Chris Perkins: 10:22
Yep. Yeah. But it was.
John Corcoran: 10:24
I mean, I have a six year old, who is my youngest. And now, if we, like, go to a hotel room or someone else’s house or something like that, we’re watching live TV. They’ll pop up and be like, I’m going to the bathroom, pause it, and I’m like, I can’t. I can’t pause it. And they don’t even understand.
Chris Perkins: 10:37
Right. Well, I have a friend that takes that to the other level. I have a friend that has the ability to do that with their car stereo, you know, whatever content they’re listening to. Obviously you can do it if you’re streaming. Yeah.
But you know, when there’s, there’s, you know, just listening to, to other content, they could do the same. And, well, I mean, it’s like. And the kid is expecting that capability and like, hey, replay that. And I’m like, yeah. What?
Yeah. You know it’s the expectation of the young folks that is so completely different. And it’s fun to see.
John Corcoran: 11:07
Yeah it is. It’s pretty funny. So you kind of have this heyday. How did that experience shape your approach? Now I’m kind of previewing what we’re going to get to.
I don’t want to get to that full discussion yet because there’s more I want to ask about. But just, you know, thinking back now on your experience of working in the heyday of these big agencies. It’s a very different staffing model, very different talent pool. Back then, you had to hire people from Boston or San Francisco or whatever or New York. But how does that shape your approach and your philosophy today?
Chris Perkins: 11:41
Yeah, I mean, so I moved from working on First Union to working on a variety of different accounts to then leading the HP Personal Systems Group account at Hal Riney. And right at that time, we actually were acquired by Publicis. And so we operationalized the global rollout of a unified campaign. First time ever HP has done it. They used to do it regionally and had agencies regionally.
So they had lots of duplication of time and effort. And as we got we so the first round campaign we did was headed in the right direction. Everybody was on board, you know, and it was really working phenomenally. The second, as we started our second year planning , Jan McDaniel, who was our client lead, said, let’s get together with our team and your team in Ireland and let’s spend ten days locked up writing our next year’s plan. And I said, great, love it.
You know, I mean, haven’t been to that part of Ireland. That’d be amazing. And we get to, you know, have some time together would be good. And I said, so who are you bringing? She said, well, I’m bringing like 35 people.
And I like to do what that sounds like team building, not working, you know, like getting stuff done. And she’s like, well, what do you mean? Like, who are you bringing? And I’m like, well, if we’re going to write a plan for the next year that we actually build and execute on a global basis, I’m going to bring six other people and me and she’s like, oh. And so she ended up bringing like five people.
We brought six total. And in ten days we had the a really ready to take on the road plan, outline and framework that we then took to regional centers. And that was the point at which I realized, even though we had effectively 150 people in scope per our contract and lots of people in different offices around the globe through the network, fundamentally, the drivers of that are a small team, like the strategic imperatives are coming from a small team. And so that’s very much the way I learned the lessons that that kind of led to where we are today and, and, and then, you know, tying that to the way the market is, is, you know, the talent is available. It’s like you’ve never seen a difference like the number of people.
Just last year, 3.4 million more people changed their LinkedIn profile from W-2 to 1099.
John Corcoran: 14:14
Wow. Interesting.
Chris Perkins: 14:15
3.4 million people. And those are greatly talented people. And sometimes it’s because they’re older and they’re, you know, they have a high salary. And, you know, it’s easier to get somebody younger or some, you know, now the AA. I am taking a lot of those, you know, maybe not taking their job, but it’s a reason that’s being used. And certainly over time it’s delivering efficiencies that will affect people.
But yeah. So I mean that was the seminal one of those seminal moments for me. And so you pair great work and a small team that focuses on the most important bits. And that’s the foundation of what we’ve built to be around.
John Corcoran: 14:52
The other thing I’m struck by from that experience, like flying across the globe with even half a dozen people or 35 people or whatever it is, getting together in a room for ten days together. The amount of money that was spent on these things that’s now saved today through things like zoom and, you know, stuff like that is just mind boggling how much more expensive it must have cost for a client like HP to roll out an international project. I mean, it would just have been nuts.
Chris Perkins: 15:20
Yeah. I mean, I’m a million miles on United and American Airlines and I would happily trade those back in for, you know, time with family or, you know, fishing or reading a book or, you know, actually having time to do productive things. You know, it’s it’s now that’s not to say that there isn’t value in spending time together. There is. But doing it more thoughtfully and deciding when it’s team building, deciding when it’s strategy and work sessions and and being really discreet about that and rethinking even the purpose of office.
