What Happens When Creativity Meets Media Strategy?

Justin Levinson (00:00)

Hey everybody, welcome back to yet another episode of the Agency Side Podcast. I'm your host, Justin Levinson, and today I am here with Swap Patel. He is the co-president of Attention Arc. Swap shares how a MasterCard commercial led to an unexpected opportunity in the music industry and ultimately changed his career path. We also talk about building a modern media agency, why great ideas are only half the battle, and how smaller agencies can punch above their weight. Let's get into it.

Hey Swap, how's it going today, man?

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Swapnil Patel (00:37)

Doing well. How are you, Justin?

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Justin Levinson (00:39)

Good. I am so glad to have you here today. I'm I'm interested in learning about your journey. How how how did you get into this wild world of advertising?

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Swapnil Patel (00:49)

Believe it or not, I I got into advertising because of a co because of a commercial. And so I I I didn't have any plans to be in advertising when I was at school. I was looking into investment banking or consulting, something of the like. And I graduated the year of nine eleven. So recruiting on campus that fall was obviously impacted and while doing work one one night into the wee hours of the morning, I saw a MasterCard commercial and it was like

Kid on a bus looking for an internship. And it was like, internship at Uncle's law firm, $5.50 an hour. Internship at mother's, you know, friend's bank, six dollars an hour. Internship in the music industry, priceless. Apply online, you know. And so I submitted a hundred and fifty word blurb and they picked that out of something like fifteen thousand entries, and I got to do five weeks in Nashville.

learning all about the entertainment industry, spending time with some local musicians, learning what it's like to be an artist, meeting Alanis Morset and seeing what it's like to, you know, be an artist and in her manager and the people that put on the production, people that were in entertainment law. And I was like, this stuff feels a lot more fun than, you know, than working in investment banking or or consulting. So I went back to New York. I started looking for jobs in PR advertising, marketing and

I got a job as an assistant planner at Lowe and partners in New York and that was my foray into advertising.

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Justin Levinson (02:21)

That's amazing. That's that's quite the journey. Was it was last more separate kind?

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Swapnil Patel (02:26)

Yeah, yeah. She she did great. We went to Atlanta to see her show. We went a little bit early to see all the production and that's a whole operation of putting up the sets and taking them down. And so you got a whole view of everything from entertainment law to artists and artist management. I have a guitar from Nashville. I'm not very good at music. My brother plays the drums and my submission was about basically a custom bobblehead doll making company that would bobble to the the

the beat of a song you chose and I picked the you know, the song Roll Out by Ludacris and you know made a little MasterCard commercial to send it off and sent that off. And then I met John Rich and Big Kenny who are part of Big and Rich. One of the songs they wrote in the subsequent year was Save a Horse, Ride a Cowboy through this internship. And that's the song that propelled them into their their stardom in the country and, you know, even

opening up for like the S PN's game day for many years, stuff like that. So it was pretty cool.

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Justin Levinson (03:24)

That's super cool. So walking back on this first walk me back on this first role you had as a said as an assistant planner role g was your job. What what was what was your day to day like in that in that position?

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Swapnil Patel (03:36)

So Assistant Media Planner, we're figuring out where to spend the client's budgets, what to do. And back in the day, the media mix in two thousand two was very different than what it is today. But I worked on several J J brands. One of them was J and J Baby, and the commercial was different situations with a mother and a father, mother and a a a kid, and a father and a kid, and it was like guy's night out turns into guy's night in, and it's you from playing poker with the the friends that you have to, you know, splashing in the tub with your

baby and the tagline was having a baby changes everything. And so what we were doing was figuring out where do those ads go. You do MRI runs, you find the, you know, high indexing channels, websites, print magazines, and you you talk with sales reps to figure out, you know, how much to pay for all those ads and then you see how they are performing. Obviously a lot less data back then to now, but the process of how you go through all that is not very different today than it was back in O two.

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Justin Levinson (04:36)

How were you still loving the industry in this first gig? Were you still feeling like this is gonna be my path?

