Gully Flowers: Today on Second Wind, Elimeliah Chief Creative Officer at Code and We talked about AI, of course. Everybody loves talking about AI all the time. brands need to get their house in order, what refounding actually means, and why the next generation of creative leaders may up running the whole business. Broad strokes, you've won a lot of awards, worked a lot of great agencies. Jake said what he thinks is interesting about you is that you are the most successful producer ever. And I'm like, well, you became CCO, which is sort of the ultimate goal. I don't know.
Craig Elimeliah: Well, see, the thing, that's the funny part. I started off as a designer. And when in the early days, I was one of the original guys at Firstborn. And back then, if you were a designer, your aspiration was to become a producer. Because if you were a producer, you were running your own accounts. And so you kind of felt like you were kind of a partner in the agent, because you managed your own book of business. And so I think that's
Gully Flowers: I don't think I knew you were at Firstborn, because I was there late days. I was there at the sunset when Dentsu destroyed it. But you worked with Joon and Ferdman and stuff? wow, pre-Joon. Yeah, yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: Yes, was there. I was there before Joon. But yes, I Michael very well. Joon, ⁓ brought Joon in. He was a young Joon and I used to work very closely together. Yeah, ⁓ and I worked very closely together.
Gully Flowers: He's such a unique talent. He's got to be the best CCO I've ever worked with, I think.
Craig Elimeliah: But producer really just came about because we wanted autonomy. And it was just sort of like, if you were a designer, you were basically a commodity. were like, you're just a designer. ⁓ So yeah, producer was like sort of a fake way into ⁓ seniority.
Gully Flowers: downstream, right? Have you felt a second wind in your career or do you feel like it's been a you ⁓ know, smooth journey and you haven't had to make a big pivot yet?
Craig Elimeliah: Not really pivot. I mean, I feel like I'm getting back to my roots. I feel like I'm back to where I started, which I really love. I always found it really weird being in more traditional agencies. It just was always like, what am I doing here? Like, you you would go with the aspiration of like, ⁓ I'm coming to change things because the world was changing. And then like all they ever wanted to do was like, you know, 30 second spots.
Gully Flowers: Yep. Which still is the case for like most of the industry, right? You think, well, 15s now, we've moved to 15s. And the web film, which is nine minutes and nobody watches.
Craig Elimeliah: And you you've got No, I think that's where it's working. Sixth, sixth. Sixth, right. lot of coming out of those smaller digital shops moved into traditional agencies hoping to, help drag advertising into what it really should be, which is this of very multi, you know,
Jacob: You
Craig Elimeliah: highly fragmented, multi-stream, multi-modal, multi-faceted, ⁓ very ecosystem kind of thinking. where I think a lot of agencies failed was just thinking about one part of that ecosystem. was just sort of like, well, TV, that's the most glamorous part because it costs the most to make. if you think about it, that's such inverse thinking when it comes to advertising. Advertising should not cost you a lot of money actually like the idea is to make as good a piece as you can make with the least amount of right and ⁓ You know and and in a world where your consumers are engaging on on Every single surface you can possibly imagine Why would you put all your eggs into the surface that nobody's engaging actually engaging with right like or very few people are engaging with so You know for a long time it being in a traditional agency. It was just kind of like banging my head and I'd pick up the phone and call Jake and be like, hey, I finally sold in some crazy idea that actually had something to do with a channel people are engaging with. Who should we work with? ⁓ So I kind of always felt like very Sisyphusian, right? I was always trying to move that, but when I look back, was wonderful. It was the best thing that could have ever happened to me because of the moment we're in right now, I find myself like,
Gully Flowers: Mmm.
Craig Elimeliah: benefiting from all of that struggle and all of that kind of like really pushing to kind of unify, you know, marketing efforts across all surfaces, which is where we are today. right. AI I think is really helpful in, in orchestrating every single surface. And so you can really kind of, you know, provide the governance necessary to make sure that this, you know, the right message, right place, right time, right person, right, you know, all that good stuff. But I also think that benefiting from LLMs kind of being this sort of like all seeing eye where as a brand you can no longer have a fragmented brand, right? Like it needs to make sense. It needs to have credibility. It needs to work across every single touch point. Otherwise it's not credible, right? And so if anything, that's the pivot. feel like I've been waiting for this moment my entire career and it's finally. happening very fortunately when I'm an adult, you know, and so like I spent a lot of my years just kind of being a curious kid and really exploring. I think if you look at the body of work that I have, it's just a lot of exploration. It's a lot of like pushing the boundaries and it's a lot of, you know, trying to, you know, connect worlds and connect things that weren't necessarily connected. And now we live in a world where you can't survive unless it's connected, you know what I mean? And so I just feel very fortunate that I'm in a place in time where I have seniority and I have experience and I have vision and hindsight ⁓ and the wherewithal to take it on because I've been pushing that rock up that hill for so many years. And so my muscles up here are pretty strong.
Jacob: And can we take back up to when you were sort of shifting from design to producer and then maybe use that as a launching point for your role now, right? Cause like, you know, as CCO, you're not often the pure ideas person. to younger people who thinking about how they get into the CCO chair. you know, how should they be thinking about personal branding, know, producing teams, you leading in that way.
Craig Elimeliah: That's a great question. Look, I have always been very fortunate to have worked with CCOs that had very strong personal brands, you know, and I always kind of keyed into the fact that it's very hard to sell an idea unless you have a point of view. selling has always a part ⁓ of the job me at least. ⁓ But you're right, I at this point, we've got thousands of people here that are coming up with ideas and coming up with like amazing concepts and design and activations and apps and sites and all kinds of stuff like that. ⁓ You know, I'm, I feel very lucky and fortunate to be the front man, you know, to take it into the room and kind of use my ability to, you know, have a point of view on where the world is today to help, you know, clients kind of align with, you know, what their business needs. And so the cell for me is just a very natural role to step into. I love selling. love pitching. love, you know, leading teams into pitches. I think that. You know, it's very similar to sports. You know, you have to motivate and encourage and build people's confidence and really believe in what you're putting out there. And, you know, to your point, one of the transitions that I had to make very early in my career was it wasn't enough just to kind of have a design eye and have a point of view on where the internet is going. But how do you get it done? How do you make it? How do you? And so because it was such a new thing back then, you had to be a producer. You had to know what to do. You had to just figure it out. And so I think that has just stuck with me my entire career. I'm also a closet strategist, right? I've always been very close to strategy. I've always been ⁓ involved in how the work comes to be and what insights and what imperatives need to live in the work. so... I don't know, I feel like we're moving into a moment in time where AI is doing a lot of the output and we have to do a lot of the input, right? And we all know the saying like shit in, shit out. So, you you're only gonna get back what you put in. So I think I've always felt like I had to put in as much of myself as possible in order to sell an idea because it's really hard. Like you're getting in front of a client who's responsible for. you know, selling a product, moving a product, you know, millions of dollars, and you're trying to convince them that this crazy thing that you thought of just a few days ago is going to change their business. It's a big leap of faith to take in someone. And so I think that's just part of instinctually who I am is to think about not just the idea, but what goes into making the idea, what goes into bringing it. to life as part of the cell, because I do think confidence is 90 % of everything. I mean, you can have a really good idea. And sometimes you watch something or you see something, you're like, how did that get made? Like, that's such a ridiculous thing.
Gully Flowers: We got all those calls
Craig Elimeliah: Right. And it got made because someone was really confident. You know, someone believed in it enough to get others to believe in it. And so I think that's part of the job of being a CCO is to believe in something so much that you can convince other people around you to go along and to take that leap of faith, because no one knows. Right. It's a gamble. It's always going to be a gamble. I think today you have more tools that can do a lot of like pre-optimization and post-optimization. And I think that we live in a more dynamic environment where you can put something out and then you can kind of tweak it while it's in market and you can kind of test it while it's in market. ⁓ But back in the day, you know, a big idea was almost like a car. It kind of lost value the second you drove it off the lot, right? You put it out there and then it's like diminishing in value versus today. What you want to try to do is plant a seed that's going to grow. in market that's going to figure out like, what are all the signals? How are people responding? And that, and that idea should be able to respond in real time and sort of grow, you know, into whatever is necessary for that message to, to resonate. And so that's, that's what I find to be incredibly exciting right now, because, you know, AI allows us to do that at scale and, you know, speed and scale has, have always been the the holy grail of our industry. Like how fast can we get out there? How far can we push it? But speed and scale always, you know, sort of, you know, it put the brand at risk because we all know that when you run fast and when you go far, the brand starts to, you know, break apart. But with AI and a lot of the tools we have today, You can have speed, can have scale, and you have brand because AI is sort of the governance layer. with AI and a lot of the tools we have today, you can get, you can have all three. You have speed, can have scale, and you can have brand because is sort of the governance layer. that keeps the brand intact while you're going incredibly fast and incredibly far.
Gully Flowers: It sounds like spent. 20 years trying to convince people to do something new and different. usually a totally different way to measure things. And it's unfamiliar, right? So it's dangerous.
