CHESHIRE, CT, February 14, 2024: Rebel Interactive Group, a boundary-pushing marketing agency serving clients for over ten years, is proud to announce its evolution into the Rebellion Group – a restructuring that brings new expertise-focused brands and comprehensive services together under one portfolio to better support the needs of today’s clients.
“A single source for brand and business solutions, Rebellion Group is a big-brained, brief-breaking, business-building partnership of boutiques,” said Chief Strategy Officer BJ Kito. “Our structure is designed to cater to clients of varying sizes providing strategic, creative, and technological services at the scale and depth that meets the client’s needs, including access to proprietary AI technologies, automation, and integrations.”
With this shift comes the formation of two new entities – Group Rebel (world-class creative), and Group 535 (cutting-edge technology and Saas) – and the relaunch of Group Virtuoso (new-school business strategy). The entities are purposefully structured and associated to ensure clients receive high-impact, efficient work while expanding our footprint to enable new leaders to emerge and reduce the risk of trends, technologies, and economics impacting specific services.
“This evolution is something I’ve been thinking about for quite some time. I purposefully set out to assemble the right talent and leadership in the respective disciplines to lead the various Groups,” said Bryn Tindall, Founder & CEO of the Rebellion Group. “With these changes, we’re able to be a bold, sophisticated AOR for our Enterprise brands and also have the infrastructure to continue to support the SMBs that have played a crucial role in our growth and for whom I’ll always have an entrepreneurial soft spot.”
Virtuoso, an outcome-obsessed strategic business consultancy, leverages data and insights to help brands grow boldly against the norm. With an unrivaled combination of business acumen and societal pattern recognition, Virtuoso consultants catalyze creative models to accelerate investment and market expansion. First launched before COVID, the new Virtuoso has been redefined by BJ Kito as he joins Tindall as Co-Founder and equal Partner while serving as Virtuoso’s CEO in addition to his continued Chief Strategy Officer role of the Rebellion Group. Kito sees this venture as the foundational data-driven insights of Accenture mashed up with Mad Ave ideas, all set to the beat of old-school hip hop.
With a combined strategic and creative focus, Kito and Chief Creative Officer James Dowd are set to lead Group Rebel, positioning it to be the state’s premier creative studio, providing conceptual ideas, brand identity development, creative campaigns, and content production. Maintaining the decade-old Rebel name, this creative brand studio is poised to be even more of a provocateur in creating disruptive stories for brands. Their entire focus is making businesses succeed by waking up and standing out.
535, a performance-driven, skunkworks-style lab, will be led by Chief Operating Officer Bryan Czajkowski. 535 was purpose-built to integrate with businesses at all stages of maturity. We contextualize the micro and macro trends, create strategies, and launch solutions that fuel growth today while establishing a trajectory toward a more expansive future reality. From innovative growth marketing and media amplification to AI and Web3 SaaS products, 535 constantly tests its assumptions and work, seeking to change the game at every opportunity.
This evolution has also allowed for the appointment of new leadership within each brand and the elevation of existing leaders, including Steve McLoughlin, VP of Strategic Marketing and Impact, who has joined the five-member Executive Leadership team of Rebellion Group, which will serve as the centralized operations point for Client Service, Project Management, Strategy and Activation.
Additionally, Rebellion Group appoints Tim Conroy, Sam Manz, Connor Millican, Sarah Riedel, Nate Szymanski, and Gail Zaharek to join Katy McGrath, Melissa Nardiello, Joe Lane, Mark Anderson, and Sam Barrett in senior leadership roles. Dr. Christopher Nocera, a data engineer, scientist, socio-cognitive behavioral psychologist, and medical doctor has also joined the Rebellion as its Chief Data Scientist and newly created AI team. Creative leaders Justin Girard, Corey Hutchinson, and Scott Serencha will advance the vision for Group Rebel. Meanwhile, Group 535 sees David Givens welcome Kyle Sheldon to its senior leadership, and Virtuoso welcomes Dr. Nocera and Hannah Lafontaine to its senior leadership.
Fueling the launch of the Rebellion Group is the expansion of its engagement with Cornell University’s College of Engineering, adding to the Cornell SC Johnson College of Business relationship. Virtuoso has been tapped to bring TV’s Wicked Tuna from screen to counter, launching a licensed seafood brand. Additionally, it’s supporting the design and development of a financial literacy program in collaboration with the NFL Hall of Fame Village, developing an inaugural Halftime Hall of Fame enshrinement featuring Usher, as well as the ongoing support of his album promotion in collaboration with his new record label, Gamma, Coherence Agency, and others. Rebel is producing new content for and dreaming up campaigns for CT’s RIPE Bar Juice as it grows nationwide. The 535 team is launching two proprietary AI-powered tools in Geniee and Shrman.
“With brands increasingly unable to keep pace with changing technology and marketing solutions looking more and more routine and one-size-fits-all, we felt it was time for a Rebellion,” said Kito. “We’ve noticed a yearning for marketing partners who more deeply understand external business factors and simultaneously dig deep into a business or brand to reveal previously unknown insights. Clients crave an agency partner who not only gets them but gets to work rather than just throwing unactionable data at them and failing to provide a roadmap for results. This shift toward the Rebellion Group was meant to get ahead of all others, and it has already resonated with the marketplace.”