Nothing gets our creative minds going like a good business problem. While we love creating a pithy line or an eye-catching campaign, what really inspires us is being “invited to the table,” asking all the right (and tough) questions, then going to work, until we find that elusive, thoughtful creative solution that makes perfect business sense. Maybe it’s about getting sales reps in the door. Or finding a way to engage a hard-to-crack audience. Or, maybe it’s something that’s multi-faceted and a bit ethereal. At Metal, we approach every problem and project with the left and right sides of our brains working in concert. After all, creative thinking elicits smart strategy—and smart strategy inspires great creative.

Services & Industries

Metal Creative has been a virtual agency since before virtual agencies were a thing. In 2001, just as the dot com bubble burst, Marilé (pronounced Mare-ih-lay) Borden left the big agency world and began her career as a freelance Creative Director. She quickly discovered that there were an awful lot of companies who needed to fill the pipeline, but no longer had the budget to support big agency fees. Marilé also knew a lot of really talented folks who, like her, were setting out on an independent path. She realized that if she could assemble the freelance talent and package it up for her clients, she might just have a new kind of agency: one with no office space, no overhead and no allegiance to the status quo. She decided to call it Metal. The “M” is for Marilé, our Principal and Creative Director—and the “et al” is for the great network of talent that has helped us deliver exceptional, full-service marketing communications for two decades.

The right-sized team for any project.