Think Big Collective is a team of experts shaped for today’s evolving marketing world

The market for marketing services is changing and so are client needs. The response to these shifts is Think Big Collective, an expert platform in marketing and communications. It brings together six agencies: Wiktor Leo Burnett, Starmedia, Leopard Production, Socialists, Data on Steroids, and DataConcept. Their representatives Braňo Polák, Peter Kontra, and Tomáš Ručkay explain what led to the creation of Think Big Collective, what it brings to the market, and why it takes collaboration to a new level. The interview was originally published in the magazine Stratégie, and we are sharing it here in full with the kind permission of the editorial team.

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What brings your agencies together?

Braňo: We are co-owners of the agencies Starmedia, Wiktor Leo Burnett, and Leopard Production. Alongside these three, our group also includes Socialists, DataConcept, and Data on Steroids.

Peter: All of our agencies share a common HR, IT, and finance department, essentially the entire back office. At the same time, our agencies already operate on a unified digital infrastructure, from a shared Microsoft 365 and SharePoint ecosystem license to the Scoro platform, which integrates project management, finance, and reporting into one environment

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These agencies were previously known under the common name Kreator Group...

Braňo: …and that no longer exists.

Peter: The change has already been registered officially. We have renamed it to Think Big Collective.

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Why did you decide to rebrand? Has the market changed, or has your way of working together evolved?

Peter: The three of us started in advertising at roughly the same time. Each of us has around 25 years of professional experience in advertising and marketing. This rebranding is the result of our personal 25-year journeys, but also the outcome of more than a decade of collaboration between our agencies, which until now operated under the name KREATOR GROUP. It also reflects our intensive internal project that lasted about 18 months. At the beginning, we defined a clear ambition: to take the existing “soft” model of how our agencies were connected and elevate it to an entirely new level. And this new level became our main motivation, inspiration, and goal.

Braňo: We’ve been observing for a long time that we work better when we collaborate than when we operate separately. And our clients respond to this very positively. We also see the same trend abroad the world of advertising and communications is changing. We didn’t approach this intuitively, but as a managed process. We prepared everything in detail both for the external market and internally in terms of processes and now we want to tell the market about it.

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When did you first start thinking that you needed to look at things a bit differently?

Tomáš: Around a year and a half ago. Our Marketing Director, Richard Čermák, was part of the discussions from the very beginning. We wanted to look at things differently and search for deeper connections. At the same time, we aimed to explore and bring new solutions to the market — solutions that would move not only us forward, but the entire industry.

Braňo: It’s like the shoemaker’s children who walk barefoot we create communication and marketing for our clients, but to be able to do marketing for ourselves, we needed to bring in a marketing expert. That’s why we’re glad Richard is with us (laughs).

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What makes you different from the competition?

Peter: Our goal is not to bring together as many agencies as possible we’re taking the opposite approach. We want the most diverse palette of experts, whom we can connect into project teams for our clients. This ability to connect expertise and the way we do it is our most fundamental innovation. Its outcome is our portfolio of productized services, which we are introducing to the market together with the launch of Think Big Collective.

The foundation for this approach was realizing the added value of having multiple specialized agencies working in close proximity. We’ve operated this way for many years and have delivered numerous projects where we functioned as a well-coordinated team, providing clients with integrated services across the full scope of a project. What truly differentiates us from any other group in Slovakia is the depth of interconnectedness between our agencies, both in the background and inside the organizations as well as the cultural awareness of belonging to one shared identity.

Braňo: And we can deliver this in a fully tailored way for each client a true one-stop shop. We assemble teams based on the client’s specific, current needs. Not like in the old days, when a full-service agency did everything the same way for everyone. Today, every project requires a different team structure. It’s important for the client to have ideally one main point of contact who oversees the entire project but behind that, always a bespoke, purpose-built expert team.

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What’s behind the name Think Big Collective?

Peter: We changed the name also to make it clear to ourselves and to the outside world that this transformation isn’t cosmetic. It’s fundamental. It represents a major shift forward. Its foundation lies in our people and in our platform. Think Big is about our people and their talent. And about the belief that meaningful change can’t be made in tiny steps. It also reflects our philosophy that the world isn’t divided into big and small brands, but into big and small ambitions behind them.Collective describes our platform a modern, informal, and highly flexible grouping of people. We want it to express an open-source mindset that can absorb different specializations and functions while still operating with agility.

