Oliver McAteer: Full Episode Transcript

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Hello, everyone. Welcome to Question Everything, a podcast all about learning from the successes and the failures of those who dared to, well, question everything. This podcast is part interview, part therapy, and part Price is Right. We have our own game board stacked with questions that'll make even the most successful CMOs totally sweat. I'm your host, Ashley Walter, CMO and partner at Curiosity. On today's episode, I sit down with Oliver McAteer, partner and head of development at Mischief at No Fixed Address, one of the most awarded and effective creative agencies of all time. If you follow Mischief on social media, you'll know his iconic accent. On today's episode, we're stirring up why the line between getting fired or becoming famous is actually not that fine. How Mischief turns once-struggling brands into total bangers. Hello, Chili's. Greg Hahn's philosophy on agency culture and one non-Mischief ad Ollie's jealous of. You know them, you love them, you may even envy them, but today you will learn from them. As with everything Mischief does, this episode is unignorable. Tune in.

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Oliver McAteer: Oliver’s introduction

Oliver McAteer is partner and head of development at Mischief at No Fixed Address. He is part of the original crew that grew it from a pandemic startup to one of the world's most popular creative agencies. Oliver fell into advertising by mistake after spending years writing about it as an ad trade editor. He's now the growth engine, managing new business, PR, and everything in between. Ollie, welcome to the show. Thank you. Thanks for having me. And yeah, you got a nice, you got a nice studio there. I'm sorry that I'm throwing you back to the beginning of the pandemic lockdown in like my mom's bedroom. No, I won't. Kind of fitting given that mischief kind of started in the pandemic and you guys were all virtual during those early days, but this is our new studio.

So I'm super excited to be in here finally. Very swanky. Very nice. And yeah, hats off to you and all the success at Curiosity. And yeah, you're one of the reasons why we just haven't started a podcast yet. Love this podcast. And you know, we're big on all things agency marketing. A podcast should be part of that, but it's not because you're doing it so well. So thank you for leading the charge. Wow. Wow. Okay. Well, I really appreciate that. Well, we've got a lot to learn from you today. So I'm really excited to dig in. But before we get to the game board, I just want to run down a few of your

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Oliver McAteer: What Mischief award means the most to Ollie

The list goes on, my friend, and I'm curious which one means the most to you. my gosh they're all they're all equally as this is a cop-out but they're all equally as impressive because it is crazy to have achieved that in such a short space of time we're heading into our fifth birthday which is happening in June and and to even have one of those is incredible but I will say if I did have to pick The GQ, most creative companies, is a crazy wild one because we're next to the likes of Apple and Nintendo. I was about to say Tesla, but that's not a hype anymore. And it's just, you know, our mission to kind of, yes, be the best creative agency in the world, but be the best creative brand slash company in the world means, you know, being recognized outside of the ad bubble.

So that is a huge step forward for us in that mission. So I personally like the GQ, but they're all amazing. I love that. In fact, I was asking a couple of folks around the office like, hey, I'm going to be sitting down with Ollie. Any questions you'd want to ask him? And, you know, our chief creative officer very candidly said, can you ask him if they even consider themselves an advertising agency? Because I kind of feel like you're on a totally different level here. Yeah, 100%. We are an advertising agency. We solve problems with creativity. We create work that makes a stir because the riskiest thing a brand can do is be ignorable. So we're always going to be an ad agency at our heart, solving problems with creativity.

But I like how the brand is so much, it's so clear in culture that we could go into anything and you would kind of feel, you would know what it would feel like if it was Mischief. So if Mischief was to open up like a line of clothing or a hotel brand, I like to think you would know how that would look and feel. But at our core, not saying we're going to go into those things ever, but at our core, we will always be an advertising agency. Yes, yes, yes. 100%. That's awesome. You also won, I believe, 40 under 40 at ages 40 under 40. Is that true? You were on that list recently? Yeah, I guess I'm on the more vintage side of that age, like, like nudging 40.

But yeah, no, it's yeah, that happened last year. And that was that was awesome to get to. Big recognition. Really, really grateful for it. Yeah. Congratulations, my friend. All right. Well, this is going to be fun. So we have a game board stacked with 12 super spicy questions. And the power is totally in your hands. You have no idea what's behind each of these. But I think we're going to have a good conversation. So we will pull up the game board now. I can choose anyone. Anyone you want. How often do people go straight in for seven? We need to do an analysis on this and see like the most common first pitch number. All right, let's go for it. So well, you mentioned this at the top.

