A door closes, another opens

Kevin Frank started as a copywriter and worked his way up to creative director at Apple, then executive creative director at LinkedIn, where he built the in-house agency from scratch and helped it become Ad Age’s in-house agency of the year. Then he stepped away, moved his family to Paris, taught at the American University of Paris, wrote a book called Raising Creative Teams, and joined a French Elvis cover band.We talked about building a team from nothing, why “I don’t like it” is the worst feedback a leader can give, and the career he could have had in New York.Here’s our conversation...-If you lead a company and you keep meaning to build an executive presence online, that’s what my company does for C-Suite leaders at thoughtleadertoday.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit morgansnyder.substack.com/subscribe

Chris Mann is a British designer and a partner at Goal, a brand and design agency in Utah. He and his business partner Crosby have run it for seven years, and they work with deep tech companies.Here’s our conversation...That’s this week’s episode of Chief Brand. You can listen to every episode here.If you lead a company and you keep meaning to build an executive presence online, that’s what my company does for C-Suite leaders at thoughtleadertoday.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit morgansnyder.substack.com/subscribe

George Tannenbaum has been writing advertising for 42 years. He was an Executive Creative Director at Ogilvy, R/GA, and Digitas.He has strong opinions about why almost everything you scroll past is boring, and why that costs you money. This one is less a podcast episode and more a masterclass in getting noticed.Here’s our conversation.Morgan: You’ve been writing your blog for a long time, and your LinkedIn content is some of my favorite stuff out there. Has it always been easy for you to do this?George: Not to sound noble, but it’s never been easy. The cliche would be, well, that’s why they call it work.I do this thing with a lot of people, both clients and, let’s call them civilians. Someone comes to me and says, I have a company that makes an AI, or I have a company that makes a frozen pizza, or I’m 53 and I’ve just been let go from a major holding company agency. And I always ask the same question. What makes you different?Because I translate the world into shelving at a supermarket. I’ll say, there are 58 people who look like you. They have your qualifications, your resume, your education, your portfolio, your AI protocol, whatever it is. And they’re all pretty much the same. These days most stuff is nicely designed, and you can find a bot to write something that doesn’t suck. So how are you going to stand out?That became the motivation behind my ads. There are a lot of people, inside agencies and freelance, going after the same work and the same share of client wallet. And I’ll be honest with you, I’m a New Yorker. I like to cut lines. So how do I get in there and make myself the first choice?The blog started as a way of expressing myself. I was doing it for a good ten years or more before I ever linked to it online. People found it organically, the way things worked before the social platforms. It took me a long time to get over the trepidation of being that public.The ads came from a realization. A recruiter called me a long time ago, gushing about my portfolio, saying she wanted to bring me in. This was a Thursday. She said, call me Monday. So I called her Monday and she bit my head off. She said, what are you calling me for? We just spoke.And I realized that most of the so-called gatekeepers, the recruiters, don’t have great memories. They have 27 tabs of people open. They can’t keep them straight. If they need a left-handed copywriter with experience selling mothballs in Serbo-Croatian and you happen to be that person, you’ll get the job. But if you’re not, you just keep moving down the list. So how do you keep yourself at the top of the list?That became a brief for me. I developed this square format. There’s nothing special to it, but most of what’s online is 12-point type and stock photographs. So I said, I’m going to do 72-point and be funny.And here’s the other part. I realized that once you get to about 10,000 connections, that’s not connections anymore. That’s a media channel. You probably have the circulation of Ad Week. If I were writing op-eds for the Des Moines Register, I probably wouldn’t have that many daily readers. I’m not saying all of my connections read what I do. But I have a media channel. And to not use a media channel that’s free is stupid.That’s how I’ve gone about trying to make myself the copywriter of choice. I’m not claiming I’m wholly successful. But that’s how it’s worked.Morgan: You’ve said the only real argument against putting yourself out there is laziness, or fear. How do you think about that with clients?George: Forty years ago I read a book called The Presidential Character by a scholar named James David Barber. He categorized presidents into four boxes. Active-positive, active-negative, passive-positive, passive-negative. They’re fairly self-explanatory, and you can do your own calculus depending on your politics.Active is someone who does a lot. Positive means you generally agree with it. Negative means you don’t. And you say to yourself, the only way for a brand to be is active-positive. You have to do a lot, and it has to