Advertising is a crappy business. So why did we start Pinstorm?

I've worked at earlier versions of FCB, Grey and Ogilvy - and I'm not sure if any of these exist in any meaningful way anymore. Which is kinda the point I wanted to make.

I'll make a few more in a roundabout way.

So settle in, there's no TL; DR here.

Life was fine till the mid-1990s, by which time I'd spent more than a decade trying to be a great copywriter and failing often - though my bosses, Neil French and Ricardo de Carvalho included, were some of the best.

My clients till then were mostly the crisp suit, Italian tie and wingtip loafers types across the Unilevers, P&Gs, Krafts and Pepsis of the world.

Then I was hired by a Silicon Valley agency and some time in 1995 I started doing work for their newest client - two guys wearing shorts and sandals in the Bay Area.

I helped re-design their directory to the internet they called Yahoo. (In fact it still uses some of the structure and icons I helped design over 30 years ago!) Yahoo was up against much a better-funded rival called, Excite. Long story short, and we'll keep the long story for another day and another article here - we beat Excite by out-thinking and out-executing them.

And then my clients, David Filo and Jerry Yang, became millionaires and eventually billionaires.

I got a small salary hike and next, I started working with a small client based in Seattle. This was after fighting with my agency's leadership who asked me to sack them as they thought they'd never amount to much.

Helped design their site, identity and did all their online and print ads for a few years till "the earth's biggest bookstore" - a line I came up with - was too big for any agency to handle and I had to reluctantly hand the Amazon.com account back to Jeff Bezos telling him he needed to take it in-house.

Jeff too, went on to become a billionaire. Jeff surely deserved his mega-payday. But this caused in me no end of navel-gazing.

I looked around. While my clients were annoyingly becoming billionaires, no one in advertising was even becoming a millionaire.

Even today there are so few agency folks that are truly well off - let's leave out those guys in media sales who brokered large deals with hidden kickbacks - I'm referring to the mainline advertising lot: creative, planners, account directors and such.

While I didn't have many delusions of grandeur, I certainly didn't feel I was much lower on the capability ladder than Jerry, David or Jeff. They too put their pants on one leg at a time.

So I wondered if my career choice was destined to be one of relative penury and settling down for eventual retirement in some old people's home in Florida or if I was very lucky, a small castle in France. Neither prospect appealed much to me.

I figured then that the problem wasn't so much me. It was the advertising model.

The industry charged, then, 15% of what the media cost was for its services. And I could see that wouldn't work in the new world at all. As Yahoo's agency, we'd spent close to zero on media for and as Amazon's agency, we'd spent a small, tiny bit. Not enough to pay even one person's salary if we'd charged 15%.

And over time, newer brands distinguished themselves by living the 180-degree converse of the earlier rule. Earlier it was "the more you spend (on media), the bigger you get". These new ones kept getting bigger by spending less.

Google rules 90% of search, WhatsApp rules more than half the world's messenger apps, Tesla rules the electric car business. And all of them got to their super-dominant positions by spending close to zero on media.

So it was in hindsight a silly model to be paid a percentage of how much a brand spent. Amazingly, it's still how a large percentage of advertisers pay their agents or agencies today. "The more you make me spend, the more I'll pay you" they say. Or, to paraphrase somewhat more succinctly, "Come screw me."

Actually, as a sidebar, marketing firms are called "agencies" because that's what they originally were. They were sales agents - not for brands - but for the newspapers, selling ad space and making a commission on their sales. They worked for the publishers then and not you, and in many cases they still do - though they pretend to work for you. No coincidence that when you meet agencies, many seem to want you to buy even larger amounts of media. Though ideally they should want you to earn more, not spend more. But I digress.

So the commission structure I figured wouldn't make me rich. And even if it did, spending a lifetime getting brands to spend more instead of earn more just didn't sit right with me. So that was out.

Advertising was then moving to the fee or retainer era. I'd charged flat fees from Amazon and Yahoo based on hours worked. But then the clients made the mega-bucks and we made the pennies. Obviously, earning flat fees based on hours worked or even based on the number of deliverables delivered wasn't going to get me rich.

Heard of any Big 4 consulting firm billionaires? Neither have I.

