How AI and Influencer Marketing Are Reshaping PR

Justin Levinson (00:00)‍

Hey guys, welcome back to another episode of the Agency Side Podcast. I am your host, Justin Levinson, and today I am with Bruno Solari, founder of SoulComms. Bruno went from rising through the PR agency world to launching his own firm and scaling it to more than 50 people in under four years. We get into what drove that growth, how he thinks about hiring and culture, why he believes PR is entering a really interesting new era, and how AI influencers and experiential are changing the way agencies create value for clients.

There are a lot of really practical takeaways in this one for anyone building or leading an agency. Let's roll out.

Bruno, it's so great to have you today.

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Bruno Solari (00:46)

Yeah, thanks for having me. I'm excited to be here.

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Justin Levinson (00:49)

Yeah, so I'm always interested in the origin story. How did you get into this world?

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Bruno Solari (00:55)

Yeah, so I started working in comms and PR back in college, right? Did did my fair share of internships pretty early on. I always knew that I wanted to do something in communications, loved to write, loved to strategize, loved being creative, and felt like PR was a natural path for that. So yeah, I got got my first big PR agency internship about junior year of college, and by senior year of college, I had a full-time job.

was a full time account coordinator while juggling a full time course load. It was crazy but well worth it. And I've just been able to, you know, rise the ranks of the PR agency world since then.

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Justin Levinson (01:37)

Cool man. So you were at University of Miami, is that where you're studying?

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Bruno Solari (01:40)

That's right. Yes. It's all about the

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Justin Levinson (01:43)

Yeah, yeah. And what what was your major there actually?

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Bruno Solari (01:45)

Yeah, majored in communications with specialty in public relations and a minor in marketing, which basically sums up what I do today.

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Justin Levinson (01:55)

Yeah, and so you got into you started out in accounts. Tell me how you kind of like rose up up the ranks on that.

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Bruno Solari (02:02)

For sure. You know, it was a lot of faking it till you make it, to be completely honest. Like that's my my best advice for people who are nervous. yeah, my my first job was at a firm called Max Borgious Agency. It was a fully consumer tech PR firm. So everything from headphones to speakers to smart home devices. And this was back in twenty fourteen. So tech

Consumer tech was all the rage and, you know, really got creative with how to make tech come up in culture, right? You know, headphones aren't a fashion accessory, but pitched them to be a fashion accessory and got them over the pages of Vogue and GQ and publications like that. So really got creative with how to get my clients awareness outside of, you know, the boxes that they were put into, which was the tech world.

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Justin Levinson (02:52)

Yeah. And so I guess like before you started Solcoms, I you were at you were at Autumn Communications. I'd noticed that your job title was like associate VP. Yeah. And I you I've been doing this for a lot. I haven't seen a lot of people go from like A V P to agency founder. So I'm kind of curious how that jump came to be.

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Bruno Solari (03:13)

Yeah, I mean it was a matter of when not if. I always knew that I was going to run my own firm. And while the title was A VP, I was essentially running two different divisions at Autumn that I built from the ground up. I was running a healthcare division of clients that I brought in and serviced and a team that I helped, you know, mold and train and mentor. And then I was running more of a corporate communications division for clients that wanted deep thought leadership.

Right. So brands like Madison Reed, a beauty brand, you know, I was never a beauty publicist by any means, but I knew how to tell a founder CEO story and really helped put that founder CEO on the map, Amy Eric. She's incredible and she's still a client of mine to this day.

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Justin Levinson (03:57)

Awesome. I've read that you have rapidly scaled. How many people currently work for SoulComps?

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Bruno Solari (04:04)

I think fifty three or fifty five today. We we just had like three people start today. So continuing to grow in in under four years, which is just insane.

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Justin Levinson (04:15)

That is pretty bonkers. How I how can you know, how do you scale that quickly and still, you know, kind of keep keep culture that that's that's positive?

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Bruno Solari (04:24)

Yeah. I mean, that's exactly what what we aim to do at SoulComms, right? It's called smart growth. So number one, we're not gonna take clients just for the sake of taking clients. We're gonna take companies that we have strong conviction have a great story to tell, right? Whether it's c a compelling founder or a product that we're all excited about, you know, that's kind of our barometer for how do we take on a client. And number two, does our team have the bandwidth? Right. So we are constantly, you know.

