From Film Marketing to Healthcare: Andy Freedman on Agency Leadership, Industry Shifts, and Navigating the AI Landscape

Episode Description

Andrew Freedman, CEO of Substance Global, shares his journey from film and music to founding a diverse agency. He covers industry challenges, the role of referrals, leadership, staffing, AI's impact, and his record label experience, ending with advice for future agency founders and job seekers.

Episode Outline and Highlights

  • [01:01] Andy's Journey in the Creative Agency Space
  • [03:12] Diversifying into Healthcare and Pharmaceuticals
  • [09:05] The Power of Referrals in Acquiring New Clients
  • [15:29] Leadership and Business Development in a Growing Agency
  • [19:14] Navigating Industry Trends and Building Strong Relationships
  • [23:10] Staffing Challenges and Right-Sizing
  • [26:19] The Impact of Technology on Creative Agencies
  • [30:44] Andy's Journey in the Music Industry
  • [37:21] Advice for Starting Your Own Agency
  • [39:48] Tips for Job Seekers in the Creative Agency Industry
From Film Marketing to Healthcare: Andy Freedman on Agency Leadership, Industry Shifts, and Navigating the AI LandscapeFrom Film Marketing to Healthcare: Andy Freedman on Agency Leadership, Industry Shifts, and Navigating the AI Landscape

Today's Guest

Andy Freedman

Founder & CEO

Andy Freedman, CEO and founder of Substance Global, shares his journey in the creative agency space. He started in film production and then transitioned to working in a music promotion agency. Eventually, he co-founded Substance Global, which initially focused on film marketing but later diversified into healthcare and pharmaceuticals. Andy discusses the challenges and opportunities of working in different industries and the importance of referrals in acquiring new clients. He also talks about the role of leadership and business development in a growing agency. In this conversation, Andy Freedman discusses the challenges of staffing and right-sizing a business in the creative agency industry. He also talks about the impact of technology, particularly AI, on the agency's operations. Additionally, Andy shares his involvement in the music industry and his experience running a record label. The conversation concludes with advice for those interested in starting their own agency and tips for job seekers in the industry.

Episode transcript

Justin Levinson (00:01.08)
Hey everybody, welcome to Agency Society podcast where we dive into the minds of creative agency owners and explore the stories behind their success. Today we have a special guest, Andy Friedman, who has been the CEO and founder of Substance Global for past 20 years. Proudly independent, Substance is a multidisciplinary strategic communications and creative agency that helps companies and brands across various industries deliver best in class digital content.

Andy lives in Thousand Oaks, California with his wife, four children and two brand new Jack Russell Terriers. Holy cow, welcome to the show, Andy. Yeah, man, that's a full house right there. Yeah, I got two kids and a cat. I can't compete with four and two brand new Jack Russell Terriers. Yeah. Yeah, man.

Andy Freedman (00:34.262)
Thanks so much Justin, appreciate it.

Andy Freedman (00:40.406)
It's a lot of mouths to feed. A lot of mouths.

Andy Freedman (00:50.238)
It's all relative though, right Justin? Yeah, no it's good, it's good. I like a full house. It's always one of the big families so I definitely got what I wanted.

Justin Levinson (01:01.3)
Me as well, awesome. Well, thanks again for being here today. I guess I wanna kick off the show by just asking you how you got involved in, how you got to be in the creative agency space. How'd you get

Andy Freedman (01:04.758)
Sure.

Andy Freedman (01:14.326)
Yeah, quite randomly. I I did touch on marketing in my college career and I also studied script writing and film and that was really my first love and where I wanted to work after I graduated. And I did for a while. I worked at Panavision and learned all about camera crews and how they set up for movies and the equipment they need and how all that works on set.

which is really instructive and evolving. And from there, I kind of found a natural pathway into production. So I spent the first couple of years out of college doing kind of short production, commercials production, some small low budget feature stuff. It was a hard graph, not gonna lie. And my entryway into being in a creative agency, because it definitely was not on the roadmap, not that I had one.

I was called by a friend from college who had just started working at an agency that was doing music promotion on the internet. This newfangled thing that just started rearing its head at the late 90s. He was doing quite well and doing kind of, know, Muse and the Prodigy and all of these great acts. he said that his company wanted to start up in the film space

did they know anyone who might want to come and help set that up? And so he thought of me, I having had only very little experience on the production side and none on the kind of promotion and marketing side. I just went for it, you know, and just from there we built out one of the first kind of pure play film distribution kind of marketing agencies, concentrating on trailer distribution, kind of replicating offline PR.

activations in the new digital space. So that was really how it all started.

