Chief Brand

Kevin Frank started as a copywriter and worked his way up to creative director at Apple, then executive creative director at LinkedIn, where he built the in-house agency from scratch and helped it become Ad Age’s in-house agency of the year. Then he stepped away, moved his family to Paris, taught at the American University of Paris, wrote a book called Raising Creative Teams, and joined a French Elvis cover band.

We talked about building a team from nothing, why “I don’t like it” is the worst feedback a leader can give, and the career he could have had in New York.

Here’s our conversation...

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If you lead a company and you keep meaning to build an executive presence online, that’s what my company does for C-Suite leaders at thoughtleadertoday.com.

Chris Mann is a British designer and a partner at Goal, a brand and design agency in Utah. He and his business partner Crosby have run it for seven years, and they work with deep tech companies.

Here’s our conversation.

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That’s this week’s episode of Chief Brand. You can listen to every episode here.

If you lead a company and you keep meaning to build an executive presence online, that’s what my company does for C-Suite leaders at thoughtleadertoday.com.

George Tannenbaum has been writing advertising for 42 years. He was an Executive Creative Director at Ogilvy, R/GA, and Digitas.

He has strong opinions about why almost everything you scroll past is boring, and why that costs you money. This one is less a podcast episode and more a masterclass in getting noticed.

Here’s our conversation.

Morgan: You’ve been writing your blog for a long time, and your LinkedIn content is some of my favorite stuff out there. Has it always been easy for you to do this?

George: Not to sound noble, but it’s never been easy. The cliche would be, well, that’s why they call it work.

I do this thing with a lot of people, both clients and, let’s call them civilians. Someone comes to me and says, I have a company that makes an AI, or I have a company that makes a frozen pizza, or I’m 53 and I’ve just been let go from a major holding company agency. And I always ask the same question. What makes you different?

Because I translate the world into shelving at a supermarket. I’ll say, there are 58 people who look like you. They have your qualifications, your resume, your education, your portfolio, your AI protocol, whatever it is. And they’re all pretty much the same. These days most stuff is nicely designed, and you can find a bot to write something that doesn’t suck. So how are you going to stand out?

That became the motivation behind my ads. There are a lot of people, inside agencies and freelance, going after the same work and the same share of client wallet. And I’ll be honest with you, I’m a New Yorker. I like to cut lines. So how do I get in there and make myself the first choice?

The blog started as a way of expressing myself. I was doing it for a good ten years or more before I ever linked to it online. People found it organically, the way things worked before the social platforms. It took me a long time to get over the trepidation of being that public.

The ads came from a realization. A recruiter called me a long time ago, gushing about my portfolio, saying she wanted to bring me in. This was a Thursday. She said, call me Monday. So I called her Monday and she bit my head off. She said, what are you calling me for? We just spoke.

And I realized that most of the so-called gatekeepers, the recruiters, don’t have great memories. They have 27 tabs of people open. They can’t keep them straight. If they need a left-handed copywriter with experience selling mothballs in Serbo-Croatian and you happen to be that person, you’ll get the job. But if you’re not, you just keep moving down the list. So how do you keep yourself at the top of the list?

That became a brief for me. I developed this square format. There’s nothing special to it, but most of what’s online is 12-point type and stock photographs. So I said, I’m going to do 72-point and be funny.

And here’s the other part. I realized that once you get to about 10,000 connections, that’s not connections anymore. That’s a media channel. You probably have the circulation of Ad Week. If I were writing op-eds for the Des Moines Register, I probably wouldn’t have that many daily readers. I’m not saying all of my connections read what I do. But I have a media channel. And to not use a media channel that’s free is stupid.

That’s how I’ve gone about trying to make myself the copywriter of choice. I’m not claiming I’m wholly successful. But that’s how it’s worked.

Morgan: You’ve said the only real argument against putting yourself out there is laziness, or fear. How do you think about that with clients?

George: Forty years ago I read a book called The Presidential Character by a scholar named James David Barber. He categorized presidents into four boxes. Active-positive, active-negative, passive-positive, passive-negative. They’re fairly self-explanatory, and you can do your own calculus depending on your politics.

Active is someone who does a lot. Positive means you generally agree with it. Negative means you don’t. And you say to yourself, the only way for a brand to be is active-positive. You have to do a lot, and it has to be pretty good.