Thinking three steps ahead of where our team is today and what resources we're gonna need. So we're really good at anticipating those hiring needs. And then from a culture perspective, you know, keeping it light and fun at the end of the day. We like the old adage is it's called P R not ER, which is right. So how do we keep things light, keep things fun? You know, our culture is great. We constantly are bringing bagels to the office, doing fun.

you know, quarterly outings as teams, a monthly catered lunch. We were actually featured in CNBC this morning for an initiative that we called Work From Anywhere August, where we shut down our office for the entire month and let our team work from anywhere in the world and, you know, boosted morale, ended up boosting revenue too, which was great.

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Justin Levinson (05:41)

So everyone was wherever they wanted to for a full month, you said?

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Bruno Solari (05:44)

For a full month. Yeah. And we're typically four days a week in office, which is, you know, not traditional today. But we you know, I come from old school agency life and I thought that was important from a culture perspective, for us to be in office versus remote.

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Justin Levinson (05:59)

Yeah, that's cool. But so boosted morale and and people still they did their their thing from rem from afar and you you found an action boosted revenue. That is fascinating. Very cool. so when you started this journey, were you anticipating there to be sixty people or did you did you think this was gonna be a smaller type of firm or how did you how were you envisioning it at that time?

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Bruno Solari (06:26)

I always knew it was gonna be big. You know, that was never a doubt in my mind. I think the time in which it took to get here is what's shocking to me, right? Never in a million years would I thought that we have scaled at the pace in which we've scaled. And I think ultimately it is a testament to the team that I've been able to build and surround myself with. I have an incredible team here at Soulcomms from our leadership team all the way to our junior team members who really have hustle, grit, and care deeply.

about the work that they do. And, you know, it it makes everyone's life easier when everyone is, you know, laser focused on that goal.

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Justin Levinson (07:03)

Yeah. Who what was your first hire?

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Bruno Solari (07:06)

First hire Isabella Moriali. She was my right hand at Autumn, is my right hand till this day. She is our vice president of our health tech practice. So her role is overseeing, you know, healthcare companies that are selling into health systems, into pharma life science companies, you know, back end AI healthcare stuff, really, really deep, requires a lot of a lot of knowledge and a lot of patience.

Bella Bella's amazing.

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Justin Levinson (07:38)

So it was it was you two were were were starting everything. Yeah. So I know you had this vision of that you knew that it was gonna be big, but not you didn't realize it it was gonna go this quickly. Were you feeling confident or kind of nervous when this whole thing launched? I mean, I know a lot of people when they, you know, break away from their agency and want to start something on their own. I've done done that myself. It's you know, you're you're really kind of just putting yourself out there and you you kind of you're hoping your the clients are gonna come, you're kind of

in you know, but you still have like a a mortgage and all these responsibilities. I'm sure you have have things that that require payment. How how were you feeling when you've when you first started?

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Bruno Solari (08:14)

Yeah, I mean, you know, never was there a day that I regretted what I did. I never once thought, damn, like I shouldn't have started my own firm. There there were days that were harder at the beginning for sure. I mean, clients that I was so convinced we were gonna sign didn't. And that was, you know, heartbreaking and really tough to deal with. But, you know, by the end of the first three months, we had twelve clients already, all at pretty sizable revenue. So I at that point I was like, okay.

We're gonna be fine.

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Justin Levinson (08:46)

Totally. And now you have like sixty plus or something I was reading.

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Bruno Solari (08:50)

Yeah. Yeah, we have we have a lot. Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (08:53)

Yeah.

What has been the the I guess the key of how you've scaled so fast? I mean what what's the secret sauce here, Bruno?

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Bruno Solari (09:01)

I mean being being a real partner to our clients, right? I think PR gets a bad rap because people give false expectations to clients and people say people are yes men in PR, right? I think the two biggest issues in PR is the false expectations of yeah, sure, we're gonna get you on C and DN day one, which like I wouldn't tell that to anyone. Yeah. And then saying yes to everything and not challenging clients. And I think we're really good at both, right?

