Pat Murphy:
Hi and welcome to the MCA Prodcast, your fix for everything innovative in advertising and production. I’m Pat Murphy and I’ve been working in this industry for more than 35 years now. I’ve seen a lot of changes, but know there’s plenty more around the corner. Each week on the podcast, you’ll get to hear from one of the movers and shakers who are shaping the world of advertising for the future, and we’ll dive into some of the key challenges facing our sector today and how we’re best placed to overcome them.

Today we’re talking to Ed East, the Founder and Group CEO of Billion Dollar Boy, one of the world’s leading influencer marketing agencies Launched in 2014, well before TikTok and Instagram reels were shaping global brand strategy, Billion Dollar Boy was built around a bold vision that creators aren’t just media channels, they’re storytellers, producers and brand partners. Ed leads BDB’s global expansion and continues to champion the professionalization of the creator economy.

Ed, I really appreciate you coming to our podcast today. Welcome along.

Ed East:
Thanks so much, Pat, it’s great to be here.

Pat Murphy:
Now I need to ask you the very first question. It’s a very personal question. How come you always look like you never age? That last time I spoke to you five years ago, you look exactly the same today.

Ed East:
Well, I can assure you I’ve definitely aged. I would say I feel the complete opposite, since I’ve had my two boys. That has made a big difference, there’s no doubt.

Pat Murphy:
You’re taking something and whatever you’re taking… I want a bit of that!

When we last spoke, it was one of our weekly MCA webinars, I think in 2020. You have come a long way since, not least relocating, as you just said yourself, to New York with your family. But let’s rewind back to the start of the business in 2014. What was the original gap in the market that you and your co-founders identified when you started the business?

Ed East:
Sure. Well, I was working and living in Los Angeles at the time running social media at a film company, and I had been in my spare time running a blog and we had inquiries from PR agencies etc saying ‘can we run sponsored articles in blog posts’? And so we kind of started building a database which would help connect PRs to blogs like mine, and the idea was to license them access to the platform for a fee. At the same time, YouTube was on the rise, Instagram was just about to arrive and we realised it wasn’t just bloggers but it was the YouTubers and Instagram. So the database expanded outside of just blogs to those other channels and that was kind of how it all got going.

Pat Murphy:
And the name Billion Dollar Boy. You stole that, didn’t you? You nicked it from someone else?

Ed East:
Inspired by someone else! At the same time I was listening to a lot of music by Pharrell. I still listen to a lot of music by Pharrell. I just think he’s one of the best artists ever and he had launched a fashion label called Billionaire Boys Club. And while I was building that database and running a blog, I was quite aware of the fact you could buy and sell domain names and so I thought, ‘hey, what if I was to buy BillionDollarBoy.com’ and see if I could then get a route to Pharrell and maybe he’d want to buy it so he could own that and be the Billion Dollar Boy. So that had happened like two years prior to starting BDB while building the database, and Pharrell never came knocking!!

So when we got the business going, we were trying to find an angle, a route into market that would differentiate us from other businesses out there, and our sort of main target customers at the time were beauty companies, and I was told by friends and colleagues who worked at those companies that there were people offering similar services to us, but they were all talking about how you could reach women. So it was a recommendation to us that we should say ‘why don’t we start off our business with targeting men, helping brands reach men versus women in intimacy marketing’. And when we were thinking about a name I was like ‘guys, I actually own this domain name Billion Dollar Boy’. It could work. And so everyone thought it was quite fun, quite brash, quite social and it sort of aligned with the sort of initial targeting of trying to reach men. But obviously a couple of years later we broadened quite widely out of that.

Pat Murphy:
But is it true that you only set the business up because you couldn’t get a gig at Google?

Ed East: 4:33
I couldn’t get gigs really anywhere, so I was always quite keen to set up my own business. Both my brother and father had done something similar, so they were always very supportive of that. I did try getting onto all the different graduate traineeship schemes and I kept getting through to the last round of interviews. I got through to Google three times and I still didn’t get onto the sales scheme. So then I went off, had a slightly different career working for a couple of other companies, but really keen to set up my own business. So when the opportunity arrived which it did by chance I could get going with that database and that’s where we built from.

