← Frontier CMO
Frontier CMO
Tombras president Dooley Tombras on creating an impossible ad with gen AI | Modern Marketers
00:21:54
This week on Modern Marketers, Tombras president Dooley Tombras joins Google’s Joshua Spanier and Bethany Poole to discuss being the third generation to lead the family business, what it means to be an independent agency focusing on data and...
Loading summary
Transcript42 lines
- [00:01]
Joshua Espanier
Hi everyone. This is Modern Marketers, I think with Google. I'm Joshua Espanier, VP of Media Lab within Google Marketing. I lead teams around the world who plan, invent execute and measure marketing programs on behalf of Google's brands. Each episode I talk to game changing marketers and founders who are delivering modern marketing today. Let's dive right in. G', day, everyone. I'm here today with Dooley Tombras, president of Tomris, and my colleague Bethany Poole. How are you guys doing today?
- [00:29]
Dooley Tombras
Doing great. Thank you for having us on.
- [00:31]
Joshua Espanier
Yeah, feeling good, excited to be here. Let's get going. So, Dooley, why don't you tell us a little bit about yourself. The bio is going to have covered it, but you know, let's hear in your own words who you are, where you're coming from and what Tombris is.
- [00:45]
Dooley Tombras
Hey, I'm Dooley Tombris. I'm the president of Tombris. We're a full service independent advertising agency headquartered in Knoxville, Tennessee, and we're known for connecting data and creativity for business results.
- [00:56]
Joshua Espanier
Your accent's coming through loud and proud. Tell us a little bit about your Tennessee and roots.
- [01:02]
Dooley Tombras
Well, you know, it's unexpected for an ad agency to be in Tennessee, right? And Jeff, our CCO talks about it. The naive genius of Tom Brass. You know that we're headquartered in the foothills of the Great Smoky Mountains. And I think, I think it means a couple of things. One, we don't get hung up in the whole cynical ad scene of. And you know, when you're in Knoxville, Tennessee, you do it your own way. We've got a saying at the agency that a great agency should be like the bar from Star wars. And you need a lot of interesting characters. And bringing a little Tennessee flair to the table can be unexpected in our industry.
- [01:40]
Joshua Espanier
We are the agency you're looking for. I love it. Thank you. Before we get going, let's ask a few sort of quick fire questions just to sort of warm up here. So who's your favorite creator right now across social platforms?
- [01:50]
Dooley Tombras
My favorite creator is. Y' all might laugh. Carnivore md. And I am not on the Carnivore diet, but I do think he is the successor to the Liver King empire and love watching him on YouTube shorts.
- [02:05]
Joshua Espanier
Nice. Bethany, anything new you've been following?
- [02:08]
Bethany Poole
What have I been following lately? Well, you know what? I just got into a new podcast. Julie Louis Dreyfuss podcast is now my new thing, Wise Women. So that's not creator per se, but that's what I'm listening to.
- [02:20]
Joshua Espanier
Dooley, what's the best piece of career advice you've ever got?
- [02:22]
Dooley Tombras
Well, I got some advice from my dad right, when I started in the business, which was you need to be very inquisitive and you've got to be a voracious reader. And I think that's timeless advice. Right. That was good advice when he told me that 20 years ago. And if you look at how fast the industry is changing, it's probably even better advice right now.
- [02:42]
Joshua Espanier
Can you spend a couple of minutes talking about your dad? I mean, this is. You run a family run business. Right. So I'd love to hear a little bit more about the origins of the company. And that's pretty rare in the world of marketing today.
- [02:54]
Dooley Tombras
Yeah, Tom Bris is very unique. So my granddad actually started Donburs in 1946 and he was the in house marketing director at what was called kub. It was the Knoxville Utility Board, the power company. And he was writing a lot of like award winning newspaper ads and radio ads back in the 1940s. And so he started what was the first advertising agency in the state of Tennessee. KUB was his founding client, kind of off to the races. And then my dad took over from him in the early 1980s. And then I learned the business from my dad and he's still the chairman of the agency.
- [03:28]
Joshua Espanier
That's pretty remarkable. Do you have any other family members at the agency?
- [03:31]
Dooley Tombras
Right now I don't, but I've got a two year old and a four year old son and the four year old son loves our commercials. So the family business could be growing in the future.
- [03:42]
Joshua Espanier
Who do you reckon had a harder time of it? Your grandfather setting up his business in the very early days. Your dad in sort of the 80s when whatever was happening then or you now with the digital transformation which is sort of roiling the marketing services industry?
- [03:56]
Dooley Tombras
Well, I think every generation gets it a little easier. Right. And so I've got to think it was a little tougher for my granddad starting the agency with one person bootstrapping it up. So he probably had it the hardest.
