Court Crandall and Kirk Souder bring clients, agency staffers and production companies together to create an advertising ground zero, or rather, Ground Zero Advertising.

Crandall, 34, and Souder, 38, are creative partners at the agency, whose clients include ESPN, the Virgin Group, Activision and Sun International Resorts. The men met while working as co-creative directors at another agency and immediately felt they should form their own shop.

"Court and I left SteinRobaireHelm with a clear idea that we wanted to create a different kind of company, one that believed that what attached people to brands is the soul of the brand rather than its physical manifestation," explains Souder.

They found a like-minded managing director in Jim Smith, and in January 1994, opened Ground Zero above a Venice, CA restaurant. As the agency grew, implementation of its "soul of the brand" idea also developed. The agency moved to a 25,000-square-foot Marina Del Rey warehouse space last December, designed to mesh with the architecture of the agency's personnel.

The agency consists of a number of brand teams structured to include client representatives, agency staff and eventually members of production companies. The only enclosed areas are brand rooms, where the various teams focus their energy on creating the strategy and concepts behind individual campaigns.

"There is a client representative, an account person, a planner, a creative team and a media person," says Crandall. "They all work together, not really beholden to the agency or the client, doing what is right for that brand. The creative that comes out of this is a natural outgrowth of what they decide; if you are part of that, it doesn't seem so scary - it feels like the right thing to do."

This approach has led to a number of decidedly odd but successful campaigns, notably recent work for ESPN. One campaign promoting the Women's World Cup of Soccer employed the likes of James Carville inviting President Clinton to attend a game to show his support for the U.sboards||19991101. team. The campaign was created to get people talking about women's soccer, says Souder, not to draw attention to the President. However, the spots went beyond their desired effect and the President made an appearance at the final game.

"He says, 'I'm a big fan but, of course, I had to come because those commercials on ESPN forced me to be here,'" says Souder. "It was a major, giant validation of doing something different but having it work."

Even more unorthodox was the Ground Zero campaign for ESPN2, entitled "Knowledge." The TV spots were centered on a couch potato sports fan who is concentrating on improving his knowledge of sports. His understanding of sports is represented by a walking ball of fur that responds to its master's attentiveness to a nightly sports news program.

"People will ask us, 'How did you get ESPN to use this big hair ball?' But if you were with us all along, it would seem like the perfectly natural thing to do," says Crandall. "Sports fans think of their knowledge as a kind of entity they can show and compare with other people's knowledge; the ball is a metaphor, a physical manifestation of their knowledge."

Souder adds that this concept stemmed from the ESPN brand team's understanding of the sports channel's soul - the embodiment of the sports fan rather than sports or athletes. The "Knowledge" creative team - Grant Shelmerdine, art director, and Grant Holand, copywriter - won a Belding Award for the campaign.

Shelmerdine and Holand were soon hired away by Cliff Freeman and Partners, a trend to which Souder and Crandall say they are becoming adjusted.

Crandall and Souder hope to avoid allowing their agency to fall into the mold of many agency businesses, which Souder says are built on hierarchical and archaic structures. The goal of Ground Zero is to function in an organic rather than mechanical manner, says Souder.

WEB.FILES
Ground Zero Advertising: www.groundzero.net