Author: Calvin R. Evans
Published: November 7, 2005
Tool: [ email ]
Manhunt: Yeah.
Michael: Because we were building that company already. It’s like; Qwest didn’t do anything for me. I’m helping by bringing in additional funding for the projects and things that are going on. So, to wrap it up, three years went by. Kelly and me lasted for about a year and a half, and then we bounced and were doing our own thing. We opened up our L.A. office for Persaud Brothers and Mark continued on at Qwest for about another year and a half. Then finally around 1999, he bounced and started working with Persaud Brothers full time. So we kind of accomplished all of our goals with Persaud Brothers because we now have ridiculous connections, contacts and relationships in music. And not just music hybrid relationships, we have film relationships; we built relationships with talent agencies. So now we’re off to the races with Persaud Brothers.
Manhunt: I got you. That’s real good. Now when you guys started out in the beginning, did you advertisement mainly come from word-of-mouth or did you have street teams that got the word out?
Michael: It was all word-of-mouth pretty much initially. That coalition that I told you about when we used to meet at RCA, I purposefully pulled people in that were interested and understood the vision of what we were trying to build, but a couple of them I knew would be able to throw business at us. Like I called one of my homegirls, Gabrielle Glore, and I told her about the business. She was interested in helping and getting involved, but she also worked at HBO. Guess what, in the marketing department. Guess what, one of the first deals that we had was from HBO. And there were a couple of different scenarios I could paint like that, but that’s how we jumped up our initial clients. She would tell somebody about us and people would call us and say “Hey, I heard your doing this kind of work for HBO, we would like to bring you in.” Maybelline was calling us to try to do a deal. Tangaray was one of our early clients and we lasted with them for a good eight years. So then it flipped from word of mouth to a industry buzz thing. Once you get heat, where people are doing the talking for you it becomes easier. But for a couple of years straight we never did any hard advertising or PR., stuff was just coming at us, right Oz?
Ozzie: Yeah, cause once you get tied into the entertainment industry, and plus you’ve got the guys who are doctors, lawyers and investment bankers; they want to get to the entertainment people. So we become the link between those two.
Michael: Right. That was a good point. We had a mixture of all these crowds and that was a benefit to us. But the other thing was back in the early to mid ‘90s there were not many people doing the stuff we were doing. So there were not many other games in town for people to mess around with. I mean Rifkin quite honestly was in the game before us and interestingly enough, Mark wrote Rifkin’s business plan for the Steven Rifkin Company. So we used that as somewhat of a model to our business. Because we saw what Rifkin was doing. He was involving music but, as a matter of fact, he started off with the marketing but more so with promoting records but then he flipped it and started doing corporate deals with Nike and promoting movies and other things. But if you look at his business, he’s successful at taking his music industry company and doing this with corporate clients, and he was only doing one thing, street teams. That was all he did. That was his thing. So we thought, what could we do to expand the services we provide? From strategy to all sorts of non-traditional promotions, which includes a bunch of other things: event, insert promotions, to advertising. So what happened was we were building a real agency, and nobody had a real agency that was doing this stuff and targeting this audience. You had smaller players, like I mentioned Rifkin got rather big, but you had a company before all of us called The Streets. That was Chris Latimer’s company. And all respect due ‘cause I looked at what Chris was doing, and he only did a couple of things. His main thing was events and product placement. He was big in helping blowing up clothing brands by placing their products in television shows and music videos.
Ozzie: Yeah. Chris Latimer goes back to when I was working with (Doctor) Dre and Ed (Lover) when they first started with MTV. Dre had a group called Original Concept
Manhunt: Yeah big shout to the Concept.
Ozzie: Dre is from Westbury.
Manhunt: Yeah, right.
Ozzie: So when Dre got on with MTV, Chris Latimer came through with the African American College Alliance. That’s what got him started. He started pumping that and then Dre and Ed were like, “Yo, he got a clothing line for black colleges. Yo, I’m gonna start rocking this!” That’s where Chris Latimer started his whole company. He blew that up, I got to give it to him man. He did his thing with that.
Michael: So you got to give credit where credit is due. He was doing that back in like ’92, ’93. So we were looking at this stuff happening and we said lets make a bona fide agency that does more. And it was also my experience at Vibe that gave up some insight on what we needed to build. I was in the launch stages of a magazine that targeted the so-called “urban” audience, which at the time, believe it or not, nobody understood. I remember when Leonard Burnett and all those guys in the sales department were trying to sell the stuff to advertisers. The advertisers didn’t get it. They were like, “What is an urban audience?” And I’m with a crew of people at Vibe that were literally in a one floor of a building. There were only a few people. But I sat back and I knew that they were going to be successful at this. And that’s where the initial idea of starting a company came from. I was like, “I going to run through the same door and push you all business, because this magazine is going to be successful at selling this audience.” And that’s another thing that helped us become successful.
