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ALP 17: What responsibility do agencies have for client behavior?

The recent documentaries about the disaster that was the Fyre Festival raise an interesting question: are agencies responsible for their clients’ actions?

Chip and Gini tackle the topic in this week’s episode and explore the different ways that agency leaders can handle their concerns about prospects and clients.

The duo discuss what expectations of agencies are reasonable, how money influences decision-making, and some real-world examples where both have had to confront ethical dilemmas in the past.

Transcript

CHIP:
Hello, and welcome to another episode of the Agency Leadership podcast. I’m Chip Griffin

GINI:
and I’m Gini Dietrich.

CHIP:
And you know, I’m very excited because the Patriots were on fire this weekend and won the Super Bowl for the sixth time in this century, it’s fantastic.

GINI:
I loved the NFL Centennial commercial where they’re all you know, tossing the football back and forth, and it comes up to Tom Brady. And he takes all these rings off and goes here, hold these, I laughed.

CHIP:
Well, and now he’s got another one in that collection. And now he will certainly have to use two hands.

GINI:
Well, I was going to say at this point he may as well get one for every finger. Right?

CHIP:
Well, yeah, I mean, and he would like to, he said he wants to play until he’s 45. Although I still have a sneaking suspicion that that he might retire and I know that

He has said that he would not do it. But there was just there was a mere moment in the interview after the game

where he seemed to almost be suggesting that he was going to think about it and then caught himself and it was it was you know it could be completely wrong but you know just my impression is that he’s getting a lot of pressure from home to just stop playing.

You know Gisele has been pretty open in some of her interviews saying that she doesn’t particularly like it but that she supports him and he emphasized the importance of having support from his family to continue to play so, I don’t know I just, you know we’ll see what happens. You know and I think I mean honestly i think you know most of those players at that level are you know it does take them some time to come down off of the season and figure out you know, what really matters and so whatever they you know, even if they say zero percent chance going into it, you know, as Brady did i i think that’s it’s hard to rely too much on that because who knows how you’ll be thinking after you’ve had a chance to go sit on the beach for a week and say geez do I really want to take another blow to the head.

Yeah, yeah, yeah.

GINI:
yeah, yeah.

Ah. How old is he?

CHIP:
He is 41.

GINI:
Oh, well, yeah. If he did four more years and won four more Super Bowls, then he’d have one for every finger.

CHIP:
He would. Yeah. Yeah,

that would be,

that would be fantastic. But, you know,

one season at a time, one game at a time. It’s the Patriot way.

GINI:
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah.

CHIP:
Don’t get too far out ahead. Actually lots of good lessons there for for agency owners, as far as you know, how to stay focused on those sorts of things. In fact, maybe I’ll write an article about that just to help agency owners and piss off all the Patriot haters at the same time.

GINI:
Not even that, there was a really good article, I can’t remember where I saw it, about his, the way he approaches just life in general, his

the way he eats and the way he exercises and you know sleeps and all those kinds of things, I mean he is super super disciplined and there are some good lessons in that.

CHIP:
Absolutely. You know I think as as successful people often do he’s taken a few of them a bit to the extreme. You know some of his some of his eating habits are…

GINI:
Crazy.

CHIP:
I was gonna say interesting but sure we’ll go with crazy, and I’m not sure how sustainable they are for most people who don’t have private chefs to adequately compose everything.

GINI:
Or people who like French fries like me.

CHIP:
well

Yes, I mean french fries are, I think aren’t they an entire food group I think they are.

GINI:
I think they are, yeah. Yeah, I mean, he is very very disciplined I think there’s some great, no matter if you’re a fan or not, there’s some great lessons in there for sure.

CHIP:
True So there we go. Maybe I’ll get something for an article for later this week or maybe I’ll maybe I’ll see if I can get it placed on Spin Sucks and get some reference in there to Chicago.

GINI:
Oh, well, we’ll edit that part out.

