POV: Interview with Mike Germano, Co-founder and CEO of Carrot Creative

Welcome to The Agency Post. Tell us about yourself.

I’m Mike Germano, and I’m the co-founder and CEO of Carrot Creative.

I have always had a passion for the Internet and, at the same time, I’ve been motivated to improve, enhance and create communities. These driving forces collided in college when I ran for city council. I became one of the youngest elected officials in the country and one of the first candidates to use social media to get there.

While in office, I realized that a Democrat versus Republican campaign was no different than the battle between Coca-Cola and Pepsi. So, in an effort to make a profit and see ideas come to fruition — something not as easily achieved in politics — I formed Carrot Creative with my business partners in the basement.

At the onset, we knew that our company would leverage social media, a medium we saw as inherent in the future of brand communications. We weren’t a PR shop, and we weren’t a traditional advertising agency. Instead, we were creating something that was centered around truly understanding social media platforms from a communications and technical standpoint.

While we were helping our friends build startups, find partnerships and grow their names, all of the agencies were laughing at us. They didn’t think social media would be a big deal.

As the co-founder and CEO of Carrot Creative, talk to us a little bit about starting an agency. What were the challenges? What did you see in the market that signaled your future success?

We didn’t start our agency in the traditional way, and we didn’t start with clients, either. We believed in social networks, social media and that communication-based websites were the future.

http://vimeo.com/41590818

We experimented as we took on web projects to pay the bills and grow the team, always focusing on social and its implication for brands. The most difficult part of our growth was being different. Agencies thought we were a bunch of coding nerds and not good marketers. Startups thought we were sellouts because we were working for brands. We were stuck in the middle of two working models.

Luckily though, because we were different from the traditional agency, we had the advantage of building our company for the digital age rather than adapting to it. While big shops were experiencing growing pains and supplementing their work with social media, we were already operating with social media at our core,— an obvious choice for us.

Agencies came to us to help them build social ideas as well as their internal social and digital structures. We were well-versed in the platforms, understood the technology, the potential user experience on them, and we were chosen early on as a preferred developer for platforms like Facebook. We quickly realized that the larger agencies adapting to social didn’t understand the space as well as us and only really understood the brands they were working on. So as we grew, those brands — realizing the same thing — began to come directly to us.

Today, there are a lot of “social media agencies.” Unfortunately, many of them don’t have a true understanding of the technology within the platforms. We’ve built Carrot to support all facets of social media: design, development, strategy, analytics, accounts and more. Everyone in our company is a digital native, which has been instrumental in our growth and the quality of work we’ve been awarded.

How are you continuing to grow the agency as a social media industry leader internationally?

Quite frankly, growing internationally is the biggest obstacle that we are facing. We have a handful of international clients, and when we addressed opening offices globally, clients wanted us to stay where we are. Our work is digital, so we can work anywhere, but our Brooklyn office is our heart and source of innovation.

Our international client work and involvement as co-founders of Digital Dumbo has made us known globally and helped us establish relationships in other markets. We don’t need to be on the ground to be successful around the world like great global companies did in the past.

How does Carrot Creative work with other marketing agencies and niche services? How does this add to your agency’s capabilities and make you an industry-leader in your niche expertise?

We aren’t trying to develop our traditional marketing services. Our global clients have other agencies that handle those duties. Instead, we are focused on offering our clients innovative services in the digital space. We’re always on the hunt for startups we can foster that offer something new. We then inform our strategies using their niche expertise. We’ve found partnering with small companies much more beneficial, and we’re able to speak with startups like peers because we share similar experiences and DNA. This type of approach is what has made us the first agency in the world to wear the developer triple crown: being a preferred partner for Facebook, LinkedIn and Tumblr.

In 2005, you were one of the youngest elected officials in the country. What do you think perpetuated your success? How did you utilize social media to gain traction? How did this experience affect Carrot?

Yard signs are big in local politics. Politicians go door-to-door trying to establish connections with voters and convince them to tell their neighbors with a sign which candidate they are supporting. I took that approach in my campaign using social media. I asked people to post “Vote for Mike Germano” on their Myspace page and was able to reach more people that way. My strategy online was to be transparent. People, even from out of the voting boundary, found my campaign refreshing and contributed to my fundraising efforts. Social media not only amplified my campaign’s reach — it allowed me to know my community that I was running for better. At the time, Facebook allowed you to search for addresses, and I used the platform as a CRM tool to find eligible voters in the district. I would use profile information to gauge the contacts who were more likely to vote for me and would use it as conversation fodder in my door-to-door meetings.

