#50 - Rory McEntee - GymNation [Chief Marketing (/Mischief) Officer]

0:00Rory McEntee:Hello, hello, hello, and welcome back to the Unfounders. Today, I am joined by the absolutely brilliant Rory McEntee. He is the Chief Marketing or Chief Mischief Officer at GymNation over in Dubai, and I really, really enjoyed digging into this episode. Rory is a creative genius. He has worked on some fantastic campaigns over the years. I first knew of him for his time at Gymbox, and we dig into a few of his favorite campaigns there. He's already making a splash with GymNation with their coolest class and all sorts of other things in the pipeline, and he's worked for some fantastic brands so it was great to deal into where this creativity comes from his background what family life is like living in dubai actually upping and choosing to move over there for the job there's so much within this it's a cracking episode and roy is brilliant so without further ado let's get on with the episode are you a founder of the next exciting food and drink round are you looking to scale and grow well let me introduce you to mission kitchen London's home for food and drink entrepreneurs and sponsor of the Unfounders Mission Kitchen gives you the equipment support and community to take your business to the next level with flexible access to commercial kitchens expert mentorship on site and a network of hundreds of like-minded founders this could be exactly what your business needs to level up if you want to find out more why not book a tour today at missionkitchen.org forward slash Unfounders

1:26Rory McEntee:Hello and welcome back to The Unfounders. Today I'm joined by the brilliant Rory McKenty. So Rory, please introduce yourself, where you work and how long you've been there. Hey, how you doing? Yeah, Rory from Gymnation over in Dubai. I'm the CMO, officially CMO, unofficially kind of chief mischief officer. I've been with Gymnation since April this year. So pretty, pretty fresh, fresh meat. Brilliant. and Gymnation, for those who don't know it, give us a spiel, like what is Gymnation? So yeah, Gymnation is the number one gym brand in the Middle East. So we've got locations all across kind of Dubai, Abu Dhabi, Saudi.

2:03And it's a kind of one of the most affordable and accessible gyms in the region. It's a kind of big gym. It does everything from reformer Pilates to high rocks to boxing. It's a little bit tongue in cheek and irreverent in its tone, a little bit fun, loud, very different to any kind of gym you may know. And so the marketing is a little bit disruptive, creative, and kind of very, I think, in your face. It's kind of a fun brand and a kind of, you know, a really disruptive brand in the market.

2:31Rory McEntee:Well, they've definitely got the right person for the job. And I think I first kind of came across you when you were at Gymbox, and we're definitely going to dig into that stuff later. But I know before hitting record, we mentioned, obviously, you're now living in Dubai. So I'd love to dig into that side because we hear all the time about people leaving the UK and moving to Dubai. or these other countries for various reasons? Like what was it that pulled you to Dubai? Was it the job itself or was it we're at Dubai first and then you found the job? Like how did that come about for you? Yeah, you know, it's an interesting one actually because I never envisioned myself living in Dubai initially.

3:02And I think you see a lot of stuff on social media with, you know, influencers coming over and the lavish lifestyle and brunches and Dubai chocolate. I think going back first of all, so yeah, you're absolutely right. It was job first rather than Dubai first. lived in London for 17 years, spent the last seven or so years at Gymbox, which I know we'll come on to. And I left Gymbox to kind of go traveling again with my wife and six-month-old baby, which not a lot of people tend to do when they have a baby. They normally settle down and get the mortgage and set up a nest. And me being a little bit ying when everyone else yangs, I kind of went to Australia with my wife.

3:39And so I was kind of doing a few little side projects here and there and I think Dubai appealed in a couple for a couple of reasons it was that midway point between the UK and Australia my wife being Australian and me kind of being in the UK and Ireland so quite easy to kind of have one flight home however it was really the job and I think just the opportunity where the brand gym nation is kind of riding the crest of a wave here in in the Middle East and in UAE particularly fitness and lifestyle and wellness is on a on a real upward trend here at the moment. And I think being able to kind of come into a business that's thriving and being able to take some of my learnings at Jimbox and take them to a kind of up-and-coming brand was the appeal.