Manhunt: Indeed. Now Michael, I understand that when you was at Harvard Business School, you wrote a paper that became the business plan for Persaud Brothers, Inc. What was the vision of Persaud Brothers, Inc. at that time?
Michael: Wow, where you getting all that information from man?
Manhunt: Come on man, I study baby. (laughs)
Michael: Yo, you showing due diligence. That’s good.
Manhunt: I gotta study baby. (Laughs)
Michael: Yeah. Well that’s a good point. Well let me back up cause I trying to make sure its making sense to you. There was so much going on back then and things were happening at the same time. It was during the summer of 1993, which was between my first and second years of business school. You know, as I told you, I was out concocting this thing with Mark and Irwin. By the time I got back to school I thought that I needed to spend some more time researching this thing. If I am going to start a company, I don’t want to waste time in school going to class. So I found out that there was a thing called the independent research, or field studies. Which was basically, you find a professor to sponsor you on essentially an idea or something that he feels is necessary for research exploration. And I posed it to him, not necessarily as though I was writing a business plan, but more so it was doing a research study into how a marketing firm could turn itself into a larger, broader communications entity. I forgot the actual title. It was something like “Turning your Marketing and Research Shop Into a Larger Marketing Entity” or something like that. But anyway, the bigger idea behind it was in ’93 we had this big thing that people are talking about that they are calling The Information Superhighway. And I remember that Al Gore was big on this thing. This was his thing: “The communication superhighway is going to change the way we do business.”
Shawn: Yeah, he claims he invented it.
Michael: Yeah. Anyway, at this time AOL was hitting everybody over the head with their free AOL disks. They were floppy disks at the time, they weren’t even CD’s, to sign with AOL. This stuff was just happening. So I said, “Wait a minute. The whole world is about to change.” So my premise was, with the proliferation of all these different channels of communication, what’s going to happen to advertising and marketing? I knew the consumer was going to have more control of when and how they are going to receive messages. That changes the whole structure of the advertising and communication business. That was the premise of my whole study. So what I wanted to do was build a company that was going to take advantage of that. So that was the premise of my whole thing. And some of it still holds true to this day. Some of that stuff is solidly in our company and some of it, when I look back at it and I say, “Man that looks like a whole lot of garbage. Some of it I look at it and it's exactly what we are doing today and this stuff was written like twelve years ago. So, yeah I would say that the paper served as a loose blueprint for what we did in building the company. Because we didn’t have a business plan, we had a conceptual plan. We used it as a guideline.
Manhunt: That’s real good, that’s interesting. Now Ozzie, what is your official title with the company, Executive of Promotions?
Ozzie: Yeah you could call it that.
Shawn: He don’t know what his title is. Ask Michael what his title is.
Manhunt: Yo Michael, what is Ozzie’s official title?
Michael: He has several titles up in here, because he is like a jack-of-all-trades. At this point Ozzie is working on a lot of different things. So rather than hinder people with a title… you know, because at one point he was handling a lot of different promotions and other things for us, but he also brought in deals. So there is no title really.
Manhunt: OK. Well Ozzie, I don’t know if there is such a thing as a typical day for you, but if there is such a thing, what does a typical day for you look like?
Ozzie: As far as the Persaud Brothers? Alright. Well we come in, me and Mike will argue about something. (Everybody laughs) We gotta get that out of the way.
Manhunt: (laughing) Gotta get that business out of the way huh?
Michael: (Mimicking Ozzie) I told you! I told you that was gonna go down! You don’t listen to me!
Ozzie: Yeah I might see something that happened on TV and I say “Yo Mike, I told you that was gonna go down! I told you they were gonna do this next!” And he’ll be like, “Come on man that ain’t gonna happen.” And then we’ll get into it. And then next I’m on the phone getting at people who said they were gonna give certain business. You know, like people I know from school who work in certain aspects of the business like HBO or whatever. And I tell them, “Yo that guy don’t know what he’s doing, bring it over to us. We know how to get this done, that done, we got the answers for you.” So that will take most of the day getting at those guys. Then the guys who are definitely going to bring business to you, I get the paper work from them, you know saying, “Yo, make sure your man puts it down on paper, fax it over, email it to me, lets get going.” Then it will go on from there, and it will get back to me and Mike going at it again about some other mess. And then its back on the phones, making sure that these guys get the paperwork over to us so we can get started moving on business. Because without the paper, it just about being on their word, that’s not good now. Because cats will jerk you all the time on that, Mike will tell you. So many people will tell you that they are going to come to you for business, and then they don’t, and their business will be all messed up and they say they should’ve come to us first. But it kills us because then they look at us like “Oh, ya’ll are a black company, oh forget it. We know what’s gonna happen with them.”