A lot of brands are active-negative. They scream at you. Every time you turn around it’s another message shouting $49.99. And passive is up to you. If that’s what you decide to do, fine. But then you can’t complain about a lack of business.

So if you want to be active-positive, you make rules for yourself. I have to tell a joke a day, or every other day. I’m going to post something every day. Because let’s face it, people forget.

And that’s influenced the non-self-promotional side of my business too. When I grew up in the business there were these things called magazines. People went to a newsstand. Back in the 70s and 80s there were the Seven Sisters, Good Housekeeping, Redbook, women’s magazines with recipes and getting your kid ready for school. I’m not judging or being gendered, that’s just how things were.

And if you worked on a fast-moving consumer good, mustard or mayonnaise or sliced bread or ketchup, you and your partner would spend three months coming up with a campaign of three ads. The client would eventually buy one. You’d produce it, and it would run for about a year and a half.

Today, if you run an ad twice, people get annoyed with you. So this daily stoking of the furnace comes from an always-on media environment. I grew up in a world where if you lived on the East Coast and the Yankees were playing on the West Coast, you had to wait until the next afternoon to get the score. That’s just how it was. It isn’t that way anymore.

So much of the ad industry is still pretending we can get away with three ads. The whole paradigm of putting a portfolio together, or a new business deck, is “here are our three ads.” That’s as antiquated as things get.

So I built an offering around what clients actually need. I call it the Nifty 50. I’ll sell you a package of 50 ads, and you can run one a day for two months. That’s how people consume things now. If your brief is good enough, and you can convince the client that not everything has to sell the pants off of everything else, some of it can just be a smile. That’s okay too.

I’m almost 70. I grew up in a world where Tiffany’s, the jewelry store, ran a 300-line ad, about three and a half by five and a half inches, in the upper right corner of page A3 of the New York Times, my entire life. Because they wanted to remind people they existed. If it isn’t your anniversary or Valentine’s Day, you forget about Tiffany’s. So how do I remind you every day?

That’s what brands need to do. They don’t need to bang the drum and sell. They just don’t want you to forget about them. Most of what I do is a joke of some sort, just to get my logo out there. I’m not expecting the cash register to ring. I just want that when somebody is ready to buy, they think of me. I want to be on their consideration list. That’s the purpose behind all of it.

In the MBA, ROI-driven world, we’re looking for things that don’t exist. Number one is causality. If I do something Tuesday, I’ll see a result Wednesday. I know very little that works like that.

Morgan: How do you get brands to do things that aren’t safe? How do you explain that risk to them?

George: I’m a lucky man in a lot of ways, and one way is that I built my agency to be founder to founder. Sometimes I’m working with a Fortune 50 company and I have to go through 27 no’s to get to a yes. But most often I don’t go lower than a CMO, and often I’m dealing with a CEO. A CEO doesn’t want a lot of theory. He wants to see things that make him laugh and smile.

Here’s one of the things I say when I talk to people about a Nifty 50. When you deal in increments of three, as we pretty much have our whole lives, each one becomes very precious. If you’re dealing with 50, you can hate the yellow one and love the orange one. Your partner can hate the orange one and love the yellow one. And it’s fine. What’s the cost? It runs for a day. It isn’t going to drive sales away. It isn’t the advertising equivalent of stepping in dog poo. You just didn’t like that one.

If you’re watching a comedian you like, not every joke hits. You don’t hate the guy. You think, that wasn’t my favorite, and the next one comes along. If enough of them are hits, what’s the cost of doing something rotten? Orson Welles didn’t hit Citizen Kane every time out of the box. You have good ones and bad ones and you hope to have more good than bad. You never really know what’s going to strike a chord.

Do you have children? If you packed your kid’s lunch on Tuesday and put in Fritos, and she came home and said, dad, I hate corn chips, so the next day you put in potato chips, she’s not going to report you to child services. You just put in the wrong chips. And next time you pack corn chips she might say, God, dad, I love these, get more. You don’t know. Nobody knows.

The other thing I’ll say to a client, and I don’t mean it to sound arrogant: you called me because of those ads. So you’re not suddenly going to get something dramatically different from that, because that’s why you called. If you like fresh, funny, and quick, that’s what I believe most advertising should be.

