May 28, 2025 • 47 mins
Ross Martin has built a career on challenging norms and delivering results—and today, he’s helping the world’s biggest brands do the same. As President and Co-founder of Known, he’s fusing creativity with science to reimagine how marketers connect with culture, cut through noise, and stop wasting money on outdated thinking. This episode unpacks how Ross is reshaping the marketing playbook and proving that brains reign over brawn — one bold, data-backed idea at a time.
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Speaker 1 (00:00):
Good Company is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
I think we set out and we said, we're just
going to make better marketing, and we quickly realized we're
also just trying to make marketing better. It feels like
now every day more and more when you look at
the issues that still plague our industry, the lack of trust,
the lack of precision, the amount of waste. We can
do better than this, and the fact that our industry
(00:26):
somehow has become among the most wasteful in American history
is a travesty. It's also a massive opportunity for a
company like Known, which really comes from a world of
data science and AI and prediction and precision.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
I'm Michael Casson, and this is Good Company. Together we'll
explore the dynamic intersection of media, marketing, entertainment, sports and technology.
I'll be joined by visionaries, pioneers, and yes, even a
couple of disruptors for candid conversations as we break down
how these masters of ingenuity are shaping the future of business,
culture and everything in between. My bet is you'll pick
(01:11):
up a lessen or two along the way. As I
like to say, it's all good. I want to welcome
everybody to good company. Today, I've got a guest who
doesn't just predict where marketing is going. He helps build
the road to get there. Ross Martin, president and co
founder of Known, is the guy brand's call when they
need to shake things up, think differently, and frankly, stop
(01:34):
wasting money on bad ideas. He's a master at blending
creativity with hard data, proving that storytelling and science aren't adversaries.
They're the ultimate power couple. From shaking up the agency
world to executive producing award winning projects to redefining how
brands connect with culture, Ross is here to help us
all think outside the box. Get ready for a conversation
(01:57):
that's as sharp as it is insightful. Because and Ross speaks,
we all lean it before we dive in. Congratulations are
in order, Ross. I know that recently None celebrated its
five year anniversary in February of twenty twenty five. That's
quite a milestone. Mazel Tough, Thank you, Michael. February fifth.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Heretofore known as Known day we founded the company twenty
twenty February fifth, And as you know, I think our
company's pretty good at predicting what will happen in culture
and in media, but predicting a global pandemic was really
not something we were capable of doing. So three weeks
after we launched the business, we were all back home
(02:40):
in our spare bedrooms and closets, building a company and
integrating our business. And now I'm happy to say we're
more than two times the size we were back then
across every metric, and finally we get to be together
every day in person, and the pandemic's over.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Well that's a good thing. So Ross, I want to
take us back to when I first met you. You
were scratching. You were scratching where it itched in the market.
You launched a division back in the day at Viacom
called Scratch, And the way we met was I was
hiring somebody who worked for you, and I needed a reference,
and I also needed kind of your blessing. And that
(03:17):
young man was Robbie Salter, who has a very special
place in my heart always. He was my second chief
of Stuff, and I'm proud to say that I still
and partners with Robbie and wish him great success with
Jupiter his product. But that's how we first met.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
I'm also an investor in Jupiter thanks to you, and
thanks to both of us, but more thanks thanks to
Robbie and his partner Ross Goodheart and their hard work.
Jupiter just launched in over a thousand target size. Saw
that let's give a shout out for our Jupiter friends.
Fifty to seventy five percent of human beings on planet
(03:54):
Earth get dandruff, and more than half of those people
are women. There hasn't been this kind of disruption in
the dandriff and dry scalp space in a very long time.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
So I think we made a good bet. Michael. Well,
there you go, and there's another example of scratching where
it itches. Oh my god, that's good. You know I
found that moment there Ross, I grabbed it. But seriously,
let's go back a bit. When I described scratch, I
was saying it was a kind of in house the
way I would describe an in house agency at aar
(04:24):
amount back in the day, or by a combna that
would be a creative source for your clients and brands,
that would be advertising on your properties on cable and broadcast,
et cetera, or wherever. And you know you were a
creative resource internally. But give me a little history, because
that is so relevant today in terms of content creation.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
I think Michael Scratch was one of the very first
in house agencies or consultancies at any company.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
At the time, there really weren't any, and I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
I didn't have the language that you just used back
then to describe bit Now it makes more sense almost
than it did back then. But I think my entire
career I've been guilty of using things, capabilities, tools, companies,
jobs in ways that they weren't necessarily designed to be used.
And that was very true about my time at the
(05:17):
Artist formerly known as Viacom now Paramount. You know, I
just believe you should never read your job description after
your first day. You get there and you kick open
the door and you look around and you go, how
can I add as much value as possible?
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Yes, for sure, Ross, But I want to push back
on that a little because one of the things that
I've really not stumbled on. It was a wonderful question
that was asked at the Ford CMO summit a couple
of years ago. I was being interviewed and Seth Matlins
asked me a question which has really continued to resonate
in the market and particularly with me. Interacting with chief
(05:54):
marketing officers as frequently as we both do, I think
it's worthy of a conversation here. The question I was
asked was, Michael, what does the CEO not know about
the role of the CMO? And I thought that was
a very provocative question, and I thought it took me
back to basics, which was job description. And that's why
(06:16):
I digress, because job description is important because the thing
I always say is, if you write a job description
and you give somebody responsibility, the greatest cause of heart
attacks and ulcers in business is responsibility without authority. And
so if you're going to write a job description that says,
in the case of a chief marketing officer, and again
(06:38):
we interact with these people all the time, there are
bread and butter. If somebody has got the title of
Chief Marketing and Growth Officer, which happens frequently, or Chief
Marketing and Product office, or a Chief marketing Communications officer,
read the job description because if you have the title,
you better make sure the person has the levers to
pull it so they only push back I have is
(07:00):
it's fair. Job description should be a guy. It shouldn't
be the end. It should be fair. Yeah, yeah, it's
totally fair.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
And I think you know, we both know a whole
bunch of cmos who are really good at being the
CMO of themselves internally and externally right, who.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Manage their leadership brands very very well.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
And we also know cmos who are horrible at that
but might be really good cmos.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
I totally hear you.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
If we look back at what I was doing, and
I think I had three or four bodies of work
as I think about it, over my thirteen years at Paramount,
the one you're describing with scratch was probably the most
me in that I looked around and I said, look,
there's all these things that our company is just great at,
(07:46):
like design, research, consumer intelligence, brand strategy, hiring and empowering
young people to do the best work of their lives,
content creation. If you looked across the portfolio of brands
and business is inside what was then Viacom, you have
Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, BET, Paramount, the studio. And I
(08:08):
felt that we were not leveraging these capabilities in the
most commercially successful ways. If you're really good at these things,
why can't you make them available to clients on the outside.
So The biggest breakthrough really was General Motors and doing
(08:29):
a deal with Mark Royce, who's still one of the
great leaders of General Motors, and they were coming out
of bankruptcy and there were all these things that the
Viacom networks were just really good at, and those were
things that GM needed to get better at, and so
we started to make capabilities that we took for granted
(08:49):
inside our company available almost in a consulting capacity.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
As opposed to just selling them thirty second spots.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Right, And they to do that deal to get access
to our real core capabilities, they had to make a
massive ad commitment as well.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
Absolutely, but that's hard. That's commerce.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
I think there's so much more knowable in twenty twenty
five than we could see, know and understand as marketers
just a year or two or three ago. And I
think we set out and we said, we're just going
to make better marketing, and we quickly realized we're also
just trying to make marketing better because, as you know, Michael,
(09:28):
marketing could be so much better, and we're watching.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
That play out.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
It feels like now every day more and more when
you look at the issues that still plague our industry,
the lack of trust, the lack of precision, the amount
of waste. We can do better than this, and the
fact that our industry somehow has become among the most
wasteful in American history is a travesty. It's also a
(09:55):
massive opportunity for a company like Known, which really comes
from a world of to science and AI and prediction
and precision well exactly, and as you bring together innovation
and AI and look at workflows and things of that sort,
the opportunities are massive.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
This is, as far as I'm concerned, and I'm old
this is one of the most important inflection points in
my career. And I would certainly submit that I started
my previous company around the time of the dot com
explosion and implosion, and that was clearly an inflection point.
(10:34):
As we kitted around back in the day and talked
about the interweb, that moment was an inflection point. We
are at a I think even more important inflection point
now because the stakes are higher. I came up with
a couple of words, and people will get tired of
hearing them, but they actually still resonate, and you've used
(10:56):
them already several times. I called them my t's and
c if you remember that Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where
they were trying to decide who the middler was at
the dinner party, I kind of think that's my role.
You're a great middle you're a great medal, and so
if that's the case, then I better know what the
hell I'm going to talk about. So I wrote down
(11:16):
a bunch of words as thought starters, and I'm going
to just play them for you. The tea words trust, transparency,
you were to use both of those talent clearly, technology duh,
and transformation. I don't know a company that isn't focused
in some way, shape or form on trust, transparency, talent, technology,
(11:40):
and transformation, either with a big TA or a small T.
The s words content, commerce, culture, creativity, community, and curation.
If I were to describe known even the recent announcement
you made about where you saw the waste in media
spend and we can talk about that, I'd love to.
(12:01):
You're building the muscle in trust and transparency. We can
be transparent about this. We can show you how you
can regain trust in how your money is being spent.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
I don't understand why those things are not table stakes.
