37
2023
Dallas, TX
Creative Agency
3
Underdog
We believe the traditional big agency model is broken. Our founders grew up on some of the biggest brands at the largest independent agency in the country, where they learned how to truly be independent but also what clients really need…and want. We don’t subscribe to bigger is better - only when it comes to the idea.
As our name would suggest, we are not afraid.
To give you our opinion. To tell you what you may not want to hear. To try things others are too scared to try. To rock the boat a little (because hey, some boats need to be rocked.) To poke holes in “but we’ve always done it this way”.
We are the people who really know how to get to the soul of a brand. The ideal Poke The Bear client? Marketers who know they can’t afford to play it safe.
Founded in 2023 by creative director veterans Bill Milkereit and Todd Tucker—who previously shaped iconic campaigns at The Richards Group—Poke?The?Bear has rapidly established itself as an agency built to shake things up. The agency rejects the one-size-fits-all approach. Our team stays purposely lean then “loads for bear” only as needed. There aren’t conference rooms full of people waiting around who clients have to pay for. (There aren’t even any conference rooms.) Overhead is non-existent.
Our name is your first clue as to what we are all about: “We relentlessly poke. We prod. We provoke.” They passionately refer to it as their “give-a-shit factor” which stays uncommonly high. It’s what fuels breakthrough creative, rooted in daring ideas - making brands impossible to ignore.
Poke?The?Bear operates seamlessly across every touchpoint, every asset and deliverable, making sure each step of the process is infused with strategy, rigor and distinct personality - all from the same team that you see from the pitch through production. No modules, no silos—just one unified creative strike force that resonates with real consumers and solves real client problems.
The world doesn’t need another ad agency - and no one knows that better than Poke The Bear. Which is why we formed to counter punch the outdated, slow, multi-layered agency model. In doing so, we lead the industry toward a more customized, agile future—one in-your-face campaign at a time.
It was a big year for Poke The Bear as we entered year three in business. By keeping overhead low, and building the agency on the experience of a strong foundational leadership team, Poke The Bear saw monumental growth over the last two years, up 534%.
By having a model that allows us to partner with media, strategy and production when needed, we were able to make some business changing, results yielding work for some major brands.
In partnership with Johnsonville AOR Hold Fast Co., we launched the second iteration of Johnsonville’s “Keep it Juicy” campaign featuring America’s favorite party-starter Vince Vaughn as the voiceover. The key, pokey insight? Americans were more divided than ever. As our greatest get-together food, maybe we all get back to cookouts and brunches and block parties together. The campaign has been so successful with over a billion impressions, a third of those earned, +21% increase in consumer loyalty and 3.1% increase in sausage sales, helping to win the brand a coveted 2025 Effie in the Marketing Disruptors category proving a little sausage company from Sheboygan Falls, Wisconsin can really bring people back together.
Poke The Bear has helped the country’s #1 honey brand, Nature Nate’s Honey Co. create a distinct brand look and voice, notably marked by the witty and disruptive “Ingredients: Honey” campaign. The campaign has been refreshed yearly, keeping Nature Nate’s leadership voice and swagger jumping off the shelf. In the first year alone, Nate’s saw an increase in sales by 6.7% and dollar share by .72 points when the entire honey category remained flat to down.
And lastly, Poke The Bear won the See’s holiday business, helping to launch a brand new campaign, “Break Out The Good Stuff”. Now in year two for the 104-year-old iconic American company, a fully integrated campaign has helped make the brand more culturally relevant than ever - with a single spot driving 60% of revenue.
With more poking, prodding and provoking in a world of lazy, safe and boring messaging, it’s clear Poke The Bear will stay in attack mode going forward.
Our founders cut their teeth at the largest independent agency in the country. The setting: some of the most crowded, time suckiest, most pressure-packed rooms in marketing. It was a world of endless layers, lag and lip-service. Not a vibrant ecosystem for daring ideas.
Post pandemic, we were given the chance to break away and cut our own path. After a full year of debating and finally landing on the perfect agency name for us, we went all-in on Poke The Bear for two fundamental reasons:
1. We lived the big agency world for decades. The biggest thing we learned: Even the most massive brands don’t need an army. They need a highly-skilled, responsive, core team with actual skins on the wall. A team they know by name. Grown-ups who will own the problem with them.
2. The second-biggest thing we learned over and over and over: The big idea, the one that kills categories and defies the rules, is truly rare. And is still what matters most.
With Poke The Bear, clients get big agency creative firepower without the big agency waste.
We are creative guys, not entrepreneurs. We had zero clue how to run an ad agency. We didn’t plan for this to happen. But when it was time to decide where we wanted to take our careers next, we bet on ourselves. Because we know for a fact that what we do is rare and valuable. Then we quickly leaned on our loyal network of agency pros to help us figure the rest of it out. Which we are still doing, by the way. Neither one of us is mastering QuikBooks any time soon. But that’s the fun of it. We get to make up our own rules.
Hey, plain and simple: we’ve got the fun jobs. As long as there are people who do what we do as Creatives, it has to stay fun. And nothing zaps the fun like the process police. Or a good whiteboarding or brainstorming session. Or decision-by-committee. Or layer upon layer of agency gymnastics. And that’s just internally. Imagine all the super good times when you pile on outside stakeholders. No thanks.. Hopefully, the industry will continue to look at our own Poke The Bear brand as inspiration for how to strip away all the nonsense and get straight to the good stuff.
Championing the big idea – the one that people talk about, shush the room over, share and aspire to be a part of will always be our daily mission at Poke The Bear. We know no other way. And so with that, it will also be our daily mission to clear a path for those ideas to breathe and take off.
