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Jon Sneider is the dynamic Founder and President of Wild Gravity, LLC, a creative production powerhouse for technology brands. As the bestselling author of Hacking Advertising, Jon brings a pragmatic, results-driven approach to marketing, shaped by decades of experience in global advertising across TV, digital, social, and retail channels. A veteran marketing executive, Jon has led innovative campaigns for some of the world’s largest brands, earning numerous industry accolades for creativity and business impact. In 2017, he co-founded Wild Gravity with Jonathan Harris, driven by a mission to revolutionize the advertising-production landscape through efficiency and creative excellence.

 

In this episode, Jason and Jon discuss:

  • How to produce high-quality ads without the traditional agency model
  • The five magic metrics that determine advertising success
  • The evolution of digital marketing and how big brands are adapting
  • Why creative production companies can outperform traditional ad agencies
  • The role of AI in modern advertising and its current limitations

Key Takeaways:

  • Jon champions creative production companies, like Wild Gravity, that seamlessly integrate creative services, production, and post-production. This innovative approach eliminates inefficiencies while delivering high-quality ads faster and at a lower cost compared to traditional agencies.
  • The five essential metrics—breakthrough, brand recall, message clarity, likability, and purchase intent—are pivotal in crafting impactful ads. Mastering these metrics not only enhances brand presence but also drives measurable business outcomes.
  • Jon’s journey from large advertising firms to founding Wild Gravity was driven by witnessing the outdated, fragmented processes within traditional agencies. This realization catalyzed his mission to streamline ad production through a more holistic and efficient model.
  • The episode reveals the transformative power of professional relationships, as Jon’s network played a crucial role in his entrepreneurial journey. Cultivating connections is not just beneficial but foundational to long-term success.
  • While AI is a valuable tool for ideation and drafting, human intervention remains indispensable. The nuanced discussion emphasizes that creativity and refinement still lie within human expertise despite AI advancements.

“If you want to start a company one day, get a job in the industry that you want to start your company in, learn every single role that there is, try and work every single role, and in that way you are going to figure out what the niche is for your company, and in that way you can be successful.”

 - Jon Sneider

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Listen to the podcast here:

 

 

Jon Sneider-Hacking Advertising

Hello and welcome everybody to this episode of The Insight Interviews. I've got a guest today, and it feels like I've said this 110 times now, but this one I am especially excited about now, and here's why. So, my guest today, he's held roles such as head of advertising for a little company that you might have heard of, called LL Bean, he's been the director of digital campaigns for Windows, another company that I think people have heard of, and similar roles at Redfin. None other than Jon Snyder is joining us this morning. Jon is the founder of Wild Gravity, he's the author of the best-selling book, “Hacking advertising”, and when I say best-seller, that's not just like, oh, it's his best seller. No, no. It's Amazon's best seller. In fact, it is number one in new releases, in media and communications. That kind of number one best seller. This guy has figured out how to deliver broadcast quality work at a fraction of the time and money that his larger marketing agency competitors can, and we have lots and lots to learn from this guy. Jon, welcome to the show.

Jason, thank you so much for having me. Very excited to be on Rewire, man.

We're pumped to have you. I'm gonna ask you a question, and we're gonna get to all kinds of marketing things, hacking things, things that I think will just add a ton of value to our audience, but I'm gonna ask you a question that we ask all of our guests out of the boat, which is, I usually say out of the box, I think I said out of the boat because you and I were talking about boating before we hit record. That's kind of funny, but anyway, as you and I engage one another today, John, who or what are you especially grateful for?

I am so grateful for my network overall. My business and my book could not have happened without my network. In particular, I've had some great bosses over the years. My boss at Microsoft gave me the biggest opportunity of my career, letting me run advertising or giving me the opportunity to run advertising for Microsoft, which was a huge job. We're spending hundreds of billions of dollars a year on media, but again, my company Wild Gravity does not exist without my network, and I am so grateful to all the amazing people that I've worked with throughout my career. I think it's an under discussed topic that if you want to be an entrepreneur, have a career, first get really good at something, and because of that, you establish a reputation, right? And then, when it's time to go out on your own, you have a lot of people that you can draw on. You're able to get the meetings, you're able to get that support. So, I would say, overall, just super grateful for my network.

