Why AI Makes Your Brand Sound Like Everyone Else

0:00Todd Anthony:What was in the end what really made you decide to just branch out on your own?

0:03Andres Figueira:I sort of created Pinwheel as a counterpoint to the big agency model. And the thing that I didn't love about the big agency model was that, you know, they work people to death.

0:14Todd Anthony:Your marketing philosophy and your creative style and leadership, do you feel that's evolved in a certain way?

0:19Andres Figueira:I never stopped evolving. A good example of that is the advent of AI. And engaging with that has really helped me kind of evolve my approach to it. But other things like what it takes to be creative, what it takes to come up with good ideas. These are foundational things.

0:34Todd Anthony:How are you guys leveraging AI your day to day?

0:36Andres Figueira:What we've done is custom GPTs for brand voice GPTs.

0:44Todd Anthony:Hey, everybody. Thank you for tuning in. My name is Andres Figueira, and I'm going to be your host for the day. This show is brought to you by the Global Talent Company, helping fast-growing teams hire exceptional remote talent from Argentina, South Africa, and beyond. We connect companies with world-class professionals who bring skill, reliability, and a global perspective to every role. And just for our listeners today, we're offering an exclusive 10 % discount on your first hire. All you need to do is visit GlobalTalent.co, click Start Hiring, and mention the podcast listener discount when we reach out.

1:17Todd Anthony:And today, with me here, I am speaking with Todd Anthony, Executive Creative Director and founder of Pinwheel Content Incorporated, a creative agency populated with senior-level talent that creates powerfully persuasive marketing. And with that said, Todd, welcome to the show. It's a pleasure to have you here. Andres, good to talk with you.

1:37Andres Figueira:Thanks for having me.

1:38Todd Anthony:No problem at all. No problem at all. And Todd, just so that we can hit the ground running and give the audience a bit more context as to who you are, Would you be able to give us a bit more about your background, what Pinwheel Content Inc. is in your own words, and yeah, just how you got here, man?

1:54Andres Figueira:Yeah, sure. So I'm the son of a trial lawyer and a psychologist. It was, I guess, if you think about it, it was actually natural that I would wind up in marketing. Growing up, reading my dad's depositions and working in his law firm and then talking with my mom, who was a trained psychologist, just trying to understand me as a teenager. So, yeah, so that's where I come from. I got my start in advertising in Prague, Czech Republic. I'd been selling phone books, business phone books, door to door in the former Czechoslovakia and in Prague. And I heard about an opportunity at an agency called McCann Erickson, which is a global agency working on Coke and Johnson and Gillette and a few others.

2:48And so I went for it and I got the gig and was there for about a year and a half and actually wound up coming back to the United States and then going back to Prague and working at an agency called DMBNB.

3:02Andres Figueira:I started out on the account side. What I loved about the account side in Europe was that it was really heavily about strategy and I love strategy. When I came to the United States and tried to do that job, I went to work for McCann Erickson San Francisco. It became more about project management and just pushing paper and getting things done, which was not really my strong suit. So I switched over to the creative side. I went to the Portfolio Center in Atlanta to put my copywriter portfolio together and then went to work at J. Walter Thompson and went to work at Young Rubicam, went to work at Obavine Mather.

3:46Andres Figueira:And then I went to the client side working at Yahoo and CBS. I was a creative director at CBS before I launched the agency.

3:58Todd Anthony:Wow. You've been around. That's a bunch of places where you gained experience in order to then create your own thing. And in what year did you end up actually creating Pinwheel?

4:10Andres Figueira:It was 2014. Okay.

4:13Todd Anthony:So that's already 50, what's it called? 12, 11 years ago. Okay. Okay. And then after gaining so much experience in all these different companies, seeing how things worked all around, what was in the end, what really made you decide to just branch out on your own?

4:29Andres Figueira:I created Pinwheel as a counterpoint to the big agency model. And the thing that I didn't love about the big agency model was that they often, they work people to death. They put young people on the business. They charge out like 3x, literally this is the number, 3x what they're paying their people. And they're just working them to death. And so that's the model. And that's how they make money. and I didn't love that. They also had a tendency to like bring in the big guns for the pitch meetings and then replace them with juniors the second they get the business. Clients often complain about the bait and switch there and I don't love that.

5:11Andres Figueira:So Pinwheel is a counterpoint to that in that we are all senior level people. We all, we're running the agency not to become millionaires. That's not why we're doing it. We're doing it because we enjoy the work. It's fun. I love working with clients on their projects. And so that's why we focused on having senior level people only to do the work. And the other benefit to that was that I found out very early on is that I don't have to babysit them, which meant that I would scale. It really helped me scale, not having to be so focused on bringing, ensuring that the quality was where it needed to be.

5:50Andres Figueira:I could just trust that this person's been doing it for 20 years. They're at the top of their game. We've hired some amazing people to do work. It's very fun to be able to hire people that are better than you.

6:04Todd Anthony:Okay. I love that. And I was actually going to ask if the hiring process for finding senior level people that match the requirements of what you're mentioning, if it's harder to find that type of profile around or when you're doing interviews, or if it is actually easier because you already trust that they do have the experience that you need.

6:28Andres Figueira:My network is full of people who are senior level. In fact, if somebody came to me and said, do you know any good junior level copywriters? I'm like, no, I don't. Everybody I know is senior level. It's all been on LinkedIn. It's research. I love research. So I consider myself a unicorn hunter. I look for the perfect people and I often tend to find them and it works out.

6:53Todd Anthony:And do you have any certain process for doing that? Or do you just trust your gut and what you have in your own circle of known people?