Like, you know, going to an office is irrelevant if you don’t have value built into the way you collaborate. And we think very hard about that and advise our clients accordingly.
John Corcoran: 16:05
Oh, yeah. I mean, I think about that because the number of jobs I had, you know, back in the day, high school, college after college, where it was just a bunch of people traveling across town, 45 minutes or an hour to get into an elevator, to go up in an office building and then sit in their cubicle or office. One wall over from another person is doing something else completely independently. It didn’t make any sense functionally. You could have been doing it in your own house and saved all that time.
Chris Perkins: 16:38
Yeah. Yeah. Well, and you and you look at some of the methodologies out there, there are companies that have standing meetings only. And that was done in the 80s. Right.
Because their thoughts came prepared to. And I think it might have actually been Amazon where their approach to it was that the discussion framework had to be supplied in advance so people could consume it as a baseline. So you’d enter the room hot and ready to discuss, and they’d do a standing meeting. And if you weren’t done in a certain amount of time, it was rescheduled, or there was a new time and you were basically on a on a list of, yeah, people, people to help and, and and, you know, those are lessons to me that we can leverage as we think about the future of work and the future of kind of cracking problems differently. And, and, and, you know, the worst thing we could do is try to go back to what used to be a 9 to 5 in an office and a desk in a cube farm or whatever.
I mean, I think that’s just the death of humanity. And, and and, you know, it scares me to death that companies are demanding people to start doing that again on certain levels.
John Corcoran: 17:46
There definitely is a trend as we record this in mid 2025 of companies kind of demanding that back to work, back in the office type of thing. Before we get into that further in that discussion I want to ask about the brand USA. So you were CMO for this first initiative. Nationwide initiative to sell tourism to the United States. This is around 2011.
Time frame. Where did that come from? How did that originally come about?
Chris Perkins: 18:15
So the travel industry as a group had worked for years to get Congress to, you know, basically create a national, national brand organization that would focus on inbound tourism, you know, countrywide, right. So it’s one of those ironic jobs. You’re selling everything and nothing, right? You can’t book through brand USA. Yeah.
You know, but you can create that clarity of what we stand for. You can create that clarity of ways you can access the experiences that are those of your choice. And but to me, it was absolutely it was. It was created by the travel industry. They got the Obama administration to pass a bill called the Corporation or the Travel Promotion Act in 2010.
And then they formed a board from the industry. All the different kinds of majors, you know, air airlines and hoteliers and destinations and state level destination marketing organizations. Demos and that board then began the process of hiring a team. I was number three, the CEO and a key assistant. I was employee number three.
And and literally seven and a half months. We built a global program, integrated and ready to go with an incredible partnership program across the industry, including all the US territories in nine countries. And, you know, investing A effectively a $200 million budget to invite the world to the US. And in year one, we calculated with Oxford, not Oxford Economics travel Division a 20 to 1 ROI. And I’m so proud of the work that we did as a great team and JWT back in the day when that was an agency, was my global agency, and I had several other partners.
But it was a great honor to do that for two reasons. One, it wasn’t like it was hard to invite people like that, but honestly, we’d never said, as a country, welcome, you know, please come visit. We’d never had said that. In fact, you could argue even having Homeland Security as kind of our border management was like, we only care about us. You know, we’re going to pretend you’re not there.
John Corcoran: 20:33
And I just went through the border crossings. I went to Canada this summer, and it is not a friend, and I’m an American citizen. It is not a friendly experience.
Chris Perkins: 20:41
That’s right. Well, and there was a time period right around there where in working with them, it actually improved in some ways. And now it’s, you know, back to the dark days, if not darker. But, you know, it was a great honor to do that. And the thing I’m most proud of is it was not about red, white and blue and the Statue of Liberty and the things that we as Americans value and kind of relate to and kind of our pride points.
It was about the United States being the land of endless possibility. And, and, and and we got to that because we talked to people around the world and, and in fact, one of the things we actually did to get them to, to help us refine the strategy is we we gave them prepaid postcards and asked them to send a postcard to America telling us what they think of it. And it was. And then we made a coffee table book out of that. That was actually the first thing we did.
And, and used to kind of make sure that people knew we’d done the due diligence of understanding the way people think about us.
John Corcoran: 21:45
It’s a cool idea.
Chris Perkins: 21:45
And at the time you have to imagine, like at the time, a lot of people’s context was, you know, you know, pop culture and, and, you know, kind of film and, you know, the Jersey shore was the most widely viewed show globally. And to think that’s their view of America, I.
