Oysters may be among the world’s most savory yet unsightly creatures. Our latest campaign for Bombazine Oysters celebrates the charm of this unconventional delicacy, embracing a deeper philosophy of beauty. Find the work featured online, in-store, and beyond.
See the work here.
How do you motivate people to visit the New England Aquarium? You create a campaign that reflects the true experience and brings the exhibits to life with a stunning visual approach. In short, you WOW them.
We created a stunning typographic series that brought to life the emotions of the word WOW. Each letter, intricately formed from coral, anemone, and seaweed, was brought to life by the aquarium’s diverse marine life. This innovative approach not only resonated with audiences but also drove record-breaking ticket sales.
Bus Éireann Expressway and Connelly Partners have been busy filming in Dublin and beyond, capturing everything from awkward moments to spur-of-the-moment escapes. It’s all part of a new campaign, “There’s a Route for That”, rolling out across VOD, digital audio, OOH/DOOH, and social.
Expressway isn’t just about destinations, It’s about every weird and wonderful reason people travel. And whatever that reason is… there’s a route for that. The campaign celebrates the wonderfully specific, sometimes ridiculous, always relatable reasons people really travel. Need to escape small-town boredom for a gig in Galway? Decided hiking is suddenly your whole personality? Want to dodge bumping into your ex in Limerick? Whatever the story, Expressway has the route to get you there.
The work was filmed across two separate shoots with production partners Collective Films, leaning into humour, authenticity and a digital-first energy that connects directly with the 19–25 audience it was created for.
“The best stories aren’t just about where you’re going, they’re about why” – Mikey Fleming Creative Director at Connelly Partners Dublin. “This campaign brings that truth to life in a way that speaks directly to young adults, reminding them that Expressway is always part of the journey.”
With “There’s a route for that,” Expressway strengthens its connection with Ireland’s young adults, embedding itself in their everyday routines and spontaneous adventures, reminding audiences that wherever they’re going – and for whatever reason – Expressway will get them there.
David Register, Executive Creative Director
As a child of the ’80s, album covers meant the world to me. Whether it was a cassette or a CD, the artwork was often how I decided what to bring home. It was like judging a book by its cover. I fell for Warhol’s iconic banana. I locked eyes with the little boy staring back at me on U2’s War. These covers didn’t just sit on a shelf; they lined my walls, serving as precursors to the music videos that would later define an era. And although it’s hard to not judge these covers by the music on some level, I will try to make it about the album art and why it meant something to me.
My older brother never stopped playing this record, and I found myself lost in the world Robert Frank created for its cover. A collage of circus performers, sideshow acts and misfits—all pasted together in black and white. It wasn’t glamorous; it was gritty. And maybe that’s why the Stones always felt a little more dangerous, and a little cooler, than the lovely lads from Liverpool.
That little boy on the cover—haunting, defiant, staring straight through me. The stark portrait, framed by red letters, felt like a warning and a promise all at once. It wasn’t just an album cover—it was a declaration. Urgent and unforgettable, just like the music inside.
It doesn’t get more rebellious than this. The band lined up near a concrete monolith, zippers down, like they’d just left their mark on the world. The sky glows with post-storm drama, the image is as defiant as the music inside. It’s all attitude.
The art school RISD vibe is all over this one. The cover feels handmade and nerdy, with missing words and mixed media scattered across the frame, like a project you’d see in a freshman painting class. I’d hang this on my wall as art if it weren’t already an album.
I’ve never been a huge Kanye fan, and his recent chaos makes you wonder. But when it came to art, he knew how to provoke. The blurred, censored cover felt dangerous and unhinged, a warning flare for everything to come. Disturbing, brilliant, and impossible to ignore.
This cover is why anyone dreams of being in a band. Four guys on a rooftop, slouched in mismatched clothes, looking like they just woke up in last night’s outfit. It’s not about fame—it’s about the hang. The late nights, the inside jokes, the feeling that something great might happen if you just keep playing.
I’ve always loved driving, and this is driving music. A grainy black-and-white shot of the open road, no GPS, no cell phones—just following the sun and letting the album play straight through. Stark and simple, the image says it all: crossroads, possibility and the kind of solitude that makes the songs hit even harder.
