valuable certifications. We employ the entire digital spectrum – from analytics to social channels to content creation – to help you engage with your customers, yielding not just today’s sale, but tomorrow’s customer relationship lifetime value. Consider this list of services a starting point. Because of our unique structure as an agency, in which we are all partners, we can tap our substantial contacts to bring in known specialized talent for anything related to marketing and business growth, and with experience in pretty much any industry. Our ultimate goal is to be both successful on your behalf, and efficient, so whatever services are already covered by resources that are working well for you, we will integrate the services you need from us into your team. Here’s a cross section of work done for Horsefly clients in food, nutrition, and aviation industries, but we have experience, often substantial, in many other categories spanning b-to-c, b-to-b, and b-to-g. We’re happy to put together a custom selection of case studies and creative portfolio relatable to your company’s business and situation, so you can see the success we’ve built for others. A side benefit is that we literally have people from coast-to-coast in the USA plus Canada, England, and France, giving more efficient coverage for client meetings and events. Even better, our way of doing things means we only let in people we already know and have worked with, and we don’t have to have a full-time employment situation for them to do so. We can start off with a few projects, make sure they like our approach, and as we grow, we put more work on their desk. This means we have exceptionally low turnover, so if you love your own herd of Horseflyers, there’s no need to fear that it will be a revolving door with folks looking for better opportunities elsewhere.