I was freaking out. I told my business coach that I wanted to move the event date out a couple weeks. He said, “Keep the date. Launch ugly.”

That did not make me feel better, but I went into overdrive. One thing about ADHD is that it allows for intense focus when there are tight deadlines. For the next three weeks I was possessed.

The event was called Hacking Advertising LIVE :: Get Your Own Commercial. On TV. In 45 Days.

I had no web page, no sales mechanism, no presentation, no collateral, and certainly no ads. I did have my book to draw material from, and I had a list.

Let me back up.

On July 5th I decided to do a live event. My book Hacking Advertising had been out for a little over a year. It had a great reception, terrific reviews and endorsements, and modest sales.

I knew the next step for me was public speaking, and I had gone to an event about how to run your own events. The coach was outstanding. I signed up.

Now I had to fill at least a dozen seats at my studio, Wild Gravity in Seattle, and create a program based on the book so I’d have an offer I could sell at the event. In three weeks.

At Wild Gravity we produce premium video and digital assets for (mostly) enterprise brands. Brand videos, explainers, demos, docuseries, animations, and the thing we love to do: TV commercials.

At the same time I had become obsessed with the insane opportunity represented by streaming TV advertising. Same cost as Meta, just as targeted and measurable, running on the biggest screen in the house with no skip-ad buttons. Double to triple the returns.

I got us certified as creative partners with Vibe, MNTN, and Trend TV. Now we needed clients.

I knew it wasn’t enough to teach people how to run streaming TV ads. I needed to teach them what to run. I had to show them what makes a commercial great. Not just aesthetically, but what really drives conversion.

You can buy all the right media, do all the testing, but if you don’t have a response-engineered ad your campaign is going to flop. You can’t test into greatness. Testing helps you optimize. If it’s a turd to begin with, no amount of optimization is going to make it shine.

Day one I wrote the creative brief, forty hooks, the campaign plan, the run of show and the first eight ads. I went deep with Claude Code, and that’s a story for another article.

I looked at the ad images the next morning and killed all fourteen. They led with stats. They looked like AI. Nobody buys from a stat card. Rebuilt them to lead with the pain and the dream. Went with text and real images instead of machine-created slop.

I was going to build out the landing page and sales mechanism on Eventbrite, but it was really limiting. I built the whole thing in GoHighLevel so I’d own every step. Landing page, checkout, confirmation emails, a show-up sequence.

July 20th was campaign launch day. Meta ads live at fifty dollars a day. Newsletter out to the list. And an email to friends and family that I rewrote myself at the last minute because the draft didn’t sound like me.

That email sold the first three tickets. The ads sold none. That should have told me everything. It didn’t. I spent the next few weeks trying to get the Meta campaign to perform.

Here’s what paid social did in a month. Brought 2,869 people to the landing page. Two conversions. Then I found out three quarters of the people landing on my page were over 65, in an ad set targeting owners 30 to 60, because Meta’s Advantage+ treats your age range as a suggestion and I forgot to turn that off one time.

My color-block text and image ads beat both my video ads on landing page views. But not conversion. I tested and optimized the best I could on a limited budget, then I ran the math. To fill a dozen seats from cold traffic alone would cost somewhere between two and five thousand dollars in media. I spent less than twelve hundred.

I’d been trying to buy a room I couldn’t afford, with an ad that was never the problem. The ads and landing page were converting fine. I just didn’t have the budget to fill the room with strangers. Nor did I want to. My coach, Chad, had told me: “Fill the room with friends by sending them personal texts.” I nodded and went back to Ads Manager.

Four days later I finally opened my contacts and started at A. Personal texts, one at a time. No cut and paste. Each one custom with personal references. I made it through G the first night. P the second. I finished the alphabet on August 8th. On the ninth I turned off the Meta campaign.

Nine of the eleven people who registered came from those texts. Not from the ads, not from the emails. From my phone. (Chad was right. Chad is usually right. I mean, that’s why I hired him.)

At the same time I thought, if I’m going to tell a room full of people that streaming TV ads are a better platform than Meta and just as affordable, I should eat my own dog food. Ten days from the event we shot an ad, finished it the next day, and started running it the day after.

It was driving leads four days after we shot it, for about fifty bucks a day. Same as I was spending on Meta. Reached 63K targeted people. Got an extra 2K people to the site. That’s the ad I showed on stage as proof this works at small business prices.

A week out and I had spent all my time on the funnel, landing page, emails, texts, ads, follow-up threads, my own commercial... and I had no presentation.

I used Claude to build the deck in HTML instead of PowerPoint so every video clip would live on my laptop and nothing would depend on the room’s wifi. And basically because Claude wanted to do it that way, and by this time we had a really solid working relationship. Hah.

Fifty-four slides on August 9th. Then, four days before the event, I completely changed the offer.

I was going to provide a DIY plan for everyone, but I changed it to a six-week program, $1,000, we build your ad with you and put it on the air. New checkout page, new agreement, new schedule, new economics. Sixty-three slides.

Then I read the talk track and it wasn’t me. So on August 11th, two days before the event, I rewrote the whole thing myself, in my own words, and we rebuilt the deck from scratch to match. Sixty-six slides. That afternoon my team gave notes. Sixty-four.

The night before, I walked Chad through the deck. None of the video clips played. He gave me thirty numbered changes and put the close back together. Sixty-two slides.

Sixty-one by the time the doors opened. The deck changed structure five times in seventy-two hours.

An hour before doors I was still creating builds on several slides.

Seventeen people came. Exceeded my expectations by a sizable amount. Perfect size for the room. The presentation ran clean. Every clip played, the audio held, the countdown clock hit zero right when I said it would.

Everyone was engaged the whole time, lots of crowd interaction, tons of genuine praise when I was done.

Then the checkout page broke. Because of course it did. Two people bought anyway. Five have now signed up. That’s a 29.4% conversion rate.

The program starts on Wednesday. In six weeks all five people will have their own commercial, running on TV, driving leads, for about the same as they were spending on Meta.

And in week seven I’ll do it all over again.

Stephen Colbert ends The Late Show next week. The number one show in late night. Off the air.

CBS says it was a “financial decision” but we all know why it was really cancelled.

The First Amendment doesn’t have a business carve-out. But what happens when the message is clear enough, that saying the wrong thing makes you a target, that everyone just decides on their own to go quiet? That’s not censorship in the legal definition. But it gets you to the same place.

If enough people stop saying things, the things stop getting said.

You’ve seen the list. From Colbert, to Kimmel, to Meyers. Nearly every news and media outlet. Anthropic, Google, Amazon. GM and Toyota. Macy’s and Nordstrom. It keeps growing. When you watch that happen, you start choosing your words more carefully.

That’s not a PR calculation. That’s something more existential.

There’s a word for when people stop speaking because they’re afraid of what a government might do to them. I’m going to leave it out of this. You already know what I mean.

Here’s what my LinkedIn feed looks like these days: AI hot takes. Productivity hacks. Growth frameworks.

What I don’t see a lot of is people talking about on this platform is the real business climate. Tariffs. Fuel costs from an ongoing war. Tech layoffs so routine that people have stopped being shocked by them. Corporate marketing budgets getting cut. Not trimmed. Just gone.

The stock market is being artificially lifted by “AI” and without that the market would be down significantly. Meaning business writ large is down, and the AI inflation is masking the effects.

I run a creative production studio in Seattle. I’ve been watching competitors disappear this year. Not lose a pitch. Not pivot. Just close. I counted six conversations in the past few months about people I respect shutting down. In my first seven years in business, I had maybe two.

Nobody is writing the obituary for any of them.

It’s always the same story: “budget cuts,” “projects pausing,” or “clients just got laid off.” Budget freezes don’t appear from nowhere. Corporate confidence is downstream of something. And right now that something is a business environment that feels, to a lot of people I talk to, genuinely unpredictable. Genuinely down.

Almost nobody’s talking about the macro factor driving all of it. And I think it’s pretty obvious why.

The business leaders that are on the radar would rather play nice than draw the ire of the administration. For understandable reasons. So the ones that could exert pressure are just not doing it.

The thing nobody’s talking about is the thing causing all the pain.

Here’s the question I keep sitting with: if the business community is the only entity that could exert pressure on the administration, and it doesn’t name what’s happening, if we keep posting AI frameworks while our peers close their doors, does it get better on its own?

Now, it’s scary to say something. I’ve used the most careful language in this article to the point where I’ve barely levied a criticism, yet it still gives me pause to press publish.

That’s not the American I grew up in. That’s not what created the greatest economy in the world.

I sure hope someone says something soon before no one’s left to say anything.

In a world full of Rogans, be a Colbert.

What do you do when you’ve spent twenty years watching an industry make the same mistake, everywhere, at every company, at every budget level?

You start the company that solves the problem.

What do you do when your company’s success proves the model really works?

You write the book.

*Hacking Advertising: How We Learned to Make Ads Without the Agency (And You Can Too)* turns one this month.