- [04:06]
Joshua Espanier
I kind of agree with you. It always seems easier, but the challenges we face today do seem pretty significant. So, Dooley, you work in an advertising agency, you pitch business all the time. What was the pitch you're most proud of or the pitch where you had like sort of that you felt like the best win for you, for the agency?
- [04:23]
Dooley Tombras
Oh, gosh. Well, I mean, I've probably gotta go back to our two most recent ones. Two of the best New business wins of all time. We get agency. We've gave agency of record for Spirit Airlines and that's a milestone. Anytime you can do something in advertising that there's a Mad Men episode about, I feel like you've unlocked an accomplishment. There is a madman episode about all great agencies have to have an airline and that's a really nice win for us. And then also not product placement. But since you asked, I've got one of the brands right here in my desk. RXBar. We want a new business pitch with Kellanova to become agency of record on six brands in their portfolio. And that one's incredibly exciting. Not just because it's recent, but because I like being prolific. I love having a lot of at bats and that that's going to be a lot of at bats across six different brands.
- [05:13]
Joshua Espanier
This is called the Modern Marketers podcast. I'd love to hear, Dooley, your perspective on what a modern marketer looks like. You sit in a slightly offset, you're doing modern marketing, but you meet with CMOs, you meet with customers, you meet with clients. What does modern marketing mean today from an advertising agency perspective?
- [05:28]
Dooley Tombras
Well, it's interesting. I would have a different answer if you'd asked me a year ago versus three years ago versus five years ago. But right now I feel like so many to be a modern marketer. So many brands have pushed so much money into the bottom of the funnel, they've overswung towards digital that now being a modern marketer is almost this balance of the classic benchmarks and things that worked before, but using all of the modern tools and technology to execute against it. And I think modern marketers. Now I've got to get back to how can we be mass reach always on to the extent that you can for your brand with your budget, but how do you deploy that with a modern content strategy through the modern channels? And that's the calculus that I'm seeing a lot of our clients who I think are really strong modern marketers navigating right now.
- [06:21]
Bethany Poole
You talk about modern marketing, you're also an independent agency that's like been really thinking about that data and creativity you mentioned for a long time. When did you start investing in that intersection and how has that changed? I would say over the last 10 years. And how is it continuing to change? You just talked about like thinking about all of this content, all of these channels. It's a different world than it was. But you had a lot of foresight to think of where it was going.
- [06:47]
Dooley Tombras
Yeah. So I graduated from Vanderbilt 2004 started at the agency. This is a real number. It's gonna sound like a made up number, but we ran an analysis at that time. 99% of our revenue in 2004 was traditional. So we were a big TV shop. McDonald's was a big client then regionally for us, we were doing a lot of television, radio out of home. And Digital represented literally 1% of our revenue. And, you know, I don't think you had to be, you know, an oracle to look into the future. And go golly, everything is about to change. And so literally not day one, but, you know, a couple of months in at the agency, I worked with my dad and we really started to double down on building out digital, which was not data at that time. It was hiring UX people, front end and back end coders and getting into building digital products for clients and doing banner ads. But we were ahead of most full service agencies and independent agencies at that time. And I think one thing that helped us, a lot of agencies tried to buy and we went the route of building. And when you build, you get your hands dirty and you actually learn how to do it. And then we were in a better position come 2007 when all of the other innovations started to come out and things went into mobile. We got into mobile very quickly. We got into social very quickly. As soon as Facebook became available, you know, to people that didn't have a Edu address. We got into content development very early on. So we were very early into digital for independent full service agencies. And we were an outlier in that we built instead of buying. So we really knew how to do it for sure.
- [08:29]
Bethany Poole
Yeah. So TomPras took on a challenge recently with the Google AI Lighthouse program, where we were like, this is the ultimate brief. Use our generative AI to develop a solution that would be an impossible creative campaign for a client. And I love what you guys did with pods. Can you tell us a little bit about like, well one, tell us what you did, but then also how. I think the history that you guys have led to this had to have led to this idea. Just the way that the minds work to kind of think about how the creativity and data could come together in a really interesting way.
