Coworking with Bryant Kohler

Each week, we spotlight Marketing Brew readers in our Coworking series. If you’d like to be featured, introduce yourself here.

Bryant Kohler, or BK, is managing director and partner at Conscious Minds. He previously worked on brand and marketing at Nike and Adidas.

How would you describe your job to someone who doesn’t work in marketing? The tired, salty, old cynical me would say, “I convince people to buy shit they don’t need.” The more wholesome, heartfelt, and honest truth is “I make the brands you buy feel like the best friends you never see.”

Favorite project you’ve worked on? This is the toughest question on earth. I’m going to go with my gut here and say that it was the @Nike social relaunch in 2018. We took a well-established brand and a pretty well-established space to a new and exciting place. The channel had kind of turned into a product marketing funnel—a classic brand pitfall to this day. So Nike, being Nike, asked to bring back the soul of the brand to the flagship account. We didn’t build for best practices or for what was “hot” at the moment. We built a plan that combined what the brand stood for and aimed at where the platform was going.

Nike has always been about athletes and storytelling. Instagram and YouTube were trending culture toward medium-form video. So we created a modern-day media channel, telling raw, real, and human athlete stories through their voice and on their terms. We made the athletes the director and gave them a platform to share their stories with the world, from Cristiano Ronaldo to a kid from Chicago that said sport saved his life. We told over 300+ athlete stories over three years. I truly believe we changed people’s lives with our work and made people fall in love with sport—and with Nike on the way.

What’s your favorite ad campaign? I’d have to say it’s Allstate’s “Mayhem.” To this day, that was such a brilliant concept—how they took real human disasters that we likely drive by every day—and personified them into a character. You want to know how much I loved it? I dressed up as Mayhem for Halloween in 2011. I had three different variations of the costume on me. Fast-forward 15 years, and that platform (and character) is still alive. Can’t name five beloved TV shows that have stood up to time like that.

One thing we can’t guess from your LinkedIn profile? Here are a few. I am not sponsored by a watch company. I am the opposite of a brand manager/account guy. As much as my titles suggest, I have always been a hands-on-paper, fingers-on-keyboard, “let’s do the work” kind of guy. My happy place is next to a giant empty whiteboard with a fresh box of Expo pens. And I threw my computer and company badge at my boss in 2015 and told him to fire me. (He laughed.)

What marketing trend are you most optimistic about? Least?

Optimistic: Doing shit versus saying it. The era of capital-B brands that see themselves as the hero of the people is over. Brands need to be the Robin to the Batman that is consumers. Don’t say you serve them, or support their beliefs. Prove it. Do it. Brand actions, micro and macro, that proactively serve their consumer and don’t ask for attention will win the next decade, AI or not.

Least: Anything that says more content is the answer. It’s not. It may work in the short term while we are all still addicted and haven’t figured a way out. But the media-minded scale play will not win in the next season of marketing. It will play off short-term reaction versus deeper connection. And true love will be the winners of this next season of marketing.

What’s one marketing-related podcast/social account/series you’d recommend? There are so many good ones these days. I think our friend Ana Andjelic of The Sociology of Business does an incredible job discerning the real meaning behind our industry, both on the audience side and what actually makes them tick, and on the enterprise side—how great brands architect innovative stories and keep the consumer on their toes. There is so much talk about trends, influencers, culture, but it doesn’t mean anything unless you know why. She uncovers the psychology behind it all.