Updated July 2026
The LOOMIS Agency is a Dallas advertising agency that works only with challenger brands. Not a full-service shop that also takes challenger work. Challenger brands are the only work we do, and have been since 1984. From Dallas, we serve restaurant, franchise, healthcare, retail, and financial brands nationally.
If you were an emerging athlete with your sights set on a college scholarship, the Olympics, or the World Championships, you’d seek out a trainer, a coach, a physio, and the like to help you get from where you are to where you want to be. If, after long periods of working out, your body started to hurt, you’d look for the best doctors you could find to help take the pain away and get you back on your feet. Fully recovered, you find yourself on the precipice of winning. But something you can’t see is holding you back. You could give up. Or you could seek out those who have been where you are and can objectively help you leverage your gifts, fight the giants, and get over the hump. Finding direction. Alleviating growing pains. Learning how to win. That’s what challenger brand agencies are all about. And you’ve just reached the best challenger brand agency in the country.
WELCOME TO THE DOGFIGHT
Since our founding more than 35 years ago, LOOMIS has been helping challenger brands compete with category leaders and win. We are a challenger brand agency in the business of helping underdogs who are underleveraged find a way where seemingly there is no way. First and foremost, that requires understanding what it means to be a challenger brand and second, understanding what it means to be an exclusive challenger brand agency. We do.
According to current data from the Small Business & Entrepreneurship Council, out of 32.6 million businesses in the United States, only 20,868 have more than 500 employees. Big companies. Of the rest, 84.7 percent of American companies have fewer than 20 employees. We are a nation of underdogs. In every category, there is only one, on occasion two, true category leaders. That leaves the vast majority of brands in the role of challenger. But here’s the thing – being a challenger brand is about way more than just how big you are. You’ve most likely heard the quote, “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight, but the fight in the dog that matters.” Winning as a challenger brand is about mindset and action, not size. LOOMIS is the best challenger brand agency in the country because we understand that, and we help our clients leverage that truth in ways they wouldn’t see alone.
WHAT MAKES A CHALLENGER BRAND: THE CHALLENGER BRAND ETHOS
Three fundamental factors make up what we refer to as the “Challenger Brand Ethos.” It’s the starting point for every challenger brand that genuinely wants to compete.
State of the Market
The first factor is STATE OF MARKET, understanding honestly where you rank among your competitors.
State of Mind
The second factor is STATE OF MIND, understanding who you are as a brand. Challenger brands are the best at something, or actively striving to be the best. The third factor is where the rubber meets the road and where true challengers are separated from wannabe brands forever stuck in neutral.
State of Readiness
The third factor of the Challenger Brand Ethos is the STATE OF READINESS, understanding how prepared you are to go to battle. Are you open to new ways of thinking and potentially uncomfortable ideas? Are you open to changing things up, and doing business differently? Are you ready to get out of your way and pull the trigger to improve your ability to compete?
True challenger brands engender a corporate culture of willingness, openness, and energy for embracing new modes of thinking. This includes a higher organizational tolerance for calculated risk-taking. Often, this culture is present early in a company’s lifecycle but may wane as the company matures, and modes of thinking become traditionalized. It can be reignited during an organizational inflection point, such as a leadership change, or a reengineering process that has been intentionally and effectively managed. But regardless of origin, the company’s collective mindset must embrace alternative ideas. The strategy, creation, and implementation of those ideas are what make LOOMIS the country’s leading challenger brand agency.
WHICH KIND OF AGENCY DOES A CHALLENGER BRAND NEED?
Ask five agencies what a challenger brand needs and you will get five answers that happen to match what each of them sells.
The branding shop says you need positioning. The creative shop says you need a big idea. The PR firm says you need credibility. The performance shop says you need better targeting. None of them are wrong. Each of them is describing one piece of a problem that does not come apart cleanly.
Here is what usually happens instead. A challenger brand hires a branding agency and gets a positioning deck. That deck goes to an ad agency, which reinterprets it. The campaign goes to a PR firm, which softens it. The whole thing lands with a performance shop, which optimizes the softened version for cost per click. Four vendors, four interpretations. By the time the work reaches the market, the distinction that justified the entire exercise has been sanded off.
Category leaders can absorb that. They have the budget to pay for the same thinking four times over and the market position to survive a diluted message. Challengers do not. When you are the third brand in your category, a diluted message is not a missed opportunity. It is a paid reminder that the leader exists.
So the useful question is not which type of agency. It is what each type is actually for, and what happens at the seams between them.
Brand Strategy and Branding Agencies
What they own: what the brand stands for, who it is for, and why anyone should care.