Here’s the high-level results:

Over 500 copies sold. Over forty 5-Star reviews. Over 20K followers. More than a dozen podcast appearances. Endorsements from some of the heaviest hitters in the industry. A cover story in the local magazine. The opportunity to reach people I never would have reached. People I don’t know telling me how much they loved the book. The satisfaction of knowing you’ve inspired hundreds to achieve their own dreams.

Here’s what I’ve learned:

It’s a hell of a lot of work. Writing the book is the easy part - it’s what comes after that’s hard. Create the funnel first, then the book. (I did it backwards.) A lot of people write a lot of books. Creating demand is really difficult. Fiction books outsell business books by orders of magnitude. Don’t worry about finding a “real” publisher, they don’t do much for you anyway. Hybrid publishers cost a fortune. I learned the hard way.

Self-publishing is really the way to go and you can put out a super professional product that way, save a ton of money and maintain total control. I didn’t do it this way but I will for the next book. All the marketing is on you no matter which way you go, so you might as well do it all. That doesn’t mean you don’t hire experts for each of the steps.

Here’s what’s next.

Dial up sales through my own funnel. Amp up advertising on Amazon. Use the book as a direct mail piece to my most prized prospects. More podcast guesting. PR? Start public speaking.

Here’s what you get from my book.

Part One is my career journey from agency life to client-side. My experience as head of advertising for L.L.Bean, then Windows, then Redfin. My discovery of the incredibly flawed commercial advertising-production process and my attempts to fix it from within.

Part Two is all about how I started Wild Gravity to exploit the flaws in the system and solve the biggest problems: insane expense and ridiculous timelines. I give away all the secrets for how we make better ads than the big agencies 4x faster at a quarter of the price.

Part Three is about how you can do it too. If you’re a brand advertiser, I teach you how to save tens of millions of dollars by switching from traditional commercial production to creative production. If you’re an agency or production company, I teach you how to transition to creative production to capture millions more in revenue in profit. If you’re not in the industry, it’s still a damn fun read and you learn a lot of lessons you can apply to your own field.

Everyone’s being asked to “do more with less” and for $4.99 you can learn how to do exactly that. Creative Production is the way. Grab your copy on Amazon and stay tuned to see what’s next.

Lastly, a massive thank you to everyone that has helped me along the way and to the hundreds of people that have already purchased Hacking Advertising. It’s been a hell of a ride and it’s not slowing down.

Cheers,

Jon

Amazon.com: Hacking Advertising: How We Learned to Make Ads Without the Agency (And You Can Too)

For most of the last thirty years, TV advertising was gated by two things: what it cost to make a spot, and what it cost to put it somewhere. The production budget ran $600,000 to $800,000 at a major agency. The media buy required minimums that made it Fortune 500 territory by definition. If you were a mid-size brand, you bought digital and didn’t revisit the question.

Both of those barriers fell at the same time. And most brands haven’t noticed yet.

On the media side: streaming now accounts for 47.5% of all U.S. television viewing, the highest share ever recorded. Pay-TV dropped from over 100 million households to under 70 million in a decade. CTV ad spending is on track to hit $38 billion this year. Platforms like Vibe. co and MNTN let brands run campaigns across hundreds of premium channels with no minimums, audience targeting that’s arguably more precise than Meta or Google, and measurable return. You can start for $500.

On the production side: the $600,000 spot was about the model and the bloat of the industry. A major agency with its overhead and margins, then a production company, then a post house, VFX, then a finishing vendor. Each one handing off to the next. Each one adding cost.

When creative, production, post, and VFX live in the same team, a significant portion of that cost disappears and timelines accelerate.

What this means for mid-size brands is that TV stopped being the expensive option. Not cheap. Just not the gap most people assume.

We’ve been running numbers with companies lately that never seriously considered TV before. Regional brands. DTC businesses that have only ever been on Meta and Google. B2B software companies trying to build awareness somewhere beyond LinkedIn and search.

When they see what production actually costs under a model that isn’t carrying five vendors and a midtown overhead, the reaction is usually some version of the same thing: this isn’t much more than what we’re spending on digital.

And they get the sixty-five inch screen in someone’s living room with no Skip Ad button.

One thing worth saying clearly: cheap media doesn’t make cheap creative work. A bad spot on Hulu is still a bad spot on Hulu. The research on this is consistent. Low-quality video on premium streaming inventory actively lowers how audiences perceive the brand.

The quality bar didn’t fall with the media cost and the production cost. The brands that figure out how to do all three well at once are going to find a significant window of opportunity while everyone else is still assuming the answer is no.

Wild Gravity has been making broadcast-quality video creative for nearly a decade at costs and speeds that make agencies cry and CFOs cheer.

If you want to know whether TV makes sense for your budget, hit me up, I’m happy to run through the numbers with you.

Cheers, Jon

Jon Sneider is the co-founder of Wild Gravity, a Seattle-based creative production studio. If you want to learn how to build better creative for less, or you’re a client constantly being asked to do more with less, my book “Hacking Advertising” is on sale on Amazon right now. And of course if you need help right away, just message me and I’ll be happy to lend a hand.

The entire ship was built from the inside out. Rocky the alien was on set in every scene. Gosling on wire rigs. Practical zero gravity. Real avionics in the cockpit.

$250 million budget. Zero green screens.

We had a long discussion about the production of ‘Project Hail Mary’ at Wild Gravity and the overwhelming feeling was a deep respect the filmmakers’ dedication to using real sets and practical effects wherever possible. In an age where movie blockbusters rely too heavily on green screen, it’s refreshing to see this approach being used. Personally, we’re super tired of all the Superhero and Science Fiction films, and really most Hollywood films, relying entirely too much on Greenscreen-VFX sets. When a character is in the middle of a scene built entirely via CGI, it begins to feel false. It’s close to just being an animated film. Nothing wrong with animation, but we can all agree that animation doesn’t feel “real.”

We like that they acknowledged that no green screen doesn’t mean no VFX shots. There were 2,018 of them! They used black screens instead of green ones, so some might see this as a bit of a handwave. But when you learn more about it, they still strove to make lighting and actions as real as possible. The actor was in the scene, not in front of it. That’s the distinction that matters.

We have a killer VFX team here and we get asked to use that capability all the time for projects with tight budgets. Someone is always in the room asking “can’t we just green screen it?” It’s almost always a budget conversation, not a creative one. This wasn’t that. It was a creative decision that made the film feel real.

Clearly it paid off. The movie has already grossed $421M, making it ROI positive for the studio in just a couple of weeks.

What does it mean? Audiences were hungry for this. Likely the majority of filmgoers weren’t thinking “we hate CGI/VFX.” Most are unaware of exactly how movies get made and aren’t thinking about it while they’re watching. So it’s not like they have CGI fatigue, per se.

It’s fake fatigue.

CGI fatigue would mean people are tired of the technology. Fake fatigue means they’re tired of things that don’t feel real, even when they can’t explain why. The scene just feels off. The character doesn’t seem to actually be there. Nothing is catastrophically wrong. But something registers, and you stop believing it.

In an age of increasingly artificially generated content, people are craving authenticity more than ever. Even if they’re not fully conscious of what’s “real” and what’s “fake,” they can sense it. And real always resonates.

We should all think about this every time we’re generating any piece of content. The lesson isn’t: don’t use technology, but strive to use it only in ways that are absolutely necessary, and default to authentic whenever possible.

Mad respect from all of us at Wild Gravity to the filmmakers on this one. Bravo. We hope this is the beginning of a bigger trend.

Practical effects rule.

I’ve always been fascinated by the correlation between one’s childhood passions and one’s career choice later in life, as they often align without us even realizing it. Kirkland resident, Jon Sneider, is a perfect example. As a kid growing up in Brookline, MA, Jon felt lucky to have a group of crazy, fun friends who were “as passionate about troublemaking as they were about the arts—specifically music, acting, and writing.” He was passionate about creativity as an ethic and dreamed of becoming a writer.

That creative drive continued to be a centering principle for Jon, manifesting itself in diverse ways throughout his journey. Today, he is the owner of Wild Gravity, an award-winning creative production agency specializing in premium video and digital content for brands. We recently chatted about how he has created a career he loves by capitalizing on his creative talents. For Jon, it’s simple. “I’ve always believed you must create the life you want. Aspire to an ideal and make all your work experiences building blocks to get to that ideal.” He adds, “Some people live to work. I work to live.”

Jon began the journey toward his ideal by getting a Comparative Literature degree from Colorado College with a minor in Art. As he says, “These famously ‘useless degrees’ were, at the end of the day, very important to my career in the way they taught me how to think abstractly, how to be a creative problem solver, and how to interpret text and meaning—all skills that were foundational to my success.” After a brief stint as a ski bum in Telluride, CO, Jon headed back to Boston to get a ‘real job’ and entered the marketing and advertising world. While it felt like he was walking away from his dream of becoming a writer, the next two decades turned out to be building blocks to get there.