Craig Elimeliah: I've always been unconventional and that's been part of my brand. And I feel like the industry needed ⁓ some adversarial force to ⁓ give ⁓ teeth and tension ⁓ and to be to question things and to look at performance and look at spend and look at creative and look at things through a different lens. And I've always stayed true to that. And ⁓ in a lot cases, you know, it didn't work to my, you know, I've had a lot of ideas killed because it was just too risky. was too, it was too abstract. And, but I, but I stuck with it. And what I've learned is that, you know, we live in a day and an age where that is, you know, that is the environment, right? You do have to measure things differently. You do have to look at things differently. I don't think consumers are dumb anymore, right? Like with AI and with, you know, with You know, we talk a lot about man and machine and you have to talk to both agents and people. And so you need to be like, you know, you need to be as credible and as clear as possible. So agents, you know, can, can, can rate your credibility, but then you also have to be as emotionally resonant as possible in order to connect with people. And so you're doing these two things at once. And that's always kind of been the way my brain was wired. And, you know, it, it, it's helping me right now because it's sort of native to how the industry is shaking out. I think, you know, the response, what was once, you know, fear and maybe risk aversion, I think today is almost the opposite. It's coming from the top down where, you know, CEOs are telling their organizations, you have to do this. You can't, you know, there's no, you know, you cannot do things the way you've been doing them. So look, I... I'm like exhausted. just got back from Adobe Summit last night and I could tell you like this is the case. You you go to these these conferences where the biggest decision makers are coming together and they're talking about this stuff and it's real. You know, it really is real. they and I could tell you every brief that comes in is written very differently than they were written a year ago. Right. It's no longer, you know, I'm looking for an AOR to like write me a ⁓ you know, an emotionally resonant manifesto and shepherd my brand into culture. It's I need speed. need scale. I need brand. I need creative excellence in pipes. I need someone who understands, you know, content supply chain, who understands how, you know, how to, you know, how to leverage technology in order to do all of the things that it's capable of doing. And I do think within the next few years, we're going to see a big shift. mean, we're seeing it already.
Gully Flowers: Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: to say in a few years, but we're going to see a big shift in sort of who kind of takes the lead ⁓ from a brand perspective, where I think it was once ⁓ kind of the realm of the emotional, and now I think it's moving more to the realm of the functional, obviously with the emotional built in. ⁓ But it's really technology that's underpinning all of this stuff. ⁓ I don't know that there's been a more exciting time to be in this industry. I think we're gonna finally realize some of the things we've always been trying to do, but couldn't really achieve it because of limitations.
Jacob: all marketeers both on the client and agency side have the same challenge, as the business model is changing. and we can simplify that to we all used to make money for hours for output. And now that needs to change, right? Like, do you see clients embracing that?
Craig Elimeliah: Absolutely, absolutely. And that's what I meant. It's finally happening where the alignment between agencies and clients are coming together. Yeah, we're having these discussions and when what took five weeks now takes five days or sometimes five minutes, right? You can no longer look at time and. You have to look at you know outcomes and what it takes to do something and what the result is a hundred percent yeah, those conversations are and and they're fun conversations to have because That in itself is is a creative endeavor, right? It takes a lot of creativity to figure out what what that looks like. No one there's no there's no playbook There's no model yet and we're all figuring out figuring it out in real time and and look, you know, it's it's interesting because
Jacob: Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: I think as agencies are platforming and they are platforming, we're all becoming platforms and we all have our platform that we're building and WPP is open and Omnicom has Omni and Publicis has their thing and Stagwell has the machine. And we all have these platforms that we're selling to do a lot of the sort of orchestration and kind of the day-to-day stuff. And then on top of that are services, right? So you have software and services that are now ⁓ sort of the new the new model and where that's very different from where we came from, which was only services, right? And so I think that clients are actually really excited to have those conversations because I think it benefits everybody. It benefits everyone.
Jacob: Do you see SaaS as being one of your biggest competitors now?
Craig Elimeliah: for the time being, for the time being. think ⁓ a world, ⁓ the thing. organizations, exactly, SaaS organizations are sales organizations. They ⁓ sales. They understand sales. I think we could learn a lot from them. And we are. I can tell you, especially from a Code and Theory perspective, we are learning a lot about how those companies sell and how we're the best of what we're learning.
Gully Flowers: They're very good at sales. The delivery is not as strong.
Craig Elimeliah: ⁓ And there's a tremendous, I think there's a tremendous culture there of understanding how to get paid for what you do and for the outcomes. But what we do is a people business. think it will always be a people business. It's about relationships. It's about trust. again, think it's, is a creative endeavor, right? The ability to create change is creativity. You asked before what it takes to be a CCO today. It's also being able to involve yourself in those conversations and to use creativity to be able to say, can we form a commercial partnership that benefits everyone? And I think SaaS, for the time being, but at some point when a brand is fully invocable to the sense that where everything is kind of. you know, sort of exposed in a way that things are consuming other things and everything's kind of connecting via MCP or API or command line, whatever that might be, ⁓ you know, SaaS sort of goes away and everything kind of becomes very interoperable and interchangeable. And ⁓ so that model is changing. And I think we're becoming a little more like them and they're becoming a little more like us, you know, in that regard. So I think there's some some brackish middle we all meet in that becomes fun again as well becomes fun.
Jacob: Good word. ⁓ Given, you you mentioned before how you think brands have to move more towards utility base and sort of the emotional storytelling that's kind of been the linchpin of our industries will still be important, but will not be the top layer anymore. Are you finding that challenging from a recruitment standpoint? Cause the, you know, the The people that come up with the ideas have basically been educated to make TV spots for...
Craig Elimeliah: It's hard. It's hard. We're seeing. It's funny. I'm seeing some of the more seasoned writers, art directors, creative directors. There's a handful that have fully taken to the new tools and they understand the systemization of a brand. They understand how to write to that systemization. They understand how to inject storytelling into that systemization. but there's a big middle that's not there. And what's exciting is we're meeting new talent. We're meeting new people that you and I have been around for a long time. These are people we've never met before. These are people we haven't had parties with or seen at Cannes. And that's exciting. There's a new breath ⁓ in the industry. There's just a new, I feel like there's just like a new wave of talent. that's coming in that under that inherently understand the convergence of creativity and technology and they inherently understand, you know, the the role of storytelling inside of a generative experience or inside of a technology powered experience or inside content at scale. Right. And and it's exciting. It's still early. It's there's not a lot of people out there that can do this. But I mean, I remember when I was a young flash designer, there was just a handful of us who could do that. And then there were more, and then there were more, and then there were more. And I do think that the acceleration of the technology will also sort of ⁓ accelerate the amount of people who can play with it and who can master it. But you're right. There's a lot of people in the industry right now that unfortunately, ⁓ need to catch up with the client demand of being able to use new tools. in a lot of cases, it's not even using new tools, it's building their own tools. I have designers that literally build their own tools, which is wild. It's wild. And I love it. I love it. Every single day, I have a different designer coming to me with a tool they built to do the thing they need to do.
Gully Flowers: That's cool.
Jacob: Yeah. ⁓ think that people in your who were really successful tended to have a mix of coding background, design background, and some production background, you know, which was their core competency, you know, for who's really successful is a little nebulous, but like kind of always had that, right? You know, like in this new class, are you seeing sort of a profile that's starting to... ⁓ to percolate.
Craig Elimeliah: Yeah, I would say there's this level of comfort inside of a command line, inside of a ⁓ coding screen that I've never seen before. And it's because coding has become this vibe coding, right? People are just so much more comfortable creating prototypes and creating artifacts that are either close to done or very high fidelity, extremely high fidelity. And there's a confidence in that that I think people our age probably would have like major imposter syndrome about, right? And it's like, you know, I remember being a young creative and like being able to spin something up pretty quickly, but I'd actually hold onto it for a few days because I didn't want anyone to think that it was easy to do, you know, and I just kind of like, you you sort of like, I don't want, I don't want to give this away too fast. ⁓ Here's this profile today where there is zero like hesitation where it's like, Hey, I just spun this thing up and it looks fucking awesome and took me like an hour. What do you think? And I'm just like, wow, like that's awesome. yeah, it's this, it's this wild convergence of like digital confidence or, know, like kind of technical confidence and taste, like really good taste, like design taste. And I think aesthetics are definitely starting to change. think what we refer to a lot of generative stuff is slop, but I think there are people doing really beautiful things with generative AI. think there are people who are harnessing it in a way and understanding how to get the right output from the medium that complements the medium. doesn't try to create something that it's not. ⁓ Yeah. And that taste really is sort of the leading kind of attribute and everything else is sort of in service of, right? And so they're comfortable in the tools, they're comfortable, able to articulate, they have writing tools, they have design tools. So having that level of taste and understanding in culture and being able to manufacture something that's going to resonate in culture. but doing it really fast and being super confident in how fast they're doing it because they're also eager to iterate. They're not afraid to bring you something and be like, ⁓ that's not right. Okay, back to the drawing board. I'm happy to go like explore some more. where in our generation, it's like heads down six weeks, don't look, I'm protecting, I don't want you to see, I'm cooking, I'm in the kitchen, right? Like it's all out in the open now. And I think that's great. You know, I really think that's a wonderful thing because that, to me, a lot of the stress and the anxiety in our industry came from that sort of lack of collaboration. It was like, we all went back into our caves and everyone's wondering like, what are they doing? Did they understand the brief? Did they not understand the brief? When am I going to see it? You know, and now it's like, hey, here's something. You like it? Nope.