There are times when you have to explain how a security protocol works, and that takes time. But you still have to stop people first. And that’s usually something funny and unexpected. I can’t think of many cases where unexpected and therefore impactful doesn’t work.

I have a page in my decks called One Minute of Theory. It’s literally Dave Trott’s upside-down pyramid divided into three: impact, communication, persuasion. And I say, today we’re really talking about impact. Because if I don’t stop you, everything else is moot. If I don’t stop the scroll, what are we doing here?

Because 99.9% of what’s out there is inhuman-looking models smiling stupidly at a screen, and 12-point type that says “agentic scalable configurations built around the needs of your exigencies.” And I’m like, there’s no way that works anywhere outside a conference room. And we don’t advertise in conference rooms.

Morgan: In a world flooded with AI content, why does that “I haven’t heard that before” quality matter so much?

George: David Ogilvy said the best ideas come as jokes. And by joke he meant it broadly, as a shock to the system.

If it were 1956 rather than 2026, the advertising acronym of the day was AIDA. Attention, interest, desire, action. Trott boiled it down to impact, communication, persuasion. Both are fine with me.

But somehow most communication, by the time it goes through the corporate filters and the agency filters and the superego that tells you the client will never buy the word “plethora,” ends up being about the equivalent of an in-flight announcement telling you to fasten your seatbelt. There’s absolutely no reason to pay attention. Nothing gets you to look up or stop thumbing.

Ogilvy talks about how, when you’re approving ads with clients, they spend about 80% of the time picking over your body copy and 20% on the headline. Sometimes they hardly get to the headline at all, because they want to get into the copy, since that’s where the facts are. You got this wrong, I don’t like how you said that. But nobody is going to get to the copy if you don’t stop them with the headline.

So I’ll say, I’ll give you the body copy. We’ll work it out together. I’ll make it good, and English, and short and fun and human. But if I don’t get your attention, what are we doing?

Here’s my macro theory. Over the last 30 years, since the rise of the personal computer, when data became ascendant, direct marketing took a bigger role in marketing. It was more provable. And a marketer could say, I know Morgan likes books with orange and red covers because I can see them over his shoulder, so if I put “savings on books with orange and red covers” on the envelope, he’ll open it, because my targeting is that good.

So when the direct marketing people morphed into digital, they kept that belief system. They said, we don’t have to be interesting, because our targeting is so good. I know Morgan is a left-handed scuba diver who only dives in the Great Salt Lake. I know so much about him that I don’t have to be interesting.

But now every sphere we’re in is mass marketing, regardless of targeting. We’ve forgotten we have to be interesting because we have this belief in targeting.

And I’d question how good that data really is. I’ll bet you five bucks that over the last year you’ve gotten ten emails, based on the genius of data, for baldness. You’re not bald. I’m not bald. Until COVID I lived on a high floor of a 22-story building in Manhattan, and I still got an email a month for gutter replacement. At some point you have to say, maybe this data thing doesn’t work the way the data people tell me it works.

Think about it another way. If you were single and looking for someone in a bar, you can’t walk up and say, I’m wearing a peach-colored shirt, I’m a 34 long in my jeans, I have a black leather belt from Brooks Brothers, and these are my shoes. You have to say something interesting. Can I buy you a drink? Did you see the game last night? You have to find some commonality.

But think about most marketing you see. I like cars, so I’m always looking at cars. When EVs were the thing, every brand ran a banner that said “the new X274, now electrified.” That’s not going to stop me. Everyone’s doing the same thing. Or “come in for the summer of savings event.” It’s not going to stop me. It’s not good.

And this is binary. If it doesn’t get my attention, it isn’t good. It’s that simple. And to get my attention it has to be different somehow. Hopefully not different for difference’s sake. Meaningfully different, not just startle effect.

Morgan: What’s one thing you’d say to a leader who wants to write with more humanity, and who’s afraid to put themselves out there?

George: I’ve spent much of my career in the tech world, and tech can be complicated. My simple test is: pretend you’re explaining it to your grandmother. Someone with absolutely no understanding. What does this thing do? Why is it important to me? Why should I care? And do it in human language.