I don't understand why it even has to come up
in a conversation like this.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
It's absurd.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Like we're living in a world right now where for
the last thirty plus years, even the most sophisticated marketers
have had almost no alternative, no choice but to accept
the fact that they're working with agencies that are taking
agency but not giving them agency.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
Well, I agree with that, Ross, And what I will
say is it likens for me. And I want to
avoid any political overtone to what I'm about to say,
but I'm going to give you a quote Ross that
has to do with something that will be much more
severe than ratings and waste and spending. But it was
a quote from an essayist, a scholar in the thirties
(13:01):
in Germany. And what this person said about the political
So this is a political statement, but it applies brilliantly
to what you just said. It was describing the moment
in Germany in the thirties, and he said, a country
is not merely what it does dot dot dot, it's
what it tolerates. A market isn't what just what it does,
(13:25):
is what it tolerates. We've as marketers broadly, have tolerated
things that we should know are intolerable, and I agree
with you. Why the hell are we having this conversation
in twenty twenty five, when one of the great promises
of the Internet was I wouldn't have to pretend I
didn't know what happened to fifty percent of my advertising spend.
(13:48):
I would be able to know. I would finally have
the holy grail, I could finally know.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
The same conference you mentioned earlier, the forb CMO conference,
Seth Mattlins. He lobbed the ball to me on stage
only six months ago and said, what's going on out there?
Speaker 3 (14:04):
And I said, what's going on out there?
Speaker 2 (14:06):
I said, why don't you use There's two hundred cmos
in the audience, as you know, and they're the best
cmos in the world. I said, everybody in this audience,
raise your hand if you remember the last time your
agency told you you've spent enough, you don't need to
spend any more. In fact, I think we could spend
a little less and still beat the goal. Nobody could
say that now, I said, raise your hand if the
(14:28):
platforms you're buying on which are grading their own homework,
ever told you to spend less or you've hit your threshold.
The more you spend, it's just getting wasted again. Nobody,
So I said, look to the marketers in the room
and the cmos that are listening to this. It's not
your fault that this is happening. But you all share
mostly the same affliction, which is you all have FOFO.
(14:51):
You got FOFO fear of finding out. And all we're
doing right now is peeling that back and shedding some
light on what's actually happened here. And when you look
in the daylight at what's going on, and you look
at the tens of millions, in some cases hundreds of
millions of dollars that are being wasted, it's not even
about the money. It's to your point, it's about trust
(15:14):
and transparency.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
And then, by the way, as my friend Alan Grubin,
who's a very famous lawyer in the entertainment and corporate world,
famously says, it's not about the money. It's about the money.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
It's about the money. But you also said two other
the next two t's on your list talent and technology.
That's how we built our business. I mean, we have
a proprietary technology here called Skeptic, and it wins lots
of awards, and it provides a very awesome competitive advantage
to our team. It's why we're growing so quickly, and
it's why our clients are seeing the kind of results
(15:47):
they're seeing. Is because Skeptic is something we've been building
for more than twenty years. And the thing about Skeptic
is it's like a Digita called it an iron Man
suit of data and creativity, and it does feel to
us when you're in you're at known working in our
operating system, it does feel like you're stepping into an
iron Man suit and there's there's new buttons on it
(16:08):
every week.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Good company will be right back after the break. I've
got the pleasure of chatting with you today, But I've
also known your partner and co founder, Kurrent for twenty
(16:31):
plus years. When I met him the first time in
the halls at Viacom, he was the nerd, you know,
the data guy, and you know, kind of a mysterious
data guy to boot and you know, hulking, and in
a good way I adore, but you know, kind of
hulking and you know, very secretive and black box kind
(16:52):
of and and so to me, the two of you
coming together is a little bit of country and a
little bit of rock and roll. I mean it's the
perfect blend of art science. I appreciate you saying that.
Although I think you have science in your art, I'm
learning most artists Kern surprisingly ended up with a little
(17:13):
art in his science, which is, you know, makes for
an interesting and look, you know you're talking about skeptic
and the tool you're using or one of the proprietary
tools you've created. I was at a conference and Jensenhang
was speaking, and I had not heard him speak directly.
I've seen him on television and whatnot. And he said
(17:34):
something that maybe others have heard it. I had not
heard it this way. I'd said it differently. But the
trojan horse nature of AI in the workplace. What he
said was pointing to the audience. AI won't replace your job,
but somebody who understands AI will replace your job. That's right. Ultimately,
(17:54):
AI might replace that person's job. But that's second gem.
So we got you got, you got some time. You're
okay basically looking at us unless you don't get up
to speed.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
This is why talent, talent, and technology, which are your
third and fourth ties. You're one hundred percent right, But
also think about this. Our Ironman Suit. I don't know
if I'm allowed to curse, but it's fucking amazing. Like
what you can do in here gets better every day.
Engineers at Known run into my office almost every day
(18:25):
and go, hey, we just put a new button on
the Iron Man suit. Push it, see what happens, And
you're like, holy shit, I didn't know we could do that.
Now that happens every day, Michael, and we're one company.
But the point I want to make about talent is
the Ironman suit is nothing without Tony Stark inside. And
we've got a lot of Tony Stark's, and Tina Starks
(18:47):
and Tyrone Starks. Most of them, it turns out, don't
come from traditional agencies. They come from other industries and
they see massive opportunity in marketing and advertising to step
in and bring together an alchemy, like you said, of
science and technology and creative inside an Iron Man suit
that can do shit that is amazing.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
Well, the Tony Starks of the world are hard to find,
but when you find them, it seems to you know,
bring good things to humankind.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
Quick aside for you for a second. As you may know,
we pitched and won some business with a company that
the original Ironman, Robert Downy Junior runs or owns, and well,
if we're talking about Aura, the awkwardness of that only
because are we talking about Aura Russ? Yeah, yeah, you're
talking about Orra and the awkwardness of working with them.
(19:38):
When we first started was pitching them our capabilities and
there's a slide in our capabilities deck which says Digita
says that we're an Ironman suit of data and creativity,
and there's a picture of iron Man on the slide
and he's looking at us like you, guys, did.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
You do this because I'm Ironman? And we're like, no,
we didn't realize it. Sorry.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
What's cool about your t's and c's is that if
you look at trust, transparency, talent, and technology. Without those,
you can't get to that fifth T of yours, which
is transformation. And I don't know a company that's not
focused on transformation. You're either transforming yourself or you're being transformed,
and we like to think we can help you on
that journey. But I think the other your c's are
(20:20):
also profound, and they're they're exactly what we focus on
here too. It's like you wrote our mission for us,
so content commerce, culture, communityativity and community invitation and curation.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
Yeah, all of these things so and they match up raw.
So I look at the first two words particularly rarely
do I see the word commerce any longer not modified
by the word content right right, content on commerce, whether
a schoppable video or what have you. And with the
growth of retail media as such an important vein in
our market today.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Well, shout out to Mick Mac and Rachel Tipograph on
the content commerce side, because I think Mick Mac is
one of the best in the business at that. But
I also would just say, like, look, the way we
think about this stuff at NON is a new client
comes in the door, and we're kind of like a
general practitioner, right, They're presenting with a set of problems
or issues or opportunities we don't know. So, you know,
(21:14):
you walk into the doctor's office and you're like, well,
my arm is hurting, and you think like, well, maybe
we need to treat your arm, but maybe it's actually
your spine that's the problem, right, or maybe it's your leg.
And so we look at the whole body and we
go all right, let's take a look at everything here
for a second. How can we just help you win,
and sometimes that means content. Sometimes it means a campaign.
Sometimes it means better media prediction and optimization. Sometimes it
(21:37):
means you should be making original programming, and sometimes Russ
it means you have to actually help the person come
up with the answer to that question because they don't
always know. And what I say is going back to AI.
Years ago, somebody described five G when it was a
new technology as the technology of yes, and I said.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Why do you say that? They said, well, everybody asked me,
will five G impact this? Will it impact that? In
the answers, yes, yeah, okay, good point. I said. As
I've been rolling forward as we all have, trying to
get my hands and thoughts around the power of AI
and how and where and what I said, it would
(22:20):
certainly be characterized in my book as the technology of yes.
It's going to impact everything. Where I think the difference
is right now, we don't even know which questions to
be asking, and so the education is so critical right now.
And it goes back to what I said about job security.
(22:40):
If you're not educated, you don't have job security right now,
in my opinion, in any aspect of our business, whether
it's a media planning and media buying in ad tech martech.
If you're not thinking through the lens of whether it's
LM or whichever model you need to be, you need
to be there and it can't be cocktail party. You know.
(23:02):
The joke in the early days of one point zero
web was somebody would be at a cocktail party and
he'd be speaking to or she'd be speaking to another
executive and they'd say, oh, do you have a website? Yeah, Well,
and they'd go home and call their office and say, hey,
we need a website. We need a website pretty quick.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
I hear you, and I think that, like, there are
people in our industry who you and I know really well,
who get up on stage or come onto a podcast
like yours and act like they've got it all figured out.