Gully Flowers: Mm. Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: I'll be right back. I'll give you something else. I'll be right back. I'll give you something else." And that's kind of great. there's so much less stress where even clients I think are really enjoying the repartee. Like they're enjoying the back and forth. They feel more involved. And, you know, like I can't tell you how many times I've been in a pitch or been in a client meeting where they're like, yeah, we want this to be collaborative. We want to work with you. And there was no real way to do that. Right?
Gully Flowers: Yeah. Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: But now you can, now you can like bring them into the process. We share Figma boards, we share prototypes, we share all kinds of things in real time and we're doing it in real time. And I just see a really sort of a renewed sense of partnership between us and our clients.
Jacob: It's awesome.
Gully Flowers: Do you believe every agency will be a social agency from like a paid advertising perspective? Or do you think they already are?
Craig Elimeliah: What do mean the social agency?
Gully Flowers: Well, it feels like, you know, over 50 % of media spend now goes to agents, to social, right?
Craig Elimeliah: ⁓ yeah. People said the same thing about digital, right? Yeah, I mean, look, I think that social represents a large part of where people are consuming content. And I don't see it as social necessarily anymore. I see it as ⁓ a very important channel within an ecosystem of many other channels that are required to, you know, communicate a message ⁓ to a potential customer or to a current customer. I sort of consider myself like, or I consider our agency to be sort of touch point agnostic. You really have to be able to think ecosystem first and not every agency can execute ecosystem first. I don't claim that Code and Theory can do every single surface, but I do think that we are really good at orchestrating an idea or a concept or a piece of creative across a very complex kind of ecosystem. And yeah, there are people who do one thing really well. And then I think the agency of the future is going to have the ability to look at any sort of composable ecosystem and be able to execute against it in the most effective way possible. Some will be better than others. think you don't want this to become completely commodified. I think that clients will choose agencies that have strengths in certain areas and they might not have strengths in other areas, but they have to be capable enough to understand the importance of the ecosystem, not TV, right? They can't believe that TV is the end all be all. Like that has to stop. I mean, that is toxic. And ⁓ I think it's up to us to decide where we want to flex our muscles.
Gully Flowers: Because most of the digital shops of Code and Theory's know, brethren, didn't make it.
Craig Elimeliah: They didn't.
Gully Flowers: I want talk about shifting like better AI tools to like systems. And just understand like how you do that a large organization where that often represents like changing behaviors on their end and rethinking the way they operate. ⁓ how do you do that without saying to a client like, you have to change everything about way you work?
Craig Elimeliah: Yeah, we actually think the opposite. We build tools that plug into their systems. We build processes that plug. So our kind of like mantra is, you know, we work where you work. We understand org change is like the hardest. Any agency that thinks like they're going to walk into some hundred year old company and change the way they work is delusional, right? It's not.
Gully Flowers: Even a 30 year old company, Like, I mean, Microsoft, Amazon, you know, these are very large. Yeah.
Jacob: Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: Or even a five year old company, is someone going to walk into Anthropic and tell them to do things differently because they need to make an ad? Like, absurd, absurd. No, I think an agency has to be like fluid, like liquid. You need to be able to plug into your clients, meet them where they are, understand what their processes are, understand their culture, understand how they work. and meet them there. Like that's what they're paying you for. They're paying you to meet them where they are. They're not paying you to walk in there and be like, no, sorry. You know, I'm sorry, Campbell's Soup Company. Stop making soup and pay attention to, I need you to approve these five, you know, these five TV spots. And, you know, that's not the priority. The priority is to do what they do best. And, you know, we are their most valuable partner if we understand how they work. what their culture is and how we can be additive to that. And in many cases, like big companies, they can't be agile. So can we be agile on their behalf? They can't be culturally connected because of what, so can we help them do, so you really wanna meet them where they need to be met. Don't try to change them. It's not gonna work. It's not good. Look, there are, processes in which they will have to change in order for them to get what they want. Right. So if you come to me and you say, hey, I need you to make me a 30 second spot using AI and I need it in instead of five weeks, I need it in five days. I'm like, great. I love that. We could definitely do that. But guess what? You have to approve it in one day. Right. You have to approve it in one hour. Right. So the whole thing has to
Gully Flowers: Yeah. Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: work together so you can't expect to get more from less but not change the way you're doing things. So if you're motivated to take on a new process then yeah, you have to understand what comes along with that, right?
Gully Flowers: And are you getting briefs that are shifting from deliverables to problems to solve?
Craig Elimeliah: ⁓ yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Big problems, major problems. Big, big, problems, yes.
Jacob: it sounds like the thing you're most excited about is how ⁓ sort of marketing and the internet gets ⁓ a new infrastructure
Craig Elimeliah: Yes. I mean, look, I just came back from a conference, at Adobe where, like the largest infrastructure provider is, completely, changing everything ⁓ that they're doing from a, enablement perspective. sitting there with some the biggest CMOs. at the biggest brands all trying to figure out like, how is everything changing? How are our dams and our repositories changing? How are our workflows changing? I mean, 100%. It's all changing and it's all profoundly kind of underpinned by technology in a way that we've never seen before. mean, the internet, like what's happening right now is like, ⁓ 100x what happened. Like even when digital happened, there were some companies that never fully got digital, right? Like we know there are brands today that are still like just passing PDFs back and forth and trying to figure out how to traffic ⁓ an asset in whatever antiquated way that they still do. But The entire thing, the entire thing is completely, completely upended in a good way. think that the biggest issue in our industry for as long as I've been alive or in it has been silos and disconnection. Everything's disconnected. The data people and the creative people and the strategy people and the trafficking people and the media, there's no orchestration. And look,
Gully Flowers: seven agencies to do an activation. Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: I know I'm known for these takes, I do think orchestration is the thing right now. All of a sudden, things are connected. All of a sudden, things are connected to one another. And if I was a CMO today, and my data, and my creative, and my strategy, and my... Every part of my organization, if those things were not connected... can't do it. You just like walk away, like let someone else do it, right? ⁓ and this is anyone in industry will tell you this, every single time you get a new brief, it's like Groundhog Day. It's like starting from scratch again and again and again. And there's never any sort of compound learnings. It's like ⁓ you do a campaign, yay!
Gully Flowers: Or they're in a 60 page PDF you like, they're not, yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: You do a campaign, you win a lion and then you get the next brief and it's start from the beginning again. It's like, what did we learn? What happened? What did they, you there's just nothing's compounded. There's no memory. We have no memory. Right. And now we do. Now we have memory. Now things are connected. Now things are orchestrated. Now things make sense. Now things, you know, ⁓ they compound. Now we have memory. Now things are connected. things are orchestrated. Now things, you know, ⁓ they compound. And not only is it on the agency that that has to happen, but also on the brand side again. ⁓ I said this before in the world where LLMs are navigating everyone's journey. If you are not in order, if your brand is not in order, it will know immediately and it will deem you not credible. It will not return you as a credible result when you're asking Chachi PT, you know what the coolest, you know, jean jacket is right now, right? It just won't. And so you kind of have to get your house in order. And if you don't get your house in order, you're kind of fucked. Right? So I do, I've been using this term. I don't know if I made it up or not. I'm not going to claim I made it up. definitely, I feel like, you know,
Gully Flowers: Just claim it. Just claim it.
Craig Elimeliah: we've been using this word transformation for a long time, I think we're beyond that. I believe that we are in an age where brands are refounding themselves. we've been using this word transformation for a long time, brand transformation. And, you know, we've all thrown it around a million times. I think we're beyond that. I believe that we are in an age where brands are refounding themselves.
Gully Flowers: Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: Refounding I don't care how old you are you are being you are Refounding yourself and brands are looking back into their history and they're saying okay. We got to clean this shit up and in order to do that you kind of have to refound the brand you have to rethink the brand because it has years and years and years of baggage it has years of debt that render it not credible right and and you know True healing requires deep introspection. And I think that that's the job to be done right now. I think we're going to see the next, I think the next few years are going to be about this idea of refounding brand. And we see it. mean, Apple's Tim Cook step down. That is an example, I believe of refounding. I think Apple is refounding themselves. I think we're going to see the biggest companies in the world start to refound themselves in the dot-com era. Brands thought they could just add .com to their name and that was it. It doesn't work any, right? And everything on the website, that's it, we're done, we're digital, move on. AI is forcing people to refound.
Gully Flowers: Put everything on the website. And it's it strikes me you're at the bleeding edge right working you probably in the top 5 % of ⁓ companies that you know ahead of the pack probably by a lot you know you mentioned Campbell's Soup before. I don't think they're building systems in way that you guys are right maybe they are sorry not the not the shit on Campbell's Soup but
Craig Elimeliah: I hope they
Gully Flowers: Jake and I've been out trying to sell AI for like four years, right? Everyone's been like, yeah, whatever dudes, we're making our TV spots. There's been a shift this year for sure. But the question is like, where should CMOs ⁓ start or where should brand leaders start? Like refounding sounds really hard to me.