We will always set expectations on what we find to be realistic. And we're always gonna challenge clients to think differently, think bigger, and you know, work as partners to create these strategic moments. We need our clients to be in the news 247. And in order to do that, we need to partner with them and dream up ideas and creative moments and campaigns and storylines that are gonna get them there.

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Justin Levinson (09:53)

Yeah, I'm sure people come in and are just like, Bruno, I wanna be on the front cover of New York Times and you gotta kinda like level with people.

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Bruno Solari (10:00)

Client like that, I'm not gonna take right because they have they have unrealistic expectations. Yeah. So if someone asks me that on the first call, I'm gonna say, you know, that's not gonna happen. Here's why that's not gonna happen. Here's what we can do to work toward that goal. If you're okay with those expectations, we could continue the conversation. Otherwise, you know, maybe not the best fit for us.

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Justin Levinson (10:21)

That makes sense. Are there any other examples of like pushback pushback that you've found to be effective and and how you had a win with a client? Thanks for tuning in, folks. This episode is brought to you by Coming Up Creative, a relationship-first boutique creative recruitment agency. We disrupt the creative ecosystem by running sophisticated multi-channel campaigns with custom video and voice outreach that actually gets responses. We actively market the agencies and brands we represent.

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Bruno Solari (11:05)

Yeah, a thousand percent. I mean, like sometimes clients are afraid to announce certain revenue milestones, right? And if they want to be on right, for example, there's a client that we're about to get on the cover of Inc. magazine. The client's been shy about sharing metrics for for a few years. And we've been coaching them and working that working with them. And we're like, listen, your goal is to be on a magazine cover. In order to be on that cover, we're gonna have to play ball.

And we finally got them to agree and we got the cover story and it's gonna be great and I'm really excited about it.

But yeah, it it it really is a matter of education and pushing.

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Justin Levinson (11:43)

What was the hesitation of sharing metrics?

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Bruno Solari (11:46)

I mean, these are private companies. Yeah. Right. Private companies don't have to report the way that a public company does. So it's not in their best interest to let, you know, potential investors or potential companies to acquire them what exactly they have in the bank.

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Justin Levinson (12:01)

Yep, that makes sense. Cool, cool. So you are doing four days in office, one day remote. And so do you feel like I guess w just pivoting my brain here a little bit. What is it that you're that you're looking for in in people when you're hiring them? What you know, what kind of qualities makes a good hire for you?

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Bruno Solari (12:18)

That's that's a great question. And I think it's different based on the level, right? When I think about the account coordinator level, which is your entry level post grad position. Number one, I want to know if they have like work experience. And that's not necessarily PR agency experience. It's just work experience, right? One of our early hires, a girl named Kelly Merritt, who's still here, she worked at Starbucks throughout her four years in college. And I loved that, right? I loved that she had hustle, she had promise, like

She knew how to get things done. And we hired her for that very reason. And she's like proven to be a hustler. So at that entry level position, it's like having work experience, not okay, mommy and daddy funded your way throughout college. You didn't have to work. Like, I want to see a hustler. Then when it comes to more of the senior level hires, it's can you number one command a room? Can you get clients to trust you? Can you get teams to believe in you? And can you energize teams?

So we really dig deep into like asking those questions about like, all right, how do you build plant relations? Give us those examples. How do you motivate and energize a team? And more importantly, can you get your hands dirty too, right? I think a lot of senior level hires in PR people think that they're just gonna have this cushy job where they're not executing and just delegating. And like, we don't believe in that whatsoever. I I get my hands dirty. I'm still very much in the weeds. Like I expect everyone to get their hands.

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Justin Levinson (13:44)

Yeah. Are there any other I mean you said this employee had worked at Starbucks. Are there any other particular like industries or places where you found like good talent to to bring in early? And and I only say this because in sorry about that.

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Bruno Solari (14:02)

Yeah, no, it depends, right? She she was a Boris said Starbucks, right? So like anything like that, right? Anything that shows that like you can you could take a job like that and run with it for extended periods of time. I think too like longevity at a client at a company is really important to us. I care less about industry and more about showing hustle. Obviously, at the mid to senior level, like you need to have been at a PR agency. If you haven't been at a PR agency, you're not gonna succeed here. And and we wanna spare everyone that experience.

