02:01:38 · John Coogan, Will Mayer, Rodrigo Liang, Jordi Hays
[02:01:38] S1: Award. Congratulations. Thanks, Give us a little background. Give us a little bit of the journey. Introduce yourself for those who are watching who might not be familiar with your work. [02:01:46] S7: Yeah. Of course. I am Will Mayer. I'm the co founder and high priest at Cold Holdings. [02:01:51] S4: Mhmm. [02:01:51] S7: Background came from making skateboard films at a young age when I was, like, 14 for companies like Vans. Became deeply obsessed with brands and what they represented. [02:02:00] S1: Yeah. [02:02:01] S7: Moved from there into advertising, working with brands like Nike and Netflix, and then started working more and more with startups, incubating companies, and fell in love with cults and religions and believe that many of the best brands are some form of a religion. [02:02:15] S1: I remember remember early in Silicon Valley, was working on a company and people were saying like, oh, like, you don't want your product to have a cult like following. And I was looking at Cult of Mac, like the the website that tracks Mac. They they they refer to it as a cult. It's a great way to think about things. Obviously, some [02:02:35] S0: negative case against not wanting a cult? [02:02:38] S1: Oh, just that, like, you know, cults are bad. They often lead to, like, terrible outcomes in the literal sense. And also, you probably don't want, like, psychos following you. You want just like normal customers in reality. And that's what Apple wound up getting. They got a huge amount of just normal consumers, but they do have a cult like fan base.
02:02:38 · John Coogan, Jordi Hays, Will Mayer
[02:02:38] S1: Oh, just that, like, you know, cults are bad. They often lead to, like, terrible outcomes in the literal sense. And also, you probably don't want, like, psychos following you. You want just like normal customers in reality. And that's what Apple wound up getting. They got a huge amount of just normal consumers, but they do have a cult like fan base. [02:02:57] S0: Yeah. They needed they needed the cult to get them through to the truly hit consumer product. [02:03:02] S7: Yeah. I I mean, before the, like, nineteen seventies, the word cult was actually neutral. It just meant a new fringe group. There was a period in, like, the sixties and seventies people referred to as the fourth great awakening. It's like a huge boom in spirituality. Things like, Aum Shimmerichio, Children of God, but also brands like Blue Ribbon Sports, which became Nike or Apple Yeah. Yeah. From Jobs. In that period, the word cult went from being a neutral word to a negative, and conservatives started to use it to demarcate and delegitimize new movements. So today, sociologists mostly refer to cults as NRMs or new religious movements.
02:03:02 · Will Mayer, John Coogan
[02:03:02] S7: Yeah. I I mean, before the, like, nineteen seventies, the word cult was actually neutral. It just meant a new fringe group. There was a period in, like, the sixties and seventies people referred to as the fourth great awakening. It's like a huge boom in spirituality. Things like, Aum Shimmerichio, Children of God, but also brands like Blue Ribbon Sports, which became Nike or Apple Yeah. Yeah. From Jobs. In that period, the word cult went from being a neutral word to a negative, and conservatives started to use it to demarcate and delegitimize new movements. So today, sociologists mostly refer to cults as NRMs or new religious movements. [02:03:35] S1: Okay. Got it. Interesting. Yeah. But you're you're you're reclaiming it. You're taking it back. Talk to us about I mean, you have a couple different a couple different things going on in your world, but I'm interested particularly in in advertising video production. Like, what does it look like to work with you? How long are you on a particular project? The Polymarket ad went very viral. And I'm wondering, like, what does that process look like from start to finish? [02:03:59] S7: It really depends on the type of folks we work with. With Polymarket, we've been working with them since January Mhmm. In, like, a bunch of different capacities. Mhmm. The team and I have been working on strategy, a bunch of the brand work, and out of home stuff. [02:04:10] S1: Okay. [02:04:10] S7: That campaign came together in an insane timeline and was driven a lot in partnership with their internal team. [02:04:15] S1: Sure.