And let me just tell you, I mean, we run
a company called Known, and we don't know jack compared
to what we're going to know tomorrow morning.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
We just don't. So you get up in the morning.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
And it's the reason I think you and I agree
that this is the most exciting time to do what
we do is that tomorrow morning we're gonna wake up
in a brand new world where we didn't even think
that whatever is now possible was a question to even
ask yesterday. This is what's crazy about the moment that
we're in. And so look, we are a mid sized, independent,
(24:00):
an employee owned, full service, integrated agency. What that means
is we're not dragging hundreds of thousands of people.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
Hopefully that's not a bumper sticker. It would be a
very long bumper sticker.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
We're not dragging hundreds of thousands of people and millions
of empty square feet of office space around the world
with us. We're nimble, we're fast, We're responding to opportunities
and learning in culture.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
At the speed of culture.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
That's what is demanded of and expected of an agency today. Trust, transparency,
all of that should be table stacks. Unfortunately still in
our industry it's not. But what you should be able
to win on is your ability to anticipate and respond
to opportunities to help your clients win.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
You know this because you met her with me. But
I was very very good friends for more than forty
years with somebody that I have a warm place in
my heart for, which was doctor Ruth Westeimer. And as
Ruth used to tell me, size matters Okay, she was
talking about her height. Ross, don't get excited. Don't get excited, Russ.
She was talking about her height.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Doctor Ruth, most people don't know had the hottest perfume
of anybody.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
She really smelled so good. Well wait, let me let
me give our audience my my impression. How's that? Yeah, Michael,
Michael cashanen, if you do this for me, you'll have
goud write sex. That's she told me that more than once.
That well, I miss her dearly. But size matters and
(25:33):
and in this case maybe it matters in a negative way.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Look, you got a lot of friends who are still
buying media by the pound. You have yourself. You have
seen or overseen so many reviews of agencies media agencies
where it was and you might admit it a race
to the bottom on price.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
And we now, let me say it this way. We
always set it up because we all believe this that
it's not about But it comes back to what my
set my friend Alan Grubman said, it's not about the money.
It's about the money. I mean, everybody starts out on
a very high plane. And bearn mind, Ross, this is
(26:13):
an important nuance in our industry at that same conference.
Maybe it was a different conference, and you know, you
know famously, I'll show up at the opening of an envelope,
So I'm at a lot of conferences. But it was
Andrea Brimmer from Ali Bank who went on a stage
I think it was at the MMA concert the conference
last summer, and she brought her CFO on the stage,
(26:34):
and that was a really important message to the market.
When you're pitching me as a CMO today, you're also pitching.
In that case it was a woman, you're pitching her
as the CFO hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
That's why we said when we started out as an agency,
we can't just afford to be your CMO's favorite agency.
We've got to be your cfo's favorite agency. Michael, what
do the NWSL, MODERNA, hp adt MSK and Shakeshack have
in common. What they all have in common is known
and understanding a.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Wild guests, but a good one.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
And in understanding that we are very quickly moving into
a world where brains are more valuable than brawn. Every
dollar actually has to count. You need to be able
to see and understand the choices you're making in media
and creative and strategy so that you can make better
(27:31):
decisions an hour from now. We are at our very worst,
very worst on day one of a campaign, and within
hours we get incrementally better, more efficient, more effective, and
we can see it coming back. And everything we do
for a client is a social experiment that we and
they need to learn from very quickly, get the signal
(27:55):
back and use it to generate a new set of hypotheses.
Speaker 3 (28:00):
I take this back to the earliest days of my
career RUSS, where I was buying media and we represented
the Walt Disney Company. There's nothing more retail than a
movie when it's being released, because it's got a shelf
life of I hate to say it, but a weekend.
You worked in a film studio, you know that if
it doesn't open that weekend, the home video. Back in
(28:22):
the day, everything else is going to be, you know,
on the downflad. You had no way to predict what
was going to work back then. No, but but well,
the earliest predictive modeling we came up with back and
this is in the early nineties, we said, look, by
noon on Friday, well, no, you know what that movie's
going to do for the rest of its run through
(28:45):
every window? You know what it's going to do in
box office within plus or minus ten percent.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
The problem with that is you knew you couldn't do
anything about it right.
Speaker 3 (28:53):
Now, the real time feedback allows you to adjust. That's
where we are now. In content. You can adjust much
faster now. But remember, and this is something that I've
been preaching for, and it's the mixture of what I
think known is the manifestation of in the marketplace. You know,
(29:15):
it's the art and the science, as you said, but
it's a little more than that. It's not just the
art and the science. It's the ability to know as
soon as possible what you can do when you can
do it. And the real time capability that now exists
changes the dynamic. But you have to know what to
(29:37):
do with it. You have to be able to adjust
that information. And it's what our friend Rashad Tobaka Wala
has said famously for years. Data is like oil. It's
not worth much when it's in the ground. It's only
worth something when you take it out and refine it
and use it, you know, to power or do whatever
(29:58):
you needed to do. It's the refining of it.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
Data just sits there. There's a reason we call it
data science. The science is the important part here, Like
we all have the data, right nobody has more data
than we do. I can tell you that right now.
But the science and the sophistication and understanding how to
use and webinize the information that you have is the
entire game. Why do you think we call our technology skeptic?
(30:22):
Skeptic is called skeptic because it never believes it's good enough,
It never believes it's done. It doesn't buy its own shit.
It knows it can get better in a matter of seconds.
So this is the world we're living in, and it's
providing you know, really good marketers with superhuman powers. What
our technology is enabling you to do is things that
(30:43):
you can't compute or do fast enough on your own
as a human being.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
And skeptic is interesting because you know, as you know, Ross,
I began my career as a lawyer, for the first
ten years as a tax lawyer. And there's a reason
we always used to say they call it a practice
of law as you're continually practicing.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
I wish that people would talk more about our industry
like that. I mean, look, you know, we don't just
sort of think about like what information can we get
back and how do we generate new hypotheses and test
new things Immediately We also go into a campaign with
a much more radically intimate understanding of our priority audiences
what Skeptic does, and other agencies will catch us on
(31:23):
this probably in weeks. By the time this comes out,
I bet other agencies are going to say they're doing it. Okay,
they're What we're able to do now is generate segment simulations.
So in other words, I can go interact with a
micro segment and ask that segment what are you doing
this weekend? What music are you listening to? What do
(31:45):
you think about this color? Can I try and add
on you? And there's billions of rows of data that
are feeding that segment simulator. So when you talk about
like doing a segmentation and then you do personas for
a segment and you try to match the mess with
that persona that we used to do that in such
an analog way. Both you and I did that in
analog ways. Absolutely right now on my freaking phone, Michael,
(32:10):
on my phone, when I get off this podcast with you,
I can go interact with a sub segment of women's
soccer fans, and I can test messages on that AI
generated segment and simulate their response with great accuracy, so
that when we launch their campaign next week, I know
(32:31):
it's going to work, and then I know, as soon
as I get the results back, how I can make
it two percent better. That's how you beat Google's optimizer
by thirty percent. That's how you beat Meta's optimizer by
thirty percent. That's how you beat expectations from clients and
put points on the board in a modern, sophisticated way.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
That's brain's over brawn. You had me at hello on
that one. Rossia. We're going to hit pause for a moment,
but stay with us after the break, we've got more
insight to share. Let me move ahead a little Rawson,
(33:11):
I want to talk about a couple of the things
that I've picked up that you guys are getting more
active in on the experiential side. It's an area of
growth for our market. For the market number one and
number two that up close and personal feeling with your
consumer has great attraction. Talk to me about how you
(33:32):
see the growth of experiential and the meaningful nature of it.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
At no I think for a really long time we've
all had the instinct that putting your product in the
hands of people is probably a good idea. Or creating
an environment for them to feel the way you want
your brand to make them feel and then associate that
feeling with your brand probably a good idea. But the
reason Known has jumped in so aggressively on experiential is
(34:00):
really due to some science and innovation around what we
call causal modeling, which didn't exist before we started doing it.
So causal modeling was invented by some PhD data scientists
at KNOWN. They're using some methodologies that have won the
Nobel Prize to do it. What causal modeling does is
(34:21):
it allows us, for the first time to be able
to identify the drivers of behavior in the upper funnel,
in other words, what you're making somebody feel, and correlate
those feelings.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
With lower funnel actions.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
So if I can make Michael feel something with an
experience I give him, I can track and predict it's
going to cause him to take an action. We didn't
have science for that before. Causal modeling innovations have made
it more possible for us to isolate the clear messaging
and objectives of let's say, an experience like a concert
(35:01):
or a movie screening or some sort of sampling opportunity.
If I can make those people that I've identified feel
a certain way with a great degree of certainty, I
can predict that they're going to act the way I
want them to and convert. Without that science, we were
kind of aiming in the dark there and experiential. But
now that we've been able to codify so much of
this and predict it, we're applying a layer of science
(35:24):
and truth to something that really was kind of like
just misunderstood and shady and didn't know. Now we know,
and we're making recommendations to clients that they do the
things we know at Upper Funnel Brand Marketing that we
know are going to cause the results we need to
see in purchasing.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Let's say, so I want to bring you back to
a session you were probably at ross that I did
I don't know, ten years ago at the Wiki Museum.
And you know my passion for the Wicked Museum, being
fortunate to be a member of their board of trustees.
But we did sessions there during advertising week back in
the day, you might remember, and I did one years
ago which is still with me and I still apply
(36:05):
it because it's an ol reliable, and that is the
conversation around spontaneity in marketing. We are all and you've
just said it brilliantly, in the hunt for the right
context and the right device and the right time to
the right consumer with the right message right right, right,
right right. All of that what we can't ever lose
(36:28):
sight of. And this goes to the blending of art
and science that you and Kerns so well, Embody and
Kasha and your other you know, senior partners, all of
that struggle to find the right right, right, right right.
We do have to remember we're in a business of
surprise and delight and we're in a business of art.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
I'm going to give you an example of a real
time response from known that was all about instinct and
gut and realizing something and then going well, how fast.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
Could we actually do that? Now?
Speaker 2 (36:59):
I think when people come on your podcast, and I've
listened to every episode, there are so many examples of that.