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Oliver McAteer: How Mischief makes the best out of the unexpected 

So sometimes creating a stir can come at a cost. So I'm curious, can you tell us about a campaign that maybe didn't land with consumers in the way that you thought it would? Great question. And I believe, I mean, If you're creating work that makes a stir, sometimes the stir is going to be in a way that you didn't expect. And I think there are a couple of examples. I think one is probably a campaign that we did for Represent Us, which was all around sort of having to unite people on both ends of the political spectrum to fight. Corruption at the highest level in government and the way that we came about that was everyone is united over a common enemy.

And when you think about government interference and corruption at the highest level, you tend to think of like bad actors and foreign interference, like Russia meddling with elections and stuff like that. So, we came together and thought that it would be cool to have a deep fake of Vladimir Putin and Kim Jong Un, like big global dictators, issue a chilling warning about the fragility of democracy to Americans. Because these people are not the reason why our democracy is under threat. The biggest reason our democracy is under threat is us ourselves not turning up and taking part in democracy. So we had these people kind of issued this chilling warning of being like, 'Hey, like we don't have to do anything, you know, like we just have to do nothing.' We sit back and just let you do you.

And if you're not turning up and taking part in democracy, if you're not going to vote, then that is going to be enough to be the demise of American democracy at large. And what happened in the lead-up to that campaign was we were meant to go really big. on a tv ad that happened like during one of the election debates and it got pulled last minute because some of the networks got spooked and that that kind of pulling added to a new sort of pr angle where we kind of twisted it and we were like this is a pr message or like the message that networks are too afraid to kind of air and

the deep fake and the conversation around deep fake and how real it was and how scary it was took not so much of a lead in that campaign but really kind of fueled the campaign in a way that was completely unimaginable where it kind of brought into question like how should this technology be used so it was interesting in that I wouldn't say it was a real negative you know side of the PR it was just a really nice unexpected conversation that we didn't expect to happen in culture that ended up fueling the message so it just created an unexpected stir which I don't know this campaign so I want I want to I was trying to hypothesize maybe what you would what you would say here but I want to go look into it that's super fascinating um

the amount of like just like research and social listening and things that you guys had to do to like make sure your tone was correct There, I imagine was pretty difficult when you launch a campaign for, like, Tinder as an example; do you know the stir you're trying to create? Like, is it do you nail it every time or like just do consumers like take it and make it their own, like in these like unexpected ways that you're like 'Ah, dang, we didn't even think about that' but it's so cool to see how it's translating into culture. Yeah, well, you know, I think everything starts with a really kind of hardcore brief, like a very clear brief, a very clear, you know, business challenge to solve. And our whole process is two steps.

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Oliver McAteer: How Mischief leverages campaign PR

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Like one, we figure out what we're trying to say. And then two, we decide how to say that in the most interesting way possible. So it's always very clear what the intention is supposed to be. I would say we have a reaction to the very clear intention that it's supposed to be executed how we want it to be executed. And that we can kind of predict. But to your point, there is always sort of, you know, unintentional side conversations that happen on social or people twisting it and talking about a different element or part of that campaign that you didn't even think would be a talkable point. And then it has its own kind of legs in social. And then that's fun too, because, you know, mischief is quite big on social in terms of we get involved in the campaign conversation too.

So we monitor it really, really closely. So I love, it's like one of my favorite parts of the. Job is, we launch a campaign; we see the PR impact it has that is intentional and then the PR impact it has that is unintentional, and the conversations that you didn't expect to be having that people are having that you can jump in and you know help add fuel to the fire. So, it's very much like that, yes, it's very fun, super cool. All right, let's go back to the game board; we have got to go right to number one, number one. There is a fine line between getting fired and becoming famous. So you are just so well known for getting clients to like push the boundaries.

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Oliver McAteer: How Mischief gets CMOs to trust that the stir is worth it

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And us agencies, at least here, like Envy, this so much. And so I'm just curious, is there a secret to how you get clients to push past the apprehension that we know they must feel? They've got to have it, right? The lifespan of a CMO is pretty short in their role. How are you doing it? I think. Two things. Two things. I think the first thing is, you know what you're going to get with an agency called Mischief. So what we have right there is on the door; it's on the hat. And obviously, we put a lot of time into kind of marketing ourselves to showcase who we are. So by the time you come to our door, you know we're the agency that helps create work that makes a stir because the riskiest thing your brand can do is be unignorable.

My mission is to make sure that everyone coming to our door knows that as soon as they open it. So there's no questions asked so I think that's that's one really important thing to have a clear kind of brand, a clear kind of 'we do this one thing really well' and not we do all these other things and maybe that blah. I think the second thing is, and it's it's hard to explain unless you're in the weeds and it's going to sound kind of trite but collaboration is everything. So the process that I'm talking about which is our whole creative process one figure out what to say to decide how to say it. The first one is strategy. And for us, strategy is intense collaboration with our clients.