“I had heard about Bose in Framingham, MA, and was obsessed with getting a job in marketing there,” he explains. “But you don’t just walk into a marketing position with no experience, so I had to start in sales, selling Bose Wave Radios over the phone.” While there, Jon took advantage of the continuing education opportunity Bose offered employees—taking business classes at Babson College while working full-time. “I got my MBA at night while working there, then was recruited by Digitas in Boston, one of the first digital ad agencies,” he says. “That started my career in advertising.” At Digitas, Jon got to lead big accounts for General Motors, AT&T, Microsoft, and Time Warner before jumping over to the client side as Director of Onsite Marketing for Fidelity Investments. But it was the next position that truly caused his career to take off.

“I was recruited to be Head of Advertising at L.L. Bean, and that’s when I went from digital marketing to more traditional broadcast advertising,” he says. “I made my first television ad there, and it was an eye-opening experience.” After doing a national search for an ad agency, hiring one, then working with them on creating the ad for months, it was time to shoot. “They started talking about what production company they would hire to shoot the spot, and I was totally thrown,” Jon admits. “I went into my boss and said, ‘Wait. The ad agency doesn’t make the ad?’.” When his boss responded “no,” Jon couldn’t believe it. “I said, ‘Wait, we just spent three months and tons of money working with 25 people called the ad agency, and they don’t actually make the ads?’ It didn’t make any sense to me. I was used to digital marketing where we made everything in-house.”

In addition to Jon’s shock at all the wasted time and dollars involved in making television ads, the culture there wasn’t a great fit. So when his previous boss at Fidelity asked him to come work for her at her new stint as Head of Brand for Windows at Microsoft, he was thrilled. Six months later, in 2009, Jon and his wife found their home in Kirkland, which they saw as the perfect place to raise their young family. As Jon says, “This place is spectacular. I wouldn’t want to live anywhere else.”

Once here, Jon became Director of Advertising for Windows, where the ad making process was on a much larger scale. “We worked with the most coveted agencies in the country, if not the world, and I loved the work, but saw a tremendous amount of bloat, wasted energy and spend.” After a few years he left to become VP of Advertising & Brand at Redfin but soon realized they were stuck in the old ways of doing things as well. After a two-year stint as CMO of a content marketing shop he decided it was time to shake things up by starting Wild Gravity in 2017, with a mission to disrupt the ad industry.

“My intent was to produce world-class advertising creative with a fraction of the timeline, budget, and staff of a traditional agency,” says Jon. “I started pitching the idea to everyone I knew, and we landed Microsoft and Amazon as clients right away.” They have since worked with dozens of billion-dollar brands including Nintendo, LEGO, Coca-Cola, NFL, NBA, Valve, McLaren, Heineken, and Dungeons & Dragons. “What sets us apart is that we have Creative, Production, Post, and Visual Effects all under one roof at our studio in Seattle. We’re a multimillion-dollar company, but have less than 10 people,” he says proudly. You can learn more at wildgravity.net.

In addition to creating his dream company, Jon finally achieved his ultimate dream of becoming a writer. He published his first book, Hacking Advertising, in April of 2025. “It started out as kind of a manifesto to the industry that there is a better way to do all this—that brands don’t need to pay ad agencies insane amounts of money and deal with all the headaches and slow timelines usually associated with commercial advertising creation,” says Jon. While the book was originally intended for brand marketers, CMO’s, advertisers, and anyone in the ad industry, people outside the industry are loving it as well. If you’re interested, you can find it on Amazon or hackingads.com.

Jon is proud of the success of both his company and his new book, yet family is the most important thing in his life. “My wife, Ellen, is amazing and we’ve been married for almost 22 years. We have a 20-year-old son, Max, and an 18-year-old daughter, Sadie,” he shares. “We’re very close and I love them all deeply.” When asked if his wife and kids are creative as well, the answer is a resounding ‘yes.’ Max loves music and is a drummer, while Sadie has been a competitive dancer throughout high school. As for his wife, Jon says fondly, “Ellen is one of the most creative people I know. She paints as a hobby and is constantly doing creative things for herself and other people. I really admire that whatever she’s doing, she always makes it creative and fun.”

As for what inspires him, Jon says, “I love art but I’m passionate about design because art is made for the artist, while design is made for the people that interact with creative,” he explains. “I also admire people who use their creativity to make money—people who make something out of nothing.” He gives an example of the band; They Might Be Giants. “When their hits stopped coming and they had all become parents, they started creating children’s music and ended up making more money than they had off their hits,” he says.

As we concluded our interview, I asked, “What is the most important life lesson you’ve learned along the way?” Jon said, “The meaning of life is life. We must experience as much as we can, meet as many people as we can, and have as much fun as we can.” In fact, Jon hopes when people think of him, they’ll think, “He made life more fun.” It’s a suggestion he has for us all.

“Try and make life better for other people—we’re all in this together.”

I’ve been in the marketing/advertising industry for three decades. I’ve worked both agency and client-side, working with and for some of the largest brands in the world: Amazon, Microsoft, LEGO, Nintendo, NFL, NBA, Valve, Fanatics, and many others. I’ve executed campaigns totaling over a billion dollars in collective media spend.

This is a conversation space exclusively for subscribers—kind of like a group chat or live hangout. I’ll post questions and updates that come my way, and you can jump into the discussion.

Most importantly, I want to help you get better at marketing and advertising. So really…Ask Me Anything!

Join chat

How to get started

1. Get the Substack app by clicking this link or the button below. New chat threads won’t be sent sent via email, so turn on push notifications so you don’t miss conversation as it happens. You can also access chat on the web.

Get app

2. Open the app and tap the Chat icon. It looks like two bubbles in the bottom bar, and you’ll see a row for my chat inside.

3. That’s it! Jump into my thread to say hi, and if you have any issues, check out Substack’s FAQ.

Your agency just lost another account.

They’ll tell you it was about “fit” or “timing” or “strategic direction.”

Here’s what they won’t tell you: 82% of major brands now operate in-house agencies. That number was 42% in 2008.

55% are actively planning to switch their primary agency within six months.

This isn’t clients being difficult. This is a full-scale rejection of the agency model.

Why?

Because 53% of brands cite “dissatisfaction with value” as their number one complaint. Up from 39% last year.

Translation: We’re paying you a fortune and we don’t know what we’re getting for it.

I’ve been on both sides of this. I’ve been the agency guy presenting to clients. And I’ve been the CMO writing the checks.

As the client, you know the dirty secret. The agency doesn’t make the work.

They brief strategy. They concept. They present. And then they hire someone else to actually make the thing.

The production company shoots it. The post house edits it. The VFX shop handles graphics. The sound design studio does audio.

The agency coordinates all of this. For a massive fee.

Here’s the headwind agencies are facing:

• Traditional agency model: Growing at 1.3% annually

• Creative production services: Growing at 6.78% annually

That’s not a gap. That’s a chasm.

Meanwhile, brands that moved production in-house are reporting:

• 30-70% cost reductions

• 50% faster timelines

• Better creative (because production is involved from the start)

• Full control over the process

Bayer saved $10-11 million in their first six weeks of going direct. Sprint cut their time-to-market from weeks to one day (while doubling click-through rates!).

These aren’t small wins. These are game-changers.

In response, the agencies are scrambling. They’re adding production capabilities. They’re talking about “integrated offerings.” They’re promising to move faster.

But here’s the problem: You can’t bolt production onto an agency structure and expect efficiency. You’re just stacking new infrastructure on top of already bloated infrastructure.

The bureaucracy remains. The layers of account management remain. The incentive to move slowly remains.

Real transformation requires rethinking the entire model from scratch.

That’s what we did at Wild Gravity. Creative, production, post, VFX, sound – all under one roof. Small teams of experts who can scale fast. No account managers playing telephone. No approval layers.

Just people who make stuff.

Our first clients were trillion-dollar brands – Amazon and Microsoft. They’re still with us nine years later. They were tired of the traditional model. Tired of paying for strategy they didn’t need. Tired of waiting months for work they needed in weeks. Tired of not being able to prove ROI to their CFO.

Only 27% of CMOs exceed their C-suite’s expectations. Why? Because they can’t demonstrate clear value from their marketing spend.

When you’re paying millions for an agency retainer, and you can’t point to exactly what that money produced, you’ve got a problem. Creative Production solves this. You know exactly what you’re paying for. You control the process. You own the data. You can respond in real time.

Of course, it’s not magic and requires a serious restructuring of your go-to-market infrastructure. You need the right talent. You need to streamline processes. You need to be willing to make the change.

But 82% of major brands figured it out. They made the math work.

Your agency is probably pitching you on why you need them now more than ever.

Ask them one question: “If 82% of major brands are building in-house capabilities, and creative production services are growing at double your rate, what makes your model the future?”

See what they say.

Jon Sneider helps brands break free from the agency model. His book “Hacking Advertising” became an instant Amazon bestseller by telling CMOs what agencies won’t.

This morning I am mourning the loss of the Patriots in last night’s game but taking solace in the fact that the team had a fantastic season, vastly outperforming expectations (except for last night). Clearly the Seahawks were the better team, so congrats to all of their fans.

But enough about the game, let’s get into the ads. Similarly to the game, not a lot of touchdowns.