Craig Elimeliah: Yeah. Yeah. what I've seen across the board ⁓ is, you know, really looking at the like the foundation of your brand. How ⁓ consumable is it? Right? How does it sense? Is it clear? You know, if a machine were to look at your brand from 30,000 feet up high, is it, is it clear what you do? Will it know what you do? Will it know what your value is? Will it understand what expectation you're setting? And will that expectation meet the experience that you're providing? And if not, you got to close that gap. got to... Yeah.
Gully Flowers: So like Yeti, we're for the outdoors. All of our products, high quality, just as an example.
Craig Elimeliah: Yeah, yeah. would, if I were Yeti right now, I would really make sure that what we're saying and what we're doing matches up. That there's credibility, right? If we're saying we have the best products in the world for the outdoors and there are 50,000 reviews out there that are like, these are shit. They break every single time. The little top falls off every single time I have to buy a new one. Go fix that. Go fix that.
Gully Flowers: Yeah, the quality's not there, yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: You can no longer afford to have that stain because you think people won't see it. LLMs are going to see it. People will see it because we're not just Googling anymore. It's not just feeling around in the dark. We've got these powerful tools in our hand that go really deep and really wide and understand the context of what we're looking for, understand it has memory, it knows what we like, what we don't like. And it's imperative to really look at your brand and really understand like, are we credible? Are we?
Gully Flowers: So it's really the diligence that shifted, right? The access for consumers to do diligence on companies has just become exponential. Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: Exactly. 100%. And, you know, something that I struggled with in my career is, and I'm not saying this in any bad way, shape or form, but, you know, we've treated consumers like they're dumb. We treat them like they're dumb. We put out dumb advertising. It's just what, you know, there's a saying in the industry, like brick to forehead. Make it brick to forehead, right?
Gully Flowers: And we make them watch it between football or whatever. Yeah, Yeah, run it 100 times.
Craig Elimeliah: Right. And people are not dumb anymore. Right. You know, for a long time, know, banks and pharma companies relied on a lack of financial or health literacy. Right. And there was sort of this ambiguity around these things where people are just like, ⁓ I don't know what to do. OK, whatever. Right.
Gully Flowers: You ever see when they put, our ad in Golf Magazine? And you're like, wow, they must be trustworthy. They've got an ad, like on the ad, you're pointing to another ad. It's like, okay.
Craig Elimeliah: Exactly. Right. Right, right. Right, right. And so consumers are no longer dumb. They're really smart. They have machines working on their behalf. They've got, you know, the most powerful brains in their pockets right now. And, you know, and and ⁓ and they're the expectation that people have are always going to be ⁓ set by the best ex the best experience they're currently having. So if, if Anthropic or Claude or open AI or whatever perplexity is setting the benchmark for like the experience that they're getting where they can literally garble something in and get back really smart, coherent, right? That's their expectation now. Don't treat me like an idiot anymore. I'm now smart, right? I've evolved. And ⁓ you can't fool people anymore. You it used to be you could, you know, you could wave your hand and trick someone and be like, look over here, buy this thing. It doesn't work anymore. ⁓ We have to treat consumers completely differently. We have to assume that they're fucking smart. That's it.
Gully Flowers: ⁓ Do you spend much time worrying about like, I mean, look, if you look in the media, AI has got a bad brand right now. A lot of people are pretty scared about job loss, about this supercomputer taking over the world in a term, maybe not in a Terminator style, but as somebody who's pretty deep in the space, like how terrified are you versus excited?
Craig Elimeliah: I'm definitely much more excited. I just don't, you know, and I've always been a tech optimist. I've been working with AI for very, very, very long time. I've been doing projects with AI and with Jake even, you know, for years now. I think we did some AI work 10 years ago for New Balance. Right? Right? Right? Exactly. So like, I'm not scared. I'm not scared.
Jacob: balances like 10 years ago.
Gully Flowers: Trendspotting.
Craig Elimeliah: I understand that it is scary. I understand, I get it. Like I have, I empathize with, you know, if I was a mid-level writer right now who, you know, like gets paid money to fill in boxes and I'd be like, shit, like that's really scary. Like I, this machine can arguably do a better job than me and faster and you know, but I'm not scared. The work hasn't stopped. It's only gotten more. There's more work to be done. There's more things to solve. There's more problems to solve. There's other things to do. It's exciting. I see it. I'm, you know, I see it every day. I'm sitting here and I see it. I'm busier than ever. You know, people would argue, ⁓ AI is going to take you I'm busier than ever. And
Gully Flowers: Mm. But you can do 10 times more, right? Or 100 times more or whatever it is.
Craig Elimeliah: I can I could I could do a hundred times more but I'm still busier than ever I'm still busy and and the briefs still come and the work is still there and there's bigger problems to solve and there's ⁓ you know huge huge ⁓ you know ⁓ Refounding to do right and so ⁓ I Wouldn't be scared. I think I think anyone anyone who is embracing the tools and using them in a way that
Gully Flowers: Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: increases their productivity, that increases the talent they already have, should be really excited to be in this time and place right now. I marketing, advertising, I mean, the entire industry is going to change. It is changing. It's not going to change. It is changing. And I think in a really good way, I think there's going to be so many more opportunities to do all of the wonderful, crazy, creative, marvelous things that we want to do and we get paid to play. ⁓ And we now have the speed and the scale to do it and to really meaningfully get in front of audiences. We all know this has been the most wasteful industry ever. It is so wasteful. We make things.
Jacob: You mentioned can and wasteful already too many times together.
Gully Flowers: tell anybody.
Craig Elimeliah: We make things that no one sees. Let's make things that people see. Let's use precision. Let's use technology. Let's get our things seen, right? And so ⁓ I'm excited. I'm not scared.
Jacob: Eventually, someone like yourself or CBH or the new version of David Droga becomes CMO of a Fortune 500 brand. you think the pace of that is five years out?
Craig Elimeliah: think it's happening right now. mean, yeah, absolutely. ⁓ I think that part of the refounding ⁓ of a lot of companies is going to be ⁓ a ⁓ reshuffling of C-suite, Like, what does that new C-suite look like? Or, you know, like we call it, you know, what is the new stack? Right? And that stack, I think, is going to involve somebody who ⁓ you know, has that vision and that taste and that capability of yielding it in a way that ⁓ embodies the full sort of expression of the brand, right? And like I said before, the reason why that hasn't happened as it's not as common is because most brands are so disconnected. There is no one person that could fully express that. And as brands become more and more connected and more and more sort of interoperable, yes, at some point you're going to need someone who is sort of the in charge of the ultimate expression. And that ultimate expression is not just, you know, what is our Super Bowl spot, but that ultimate expression is how consumable and relatable is the brand the most, Intertwined sense and and that's hard. That's really really hard. I ⁓ experience, you know, I always say Code and Theory You know We are at our best when we do that when we are Code and Theory when we try to be code only code We suck when we try to be only theory we suck But when we put those two things together, we're fucking awesome and so I do think that that's kind of you know the challenge and the job to be done or the job to be had at these brands is, you know, how do you bring someone in that can fully express that speed, scale, that velocity, but that brand, right? And I think it's gonna start to happen pretty soon. I think we're gonna start to see it over the course of the next year and next few years. you know, that person is going to ultimately be, you know, in charge of growth, in charge of, you know, other things. ⁓ Yeah, it's happening.
Gully Flowers: Tim, Tim Cook's may be a great example of that. And I feel like the last two decades have been all about scale and operations, right? And that's created like $10 trillion just for two companies, right? And so maybe the next wave is a more creative leader that can ⁓ tell a cohesive story across surfaces to your point.
Craig Elimeliah: Correct, absolutely. mean, look, Steve Jobs was the most masterful storyteller, I mean, you know, we've seen in a lifetime. ⁓ And yes, all of a sudden, the CFO takes over, right, and creates all this value. ⁓ But, you know, I would argue, you know, people love Apple still, right? I think the scale sort of made it, you know, inevitably successful, but, you know,
Gully Flowers: Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: that brand love needs to be restored. And in a world where the iPhone is starting to lose some of its luster, ⁓ someone new is gonna come in and that person's not a bean counter. That person is an engineer. He's a product guy. He gets product. He understands product. And so I do believe
Gully Flowers: Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: Change a creative And if ⁓ in a world where the rate of has never been as fast, you need a creative person to be able to enact it, to enable it.
Gully Flowers: How important is your design background for that? Because a lot of creatives come up more in a storytelling advertising sense, but I think design is about change,
Craig Elimeliah: For me, I think through creative. My thought process is always by design. I think about creative ideas through a very designed, systematic way. So, you my background is design, but having spent so many years in kind of traditional agencies, I've kind of trained myself to be a big idea thinker, but to think it through a very systematic approach. To understand that The idea cannot live in one place alone, but it must be designed to live in many, many, many, different formats and iterations and incarnations. in many cases, almost needs to be composable. It needs to be whatever the consumer wants it to be. Right. And so that's where my design background really is an advantage because that's how I think. I think about how do you take that thing and put it in a container that's going to be the most desirable and consumable by the end user.