CHIP:
I did like the Red Sox tweet that they put out after the game on Sunday night. They put out a tweet that said congratulations to the Patriots on ending Boston’s championship drought of three months.

GINI:
Okay.

CHIP:
Slightly arrogant, but you know unfortunately my kids don’t know any different and so that’s that’s frustrating for me right? I mean I grew up as a long suffering Red Sox and Patriots fan and and you know, when I was a kid, the Celtics were good and the Bruins had been good a decade earlier. But that was pretty much it. And now, you know, my kids are just used to seeing Boston in the championships. I mean, this is this is the I think what? the 12th Boston championship of this century already.

GINI:
They’ll have a rough life, later on, when they realize that not everything’s about winning.

CHIP:
It’s not. Which is actually a good segue. Apparently, that is not a lesson that Billy McFarland ever learned.

And actually, you know, we were talking about the Patriots being on fire, I was at least and we’re going to talk about the Fyre festival, how that applies to agency owners and leaders because there are some good lessons to take out of that as well. And, and some good discussion to be had around it. Because ultimately, when you think about what took place there, it wasn’t just meant – for those of you who haven’t seen the documentaries on either Netflix or Hulu, first of all, I would encourage you to do so they’re, they’re, it’s really worthwhile watching for anyone who’s interested in communications, technology, entrepreneurship, any of those things. There are lessons to be had out of it. Or just interested in a good documentary. So, basically, the, the idea is that Billy McFarland is a scam artist. But nobody really realizes that at first, and he puts together what is supposed to be like the new Coachella on a private island in the Bahamas that used to be owned by Pablo Escobar, maybe, possibly, because, you know, everything that comes out of his mouth is 50/50, whether it’s the truth and so gets all of these, you know,

presumably wealthy, or at least people with fairly disposable income to pony up thousands of dollars to come to this thing, only to find out that they’re sitting in FEMA disaster tents with no plumbing, no food and and yeah, it was just an absolute, yeah, utter disaster, utter disaster. But the reason why it’s relevant for this podcast is because it involved the marketing agency, at least one, maybe more that helped promote the Fyre festival and also did work for the underlying company because the Fyre festival wasn’t even the core business, right, but that was, it was supposed – it started out as a marketing schtick to help a company called Fyre that was basically doing, it was a booking site for celebrities to make celebrity appearances and that kind of stuff, but so there was a marketing agency involved and there were also influencers involved, primarily supermodels and that kind of stuff. So from the perspective of the communicator, What are your obligations as far as figuring out that your client is a scam artist and not promoting it? How much due diligence do you need to do and you know, how much blame should be heaped upon the agency that helped do this work?

GINI:
Yeah, I mean I think it’s a tough one because my my perception of it all was, first of all this agency, Jerry Media that won the social media piece of it …you know, they said, like this is one of the biggest accounts we’ve ever won, and here we’re working with, like, it’s more money than we’ve ever ever made and we’re working with supermodels and this guy who has this great idea and he’s paying, you know the likes of Kendall Jenner a quarter of a million dollars to share stuff on Instagram and you know we we’ve created…

CHIP:
Not share stuff. Share a single post.

GINI:
I think it was four. Was it for one or four?

CHIP:
No, the 250 was for a single post.

GINI:
Was for one. Okay. Yeah, so it’s like all this stuff. And so yeah, I mean, you certainly get caught up in all of that and you certainly are like okay, well if they can afford to pay Kendall Jenner a quarter of a million dollars and they’ve flown all these supermodels down to the Bahamas. And they’re doing, like they did this all for this promotional video to promote the the festival… like, you don’t question that. You don’t say, let me see your financials just to make sure that you’re actually paying these people like you said you were going to. You’re doing the work, you’re finding them the influencers, you’re asking them to do what, you know, they’re going to be paid to do. Like, you don’t… but you also aren’t the ones paying them. It’s going through the client. And so there’s that piece of it. But I think they started to realize… the agency themselves didn’t start to realize that something was wrong until just a couple of weeks before the festival. But when it really hit home, which I thought was fascinating, is they get on a plane and they fly down there, they get off the plane, they can’t get to the festival. There’s no rental car, right? Nobody has sent a car to pick them up. So it’s these four guys that have gone down to this festival for their clients and the can’t get there. So they had to hitchhike!