But at the post college level, you know, just any type of work experience, we do a summer associate program every summer for college grads, right? It's for students who are just graduating looking to get their first job in the industry. More times than not, those summer associates end up becoming full time hires. So we think that's the great great incubator for talent that folks end up staying with us in growing.

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Justin Levinson (14:55)

Interesting. Yeah, I was curious because on the recruiting side, I mean, we we're always looking for people that obviously people that can sell sellers, people have sales experience, but also we find like a lot of people that were like former athletes, people that are very competitive. Those are kind of the people that we typically hire and

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Bruno Solari (15:11)

I mean Bella on my who I spoke about on my team, she's a former Division I swimmer. So she loves hiring former athletes for her team. And I think that's the beauty about Soulcoms, you know, each VP has autonomy to run their teams how they see fit. So she has a certain barometer on the type of talent that she likes, whereas like the consumer team might have a different style and the digital health team might have a different style.

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Justin Levinson (15:37)

Very cool. so things are things are obviously been going really well for you guys. You're you're building your scaling, you have lots of clients. things things are it sounds like they're coming up roses, but I'm curious, what are some of the pain points that you're seeing in the industry now and and how are you solving them?

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Bruno Solari (15:52)

Yeah. Pain points, that's a good question.

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Justin Levinson (15:55)

I like the pain, Bruno. I like what hurts.

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Bruno Solari (15:57)

Yeah, I guess pain points number one is like how do you use AI responsibly? Right? Like making sure that people aren't relying on AI to do all of their job for them, but like automating more of the mundane tasks I'm a fan of, but like I don't want people using AI to write and like we're meant to be good writers and communicators at the end of the day. And so that's you know, making sure that everyone is operating like that. I think pain points too are

You know, in the PR world, the rise of generative engine optimization and AI engine optimization, you know, being able to illustrate to clients the importance of that and show the metrics from a reporting perspective, you know, that's that's you know, not a pain point, but something that I have my eyes set on on all right, how are we gonna roll this out to more clients? We have some clients that have their own platforms.

Who really care about it? But you know, I see PR being in this golden age right now because we are driving that AEO and GEO. So it's okay, beyond just getting the placement, how are we showing the value of that placement from an AI storage perspective? So that's one one pain point that I'm in the process of like solving.

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Justin Levinson (17:09)

Yeah. Very cool. You guys do it's not just regular PR, I mean you guys are doing like experiences and influencer marketing and there's lots of other parts a lot of offerings you guys have. and I know this is sort of like the modern day PR model. I'd be interested to learn more about those things that you that you're doing.

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Bruno Solari (17:27)

For sure. So experiential is something that we do a lot in our consumer team. right. We work with a company, Tangle Teaser. It's a hairbrush brand, one of the top selling hairbrush brands in the world. And for them, we're doing experiences 24-7. they just launched their first new hairbrush in 10 years, the complete care brush. And we did what we called the complete care club. It was a full scale event with, you know, hundreds of influencers and media here in New York. took over the rooftop.

Of Nine Orchard A Beautiful Hotel on the Lower East Side. And every detail was completely flawless, beautiful, right? Down from the menu to you know the ice cubes to the decor. Also for Tangle Teaser when the Devil Wears Prada 2 movie came out. They came out with a hairbrush collab with them. So it was how do we bring the magic of the Devil Wears Prada to life by way of this? So, you know, we did really special media and influencer mailer drops where we had like an intern like Andy Sachs.

Go to publishing houses, drop off copies and the hairbrushes. We did an entire event bringing in that velvety red color and theme from the Double Wars Prada, and took over a bar in the West Village for it. So experiential, constantly doing really fun stuff. We're actually in the process of doing a big grand central takeover for one of our clients in a few weeks, which is gonna be great. you know, all in the hope of going viral. And then from the creator influencer perspective, yeah, I mean.

Every single brand needs to have an influencer engine turned on. It's really important. So from that perspective, making sure that we are constantly helping clients get into the cultural zeitgeist by tapping in to the creators that are of the moment and partnering with them in smart ways to bring their brand to life. We work with Bake My Melissa, the viral cupcake brand here in New York City. And creators and big portion of what we do for them, making sure that I mean Bake My Melissa is doing collabs and

ne launches every month. So making sure creators are the ones who are really sharing that news and posting with their channels and all that good stuff.