4:20That said, I obviously wouldn't just come to a random country for a job. I needed to understand what is Dubai really like? Is it just full of brunches and everything else? And there's a lot more to it, actually. I really enjoy living here now. I almost describe it to people who just see the kind of fast cars and the beautiful looking people, it's way more than that. It's so accessible and it's almost like the Truman Show. If you designed, if you were able to go back in time and design where you live, it's almost like they've had that opportunity. In one sense, it's a little bit weird and hasn't got the culture and the soul that you have living in London for 17 years and Ireland before that.

4:58But actually growing up and in my community, I've got numerous swimming pools that are free. You've got your spinnies slash waitrose shop around the corner. you've got the Irish bar they've almost just gone what what would you want if you lived in a little village and you've got everything you want you've got child care so everything's in walking distance and then I obviously you can you can drive around it's a big city but it's a um it's a it's a great city to live in and it's a real outdoor lifestyle which is something that as you can have a growing family and you want to be outdoors more it's a it's a great place to live yeah you don't really

5:27Rory McEntee:hear about like the the raising a family side of living in Dubai it is always about like like I said the fast cars the nightclubs the palm all these places like i've been to dubai before for free running jobs in the past and again that was the only reason i went there it wasn't because i was like oh i'm gonna go on holiday here like a lot of people but um yeah i think it's really interesting to know that obviously family life it sounds like you're you're pretty set up there and um going back to uh gym nation you're already having a lot of fun with some campaigns so i've seen a few big ones coming out there so i'd love to touch on a few things that you've already been involved in since you've been over there and working for them?

6:00Rory McEntee:Because I think it's the, what was it, the coolest class? That one just was absolutely awesome. Yeah, you know, it's funny when you come into a new role like anyone, you kind of want to hit the ground running a little bit and you don't want to spend months and months and months coming up with ideas and not delivering. Straight away, I kind of launched the coolest class for anyone who hasn't seen it. Tapping into the hot summers in Dubai, where it kind of gets up to 42, 43 degrees outside. A lot of people in July and August spend the majority of their time indoors escaping the heat. So the kind of insight on this class was come into gymnasium, escape the heat.

6:36We've got the coolest class in Dubai. And there were things in there like, you know, we had blizzard sprints where you're running against giant fans to keep you cool. The polar push where you're pushing a massive sled of ice, a massive ice block. We had frosted reps where you had a vest of ice. It was very much kind of leveraging the ice and wind and keeping you cool. You know, we had recovery ice baths. And it's a, you know, fun, topical kind of, you know, stunt, really, if I'm being honest. It gets people talking about the Gymnation brand in a way that they wouldn't talk about other gym brands.

7:10You know, we positioned it to, you know, a social first kind of audience, you know, people who are looking. And it taps into that Dubai market, right? you've got a lot of whilst I'm not that particular target market you've got a lot of influencers creators who are looking for the next exciting thing so we just ran a number of classes back to back and we had I think 50 to 60 influencers come down in the first week to kind of experience the coolest class in Dubai and it just creates a lot of noise for the brand and gets us talked about which is something that I probably leverage from kind of my gym box London days and it's something that I'm going to try and do a lot more kind of going forward and kind of more disruptive stuff and the brand has always been quite disruptive over here but i'm just going to

7:50Rory McEntee:ratchet up a notch we all know that brand is important right but what if i told you it can impact growth and customer acquisition costs by up to 50 against ordinary are a brand agency who help founders marketing departments scaling teams ensure their brand is the most powerful tool for growth from brand strategy tone of voice and visual identity to helping you get retail ready with ongoing brand growth retainers they really are the full circle agency for growing your brand being the team are absolutely fantastic just imagine what they could do for your brand so what are you waiting for see how they can be your grand growth partners against ordinary.com yeah no it was absolutely brilliant and uh yeah i saw like the the pr bars it's like millions of eyeballs seeing this you've got a heat wave happening in the uk at the same time being like please bring it over here like we need these classes here so yeah i think it was a funny funny thing on that was that that's an example of kind of adapting pretty quickly so that wasn't the initial obviously people in the uk but there's not a gym nation in the uk but actually you know my vision for the brand is to try and build the brand beyond the kind of middle east from a from certainly from a brand point of view i think from a business point of view that you know we'll look to expand beyond certainly i want this brand to be talked about in the uk and america and australia when i knew there was a heat wave back in the uk it was perfect timing to then reposition and repitch the pr to try and get coverage so we were getting coverage in uk titles and everything else which was something that has never really happened for the brand.