I was 15 at an all-boys school when this album landed, and I had no idea what Madonna looked like until I saw that cover. I’ll never forget it. Draped in lace and attitude, she was the promise of something completely outside of the walls of my life.
My girlfriend in college played this record constantly, and it always felt cooler than me. That simple banana carried a kind of underground swagger. In the middle of Ohio, it felt like holding a little piece of NYC in my hands.
This cover is a perfect example of how type and design can excite me on their own. Just a warm, rustic script against a faded background, like a T-shirt I’d want to wear or a decal on a surfboard. No flash, no gimmicks. Authentic, just like Neil Young himself. It reminds you that it’s all about the music.
Read more here.
We’re thrilled to announce that our “BÉ Part of It” recruitment platform film for Bus Éireann has secured a Silver Shark in the Best Writing/Idea Craft category at the prestigious Kinsale Shark Awards.
The Kinsale Shark Awards are a top-tier creative benchmark in Ireland, with serious international weight, making this win a huge achievement for the agency and a testament to the power of thoughtful storytelling in recruitment.
Launched earlier this year, the platform’s hero film is a 40-second piece that captures a quiet, deeply human moment between two people: one looking forward to a new journey, and the other reflecting on the road already travelled.
The film is a short, reflective story that sets the tone for the entire platform. By focusing on craft and clarity, and drawing loosely from a real family story, it successfully invites future drivers and engineers to see themselves in the Bus Éireann story.
Learn more here!
Check out the award-winning film
Michele Hart-Henry, Managing Director, Connelly Partners Health
Imagine the following situation (purely hypothetical): Maria, age 58, has successfully managed her Type 2 diabetes for years. Recently, she stopped checking her blood sugar, not because she’s ignoring her health, but because after going down a rabbit hole with Instagram posts and TikTok videos, she felt overwhelmed. Online, she found conflicting advice about new treatments. On TV, pharmaceutical ads promised miraculous results while disclaimers scrolled by. Even her doctor’s recommendations seemed to conflict with what she read on social media. Unsure who to trust, Maria postponed her next appointment and decided that using a combination of ginseng and a highly restrictive diet was a better way to take care of her health. Far-fetched, you say? Not really.
Her story is not unique. In today’s fraught times, wading through health information has become even more challenging, especially for those who may not have high levels of health literacy.
Across the country, patients pause care, second-guess medical advice, and turn to non-expert sources for guidance. The erosion of trust in “traditional” healthcare professionals and institutions harms people directly. According to reports published by the Kaiser Family Foundation, when patients hesitate, they let chronic conditions worsen, skip preventive care, and potentially drive up costs for everyone.
Recent surveys confirm this pattern. Forty-five percent of adults say they delayed or avoided medical care because conflicting information confused them. Sixty-five percent report they feel overwhelmed by contradictory health messages (Kaiser Family Foundation, 2024). Confidence in hospitals and physicians dropped significantly over the past decade (Gallup, 2024). Meanwhile, misinformation spreads unchecked and deepens confusion (Edelman, 2024).
The human papillomavirus (HPV) vaccine rollout shows just how trust problems can stall public health progress.
After health officials introduced the HPV vaccine, myths about safety and necessity spread widely. Holman et al. (2014) documented how social media amplified worries about side effects. Lower vaccination rates resulted in population-level protection being behind schedule and delayed reductions in HPV-related cancers (Walker et al., 2021).
Misinformation did not act alone. Providers gave inconsistent explanations, and anecdotal fears gained traction. Despite extensive research and monitoring by health organizations such as the World Health Organization (WHO) and the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC), misinformation about the vaccine’s safety remains a significant barrier to its widespread adoption. Unsubstantiated claims linking the vaccine to serious health problems like autoimmune diseases, infertility, and chronic pain syndromes have circulated, often amplified by social media.
This example proves a simple point: even well-supported interventions fail when people do not trust the messages or the messengers.
Healthcare marketing shapes how people perceive treatments and institutions. When marketers serve up ambiguous messaging, they fuel skepticism. Lyles et al. (2023) found that 35 percent of direct-to-consumer pharmaceutical ads used conditional or unclear claims, which undermined consumer trust.