Around creating something and making something and offering something. I'm
going to give you an example of subtracting something, pausing something,
stopping something. When the hurricanes there were two of them, obviously,
remember hit Florida and they were devastating. We realized very
quickly we were running campaigns for three different clients in
(37:23):
those communities, and.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
We're like, why would we do that? Why would we
do that?
Speaker 2 (37:28):
And I think other agencies didn't even think about it,
and you're just sort of like, well, that's part of
the plan.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
We already made the buy.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
We used our AI, we tapped into the real time
FEMA data, and we plugged that FEMA data into our
optimization engines at Skeptic, and we were able in real
time to pause marketing into communities that.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
Were about to get devastated.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
So this is a FEMA integration tool using AI in
responding to something that's happening in culture in real time
to go, hey, stop doing that, because not only are
you going to waste the dollars anybody who sees you
advertising a soap during a freaking hurricane or a natural disaster,
you're doing damage to your brand.
Speaker 3 (38:11):
Well it's it's look when we got into the and
we're still in it, God knows. Into the brand safety
conversation early on, I harkened back to Joe Anne Ross,
who was then running at Sales, so you worked with
obviously when the CBABS and Bacon came together and she
stood up and she was trying to make the point,
and she showed a headline about a cruise ship sinking
(38:34):
and an ad for cruise lines running next to next
to it. Yeah, and you're like, what's going on here?
And she said she was trying to point out that
on CBS they would not have ever let that happen.
She said, quote, this ship doesn't happen on CBS. But
the point is real time you probably couldn't do that.
I mean, it's hard to do now, it's easier to do.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
When we started working with TikTok, it was twenty twenty
beginning twenty twenty one, and you may remember back then,
people like you and I maybe didn't think TikTok was
for us like we thought it was. You got to
be singing, you got to be dancing and doing duets.
And it turns out like that was a real problem
for TikTok because it meant that hundreds of millions of
potential users just didn't think TikTok was for them. So
(39:20):
our job working for the then CMO, Nick Tran was
open the platform up and convince people like you and
me that actually TikTok has a place for us, and
I'll never forget how quickly Nick pressured us as his
agency to move when we started seeing trends on the platform.
You might remember the ocean spray guy on the right
(39:42):
on the long board drinking ocean spray and listening to
Fleetwood Mac. When that started to pop and you could
see it in the analytics, Nick and Nick and his
team and me and my team, we called each other.
We said, hey, we got to do something with this.
And that was a Saturday. By Monday night, we had
changed out our primetime inventory and it was turned into that.
(40:05):
We put that guy that was blowing up on TikTok
and all of his imitators, we put them into the
campaign Monday night on national TV in the NBA Playoffs.
People were like, wait a minute, how did they get
something from a trend that's growing on TikTok onto national
television at nine to thirty pm on a Monday night.
Within forty eight hours, guess what happened. We woke up
(40:27):
Tuesday morning, another thirty thousand people had imitated that video,
so we had to change the ad again. Tuesday night,
a different version of that ad ran on ABC. We
had to call the lawyers people you know at ABC,
and go, hey, we had a mistake in last night's version.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
We're gonna give you a new version. Meanwhile, it's not
a mistake.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
It's a brand new commercial spot that we just caught
in three hours. We were treating traditional cable television like
a digital platform that can move as fast as TikTok.
Can't top that story.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
By any means, but I just have to tell you
a funny story. Back in the day, I mentioned that
Disney was our client and one of the great campaigns
we would be responsible for trafficking. Yeah, we didn't create
the campaign. I was on the media side, not the creative.
Don't forget, but the Ross Martin, You've just won the
super Bowl, what's next, I'm going to Disney World. I'm
going to Okay. You have to understand the Olympics would
(41:21):
be over or the super Bowl would be over. On
Sunday night. The thing that always amazed people Monday morning,
the morning shows, Good Morning America, you know, the Today
Show and CBS This Morning had the ads already and
we would literally tell the stories about our traffic department
(41:41):
would be hand delivering literally the one that always stuck
in my mind was from Lillly Hammer when Nancy Carigan
and Tom Harding and literally delivering that you know, I'm
going to disney World or I'm going to Disneyland. And
by the way, it was split creative because in the
Way Coast you'd say I'm going to Disneyland. On the
(42:02):
East Coast, that spot would run say I'm going to
Disney World. We had to do that on foot. I mean,
sure there was technology in play.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
You're you're running a tape down to to the network
operations center. I know. Look this year, I sat in
the Disney suite as they made the choice and they
were preparing. Well, it's obvious, by the way, it was
obvious before halftime who was winning the Super Bowl, but
it was like, well, who on the Eagles is going
to suit to disney World. And I watched them do this.
I watched them do it, and I'm like, oh my god,
(42:31):
this is so Awesomeage gets made. Everyone takes that for granted,
but you know, people are like, wow, look at this
real time ad from Nike. Think about the fact that
Disney has been doing this for decades, and we take
it for granted. But how quickly they were able to
get Jalen Hurts on camera live saying it, and then
(42:51):
within less than twenty four hours his family's on the
ground in the park. Less than twenty four hours later,
he's into amazor and people are like, you know, Disney
deserves a lot of credit for that. I mean, it's
one of the most innovative companies in the world right now.
Speaker 3 (43:05):
It's true, Ross, everything old is new again. Yes, in
so many ways and in so many aspects of what
we do. The big difference is the technology isn't old,
the technology is new. Ross. I want to do a
lightning round with you. I'm going to throw some things
out at you. You can pass or or you know, respond,
you're ready. I'm ready. What's one small habit in your
(43:29):
daily routine that brings you unexpected joy? I read a
poem between meetings Love that if you could give your
younger self one piece of advice, what would it be.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
You're going to try to do some things that nobody's
tried to do before, and that's going to be hard,
and that's going to be worth it.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
How do you recharge after a long day? I hug
my wife, by the way, that's cat state you can't
help tell. Yeah, I know, but that's how I stayed
married for fit years hugging my wife. So if you
had twenty four hours with no restrictions, what's one adventure
you would embark on.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
I would sit there freaking out that I didn't know
what to do with twenty four hours.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
That would be horrible.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
I oh, Jesus, I think I would pull my drum
kit back out of the garage and I would play
the drums again, and I would try to convince my
old band to get back together.
Speaker 3 (44:22):
Oh, Ginger Baker, I didn't know I had you here
on the podcast Buddy looking back Ross. If there's an
opportunity you passed on that still gives you a bit
of that kind of what if.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
When I was working for Spike Lee, which my first
was my first job in this industry, I'm the moron
who passed on the movie Cinderella Man and told him
not to even read the script because it wasn't worth
him considering directing it. Of course, Ron Howard directed it
and won an Academy Award for that. And I hope
Spike Lee is not listening to this.
Speaker 3 (44:56):
As well. If you weren't doing what you do. Now,
what job would you be chasing.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
I would like to teach poetry again, which I used
to do at Rizzdy Wow.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
On school Design. I'd like to go back and teach poetry.
I see a theme here. Who was your mentor early
in your career and what's the best piece of advice
they ever gave you.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
I've struggled in business to find mentors that I could
really trust and believe in and look up to. That's
that's been a real hard thing for me, to be
honest with you, which is why I spend so much
time trying to mentor others. I will say that more recently,
over the last five years, that person has become Antonio Luccio,
who mentors so many of us in this industry, and
(45:42):
he has shown me a path and reaffirmed my belief
that you can do incredible work and still be a
great person and have a lot of success, but never
lose that true character and your moral compass. And I
think Antonio embodies that more than anybody. But if you'd
asked me, who are my real mentors, it's my mom
and my dad. My mom who woke me up every
morning reminding me that today is the day and my dad,
(46:04):
whose last words to me before he died were be there,
be there.
Speaker 3 (46:10):
Well, I was there when you're dad past. Thank you,
I know and I remember that. Thank you, Rush Martin.
I want to thank you for joining me on Good Company.
Love you. If you are a wonderful member of our community,
you are a wonderful friend, and above all, you are
a mensch. So are you. Thank you so much, Michael.
(46:36):
I'm Michael Casson, Thanks for listening to Good Company.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
Good Company is brought to you by Three C Ventures
and iHeart Podcasts. Special thanks to Alexis Borger Pudeo, our
executive producer and head of Content and Talent, and to
Carl Catle, executive producer at iHeart Podcasts. Episodes are produced
and edited by Mary Doo. Thanks for joining us. We'll
see you next time.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
A
Good Company is a production of iHeartRadio.
Speaker 2 (00:03):
I think we set out and we said, we're just
going to make better marketing, and we quickly realized we're
also just trying to make marketing better. It feels like
now every day more and more when you look at
the issues that still plague our industry, the lack of trust,
the lack of precision, the amount of waste. We can
do better than this, and the fact that our industry
(00:26):
somehow has become among the most wasteful in American history
is a travesty. It's also a massive opportunity for a
company like Known, which really comes from a world of
data science and AI and prediction and precision.
Speaker 3 (00:47):
I'm Michael Casson, and this is Good Company. Together we'll
explore the dynamic intersection of media, marketing, entertainment, sports and technology.
I'll be joined by visionaries, pioneers, and yes, even a
couple of disruptors for candid conversations as we break down
how these masters of ingenuity are shaping the future of business,
culture and everything in between. My bet is you'll pick
(01:11):
up a lessen or two along the way. As I
like to say, it's all good. I want to welcome
everybody to good company. Today, I've got a guest who
doesn't just predict where marketing is going. He helps build
the road to get there. Ross Martin, president and co
founder of Known, is the guy brand's call when they
need to shake things up, think differently, and frankly, stop
(01:34):
wasting money on bad ideas. He's a master at blending
creativity with hard data, proving that storytelling and science aren't adversaries.
