John Sampogna Podcast Transcript
John Sampogna joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive. Today’s guest is John Sampogna. John Sampogna is a seasoned entrepreneur, investor, and CEO with over 15 years of experience crafting award-winning strategies, digital experiences, and campaigns for renowned brands such as Golf.com, Nike, L’Oreal, Scots, Six Penny, NYC’s Brookfield Place, Chandon, among others.
Inspired by his generation growing up with the internet, Sampogna was among the first in his field to embrace social media as a creative tool for growth, earning recognition on Business Insider’s list of 30 Most Creative People in Advertising Under 30. His insights have been featured in various media outlets, including Glossy, Adweek, CNBC, Marketing Brew, Ad Age, Yahoo, and Digiday.
He has also appeared on globally ranked podcasts as a judge for prominent industry awards and on stages like Brand Innovators Summit at the US Open Well, good afternoon, John. Welcome to the show.
John Sampogna: Thanks for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, my friend. I appreciate it. Hailing out of New York, I’m in Kansas City, we’re just an hour apart, but I always appreciate people that have to traverse time zones and calendars to get here, so thank you.
John, let me jump into your first question. You’re among the first in advertising to embrace social media as a creative growth tool, landed on Business Insider’s thirty most creative people in advertising under thirty, and built Wondersauce from a two-person shop to a hundred-person agency. You’ve described that early period as marked by optimistic naivety, where not fully understanding the risks actually lets you move faster and make bolder decisions.
Looking back, what would you never have done if you’d known what you know now, and are glad that you didn’t know it?
John Sampogna: Honestly looking back, thankfully we, we didn’t make any ma- any massive mistakes that I’m, like, harping on or dwelling on from the past, so it was, like, little things, right? Like, don’t include that in the contract or maybe skip that hire, make that hire.
Little things that aren’t gonna necessarily move the needle fifteen years forward, right? So thankfully we’re– we don’t have many of those lessons that we regret. I, I’d say that honestly, like, the, the biggest takeaway for me is in the early days of scaling a business, at least in our case, we were in our late twenties when we started it, we didn’t really know much.
And I think the, the kind of innocence we had when we approached the operations of the business and the day-to-day, we were learning so many things that were outside of our core focus, which was delivering technology, creative, and results for clients. So when you’re learning operations and finance and legal and how to actually manage a business, you’re approaching it from a very pure point of view.
And I feel like I wish I ha– I can go back to that mindset now, fifteen years later, when things now, everything I do is, like, through, like, eight risk factors and all this other stuff of things I’ve picked up along the way. So to answer your question, I wi- I wish I could actually go back to those days and kind of have that pure mindset of just open-mindedness.
Brian Thomas: No, that’s amazing, and I think that’s part of the, the joy and, and I know it’s a double-edged sword as a startup, but there’s just so much excitement and things that you’re building that you kinda put the, the little things that people worry about, like, oh, it’s raining today, I just love that. The excitement of entrepreneurship, starting something that’s really exciting.
And it would be nice to go back and, and maybe have a knowledge base and look back, maybe a video of that whole time that you could go back and just kinda rekindle. I think that’s amazing. So thank you for the backstory. Really appreciate that. And John, Wondersauce positions itself as a business acceleration agency rather than a traditional creative or media shop.
You’ve described the model as helping brands break through specific growth thresholds, whether that’s getting to market, making the first million, or breaking through a revenue ceiling. What does that distinction mean in practice, and how does it change the relationship you have with clients compared to a traditional agency of record model?
John Sampogna: I think it depends, but in simplest form, it’s, it’s moving away from selling a service to selling results. So we like to focus our conversations early on with our clients around what we’re trying to achieve together, what business goal we should be hyper-focused on, and ultimately, like the value we’re bringing to the partnership.
Sometimes that value happens to be a service, and they need like a transactional service, and the relationship goes down that path. In other instances, it’s, it’s growth, and it’s achieving a new revenue milestone or getting more engagement to, I don’t know, like an email newsletter or something like that.
And we’re able to prescribe a set of solutions that ultimately we feel, if done over the course of weeks and months, will drive success. And we can then look back and, and measure that and optimize what we’re doing and ultimately pivot if it’s not working or double down if it is working. So for me, it’s less of a focus on the in-the-weeds selling of services, whether it’s like you need content or you need a new front end of your website.
More– and it’s more around like a set of things that are prescribed to ultimately unlock this goal. So it’s, it’s really just a mindset shift, and it starts with kind of like the first interaction you have with clients when you’re taking requirements on the, on the call for, whether or not this is going to be a fit.
