The world looked different in 2018. TikTok was still Musical.ly, Meta was still Facebook, oh, and we also weren’t living through a global pandemic. And it was then that the three founding members of what would become Tilt had the beginning of an idea that many said couldn’t and should’t be tried: bring creative and production together under one roof.

And it wasn’t like they had time to figure it out first. The teams merged and hit the ground running with Walmart and Audi as clients, which wasn’t exactly low-profile. But having worked together before, they were able to seamlessly kick off a new chapter and even grow the business in the process.

In those first two years, what had once been just the seed of an idea quickly grew into something much larger. Before they knew it, others like Capital One came on board. Things were off and running.

…and then 2020 happened.

While most of the industry spent the beginning weeks of the pandemic keeping up with brands’ shrinking marketing budgets and agency layoffs, the Tilt team was busy figuring out how to keep 100% of staff employed, as long as possible, by whatever means possible. Everyone – from entry-level to executive – learned to stretch skill sets in ways that might have sounded unrealistic in 2018, but were the only path forward in 2020. “That challenge revealed talents we didn’t know we had,” said CEO and Founder Ron Carey.

Survival may have been the initial mindset, but the experience proved to be much more robust and defining. It reinforced that agility and curiosity are central parts of Tilt’s DNA. It became codified as part of a mindset: one where hybrids are the norm, not the exception. It paved a path for the discovery of the new way of creating work that later helped bring in projects from Disney and HP, to name a few.

In 2022, this brings Tilt more complexity in client projects, a deeper understanding of the value that strategy and intelligence can bear, and an overarching emphasis on improving both the product and the process even if that means shaking things up every now and then. These lessons have ushered in a new set of capabilities for the agency that reach beyond advertising, including TV show and documentary film production.

They may not have known it then. But looking back on the last 4 years, it’s clear that from the very beginning Tilt was built to evolve. As Carey puts it, “Our goal is to always be better than we were the day before.”

Here’s to what’s next.