If you’ve worked with us for a while, you’ve probably noticed a few things. The name got shorter. The logo looks like somebody wrote it by hand, because somebody did. And we’ve started describing ourselves in a way we weren’t a year ago.
Here are the facts. Noble Studios is now just Noble. We’re a business to people marketing agency. And rather than one logo, we have one for every person who works here.
None of that happened by accident, and the reasoning behind it is more interesting than the changes themselves. So we sat down with B.C. LeDoux, our CCO and Managing Partner, who led the work, and asked him to walk through all of it.
Let’s start simple. What is Noble?
Brand and performance marketing is what we do. It’s how we reach our outcomes. But what we are is something different.
We’ve all heard of business to business marketing agencies, business to consumer marketing agencies and travel and tourism marketing agencies. We’re actually not any of those. Noble is a business to people marketing agency.
We don’t target professionals or travelers or consumers, we reach people. Using brand and performance marketing, we help our clients make meaningful connections, moving people and the needle all at once.
Why change anything? What prompted this?
Our industry is changing. We’re changing, and we’re doing different, bolder work than we were a few years ago. We’re winning big industry awards. And clients are asking us and expecting us to help shape the future, not just execute against a brief.
That future, for us and to us, is about humans and meaningful connections. So we put a vision behind it: we’ll make sure the future of marketing is built on meaningful connections, and we’ll be known, loved and sought after for it.
“Digital went from being the differentiator to just being the baseline.”
You spent years calling yourselves “creative digital performance.” What happened to that?
Honestly, it just stopped fitting us. We do more than just digital, and we wanted to reflect that.
Digital is still a large portion of what we do. But it’s a large portion of what every relevant agency does. There was a time not that long ago when having digital in your name meant something real. It told a client you could do the thing most shops couldn’t even attempt yet. That was a genuine advantage.
But over time, digital has gone from being a differentiator to just being a baseline. And over the last few years, as AI has taken a prominent role, “digital” feels like a word from a different generation. This is a new era.
So, we’ve changed, and the industry has changed. Time to change how we talk about ourselves.
Brand and performance marketing is really what we do. We elevate brands emotionally and drive performance with smart insights and tactics.
How do all these pieces fit together?
The best solutions come from an obsessive pursuit of better practices. That’s the iterative art of blending humanity, technology, creativity and data to find a better way, and obsessive is the right word, because it never really finishes.
Better, by the way, is deliberate. Best practices are usually just whatever worked for somebody else two years ago–quickly a past practice. Better means we tried something, watched what happened and improved it.
Any one of those four (humanity, technology, creativity and data) on its own only gets you halfway. Data without creativity buys you an efficient campaign nobody remembers. Go the other direction and you get something beautiful that nobody ever sees.
Blend them with brand and performance marketing and what you get is meaningful connections. Those lead to meaningful conversions, which is how you move people and the needle all at once.
“I’ve never met a human in this industry that didn’t want results.”
How are people reacting to ‘business to people’?
They’re like, oh, I see what you did there, that’s a twist.
And the twist is the point. B2B and B2C describe what somebody is to you, a business or a consumer, a segment on a slide. There’s an actual person on the other end who has a job and a family and about four seconds of patience for whatever we made. Same person, whether they’re buying software at work or booking a hotel on a Sunday night.
The other thing people pick up on is that it doesn’t let us off the hook. Plenty of agencies talk about human-centered work and then never mention results.
I’ve never met someone in this industry that didn’t want results.
So calling ourselves business to people while also calling ourselves a brand and performance marketing agency means we still have to move the needle. We love that part.
You also dropped “Studios.” Why?
Honestly, everybody already called us Noble. Clients, partners, people in the hallway. We were the only ones still saying the whole thing, usually in a deck or an email signature, and it always felt a little like putting on a tie to go to the grocery store.
Studios was accurate for a long time, to be fair. We started as a web design studio, and back then that’s exactly what we were. Then we kept growing.
Somebody said it to me at a conference not long ago after I told him our name. “I knew you looked like a production studio guy.” And I was like, no, no, no, we’re a brand and marketing agency. But he wasn’t wrong to read it that way. Studio makes people think photo studio, design studio, production studio.
This feels like an inflection point. Like when a kid named Tommy starts making his parents call him Tom. We’re all grown up. We’re just Noble.
And the visual identity had to change too?
It didn’t have to change. It wanted to change. It was begging us to change it once we changed our brand vision and positioning.
We considered what agencies from across the world are doing with their identities. Some are bold and whimsical. Some are clean and boring. Some are variable. Some are trying to lean back into craft. We wanted to embrace humanity.
But every one of them, ours included, was still one mark made by one designer for one company. Nobody was questioning that part. So we did.
We started looking at how our own logotype made us feel. It felt corporate rather than human. It felt techy but not creative. And it felt slick, when we’re really a bunch of mother funners.
Okay. Drum roll. What’s the new logo?
We’re referring to it as “Of the people, by the people.”
If we believe that humanity, meaningful connections and our “we” culture are everything, why not reflect it in our logo? So we challenged what a logo has been historically, which is one polished symbol brought to the world by one keen-eyed designer.
Instead, we created a logo for every person at Noble. By every person at Noble. Everyone creates one handwritten version, and we use them all. A signature. A piece of who we are.
There’s not one logo. All our logos are our logo.
Each time we onboard a team member, they create a new one in their own handwriting, and we add it to the library for all time.
What does that look like in the wild?
Depends where you catch us. On the site, on a deck, on a shirt, it’s somebody’s handwriting sitting next to “A Business to People Marketing Agency” in clean type. The rough hand against the clean type is the whole idea in one lockup.
Create a rotating animation or tile a bunch of them together and it turns into a pattern, and that’s where you really see it. Seventy something different hands, all writing the same word, none of them matching.
It’s bold. It’s different. It’s us.
It’s going to confuse some people. It’s going to amuse some people. It’s going to make some people love us. It might make a few designers hate us. But it’s us. That’s for sure.
How are you rolling it out?
In pieces. We’ve done enough big brand rollouts for clients to know they don’t all have to land on the same morning, so this one comes out over time and keeps filling in as it goes.
Some of it is already out. The rest arrives as we continue building the rules around the identity, the palette and the illustration work behind it.
A logo built out of everybody’s handwriting is never really finished anyway. Every new person adds one. Which fits, because the whole idea is to be better every day.
Last one. Why does this matter to you?
It matters to us because of what happened when we showed it internally.
We put it up, explained that everybody’s handwritten logo was going to create our logo, and somebody in the meeting got overwhelmed and started tearing up because they loved it so much. That was not on my list of expected outcomes for a brand presentation, but it’s one of the best meeting KPIs you can track.
It makes sense, right? Our handwriting is very personal. It’s a signature in many ways. And everyone’s handwriting together representing one company, one team, a big “we” is kind of beautiful, right?
Of the people, by the people is why we did this, because our team, and our meaningful connections, make us who we are and good at what we do.