I would like to think that social media was the main reason I was elected; however, I had a team that understood traditional tactics as well. Rather than social supplementing our efforts, it was an integral part of the campaign with everything connected and not disjointed. This experience helped me see just how a campaign could be executed in the brand world. It was confirmed for me that one must always be transparent. Transparency not only helps you win supporters, but it also increases loyalty. Traditional tactics always have a digital equivalent; using both ensures the success of a campaign.

Carrot Labs is the creative innovation hub for Carrot Creative. How does it work? How does it help to achieve the agency’s overall strategy and goals?

Labs aren’t something new — many companies offer labs and incubators. However, in 2013, we’ll have an announcement about Carrot Labs that will set us apart.

The nature of an agency is that if you present an idea that is too forward-thinking to a brand, they likely won’t buy into it. This can be stifling to creativity and team morale. Labs can be our way of experimenting with bigger ideas. We are generally solving problems that brands aren’t yet experiencing. When they start to ask about certain possibilities, we already have the know-how and are well-versed in the concept. Labs allow us to be proactively curious and innovative.

Tell us about Digital DUMBO and how it helps the digital community in Brooklyn? Do you have plans for expanding this business model to other cities?

Carrot is a co-founder of Digital Dumbo. When we moved our company to DUMBO in 2008, there were many digital companies in the area but no coordination between them. We created Digital Dumbo to bring together like-minded employees and CEOs to discuss culture and trends in the digital space in the form of workshops, events, conferences and more. Since its inception, Digital Dumbo has grown organically to Boston, Dallas, London, Valencia (Spain) and has enormous potential to franchise and replicate in more cities developing around digital. We’ve created a global community in which we are proud to play an active role.

Founding this organization was rooted in my passion to build communities. We are heavily invested in Digital Dumbo for ourselves and for the future of other companies and our competition. I believe that in the social media business, if you’re not building a community within the community your company is in, you’re full of shit.

Seeing each of these communities develop firsthand only makes Carrot Creative stronger and more connected.

In the next three to five years, how do you see the social media space evolving? How do you see brands utilizing the medium to increase brand awareness or engage consumers?

Three to five years? Are you kidding me? Maybe people can make plans within that time frame in traditional advertising, but at the rate everything is going in digital, it’s smarter to talk about flying cars than where we’ll be in five years. I will say that social media is not going anywhere; it’s continuing the take budgets and time away from other marketing initiatives and continuing to gain room in the press. The best information is now being leaked through social media.

Showing ads to attract a consumer to what you’re marketing is going to become a thing of the past. Instead, brands will begin to think about their investments in social media and digital the way they think about their actual product/service. They will start investing in original content more and more. Consumers are looking at what brands can offer and find themselves aligning with companies that appear innovative.

Favorite Ad of All Time: “Impossible is Nothing,” Muhammad Ali:

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HYOIv6m3gsI

Mentor: I have micro mentors. As an early adopter of Twitter, I’ve built great relationships with people on the platform, forming a network of smaller connections that I can tap into for niche issues.

Must read book: “The Man Time Forgot” by Isaiah Wilner. This biography of the founders of Time Magazine is the reason I know that being the ‘crazy one’ isn’t a bad thing. When done well, the innovation and adventure of pursuing a dream is worth all of the potential repercussions. Seeing past mediums become great makes you realize that your crazy thoughts aren’t as crazy as they first appear. For all we know the Internet is the next great medium, and we are innovating a whole new approach to it at Carrot.

Music that gets you in your zone: Rap — it’s the only genre that talks about entrepreneurial business activities and the continuous hustle needed to beat your competitors.

Anything else you’d like to add? We didn’t start Carrot to be an agency to sell to a holding company, and we never received funding. We are trying to build something BIG — something much crazier than “an agency.” We aren’t modeled after any other company. Instead, we are digital natives, and the way we do business is likely the way future business will be done. Where we’ve gotten isn’t by accident; it’s due to pure passion.

Every agency tells you all about their successes and then when they write a book, they reveal all of the challenges along the way. Not us. We are proud to be the most socially public, privately held company out there. We tell our audience what we’re up to in real time.

http://vimeo.com/53980605

We don’t hire people — we celebrate them (carrot.is). We’re on a mission, and we’re always looking for the most innovative people to join us on our adventure.

At the end of the day, we don’t give a shit what anyone thinks of us. If we did, we wouldn’t be as successful as we are today. We will continue to ignore all of the critics and build the greatest company to ever be created. If we fuck it all up and burn the place down, at least we went on a fun adventure.

http://vimeo.com/24850217

Connect with Mike on Twitter @mikegermano or on LinkedIn. Follow the Carrot team on Instagram or Facebook.