02:04:15 · John Coogan, Will Mayer, Tyler, Jordi Hays
[02:04:15] S1: Sure. [02:04:16] S7: I got a call, like, three weeks before the World Cup. And if you guys know, like, people now are working on Super Bowl ads. [02:04:21] S5: Yep. [02:04:22] S7: It's like a six month process. Normally, that whole thing from, like, concept to production to post to being online and routed for TV was, like, three, three and a half weeks. [02:04:30] S0: Wow. [02:04:31] S7: So it was insane. [02:04:32] S0: Yeah. What how did you process all the different reactions? I I think I saw the Reuben ad, like, while watching UFC. I watched it too. And I was like, woah, Rick Rubin in a prediction market ad. Yeah. The ad was obviously very cool. A lot of people were surprised by that. I brought it up to you. You were like, Rick Rubin came out of the rap game. Why is it surprising that he would do like a Prediction market? Prediction market. UFC? So so, yeah. I feel like it was very yeah, very mixed reactions to it. You know, not not on the creative. I think that was universally, like, creative was awesome. How did you process people's reaction to it? [02:05:09] S7: I mean, I feel like a lot of the best campaigns are pretty controversial. I mean, in our time with Equinox, we, like, banned membership sales on January 1, and that became, like, the most heated moment that business has ever had, but also the most successful campaign in history for them. So I think with with someone like Rick, what was great is there's nobody that represents questions better than him for those who feel like either the creative actor [02:05:29] S1: Oh, yeah.
02:05:29 · John Coogan, Will Mayer, Jordi Hays
[02:05:29] S1: Oh, yeah. [02:05:29] S7: Anything else. So he felt like a great fit. [02:05:31] S1: Yeah. [02:05:33] S0: I've been feeling over you know, we're we're sort of at, like, peak marketing content. And yet, like, it feels like advertising has never been in a worse place. I don't know if you feel the same way. The the the campaign with Polymarket is like, it is a campaign. It feels like the the the craft of of advertising and that's why I think it broke through as much as, like, again, the actual creative was good. Do you feel the same way? Do you have launch video fatigue? It used to be, like, you know, maybe a company would come out with a video, but they were really just hoping for, like, a TechCrunch article. Now it's, like, well, we're definitely doing a video and it'll look exactly the same as every other video. And then, yeah, maybe we get a TechCrunch article, but it feels like people are trying to create their own artifacts. [02:06:21] S7: I mean, dude, I don't wanna I don't wanna point it back at you, but you guys created like the OG launch video, I feel like. I remember that was my first experience at TBPN was, like, you guys on a helicopter or something. [02:06:32] S1: Yeah. Yeah. [02:06:32] S7: Yeah. So I I'd say [02:06:34] S0: No. And and we you you you'll appreciate. We had 20 other videos planned, and then it it just started this sort of snowball where everyone was launching videos. And we were like, this is no longer a good way to actually break through and get attention. So we just switched to
02:06:34 · Jordi Hays, John Coogan, Will Mayer
[02:06:34] S0: No. And and we you you you'll appreciate. We had 20 other videos planned, and then it it just started this sort of snowball where everyone was launching videos. And we were like, this is no longer a good way to actually break through and get attention. So we just switched to [02:06:50] S1: gratitude. We we literally had the whole production team here, like, geared up for, like, weekly video shoots with ideas and different songs that we 're gonna play on, and then it just got so [02:06:58] S0: tired. Saturated. [02:06:59] S1: We're like, ah, okay. Let's not do that. [02:07:01] S0: Yeah. Should have we should have made 10. [02:07:02] S1: We should have made them one day at a time or something like that. But I don't know. What yeah. What what do you think about, like, the the the the the oversaturation of things, like how fast the Internet moves, when you wanna jump on something, when you wanna bring back something from the archive that hasn't been touched in years? [02:07:17] S7: It's tricky, man. I mean, again, like, not to throw it back to the seventies again, but the average American, I think, then saw, like, 500 ads a day, and now it's more than 5,000. And who knows what it'll be in, like, a few years from now. [02:07:28] S1: Wow.