At that point, you’re kind of going, Oh crap, what is going on?

But do you, like, I don’t know that there’s an onus on them to do, like opposition research or financial digging into financials or anything like that when you have a new client coming on.

CHIP:
Right. And that’s, that’s effectively what their argument was in the documentary, right? That they were, they were as much a victim as anyone else here. And you know, the the one asterisk that we should provide is that the Netflix documentary was apparently co-produced by Jerry Media, so it would be unlikely that it would reveal anything negative about them. The Hulu one takes a slightly different approach and, and does knock them a little bit more but still doesn’t really… it really more just asked the question you know, do they have this responsibility? Should they, should they have pushed back harder, known more, that sort of thing? And, and you’re right I mean, you’re not going to do, and you shouldn’t be doing in-depth due diligence on your clients. Now, that doesn’t mean that you know, you shouldn’t generally check out your clients, right? If you if you’re working for a client you’ve never heard of, can I suggest that there’s this cool website called Google.

GINI:
There is a cool website. Yeah, it’s pretty cool you can just jot in the client’s name and…

CHIP:
Yeah and it’s relatively new I mean you know, it’s only been around about 20 years now. So you know, it’s possible that there are some folks who are listening who haven’t had a chance to try it out, you know, so give it a shot and when you’ve got a prospect put their name in there, both their individual name as well as the company name. My guess is any media agency that, marketing PR agency that does that here in the future probably is not going to take on Billy MacFarland as a client, right, well, maybe not though, because at the at the end, it turned out that he was running another scam while he was out on bail.

GINI:
Yeah, but he had some guy running it for him because he was in trouble.

CHIP:
Yeah, right. Yeah. Right. Right. It just, it just boggles the mind and shows you just how sick the individual actually is. But you know it from a from an agency perspective. You know, the Fyre festival is probably a good jumping off point for our conversation. But ultimately, most of us are probably not going to be involved in anything nearly of that scale, right? Where it becomes that big a deal where it makes Nightly News and all that kind of stuff. But, you know, I think most of us certainly have have encountered clients or prospects that may be give us an uneasy feeling. For whatever reason, maybe it’s not an all out scam. But, you know, are they, you know, are their claims, you know, going too far? Are they, you know, do they share the same values that that we have, you know, there are different things. And, you know, particularly for, you know, for listeners who may be in the public affairs space, or do anything tied to causes, you know, that there, it’s very common for folks to say, Okay, look, I’m, I’m not going to do business with the tobacco industry, or the guns or pharma or whomever. And so, you know, people are thinking in general about what it is that their clients are involved in. But you know, what about that, you know, that startup company that’s just, you know, really pushing the idea that they’re going to revolutionize something, but you just don’t feel comfortable? Where do you draw the line? And I think that’s where, you know, most of us probably on a day to day basis, as agency leaders have to think about this a little bit more and have to give, you know, consideration to, you know, what, we’re what we’re comfortable doing, and, and you know, what questions we should be asking?

