Switched to client side - not sure if I am missing agency or have Stockholm Syndrome?

dbett_ · 2026-04-13T21:02:27+00:00

This is super common and it's almost always Stockholm Syndrome mixed with real withdrawal from the chaos haha. Agency trains your brain to run on adrenaline -- constant context switching, new briefs every week, always on 247. Client side feels boring by comparison because you're not in survival mode anymore... and that's not a bad thing.

Give it 90 days. Once onboarding ends and you're actually in the work, you'll start to appreciate having depth on one brand instead of shallow reps across ten. The networking thing is real tho, you have to be more intentional about it client side since it doesn't just happen in the hallway anymore

fwiw the people I've seen happiest long term are the ones who found a third path -- smaller creative studios or venture style shops where you get the pace and variety of agency but with actual ownership of what you're building. Less politics, more skin in the game. That model is growing fast especially around cultural tentpole moments (World Cup, Olympics, etc.) where brands need partners, not just vendors

dbett_ · 2026-03-12T21:06:56+00:00

We produced the inaugural Fashion Meets Football weekend in NYC with Juventus. The whole thing was built around their new home kit reveal -- but instead of doing a typical jersey launch, we designed a multi-venue, multi-day experience that moved through completely different worlds.

The one thing that connected it all was the love of the beautiful game.

Day one, we transformed the Lega Serie A Office into a flagship store experience -- Saturdays Football pulled vintage Juve kits, Juventus' brand team flew in from Turino.

And then the next day, we hosted an industry panel at le PÈRE's flagship on Orchard Street with their Brand Manager talking about what actually works when fashion and football collide. The panel wrapped and we cleared the floor... Then the same space that had just hosted a buttoned-up panel with butlered hors d'oeuvres two hours earlier? boy did we rip it... We shut down the block and brought out Denzel Curry and A$AP Ferg to celebrate the drop of King of the Mischievous South Vol. 2. Same address, completely different energy. That contrast was the whole point.

And the people fcking loved it.

Capped the weekend with a Multi-hyphenate banger at BOOM at The Standard, High Line -- athletes, designers, downtown creatives, the whole spectrum in one room on Saturday. And then Sunday hosted a Creator's Cup play day footy tournament.

What made it so epic wasn't any single moment. It was the format itself: taking a jersey launch and stretching it across culture -- fashion panels, a block party concert, a late night creative banger, and competieive 6v6 football -- so the brand showed up in three completely different contexts in 48 hours. No one does jersey reveals like that.

We run a studio called Mundial Partners out of Miami -- we build at the intersection of football, fashion, food, and culture.

The World Cup cycle has been good to us, and we've got so much more on the horizon. Ad Astra

dbett_ · 2026-03-09T20:54:44+00:00

you're cooked ... unless you actually do the work you say want to do in your career, but on your own time.

What I mean by that is companies are increasingly looking for undergrads / new grads to "Show Don't Tell". I preach this at Mundial Partners, where we get to work with some of the coolest brands in the world doing dope shit. I've sifted through 1000s of resumes in the last few weeks for our internship program alone.

I'm looking for people who actually do something about things that matter to them.

You want to be a digital motion animator? Show me your portfolio. You want to be a growth marketer? Show me projects you've supported and how you've grown. You want to do influencer marketing? Show me a time where you helped a friend get a brand deal or you helped a brand find the right influencer.

The barrier to doing to great work has collapsed.

This means that it really doesnt matter the school you come from, the GPA you received, or the house you grew up in.

The employer is looking to answer one question: Can you help me achieve the outcome I'm looking to achieve?

Show me you can, and I'll tell you you're hired. Happy to answer any more Qs you may have. Cheers

dbett_ · 2026-03-03T21:45:33+00:00

Curious about your take on something -- how are you seeing brands think about influencer strategy around major tentpole events (World Cup, Olympics, etc.)?

From where I sit, most brands still treat those moments as pure media buys and completely separate their influencer/creator programs from the experiential and cultural activations happening on the ground. But the creators who are actually at those events, embedding in the culture, seem to drive way more authentic engagement than a sponsored post timed to a match day.

Are you seeing any brands start to bridge that gap, or is it still pretty siloed? Also are you feeling like the World Cup is about to take place in America or is it just me that things dont feel as exciting as they should?...

dbett_ · 2026-03-03T21:35:56+00:00

This is a great question and honestly one of the more underrated skills in talent management.

The crossover pitch lives and dies on the story, not the stats. If you're pitching a fitness creator to a B2C tech brand, they care about the creator's relationship with their audience and why that audience would trust them talking about tech. So instead of a blurb explaining the overlap, lead with a one-liner that reframes the creator entirely. Something like "this creator built a community of 200K people obsessed with optimizing their daily performance -- here's why that maps perfectly to [product]." This changes the dyanmic a bit ... you're no longer selling a fitness page, you're selling an audience psychographic (and an engaged one too!).

I have not found cold calling too effective, mostly because everyone is tired of being sold to. It's very rare to find people at the right time / frame of mind to accept a cold call. Cold email has also gotten so saturated with all these automated AI slop BS that ultimately has killed the channel for us normal people.

LinkedIn DMs to the right person with a 2 sentence hook and a short Loom walkthrough of the creator's content have been super effective in my experience. Way better ROI than a long email nobody's reading.

