Artificial intelligence is quickly becoming part of everyday marketing work. But for many companies, the question is not whether to use it, but how to integrate it without losing strategic clarity or creative quality.
Building a Culture That Supports Innovation
In this episode of Spilled Salt with host Maureen Ballatori, her guest, Truth Collective founder Bob Bailey, shared how his agency approached that challenge. Rather than treating AI as a shortcut, the firm built a structured process that keeps strategy and human judgment at the center.
“We really wanted to harness it to help us be more elite at what we do,” Bob said.
Rethinking Creative Workflows in the Age of AI
Bob credits his early career experiences with shaping how he leads today. At his first agency role in the early 1990s, he learned a lesson that still guides his thinking about leadership and decision making.
“I learned there that the greatest mistake is inaction,” he said.
That mindset has influenced how Truth Collective approaches experimentation with new tools. The company trained its entire team together, encouraging open discussion about what worked, what did not, and how AI could improve their processes.
Democratizing Premium Creativity
The agency’s latest initiative, called AI Bravestorm, brings clients directly into the creative process using AI-powered workflows. The goal is not simply speed, but greater collaboration and alignment.
According to Bob, the long-term vision is clear: “Our whole business strategy now is about democratizing premium creativity.”
Bailey’s approach highlights the importance of clear systems, team trust, and a willingness to experiment before bringing new technology to clients. The episode ultimately reinforces a simple idea for leaders navigating change: innovation works best when it is grounded in strong values, transparent processes, and a culture that encourages people to test, learn, and keep moving forward.
Transcript
This transcript has been edited from its original form to support readability.
Maureen Ballatori: I’m Maureen Ballatori and this is Spilled Salt, a podcast on the thrills and spills from the food, beverage and agriculture industries… with the exception of today.
Today, my guest is Bob Bailey. Bob is the founder and managing partner at Truth Collective, an agency that helps brands find their braver side.
Bob is not focused in food, beverage or agriculture, but he, as an agency owner, is a really innovative thinker and a great friend and he has a lot of experience and knowledge in bringing AI to the table and how AI is working with brands. And brands are certainly a cornerstone of a lot of what we talk about on the podcast.
You’ll enjoy this conversation in what we touch on in terms of AI topics, but to go back and talk a little bit more about what Truth Collective is and who Bob is in relation to that. Bob’s job at Truth is to create ideal conditions for trusting creative relationships.
We talked a lot about that on the episode today. Truth focuses on growing their clients’ businesses in two ways with brand strategy, brand identity, and brand activation. Their client NPS, or Net Promoter Score, is a 93, and their employer Net Promoter Score, is an 82, which are both considered world-class numbers.
Speaking of world-class, Truth is leveraging AI in such a novel way with what they’re calling AI Bravestorm. It’s a premium workshop experience that supercharges your marketing with the power of AI. I love how Bob talks about that and really boils it down to the concept of democratizing premium creativity. Enjoy the conversation.
Maureen: Hey Bob, welcome to the show. How are you? Good. Yes, yes. I am very excited. I’ll start by sharing with everybody. Bob and I are old friends and so really excited to be able to pull out some of his expertise to share with all of you. So glad to have you.
Bob Bailey: Good morning, how are you? Thanks for having me.
Maureen: I love to start back in the beginning. And so you’ve been in account management your entire career, right?
Bob: Yes.
Maureen: Tell me a little bit about what interested you in that early on. Did you always know that that was what you wanted to do or was it just something that you fell into?
Bob: Interesting question. I haven’t thought about that in a really long time. You know, when I think about how I got into the business, I don’t think there’s a lot of high school kids running around saying, I want to be an account executive. That really isn’t a thing, but there were a couple of areas that really interested me. First was actually being an attorney. So I loved the idea.
Maureen: Exactly. Yes. That’s what you thought you wanted to do?
Bob: Yes, I did. I thought I wanted to be an attorney. I was always super interested in that. And the idea of these like the TV moments where you’re in high stakes situations, you’re persuading people, you’re doing those kinds of things, which was really interesting to me. But the idea of going to school for a lot longer did not interest me.