9:15So it was a really good start, really, really happy with the response that we got from it. And it's kind of hopefully the start of many more.

9:21Rory McEntee:And like you said, hitting the ground running. I think it was my third day in the job when I posted about the frozen avocado and the buyer from Spinneys messaged me. So you very kindly sent me a photo of the products now sat in shelf as of this week. So, yeah, very much good timing to get you on the podcast as well. But now digging back into your creativity and everything, Where does this all stem from? Like you, as I said, we'll get into Gym Box because you've done so many amazing things over the years with them. And no doubt all the different roles you've been in. But creativity is something that clearly you develop over time.

9:54Rory McEntee:And like as a child, were you always creative? Like were you into arts? Like where did that passion for thinking outside the box really come from for you? No, I don't really know. I guess I guess we should get my mom on the podcast. She might be able to answer that question a bit better. But yeah, I've always been kind of creative and into that side of, you know, ideas and doing things a little bit differently. I guess, you know, when I go back to school and education, like in Ireland back in the 90s when I was going into university, everybody was just going into business. That was kind of what people did.

10:27It was the Celtic Tiger. And you had to choose between accountancy, marketing or business administration, pretty much. that's all anyone ever really did and I think I went into marketing more so because that's where all the girls were going and it was a bit more fun fun place to go and I'm terrible not terrible with numbers but numbers never really appealed to me so I kind of went into marketing and I think probably a combination then of whatever creativity I might have had in my my kind of use probably then helps with the marketing because I think as as I've kind of gone through my career, the marketing I've done, I've always leaned more into the creative side.

11:04So certainly, you know, Jim Nation now, and who's a co-founder, he looks after all the performance marketing, which is great. It gives me the opportunity to focus on the creative side. But I think the creativity bit comes out from working, I guess, in industries and brands where I have a real passion. So I've been very lucky to work in, you know, sports betting, food and beverage, hospitality, cinema, and now kind of the fitness world. And there are just areas that I've got a passion in. So the ideas don't feel like work, if that makes sense. They kind of just feel like I've got an interest in this particular industry.

11:37And therefore, the ideas just kind of come naturally. It's an interesting one. I've never taught myself really as creative in that sense. I think I've just taught myself as someone who's quite good at creating noise and getting eyeballs on myself. Maybe it's a bit of an attention seeking thing from being a child and trying to get attention. I've always been creative on how I've got attention from mom or dad but yeah it's it's just it's something that just comes quite naturally i don't even consider myself overly creative and that's not kind of a humble brag or anything i just kind of always had ideas whatever it is in life so yeah i'm pretty i'm pretty lucky does

12:11Rory McEntee:that mean uh have you got siblings or your only child is it like you're the only child you want the attention or you've got lots of brothers and sisters and you're like okay i need more attention yeah i think i think it was yeah lots of brothers and sisters we're all craving from a different attention and probably from coming from a divorced mom and dad we're probably trying to you know get get attention from both of them in different ways so yeah if i dig into it could be a whole new podcast now let's let's do that in the new time brilliant and then obviously you went on and studied marketing so you went through that and then early roles then so your kind of first big marketing role that you're like okay i'm now professionally working in marketing where did that land you and where have you kind of progressed through because as you mentioned you've worked in the betting world with Paddy Power.