7:00Andres Figueira:Certainly, if we're hiring creative talent, I'm looking at examples of their work. And after 30 years of doing this, I'm very good at being able to tell if somebody knows what they're doing or not. And if they're good, if they're creative, if they're exploratory, if they're willing to go out there and really take some risks, things like that. And if they're talented writers, you can just tell right away.

7:26Todd Anthony:And how big is the team that you have helping you out, Todd? Like with this senior level, what's it called? Like exclusivity, I want to say, for the company since you want everybody to have the highest level they can have. How many people do you have helping you out with Pinwheel?

7:40Andres Figueira:So we're six full timers now and we have about a cadre anywhere between 25 and 35 contract employees at any given time. A lot of those people are people we've worked with forever. And then some of them are new. And, you know, some of them are people who come in and go out and then come back in.

8:04Todd Anthony:And is the majority of your workforce located inside the United States? Or have you outsourced to different places due to, I don't know, to help you out with time zones or with maybe pricing of how much you need to pay them or anything like that?

8:16Andres Figueira:I had some experience trying to outsource to save money when I was at CBS as a creative director. And I think we tried, we tried a little bit of South America and, and things like that. And I just found that the quality and the disconnect, the quality was low and the disconnect was just hard to overcome. and it just it's great if you have something that's essentially like a machine that you're like a production machine like that's great but if it's something that requires knowledge of the client or that requires and most things do frankly require knowledge of the client so i don't do that and i know a lot of agencies do that and maybe they've found a way to do it that works well The other thing is that, yeah, there's a lot of people that work for Pinwell that are outside the United States.

9:09Andres Figueira:We have an amazing health writer in Scotland. We have an amazing finance writer in Berlin. We've got a designer that works in, she's traveling around the world, but she's mostly in Asia. So cool. Okay. Yeah. And that has helped us. The time zone shifts have helped us get work done faster because we have people working while we're sleeping.

9:35Todd Anthony:Okay. No, that's amazing. And that is also very nice that you're able to follow the sun with the company. So that way, when somebody clocks off, then somebody's clocking in and it's always everything

9:44Andres Figueira:is intended properly. So I totally get that.

9:46Todd Anthony:And Todd, now shifting to another point of this conversation. How have you felt by leadering a creative agency with what you've learned before in your previous agency life and other places and with the client side roles? Have you extrapolated your learnings from there in order to lead Pinwheel content appropriately? Or have you felt that you've learned more like on the go once you decided to branch out?

10:08Andres Figueira:There are certainly a lot of theories that I had coming into it based on the experience I had. And some of my previous experiences before being at Pinwheel is not only leading creative teams, but also managing client relationship or agency relationships. So I had some experience sort of being on the other side of it. And so I had some theories there. But honestly, like when I first started, there were a lot of unknowns and a lot of things that I was learning as I went. Finance related things, how to scale seamlessly. my first my first hire was a bookkeeper okay i highly recommend anybody starting an agency start with the money and go from there and then the second thing the second person i hired was a was a designer that i'd worked with previously and i just i knew he was awesome now he's our head of design and then the third person was somebody who is just amazing at project management And that she has really helped us to scale and, yeah, grow exponentially.

11:14Andres Figueira:But there were a lot of things I didn't know. I had coaches along the way. I had a, when I first started, I had a business coach that my parents paid for. It was like$1 ,200 for eight sessions or something back in the day. And he was hugely helpful. One of the things he said to me was, treat your bank account like your girlfriend. If you stop paying attention to it, it might go away.

11:37Todd Anthony:I like that lesson.

11:39Andres Figueira:The other thing you said to me was have lots of coffees with people and lunches with people. That's super important as you're building an agency, just getting yourself out there. So I did that and he was right. And then I had a growth coach out of New York who had run her own agency up to 100 people. So she had a lot of wisdom to impart on me. And she was not shy about sharing that with me. It was a tough love sort of relationship. And I learned a ton from Kelly Campbell. And then I had another business coach who helped me with a pivot that we made as an agency.

12:19Todd Anthony:That's amazing. And I do understand so much the value of having different mentors at different stages of your growth journey, because that is the best way to, you'll always make mistakes, but to learn from the mistakes that others made and then being able to transmit those lessons. It has a lot of value. So that is super cool that you were able to obtain that wisdom from these different characters. And Todd, also another question I have is, do you feel that since Pinwheel started up until today, then your marketing philosophy and your creative style and leadership, do you feel that's evolved in a certain way or in how you're working now?

12:53Todd Anthony:Or have you had, what's it called, like the same perspective of how to do things and those things are actually working?

13:01Andres Figueira:It's a combination. So I would say that in some ways I have evolved and I never stopped evolving. I was just like a constant evolution. Everything I'm doing, I'm learning from and growing. And that a good example of that is the advent of AI and just how engaging with that has really helped me evolve my approach to it. But other things, what it takes to be creative, what it takes to come up with good ideas. These are foundational things. The human mind hasn't changed. It's still the same technology. And so what different things work for different people, but I know it works for me and I know what, you know, what works broadly speaking, giving people time to explore the universe of ideas because there are millions of them that would be perfectly fine as a fit for every single project.

13:49Andres Figueira:or what I mean by that is that there are plenty of ideas in the world that are appropriate for at any given time for any given project. And so being able to explore all those different ideas is important so that you know that you're getting the strongest ones. My buddy, David Swope, who's just a great creative, he's a video guy out of the Bay Area. His analogy is you got to wander as a cow. You have to wander beyond the barn to go out into the barn. The area right outside the barn is like all the ideas that anybody would have. And they're just like first ideas, simple ideas. You got to wander beyond that to be able to find the sweet grass where the good, where the great ideas are.