Scott Carlson Podcast Transcript
Scott Carlson joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive Podcast. Today’s guest is Scott Carlson. Scott Carlson, founder, and Chief Creative Officer of Vans General Store is an accomplished professional in the marketing and advertising industry, renowned for his expertise in digital strategy, content creation, storytelling, and integrated marketing.
Well, good afternoon, Scott. Welcome to the show!
Scott Carlson: Thank you for having me.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely, Scott. I appreciate you making the time jumping on a podcast early to out of New York City, which is phenomenal, and I appreciate again all the work that you do as the chief creative officer at Vans General Store. So, Scott, we’re going to jump right into your first question here.
Could you share the story behind the inception of Vans General Store and how it has evolved into a creative collective specializing in storytelling and digital strategy. And integrated marketing for clients like Pepsi and Hulu. Your approach to creating impactful and authentic brand experiences seems unique.
Scott Carlson: Yeah, so I’ve been doing advertising for quite a long time at big agencies with big, big creative departments. And we, we got to a point I was at an agency called mother very creative agency, amazing culture, lovely people. And we started to get to a point where there were just so many new opportunities in media, right?
Like. Social media was, was blowing up and then you had influencers and you had, you know, how, how can you weave certain ideas together and cross all the different medium paths? And now we have and it just, it seemed like to me that there were so many. New and interesting ways of solving clients’ problems and we have always been coming at it from your standard advertising point of view, where you have teams, you have a copywriter and art director from the creative side.
You have a strategist and an account person. It was all very. Very standard in how we approach things for many, many years. And I started to look at having, having a creative background you know, in fine arts, I started looking at solving problems by bringing different types of creative people in bringing an architect and bring in a lighting designer and bringing an engineer in or a coder.
Not just the advertising people, and these people could surround the team and work with the team and the philosophy. Really was, more about, you know, how, how do you make movies? And when you’re, when you make a horror film, you make sure you have horror film experts on it, right? You don’t, you put, you don’t put a romantic comedy team on a horror film.
And so, I started building teams out based off of what clients’ needs were, and I was in the process of thinking, wow, this is really something interesting. This is something that I think has a future in it. And I was talking to my friend, Liev Shriver. And I was telling him the philosophy about bringing in these different types of people, this, this more of an eclectic type of problem solver to put it into the creative team with the strategist and the account people and, and, you know, creative directors who understand brand DNA and the things that come out from clients.
And Liev said, oh, my gosh, I love that idea. I would like to do that with you. So, and he said, you know, you can bring in the marketing and the fine art people and I can bring in, you know, entertainment people. So, we started Vans General Store, and the agency is named after, my great, my grandfather used to have an agent hardware store called Vans hardware in Ventura and Santa Monica in LA.
And so, we started thinking about, well, we, we actually, you know, we’re going to be delivering a lot of different things. We’re probably more like a general store than we are an agency. So that’s how we came about it. My son’s name is Van. It’s a family name. So, it became Vans general store and that was the philosophy.
It was to build out each. Each client with a team that made, you know, that made sense for what needed to happen. So that that’s how it started. We approach things in a little bit of a different way. We get everybody together in a room. It’s more like a writer’s room. And we have a, like I said, very diverse, eclectic group of thinkers and makers together, working together, trying to solve the problem together for the 1st, you know, few weeks.
And then from there, we disperse the teams, and they go off and make the proper things. And in the role in this has always been a consultant and someone to help. He’s 1 of the smartest guys. I know he doesn’t behave as a celebrity in this. He’s purely a creative person in the agency. So that was the, the idea was let’s, let’s create something different.
Let’s approach things a little bit differently and let’s see if we can, you know, maximize really you know, efficiency and time and budgets with, with clients. And that’s, that’s where it came about.
Brian Thomas: Love the story. The backstory is always the best, typically on these podcasts, Scott, I really do appreciate it.
And the fact that you’ve got. Such an, an amazing artist as your partner. Liev obviously has done some great work and as you mentioned, he’s doing some work on Broadway now, which is awesome. But do appreciate the story. Love that sort of stuff. And Scott, jumping into the next question here, you’ve emphasized the importance of working with like-minded clients and the joy of collaboration. How do you vet potential clients to ensure they align with your creative vision and values?
Scott Carlson: It’s this and great question. It’s difficult. You know, I’ve had clients and categories before where you wouldn’t think, you know, there, there was an openness to doing things new. I’ve worked with the people at Nestle Purina for years and found that that group is probably 1 of the most open minded fantastic clients on the planet.
I’ve worked with very creative companies and found that they’re, you know, they’re not quite as open. So, it really, it’s a hard thing to figure out. There’s a little bit of. You know, meet and greet in the beginning and see if we like sitting across the table from each other. They’re usually by the time we get to a client, they’ve either seen our work, so they know what to expect.
Or we’ve 1 in some sort of pitch, and they’ve, they’ve seen the type of work that we’ve presented and move forward with us. And I think at that point. You know, we, we really do have an interesting approach to the work, and we’ve created something called the, we call regenerative media, which is we try to maximize the, the core idea into as many pieces as possible.
So, if we were going to, you know, we could do an entire brand campaign by just doing an experiential event and using that experiential event to create all the. Broadcast out of home, social media as well as PR. So we’re really, you know, when, when clients see how we approach things, that’s usually the time when, you know, that they’re, they’re, they’re like minded thinkers when they understand, like, wow, what you guys have really done here is you’ve maximized my budget, but you put the way that you’ve done it is you’ve created, you know 50 different things we didn’t think we needed, or we weren’t asking for on the scope of work, but you’ve shown us here that you can actually do it with inside our budget.
