There’s a framed Oreo cookie on the shelf behind Roberto Salas, co-founder of Young Hero. A gift from his longtime copywriter partner Nick, it commemorates the moment that launched a thousand thought pieces — the “Dunk in the Dark” tweet during the 2013 Super Bowl blackout.
Salas was there. Nick was there. So were Adam Glu and Doug Nuzzo at 360i. “I literally found the file the other day on my hard drive,” Salas says. “There’s a mistake in the actual file — the copy and the logo were blue, and I quickly did a color overlay. It was so fast that it’s like 96% white. You can see a little bit of the blue.”
That scrappy, culture-first instinct became the DNA of Young Hero, which Salas founded eight years ago with Nick and Zoe out of Williamsburg, New York. Today they work with brands like Ro, Lululemon and Hero Bread — assembling bespoke teams through a casting model that matches each brief with collaborators who’ve lived the experience they’re trying to reach.
From Milk Studios to a creator-led agency
Young Hero’s origin story starts at Milk Studios in 2017, where Salas and Zoe were collaborating with creators on cultural events, fashion and everything outside traditional advertising. They noticed something: creators wanted to work with brands, but brands only saw them as a media buy — a pay-for-play asset to spread the word about a product.
Meanwhile, Nick was at 72andSunny seeing the same tensions from the agency side. “We started to brainstorm — if there was an agency, how would it look?” Salas says. The answer was creator-led, and it’s stayed that way for eight years.
What Young Hero is known for: casting teams, not staffing them
The agency’s defining move is how they assemble teams. For every brief, Young Hero casts collaborators — strategists, creators, designers — who reflect the audience they’re trying to reach. When Lululemon came to them for their pride campaign in 2023, the entire team reflected the LGBTQ+ community.
“We do this on every single brief,” Salas says. “Whether it’s FinTech, sports, whatever — we bring people who have lived experiences with the audience into the brainstorm room.”
This extends to production. Directors and creators are embedded in the creative development process from the start. By the time they hit pre-production, the creative team and production team have been working in sync. “Our EPs are already telling us what we can and can’t do,” Salas says. “It basically narrows down the pre-production phase.”
3 things Young Hero does differently
First — the creator-led approach to development, using cultural insights to embed authenticity into scripts, concepts and outputs. Second — seamless production integration, where directors and creators are part of the creative process from day one, not handed a finished script. Third — direct-to-founder access. Salas and Nick are still writers and art directors. They’re in the Figmas, on the brainstorms and in the work.
“Clients love that you get access direct to founder,” Salas says. “Nick and I are still writer-art directors, even though we’re leading the business.”
Independence keeps the vision pure
For Salas, independence is straightforward: it keeps the agency creative-first. No reporting obligations. No compromise on who gets hired or how briefs get answered. “It allows the agency to be creative first,” he says. “And I think that’s why a lot of our collaborators, freelancers and full-time team love working with us.”
The freedom to explore enables the thinking. The thinking enables the creativity. The creativity enables the results. That’s the professional broadcast segue, as the show’s host might say.
Why brands pick Young Hero
Brands come for the founder access and the casting model. With Nick’s five years at 72andSunny and Salas’s time at RGA and 360i/Ogilvy, the network runs deep enough to scale without the overhead of a large staff.
What they call “generosity boards” — unsolicited creative ideas packaged and sent to brands they admire — has become a calling card. It’s not a pitch. It’s a handshake. “We create almost like an award idea and a one-pager,” Salas says. “We sometimes outreach people just to say hello.”
Why young talent grows fast here
At RGA, Salas was put in one group and worked on one client for a year and a half. At Young Hero, the client roster is diverse enough that designers and strategists touch different industries every month.
The agency also gives young creatives access to creators — which is where the magic compounds. One of their full-time designers, Corey, started collaborating with musicians on Spotify visualizers and album covers. “It allows us to try things that maybe aren’t proper for a brand project,” Salas says. “There’s a very broad range of artfulness you can bring.”
Weirdos when it’s weird, misfits when it’s bold
Salas won’t pick one. The Hero Bread campaign — a project for a carbless bread brand — was a weirdo moment. The Ro work with Charles Barkley, where Barkley was in the room co-writing scripts with Nick and director Beatty — that’s misfit energy.
“Charles was right there with us writing the scripts,” Salas says. “There’s a lot of references you can write in his tone, but you need to riff with him.” The resulting GLP-1 campaigns for Ro broke stigma with humor, and the cutouts from one of their ads made it onto the Inside the NBA segment.
Dear Dude Wipes (and Morgan Flatley): hello from Williamsburg
Salas shouts out Riley, the founder of Dude Wipes, whose Expo West booth was “the coolest by far.” Young Hero even sent them a generosity board — just to say hello.
The other shoutout has roots. McDonald’s was Salas’s first client at ALMA DDB back in 2006, working on Happy Meal campaigns. Now, calling in from Ecuador with his family, he’s been ordering McDonald’s with localized menu items — tostones with egg McMuffin and Ecuadorian sausage. Morgan Flatley, global CMO at McDonald’s, gets the nod. Some connections never fade.
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