Justin Levinson (03:12.344)
That's interesting. That's cool that it came through the music channel as well. Where did you pivot to next after that? What was your next agency experience that had after

Andy Freedman (03:24.658)
Yeah, my next agency experience was interesting. I moved to a bigger agency at the time called Beatwax run by my friend Chris Ward. Fantastic agency was very well known in London and the UK for youth marketing and youth brand marketing and that kind of thing reaching that audience. And they worked across kind of music, film, consumer products, that kind of thing. But when I got there, there was a lot of people there who didn't know.

quite what was going on. it turned out, as these things do, that the company had recently been acquired by a holding company and that holding company had acquired several other agencies as well to kind of merge into a roll up. And it was kind of Game of Thrones really before Game of Thrones was a thing. So everyone was kind of like looking over their shoulder and kind of trying to grab their bit of the fife to them. And I was only there for a short time.

And it wasn't for me that kind of atmosphere. The previous agency I was at had a much more entrepreneurial spirit and kind of everyone pulling in the same direction. And then you go to this agency where it was just knives out, which I didn't really want to be a part of long term. I, along with another chap who I had befriended at the agency, who was a freelancer at the time, who wasn't a full -time employee of the agency.

Justin Levinson (04:38.156)
You

Andy Freedman (04:51.796)
He was looking to go out on his own and we got chatting and I thought, you know what, I could come and do that as well. Why don't we go and do that? That was literally the kind of genesis of going to start substance properly. Just, you know, we can do better than this and we can do it without all of this background noise and actually it even background noise, it was like, you know, noise in the main arena every day. And

Justin Levinson (05:06.637)
Wow.

Justin Levinson (05:18.156)
Yeah.

Andy Freedman (05:20.574)
I called a couple of clients, told them what I was doing. I said, will you come with me? They said, sure. I said, that's good enough for me. I went out and bought my own laptop and started it in my back room and went from there. Yeah. And I only really had like one or two clients at the time, but one of those clients was 20th Century Fox at the time. Big, big legacy Hollywood studio.

Justin Levinson (05:29.388)
That's amazing.

Justin Levinson (05:36.14)
Wow.

Andy Freedman (05:50.382)
and they put the faith in me which is fantastic. Yeah, was lucky enough to do

Justin Levinson (05:54.348)
That's amazing. it probably took a little bit of the anxiety out knowing that you had this relationship and that you weren't starting from nowhere basically. I mean you had a reputation, you had clients that were going with you.

Andy Freedman (06:11.124)
sure, but it was based on unsteady foundation, shall we say. It was gonna be, you're only gonna be as good as your next job. And it's all intents and purposes, it's not a company until you have a bit of structure and a few employees and you've got some mode of operation. What we were doing is essentially kind of contract work. But we believed in it from the beginning.

Justin Levinson (06:15.222)
loose.

Justin Levinson (06:22.764)
Mm -hmm.

Justin Levinson (06:35.479)
Yeah.

Andy Freedman (06:41.108)
to it and we slowly started to pick up more independent clients at the time. There's only a few of us working there so we didn't need huge budget campaigns. We very much played in the independent space with one major supply and the bigger targets.

Justin Levinson (06:59.916)
Yeah. Were you still pretty nervous a little bit? Like going out on your own? Like at that point in your life, did it sort of feel like, or were you sort of like that, just ready to do

Andy Freedman (07:10.91)
Yeah, I mean, I always say this to people who ask me about starting a business. I always say starting is the easy thing. Like just saying you're going to do it, you know, that's the easy part. The hard part is then what comes next. How do you build your experience? How do you build your client base? How do you build your company? How do you find talent? How do you keep the lights on? You know, that's the hard part. You know, saying yes is the easy part. You know, if you fail, you can always go back and do something else.

Justin Levinson (07:30.304)
Yep, totally.

Andy Freedman (07:40.69)
you know and when you're in your mid -20s that's the time to be in my book anyway time to try and that's what i did it so

Justin Levinson (07:46.37)
Totally. Yeah. So you, you, have a business partner. There's somebody that sort of, works, it works with you. that still the case or do you, are you, how's that working?

Andy Freedman (07:55.518)
I've had a complicated relationship with my partners in the past. So my first partner who I actually started the business with, he left very, very early on after realizing that he was about to lose all of his clients and he was gonna be relying on me to fill the gap. So that was not the intention when we first started, obviously. And so that didn't last very long. He was brought out by our first employee who...

Justin Levinson (08:07.458)
Hahaha

Justin Levinson (08:15.18)
Yep.