They're the ultimate power couple. From shaking up the agency
world to executive producing award winning projects to redefining how
brands connect with culture, Ross is here to help us
all think outside the box. Get ready for a conversation
(01:57):
that's as sharp as it is insightful. Because and Ross speaks,
we all lean it before we dive in. Congratulations are
in order, Ross. I know that recently None celebrated its
five year anniversary in February of twenty twenty five. That's
quite a milestone. Mazel Tough, Thank you, Michael. February fifth.
Speaker 2 (02:19):
Heretofore known as Known day we founded the company twenty
twenty February fifth, And as you know, I think our
company's pretty good at predicting what will happen in culture
and in media, but predicting a global pandemic was really
not something we were capable of doing. So three weeks
after we launched the business, we were all back home
(02:40):
in our spare bedrooms and closets, building a company and
integrating our business. And now I'm happy to say we're
more than two times the size we were back then
across every metric, and finally we get to be together
every day in person, and the pandemic's over.
Speaker 3 (02:55):
Well that's a good thing. So Ross, I want to
take us back to when I first met you. You
were scratching. You were scratching where it itched in the market.
You launched a division back in the day at Viacom
called Scratch, And the way we met was I was
hiring somebody who worked for you, and I needed a reference,
and I also needed kind of your blessing. And that
(03:17):
young man was Robbie Salter, who has a very special
place in my heart always. He was my second chief
of Stuff, and I'm proud to say that I still
and partners with Robbie and wish him great success with
Jupiter his product. But that's how we first met.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
I'm also an investor in Jupiter thanks to you, and
thanks to both of us, but more thanks thanks to
Robbie and his partner Ross Goodheart and their hard work.
Jupiter just launched in over a thousand target size. Saw
that let's give a shout out for our Jupiter friends.
Fifty to seventy five percent of human beings on planet
(03:54):
Earth get dandruff, and more than half of those people
are women. There hasn't been this kind of disruption in
the dandriff and dry scalp space in a very long time.
Speaker 3 (04:03):
So I think we made a good bet. Michael. Well,
there you go, and there's another example of scratching where
it itches. Oh my god, that's good. You know I
found that moment there Ross, I grabbed it. But seriously,
let's go back a bit. When I described scratch, I
was saying it was a kind of in house the
way I would describe an in house agency at aar
(04:24):
amount back in the day, or by a combna that
would be a creative source for your clients and brands,
that would be advertising on your properties on cable and broadcast,
et cetera, or wherever. And you know you were a
creative resource internally. But give me a little history, because
that is so relevant today in terms of content creation.
Speaker 2 (04:46):
I think Michael Scratch was one of the very first
in house agencies or consultancies at any company.
Speaker 3 (04:54):
At the time, there really weren't any, and I didn't know.
Speaker 2 (04:56):
I didn't have the language that you just used back
then to describe bit Now it makes more sense almost
than it did back then. But I think my entire
career I've been guilty of using things, capabilities, tools, companies,
jobs in ways that they weren't necessarily designed to be used.
And that was very true about my time at the
(05:17):
Artist formerly known as Viacom now Paramount. You know, I
just believe you should never read your job description after
your first day. You get there and you kick open
the door and you look around and you go, how
can I add as much value as possible?
Speaker 3 (05:32):
Yes, for sure, Ross, But I want to push back
on that a little because one of the things that
I've really not stumbled on. It was a wonderful question
that was asked at the Ford CMO summit a couple
of years ago. I was being interviewed and Seth Matlins
asked me a question which has really continued to resonate
in the market and particularly with me. Interacting with chief
(05:54):
marketing officers as frequently as we both do, I think
it's worthy of a conversation here. The question I was
asked was, Michael, what does the CEO not know about
the role of the CMO? And I thought that was
a very provocative question, and I thought it took me
back to basics, which was job description. And that's why
(06:16):
I digress, because job description is important because the thing
I always say is, if you write a job description
and you give somebody responsibility, the greatest cause of heart
attacks and ulcers in business is responsibility without authority. And
so if you're going to write a job description that says,
in the case of a chief marketing officer, and again
(06:38):
we interact with these people all the time, there are
bread and butter. If somebody has got the title of
Chief Marketing and Growth Officer, which happens frequently, or Chief
Marketing and Product office, or a Chief marketing Communications officer,
read the job description because if you have the title,
you better make sure the person has the levers to
pull it so they only push back I have is
(07:00):
it's fair. Job description should be a guy. It shouldn't
be the end. It should be fair. Yeah, yeah, it's
totally fair.
Speaker 2 (07:07):
And I think you know, we both know a whole
bunch of cmos who are really good at being the
CMO of themselves internally and externally right, who.
Speaker 3 (07:16):
Manage their leadership brands very very well.
Speaker 2 (07:19):
And we also know cmos who are horrible at that
but might be really good cmos.
Speaker 3 (07:24):
I totally hear you.
Speaker 2 (07:25):
If we look back at what I was doing, and
I think I had three or four bodies of work
as I think about it, over my thirteen years at Paramount,
the one you're describing with scratch was probably the most
me in that I looked around and I said, look,
there's all these things that our company is just great at,
(07:46):
like design, research, consumer intelligence, brand strategy, hiring and empowering
young people to do the best work of their lives,
content creation. If you looked across the portfolio of brands
and business is inside what was then Viacom, you have
Comedy Central, MTV, Nickelodeon, BET, Paramount, the studio. And I
(08:08):
felt that we were not leveraging these capabilities in the
most commercially successful ways. If you're really good at these things,
why can't you make them available to clients on the outside.
So The biggest breakthrough really was General Motors and doing
(08:29):
a deal with Mark Royce, who's still one of the
great leaders of General Motors, and they were coming out
of bankruptcy and there were all these things that the
Viacom networks were just really good at, and those were
things that GM needed to get better at, and so
we started to make capabilities that we took for granted
(08:49):
inside our company available almost in a consulting capacity.
Speaker 3 (08:53):
As opposed to just selling them thirty second spots.
Speaker 2 (08:56):
Right, And they to do that deal to get access
to our real core capabilities, they had to make a
massive ad commitment as well.
Speaker 3 (09:05):
Absolutely, but that's hard. That's commerce.
Speaker 2 (09:08):
I think there's so much more knowable in twenty twenty
five than we could see, know and understand as marketers
just a year or two or three ago. And I
think we set out and we said, we're just going
to make better marketing, and we quickly realized we're also
just trying to make marketing better because, as you know, Michael,
(09:28):
marketing could be so much better, and we're watching.
Speaker 3 (09:32):
That play out.
Speaker 2 (09:33):
It feels like now every day more and more when
you look at the issues that still plague our industry,
the lack of trust, the lack of precision, the amount
of waste. We can do better than this, and the
fact that our industry somehow has become among the most
wasteful in American history is a travesty. It's also a
(09:55):
massive opportunity for a company like Known, which really comes
from a world of to science and AI and prediction
and precision well exactly, and as you bring together innovation
and AI and look at workflows and things of that sort,
the opportunities are massive.
Speaker 3 (10:12):
This is, as far as I'm concerned, and I'm old
this is one of the most important inflection points in
my career. And I would certainly submit that I started
my previous company around the time of the dot com
explosion and implosion, and that was clearly an inflection point.
(10:34):
As we kitted around back in the day and talked
about the interweb, that moment was an inflection point. We
are at a I think even more important inflection point
now because the stakes are higher. I came up with
a couple of words, and people will get tired of
hearing them, but they actually still resonate, and you've used
(10:56):
them already several times. I called them my t's and
c if you remember that Curb Your Enthusiasm episode where
they were trying to decide who the middler was at
the dinner party, I kind of think that's my role.
You're a great middle you're a great medal, and so
if that's the case, then I better know what the
hell I'm going to talk about. So I wrote down
(11:16):
a bunch of words as thought starters, and I'm going
to just play them for you. The tea words trust, transparency,
you were to use both of those talent clearly, technology duh,
and transformation. I don't know a company that isn't focused
in some way, shape or form on trust, transparency, talent, technology,
(11:40):
and transformation, either with a big TA or a small T.
The s words content, commerce, culture, creativity, community, and curation.
If I were to describe known even the recent announcement
you made about where you saw the waste in media
spend and we can talk about that, I'd love to.
(12:01):
You're building the muscle in trust and transparency. We can
be transparent about this. We can show you how you
can regain trust in how your money is being spent.
Speaker 2 (12:13):
I don't understand why those things are not table stakes.
I don't understand why it even has to come up
in a conversation like this.
Speaker 3 (12:19):
It's absurd.
Speaker 2 (12:21):
Like we're living in a world right now where for
the last thirty plus years, even the most sophisticated marketers
have had almost no alternative, no choice but to accept
the fact that they're working with agencies that are taking
agency but not giving them agency.
Speaker 3 (12:38):
Well, I agree with that, Ross, And what I will
say is it likens for me. And I want to
avoid any political overtone to what I'm about to say,
but I'm going to give you a quote Ross that
has to do with something that will be much more
severe than ratings and waste and spending. But it was
a quote from an essayist, a scholar in the thirties
(13:01):
in Germany. And what this person said about the political
So this is a political statement, but it applies brilliantly
to what you just said. It was describing the moment
in Germany in the thirties, and he said, a country
is not merely what it does dot dot dot, it's
what it tolerates. A market isn't what just what it does,
(13:25):
is what it tolerates. We've as marketers broadly, have tolerated
things that we should know are intolerable, and I agree
with you. Why the hell are we having this conversation
in twenty twenty five, when one of the great promises
of the Internet was I wouldn't have to pretend I
didn't know what happened to fifty percent of my advertising spend.