When a challenger needs it: almost always first. Challengers rarely have a reach problem. They have a reason problem. If a customer cannot articulate why you and not the leader, more media only makes the confusion more expensive.
Where it breaks: a positioning deck is not a position. It becomes one when it survives contact with the work.
Advertising and Creative Agencies
What they own: turning the position into ideas that run in the market.
When a challenger needs it: once the position is real and defensible. Creative that arrives before strategy produces work that tests well and sells nothing.
Where it breaks: safety. An agency that came up defending category leaders will instinctively make you look like one. That instinct is expensive, because a challenger who communicates like the leader has just paid to strengthen the leader’s position.
PR and Communication Agencies
What they own: earning third-party credibility for the position.
When a challenger needs it: whenever the claim is one the market will not take on faith. Challengers make bolder claims than leaders do, out of necessity. Bolder claims need better proof.
Where it breaks: coverage is not credibility. A placement that does not reinforce the position is a clipping, not an asset.
Digital, SEO, and Content Agencies
What they own: capturing the demand the position creates, and proving what happened.
When a challenger needs it: continuously, and always downstream of everything above. This work is the most measurable, which is why it often gets funded first. Measurable is not the same as leading.
Where it breaks: optimizing distribution for a message that was never distinct. You end up very efficient at delivering something nobody asked for.
| Agency type | What it owns | A challenger needs it when | Where it breaks |
|---|---|---|---|
| Brand strategy / branding | The position | The market cannot say why you and not them | The deck never reaches the work |
| Advertising / creative | The idea | The position is real and needs to be felt | Instinct toward safe |
| PR / communications | The proof | The claim is bold enough to need backing | Coverage that reinforces nothing |
| Digital / SEO / content | The capture | Demand exists and needs converting | Efficiency on an undifferentiated message |
Look at the four failure points together and the pattern is hard to miss. Every one of them happens at a handoff.
That is the argument for holding positioning, creative, media, and digital in the same building, and it is the reason LOOMIS is built the way it is built. Not because integration is fashionable. Because a challenger brand cannot afford to have its distinction renegotiated four times before it reaches a customer.
One more thing worth saying plainly. The type of agency matters less than whether you matter to the agency. A challenger brand inside a holding company is a rounding error, and rounding errors get junior teams. Ask anyone you are considering where your account would rank in their book. The answer will tell you more than the credentials deck.
WHO WE WORK WITH
Restaurant and QSR
The category where a challenger’s disadvantage is most visible, because the leader’s sign is on the next corner.
We have worked with Golden Chick since 2014, when the brand had 103 units. It is past 200 today, with average unit volume doubled systemwide. Texas Dairy Queen, Black Bear Diner, Rib Crib, Taco Bueno, and Salad and Go have all trusted us with work that had to move traffic, not just win awards.
Case Study: Dairy Queen
Franchise
Franchise brands carry a complication most challengers do not. Every message has to work for the consumer and for the franchisee, and those two audiences do not always want the same thing.
We have built systemwide campaigns that franchisees actually adopt, which is a different discipline from building campaigns that test well at corporate.
Case Study: Franchise
Healthcare
Healthcare challengers compete on trust, which cannot be bought with frequency.
Texas Oncology and Texas Colon and Rectal Specialists have both engaged us for work in categories where the wrong tone does more damage than no advertising at all.
Case Study: Texas Oncology
Retail and Consumer Services
Fitness Connection. Sun Tan City. Rug Doctor. The Maids. Stanley Steemer. Murphy USA.
Different businesses, same problem. A commoditized category where the customer sees very little difference between options and defaults to whichever brand is cheapest or closest. Our job is to give them a third reason.
Case Study: Retail
What these brands have in common is not size or category. It is a posture.
Every one of them arrived understanding that they were not going to win by doing a slightly better version of what the leader was already doing. That understanding is the only real prerequisite for working with us. We can build the strategy and make the work. We cannot install the willingness to be different, and we have learned the hard way not to take on brands that are hoping we will.
7 REASONS TO CHOOSE LOOMIS
Every advertising agency will tell you they have what it takes to help challenger brands win. Very few have wholly committed themselves to make challenger brand success their exclusive focus. More than 20 years ago, that’s exactly what LOOMIS did. There’s not an agency in the country that wouldn’t love to have Coca-Cola, GEICO, Nike, Home Depot, and Ford on their rosters. But the corporate monoliths aren’t who we serve. We fight with the brands that break themselves against the category leaders again and again and again, chipping away and finding victory in unexpected places. We’ve helped brands win that fight for nearly four decades and we can do the same for you. Here are seven reasons why.