Andy Freedman (08:25.457)
Shall remain nameless, but you know, we worked together then for a good number of years on the company, him more on the technical developer side and me more on the PR promotional side. And we kind of built up from there our capabilities. And now this is 2003, 2004. So YouTube is just about to be a thing. You know, Facebook has just started. You know, MySpace was there.

And we were at the forefront of that social media kind of explosion. So, you know, was definitely an interesting time, lots of trial and error, lots of clients wanting to try new things. yeah, it was good and exciting.

Justin Levinson (09:05.88)
Cool, yeah, I was just curious to see in terms of a partnership and in terms of leadership structure in a creative agency, do you find that it's good to have one person that is, like you said, more technical and then maybe one person that's more like PR? there any sort of...

Andy Freedman (09:23.484)
Yeah, I think it depends on what you're doing, right, Justin? think, you know, we're a multidisciplinary agency for, and that's a great, that can be a great thing. It can be also be a really challenging thing. Not everyone's gonna wanna buy everything all the time. But when you can kind of unload with all of your best assets, then, you know, you can do some pretty good stuff. But I have, have,

A chap called Colin Swift, who's one of my very good friends, he's been with me nearly the whole 19 years, who is the management director in the London office. I'm based out in Los Angeles. And, you know, we do have a strong management team. have, you know, financial director and operations director, creative services director, you know, and those combined to help be the, you know, the sharp end of the business in terms of the management of the running.

It does always help to have kind of universal skills. I mean, we don't really do much development or build anymore. know, that ship sailed a long time ago for us, you know. So, you know, when the market shifted in terms of what our clients were buying from us, we don't necessarily do that anymore. it's not necessarily having a technical or a developing background. It just depends what you're actually, what you're producing. What we produce now is mainly strategic.

content, whether that's social, digital, out of home, whatever it is. And that's our kind of

Justin Levinson (10:58.026)
Yeah, do you have any particular campaigns that stand out to you as very exciting or that you're most proud of?

Andy Freedman (11:09.65)
sure, I mean in the past we've worked on everything from Avatar to you know The Simpsons movie You know the first film that I did as substance you know with Fox was The Day After Tomorrow which is like a cheesy disaster movie that everyone kind of knows but that launched my agency so like I'm very proud and fond of that film and kind of return to it every every every now and again

Justin Levinson (11:24.662)
Yeah. Yep.

Justin Levinson (11:31.637)
Yeah!

Andy Freedman (11:35.7)
And then, know, on the other areas of our business that are non -film or non -entertainment, very proud of some of work we've done with Amgen, particularly on a drug called Lumacras, which is a novel drug that helps patients with non -small cell lung cancer. And, you know, that was a phenomenal kind of multi -year effort and was rewarded with a PR Week award, which is fun. So yeah, those are two that definitely stand out for me.

Justin Levinson (12:05.11)
Yeah, it's interesting that you guys sort of have a bit of like, you know, have the pharma, you also have entertainment. That's an interesting like, you know, diverse set of clients, which seems like it's unlike a lot of other agencies that I've been in touch with over the years. How does that sort of come about that you sort of work in such diverse ways there?

Andy Freedman (12:28.096)
Well, that's a great question and the answer is very random. But it all comes down to referrals, which for small agencies, that's the lifeblood, right? The work you do, how it's received. Do those people then have other contacts or when they leave and go to another company, do they take them with you? And it was an interesting time, but we were a pure play entertainment agency. Our core client base was entertainment, film, streaming, and home entertainment, that kind of thing.

a little bit of consumer products, I've worked with Hasbro a little bit, things like that. Our biggest client in 2019 or 2018 was 20th Century Fox and they were about to be bought by the mouse, by Walt Disney. And so we saw a future whereby one of our biggest clients was about to be consumed and we knew that that would mean curtains for a lot of the business that we had been doing with Fox because we understood

what was happening, they were gonna buy the catalogue, the studio itself was not really gonna be much of a function and the work that we were doing, which was very, very involved with the international markets, like connecting the dots between home office in the US and all of the international markets around the world, that was gonna go away. At the same time, very randomly, someone from Fox reached out to me and said,

I've got a friend who's looking for an agency in the healthcare space and I know you guys don't know anything about that or you don't do anything with that, but you do know how to build an audience on social and that's what they're looking for and they actually want to work with a company that isn't pharma specific, that isn't healthcare specific, that can bring a new viewpoint on kind of what they're doing in the social space.