They know the brand better than anyone. And so we have, I'm not talking about coming out of a strategic workshop with like a hundred slide deck and you're like, 'what the hell do I do with this creatively?' It's very iterative. It's very strategies-creative, creative strategy. We sit down with the clients and we have many like little workshops and we're like, this is a strategic territory we're thinking. How does this feel? Should we tighten here? Should we go here? Lots of different ways in. We go really, really kind of wide before we go deep in one area. And it's just having those multiple conversations. And by the time we get to the creative execution, it just looks like the natural conclusion to all the homework we've done together.

So people ask all the time, oh my God, like how did you sell him that idea? Like, we didn't sell it anything; like, we genuinely solved the problem by walking through step-by-step, big emphasis on strategy, big collaboration. So when we get there, to us and with the client, it looks like the natural conclusion; but to everyone else, it's like whoa, how did that happen? It's like insanely simple, really, but simple is hard to do in an industry that we have really overcomplicated, I think. Okay, I love that on a lot of levels. I think it is very hard to replicate. I'm just thinking, if I was wearing a hat, it would say curiosity. So I really need to think about like, how do I manifest curiosity into big, bold, courageous decisions that that can kind of naturally happen along the creative path.

I find that so fascinating how you guys are just able to do it time and time and time again. Like, are you ever told no? Is an idea ever too bold? Is that like a good thing? Like, okay, now we know the edge. I mean, look, there are, if you could see the cutting board floor, if you could see the archives, like, yeah, there are some pretty tasty, spicy ideas. I have not seen them all day, but that's good. I mean, if you go onto our website, one of the things that we say is like, it's clear on the first page. It's like, we'd rather go too far than not far enough. You know, like we're always gonna.

Push a lot, but as long as it's grounded in strategy as long as you can see the way back to where we came from and it ladders up to everything that we're trying to achieve and the brand messaging like we'll put it on the table, you know. And it's the campaign that I was talking about, corporate dictators will represent us, that was in the very early days, and that was like, if we were working for our old agencies, this is something that we just would never have put forward. But this is going to be the idea at the back of the deck that we put on the very front of the deck. So, our presentations are stacked with like, yeah, the big ideas first and then like a little bit safer, safer, safer.

But yeah, do you present your ideas in like that order, like safe and then not safe? Like, is there a continuum there or is that nothing? No, there's just different ways in. It's just, like I said, it's like really wide before we go really, really deep. So it's just many unignorable ways in to tackle the same situation. I mean, we like to explore many strategic territories, many, many ways to execute against those territories. If we're in a pitch, you know, I guess we want to bring conviction, come with maybe just one or two. Depending on what the challenge is. But yeah, we do like to explore really, really wide first and then sit down with the clients and use that process to kind of whittle down and figure out what feels right for them.

Because what feels right for one marketer will feel not right for another. But they are the gardens of the brand and they know it better than anyone, you know. So that's why that collaboration is so important. Yeah. Trust and collaboration in an iterative process. I think it's the combination of those. So thank you. I feel like I was just a fly on the wall in one of your strategy sessions. That's nice. All right, let's go back to the board. All right, let's go. Let's do nine. It's my favorite number. All right. So first, you're going to have to explain this photo to our listeners. And then second, I know this was taken out of Chili's. I'm just curious, what is the secret ingredient to reviving a brand like Chili's?

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Oliver McAteer: How Mischief helped Chili’s make its comeback

I mean, I think a lot of people would say Chili's was kind of on the decline. And now you look at Chili's and stock prices are high. And so, yeah, walk us through this. But first, tell us about this photo. I mean, this is confession time, really. I mean we've been working on Chili's for a couple of years now, and we're part of a huge network of agencies and partnerships that help Chili's. You know, like Chili's has a great relationship with multiple partners, and we are just. Happy and honored to be one of, you know, a big kind of pie. So there's lots of great people on it. But we've been working with them for too long for me to have never gone to a Chili's.

So that picture is me first time debuting as a British guy in America at a Chili's on Route 10 in New Jersey after I was getting my car maintained on. And I was with my wife and wanted to do the famous mozzarella cheese pull, which has taken the the industry by storm as in QSR industry and the ad industry, and you know has been a huge driver for them in terms of social clout and eventual sales too. So, wanted to do the cheese pull and can confirm it does work; it does work. Um, with regards to how they've plumped up their business, I mean, I wish you were talking to our strategists, our CSO, Jeff McCurry; they have a really good tight answer, I think. It's a few things.

