Latest / Frap Rap with GDogggggggg / Ep 1: Jeff Marshall (JeffJLM)

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Ep 1: Jeff Marshall (JeffJLM) · Frap Rap with GDogggggggg

• AG + JM: Welcome to Frap Rap. I'm your host, Aaron Goldman, AKA AG, the artist formerly known on AOL Instant Messenger as GDogg with eight Gs. Yes, one through seven were taken. All right, 25 years ago, I was an AE at an ad network called L90, and my biggest client was Starcom IP. Every Thursday, I'd invite everyone in Chicago at 35 West Wacker to meet me at the Cosi across the street for coffee, and for each person that came, I'd do a freestyle rap about them. Hence the name, Frap Rap. Each episode I track down another OGIP'er to reminisce about the good old days and see what they're up to now. Today my guest in studio is Jeff Marshall. Jeff, that's your cue. There he is. What's up, man? Good to see you. Good to see you as well. Where's my squagel? Welcome to Cosi's Yeah, you say Cosi's I want a squagel the squagel the thing I love the best was remember they would have like the free little samples. They would cut up the bread in the little oh, yes You could like go up and get one. are we? exactly. weren't making any money. It's like let's get a free meal. That was the move. Well, it's great to have you here in studio. This is the first episode of Frap Rap and I thought who better to start it with then the man who was there pretty much from the beginning. Pretty much. Yeah. So You know Well, as we go through, whole goal here is to try and find as many people. we can to come on and talk about the good old days. ⁓ of them will probably be virtual. ⁓ just happens to work out that we live close to each other. So thanks for dropping by the crib. Because I'm an old head. We couldn't get the technology figured out and we we live close enough. So I'll come over. Yeah. But anyway, I guess we'll look over here. So we're on as well as audio. Anyone ever tell you you got a face for audio, ⁓ boy. Yeah, a forehead for audio. Look at that. ⁓ Yeah. At any So yeah, great to have you here. Why don't you tell everyone sort of like, how did you come into the picture with IP, what was it like when you started and we'll build from there. Sure, sure. So, you know, what was the year? It was '99 and I was just finishing up grad school. I was doing it at night and I was... you know, gung ho thinking, you know, everything in this dot com stuff was like blowing up. It so exciting. I think ton of my classes were talking about it, kind of like people are talking about AI now. It was kind of like the same kind of hype. And I was like, I'm dead set. I got to go to Silicon Valley. I got to make this thing happen. And it just so happened right at the same time, a good buddy of mine who I worked with previously at Starcom, Tim Harris, hopefully he gets on gets on the invite for this show as well. I don't know. He's he's kind of sketchy, but He had just gotten hired. He left Starcom, went to work for a dot com-ish company. It was a CD-ROM, interactive CD-ROM magazine. had those things back then. Launch CD-ROM. And he was coming back and he was being hired by this mysterious guy, Rishad Tobaccowala and he said, why don't you come join me? And I'm like, I don't know, man, Silicon Valley, like, you know, staying here. And he had me sit down and meet with Rishad and it was like over from there. I mean, Rishad just, you know, blew me away and I was like, hey, I can stay in Chicago. and do kind of this dot-com thing at the same time I thought why not it's the best of both worlds it was awesome Well, we'll definitely have to get Harris on. ⁓ I hope to get Rishad on at some point, too. I kind of think he'd be a good closer. So we're kind of starting, you know, we've got good bookends here. ⁓ And my goal, actually, I still have the old IP org chart here back in the day. ⁓ And goal is to work my way through it see if we can kind of cross off everyone. There's a great ⁓ sandwich shop called Chicago Authority, CBA. ⁓ people would take the menu and sort of you'd have to work your way through and print, ⁓ you'd get the printed menu. And you would mark each time you had one of their sandwiches and then when you completed it very few people did They would post it up on the wall. ⁓ nice in the CBA. So that's what's gonna happen here I never made it I did a fun fun story though at one point they were in danger of losing their lease I think there had been Actually, maybe there had been a fire or something. They were raising money I forget what it was for they were raising money and if you donated money, then they would ⁓ put a sandwich named after you on the menu for like a week. So as we'll get into, ⁓ my nickname at the time was GDogggggggg. ⁓ And so I had them make the doggy style sandwich and it was ⁓ tuna, pepperoni and cheese. And they do steamed