Maureen: So you were not a school kid. You were not a kid that enjoyed school.
Bob: No, when I was in high school, my academic gifts were really not apparent to people. But when I was a senior in high school, we took these mini courses. We took four mini courses that we got to pick for English class. And I was always a good writer. I always really enjoyed writing. And it saved me and it covered a lot of soft spots in certain ways.
And I took an advertising course and I fell in love with that and the idea of, , brands and helping them stand apart and finding really interesting ways to do that. And then I also took a debate course. And so it taught me how to think through different situations, structure a point of view and express that point of view, , in front of others and to try to do that in a persuasive manner. I fused those two things together.
I didn’t know I was doing that at the time, but I put those two things together. I love this, I love that. And that’s kind of what the agency world is all about, ? And I wasn’t a creative in that I wasn’t a writer or a designer. I was very business focused.
So, the account side was really where it was at for me. I wanted to get into that business straight out of school, especially.
In 1993 I began at a direct marketing agency called Catalyst and quickly learned the importance of accountability in your marketing… I then moved into more of a brand and integrated model, because I wanted to expand my knowledge that way. And all that time, I began as an account coordinator on my first job, which I don’t even think that’s a job anymore.
But I was in a storage room and doing whatever. And then, as I went I rose through the director of client service levels. COO, President, and then it was just time to see if I could do it on my own.
Maureen: So going back to Catalyst. So first of all, I want to just reflect back to you what I’m hearing. You mentioned writing in those very early days saved you from some soft spots where you were not as strong on the academic side, but also said that your interest on the attorney side of things was persuasion and debate and advertising. You love the persuasion side of things.
Those are all so connected. They’re very different lanes. An attorney versus accounts and business management, really, and managing partner and the work that you’re doing now, but they are connected in a lot of ways.
I’ve been thinking about that a lot lately, just the idea of as a business owner, how many various hats you have to wear and you have to be able to be nimble to kind of go from one lane to another. And sometimes you probably are wearing a hat that’s very similar to an attorney in terms of reviewing documents and that thing.
So I’m curious about your time at Catalyst and what sort of place that was. Maybe you don’t even have to speak about them specifically, but just, I spent 10 years in professional services before I started and grew Agency 29 to a full-time thing.
And there is a lot about the culture that I very intentionally created at Agency 29 that is built on the things I really, really hated from previous roles and places. So, I’m curious about Catalyst and some of the other places that you worked before starting Truth, how those shape what you do at Truth and how you work and how you grow the team today.
Bob: Yes, that’s an interesting question too. I think we’re ultimately as leaders, we’re the product of a lot of really good things and a lot of tough things and then when we venture out and try to mold something in our image.
That’s subconsciously and sometimes consciously what we’re doing is, we’re taking those bits that really work and we’re changing and tweaking some of the stuff that really didn’t work for us.
I would say that at Catalyst, right out of the gate, I was the 19th person hired there. So it was small. It was fast. It was a really hard charge and really hard working, really intense, which, in the first six months of a career with knowing nothing, that’s a hard place to be. But ultimately, it really shapes you and I think pulls some good stuff out.
That was also a culture in which character really mattered. I watched the two owners a lot. I got to interact with them a lot because of our size, which was great. But I really paid attention to how they carried themselves in good situations and in hard situations and how they responded to mistakes and bad things. I learned there that the greatest mistake is inaction.
As long as you’re doing your level best, as long as you’re operating within the values of the company and the team first, mistakes are going to happen.
And in fact, as long as you’re learning from those, then they can be a good thing. But the number one thing is to just act. Keep going. And I think that’s a hard thing for people a lot of times.
I think people tend to wait for perfect situations or all the information before they will form a decision and take a step, but business isn’t like that. I think that one of the things that I’ve really tried hard to do at Truth is create that same culture where I value action.