I think they have incredible, incredible leadership over there in Jesse Johnson, one of the VPs of marketing and the CMO, Chief Marketing Officer George Felix. And they come from crazy backgrounds. I mean, George Felix worked on, I forget the name of the campaign, but the Old Spice campaign with the guy on the horse. Like he comes from the man you wish your man smelled like, I think, isn't it? Their pedigrees are huge. And they've, like I said, have just built an absolute impenetrable fortress of partners around them. They've got us as one of their creative agencies. They've got another creative agency. They've got a really good CRM agency in Gale. They've got a really powerful in-house agency too. And really, really good on the button social. So they've just got literally all corners covered.

And they're very, very focused on this value proposition. And it's interesting when we were first looking around and poking around the strategy for Chili's. Yes, we wanted to help revive the iconic brand, but it's like, what's their role in culture, society right now? And it comes at a time when fast food prices and QSR prices are like going through the roof. But Chili's comes in as the very unlikely hero. You know, being able to serve up huge amounts of value at top quality in huge volume too. Like I sat down and had the meal for myself, like the experience and the quality of food and the amount of food you get is unparalleled. And I walked away spending, you know, about 40 bucks between me and my wife, and we had a lot.

So finding many, many, many exciting, interesting, different ways to ladder up to the same messaging, which is. Their value messaging doesn't have like a solidified tagline as such; they just all find really interesting ways to talk about that value messaging and they've just done it in such an incredible way, but like I say, that's just the marketing side. Like operationally, they've paired back the menu, you know? They've really taken a sharp eye with Kevin Hockman as CEO, and like what needs to stay and what needs to go. It really is a success story of the entire business outside of marketing. But yes, marketing has played a huge role in that for sure. I will add to the year-over-year sales increase of more than 30% in their last quarter closing.

And as you mentioned, yeah, the year-over-year stock pump of like more than 100% is absolutely wild, but they deserve all the success because they're taking big risks. Well, congratulations to you. I have to let you in on a little secret. I was a hostess at Chili's in high school. No way. Dead serious. I loved it. I loved working there. I loved the brand. I loved the managers of the local store in Centerville, Ohio. So I have a huge appreciation just for the brand and the memories my family built there. And I think your work is really great too. Especially when you compare it to like similar types of restaurants in that category who I think are just not doing a great job right now. Yeah. What's your favorite memory from Chili's?

Do you have one? My wife actually worked as a waitress in Chili's, too. That's funny. Yeah. I mean, I can tell you my mom would come while I was working and when they would have like the half-priced margaritas and she would get margaritas and chips and salsa. And so that was always fun. She'd bring her friends and I could serve my mom and her friends. So that was always fun. But for me, it was just like the meal, like the great. The meals that we had, the chicken fingers, I remember were really good back in the day. The burgers were great. Yeah. Yeah. The chicken tendies especially. But yeah, I mean, to your point. Everyone in the sector is talking about value.

In fact, you could argue that most brands these days that are offering a service are talking about value in this time when everyone is trying to tighten their pockets and brands are trying to reach into them deeper than ever. It's like everyone's talking about value, but Chili's is just going at it in a very, very unignorable way. And that's all down to the leadership of the marketing, but then obviously the operational stuff too. So yeah, crazy success story all around the ring. Yeah, yeah, great. All right, let's go back to the board. All right, we're going to go 11. Okay. 1-1. Slow to hire, fast to fire. How has this helped your culture? I just want to talk a little bit about your culture in general because you seem to hire just really incredibly talented, amazing kind of social first thinkers who I don't know how you do it.

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‍Oliver McAteer: Mischief’s philosophy on agency culture

And hiring is really hard in this industry. And so talk a little bit about your culture and what makes it unique and the people that you're bringing on. We are, the first part is really true. Like, we're really slow to hire, not in a way that's detrimental to the business, but we really want to be careful about who we're taking on and how we're building our culture going forward. We're year five and nothing matters more than guarding the culture right now and making sure that we're not taking on, it's not just. High as in terms of talent, it's like the wrong kind of client. You know, like making sure that we're not taking on the wrong account that crushes culture or doing many many pitches that crushes culture, that then you know leads to a drain in talent or like I say, you take on the wrong account, it leads to not the kind of work we want to do, mediocre, mediocre work that doesn't solve the business problem.

Um, that then produces poor case studies, got unhappy agency, unhappy client, clients leave, talent leaves, like it's a very, you know, simple cycle that can happen very easily and I think we're more conscious of it the older that we get and we've got more people to look after. So, i mean, look what makes Mischief really special and I speak from the heart and not the PR hype mouthpiece for Mischief. It's the reason why I joined and it's it's the environment in which you are so unshackled by fear and judgment from the day that I walked in, everyone has just said here are the keys Ollie, like drive the car, and the amount of faith that they put into me from day one was Crazy if you're launching an agency during the pandemic, which would feel like one of the worst times to launch an agency.

