Fire Kite launched out of Franklin, Tennessee, in late 2024 with an obsession borrowed from Ben Franklin and zero interest in safe work. By early 2025, they were the most awarded agency at the Nashville Addies. By 2026, they’d done it again — Best of Show two years running with a roster that spans a FinTech gold app, a nonprofit fighting the global water crisis and a financial services firm that planted a fake alien abduction insurance ad in the New York Times.
A pharaoh walks into a swimming pool
The streak started with Vaulted — a gold and silver investment app under the McElveen Financial Group umbrella. Founder and ECD Alex Goulart and his team noticed something obvious that no one in the category was saying: gold is celebrated everywhere in pop culture, yet every competitor was stuck talking about portfolio diversification and fear.
Fire Kite leaned all the way in. They resurrected King Tut as the brand’s spokesperson — played by Chris Guerra, an improv actor from Oddity Improv in Franklin who once upstaged the Denver Nuggets mascot at a game. The gold paint oxidizes on hot days (it turns green) and gets moldy in chlorinated pools. Worth it.
Free gold never happens — except now it does
The second year’s Best of Broadcast winner wrote itself from the brief: Vaulted was giving away $50 of free gold to new investors. The insight — free gold never happens, because it’s gold — became a spot starring a drenched King Tut poolside with a margarita, telling a swimmer, “Do you do private lessons?” That line won from a pile of outtakes. The whole campaign drove a 200% increase in signups and trade volume.
1-833-NO-PROBE
For McElveen Financial Group’s gold IRA product — a category so dry it could lose an audience mid-sentence — Fire Kite reframed the entire positioning as wealth insurance. The creative rabbit hole led them to real alien-abduction insurance policies sold in Florida, which became a 60-second spot and a print ad in the Wall Street Journal and the New York Times, with the headline: “Get alien-abduction insurance before they get you.”
Callers who dialed 1-833-NO-PROBE reached a voicemail from CEO David McElveen explaining that while the odds of a tractor beam were slim, the odds of your retirement getting tractor-beamed away were not. Some callers genuinely wanted the alien coverage. Most got redirected to a financial advisor.
Olympic gold that isn’t gold
Goulart’s team discovered that Olympic gold medals contain just six grams of actual gold — plated, not solid. Athletes at the pinnacle of their sport receive a trinket worth less than the silver medal. Vaulted is now offering $30,000 of real gold to every first-place Winter Games finisher. Lauren Williams — the first woman to medal in both the Summer and Winter Olympics and now a certified financial planner for athletes — has partnered on the initiative. The campaign landed in Parade and Complex, with more coverage coming.
Labor Day for people who can’t stop laboring
The work that took this year’s Best of Show came from charity: water — and it cost almost nothing. Goulart was thinking about Labor Day when the juxtaposition hit: Americans make easy plans while 703 million people walk hours for clean water with no day off. Fire Kite went from idea to finished piece in seven or eight days using existing footage from charity: water and street interviews recorded in Franklin’s Factory district.
No big shoot. No massive production budget. Just a pure idea — and it resonated enough to win Nashville’s top honor for the second consecutive year.
The founder-led advantage
Both of Fire Kite’s anchor clients are founder-led companies — McElveen by David McElveen (son of founder Don McElveen) and charity: water by Scott Harrison. Goulart says the dynamic changes everything: “I don’t have to say ‘hey, let’s do something audacious.’ They’re already allergic to the safe option. They want to feel safe about one thing — that they’ve got a team that can guide them into uncharted waters.”
That trust has let a small indie in Tennessee build four integrated campaigns in a single year — a pace Goulart says he never hit at larger shops where six months of work could die in a meeting.
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