"It doesn’t take a majority to make a rebellion; it takes only a few determined leaders and a sound cause." – H.L. Mencken
“A lot of older cats have the wrong idea about our generation,” laments 26-year-old Ian Ford, co-founder of Rebelutions, a full-service creative consulting agency that specializes in connecting major brands to the youth and urban subcultures they often miss. “They think we’re lazy, that we’re leeches on society, and that we have no respect for the culture. They think we’re rebels without a cause. We’re out to let them know that yes, we are rebels, but our cause is to prove that, when organized, we can take the culture to new levels and create positive change in this world.”
Born from the minds of three hardworking and like-minded twenty-somethings – Ford, Bem Joiner, 28, and Alex Morgan, 26 – Rebelutions is a generation’s response to a corporate marketing machine that doesn’t seem to understand it. “We realized that the majors were using an outdated model to communicate with an urban culture that changes daily,” Ford explains. This realization convinced the trio to use their own intelligence, connections and cultural expertise to become the missing link between the suites and the streets they so badly wanted to reach. They were out to become representatives for “the generation that can do everything.”
The cause of the Rebels had been identified.
"What is a rebel? A man who says no." – Albert Camus
Rebelutions faced resistance from its very inception two years ago.
First, it was their age. Getting big business to trust a company made up by guys they saw as lil’ niggas was no easy task. “They weren’t really tryin’ to listen to some young, rebellious kids,” Ford remembers. “We’d try to get accounts and it was always, ‘Y’all are 24, 25 years old, what do y’all know?’ Regardless of the grind we’d put in to get to that point or how dope our résumés were, they still saw us as a bunch of kids.”
The majors thought they had their urban marketing schemes under control, but Ford and his partners knew that the bigwigs didn’t understand the “new urban” and that Rebelutions’ marketing strategies were most effective at reaching the young, urban demographic – regardless of what entire corporations of naysayers believed.
“When [going straight to the majors] didn’t work, we had to lean on the people we knew,” recalls Joiner, the company’s networking extraordinaire. “We knew that we knew what we were doing, and I’d love to say that we were so good in the beginning that the work was just rollin’ in, but it didn’t happen like that. A lot of people we knew just showed love and gave us a shot.” In fact, one of Rebelutions’ earliest major projects came via a childhood friend of Joiner’s. “The Boost Mobile rep for this region just happened to be this cat I’ve known since kindergarten, so getting that account was kinda easy.
“But even though friends showed us love, we still had to bang the projects out well, ‘cause their name and reputation were on the line,” Joiner continues. “Needless to say, we killed ‘em.”
"The harder the conflict, the more glorious the triumph." – Thomas Paine
The work came slowly but surely. “We really had to pay our dues to prove our worth,” Ford explains. “We did a whole lotta free shit and a lot of strategic branding to get our name out there.”
Several local businesses benefited from and eventually partnered with Rebelutions, causing the company’s client list to gradually swell, their experience to increase and their worth to become more apparent. Teaming with companies like Visual Vinyl, Art, Beats and Lyrics, Bang-Bang Publicity and Vintage Imperial gave Rebelutions the additional arms, legs and minds necessary to fully, effectively and stylishly fulfill any obligations a client may require. Couple those resources with their unique Trend Intelligence program that uses an intimate understanding of current trends (and an almost clairvoyant ability to predict future ones) to effectively reach their clients’ intended audiences, and Rebelutions is poised to become a major force in the game. They regularly buck convention with their unorthodox and unpredictable marketing methods, and the majors are starting to catch on.
In only two years, they’ve already handled successful campaigns for some major names in and out of the entertainment sphere, including Def Jam, ESPN, truth.com, Hands On Atlanta and the TBS network who, with Tyler Perry, chose Rebelutions to promote House Of Payne. When the series premiered, Atlanta ended up with the largest viewership of any TV market in the country.
Coincidence? Perhaps. But it’s more likely that the high numbers were triggered by the fact that Rebelutions is creeping ever-closer to cornering the market on urban marketing – and, in true rebel fashion, they’re doing it their way.
“We know what works for this generation ‘cause we are this generation – we live and breathe this shit every day,” says Joiner. “I want Rebelutions to be an international voice for Hip-Hop culture; to squash stereotypes about Black people and about our generation in general, ‘cause we’re definitely gonna do some good in this world, like it or not.”
