Today we’d like to introduce you to Ryan Blake.
Hi Ryan, so excited to have you with us today. What can you tell us about your story?
I’m a brand strategist, content creator, advertiser, and storyteller going on 20 years. In many ways, my story really starts with my Dad and my uncle. Before I was born, my dad worked at J. Walter Thompson, one of the very first and most influential advertising agencies in history. Founded in the 19th century, JWT helped define modern advertising and became the industry’s standard-bearer long before Madison Avenue became a cultural touchstone.
When I was a kid, he was creating campaigns for big names like Pepsi, LG, and Sony. He’d always come home with new products they were launching, and campaign concepts for them. So much of his approach was about how humans connect with other people, not just the product (that’s something I carry with me to this day).
Meanwhile, my uncle was a research psychologist, working in the early stages of what we now know to be Neuroplasticity. I was fascinated with the things he told me about human behavior and it’s connection to brain activity.
Interestingly though, those childhood experiences just planted a seed — my entry into digital marketing happened almost completely by accident, and much later. In my early 20’s after undergrad, I wanted to get into music production. So I got an internship at a recording studio in L.A. This internship wasn’t paid (as many weren’t back then), so I got a paid internship at a marketing agency that worked with record labels like W.B. Record, Atlantic, and Red Bull Records. I thought it was close enough to the music industry, so why not? Obviously, the marketing world got it’s hooks in me at that point and I never looked back.
Since then, I’ve worked in and with agencies and brands both big and small, from ABC/Disney Television Group, to Humm Kombucha right in our backyard. The ethos of brand strategy and human psychology that my dad and uncle left me with has shaped the way I approach marketing to this day.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
I would definitely not say a smooth road – a lot of lessons learned, a lot of experience gained, a lot of losses alongside the wins. But that’s how you learn the foundational stuff. The experience that can only time can teach. I’ve learned that tools and tech, whether it’s the internet, social media, AI, whatever — always change in the marketing world. But a solid foundation of experience in the way humans behave doesn’t. That’s a constant.
Thanks – so what else should our readers know about The Rove Agency?
The Rove Agency is a small creative and strategy shop built around a pretty simple idea: good marketing should be human, shouldn’t be copy and paste or rinse and repeat, and should always meaningfully move a business forward. We work with brands on everything from brand strategy and positioning to paid media, social, content, websites, and the customer journey that connects all of it, but what I think we’re really known for is figuring out why something should matter before we start deciding what to make.
Why brands do what they do is ultimately more important than what they do. I loose some people with that statement, but hey. If you get it you get it. If you don’t, Fiverr exists for a reason (no shade to Fiverr. They’ve got a thing, and it works for some folks).
I’ve spent nearly two decades working across branding, advertising, digital strategy, media, hospitality, tourism, food and beverage, and consumer brands, and Rove is really the culmination of everything I’ve learned along the way. We stay intentionally small, which means our clients aren’t getting passed through layers of account managers or handed a strategy that disappears into a deck somewhere. We’re in it with them. We ask a lot of questions, challenge assumptions when we need to, look at the entire business instead of just the marketing channel we were hired to manage, and care a lot about whether the work is actually working. Brand wise, I’m probably most proud of the brands where we’ve helped uncover something that was already true about the business and turned it into an idea people could actually feel. I don’t think great branding is about inventing a clever personality and putting it on top of a company. It’s about finding the thing that makes that company genuinely worth caring about and building everything outward from there. That philosophy carries into everything we do. Whether we’re building a brand, running an ad campaign, creating content, or looking at why customers are dropping out of a booking funnel, we’re always trying to connect the dots between what a business wants to accomplish and what a real human being on the other side actually needs to see, hear, or feel to take the next step. We take the work seriously, but ourselves considerably less so, and I think that combination has become a pretty important part of who Rove is.
How do you think about luck?
I think it’s played a pretty big part for sure, both on the good and bad side. Right place, right time can be an aspect of that. But also being open to opportunities that may not look like opportunities is a key thing when it comes to luck. Listening to your gut. Following where your experience leads. That’s something I wish I had learned and done earlier on.
Contact Info:
- Website: www.theroveagency.com, and brandtherapy.studio
- Instagram: @ryan_blake.co