As always, I judge ads based on the 5 Magic Metrics:

1. Breakthrough - Will people remember it?

2. Brand/Product Recall - Will people remember what it was for?

3. Message Recall - Will people remember the benefit?

4. Likeability - Will people like it?

5. Purchase Intent - Will people want to buy the product as a result of the ad?

Typically Superbowl ads way over-index on Breakthrough and Likeability. Brand Recall can vary a bit and where a lot of brands fall down is Message Recall and Purchase Intent.

I took extemporaneous notes during the game so that I’d remember my real feelings watching the ads.

Here are my thoughts on the most notable spots, in no particular order.

I thought the big winner last night was the Anthropic/Claude spots. I think they did a great job of dehumanizing their competitor, ChatGPT, and highlighting a key differentiated benefit - ads a are coming to ChatGPT and there will be no in-product ads on Claude. For AI users this will drive a lot of consideration.

On the other hand, the ChatGPT, Build Things, ad was pretty good but they showed a lot of smart people building complex things. So the message takeaway became: building things is hard and complex, which I’m sure, is not the message they wanted to land.

Squarespace/Emma Stone could’ve been great but…she didn’t get her URL. ‘Get it before it’s gone’ could be a message for any URL registrar. I thought it was going to be a, ‘we will negotiate the purchase of your ideal URL’ message, but it wasn’t.

Similarly, the Alexa, Fear of AI spot had star power, high production value, but they never rounded the corner to a message of, ‘our AI is not scary.’ So it’s a fail fo rme. Not buying.

Adrian Brody, Turbo Tax. Same thing. Over-produced, star power. Not landing, no drama with TurboTax.

The Pepsi, highjacking the Coke polar bears, taste-test thing, wasn’t nearly the zinger they thought it would be.

Intacart, Ben Stiller and the Gen Z backflip guy, should’ve been funnier. I guess the message was, ‘we’ll buy fresh produce’ for you but that really didn’t land.

Good Will Dunkin’, also should’ve been funnier and never landed the plane. State Farm, Halfway There was halfway there. Liquid Death, Exploding Head, same thing. Could’ve been great. Coinbase, Backstreet Boys was a total fail. Svedka, AI Robots, fail. And I don’t remember the YouTube TV spot, but I wrote, “meh,” so I’m thinking it was, meh.

Redfin got twisted in their underpants. It tried to tug on your heartstrings and show you that neighbors are important. Girl loses puppy, neighbor finds puppy. Neighbors help each other after a storm. What this says about Redfin, I have no idea, and I’d be surprised if you even remember this ad or that it was for Redfin.

...and I know a lot of people loved the Budweiser, Freebird spot, but for me it was pandering, not as good as past spots, no message other than, Go America, and I think a lot of people are not really in a, Go America, state of mind.

Now some ads that I thought were really good.

The Ring, find your pets, spot. Really good and made you want to be on the Ring network.

The Google Gemini spot was good.

I really liked the Kurt Russel, Michelob Ultra spot, and it landed the message that Ultra is the beer for athletic people.

I liked the Mandalorian spot. It was cute.

Levis’s, Butts In Levis, was really, really good. Landed that it was an iconic brand and that your butt will look good in Levis. I bet a lot of people, consciously or subconsciously thought about getting another pair of Levis.

Liquid IV, “Take a look at your pee” to the tune of “Take a Look at Me Now” was a big win. Funny, and ‘you know you’re dehydrated when your pee is really yellow,’ is a perfect message for them. Solid.

Bosch, Guy Fieri, solid spot. The Bosch/Boss thing lands.

The NFL I am a champion, spot was really good, though selling the NFL as a product is pretty easy during the Superbowl.

The Tight Ends, Screen for Prostate Cancer, spot was just great and definitely landed the message.

Lastly, the one thing I’ll probably buy after watching the ad, was Spruce, petsafe weedkiller. Not sure if it broke through for everybody but the message really landed with me, and likely with a lot of pet owners, and again it’s probably the one product I will buy as a result of their ad last night.

Those are my thoughts. What do you agree with, disagree with, and what did I miss?

Also, LMK in the comments if you’d like a deep-dive on the 5 Magic Metrics, and I’ll send you a comprehensive article on it so you can make sure your ads always land.

Why I’ve Been Quiet

I’ve had a hard time getting into the swing of things this year. It actually started at the end of last year, and it’s largely related to the state of this country and the world.

There are so many negative things happening, mostly related to the current presidential administration. We’re clearly on the descent into a fascist, authoritarian regime, and the rational part of my brain does not see any way out of this. What’s happening in the United States so closely mirrors what happened in 1930s Germany it’s uncanny. It mirrors how every democracy has descended into fascism, but the particular similarities to events in pre-WWII Germany are striking.

I once read that history doesn’t repeat itself, but it rhymes. This seems to be the case here. And if history has a lesson, it’s that democracies don’t survive authoritarian regimes once they’ve been elected into office. I recently read that there are zero instances where a democracy survived under these conditions.

Now America could still be the outlier, but it’s not looking good so far. I think the last chance to save democracy will be the midterm elections this year. It’s clear that this administration plans to rig the midterms through every means possible, with the most obvious being that they’ll post ICE agents at every minority polling station under the guise of preventing “illegal immigrants” from voting. At the same time, they’re sending clear signals that they will limit or eliminate mail-in voting wherever possible. And that’s just two tactics out of many they’ll use to tilt the table in their favor.

If somehow Democrats are able to overcome these obstacles and retake the House and/or the Senate, there is a chance we can survive this autocratic takeover. But if the administration is successful in rigging this next election cycle, I believe there is zero hope that the next presidential election will be anything less than a sham.

Once installed, history tells us that the regime will last between 15-30 years.

At the same time, as a Jewish person, it’s hard not to be overwhelmed by the worldwide surge in antisemitism, punctuated by the Bondi Beach massacre on the first night of Hanukkah. Fifteen killed, forty injured, and the news barely made a ripple in this country.

Clearly anti-Jewish sentiment has been driven quite a bit by the conflict in Gaza. I’m not going to get into the details here other than to say I don’t agree with how Netanyahu has prosecuted this campaign, but that a lot of the anti-Israel rhetoric being used is straight-up propaganda, and most who are repeating it are greatly misinformed.

I’m not going to debate any of the above geopolitical issues. I’m just bringing these things up in reference to how they’ve affected me personally.

And it’s not good.

It’s been a constant fight for me to avoid deep depression. I think of myself as a generally happy, optimistic person, full of energy and vigor. But particularly at the end of last year and the beginning of this one, I’ve felt anything but.

How does this relate to business?

I’ve got a pretty successful creative production company, Wild Gravity, that’s close to celebrating its ninth anniversary of serving some of the biggest brands in the world. I launched a book last year, Hacking Advertising, that’s enjoyed an extremely positive reception with incredible endorsements from some of the heaviest hitters in the ad industry, forty 5-star reviews, and pretty decent sales for a debut business book.

Strategically, I committed to content creation two years ago, and I’ve been mostly successful in putting out one article and two to five videos every week.

It’s been really hard for me to do that lately.

Mostly because when promoting a business or a book, you want to show up “happy.” You want to be positive. People are attracted to positivity and success, and showing up moaning about how world affairs are leaving you down in the dumps is no way to promote yourself.

Also, I don’t want to be The Politics Guy here. Ironically, my most viral post ever was my Dark MAGA post, which reached 3 million people last year. I struggled to turn the corner from that so I could be known as The Creative Production Guy, not The Dark MAGA Guy, which was especially hard when I knew it would be pretty easy for me to create more viral political content.

With that as the backdrop, I know that the very best way for me to survive this era is to drive success of my businesses.

So what do I do?

I’m committing to showing up genuine.

I don’t have the capacity for false fronts. Some people are honest to a fault. For me, if I don’t temper it, I can be honest to my detriment. That I cannot afford to do. But I can still be real. I can be honest about both successes and challenges.

Mostly I don’t think people will be able to tell the difference, but I’m not going to force myself to show up happy when I’m not. And I won’t let myself show up negatively. I still won’t dwell on politics, but I’m not going to avoid it on this forum when politics affects business.

Ironically (or not), this has been the easiest article for me to write in months. I wanted to get it out there because I know a lot of people are feeling similarly, and it’s hard to talk about. So if this helps even one person feel like they’re not alone, I’ve done my job.

Now I know I only have one option if I want to maintain my creative energy: Show Up Genuine.

Now it wouldn’t be a proper Substack article without a call to action, so:

If you want world-class creative without the time, hassle, or cost of an agency, email me at jon@wildgravity.net.

If you want to learn how to make world-class creative without the time, hassle, or cost of an agency, grab my book at hackingads.com.

I guarantee genuine experiences for both. ;-)

I love January. I love January like I love Mondays.

I think it’s because I’m an entrepreneur and January is back to business. While the corporate world is resting over the holidays, entrepreneurs with a service business are stressing. Business slows to a crawl, clients are unreachable, and new jobs are rare.

In January, it all flips. Everyone is back in the office and there’s work to be done! New budgets unlock and projects that were delayed get resurrected.