OUR PURPOSE
We are a challenger brand agency. Period. We understand challenger brands because we’re an underdog ourselves. We aren’t the biggest, or the most famous. But, oh, you ought to see us in a dogfight. The purpose of our challenger brand agency is to “help underdogs win.” It’s not an area of expertise or one of a long list of capabilities on our website. Helping challenger brands win is all we do.
OUR PEOPLE
Of all the things we’re proudest of, our people top the list. Our award-winning staff includes more than 70 industry experts who specialize in Marketing and Advertising Strategy, Account Service, Creative, Media, Digital Marketing, and more. We’re perpetually included on multiple “Best Places To Work” lists. And on average over the past 20 years, we’ve held on to our talent twice as long as the national average. There are several reasons for that. One of the biggest is how compelling it is to work for a challenger brand agency focused on creating and implementing big ideas that move the needle for our clients. It takes a special mindset to thrive here. Our people are smart, brave, and driven with a work ethic that’s unmatched. Our team is fiercely loyal to our clients, to the agency, and to each other. It’s no coincidence that our client tenure also vastly exceeds the national average.
OUR BOOK
When we say we wrote the book on challenger branding and culture, we mean it literally. Published in 2020, “The Voice of the Underdog: How Challenger Brands Create Distinction By Thinking Culture First” is a master class on how to compete as a challenger brand and the importance of building an extraordinary company culture. Written by agency CEO and President Mike Sullivan and Michael Tuggle, the former co-Executive Creative Director at LOOMIS, the book unpacks the poorly understood and grossly underleveraged connection between brand and culture. Filled with fascinating case studies, entertaining stories, and engaging insights, the book examines the true essence of what makes a company a challenger brand, unveils how successful challengers of all sizes use culture to create extraordinary brand distinction, and finishes with a detailed blueprint for building your own transcendent culture.
OUR TRAINING
Like any great athlete, we don’t just show up and perform. We train. We study. We watch, listen, learn, read, and discuss challenger branding strategies, tactics, and ideas all the time. All of our team members work through our 16-week challenger brand workshop series exploring challenger branding and culture from A to Z. Challenger branding is a living, breathing, evolving process and as the leading challenger brand agency, we have to change with it. We are lifelong learners who are open to new ways of thinking and believe that creative ideas can come from anywhere. We train hard to be the best at what we do.
OUR PROCESS
As part of our Challenger Brand Workshop Series, we developed “The Challenger Blueprint: A Systematic Guide for Building the Underdog That Wins.” It’s a proprietary process that helps us identify where a challenger brand is in its journey, what they need to do to compete, and what the consumer insights are to drive that growth. The result is a marketing and advertising plan grounded in the Challenger Brand Ethos that’s laser-focused and primed for competition. Our success as a challenger brand agency and that of our clients starts with this process.
OUR STRUCTURE
Everything above this is an argument that handoffs are where challenger brands lose their distinction. Fair, then, to ask how we are built to avoid them.
Strategy, creative, media, digital, and social all sit under this roof and answer to the same work. The design firm is in-house and has the awards to justify being there rather than on a vendor list. One of the best recording studios in the country is one floor down, which means a spot gets scored and mixed in an afternoon instead of a week.
Performance measurement is ours too. That matters more than it sounds like it should. When the team that made the work also owns the numbers, nobody gets to blame the media plan for weak creative, or the creative for weak targeting.
None of this is unusual at a large agency. It is unusual at our size. That is the entire point. You get the capability without becoming a line item in someone’s quarterly forecast.
OUR RESULTS
That brings us to the thing you most likely care about the most – results. We wouldn’t be America’s leading challenger brand agency without them. Quite frankly, at LOOMIS we are driven and obsessed with moving the needle for our clients. We drive revenue. We sell tickets. We put butts in seats.
- We helped double the Average Unit Volume of a 600-store QSR chain.
- We helped increase the profit of a home services company five-fold over eight years.
- We created the national sports promotion of the year for a pizza chain that was so successful when it ran, competitors told their delivery drivers to stay at home.
- We helped increase the web traffic for a healthcare company by 44 percent and new patient requests by 36 percent in one year.
- During COVID, we helped a 200-unit QSR chain increase their Nation’s Restaurant News ranking by 43 spots.
Those are just a few of our success stories, but they should give you some idea of what it’s like to work with LOOMIS. We aren’t a challenger brand agency because we choose to position ourselves that way. We’re the country’s leading challenger brand agency because nobody understands challenger brands and how to help them win better than we do. If you’re a challenger brand, you’ll find no greater advocate. Call us and let us show you.