Pat Murphy:
You should be sending them a note now to say ‘thanks for not hiring me’, right?

Ed East:
Yeah, of course. Or who knows, maybe I’d be better off going there anyway.

Pat Murphy:
You never know, life is full of surprises and twists and turns.

When you started the business obviously you’re a small business it’s obviously changed and morphed into something more substantial. How has your leadership changed from the day that you opened doors to today?

Ed East:
The advice I was given recently and we just set up an advisory board to help us with our strategy moving forwards was, at this stage, I need to be less in the business and more on the business, and by that it meant focusing more on the strategy, more on the communications around the strategy and helping hold people accountable to that and supporting them in the journeys.

What I find is that I’m always getting really stuck in trying to help the team, but actually, as we all know, it’s very important to invest in them, put the right structures in place and empower that team to do their jobs well and then hold them accountable. So I think, as I move forward, it’s more about stepping perhaps away a little bit away from the day-to-day and trying to support the team that work with me into me doing the best job possible in their roles.

Pat Murphy:
Do you have a mentor that you lean on? It’s very kind of lonely at the top, even in a business of our sizes. I certainly have one, but is there somebody you kind of lean on?

Ed East:
In the early days it was my father, but for the last four years or so it hasn’t been, and just recently the reason for setting up the advisory board was actually for that same purpose. So we only just formed it and it’s proven to be really useful to have those people to talk to about the different topics and challenges that arise.

Pat Murphy:
Now. At MCA, we are, as you know, deeply involved in production. How do you approach the production process when you are working with creators as they become essentially the production team?

Ed East:
Well, look, it’s not that dissimilar to, let’s say, comparing it to other, more traditional forms of advertising. A creative agency will come up with an idea, it will hire a production crew and a production team will go and make the ad. So, if you compare the same thing, we come up with the ideas, we give it to a production crew, which is the creators, and they make the ads. It’s exactly the same.

Pat Murphy:
And then how do you at BDB navigate the balance between creator freedom and keeping the kind of brand standards that they expect?

Ed East:
So, again, I guess it’s like when you’re a creative agency choosing their production company. The production company will make a pitch. They’ll have a sort of a roster of work which feels appropriate, so bringing that add to life. It’s just the same with creator marketing. You look at what the creators have produced previously and you use that to align them to the creative idea you have and you believe you sort of there’s a belief element there. Can they bring that to life visually? And will it fit within the type of work they typically do?

At which point, the creative we give to the talent is less of a ‘this is what you have to do’. It’s more like ‘this is an inspiration and then you turn it into what you think’s right’. There will be some do’s and don’ts, um, and there is. There are different steps in the production process. So we’ll brief a creator, we’ll ask them for an idea in response. It can be as detailed or as little detail as needed. We’ll go ‘yes, that sounds great’. They go away, they produce it, they return it to us and then, depending on the contract and the scale and the size of the budget, we have different rounds of approvals and amends where we can request changes if it hasn’t met the idea, uh, that they initially pitched to us. And there are other instances, Pat, where increasingly we do a lot of production ourselves, and what I mean by that is, rather than just letting the creator do the production all themselves, either we support them with the production or we’re actually hiring a production company, which then creators feature in the production, like your talent. It’s probably 20% of the business and it’s fast growing. So, yeah, that’s slightly different.

Pat Murphy:
You’re a bit of a hybrid actually. So you’re not just an agency, you’re also part production house, so you’re a bit of a hybrid business.

Ed East:
Yeah, a hundred percent. We describe ourselves as a creative first social agency. So we’re really creating social media campaigns and we create those in a few different ways, which is one – creators producing the assets for the client and for the ads, and then separately BDB creating those assets too.