The Energy Is Different

There’s something electric about the first two weeks of January. Everyone has fresh goals, new mandates, and something to prove. The slate is clean.

December was about wrapping up. January is about launching forward.

Your clients are back. Their bosses are back. The decision-makers who’ve been “thinking about it” are suddenly ready to move. Projects that stalled in Q4 are now priority one. Budgets that were frozen are thawed.

This is the time.

While others are easing back in, sipping coffee and catching up on emails, entrepreneurs are sprinting. We’ve been ready. We’ve been planning. We’ve been waiting for everyone else to show up.

And now everyone’s back and raring to go.

Set the Tone

January sets the tone for the entire year. The momentum you create in these first few weeks? It compounds.

In January there’s no “let’s circle back in a few weeks.” No “we’re still ramping up.” It’s way more, “yes, it’s time, let’s do this.”

January conversations carry urgency. People are ready to kick off the year strong set themselves up for a big year. It’s Q1, baby! December’s over and it’s now time to get sh!t done.

So many of the best clients and projects come from January energy. People are motivated. They’re decisive. They’re ready to move fast.

And if you’re set up to match that energy? Magic happens.

When everyone is aligned and focused, you can accomplish in weeks what takes others months. That’s always true, but it’s especially true in January when everyone is firing on all cylinders.

Ready to Rock?

If you’re reading this and feeling that same January energy, if you’ve got a project that needs to be awesome, that needs to move fast, that needs a team that matches your urgency, hit me up.

Wild Gravity is fully staffed, fully caffeinated, and ready to rock.

DM me. Let’s build something and crush 2026.

And if you want to build something like I built, check out my bestselling book, “Hacking Advertising” Learn More Here

We just kicked off Job # WG357. Almost nine years ago we started on WG001.

A lot of things have changed during that time but there’s one thing that’s stayed consistent: technology products are incredibly complex.

They tend to be so complex that the people working on them often have trouble conveying the overarching benefit. They have confusing value props because they do so many things.

The product is brilliant. The engineers spent years building something that actually works. The features solve real problems. But the marketing sounds like an engineering spec sheet.

From mid-size SAAS companies all the way up to giants like Microsoft and Amazon it’s almost always the same problem.

Twenty-five years in this industry. And I’ll tell you the same truth I learned at every stop:

Technology is complex. Stories are simple. Simple stories sell.

At Wild Gravity, we help tech companies transform their “what we made” spec sheets into simple “what’s in it for me” stories.

The Secret: Find the Human Truth Behind the Tech

Every piece of technology solves a human problem. That’s it.

Your job isn’t to explain the technology. It’s to tell the story of the problem being solved.

Nobody cares about your GPU architecture. They care that their kid’s soccer game video doesn’t buffer.

Nobody cares about your cloud infrastructure. They care that their team can work from anywhere.

The tech is the how. The story is the why.

4 Steps to Simplify Your Value Prop

Step 1: Ask “So What?” Five Times

Start with your feature. Ask “so what?” Keep asking until you hit the human benefit.

“Our platform uses AI-powered analytics.”

So what?

“It predicts customer behavior.”

So what?

“You know what they’ll buy before they do.”

So what?

“You stop wasting money on people who won’t convert.”

That’s your headline.

Step 2: The Dinner Party Test

If you can’t explain your product to someone at a dinner party in one sentence, your value prop is too complex.

“We help sales teams close deals faster by showing them exactly which prospects are ready to buy.”

Not: “Our AI-driven predictive analytics engine leverages machine learning algorithms to...”

I mean, come on.

Step 3: Show, Don’t Tell

Stop describing features. Show someone’s day getting better because of your product.

At Microsoft, we didn’t talk about Windows technical specs. We showed a modern worker managing family and career seamlessly. The tech was just there. Invisible. Making life easier.

That’s the ad.

Step 4: Test in Market, Not Conference Rooms

Your engineering team loves the technical details. Real customers don’t.

Put simple stories into market fast. Let actual humans tell you what works.

You know what the best focus group is? The market.

The Promise

Turn your complex tech into simple stories that break through. Skip the agency and find a savvy Creative Production shop to create simple, compelling stories for you.

In a few weeks, for less than it costs your agency to produce a single-ad, you can have a slew of video assets that communicate your products’ benefits more simply than your lead engineer ever could.

One project. That’s all it takes to see the difference.

Three Ways This Transforms Your Marketing

Break Through the Noise

Tech companies all sound the same. “AI-powered.” “Cloud-based.” “Cutting-edge.”

Simple human stories cut through. Apple used to know this better than anyone.

Take your homepage hero message right now. Can your grandma understand it? If not, rewrite it.

Speed to Market

When Microsoft needed to respond to Apple’s iPad launch, we couldn’t wait months for agency processes.

We went straight-to-production, created and tested stories in weeks.

List your Q1 product launches. Now what if you could have 4X the stories in a quarter of the time your agency is asking for. That’s what’s possible.

Better Conversion

Simple stories convert. Complex value props confuse.

Confusion kills conversions.

Test your current messaging against one simple human story. Watch what happens.

I’m doing a workshop the first week of December on turning complex tech value props into simple stories that sell—while slashing production costs and maximizing ROAS.

You want to check it out? Comment ROAS below.

Jon Sneider Founder, Wild Gravity | Author, “Hacking Advertising”

There’s a revolution happening in advertising production, and the smartest brands are already winning because of it. While traditional agencies scramble to justify their value, a new model is delivering superior creative at a fraction of the cost—and it’s called Creative Production.

Here’s what makes it different: instead of a Big Ad Agency handling strategy and concepting, then farming out to separate vendors for production, post-production, VFX, sound and color, Creative Production brings everything under one roof. Creative direction, production, post, VFX, sound, and color all working together from day one.

The results? Massive cost savings, faster timelines, and better creative output. No wonder 82% of major brands now operate in-house creative capabilities—nearly double the 42% who did just 15 years ago.

The Numbers Don’t Lie

This isn’t a trend. It’s a fundamental restructuring of how advertising gets made.

According to the World Federation of Advertisers, 91% of brands with integrated creative production achieved significant cost efficiencies. Nearly half—48%—reported savings exceeding 20%. That’s not incremental improvement. That’s millions of dollars flowing back into media spend and business results instead of agency overhead.

The speed advantage is equally dramatic. Brands that unified their creative and production capabilities report cutting timelines from months to weeks, or weeks to days. When you eliminate the handoffs between agency, production company, and post house, you eliminate the delays, miscommunications, and revision cycles that kill momentum.

Traditional agencies are growing at barely 1% annually. Meanwhile, the Creative Production market is expanding at 6.78%—nearly seven times faster. The market is speaking.

Why the Traditional Model Is Broken

The problem with the agency-led model is structural. Agencies don’t actually make ads. They conceive them, then hire production companies, post houses, and VFX shops to create the spots. Each handoff adds time, cost, and the telephone-game effect where the original vision gets diluted.

When your production team sits in the concepting meeting, they can tell you what’s achievable, what will look incredible on screen, and how to maximize every dollar. When they’re brought in after the fact, they’re just trying to execute someone else’s vision—often one that’s prohibitively expensive or technically problematic.

The Wild Gravity Example

Wild Gravity, our Seattle-based creative production company, proves this model works at the highest level. With clients including Microsoft, Amazon, LEGO, Coca-Cola, NFL, and NBA,we’ve demonstrated that small, efficient teams can serve the world’s biggest brands.

Our approach delivers up to 4X cost reduction compared to traditional agency-led production. Not by cutting corners—by eliminating waste. We’re not cheap but we represent a massive savings over traditional agencies. We’re efficient. Every dollar goes on screen where it matters, not into layers of account management and agency overhead.

We are not alone. Hybrid creative production shops are emerging everywhere, each with their own take on the integrated model. The common thread: creative and production unified, bureaucracy eliminated, quality maintained or improved.

What This Means for Your Marketing ROI

For CMOs defending budget decisions to CFOs, this model is a game-changer. When you can deliver the same quality creative for 30-50% less cost while moving faster, your ROI calculations transform overnight.

The brands moving early aren’t just saving money. They’re reallocating those savings into more creative variations, more market tests, more media spend. They’re outpacing competitors who are still locked into the old model.

The Creative Production revolution isn’t coming. It’s here. The only question is whether you’re leading it or getting left behind.

What’s your experience with traditional agencies vs. integrated production models? Have you made the shift or are you considering it? Let’s discuss in the comments.

People pitch me business ideas all the time.

My first question is always the same: “Who’s your first customer?”

You’d be amazed how many can’t answer.

They’ve got five-year plans. Exit strategies. Beautiful pitch decks. But no customers. That’s not a business. That’s an idea that needs work.

Here’s how we did it different.

The Facebook Post That Started It All

April 2017. I posted on Facebook describing a vision for a new kind of creative production company. I asked if anyone wanted to help build it.

No talk of pay. No equity discussions. Just the vision.

Ten people responded. Highly talented people with significant industry experience. They just wanted to help build something different.

That told me everything. If your vision is clear enough that people will work on it for free, you might have something.