So even though it was a slightly more ethical model, retainers still didn't make sense to me. The secret, I imagined, was in having skin in the game. Owning the brand. Or co-owning it. So while the agency I was in did well, we went public and we all owned some equity and each of us did better than the average agency person, I moved from advertising to a Seattle-based VC-funded startup as their head of marketing.

Got some equity, the works. And yes, did well here too. I helped launch an early precursor to Shopify - our rivals were a firm called Viaweb founded by Paul Graham who went on later to found the hugely influential Y Combinator. We got acquired by Intel, got a decent payout and all.

But those two years here taught me why I loved and missed advertising - the sheer variety of challenges. And I missed those while working on only one brand at the Seattle e-com firm. I figured I wasn't built to be one inch wide and one mile deep - the profile of the typical unicorn foundrr. I was probably more one yard wide and one yard deep. So I then logically concluded that I needed a career with a variety of different challenges, and ownership in each one of them.

Couldn't see anything around which offered that. So left the marketing business, moved back from the US to India. Was hired to launch a couple of TV channels (MTV India and Channel V India - they're both defunct now, if you're keeping track). Those did well, sold one of them, made a little money, but then again no life-changing amount of cash.

And as a sidebar, started being an angel investor. (How did I learn to be one? That's another story which involves Jeff Bezos and we'll keep it for another day.) And I liked it. Variety, check. Challenge, check. Grew that role into starting a VC fund - one of the very first in India. Variety, big check. Ownership, bigger check. Enjoyed working with founders and CEOs as a co-owner.

I still invest in companies as an angel investor / marketing guy. That's the best way. All incentives are aligned. And all petty politics is off the table.

It was during that period that I was asked to be on the advisory board of a kids' charity. At some random meeting I asked the CEO why they wouldn't look to raise funds from the lay public around the world using the internet. I was met with a variety of reasons why that was a dumb idea.

So, anyway, I went home, taught myself how to use Google AdWords - it was early days, 2003. Put in my credit card, did some design, wrote some words, started a campaign. Kept tweaking it month after month. A few months later I'm called in to their office.

Have you been running an online campaign globally, I'm asked. I beam and say yes, open my laptop and show the countries I'd targeted. And then find out those are the very countries they've ended up with completely unexpected donations from. And a decent chunk of money as well. (Including some stolen money - more on that here.)

I'm castigated for doing stuff without permission and all, but I respond with "Hey, it's a donation from me to you, just take it, no string attached." I leave the room and am called back a few days later. "Look, you have to stop doing this maverick stuff" I'm told. Okay, I say. "We want you to do it officially for us" What, I ask, what do you mean. Start an agency, and do this for us officially.

I flat refused. Over my dead body I said. Agencies are shitty businesses and I never want to start an agency.

So we're at some sort of Mexican standoff. Client wants me to start an agency. I refuse, outright. Finally client asks, exasperatedly, but why. I list the reasons: It makes no sense to work on commissions - I should earn more to get you to spend less, and not be penalized for my efficiency. Okay, she agrees.

And it makes no sense to work on a fee either, I continue: I get no reward if our work is any good. So there's no reason to do great work. (Oh awards? That's mostly a shit show. Like sausage, once you see how it's made, you wouldn't go near it. Grist for another piece here, another day.) She agrees.

And further, if I know what works, I don't want to spend half my time fighting with you and your little Kotler-poisoned children in your marketing team, trying to persuade you all over what ads and what creatives to run and what to change - because I know the customer better than any of you do, and I know what works better than any of you do. If I'm your marketing person I want to be left to do my job and not have to get some junior dweeb's buy-in on everything I need to do for your brand.

She gets a little upset but she's ex-advertising as well, so she nods. Then she asks me - so tell me - under what conditions and circumstances can you do this for us?. I said I'll think over it.

I go home, roll things around in my mind, and say to myself - well my version of what an ideal agency is would be so off the reservation for her that she would never, ever buy it. Let me share it with her so she can say no and I can go back to my VC world.

I go back the next day and say. Okay - here's what might work. One, I pay for creatives and not you, so I control it and I own it. (What was common then, and now too, was to pay a premium to get nice ads done by someone of quality and then give the work to a cut-price firm to make all the adapts and edits. So I said the IP was ours, not theirs, so they couldn't pull this crap.)