Pat Murphy:
Now, as you probably read in the marketing press recently, Unilever has recently announced a significant shift in its marketing strategy and placing a stronger emphasis on influencer marketing. I mean, this is a big one! The company plans to allocate 50% of its advertising budget to social media platforms. I mean that’s up from the previous 30%. This move is part of an influencer-first approach on their part. Are you seeing the same trend with other brands?

Ed East:
Yeah, I think, just the industry. You see the same sort of trend happening within the industry as a whole and it’s the reason why influence may disappear to an extent, but the production model – it used to be called influencer marketing, increasingly you hear the term creator, creator marketing. There are different reasons to why that’s happened. My belief is that we’re seeing the value shift away from the influence and the eyeballs that influencers bring, but more towards the actual production of the assets that they’re creating. And the production model has democratized how you can create content. It’s far faster, it’s far cheaper, than if you compare it to those big creative agencies, big production companies. It’s much more diversity, and the quality is much higher. That’s the reason creator marketing continues to sort of explode and strangely, in sort of tricky times, like even recently with the tariffs, there’s a lack of confidence in where people would spend their money. I find that’s where actually influencer does well, because people want to put their money towards more cost-effective ways of producing content effective ways of producing content.

Pat Murphy:
How do you ensure brands understand the value of creator-led campaigns, especially when production and media costs are now blurred? How do you measure both the investment and the success of a campaign?

Ed East:
A lot of procurement people may hear this. I think there is a challenge there, which is the businesses like Unilever – large SMCG companies, a lot of our clients, a lot of those types of clients increasingly, are trying to hold business like ours. It’s accountable to very thin margins, but those margins aren’t accounting for the creative and the strategic work that has to go into planning for successful campaigns. It’s really just the executional elements. They’re thinking of it as like a media buy. There’s sort of, as you said, the blurred lines between with creators. You get both the assets created and you get eyeballs. So the comparisons they’re making to other forms are completely wrong. So that’s one thing to bear in mind.

But then how do we ensure that brands understand the value? So, increasingly, depending on the type of client you’re working with. So let’s say, if you’re working with a direct-to-consumer brand, we can measure full-funnel results like brand awareness, consideration, conversion, everything from start to finish through tracking. But then if you’re working with a brand who is selling through retailers, third-party retailers, then we have developed a proprietary data measurement system. It sits within our tool Companion and we then leverage certain partners depending on what stage of the waterfall it sits in and we call it a waterfall because it’s like a list of different items. So we partner up with different partners for brand lift studies, we partner up with different partners for econometric modeling, and then Companion at the top of the funnel, measures, things like engagements, impressions, those basic metrics. Now, all of those are comparable to any other forms of media, so it’s really just trying to create the clarity in how you compare it to others.

Pat Murphy:
When you’re working with incredibly well-known influencers. Some of them, I mean, I hear some amounts that get charged, right? I mean they are like almost more than normal celebrities. I mean, how do you know when to walk away from those kinds of engagements, or do you have kind of benchmarks that you use to negotiate?

Ed East:
Yes, we do. Yeah, so Companion is the tool that we use for that that, and we look at all of the deals we’ve done in the past and it considers many different criteria for recommending a price to our accounts team and it varies massively, so seasonal, you know, depending on the season, that will have an effect. So around Christmas time, creators can charge lots more. The industry. If they’re in a niche and they’re in high demand, they’ll charge more. If it’s a celebrity talent who has a top agent from CAA, they’ll typically charge you more. But what we try to do is pull it back to impressions and engagements as a starting point. If that is what you’re looking to drive from that asset. There are other times where you’re using creators just to produce the assets that you could run in different forms of media, and then it’s a completely different way of measuring the value. But at the most simple level, if you look at, let’s say, impressions as a key value indicator, then Companion recommends to the team what they should be paying, based off thousands or hundreds of thousands of deals and quotes we’ve negotiated over the years.

Pat Murphy:
Now, in the last year or so, I’ve seen more and more AI generated influencers on the various platforms, but do they actually work? And as they’re not real, do you think there’s something somewhat deceptive about having those being used by a brand? I mean, do you think there’s a negative impact on the brand perception when AI-generated influencers are used?