I can make this really easy. Go online and Google “Politics and the English Language” by George Orwell. He gives six rules for better writing. If you follow them, you’ll be a better writer than 93% of the people practicing this. Don’t use a big word where a small one will do. Don’t use jargon. Don’t use foreign phrases, because people don’t understand them and they won’t raise their hand to say they don’t know what “je ne sais quoi” means. Most people will never raise their hand.

For a while, one of my tricks with really complex technology was to write about it as a children’s book. What is robotic process automation, explained to a five-year-old? This is what mommy does all day.

Probably the highest praise I’ve had in 42 years of working: we pitched a pretty big company and we won it, and part of the reason we won was that children’s book about robotic process automation. After we were awarded the business, the client came up to me and said, for the first time, my six-year-old knows what I do.

That’s the test. Would a six-year-old understand this?

If we were talking about microfiltration devices to make water pure, I don’t know all the science and the alkalines and the compounds. But I could say to you: you know how at the beach you take a sieve and put sand in it and take out the rocks, and then you use a finer sieve and take out the smaller ones, and sooner or later you have the finest sand, almost like flour? That’s what we do with water. We take out the big stuff, the tires and the car fenders. Then we take out the lead. Then we take out the rest. That’s how you get clean water.

You understand that. Somehow you have to figure that out. I don’t think it’s that hard. Do you?

That’s this week’s episode of Chief Brand. You can listen to every episode here.

If you lead a company and you keep meaning to build an executive presence online, that’s what my company does for C-Suite leaders at thoughtleadertoday.com.

Toni Lee has been doing PR for the advertising industry for 28 years. She runs Toni Lee Communications, and she is a co-founder and vice chair of the BLAC Internship Program.

We talked about why she left a holding company and never went back, how she finds a point of view a leader did not know they had, why earned media suddenly matters more than it has in years, and what she means when she says a lack of bravery is what holds most companies back.

Here is our conversation!

Scott Goodson is the founder and chairman of StrawberryFrog, the agency he started in 1999 after reading an article that called the big global agencies dinosaurs. He decided to build the opposite. He has spent 25 years arguing that brands should stop running campaigns and start building movements. He also just walked from France over the Pyrenees into Spain. Here’s our conversation.

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Morgan: Where can people follow along or get in touch?

Scott: Check us out at StrawberryFrog.com, or find me on LinkedIn.

That’s this week’s episode of Chief Brand. You can listen to every episode here.

If you’ve been meaning to build the kind of visibility Scott is describing for your company, that’s what we do at thoughtleadertoday.com.

Welcome to Chief Brand!

Vikki has written the voice for Range Rover, Jaguar, Defender, Discovery, ITV and Sky.

Vikki Ross writes brand voices. Not campaigns, not taglines. The actual rules that decide how a company sounds when thousands of people are all trying to speak as one thing.

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Working on your executive brand? Come to thoughtleadertoday.com.

Vivek Jayaram is the founder of Jayaram Law, an IP and business firm he’s run for 17 years.

He represents artists, musicians, fashion brands, and tech founders. He teaches at the University of Miami Law School. And in 2026 his firm was named to Fashion Law’s list of the top US firms for fashion and retail, the youngest firm to make it by about half a century.

Here’s our conversation.

Morgan: You do tons of work with creative people, and the firm carries your name. How have you thought about your brand, both as an executive and as a firm, over 17 years?

Vivek: I appreciate the question, and I’ll try to answer it with as much humility as possible, because it might sound like I’m full of myself.

From the beginning, one of my aspirations with Jayaram was to build the first real brand in legal. If you look across our industry, there are firms a lot of us know. Kirkland and Ellis, Skadden, the big ones. But I bet if you stopped people on the street anywhere in the country, from New York to Cleveland to the middle of Nebraska, and asked them to name five law firms, very few could do it.

I don’t think that’s a failure exactly, but law firms have gotten very big and very profitable while never really focusing on their brand. And you saw where that leads recently, with the capitulation to the current administration. If you’re a brand with values, those values guide your decisions. A lot of firms realized they didn’t really live by any values or mission. They were just service providers doing whatever was best for the bottom line.

So from the first couple of months, I wanted to model everything, the identity, the website, how we talked, how we showed up, not after other law firms, but after all the great brands I loved. If you’re in the service business, maybe your clients would appreciate you connecting with them and presenting yourself as relatable, rather than looking exactly like every one of your peers. That was the big-picture philosophy, and over 17 years it’s shown up in everything, from the way we dress to the way the offices look.