Two of our values are energy and ambition. If you’re doing that and you’re telling the truth and you’re being honest and you’re taking care of your teams, that’s fine. Nobody’s getting in trouble. And I think that’s probably the most salient thing that I learned at a young age that really still sticks with me, to try to create an environment where people can just be their best and be comfortable, and feel safe enough to take those risks.
Maureen: I was just going to say that word safe because that’s really ultimately what it comes down to, right? It’s that people want to know that they’re in a safe environment and that means something different to a number of people, right? This idea that as long as you’re aligned with our core values, you’re not going to get in trouble.
I literally had the same conversation with my kids the other day when we were talking about who did something to knock something down and no one would ‘fess up to it.
I still don’t know who did it, but I said, I don’t care about the thing that got knocked down. I care about the fact that I know that it was one of you two and nobody’s telling me what happened, right? That’s the problem. You’re not going to get in trouble, but it’s about the truth.
Not to skip a few, because I do want to talk about the transition and how Truth was created, but tell us about the name a little bit. Where did that come from? Maybe in that you can also talk about your partners and kind of why you guys wanted to team up.
Bob: Yes, Truth is really, it’s a really interesting idea. Before we started it, I’m going to say we started in 2013, around 2010 or so, you started to see a lot of data of consumers distrusting brands, right? It became a real topic of conversation. And it also was starting to translate into trust diminishing between clients and agencies on both sides.
And so believe it or not, the question that started it was, hey, do you think an agency could thrive by telling the truth at every turn? And it was simple but not easy, right?
I love the simplicity of the idea still today. But it became our north star. Like let’s just really simplify this thing. If you lean into your credibility and you’re confident in what you do and you place your clients first all the time, no matter what, then let that be the way.
And it really does simplify things. There’s really no question about what to do or how to do it. And so that was the impetus of the Truth aspect.
And Collective was actually about a group of people who believed that, but then also our model was we wanted to not build a big agency with tons of head count and things like that.
We wanted to be able to build flexible teams based on what the client needed. Sometimes a client is going to need a brand strategy and a brand identity. That’s a different team than a client who needs a national TV spot, for example.
And so the flexibility to bring the best talent to that table was always really important to us. And that’s Truth Collective.
I have two partners and one is John Roberts, who’s a strategist and Jeremy Schwartz, who’s a creative and we worked together at our former agency for a number of years. Gosh, I think, I think we’ve been working together now for probably 25 years or so. 13 at Truth and the rest, at our former agency.
And we had done a lot to support that agency, support the team, support those clients. And it got to a point where the thing that we had not done was see if we could build it for ourselves. And that was the impetus to take that leap.
It was important for us at the time too. Being a sole founder, I really respect that about you. Like I would have a ton of questions for you about that.
But for us, the type of work that we were doing, we recognized that if you have solid client leadership skills, if you have solid strategic skills and solid creative skills, that’s the three-legged stool thing, you can get a lot done. Three people can get a ton done and so that was important to us, and that actually is how we shaped the business.
Maureen: It’s so interesting for you to say that about me being a sole founder because I’ve had other businesses where I was in partnership and partnership is actually in my mind more difficult. So I know exactly what you’re talking about with that idea of a three-legged stool and the strength of you all kind of in it together, but it can be so hard to find people who have shared values, same mindset, looking to do the same thing
So, 13 years later, you’re still in this and nobody changed their mind and said, what, this isn’t for me or you came to an impasse or something like that. So I think that there’s a lot to be said about the strength that the three of you have as people and your character to kind of stick it out together.
I’m not saying that there haven’t been hurdles along the way. I’m sure there have been. It’s life, right? But to be able to kind of overcome that and stick it out together.
And again, I’ve said this in other interviews as well, that even if that wasn’t the case and somebody needed to go in another direction, that that would be okay too, right? It’s more about kind of sticking with what is the right thing for all of the parties involved?
Bob: It is. I’m grateful for the fact that the three of us have aligned as well as we have for this period of time. I think it’s unusual. But I think what it comes down to, it doesn’t necessarily mean we agree on the same things all the time because that wouldn’t be real, right? But I think what it does do is it keeps us focused on the bigger picture.