Ed East:
I think there can be, and then there can be other instances where it works really well, but actually, when it comes to AI, I think there’s a far more interesting conversation to be had, which is ‘how does how do creators in general influences, leverage AI to improve their creative output’? And we’ve had a huge amount of success with brands like Versace, Laueva and Burberry over the last two years where we have supported them in working with Gen AI creators to create really interesting creative assets that then live on their social channels, and those assets have way outperformed their business-as-usual assets.

Pat Murphy:
Now BDB published influencer pay rate breakdowns by ethnicity. What’s been the response from brands and agencies from that?

Ed East:
I wish there’d be more response. Really nothing! But we use that just to hold our own teams accountable as well. But I think what’s interesting about it is I do read a lot in the industry about there being pay gaps, and there will be pay gaps of some sort, but it’s not necessarily always the way you’d expect it.

Pat Murphy:
You obviously use Companion a lot. This is your internal kind of technology platform. Do you use that to kind of drive the transparency and fairness in the influencer compensation models?

Ed East:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So it recommends what we should be paying to talent, but obviously it’s averaging and using benchmarks, so different talent charge different amounts, but there’s lots of consideration that goes into what we should pay. We try to make it fair for both the talent and for the brand.

Pat Murphy:
So when you moved to the United States, how was that for you, as a move, as a transition, as a kind of difference from the way of working in the United Kingdom?

Ed East:
It was a big change initially, mainly because I was always quite intimidated about New York as a city to live in. But two years in I now really do like New York. Apart from my family and friends aren’t here. I think it’s a great city and it’s very comparable to a city like London. Our team was smaller, it was less established, we had fewer clients, so it was kind of going back to the scrappy early days of being an entrepreneur and getting the business going. But now fast forward two and a half years later the US business is on par with, and quite quickly growing fast. It’s growing faster and it will, I would be surprised if it didn’t surpass the UK business this year.

Pat Murphy:
We had exactly the same experience. So when I moved to New York as well, we very, very quickly equalled the same revenue that we were turning over in the UK. I mean within six months. But it was also an incredible. You suddenly realise everything’s just so much bigger. The volumes are bigger, the numbers are bigger, everything is just so much bigger. And that was a big surprise for me. Actually easier to do business.

Ed East:
Yes, it’s been fantastic. I’ve loved it. I’ve really loved it. We’re really making headway now. I think what was interesting is there were quite a lot of American companies which kind of bought market share over the last since COVID. The actually underlying service isn’t that strong, but they’re still very well regarded and they’re well known and they kind of be your default go-to’s, maybe as a big brand. But increasingly, now that we’re being invited into those pitches, we’re being chosen sort of time after time and we’re growing very rapidly, which is really exciting because the underlying service is just stronger.

Pat Murphy:
What makes the difference between you and your competitors? I mean, what difference are you providing, and what does a great agency-client relationship for you look like?

Ed East:
So, on the client-agency relationship, I think a client that has an understanding of how influencer works always helps and experience in doing it. I think a client that’s open to recommendations and takes advice, I think a client that’s clear and considerate of what their decisions are and respects you in the same way you would expect respect to happen internally. So an agency really is just an extension of that client’s team, so they should treat you like they’re their team and at BDB we really try to respect our team as much as possible. So where the client does that, it works really well.

Pat Murphy:
Do you ever get rid of clients? On my last podcast which I did with Nils Leonard, he talked about toxic revenue – it’s better not to have that revenue than just to have it, because you know it means you’ve got money coming into the, into the business. Do you ever, do you ever think about not bringing in a client or not taking on a client?

Ed East:
Yes, and increasingly we try to do that more and more but it’s a hard, it’s a hard balance. But yeah, 100% we do. I think if you were to ask my team they’d be like that’s true. But you know we have a lot of hard clients and we definitely do. But what I find with our work is that when, when it’s busy and people are being pushed, it’s always going to be hard work, but that’s when you’re growing and that’s when the exciting, good work is produced. But I think where a client really doesn’t respect you, you have to be really honest with yourself about can you fix that and turn that relationship around. If you can, great, and there are some times where you can’t. But again, a lot of it’s about feedback and making sure you give the feedback to the client and having those hard conversations and hopefully that can turn the relationship around.