We started meeting biweekly. Conference calls with people distributed around the country. My co-founder Jonathan Harris and I would meet in person at a co-working space in Seattle, whiteboard our ideas, and conference in the rest of the group.

Over a few months, people started falling away. It was like that scene in Forrest Gump when he’s running, except in reverse. Started with ten people running next to me. Then eight. Then six.

One person was building their own competing company the whole time, plagiarizing our model. Another wanted 50% equity but didn’t want to do business development. Be careful with “FrieNDAs.” They’re not as strong as you think.

By the time we launched, it was down to three of us. Jonathan and I found we were always on the same page. I kept saying, “You’re in my head, dude!” That alignment matters more than you think.

The Anti-Startup Playbook

Here’s what we didn’t do:

We didn’t raise money. We didn’t lease office space. We didn’t hire employees. We didn’t build anything until we had a customer.

Zero capital. Zero employees. Zero infrastructure.

Every startup article tells you to raise funding, build your team, create your product, then find customers. We did the opposite.

Why? Because we’re entirely bootstrapped. We had to be profitable from day one. That constraint forced better decisions.

Jonathan and I tell people all the time, “It must be so satisfying to own your own business.” We always say, “It alternates between incredibly satisfying and existentially terrifying.”

Don’t underestimate the existentially terrifying part.

The One Question That Actually Matters

Before we launched, I knew I could get a client. Not a target market. Not an ideal customer profile. An actual client.

I had twenty years of experience. I’d been at Digitas, Fidelity, L.L.Bean, Microsoft, Redfin. I’d run hundreds of millions in advertising budgets. I’d worked both agency-side and client-side. I knew what was broken. I knew how to fix it.

More importantly, I had a network. When I reached out for coffee meetings, people took them. When I asked for introductions, I got them. When we pitched in big conference rooms at big corporations, they listened.

The feedback was always, “What you’re saying makes a ton of sense.”

But feedback doesn’t pay bills. We needed actual work.

I had a former colleague who was now a marketing director at Amazon. We met for happy hour near Amazon headquarters in South Lake Union. She told me they needed in-product videos for Fire TV. Five videos teaching people how to use the device.

We pitched five different creative concepts. Living-room host. Stop-motion animation with Amazon boxes. Anchorman-type presenter. Time-lapse artist. Full VFX animation.

We killed the presentation. Genuinely confident. Enthusiastic. We got the unofficial nod at the end of the pitch.

Our first real client was going to be Amazon.

We thought the project would come in around $50K to $100K. Not bad for a first job.

Then Microsoft Called

Right after the Amazon pitch, I got a call from another former colleague. She was running video for Windows at Microsoft. They had a project that was much bigger.

Six-figure project. They needed it fast. Traditional agencies couldn’t move at the speed they needed.

We pitched it. We won it.

Suddenly we had Amazon and Microsoft as our first two clients. We went from zero to building a company that needed to deliver for two trillion-dollar corporations.

We were three months in.

What Actually Made This Work

The secret isn’t complicated. It took me twenty years to be an overnight success.

Here’s what positioned us to pull this off:

Deep industry experience. I got my MBA in entrepreneurship in 2000. We started Wild Gravity in 2017. Seventeen years is a long time for it not to be the right time yet. There was a period when I thought my time to start something had passed.

What changed? I became confident I could get a client. When I landed Microsoft as a client for a previous startup, I thought, “I bet I could do that again for me.”

Both agency and client-side experience. I knew what agencies did wrong because I’d been on the other side approving their invoices. I knew about 70% of what I paid for was unnecessary. That perspective is gold.

A network built on delivering. For two decades, I was the guy who always delivered. Fun to work with. Straight shooter. People were happy to take meetings because they knew I wasn’t going to waste their time.

A vision clear enough to attract talent. Ten people volunteered to help build this for free. That doesn’t happen unless the vision is compelling.

A partner with complementary skills. Jonathan had the creative chops. I had the business chops. We both had the network. We both understood the same problems.

The Model That Makes It Possible

Traditional agencies have it backwards. They need layers of junior staff to be profitable. Account coordinators. Junior creatives. Assistant planners. That’s their business model.

We went the opposite direction. Everyone is senior. No junior employees. No internship program. No training program.

Why? Because small teams of experts move faster than large teams with leverage. Five GSD (Get Shit Done) people beat fifteen generalists every time.

That’s the math that makes bootstrapping work. You don’t need massive overhead to scale revenue.

We unified creative and production under one roof. Traditional agencies hand off to production companies, who hand off to post houses, who hand off to VFX shops. Four vendors. Four markups. Tons of time wasted.

We do it all. Creative concepts in the morning. Storyboards by afternoon. In production by next week.

Microsoft needed to respond to Apple attack ads in two weeks. Their traditional agency said, “We’ll have the statement of work to you in two weeks.”

That’s the problem we solve.

What You’re Getting Wrong

If you want to start an agency, here’s what most people screw up:

You’re building the business plan before you have the customer. Stop. Find your first client first. Revenue is your friend. Everything else flows from there.

You’re trying to launch too early. I waited seventeen years after my MBA. That’s not too long. That’s how long it took to build the experience and network I needed. Get a job in the industry. Client-side and agency-side. Learn what’s broken.

You’re focused on funding instead of profit. We’ve been profitable since day one. Being bootstrapped forced discipline. Every dollar had to count. That’s a feature, not a bug.

You’re planning for scale before you have proof. We didn’t get office space until we had clients. We didn’t hire employees until we had work for them. Grow as you go.

You think you need a perfect team. You need one or two aligned partners. That’s it. Everyone else can be freelance until you prove the model.

The Moment You’re Ready

How do you know when it’s time to start your own thing?

When you can answer this question: “Who will give me money for the thing I want to build?”

Not who might. Not your target market. Not your ideal customer.

Who. Specifically. Will write you a check.

If you can’t answer that question, you’re not ready. Your first priority is finding that person or company. If you can’t find that first customer, you don’t have a business.

I knew I could land Microsoft and Amazon. That’s when I knew it was time.

We launched in 2017. We’re in our eighth year now. Microsoft and Amazon are still our core clients. We’ve added T-Mobile, LEGO, Coca-Cola, the Seahawks, the NBA, Nintendo, Brooks Running, Pearl Jam, Alaska Airlines, and others.

We’re planning to expand to four to six Wild Gravity locations across the US. Same model. Same approach. Acquire underperforming production studios and transform them.

But here’s the thing. I’ll give you our entire model. I’ll tell you exactly how we do it. It doesn’t matter.

You can’t copy experience.

The reason we’re confident nobody is going to eat our lunch is simple. Everyone on our team has deep, significant industry experience. We’ve all been doing this for decades. That’s not something you can fake or fast-track.

Start Running

If you want to build an agency, here’s what to do:

Get a job in advertising. Work client-side. Work agency-side. Learn what’s broken. Build your network. Deliver over and over again until people trust you.

Develop a vision so clear you could post it on Facebook and ten people would volunteer to help build it.

Find your first customer before you quit your job.

Then launch.

Don’t waste time on your five-year plan. Get a customer. Get another customer. Revenue is your friend.

Everything else is just noise before defeat.

Jon Sneider is the founder of Wild Gravity and author of “Hacking Advertising: How We Learned to Make Ads Without the Agency (And You Can Too).” After 25+ years in advertising at companies like Microsoft, Redfin, and L.L.Bean, he started Wild Gravity with no capital, no employees, and no office. Learn more at hackingadvertising.com/book

Your agency just lost another account.

They’ll tell you it was about “fit” or “timing” or “strategic direction.”

Here’s what they won’t tell you: 82% of major brands now operate in-house agencies. That number was 42% in 2008.

55% are actively planning to switch their primary agency within six months.

This isn’t clients being difficult. This is a full-scale rejection of the agency model.

Why?

Because 53% of brands cite “dissatisfaction with value” as their number one complaint. Up from 39% just last year.

Translation: We’re paying you a fortune and we don’t know what we’re getting for it.

I’ve been on both sides of this. I’ve been the agency guy presenting to clients. And I’ve been the CMO writing the checks.

As the client, you know the dirty secret. The agency doesn’t make the work.

They brief strategy. They concept. They present. And then they hire someone else to actually make the thing.

The production company shoots it. The post house edits it. The VFX shop handles graphics. The sound design studio does audio.

The agency coordinates all of this. For a massive fee.

Here’s the headwind agencies are facing:

• Traditional agency model: Growing at 1.3% annually

• Creative production services: Growing at 6.78% annually

That’s not a gap. That’s a chasm.

WPP, the world’s largest agency holding company, declined 3.3% in 2024. IPG fell 3.6%. These aren’t temporary blips. This is structural collapse.

Meanwhile, brands that moved production in-house are reporting:

• 30-70% cost reductions

• 50% faster timelines

• Better creative (because production is involved from the start)

• Full control over the process

Bayer saved $10-11 million in their first six weeks of going direct. Sprint cut their time-to-market from weeks to one day while doubling click-through rates.

These aren’t small wins. These are game-changers.