You would feel like you would need someone that's at least had agency experience. I've got none of that; I was a journalist but you know I had a lot of passion and I believed in it, still believe more than ever the vision that Greg Harm put forward for the agency and the operational model that Greg was launching it with, which is no fixed address and the model that they have with the shared services. So I believed in it so much and they gave me the keys to drive the car however I wanted, and that kind of unshackled freedom. Of fear and lack of judgment, and like hey, you can do this. And if it doesn't work out, that's fine, but we've tried it.

I've never experienced that; like I didn't have to work in an agency to to kind of know that was special. Like I've worked at companies where you don't get that sort of freedom, um. But yet, at the same time, to be around so many people that you can learn from and and grow every single day, like that kind of balance learning all the time, but yet having the freedom to fail-it was everything to me, so I never want to lose that. And I really hope that most people, everyone at Mischief, feels like they have the freedom to be fearless. and the freedom to do whatever they want in terms of there's no judgment, there's no wrong answer, there's nothing that you can do that would be detrimental to you being here, you know.

If you're giving it your all, being yourself, if you can be yourself 100%, 110%, 1,000%, then you can do your job better. And I think that's what we have here. We have an environment where everyone feels like they can be themselves. So the output is much better and the efficiency is much better. And we can do more with less people because of it. That's a huge rambling answer, but hopefully you've got your intel into it. How we feel it's special here, or at least how I think it's special. Yeah, it's very poetic. I mean, I think it's something that a lot of companies try to emulate. I think a lot of people would say, I mean, BU is one of our core values at our company.

I'm sure there's a lot of agencies that have something similar. And in theory, it's really easy. But in practice, that's when the discipline really comes into place. And I imagine it starts with Greg and your leadership team and you and kind of the freedom and the space that you give others. I mean, you guys have grown so significantly. So to maintain that culture through growth is really hard to do. I mean, most agencies, do they even make it past five years? You think about all these agencies popping up. So, to only be five in one sense, but then to make it to five and still be on this trajectory is something to really be proud of.

Well, well thanks, and to your point, I feel like it's easy to say, 'But it's very, very hard to do.' And we pride ourselves on being a safe place for dangerous ideas. And it has to all come from the top down, and that environment that is free from fear, free from judgment. That's what Greg brought to the table from day one. It's what everyone brought to the table from day one. And they were able to do that, do it, and not just say it because I haven't met one person that's a mischief that has an ego. And that's crazy for an industry that can be quite egotistical and quite insecure. Um, you know it's very judgmental; it's almost hard to believe, I mean that's incredible.

The all the awards that you have won, uh yeah, you would think that would kind of get to you at some point, yeah. I mean it's all very we're not very good at celebrating right, so it's just kind of like that's great if that's a byproduct of us being who we are, but it's not; we don't craft ourselves to do that and then try and have fun; it's like we have fun and then the byproduct is is is is uh the kind of winning. But I mean Greg says all the time that culture is defined by the biggest asshole in the building um which is which is so true, I mean so we that going back to your question is why we are very very careful about who we take on because the wrong kind of person can um cause a lot of damage.

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Oliver McAteer: Oliver’s take on virtual pitching

I'm gonna repeat that That's good. All right, let's go back to the board. Let's do six. Okay, number six. Okay. Oh, I love this. So you just recently clapped back at an Ad Age article, I think it was just last week, that was talking about virtual pitching and how they kill chemistry. And they talked about what pitching virtually is so wrong. And you just had incredible perspective and advice on the virtual world. And I'd love for you just to talk a little bit about, you know, virtual pitching, I guess, in one sense and kind of how you guys are nailing that, but how you build chemistry through the screen. Yeah, that's hilarious. I feel like I've been really stalked. Good. You've spiced it up. Yes, the PR-ness is very showing.

I love it. Yeah, let's get spicy. Yeah, look, I think the article was something. Yeah, I mean, virtual pitches are killing chemistry. I mean, look, you're talking to an agency that started during the peak pandemic time. We were locked down. It was June 2020. I think our first official day was like, 6th of June, I can't remember but we were always we were always virtual from the day that we started; we didn't have an office and, side story, like a lot of us hadn't actually met each other in real life, like, like Kevin knew Greg knew Bianca, and Kevin from his time at BBDO, but like most of us had never met. Like Kerry, our president, never met Greg.

I'd met Greg throughout my time as a trade journalist, a campaign a couple of years prior, but I never met Jeff, our CSO. I never met Will Dempster, our head of development, Bianca, Kevin. I'd never met them. So a lot of us had never met. And by this time we were like 25 people, a year and a half later. We had never met and we just came together. After starting this agency for the first time, it was like the most incredible experience and so I think we come at it from a couple of ways-like it's weird how quickly you get bonded with people online in this situation. But it was just a big intersection of like, I don't know, it was it was fate that brought us all together and it was a really good timing in all of our lives.