bagel sandwiches. That's kind of their gimmicks. So yes, back in the day. But let's go. We're back. So back to the early days. ⁓ of all, What did IP stand for and how was it created? Oh boy, IP stood for a lot of things. Some overt and some not so overt and out there. But technically it for Internet protocol. But we had this little game that we use a little bit in early presentations with clients where we would say like what it stood for. It'd be integrated planning or it'd be interactive planning or all these kinds of different things. And then there were some funny jokes in there that, you know. maybe appropriate for other audiences. But Internet Protocol, was Starcom Internet Protocol. Got it. that was, so I remember where I came into play on the rep side, I had actually come out of school and I had two job offers. One was from Starcom and the other was from L90. And it was the same amount of money and my calculus was, right, think this like Internet thing is going to be a big deal. And I asked Starcom if I could get placed in IP. And what they said was you got to go through, think they called it pit. Like you kind of go through a general sort of rotation. You get onboarded and then they decide where to put you. And they couldn't guarantee me that I'd end up in the Internet group. But I was like, I really think this is going to be the thing. I want to start my career in it. And so I ended up not taking that job. I took the sales planner job at L90. At any rate, ⁓ now here we are. worked out great for you. But then, of course, ⁓ you had to have ⁓ it had to be a separate group, right? Because it was a new ⁓ medium and and and so how did you build it in a way that was like ⁓ able to serve clients who were thinking about their marketing and media plans ⁓ holistically, but there was this kind of new thing coming up here. You had to some expertise for it. Let me let me me go a couple steps back and talk a little bit about the kind of the history so Rishad who we mentioned before he he ⁓ had a long time kind of history ⁓ kind of being interactive and forward. So he was, he's from India. He went to college in India and then he came to the United States. He went to University of Chicago Business School. And when he came out of business school, he got a job offer at Leo Burnett and ⁓ started as a lowly account executive. He loved his time there, but he was always kind of doing forward facing things. So he was doing this like database marketing. in Leo Burnett and it really got him into the place where he was seen as kind of futuristic. And so when Leo Burnett wanted to get into the game, they bought a company called Giant Step and the Heneghan over there were running it. ⁓ And Leo wanted to put ⁓ one of own over into Giant Step to kind of like help make sure that it was serving Leo Burnett purposes as well as growing the Giant Step So he was in very early at Giant Step, very successful interactive marketing company. ⁓ After he'd done that for a few years, then Jack Klues kind of saw him and his potential, saw the idea for doing, you know, Internet media, online media, and said, I wanna tap Rishad and see if he can head this up. So he brought Rishad into Starcom, Starcom Mediavest Group at the time, and said, let's start this up. ⁓ His first hire was Tim Harris from the interactive. ⁓ company he was working at. There was an associate in the company, Sarah Cook. ⁓ And then from there, ⁓ pulled in ⁓ ⁓ Harris like talk to this guy. ⁓ So ⁓ was very much kind of ⁓ but the idea always was like we had to be like specialists and dedicated to what the space was, how do we build this out? ⁓ Originally just being like a handful of people wasn't any big deal. But as it got bigger and bigger and bigger, it became its own business unit and its own company. And it really had to do that to operate differently separately. Like a quirky thing that you wouldn't think is a quirky thing. And it's kind of funny to look back on it now is investing in technology for us. Like we needed to be technology forward with our clients. In Starcom, everything was standardized. Like if you're working across 500 employees, like you couldn't offer BlackBerrys to 500 employees. But for our group, had to be futuristic. We had to have BlackBerrys. We had to ⁓ connected to our email and know what this technology was doing. So Rishad had to ⁓ things to get it created as a separate business unit, separate company. So could do things almost as simple as that. ⁓ then also just operate differently on behalf of our clients as well. So did you have the beeper BlackBerry or the one with the full keyboard? I ⁓ the full keyboard. At the beginning, there were some people who had Do you remember AOL Sidekicks? Sure, oh yeah. We had AOL Sidekicks, like we were definitely some of first was the one that kind of like went sideways, I think it