The internet magnifies the problem. McKinsey (2024) found that 72 percent of consumers struggle to navigate online health information, and half rely on non-expert sources. In that environment, misinformation spreads faster and patients lose confidence in legitimate medical guidance.
As Marketers and communicators, we can take concrete, evidence-based steps to maintain or restore trust:
Confusion and lack of trust produce measurable harm. We’re all hit daily with an onslaught of information. Knowing who and what to trust is hard, especially for consumers who don’t work in the industry. They may delay care, skip prevention, and struggle to make informed decisions.
One thing is clear: from vaccine hesitancy to skipped treatments, individuals and the health system share the cost.
Healthcare leaders must earn trust, not assume it. When marketers prioritize clarity, transparency, and empathy, they can restore confidence and help people make better health choices.
Ready to learn more about our anthropological approach to moving consumers through their healthcare journeys? Reach out to us to see how we can bring clarity and empathy to your needs.
What does a 175-year-old seafood brand have in common with sports culture? Until recently, not much. But that’s exactly the creative leap we’re taking with Gorton’s in the newest evolution of its 2025 campaign, bringing the brand to NFL game day with NBC Sports.
It’s an unexpected, but intentional move to meet broader Gen Z and Millennial audiences where they are: in spaces that feel less like advertising and more like community. It also capitalizes on the massive cultural shift in football viewership, which has seen a 7% increase in viewers since 2015.
Over the past three years, Gorton’s has been rewriting the playbook for how an established brand can show up authentically, in modern ways —through culture, not just category cues. They’ve leaned into the unexpected and kicked off 2025 by throwing a house party at SXSW that drew 3500+ attendees, lined up day and night to spend time with the brand. Not to mention, building off of previous success with an award-winning TikTok glow-up and ‘shockingly good’ merch drop . Now, the brand is doing the same by entering the sports arena.
The campaign, which includes TV, social, media, and partnerships, will run through the end of the year.
Watch the tongue-in-cheek hero spot below:
A look behind the scenes:
Two of the biggest names in Boston’s advertising circles have teamed up.
Connelly Partners announced on Tuesday that it has acquired McCarthy Mambro Bertino, a smaller ad agency and longtime neighbor in the South End, for an undisclosed amount. MMB cofounder Fred Bertino will work with Connelly Partners chief executive Steve Connelly, overseeing a marketing group that will keep the MMB name; partner Jamie Mambro has sold his stake and is no longer involved.
They’re two of the largest independent agencies in Boston, in an industry that’s often dominated by the mega holding companies like Omnicom and IPG (which are in the midst of their own, much bigger merger).
Connelly and Bertino have long shared the same parking lot, working in buildings owned by Mario Nicosia’s GTI properties.
“Freddie would park his car and turn left, I would park my car and turn right, and we would have lunch every now and then,” Connelly said.
In the past year, Bertino moved MMB into Connelly’s spacious digs at 46 Waltham St., and the two firms began bidding on jobs together.
“We’ve had a chance to ‘date’ while living together,” Connelly said. “It just kept making more and more sense. We were pitching things together. He was using our folks. We were using his folks.”
The two have known each other since the 1990s when they both worked for other firms, Connelly at Ingalls Advertising and Bertino at Hill Holliday. Both launched their own firms around the turn of the century. Bertino said his first client was Jim Koch at Boston Beer, to promote Koch’s new light beer at the time; MMB was often seen as punching above its weight, chasing after national clients, and winning over many of them, most notably Subway.
As the industry consolidated, Connelly Partners emerged as the biggest independent agency in the city, with additional services such as media buying and data analytics that MMB did not offer; Bertino said he’s happy to finally have those tools at his disposal. (Connelly also expanded to Vancouver and Dublin.) They see their firm’s independence as giving them an edge, as they don’t have to report profits up to an out-of-town holding company.
Connelly employs about 175 people today, including 100 in Boston. That number includes 20 people who came over from MMB, such as David Register, now Executive Creative Director at Connelly. Both firms had layoffs in the past year as the overall industry retrenched in part due to uncertainty around trade and tariffs.
Now, Connelly and Bertino are talking about growing again, building off recent wins such as an expansion of their relationship with Yale New Haven Health.
“We just felt like now is the time to get it all under one roof,” Bertino said. “That seems to be what clients want today.”