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Swapnil Patel (04:42)

Yeah. Everything I heard back then was the industry was wild and fun and lots of parties and then I graduated the dot com bubble and the burst there and all that. But still as a as a kid in New York City and you're getting to go to like different rep events and you know, stuff like that. it was a lot of fun and then it it just shows you like you could make money doing something you enjoy and you can think through and this seems pretty cool at that point, right?

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Justin Levinson (05:08)

Yeah. What was your next leap after that position?

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Swapnil Patel (05:13)

So I was in New York for a little over a year and a half and then I left New York to go to an agency called Crispin Porter and Beguski in Miami. I started there in four and I was there till the end of twenty twelve. Learned a lot more about the the bridge between message and medium and how if you start with just the medium only, you know, there's only so much you can do before you're just running impressions and kind of forcing your message into someone's life versus if you start with the idea and figure out

how do you put this in people's lives in meaningful ways and places, you could get to a different outcome. And so a lot of the work that the agency had done at that time was you know, groundbreaking and just showing you the possibility of what message and medium can can do in the lives of people.

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Justin Levinson (05:59)

Great. And w what was your your job title there?

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Swapnil Patel (06:02)

I started as a media planner and then when I left I was a group media director. So s always been in media in all twenty four plus years of my career. But working in an integrated agency where you collaborated with strategists, creatives, account people, you got to, you know, think through what happens from the brief from the client all the way through and see how it's doing. And having a economics and sociology background, a lot of what I brought to the table was just more of a business understanding. What are they asking?

How do we reach these people? At the end of the day, a client's business makes money in a couple ways. You either get more revenue from new people, or you get more business from the same people. And so, you know, when you break it down that way, what are you briefing creatives on? How do you help them see whether this idea is, you know, helping achieve the business objective, but allow room for where you could reach people? It's not just the most efficient thing you can do, but it's a combination almost like a

portfolio of your investments, you're not just gonna run in all stocks or all cash or whatever, but what's the right mix of all that so you can make sure you're given the the idea a chance to resonate and then also be hardworking.

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Justin Levinson (07:14)

Yeah. I want to fast forward a little bit and kind of learn a little bit about Attention Arc and kind of what what makes you guys special.

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Swapnil Patel (07:22)

Yeah, so Attention Arc is a fairly new brand in the marketplace. It's been interesting to create a a new entity, if you will. So after I left Chris McMorter and Beguski, I came to McKinney, which is a creative agency in our network, and I ran the media group here. And then about two years ago, we acquired a performance media agency named LWD based out of Irvington, New York. And what we're doing today is trying to combine the best of both worlds where you have experts in how to plan and optimize media.

From a performance and an and an efficiency perspective. But then you have a group of people that are thinking about the integrated view of reaching people from a message and medium perspective. And so what Attention Arc allows us to do is to try to create that almost like a yes and option for clients where they don't have to just settle for one or the other, which is typical in the in the business. But how do you come to a place where you can theoretically benefit from really hardworking stuff?

But it's all built on the strategy and the the the integrated thinking that it takes to connect with people. So that's what we've been working to build. And you know, anytime you're you're working to try to bring two usually separate philosophies together, it's it's tricky. But we're not asking everybody to do one job. The collection of people have to help make that happen. And I think that's where people are growing more comfortable with what what's ahead.

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Justin Levinson (08:45)

That's cool. So you there's another is there another co president or how how is it set up?

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Swapnil Patel (08:49)

Up.

Yeah, exactly. So Asia Pine my co president. She ran LWD for twenty five years, started off as entry level and has now been the president of the agency for many years. She brings a wealth of like client experience as well as like operational stuff to make sure that your scaling and your ability to do what you need to do is there. And then I bring, you know, more of the integrated creative experience and obviously everyone has to be client facing and

comfortable with that, right? 'Cause we're in a client service business. So that's kind of a unique thing, but then there's a lot of complementary skill sets that we're we're working to to bring together to to shape the, you know, positioning and output of the agency.

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Justin Levinson (09:32)

That's cool. you guys are clicked to yin to to yang there. That's great. And how how many people all together in the team?