like, didn't it like flip out? Yeah, Like it didn't have like a top that kind of like flipped out and then the keyboard like exposed itself when you... Yeah. It was almost like a, it was like a slide version instead of a flip phone. It was like a slide kind Yeah. I think Paris Hilton was like the spokesperson and she was like, bedazzled or something. I think so. I think you're right. Somewhere in here and you're getting a treat here Jeff in my home office So most people are only seeing behind the scenes people correct But it's like well one side right next to the screen is all like my fidgets and stress balls to keep me occupied Well, I'm so I can't be multitasking on my calls, but somewhere in here. I'm gonna pull it out I think I have the old BlackBerry. Oh my gosh. I think I finally did get rid of all my old devices at some point Oh look at that thing ⁓ full keyboard and everything that brings back some bad memories. Like I think that I had like calluses on my thumbs from typing. Now was it was Research In Motion right RIM was really? They were a client of ours they became a clean not they weren't an early early client of ours But they did become a client of ours for sure Brandon Starkoff ran that business for a long time ⁓ Now who were some of the other early clients that you on? boy ⁓ I so McDonald's was one of the early ones, Miller Coors ⁓ I worked on Hallmark and Network Solutions. Network Solutions was probably our biggest, biggest, biggest early pitch because they were e-commerce at the time and they ended up being our biggest, they were probably our biggest team at any. given point. I remember. So back to the org chart and we should talk about this. Nobody even knows what Network Solutions is today. NetSol. ⁓ The NetSol. Yeah. Domain register. But on the org chart, I always remember like there would be, you know, each account would usually have like a row, right? And each row was like, okay, who was the director on the account? director, manager. Let's actually read the others. ⁓ Assistant and then down. IC interactive coordinator. ⁓ But then the NetSol ⁓ would have like six rows because there'd be like, you know, eight ICs and six assistants and multiple managers. ⁓ And I remember they ran a ton of pop-ups. ⁓ yeah. Pop Unders. ⁓ the Pop Unders. They perform great. Like come on, people will click through on them. They generated a lot of revenue for Network Solutions. They did and a lot of commission for me as a salesperson. At L90 we called them Power Ads. ⁓ yes, Power Ads was the good name for them. And our innovation was, so Pop Ups were, I don't know how much explaining we want to do on this podcast. There's gonna be lot of like insider and time dated references here, but I think the audience that's gonna be tuning in for this is probably people who were there at the time. So I'm not gonna do too much. ⁓ Do you watch or listen to Smartless podcast? So now that was like explain it for Tracy, right? sister, like who doesn't know the industry. I know how much of that we'll do in this pod, but anyway, Power Ads ⁓ was instead of launching ⁓ a page. So the creative for a pop-up would usually be like an ad unit. But instead of having an ad unit, we just launched the actual landing page on networksolutions.com in its own window. So we skipped the step of you having to click on an ad to get to the site. We just launched the site in a new browser, either above the browser you were looking at or hidden below it. It sounds like a combination of like AI and MFA. Well, and in fact, what we were really doing, and we didn't realize it at the time, was cookie bombing because we would have the landing page sort of subtly there and it would then make that person tracked as a visitor to the site. And if at any time in whatever the window was, they ended up buying a domain from NetSol. We got credit for We got credit for it. So we did touch them. We touched them with a messaging. like we should get credit. Amen. Some kind of credit. ⁓ Fractional at best. Yes. But we'll take it. ⁓ OK. So ⁓ so we're in the early days of IP. You've stood up the group. Let's actually go back to the org chart because I'm curious how both we'll talk about it like. ⁓ Literally and figuratively. ⁓ Literally, I remember ⁓ the org chart was like coveted. If you could get your hands on it, it was like gold for people on our side of the aisle because we could then figure out, who's on what accounts. And a lot of other agencies at the time wouldn't share their org charts. Their policy, know, OMD down the street was not putting out their org chart. You really had to like work your way through the system to find the right people. But you kind of had a policy where You put it out there and what was the calculus there? Yeah, think that ⁓ mean, I give I give ⁓ 99 % of most of the credit for a lot of this stuff to Rishad