Yeah, so, so great. I mean, who are we without the people around us, right? And I think that's exactly what you said. So yeah, I always learn a lot from people's answer to that question. I really appreciate that. I mean, that goes hand in glove with exactly what you do. And I know, for instance, just on LinkedIn, as part of my research for this episode, I'm going through your material online and looking at your book, and I'm just a big user of LinkedIn. I love that platform. You have 15,000 followers, and I happen to know LinkedIn well enough to know that that doesn't just happen by chance. That's not like a bot thing that happens, because LinkedIn is very specific about organic, and that just means that you're putting out valuable, information and so, yeah, very cool. So grateful for your network. That's amazing. So, you held these positions in a former life for Global Brands, you saw something, and this happens a lot with entrepreneurs. You saw something. Call it a gap, call it something that was broken, maybe call it a dysfunction. There was something happening where you then said, okay, I'm going to make a right-hand turn, a sharp right-hand turn, and I'm going to go out on my own. I'm not so much interested because this particular episode isn't about the mechanics of how you started your own business, but I would like to know what dysfunction did you see, where you're like, I can do this better, I can do this different, this needs to change somehow.

Yeah, sure. I've been in the advertising and marketing world for over 25 years now, and I grew up doing digital marketing. I was working for one of the biggest and best digital marketing agencies at the beginning of my career, and then I transitioned client side when I worked for Fidelity Investments, but I got my first experience running broadcast advertising, working for LL Bean. I tell a funny story at the beginning of my book, “Hacking Advertising”, where I'm talking to my boss and I'm like, wait a second, the ad agency doesn't make the ads. Did you know that ad agencies don't make the ads?

So, maybe I knew that, but I want to hear more about where you're going with the story.

Right. So, I'm like, the agency doesn't make the ads? And he was like, no. I was like, who does? And he said the production company actually does all the filming, the directing, you know, all that aspect of it. And I was like, okay, so you mean we've just been spent three months working with the ad agency, and they're not actually making the ad? He was like, well, they'll be there on set, right? And I was like, okay. And so, in reality, the ad agency does the concepting, they think of the campaign strategy, the campaign overall, and they concept the individual spots, the individual commercials, but when it's time to produce it, they go to a production company. And then when it's time to edit the spot, it goes to a post-production company. They do all of the editing, the sound design, all of that type of thing. And then after that, there's a fourth company, which is the visual effects company. They're going to do all of your superimposed texts, obviously any effects that are in it, and then also, if there's any computer screens or phone screens, all that comes in, in post-production, and the VFX company does that work. So, as a client, you're dealing with four different vendors, and its nuts. And what happens is, that adds cost, it adds complexity and it adds a lot of time to your schedule. You know, this was my first broadcast spot when I worked for LL Bean, but by the time I worked for Microsoft, I was running advertising for Windows, and these were hundreds of millions of dollars on the campaigns that we're spending, and I was going through this process, and I was like, there's got to be a better way to do this. There has to be. And I started at Windows in 2009 and then Facebook and Twitter became things in 2007, so all of a sudden, television wasn't the primary channel that we were producing for. We needed to get videos out on social media. I'd go to the agency, and I would be like, hey, Apple just made this ad attacking us. The Mac versus PC campaign was over, but still, they were doing all this series stuff, which was completely making fun of Microsoft.

Yep, yep.

So, it was like, we need to come up and we need something in two weeks to respond to this. And the agency would be like, well, we'll have the statement of work to you in two weeks.

Yeah, no, you need to finish product now.

Exactly. So, I was like, this isn't working. So, we started developing smaller vendors, and smaller vendors were great. They could produce great film, but they don't do a lot of the things that agencies do for you. Like, the agency knows your brand, they knows your logo, they know how you say things, all of that stuff. And so, when I was working with smaller vendors, it took a lot of work for myself and my team to do all the stuff that the agency would normally do. So, I was saying my boss one day, why isn't there a company that does all of this? Why is there not a company that does creative services, production, postproduction and VFX, and why are they not able to get sophisticated enough to manage a big brand like Microsoft? And so, that was the crack in the industry that I found, and the niche that we were able to exploit when we started my own company, Wild Gravity.

Okay, yeah, that is that's very helpful to understand that. And I will tell you, you know, our listeners and our clients here at Rewire, we hear this problem often, whether it's advertising, sales, marketing, and sometimes those get a little gray with one another, but I do hear often that it even today, with all the tools, all the AI stuff that people are experimenting with, whatever, it is still cumbersome, expensive, it takes time to get certain messages out there, not just the big global brands, but like a lot of companies that we deal with are, you know, medium sized companies, sometimes regional, sometimes even small businesses, and they're trying to do sales and marketing and ads of their own, and it can be cumbersome or expensive. Or they try to do it themselves, and it lands flat, and it takes a lot of time, and whatever. Those are the people that are listening to us right now. What types of things would you say to them?