12:51Rory McEntee:You've done the pizza world, Papa John's, Pizza Express, Banugo. So some really big names as well. So it's like that doesn't happen from nowhere. So clearly like you hit the ground running. Yeah. And you know what? It was a very purposeful approach. So when I finished university, I kind of went to Boston and worked in bars over there and had a bit of fun and took some time out. And I came back and studied. I did my master's in marketing, which when I look back on it was a year, an intensive year of master's, which, you know, social media wasn't a thing back then. It was 2003. You know, I look back at my master's and actually most of it is completely irrelevant now.

13:26However, what that allowed me to do was to kind of explore where I wanted to kind of take my career. And whilst a lot of people went straight into graduate programs, working for big companies like Unilever or Reckitt Benkeiser or Kerrygold, I decided to take a slightly different route where I wanted to kind of go agency side because I I felt agency side would allow me to explore different brands and work for numerous brands and also potentially different areas within marketing. So, you know, at the time digital marketing was just starting to come, started to work. So I probably spent probably four years working for different agencies for Heinegan.

14:03I worked for McDonald's. I worked for Gatorade, Robinson's Fruit Shoot, Wimbledon, a lot of sponsorship pieces. And that allowed me to kind of go, I'm not really interested in FMCG, for example. I'm a little bit more interested in the sports brands, et cetera. And that then allowed me to then go, actually, I want to own more of the brand, not just the sales promotion or the above the line. So that's when I made the jump brand side, which was challenging, but also the most rewarding thing. Because at that point, you can then go, right, I now own the brand. I can just focus on this particular brand.

14:37And it was probably the luck I had going to Paddy Power was the big one. So I was in Paddy Power in 2012. And that was when they were doing a huge campaign. They'd just broken into the UK. You know, they were doing tweets in the sky during the Ryder Cup. They had Nicholas Bettner doing the Paddy Power pants. So I really learned my craft. And that was the point at which I went, right, I'm working for a disruptive brand doing really untraditional marketing. This is where I need to be. Wherever brand I work for, this is kind of where I need to be. I actually moved away from that later but but it's kind of where I've then circled back to and that's kind of where my real passion is but it was Paddy Power which I think was the the time I went I've made it now.

15:13Rory McEntee:Was there someone that you kind of in that period it was like okay I really like the like working with them or their way of thinking or was it more they gave you the space to go hey I've got an idea have we thought of doing this or how did that kind of formulate because I think it's it's always amazing what being in a different room can do for you both from an experience and just kind of like pushing yourself or being the given the freedom to go you know what you're on about let's go with it. Yeah, it was, well, there was a guy, there was a couple of people there. The marketing director at the time was Barney Evans when I came in and he had done some great work, but it was a gentleman called Ken Robinson, who's now set up by himself an agency called the Tent Man.

15:47He's behind some great campaigns, but it was just a culture they created. So it was a, they flipped everything. So for example, now I sit in meetings, I've been in corporate meetings where you've got to run an idea past legal and get it legal to approve the idea before you can get the campaign out. Whereas at Paddy Power, it was very different. So it was almost, we'd have the idea and yes, you'd run it by legal, but they would only have two hours to almost persuade you that it's a bad idea. And if they couldn't do that, we would go ahead with it. So it was just completely flipping the script on how you approach kind of marketing communications.

16:24And again, I remember it was, back in 2011, 2012, we had our most creative meetings in the pub on a Friday afternoon where we had a whiteboard, load of beer. We had somebody from the agency come who would kind of emcee and kind of direct the meeting. And we'd kind of just get drunk and come up with ideas. You'd kind of forget about it. The ideas became more and more crazy as the beer was flowing. And you'd kind of forget about them. And then on Monday you'd come back in and we'd get a report from the agency and we'd look back at the ideas and you'd kind of go, we could never do that. and then we go well why not that's kind of the it was this kind of you know enjoying the risk and trying to do things differently as a brand that just i've tried to take into my roles going forward which um in some brands it works in some brands it doesn't and then from say like paddy power going

17:14Rory McEntee:into the pizza world because obviously you did papa john's cine world kind of sandwiched in between and then onto pizza express i imagine their tone of voice their way of marketing is very different to Paddy Power, especially in the likes of Pizza Express, which by 2014, 2016, it's got a lot of heritage, it's already got a brand look and feel. How did those roles differ and the teams and what you're allowed to actually get involved with? Yeah. So it was really interesting. It was a great part of my career and my life doing that. But I learned so much because what happened there was I left Paddy Power, not because I didn't enjoy the brand or enjoy the work, but the company was so big to find opportunities in different spaces.