Morgan: Who were the brands you looked to when you were building that early identity?

Vivek: It may sound cliche, but I’m still inspired by the Steve Jobs era of Apple.

I’m 48, so I was a teenager and a young adult in the 90s and early 2000s. I was a computer kid. I researched all of it, the Gateways, the Dells, the IBMs, the Apple IIGS. And Apple was delivering the same product everyone else was. A hard drive, a monitor, a keyboard, a mouse. Functionally, nothing different.

But when you opened the Apple packaging, or saw the ad, or heard Steve Jobs talk about the product, it made you feel something completely different than opening the box of the cheap laptop I had my first year of law school. Jobs showed us that design and aesthetics make a material, substantive difference in both products and services.

So everything we do is intentional in that same spirit. The identity, the newspaper we send out, the sneakers we make for the team every year, the holiday gifts, the objects in the office, the events. We’re confined by the same bar rules as every other lawyer. We’re still lawyers. But the way we deliver it, and who we deliver it for, I hope makes our clients and our community feel differently.

Morgan: For anyone who hasn’t seen your videos, you’ve got giant cracks in your office walls, chairs coming out of the walls. Where did these ideas come from? Did you design it all as you went?

Vivek: This is really the origin story.

I’ve played music my whole life and loved all the arts as long as I can remember. Visual art, music, fashion, film, poetry, books, all of it. When I graduated law school, my first job was a clerkship for a great federal judge, which I loved. Then I went into big law, met a lot of great people, got good training. But the culture was completely foreign to me. It didn’t fit who I was.

After a few years of long hours, I realized I was getting detached from the creative community I’d spent my first 25 to 30 years in. That was the spark for Jayaram. I was 29 and I had much more confusion than clarity, but the one nugget of clarity I had was that I wanted to work with creative people. That was it.

And I cast a very broad definition of creative. My first clients were friends. People starting a fashion brand, a couple of musicians, sculptors, visual artists, a few tech founders. People forget that back then, up through about 2013 or 2014, the tech world and the creative world were in the same rooms. Somewhere between the financial crisis and the pandemic, tech went from Soho to Wall Street and lost some of that luster. But back then, that’s how our tech practice developed, because those founders were in the same rooms as the artists and designers.

I didn’t want to draw the hard, bright lines lawyers tend to draw around the attorney-client relationship. If you’d asked 100 creative people in 2010 their impression of lawyers, 99 would have said stiff, inaccessible, speaking a language we don’t understand, so we just don’t use them. So from the beginning we had almost a co-op feel. Yes, we did the legal work, but if a client needed an investor to get a project off the ground, we used our network. If they needed a downtown space for an exhibition or a pop-up, we helped find it.

A few weeks ago we helped put together a deal between two of our clients, KidSuper and Inter Miami. One comes to me looking for a soccer arena to do a fashion runway show, and I think, I’ve got a guy. That spirit is what birthed a lot of this, and it’s why we’ve done everything we’ve done for Daniel Arsham over the years, including producing our own shows of his work during Art Basel Miami Beach.

So when you ask why there are eroded sculptures in the office, for us it feels natural. It just feels like being ourselves. And if I’ve learned one thing in 20 years, it’s that being yourself is always the right answer. It’s also one of the hardest things to figure out. That “for real, be real” is what got me out of big law. An office with mahogany and cubicles and a library, that’s not us. This feels right for us.

Morgan: You’ve said that to advise an industry, you have to be inside it. You’re at the fashion weeks, the exhibitions, the openings. How do you give honest, balanced counsel while wearing so many hats?

Vivek: At the end of the day my job is simple. I’m a problem solver. Given my expertise it’s usually a legal problem, but often it starts legal and morphs into a business problem.

One thing I’ve never understood is lawyers who say, “I’m going to stay silent, that’s a business question.” Then what are we here for? You’re advising the business. If your legal advice isn’t tied to the business reality, it’s probably not the most valuable advice you could give. I’m not saying we substitute ourselves in as CEO. But to solve the problem, you have to place the solution squarely within the best interest of the business.