It's difficult to make something that looks like a world class piece of creative, but at the end of the day, that's what we all want, right? And so, small and mid-sized companies, they usually fall into one or two categories. They've used an ad agency and found that it was expensive, slow and cumbersome, or they don't want to use an ad agency because they know that's the deal. And then usually they've worked with smaller providers, like a videographer or something like that, that can't quite do it all. And what I want to let people know is that there's a third alternative, and those are creative production companies. Now, creative production companies like Wild Gravity have all of those functions in house, and because of that, we can do work much quicker with far fewer people and far lower budgets. And guess what? At the end of the day, the work is better. It's better that you're going to get from an ad agency, because all of these things happen within the same place, because the creative people in the production company and the production people are talking to each other, so you don't end up with some concept that can't be produced, for example, or wasting a lot of money in that way. So, there is a way for smaller companies to engage, and the key is to really find a creative production company that's in your region, or can work on your same time zone.

Yeah. So, could you give us an example? Like, if I’m listening to our conversation right now, and I'm the CEO or CMO of an organization, I'm always looking for, like you said, the best quality work for the least amount of time, the least amount of money, and typically, there's the old adage, you know, you get what you pay for, type of thing, but I think what you're saying, especially with the title of your book, “Hacking Advertising”, like you figured out a way to really get good quality work for less time and less money. So, for that listener that's kind of listening to us now, I don't even know what to ask John, maybe where would somebody like that start? Or maybe I'll ask it this way. Do you have a story or a case study of an organization that was doing it the old way, came to you, for instance, and now we've got this success in doing it the new way. Maybe that’s the question.

Yeah. I mean, I think Microsoft is a great example. When I was there, we were spending, again, hundreds of millions of dollars on advertising in media and putting out a new campaign every quarter. We would create six to eight spots per quarter, run those to death, and then do it all over again every three months. If you look at Microsoft today, Microsoft is hardly running any television. If you think about it now, you rarely, rarely see ads from Microsoft. I think last year they might have made two commercial spots. This year, I know for a fact that they made 10. You know, that's a big difference. And so what are they doing? Well, they're still producing quality creative, but a lot of it is for digital. A lot of it is for their trade shows. And so what's happened is, my company now has Microsoft as one of their clients, right? And because of how we work, we have been able to displace giant agencies at Microsoft and other huge brands like Amazon, Coca Cola, Hasbro, the NFL, the NBA, Zeiss group, Lego house and a bunch of others. So the shift is happening. Advertising is not in danger of being disrupted. It's being disrupted, and there's a lot of companies like Microsoft that are flipping the way that they think about this. They know that television is no longer the medium that it was. They can still produce great work for television, but they're doing it in different ways. They know that they've been spending way too much on huge ad agencies, and they just don't need to be doing it anymore.

Yeah, yeah. It's very interesting. So, you worked at Microsoft, and now you have Microsoft as a client of yours. That's a full circle moment right there, man.

Yeah, that’s right. That's been incredibly rewarding. I actually remember thinking that one day. I was like, you know what? One day it would be great if it was the supplier.

And now you're doing it, and you're talking about it. Well, you know, as a fellow author myself, who has a book on Amazon, I know what it means to become a best seller, and that doesn't happen, you know, because you game the system, or whatever. It happens, because it's really quality information that you're putting out there. And in fact, I did enough to know that you were number one bestseller in one category, and then when I went back on Amazon, you are a number one bestseller in what I'm going to call it a bigger category, you know? In media and communications.

Right.

And I'm like, ah, man, this book is really shooting the moon. So, would you mind just walking us through some of the big rock items, or the big idea of the book?

Yeah, I mean, the book is called “Hacking Advertising: how we've learned to make great ads without the agency and how you can too”. And it's really a manual, or some people have called it a manifesto on how you can re-create great ads for yourself, and how you can completely reinvent the way that you go to market as a brand. It's really meant for marketers, CMOS who are sick of doing work the old way and want to reinvent the way that they're going to market. You know, they know that they can save 60, 70% this way. And then it's also for agencies and production houses on the way that they can transform their shops to be creative production shops, and not just do one function, but can be vertically aligned to supply all of the resources that you need or that a client would need. And then lastly, it's great for a lay person, or anybody that wants to examine how industries are built, what it's like to disrupt them, how you look for those keys, and then how you build your own company. The first part of the book is about my experience at these huge brands, and then the second part of the book is how to create a company that answers those problems. And I have a great deal of lessons that are applicable to any company about the way you can improve your service, and the way that you can shortcut certain processes, and the way that you could be more efficient, and the way that small companies can actually serve giant brands. I mean, these are trillion dollar brands we're talking about.