So we went to meet with them. It turned out that the company was Amgen, which was based in the city that I live in, Thousand Oaks, just outside of LA. And so it was very random in that respect because it is one of the biggest employers of my local town. We went in there and we chatted about what they needed. We came back to them with a pilot proposal, which they loved. We executed on that. And, you know, four or five years later, we now do pretty much all of their strategic social media across their therapeutic areas.

Andy Freedman (14:51.178)
both in the US and globally, we work for their foundation, the Amgen Foundation, which is nonprofit. We work across their business in many different ways. And we pretty much touch on every muscle of the agency. So from creative strategy, monitoring insights, data reporting, all of that good stuff. We do that on a daily basis for that client. it's

been one of the main reasons why in the last four years since pretty much 2019 we've been able to double the revenue of the agency.

Justin Levinson (15:29.762)
That's wonderful. That's really cool. And it's very cool that like your experience in entertainment and all that stuff really shine a new light maybe and sort of, you know, kind of segue right into that new part of your business, which is really cool. Yeah, that's really awesome. Yeah, so I guess the other question I was gonna ask you, like, what is your sort of role look like?

Andy Freedman (15:43.54)
Yeah. Yeah.

Andy Freedman (15:57.854)
See you

Justin Levinson (15:57.994)
in the agency at this point, because I know as you start to scale and grow and you have all these different clients that I'm sure your role has changed a lot from the beginning. What does that kind of look like now for you on day to day?

Andy Freedman (16:09.802)
Yeah, definitely has. I mean, I'm still really involved with the business on a day to day because I am the one who kind of helped to build out the healthcare practice in the agency. first of all, I had a mighty job to kind of convince everybody that this was a good thing for us to do. know, people working on cool stuff like, you know, gaming and films, and then they're suddenly faced with oncology, cancer, and, you know, stuff that's actually pretty heavy, you know.

Justin Levinson (16:39.38)
Yeah.

Andy Freedman (16:39.866)
And I think that that was a real challenge, but it was also an opportunity, right? Because how often does an agency who's very, very known for one thing or one industry break out and diversify to another industry? It's always the thing that you want to do as an agency owner. I'd love to work on that brand. I'd love to work with this product, but it's not as simple as that.

And so like for me, this was our opportunity to really show our skills in a new light. so it was about impressing upon everybody to be, you I became kind of the de facto cheerleader for it and built out the practice really. At the same time, very, very on a personal level, my youngest daughter at the pretty much, I think two months after we first started working with Amgen was diagnosed with leukemia.

And it kind of brought my professional and my personal worlds, you know, crashing together. But for me, it kind of just was one of those signs that, you know, you're in the right place. This is the right thing to be doing. It turned out actually that they actually produced a drug for my daughter's condition. Thankfully, my daughter didn't need it and she is now off treatment. You'll be pleased to know. But it just gave me that sense of, you know.

this is the right thing to do. obviously people are to react quite viscerally to that. Everyone's had a family member affected by a disease, whether it's cancer or heart disease or something like that. So we had to take everyone's reactions and feelings into consideration. think by and large, everyone was really like a couple of years down the line, everyone looks back and look how much we've learned. We've learned a whole new industry.

challenging industry at that. know, healthcare is highly regulated, highly technical, you know, we've managed to bring in some of our good stuff and we've taken out a lot of learnings and a lot of growth from kind of what we've learned from our clients and from our partners who work on those businesses as well. So it's really helped embolden the agency to feel like they could go and do anything now. They could go and do any industry if you can kind of tackle healthcare.

Andy Freedman (19:03.816)
or tackle pharma, then you can go and do any other industry. There's no limit to what you can do. So in terms of approving around, it was fantastic.

Justin Levinson (19:14.1)
Yeah, how do you, sorry, how do you guys go at this point? I you have a core of clients and things are humming. you still actively look for new clients? you still kind of leave? And how does that sort of, how do you go about finding new clients? it through like referrals or like you had been talking about before or do you guys do cold outreach or what sort of like business development look like on your end?

Andy Freedman (19:42.89)
We do a bit of everything, Justin. Obviously, referrals are key. They've always been key to the business and they're very welcome. And the work you do is your, know, the latest work you've done is your best ad for what you can do. We have a biz dev team. have our heads of different verticals who are very biz dev focused. But we like to say that everyone is on sales, right? You know, whether that's you just

a designer posting about a cool spot they did or the fact that the PR team were at a trailer launch for Gladiator 2 the other day. Just even posting about our social is a form of new biz in itself. And so everyone kind of gets involved in new biz. We've done various things in the past, like pay to play at certain events, especially in the pharma world when we're just trying to make a name for ourselves. And that's a very slow burn. it's like, you invest in that.

and you wanna see some return on that, but the return is very, very slow. Farmo is a very slow moving industry, unlike film. It's much more planned, it's much more considered in a lot of the things that it does, especially from communications and marketing standpoint. So,

Justin Levinson (20:45.048)
Yeah.