GINI:
Well, I, Yes, and I also think they’re red flags, right? I mean, red flags from the perspective of this of the Fyre festival or things like every time somebody said, No, or pushed back, they no longer had a job, there’s that, but also from the social media perspective, they had, they kept getting direct messages and from angry people, like, I don’t know, I’m supposed to fly down there. I don’t have my flight information. Where do I, like they weren’t getting, they weren’t able to provide the information that people needed that they were asking on social media. And so they and then they started deleting comments, right? I mean, so there, there’s some major red flags there. But I see. And to your point that, you know, it’s not we’re not going to have, most of us are not going to have situations that are that big, but I have, and to this day, I regret this. But we, I had a really good friend who ran a very successful business here, and he sold it in 2011, and took the money and started a second business, it was a Groupon me-too, it was right after Groupon was had gone big. And everybody was trying to create, you know, Groupon-like businesses. And, you know, I remember sitting in a meeting and he was a good friend, I remember sitting in one of the first meetings with him and saying to him, you know, I don’t know if this is the right thing to do, everybody seems to be doing this, and everybody wants to be hanging on the coattails of this company. And you know, I just don’t know that this is the right thing for you guys to be focused on. And he turned and he looked at me, in front of in front of my team said, If you f this up, except to use the actual word, I will fire you. And I remember thinking, well, that’s a nice way to start a relationship. But because he was a good friend, I just figured he was under a lot of pressure. And he didn’t like me pushing back. And, but it got progressively worse. And I think we lasted maybe six weeks, but you have to the fact that I didn’t just stand up at that point and go, Okay, this is not right for us is on me, and I should have done that. But you have to be able to respond to those red flags in a professional appropriate way that doesn’t hurt you, or your business or your your team.

CHIP:
Right. And it’s, you know, it is challenging because, you know, first of all, hindsight is 20-20. So, it’s, it’s a lot easier for you to sit here today and say, that was certain you should have gotten up and walked out. But, you know, in the moment, you know, most of us probably are not going to do that, because we’re sitting there sort of thinking about, well, is this is it really as bad as I think it is, you know, what am I missing? You know, there’s other people here, and, you know, frankly, a lot of these situations come about there, you know, sort of the, the boiling the frog situations, right, where, you know, you just the, you know, one little problem here, and then another little red flag there, and, you know, the, but, you know, you’re sort of like, Okay, well, you know, I saw that last one, but we’re still going, it’s all okay, you know, maybe it’s, maybe I’m making too big a deal out of it. And then, you know, when you take a look back over time, like, wow, I really should have seen that. But in the moment as you’re there, particularly because, and you look at this particular example of the Fyre festival, it was a lot of little signs that there were coming up. It’s not like someone came in and gave, you know, a pre-packaged thing to Jerry Media and said, hey, look, guys, this, this is a pyramid scheme. Basically, this whole thing is, it’s a shell game, it’s not going to happen. This is just Billy putting money in his own pocket. You know, nobody ever did that. So, you know, they had to read all of the signals and realize that that’s what was happening. And not just that it was, you know, mismanaged. And, I thought was particularly telling that there was one consultant on there who put on music events. And he basically said, you know, look, pretty much all of these festivals, you know, look like, total clusters before they come together, right? So, you know, did I read anything into it? No, because this is – they all – you think they’re all going to fail right up until the moment when it succeeds. And so I thought that was an interesting perspective. And again, you know, perhaps self-serving, because he knows this is a documentary being made that could make him look bad, right. But, but at the same time, it sort of makes sense. And there, you know, having come from the world of politics, look, you know, there’s been a lot of things in any campaign that you sit there and say, Wow, I never thought we’d actually make it to the end, you know, because it, but also in campaigns, you also have those moments we’re you’re like, I don’t know, I’m a little

uncomfortable with that statement, the candidate made, or that action and, you know, sometimes when you then look back on it over time, like, oh, okay, it was clear, this was a terrible candidate running a terrible campaign. But in the moment was, it just didn’t have enough sleep? And so, I think it is really challenging. And I think the, the solution for agency owners is, is simply that they need to make sure that they’re taking the time to be tuned into these things. And, and actually thinking about them, because I think, you know, too often we are blinded by money, right? And you made that point about, you know, this was a giant contract for, for Jerry Media, perhaps the largest that they had ever had. And, and certainly, you know, I know that the times where, you know, I felt the most uncomfortable with clients, it’s usually because they’re paying a ton of money. And so you’re willing to, I won’t say, necessarily look the other way, but you’re, you’re willing to put the most positive interpretation on bad news. And that gets you in trouble.

GINI:
It does get you in trouble. And, you know, like them, the music festival consultant that you mentioned, 70% of what he would be paid would be day-of events, so, like…

CHIP:
Which by the way is a stupid contract.