And it goes down to like how you write contracts and then ultimately how you train your team to navigate the day-to-day of a relationship. And I think it’s it all comes down to mindset
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. And that’s what I highlighted here is it’s a mindset. I like how you go into this.
You’ve got a, a whole toolkit that you can offer your clients, but at the end of the day, you provide measurable outcomes, and if things aren’t hitting the mark, you have ways to pivot and to obviously do some things that will really make your client stand out in the work that you do for them. So thank you.
John, you’ve been vocal about companies losing themselves, chasing performance metrics at the expense of brand-building. What does that imbalance actually cost a company over time, and how do you make the case to a CMO or a CFO who’s been rewarded for hitting short-term conversion numbers?
John Sampogna: Yeah, it’s ironic because, you know, the last question, we’re talking about measurability, and now I’m about to smash measurability.
I think in simplest terms, it’s one of those things where as marketers, we’ve all been trained over the last year to speak in CAC and cost per acquisition and ROAS, and we are so used to doing the majority of our marketing on hyper-measurable channels, whether that be, Meta or, or TikTok or Google, where, we’re analyzing every hour and every day’s performance, and that’s super healthy for certain aspects of the marketing funnel, right?
Lower funnel, mid funnel. And I think the, the issue is when your entire business is– your entire marketing plan is focused on just that, you are now basically signing up for every single transaction and new customer being something you pay for. And the second that you turn off the media spigot, what happens to your business?
Does it completely, like, stop and halt? Does– Do people still care? And I think what we’re preaching is more of a balanced approach. So figuring out how to still do the foundational elements of brand building, which over time should help build affinity for your brand towards a audience or a product or a solution.
And over time, you become synonymous with that, so you’re not having to ultimately pay for every single new customer or retain every new customer. And it starts to balance that organic with the, you know, the earned and the paid equation. So it’s, it’s just really like a balanced approach, and I think that the performance side is still super important, but s- but so is the earned side.
And I feel like brands usually give up too soon on the earned side because they’re not, they’re not seeing the immediate results. Because it’s not an immediate thing. It takes months, and in some cases, years to have that payoff. But once that payoff happens, it’s real, and it isn’t something that you can turn off by, just simply eliminating some spend.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. Really appreciate that. And you did break it apart, some short term versus the long term. You said that both are important, of course. You did tease apart, obviously, earned, how important that is, obviously, in the long-term strategy. Again, sometimes people just don’t wanna make that effort or that spend, but we know over time that certainly works.
So I appreciate your insights. And then, John, the last question of the day, as we look ahead, you’ve described the future of the agency model as one of human and machine collaboration, and the landscape is shifting fast with in-house teams growing, AI reducing some production costs and holding companies under pressure.
Where do you see the independent and mid-size agency model in five years and– or less? And what does Wondersauce need to be in that future to stay relevant and win?
John Sampogna: I think that working with in-house teams, it should be nothing new to many agencies. I hope it’s not. We’ve been doing it in some way, shape, or form since the beginning of, of our agency.
I think it will continue to be more and more integrated in many cases. I think that partnering with, with their clients’ internal teams will start to feel just like one team if it’s done correctly. So I would say getting used to that as the new normal would be a good first step. And I think in terms of what AI is going to do to the commoditization of many aspects of marketing, I think that it’s important to look at, at marketing as a before and an after scenario with AI.
So the way I’m looking at it now is everything kind of like before twenty twenty-four is the old way of marketing, and I’m not saying that stuff won’t be important, but the– what AI is going to do to that stuff is make it faster and cheaper, in some cases better. So make sure your agency can do the old way faster, better, and cheaper using AI.
And I think that where the real opportunity is, is where marketing is going, which is the post-AI world, where it’s gonna reinvent many aspects of the marketing journey. And the brands that are one step ahead versus only focused on making things faster, better, and cheaper, the ones that are investing in how to make marketing more connected, more smart, more personalized, more adaptable, are the ones who are gonna be paving the way for what the future of marketing looks like, and that is not something that AI could eliminate.
So it’s– you have to be focused on both.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I appreciate that. Really do. There’s a lot that goes into traditional marketing, as you know, but if you’re able to leverage platforms or technologies like AI, you talked about smarter, better, cheaper, faster, those are the companies that are gonna win because they are easily adapting to the technology landscape that’s changing literally by the minute now.
So, appreciate those insights. John, it was such a pleasure having you on today, and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
John Sampogna: Thank you so much.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
John Sampogna Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s Podcast Page.