Andy Freedman (21:05.675)
That business development is ongoing, but we have started to kind of spread out now and build a number of pharmaceutical clients. And then on the entertainment side, it's the same thing. We're constantly still going out to people we know or adjunct to people we know to try and keep the home fires burning. Because people leave, people move from companies, right? New teams come in all the time. New structures are in place all the time.

done one year might not be the same the next year. So you're constantly kind of reevaluating your approach to those kinds of people as well. And obviously it's been a tough time in the last two, three years in film and entertainment. First with the fallout from COVID, then the strikes, and then the streaming wars as well. So it's been a bit of a minefield, but I guess it speaks to having diversity of client base to help you through those times. It's very important.

Justin Levinson (21:52.61)
Totally.

Justin Levinson (22:02.412)
Do you have any sort of a crystal ball on where you if you think it's going with the scale is sort of leveling out there? Do you are you optimistic? Are you what's your temperature on?

Andy Freedman (22:13.358)
I'll always be optimistic, but realistic. We've obviously seen the numbers have dwindled in terms of product output from Hollywood studios and streamers. There's definitely an air of let's bring it back down and see what we've got and then go again. So we think we're hopeful that next year there's going to be a little bit more of an upswing in terms of what's available to work on.

because this year has been pretty tough in terms of gaming, terms of film. There's been obviously a lot of layoffs and strife across those two industries. It's well known. But we try and stay on top of it and try and understand the signals not only from what we read and what we see, but who we talk to, people who we talk to, and their kind of confidence levels on kind of how they think things are gonna be in the next six months or the short

Justin Levinson (23:10.518)
Yeah, it affect like, does it make staffing challenging it for you at all? Because I guess it can be hot or cold. What are some of the challenges that you have with staffing? Is there any particular things that can be troublesome at times?

Andy Freedman (23:14.238)
Yep. Yep.

Andy Freedman (23:28.958)
Yeah, mean, absolutely. have to be aware of the people you've got, the skill sets you have, and what clients are buying. And things that you have built up internally sometimes don't equate to what clients are buying anymore. It happened to us with development teams in the past. And we've definitely had to keep an eye on that. And it is the most challenging, as well as hiring.

Right sizing the business is also a massive, massive challenge. And we're a small company, we're only 80 people. I say only, it sounds like a lot, but in terms of bigger agencies and bigger companies, we're pretty small. we're also very interconnected. A lot of our services are interconnected. So it's not as simple as just saying, they don't need that anymore, so we only need this person. There's a lot of connected tissue.

Justin Levinson (24:04.7)
You

Andy Freedman (24:24.288)
connects our departments and the people who do what they do. So we have to be very kind of careful considerate of that. The flip side of that is you can be a little inertia can slip in, right? It can kind of be, I'll just wait and see because that's going to happen. This happens. They might need that. So you kind of try to hedge your bets in terms of what's going to be, what's going to be bought really from, from you as an agency. And the way that the industry is operating at the moment is that everything's very, very late.

briefs are very, late. Turnaround time is very, quick. And budgets are down. it's like those three things combined to kind of leave you with a really challenging picture to predict. Because that's always what you're doing, right? As an owner, you're trying to predict the next three, six, nine, 12 months and see what the flow is going to be. we know

Justin Levinson (25:05.385)
Yeah.

Justin Levinson (25:10.988)
Yeah.

Justin Levinson (25:18.52)
Totally.

Andy Freedman (25:22.518)
especially in film, there's a time lag between events and the impact on the industry. So the strikes obviously finished, but the studios down tools during those strikes, they cut back on what they were gonna actually release, as well as there being an impact on the actual number of things being made, we're seeing that now. And so 2024 has kind of been kicked in the butt by what happened in 23.

Justin Levinson (25:30.381)
Totally.

Justin Levinson (25:45.72)
Totally.

Justin Levinson (25:52.992)
Yeah, definitely. How has technology been sort of changing your business? you guys, I guess I'm a little bit of a tech nerd in a way. Obviously my background is in, I I love music. I always have my guitars here in the back, but I'm also fascinated by AI and different automation tools and machine learning and all that stuff I just find fascinating. And I know,

Andy Freedman (26:19.008)
Sure.

Justin Levinson (26:23.19)
Yeah, all industries are changing because of it. What sort of tools are you finding that have been successful at Substance Global?