John Corcoran: 22:09
Mean, yeah.
Chris Perkins: 22:10
So we had a lot of work to do to kind of give them a clearer view into the past of the big cities.
John Corcoran: 22:15
And so I have to ask about what some of the challenges were in that job, because there must have been so many challenges. One, you know, one like, where you like reporting up to like the white House and senators, you know, have funding coming from different sources, then also getting all these different, I guess maybe the tourism boards involved in these territories involved and states involved and all in agreement on messaging. Talk to me a little bit about some of the challenges around that.
Chris Perkins: 22:41
Well, the good news is that the organization was set up as a public private partnership. So we had autonomy to a point. The board was appointed by a collection of senators that backed the original act. So we did have some oversight. In fact, I spent a lot of time on the Hill with, you know, Klobuchar and Schumer, Chuck Schumer and Blunt from Missouri and, and folks in the white House.
But back then it was Jeffrey Zients and others. And so we did have to get their awareness of what we were doing and why. And then, you know, the bar showed me the money, right. If we could quantitatively prove that the investment was coming back in more inbound tourism, you know, longer stays, more spending, then everybody’s fine. Yeah.
But you know, we did have you know, I had, you know, one senator literally say I want to see something from my district in the ads, and if you don’t do that, you’re going to have hell to pay. And I mean, he wasn’t that direct, but he was that direct. And so, you know, we found a way to do it in a way that was not unfair to the other, you know, millions of destinations and, you know, content that we could cover. And it was organic. And of course, part of the story is how do you continue to build the, the, the volume of experiences and create, you know, we actually one of the web experiences that we had was think of it as a mix as a mixing board.
We literally created a mixing board on the website where you could do sliders, you know, family or children, sunny or cold.
John Corcoran: 24:28
Yeah.
Chris Perkins: 24:29
And, and and based on that, it would calibrate and present to you a range of tile visual tiles that you could then click on to go down into the experience continuum.
John Corcoran: 24:39
Cool idea.
Chris Perkins: 24:39
And then so part of what we did is we kept the industry busy by saying, feed us that info. You want to be in it and feed us that info. So now you. Now you’re present, now you’re in it. And we had 3500 plus partners providing us content and, and that was all part of the operating system and mechanism.
And that way it was less about I want to be in the ad and I want to make sure I’m present. And we served all the masters that way. Yeah. But I think, honestly, the biggest challenge was that our funding model required oversight from the Department of Commerce and Treasury, and they’d never seen anything like it before. They’d never like how you value advertising.
John Corcoran: 25:18
And
Chris Perkins: 25:18
And how do you measure ROI? And so I spent way too many days and nights working with them to explain that it’s not a GAAP compliant methodology. You can’t put it on a balance sheet.
John Corcoran: 25:32
You know.
Chris Perkins: 25:33
It’s a much more qualitative measure with, you know, the best science applied. And that was probably the most, you know. The unique and least fun part of my job, I would say for sure.
John Corcoran: 25:49
Yeah, for sure, I could see that. Let’s get to talking about Model B, because you have an interesting vantage point. I’m looking at your LinkedIn here, and it says that you were a board member first before moving into the role of president. So talk a little bit about what your involvement was first, what your involvement is now, and then we’ll get into some of the discussion around the, you know, mixing internal resources, using outside resources and how that model works.
Chris Perkins: 26:20
Yeah, no. Sure. I mean, the curious thing, the owners group actually reached out to me through a recruiter, a prominent recruiter in the industry, about joining as president early on before it became a board member. And I had a conversation with them. And what they really meant was they wanted a new business person.
And I said, look, you know, my belief is that it’s a team sport. Everybody’s got to do it. Somebody can drive that bus. But you know, here’s how I would do it. And we had a great connection.
I really liked all the guys. And you know Ashtan you know the guy you mentioned earlier as one of them really had a great connection to him. But my approach was so foreign to them that one of the other people there. We were talking, they actually moved forward with. And he had he came from the media space and had a huge book of contacts, having been a media rep, you know, selling basically media space.
And his story was I got a Rolodex. I’m going to load up your account list, and it’s going to be amazing. And I’ll never forget the CEO at the time, Ashtan said, you know, Chris, you know, we really like you and we want to stay in touch. But we think the better play for us is having this guy that’s got this book and it’s going to, you know, be the quickest path to revenue. and I said, look, I, I, I want you to make the right decision for you.