be pretty good.A lot of brands are active-negative. They scream at you. Every time you turn around it’s another message shouting $49.99. And passive is up to you. If that’s what you decide to do, fine. But then you can’t complain about a lack of business.So if you want to be active-positive, you make rules for yourself. I have to tell a joke a day, or every other day. I’m going to post something every day. Because let’s face it, people forget.And that’s influenced the non-self-promotional side of my business too. When I grew up in the business there were these things called magazines. People went to a newsstand. Back in the 70s and 80s there were the Seven Sisters, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, women’s magazines with recipes and getting your kid ready for school. I’m not judging or being gendered, that’s just how things were.And if you worked on a fast-moving consumer good, mustard or mayonnaise or sliced bread or ketchup, you and your partner would spend three months coming up with a campaign of three ads. The client would eventually buy one. You’d produce it, and it would run for about a year and a half.Today, if you run an ad twice, people get annoyed with you. So this daily stoking of the furnace comes from an always-on media environment. I grew up in a world where if you lived on the East Coast and the Yankees were playing on the West Coast, you had to wait until the next afternoon to get the score. That’s just how it was. It isn’t that way anymore.So much of the ad industry is still pretending we can get away with three ads. The whole paradigm of putting a portfolio together, or a new business deck, is “here are our three ads.” That’s as antiquated as things get.So I built an offering around what clients actually need. I call it the Nifty 50. I’ll sell you a package of 50 ads, and you can run one a day for two months. That’s how people consume things now. If your brief is good enough, and you can convince the client that not everything has to sell the pants off of everything else, some of it can just be a smile. That’s okay too.I’m almost 70. I grew up in a world where Tiffany’s, the jewelry store, ran a 300-line ad, about three and a half by five and a half inches, in the upper right corner of page A3 of the New York Times, my entire life. Because they wanted to remind people they existed. If it isn’t your anniversary or Valentine’s Day, you forget about Tiffany’s. So how do I remind you every day?That’s what brands need to do. They don’t need to bang the drum and sell. They just don’t want you to forget about them. Most of what I do is a joke of some sort, just to get my logo out there. I’m not expecting the cash register to ring. I just want that when somebody is ready to buy, they think of me. I want to be on their consideration list. That’s the purpose behind all of it.In the MBA, ROI-driven world, we’re looking for things that don’t exist. Number one is causality. If I do something Tuesday, I’ll see a result Wednesday. I know very little that works like that.Morgan: How do you get brands to do things that aren’t safe? How do you explain that risk to them?George: I’m a lucky man in a lot of ways, and one way is that I built my agency to be founder to founder. Sometimes I’m working with a Fortune 50 company and I have to go through 27 no’s to get to a yes. But most often I don’t go lower than a CMO, and often I’m dealing with a CEO. A CEO doesn’t want a lot of theory. He wants to see things that make him laugh and smile.Here’s one of the things I say when I talk to people about a Nifty 50. When you deal in increments of three, as we pretty much have our whole lives, each one becomes very precious. If you’re dealing with 50, you can hate the yellow one and love the orange one. Your partner can hate the orange one and love the yellow one. And it’s fine. What’s the cost? It runs for a day. It isn’t going to drive sales away. It isn’t the advertising equivalent of stepping in … This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit morgansnyder.substack.com/subscribe

Toni Lee has been doing PR for the advertising industry for 28 years. She runs Toni Lee Communications, and she is a co-founder and vice chair of the BLAC Internship Program.We talked about why she left a holding company and never went back, how she finds a point of view a leader did not know they had, why earned media suddenly matters more than it has in years, and what she means when she says a lack of bravery is what holds most companies back.Here is our conversation! This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit morgansnyder.substack.com/subscribe

Scott Goodson is the founder and chairman of StrawberryFrog, the agency he started in 1999 after reading an article that called the big global agencies dinosaurs. He decided to build the opposite. He has spent 25 years arguing that brands should stop running campaigns and start building movements. He also just walked from France over the Pyrenees into Spain. Here’s our conversation. ..Morgan: Where can people follow along or get in touch?Scott: Check us out at StrawberryFrog.com, or find me on LinkedIn.That’s this week’s episode of Chief Brand. You can listen to every episode here.If you’ve been meaning to build the kind of visibility Scott is describing for your company, that’s what we do at thoughtleadertoday.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit morgansnyder.substack.com/subscribe