Andy Freedman (26:33.334)
Well, I mean we've been with everybody else in the sandbox, know as a creative agency seeing what AI can do in terms of image, terms of audio, in terms of text, you know, we find that it helps us on the research side of things quite considerably obviously and in terms of storyboarding or visualizing stuff, you know, trying to get a quick viz to explain what you mean to a client.

so they can kind of get the picture. That's great for an agency like us, means we don't have to necessarily use resource internally to kind of do those things to keep things moving along. Plus also, it's the vanguard of this new age, right? So it's like, try to figure out what does what and what works and what is kind of commercially...

Andy Freedman (27:24.906)
reliable, I guess, from the AI perspective. But internally as well, we build our own tools as well, if we see that they can facilitate some efficiency. right now we're building an internal tool that is gonna take, we do a lot of reporting for our clients, a lot of reporting in terms of performance, but also in terms of insights and social listening and things like

Justin Levinson (27:26.797)
Totally.

Andy Freedman (27:51.092)
So we've automated a lot of the functions that will enable us to kind of pull all of our data from multiple sources in one fast sweep and also then populate a deck at the same time. So, you know, the hours that it took to kind of download and pass the data and review the data is basically completely caught. And then the actual development of a deck and the...

Justin Levinson (28:02.518)
Mm, fascinating.

Andy Freedman (28:18.998)
And the output is something that we can start to semi -automate as well. So we've been doing that at the moment and that's going to save like 10 days from someone's workflow.

Justin Levinson (28:28.556)
Wow. That's amazing. And so you guys are like, are you partnering with developers? Are you doing it yourself?

Andy Freedman (28:35.646)
We've got an internal data and insights team that includes data scientists who are doing that thing. Yeah.

Justin Levinson (28:45.548)
That's really cool. That's really cool. You're kind of a different subject, but you're involved in music a little bit too, right? I was just kind of, I think I remember the first time, mean, I've known you for a bit over the years. And I know, I, you know, obviously, you know, I'm always on LinkedIn. That's sort of my kind of like, my wife calls me, she calls me Abraham LinkedIn. We're into puns, cause I'm always, I'm always looking, I'm like.

Andy Freedman (28:58.877)
Yeah.

Andy Freedman (29:05.718)
Sure.

Andy Freedman (29:10.992)
That's pretty funny.

Justin Levinson (29:12.364)
I'm like there in my bed just looking at it. She's like, you on LinkedIn again? I'm like, I know. Possibly the least cool social media to be on all the time, but you know, in

Andy Freedman (29:20.862)
I don't know, in healthcare at Farmer's, it's the coolest. Wimp.

Justin Levinson (29:25.394)
I know it's like for me it was like I ended up actually like I had once I quit Instagram and Twitter and Facebook. I didn't quit them but I realized that there was definitely a if I was gonna have a time suck into LinkedIn at least you know there was going to be some sort of a financial potential financial gain for me to be had there and also maybe a little bit less you know divisive and

Andy Freedman (29:36.991)
Yeah.

Justin Levinson (29:55.102)
and maybe more informative in certain ways. So I don't diss LinkedIn. I do really appreciate it. But yeah, she calls me Abraham LinkedIn. I probably should look at my phone a little bit less. But yeah, I know I had checked on your page and I had seen that you were involved in music or you had a record label. And obviously we talked a little bit about some of your background in music before. But I think that was one of the things that sort of like...

Andy Freedman (29:55.722)
Sure, definitely.

Right, right, right.

Andy Freedman (30:18.592)
Sure.

Justin Levinson (30:22.172)
I thought to myself, I bet this guy is pretty cool because you're just not a guy in a suit and you have this, it's just a very cool humanizing thing on LinkedIn when you see that people are involved in the arts and having your own record label. So what is your connection to music with all

Andy Freedman (30:44.542)
Yeah, I mean, I always loved music, played music all my life and, you know, being a fan and a consumer of music, both like obviously on record or digital, but also going to shows, know, going to shows is one of things I love to do the most. It's one of the things I can do the least now I have four children and two dogs. But, you know, that for me is my happy place, right? is a festival or a gig, like listening to a band I love and connecting with that and having

you know, experience with people and that's pretty much probably why everyone loves it and that's how it should be. In terms of the record label, so the record label is called Superpop. It was hatched by a friend of mine, Chris, who is an entrepreneur and has had various dalliances in the music industry, very interesting guy and one day he called me up he said, Andy, I know we haven't spoken for a while but I'm in LA with my friend Michael who's a producer.

very successful producer. We've been producing these guys basically out of Seattle, out of Whitby Island, and we think they've got something, you know. So we got them down here to Sunset Sound of all places, like one of the most famous studios in LA, and they got a full band for these guys. And these guys are like a singer -songwriter and his brother who played kind of drums, and they both rap. And they produced these tracks that were just phenomenal.