Last week someone said they were looking for an early-stage investor for their CPG brand. Not a legal question. But I represent a VC on the West Coast who only invests in CPG. So I get them on a call and introduce them. Once you’re providing solutions and value, it compounds. You build your network, you get introduced to more people with more problems. That’s a big part of the game.

Morgan: A lot of people think of attorneys, especially in IP, as being about restriction. What you can’t do. Your firm’s positioning is the opposite. Talk about that.

Vivek: We literally have a written mission, and everyone who joins signs off that they understand it. The mission is to enable original ideas.

And that’s consistent with something the founding fathers put in the Constitution 250 years ago. A lot of people are surprised to learn intellectual property is in the Constitution. It’s not there to stop people or as a restriction. It says right there in the document that it exists to incentivize Americans to make things, to be creative. I think that’s beautiful, because I believe most human beings, left to ourselves, would be pursuing something creative. We’re a creative species.

So IP law isn’t there to restrict people, it’s there to incentivize them to make cool stuff. Sometimes we do that by creating IP, sometimes by licensing it, and believe it or not, sometimes by enforcing it. You stop someone else from using your IP not because that’s the point of existing, but because protecting it incentivizes the creation. Through the whole two-party system over hundreds of years, our IP system has worked pretty well. There are inequities, and you see some now with streaming and Ticketmaster in music. But by and large it works.

Morgan: You represent MSCHF whose whole thing is toeing the line. For anyone who hasn’t heard of the Cease and Desist Grand Prix, brands were practically racing to sue them. Tell us about that.

Vivek: MSCHF is a client, and their GC, John Belcaster, is one of the smartest lawyers I’ve ever worked with. They create artworks and products that toe the line between infringement and non-infringement. The Cease and Desist Grand Prix jersey was a bicycle racing jersey covered in the logos of about 20 of the most prominent US trademarks. Subway, McDonald’s, Burger King, Google, others.

And here’s the interesting part. They never got sued. Subway actually joined in and had some fun with it on Twitter. Each of their projects plays with parody, satire, the First Amendment, infringement.

John and I both teach at the University of Miami, and there’s a line of his that always gets a laugh but contains real wisdom. When MSCHF’s artists come to him with an idea, his answer is always yes, unless it’s criminally illegal. That gets the laugh, but honestly that’s how I advise everyone. Because if it’s not criminally illegal, then it’s just a matter of risk. Civil lawyering is a risk allocation exercise. Sure, go do that. You might get sued for breach of contract, or trademark infringement, or tortious interference. Those are the consequences, and I think we have defenses.

I’m the last lawyer who will tell you not to do something. I’ll identify every risk for you. But when you tell me you want to build a ladder to the moon, I’m going to do everything within the bounds of the law to get you there. It might be incredibly risky, but I’ll get you there. The client whose problem it is, and who’s paying for the advice, gets to decide how much risk to absorb.

Morgan: So what’s the lawyer’s job when the lawsuit is the marketing?

Vivek: They’ve had some great cases. The Wavy Baby case was great. And the one I’m proudest of was the Big Red Boot. We got trade dress protection for it from the USPTO by proving that even though it was just a red boot, it was a very specific red boot that the world immediately recognized. There were a lot of naysayers who said we’d never get it. It was a cool collaboration to advance those arguments and prevail. It also helps when your client is willing to take those leaps with you.

Morgan: As brands try to protect their distinctiveness, what do founders get wrong about what’s actually protectable versus what’s just vibes?

Vivek: A few things. With copyright, people don’t realize until they talk to a lawyer that ideas aren’t copyrightable. You have to fix it in a tangible medium, put it down on paper or in a file. On the trademark side, likelihood of confusion trips people up. They think, I can’t call it Nike, so I’ll call it Nikes, add an S, that’s fine. No, you can’t, because the test is whether it’s likely to be confusing.

And this goes to a hot-button issue the New York Times covered extensively last year: can you protect a vibe? A vibe is a look and a feel, and you probably can’t protect it. The closest tool is trade dress, but it’s not easy. Color palettes, the overall look of something, those are hard to protect. Which is exactly why you should talk to an IP lawyer at the beginning of the process, so you understand what’s protectable.

Because I’ve validated this enough over my career: at the end of the day, all of the value in any brand is in the IP. Anybody can source the same great merino wool or leather or cotton. But only one brand can have the guy on the horse, or the alligator, or the LV monogram. Those trademarks are the entire value of the brand. Same with musicians. The reason a name, image, and likeness is valuable is the catalog, which is copyright.