And it’s and it’s fun. So, it’s a little bit of a time process with clients, but it’s usually they’ve come to us because they see the type of work we do, or. They’ve that we’ve won in a pitch and they’ve liked what we’ve done. That’s great. It doesn’t always stay that way. We, you know, I’ll be honest.
Most of our clients are great. I don’t, I don’t have a single complaint about our clients, but in the past, you know, we’ve had, you know, people who have been really open and then eventually. Come back down to all things tried and true really do
Brian Thomas: appreciate the insights there. Obviously, things projects work a lot better when you’ve got a collaborative client, of course.
So, Scott, yes, jumping into the 3rd question here as you look towards the future. How do you define success for Vans general store in the coming year, especially in terms of client satisfaction, creative output and team happiness?
Scott Carlson: Again, like an amazing question and probably the most important one. So, you know, for us success is a big part of our success is the last part of your question.
Like, how happy are people? And that’s really, really important to us. The culture of the agency, the happiness of the agency, you know, the health of the agency. And a big part of that is allowing people you know to be themselves and, and going, and it goes back to, you know, your client, you know, a client.
We can drive a client crazy, and a client can drive us crazy. So, we just, we try to make sure that, you know, we are working in healthy environments with, with healthy clients. And for me, success is, you know, the. The capability of constantly attracting. New people to work, so it’s not, you know, of course, we’d love to grow, but it really comes down to when we have interesting and talented people reach out to us and say, I’d love to work there to me.
That’s the success part of it. You know, I, I’ve had, I’ve been very, very fortunate in my career to have. Great mentors and leaders and creative directors take time to, really helped me craft who I became in the end. So, for me, it’s important to do that. And I think the other thing that’s really important for our growth is to stay, you know, to keep your eye on what’s happening is such a big thing right now.
And there’s ways that it’s scary and there’s, there’s, there’s ways that it’s going to be brilliant. Right? So how do we lean into that? Not be afraid of that and figure out how best to use that. Right. And then I think the other thing that’s really important is generations. So, you know, I’ve been doing this for a while.
I have a lot of friends who have been, you know, in, in the business for a long time, most on their own agencies. But they’re really smart people and then we have a whole new generation, you know, every, every 5 years that have been brought up on media opportunities and lifestyles that. That are that are new and different, you know, to the older group and I think that the there’s such a balance between the 2 because I think there’s also something missing in in part of the whole influencer likes followers generation that they miss out on.
Where did the big idea come from? How do you create that? That core message for a client, that big idea for a client that translates across everything. So, there’s, there’s definitely a mix in the generations. That just makes all of the work better. You know, there’s so much to learn from both sides of the spectrum that we’re constantly keeping our eye on.
So, for me, that’s success being able to attract. Like minded thinkers and creative people who see what we do and hear what we do and say, I want to be part of that.
Brian Thomas: That’s great. And the creativity part of it, obviously, is the juice. And as you mentioned, even sometimes we need to kind of lean into some of the newer technology like AI to help us assist, you know, doing some, maybe, maybe the mundane type tasks, but also bring some creativity into the mix as well.
I really love that as we focus on tech here on this podcast, but Scott, thank you. And Scott, last question of the day, Vans general store has been described as a blend of a general store, art gallery and advertising agency. How do you balance these elements to create unique brand narratives and immersive experiences for your clients?
Scott Carlson: It just happens organically. It’s interesting. I mean, it’s such a good question, but it really does happen. When we are working on ideas for clients, and we started by having a small storefront on the Lori side of Manhattan and. And in a lot of this stuff, we do, because, like I said, because we do have such an eclectic group of people, we often are finding ourselves with many, many different things.
We could, you know, we could, we could set out to do you know, we are hired by sleepy Jones pajama company just to do some, some art for a new A new store, they were opening in L. A. and by the time we were done with the project, we had a tabletop art book that sold in bookstores. We created these 12-foot teddy bears out of pajama remnants that were given to the children’s hospital here in New York.
We helped design the store, so. It’s that’s how we look at being a general store. It’s, we can come in and look and you might be looking for 1 thing and you’re going to walk out of the store with 5 things. And then what happened was, is because we’re a storefront, we were creating so many fun, interesting things.
We found ourselves being able to, to make films and art for clients. And we use the front of the front of the office to highlight that. So. Cool. We would have monitors that were running short films that we made, or some of the art that we were using, especially for Pepsi. When we relaunched Sierra mist, some of the original artwork for the billboards that were created were just absolutely stunning.
So, we had a brand launch in the store, and that’s been the balance and it seems like they’re all different pieces. But the truth is, because of our philosophy and how we work. All of that stuff works together, and it goes back to the regenerative media ideas. All of those things just happened to come out of what we were doing as the core message or the core assignment for the client.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And again, it goes back to the creativity behind your work. You know, starting with the name Vans, Vans general store, and the fact that you really offer just a menu of different items that will really help the client obviously be satisfied and you do a better job, obviously, of the output, which I really enjoy especially in this side of the work that you do.
And Scott, it was such a pleasure having you on today and I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Scott Carlson: All right. Thank you so much. It was a pleasure.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Scott Carlson Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