Gully Flowers: Thanks for coming on Second Wind. It's been a real pleasure.
Craig Elimeliah: Likewise.
Craig Elimeliah: Well, see, the thing, that's the funny part. I started off as a designer. And when in the early days, I was one of the original guys at Firstborn. And back then, if you were a designer, your aspiration was to become a producer. Because if you were a producer, you were running your own accounts. And so you kind of felt like you were kind of a partner in the agent, because you managed your own book of business. And so I think that's
Gully Flowers: I don't think I knew you were at Firstborn, because I was there late days. I was there at the sunset when Dentsu destroyed it. But you worked with Joon and Ferdman and stuff? wow, pre-Joon. Yeah, yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: Yes, was there. I was there before Joon. But yes, I Michael very well. Joon, ⁓ brought Joon in. He was a young Joon and I used to work very closely together. Yeah, ⁓ and I worked very closely together.
Gully Flowers: He's such a unique talent. He's got to be the best CCO I've ever worked with, I think.
Craig Elimeliah: But producer really just came about because we wanted autonomy. And it was just sort of like, if you were a designer, you were basically a commodity. were like, you're just a designer. ⁓ So yeah, producer was like sort of a fake way into ⁓ seniority.
Gully Flowers: downstream, right? Have you felt a second wind in your career or do you feel like it's been a you ⁓ know, smooth journey and you haven't had to make a big pivot yet?
Craig Elimeliah: Not really pivot. I mean, I feel like I'm getting back to my roots. I feel like I'm back to where I started, which I really love. I always found it really weird being in more traditional agencies. It just was always like, what am I doing here? Like, you you would go with the aspiration of like, ⁓ I'm coming to change things because the world was changing. And then like all they ever wanted to do was like, you know, 30 second spots.
Gully Flowers: Yep. Which still is the case for like most of the industry, right? You think, well, 15s now, we've moved to 15s. And the web film, which is nine minutes and nobody watches.
Craig Elimeliah: And you you've got No, I think that's where it's working. Sixth, sixth. Sixth, right. lot of coming out of those smaller digital shops moved into traditional agencies hoping to, help drag advertising into what it really should be, which is this of very multi, you know,
Jacob: You
Craig Elimeliah: highly fragmented, multi-stream, multi-modal, multi-faceted, ⁓ very ecosystem kind of thinking. where I think a lot of agencies failed was just thinking about one part of that ecosystem. was just sort of like, well, TV, that's the most glamorous part because it costs the most to make. if you think about it, that's such inverse thinking when it comes to advertising. Advertising should not cost you a lot of money actually like the idea is to make as good a piece as you can make with the least amount of right and ⁓ You know and and in a world where your consumers are engaging on on Every single surface you can possibly imagine Why would you put all your eggs into the surface that nobody's engaging actually engaging with right like or very few people are engaging with so You know for a long time it being in a traditional agency. It was just kind of like banging my head and I'd pick up the phone and call Jake and be like, hey, I finally sold in some crazy idea that actually had something to do with a channel people are engaging with. Who should we work with? ⁓ So I kind of always felt like very Sisyphusian, right? I was always trying to move that, but when I look back, was wonderful. It was the best thing that could have ever happened to me because of the moment we're in right now, I find myself like,
Gully Flowers: Mmm.
Craig Elimeliah: benefiting from all of that struggle and all of that kind of like really pushing to kind of unify, you know, marketing efforts across all surfaces, which is where we are today. right. AI I think is really helpful in, in orchestrating every single surface. And so you can really kind of, you know, provide the governance necessary to make sure that this, you know, the right message, right place, right time, right person, right, you know, all that good stuff. But I also think that benefiting from LLMs kind of being this sort of like all seeing eye where as a brand you can no longer have a fragmented brand, right? Like it needs to make sense. It needs to have credibility. It needs to work across every single touch point. Otherwise it's not credible, right? And so if anything, that's the pivot. feel like I've been waiting for this moment my entire career and it's finally. happening very fortunately when I'm an adult, you know, and so like I spent a lot of my years just kind of being a curious kid and really exploring. I think if you look at the body of work that I have, it's just a lot of exploration. It's a lot of like pushing the boundaries and it's a lot of, you know, trying to, you know, connect worlds and connect things that weren't necessarily connected. And now we live in a world where you can't survive unless it's connected, you know what I mean? And so I just feel very fortunate that I'm in a place in time where I have seniority and I have experience and I have vision and hindsight ⁓ and the wherewithal to take it on because I've been pushing that rock up that hill for so many years. And so my muscles up here are pretty strong.
Jacob: And can we take back up to when you were sort of shifting from design to producer and then maybe use that as a launching point for your role now, right? Cause like, you know, as CCO, you're not often the pure ideas person. to younger people who thinking about how they get into the CCO chair. you know, how should they be thinking about personal branding, know, producing teams, you leading in that way.
Craig Elimeliah: That's a great question. Look, I have always been very fortunate to have worked with CCOs that had very strong personal brands, you know, and I always kind of keyed into the fact that it's very hard to sell an idea unless you have a point of view. selling has always a part ⁓ of the job me at least. ⁓ But you're right, I at this point, we've got thousands of people here that are coming up with ideas and coming up with like amazing concepts and design and activations and apps and sites and all kinds of stuff like that. ⁓ You know, I'm, I feel very lucky and fortunate to be the front man, you know, to take it into the room and kind of use my ability to, you know, have a point of view on where the world is today to help, you know, clients kind of align with, you know, what their business needs. And so the cell for me is just a very natural role to step into. I love selling. love pitching. love, you know, leading teams into pitches. I think that. You know, it's very similar to sports. You know, you have to motivate and encourage and build people's confidence and really believe in what you're putting out there. And, you know, to your point, one of the transitions that I had to make very early in my career was it wasn't enough just to kind of have a design eye and have a point of view on where the internet is going. But how do you get it done? How do you make it? How do you? And so because it was such a new thing back then, you had to be a producer. You had to know what to do. You had to just figure it out. And so I think that has just stuck with me my entire career. I'm also a closet strategist, right? I've always been very close to strategy. I've always been ⁓ involved in how the work comes to be and what insights and what imperatives need to live in the work. so... I don't know, I feel like we're moving into a moment in time where AI is doing a lot of the output and we have to do a lot of the input, right? And we all know the saying like shit in, shit out. So, you you're only gonna get back what you put in. So I think I've always felt like I had to put in as much of myself as possible in order to sell an idea because it's really hard. Like you're getting in front of a client who's responsible for. you know, selling a product, moving a product, you know, millions of dollars, and you're trying to convince them that this crazy thing that you thought of just a few days ago is going to change their business. It's a big leap of faith to take in someone. And so I think that's just part of instinctually who I am is to think about not just the idea, but what goes into making the idea, what goes into bringing it. to life as part of the cell, because I do think confidence is 90 % of everything. I mean, you can have a really good idea. And sometimes you watch something or you see something, you're like, how did that get made? Like, that's such a ridiculous thing.
Gully Flowers: We got all those calls
Craig Elimeliah: Right. And it got made because someone was really confident. You know, someone believed in it enough to get others to believe in it. And so I think that's part of the job of being a CCO is to believe in something so much that you can convince other people around you to go along and to take that leap of faith, because no one knows. Right. It's a gamble. It's always going to be a gamble. I think today you have more tools that can do a lot of like pre-optimization and post-optimization. And I think that we live in a more dynamic environment where you can put something out and then you can kind of tweak it while it's in market and you can kind of test it while it's in market. ⁓ But back in the day, you know, a big idea was almost like a car. It kind of lost value the second you drove it off the lot, right? You put it out there and then it's like diminishing in value versus today. What you want to try to do is plant a seed that's going to grow. in market that's going to figure out like, what are all the signals? How are people responding? And that, and that idea should be able to respond in real time and sort of grow, you know, into whatever is necessary for that message to, to resonate. And so that's, that's what I find to be incredibly exciting right now, because, you know, AI allows us to do that at scale and, you know, speed and scale has, have always been the the holy grail of our industry. Like how fast can we get out there? How far can we push it? But speed and scale always, you know, sort of, you know, it put the brand at risk because we all know that when you run fast and when you go far, the brand starts to, you know, break apart. But with AI and a lot of the tools we have today, You can have speed, can have scale, and you have brand because AI is sort of the governance layer. with AI and a lot of the tools we have today, you can get, you can have all three. You have speed, can have scale, and you can have brand because is sort of the governance layer. that keeps the brand intact while you're going incredibly fast and incredibly far.
Gully Flowers: It sounds like spent. 20 years trying to convince people to do something new and different. usually a totally different way to measure things. And it's unfamiliar, right? So it's dangerous.