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Justin Levinson (19:33)

That's amazing. What type of infrastructure do you need to I guess on the experiences side, we must need like you know, events producers and three D designers and all these different parts. Like what what is that infrastructure that that puts this together?

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Bruno Solari (19:47)

I mean, I will say most of it does fall on our team. Our team works magic and brings brings it to life. But then for bigger productions, we do have third party experiential firms that we tap to partner with us and bringing our vision to life.

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Justin Levinson (20:01)

Very cool. And how do you connect with all these influencers? How do you how do you build relationships with these people?

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Bruno Solari (20:06)

Yeah, I mean, it's changed so much. So we we do have an influencer team that's about three people and really today it's about building relationships with the agents. The agents are the ones who hold the power. You know, the individual influencer will rarely respond to things themselves. It's the agent who's helping run. Okay, what do they want to receive? What kind of campaigns make sense based on, you know, what narrative they're focused on at the moment.

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Justin Levinson (20:31)

Got it. I guess a lot of this has probably changed in l recently. Like how I mean I guess what you know, somebody who was in PR five years ago, I imagine it's even a different world than than

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Bruno Solari (20:43)

Yeah,

I mean listen, I started in twenty fourteen and I I've seen the growing pains and I've been through my fair share of growing pains with the industry. I think the first round of growing pains was probably in like twenty eighteen when affiliate became king, right? And the commerce editor was born. And, you know, the prioritization of Amazon versus direct to consumer from publishers because they were gonna make

more money from from featuring that and publishers really wanted to profit. So I think that was like the first big growing pain that I felt, right? The commercerization of PR and and the rise of affiliate. And then I think influencers coming into the fold. I mean, influencers have been around since twenty sixteen, twenty fifteen. They were bloggers then. But I think creator culture got so big in the pandemic.

Right. Like come 2020, 2021, 2022, 2023. Like that was a time when every brand like was really trying to tap into it.

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Justin Levinson (21:48)

Yeah. How how did things go during the pandemic? Like I guess what what was that how did that affect your business?

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Bruno Solari (21:54)

I mean, we weren't open in the pandemic, right? So I was working at another PR firm during that time, but you know, a lot of things went to virtual. I think it so for me, the pandemic is actually where my like love of healthcare PR was born. healthcare was the biggest topic during the pandemic and I started working on some healthcare adjacent clients and just crushed it in that space and it was a huge unlock for, you know, what you know half of Solcom's today is healthcare.

PR and I wouldn't be able to like claim that if it weren't for, you know, the companies I got to work with during the pandemic.

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Justin Levinson (22:31)

That's awesome. During the pandemic, we, you know, we we struggled 'cause I was everybody was struggling at that time. But we were able to really lean into our gaming clients. Mm. because everybody was playing games. So all of the agencies that we partnered with that you know, were marketing games and were like booming. So yeah. That was kind of where we had had shifted during that time. But I think everybody kind of needed to figure something out at that point in time and and make a pivot. And it was was not a fun time. No.

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Bruno Solari (22:59)

No. I I I can't say I miss it. Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (23:02)

For sure. Yeah. What what do you guys you told me about AI and how obviously we don't want to be putting out content that's just totally AI driven because it's not authentic and it's not gonna, you know. And I think that's not just in PR, that's in every industry. If you're just sending out something that's generated, it you know, it's gonna what it's not gonna resonate with people and it's getting more predictable in terms of what that looks like. You know, it's like you can tell when something's written by AI. But with that said, what what is in your

If you can tell me what's in your tech stack, like what tools are you guys using, AI or not AI, I guess, that seem like they're offering value to you right now?

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Bruno Solari (23:40)

For sure. I mean, number one, Claude, right? Claude is so great at building unique skills. You could really hack Claude to be your own agent on what you need. so Claude, our team has a lot of fun with everyone at the agency, has a full-on Claude account that the agency pays for, and we like people to go wild with it. There are real Slack plugins. We're a fully Slack organization. So Slack plugins where Claude could give you

breaking news where your client could be commenting on, right? Those types of moments all the way to like rather than have someone like look at seven people's different calendars, Claude could give you availability within 30 seconds. So Claude, Claude is huge for us. Right. We have it linked to all of our other platforms, our G drive and like just makes life easier. Claude is still another one where I think we could like find ways to to make it work even harder for us. So that's one.