I will warn you, I’ve seen this episode before. It’s not going to end well, I don’t think. I hope I’m wrong. I mean, I don’t say that because I want you to fail. And sure enough, five months later, you know, things have changed and it wasn’t the right fit and it didn’t pay out.
And during that time, they said, look, you know, you had all these ideas that we don’t really understand. Like you keep saying, what if you did this? What if you did that? You know, come be on the board and help us build that. I’m like, great, let’s go.
And so I joined the board and, you know, like, you know, a good board member. I offered, you know, you know, very clear guidance as best I could. And as a board member, your job is to provide guidance and, and support and not to do. Right. And so I was doing that, but the team didn’t understand it well enough to actually execute.
And so as I was wrapping up my current engagement at the time. You know, we closed a B round and it was time for me to go. I’d built the team and I’d done the stuff I do. I stepped out and as soon as I stepped out, they were like, hey, you keep poking us about all this stuff. Come and do it, for God’s sake.
And so I did. In January of 23, I came in as president, and we began the process of building our current business model. And here we are today, you know, really seeing the benefit of a very untraditional, innovative new business or new business model, not just new business, but an operating system for an agency that we think is really right for the times.
John Corcoran: 29:22
So walk me through it. A client comes to you looking for help with a marketing issue, and you said you use a mix of internal resources and outside resources. I can think of a lot of different ways in which that could go poorly, right? You know, requiring teams that haven’t worked together to suddenly work together in collaboration for a client. Talk a little bit about how you make it work.
Chris Perkins: 29:46
Well, I mean, a client’s job is to ask for advertising and marketing support, right? And they often ask for specific tactical level work. And one of the challenges is the industry very often just does what they’re asked. So we take a management consulting front end approach. So we understand how each client makes money and where marketing can apply best.
So when a client says we want to do ads, we step back and say, now that we totally do that. That’s great. How can we make sure they’re going to deliver you the result that you’re looking for? And you know, what are the friction points? You know, what’s the customer experience look like?
Is, you know, where do we make sure those ads go? Who’s your ICP? You know, we have a lot of questions, and we don’t beat them to death with questions. We literally form what we call an ecosystem map, that visualizes what the touch points are, that are both structurally, internally and on the outside and where those customers sit and why. And we titrate it by their relative value.
And then and only then do we decide what tactical kind of approaches will go to, you know, go forward with and and then, you know, with our 12 person team, you know, some of the stuff we can do ourselves. But, you know, in the world today and this is something that I learned, you know, in these big agencies, if you have lots of departments, the best people in those departments, when you go tap them are always busy.
John Corcoran: 31:23
Yeah. So guess what happens?
Chris Perkins: 31:25
You use who’s available. And sometimes it’s Susie and Bob, the two interns.
John Corcoran: 31:29
And yeah.
Chris Perkins: 31:30
Are you really getting your client the value that a big agency pretends is really happening there? In most cases, no and no agency can be great at everything, right? It’s just impossible. Even the biggest organizations in the world have capacity and, you know, utilization criteria. And they’re commercial first, delivering value second, you know, they’re there to make money, you know.
And so that misalignment is a big opportunity in the world today. And given there are so many wonderful agencies out there that have capacity, they love it when, you know, we have actually created what we call the partner collective, which is over 60 agencies around the globe that we’ve vetted, we’ve got papered, and they’re on a cloud based platform. So I can go in and say, I want a CRM partner that is exceptional in life sciences, and bingo, they’re searchable. All their information tells me that that’s their skill set. And it’s a hand raiser model.
So when they raise their hand, they have the right people, the right skill set, and they’re ready to go. And the beauty is it costs us nothing and our clients nothing until we deploy them. And you think about it from their perspective. They’re thinking, wait, I just got a lead and it didn’t have to do anything other than say, yes, let’s go.
John Corcoran: 32:53
I mean, yeah, it’s.
Chris Perkins: 32:54
A win win win. And that’s, you know, kind of part of our ethos is how do we have a yes and a model that delivers a better result, takes the friction and brings precision to the table. And we, you know, the marketplace is ripe for it today. And we think it’s a better approach.
John Corcoran: 33:13
Has it been I guess, where has the challenge been as you’ve built this model? Has it been building the bench of the 60 companies? Has it been educating the market about the model that you’ve built? Has it been getting the word out. So visibility about Model B where’s the biggest challenge has been.
Chris Perkins: 33:34
Well honestly it’s all of those you know because with. Depending on which data you look at. There’s 10,000 marketing services firms in the US. And so I mean you do a search. There’s you know more than you can bear to even look at.