Craig Elimeliah: I've always been unconventional and that's been part of my brand. And I feel like the industry needed ⁓ some adversarial force to ⁓ give ⁓ teeth and tension ⁓ and to be to question things and to look at performance and look at spend and look at creative and look at things through a different lens. And I've always stayed true to that. And ⁓ in a lot cases, you know, it didn't work to my, you know, I've had a lot of ideas killed because it was just too risky. was too, it was too abstract. And, but I, but I stuck with it. And what I've learned is that, you know, we live in a day and an age where that is, you know, that is the environment, right? You do have to measure things differently. You do have to look at things differently. I don't think consumers are dumb anymore, right? Like with AI and with, you know, with You know, we talk a lot about man and machine and you have to talk to both agents and people. And so you need to be like, you know, you need to be as credible and as clear as possible. So agents, you know, can, can, can rate your credibility, but then you also have to be as emotionally resonant as possible in order to connect with people. And so you're doing these two things at once. And that's always kind of been the way my brain was wired. And, you know, it, it, it's helping me right now because it's sort of native to how the industry is shaking out. I think, you know, the response, what was once, you know, fear and maybe risk aversion, I think today is almost the opposite. It's coming from the top down where, you know, CEOs are telling their organizations, you have to do this. You can't, you know, there's no, you know, you cannot do things the way you've been doing them. So look, I... I'm like exhausted. just got back from Adobe Summit last night and I could tell you like this is the case. You you go to these these conferences where the biggest decision makers are coming together and they're talking about this stuff and it's real. You know, it really is real. they and I could tell you every brief that comes in is written very differently than they were written a year ago. Right. It's no longer, you know, I'm looking for an AOR to like write me a ⁓ you know, an emotionally resonant manifesto and shepherd my brand into culture. It's I need speed. need scale. I need brand. I need creative excellence in pipes. I need someone who understands, you know, content supply chain, who understands how, you know, how to, you know, how to leverage technology in order to do all of the things that it's capable of doing. And I do think within the next few years, we're going to see a big shift. mean, we're seeing it already.
Gully Flowers: Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: to say in a few years, but we're going to see a big shift in sort of who kind of takes the lead ⁓ from a brand perspective, where I think it was once ⁓ kind of the realm of the emotional, and now I think it's moving more to the realm of the functional, obviously with the emotional built in. ⁓ But it's really technology that's underpinning all of this stuff. ⁓ I don't know that there's been a more exciting time to be in this industry. I think we're gonna finally realize some of the things we've always been trying to do, but couldn't really achieve it because of limitations.
Jacob: all marketeers both on the client and agency side have the same challenge, as the business model is changing. and we can simplify that to we all used to make money for hours for output. And now that needs to change, right? Like, do you see clients embracing that?
Craig Elimeliah: Absolutely, absolutely. And that's what I meant. It's finally happening where the alignment between agencies and clients are coming together. Yeah, we're having these discussions and when what took five weeks now takes five days or sometimes five minutes, right? You can no longer look at time and. You have to look at you know outcomes and what it takes to do something and what the result is a hundred percent yeah, those conversations are and and they're fun conversations to have because That in itself is is a creative endeavor, right? It takes a lot of creativity to figure out what what that looks like. No one there's no there's no playbook There's no model yet and we're all figuring out figuring it out in real time and and look, you know, it's it's interesting because
Jacob: Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: I think as agencies are platforming and they are platforming, we're all becoming platforms and we all have our platform that we're building and WPP is open and Omnicom has Omni and Publicis has their thing and Stagwell has the machine. And we all have these platforms that we're selling to do a lot of the sort of orchestration and kind of the day-to-day stuff. And then on top of that are services, right? So you have software and services that are now ⁓ sort of the new the new model and where that's very different from where we came from, which was only services, right? And so I think that clients are actually really excited to have those conversations because I think it benefits everybody. It benefits everyone.
Jacob: Do you see SaaS as being one of your biggest competitors now?
Craig Elimeliah: for the time being, for the time being. think ⁓ a world, ⁓ the thing. organizations, exactly, SaaS organizations are sales organizations. They ⁓ sales. They understand sales. I think we could learn a lot from them. And we are. I can tell you, especially from a Code and Theory perspective, we are learning a lot about how those companies sell and how we're the best of what we're learning.
Gully Flowers: They're very good at sales. The delivery is not as strong.
Craig Elimeliah: ⁓ And there's a tremendous, I think there's a tremendous culture there of understanding how to get paid for what you do and for the outcomes. But what we do is a people business. think it will always be a people business. It's about relationships. It's about trust. again, think it's, is a creative endeavor, right? The ability to create change is creativity. You asked before what it takes to be a CCO today. It's also being able to involve yourself in those conversations and to use creativity to be able to say, can we form a commercial partnership that benefits everyone? And I think SaaS, for the time being, but at some point when a brand is fully invocable to the sense that where everything is kind of. you know, sort of exposed in a way that things are consuming other things and everything's kind of connecting via MCP or API or command line, whatever that might be, ⁓ you know, SaaS sort of goes away and everything kind of becomes very interoperable and interchangeable. And ⁓ so that model is changing. And I think we're becoming a little more like them and they're becoming a little more like us, you know, in that regard. So I think there's some some brackish middle we all meet in that becomes fun again as well becomes fun.
Jacob: Good word. ⁓ Given, you you mentioned before how you think brands have to move more towards utility base and sort of the emotional storytelling that's kind of been the linchpin of our industries will still be important, but will not be the top layer anymore. Are you finding that challenging from a recruitment standpoint? Cause the, you know, the The people that come up with the ideas have basically been educated to make TV spots for...
Craig Elimeliah: It's hard. It's hard. We're seeing. It's funny. I'm seeing some of the more seasoned writers, art directors, creative directors. There's a handful that have fully taken to the new tools and they understand the systemization of a brand. They understand how to write to that systemization. They understand how to inject storytelling into that systemization. but there's a big middle that's not there. And what's exciting is we're meeting new talent. We're meeting new people that you and I have been around for a long time. These are people we've never met before. These are people we haven't had parties with or seen at Cannes. And that's exciting. There's a new breath ⁓ in the industry. There's just a new, I feel like there's just like a new wave of talent. that's coming in that under that inherently understand the convergence of creativity and technology and they inherently understand, you know, the the role of storytelling inside of a generative experience or inside of a technology powered experience or inside content at scale. Right. And and it's exciting. It's still early. It's there's not a lot of people out there that can do this. But I mean, I remember when I was a young flash designer, there was just a handful of us who could do that. And then there were more, and then there were more, and then there were more. And I do think that the acceleration of the technology will also sort of ⁓ accelerate the amount of people who can play with it and who can master it. But you're right. There's a lot of people in the industry right now that unfortunately, ⁓ need to catch up with the client demand of being able to use new tools. in a lot of cases, it's not even using new tools, it's building their own tools. I have designers that literally build their own tools, which is wild. It's wild. And I love it. I love it. Every single day, I have a different designer coming to me with a tool they built to do the thing they need to do.
Gully Flowers: That's cool.
Jacob: Yeah. ⁓ think that people in your who were really successful tended to have a mix of coding background, design background, and some production background, you know, which was their core competency, you know, for who's really successful is a little nebulous, but like kind of always had that, right? You know, like in this new class, are you seeing sort of a profile that's starting to... ⁓ to percolate.
Craig Elimeliah: Yeah, I would say there's this level of comfort inside of a command line, inside of a ⁓ coding screen that I've never seen before. And it's because coding has become this vibe coding, right? People are just so much more comfortable creating prototypes and creating artifacts that are either close to done or very high fidelity, extremely high fidelity. And there's a confidence in that that I think people our age probably would have like major imposter syndrome about, right? And it's like, you know, I remember being a young creative and like being able to spin something up pretty quickly, but I'd actually hold onto it for a few days because I didn't want anyone to think that it was easy to do, you know, and I just kind of like, you you sort of like, I don't want, I don't want to give this away too fast. ⁓ Here's this profile today where there is zero like hesitation where it's like, Hey, I just spun this thing up and it looks fucking awesome and took me like an hour. What do you think? And I'm just like, wow, like that's awesome. yeah, it's this, it's this wild convergence of like digital confidence or, know, like kind of technical confidence and taste, like really good taste, like design taste. And I think aesthetics are definitely starting to change. think what we refer to a lot of generative stuff is slop, but I think there are people doing really beautiful things with generative AI. think there are people who are harnessing it in a way and understanding how to get the right output from the medium that complements the medium. doesn't try to create something that it's not. ⁓ Yeah. And that taste really is sort of the leading kind of attribute and everything else is sort of in service of, right? And so they're comfortable in the tools, they're comfortable, able to articulate, they have writing tools, they have design tools. So having that level of taste and understanding in culture and being able to manufacture something that's going to resonate in culture. but doing it really fast and being super confident in how fast they're doing it because they're also eager to iterate. They're not afraid to bring you something and be like, ⁓ that's not right. Okay, back to the drawing board. I'm happy to go like explore some more. where in our generation, it's like heads down six weeks, don't look, I'm protecting, I don't want you to see, I'm cooking, I'm in the kitchen, right? Like it's all out in the open now. And I think that's great. You know, I really think that's a wonderful thing because that, to me, a lot of the stress and the anxiety in our industry came from that sort of lack of collaboration. It was like, we all went back into our caves and everyone's wondering like, what are they doing? Did they understand the brief? Did they not understand the brief? When am I going to see it? You know, and now it's like, hey, here's something. You like it? Nope.