Number two, I'm more of like the PR tech platforms like Muck Rack, like Meltwater, right? Your reporting, your research and all that good stuff. but Claude is definitely our our bestie.

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Justin Levinson (24:49)

Cool. Yeah, some some firms are reluctant to let everything guy everybody have an account and plug in. You know, I've I've talked to some some agencies that that are not as comfortable with doing that. But it seems like you don't

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Bruno Solari (25:01)

That's

crazy to me, right? Like why are you gonna restrict someone someone from something that's gonna make them more efficient?

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Justin Levinson (25:08)

Yeah. It is bonkers. Cool. That's that's great. It's what about in terms of like like like a client, like CRM? Is there something that you guys like to for for managing accounts?

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Bruno Solari (25:18)

No. I mean, we're we're pretty analog, right? Like the drive is our best friend, Google Suite, right? A CRM and things like that, it's it's hard to see the value because I don't see how it's gonna be any different from a Google Sheet. Yeah. Right. In some regards.

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Justin Levinson (25:35)

I no, I totally get that. My the biggest year I ever had in recruiting was using a Google Drive and just and a and a LinkedIn business account and they're very limited resources. And I I imagine the business our business is similar in the fact that it's really a relationship based business and people have to wanna do business with you and yeah, it's it's just yeah, I c I can see why you would not need one.

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Bruno Solari (26:02)

Yeah, I mean like those CRMs cost what a high five to low six figures. And for what? Like what is what is that gonna give you at the end of the day?

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Justin Levinson (26:12)

Yeah. Well I'll tell you, in my experience, they all are missing something. So that and so you kind of find yourself putting together many different tools together and it becomes pretty clunky. I don't think anyone has really figured it out.

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Bruno Solari (26:24)

Every platform is missing something, right? No platform is perfect.

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Justin Levinson (26:29)

Yeah. Unless I can figure out a way to develop it one myself. I'd become a very rich man. but of course it probably wouldn't work for everybody 'cause it'd be very I it's a very specific thing to every person. I think that's why it seems to fail is because

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Bruno Solari (26:41)

That's why that's the beauty of Claude and Bibecoding today, right? Like Claude is how you can build those platforms exactly how you want it based on how you operate.

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Justin Levinson (26:51)

Totally. Yeah, it is a total game changer. I haven't been using Cloud too much, but I just went to a conference. It's called the Pinnacle Conference. It's like the it's like the top eighty recruiters basically in the world are part of this association. I'm I'm not in it. I I was pledging to be to be in it. So I was trying to get into it. But they had a great Yeah,

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Bruno Solari (27:08)

Great to be great to be considered for it.

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Justin Levinson (27:11)

yeah. I'm ex you I don't know what my fate is gonna be, but I really learned a lot. Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed. but it's all based on like

how many how many billings you've had consistently. So it's a little bit of on like the dollar side of things, but it's also like just on who you are as a person. Like do you give back to your community? Do you share ideas with others or do you, you know, keep them all for yourself? So it's a it's a really like, you know, it was a very unique thing for me. But what I was trying to get to is that I've really learned a lot about we had a guy come in, showed us how to use GPT where, you know, we can really I mean I had already been using the plugins, but really building the skills within the GPT, which I don't think I have been doing before. So it could really like

you know, work for me more fluidly. And I that it's kind of embarrassing that I just learned that, but it really made a big a big difference in my in my day to day.

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Bruno Solari (27:56)

Yeah, that's awesome. Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (27:58)

So I guess outside of the world of PR agency space, what do you like to do for fun?

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Bruno Solari (28:05)

For fun. I like to have fun. Like I'm young. I'm thirty-three. I'm not your typical founder, right? I still very much like to go out, like to go party. Was out till four in the morning on Friday night, right? Love love to travel. I am I spent a lot of the summer in Europe, traveling around Spain and whatnot, working out, right? Very important for the mental health. You know, I'm just your

your typical thirties something living in New York who happens to run a multi million dollar agency.

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Justin Levinson (28:37)

That's great, man. what do you what does your like, you know, inner circle, your family think about what you've accomplished?