(13:48):
I would be able to know. I would finally have
the holy grail, I could finally know.
Speaker 2 (13:53):
The same conference you mentioned earlier, the forb CMO conference,
Seth Mattlins. He lobbed the ball to me on stage
only six months ago and said, what's going on out there?
Speaker 3 (14:04):
And I said, what's going on out there?
Speaker 2 (14:06):
I said, why don't you use There's two hundred cmos
in the audience, as you know, and they're the best
cmos in the world. I said, everybody in this audience,
raise your hand if you remember the last time your
agency told you you've spent enough, you don't need to
spend any more. In fact, I think we could spend
a little less and still beat the goal. Nobody could
say that now, I said, raise your hand if the
(14:28):
platforms you're buying on which are grading their own homework,
ever told you to spend less or you've hit your threshold.
The more you spend, it's just getting wasted again. Nobody,
So I said, look to the marketers in the room
and the cmos that are listening to this. It's not
your fault that this is happening. But you all share
mostly the same affliction, which is you all have FOFO.
(14:51):
You got FOFO fear of finding out. And all we're
doing right now is peeling that back and shedding some
light on what's actually happened here. And when you look
in the daylight at what's going on, and you look
at the tens of millions, in some cases hundreds of
millions of dollars that are being wasted, it's not even
about the money. It's to your point, it's about trust
(15:14):
and transparency.
Speaker 3 (15:15):
And then, by the way, as my friend Alan Grubin,
who's a very famous lawyer in the entertainment and corporate world,
famously says, it's not about the money. It's about the money.
Speaker 2 (15:25):
It's about the money. But you also said two other
the next two t's on your list talent and technology.
That's how we built our business. I mean, we have
a proprietary technology here called Skeptic, and it wins lots
of awards, and it provides a very awesome competitive advantage
to our team. It's why we're growing so quickly, and
it's why our clients are seeing the kind of results
(15:47):
they're seeing. Is because Skeptic is something we've been building
for more than twenty years. And the thing about Skeptic
is it's like a Digita called it an iron Man
suit of data and creativity, and it does feel to
us when you're in you're at known working in our
operating system, it does feel like you're stepping into an
iron Man suit and there's there's new buttons on it
(16:08):
every week.
Speaker 3 (16:09):
Good company will be right back after the break. I've
got the pleasure of chatting with you today, But I've
also known your partner and co founder, Kurrent for twenty
(16:31):
plus years. When I met him the first time in
the halls at Viacom, he was the nerd, you know,
the data guy, and you know, kind of a mysterious
data guy to boot and you know, hulking, and in
a good way I adore, but you know, kind of
hulking and you know, very secretive and black box kind
(16:52):
of and and so to me, the two of you
coming together is a little bit of country and a
little bit of rock and roll. I mean it's the
perfect blend of art science. I appreciate you saying that.
Although I think you have science in your art, I'm
learning most artists Kern surprisingly ended up with a little
(17:13):
art in his science, which is, you know, makes for
an interesting and look, you know you're talking about skeptic
and the tool you're using or one of the proprietary
tools you've created. I was at a conference and Jensenhang
was speaking, and I had not heard him speak directly.
I've seen him on television and whatnot. And he said
(17:34):
something that maybe others have heard it. I had not
heard it this way. I'd said it differently. But the
trojan horse nature of AI in the workplace. What he
said was pointing to the audience. AI won't replace your job,
but somebody who understands AI will replace your job. That's right. Ultimately,
(17:54):
AI might replace that person's job. But that's second gem.
So we got you got, you got some time. You're
okay basically looking at us unless you don't get up
to speed.
Speaker 2 (18:05):
This is why talent, talent, and technology, which are your
third and fourth ties. You're one hundred percent right, But
also think about this. Our Ironman Suit. I don't know
if I'm allowed to curse, but it's fucking amazing. Like
what you can do in here gets better every day.
Engineers at Known run into my office almost every day
(18:25):
and go, hey, we just put a new button on
the Iron Man suit. Push it, see what happens, And
you're like, holy shit, I didn't know we could do that.
Now that happens every day, Michael, and we're one company.
But the point I want to make about talent is
the Ironman suit is nothing without Tony Stark inside. And
we've got a lot of Tony Stark's, and Tina Starks
(18:47):
and Tyrone Starks. Most of them, it turns out, don't
come from traditional agencies. They come from other industries and
they see massive opportunity in marketing and advertising to step
in and bring together an alchemy, like you said, of
science and technology and creative inside an Iron Man suit
that can do shit that is amazing.
Speaker 3 (19:09):
Well, the Tony Starks of the world are hard to find,
but when you find them, it seems to you know,
bring good things to humankind.
Speaker 2 (19:17):
Quick aside for you for a second. As you may know,
we pitched and won some business with a company that
the original Ironman, Robert Downy Junior runs or owns, and well,
if we're talking about Aura, the awkwardness of that only
because are we talking about Aura Russ? Yeah, yeah, you're
talking about Orra and the awkwardness of working with them.
(19:38):
When we first started was pitching them our capabilities and
there's a slide in our capabilities deck which says Digita
says that we're an Ironman suit of data and creativity,
and there's a picture of iron Man on the slide
and he's looking at us like you, guys, did.
Speaker 3 (19:53):
You do this because I'm Ironman? And we're like, no,
we didn't realize it. Sorry.
Speaker 2 (19:57):
What's cool about your t's and c's is that if
you look at trust, transparency, talent, and technology. Without those,
you can't get to that fifth T of yours, which
is transformation. And I don't know a company that's not
focused on transformation. You're either transforming yourself or you're being transformed,
and we like to think we can help you on
that journey. But I think the other your c's are
(20:20):
also profound, and they're they're exactly what we focus on
here too. It's like you wrote our mission for us,
so content commerce, culture, communityativity and community invitation and curation.
Speaker 3 (20:31):
Yeah, all of these things so and they match up raw.
So I look at the first two words particularly rarely
do I see the word commerce any longer not modified
by the word content right right, content on commerce, whether
a schoppable video or what have you. And with the
growth of retail media as such an important vein in
our market today.
Speaker 2 (20:51):
Well, shout out to Mick Mac and Rachel Tipograph on
the content commerce side, because I think Mick Mac is
one of the best in the business at that. But
I also would just say, like, look, the way we
think about this stuff at NON is a new client
comes in the door, and we're kind of like a
general practitioner, right, They're presenting with a set of problems
or issues or opportunities we don't know. So, you know,
(21:14):
you walk into the doctor's office and you're like, well,
my arm is hurting, and you think like, well, maybe
we need to treat your arm, but maybe it's actually
your spine that's the problem, right, or maybe it's your leg.
And so we look at the whole body and we
go all right, let's take a look at everything here
for a second. How can we just help you win,
and sometimes that means content. Sometimes it means a campaign.
Sometimes it means better media prediction and optimization. Sometimes it
(21:37):
means you should be making original programming, and sometimes Russ
it means you have to actually help the person come
up with the answer to that question because they don't
always know. And what I say is going back to AI.
Years ago, somebody described five G when it was a
new technology as the technology of yes, and I said.
Speaker 3 (21:58):
Why do you say that? They said, well, everybody asked me,
will five G impact this? Will it impact that? In
the answers, yes, yeah, okay, good point. I said. As
I've been rolling forward as we all have, trying to
get my hands and thoughts around the power of AI
and how and where and what I said, it would
(22:20):
certainly be characterized in my book as the technology of yes.
It's going to impact everything. Where I think the difference
is right now, we don't even know which questions to
be asking, and so the education is so critical right now.
And it goes back to what I said about job security.
(22:40):
If you're not educated, you don't have job security right now,
in my opinion, in any aspect of our business, whether
it's a media planning and media buying in ad tech martech.
If you're not thinking through the lens of whether it's
LM or whichever model you need to be, you need
to be there and it can't be cocktail party. You know.
(23:02):
The joke in the early days of one point zero
web was somebody would be at a cocktail party and
he'd be speaking to or she'd be speaking to another
executive and they'd say, oh, do you have a website? Yeah, Well,
and they'd go home and call their office and say, hey,
we need a website. We need a website pretty quick.
Speaker 2 (23:19):
I hear you, and I think that, like, there are
people in our industry who you and I know really well,
who get up on stage or come onto a podcast
like yours and act like they've got it all figured out.
And let me just tell you, I mean, we run
a company called Known, and we don't know jack compared
to what we're going to know tomorrow morning.
Speaker 3 (23:37):
We just don't. So you get up in the morning.
Speaker 2 (23:39):
And it's the reason I think you and I agree
that this is the most exciting time to do what
we do is that tomorrow morning we're gonna wake up
in a brand new world where we didn't even think
that whatever is now possible was a question to even
ask yesterday. This is what's crazy about the moment that
we're in. And so look, we are a mid sized, independent,
(24:00):
an employee owned, full service, integrated agency. What that means
is we're not dragging hundreds of thousands of people.
Speaker 3 (24:07):
Hopefully that's not a bumper sticker. It would be a
very long bumper sticker.
Speaker 2 (24:11):
We're not dragging hundreds of thousands of people and millions
of empty square feet of office space around the world
with us. We're nimble, we're fast, We're responding to opportunities
and learning in culture.
Speaker 3 (24:24):
At the speed of culture.