GINI:
Yep.

It is a stupid contract. I think that’s how it’s done. And I also will add, anybody who’s ever done events knows that everything that could possibly go wrong does. So there’s that too, but, you know, I think when clients don’t pay their bills, you know, they’re, there is a tendency for us to say, Okay, well, one month is, okay, two months is, okay, three months, we’re starting to go like, Hello, we need to get paid here. And, you know, you can’t let it go on like that. So you still have to run a good business, no matter how sort of starstruck or awestruck you are by the client, his or her ideas, the innovation, the entrepreneurship, all of that.

CHIP:
Right, right. And, look, I mean, you know, I, there are, there are times over the course of my career where, you know, money has made the difference in a decision, you know, where it’s, you know, it’s, it’s a close call, you know, I’m not proud of it. And usually, they’ve turned out badly in the end. So, I got, you know, I got my comeuppance on them. But, you know, I can recall one particular situation where I was, I was in a conference room with a couple of folks, and we were talking about a project that we could all work on together, and I had been resisting it for probably six or seven months as a concept because I just, it didn’t, didn’t feel right to me. And so, you know, we’re sitting in this meeting and on the whiteboard, they’re sort of sketching out the, the model of how it works, and they’re putting dollar values next to it. I’m like, well, well, I mean, would I be willing to take the risk for that dollar? Well, maybe. And so, you know, it was it was not that I, that I necessarily gave in and capitulated, but it was okay, how can I find a way around my concerns? How can I make small adjustments so that it falls within my comfort zone, right. And so ended up doing that, at the end of the day, that made the project frankly, less successful, because in order for it to be as successful with, you know, would require cutting more ethical corners than I was comfortable with. And so it ended up not going where it could have. And so, you know, you learn and you say, Okay, look, you know, it’s, you know, when you have those situations, you know, probably figuring out how to get it into your ethical comfort zone is not the right solution it’s probably better, just not to do it,

right. I mean, but it’s, but it’s tough. And

GINI:
It is tough!

CHIP:
You know? And particularly with, you know, so many agencies, you know, fighting to make ends meet, you know, we know this from the folks we talk to, on a regular basis and, and saying, you know, Geez you know, I’m going to jettison this client, particularly if it’s a big client – that’s, that’s not an easy call. And so you know, it is really easy to get into trouble but I think that’s you know, if you start, if you sort of keep reminding yourself that that you need to remain within your comfort zone that that it will help. It’s certainly not going to solve it, right but I think that we all have a habit of just getting tied up in the day to day and we don’t take that time to step back and ask ourselves you know, are we doing the right thing. And you know as tough as it is if you do more of that, you know, if you’ve got if you’ve got a trusted team that’s willing to question you as the leader, right say, you know because frankly a lot of these times you know you could have been saved by juniors who are working for you and my guess is even that – you know i don’t know Jerry Media at all so I’m this is pure speculation – but typically the frontline more junior people are the ones who see the problem first. You know they would be particularly when it comes to social media, they’re the ones who are seeing the stream of questions and and and DMs and comments and all that, so they’re seeing it, they’re feeling it, and yet if you’ve built a culture where they’re comfortable coming to you and saying hey something ain’t right with this client , you know, we need to we need to ask a few more questions. Not necessarily, you know, investigate them right that’s not the role of an agency, but you know ask questions and and push. Although in this particular case I’m not even sure how successful that would be because it seems like this Billy McFarland character was just a really accomplished liar, a really… and, you know, the sad truth is that the people who are you know, really good at doing that, it’s, it’s hard to, to catch until it’s too late. And, you know, it doesn’t excuse the people around them. And and in particular, you know, and we talked about this before we recorded but Ja Rule who was his partner…

the fact that he got to walk away unscathed from the whole….maybe he didn’t know. I mean, look, I, you know, I’ve certainly seen instances where business partners have no idea what the other business partner is doing. But there should be a higher level of responsibility.