Pat Murphy:
Now you not only have grown, but you’ve obviously got accolades as well to your name. In the last year or so. BDB was named Influencer Marketing Agency of the Year at the B Creator Awards in 24, as well as Best Team in Influencer Marketing at the 24 Global Influencer Marketing Awards. How do you cultivate and maintain such a high performing team, and what do those recognitions mean to you?

Ed East:
The recognitions are fantastic and I’m really always very, very, very happy for the team because I think there’s so much hard work that goes into what we do. So I’m always delighted for the teams. Obviously, it feels great on a personal level, but more I’m just happy when the team are happy about it, because I think it’s a great testament to, and great sort of acknowledgement of, what they’re doing. So I think from a team perspective, it’s as important as possible to try to get the right team around you, to empower them and try to set them up for success. Of course, you need to be challenging and provide feedback, and hard feedback, like be clear in it where possible. Whenever I haven’t given feedback soon enough, I’ve always regretted it! But again, you need to be considerate with the feedback, But I think the main thing is trying to just set your team up for success, build the platform which they can do well with, and it’s really hard work. But I think it’s all about trying to empower the people and putting your trust in them to deliver.

Pat Murphy:
Yeah, I agree. Massive congratulations, by the way, on those accolades and those awards from last year, and I’m sure you’ll be doing many more to come as well. Now I was curious to read recently about your is it an influencer lounge that you’ve set up the Five Two Nine Creator Club. What is that?

Ed East:
So we started BDB 2014. So last year it was 10 years and over the last couple of years we’ve been looking at the market and seeing how things are shifting and we were quite keen to sort of broaden our horizons by tapping into what’s described as the wider creator economy. Influencer Marketing is a small component of that, but the wider creator economy is all the businesses being built by creators and the businesses supporting the building of those businesses. So it could be accountants, lawyers. An example of that business could be Prime. That is a creator economy business. And then, on the flip side, there’s a famous creator called Thomas Traker who has a restaurant just off the Portobello Road. That’s another example of one off the portobello road. That’s another example of where? So we were keen to dip our toes into the creator economy, and we thought ‘what better way to do that than by getting closer to creators?’. And we don’t represent creators as talent. We’re not talent agents. We go out to talent agents. Some businesses like ours do both.

Pat Murphy:
Slight conflict there, isn’t there?

Ed East:
I think it’s a conflict when choosing talent. Definitely because really there’s a lot of double dipping there for those businesses that do that, and so the client isn’t getting the best results, although they may not know that. So Five Two Nine was aware of us creating a vehicle that would help BDB dip our toes into the creator economy, and so we thought, well, how do we do this? How do we get closer to creators? What is it that they need that we can provide? What value can we provide to them? So we did a huge amount of research and surveys and interviews and had discussions with thousands of creators to understand what they needed, and the quite clear advice that came back from them was they needed advice on how to build their careers and businesses.

So what we’ve created is a community which we’re investing millions of dollars into, with partners to provide networking, education, and opportunities to creators to help them fast forward, accelerate their businesses and careers. And it’s more the long tail of creators versus, like your Grace Beverly’s or the Sidemen or Logan Paul, like those big, well-known ones. In fact, what we’re trying to do is get those well-known, successful creators to come and give advice to the creators that are aspiring and trying to grow like that. So it’s been really a really exciting journey for us because it’s part of our mission is to support creators, and it’s worked incredibly well. We’re getting a huge amount out of it.