Two, I pay for the media and control it. You wont be told the media plan either. Same reason as for the earlier point.

Three - if you want the creatives or media plan that worked, you need to buy it from me. Separate negotiation.

Four, I'll show you the work before it runs so you can be sure its on brand, but I get final say on creative, you don't. The only red line is the brand guideline, and if it's on guideline, then it's approved no matter what.

And five, I'll take X% of all the donations that come in as my fee - there's no floor and there's no cap - if you make many millions, I'll make some millions as well. You will never benchmark my earnings to that of any otherr agency.

Six, you'll pay me within 2 weeks of your money coming to you, or I'll stop doing it for you and charge you a penalty for every day you pay late late. Those are the conditions.

Long silence. I wait for her to say the predictable "Thank you, I'll think about it and revert."

But she says "Okay". And that's how Pinstorm was born.

That's how the first client contract was structured - and the hundreds others since haven't veered too far from the course.

Variety and ownership. That's what makes it work for us: the variety of learnings excites us, and the ownership in each case motivates us. Perhaps that's what will make it work for some of you reading this as well. I know it won't work for many, and that's all right.

It's been more than 20 years since that day we started. We've run campaigns on every continent, including Antarctica (really). Across over 100 countries. On hundreds of briefs.

During this time, advertising's become crappier still as a business. The only way most large agencies make money is by cheating on media costs and by cheating on production costs.

The most common way to cheat on media? Persuade a brand it needs to spend a lot of money on ads, say a $100 million. Then say you'll spend their money for a fee of 'only' 1.5%, instead of the older 15%. Then turn around and negotiate with publishers to give you a huge rebate - often more than that 15% - and contractually forbid them from informing the client about this. Then do some average work, pocket $20 million from it.

A simple way to prove this? Take any large media agency, ask them their audited billings (this is the client spend passing through that they also earn interest on as they collect in 30 days and pay publishers in 180 days.). Then take 1.5% of those billings as their revenues or media fee. Then go to LinkedIn and see their headcount. Now try to figure how they can support that headcount on those 1.5% of billings. They can't. They survive by theft.

And cheating on production? That's easier. Recently a client showed us the script of an ad film they were producing. To us, it seemed like a $10,000 job. But they were paying $195,000 for it. The agency must have gone to the ad film producers and told them, hey, it's a $10,000 film we know, but we can give you $15,000 for it. If you'll kindly raise an invoice for $195,000 and kick us back the difference. Almost every producer says yes to this, and why not, they're getting 50% more than they'd get otherwise.

And was the client so dumb that they didn't know they were being gypped? Unlikely. Likelier that they were in on it, getting a chunk of that over-invoiced money in their personal bank accounts. Not that this happens everywhere, but yes, it happens to an enormous extent.

All of these are the vultures of the advertising business, picking away at the carrion of a dying model. Small wonder that we're sitting here in a world where advertising is largely imploding.

Just in the last few months of 2025, we've seen the demise of brands like Ogilvy, Grey, DDB, Burnett, Y&R, FCB, Saatchi. All collapsing from famous agency names into near-anonymous word-mash distillations. This is a business about creativity and innovation. To have the world's largest players with names like "Omnicom" and "Wire & Plastic Products" is in itself an indictment of its failure.

Sidebar 2: Ironic that, of all people, ad agencies have never managed to build lasting brands for themselves. If they wanted to have just one name, WPP could have called itself Ogilvy, and Omnicom could have called itself Bernbach - how much more memorable those would be. But no, they still suck at building brands.

But we're soldiering on at Pinstorm. We're tiny. Based in 3 countries. But operating in over a 150.

We do the work of a 250-person firm - but we're maybe one-fifth that size. We use a huge amount of technology and AI. This entire site, for instance, was designed, written, coded and built in one weekend by one person.

So, yes, it makes even less sense these days to charge by the hour or by the deliverable.

We're doing well. Loving our work when it works. And feeling your pain when it doesn't. Yes, we've failed often. But it's at our cost, not yours. And we've succeeded far more often that we've failed. And in those cases, we earn a heck of a lot more than what you might pay any other agency.

But our clients - or should we use that terrible cliche and call them 'partners' because in the true financial sense that's what they really are - don't seem to mind it.

We love this business. And we try, every day, to make it a less shitty. Tell us how we're doing?