Speaker 2 (24:25):
That's what is demanded of and expected of an agency today. Trust, transparency,
all of that should be table stacks. Unfortunately still in
our industry it's not. But what you should be able
to win on is your ability to anticipate and respond
to opportunities to help your clients win.
Speaker 3 (24:46):
You know this because you met her with me. But
I was very very good friends for more than forty
years with somebody that I have a warm place in
my heart for, which was doctor Ruth Westeimer. And as
Ruth used to tell me, size matters Okay, she was
talking about her height. Ross, don't get excited. Don't get excited, Russ.
She was talking about her height.
Speaker 2 (25:05):
Doctor Ruth, most people don't know had the hottest perfume
of anybody.
Speaker 3 (25:10):
She really smelled so good. Well wait, let me let
me give our audience my my impression. How's that? Yeah, Michael,
Michael cashanen, if you do this for me, you'll have
goud write sex. That's she told me that more than once.
That well, I miss her dearly. But size matters and
(25:33):
and in this case maybe it matters in a negative way.
Speaker 2 (25:37):
Look, you got a lot of friends who are still
buying media by the pound. You have yourself. You have
seen or overseen so many reviews of agencies media agencies
where it was and you might admit it a race
to the bottom on price.
Speaker 3 (25:51):
And we now, let me say it this way. We
always set it up because we all believe this that
it's not about But it comes back to what my
set my friend Alan Grubman said, it's not about the money.
It's about the money. I mean, everybody starts out on
a very high plane. And bearn mind, Ross, this is
(26:13):
an important nuance in our industry at that same conference.
Maybe it was a different conference, and you know, you
know famously, I'll show up at the opening of an envelope,
So I'm at a lot of conferences. But it was
Andrea Brimmer from Ali Bank who went on a stage
I think it was at the MMA concert the conference
last summer, and she brought her CFO on the stage,
(26:34):
and that was a really important message to the market.
When you're pitching me as a CMO today, you're also pitching.
In that case it was a woman, you're pitching her
as the CFO hundred percent.
Speaker 2 (26:48):
That's why we said when we started out as an agency,
we can't just afford to be your CMO's favorite agency.
We've got to be your cfo's favorite agency. Michael, what
do the NWSL, MODERNA, hp adt MSK and Shakeshack have
in common. What they all have in common is known
and understanding a.
Speaker 3 (27:09):
Wild guests, but a good one.
Speaker 2 (27:11):
And in understanding that we are very quickly moving into
a world where brains are more valuable than brawn. Every
dollar actually has to count. You need to be able
to see and understand the choices you're making in media
and creative and strategy so that you can make better
(27:31):
decisions an hour from now. We are at our very worst,
very worst on day one of a campaign, and within
hours we get incrementally better, more efficient, more effective, and
we can see it coming back. And everything we do
for a client is a social experiment that we and
they need to learn from very quickly, get the signal
(27:55):
back and use it to generate a new set of hypotheses.
Speaker 3 (28:00):
I take this back to the earliest days of my
career RUSS, where I was buying media and we represented
the Walt Disney Company. There's nothing more retail than a
movie when it's being released, because it's got a shelf
life of I hate to say it, but a weekend.
You worked in a film studio, you know that if
it doesn't open that weekend, the home video. Back in
(28:22):
the day, everything else is going to be, you know,
on the downflad. You had no way to predict what
was going to work back then. No, but but well,
the earliest predictive modeling we came up with back and
this is in the early nineties, we said, look, by
noon on Friday, well, no, you know what that movie's
going to do for the rest of its run through
(28:45):
every window? You know what it's going to do in
box office within plus or minus ten percent.
Speaker 2 (28:49):
The problem with that is you knew you couldn't do
anything about it right.
Speaker 3 (28:53):
Now, the real time feedback allows you to adjust. That's
where we are now. In content. You can adjust much
faster now. But remember, and this is something that I've
been preaching for, and it's the mixture of what I
think known is the manifestation of in the marketplace. You know,
(29:15):
it's the art and the science, as you said, but
it's a little more than that. It's not just the
art and the science. It's the ability to know as
soon as possible what you can do when you can
do it. And the real time capability that now exists
changes the dynamic. But you have to know what to
(29:37):
do with it. You have to be able to adjust
that information. And it's what our friend Rashad Tobaka Wala
has said famously for years. Data is like oil. It's
not worth much when it's in the ground. It's only
worth something when you take it out and refine it
and use it, you know, to power or do whatever
(29:58):
you needed to do. It's the refining of it.
Speaker 2 (30:02):
Data just sits there. There's a reason we call it
data science. The science is the important part here, Like
we all have the data, right nobody has more data
than we do. I can tell you that right now.
But the science and the sophistication and understanding how to
use and webinize the information that you have is the
entire game. Why do you think we call our technology skeptic?
(30:22):
Skeptic is called skeptic because it never believes it's good enough,
It never believes it's done. It doesn't buy its own shit.
It knows it can get better in a matter of seconds.
So this is the world we're living in, and it's
providing you know, really good marketers with superhuman powers. What
our technology is enabling you to do is things that
(30:43):
you can't compute or do fast enough on your own
as a human being.
Speaker 3 (30:48):
And skeptic is interesting because you know, as you know, Ross,
I began my career as a lawyer, for the first
ten years as a tax lawyer. And there's a reason
we always used to say they call it a practice
of law as you're continually practicing.
Speaker 2 (31:02):
I wish that people would talk more about our industry
like that. I mean, look, you know, we don't just
sort of think about like what information can we get
back and how do we generate new hypotheses and test
new things Immediately We also go into a campaign with
a much more radically intimate understanding of our priority audiences
what Skeptic does, and other agencies will catch us on
(31:23):
this probably in weeks. By the time this comes out,
I bet other agencies are going to say they're doing it. Okay,
they're What we're able to do now is generate segment simulations.
So in other words, I can go interact with a
micro segment and ask that segment what are you doing
this weekend? What music are you listening to? What do
(31:45):
you think about this color? Can I try and add
on you? And there's billions of rows of data that
are feeding that segment simulator. So when you talk about
like doing a segmentation and then you do personas for
a segment and you try to match the mess with
that persona that we used to do that in such
an analog way. Both you and I did that in
analog ways. Absolutely right now on my freaking phone, Michael,
(32:10):
on my phone, when I get off this podcast with you,
I can go interact with a sub segment of women's
soccer fans, and I can test messages on that AI
generated segment and simulate their response with great accuracy, so
that when we launch their campaign next week, I know
(32:31):
it's going to work, and then I know, as soon
as I get the results back, how I can make
it two percent better. That's how you beat Google's optimizer
by thirty percent. That's how you beat Meta's optimizer by
thirty percent. That's how you beat expectations from clients and
put points on the board in a modern, sophisticated way.
Speaker 3 (32:50):
That's brain's over brawn. You had me at hello on
that one. Rossia. We're going to hit pause for a moment,
but stay with us after the break, we've got more
insight to share. Let me move ahead a little Rawson,
(33:11):
I want to talk about a couple of the things
that I've picked up that you guys are getting more
active in on the experiential side. It's an area of
growth for our market. For the market number one and
number two that up close and personal feeling with your
consumer has great attraction. Talk to me about how you
(33:32):
see the growth of experiential and the meaningful nature of it.
Speaker 2 (33:37):
At no I think for a really long time we've
all had the instinct that putting your product in the
hands of people is probably a good idea. Or creating
an environment for them to feel the way you want
your brand to make them feel and then associate that
feeling with your brand probably a good idea. But the
reason Known has jumped in so aggressively on experiential is
(34:00):
really due to some science and innovation around what we
call causal modeling, which didn't exist before we started doing it.
So causal modeling was invented by some PhD data scientists
at KNOWN. They're using some methodologies that have won the
Nobel Prize to do it. What causal modeling does is
(34:21):
it allows us, for the first time to be able
to identify the drivers of behavior in the upper funnel,
in other words, what you're making somebody feel, and correlate
those feelings.
Speaker 3 (34:35):
With lower funnel actions.
Speaker 2 (34:37):
So if I can make Michael feel something with an
experience I give him, I can track and predict it's
going to cause him to take an action. We didn't
have science for that before. Causal modeling innovations have made
it more possible for us to isolate the clear messaging
and objectives of let's say, an experience like a concert
(35:01):
or a movie screening or some sort of sampling opportunity.
If I can make those people that I've identified feel
a certain way with a great degree of certainty, I
can predict that they're going to act the way I
want them to and convert. Without that science, we were
kind of aiming in the dark there and experiential. But
now that we've been able to codify so much of
this and predict it, we're applying a layer of science
(35:24):
and truth to something that really was kind of like
just misunderstood and shady and didn't know. Now we know,
and we're making recommendations to clients that they do the
things we know at Upper Funnel Brand Marketing that we
know are going to cause the results we need to
see in purchasing.
Speaker 3 (35:42):
Let's say, so I want to bring you back to
a session you were probably at ross that I did
I don't know, ten years ago at the Wiki Museum.
And you know my passion for the Wicked Museum, being
fortunate to be a member of their board of trustees.
But we did sessions there during advertising week back in
the day, you might remember, and I did one years
ago which is still with me and I still apply
(36:05):
it because it's an ol reliable, and that is the
conversation around spontaneity in marketing. We are all and you've
just said it brilliantly, in the hunt for the right
context and the right device and the right time to
the right consumer with the right message right right, right,
right right. All of that what we can't ever lose
(36:28):
sight of. And this goes to the blending of art
and science that you and Kerns so well, Embody and
Kasha and your other you know, senior partners, all of
that struggle to find the right right, right, right right.