GINI:
And I think in this case, he knew, I mean, maybe not to the extent…. but I also think there are other people around, really close people around him that were culpable too because they knew as well. And so I think it’s really difficult to say to an agency that sitting in New York City being directed by the chief marketing officer who’s in the Bahamas, who’s being directed to lie and not tell the whole truth for it’s hard. It’s, it’s not so easy for that agency to be like, oh, there’s a problem here. When you have the chief marketing officer saying, do this, do that, handle it this way, handle it that way. They’re not in the Bahamas, seeing it all fall apart. The chief marketing officer was in the Bahamas, seeing it all fall apart. And, by the way, was willing to go do some very awful things to get Evian water brought into the country.

CHIP:
Yes, yeah, that was a very memorable scene. Go watch it, we’re not going to discuss it.

GINI:
So I mean, there is there is a lot of a lot of that going on, where those people were there, they were on the ground, they were seeing what was happening. And they even said, like, let’s cancel, let’s push, like, let’s do this, because it’s going to be far better now than when people show up, and they don’t have anywhere to go.

CHIP:
Right. It absolutely is, but you know, it, you know, so, I’ve seen a number of cases, you know, where there are, you know, really aggressive entrepreneurs, and, and, in some respects, a really aggressive entrepreneur, and the line between a really aggressive entrepreneur and a scam artist is not that big, right?

Because, you know, there are any number of people who have succeeded in business by, you know, pushing the envelope, you know, really hard by juggling a lot of balls up in the air, and just hoping that none of them hit the ground. And, and they get lucky and they don’t, and, and, you know, the, you know, one of the, I think at least one of the folks in the documentary even said, you know, sort of, if one or two things had had had fallen correctly, you know, this might still have turned out okay, despite all of this other stuff, right?

GINI:
Which is true!

CHIP:
Which is true. And, you know, I mean, honestly, as I was watching it, you know, I’m putting on my entrepreneur hat and you know, and problem solver hat I’m like, well, geez, you know, even even when you’ve got that mass of people on the island, there’s like, two or three things you could have done that maybe would have, you know, made it not an utter disaster and just, you know, not great, right? But but but, you know, it seemed like at that point they went into panic mode and particularly when you’ve got people just sort of milling around not knowing what to do, I mean, you got all these tents there instead of doing like Billy did and just saying, hey everybody go find a tent! Which… I mean that’s just never going to work out well, right?

GINI:
Noooo…and and everybody was drunk, too, at that point so, sure!

CHIP:
Right, right! Yeah,

yeah. For those, I mean you really have to watch this thing because it’s incredible. I mean they basically send all of these angry vacationers, pour, literally pour alcohol down their throats. Literally. Literally pouring it down their throats to get them as drunk as humanly possible, then you stick them out there baking in the sun and saying, um yeah we don’t have any place for you, we’ll get to it and then it gets dark and they basically say, have at it, go find a place to sleep. I mean seriously, at that point if they had simply sat there and just started you know moving through the line and saying okay you’re in tent number one, you’re in tent number two…

you’re I mean

that would have solved a huge portion of the problem, right? I mean just just do that. Is it ideal? No but you’ve now got people in tents. They’re not fighting over mattresses and you know turning into a Lord of the Flies type situation I mean, it’s

GINI:
Hording rolls of toilet paper. Yeah. It was unbelievable.

CHIP:
right. Just really, really unbelievable. Yeah, but I guess the you know, for me, the upshot is that you know, as an agency owner you need to make sure that whether it’s a prospect or client that you are comfortable with, you know what it is that they’re doing, if if your if your little spidey sense is tingling and telling you something’s off, ask a question. Follow up. Google them. You know, do a little bit to try to just to figure out whether you are on the right track or not. But once you’re in, actually working for the client, if they’re asking you to do things that are making you and your team uncomfortable you need to raise that. And so if you’re being told, delete comments because you know people are speaking the truth but we’re not addressing it – that’s a problem and maybe maybe you do need to walk away at that point or at least you know at least speak up and it didn’t appear that that was really happening in this case. Although I guess you know, perhaps to Jerry Media’s credit that you know they didn’t tell the lies directly. They forwarded it over, they forwarded the emails and messages over and said, look if you’re gonna lie to him you guys do because we’re not in this yeah we’re not in on it. And again, with the caveat that that’s their story, it’s their documentary so you know, who knows. But you know you have to figure out how to deal with those kinds of situations effectively and it is certainly a challenge.