So, when you talk about the lounge, both of our  spaces in London and New York are in fact creator spaces where creators can come. Members of that Five Two Nine community can come to use the space if they wish, but primarily it’s used for events and moments in the calendar where we put on these educational moments and networking opportunities for the creators and as an example we are, we’ve actually we’ve invested in taking 20 creators to Cannes  in partnership with Cannes Lions, and not only have we paid for their passes and they’re covering their own travel this year, but we hope to find a partner to help us with that next year. But what we’ve actually done is we’ve created an incredible roster of introductions and moments and events for those creators to get access in Cannes, which we know is so hard. So really excited to see that come to life, and it’s called the Creator Fund. You can look it up on Five Two Nine, which is the name of the community.

Pat Murphy:
I think that sounds like a brilliant initiative and, and talking of Cannes, I’m looking forward to seeing you down there. Hopefully we’ll get a chance to not only meet the two of us, but maybe I’ll get a chance to meet some of your talent that you’re bringing down, some of the creators that you’re bringing down. That’d be amazing.

What keeps you up at night as a CEO? I know what keeps me up at night, and it’s not the stuff that I’m supposed to be worrying about. But do you ever kind of worry about creative burnout, client demands, clients not paying on time, all of that kind of stuff? Is it the same thing or is it something different?

Ed East:
Sometimes it can be clients not paying on time, but as I say in general, our financial systems and processes have all been set up quite well and we take sensible risk, but not huge risk. So as a business, we have consistently grown year on year, every year since we started, whereas some businesses recently in our space have actually had very bad periods in the last couple of years, and so you’ll see them raising quite a bit of money to cover that. So the financial side of things yes, I’m always worried about it. Worried, not in a negative way, I’m thinking about it. But as I say it’s like balancing… there is a tightrope to be balanced in the resource you need to hire to grow. So the balance between growth and the resource you need, the investments you need to make and the cost, essentially, is a really fine tightrope. So that is something that I’m always thinking about.But it doesn’t necessarily keep me up at night in a bad way

I think when our team’s unhappy or when a client’s unhappy for one reason or another, sometimes out of your control, those are the things that keep me up at night and more often than not it’s if the team’s unhappy. So it’s just trying to work on those things. But recently we just finished our financial year, which actually had our best year ever, which is fantastic. And one thing that’s taken up a lot of time is planning for the year ahead and that has kept me up a bit at night because there are loads of tough decisions or hard decisions to make, big decisions to make. But the good news is I’m now getting out of that little sort of phase of planning. It’s gone on for about two nights and there’s been a lot.

Pat Murphy:
Yeah, I know exactly. I mean it’s almost like a replica of your business. We have exactly the same issues. The planning for the year ahead is long and you’re already halfway and we’re already quarter of the way through the year and you’re still doing it.

One of the challenges that I found in our business and is not necessarily winning new business, the challenge is that probably the biggest challenge I find is finding great people to work in our business, on our clients. Would you say that’s the same for you?

Ed East:
Yeah, it’s really challenging and you have to spend a huge amount of time doing it, and I think the team around you have to spend a huge amount of time doing it. We have a fantastic recruitment team at BDB and they really help. But I think a message that I’ve tried to deliver to our leadership team I’m going to say it again here so hopefully they hear it is that they can’t rely on that recruitment team to do the recruiting. A big part of their job is to do that themselves too, and they have to be meeting people all the time in order to find the people that could be part of their team in the future. So it’s absolutely vital.

Pat Murphy:
What’s been your biggest ‘oh shit’ moment, ed? Come on, you must have had one.

Ed East:
I definitely have had loads. I know there was one in the early days, really early days, and there was even a question, I think around, like what were your challenges in the early days? And it was cash flow then, and I wasn’t aware of VAT at the time. I didn’t understand the concept or the principle of it, and we got a bill from HMRC to pay our VATs and I was like, ‘oh my God, you can’t cover this cost. We’re going to be out of money by the end of the month’. So I actually managed to somehow manage to convince HMRC to allow us to split the payments, but that was definitely a nerve wracking moment because they were very much. They were very adamant against doing it at first.