The agencies are scrambling. They’re adding production capabilities. They’re talking about “integrated offerings.” They’re promising to move faster.

But here’s the problem: You can’t bolt production onto an agency structure and expect efficiency. You’re just stacking new infrastructure on top of already bloated infrastructure.

The bureaucracy remains. The layers of account management remain. The incentive to move slowly remains.

Real transformation requires rethinking the entire model from scratch.

That’s what we did at Wild Gravity. Creative, production, post, VFX, sound - all under one roof. Small teams of experts who can scale fast. No account managers playing telephone. No approval layers.

Just people who make stuff.

Our first clients were trillion-dollar corporations - Amazon and Microsoft. They came to us because they were tired of the traditional model. Tired of paying for strategy they didn’t need. Tired of waiting months for work they needed in weeks. Tired of not being able to prove ROI to their CFO.

Only 27% of CMOs exceed their C-suite’s expectations. Why? Because they can’t demonstrate clear value from their marketing spend.

When you’re paying millions for an agency retainer, and you can’t point to exactly what that money produced, you’ve got a problem.

Creative Production solves this. You know exactly what you’re paying for. You control the process. You own the data. You can respond in real time.

Of course, it’s not magic and requires a serious restructuring of your go-to-market infrastructure. You need the right talent. You need to streamline processes. You need to be willing to make the change.

But 82% of major brands figured it out. They made the math work.

Your agency is probably pitching you on why you need them now more than ever. AI, complexity, integration, whatever the buzzword of the quarter is.

Ask them one question: “If 82% of major brands are building in-house capabilities, and creative production services are growing at double your rate, what makes your model the future?”

See what they say.

Jon Sneider helps brands break free from the agency model. His book “Hacking Advertising” became an Amazon bestseller by telling CMOs what agencies won’t.

Order Hacking Advertising here: hackingadvertising.com/order

It was a month before launch. The Windows commercial team came to us and said, ‘we need a launch video but we’ve only got 4 weeks.

‘We want you, Wild Gravity, to take the Windows consumer team’s launch video and replace the screens on the devices with screens that show business scenarios.’

Not our favorite brief, but right in our wheelhouse. We’re expert at building screens and animations for devices - phones, tablets, computers.

A week later they told us, ‘we’re dead in the water. The consumer team’s video got killed in an exec review.’

Our proposal, ‘why don’t we just shoot a new video, concepted from the groundup to target business decision makers. We know all the scenarios you want to show. We can shoot it here.’

‘There’s no time for that,’ they said. ‘The Agency had three months to do this and failed.’

We cast it in two days and were shooting at our studio by end of that week.

Our visual effect artists hand-built every screen and animation, working directly with Windows engineering and UX teams. Animated, comped, color corrected, and finished everything in-house.

And delivered with time to spare.

The executives loved it. The video was featured in the Chief Product Officer’s Keynote and became the hero asset in the center-well on Windows .com for both Commercial and Consumer.

We delivered at 4X the speed and ¼ the cost of their agency that failed to deliver.

How?

We skipped all the agency B.S. Rather than having an agency, that manages a production shop, post house, and visual effects studio, we have creative, production, post, and VFX all right here under the same roof in our gorgeous Seattle studio.

Look, I’m not anti-agency. I worked at and with tons of ad agencies. Led accounts for GM, AT&T, Microsoft, Turner from the agency-side, and I led advertising for L.L.Bean, Windows, and Redfin on the client-side.

I’ve been on both sides. I know what agencies are good at. Strategy, big thinking, cultural curation. And I know what they suck at. Speed and agility.

McKinsey found that only 3% of brands characterized their agency’s transition to agile as “smooth.” Over 80% reported obstacles.

The problem is structural. Big agencies have huge hierarchical teams and are mired in bureaucratic processes.

Agencies bill by the hour. Their business model rewards moving slowly. An R/GA exec admitted it: “If you bill by the hour, you’re incentivized to drag things out.”

63% of CMOs say they can’t make decisions fast enough. They’re missing market opportunities because their execution velocity is garbage.

The solution isn’t to pressure your agency to move faster. They can’t. Not really. Not without breaking their business model.

The solution is to work with people who have creative, production, post, and VFX under one roof. People who can pivot in real time because they’re not coordinating four different vendors.

At Wild Gravity, we built the company for speed. Small teams of seasoned pros. Everyone’s an expert. No layers of approval.

Traditional agencies take months. We deliver in weeks. Sometimes days.

The difference? We make stuff. That’s our job. The only job.

Your quarterly campaign cycle? It’s a relic. By the time you go through agency concepting, focus group testing, production, and post, your competitors have already moved on.

Speed isn’t just a nice-to-have anymore. It’s survival.

The brands winning right now are the ones who can create fast, test fast, learn fast, and iterate fast.

You can’t do that when every change request goes through three layers of account managers before it reaches the person who actually does the work.

So yeah. We delivered in three weeks when the traditional process failed to deliver in three months.

Not because we’re special. Because we removed the friction.

Maybe it’s time you did too.

Wild Gravity was built to deliver world-class creative at a fraction of the cost, footprint, and timeline of any traditional ad agency.

If you’re sick of the big agency run-around, high-costs, and long timelines, get in touch with me.

See more of our work here: wildgravity.net/work

The Amazon Fire TV team called with a brief.

Five videos. Five different scenarios. Show people how to use their Fire TV devices.

Budget: around $10K each. Timeline: tiiiiiight.

We brainstormed five creative platforms. Living room host with real people. Stop-motion with Amazon boxes. Anchorman style. Artist sketching. All VFX animation.

“Cool,” they said. “Which one do you recommend?”

“Well, we could test a couple scenarios across the different platforms and—”

“We want all five.”

“All five platforms? So like, pick two scenarios and—”

“No. All five scenarios. All five platforms.”

That’s 25 videos.

“Also, we need to localize for UK, Germany, France, and Japan.”

That’s 125 videos.

There were six of us at Wild Gravity at the time.

We scaled to sixty people in two days.

We had two film crews and an animation crew running in parallel. Production took two weeks. Post and VFX took another two. Color, sound, finishing, and localization took us to six weeks total.

We delivered 125 finished 15-second videos plus hundreds of static assets to five different markets in six weeks.

Could your agency do that?

No. They couldn’t.

Here’s why.

Traditional agencies aren’t built for speed and volume. They’re built for marquee campaigns. The big idea. The awards show reel.

They have great creative directors. Brilliant strategists. But when you need to produce 125 videos in six weeks, their model falls apart.

Because they have to:

1. Brief the production company

2. Get bids back

3. Present options to you

4. Lock the vendor

5. Coordinate schedules

6. Then repeat for post-production

7. And again for VFX

8. And again for localization

By the time they coordinate four different vendors, you’ve blown your timeline.

“If you bill by the hour, you’re incentivized to drag things out.”

-R/GA Exec

We made it work because everyone was under one roof. Creative + Production + Post + VFX + Sound/Color - all right here in our gorgeous Seattle studio.

Our creative team knew what production could deliver. Our production team understood the technical requirements. Our VFX artists were in the building working directly with the product team.

No telephone game. No waiting for the agency to relay your feedback to the production company. No post house telling you a change will take three days because they’re slammed with other clients.

Just one team, all expert, all moving fast.

This is what modern content production looks like. Setup’s survey found that 58% of brands now need high-volume video content.

But traditional agency pricing makes that impossible. Video can cost $50K- per project with an agency. You can’t produce dozens of assets at that rate.

The brands adapting are the ones that either:

• Built in-house studios (like Marriott, Red Bull, Allstate)

• Partner with creative production companies (like us)

• Use a hybrid model (Coca-Cola, Unilever)

The common thread? They all reduced or eliminated the traditional agency relationship.

Only 11% of major advertisers believe the current agency model fits future needs. Not “needs improvement.” They think it’s fundamentally broken.

Because when you need 125 videos, you can’t wait for quarterly campaign cycles. When you need to respond to a competitor’s attack, you can’t wait for focus group results. When you need to test five different approaches, you can’t pay agency rates for five separate productions.

You need a model built for speed and scale.

At Wild Gravity, every person is a seasoned pro. No junior staff learning on your dime. No layers of approval. When Amazon said “we need 125 videos,” we didn’t blink. We just said yes and figured it out.

That’s how we went from six people to a multi-million dollar business in year one. Microsoft and Amazon were our first clients. They came to us because they needed work done, and they needed it done fast.

The traditional agency model can’t scale like this. Their overhead won’t allow it. Their vendor coordination takes too long. Their business model doesn’t support it.

Meanwhile, the Creative Production market is growing at 6.78% annually. Traditional agencies? 0.9%.

The math isn’t complicated.

Brands need more content, faster, for less money. Agencies can’t deliver that. Creative Production companies can.

So when your next project brief lands, ask yourself: Do I need strategy slides and account management? Or do I need 125 videos in six weeks?

If it’s the latter, you know where to find us.

Jon Sneider’s Wild Gravity produced 125 videos for Amazon in six weeks. His book “Hacking Advertising” shows you how to build the same speed into your marketing.