- [09:01]
Dooley Tombras
Yeah, well, it was so cool, right? Like you said, what a dream brief for an agency. Hey, Tomris, go make a campaign that would have previously been impossible without AI. And so we needed to work with a client that valued innovation and was willing to take some risk and could move fast. And Pods is a very innovative client. And so we went to pods. They were in and then it was interesting, right? If you're positioning as data plus creativity for business results, you should use data upstream and you should use it end to end, right? So we actually used Gemini throughout the entire creative process on this. And we actually used Gemini to write the brief for our internal teams. And the brief that Gemini wrote just sort of served us up a great opportunity for the creative team. Write where the brief pulled out a nugget from a podcast. People should listen to more podcasts, right? Pulled out a brief podcast with the founder of pods where the founder of pods had said the actual pods themselves, the physical pods were really the original billboard for the brand and frankly the best advertising the brand had ever had. And Jim and I pulled that into our brief and then the creative team was sparked and that was where the human idea came in. And you still have to have a big idea to really leverage the full power of AI. And the creative team was, okay. Their big idea was if the actual pod was the original billboard for the brand. What if we used AI, took the physical pod and turned it into the world's smartest billboard? There was Google Maps in there. So you think about the tech stack. We had Google cloud, we had Gemini inside the truck. We had a laptop that was using Google Maps to get to the lat long and then that was talking to a Google sheet where we had pre programmed a lot of things by neighborhood. And then we were looking at time of day, weather, subway delays, traffic information, Google reviews from retailers on those streets. And you know, that was what was powering the AI there. But the idea was, right, the world's smartest billboard, where we created this physical pod, we drove it around New York City, we hit every neighborhood in New York City in 29 hours. It ended up generating thousands of unique headlines. But the whole key, right, is they were brand safe and in the voice of pods. And you know, one way I'm talking about the campaign right now, you know, was it took a couple of days of work to train the large language model. And then it took a couple of days to get to the point where we could get to 5,000 deadlines in five minutes.
- [11:40]
Bethany Poole
And that's the crazy thing. The copy lines were so good until like take off of a subway stop that's like got a delay and be able to dynamically make the truck say something that rips off of that in a quirky, like authentic to the brand voice. It's insane. I didn't realize that was happening in real time.
- [11:57]
Dooley Tombras
Well, we've got some really smart tech people at Tom Brass that figured out how to leverage a lot of the horsepower of Gemini. And it's an interesting challenge, right? It's like, how do you generate headlines at scale that are in the brand voice of pods that are brand safe and that are also funny and breakthrough? And so we fed into the large language model all of the pods previous advertising. We interviewed the CMO and fed a video of that in. And then we played with it and we still weren't quite getting the headlines we needed. And then we fed in some inspiration and some other campaigns and some things outside of advertising. And then we really got the Voice nailed on it. And basically in the 24 hours after that pod drove around New York City, pods had a 60% increase in organic traffic to the website in Tri State New York and a 33% increase in leads. It was literally the number one volume business day year over year for 2024. So pretty powerful.
- [12:58]
Joshua Espanier
You can actually go to thinkwithgoogle.com and there's an article about that whole campaign and initiative. And I'm sure if you go to the Tombris website, there's other case studies written there.
- [13:07]
Dooley Tombras
And if you go to Tom Brush Social, you better believe we have shared the Think with Google article on Tom10.
- [13:13]
Joshua Espanier
Every client says they want innovation and in this digitally transforming world, there's so much opportunity. Your agency specializes in delivering that intersection of creativity and data and art. How can you tell if a client's going to actually take you up on that? What are the signals? What are the things that your great best clients do regularly to get the best out of you as their agency?
- [13:36]
Dooley Tombras
That's a great question, Josh. I'm going to protect the name of who told me this. I talked to somebody at the Martin agency one time and they told me that clients come to them and do business all the time and say, we want Geico. And this person at Martin told me that quite often they look at the client and go, no, you may think you want Geico, you don't want Geico, you're not ready for Geico. And the same is true at Tombris. If you look at a lot of the wild, innovative stuff that we've done. Even in the last year, we did the world's first ad campaign targeting extraterrestrials for Moonpiece after the experts testified in front of Congress last year that said UAPs for real, we deep faked vegans saying they loved meat for steak. Them, our frozen meat company. Obviously we had the pods case Study. And to your point, the phone does ring and clients do call and they go, we want to do that. Well, you know, look at what you guys did for moonpie or stake them or pods. And what you've got to look at is, does the brand have a history of doing breakthrough work like that? Does the actual client, have they done breakthrough work at a previous organization that they've been in? And if they haven't, has there been an event horizon that is triggered to give them permission to do it, where they say, oh, we're owned by the PE Group and the PE Group has said we better be breakthrough or their back is against the wall for a business reason? And nine out of 10 times, if the brand has not done breakthrough before or the client has not been a part of breakthrough work in a previous organization, or if something hasn't just changed, they're not going to be ready for that level of innovation. And it goes back to trust, which I talked about earlier. You come up with the greatest idea in the world, you can't, quote, unquote, sell a client to go do that. They've got to believe in the idea, believe that it's on strategy, believe that it's right for the brand, believe that it will resonate in culture and resonate with their target audience into calculated risk. And you've got to all hold hands and go do it together. And so people talk about having brave clients, but it's really about having clients that believe in the data and believe in the idea and have the trust to go execute it.
