In a crowded consultancy space, The Intangibles wants to be a not-so secret weapon for CMOs

Last fall, Will Ferrell sang an homage to PayPal to the tune of Fleetwood Mac’s classic “Everywhere.” The payments platform was making a big swing with the comedy legend for its biggest-ever U.S. ad campaign. It was also the first major piece of work under PayPal chief marketing officer Geoff Seeley, who joined the company in February 2024. The campaign was created with agency BBH, with an assist from Publicis Groupe creative shop Le Truc.

But there was another partner holding influence over the brand strategy, all behind the scenes. The Intangibles—which some might call the Avengers of marketing—is a marketing powerhouse that has largely operated in the shadows until now.

Founded in 2022, The Intangibles is a unique consultancy in a marketing industry littered with consulting options. Led by founder and CEO Ben Richards, founding partner Jon Wilkins, and chair Judy Smith, the firm is now launching publicly. It’s made up of executive talent that focuses exclusively on intangible assets like brand, innovation, IP, customer experience, reputation, and culture—all oft-overlooked yet critical areas that drive long-term value.

Richards is the former global chief strategy officer of Ogilvy, where he led a team of 1,500 strategists across 83 countries for nearly a decade. Wilkins was most recently the global chief strategy officer of Accenture Song, one of the world’s largest agencies. The two met in the early 2000s at legendary strategy firm Naked, where Wilkins was one of the three global founders. Smith is also CEO of strategic advisory firm Smith & Company, the former deputy press secretary to President George H.W. Bush, a veteran of crisis management, and the real-life inspiration behind the hit ABC series Scandal.

Richards says that intangible assets are seen as the dark matter of the business world. “In reality, they’re very real, they’re very measurable, and I think they’re the future of business,” he says. “So we started thinking about the kind of company that could advise on how to grow tangible value from intangible assets.”

“Tribrid” model

A decade ago, marketing and advertising was in the midst of a tug-of-war between major consultancies and ad agency holding companies. Deloitte alone had acquired more than a dozen creative agencies, while Ad Age named Accenture Interactive (now Accenture Song) the largest and fastest-growing digital agency network every year between 2015 and 2021. Agencies, meanwhile, were shifting their own strategies to better compete. R/GA, for example, set up a business transformation practice in 2012.

The relationship between consultancies and agency partners for brands is still a shifting landscape between competition and collaboration, but Richards says he and Wilkins saw an opportunity for a very specific type of consultant, with a particular approach. “It’s a ‘tribrid’ firm that combines the rigor of a management consultancy, the creativity of Madison Ave, and the value creation mindset of private equity, that we thought would be the best at unlocking tangible value for intangible assets,” says Richards. 

Take the PayPal example. When PayPal named Alex Chriss its new CEO in September 2023, Seeley was less than a year into the job. PayPal was looking to shift its positioning quickly and significantly from a payments platform to a broader fintech company. “We were brought in to help them engineer a new way to bring the brand to life in North America,” Richards says of The Intangibles’s partnership with the company.

Seeley says the firm has been invaluable in providing high-level consulting on the overall brand strategy, given the breadth of their experience in particular with marketing and marketing transformation.

“I need people around me who have been there and done it right,” says Seeley. “They’ve played the snakes and ladders of marketing for a long time, and they know more about the ladders, and they know where the snakes are.”

PayPal’s Seeley says the work his company has done with The Intangibles has complemented his other agency partners. “It’s not competitive, because the services that they provide aren’t tangible things like making an ad or buying media,” he says. “It’s sitting with my VPs of marketing, or my heads of growth, and consulting with them over ‘Hey, when we did this at like this big company that I was at, this is where we found some goodness.’ So it’s more senior client whispering than it is agency services.”

Elite experience

The “tribrid” model is combined with what Richards called a “naked” style of communication and transparency: solid advice, plainly told. In a time when CMOs are asked to do more with less, and always faster, it’s easy to see why a resource like this could be helpful.

Executing on this promise is easier when consultants are seen more as peers than hired help. The firm has talent with experience in the upper echelons of the industry, as opposed to a few senior leaders backed by an army of junior talent. So far, Intangibles works with about 30 people across New York, London, and San Francisco. At the partner level, the company’s roster includes former Global CMO of Disney Studios MT Carney, former Goodby, Silverstein & Partners’ Chief Strategy Officer Gareth Key, former Global CMO Lufthansa Alex Schlaubitz, former Global CMO of Bill Gates-backed C16 Biosciences Margaret Rimsky, and former Global CEO of Ogilvy PR Stuart Smith.

So far, the company has done work with PayPal, Venmo, YouTube, and Kenvue (owners of Tylenol, Neutrogena, and Band-Aid), as well as a handful of private equity firms.

Essentially, the company has assembled an on-call SWAT team of marketing, creative, strategy, and communications for the executive suite. Wilkins describes it as a hybrid model of senior talent within the company, and then tapping into their collective Rolodex to tailor teams to a client’s particular needs. “We’ve got traditional employees, but we’ve also got this fantastic network of folks who are on speed dial,” says Wilkins. “So this really surgical application, this Avengers-style team, bringing together genuinely the best people in the world for a particular mission has worked really well.”

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