Consensus doesn’t mean agreement all the time, right? And sometimes consensus is just about like, okay, what’s the best way to move forward for our team and for our clients? You know, even if Bob would rather a different path be chosen.
And I think it really comes down to how connected we are and how connected partners stay. Because it’s super easy to be really connected in the early days, in the first few years of things, because it’s the three of you. Then it’s five of you, but it’s super tight,in the early days.
And I think it’s really easy for partners to drift apart and to, I’m solely focused on the clients, I’m solely focused on this and that. And that’s when misalignment can come in.
Actually during COVID, like the first couple of days of COVID in 2020, we decided that the three of us were going to meet, we’re going to dedicate every Friday morning together. And nobody was coming in the office, but the three of us were coming into the office and just working together and talking together and figuring out what to do.
And we still do that every Friday morning. It’s called the JBJ meeting. It’s not John Bon Jovi, it is Jeremy, John and Bob. Jeremy, Bob and John. We still do it every Friday. And it’s incredibly helpful to stay aligned and to know that you’ve got people that you can lean on and sometimes you’re picking them up.
Maureen: Totally. Yes, yes, I love that. Critically important.
You talked a little bit about this idea of a flexible team and that that’s where the concept of collective came in and this search for Truth and the pursuit of doing the right thing is kind of how I receive that in how you talk about it. And this idea of what we do and what we don’t do.
So you and I are both team “niches”, right? So, we believe what they say about that, riches in the niches, but talk about yours.
So obviously ours is an industry focus in food, beverage, and agriculture. You went more services focused on brand identity and brand activation. Talk a little bit about that because that was, I remember you guys making that shift years ago. It was really, I think it was really novel at the time, right? To be more services focused like that.
So talk a little bit about how you found that? How did you determine what made you want to do it?
Bob: Good question. We actually started that way in the very beginning. We started with a real focus on the things that we were great at and we got off the ground that way.
As client relationships deepen, they say, hey, can you help us with a website? Hey, can you help us do these things, right? And so, of course, you want to help them and you service them and ultimately, you start to build out different offerings, different capabilities, things like that.
You can be good at a lot of things, but I think you can be great and elite at a few things.
A few years ago, probably like four years ago, I don’t remember exactly when it was, but we said, listen, we’re not sector specialists. We didn’t feel like that was the right approach for us, but we really wanted to simplify things. And we focused on the zone where we can provide elite services. And that’s brand strategy and identity and it’s brand activation work.
So translating that brand into a brave distinctive campaign platform. And even within the brand activation space, we tend to focus more on the upper funnel aspect of the campaigns. You know, I don’t have a studio cranking out thousands of banner ads, things like that. And so we really focused where we felt we could add the greatest value to our clients. And those were the two areas that we felt best about.
Maureen: Yes, right.
You mentioned that you started out with a brand focus, but there was a time where you made a shift to only do a certain type of work, right?
Bob: If it doesn’t fall into those two camps, I say no. I don’t try to fit things. I don’t try to structure things. I’d rather just have good people that I know that I think could do a good job for them and help them that way. Yes, mean, there’s always been things that we have not done. We don’t do media. We don’t do PR. We never have.
Part of the Collective is recognizing that there’s really exceptional people that do this all day long. There’s people who have forgotten more about media than I will ever know. And so it’s really about knowing where your value is going to come from and where you need to augment that with somebody else’s. I don’t know if I answered your question there.
Maureen: Yes, that makes sense. And we could have a whole other conversation about the importance of saying no and what is right for you versus what isn’t. If we have time to circle back to that, we can go into it.
But I want to shift over to your AI Bravestorm initiative and have you talk about that a little bit, especially on the tail end of this conversation where we’re talking about elite and what you do well and it being a cornerstone for Truth and really staying in your lane.
Why is AI now deserving to be part of that lane?
