Rocket Companies has chosen Mirimar as its creative agency of record as it moves forward with an ambitious new marketing plan under group CMO Jonathan Mildenhall.
“I have a very, very clear ambition, and that is to make Rocket one of America’s most culturally significant brands over the next five years,” Mildenhall told ADWEEK.
Mirimar will be responsible for developing Rocket’s multiyear core creative idea that will pull together all of the Rocket brands. The agency has already been working with Rocket for the past few months, helping craft that long-term creative platform.
“We’re united in our ambition to create one of America’s most culturally significant brands. Mirimar is inspired by and fully invested in this Rocket partnership and making iconic work together for years to come,” co-founder and CCO John McKelvey told ADWEEK.
Mirimar has done lauded Super Bowl work for Klarna, Expensify, Priceline and Gopuff. Details of the Rocket Companies deal were not disclosed, but COMvergence estimates the 2023 measured media spend for Rocket Mortgage at $184 million.
How Mirimar was chosen
Rocket Mortgage, one of the 14 companies under the Rocket Companies umbrella, has had advertising success in the past, its Super Bowl ads topping the USA Today Ad Meter two years in a row with smart and entertaining work by Highdive.
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But Mildenhall, who arrived at Rocket at the top of the year, has had plenty of success as well. Before coming to the company as its first group CMO, he helped launch the “Open Happiness” campaign for Coca-Cola, and the “Never a Stranger” campaign for Airbnb, a company whose $1 billion valuation jumped to $31 billion during his tenure as CMO. In 2018, he co-founded TwentyFirstCenturyBrand, a branding and marketing consultancy, where he came across Varun Krishna, now CEO for Rocket Companies, who eventually brought in Mildenhall for the CMO role.
The partnership with Mirimar came about not through a protracted pitch process, but a relationship Mildenhall had with the agency previously at TwentyFirstCenturyBrand.
“Some of the most responsible CMOs are constantly running pitch processes in their mind as they’re meeting different advertising agencies, creative agencies, influencer agencies,” said Mildenhall, adding that he had come across Mirimar when the agency worked with the TwentyFirstCenturyBrand roster of clients and wanted to work with them when he got to Rocket.