But it was like we all came together for this shared belief, in the shared mission, and we want to create work that makes a stir because the riskiest thing a brand can do is be unignorable. Like, we all knew what we were working towards. And I think that really bonded us, virtually as much as it would have done in person. When it comes to pitching, look, we pitched a good amount more than we do now. We pitched a good amount when we first started. And we liked that a virtual pitch stripped all of the theatrics. all of the everything, to people on a screen, and their thinking, like the ideas that you see shared, like that's what we really liked it was.

It was chemistry that you're building by talking um without the flamboyance of body language and the big kind of pitch theater, it was like here's my thinking, you can get a good sense of who someone is on online, I think. And we just love that it just stripped away all of the BS and it was just the thinking and there you go, and here are the ideas. And I think a lot of that is true today still. Like there's, you know, pictures that are coming back that are in person now. I think that's probably been the way for about a year and a half, maybe two years. But what hasn't changed is the accessibility that the pandemic gave us with marketers.

Like, it's very easy for us to have a quick, chem session or a chat with a CMO or a VP of marketing, whereas like pre-pandemic, you would have to work out where they were, schedule a time with them, jump on a plane. Like it was very much like that, but I like that it stripped away that sort of access. And that's, you've seen an explosion of new agencies come onto the scene. That's a huge advantage for them, that they're able to get in touch with a CMO like that, if they have the right kind of like, hey, hi, you know, Pata, can we jump on a call and have like a chat? The hard thing is guarding your time because it's too easy to get everyone's time now. That's so true.

That's so true. Are you guys in office now? Are you hybrid? What's your situation? Yeah, so we, after about a year and a half, maybe two years, when we came out of lockdown, we took out this space, which we. Which was in Dumbo in Brooklyn and we grew out of that so quickly um we were there for about a couple of years and we were like well we need to start thinking about a bigger space at the beginning of this year, we officially moved into a bigger space next door ironically um to where we were in Dumbo and it's beautiful, it's big, we are going to grow into it, you know it's um it's a really really fun space and and a nice a nice collaborative space, and we've We've settled on like a hybrid situation where, you know, we love people to come in kind of Tuesdays and Thursdays and so we can be all together.

But, you know, everyone's situation is so different. And we were built at a time of such flexibility. We're never going to take away that flexibility. Like it just doesn't make any sense, you know. So we'll never. We'll never renege on that flexibility, it's it's too important to us, and like I say, everyone's situation is very different. Um, so yeah, Tuesdays Thursdays hybrid, but you know we have people coming in all times of hours of all times of days, and I think it's um, it depends on the team, and there's a lot of young people that really like to be together as well to see how you know their seniors are kind of working so they can learn by osmosis. I mean, I still find that really helpful, you know, so it's a different case for everyone.

But yeah, we run a hybrid situation and we're out of a big ass place in Brooklyn now. So please come on by, come on by. Do you guys ever hire outside of the area? Do you hire virtual employees, like full-time virtual employees or no? I think it's, I think there are some, honestly, like I think there are some very complicated. Tax laws and HR things that I'm not even kind of privy to, I don't really understand that like that can be an impediment for some reasons um but I think it's kind of like it's like I never say never you know it's um like I say everyone's got their own personal situation and we hire for the talent you know not necessarily you know because you live around the corner of Dumbo you know like we have We want the best talent in the world and we will move mountains to welcome them into mischief.

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Oliver McAteer: The rumor about presenting 24 briefs to Greg Hahn

Great. All right. Let's go back to the board. Let's do four. Number four. All right. Fact or fiction. OK, I heard this is a rumor, so I just need I need to know if it's true. So somebody once told me that the Strategy team can sometimes present multiple briefs to Greg Hahn before he will approve one. Is that true? I can't give you an exact number, say 'I say we go wide before we go deep' so there are many ways to attack a problem; there could be multiple priests, multiple ways in, into how we how we tackle it so yeah sometimes there are like multiple briefs to tackle the problem and then sometimes out of that there are multiple, multiple strategic territories to choose from before we decide how to execute creatively.

Uh, I think 24 is a wild number. Cannot confirm or deny because I am not on the day-to-day strategy team. But I don't think it's that much. But yeah, we like to go really wide before we go deep, I guess. Well, I love this for a few reasons. One, it tells me that Greg is very involved. And I think I'd love for you to just shed any light on that. I think one of the things that you and I have talked about is like being independent and being on the smaller midsize side. Like one of the benefits you bring is like you get access to Greg Hahn. That's true, right? Yeah. And you see it all the time, right? I mean, we're both on the new business front.

