The same hire it picked up when it opened an office at the beach has led a longtime Richmond ad firm to expand once again.

The King Agency has opened an office in Atlanta, marking its first expansion outside Virginia after establishing a presence in Virginia Beach five years ago.

Founder Dave King said the move was prompted by the relocation of the agency’s vice president, Meggan Adams, who moved to Atlanta when her husband’s job took them there in 2021 and has been working remotely since.

Meggan Adams

It was Adams whom King hired when the agency expanded to the beach after picking up a client there, First Team Auto Group. Adams, who started as an account executive and now serves as director of client services, had been working in the dealership group’s offices until the agency’s outpost opened at Virginia Beach’s Town Center.

King said Adams’ move to Atlanta presented an opportunity for the 11-person agency to grow.

“We thought that would be a good move for us as well, that we could get ourselves into a bigger market and see what we can do down there,” King said.

He said he’s hired a second employee to work with Adams in the Atlanta office at The Battery Atlanta shopping complex. He said one employee remains at the Virginia Beach office, while the rest of the agency’s staff is based at its Richmond headquarters at 3 N. Lombardy St.

King said the agency is aiming to grow the Atlanta office as they’d started to do with the Virginia Beach outpost before the pandemic slowed that effort.

“Ideally we’re trying to get it to where it’s self-sustaining,” he said of the Atlanta office. “Right now, we’ve got all the creative services up here in Richmond and account services down there. We’re going to try to grow it to where we can grow our headcount down there and have the two offices work together.”

The King Agency’s building at 3 N. Lombardy St. (Photo courtesy King Agency)

King said the Atlanta office will be shaped by the business it picks up and is running a campaign in that market. He said the agency is targeting the automotive, healthcare and mechanical sectors, as well as residential services such as HVAC, window siding and home repairs.

“We’ll see what the needs are and where we have to put people with different strengths,” he said. “These days it’s so much easier to work from a distance than it was even five years ago. It’s been going very well the past few years from a distance, so we decided it was really time to make a run at it.”

In Virginia, King’s clients include Virginia Family Dentistry, for which it recently released a campaign to promote the Central Virginia practice’s 50th anniversary. Other clients include an event venue group in Norfolk called SevenVenues and First Team Auto’s five dealerships in Hampton Roads, where he said the agency will maintain its presence.

“Virginia Beach is still a place we really like,” King said. “We were really starting to get some traction and making inroads into the area right before COVID hit. That sort of put the brakes on everything. Hopefully we can get back to growing that one as we get a foothold more in Atlanta.”

The expansion comes on the heels of a notable year for the 27-year-old agency King founded in 1997. It took two best-in-show awards at the Advertising Club of Richmond’s 2023 Richmond Show for the Netflix-themed invitations it designed for a party to celebrate its 25th anniversary.

The King Agency’s expansion comes a year after a Richmond peer, Brand Federation, opened a second office in New York. Brand Federation is led by Kelly O’Keefe, whom King worked for as creative director at his namesake O’Keefe Marketing firm before launching his own agency.