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Bruno Solari (28:44)

Yeah, I mean, I think everyone is like, holy shit. Like what? Obviously everyone is super proud and super supportive. Yeah. I I don't know. It everyone is like, holy shit. Like what? There's no other way to put it. Yeah, but I mean like we it's fun and like a lot of my friends are the same friends I've had like most of my life. So it's like crazy that they've known me since I was like ten years old, all the way till now. Right? yeah.

And and that growth and that rise. And then my family too, I think. My par I mean, my dad is like one of the hardest working people in the world. So definitely got a lot of that hustle from

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Justin Levinson (29:20)

What what industry is he in?

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Bruno Solari (29:22)

He

is in acoustical engineering.

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Justin Levinson (29:25)

Acoustical engineering.

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Bruno Solari (29:27)

Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (29:28)

Interesting. Mate, can you explain what that is a little bit?

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Bruno Solari (29:31)

You know, it's hard

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Justin Levinson (29:33)

Like sound engineering? Like

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Bruno Solari (29:35)

to like sound engineering, but like let's okay. Let's say like projects that he's worked on are like airports, right? How how does it how do the acoustics sound within an airport and how is that created? Yeah. Things like that. You know, I'm probably buttering buttering it to that effect, yeah.

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Justin Levinson (29:51)

It's interesting.

Yeah, I mean I I took a course in music production and engineering when I was in college and they briefly touched on this kind of thing and and even from like how like highs and lows like affect our like hearing like for the rest of our life. Like you know, like if you know you see that person going down the the highway with the with the thumping bass in their car, like even those lows Yeah,

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Bruno Solari (30:16)

Worst sound ever.

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Justin Levinson (30:18)

and I might not be exactly in

the the lane where your where your your dad is in, but it is really amazing what the highs and the lows, how much they damage our hearing like over time. I'm sure in airports they wanna make sure people's ears aren't getting blown out.

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Bruno Solari (30:30)

Beyond the damaging, it's like how does sound travel? And does sound travel smoothly? And can people have conversations without echoes? I think we've got maybe a room with a crazy echo and you know, that's probably one of the most annoying sounds in the world. So I think it's like, you know, mitigating all

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Justin Levinson (30:46)

Fascinating. Well that's a cool that's a cool little space to be in.

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Bruno Solari (30:49)

Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (30:51)

Cool. And so what's your kind of music do you like? Do you like are you a music guy? I'm always interested in that.

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Bruno Solari (30:56)

Big music guy. I mean, I I said I was in Europe over the summer, a lot of the time was in a visa. lots of lots of tech house, techno, all that good stuff. But also huge Swifty. I love Taylor.

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Justin Levinson (31:09)

I am too. I am too. I actually I just heard a new song of hers just pop up on the radio today, but that whole Fate of a Feel album, really really like it.

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Bruno Solari (31:18)

Girl

on Life of a Showgirl. And yeah, you know, one one thing we did for Baked by Melissa, like bringing pop culture passion into the work, Baked by Melissa, our client, when Life of the Showgirl came out last year, we suggested that they do a Life of a Showgirl themed cupcake pack, right? Not a partnership in Taylor Swift, because one Taylor wouldn't allow that, two, that'd be like millions and millions of dollars. But we were able to culture jack that trend, got crazy press for it. It was one of the best like

launches they've ever had from a sales perspective too.

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Justin Levinson (31:51)

That is brilliant. That is brilliant. yeah. I mean her her career has just evolved so much over the years and I mean

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Bruno Solari (31:56)

I've heard of that.

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Justin Levinson (31:58)

she's like our generation's equivalent of like, you know, Elvis or the Beatles or something like that. I mean, there's almost nothing like it. Yeah.

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Bruno Solari (32:05)

I I went to the Aerostour in London. It was best concert I've ever been to in my life.

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Justin Levinson (32:10)

That is amazing. Cool, man. Well, Bruno, I wanna thank you so much for being on here today and and offering value to the community and telling us your story. It's been a really great conversation today.

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Bruno Solari (32:19)

Yeah, thank you, Justin. It's awesome.

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Justin Levinson (32:21)

All right, man. Have a good rest of your day. All

right. Bye.