Read more here.
Media fragmentation has made it essential that marketers paint a clear picture of their consumers using data. Look no further than the host of ad agencies developing data offerings this year, such as WPP’s purchase of InfoSum in April.
Brands have no shortage of disparate data sets, but often struggle to derive meaningful insights from them, said Alejandro Fuenmayor, Chief Media Officer at Tombras. That challenge is only magnified as users opt out of sharing personal data and regulators scrutinize the collection and sharing of such information.
What brands often don’t realize is that meaningful consumer insights can be tucked away in unexamined data sets. AdAge spoke with data experts to identify four sources of consumer insights marketers frequently overlook.
Geospatial Targeting as an Alternative to Demographic Profiling
Marketers are focused on identity and demographics, and agency partners have indulged them with things such as AI offerings that test against synthetic audiences. But there is plenty of information on real humans that is being underutilized, including geospatial data, which refers to information gathered from a person’s location and movement.
Marketers have viewed the technology as more of a vehicle for gimmicky activations than a serious source for consumer insights, Fuenmayor said. However, as consumers become more savvy about data privacy, marketers are having a harder time finding a one-stop shop for demographic, psychographic and transactional data. That challenge has made geospatial data more enticing, as consumers still show a willingness to turn on location services that offer key insights about their behavior.
“People are carrying a GPS on their phone 24/7, so you can get a pretty complete picture of what people are doing at different times,” Fuenmayor said. “If you’re an advertiser and you’re thinking about a holistic campaign, suddenly understanding people’s migration patterns can give you a lot of insights.”
For example, seeing commuting details could inform investment decisions in media channels such as audio or out-of-home.
“These are things that can help you build a more logical explanation than what most advertisers do, which is just create an audience roughly based on demographic patterns and then put that into a Meta or Google to try and reach as many of them as possible,” Fuenmayor said. “That may have some degree of success, but it depends on your scale.”
Tombras recently leveraged location data for a grocery and gas client that was challenged by consumers who stopped in for gas without buying food. After launching a geospatial analysis, it found that consumers would get food and coffee at neighboring restaurants after stopping in to get gas. Seeing that consumers were indeed visiting the client while hungry informed the decision to begin marketing food and coffee more heavily.
The Less Popular Use Case for Retail Media
Retail media is by no means overlooked in marketing. However, advocates say it’s still underutilized relative to its potential for providing insights about consumer behavior leading up to a purchase. Marketers are accustomed to pulling insights from Amazon’s data clean room, but take less advantage of similar offerings from retailers such as Walmart and Kroger, said Tavo Castro, Executive VP and Head of Strategic Planning and Investment at Tinuiti.
Walmart offers marketers a data analytics product suite called Scintilla, and Kroger has a similar consumer insights platform called Stratum, which it runs through its loyalty program data business, Kroger Precision Marketing.
“Those are incredibly rich data sets that help us understand customers,” Castro said. “Marketers may see it as just purchase data, but there’s information about how customers shop and how they navigate and find products.”
Marketers typically haven’t searched these data sets for insights as often as they could because brand teams and strategists usually lack the technical know-how to navigate data fields, Castro added.
The advent of AI has lessened this problem, however, as marketers have been able to deploy agents to mine data reports and translate consumer insights into plain language. Tinuiti has been developing agents internally so it can navigate a variety of retail media spaces and program the tech to weigh first-party data more heavily than third-party sources or information coming from the open web.
Having tech that can navigate different retail data sets is key, as marketers still struggle to stitch together reports from different providers to create a coherent picture of their consumer base.
Retail networks are attempting to simplify their complexity, particularly for mid-sized and small brands. Last Tuesday, Kroger Precision Marketing launched an in-house team that will help marketers with off-site programmatic advertising across audio, connected TV and dynamic creative optimization for display ads. The managed-service offering will also include retail media measurement.
“It shouldn’t be that difficult for a brand to run what they need to run in the spaces where their audiences are,” said Christine Foster, senior VP of Commercial Strategy and Operations at 84.51°, the retail analytics subsidiary of Kroger.
“There are a lot of mid-sized brands and teams that don’t have the expertise to activate self-service programmatic on their own,” added Brian Spencer, Marketing Director of Kroger Precision Marketing. “This layer of managed service is really about helping those smaller teams and brands tap into retail data they haven’t been able to work with before.”
