Adweek 2018 Breakthrough Agency Of The Year Giant Spoon

From Startup To Serious Contender In Five Short Years.

- Lindsay Rittenhouse

Giant Spoon, Adweek’s Breakthrough Creative Agency of the Year, has been steadily turning out striking work since its founding five years ago, but 2018 was exceptional for the scale and impact of its campaigns.

For client HBO, the full-service shop created a meticulous replica of Sweetwater, the town inside hit series Westworld, on a two-acre plot of land just outside Austin, Texas, for South by Southwest. There was live music, taverns, horses, 60 actors and a train that, albeit stationary, resembled to a T the one in the show that carries people to and from the amusement park for which the series is named.

Westworld became the most discussed TV show during SXSW thanks to the activation, which garnered 1.9 billion social impressions, and Giant Spoon went on to win a gold Cannes Outdoor Lion.

HBO chose Giant Spoon for its SXSW activation on the strength of the agency’s 2017 work for Warner Bros. at San Diego Comic-Con: a re-creation of the postapocalyptic world of Blade Runner built in a 12,000-square-foot space.

“After witnessing their Blade Runner experience, we knew they had the capability to bring Westworld to life in a way that matched the scale of our campaign,” says Steven Cardwell, HBO’s director of program marketing and advertising. “Giant Spoon has proved to be an agency who can flawlessly execute on big ideas with huge ambition.”