4th Time's the Charm: 3 Broken Deals to Buy a Great Business

Oh my God, talk about ROI on that campaign. Yeah, so I mean, everybody wins. So it's a lot of fun.

It's a lot of fun. That's great.

That's the sort of default picture, I'd say, of an agency these days. But your style is doing, first of all, not just social, but in real IRL stuff, in real life stuff, like you just described, with bigger clients, kind of traditional. In some ways, it's traditional advertising.

So talk to us about that type of business versus what we think of as digital agencies today. I feel like what ECP is is less common than it used to be, frankly.

That's a great way to put it. And I'd love to say that I had the wisdom to be able to look outside, looking in to see ECP for this unique trait that they had. And I really didn't appreciate it until after I bought the business.

So this wasn't something that I... really fully understood even outside looking in and it was just it was the reason why all the other parts of it looked so good it's it was the the the secret sauce the engine that that kind of drove the results that i was attracted to um it was that that truly creative piece um

know i einstein i think once said you know creativity is just intelligence having fun and and that's that's how i that's how i look at collaboration it's just you get a bunch of smart people together and you give them a problem

and then you just turn them loose and they just they just get to spin on it and throw it different directions and it's so fascinating to watch the evolution of our ideas in the studio because they're there's such an iterative process meaning you have a you have an introductory we have boards all around the studio uh physically so we'll take ideas and we'll print them off and pin them up with with…

And each iteration, we just kind of take the ideas and it starts broad and then we'll just pick different directions. And by the third or fourth iteration, you're seeing just these amazing concepts and the depth of these different messages coming through. And it's a lot of fun.

and all of it is tied to the brief which you know in our industry the brief is the they're the must-haves and preferreds from the client so the brief basically says this is what we're trying to do and that's that's one thing that most people don't realize is marketing marketing when it's done well is solving a problem Marketing isn't just cool stuff or fun stuff or whatever.

Good marketing is directly addressing a business problem or problems, and if done correctly. And so I know when we talked before, we talked a little bit about AI, but that's a piece, and I don't mean to jump ahead, but that's a piece that I think AI is going to really struggle to...