because he just has such a forward thinker perspective. Like those you don't know Rishad, you should go find him on, you know, like he puts his free newsletter every single week. And so it was just this like you should put it out there. ⁓ It's a a client first mentality. It's a Like I should be reachable. I should make this easier for you, like sales community, clients, whatever it is to get a hold of us. And it manifests itself in big ways, ⁓ our org chart going out to our partners saying like, hey, Aaron, like, I want to make sure you know who you should talk to so that you're not wasting your time. But our people aren't wasting our time saying, no, I'm the wrong person either. But all the way to like instant messaging. handles like my handle was in my email signature and some people thought I was crazy because they're like, do you want your computer just popping off all day long with people messaging? And I was like, I was like, if somebody needs to get a hold of me, I want them to be able to get a hold of me. And I'm like, just because they can reach out, it doesn't necessarily mean that I have to respond immediately. But if there's an emergency, if there's some, you know, like if your website went down or your ads aren't working or like whatever it is, like you needed to be ready in real time. And that was just a philosophy that, you know, maybe Rishad didn't say it directly, but like he emanated those kinds of like philosophies that manifested themselves in how a lot of business just operates now with transparency and being forward and giving things away for free so that you build relationships and build your business. Yeah, well, yeah, at the time it was super novel and I remember it was Tanya Graham who was the admin for the group. Tanya Graham. She was the keeper of the org chart every month. I would kind of like, you know, hit her up. Hey Tanya, could I get... one too though. She was a tough one. She was a good gatekeeper. Well, I hope to get her on the pod at some point too. That'd be super fun. So if anyone is still in touch with Tanya, let me know. I would love to have her on and we could talk about it. ⁓ Let's talk more now, figuratively, from an org chart perspective as you're building this group. How are you thinking about the roles and the evolution and kind of take us through you you put the time horizon. Well, actually, let's jump to the end and then back up. How long were you at IP for yourself? So I was from ⁓ I landed in the first month of its existence and I was there until it kind of, you know, was shuttered. It wasn't it's not I guess it's still somewhat in existence because like Starcom and doing interactive is there. But at a certain point, we had made the decision to reintegrate it into Starcom to make it, you know, a core function, not a separate business unit, not a separate like business, but to be, you know, a skill set that sat inside of, you know, the teams. And then, you know, like we've like everything else, it's like a pendulum that kind of like goes back and forth. It's like, do you need it to be integrated? Do you need it to be standalone? And like we're like the industry is still going through that with every single kind of like functional thing. But was there until we made that decision. And at that point, I had folded out one of the companies that we had created. Starcom IP kind of kicked off a lot of different companies, but one of the companies was a creative and interactive creative agency called Pixel, ⁓ which then merged with Starcom Entertainment and Connective Tissue at MediaVest to form Liquid Thread. It's still kind of in its own existence as well as content specialists within the group. But kind of that all strung together. So I was there beginning then. And is that like, what are we talking 15 years? Um, I was, I was within the company 16 years. I was, um, traditional media for the first four. So that leaves 12 and I was probably out of IP for five. So IP probably existed like for eight years. Okay. Like existed existed. I mean, like I said, it's Like it's still existing in lots of different forms and it lives in you. It does. So and at its at its height or peak, how many people, you know, what did you hit over 100 people? We were one hundred and fifteen hundred and sixteen at one point. I was telling Aaron before we got on here, Erin Vogel needs to show up for this pod because she kept one of these org charts and kind of from that height, that 115 or 110 or something, like there's an org chart. She started crossing people's names off as they left and I know she still has it. So I hope she is on this and I hope she brings it. All right, cool, yes. We'll have to get her on early too so we can compare the notes. But yes, my goal would be to get to every one of them. So settle in folks, we're gonna have 115 episodes of season one