For years, I was the guy writing the checks.

I was Director of Broadcast Advertising, Digital Video, Search, & Social Media for Windows, managing quarter-billion-dollar ad budgets. The most coveted agencies in the country working for us. Literally, the “Agency of the Decade” worked on our account.

And you know what I learned?

The whole thing is broken.

The Day I Realized We Were Getting Played

Picture this: Apple had just launched a Siri campaign that was verbally kicking us in the nuts on a weekly basis. My boss and I wanted response-videos. Fast.

I call up our expensive, amazing agency. “I need a video response to this in two weeks.”

Their reply? “Well, we can get a statement of work to you in two weeks.”

Let that sink in.

We didn’t need a statement of work. We needed an ad. But our huge agency just couldn’t pivot like that because of all their bureaucratic processes.

That’s when I started to see it everywhere.

The Three-Month Campaign Cycle That Delivered Two Ads

Here’s how the typical campaign flow worked at Windows:

We’d spend weeks strategizing with the agency on our campaign platform. Once locked, we’d concept around eight to ten spots. Then we’d make animatics from the storyboards and test them in focus groups.

We’d fly around the world with our janky animatics, listening to people - who for some reason had nowhere to be on a weekday and needed fifty bucks - tell us what was wrong with our ad concepts.

Not a single person in the industry will tell you animatics are a good proxy for finished ads. But that never stopped any corporation from testing them as if they were.

These are thirty-second scripts, mind you. The changes you can make aren’t big. Maybe change a few words, tweak the demographics of the actors, swap out a location or two.

Are these changes meaningful? Not at all. Do they make the creative better? One hundred percent no.

After all that, it’s finally time to shoot. A week and a half on set. Almost a hundred people. The full Hollywood experience.

If you’re in the industry you know the agency doesn’t actually make the ads. They hire a production company for that. A post house edits them. A VFX company makes them shine.

We’d start off with 6-8 ads in rotation and then start optimizing - killing the spots that don’t perform and putting media dollars behind the ones that do. By halfway through the campaign, we’d usually narrow down to just one or two spots that actually performed - and then we’d run those to death.

$4M-$6M, hundreds of people, and a quarter of the year, just to get to two ads that people will get sick of.

The Math That Changed Everything

Want to know what really opened my eyes?

We tried an experiment. We brought in a boutique shop. Told them we had three ad concepts that we, the clients, had thought of and wanted to make. They liked the concepts and agreed to produce the work.

No focus groups. No around-the-world testing tour. No statement of work negotiation.

We shot with Broken Lizard—yeah, the Super Troopers guys. Paul Soter directed. We collaborated on the whole shoot.

Those three spots cost less to produce than one spot with our giant agency.

They performed better than our television spots when we ran them side-by-side on digital platforms.

So we put them on air. They all performed better than the spots made with our huge agency.

That’s when I realized: We had just backed into a new model.

What’s Actually Happening With Your Agency Budget

The ad agency doesn’t actually make ad creative.

They concept. They present strategy (that’s often wrong because they don’t have all your data). They manage processes and vendors. But they don’t actually make the work.

Everything gets handed off. Agency to Production Company. Production Company to Post House. Post House to VFX shop. Each handoff adds time, cost, and potential for the concept to get watered down.

And here’s the thing nobody talks about: ad-agencies make most of their money on strategies, concepts, and management fees.

Strategy decks with thirty slides before you see creative? That’s not for you. It’s so they can bill for strategy hours.

Focus groups in twelve markets? That’s not for you, either. That’s so the agency can cover-their-asses if the campaign flops and drive a ton of billable hours doing so.

The best focus group is the market.

If you skip all the tedious agency strategy and pre-testing you can bring your costs-per-spot down so far that you can just run your ads in digital channels and elevate the top performers to broadcast.

You can make smaller, more frequent bets and drastically improve your ROAS (Return on Ad Spend).

The Agencies Hate This, But the Data Doesn’t Lie

After I left Microsoft, I started Wild Gravity. We solve the biggest problem in advertising production by integrating agency creative services, production, post-production, and VFX under one roof.

Then we use small teams of seasoned pros that know how to make great work, fast.

We don’t have layers of account management, creatives, and strategy. We give you everything you need to make broadcast-quality creative, and nothing you don’t.

We launched with no capital, no employees, no studio. Within three months, we had two trillion-dollar corporations as clients. We became a multimillion-dollar business in year one.

How? We deliver 4X to 5X cost savings in advertising production. And the work is better.

We produce campaigns in weeks that would take agencies months to deliver.

And because our production people are in the room during concepting, we don’t pitch ideas that can’t be made.

Now Microsoft is one of our biggest clients along with Amazon, and we partner with many other massive brands including the NFL, LEGO, Coca-Cola, the NBA, Dungeons & Dragons, Nintendo, and more.

We displace agencies hundreds of times our size at billion-dollar brands all the time.

What You Should Do Monday Morning

If you’re a CMO reading this, here’s my advice:

Audit everything your agency does for you. Map the overlaps with your internal team. Find where you’re paying for things you don’t care about or could handle yourself.

Strategy is often the biggest target as your corporation likely has a massive strategy team.

You don’t need to blow everything up. Just stop paying for bullshit you don’t need. Seriously, how much are all those status meetings costing you?

Take that strategy budget and reallocate it to media. Hire more creatives. Generate more content. Get more into market.

Nobody ever won a Cannes Lion for a strategy deck.

Jon Sneider is the founder of Seattle’s Premier Creative Production House, Wild Gravity and author of the bestselling book, Hacking Advertising: How We Learned to Make Ads Without the Agency (And You Can Too).

Slash your ad-budget by 70% or more. Order Hacking Advertising today.
www.hackingadvertising.com/order

Last week, we wrapped up a product launch video series for a $16 billion video game and console maker. This week, we started a new engagement with a $6.8 billion software and AI company.

Our team? Less than 10 people.

While agency holding companies announce another round of layoffs, something remarkable is happening. Billion-dollar brands are quietly walking away from the big shops. They're betting on small, agile creative production companies for their futures.

Industry experts are declaring 2025 "The Year Of Independent Ad Agencies." GM, Häagen-Dazs and Liberty Mutual Insurance have recently turned to shops with fewer than 100 employees. These aren't experimental side projects. These are major brand campaigns going to teams that fit in a conference room.

The $16 Billion Wake-Up Call

We're delivering a complete product launch campaign for one of the world's largest gaming companies. Multiple hero videos, dozens of cutdowns, localized versions, accessibility files, compliance versions. Thousands of assets. The entire campaign, from concept to delivery will take less than six weeks. And we can deliver in half that time.

When I was the client, it used to take the agency more than a quarter to generate a launch campaign. On week six we'd be on round two of moodboards.

New clients always ask, "how is this possible with a team this small?"

Simple. We don't have account directors managing account supervisors who brief associate account executives. We don't have strategy teams creating decks justifying strategy. We don't have meetings about meetings.

Here’s the truth. It's easier with a team our size.

We scale up with jobs. Scale back down when the gig's over.

We use trusted freelancers and contractors so there's no pink slips and tears. Just, high-fives and see-ya-next-times

We just make stuff.

The Dirty Secret About "Capabilities"

Brands like Qualcomm and Nike are finding they can often skip the agency. completely, and work directly with production companies. But it goes deeper than that.

Traditional agencies subcontract the actual asset creation to production companies like ours anyway. They'll charge you $2 million for a campaign, then hire us for $400K to create and manage all the deliverables. You're paying for the privilege of playing telephone.

Sure agencies add value, but that much?

Some CMOs worry that a shop our size couldn't handle the complexity. The irony? Many of those big agencies hand off exactly that work to companies like Wild Gravity.

We're the ones who actually create and manage the tens of thousands of assets for Microsoft, Amazon, and other billion-dollar brands, even when another agency creates the concepts.

Small Is Eating Big's Lunch

Clients are looking for optimization and cost-cutting. They are demanding that we measure twice and cut once. Smart brands are realizing they can get better work, faster timelines, and direct access to senior talent for a fraction of what they're paying the holding companies.

At Wild Gravity, every client works directly with the people actually making their stuff. No account teams. No junior creatives. No one asking if we can "run this up the chain" before making a simple change.

The New Reality

Research shows brands are looking for more centralization (53%), flexibility (45%) and simplified services (37%) from their agencies.

This shift indicates that holding companies are now contending with specialized independent agencies that are continuously evolving to meet client expectations.

Small agencies are winning because we can do what big agencies have forgotten how to do: make great creative quickly without all the bureaucracy.

The future belongs to small teams of senior professionals who can move fast and make things.

The age of massive holding companies is fading. Small is the new big.

Ready to skip the agency process and work with a team that just makes great stuff? I wrote a book about exactly how you can do it - "Hacking Advertising: How We Learned to Make Ads Without the Agency (And You Can Too)."

Available now on Amazon. www.hackingadvertising.com/order

What's your experience with big vs. small agencies? Share your thoughts in the comments.

#artificialintelligence #ai #aimodels #vogue #guess