And so okay, that's who the book is for. And again, what it is helping to do. If I were to read that, I'm a president of an organization. I make decisions around sales and marketing and advertising for Rewire. For somebody like me, and I think a lot of our listeners are in my shoes, I read the book, and I'm walking away with my myself, like, what am I sinking my teeth into?

I think you're walking away with a whole new way to go to market. You're losing all of those blockers for things that you want to do that you've been potentially looking for. You want to create a great brand, right? You want your brand to be professional. And the fact is, if you go to market with cheap looking or AI produced creative, it's not going to convey your brand in the way that you want it to. You want to come to market with work that has high production value, that's insightful, and that's super on target. The other thing that I talk about in the book is that brands often lose focus on what they're really trying to do with their advertising and marketing, and as you know, you're presented with a zillion different metrics hat you could pay attention to, you know?

Yeah, for sure.

Clicks, impressions, engagement, etc., and I argue in the book that there's really just five magic metrics that you need to focus on, and if you're dead focused on those, you're going to produce successful advertising and marketing. Now those metrics are breakthrough, which is, do I remember the ad? Do I remember the piece of marketing? Then there is brand recall, product recall. Do I remember what brand it was, what product it was? And then next is the message. Do I remember what the message is? Do I remember why the product is better? Do I remember that it was on sale or whatever the main point of the communication is.

Sure.

Next is likability, which is straight up, did I like it, right?

Yeah.

And then lastly, if you nail all four of those metrics, you're gonna have to score high in the last one, which is purchase intent, which at the end of the day, we're all trying to make more money, right? We all want people to buy our product, and so brands often lose focus on that. You see this all the time, where a company might over focus on breakthrough. They're like, we really want to break through, right? And you know that this has happened when, if you ever had a friend come up to you and say, I saw this great ad last night, and you were like, what was it for? And they said, I don't I don't know.

Yeah, I was just thinking that. I'm thinking, like, Super Bowl. Like, oh, I saw this funny commercial. I can't remember was for, but the guy did this, you know, and you're like, well, that's cool, but I don't know if the people that spent all that money appreciate the fact that you don't remember what the product was.

That's exactly, right. I'm always like, that wasn't a great commercial. It was a great piece of entertainment, but it was not a great commercial, right? And so a company that nails this all the time is Geico.

Yep.

GEICO has funny, humorous ads that people like to talk about, right? You know damn well what it's for. You know, they say the brand name 100 times.

Yeah, right, yeah.

You know what the message is. Its save 15% on your insurance, right? Do you like it? People love those ads.

Yeah, right.

And then purchase intent. How many of us have called the 800 number check the website to see if we could chase save 15%?

Right.

Right? And so, you look at other insurers, like Liberty Mutual or State Farm, and you might remember some of the ads. You're like, oh yeah, there was Andy Reid with Patrick Mahomes, or there's Doug and Limmu Emu, but then you're like, I might remember the brand, but then you're like, what was the message?

Right.

Right? And for State Farm, it's bundling. Like, you can save more with bundling, and I only know this because I've analyzed them well.

It’s your job, yeah.

Right. And Liberty Mutual is you can customize your insurance. Now, how many people remember that message?

Yeah, not as many.

Not that many, right? So then, you know, do people like them? They like them. They’re fine, but are they going to have high purchase intent? They're not, because the message isn't compelling or memorable.

Yeah, yeah. I really appreciate you answering the question I asked, which is sinking my teeth in. When you say five magic metrics, the first thing I did was grab my pen. I'm like magic? I want to know what those are. And so, yeah, those are really good. And so, for those that are listening those five-magic metrics, those are things that I'm sure in the book you go into detail on each one and how to execute and that type of thing.

Yeah, absolutely.

Gosh, I got a couple different directions I want to go with you. One is the elephant in the room, AI. You kind of mentioned this in one of your answers, which is, hey, if you want to produce something cheap looking, or AI, or whatever, that's in this category, but what we do is, is this over here. And so, talk about AI a little bit. Like, what role do you see that playing in the field that you're in?

Like, I don't want to appear as a Luddite. We use AI a lot. We use AI for brainstorming, you know, script ideas, planning and all that stuff, but if you listen to the industry, you'd think that you could make a fully functional TV commercial by just adding some text into ChatGPT, and the reality is, for anybody that's used AI extensively is, you know that the AI never produces exactly what you want.

Yeah.

It takes you maybe 40 to 80% of the way there, and then it requires work by a skilled human being to get it all the way there to where it's ready for prime time. It takes a lot of computer processing time and energy, and a lot of times when you ask AI to change something, it doesn't just change that one thing. It changes everything.

I've noticed that, yep.