of Frap Rap here. And back to AOL for a second. mean, that was literally, so every Thursday, I would get on AIM and one at a time because you couldn't like, you do there's no good messaging. There was no group message. I would just go down the list of everyone at IP say, and I would say Frap Rap question mark, Frap Rap question mark to see if, if they were free to come and that, you know, everyone by then knew that was the sign you go down to Cosi ⁓ come on in, get your squagel. ⁓ and then yes, I would rap. We'll, come back to the rap at the end. I also want to do a speed round with you. ⁓ but before we get into that, ⁓ I, know, let's so, We talked about quickly, we got to the end of your journey and IP's journey where it kind of got then baked into the rest of the practice. ⁓ So two part question, what do you think made IP so unique and what do you think its legacy will be ⁓ for the industry? Wow, remind me of the second part of the question because the first part of the question is pretty big. So the first part of the question is like what made it special? ⁓ really think and I a lot of the people who are at Starcom IP at the time you know, have shared this exact comment, but it's kind it was lightning in a bottle. It was it was absolutely lightning in a bottle. It was a specific time and place the world was changing. The world needed something new. You had the special person in Rishad kind of at the helm. ⁓ ⁓ really just attracted people who attracted other people that were all kind like minded. But the philosophy behind You know, it really was about how do I bring diversity of thinking, diversity of thought, diversity of approach to the table that can create something new. You know, the media industry has been around, advertising agencies and media as a function has been around for decades at this point, right? But the reality is that it really needed to be thought about differently. To be something needed to be created anew. so that set the foundation and then Rishad kind of filled it in and said, ⁓ would say, land of misfit toys. And we adopted that as a saying to say, we're the land of misfit toys. A of the people that we brought over from Starcom, and I'll reference one that started as an ⁓ IC, Internet coordinator, Shelby Saville, who is the CEO of Starcom. ⁓ There were people that were like, proudly weird and different and said, I want to go do something weird and different because this has been done before. And we just attracted a lot of other people who said, want to learn something new. I want to be about creating something new. And you just brought wonderful people into the company, like Erin Petty, were talking about before, Chandra Panley, know, ⁓ Saneel like they're all going and doing great and amazing things now. because they were those people who they would have been the people that were hanging out in Indiana for about a year and then said, no, cool. I need to go further west. I would have they would have gotten in their wagons. They would have circled them up and said, great, like, let's go out west because there seems to be something new and interesting out there. Those are the same kinds of people that again, that lightning in a bottle that just happened that, you all the people's what made it possible. But, you know, Rishad was spark that created it. Yeah, and so that is so part to them was the legacy or maybe another way of asking that question is like what do think the industry would be like? Had it not been for IP. You there's there's a saying and I'm probably gonna get it wrong There's something about you know, like, you know You overstate your legacy in the short term and you understood understate it and in the long term or I wanted the I can't remember what it is it sounds but it feels like it feels ⁓ We genuinely thought we were changing the world back then like we thought we were a right to a certain extent we were, but a certain extent, like, you we were just one of, you know, a group of people that, you know, all of us were trying to do this new thing. And if we hadn't happened, you know, there were 10 other companies doing similar things that would have made it happen. But I do think our legacy is probably bigger than we is you simply look at a company like Publicis. You look at the growth engine behind Publicis today. It's the technology, it's those business units that are part of the technology. It is all the companies that they're acquiring, from Epsilon to Influential, Captivate. All of these companies, that stuff was made possible because of the ground that we broke back in 1999, 2000. We broke that ground, we showed a holding company a path to doing this. And if it wasn't for that path, know, Publicis might not in the position that it was in today. Like ⁓ is clearly the leader and head of everybody else in so many of in so many of these