Jason (00:34)
we're thrilled to have you, you know, especially in person.

So, Marshall, maybe give just a little bit of your background so everyone knows who you are.

Marshall (00:42)
Up until very recently, I was Chief Creative Officer at Kramer Kressel, which is one of the largest independent ad agencies in the country. And I was there for a big portion of my life, probably years.

and lots of fun. grew that agency when I got there. was fewer than 70 people and we got it to greater than 500 people. an amazing, crazy, exhausting, awesome journey.

Jason (01:11)
Yeah, always easy to build a company, right? Always easy. Never need help with

Marshall (01:15)
never

need help with that. Everything just comes automatic, like you've done it a hundred

Jason (01:20)
So the first question on my five, Marshall, where do you find inspiration? I mean, as a creative guy, you're being the vice chair, chief creative officer. Where do you find inspiration in everyday life?

Marshall (01:30)
So in everyday life, from everything, I read a ton, I love music, I try to spend as much time outside as possible. I know we debated, should we close the door and hear the birds? And I was like, let's hear the birds. And I think anybody can be

It's sort of like looking at the world and saying what's cool about it instead of what's f-ed up about it, what's wrong with it, what's right about I met a guy, worked with a guy who is the creative director at Lucasfilm.

Jason (01:52)
That's a great perspective.

Marshall (02:01)
And one of the great ships in the Star Wars canon was inspired by a street lamp. it's just, you know, it's just amazing. that's an inspiration should come from the everyday because then I think it inspires ideas and work that are relatable to people.

Jason (02:18)
probably also stepping out of your existing environment sometimes

Marshall (02:22)
yeah, that's always

great. But then the bar is really high. You know, like, let's go see the most amazing thing ever. you're like, that's so inspiring, except I suck and I can't do that. And you don't need a lot. It's like a really potent sugar. too much just makes your head bounce against the wall. But just enough gets you

gets you going and there's more in you than you think.

Jason (02:43)
I love that. totally agree. So, you know, question number two, how do you build and lead teams to deliver the best outcomes? How many people did you lead at CK?

Marshall (02:53)
at its height probably there was, you know, think 100 direct reports, something like that.

Jason (02:57)
That's pretty good. That's a lot of people.

Marshall (02:59)
So it's partly about people and it's partly about the leader but it's mostly about the environment. mostly what I did was try and not only successfully but try to create a working world in which things that people didn't think were possible were

Bear Bryant, one of the greatest coaches,

he would say I can take my boys and beat your boys and then I can take your boys and beat my boys and so it's so what what's the difference right it's the environment that he created around the learning

of that sport and i think that what leaders need to do in any organization whether it's creatively based or not is create an environment where people believe they can fail without retribution and also where amazing stuff becomes contagious so now it's like hip for everyone to say courage is contagious well it kind of is

And one of the things that I tried to do when I had success in one corner, I would go outside of my sort of creative department world and go out into the rest of the agency and make a big deal out of what that corner was doing. And then suddenly people who weren't doing that kind of work were like, hey, I want to be on that team. want to be...

doing something like that. Like, why come my clients aren't doing something like that? I'm like, well, they could. Let's do it. Let's figure it out. How do we do that? And that's how things become environmental. And that's what we want it to be. Because if it's person-based, guess what happens when that person leaves?

Jason (04:33)
Well, and it sounds like it's a platform of trust, I always like to say if you're not learning where you're failing, then what's the purpose, but you're giving that ability to test and learn, right? That's different.

Marshall (04:43)
If people always fail, then you gotta change them.

But failures are great to

Jason (04:48)
But then the other side of it is what you were saying was recognition, And helping people then feel good about what they've done and then bring other people into that.

Marshall (04:57)
It's modeling,

right? And we talked about this earlier. When you're in a thing, you've got blinders around you and all you see is the thing you're in. And so you think there's only one way to do things. So by taking little successes and merchandising them throughout the organization, can get people to see outside of the world they're living in and say, well, maybe I need to change my world.

And did that enough suddenly everybody own make the client famous campaign. I don't want to be the person without a make the client famous.

Jason (05:33)
Make them a hero. Question number three. We're cooking with gas right now. Three out of five, three out of five. From your perspective, you know, from working for decades in this space, how does a marketer get the most out of their agency relationship? if you picked like one thing, if that's possible, how could they get the most out of their agency?

Marshall (05:55)
Two things, clarity and consistency. So the most important thing is know what you want. You really have to know what you want. And then there's a whole bit that comes before that, which is know who you are. But if you know who you are, decide what you want and don't change the rules mid-game. Stick to it. This is what we said we wanted?

I see that, stay with that. Don't change it that, you make that, if you ritualize that kind of behavior, your agency is gonna always know where they stand, what they should be doing, and you'll get the most out of it. It's like if you're in a band and you don't keep count,

like your other band members, don't trust you. You're just like, well, he's off count. He's going to come in too early, he's going to come in too late, it's going to be a mess. But if you tap your foot and you stay on count, then the band sounds amazing, and then everyone thinks that's

Jason (06:47)
And as we know, you need a good rhythm section to have a good band. Exactly. So I'm going to turn it around. having been in an agency, having your own agency and then at CK, what should an agency do in this day and time to ensure a relationship stays strong with their client?

Marshall (06:51)
Gotta have great drama, gotta have good, really good.

It's going to sound cliche. Be on their team. Clients today are pretty smart. They have really good strategic resources. If you make it really clear that you are in their corner, it's their problems you're out to solve and not your glory.

you'll get the glory. Because the only way to get the glory, the only way to make it to Cannes is to earn the trust that gets everybody on the team, clients most importantly, that gets everyone on the team to hold hands and go, absolutely, let's jump. Let's for sure jump off this cliff. And you don't get that trust.