Welcome to Chief Brand!Vikki has written the voice for Range Rover, Jaguar, Defender, Discovery, ITV and Sky.Vikki Ross writes brand voices. Not campaigns, not taglines. The actual rules that decide how a company sounds when thousands of people are all trying to speak as one thing...Working on your executive brand? Come to thoughtleadertoday.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit morgansnyder.substack.com/subscribe

Vivek Jayaram is the founder of Jayaram Law, an IP and business firm he’s run for 17 years. He represents artists, musicians, fashion brands, and tech founders. He teaches at the University of Miami Law School. And in 2026 his firm was named to Fashion Law’s list of the top US firms for fashion and retail, the youngest firm to make it by about half a century.Here’s our conversation.Morgan: You do tons of work with creative people, and the firm carries your name. How have you thought about your brand, both as an executive and as a firm, over 17 years?Vivek: I appreciate the question, and I’ll try to answer it with as much humility as possible, because it might sound like I’m full of myself.From the beginning, one of my aspirations with Jayaram was to build the first real brand in legal. If you look across our industry, there are firms a lot of us know. Kirkland and Ellis, Skadden, the big ones. But I bet if you stopped people on the street anywhere in the country, from New York to Cleveland to the middle of Nebraska, and asked them to name five law firms, very few could do it.I don’t think that’s a failure exactly, but law firms have gotten very big and very profitable while never really focusing on their brand. And you saw where that leads recently, with the capitulation to the current administration. If you’re a brand with values, those values guide your decisions. A lot of firms realized they didn’t really live by any values or mission. They were just service providers doing whatever was best for the bottom line.So from the first couple of months, I wanted to model everything, the identity, the website, how we talked, how we showed up, not after other law firms, but after all the great brands I loved. If you’re in the service business, maybe your clients would appreciate you connecting with them and presenting yourself as relatable, rather than looking exactly like every one of your peers. That was the big-picture philosophy, and over 17 years it’s shown up in everything, from the way we dress to the way the offices look.Morgan: Who were the brands you looked to when you were building that early identity?Vivek: It may sound cliche, but I’m still inspired by the Steve Jobs era of Apple.I’m 48, so I was a teenager and a young adult in the 90s and early 2000s. I was a computer kid. I researched all of it, the Gateways, the Dells, the IBMs, the Apple IIGS. And Apple was delivering the same product everyone else was. A hard drive, a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse. Functionally, nothing different.But when you opened the Apple packaging, or saw the ad, or heard Steve Jobs talk about the product, it made you feel something completely different than opening the box of the cheap laptop I had my first year of law school. Jobs showed us that design and aesthetics make a material, substantive difference in both products and services.So everything we do is intentional in that same spirit. The identity, the newspaper we send out, the sneakers we make for the team every year, the holiday gifts, the objects in the office, the events. We’re confined by the same bar rules as every other lawyer. We’re still lawyers. But the way we deliver it, and who we deliver it for, I hope makes our clients and our community feel differently.Morgan: For anyone who hasn’t seen your videos, you’ve got giant cracks in your office walls, chairs coming out of the walls. Where did these ideas come from? Did you design it all as you went?Vivek: This is really the origin story.I’ve played music my whole life and loved all the arts as long as I can remember. Visual art, music, fashion, film, poetry, books, all of it. When I graduated law school, my first job was a clerkship for a great federal judge, which I loved. Then I went into big law, met a lot of great people, got good training. But the culture was completely foreign to me. It didn’t fit who I was.After a few years of long hours, I realized I was getting detached from the creative community I’d spent my first 25 to 30 years in. That was the spark for Jayaram. I was 29 and I had much more confusion than clarity, but the one nugget of clarity I had was that I wanted to work with creative people. That was it.And I cast a very broad definition of creative. My first clients were friends. People starting a fashion brand, a couple of musicians, sculptors, visual artists, a few tech founders. People forget that back then, up through about 2013 or 2014, the tech world and the creative world were in the same rooms. Somewhere between the financial crisis and the pandemic, tech went from Soho to Wall Street and lost some of that luster. But back then, that’s how our tech practice developed, because those founders were in the same rooms as the artists and designers.I didn’t want to draw the hard, bright lines lawyers tend