Table of Contents
You're sitting on a $30 million hole. Your biggest client just declared bankruptcy hours before you're supposed to deliver a Super Bowl spot. What do you do? If you're Ross Martin and Kern Schireson from Known agency, you cry for a second, then get to work rebuilding your entire business model.
Key Takeaways
- Known agency combined three separate companies in 2020 to create an integrated marketing powerhouse that refuses to stay in traditional silos
- Their proprietary "Skeptic" platform contains 65+ AI-powered tools that clients can access directly, breaking industry norms around transparency
- The agency survived a $30 million client loss by pivoting quickly and developing new service offerings that could impact clients faster
- Company culture centers on two core values discovered through employee surveys: holding themselves to impossible standards and genuine kindness
- Disney partnership showcases how established brands can leverage Known's integrated approach across streaming, retail, and content creation
- Slate Auto case study demonstrates creative risk-taking, like placing fake commercials on Saturday Night Live to launch an electric truck
- Instagram has functioned as an "agentic AI" for the past decade, creating personalized content shows for users including product recommendations
- Small businesses should focus on understanding their value proposition clearly before investing in complex marketing technology or strategies
The Accidental Empire Built on Broken Industry Logic
Here's what's fascinating about Known's origin story - it wasn't some grand master plan. Ross Martin was running a creative agency called Blackbird. Kern Schireson had his data-focused Schireson Associates. Another group called Stun Creative was doing their own thing. All three were constantly bumping into the same problem: their clients kept asking them to work together.
"Here's the thing, Jeff," Ross explains during their Masters of Scale interview. "If it wasn't us and our partners who put this together, it would have been some other drones that did it. We think that the model we have today was inevitable."
That's a pretty bold statement, but when you look at how marketing has evolved, it makes perfect sense. For thirty years, the industry has been pulling apart all the pieces that should work together. Media buying over here, creative development over there, data analysis way back in some corner office. Clients were getting frustrated managing all these disconnected relationships while watching fidelity get lost in translation between teams.
What Known did was essentially marketing Pangaea - they recombined the continental drift that had separated these capabilities back into one unified landmass. The timing couldn't have been better, even if launching during a global pandemic wasn't exactly part of the plan.
Building Culture Through Computer Screens During COVID
Starting a company is hard enough. Starting a company during COVID when hundreds of employees can't meet in person? That's next-level difficulty. Ross, who's known for building strong internal cultures throughout his career, admits this was "the absolute hardest part of the job."
"We launched a company and then hundreds of people didn't get to be in the same room together ever," he reflects. "We all were sent home for a year and a half and had to go live in our spare bedroom or our closet or in our basement and get to know each other through rectangles."
Instead of trying to force some artificial corporate culture from the top down, they asked their own people what they had in common. The results were revealing. First, everyone held themselves to standards higher than anyone else could impose. Second - and this surprised the leadership team - when asked to describe their colleagues in one word, the overwhelming response was "kind."
Not innovative. Not brilliant. Not genius. Kind.
"The people who work at Known are really super kind and they care about one another," Ross notes. "They care about doing a great job, but they also care about making sure that the people to their right and left are also very successful."
This kindness isn't just feel-good company culture fluff. It's become a competitive advantage in an industry known for backstabbing and ego battles. When everyone's genuinely invested in collective success rather than individual glory, the quality of work improves dramatically.
The Technology Platform That Breaks Every Agency Rule
Most agencies guard their proprietary technology like state secrets. Known does the opposite. Their platform, called Skeptic (because "it's never satisfied with its own answers"), currently houses about 65 apps that get updated constantly. But here's the kicker - they give clients direct access.
"I don't think any other agency has ever done this before," Kern explains, "has ever actually opened up its operating system and said, 'Our planners and buyers that work in platforms A through C are going to be in the same UX, same UI, same backend as your internal planners and buyers who work in these other platforms.'"
This level of transparency would terrify most agencies. What if clients see how the sausage gets made? What if they realize they could do some of this work themselves? Known's philosophy is that clients want agency, not dependency. They want to control their destiny rather than blindly trust that someone else is making good decisions with their money.
The platform covers everything from audience insights to asset creation to optimized delivery across platforms. Each tool gets smarter the more it's used, creating a flywheel effect where client success feeds back into better technology performance.
When Your Biggest Client Vanishes Overnight
Success stories are great, but how companies handle disasters reveals their true character. Last year, Known faced their biggest test when one of their largest clients - representing more than $10 million in already-spent production costs and a $30 million total hole - suddenly went into administration in London.
"You're sitting on more than a $10 million hole. You have to stop production on a Super Bowl spot that you have to deliver in just days. And you're told, 'Actually, the company's out of business,'" Ross recounts. "That's how we started last year."
What happened next is instructive. After crying for a second (understandably), they used the crisis to examine what they'd been doing wrong. They realized they'd fallen in love with scale for scale's sake - the big Super Bowl spot, the massive media investment, the prestige of having a London office. In pursuing size, they'd ignored warning signs about risk.
"We started to ask ourselves what is the highest best use of Known and are we missing opportunities to have an enormous impact without necessarily the exposure," Ross explains.
Out of necessity, they developed new service offerings that could impact clients' top and bottom lines more quickly than traditional large-scale media campaigns. These weren't just stopgap measures - they sold "a ton of them" and set the company up for what's becoming their best year in history.