Bob: Boy, I think we experienced that Chat-GPT moment a few years ago with everybody else. I mean, you remember it probably the first time you touched it and it was really different.
We were having a conversation about that and one of two points of view emerged. Like this is garbage, right? It’s nothing, this is crap or it’s boy, this could really change how the world works and how we work.
We were immediately aligned on that path. There were a lot of reservations and questions about it, but we really saw the opportunity of it all. And from that, we went into this FAFO mode, F-A-F-O, fuck around, figure it out mode.
Maureen: I love it.
Bob: And that led to more curiosity and that led us to create a training curriculum for all of our people.
One of the benefits of being a small company is you can train everybody all at the same time. And we created a training curriculum, did bi-weekly homework assignments that everybody was doing and everybody learned and showed up and presented their work, which led to real breakthroughs in terms of skillset and skill capacity building.
And that turned into working a little bit differently internally. And actually one of our people said, geez, why don’t we work this way with clients? Could we apply this to client work situations? And we piloted it with a couple clients in Q4 of 2024, and the results were pretty good. We learned a lot and we commercialized it really hard starting in Q1 of 25.
Really what it does is it brings our clients directly into the creative process. There’s no black box.
Maureen: I have a million questions for you that I’d love to get into about what exactly that looks like when you say you’re bringing them in and they’re coming to the table.
But prior to that, I want to just kind of talk about this concept of bringing it to the team, right? And you mentioned that you’re training them, you’re giving them homework, and you talked a little bit about the perception that you welcomed it, welcomed this iteration of AI.
Of course it’s been around for a long time, but we’re talking about what’s been happening over the last couple of years. That there are some agencies and even companies in general that saw this happening and approached it with fear. There were concerns about, is this going to replace my job? Am I going to be obsolete? Am I going to have to change everything about the way that I’ve done, that I’m doing things?
Instead, your team welcomed it with open arms, not only from the leadership, but from, it sounds like, every person. Why do you think that that happened?
Bob: Boy, well, I’ll be really candid. There were varying degrees. All of those things, all those emotions that you just described, they live among our team. They’re regular people. And so I think what was really core to us is that we were always really clear that humans were going to be in the driver’s seat of everything that we do.
And we’re not going to take a picture and spit out 50 banners and see you later. We’re never going to do that. We really wanted to harness it to help us be more elite at what we do and our skill and to sharpen it from that perspective. And I think that the group training made it okay for everybody. They were coming every other week on Wednesdays, presenting your homework to people and talking about what could be a writing assignment, could be a design assignment, whatever it was.
And you take them through what you did and the decisions that you made and what was great about it and what sucked about it. And everybody learned from one another. And I think that environment made it okay. We were okay to experiment and do these things. And it’s really okay to talk about what’s great about it and what’s less great about it.
I think we just created an open, honest environment around it and let people, we didn’t force it on people, right? People tend to support what they help to create. And so they were absolutely part of our AI adoption and evolution and business pivot in that regard, because they’re the right conditions to do it and to experiment and to learn from.
Maureen: I think it goes back to what we were talking about in terms of culture and making it a safe place for people, right? That I’m sure contributed to people feeling comfortable that they could bring their whole selves to those meetings and say, this was really hard or this was stupid or I couldn’t get past this or this was frustrating or whatever, right?
In some environments where your bosses are asking you to model and test some new technology, at times there’s an undertone of that, right? That’s not actually, let’s figure this out together. You’re going to figure this out and we’re going to use it whether you like it or not. That safety that you created for them allowed them to bring their whole selves to those meetings.
Bob: I think that’s true. I’m glad you brought it up because I hadn’t thought this deeply about this until this conversation. But there are situations where it is a top-down mandate: do these things and use it starting now. There’s also like the result of that is like there’s a lot of internal sabotage that happens, because people don’t necessarily want to do that or they’re afraid to do that. And so they don’t do that.
So many AI initiatives fail. I think close to 90 % of AI initiatives are failing right now. And I think a lot of it is that. It’s top down from people who don’t fully understand it and just want things to happen in that chain of command way.
