Promax: Chuck Carey & Robert Blatchford launch Compadre.

Veteran creative marketing executives Chuck Carey and Robert Blatchford have come together to launch new Los Angeles-based creative agency, Compadre. The name suggests both their own friendship as well as their view toward their relationships with clients.

“Compadre is a representation of unifying elements of the strategic and creative process that are traditionally separated: positioning with creative exploration, insights with intuition, technology with storytelling,” the partners said in a statement. 

Using strategy, design, storytelling and technology, Compadre’s mission is to grow audiences, spark conversations, shape brands and impact culture.

“There are new ways for people to interact with brands every day, so our approach evolves with every project and every client,” said Blatchford. “But at our core, we’re specialists in building a brand’s story, and telling that story how and where people can fall in love with it.”

Carey and Blatchford are good friends who have worked for different companies in the entertainment marketing industry for years, starting with Los Angeles-based Troika, where Carey was president and partner for 12 years, while Blatchford worked as head of business development. Since then, Carey moved on to creative agency mOcean, where he served as executive vice president/managing director. Blatchford went to Loyalkaspar, where he was partner and chief development officer.

About a year ago, the two decided the time was right for them to rejoin forces and launch something new.

“There is so much changing so rapidly in this industry that everyone’s having to rethink the way they approach things,” said Carey. “Coupled with that is the need to be hyper-efficient with what we’re doing and how we’re doing it.”

For Carey and Blatchford, that approach starts with storytelling and is anchored in authenticity. From there, it extends out to different platforms and formats. 

Because both men have so much experience in the industry, they take a long-term consultative approach. “We really love to get under the hood with clients,” said Carey. “We build relationships so clients can trust us with what’s really going on.”

To that end, Compadre has hired a full team, including a strategist and a data science firm, to collaborate with brands, helping them to approach their creative from a strategic point of view that will carry them continually forward. Compadre aims to give brands much more than a campaign that fulfills a need at a certain point in time; it wants to help brands scale up and grow into the future.

“We don’t just offer subjective creative,” said Blatchford. “We also want to add value for our clients. We really want to collaborate with them and solve problems for them.”

Among Compadre’s first clients is Freeform, who worked with Compadre on its “Dear Society” brand spot, below:

Body: Keeping with its view that authenticity is paramount for brands, Compadre worked with Freeform to cast fans who personified the youth-targeted network’s message.