GINI:
Well it’s a crazy crazy documentary and one thing I will add at the end is

this is part of the reason that disclosure is so important on social media, so when you’re working with influencers please make sure they use “hashtag ad” in everything they do.

CHIP:
Right. Yeah. That’s, that is certainly a lesson that that needs to be learned. I’m not sure that it ever fully will be, but yes please, please do it. If you’re influencing, label it. If you’re asking someone to influence, label it, just label it. Right. I mean it, just it, honestly people who become immune to seeing it, at you know the hashtag and the two letters “ad”, that’s enough your butt is now covered.

GINI:
And honestly, I don’t think that I personally don’t think that it would have affected the outcome, and I don’t think I mean, because part of what they were saying was well, the influencers didn’t say that this was an ad and so it could have all been avoided and you know, people wouldn’t have been… I don’t think that that’s true. I think even if they had said it was – they were being paid for it, I think they still would have spent $4,000 or more to go down there for this exclusive festival. I mean they even said they had people pulling out of Coachella to sponsors pulling out of that to just sponsor the Fyre festival. So I don’t think it had anything to do, you know, not that it’s right but I don’t think it had to do anything to do with the influencers not saying that they were paid for this. I think it was just a cluster all over.

CHIP:
Oh absolutely. I mean, it’s like as I like to say you know, most of these really bad situations are like plane crashes, it’s no single thing. It’s a it’s a combination of things that all come together at just the right time that that make things as bad as they are. But you know, pretty much it seems like anything that that Billy McFarland touches is is likely headed in that direction. And I did I know we’re we’re going to push ourselves over our self-imposed 30 minute time limit. Sorry listeners. But the, the scam that that he was running afterwards where he was basically, he was selling access to events that didn’t that you couldn’t sell access to. I thought that was I mean, that was particularly special. I thought, you know, and and those are the kinds of things where, you know, if you’re an agency and you’re being asked to market that, you know, and you sit there and say, Oh, I didn’t I didn’t know that you could sell a ticket to the Met Gala. I thought that was invitation only. It is. And again, you can find that out quite quickly from Google. So if you were an agency asked to market that, you know, and you’re like, I didn’t know you could do that. Google it and find out. I mean, you know, again, Google is your friend. It can it can help you make a better pitch. It can help save you from making a bad decision.

GINI:
Yes, yes. Yes.

CHIP:
And if you google Tom Brady, it will say greatest of all time, six rings. No, no? Okay. Well, you know, I had to to to hopefully end this show on a little bit of a lighter note.

GINI:
Yeah, you’re not gonna make very many friends out there, my friend.

CHIP:
Well, you know,

I don’t have many friends to begin with. And I’m okay with that. So I just I just want to help them be better agency owners. That’s my goal. If they like me, okay, cool.

But any case, I am Chip Griffin.

GINI:
I am Gini Dietrich

CHIP:
and it depends.

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The Hosts

Chip Griffin is the founder of the Small Agency Growth Alliance (SAGA) where he helps PR & marketing agency owners build the businesses that they want to own. He brings more than two decades of experience as an agency executive and entrepreneur to share the wisdom of his success and lessons of his failures. Follow him on Twitter at @ChipGriffin.

 

Gini Dietrich is the founder and CEO of Arment Dietrich, an integrated marketing communications firm. She is the author of Spin Sucks, the lead blogger at Spin Sucks, and the host of Spin Sucks the podcast. She also is co-author of Marketing in the Round and co-host of Inside PR. Follow her on Twitter at @GiniDietrich.

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