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Swapnil Patel (09:37)

We have about a hundred and seventy at the agency. I'm across four offices. We have two offices in New York, one in the city and one in Irvington, and then some people in Durham and in Phoenix, Arizona.

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Justin Levinson (09:49)

Wow. How long has the agency been been working?

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Swapnil Patel (09:52)

So we launched Attention Arc in June or so, publicly i last year. So it's been about a year and almost like year and a half. but we acquired LWD at the end of twenty four and we had previously been working on several like test accounts and stuff together. So just trying to bring all that to bear has been really fun and interesting 'cause we named the agency. Coming up with a name these days, you you're really challenged 'cause you'd have like

lose all the fouls or you have to make up something someone's never heard of and to have a name that's as, you know, colloquial as attention arc, where if you ever want anyone to buy a product or service, you have to capture their attention first and foremost. So how do you think about that philosophically? And then there's an arc or a a you know, a journey to everyone's everyone's conversion path, right? And so we're we're being able to think about it that way. I think where we're trying to push more is there there's a

An interesting almost meme like post I saw on on LinkedIn one day where it talks about, you know, marketers think that someone's journey to conversion is you know, consumer sees an ad, consumer responds to the ad, consumer buys product. And then this person listed out like twenty-eight steps of what actually happens. It's like person sees ad, person like talks to their girlfriend, person like jumps on the couch and gets up to go to the bathroom, person

And you you kinda like at the end of this whole long string of like meandering stuff, you get someone to maybe do something, right? Yeah. And so a lot of the way we want to operate is like from a a people first understanding. And so we say, you know, media starts and ends with people. And if you understand them, you can do the same things Assie and I did twenty plus years ago, which is who's the audience? Where can we reach them? What's the right amount to pay? What's the right message to run?

How's it working? And you optimize the whole thing, right? That hasn't really changed. It's just our fragmented nature over those two decades has become way, way more fragmented. And that's what is the challenge in today's marketplace, right?

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Justin Levinson (11:55)

Yeah, I guess people probably really they really want to how how do you how do you prove to somebody that like what you've done equals revenue for them? How does that work? Thanks for tuning in, folks. This episode is brought to you by Coming Up Creative, a relationship first boutique creative recruitment agency.

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Swapnil Patel (12:41)

Yeah, so i again, outside of being able to work with us, one of the things we we talk about is the number ten. We have an average employee tenure of ten years and an average client tenure of ten years. And if you think about how much has changed in a decade from data and AI to the advent of social or the proliferation of social even as early as ten years ago, there's a lot that's changed, but people's sheer motivations have stayed consistent, right? Those that want to work for you, that those that hire you.

There are intrinsic needs that we need to understand. And how do you hold a client's hand to work through the challenges? Like, are you going to be, you know, a seasoned team of people that have seen what what's come before and having the capability to dissect, you know, the the thing to break it down into manageable bytes? And then yeah, you're saying okay, here's what we would do next. And we're going to see how that is. And it's a test, learn, and scale approach, right? Is it that much more complicated than?

Than that? Or does it seemingly feel that way because you don't have the confidence in whose hand you're holding, you know, to move forward, right? So that's that's kind of how we approach. And then on the performance side of our our business, like much of the the relationship starts with a test. If you want to try and there's an upside, we're happy to do that. And if it works, you'll continue spending with us. So there's a client that started in 2021 with a $200,000 a week test.

And today they're spending over a hundred million dollars, right? Because they said, here's the target CPA. If you keep delivering at or below that CPA, we feel like we can keep spending and they have. So that's a little bit of the proof in in the pudding, but sometimes it doesn't work out. And then they have an easy way to say, Okay, well, I tried and it didn't work, right? But when it does, it gives you the confidence of continued scaling.

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Justin Levinson (14:30)

Are there any campaigns that you could talk about that were very successful?

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Swapnil Patel (14:33)

I I think we work with a lot of different brands and it it just would I would ask you, what do you what are you kind what kind of story are you interested in?