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What do you see as your strongest advantage over the competition?

Peter: Kreator was originally built as a technical holding to make the management of multiple agencies easier. But we wanted to evolve this into something more synergistic into a higher added value for clients. For me, the key realization was that added value cannot be created simply by adding more specialized agencies. Real value is created by intentionally mixing the right experts. This allows us to move from delivering outputs to delivering outcomes real, tangible effects.

There’s a phrase for this: from outputs to outcomes. One of our inspirations was the IT world, which works with different platforms and sees them as a large modular system. Like a Lego set, where you choose only the pieces you need for a specific solution. That’s exactly how we looked at our skills, competencies, and experience across all our agencies. From this agency “Lego,” we can assemble unique, specialized teams that solve very specific client needs.

Tomáš: For us, this wasn’t entirely new we had been operating in a kind of platform model for years. But we had never been able to articulate it and make it fully conscious to the extent that we could offer it to the market in a complete, structured form.

Braňo: In recent months, alongside running our agencies, we’ve been working on how to integrate our teams in a truly comprehensive way based on client needs. Shifting the mindset from a service-based to a proactive approach is, in my opinion, essential for survival in today’s advertising and communications market.

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I assume this is a reaction to what’s happening on the client side. Do you see fundamental changes in processes, for example in how tenders are run?

Braňo: It’s not really about tenders those are usually monothematic. When there’s a tender, it’s for a media agency, a creative agency, or a PR agency. Clients don’t yet think in terms of integrating these disciplines, and there are no established models for running tenders that way. With our approach, we expect the emergence of newly structured tenders or even client decisions made without a tender at all, simply because they decide they want the type of approach and collaboration that Think Big Collective offers.

Peter: We’re seeing a trend where marketing directors are increasingly held accountable for sales results. But this trend doesn’t always go hand-in-hand with strengthening their internal competencies. We believe that with our approach, we can help them achieve better results while also strengthening those competencies.

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So you’ve essentially created a platform to offer clients fully integrated products — advertising campaigns, events, production, media execution, and media planning. In other words, this is your offer to the market: this is what we can deliver, so come and build it with us?

Peter: Exactly. We’ve built a platform that allows us to very flexibly combine the strongest competency areas we have across our agencies. Through the philosophy of productizing services, we transformed individual agency deliverables into products that address the most essential needs of marketing directors and marketing teams. We are launching with eight such products. One of them is our B2B-focused product called NextGenB2B.

Another product is SportConnect, which covers the entire area of sports marketing. Very few agencies can deliver a meaningful standalone product in this field you need strong data foundations, the experience and perspective of a media strategist, celebrity management know-how, production capabilities, and a meaningful link between the brand and the world of sport, which only a creative agency can bring.

And our “flagship” product is OneAgency. It is our answer to the massive fragmentation of marketing. OneAgency consolidates creative, media, production, data, and technology expertise into one fully aligned team that thanks to our unique orchestration operates under one roof, one leadership, one strategy, and one shared goal: brand growth.

Tomáš: We spent a long time discussing how each entity fits into Think Big. When clients brief a campaign, the priorities of the agencies involved are often different. Our platform is here to unify those priorities. We won’t push what is important for any single agency. We won’t say there must be an event or a TV spot. We want to focus on the client’s goal and build the campaign strategy accordingly. As a group, we can support one another and deliver a real result.

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What sets us apart from any other group in Slovakia is the depth of interconnectedness between our agencies both in the background and internally.

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How will the individual agency brands operate going forward?

Peter: Nothing changes in how our individual agencies operate. Our goal remains the same for each of them to be the best in their field. From this perspective, Think Big Collective is an additional distribution platform for the services offered by each agency. And we believe it will also be a strong motivator for clients to try a different way of working with agencies.

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Do you expect to participate in tenders, or will your priority be winning new business through direct outreach?

Peter: We already have our first real confirmations from the market that our concept resonates. Just a few days ago, we won a tender where we entered from the very beginning as the Think Big Collective platform. It’s a client and a project with a defined total budget that will be entrusted to an agency but at this early stage, it’s naturally still unclear how that budget should be allocated across different communication disciplines.

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Our ability to look at the brief holistically and take on the work that clients typically must do themselves dividing budgets across individual streams and then executing the project in an integrated way was, according to the client, exactly what they had been subconsciously searching for but couldn’t find on the market.

