Media Buying Briefing: How Instrument won Croc’s business in a day

It certainly worked with new client Crocs, which earlier in 2026 handed Instrument a creative and tech assignment the day after hearing the agency’s pitch in a multi-agency RFP. The assignment: create new digital visibility for the brand (website included) showcasing content that works at a mid- and lower-funnel level.

To Burton, Crocs is “a fascinating brand that [sells at] a democratized cost so that anyone can purchase it, but also it’s like in Gorillaz videos and the Kardashians are wearing them — and also the three-year-old down the street is like having gibbets all over them,” she said.

The need comes at a time when Crocs was feeling increasing pressure from rivals like Ugg and Birkenstock since its patent had expired. As Ginny Golden, Crocs’ vp of creative explained, “We weren’t looking for an agency to simply make things look better. We were looking for a partner who understood that every touchpoint in e-commerce is part of the brand story, and that great storytelling and great performance should work hand in hand.”

“What stood out about Instrument,” Golden added, “was their ability to balance creativity with rigor. They brought strong points of view, but they backed them up with data and customer insight. They were thinking about what would resonate with people and ultimately drive action. That combination gave us a lot of confidence.”

So what did Instrument actually build for the client? The work spreads across Crocs’ e-commerce ecosystem, from onsite experiences and CRM to performance marketing and campaign launches. Instrument built a new homepage template for the upcoming holiday season and is currently working on an entire website re-design to improve consumers’ shopping journey. It’s also helping to manage the orchestration of thousands of pieces of content that live across Crocs’ digital footprint.

“We’ve built specific tools for the intake and management and execution of assets that are specifically for Crocs,” said Burton, explaining that it involved training agents and tools, much of it built on top of AI platform Figma so that Crocs can save budget on hiring production designers for all those creative assets. “We’re going to take two weeks, and that’s to build you a set of tools and evaluate it on a quarterly basis, to automate all of these things that normally took weeks and months and multiple humans, so that you can then deviate those costs to the cost center of creative, and hold true to what also the market needs,” Burton recalled saying during the pitch dialogue.

So far, the client seems content with what’s working. “We’re really encouraged by what we’ve seen so far. Beyond the performance metrics, there’s been a noticeable shift in the quality and consistency of how the brand shows up across our digital channels,” noted Golden.

All in all, from a holding company perspective, what Instrument and other Code and Theory Network agencies are doing has become somewhat the growth engine for parent company  Stagwell. After the holdco’s first-half 2026 earnings announcement, CEO Mark Penn cited the digital transformation group (in which the Code and Theory Network is housed) for its solid contribution to revenue and profit. 

Color by numbers

Here’s a number: $2.15 billion. That’s what Nielsen just offered to purchase DoubleVerify, about eight times the EBITDA of the brand safety platform. The deal is supposed to close in early 2027, and comes only months after DoubleVerify’s main competitor IAS was purchased by private equity firm Novacap for $1.9 billion. Clearly there’s money to be made in the brand safety business but the question many agency execs still ask is, how effective are they really? 

Takeoff & landing

• WPP and S4 Capital both released first-half 2026 earnings last week and showed similar good news/bad news trends. The bad news first: WPP’s revenue dropped 4.7%, with WPP Media revenue dropping 5.4% — and yet its stock jumped healthily on better-than-expected results. S4 likewise saw revenue drop in the first half, down 6.2%, but operating profit rose 83% over 2025’s first half. 
• QuadGraphics launched Direct, a new full-service direct marketing agency that combines audience intelligence, pre-market creative validation, production and measurement. The agency will be helmed by Carl Fischer, Quad’s vp of direct marketing.
• Agency collective Project Worldwide is launching a new hub in South Florida, called Project Hub in Delray Beach, which is slated to open this fall.
• Account moves: Omnicom Media won Novo Nordisk’s U.S. media business, worth some $600 million in media spend, reportedly, on such products as Ozempic and Wegovy. WPP Media’s Wavemaker had handled the business since 2020 … Dentsu won TVS Motor Co.’s media business in India, which moved from incumbent Madison World. 

Direct quote

“For the past 20 years, the marketing industry has built its advantage around identity-based consumer targeting. Don’t get me wrong; it’s a useful starting point. But identity alone cannot tell us how someone’s preferences and behavior is changing in real time, or help us predict what they might do next.” 

— WPP CEO Cindy Rose during the holdco’s first-half results 2026 discussion. 

Speed reading

• Speaking of Cindy Rose and WPP, Sam Bradley examined how the holding company is moving toward outcome-based compensation from clients, gleaned during the holdco’s H1 earnings report. 
• I wrote about how one research firm, Ideally, is employing synthetic data to craft insights that aim to help Omnicom agencies with creative direction at the outset of campaigns, rather than the end. 
• Sam Bradley also gauged the reaction from media buyers on publishers’ efforts to sell markdown versions of its webpages, which have been specially designed for AI systems and agents to read.