And so part of what we’re careful to do is, be discreet about fitting right. And and and to not fight the headwinds. If somebody doesn’t get us pretty quickly in the conversation on a prospect level, we’re not going to get them there. Right. If they’ve got a procurement hurdle set, that is, you know, you have to have soc2 and everybody has to be domestic and everybody, you know, all these rules.
We’re not right for them and that’s fine. You know there’s enough clients out there that need us that are open minded and frankly, looking for a better solution. And what we find is, I would say 80% of the conversations we have, the light bulb goes off pretty quickly and they’re like, oh, and you know, and then they ask questions like, well, how do you tap into them? Well, we have a cloud based platform. Let me show it to you.
And I literally say to him, what’s the project that you want, what’s the solution or the skill set that you need? Type it in. Bingo. There’s eight people that are large, medium and small in the collective that do that. Oh, okay, now I see.
And by the way, do you have an internal team? Yes. We can ingest them into the platform. So now we can actually have a collaborative model. So it’s not us against them.
It’s us and them together. And you know so our hypothesis is proving out very nicely is there’s individual contractors and agencies that can be very precise talent that we can tap with very low friction. It just requires us setting up a, you know, having NDAs in place, setting up a cloud based system that keeps us in touch in a really low friction way. So you get, you know, friction reduction and precision and talent.
John Corcoran: 35:32
You know.
John Corcoran: 35:33
And all those tools exist now compared to where we started this conversation 25 years ago when there was no zoom, there was no slack. There was no like all these things that you can use to, you know, project management tools like a Monday or Clickup or something like that. Yeah.
Chris Perkins: 35:45
That’s right. Yeah. I mean.
Chris Perkins: 35:47
An example of that.
Chris Perkins: 35:51
Literally last night at 10:00 my time, I was with a company out of Hong Kong and a partner in, in Mumbai. Would a 12 person agency be a credible resource for something in a global apparel manufacturer based in Hong Kong? No, they wouldn’t even know about us. But the partner in Mumbai knew that we would bring a resource pool to the table for a prospect that they had a connection with. So together, we’re effectively a much bigger resource and much more productive and much more efficient and, you know, happy to do it.
You know.
Chris Perkins: 36:26
It’s just.
Chris Perkins: 36:27
A shortcut.
John Corcoran: 36:28
Yeah. It’s such a cool model. Well, I know we’re about out of time. So I’ll wrap up there. Chris.
So first of all, my last question, I’m a big fan of gratitude, big fan of expressing gratitude and giving our guests a little bit of space at the end here to acknowledge any peers, contemporaries, someone like that, who they would want to acknowledge, anyone you would want to shout out.
Chris Perkins: 36:48
Well, I. Honestly, I could give you a list of hundreds of people because I’ve been the beneficiary of being around really great people. But I’ll focus on Bob Kalinski. Bob Kalinski was a client of mine. He was at Radio Shack doing really good work and liked helping us as we were on The Age.
I was at Arnold Worldwide at the time and helped our team see through the fog of a failing retailer and a great partner. He’s one of those people that if you ask Bob anybody where to ask Bob how he’s doing today, his answer is the same every time, and he means it. And it’s freaking awesome. And that optimism, that positivity is infectious. And I just love the man.
He’s a great friend. And today happens to be his birthday. So it’s oh perfect timing. That’s great.
John Corcoran: 37:37
I wish I was publishing it today, but it’ll have to go a little bit later, but great. Chris, where can people go to learn more about you and Model B?
Chris Perkins: 37:45
Well, you can go to modelb.com and find us for sure. Or I’m on LinkedIn. I am under Topher Perkins, which is the last half of Christopher so Topher Perkins. Or you can just look me up under Chris Perkins there and probably find me.
And, John, thanks for the chance to chat. It’s been fun.
John Corcoran: 38:02
Yeah. Chris, thanks so much. Oh, and you have a new podcast that people can check out too.
Chris Perkins: 38:06
We do Beyond the Brief, which is just that. It’s a conversation with marketers, for marketers around where they get their insights and ideas that are not on the brief. And it’s a fun thing. We talk to all kinds of people. Check it out.
John Corcoran: 38:18
Great. All right. Thanks so much, Chris.
Chris Perkins: 38:20
All right. Thanks, John.
Outro: 38:24
Thanks for listening to the Smart Business Revolution Podcast. We’ll see you again next time. And be sure to click subscribe to get future episodes.