Braňo: It’s an opportunity to show clients that their challenge can be approached in a fully integrated way and to inspire them in how they can manage communication and their suppliers. It also gives clients the chance to get guidance on how to select agencies, how to formulate briefs, and how to manage the entire area more effectively. And even with the possibility that they may ultimately decide not to work with us but still benefit from a more modern setup.

If you offer a client something fully tailored to their needs, chances are they won’t run a tender. And if a client takes inspiration from our products which represent what we can deliver they can simply choose a specific product and execute it with us. Our products are polished down to the smallest detail: each has a clear internal owner and communication lead, defined processes, pricing, timelines — everything needed to make it a true “boxed solution” that the client can activate immediately.

Peter: For most brands we currently work with, at least two of our agencies are involved. This way of working has been our reality for a long time. The same goes for iconic campaigns associated with our agencies such as the launch of Union Health Insurance, the Pink Commandos, or Zlatý Bažant 73. All of them were created through collaboration between our creative, media, digital, and production teams. We have a strong track record in multi-agency cooperation.

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We’ve built a platform that allows us to flexibly combine the strongest areas of expertise across our agencies.

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How do your technology-focused agencies fit into all of this?

Peter: Within our group, we have the technology agency DataConcept, which covers everything that falls under mar-tech. But with the rise of AI, an important question emerges: how will it change the business model not only of agencies, but also of our clients?By the way, the topic of AI-transformation especially in marketing is also covered in our product AI Readiness.

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Do you see clients consolidating their agencies? It seems that some are, while others keep adding more and more.

Braňo: You could divide it into two worlds. One group of clients would like to consolidate but doesn’t really know how. The other group doesn’t want to hear about it at all.

Tomáš: Marketing moves in cycles. There was a time when advertising agencies did everything. Then came the era of specialists. Today, I feel we’re entering a phase where consolidating multiple specialists under one roof makes sense it can bring efficiency not only on the agency side but also for the client.

Peter: We’re seeing several examples abroad where major advertisers are integrating at least creative and media capabilities. And they do it only when they find a solution they trust one that’s truly integrated, not integrated just on paper.

Braňo: We believe we’re bringing this kind of integrated products-and-services approach at exactly the right time.

Peter: For a marketing director, defining the so-called “agency roster” is one of the most strategic decisions they make. We want to be helpful here as well advising on how to divide competencies among agencies, what to outsource, and what to keep in-house. I believe marketing directors will see our model as a sincere effort to help them and to give them back the time to actually manage their brand instead of coordinating a web of agencies, handling potential conflicts, and policing output consistency.

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How did you convince your people to trust the new operating model as well?

Braňo: As we gradually shaped the structure and the content, we started involving the most experienced people from our agencies so they could be part of the process. Across the group, we divided the key topics and each topic had its own working group made up of agency leaders and senior specialists.

Tomáš: Over the course of 18 months, we brought people into the process step by step, familiarising them with the topic and today, absolutely everyone in our group is part of it.

Peter: I think an important signal for our colleagues was also how the three of us defined our roles and divided responsibilities across the different areas within Think Big Collective.

Braňo: Our past experience helped us a lot the best things we’ve ever done were always the result of collective work. People also need to feel that with each project and each client, we as leaders are present every single day, available to help, someone they can lean on and collaborate with. Teams need to be stable and must have a healthy vertical of seniority, experience, and expertise. We didn’t reinvent the wheel we didn’t start from zero.

Clients who work with multiple of our agencies are already starting to feel that something is truly changing inside. Communication is smoother, reactions are faster, and we act more decisively. Without clients having to challenge anything, we are making changes and things are improving. Step by step, we are transforming from a reactive platform into a proactive one.

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How do you define responsibility for quality and results?

Braňo: We have project leaders at the level of account directors and senior specialists, and each of them is paired with one of us. Whenever the client needs it, we’re in direct contact and they regularly see us at meetings. Internally, we work to ensure that each leader can responsibly and professionally guide the other specialists. It’s a big challenge for everyone we’re also trying to upskill ourselves across all our agencies so we can become a kind of superheroes (laughs).

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Do you have defined procedures for what happens if something goes wrong or fails? Who will be responsible?

