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John Trahar

Member since January 2018Contact John

John is a co-founder of Greatest Common Factory, he plays the role of Strategic & Creative Lead as well as Commercial Director — delivering fluid strategy and creative for clients then directing content as needed through shoot and post-production. John co-founded GCF to create a better marketing solution/environment for both brands and our employees after 20 years of experience as an advertising creative at Ogilvy & Mather NY and GSD&M in Austin, Texas. John has done award winning work for Southwest Airlines, Hershey’s, Land Rover, IBM, AT&T, American Legacy Foundation (EX® and truth®), AT&T, SafeAuto Insurance, and Nike. John has led creative on American Legacy Foundation, Cellular One, Goodyear, Norwegian Cruise Lines, Frito-Lay, Marshalls, LLBean, Macaroni Grill, Pennzoil, SBC Global/AT&T (including being creative lead on the work of 14 agencies through the launch of the new AT&T in 2006), and all creative at GCF. John loves to leverage universal truth and brand value to create engaging omni-channel content that solves a business problem, in other words, “work that that works.”

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  • We're Scaling Agencies the Wrong Way by John Trahar (MAD on 10/23/2019)

    What’s being said here, is that smaller existing models can scale up regionally and nationally if they have a plan for an end result that is smarter, faster and makes more sense for both client and agency than a giant conglomeration or the goal of filling a skyscraper with employees. Smaller organizations where all are involved in understanding the strategy, business goals, creative solutions, and produced work for a particular brand have greater accountability and faster reward for the work done.As you say, gone are the days “nine persons per million dollars of billings and still making a nice profit” in a large agency ecosystem. A million dollars go much farther in a small agency ecosystem. And if you can spread that ecosystem while maintaining smaller core groups you can scale up while staying nimble. Clients certainly do want it both ways — nimble service + the comfort of scale. Here is a way to achieve both.I do not propose that large systems break themselves up, as the above proposition does not work in reverse. I also don’t think your “small” portions of a larger entity is at all the same thing. Why pay a massive holding company millions of dollars to cover their understandably large overhead and then work with 5 people?From a media perspective, you bring up an interesting question about clout. If clout equals combined spend, do those combined large spends absolutely need to go through a giant agency organization or could they go through a more nimble and efficient entity?

  • Creatives Need To Lead The Data Charge by John Trahar (Marketing Insider on 10/05/2018)

    And by “Dan” I mean Ed, sincere apologies!

  • Creatives Need To Lead The Data Charge by John Trahar (Marketing Insider on 10/05/2018)

    Thanks Dan, To be clear, this was not a proposal to seek or advertise to “census level” individuals. Though I know many brands seek the holy grail of universal cross platform ID, I also believe most won’t know what to do  with it if/when they find it. My point is, that while most paid media is not fully transparent and not fully aware of the individual viewing it - there is plenty of data staring us in the face that is not being applied as well as it could. This includes the very simple dataset of the programming a brand chooses, presumably based on somewhat of a shared audience. Brands can choose to align with the programming chosen or interrupt it in a way that makes that brand appear clueless (as a broad example).

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