- [15:48]
Joshua Espanier
Tomorrow is both very progressive in that this embracing of data and data science and marrying it with art, sort of starting 10 years ago before a lot of people did. And also classic in the sense that you, a full service agency, can you talk to what you think the next five to ten years looks like for Tom Brass and I guess by default for the marketing industry, large, but certainly in your mind's eye, what do you see Tom doing? Changing, developing, growing for the next five to ten years?
- [16:16]
Dooley Tombras
Yeah, great question, Josh. Well, I don't think we can even look 10 years out at this point. I think in advertising years, 10 years might be 100 years with AI. But what do the next five years look like? I think the next five years there will be more disruption than there were in the previous 10 years. And you think about what's happened in the last 10 years with mobile and such, what's happened in the last two or three years with TikTok coming out and then effectively reels and YouTube shorts you know, drafting off of that, you know, we thought that attention spans were getting short as we go from 30s to 15s and now we're in a six second world. And now we're dealing with the proliferation of AI, as we talked about on this podcast here. So, you know, what does the next five years look like? Wow. I mean, crazy amounts of disruption. And there will be winners and losers. And the winners, I believe, will be the agencies and brands that lean in and embrace the disruption and get in on the technology early. And the time to get in on AI is not now. It was actually two years ago, or I could argue it was four or five years ago, before anybody had even heard of ChatGPT. And the whole game is about to change. And I find that personally very exciting because change is one of the reasons that brands need advertising agencies. And the volume of change is going to be at such a level that brands are not going to be able to keep up with that and they're going to have to rely on agency partners. And by default, I believe independent agencies are in a better definition than to outmaneuver the holding companies, because the holding companies are a battleship. And it is harder for a $10 billion, 100,000 plus employee global network to pivot, you know, on a foundational shift than an independent agency. And I think commerce sits in a very disruptive sweet spot in the industry because we have independence with scale with 500 employees, but because of the family ownership, we are set up to pivot faster than other independent agencies. And so I think it is going to be a very, very, very exciting time in the next five years. And I think I mentioned this earlier in the podcast, but we are going to see the distance between idea and execution shrink and things are going to speed up just like they did when smartphones and social came out. And there will be changes that we can't predict. Because if we were doing this podcast five years ago, who would have predicted TikTok, right? It's like Facebook came out, then Twitter came out, then Instagram became dominant, then Snapchat was a thing. And at some point you go, well, golly, there's not going to be more social platforms, but then there are. And so we're likely to have another social platform that hasn't even been invented yet that will disrupt everything that, that all of the other big tech companies will have to react to in that time period as well.
- [19:23]
Joshua Espanier
Bethy and I like to ask our guests to come with three cheers, three things that you're excited about in the next Months. And it can be professional, it can be personal. So, Dooley, what are your three cheers?
- [19:33]
Dooley Tombras
I'm excited about so many things, Josh. Where? How do I pick? I mean, cheers to the future of AI in the industry next year and everybody getting to practice their fast twitch muscles. I'm excited to see how everybody reacts as the timelines get crunched and as we get better with the prompts and better at using the machines. I'm very much looking forward to that for next year. And then I'm going to say another one. Cheers to getting back to big ideas and big creativity. Just like pods, that example, you can leverage the tools, you can leverage the technology. It can be the most modern execution possible. But with where the world is with media fragmentation right now, you know, one of the main reasons clients have always hired agencies is to come up with a big idea that can have a disparate business impact for them. You have an exponential business impact. And I'm a big believer that creativity is a force multiplier when done effectively. And I feel like the industry is sort of at an aha moment right now that even though the media has all done a 180 on how this gets deployed, the big idea matters more than ever. And I'm looking forward to seeing more big ideas in 2025.
- [20:56]
Joshua Espanier
Cheers to big ideas.
- [20:57]
Dooley Tombras
And then cheers to a more diverse industry. You know, I mean, there were some famous examples last week. I'm not going to name them. Everybody reads the news of a big brand that, you know, had a couple of big snafus with some creative that we put out. I'm excited to see the industry get more diverse. I'm a big believer that diversity of thinking leads to better ideas. That's part of why I'm so excited about our expansion down into Buenos Aires, by the way, and being able to tap into the incredible creative talent in our office down there. We've now got about 60 people in Buenos Aires. But I'm excited to see more diversity in the agency world and more diversity of thought in that making its way through the work in 2025.
- [21:42]
Joshua Espanier
Dude, thank you so much for doing this. Really enjoyed the conversation.
- [21:45]
Dooley Tombras
Really fun, fun discussion. Bethany, great to see you. Thanks, John.
- [21:48]
Joshua Espanier
Thank you.
- [21:48]
Bethany Poole
Thank you. Yeah.