Sometimes the best innovations come from having your back against the wall.
Disney: How Legacy Brands Can Embrace Integration
When you think about complex, multi-platform marketing challenges, Disney represents the ultimate test case. They have streaming services, physical retail stores, ESPN, theme parks, and more touchpoints than most brands could dream of managing effectively.
Known works with Disney across multiple areas simultaneously. They're helping tell Disney's B2B story to other marketers about their sophisticated data science capabilities. They're buying media on Disney platforms for other clients. They're even producing content for Hulu, a Disney-controlled asset.
"We feel like real business partners with them," Ross notes. "We have a deep trust and a relationship that enables us and our clients to do things in the Disney ecosystem that you want to be able to do."
What makes Disney particularly interesting is their foundational assets - "really powerful stories that people connect with premium magical worlds that they create." Combined with increasingly sophisticated data science capabilities, they can "surprise and delight everyone in a way that almost nobody really can keep up with anymore."
This isn't just about buying ad space or creating campaigns. It's about understanding how different touchpoints work together to create cohesive customer experiences across an incredibly diverse ecosystem.
Slate Auto: When Fake Commercials Become Real Strategy
On the other end of the spectrum, Known works with Slate Auto, a startup launching an electric truck with a base price of $20,000 (yes, really). The approach here demonstrates what happens when you completely ignore industry playbook expectations.
Instead of traditional auto show reveals with curtains and ribbons, Slate just put their cars on Los Angeles streets. People's natural reaction was exactly what they wanted: "What the hell is that car?"
But here's where it gets creative. They wrapped each demo vehicle to look like fake businesses - a taxidermy family business, raw meat delivery, even a baby nap service that would drive your kid around so they could sleep while you did other things. All of these fake businesses had been pitched as jokes on the TV show Silicon Valley.
The media team at Known took this concept and ran with it. They created actual commercials for these fake businesses featuring the real car, then placed one strategically right after the monologue on Saturday Night Live - exactly where SNL puts their fake commercials.
"People are like, 'What is this?' because you don't know as a viewer. Am I meant to fast forward through this because this is a real commercial? Or is this actually entertainment?" Ross explains.
The genius is in the confusion. Viewers couldn't tell if they were watching advertising or entertainment, which meant they actually paid attention instead of automatically tuning out.
The AI Revolution That's Already Happened (And What's Coming Next)
Here's a perspective that might change how you think about AI in marketing: it's not coming. It's already here and has been for years.
"If I told you that for the last 10 years, Instagram is an agentic AI creating a TV show for you about your life and your friends and what you should care about and think about. And it includes what products you should be aware of," Kern points out. "That is a decade old AI agent, right? It really is. That's what that algorithm is."
The Instagram algorithm has been functioning as a personalized content curator and product recommendation engine for years. It understands your interests, analyzes your behavior, and serves up a continuous stream of relevant content mixed with strategic advertising. Sound familiar?
But we're moving toward even more sophisticated AI applications. Search behavior is already shifting as people use ChatGPT and other language models instead of Google for certain queries. When someone asks "What's the best hotel for me to stay in in Amsterdam," they're getting direct answers rather than a list of options to choose from.
This creates both challenges and opportunities for marketers. The challenge is that traditional search optimization might become less relevant. The opportunity is that brands that build genuine cultural relevance and emotional connection with consumers won't need to compete in AI-mediated search results - they'll already be top-of-mind.
"Part of what I think we're going to see is a retrenching from what has become a real over-reliance on search and an overdependence on what appears to be an opportunity to capture audience but is actually just a task completion pathway," Kern explains.
The brands that win will be those that create the questions people ask, not just those that provide the answers.
Advice for the $12 Marketing Budget
Not every business can afford Known's services (yet), but the principles they've learned apply at any scale. When asked what advice he'd give to a small business owner with minimal marketing budget, Ross gets philosophical.
"Really understanding who you are, what you have to offer, and what your clients want to buy from you. Anyone for zero dollars can figure out what their value prop is, what matters to them, and how they deliver value."
He's also refreshingly honest about the success mythology: "I hate the version of the successful entrepreneurial spiel of I saw this 20 years ago and look how cleverly I engineered my success and made this happen. Look, maybe that's true for some people. It's not true for me. I don't think it's true for Known."
The reality is that building a business requires feeling your way through uncertainty, making mistakes, and continuously refining your understanding of what the world needs from you versus what you want to offer.
There's also a broader truth about the current business environment that should encourage small players: "All the chaos and confusion and uncertainty and all the acceleration of technology and innovation has completely leveled the playing field," Ross notes. "All the jokers you see standing up on stages who are telling you they know they figured it all out. They know what's coming. They don't know. They're just as terrified as you are. And because the world just hit reset, now it's anybody's game."
The industrial-revolution-level changes happening with AI could favor massive corporations with unlimited resources, or they could democratize powerful tools to the point where small players can compete with giants. We won't know which direction things go for several more years, but the uncertainty creates opportunity for those willing to experiment and adapt quickly.
The story of Known isn't just about building a successful marketing agency. It's about recognizing when entire industries are ready for fundamental change and having the courage to bet on integration over specialization, transparency over secrecy, and kindness over cutthroat competition. Whether you're running a marketing team at a Fortune 500 company or launching your first startup, those principles create sustainable competitive advantages that no algorithm can replicate.
