The 79 Percent Rule: Why Honest Brands Win

Truth can be brutal, but it's still the best policy

Here’s the thing about being explorers: Sometimes you explore somewhere, realize it’s not working, and turn around.

Three months into the CEO role, I made a decision. After careful consideration, and extensive market research, I determined that vowels are, in fact, useful. So is having a name people can actually pronounce. So, I unbranded SPCSHP back to Big Spaceship. Most agencies would quietly rebrand and hope no one noticed the retreat. They would issue a standard press release, update the website and move on. But we are not most agencies, so we made a brutally honest campaign about it.

At first blush, people may assume that’s a failure, but it’s actually just navigation. Brands have learned this lesson, and agencies need to implement it to show up as equal partners, especially as the industry’s current inflection point deepens.

The Sea of Sameness Drowning Modern Agencies

As holding company consolidation hits critical mass, the agency landscape has grown increasingly indistinguishable. Historic names are disappearing and everything seems to be consolidating into what one former agency CEO called “big, homogenous marketing advising machines.”

Agency positioning has also turned into word-salad bingo. The same buzzwords appear across messaging, with AI exacerbating the problem as we drown in a sea of identical corporate LinkedIn posts. An industry built on creativity has gotten remarkably uncreative about how it talks about itself and how it acts.

The cost? Agencies become interchangeable and pitches turn into procurement exercises. When everyone sounds the same, price becomes the only differentiator and it’s a race to the bottom.

In a 2025 study, BBB National Programs surveyed more than 3,700 U.S. consumers and found that 79 percent say authentic reviews, including negative ones, are what actually build trust, outperforming polished corporate messaging. A separate Clutch study found that 69 percent of consumers cite transparency about a brand’s processes and practices as the top indicator of authenticity. The TL,DR: people are looking for human fingerprints, companies and people willing to be brave and own their weirdness.

We’re in the business of asking CMOs to take creative risks, to explore new territory, be honest about what’s not working and try things that are uncomfortable. If we’re not willing to do that ourselves, how can they trust us?

Honesty and Exploration Take Many Forms

When Coinbase’s viral Super Bowl ad became a sensation, the brand’s CEO took credit for the work without acknowledging the agency behind it. Most agencies would’ve stayed silent, afraid of losing the client or burning bridges. But Martin Agency’s Kristen Cavallo went public, demanding recognition for her team’s work. That’s leadership courage, standing up for your people even when it’s uncomfortable.

Glossier took a different approach with its “Comments Section” campaign in May 2024. When Reddit exploded over Balm Dotcom’s reformulation, the cult beauty brand made an 83-second video of employees reading brutal comments on camera: “Hey Glossier, if you don’t bring back the original formula, you ****ing, stupid pieces of ****.” The video ends with a cart of boxes labeled “Original Formula” wheeled into frame. The brand owned this mistake, brought back what customers wanted, and turned customer rage into 60,000+ likes.

Then, there’s Astronomer, which moved quickly when the Coldplay concert CEO scandal hit last summer. Instead of hiding behind corporate speak and damage control, the company hired Gwyneth Paltrow for a deadpan video that pulled 700,000 views and redirected attention from gossip to product. By leaning into humor and honesty, a reputational hit became a marketing win.

Our Next Big Spaceship Chapter

When I started as CEO at SPCSHP, I met with every employee one-on-one. I heard the same thing over and over: “The market doesn’t know what we’re capable of. We’re one of the best-kept secrets in the advertising community.” The market also didn’t know how to pronounce our name. And, above all, no one was connecting SPCSHP with the 25 years of legacy that was Big Spaceship.

During weekly all-hands meetings, we put out an open call for ideas and landed on a campaign theme centered around “The Most Brutally Honest Rebrand of All Time,” consisting of a brutally honest press release, a mockumentary video breaking the fourth wall channeling The Office, and real Slack screenshots with actual team sentiment.

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Taking that risk was scary, but our bet was simple: if you say everything there is to say about a thing, you own the narrative completely. You can’t automate courage. And the truth, told first and told loudly, doesn’t need defending.

Three months later, the bet is paying off. Our rebrand generated two million impressions and overwhelmingly positive social sentiment. More importantly, it opened doors. We recently announced our new social AOR partnership with Dropbox, and we have two additional new business wins in the pipeline we’ll be sharing shortly. The inbound has been real and it has been meaningful.

That’s what honesty does. In an industry built on persuasion, sometimes the most radical thing you can do is just be human and tell the truth.