Pat Murphy:
I think HMRC have probably caused so many ‘oh shit’ moments for businesses including ours, by the way so one of my big ‘oh shit’ moments was a seven day wind up notice from HMRC because a big tax bill hadn’t been paid for a long time. So that was a big ‘oh shit’ moment!

Reflecting on your journey, ed, what personal milestones or achievements stand out to you? How do you balance the demands of leading what now is a global agency at the top of what you’re doing with personal well-being and personal well-being growth?

Ed East:
Increasingly, as the business gets bigger, it feels like work gets harder. You sometimes think it could actually get easier as it gets bigger and you have more team around you, but actually just more and more challenges arise. So since moving to America, I don’t have ever worked so hard and the balance I’ve had… my personal work-life balance has definitely been hasn’t been as good as it used to be and I’d love to rebalance it a bit.

Ed East:
But the big milestones, I think there are so many small milestones that make you so happy. There aren’t necessarily massive ones that stand out, but probably moving to America and taking the business in a couple of years from 20 people to almost 60 people, growing at 70% year on year, profitably with a strong margin that is not easy and that’s because of the fantastic team we have here and that has been really rewarding to see us pull that off. It was a big bet we took and I think we will continue to flourish in the US because of the amazing team that we have here, both in the US and the UK, which have made that possible. That has felt like a major milestone. That has felt like a major achievement.

Pat Murphy:
It sounds absolutely incredible, right time, right place, back in 2014! And that journey you’ve been through has been amazing. But what is next around the corner for BDB? What are your plans and vision for the business in the next few years?
Ed East:
Yeah, I think for the time being it’s refining what we’ve built, trying to just improve what we currently have. I imagine at the same time we’ll start looking at opportunities to acquire other businesses which may have complementary services or may have a different geographical footprint. So that’s the other thing we’re looking at. But ultimately it’s refining what we currently have and continuing to grow at the rates we have been in a sustainable way for the team in both of the core markets, which is UK, which does a lot of European work, and North America

Pat Murphy:
Ed, look, we’re just coming to the end. Now it’s been like five years since I first spoke to you. You’ve built this incredible business. I’m so looking forward. You know what the thing is and people don’t know. We’ve never met before in person, but we’ll hopefully meet in person in Cannes and lots of our clients are going to be there. Can they reach out to you, knowing that they’ve heard you on this podcast, because this comes out before Cannes – can they reach out to you if they want to meet you?

Ed East:
Definitely, and for all the procurement people. I really do think there is a challenge there on that bit about how you compare this to working with both a creative agency and a media agency. It’s like there are some very blurred lines there and that would be a really good call. I’d love to have conversations with people about that.

Pat Murphy:
Brilliant. Well, I look forward to seeing you down on the Little Black Book Beach for a couple of glasses of rosé. We end up on our final question, the question that everybody loves at the end of this podcast: what is your favourite ad of all time, Ed?

Ed East:
It was a very good question and I want to be saying I really would like to talk about one of our ads or something in creator marketing. But actually, when I thought about it long and hard, I go back to the sort of Guinness Snail Race. I love those old Guinness ads, those TV ads. I really, really love those, even like the Surfer. So I think that the Guinness snail race, that was my favourite.

Pat Murphy:
Ed, thank you so much for joining us on the MCA podcast today. It’s been an absolute delight.

Ed East:
Thank you so much, Pat. Thanks so much for inviting me.

Pat Murphy:
Today we talked to Ed East, the Founder and Group CEO of Billion Dollar Boy, one of the world’s leading influencer marketing agencies.

To find out more about the MCA Prodcast, please head to theprodcast.com, where you’ll find details on all my guests, links to their favourite ads and full transcriptions of all the episodes. If you’d like to feature on the podcast or have any comments, questions or feedback, please email us at podcast@murphycobb.com.

I’m Pat Murphy, CEO of MCA. Do come and connect with us on LinkedIn or Instagram, of which all the links in the notes for this episode will be there. We’d love to hear from you.

Thanks again to Ed, my team at MCA and to my production team at What Goes On Media. Thanks for listening. See you next time.