17:52So I was always trying to move on. Like I was to say, digital was starting to come and social media. And I had the opportunity, I guess I didn't have the opportunity of Paddy Power to get into that department at the time. So I left to go to Papa John's where my line manager said, look, I'll get you into social media. We're going to do all this sponsorship of the championship football. So it gave me this opportunity to get into the digital and social side of marketing, which has helped me become a more rounded marketer, in my opinion. However, that then led me on a little bit of a path for four or five years of working for what I would say more traditional corporate brands, Pizza Express, Benugo and Cineworld, where the red tape and the number of approvals and the people you have to get approval to just diluted the work, diluted the ideas.

18:37And when I now reference my career, my CV and the campaigns I'm most proud of, I very rarely reference anything that I did, Pizza Express, Benugo or Cineworld, by no fault of the brand or anything else. It was just it was the wrong culture for someone like me who had these ideas that ended up, as I say, just getting watered down. And by the time they got to market, you weren't overly proud of them as a marketeer. So it's very much, you know, great, great places to work, learned a lot, some fantastic people and really good to work in different industries. But certainly, you know, they aren't brands that you would traditionally look at their marketing and say it's quite disruptive or thought provoking in one sense.

19:16So I think for anyone kind of getting into marketing or to when you're trying to decide which kind of brand you want to work for, it's really important to kind of look at the brand, as you say, brand heritage, brand, you know, the campaign they've run over the years, because those starter brands are probably the ones, certainly for me, you know, that you want to kind of work for as opposed to maybe the bigger, more established brands who are a bit risk averse.

19:39Rory McEntee:yeah be interesting so when you did your marketing um studies did you have friends that went the unilever or pepsi route and do you know what their experience was like in terms of have they progressed what are they doing now is there anyone you're like oh yeah like me and my best mate we're both now doing this and it's too like almost that fork in the road of like if i went that way potentially i could be doing that now but i mean you don't sound like someone's ever going to be contained so no yeah and sometimes i not that i ever wish i've changed my route but i know like some of my best friends who I went to university with, still close with them now, and they've worked for some great brands, like I say, Unilever, and be, you know, Canva now, obviously, huge tech brand, and they get paid well, they're doing their jobs, you know, but they're not, you know, I speak to them, they're not overly challenged in the same way, but, you know, they're kind of at that stage in life where, you know, I'm quite content, and I'm, you know, I'm getting a nice salary at the end of every month, and, you know, work is fine, whereas I've always kind of wanted to push the boundaries a bit and just getting you know nine to five job Monday to Friday just doing work never really appealed so I needed to really drive myself which is why you know my wife calls me reckless sometimes like where you know I just make decisions where I kind of go right we're quitting our jobs and going traveling for a year because that's what life's about and what we want to do and in the same way in some of my roles that you know certainly gym box and now gym nation it's almost like let's just do it ask for forgiveness not permission let's just get the work out there and look we're gonna piss a few people off along the way and that's just life so yeah i could have had the easy life working for a slightly bigger brand where i just slotted into the to the cog and and went around but for me it was never never the appeal yeah no i think uh shout out to the latest canva out of home because that was absolutely brilliant like seeing it in london i loved the billboards i think they were all done so well just the like using all the tools to just make it really physical i think bringing it to the real world like everyone knows of canva now like online but actually seeing it on a billboard when i saw it in london i was like oh it is real i thought it was ai and that's that's one thing that must have changed like in your your marketing time the amount of stuff that can now just be computer generated from a billboard mock-up to a full-on campaign it's fascinating for me are you adapting with your current role like is there any ai prompts or things that you're finding useful or is it like a no don't need that my brain works this way that's how we're going to do it yeah you know it's an interesting one i'm i'll go back a step so about two three years ago we did i say we were ahead of our time we did the fake fake bus advert at gym box which you know the marketing world went into meltdown because we faked it we faked the who didn't see it we um put an advert on top of a london bus which didn't happen it was a getty image and we pushed it out as if it was real it was kind of to promote our aerial classes it said something along the lines of if you're reading this you're a natural aerial classes at gym box And it was a fake ad, but it was done.