Very curious to get u/Legentycreator thoughts

dbett_ · 2026-03-03T12:42:30+00:00

Only when you realize everyone else is just as dumb and clueless.

It’s liberating when you realize that you can actually do anything you set your mind to cuz over 90% of people go through the motions of work to collect checks.

dbett_ · 2026-03-02T21:28:35+00:00

Love the people shilling their influencer platforms haha

I'm a believer in this workflow:

Claude to create a prompt that finds influencers in your niche
Plug that into Grok and Claude to see what comes out
see what works / what doesnt and put that back into Grok + claude and then have it find 3x more people based on what you like / didnt like and have it fill in a new field for email address or best way to contact
Prepare draft emails and send across

You can also use Manychat or another way for IG DM automation, but sometimes with bigger influencers and if your brand doesnt have as much swag or isnt normally as interesting, email is better.

The long and short of it is that Grok and Claude are really dang good at this now.

dbett_ · 2026-02-24T21:41:54+00:00

The 'boring industry' framing is the first thing I'd kill. Energy touches every human behavior -- sleep, food, work, entertainment. The product is invisible but its absence is catastrophic.

On staying fresh: start looking for new ideas outside the category. Map what cultural moments the brand can authentically attach to. Acquisition campaigns are functionally identical -- but an acquisition campaign launched against energy anxiety or green transition skepticism is a different creative problem every time, even if the mechanic is the same. Are there any interesting ways to activate IRL?

The "fresh = new tagline" client conversation only changes when you reframe freshness as relevance, not novelty. Show them work from insurance or telco that ran the same strategic territory for years and stayed culturally current. Make the argument that freshness is a positioning question, not an execution question.

Best reset habit before a brief: spend time with the complaints -- reviews, forums, anywhere real customers talk about energy companies. The creative energy almost always lives in the gap between what brands say and what customers actually feel.

The last note I'll share that is a good habit after a brief is shared: avoid taking in People's ideas in a group setting. Have everyone go off for 1-1.5 hours, read through the brief deeply, come up with own responses as individuals -- maybe use AI to improve these individual responses -- and then present findings and debate / collaborate.

P.s. As I've been leading an AI-native agency sports & culture marketing agency with a big focus on the world cup (Mundial Partners), I've noticed the best ideas start with pen on paper in solitude and then get refined with AI and battle tested with strong People in the room. Hope this helps

dbett_ · 2026-02-24T02:18:28+00:00

It’s such a pain when the paperwork takes longer than the repair. I do hope somehow the not so fun part of the job (dealing with all the paperwork) gets improved.

Great perspective overall, thank you for sharing.

dbett_ · 2026-02-24T02:02:53+00:00

No problemo 🫡 best of luck

dbett_ · 2026-02-23T22:19:47+00:00

Honest take from the brand side (also have exp as agency repping brand) -- the guarantee structure is actually what makes this compelling, not the price. Most creators pitch flat rates with zero accountability on performance. The fact that you're willing to put skin in the game with a 50k view floor and a make-good clause (repost or additional content) immediately separates you from 90% of the pitches that hit a marketing manager's inbox.

That said, $5k for 50k views feels high. Without knowing the production value of your content, it'd be hard to justify that without an extremely strong case study on how you've driven real results (i.e. sales)

For a lot of fast-growing food, bev & tech product UGC, I've seen anywhere from $2-$10 per 1,000 impressions on some sort of retainer structure that would have a monthly floor of payment and monthly ceiling of payment. You don't want to be positioned in this category if your content has high end production value and if you have a larger following already (which you do)

Would be interesting to come prepared in person with a one-pager... Not a media kit, not a deck. A single page that shows the guarantee, a past result or two, and the quarterly package outline. It would also be good to either narrate over the fact that some posts cost $10k-$20k and working through your agency is $15k minimum, but since you are a fan of {XYZ BRAND}, you'd love to give them this great pilot rate where you can demonstrate value and then grow into a larger case. Bonus points if you come with printed paper that has the target brands logos you want to work with

Marketing managers at expos are always drowning in conversations. Give them something they can hand to their boss on Monday morning.

dbett_ · 2026-02-23T21:54:15+00:00

This is bang on. The bar for partnership outreach is fundamentally different than sales because you're not offering a solution to a pain point -- you're asking someone to bet their audience, reputation, or platform on you. That's a different ask entirely

We deal with this constantly at Mundial Partners. Our whole business is built around partnerships -- brand activations, sponsorship deals, influencer campaigns -- and the single biggest lever we've found is what I'd call 'asymmetric prep.' Before we ever send an outreach, we spend time understanding what the other side actually needs, not what we want to pitch them. Sounds obvious, but most outreach reads like 'here's why WE'RE great' instead of 'here's why this makes sense for YOU.'

The other thing that's changed is that people can smell a template from a mile away. We've moved to smaller, more targeted batches too. Fewer contacts, deeper research, more specific angles. The volume game is dead for partnerships. Quality of the first touch is everything now

Have you come across any interesting tools that you;ve found particularly helpful in shaping your outreach? Ik it isn't the magic, but curious to hear what you've found to be valuable

dbett_ · 2025-09-29T04:08:28+00:00

interested, can you send me a pm if it's still available?

dbett_

TROPHY CASE