Gully Flowers: Mm. Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: I'll be right back. I'll give you something else. I'll be right back. I'll give you something else." And that's kind of great. there's so much less stress where even clients I think are really enjoying the repartee. Like they're enjoying the back and forth. They feel more involved. And, you know, like I can't tell you how many times I've been in a pitch or been in a client meeting where they're like, yeah, we want this to be collaborative. We want to work with you. And there was no real way to do that. Right?
Gully Flowers: Yeah. Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: But now you can, now you can like bring them into the process. We share Figma boards, we share prototypes, we share all kinds of things in real time and we're doing it in real time. And I just see a really sort of a renewed sense of partnership between us and our clients.
Jacob: It's awesome.
Gully Flowers: Do you believe every agency will be a social agency from like a paid advertising perspective? Or do you think they already are?
Craig Elimeliah: What do mean the social agency?
Gully Flowers: Well, it feels like, you know, over 50 % of media spend now goes to agents, to social, right?
Craig Elimeliah: ⁓ yeah. People said the same thing about digital, right? Yeah, I mean, look, I think that social represents a large part of where people are consuming content. And I don't see it as social necessarily anymore. I see it as ⁓ a very important channel within an ecosystem of many other channels that are required to, you know, communicate a message ⁓ to a potential customer or to a current customer. I sort of consider myself like, or I consider our agency to be sort of touch point agnostic. You really have to be able to think ecosystem first and not every agency can execute ecosystem first. I don't claim that Code and Theory can do every single surface, but I do think that we are really good at orchestrating an idea or a concept or a piece of creative across a very complex kind of ecosystem. And yeah, there are people who do one thing really well. And then I think the agency of the future is going to have the ability to look at any sort of composable ecosystem and be able to execute against it in the most effective way possible. Some will be better than others. think you don't want this to become completely commodified. I think that clients will choose agencies that have strengths in certain areas and they might not have strengths in other areas, but they have to be capable enough to understand the importance of the ecosystem, not TV, right? They can't believe that TV is the end all be all. Like that has to stop. I mean, that is toxic. And ⁓ I think it's up to us to decide where we want to flex our muscles.
Gully Flowers: Because most of the digital shops of Code and Theory's know, brethren, didn't make it.
Craig Elimeliah: They didn't.
Gully Flowers: I want talk about shifting like better AI tools to like systems. And just understand like how you do that a large organization where that often represents like changing behaviors on their end and rethinking the way they operate. ⁓ how do you do that without saying to a client like, you have to change everything about way you work?
Craig Elimeliah: Yeah, we actually think the opposite. We build tools that plug into their systems. We build processes that plug. So our kind of like mantra is, you know, we work where you work. We understand org change is like the hardest. Any agency that thinks like they're going to walk into some hundred year old company and change the way they work is delusional, right? It's not.
Gully Flowers: Even a 30 year old company, Like, I mean, Microsoft, Amazon, you know, these are very large. Yeah.
Jacob: Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: Or even a five year old company, is someone going to walk into Anthropic and tell them to do things differently because they need to make an ad? Like, absurd, absurd. No, I think an agency has to be like fluid, like liquid. You need to be able to plug into your clients, meet them where they are, understand what their processes are, understand their culture, understand how they work. and meet them there. Like that's what they're paying you for. They're paying you to meet them where they are. They're not paying you to walk in there and be like, no, sorry. You know, I'm sorry, Campbell's Soup Company. Stop making soup and pay attention to, I need you to approve these five, you know, these five TV spots. And, you know, that's not the priority. The priority is to do what they do best. And, you know, we are their most valuable partner if we understand how they work. what their culture is and how we can be additive to that. And in many cases, like big companies, they can't be agile. So can we be agile on their behalf? They can't be culturally connected because of what, so can we help them do, so you really wanna meet them where they need to be met. Don't try to change them. It's not gonna work. It's not good. Look, there are, processes in which they will have to change in order for them to get what they want. Right. So if you come to me and you say, hey, I need you to make me a 30 second spot using AI and I need it in instead of five weeks, I need it in five days. I'm like, great. I love that. We could definitely do that. But guess what? You have to approve it in one day. Right. You have to approve it in one hour. Right. So the whole thing has to
Gully Flowers: Yeah. Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: work together so you can't expect to get more from less but not change the way you're doing things. So if you're motivated to take on a new process then yeah, you have to understand what comes along with that, right?
Gully Flowers: And are you getting briefs that are shifting from deliverables to problems to solve?
Craig Elimeliah: ⁓ yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. Big problems, major problems. Big, big, problems, yes.
Jacob: it sounds like the thing you're most excited about is how ⁓ sort of marketing and the internet gets ⁓ a new infrastructure
Craig Elimeliah: Yes. I mean, look, I just came back from a conference, at Adobe where, like the largest infrastructure provider is, completely, changing everything ⁓ that they're doing from a, enablement perspective. sitting there with some the biggest CMOs. at the biggest brands all trying to figure out like, how is everything changing? How are our dams and our repositories changing? How are our workflows changing? I mean, 100%. It's all changing and it's all profoundly kind of underpinned by technology in a way that we've never seen before. mean, the internet, like what's happening right now is like, ⁓ 100x what happened. Like even when digital happened, there were some companies that never fully got digital, right? Like we know there are brands today that are still like just passing PDFs back and forth and trying to figure out how to traffic ⁓ an asset in whatever antiquated way that they still do. But The entire thing, the entire thing is completely, completely upended in a good way. think that the biggest issue in our industry for as long as I've been alive or in it has been silos and disconnection. Everything's disconnected. The data people and the creative people and the strategy people and the trafficking people and the media, there's no orchestration. And look,
Gully Flowers: seven agencies to do an activation. Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: I know I'm known for these takes, I do think orchestration is the thing right now. All of a sudden, things are connected. All of a sudden, things are connected to one another. And if I was a CMO today, and my data, and my creative, and my strategy, and my... Every part of my organization, if those things were not connected... can't do it. You just like walk away, like let someone else do it, right? ⁓ and this is anyone in industry will tell you this, every single time you get a new brief, it's like Groundhog Day. It's like starting from scratch again and again and again. And there's never any sort of compound learnings. It's like ⁓ you do a campaign, yay!
Gully Flowers: Or they're in a 60 page PDF you like, they're not, yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: You do a campaign, you win a lion and then you get the next brief and it's start from the beginning again. It's like, what did we learn? What happened? What did they, you there's just nothing's compounded. There's no memory. We have no memory. Right. And now we do. Now we have memory. Now things are connected. Now things are orchestrated. Now things make sense. Now things, you know, ⁓ they compound. Now we have memory. Now things are connected. things are orchestrated. Now things, you know, ⁓ they compound. And not only is it on the agency that that has to happen, but also on the brand side again. ⁓ I said this before in the world where LLMs are navigating everyone's journey. If you are not in order, if your brand is not in order, it will know immediately and it will deem you not credible. It will not return you as a credible result when you're asking Chachi PT, you know what the coolest, you know, jean jacket is right now, right? It just won't. And so you kind of have to get your house in order. And if you don't get your house in order, you're kind of fucked. Right? So I do, I've been using this term. I don't know if I made it up or not. I'm not going to claim I made it up. definitely, I feel like, you know,
Gully Flowers: Just claim it. Just claim it.
Craig Elimeliah: we've been using this word transformation for a long time, I think we're beyond that. I believe that we are in an age where brands are refounding themselves. we've been using this word transformation for a long time, brand transformation. And, you know, we've all thrown it around a million times. I think we're beyond that. I believe that we are in an age where brands are refounding themselves.
Gully Flowers: Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: Refounding I don't care how old you are you are being you are Refounding yourself and brands are looking back into their history and they're saying okay. We got to clean this shit up and in order to do that you kind of have to refound the brand you have to rethink the brand because it has years and years and years of baggage it has years of debt that render it not credible right and and you know True healing requires deep introspection. And I think that that's the job to be done right now. I think we're going to see the next, I think the next few years are going to be about this idea of refounding brand. And we see it. mean, Apple's Tim Cook step down. That is an example, I believe of refounding. I think Apple is refounding themselves. I think we're going to see the biggest companies in the world start to refound themselves in the dot-com era. Brands thought they could just add .com to their name and that was it. It doesn't work any, right? And everything on the website, that's it, we're done, we're digital, move on. AI is forcing people to refound.
Gully Flowers: Put everything on the website. And it's it strikes me you're at the bleeding edge right working you probably in the top 5 % of ⁓ companies that you know ahead of the pack probably by a lot you know you mentioned Campbell's Soup before. I don't think they're building systems in way that you guys are right maybe they are sorry not the not the shit on Campbell's Soup but
Craig Elimeliah: I hope they
Gully Flowers: Jake and I've been out trying to sell AI for like four years, right? Everyone's been like, yeah, whatever dudes, we're making our TV spots. There's been a shift this year for sure. But the question is like, where should CMOs ⁓ start or where should brand leaders start? Like refounding sounds really hard to me.