They were really, really good. Funk soul, kind of Bruno Marsy, kind of Anderson Paak vibe, know, very, very light, very, very summery and just fantastic. And it was like, that's great, you know? And he's like, do you want to come on board and help promote? I was like, sure, sounds fun, you know, it's like, there'll be no money in it. It'll be a passion project. so...

Yeah, we started to do that. We released four singles very, very quickly. We got a little bit of buzz, but that is the hardest thing in the world to do right now, is to release music and to kind get it to stick and to kind of get people to know who your artist is. There's a lot of hard yards, a lot of graft that needs to go into it. we did it. We released the songs as a bit of a pump because we did and the opportunity was there to

Andy Freedman (33:03.434)
to make the music and so we just got it out there. But we're still developing that artist and we developed another artist in Brazil called Kami. And so it's a very slow burn, but it's something that keeps me involved in another creative area that I love. And it's not financially motivated. It's more about can we kind of, can we do it? Can we kind of make it happen or can we help support an artist?

on their journey. And yeah, that's kind of the crux of it. it's, yeah, it's been a fun ride for sure.

Justin Levinson (33:40.28)
That's cool. Yeah, I think we all need like something else outside of just running our agencies to sort of, you know, to stick a hobby and something you enjoy doing that doesn't have a, you know, it doesn't need to make money to enjoy it and to feel rewarded. I

Andy Freedman (33:46.303)
Right.

Justin Levinson (33:59.222)
you know, one thing I do as sort of like a hobby is actually teach some music to some kids. I started out because I have kids in the neighborhood and then some other kids like, hey, your dad plays, he's a songwriter, he plays music. Like, will he teach me how to play? So I taught one kid and the other kid tells the other neighbor. And before you know it, I've got every kid on my block is banging on my door looking for piano and guitar lessons. Yeah, and it's like, it's really been interesting because it's like, you know,

Andy Freedman (34:04.96)
Sure.

Andy Freedman (34:20.32)
Token of referrals, mean, kids are the best.

Justin Levinson (34:28.192)
especially since COVID and we're all, you know, we are a very like, everything is just done on zoom and loom videos, like all these things are so I'm not always connected. The people that work for me, they live in other states and and so sometimes it can be bit of a lonely, can be a bit of a lonely thing. And sometimes these kids come in and they're like, you know, they're just really goofy and they say the weirdest things and it's like, I feel like I'm

Andy Freedman (34:41.046)
Mm -hmm. Mm -hmm. Same.

Justin Levinson (34:55.49)
part of something like human. you know, I'm not charging an arm and a leg to teach a kid some chords on piano. So it's definitely, it's in the passion project kind of thing. so I can kind of understand that.

Andy Freedman (34:56.658)
Right. Yep.

Andy Freedman (35:04.842)
Sure.

Andy Freedman (35:12.692)
Yeah, that gave me a huge like extra lease when I started doing it. got my enthusiasm for everything went up like three or four notches, you know, because it was at the time the COVID was very, very heavily kind of in our lives. you know, everyone was feeling, you know, depressed, disembodied, you know, like you say, like not with anybody, disassociated. So it was just definitely for me a way to kind of feel connected to.

Justin Levinson (35:35.308)
Yeah.

Andy Freedman (35:39.578)
to something new and some creativity which is always inspiring to me. And you know obviously that's the fun part but then the hard again you know that's like I said earlier right the easy thing is getting it started. Yes is what you need right you just need to say yes and then the hard part is then developing

Justin Levinson (35:52.578)
Totally.

Justin Levinson (35:57.856)
Yeah, I mean, I make a whole podcast on the music business and then how, the, that could be a whole separate one that's can of worms, but yes, starting to get his, yeah, I totally hear you. But I guess, you know, the last question I'll have for you here, and again, and thanks so much for doing this and chatting. It's been really, really been fun. But I guess,

Andy Freedman (36:05.258)
Cushiken. Yeah.

Andy Freedman (36:17.874)
Mm.

Andy Freedman (36:21.984)
been my pleasure.

Justin Levinson (36:26.006)
You know, I imagine that a lot of our listeners are gonna be, I guess it's kind of a double -sided question. A lot of our listeners, think, are gonna be, a lot of people that I believe are gonna be interested in starting their own agency, maybe they're top performers in their current companies. They're wondering, should I do what Andy did and just make a jump forward and start it? Or they might be a little hesitant and kind of just like, I'm gonna wait out the storm and, you know.