Manhunt: For real?
Ozzie: Yeah that still happens. The Negronisms still exist.
Manhunt: That ridiculous. But let me ask you another question Ozzie. What do you believe are the essential elements of a successful promotional campaign?
Ozzie: The first thing is, you’ve got to understand what it is you are selling, and I think that is the problem with everybody is that they don’t understand what it is they are trying to sell. They use this term that I don’t even like, the term urban marketing, because urban truthfully to me is they saying how are you going to sell this to the hip-hop audience.
Manhunt: It’s a euphemism for Black, or …
Ozzie: Yeah, its how are you going to sell this to the hip-hop audience? Then another thing I don’t like is when they say they are going to focus on the teens or ‘tweens. I’m like, are you stupid man? They use stupid terms that we at Persaud Brothers are trying to get the clients that we deal with out of because truthfully what does a teen do? I know when I was a teen; we used to look at what the older cats were doing.
Manhunt: Right.
Ozzie: So we looked at what the older cats were doing and we said we wanted to do that. So they say the teens do this and the teens do that, and I say the teens don’t look at teens like that. I ask who their kids listen to, and they say they listen to 50 and they listen to Jay-Z. And I say those are grown men.
Manhunt: Right.
Ozzie: I said if you listen to (Doctor) Dre (producer), most of ya’ll don’t know ya’ll were listening to Dre back in the 80’s. So I say basically ya’ll just want to sell a product to the hip-hop audience, not an urban audience, a hip-hop audience. So it's about understanding your product and what you are trying to sell, and how you are trying to sell it. And once you understand those three aspects, then you can get into promoting your product.
Michael: And I’ll add something to that because we have been in quite a few different situations, some that have been successful, and some of them that haven’t. And the best scenario where you can be successful is when you actually are involved in the upward planning. It's critical because we can actually choose almost anything, but if the plan is something that’s faulty, its not going to work no matter who you have executing it. For example, with HBO one time I remember they called us and they had this great idea to pull off a film festival in the month of February. And the film festival was supposed to be held, it was for Black History Month, and the HBO programming was focused on the African-American audience.
Manhunt: OK.
Michael: And we were to hold this film festival in like, eight different cities or more, I can’t really remember how many we did. But it was to occur on Saturday afternoons, actually we did two each weekend in February, so we did a total of eight in the month. During the afternoon on the Saturday was the film festival where we showcased film, held a few little seminars, like a mini film festival all showcasing HBO stuff.
Manhunt: OK
Michael: Who wants to be interrupted during the day on Saturday? I mean it just didn’t make any sense. If you have a big film festival where you're going to a destination, your going to Tribeca, or your coming to Sundance, it’s a whole different story. But we tried to tell them that the premise for the thing from the beginning was off. And all eyeballs at HBO was on us. I’m talking about big time programmers people, and the joint failed.
Manhunt: Wow.
Michael: These things were lightly attended. I mean we executed it well; everything was set up and ready to go. We had all the pieces in motion. So the second part of any successful promotion is execution. We had that wrapped up tight, but without the proper planning and strategizing, the whole thing fell apart.
Ozzie: And to add on to what Mike said, a lot of that goes back to understanding the product that you are trying to sell.
Manhunt: Certainly.
Ozzie: A lot of them don’t understand it, and a lot of these people, which you will probably understand later on, they don’t understand how we live. The way they go about planning on stuff, and if we were in on the planning stages, we could’ve told them going in there on a Saturday ain’t gonna happen. Nobody wants to be interrupted; they have other things they want to do. But they don’t understand that. They wonder why we wouldn’t want to go to a film on Saturday. Its stupidity. I could tell you some stuff, like when the Chappelle Show started, oh my God, Mike I don’t know if you want to tell him that story?
Michael: Well we helped promote them, but there was a lot of crazy stuff that went on with them. What are you referring to?
Ozzie: When we had that thing and the lady was trying to understand talking about hip-hop and them being on the mixtapes, and why they should be on the mixtapes.
Michael: Oh God. Oh yeah, but sometimes they’ll bring you in for your advice, but then they try to act like they know what’s up.
Ozzie: One of them said, “Well my child watches MTV…” and I said listen, do you understand that when your looking at MTV that is six months gone. People are on the next thing. MTV gets stuff is slow. By the time it gets to MTV its six months to a year gone. She didn’t understand that. She was like, “It is?” I said yeah. And you know what? We told them certain mixtapes to get on and they told us no cause they didn’t