regards. And a lot of that is instilled in the culture and the mentality of saying, ⁓ go be the first, like let's go create the new thing. And if we can't create the new thing, we need to bring things in, whether that's people or buying companies. Like that mentality was started then and just kind of set it on fire. I may be overstating that, but I do genuinely believe with ⁓ many years of hindsight, I think that a lot of people would probably agree with that. Yeah, that's well said. ⁓ right, so let's catch up on from when you left to where you are now. Give us like the career in a couple minutes and catch us up to your role. Sure. So. ⁓ made the progression from Starcom IP to Pixel to Liquid Thread from there. I had a cup of coffee at AOL with Tim Armstrong, Jeff Levick, and then went over to NBC Universal, 11 years, NBC Universal doing digital sales, like you started in the business. I was like, that sounds like fun. So I did that. ⁓ And now I've moved over ⁓ to ad tech. So I'm still making my progression through You know the industry learning new and different things. I'm an Integral Ad Science, head of retail and CPG, leading the charge on clients, acquisition and that, and those industries, and really bringing expertise for the sales organization in those regards. So again, I continue to have this perpetual motivation of trying to learn new and different things, and that's what I'm doing today, so pretty happy about it. Yeah, well as we work our way through and have folks on I think we'll see I mean there's certainly the folks who stayed within the agency world and even some who stayed within that same agency ⁓ group ⁓ Some who went to the dark side, you know over to sales ⁓ and I do think there was like a span of a couple years where that became like the common move once they started reporting back to their friends like hey you basically do the same job and make twice as much we're just planning campaigns here, but we get a commission for doing it. And then folks who once tech became a thing became some of the pioneers ⁓ there ⁓ yourself included. How about on ⁓ the front? ⁓ I we happen to be neighbors, which is awesome. So I get to see you around town, but ⁓ catch everybody up on what's going with you and the fam. Oh my gosh. I've got my twins have graduated from college, so we're empty nesters. But what we did when we were empty nesters from high school is we I guess we followed them. ⁓ They went to schools in Colorado, one at CU and one at CSU. And so we moved to Colorado and we were out there for four years. It was great. The weather is a thousand times better in Colorado than Chicago. ⁓ But you know, what brought us back is really the people and you know, the industry, like to be honest with you, like the industry is not as strong out there as it is in Chicago and New York and those kinds of places. So. the people brought us back. So we just got back in September of last year and renovating a house, hopefully gonna be in it soon and I'll just be a few blocks over that way. I love it. Well, the next one we'll do by you. Actually, that actually brings us to our apartment crawl segment, which is something I wanna do in each episode here. For those who were around to remember it, we have our red solo cups here in studio in honor of the occasion. But the IP apartment crawl ⁓ was legendary. You know, this was you know where people would host in their apartments and We would sort of work our way from like one to the next how many would we hit in the night? like four or five gosh I mean a minimum of three. I don't like I don't know if I ever made it past three I didn't I didn't make it to as many as many people but I don't I definitely didn't make it more than three but I know they went further than three Yeah, well and and and you mentioned Shelby she was always ⁓ she had the strategy because when she ⁓ she started ⁓ pretty within the group and having multiple reports, she kind of went, okay, I go for like the first two and then I leave and then... a smart one. ⁓ Yeah, so at any rate. We should have known then where she'd be now. ⁓ right, but I want to do so the apartment crawl for the purposes of the pod is going to be our lightning round. Okay, ⁓ I'm going to just fire away at some quick ⁓ questions. First thing that comes to your mind. ⁓ No wrong. What do they say? No, no stupid answer. Just stupid people. No, that's not what they say. But anyway, let's raise the glasses. Cheers. Yes. Cheers. Cheers. And All right, I did have one quick story. It wasn't quite apartment crawl, but it is Starcom IP lore. Can I share? For sure. So not tied to an apartment crawl, but we did like to go out to other places as well, not just our own apartments. That was the efficient way to do it. But every once in we'd go something. And there was this legendary place called Life is Too Short. For