I think that that's a big part of our listeners. Also, just people that work in agencies that are kind of just like, I wonder what the people that are running the agencies are thinking and kind of just kind of want to know their vibes and their strategies and how they're seeing things going. What would your advice be for, you know, I guess somebody that is, I guess, who is looking to start an agency right now? Would you say it's a good time to do it? And how do you feel about

Andy Freedman (37:21.626)
No, I mean, it's there, but it's never going to be a good time. The good time to do it is when you're ready to do it. Like if you feel ready to do it, take it on. There's always going to be external factors that you cannot control, whether that's interest rates, whether that's, you know, the way that a certain market is performing. You know, if there are layoffs in certain industries that are really, really crushing it, that that's the, you know, that was the place you wanted to go into. There will always be opportunity

doesn't matter what time it is, like whether it is a time of a pandemic, you know, we saw that there was other opportunities that came to the fore. And now that the things have changed a little bit, there are other, you know, other opportunities come back. So there will always be challenges. You're never going to have like the ideal time. I mean, I was lucky in that I came into, I came into kind of doing what I do at the very start of

when people were doing that as a business, like actually being able to make money from utilizing this technology to kind of add value to companies. 20 years later, obviously, it's very saturated competitive place. But the incoming AI takeover, the metaverse takeover that we

we've been promised for so long that obviously we've seen since 2005 or whatever anyway. things, technology will always bring along a new wave of possibilities or ways to get involved and turn that into a business. so yeah, platforms have kind of come and gone in our lifetime as a business, right? And they've changed and they've evolved and they've been bought and sold and you know.

there'll always be something happening. It's an ongoing story. you just have to, if you want to get into that and you have a passion and you feel all you really need is the energy to do it, right?

Justin Levinson (39:26.356)
Yeah, how can people that are looking to get into the agency world, as an employee, like somebody that might want to work for Substance Global at some point, how can, any advice for them in terms of how they can show their skills or any advice on that front?

Andy Freedman (39:48.918)
Yeah, just show, mean, look, we're in a, we've got content platforms all over the place now and that's what everyone's attention is diverted to. And so that's the place you need to be to show your skills, whether you're a motion designer or a presenter or an editor, know, in those kinds of things. So always be kind of pushing yourself out there in terms of your work, making sure that it's updated, you know, no one likes to see like a showreel from 2015.

when it's 2024, but it happens. It's like, well, what have you done in the last nine years? So kind of, know, always be thinking about like, if you're going for a job somewhere and you, you know, be attuned to what it is that they do, like come prepared, do your homework, you know. But for starting yourself, I feel like, yeah, obviously it is a big deal. I don't wanna downplay that. It is a big thing to say, I'm not gonna, you know.

not gonna take a regular job type job and do it myself. But it's doable, know, it's doable. you start small and you have a goal and you have some focus and you obviously have the skill sets to produce, then that's what you need really. Then the fun starts, you know, when you grow, when you get another job, I need some more people to do this.

Where do we do it? I need an offer. Then all that good fun stuff starts. if you want to do it and you've got a desire to do it, then you should test yourself. I didn't have necessarily a desire to do it. Mine was much more circumstantial. Mine was much more of a, I'm not staying here because this place is crazy. This guy said something quite interesting. I know myself what I can achieve.

I'm going to take the job. And you know, crucially, I didn't ask anybody else for their permission to do it. I just did it. you know, million people would have had a million different answers, right? you shouldn't do that. It's crazy. You'll be exposed, blah, blah, where you can get money from. You know, there's always going to be a naysayer, someone who can tell you that you can't do it. So just don't ask for permission.

Andy Freedman (42:09.046)
Obviously if you need to ask for permission, there's financial facts in it, ask for permission. But if you're in your mid -20s and you're flying solo or you don't have that many responsibilities and roles in your life, then why not?

Justin Levinson (42:29.494)
love it. Awesome, Andy. Well, thank you so much again for your time today. Love hearing your story, how you got into this. And there's lots of nuggets in here that I know our listeners will love to hear. So thanks again, and look forward to talking with you again soon. All right, Andy, be well, Bye.

Andy Freedman (42:32.904)
Yeah, of course. Pleasure.

Andy Freedman (42:48.34)
Awesome, thanks Justin. Cheers man, bye.

Agency Side host Justin Levison

Agency Side host and the creative matchmaker extraordinaire at Coming Up Creative. Connecting top talent with leading agencies by day, uncovering industry secrets by night (well, whenever we record).

Justin Levinson

Entrepreneur & Podcaster