What Brands Can Learn From Health Data
Marketers can learn a lot about a consumer by looking at the health data they’ve opted into sharing with health tracking companies, said Kevin Dunn, Senior VP of Brands and Agencies at Liveramp. Health data can inform the types of foods, sleep products, clothes and even beauty products a person likes. It can also reveal social conditions that may affect their health, like their job, income, education or neighborhood.
“When you think about building a whole consumer profile, those social determinants of health are a big part of that profile,” Dunn said. “They naturally fit into what a person buys, what they do and where they spend their time. Does a person just buy items through an AI agent or take their time to go to a health company’s website? Marketers need to know this information to paint the story that continues to make a person feel loyal to that brand.”
There are risks to using this data, however. For one, it typically does not come packaged in the same ways that other marketing data does, making it difficult to slot into consumer behavior modeling environments. Certain kinds of healthcare data are also protected under privacy laws such as the Health Insurance Portability and Accountability Act, which may intimidate marketers, Dunn said.
He pointed to the importance of having clean rooms to handle information like health data.
“A health data collection company might be very interested in sharing a lot of the signals that their things collect, but it doesn’t want to share them with certain kinds of AI agents,” he said. “Having the ability to control when and how your data is shared is the advancement that’s going to make it possible for marketers to use so many more signals.”
Pulling Consumer Insights From Creator Marketing
Marketers need no convincing about the value of creators. Bullish brands are increasing spend year after year. U.S. annual spend on influencers is now projected to climb from $7.3 billion in 2023 to $13.7 billion by 2027, with the overarching creator economy expected to reach $480 billion by 2027. Companies such as Unilever, which plans to increase its influencer marketing spend twentyfold and allocate half of its total ad spend to social media, are leading the charge.
Creator marketing measurement is still in its growing stages, but early efforts already yield valuable consumer insights that go unnoticed, said Jen Hansen, Head of Data and Analytics at Connelly Partners. Earlier this year, the independent agency discovered that creators can share organic and paid performance data directly with their agency and brand partners on Meta by clicking into advanced settings and toggling branded content before posting.
This toggle sometimes gets ignored due to perceptions that social media algorithms deprioritize branded content. By forgoing proper tagging, creators lose the option to share performance data within the platform. Instead, they have often shared screenshots of posts and dashboards, or brands have paid third-party influencer analytics companies to relay performance information.
Accessing this information directly within Meta is both cheaper and faster, and has allowed Connelly Partners to make timely creative decisions. For one client, seeing Halloween-related content perform well in early July informed the decision to launch campaigns tied to the holiday ahead of the brand’s typical schedule.
“We’re starting to watch what our data is doing and then change the behavior of our marketing,” Hansen said. “Instead of that client waiting and holding content, we saw that the market was ready for it and we launched it.”
Learn more on AdAge
Bus Éireann Expressway and Connelly Partners have been busy filming in Dublin and beyond, capturing everything from awkward moments to spur-of-the-moment escapes. It’s all part of a new campaign, “There’s a Route for That”, rolling out across VOD, digital audio, OOH/DOOH, and social.
Expressway isn’t just about destinations, It’s about every weird and wonderful reason people travel. And whatever that reason is… there’s a route for that. The campaign celebrates the wonderfully specific, sometimes ridiculous, always relatable reasons people really travel. Need to escape small-town boredom for a gig in Galway? Decided hiking is suddenly your whole personality? Want to dodge bumping into your ex in Limerick? Whatever the story, Expressway has the route to get you there.
The work was filmed across two separate shoots with production partners Collective Films, leaning into humour, authenticity and a digital-first energy that connects directly with the 19–25 audience it was created for.
“The best stories aren’t just about where you’re going, they’re about why” – Mikey Fleming Creative Director at Connelly Partners Dublin. “This campaign brings that truth to life in a way that speaks directly to young adults, reminding them that Expressway is always part of the journey.”
With “There’s a route for that,” Expressway strengthens its connection with Ireland’s young adults, embedding itself in their everyday routines and spontaneous adventures, reminding audiences that wherever they’re going – and for whatever reason – Expressway will get them there.