We do have to remember we're in a business of
surprise and delight and we're in a business of art.
Speaker 2 (36:49):
I'm going to give you an example of a real
time response from known that was all about instinct and
gut and realizing something and then going well, how fast.
Speaker 3 (36:57):
Could we actually do that? Now?
Speaker 2 (36:59):
I think when people come on your podcast, and I've
listened to every episode, there are so many examples of that.
Around creating something and making something and offering something. I'm
going to give you an example of subtracting something, pausing something,
stopping something. When the hurricanes there were two of them, obviously,
remember hit Florida and they were devastating. We realized very
quickly we were running campaigns for three different clients in
(37:23):
those communities, and.
Speaker 3 (37:24):
We're like, why would we do that? Why would we
do that?
Speaker 2 (37:28):
And I think other agencies didn't even think about it,
and you're just sort of like, well, that's part of
the plan.
Speaker 3 (37:33):
We already made the buy.
Speaker 2 (37:34):
We used our AI, we tapped into the real time
FEMA data, and we plugged that FEMA data into our
optimization engines at Skeptic, and we were able in real
time to pause marketing into communities that.
Speaker 3 (37:49):
Were about to get devastated.
Speaker 2 (37:51):
So this is a FEMA integration tool using AI in
responding to something that's happening in culture in real time
to go, hey, stop doing that, because not only are
you going to waste the dollars anybody who sees you
advertising a soap during a freaking hurricane or a natural disaster,
you're doing damage to your brand.
Speaker 3 (38:11):
Well it's it's look when we got into the and
we're still in it, God knows. Into the brand safety
conversation early on, I harkened back to Joe Anne Ross,
who was then running at Sales, so you worked with
obviously when the CBABS and Bacon came together and she
stood up and she was trying to make the point,
and she showed a headline about a cruise ship sinking
(38:34):
and an ad for cruise lines running next to next
to it. Yeah, and you're like, what's going on here?
And she said she was trying to point out that
on CBS they would not have ever let that happen.
She said, quote, this ship doesn't happen on CBS. But
the point is real time you probably couldn't do that.
I mean, it's hard to do now, it's easier to do.
Speaker 2 (38:58):
When we started working with TikTok, it was twenty twenty
beginning twenty twenty one, and you may remember back then,
people like you and I maybe didn't think TikTok was
for us like we thought it was. You got to
be singing, you got to be dancing and doing duets.
And it turns out like that was a real problem
for TikTok because it meant that hundreds of millions of
potential users just didn't think TikTok was for them. So
(39:20):
our job working for the then CMO, Nick Tran was
open the platform up and convince people like you and
me that actually TikTok has a place for us, and
I'll never forget how quickly Nick pressured us as his
agency to move when we started seeing trends on the platform.
You might remember the ocean spray guy on the right
(39:42):
on the long board drinking ocean spray and listening to
Fleetwood Mac. When that started to pop and you could
see it in the analytics, Nick and Nick and his
team and me and my team, we called each other.
We said, hey, we got to do something with this.
And that was a Saturday. By Monday night, we had
changed out our primetime inventory and it was turned into that.
(40:05):
We put that guy that was blowing up on TikTok
and all of his imitators, we put them into the
campaign Monday night on national TV in the NBA Playoffs.
People were like, wait a minute, how did they get
something from a trend that's growing on TikTok onto national
television at nine to thirty pm on a Monday night.
Within forty eight hours, guess what happened. We woke up
(40:27):
Tuesday morning, another thirty thousand people had imitated that video,
so we had to change the ad again. Tuesday night,
a different version of that ad ran on ABC. We
had to call the lawyers people you know at ABC,
and go, hey, we had a mistake in last night's version.
Speaker 3 (40:45):
We're gonna give you a new version. Meanwhile, it's not
a mistake.
Speaker 2 (40:47):
It's a brand new commercial spot that we just caught
in three hours. We were treating traditional cable television like
a digital platform that can move as fast as TikTok.
Can't top that story.
Speaker 3 (40:59):
By any means, but I just have to tell you
a funny story. Back in the day, I mentioned that
Disney was our client and one of the great campaigns
we would be responsible for trafficking. Yeah, we didn't create
the campaign. I was on the media side, not the creative.
Don't forget, but the Ross Martin, You've just won the
super Bowl, what's next, I'm going to Disney World. I'm
going to Okay. You have to understand the Olympics would
(41:21):
be over or the super Bowl would be over. On
Sunday night. The thing that always amazed people Monday morning,
the morning shows, Good Morning America, you know, the Today
Show and CBS This Morning had the ads already and
we would literally tell the stories about our traffic department
(41:41):
would be hand delivering literally the one that always stuck
in my mind was from Lillly Hammer when Nancy Carigan
and Tom Harding and literally delivering that you know, I'm
going to disney World or I'm going to Disneyland. And
by the way, it was split creative because in the
Way Coast you'd say I'm going to Disneyland. On the
(42:02):
East Coast, that spot would run say I'm going to
Disney World. We had to do that on foot. I mean,
sure there was technology in play.
Speaker 2 (42:09):
You're you're running a tape down to to the network
operations center. I know. Look this year, I sat in
the Disney suite as they made the choice and they
were preparing. Well, it's obvious, by the way, it was
obvious before halftime who was winning the Super Bowl, but
it was like, well, who on the Eagles is going
to suit to disney World. And I watched them do this.
I watched them do it, and I'm like, oh my god,
(42:31):
this is so Awesomeage gets made. Everyone takes that for granted,
but you know, people are like, wow, look at this
real time ad from Nike. Think about the fact that
Disney has been doing this for decades, and we take
it for granted. But how quickly they were able to
get Jalen Hurts on camera live saying it, and then
(42:51):
within less than twenty four hours his family's on the
ground in the park. Less than twenty four hours later,
he's into amazor and people are like, you know, Disney
deserves a lot of credit for that. I mean, it's
one of the most innovative companies in the world right now.
Speaker 3 (43:05):
It's true, Ross, everything old is new again. Yes, in
so many ways and in so many aspects of what
we do. The big difference is the technology isn't old,
the technology is new. Ross. I want to do a
lightning round with you. I'm going to throw some things
out at you. You can pass or or you know, respond,
you're ready. I'm ready. What's one small habit in your
(43:29):
daily routine that brings you unexpected joy? I read a
poem between meetings Love that if you could give your
younger self one piece of advice, what would it be.
Speaker 2 (43:43):
You're going to try to do some things that nobody's
tried to do before, and that's going to be hard,
and that's going to be worth it.
Speaker 3 (43:50):
How do you recharge after a long day? I hug
my wife, by the way, that's cat state you can't
help tell. Yeah, I know, but that's how I stayed
married for fit years hugging my wife. So if you
had twenty four hours with no restrictions, what's one adventure
you would embark on.
Speaker 2 (44:07):
I would sit there freaking out that I didn't know
what to do with twenty four hours.
Speaker 3 (44:11):
That would be horrible.
Speaker 2 (44:11):
I oh, Jesus, I think I would pull my drum
kit back out of the garage and I would play
the drums again, and I would try to convince my
old band to get back together.
Speaker 3 (44:22):
Oh, Ginger Baker, I didn't know I had you here
on the podcast Buddy looking back Ross. If there's an
opportunity you passed on that still gives you a bit
of that kind of what if.
Speaker 2 (44:34):
When I was working for Spike Lee, which my first
was my first job in this industry, I'm the moron
who passed on the movie Cinderella Man and told him
not to even read the script because it wasn't worth
him considering directing it. Of course, Ron Howard directed it
and won an Academy Award for that. And I hope
Spike Lee is not listening to this.
Speaker 3 (44:56):
As well. If you weren't doing what you do. Now,
what job would you be chasing.
Speaker 2 (45:04):
I would like to teach poetry again, which I used
to do at Rizzdy Wow.
Speaker 3 (45:08):
On school Design. I'd like to go back and teach poetry.
I see a theme here. Who was your mentor early
in your career and what's the best piece of advice
they ever gave you.
Speaker 2 (45:20):
I've struggled in business to find mentors that I could
really trust and believe in and look up to. That's
that's been a real hard thing for me, to be
honest with you, which is why I spend so much
time trying to mentor others. I will say that more recently,
over the last five years, that person has become Antonio Luccio,
who mentors so many of us in this industry, and
(45:42):
he has shown me a path and reaffirmed my belief
that you can do incredible work and still be a
great person and have a lot of success, but never
lose that true character and your moral compass. And I
think Antonio embodies that more than anybody. But if you'd
asked me, who are my real mentors, it's my mom
and my dad. My mom who woke me up every
morning reminding me that today is the day and my dad,
(46:04):
whose last words to me before he died were be there,
be there.
Speaker 3 (46:10):
Well, I was there when you're dad past. Thank you,
I know and I remember that. Thank you, Rush Martin.
I want to thank you for joining me on Good Company.
Love you. If you are a wonderful member of our community,
you are a wonderful friend, and above all, you are
a mensch. So are you. Thank you so much, Michael.
(46:36):
I'm Michael Casson, Thanks for listening to Good Company.
Speaker 1 (46:40):
Good Company is brought to you by Three C Ventures
and iHeart Podcasts. Special thanks to Alexis Borger Pudeo, our
executive producer and head of Content and Talent, and to
Carl Catle, executive producer at iHeart Podcasts. Episodes are produced
and edited by Mary Doo. Thanks for joining us. We'll
see you next time.
Speaker 2 (47:00):
A
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