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Justin Levinson (14:41)

Yeah, I guess just like a well, how about this? Something that you really enjoyed doing. It doesn't necessarily have to be like a return on investment kind of thing, but maybe just yeah, something that you you really enjoyed.

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Swapnil Patel (14:51)

Yeah. I w one of my one of my favorite accounts and and client teams is the team at Chu Sho. And most times when I have this conversation, I I ask you, are you familiar with Chu Show? And the people we're talking to in the marketing world? The answer is no. And it's because you're really not the target audience. Chusho, in some cases in some places in the country, like think of like a food deserts, like there are retail deserts where stores have left because of the demographics or

whatever of the the marketplace. And so Shusho is the nation's largest independent footwear retailer. They have eleven hundred stores in forty-seven states. But the reason that they've stayed in so many communities is because they're a family-owned company that cares about the people they serve, their own employees as well as those in these communities that they've chosen to stay in and not leave, because there could be a mom working two jobs who's looking to buy a pair of sneakers at a valuable price for

Her son to run track. There's all these stories that we're able to unearth from like the real business, and then we tell them through our sister agencies, McKinney and Cylinder from a creative standpoint. And then our media teams are putting that in market and saying, How do we reach these people? And so, in some cases, like, you know, if the audience, which we call resourceful Americans, like if this audience doesn't have all the means in the world, but they still want to provide pops of joy for their family.

How do they do that? So do you avoid running in like movie theaters because it's expensive? Or do you say, hey, maybe we should run in the matinees because that's a sign that someone went to an experience that they're able to fund for their families and still provide without a sense of guilt, right? And so what Shusho's there to do is give you the value that the company, because of the way they operate,

the lights are on auto in their corporate offices because they don't want to waste energy, right? And every dollar that they could save they put back into their their business to help their people or their customers, right? So the intentionality that they that they operate with and that we get a pleasure of helping support is something I think we're just really we're really proud of.

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Justin Levinson (17:04)

Yeah, that's really amazing. Have there been any challenges since the since the launch? Anything that has sort of been a a struggle that you guys have have triumphed over?

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Swapnil Patel (17:15)

Yeah, I think I think the biggest challenge is when we when we acquired LWD, it's it's to create more opportunity for us collectively. And so as you grow bigger and you have more billings under management, the positive opportunity in that is you're getting more at bats for larger client opportunities, right? The thing is you now you're competing against larger agencies that are three, four, ten X our size.

And so that's that's been a little bit different in terms of understanding, okay, what do we need to show up to this conversation with? How does our narrative land? What about our tech stack or whatever it is across the board is like, how do we bring that forth in a way that's gonna show that we can punch above our weight? And then internally we're we're working to be able to figure out how to provide clients the the the vision of what we're building, which is

the best of both worlds or this yes and notion, right? And so you have to help people feel comfortable in the sense that I'm not asking you who's done this one thing to completely change. Like actually it's not that. I'm I'm just asking you to collaborate with somebody else that may think differently. And so, you know, the the example I give is departments are good because we have 18 different departments in the agency and they have depth of expertise.

But silos are bad. And so when you only operate in a silo, that's not necessarily what we want to do, but we want to collaborate across departments because you're helping take the client brief and the audience understanding and turn that into the value we want to add with what every in individual brings to the table, right? When I lived and worked in New York, people rarely went one floor down to the next. And even though like a McCann or you know, Lowe were integrated.

The way I met people that worked in other departments was because I played in the softball league in New York and I'm like, You're in production and you're a creative and these are the the ways I met people and maybe that was because I was green at the time, versus is the promise of integration really happening? Or is that something like, you know, we actually have to foster and how do we do that? And that's what we're spending our time, you know, kind of sowing the seeds up.

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Justin Levinson (19:29)

Wait, what kind of I know punching above your weight, I li I like that. is there a certain technology that you're leveraging that is kind of helping to do that at all?