Morgan: I work with a lot of growth-stage companies, and what I hear is “we’ve got time to figure out the identity and the language later.” How important is it to get it right from the very beginning?

Vivek: Yes and no. I agree with some of it and disagree with some of it.

The one thing you need to get right at the very beginning is the name. And to choose the name, you need to run a real trademark search. Not “I did a Google search and there’s nothing out there,” or “I checked the USPTO and it came up empty.” That’s not comprehensive. You need a real search by someone who knows how to analyze it and find all the common-law uses.

Here’s why. We’re at the tail end of a mid-six-figure situation right now because a startup didn’t run a search, grew tremendously over four years, and got sued by a smaller company that had used the same name two years longer, in a similar class of goods. That whole headache could have been avoided with a $2,000 search at the beginning. And the legal fees aren’t even the biggest loss. Now that they’re established, they have to rebrand. New website, new social handles, new everything. All the equity, gone.

I have founders tell me, we love this name, we’re not going to run a search. And I say, listen, at the very beginning you may love it and it may be a great name. But guess who doesn’t love it yet? Everyone else, because you haven’t launched. Nobody knows it. So it’s okay to fall in love with it, as long as you’re okay falling out of love with it when a lawyer tells you it’s not available.

Right now there’s a big show about to launch that we’re holding up, because I have a much smaller client who has the senior trademark rights. It was supposed to launch last week. Now it’s on hold. All because they didn’t run a search.

So to the early-stage people: form your Delaware C-corp, get your stack in place. Logo? I don’t care about your logo at first. It might change, ours did, logos can add energy in a rebrand. But that main name, the word mark, lock it up early so you don’t deal with these shenanigans a few years in.

Morgan: You were named to Fashion Law’s 2026 list of top US firms, the youngest to make it by roughly 50 years. And clearly you didn’t get there by imitating other firms. How do you do it uniquely you?

Vivek: It’s ironic, but I really believe the best version of yourself is just yourself. The authentic you. The minute you stop taking all these other swings, trying to be someone you’re not, playing this game and that game, and just decide to be yourself, that’s the most successful version of you. And the irony is that’s the version of us that ended up on a list next to the big firms.

How did we get there? Instinct, and being in the real world. We show up to Fashion Week to meet the people building the industry and see how brands show up. We do CLEs and workshops for the fashion industry, and we run a pro bono program for emerging fashion brands called the Creative Legal Alliance. We’re just trying to solve problems and support people.

The legal standard for trademark infringement is likelihood of confusion. If you’re trying to figure out whether brand A is confusingly similar to brand B, understanding the fashion business, the designers, the inspirations, the competitors, it’s a no-brainer to look at the brands in the real world rather than only sitting in a bar association conference talking trademark law with other lawyers. Both can help, but you understand what I’m saying.

Our industry tends to box itself into a very specific look and manner of talking and writing. That’s fine, everyone should do what they want. But there’s room to spread your wings and do it differently. Clients come in every color and stripe, so it only makes sense that their advisors are varied too. I’ve gotten notes from younger people saying it gave them a little encouragement to follow their instinct, and that means a lot.

Morgan: Where’s the easiest place for people to reach you?

Vivek: Email me at [email protected], or DM me on Instagram or LinkedIn. I’m very easy to find. You’ll probably even see my phone number out there somewhere. Morgan, it’s been great getting to know you over the years. I love the way you show up, online and in person.

That’s this week’s episode of Chief Brand. You can listen to every episode here.

If you lead a company and you’ve been meaning to build the kind of brand Vivek is describing, one that actually stands out from your competitors, that’s what my company does.

Welcome to the Chief Brand podcast.

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Mischief been named an Adweek Agency of the Year every year it's been eligible. Campaign named it the No. 1 US agency twice.

Before Mischief he ran creative at BBDO New York and made it the most awarded agency on the planet according to The Gunn Report.

Personally, Greg has two Emmys, a pile of Cannes Grand Prix, Best of the Decade at The One Show, and in 2024 he was named both Ad Age's Chief Creative Officer of the Year and Campaign's Creative Person of the Year. He has also won the New Yorker caption contest.

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