Like, you know, when you receive an ask or an RFP or whatever, one of the most common questions today is like. Will the lead team or the team that I meet be the team that looks after the business? And it is so important that the answer has to be yes, genuinely, authentically. And you can see as you get bigger and bigger and bigger as an agency, how much harder that is to contain. And you need to be at the right size, this right stage, to always make sure you have the right amount of clients so you're not overwhelming yourself with new business and new opportunities to make sure that the top T, the top players, and we have an agency full of top players at all levels.

But like the top-tier people need to be involved in it very heavily. Like, that has been one of our you know chief selling points from day one. It's like: you come into our business; you're gonna have Greg Khan on it, like he is very, very involved in the work. You're gonna have Kevin Mulroy, our ECD, on it. You're gonna have Bianca on it, our other ECD and partner. You're gonna have Jeff, our CSO, on it. Like, you're gonna have these people very heavily involved so we go into these meetings; you're like: 'You're gonna have to like us, us who you see here' because we're gonna be spending a lot of time with you. Um, and it's really, really important that you keep that access.

We've quite frankly, like I probably shouldn't say this, but I will Because, hell, we're getting spicy um you know I've heard from people that have approached us that like they've been bait-and-switched, you know, I'm sure you've heard the same thing. Like, we've had wonderful kind of chemistry and maybe even pitch situation with this team, maybe it's that team for the first couple of months or year, and then over time there's like another team that we haven't heard of that kind of comes in and slowly replaces and the agency's focus goes on to other new business. Like no, no, no! Like, we will win as an agency in terms of growth if we can build on the successes that we already have, most often.

Our growth annually when it comes down to the numbers, comes from organic growth of growing our current clients. So we want to put emphasis there and make sure that we're growing our current clients. So yes, long story short, Greg is very, very involved. All of the leadership is very, very involved. We can never get to a stage where that can't be the case, because it's such an important thing for us to be close to the work. That's great. Alright. We have confirmed 24 briefs. No, I'm just kidding. Alright. Let's go. Let's go back to the game board. I think we have time maybe for one or two more. Oh, we're running out. All right. Do you have? Let me see. Anybody want to throw up a number? Hold on. Let me look.

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Oliver McAteer: Ollie’s recent favorite non-Mischief campaign

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Let me see. Oh, okay. That's a good one. That's a good one, too. Give me your weirdest, spiciest ones. I have to admit, these are spicier than I thought they would be. You've picked the spiciest ones, I think. Let's see here. Do eight and I am just dying to know the answer to ten, but ten's a really fast one, okay. So the industry is very jealous of Mischief's ideas. Um, is there any recent non-Mischief campaigns that you're jealous of? Oh yeah, look, I mean, I won't speak on behalf of Mischief or any of our creative strategists, me, me personally just Ollie as like a consumer. Look, I, I really liked Dash the ads, like I really liked the DoorDash just that Dash the ads.

I like anything that personally is not a TV ad, like I like things that are brand acts that make a real big loud buzz in culture. You can have both by the way; you can go big in culture with brand act and you can have TV sometimes, the TV or the digital asset is the thing that could be in culture as we've seen with some of our Tinder work actually. But um, yes, I love Dash, Diaz, I thought it was, it was really, really innovative way of using that media space and Super Bowl as like its own conversation; like I like how how more brands Are like breaking the media side of things there versus the creative side, like.

DoorDash gamified it, you know, like when we did 2b interface interruption, and we pranked viewers into believing someone had changed the channel, uh, like during a live broadcast that was gamifying. I like playing with the media like I like anything that feels like you have a you have a box here, and instead of doing something different in that box, you turn that box into like a rhombus, you know, like I like changing the shape of the box, and you can have a lot of fun with media doing that. And I think Dash did that perfectly; I love that one too. And another thing that I love about it is like that ad couldn't have happened without literally everybody on that team from like your account people and your program managers all the way through, of course, your strategists and your creatives, but your production team, your legal team, like everybody had to come together to make that exist, which is really cool.

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Oliver McAteer: Who Ollie would most like to grab a Coors with in the industry

Yeah, I agree. I agree. All right. We got time for one more. Let's go back to the board and I'm going to pick number 10. Number 10. All right. If you could grab a Coors Light with anyone in our industry, who would it be? I mean, you're a pretty good hang. I mean, Coors Light with Ashley from Curiosity is always up there. I think, oh, you know what, actually? I would love to sit down, and I have done on occasion, but not in this capacity, really, of mischief, more when I was a journalist. I would love to sit down with Michael Kasson from MediaLink. And, like, you talk about a head full of secrets and, like, you know, you know what's going on. Like, this guy knows. This guy knows.