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Swapnil Patel (19:39)

I think overall what AI has done is it's allowed everyone to be competing against one another without the gap feeling so wide, right? Like if you can get a bunch of really smart people together, that equipped with, you know, the tools that we provide at at the agency wide level gives you the premise to compete with anybody. It's how do you connect with that audience? What's the narrative and how do you show up in a way that's more unexpected in the

status quo doesn't help you because then you're going to be smaller and they're always going to be bigger and better, right? But what are you doing knowing that to show up that way? And that's how we're approaching conversations is they're just another person on the other side. Do we understand their motivations, their fears, and how do we help them feel the confidence that exists, you know, to be able to to shepherd their way forward, right? So

Thinking business first, thinking people first, and then technology as an accelerator is really the role of that as opposed to it's gonna it's gonna be a game changer. It already has been in the sense of it's democratized, you know, access to the the seat at the table. And then once you have that, it's really can you compete it and convert like your fair share, right?

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Justin Levinson (20:55)

Yeah. Well what's your favorite part of your job?

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Swapnil Patel (20:57)

I have a couple of favorite parts and I don't do them as much. I growing up I loved negotiating and and trying to make something happen that people said you couldn't. A lot of that was ingrained in me at Crispin when I sh I shared an office with my buddy John and he worked on Mini Cooper. I worked at IKEA. on Mini Cooper, he was calling, you know, print publications to replace out the the gray staples in the gutter to be orange because the creative idea was to make them feel like cones and then it was a skid mark, skid mark, Mini Cooper.

Right. And so if you're having different conversations with media partners that were just so fun. You know, and today a lot of a lot of the time is really spent on new business conversations, helping clients see what we could do for them, but also spending time to help people again feel less like intimidated by what we want to do and show them that they're already operating with a ton of intention. We just need to

Take all those little things and wrap them up into something bigger as opposed to like one person has to do it all, right? Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (21:59)

So so even though you're a creative, you still are spending a lot of times on on calls with with clients, it seems.

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Swapnil Patel (22:06)

Well, I'm I'm one of the co presidents of the company and we're a media agency. So I I I can think creatively, but a lot of what I'm doing is fostering connections between, you know, people internally and and and helping our clients see what the value of that could be through the narratives we tell them. Right. And so I I think with with everything that we do, you could almost say what's expected, right? Seventy percent of what we do is like falls into an endemic or an expected bucket.

And the question we're asking ourselves is, how do we do that, but also this? And then what is that? Because they could be testable propositions that we show the client can be de-risked to do something bigger later on, right? So with the way we can run media today, you can use the learnings not only to optimize the media, which we and I imagine every other media agency does, but the question is, can you take some of those learnings?

And because you're in an integrated network with sister agencies that are creative and production and digital experiences oriented, can you bring that nugget of a learning from a media buy and say, hey, we saw this target audience segment working really well, or this message worked 3x better than another. What might that spark? Because then when you take that idea back to the client, you don't just say, this was a cool idea. Let's do this. You can say, We ran this, this showed this.

So we ideated that. Let's try that. And if it works, we can then blow it out more. So now the client isn't worried about the production dollars associated with that. They can feel a little more at ease knowing that it was de-risked because of the learnings that you built off of, right? So that flywheel of like collaboration, not only within a media agency, but within a network is what we're really excited about, technology and people propelling.

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Justin Levinson (23:56)

How do you handle pushback from clients like if they're not big in what you're presenting?

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Swapnil Patel (24:01)

I think you have to understand what is it that is is not landing. I think this this observation hit me during a a conference I went to from brand innovators a couple of weeks ago and it was mostly a room full of clients that were all the attendees and presenters. And they talked about how challenging it is to sell an idea in internally because of various like factors. So what we often think on the agency side is, you come up with a good good idea and you're pitching that.

But really the the the second pitch is how do you help them merchandise the value of that commercially for every department on their end that's gonna be involved in bringing that idea to life. If they're not on board, now your client has like twenty naysayers and the idea is dead, right? So what is the issue and then how do we help them solve that? Is a good realization because we just think about presenting an i a good idea, a good media plan, and it's like,

That's only half of the job. Getting them to bu get buy in is the other half, right?

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Justin Levinson (25:07)

Totally. So tell me what you like to do outside of the working world here. What kinda you mentioned softball. You were playing New York. Do you st do you still playing?

