Ironically, Fast Company reports that Zappos’ best customers are the ones who return the most merchandise. Just goes to show the power of great customer service.

If you’d like to see all of the creative in the new Zappos campaign, including the other TV spots, digital and print, it’s all posted on this Mullen landing page.  We’d love to hear your thoughts.

This is the second of three :30′s in the Zappos campaign. Another spot called Jesse broke last week. The reviews so far are good. Please let us know what you think.

There is one Zappos TV spot in the market so far. Many more creative pieces to follow. Thanks, as always, to the awesome customer service team at Zappos for the inspiration.

We’ll keep sharing new creative from the campaign as it breaks. There’s more TV, print, online, social and even airport bins to follow. Please have a look at Stuart Elliott’s column in the NY Times if you want to know more about the campaign.

There are many people to acknowledge for their contributions. Please take a look at the full list of credits on Mullen’s YouTube channel. Special thanks to Aaron Duffy (same guy who directed Google’s Parisian Love) and Special Guest for his directorial and their production work.  Special thanks also to puppeteer Randy Carfagno for making the Zappets. Biggest thanks of all to the incredibly nice employees of Zappos who inspired this work.

This work was inspired by the amazingly unique culture and genuinely happy customer service we discovered at Zappos when pitching their business in a wide-open review last summer.

Please check back next week to see the final creative.

Today we announce that Kumon selected Mullen’s North Carolina office as North American agency-of-record following a competitive review that began with 13 agencies. Mullen will handle advertising, media, PR, CRM, direct, digital and social media marketing. New creative is expected to launch in early 2010.

For those who may not know, Kumon is the world’s largest after-school education company. Their learning method uses a systematic individualized approach that helps children develop a solid command of math and reading skills. Through daily practice and mastery of materials, students increase confidence, improve concentration, and develop better study skills. Kumon has 26,000 Kumon Centers in 46 countries and more than four million students studying worldwide.

“Mullen demonstrated a clear understanding of Kumon North America, where we are currently, where we want to go and a compelling roadmap to help us get there,” said Jim Coakley, Branding Leader at Kumon.

“Partnering with Kumon is a great opportunity for us to help a company develop lifelong learning skills in children,” said John Fitzgerald, president of Mullen North Carolina. “It was easy for us to pour our hearts and souls into this worthy business.”

Dinesh Gopinath

Mullen announced today that Dinesh Gopinath, Ph.D., has joined the agency as executive vice president, director of strategic analytics. Gopinath, who was selected after a review of 35 candidates, will lead the agency’s analytics practice, which plays a key role in modeling, predicting and optimizing communications strategies across a wide range of client businesses. Gopinath comes to Mullen from ChoiceStream, Inc. in Cambridge, Mass., where he was chief solutions officer and active in using data for precision communications targeting and more personalized forms of communications. He has developed 1-to-1 personalization technology for clients including Zappos, Overstock, Borders, MTV, Yahoo! and AOL.

“In the hiring of Dinesh, we’re looking to further enhance our competitive advantage in gleaning data-driven insight,” said Stephen Hahn-Griffiths, chief strategy officer at Mullen. “Dinesh will provide an added edge to our precision targeting capabilities – in customer relationship management, digital, social media and beyond. He is a strategic and data analytics thought leader.”

“I‘m excited to join Mullen, focusing on the ROI of marketing and advertising while striking the right balance between short-term and long-term client business goals,” said Gopinath. “The timing is perfect,” Gopinath added. “The advertising industry is at a strategic inflection point dealing with the complexities of audience fragmentation, media proliferation, brand multiplicity, emergence of new technologies and the coalescence of advertising, marketing and selling.”

Gopinath had been with ChoiceStream since 2002, and some of his recent work there was in the development of personalized advertising and recommendation technology designed for so-called “advanced-TV” platforms. Previously, he was a principal with Oliver Wyman (formerly Mercer Management Consulting) and was at US West Advanced Technologies (Qwest).

Gopinath has a Ph.D. and an M.S. degree from MIT. His undergraduate studies were at the Indian Institute of Technology in Madras, India.

Zappos Clients and Mullen Pitch Team at Agency Boston office

It’s true. Mullen won Zappos. We found out late Thursday afternoon and word traveled fast. Adweek and Ad Age were all over it.

Ad Age published a follow-up story on Monday noting that culture was key in this review.

This was a long time coming. Stephen Larkin, our new business guy, has been reaching out to Zappos for over a year. Our PR team had great meetings with Zappos earlier in the year.  Then the ad pitch started in June and became the biggest agency shootout of the year with more than 100 shops bidding, 22 moving to round-two and three going to the finals.

Looks like we won based on best idea, culture (which is huge @ Zappos), partnership and a commitment to analytics and accountability. Alex Leikikh, our new director of account service, and Mark Wenneker, our new executive creative director, led the charge, with help from dozens of agency people who made it happen.

Zappos is a great brand with a ton of momentum and it’s great to be working with them.

It’s a happy day @ Mullen.