And he's been in the game for a hell of a long time. And the game is changing again. So I would love to sit down with him. And also, also, if we're doing Pie in the Sky, I would love to understand where Brian Reynolds head is out right now. Oh, my gosh. Can we talk about the lawsuit right now? I'm I'm like very deep into like the YouTube videos on that right now. Oh, well, send forth, please. Oh, my God. We could have a cross light and talk about what he's going through. You guys just launched a media agency. Speaking of media, like a media, not agency, but. Division within the company, I imagine, might be maybe how you're talking about it, secretly launched.

I loved that headline so much, yeah, well uh, you know it's all in the PR right, no um, yeah we we launched um a mischief media practice and we had been quietly doing it for about a year and a half prior to announcing it because you know how these things are. I mean, a lot of agencies will launch capabilities and say, 'we're doing this now' and then it kind of goes quiet. Like, I really wanted us to be able to have some receipts to kind of show, so we've got some great work that we've done as creative and media partner integrated with like Pete's Coffee. We have some standalone clients as well on the media side. But yeah, like it's been fun and we did it for a couple of reasons.

I mean, one, You know, we have a lot of people from the media side that have been at places in the past that tout integration, integration with creativity. And the reality is it's just kind of like one IAT meeting at the beginning of the brief and then that's it. But like here, we really, really, truly are integrated. Like the media team are on the creative briefs, in the creative and strategic workshops, figuring out how to plus up the ideas. Work truly as a team and I think that's really incredible to see. I think we play at a good size too where you know we're not going to be embroiled in those huge conversations about taking a massive amount of media and then like buying it at a discounted rate and then trying to sort of offload it because that's the inventory that we have, like we're able to be really unbiased in how we go about buying our media.

Because we act as like a consigliere to our clients-we don't act as like, 'Let's go out and get all this and you should have this because we have it.' It's like, 'What will solve your problem? Like, should we go here, should we go there?' And then we'll kind of help broker that sort of deal. You know, so so yes, we're able to do that because we we play at that level-that isn't huge holding company level, you know? So there's a nice gap there, I think, for us. Well, I think you guys have carved out a pretty good niche for yourself on the media side too. I mean, even just saying things like no principle-based buying and just some of the declarations that you made at the beginning.

I know as a fan of media, I worked on the media side for 10 years. I really appreciated kind of the positioning that you're bringing. And I think your integration is- best in class and so clearly the way you're going to bring media and creative along with your strategy team is it's gonna continue to produce banger after banger, I imagine like, I get so excited to see what you guys are going to come up with next. Thank you, yeah. Here's hoping you've just laid down the pressure well, I know, I mean, yeah, one of the other questions behind here was about that but we didn't get to it today but maybe we'll do another episode sometime soon so. The way we love to end these is with a little this or that.

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 Oliver McAteer: Oliver Closing remarks

Really fun, fast. You just have to say the first thing that comes to mind. Are you game? Yeah, let's do it. Okay. Bagel and a schmear or fish and chips? Oh, you know that. Fish and chips. By the way, there's a really good fish and chip shop in the West Village called Assault and Battery if you're in New York. And it's like genuine what it is like back home in the UK. But yeah, fish and chips. Awesome. Okay. A shout out from Jeopardy or from Jimmy Fallon? Jeopardy, because Jimmy Fallon's like a moment in time in culture, but Jeopardy's like, you've been in culture for a long-ass time, you know? All right, Love Island or The Secret Lives of Mormon Wives?

It has to be, it was Love Island when I was a teenager, when it was first debuting in the UK. I don't like all of what's happening right now with the reboots, like give me OG Love Island when I was a kid. So it has to be The Secret Life of Mormons. Awesome. Ali, you are an incredible guest. Thank you, as always, for your transparency, your willingness to share. I think that's one of the things that makes Mischief so incredible is that you guys are constantly out on the speaking circuit. You're constantly writing thought leadership. You're always doing these amazing recap videos and just sharing your knowledge and insight. And it really does just make the whole industry better. So I'm super grateful for the time we got to spend together today.

Thank you, Ashley. And likewise here, we're big fans of what you're doing. And yeah, I'll close by saying, yeah, we won't be starting a podcast again anytime soon because of what you're doing here. So thank you for being awesome. Love to see you on the circuits and the conferences. I'll see you at the next one, I guess. Looking forward to it. Sounds good. What's the best way for our listeners to reach out to you? You know, we're all pretty active on social. So any sort of LinkedIn DM or I look after all of the mischief. Social accounts. So any DM, TikTok, Instagram, and then my personal TikTok or Instagram too. Awesome. We'll link to them all. Thank you so much. Thank you.

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