Maureen: I have the same philosophy, right? When we’re modeling something or testing something that we want to try with clients, we are our own guinea pigs first. How can we model this in-house right before we bring it outside? So when was the right time to start modeling this with clients? And what exactly does that look like in terms of how you’re engaging with clients in this?
Bob: So we have to rewind just for a second. When we chose those two specific lanes a few years ago, One reason was, here’s our real expertise. Like these are our zones of genius. We’re getting behind these things.
The other thing we did at that time was we created real protocols and standards around how we do each of those two things. They’re highly creative, but we created systems around them. Which also creates containment.
We’re big believers in containing tasks and binding them in time. And so the traditional way of doing a creative timeline would be, okay, we need three weeks to get to a strategy. We need four weeks to get to concepts, all that stuff, right? And the reality is like clients, they need better than that.
And so we’ve always been about containment. And so we were always looking for ways, with focus comes containment. And so we were already operating under that way of thinking.
And then the AI [movement] was, okay, this lets us really contain things. It lets us bring the very best work and thinking to it in a very contained environment. And we felt like we could create real advantages for clients that way. Can we get clients and market faster? And how much so.
Maureen: When you say AI lets you contain things, is that truly what you mean or is it more so that AI allowed you to be faster, which is what the client wanted in terms of getting to that rather than three weeks, it was contained into less time.
Bob: So I think what AI allowed us to do was to continue in this containment place, but with AI, there’s no like shortcuts of knowledge. It’s still because of the way we were doing it, right? We were building in those protocols I was talking about. All the brand frameworks, all the tools that we used all the time, right? The ways of working that were proven out over a decade. We trained the AI on those.
And so you have real insight, you have IP, you have consistency there. And so that is what really helped accelerate and ensure a premium output. Right. Because that’s important.
Anybody can go fast. Nobody remembers your fast if it’s not good.
And so I think what the AI lets us do is embed all of those things that we have always done in a way that’s very repeatable and very, very fast. And so that led us to say, okay, I bet we can get clients into the market 40% faster. I bet we can do it for less money. And I bet we can do so and grow the company in a way that doesn’t require head count every single time you grow. Because that’s not a scalable business.
Those were the things that were coming together for us that said, well, if we configure this and we lean into our system and we operationalize it through this tool, that is what creates that step function change. And that’s what we wanted to try.
Maureen: So tell me a little bit about what the client’s perception of that has been. When you said we’re thinking of doing this and even when, after the first few, when it’s now certainly a more established part of the way that you work, what’s the concerns or the positivity or what’s the sentiment that prospects or active clients have when you talk about AI Bravestorm and how you use AI as a thought partner.
Bob: It’s a really different way of thinking, right? We always talk about the advantages of it first. And we talk about eliminating all gaps between clients and agencies, because everybody understands that that exists and everybody understands that that’s a problem, right?
We’re pointing out the flaws in the traditional creative workflow. There’s waste. There just is. And so we talk about ways to mitigate that.
There are business reasons to do it. And then when we can point to them and say we can do it in a way that ensures premium creative output, that is strategically grounded. [Clients are] very interested and they want to learn more about how that happens. There’s a lot of companies who are still under these AI mandates, but they’re not really sure what to be doing about it.
Sometimes partnering with somebody is a great way to get involved and to see how AI can improve the marketing communications function of company X. The other thing that we did, I think I did 70 in-depth interviews with people about this offering.
Maureen: What sort of folks did you talk to?
Bob: Clients, former clients, marketing leaders, people, search consultants, people who, who understand the business,and who see lots and lots of agencies. And I took them through this thing and talked about how it was going to work, what the outputs were going to be. I got some pricing insights from people and, to a person it was, this is as novel an idea as I’ve seen in a really long time.
And it makes sense because it’s using brand new technology, but it is doing it in a way that is strategically grounded and measured that they’re also part of. And so there’s a high degree of control and safety built into it from their standpoint too.