Jason (07:23)
Yeah.

Marshall (07:42)
if it's not absolutely clear and sincere that you're on their team. We're here to solve your problems and then really great things happen that everybody soars.

Jason (07:55)
So not to give away secrets, but is there something that you personally have used that you'd say, it seems basic, but this is just how you accomplish that, how you create a partner.

Marshall (08:07)
I think sometimes you pick a battle to defend something that the client needs that maybe the agency doesn't want to both demonstrate to the agency, this is the right thing to do and to demonstrate to the client that

When they're not in the room, they still know you've got their back. And their voice, you've gotta be true to that. Now, the whole object of not being in-house, of being somebody separate is that you've got the ability to have some distance.

Jason (08:34)
Yep, and their voice, right?

Marshall (08:47)
and some objectivity to what the right solution might be. So being on their team doesn't mean you lose that distance. It just means that you completely internalize.

Jason (08:57)
Right. You have

their perspective. Right. Question five. Relatively painless. Right. Yeah. Okay. Have you heard of this AI thing? I think that's how you pronounce it is AI. No, it's not a one. I know some people think it's a one. But it's AI. So ⁓

Marshall (09:06)
It's not a one.

Okay,

so it's AI. All right, now I'm there.

Jason (09:14)
So how is AI affecting the creative space? Right? How do you see it affecting it now? And if you had your crystal ball, how would you see it affecting the future of creative?

Marshall (09:26)
So it's fire, right? It's the discovery of fire. We can make things fly. I mean, it's that. And the changes are literally everywhere already. We were talking about performance marketing. That is built for AI.

AI is taking over so many of the decisions about planning and buying and those determine creative opportunities or not. while I can't believe I'm going to say this, I'm going to say it anyway, it's going to eat up a ton of jobs in the creative space. There's a lot of writing

in the marketing space that you don't need great copywriters to do. and there's a lot of analytics that you don't need great analysts to do because now machine learning.

can do it. There's a ton of lower funnel work across all the disciplines from media to analytics to creative that the machines can just do. So that's going to be an earthquake.

Jason (10:28)
.

So what does a creative person do then?

Marshall (10:35)
So yeah, it's a really an amazing conundrum. if you're very young, you need to be thinking about where in the space you wanna operate. And if you've been in the business for a while, you need to think about how to provide value.

putting this picture next to that picture and this word next to that word. It's gotta be about judgment. It's gotta be about adding how to leverage human truth because the technical piece, it's just gonna become less and less a part of your job.

Jason (11:12)
And I, I fully agree with what you just shared. And the piece for me kind of comes back to the big idea, And the, and the strategy, because my concern is that if everyone starts to use AI more and more, I don't know if it's a race to the bottom, but it's a race to the average.

Marshall (11:33)
Well, yeah, for sure it's a race to the average and it also eliminates the bottom. It says there's nobody, we don't need you to do the bottom. We got the bottom. Bottom's done. So how do you, if you're in the creative space, whether you're making movies, whether you're in Hollywood or you're on Broadway, you're in advertising, you've got to be the Super Bowl player. Because I'm going to give, if I'm a marketer, I'd be an idiot not to give my lower funnel.

work to AI. I don't want $600 an So you better be good at Super Bowl. I mean you just better be able to operate at that level because that's the only level left.

Jason (12:02)
Just from a cost perspective.

Right. And then you go back to the, consistency and the clarity and message and to be able to stick with it, right. To spend the time to find out what that big idea and that strategic insight is.

Marshall (12:24)
and

to take risks. So look, what is AI doing right now? Well, I guess apparently we don't really know.

But we think it's aggregating, right? I even the creators of AI don't really how a lot of the learning programs come up with their own. But we know that it's not out of thin air. It's derivative by the very nature of our world is uploaded into digits and AI is scraping those digits and rearranging them.

Jason (12:38)
and where it's going to go.

Marshall (12:52)
in ways that are familiar to what it's learned. not, well, I guess it does hallucinate, but originality, I'm hoping, and I could be very wrong about this, but I'm hoping forever right about this. Originality is still the place.

let's jump off this cliff even though it makes no sense to do it. Let's do that thing that scares the pants off us. That's still where I think the great movies can still come from people and the great art direction can still come from people is will you be bolder than the prompt engineer and the language model.

Jason (13:31)
Well, I hope that's the case or else we're going to have an existential discussion. Yes. On the road. covered our five questions. Thank you so much. The, the one piece I asked you to share is just as folks meet you on the wiserie and they want to engage you, but what can they expect? What, what types of things would you like to share? What wisdom would you like to help folks as they're on their journey, trying to figure out whatever solution they need to solve?

Marshall (13:36)
That's

Jason (13:57)
Thank

Marshall (13:57)
I think where I could add the most value to somebody's journey is in how to walk. I think entrepreneurial startups, through running a big organization, through being in a thousand boardrooms, working with 2,000 CEOs and CMOs,

There's a lot of travel there. And if you're just wondering what's my best move to get from point A to point A point two, that's a really great use of time. The marketing answers, those are yours to figure out. But I think the path.

either in career or in how do I sell something in? How do I get this person to outperform, to be better than they think they are? I know they're better than that. Those are the kinds of things where I think I can add the most value and I think are the most fun to chat about.

Jason (14:52)
I love

it. Well, I am so thrilled and honored to have you as part of the Wisery. Thank you for taking the time to do this. If you want to learn more about Marshall, book a Marshall, go to the wisery.com and you'll see more about him. You'll see his availability and hopefully you'll have a chance to have him work with you in your business again, my friend. Yeah, of course.

Marshall (15:12)
Thank you.