those of you who don't know Life is Too Short, it is no longer in existence, but it was over on the river in a... kind of a crappy part of town. nice now, I think, but it's like in a crappy part of town. it like literally, it looked like you were going into some kind of like shack or something, but then it opened up and it was this nautical themed like bar that was like really fun. And we went there a couple of times ⁓ and one of them was legendary because of the things we liked to do when we'd go out or maybe it was one of the things that Art Sindlinger really liked to do when we went out is to try to pay people to do things that made him laugh. Like this was just an Art thing. This is like anybody who knows Art, this is great. But so he got it in his mind that he wanted to pay somebody. Again, remember this place was on the river and he said, I'm gonna pay somebody if they jump in the river. And it started to be this, how much money? And he was like 20 bucks and people were like, no, it's not worth it, not worth it. So he started taking up a collection of people and got a collection of money and he got two takers. Yeah, and Kristi Westendorf. I don't did Vogel do it. I who is Buszaczer Okay Yeah, but there might have been more than that because like there's money's involved people got in but I remember I remember Kiki and Buczaczer jumped in but here's a Too Short They know this happened So they were like policing us and they wouldn't let anybody actually get close enough to jump into the river from Life's Too Short So, of course, we're you know, we got a lot of ingenuity and they're like there's a bridge right there How about you just go over to the bridge and jump off the bridge? And so Kiki went over and literally like walking across this metal bridge in Chicago. it's like a 30, 40 foot drop. I at least, at least. I mean, it's it's above the water. And the thing about it is like they have barges going down this river. It's like this is actually dangerous. But yeah, that was one of my favorite. That is what yes. Art Sindlinger and Starcom IP. stories of outside the office escapades. Yeah, we're gonna have to get Art find out what other things he paid people to do. We'll have to Kiki and Dan on to get their recollection. other one somebody just reminded me of one of the apartment crawl stories that I thought was really funny was at Chris Negron's apartment. Cappy. ⁓ So Cappy had this was like early days of this. There was a camera on the front door of the bill of his building and he invited everybody over. So this apartment crawl, right? Everybody's showing up. They covered the doorknob to the main building with Vaseline. And so then they just turned on the camera to just like watch people try to get in the door with Vaseline. That is hysterical. Yeah. That's classic. Silly stuff. Yes. Silly stuff. So now the lightning rod. On brand for Cappy though. We'll have to have him on. Yes, is gonna be great. Every time another story comes up, it's another lead for someone we gotta get on the pod. All right, so apartment crawl, speed round. Okay. We mentioned this earlier AOL Instant Messenger. What was your aim handle? JeffJLM JeffJLM. And I had that, like I had it, I got that on, like there were three of them. It was AOL, MSN, and Yahoo Instant Messenger. All three of them, I just got JeffJLM. And it was the same on all three of them. You know you were in early when you were able to secure that and you didn't have to get GDogg with eight Gs. Who was your first boss at IP? Rishad was my first boss and only boss at Starcom IP. Who was your favorite client? ⁓ gosh, that's like who's your favorite kid? I don't know if I can do that. ⁓ Person or company? You can choose, could be a company. I tended to really actually enjoy the really tough clients. Like I don't know, I was a glutton for punishment. So there was this woman at Network Solutions, her name was Aggie Antetta, and she was so tough on us. And I don't know, just really enjoyed her. At Hallmark, it was Paul Inman, ⁓ for another time I got a good email flub story with Paul Inman. ⁓ And then ⁓ at Allstate, Pete Stoutenberg ⁓ was awesome, but he was tough as can be as well. I always like the tough clients. So those are the guys that really got up in my business about making sure that we were as good as we said we were. I love it. All right, if you could have worked on any client, I guess you touched all. clients to some degree, right? there one client, was there one like your white whale that you wish you could have worked on? Yeah, I mean, ⁓ touched every client, which means I didn't touch a lot of clients like in a meaningful way, right? ⁓ I would say the client that I saw people having the most fun on, and I wish I would have been able to kind of jump in and do stuff because it was just fun, was Miller Coors. They did a couple