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Swapnil Patel (25:15)

Yeah, I still play once once a year in the fall, the spring league. I thought about the fall league, but with so much going on and and two young kids and and stuff with travel, it's it's hard to to play all the time. I you know, I've been telling my wife this, like I've had this realization that I just love to play. And like what I envision in the future in retirement is just being able to be our kids or being able to like play and you hope that you're healthy enough too at that point, whether it's recently picking up

pickleball or playing basketball or whatever it might be, I would love to to play, right? Learn and play. Like I have that guitar, it sits around. And years ago I took lessons and I was like, I'm getting a little bit of these calluses built up. And I'm like, I'm feeling like that. But like unless you practice and you commit time to it, you're not really gonna do it. Right. And so that's what I'm like really looking forward to figuring out is how do I make time for more, more play. Right. And sometimes

your best ideas can come from doing that, but it's counterintuitive to the work you have to do, whether it's at home or work related work.

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Justin Levinson (26:23)

How how old are your kids?

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Swapnil Patel (26:25)

My daughters are ten and six. And six.

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Justin Levinson (26:27)

Nice. I have two seven and four. So I'm a little bit behind you, but I'm definitely in it.

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Swapnil Patel (26:34)

Great great agents.

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Justin Levinson (26:36)

Yeah, it's really it's really great. But it is hard to find hobbies, like especially after the second kid, it's harder to find like I played Wooden Bat Baseball League this year. It's like a forty year old plus group and so I managed to escape a couple of Sundays on that.

But yeah, I I get it. It's like I I also often fantasize about what retirement will look like at some point, even though it's probably gonna be a a ways away.

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Swapnil Patel (26:59)

Yeah, no, it it's one of these things where they tell you you have to give in the airplane mask example, you gotta put the mask on first before you can help others. And sometimes we just start losing sight of that and then we don't show up in the right way for those around us, even though the intention is positive and stuff. So I I try to keep reminding myself it's not as difficult as I seem to make it be. It's like all these learnings are out there. The difficult part is the application of them and that maybe that's what makes us human.

Right, 'cause if we are machines we'd be like taught and trained to do this this way and that's it. But you have to live and learn and ask yourself, What do I want to do? And how do I wanna be different? So it's that that's what's the that's the hard part.

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Justin Levinson (27:41)

Totally. And I guess my last question for you and which I ask all the guests is what kind of music do you like? If you like music, I assume you do.

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Swapnil Patel (27:48)

Yeah. So I'm one of these people where I grew up way into sports and, you know, music was always just in the background. So like it's whatever's on and these days it's, you know, everything from like the descendants soundtrack to whatever the kids are playing, you know, and so I I'm like we have two Spotify accounts and I'm in I'm not in control of any of them.

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Justin Levinson (28:11)

Yeah, I'm the same. I'm the same. What what sports teams are you rooting for?

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Swapnil Patel (28:16)

I'm a big University of Michigan sports fan. I was the guy with the big blue big blue wig with the face painted maze and blue at a lot of games and and whatnot. I grew up a Yankees, Knicks, Rangers and Dolphins fan. Grew up in the Catskills, about an hour and a half north of New York City and now I I don't follow as much of the pro sports as I do 'cause when when you have limited time, you you have to pick and choose and so usually Michigan football and basketball, sometimes hockey is is

what takes up my time. We've gotten to go to a lot of the Hurricanes games down here in North Carolina and, you know, they won the championship last year. So the girls are really, really excited about that.

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Justin Levinson (28:55)

Cool. Yeah, for me it's just not having control of the television if I want to watch a game. Someone else is watching Bluey or something else.

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Swapnil Patel (29:02)

Yeah.

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Justin Levinson (29:03)

But cool, man. Thanks for so much for being on the pod and and talking to us. Really, really appreciate your time here today.

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Swapnil Patel (29:09)

Yeah,

likewise, appreciate catching up with you.

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Justin Levinson (29:11)

All right, man. Have a good rest of your week. Cheers.

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Swapnil Patel (29:12)

Thanks, Justin. Mate. Right. Bye.