Maureen: Yes, which really is no different than what you had been doing prior to that, right? That it’s all about the systems allows you to be able to have a conversation with a client about their strategy, their identity and their output. It’s knowing that when you get to the end of that, that you’re in alignment is thanks to the processes that you follow along the way. And so really, when you think of it that way, it’s no different, but it’s also wildly different at the same time.
Bob: No, you’re right. And in some of those, I think you’re hitting on something that’s really important because everybody talks about AI and it’s like, oh, it’s going to automate all your stuff, right? There’s a whole lot of messy, unsexy work that has to happen in order to do that. Like picking a lane and creating a structure and a system and proving it out and all those things.
What it did was it allowed us to do that, but then also just bring our clients directly into it. I think that’s the single biggest differentiator of it. Yes, we’re using AI in a really smart, structured way, but our clients are part of the creative process. And like that is a huge unlock. I didn’t see that piece of it coming.
The idea of co-creating with clients is where we’re leveraging all the strengths of Truth Collective and we’re leveraging all the strengths of those brand leaders at the same time with this tool. It’s an incredible unlock. You cover so much ground quickly. You make smart decisions. You’re creating alignment among your team and alignment among client teams is really hard to come by sometimes. And this process does that.
Also the client trust happens really, really fast because they’re part of it and they see it and they understand it now. The old way of working, it might take six months to really have a good trusting relationship with a client, just human nature. This works because they’re in it, because it’s one team.
Maureen: I know that your tagline, slogan, brand statement is brand ever braver. And that’s such an embodiment of that. Such a brave thing to do to not be afraid to try something new and bring your team along and bring clients in for it and really change the way that it’s always been done.
Not only the way that you’ve always done it, but truly the way that it’s always been done. It’s like you mentioned, the feedback you got was, was novel. That’s brave.
Bob: It is, and I do think about that often. I’m not a creative, but I think that one of my obligations is to be brave as a business [leader]. And so you can hide from this thing or you can own it and really charge a path forward.
I think I feel more entrepreneurial today than I have in a long time. And it’s because of this new novel way of doing it. And we are doing it differently and trying to stay ahead of people.
And it changed our business strategy. Our whole business strategy now is about democratizing premium creativity. We want to make what Truth does accessible to more and more and more people. And when that is your vision, then you’re going to go into some really different places as a result of that. And I do think that’s brave and I also think it’s fun. I think it makes it worth doing. In a weird way.
Maureen: I have a bumper sticker that I have pinned to the wall behind me here. I got it at the Ben and Jerry’s facility in Vermont that says, if it’s not fun, why do it? I think it’s a good reminder for anyone, not just agency owners, not just people who are looking to embrace a new tool that could be scary, to shift your mindset into how can I welcome this in and how can I make it fun along the way I think is an admirable way to think about it.
All right, so last question for you and then we’ll wrap up here. We’ll talk just a little bit about what’s next. So, with this weird time that we’re in with AI changing the landscape of how people work, no matter what industry you work in, what do you think is next in terms of the world of brands and marketing when it comes to AI?
Bob: So what it means for us, I’ll talk about what we’re doing about it right now. We are in line with that business strategy of democratizing premium creativity.
We don’t have a vast service line. But I do have, I call it the flywheel. So we have three offerings and three ways we can help clients.
First is the AI Bravestorm strategy creative output.
Second is, after that process, after we’ve trained the tool on all of our IP and your brand’s IP, we give clients access to that. So they can create on their own. And so that’s a software subscription model that is basically Truth on a desktop in a client’s office. And so, anything that they’re creating is going to be based on the brand strategy and all the things to keep it really aligned.
It’s really something. We’ve had a number of clients beta testing it in 2025, and we’re actually rolling it out in the next week or so. Truth Interface. It’s really cool. So it gives clients a lot of autonomy there. So they’re not married to big, expensive retainers.
Maureen: And you’re not bogged down with the little stuff that they can do on their own when you set them up for success. I love everything about it.