Which can be incredibly frustrating. Now, if you're doing this with text, it can happen pretty fast, and you can work through it pretty quickly, but the more computing power something needs, the longer it takes. So, the next thing is imagery, right?

Yep.

If you've worked with images with AI, it can be incredibly frustrating, right? It'll do things like spell the names wrong or something, and then you'll be like, leave it exactly the same, but fix the text, and everything will change. Now, if you take that up a level, if you're doing that with a video, there's that much more processing power. It takes that much more time, and so you're getting something that is maybe close to what you want, but never exactly what you want, and right now, it's not completely lifelike. We just made a funny AI spot, like it's a movie trailer version of the book, and there's an AI representative of me. It's not me. You can tell. The stuff is kind of wooden, and so, as of this recording, you can't just simply go into some AI chat bot and write what you want to have in your commercial and have it generate something that is going to be usable.

That’s right. Yeah, that makes sense. That makes sense. I just wanted to get kind of get your take on that. Is there anything that I haven't asked you yet that you’re just like, oh man, you guys need to know this?

I would say the biggest lesson in the book is that there's always a better way, and you just need to be brave enough to look for it, and the best way to find that is with experience. We're a big fan of saying we knew how to disrupt the industry because we're in the industry for such a long time. Picasso has this quote that I absolutely love, which is, “you need to learn the rules as a professional before you can break them as an artist.”

Oh yeah, so true.

Right? Actually, I remember going to the Picasso Museum, decades ago, and one of the things that I saw was he was an incredible realist painter. People don't know that usually, but he was an incredible realist painter, and so, he got really good at that before he went into cubism, right? And so, without that training, he would not have been able to disrupt the art world like he did. And it's similar in any industry. There's this, I think, myth that persists, that entrepreneurship, that starting your own company is some like easy way to skip having a job and that you can just quickly make millions of yourself. And what I tell people is like, if you want to start a company one day, get a job in the industry that you want to start your company in. Learn every single role that there is, try and work every single role, and in that way, you are going to figure out what the niche is for your company, and in that way you can be successful.

Well, you've brought the conversation full circle, right? Like, that's how we started, with your introduction of kind of your story, right? You did exactly that. You started working for brands. You played a lot of roles. You figured out some cracks in the system, and only after you saw that, after you experience things, then you went off and figured out a way to fix some of those things. And now you're teaching others, you know, how to do the same thing. So yeah, full circle there, Jon, I've got a feeling people are going to want to want to reach out to you or at least check out the book as a result of our conversation today. What's the best way for people to do that?

Yeah, on all the major social media platforms. I'm at Jon Snyder, which is spelled J, O, N, no, H and S N E I D E R. And then people can also find me HackingAdvertising.com, and they can find my company at WildGravity.net and through all of those resources, you can reach me directly. I answer every single message, every single email that comes my way. So, anybody who wants to get in touch with me, I would treasure that. And one of the things that I also try and really do is just offer to help people. In general, I find that I've received a tremendous amount of help, and sometimes I just put out posts that I'm like, okay, today's the day I'm offering to help. Reach out to me. If it's within my power, I will help you.

There you go.

And one of the things that I've learned is that that's not just a gift for the people that you're helping., it's a gift for yourself as well. Like, so many great things have come out of that. So I find that helping others is the best way to help yourself, and so, I very much encourage people to reach out to me. I would love to help you.

Wow. Well, on that note, I think we're going to end it. That's so darn good. You have helped us. I've got a page worth of notes. You've helped me. I know that you've helped one person for sure, and when we release this, it's going to help a ton of others. So, you've done your job, my friend.

Awesome.

Jon Snyder, thank you so much for your expertise, your time, your willingness to help us, and I wish you continued success with the book and and all the endeavors with the “Hacking Advertising” that you do, brother.

Thanks so much, Jason, this was absolute pleasure.

Oh, wow. So many insights from Jon Snyder. I mean, I really appreciated his five-magic metrics: breakthrough, brand recall, message, likability and the purchase intent. I just thought that that was really good. In other words, if we're doing advertising or we're marketing ourselves, what is it that we should be looking for and measuring? And he's got five really specific things, which I appreciate. In the beginning of our conversation, he talked about his network helping him, and then at the very end of the conversation, he talked about how he enjoys helping others and helping his network. So, there really was a full circle moment there that I appreciate it. Another quote that he had is, “there's always a better way, you just need to be brave enough to go find it.” Boy, I found that interesting. So, I had a ton of insights my conversation with Jon and I hope you did too, but like we say at the end of every episode, not only do I hope you did, but it doesn't much matter what me as the host, what my insights were, but what does matter, dear listeners, is what were your insights?

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