Braňo: Everything starts with clearly defined goals. A shared goal creates a shared commitment. One team, one target. And within our structure, it is absolutely clear who is responsible for what and who steps in when things aren’t working as they should, so issues can be fixed quickly and the project keeps running smoothly.

Peter: We’re not worried about quality at all we continue to work with our experienced team. What we are doing is setting a new layer of goals and follow-up evaluations, because in this model we’re working on more complex, integrated projects.

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Will it be expensive?

Tomáš: What is expensive and what is cheap today? What matters is the outcome. We aim to offer a service whose price is appropriate to the results delivered. Our primary goal is to identify the problem, find the solution, and implement it. That process is inherently demanding but if it’s approached correctly and handled by the right group of specialists, the results are very likely to come, and the initial cost becomes far less important.

Peter: We have a simple saying: “Think big, start small.” For every product, we’ve created an entry-level consulting module. With it, we can deliver a basic analysis within a few weeks in the specific area the product addresses. So the client quickly gets a clear overview of the topic, along with identified opportunities, potential efficiencies or savings, and more detailed budgets linked to implementation.

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Today we have 8 products, but this is not the end .We will continue developing new ones, built not on the size of the client but on their goals.

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Will this be suitable for all types of brands small, medium, and large? Or from the perspective of different categories?

Peter: The OneAgency product can be ideal for smaller brands in project-based collaborations. With us, they gain a partner capable of handling the project in an integrated way. It can also be a strong model for large brands looking for a new way of working with agencies one that delivers not only greater consistency in outputs but, through the connection of data, creativity, media, and production, also higher returns on marketing investment.

For larger brands, our thematic products may also be very attractive. Take InfluenceMAX, for example. It’s a fully developed product designed to manage influencer marketing investments effectively. It combines the expertise of our colleagues from Socialists with the unique data capabilities of Data on Steroids and the media-strategic know-how of Starmedia.

Braňo: It’s a matter of ambition. Every client is equally important and unique to us. We enjoy these kinds of challenges. If a client is consistent, committed, and has a good product, we can help them. Working with brands that want to move forward is our favourite discipline.

Tomáš: Today we have eight products, but we’re not stopping here we’ll continue developing more, built not on the size of the client but on their goals.

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What are the biggest challenges CMO's are facing today?

Peter: Their responsibility for results is increasing. They’re also struggling with the fragmentation of marketing and the overload of coordination tasks. They’re missing orchestration a unifying layer that connects multiple elements and that’s a role we can take on. Their CEOs expect results, and their CFOs expect efficiency, not only in terms of cost but also in terms of return on investment.

Braňo: The alignment of specialists should happen where the specialists are not in the client’s marketing department. Otherwise, marketing people end up becoming administrators instead of doing what they actually enjoy about marketing. When they work with us, we can give them back the joy of the work they’re meant to do. And we can help them unify their goals something boards care about. Boards don’t listen to the goals of the media agency, the creative agency, or the event agency separately. They listen to what those investments will deliver. They want to hear one number, because ultimately it’s one shared budget.

Peter: We need to flip the paradigm and, through our products, open a real dialogue with clients about how and where we can help. Mistakes have been made on both sides - client and agency, and they stem from insufficient dialogue and a lack of understanding of each other’s needs.

Braňo: Agencies need to listen to clients much more closely globally, not just here. We must invest more effort into understanding what they truly want and build a much more intensive interaction with them. At the beginning, everyone needs to spend far more time on alignment. Then execution becomes faster, cheaper, and more effective. Today, communication is mostly one-directional: agencies present themselves, clients write their own briefs, and they evaluate everything on their own.

We need to talk more ideally even before the tender, before the topic is framed. We’ve created frameworks and templates to structure these conversations, so we can understand client needs as accurately as possible and offer the right solutions. And we’re not claiming we have to do everything from A to Z. We can do it, yes but that doesn’t mean we must. We’re happy to help where clients see value, and if they want to work with another partner in a different area, that’s perfectly fine.

Peter: To give a concrete example our product Media Multiplier. It addresses a major current dilemma: the right balance between performance marketing and brand building. Its initial consulting module is essentially an analytical piece of work that helps the client, using their own data, identify and set the best possible strategy. We don’t make it conditional on moving into media planning or buying with us. But of course, we believe the quality of our analytical work will convince them to partner with us long-term.

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