Dave & Buster's Fires Its Agencies After 13 Straight Quarters of Losing Customers
After more than three years of declining sales, Dave & Buster's handed its marketing to two new agencies of record and told them to get people back through the door.
Dave & Buster's has hired GUT as its creative agency of record and Mediaplus as its media agency of record, following a competitive pitch that also included incumbent shops Deloitte Digital and DentsuX. The review comes after 13 consecutive quarters of declining same-store sales, a stretch long enough that "we need a new agency" stopped being an overreaction and started being table stakes.
The company has framed the switch as the start of "the next chapter of growth marketing," language that signals less interest in another one-off campaign and more interest in a full repositioning of what a trip to Dave & Buster's is supposed to feel like in a world where people have endless cheaper ways to be entertained. Handing both creative and media to new shops at once, rather than staggering the reviews, suggests urgency at the top: this is not a brand tweaking its media mix, it is one trying to reverse a multi-year slide before it becomes permanent.
Whether GUT and Mediaplus can actually get more families and twentysomethings back into the arcade-and-wings business is a separate question from whether the agency switch itself signals seriousness. It does. Now the work has to follow.
Kyle Duford, Founder & Editor, BRNDWIRE. More from Kyle →