Bob: That’s right. And so we’re available for office hours, because they’re going to be creating a lot of stuff on their own. We’ll do office hours and guide and help with all those types of things, keeping the humans into it.
And then also we’re taking all the things that we’ve learned as a company, the training that we’ve done on ourselves and the new workflows and how we do it. And we’re training internal creative teams.
Maureen: Training internal creative teams on the client side.
Bob: Correct. Yes. We are the exclusive AI training partner now for the In-House Agency Forum, which is a national group of internal creative teams, some really large companies, some small companies, but we are offering training programs either online, through cohorts, but we’ll also do enterprise engagements and go on site for a one or two day thing.
And so that’s the flywheel, but we’re helping people wherever they are in that process, we want to help them realize the things that we’ve been able to do and short circuit it. They don’t have to spend two years doing it like we did.
Maureen: So this is not, I guess initially I was thinking that AI Bravestorm was like an initiative that was riding alongside what you were already doing. It’s central, you’re all in.
Bob: It’s central. We’ve doubled down. And if it doesn’t, if I can’t do what you need with a Bravestorm, we’re not going to do it. And the good thing about it is, it can do a lot of things. We can brainstorm a brand strategy. We can brainstorm a campaign, a new name for a company. We haven’t found an application that it won’t work for, but if a client does not want to work in that way, that’s not going to be a good fit for us.
So yes, those are some of the strategic choices that we’ve made around it because we used last year to prove it out. Does it generate the output that we’re looking for, that clients want? Are we saving them time getting into market faster? And is it a good business deal for us? And so once we met those criteria, we said, this is how we work now. So a little brave.
Maureen: I love it. Very brave, very brave. I said that was the last question, but I lied. Tell me about a challenge. Like you said, 13 years you’ve been doing at Truth. If you had to kind of bring it all down into one of the biggest challenges that you have faced in those 10 years, what would you say?
Bob: Hmm, over the course of the biggest thing we faced.
Maureen: I mean, it could be something that transcended that whole time or just like a moment that was a transformative challenge.
Bob: Boy, I don’t know, it seems like there’s a lot of them. I’ll tell you, I think that, I’m sure it’s everybody’s answer, but COVID was, when you own a company, it really stopped you in your tracks. And like there was no strategy for that.
You really had to rely on each other. You can trust about a half a dozen people in those moments. I think that is our ability.
I think about all the time forming the formless, right? I think leaders have to do a good job of forming that which has no form. It’s a Sun Tzu reference, but how do you take this really ambiguous situation and form it and mold it into something that is understandable and that is actionable and I think that what that period did more than any other was, help us form the formless around these things.
I remember, gosh, I think the last real business day was March 13th, Friday, March 13th, 2020. And then starting Monday, it was who knows what’s going on here and clients stopping work and everybody just halting everything.
And that was one of those moments where you say, OK, I’m not sure. Do we have a business anymore? And we had to make damn sure that we did. And I think that’s a challenge. It kind of makes other things seem reasonable.
Maureen: Yes, remember that little global pandemic thing we went through? Yes, that’s a good point.
Bob: Don’t get me wrong. Like the world has been really crazy in a lot of ways since then. You know, it doesn’t seem to really slow down and give anybody a breather. But I think that if you can go through something like that with your team and do it the right way, know, do it together, it comes back to that.
I think a leader’s got to make people feel safe even when they don’t feel safe themselves. I think that’s the job. I guess that’s what I would say. I don’t know if it’s an exciting answer or not.
Maureen: It’s a challenging question. It’s not supposed to be exciting. But yes, I think that’s truthful.
Bob: Hmm. We try.
Maureen: Bob, thank you so much for joining me. I loved this discussion. Thank you for your transparency and your innovation and your bravery and what you guys are doing. I’m a big fan.
Bob: We try. Thanks, Mo. Love you too. Always love watching what you’re doing and how you’re doing it too. I think you guys do a great job and I’m really proud of you and enjoy being your friend. Thanks.