22:29We had a copywriter in-house and we had a graphic designer in-house. It was done by humans, but we kind of mocked it up and pushed it out and the world went crazy. You know, fast forward two years and actually that sort of stuff is being commended because actually it's been done by people as opposed to AI creating this generated image. And I think I learned a lot from that around should we kind of play with, you know, fake is do people value things that are real? I think it's gone full circle. So I think there's bits that I use AI for, but it's more my internal kind of workflow and how I can get stuff out.

23:03That said, I'm not going to lie, there's times where I can get press releases written and add in a little bit of emotional or my kind of what I want it to look like, as opposed to wait two, three days for a PR agency to come back to me. So there's an element of a tug of war in my head around what's right. That said, I don't think anything beats that kind of human mind. I don't think anything ever will, but there are certainly shortcuts. I think it's this new hybrid role of combination between using AI plus your creative mind on top of it that can deliver something A, quicker and B, I think, as good.

23:36Now, a lot of creative people hate to hear that. However, for someone like me in-house, me being quite creative, I think I can layer some of that on top of AI and get some good results. But certainly I think still there's an element you can't just completely rely on because, you know, it's not the same. It's not the same. Yeah.

23:54Rory McEntee:And I think it still requires a lot of like intelligence to put in from the user. And I think that's the thing. Like people are like, oh, AI's taken over. And it's like, no, like you need to know how to use it to optimize workflows and sense check emails or things that you go, actually, you know what? That's a bit too wordy. Like, is there a better way of saying it? Okay, cool. I'm going to reframe that. So I think there's definitely ways that you can be more efficient with it. But I think being the creative output, I think that's never going to take away roles like yourselves where you're like, well, I need that initial idea to happen in the first place.

24:23No, and you go back to the Canva billboard you mentioned earlier, I don't believe A, it's real. So it's not kind of a spec advert. But B, I still don't think AI could have come up with that idea because it's so, what's the word? It's so kind of relevant to that Canva audience that people got it, you know, remove the back screen and everything else. So I think, again, you can tell from campaigns which have had that real creative human mind behind them. And I think as AI evolves, it'll be interesting to see how that continues. But I think it will always be there. and it's just about how you kind of use it cleverly.

24:53Yeah, absolutely.

24:54Rory McEntee:Now, you mentioned Gymbox loads of times. So let's dig into the Gymbox journey and your time there because, as you mentioned, the aerial campaign was one of a multitude of great things that you did while you were there. How did you first start getting involved with Gymbox and, yeah, what were some of the highlights during that time because you were there for quite a few, what, six years? Yeah, seven years in the end. You know what? I'll never forget, actually, my interview with Gymbox. They messaged me a few times and I was being lazy and I never got back to them. And they came back one time and asked if I would meet with the CEO, Mark, who's a great guy.

25:28And we ended up having beers during the interview. So like it wasn't your traditional interview. We sat down in an old WeWork in Old Street and we had a couple of beers during the interview. And straight away I went, this isn't a normal company. This is a normal brand. You're sitting there with a couple of beers and conversation just flow. And that kind of was the set the tone for my kind of my experience there, because, again, I had the Paddy Power experience, probably got a little bit muddled along the way with some corporate roles at Pizza Express and Cineworld, etc. And then kind of felt like Jimbox was kind of I was back home and being able to take those creative things that have been bottling up for years.