Truant Recruits The Beardy Boyz to Help Lead the Charge on Reactive Content

Truant London – the rapidly growing and fiercely independent agency that boasts Pepsi, PizzaExpress and Virgin as part of its client roster – has scooped yet more new recruits, this time in the shape of creative team ‘The Beardy Boyz’ (aka Kostie Kontorravdis and Tom Kemp)

Reporting into Truant’s co-founders and ECDs, Simon Labbett and David Gamble, the Beardy Boyz will work across a broad range of projects spanning advertising, music and content, starting with Royal Caribbean, Pizza Express, Virgin and Pepsi.

Hailing from Analog Folk – where the team worked on major Unilever brands in between winning big pitches for behemoths including TikTok, Meta and Netflix – the pair have also previously worked as a creative team at Crispin Porter + Bogusky and Iris.

From getting people to air their dirty laundry in Surf’s Messy Moments campaign with Dani Dyer, to a sonic sampling experience for Marmite that genuinely hypnotises haters into becoming lovers, the Beardy Boyz specialise in wild and wonderful immersive digital and social content.

As well as bringing these skills to Truant and more widely bringing originality to ad land in general, the Beardy Boyz use their spare time for filmmaking, comedy writing and performing. Their immersive stage show The Inconvenience Store was described by critics as 'Argos on Acid' and featured in national newspapers.

As a duo who are passionate about comedy, the pair have previously worked in writers’ rooms with the likes of Judy Love and written, directed and performed with Joe Wilkinson on a live sketch piece for EE.

Truant’s co-founder and ECD, Simon Labbett, said of the team’s arrival: “They are part of a long list of people to join Truant in 2021, each helping us gear up to become even more reactive, exploring new and exciting ways of reaching audiences. 

Kostie and Tom bring a pedigree of talent in advertising and content, the latter being an area we are looking to expand. How can we be quicker and leaner, not making one big ad every few months for a client, but a few ads every day? With each one being even more culturally relevant than the last. For that we need people who have an insatiable drive to get on and make stuff, regardless of budgets or time.”

Kostie and Tom laid out why Truant is the right agency for them by explaining: “We feel that to truly go big, you gotta go small. Over the years, we’ve seen Truant’s work make big headlines, outside of advertising media and we want in. This place seems like a safe-space for irreverent ideas to thrive. We’ll take some of that too. It feels like much more than an ad agency here and we f***ing love that.”