of these like just really ⁓ super first of their time. ⁓ They did a takeoff of like fantasy football for, you know, a draft of, you know, like picks for things. I don't know, like it was just, they were always doing, they always seemed to have budget for fun, new, interesting, never been done before things that clients always ask for, but never really actually fund. So would have been a good one. Yeah. And was it true that like you could, when you were out, if you worked on that account and you were out, as long as you were buying Miller products, that you could expense it? Is that just what they It's kind of like I would say if you are out and you couldn't buy a competitive brand ever like that's couldn't buy I guess you can't be seen with a competitive brand in your hand Yeah, I guess you could have just had a rep pick up your tab. You weren't buying your own beers back There were a lot of reps buying our tabs. Thank you. Thank you and speaking of reps present company excluded Who was your favorite vendor? ⁓ geez, I Total old-school person I loved her death, Terri Silverstone. ⁓ She was over at ⁓ Cartoon Network and that of stuff. The reason why she was ⁓ an interesting, interesting character. But so my wife and I, was hard for us to get away on a vacation because we had a dog and she offered to babysit our dog one time. ⁓ ⁓ we were gone for a week and we gave her enough food for like 10 days. When we got back, she said she ran out of food about five days in, so she started buying like wet dog food for the dog. We were like, holy cow, who is this dog we got Our 25 pound dog had gained like seven pounds in a week. And I think it might've been because she was smoking pot around the dog too. You know, you get the munchies when you... That's funny. And by the way, we'll have to come back to this. We'll have to find someone who worked on Philip Morris, but this is the era when you could smoke in the... Well, not pot, but... tobacco for sure and Leo Burnett just used to pay the fines to be able to smoke in the offices wild ⁓ We need to have Margaret Bell on she's gonna be the one I know about them. Oh my gosh. Alright, so to close the show. We're gonna do our Frap Rap. So ⁓ Back in the day at Cosi I would do a freestyle rap off the top of the dome for every person that came I would incorporate their name or their outfit or whatever else was going ⁓ for this version you're gonna give me three keywords and I'm gonna turn them into a rap ⁓ And since you're in person here, write them down on this little card here. ⁓ I'm going to do my best Harry Mack impression. ⁓ Mack, yes. If you don't know him, look him up. Let's do that. We'll do. ⁓ my goodness. Can you read that handwriting? What does that say? banner like a banner. OK, cool. Can do one. ⁓ just gonna do that. I love it. Okay, I'm gonna do that too. Why not? This one says Rishad ⁓ ⁓ Let's do ⁓ you asked the question ⁓ about the client. Miller Coors, okay. Now back, this was pre-merger, right? They were competitors back then, weren't they? Ah, I do think they were, I think they might have been merger while we were working the business, but yes, that's a good point. So maybe it's just Miller. That's okay, I'll work it Miller Brewing. All right, no, no, no, you're cut off. No more words. All right, I'm gonna keep my hands up because sometimes people accuse me now of using AI to write my raps. here to witness it though. I'd be here to witness That's true, we do have Am I holding this for you? Hold it for the camera. I'm holding it for Because if we were on that, you know, if we were recording this virtual I'd be looking on the screen to do it. All right Here we go a little higher there Jeff. Yep. Boom. Here we go. Bad handwriting and it's backwards. I'm gonna start with my beatbox Yo, yo, I do it up. and we start to clap. You know we do it up with the old Frap Rap. It's A.G. here with Marshall too and we're taking it back to the old school. Back in the day of pop ups and unders. Everybody knows there were a few blunders. We heard some stories. We heard some tales. You put the banner ad up and you get your white whale. That account that you really wanted to land back in the day. Miller Coors You got to look my way. It was a lot of fun to work on. Everybody knew it. And next thing you know with the rhyme mama blew it. But we heard one thing about the first person at IP who was the big story his name is Rishad and he's still around he's still doing his thing He won't go long. I will stop my song. I'll wrap another time. Peace out! Jeff Marshall Drop it on a dime, baby Thank you man good stuff. All right little rusty working out the cobwebs, Episode 1 But I want to thank you Jeff being the first guest on Frap Rap. It was awesome catching up with you And we'll see you next time on Frap Rap with GDogggggggg. G-g-g-g-g-g-g-g-g. ⁓ Thanks, dude.