'Everybody's all up in everybody's grill': A former Viacom exec is promising to help brands find their true identity in a time of chaos
- Longtime Viacom marketing executive Ross Martin has launched a new consulting firm, Blackbird, designed to help companies answer existential questions and ultimately push into new businesses.
- Blackbird is already working with 10 clients in several industries, including CNN.
- Martin is also unveiling Lunch Partners, an investment firm aimed at helping marketing and media executives support and nurture startups.
A group of leaders in the media and advertising industry gathered recently to discuss how they could address the growing number of mass shootings in the US.
As the meeting progressed, typical cause-driven ad ideas were bandied about. We could run a public-service TV campaign. Try to get a viral social-media initiative going. Or maybe persuade some pop-culture stars to speak out.
Then Ross Martin, who had been mostly quiet during meeting, spoke up. "We need a physical museum," he said.
His idea was a museum evoking a high school with lockers for every kid who has been killed in the US from gun violence. The hope was to make the issue of gun safety visceral for people, not unlike the Holocaust museum in Washington, DC.
When Martin brought up the idea, "everyone just stopped," said Carolyn Everson, Facebook's global VP of marketing solutions. "We said, 'That's it.'"
Everson had seen this before. She and Martin were colleagues at Viacom in the mid-2000s when Martin was known for his vision and his ability to execute big ideas in the confines of a giant organization.
"He has a brilliant creative mind," she told Business Insider. "I'd put him among the top three most creative people I've worked with. He'll be this quiet guy in a meeting, and then he'll have these mic-drop moments. I've seen it many times."
Can being killer at brainstorming really turn into a business? Martin is betting he can channel his creative mind into two major endeavors. Since leaving Viacom earlier this year, after roughly 15 years at the media giant, Martin has spent the past several months birthing two lofty initiatives.
- He recently launched a brand-strategy consulting business, Blackbird, which has already pulled in nearly a dozen clients, including CNN, the Canadian studio Entertainment One, and a biotech firm - in several industries in just five months.
- Ross and his high-powered media friends are rolling out Lunch Partners, something of an alliance of industry executives interested in investing in and nurturing startups but who don't have the resources of a venture-capital firm.
BlackBird is not trying to be McKinsey, BBDO, or MediaLink
It's Blackbird where Martin is trying to apply his blend of mic-drop ideas and business acumen. It may be easier to define what Blackbird aspires to be by looking at what it's not. According to Martin:
- It's not an ad agency that makes ads and buys media.
- And it's a not a consulting firm that examines a business, find inefficiencies, and helps companies streamline processes and increase average revenue per user.
- And it's not about networking and bridging connections.
In other words, it's not McKinsey, it's not a giant creative agency like BBDO, and it's not MediaLink, known for its vast ad-industry networking chops.
With Blackbird, which has 10 employees between New York and Los Angeles, Martin is trying to create a new lane in an industry crowded with service firms and consultants promising wisdom and sometimes a bit of secret magic - that of a strategic brand-consulting firm that helps companies figure out their ID.
Companies have belief systems and operating systems - Blackbird will focus on the former
As Martin laid out Blackbird's mission, he explained his theory that most companies have belief systems and operating systems. Operating systems are the processes by which they do things. In the case of a media company, it's how they distribute content and sell ads and attract audiences.
Belief systems are tougher and get less attention, he says. And that's where Blackbird will come in. It will focus on high level strategy and business innovation - ideally with big giant companies that have lost their way and face disruptors, or the upstarts looking to do the disruption. Think packaged-goods giants facing direct-to-consumer brands born on the internet. Retailers battling Amazon. Car companies fighting Uber. TV companies battling mobile and streaming.
"Today, everybody's all up in everybody's grill," Martin told Business Insider. "For some people that's terrifying. For me that's super fun and exciting. Given the velocity of change in every industry, many brands and businesses have lost sight of true north, the why they need to exist. So they have an enormous difficulty unlocking growth."
"If you don't know your role in the world, it makes it hard to figure out where you take the business," he said. The need for Blackbird's counsel has exceeded his expectations. Clients include the Canadian film and TV company Entertainment One, the video tech firm MediaSilo, the Guggenheim, an architecture firm, an energy company, and even a PR giant.
"We are hearing from CEOs, CMOs, and boards," he said. "The phone calls we're getting are existential questions."
It might sound like expensive therapy, but Blackbird's clients say it has value
So how does Blackbird answer these questions? Well, it's early. So far, they'll spend weeks or months doing dozens of interviews with a client's leaderships and employees. They conduct detailed competitive research and compile as much data as they can. They'll put together a series of presentations, ideally coauthored by the client's themselves, aimed at helping a business get in touch with its true self.