Craig Elimeliah: Yeah. Yeah. what I've seen across the board ⁓ is, you know, really looking at the like the foundation of your brand. How ⁓ consumable is it? Right? How does it sense? Is it clear? You know, if a machine were to look at your brand from 30,000 feet up high, is it, is it clear what you do? Will it know what you do? Will it know what your value is? Will it understand what expectation you're setting? And will that expectation meet the experience that you're providing? And if not, you got to close that gap. got to... Yeah.
Gully Flowers: So like Yeti, we're for the outdoors. All of our products, high quality, just as an example.
Craig Elimeliah: Yeah, yeah. would, if I were Yeti right now, I would really make sure that what we're saying and what we're doing matches up. That there's credibility, right? If we're saying we have the best products in the world for the outdoors and there are 50,000 reviews out there that are like, these are shit. They break every single time. The little top falls off every single time I have to buy a new one. Go fix that. Go fix that.
Gully Flowers: Yeah, the quality's not there, yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: You can no longer afford to have that stain because you think people won't see it. LLMs are going to see it. People will see it because we're not just Googling anymore. It's not just feeling around in the dark. We've got these powerful tools in our hand that go really deep and really wide and understand the context of what we're looking for, understand it has memory, it knows what we like, what we don't like. And it's imperative to really look at your brand and really understand like, are we credible? Are we?
Gully Flowers: So it's really the diligence that shifted, right? The access for consumers to do diligence on companies has just become exponential. Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: Exactly. 100%. And, you know, something that I struggled with in my career is, and I'm not saying this in any bad way, shape or form, but, you know, we've treated consumers like they're dumb. We treat them like they're dumb. We put out dumb advertising. It's just what, you know, there's a saying in the industry, like brick to forehead. Make it brick to forehead, right?
Gully Flowers: And we make them watch it between football or whatever. Yeah, Yeah, run it 100 times.
Craig Elimeliah: Right. And people are not dumb anymore. Right. You know, for a long time, know, banks and pharma companies relied on a lack of financial or health literacy. Right. And there was sort of this ambiguity around these things where people are just like, ⁓ I don't know what to do. OK, whatever. Right.
Gully Flowers: You ever see when they put, our ad in Golf Magazine? And you're like, wow, they must be trustworthy. They've got an ad, like on the ad, you're pointing to another ad. It's like, okay.
Craig Elimeliah: Exactly. Right. Right, right. Right, right. And so consumers are no longer dumb. They're really smart. They have machines working on their behalf. They've got, you know, the most powerful brains in their pockets right now. And, you know, and and ⁓ and they're the expectation that people have are always going to be ⁓ set by the best ex the best experience they're currently having. So if, if Anthropic or Claude or open AI or whatever perplexity is setting the benchmark for like the experience that they're getting where they can literally garble something in and get back really smart, coherent, right? That's their expectation now. Don't treat me like an idiot anymore. I'm now smart, right? I've evolved. And ⁓ you can't fool people anymore. You it used to be you could, you know, you could wave your hand and trick someone and be like, look over here, buy this thing. It doesn't work anymore. ⁓ We have to treat consumers completely differently. We have to assume that they're fucking smart. That's it.
Gully Flowers: ⁓ Do you spend much time worrying about like, I mean, look, if you look in the media, AI has got a bad brand right now. A lot of people are pretty scared about job loss, about this supercomputer taking over the world in a term, maybe not in a Terminator style, but as somebody who's pretty deep in the space, like how terrified are you versus excited?
Craig Elimeliah: I'm definitely much more excited. I just don't, you know, and I've always been a tech optimist. I've been working with AI for very, very, very long time. I've been doing projects with AI and with Jake even, you know, for years now. I think we did some AI work 10 years ago for New Balance. Right? Right? Right? Exactly. So like, I'm not scared. I'm not scared.
Jacob: balances like 10 years ago.
Gully Flowers: Trendspotting.
Craig Elimeliah: I understand that it is scary. I understand, I get it. Like I have, I empathize with, you know, if I was a mid-level writer right now who, you know, like gets paid money to fill in boxes and I'd be like, shit, like that's really scary. Like I, this machine can arguably do a better job than me and faster and you know, but I'm not scared. The work hasn't stopped. It's only gotten more. There's more work to be done. There's more things to solve. There's more problems to solve. There's other things to do. It's exciting. I see it. I'm, you know, I see it every day. I'm sitting here and I see it. I'm busier than ever. You know, people would argue, ⁓ AI is going to take you I'm busier than ever. And
Gully Flowers: Mm. But you can do 10 times more, right? Or 100 times more or whatever it is.
Craig Elimeliah: I can I could I could do a hundred times more but I'm still busier than ever I'm still busy and and the briefs still come and the work is still there and there's bigger problems to solve and there's ⁓ you know huge huge ⁓ you know ⁓ Refounding to do right and so ⁓ I Wouldn't be scared. I think I think anyone anyone who is embracing the tools and using them in a way that
Gully Flowers: Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: increases their productivity, that increases the talent they already have, should be really excited to be in this time and place right now. I marketing, advertising, I mean, the entire industry is going to change. It is changing. It's not going to change. It is changing. And I think in a really good way, I think there's going to be so many more opportunities to do all of the wonderful, crazy, creative, marvelous things that we want to do and we get paid to play. ⁓ And we now have the speed and the scale to do it and to really meaningfully get in front of audiences. We all know this has been the most wasteful industry ever. It is so wasteful. We make things.
Jacob: You mentioned can and wasteful already too many times together.
Gully Flowers: tell anybody.
Craig Elimeliah: We make things that no one sees. Let's make things that people see. Let's use precision. Let's use technology. Let's get our things seen, right? And so ⁓ I'm excited. I'm not scared.
Jacob: Eventually, someone like yourself or CBH or the new version of David Droga becomes CMO of a Fortune 500 brand. you think the pace of that is five years out?
Craig Elimeliah: think it's happening right now. mean, yeah, absolutely. ⁓ I think that part of the refounding ⁓ of a lot of companies is going to be ⁓ a ⁓ reshuffling of C-suite, Like, what does that new C-suite look like? Or, you know, like we call it, you know, what is the new stack? Right? And that stack, I think, is going to involve somebody who ⁓ you know, has that vision and that taste and that capability of yielding it in a way that ⁓ embodies the full sort of expression of the brand, right? And like I said before, the reason why that hasn't happened as it's not as common is because most brands are so disconnected. There is no one person that could fully express that. And as brands become more and more connected and more and more sort of interoperable, yes, at some point you're going to need someone who is sort of the in charge of the ultimate expression. And that ultimate expression is not just, you know, what is our Super Bowl spot, but that ultimate expression is how consumable and relatable is the brand the most, Intertwined sense and and that's hard. That's really really hard. I ⁓ experience, you know, I always say Code and Theory You know We are at our best when we do that when we are Code and Theory when we try to be code only code We suck when we try to be only theory we suck But when we put those two things together, we're fucking awesome and so I do think that that's kind of you know the challenge and the job to be done or the job to be had at these brands is, you know, how do you bring someone in that can fully express that speed, scale, that velocity, but that brand, right? And I think it's gonna start to happen pretty soon. I think we're gonna start to see it over the course of the next year and next few years. you know, that person is going to ultimately be, you know, in charge of growth, in charge of, you know, other things. ⁓ Yeah, it's happening.
Gully Flowers: Tim, Tim Cook's may be a great example of that. And I feel like the last two decades have been all about scale and operations, right? And that's created like $10 trillion just for two companies, right? And so maybe the next wave is a more creative leader that can ⁓ tell a cohesive story across surfaces to your point.
Craig Elimeliah: Correct, absolutely. mean, look, Steve Jobs was the most masterful storyteller, I mean, you know, we've seen in a lifetime. ⁓ And yes, all of a sudden, the CFO takes over, right, and creates all this value. ⁓ But, you know, I would argue, you know, people love Apple still, right? I think the scale sort of made it, you know, inevitably successful, but, you know,
Gully Flowers: Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: that brand love needs to be restored. And in a world where the iPhone is starting to lose some of its luster, ⁓ someone new is gonna come in and that person's not a bean counter. That person is an engineer. He's a product guy. He gets product. He understands product. And so I do believe
Gully Flowers: Yeah.
Craig Elimeliah: Change a creative And if ⁓ in a world where the rate of has never been as fast, you need a creative person to be able to enact it, to enable it.
Gully Flowers: How important is your design background for that? Because a lot of creatives come up more in a storytelling advertising sense, but I think design is about change,
Craig Elimeliah: For me, I think through creative. My thought process is always by design. I think about creative ideas through a very designed, systematic way. So, you my background is design, but having spent so many years in kind of traditional agencies, I've kind of trained myself to be a big idea thinker, but to think it through a very systematic approach. To understand that The idea cannot live in one place alone, but it must be designed to live in many, many, many, different formats and iterations and incarnations. in many cases, almost needs to be composable. It needs to be whatever the consumer wants it to be. Right. And so that's where my design background really is an advantage because that's how I think. I think about how do you take that thing and put it in a container that's going to be the most desirable and consumable by the end user.
Gully Flowers: Thanks for coming on Second Wind. It's been a real pleasure.
Craig Elimeliah: Likewise.