to draw around the attorney-client relationship. If you’d asked 100 creative people in 2010 their impression of lawyers, 99 would have said stiff, inaccessible, speaking a language we don’t understand, so we just don’t use them. So from the beginning we had almost a co-op feel. Yes, we did the legal work, but if a client needed an investor to get a project off the ground, we used our network. If they needed a downtown space for an exhibition or a pop-up, we helped find it.A few weeks ago we helped put together a deal between two of our clients, KidSuper and Inter Miami. One comes to me looking for a soccer arena to do a fashion runway show, and I think, I’ve got a guy. That spirit is what birthed a lot of this, and it’s why we’ve done everything we’ve done for Daniel Arsham over the years, including producing our own shows of his work during Art Basel Miami Beach.So when you ask why there are eroded sculptures in the office, for us it feels natural. It just feels like being ourselves. And if I’ve learned one thing in 20 years, it’s that being yourself is always the right answer. It’s also one of the hardest things to figure out. That “for real, be real” is what got me out of big law. An office with mahogany and cubicles and a library, that’s not us. This feels right for us.Morgan: You’ve said that to advise an industry, you have to be inside it. You’re at the fashion weeks, the exhibitions, the openings. How do you give honest, balanced counsel while wearing so many hats?Vivek: At the end of the day my job is simple. I’m a problem solver. Given my expertise it’s usually a legal problem, but often it starts legal and morphs into a business problem.One thing I’ve never understood is lawyers who say, “I’m going to stay silent, that’s a business question.” Then what are we here for? You’re advising the business. If your legal advice isn’t tied to the business reality, it’s probably not the most valuable advice you could give. I’m not saying we substitute ourselves in as CEO. But to solve the problem, you have to place the solution squarely within the best interest of the business.Last week someone said they were looking for an early-stage investor for their CPG brand. Not a legal question. But I represent a VC on the West Coast who only invests in CPG. So I get them on a call and introduce them. Once you’re providing solutions and value, it compounds. You build your network, you get introduced to more people with more problems. That’s a big part of the game.Morgan: A lot of people think of attorneys, especially in IP, as being about restriction. What you can’t do. Your firm’s positioning is the opposite. Talk about that.Vivek: We literally have a written mission, and everyone who joins signs off that they understand it. The mission is to enable original ideas.And that’s consistent with something the founding fathers put in the Constitution 250 years ago. A lot of people are surprised to learn intellectual property is in the Constitution. It’s not there to stop people or as a restriction. It says right there in the document that it exists to incentivize Americans to make things, to be creative. I think that’s beautiful, because I be… This is a public episode. 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Welcome to the Chief Brand podcast.Today I’m talking to Greg Hahn, co-founder and Chief Creative Officer of Mischief at No Fixed Address.Mischief been named an Adweek Agency of the Year every year it's been eligible. Campaign named it the No. 1 US agency twice.Before Mischief he ran creative at BBDO New York and made it the most awarded agency on the planet according to The Gunn Report.Personally, Greg has two Emmys, a pile of Cannes Grand Prix, Best of the Decade at The One Show, and in 2024 he was named both Ad Age's Chief Creative Officer of the Year and Campaign's Creative Person of the Year. He has also won the New Yorker caption contest. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit morgansnyder.substack.com/subscribe

A new era of the show has arrived!..Come and say hi at thoughtleadertoday.com This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit morgansnyder.substack.com/subscribe

A year ago, I dreamed of a Dalmation.His name was Inkwell.Whenever you called his name, he would be ready to fetch a frisbee, a football, or a piece of content. :)You would just tell him what’s been going on during your week, maybe something you read in the New York Times, or even a funny tale of a pitch gone wrong.After a few minutes, Inkwell would take your content to its fellow writing companion (yours truly). The writer would take the transcript and toil over it like he normally does with his clients, and then send it back to you.With the only effort being a brief conversation with Inkwell, you’d have 8-10 posts that were ready to outshine and outclass the competition. Investors, team members, and potential customers would think to themselves, “Mrs. CEO really knows her stuff. We need to follow her!”..To sign up, just say Inkwell to this email or we can talk through it. You can get time with me at thoughtleadertoday.com. This is a public episode. If you'd like to discuss this with other subscribers or get access to bonus episodes, visit morgansnyder.substack.com/subscribe