And then Blackbird's team might dig in and puts together a business plan, which might include new products or sectors the company should go after, or tweaks to a company's message or ways to extract value from certain assets.
You might ask, isn't that just expensive therapy?
Well, the current climate in many industries clearly creates an opportunity to promise immediate insight.
"Everyone's having to deal with uncertainty and chaos," said Lisa Shalett, former CMO at Goldman Sachs.
That's undoubtedly true. But there's no shortage of independent experts-for-hire and consultants of all types offering instant solutions in nearly every industry. In the media and advertising sector alone, giants like Deloitte and Accenture are charging hard into the space,, bringing with them a track record of technology and data expertise - and a reputation for helping affect the bottom line.
Martin's marketing background, and the focus on more amorphous value propositions like belief systems, could be a tougher sell for more highly challenged corporations.
But Blackbird's early clients say not to underestimate Martin's operational expertise, and how all that heavy self-examination can help companies grow their business.
For example, CNN is working with Blackbird on its two-year-old digital publication "Great Big Story," which focuses on highlighting feel-good characters and awe-inspiring stories from around the world. After an extensive round of meetings and research, GBS tasked Blackbird with helping the publication figure out its next few moves as it expands the brand to become a next-generation cable network on the web.
"What Ross and the Blackbird team are building is unique in that they're able to take a specific business and brand challenge and offer creative solutions that are already road-tested," said Chris Berend, SVP of digital video at CNN. "He's already built about every kind of brand you can build, so his ideas feels less like consulting and more like a secret weapon."
'We were headed into a massive period of transition'
During more than a decade at Viacom, Martin helped forge new ground. For example, with Everson's help he helped birth Scratch, an in-house team that makes content for marketers.
He ran programming at the college-aimed MTVu, then built out Viacom's well-regarded data-driven ad business and research division. By the end, as EVP of marketing strategy and engagement for Viacom Media Network, Martin was overseeing more than a dozen teams and worked closely with the C-suite and members of the Viacom board.
"I always got a new job that had never existed before, other than my first job selling women's shoes," he said.
An example of the kind of work Martin shepherded: About four years ago, Snapple went to Viacom for help in rolling out Sun Drop, an older soda brand trying to reach at young consumers. Viacom's Scratch team, led by Martin, helped Snapple create a new character - the Sun Drop Girl - while conducting research on young consumers who could be used to target ad messages.
That eventually led to Snapple doing more work on brands like Dr Pepper. "The meetings with [Viacom sales chief Sean Moran] and Ross, yes, they were trying to figure out how to add value to clients to get more ad revenue," said Jim Trebilcock, chief commercial officer for Dr Pepper Snapple Group. "But is was much more like, 'We have these proprietary assets - we have solutions that leveraged the insights we have here,' as opposed to 'Let's sell some ads.'"
That's the kind of thinking that Martin wants to apply at Blackbird.
"We were headed into a massive period of transition," Martin said. "And we had to figure out how to use data science, tech, and creativity to create a new kind of future for the company. Now we as the legacy TV industry make better decisions. We are smarter."
"I'm not a data scientist," he added. "I went to poetry school."
Believe it or not, successful media and marketing executives have trouble investing in other companies
Meanwhile, outside of Blackbird, Martin is looking to steward Lunch Partners.
Believe it or not, successful media and marketing executives have trouble investing in other companies. Yes, they get lots of opportunities, but don't have the kind of leverage or volume of deals or simply the ability to follow up on investments to get what they should out of the process, Martin says.
So they need to join forces. Martin has recruited roughly a dozen executives across industries to pump money into startups - seed rounds or early A funding. The checks won't be huge (in the range of $150,000 to $250,000) but ideally the hands-on leadership and mentorship will be stronger than a typical VC.
"It's sort of the Avengers model of investing," said Nicholas Tran, head of brand culture at Samsung, who is part of Lunch Partners. "Today, we all get some limited deal flow and random ideas. You don't want to pass and you take a leap of faith. And the thing is, we're all still in the game."
And their motivations are less about making a bet to get rich (not that anyone would turn that down). "I'm no stranger to investing, but to me, there is so much more than I can do besides write a check," said Shalett, who is joining Lunch Partners along with her husband, a financial-services veteran.
Martin said they've already looked at 75 potential investment deals, and investing is about to start, with the firm looking at a customer-service startup founded by an ex-Google executive.
If someone can actually fix customer service, that would be a serious mic drop.