"Being boring is bad for business." Jonathan Haber on bringing gifts

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Jonathan Haber did not go to ad school. He dropped out of law school, landed at the PR firm Rogers & Cowan helping brands get into entertainment, and then found his way into media at Initiative around 2002. That was the TiVo panic, when the industry was convinced nobody would ever watch a commercial again.

Jonathan, then in biz dev and PR for the agency, raised his hand with a couple of colleagues: if TV is dead, let us build a skunkworks to figure out what else brands can do. They said yes. He spent the next decade-plus running versions of that innovation team at Interpublic and then Omnicom, including OMD's Ignition Factory. About a dozen years ago he and his partners walked out to start Giant Spoon, with GE as a client from day one and a small investment from Omnicom behind them. It was still a couple of years with almost no salary, right after he'd bought his first home. He got his first patch of gray hair. They made it.

What stuck with me, as someone who sells for a living, is how Giant Spoon keeps clients for ten years at a time.

The big idea: bring gifts

"It meant bringing them gifts. It meant giving them ideas that they didn't ask for." (Jonathan Haber)

When I asked about the decade-long runs with HP and GE, Jonathan didn't talk about service levels or reporting. He said Giant Spoon got in with big brands by giving them what their big creative and media agencies weren't: proactive thinking, ideas nobody briefed, and work that went past checking boxes. They still do it, and they treat every project like it could be the next long-term relationship.

Most sellers do the opposite. We go quiet after the contract is signed and only show up with something new at renewal. The gift is the retention strategy. If the only time a client hears a new idea from you is when you want more budget, you're a vendor, not a partner.

3 things to do about it

1. Send one unrequested idea a month

Giant Spoon calls its big swings "spoon shots," and the goal is one or two pitched to every client every year, sized to what's big for that client. Jonathan's point is that clients have to be taught to see those ideas as core to the plan, not a "what if" slide at the back of the deck.

This month: pick your top three accounts. Send each one an idea they didn't ask for, built on something you know about their business. No pitch attached.

2. Say no so you can say yes

Giant Spoon says no to a lot more pitches now. Before they commit, they ask: Is it real? Do they actually want to change? Do they have the budget to do it? How long is the commitment? Jonathan said the times they got burned were when they jumped in because they were starstruck by a cool brand and the client didn't really mean it. It took years of mistakes to learn.

Next RFP: run it through those four questions before anyone builds a deck. If two come back "no" or "not sure," get answers or walk.

3. Fund the dot-collecting

Giant Spoon has a culture fund. Go to an opera, an art fair, Art Basel. Not a PlayStation game you'd have bought anyway. Their first Empire State Building idea, for Stranger Things, started because one of Jonathan's partners got a private tour, mentioned it around the office, and someone remembered when the brief came in. Jonathan's word for it is collecting dots. Take a different commute. Write it in pencil. Break the routine.

Sellers need this as much as creatives. The best openers come from noticing things outside your own industry.

This week: do one thing you wouldn't normally do, and write down one idea it gives you for a client or prospect.

Bonus: the month of yes

In Giant Spoon's first year, Jonathan got introduced to Vikrant Batra, a top marketer at HP who later became global CMO. They had lunch on a Friday. Jonathan pitched the philosophy. Vikrant said he had a brief and asked if they could start Monday. That turned into roughly a decade of work, Cannes Lions, Effies, and the creative and production practice Giant Spoon is built on. Jonathan found out later that Vikrant was running a thought experiment that month: say yes to anything anyone pitched him. So when you get the meeting, pitch the philosophy and be ready to start Monday. You never know who's having their month of yes.

Best line of the episode

"Being boring is bad for business." (Jonathan Haber)

Watch the full conversation

We also get into the dragon wrapped around the Empire State Building for House of the Dragon and the data on what happens when stunts and traditional ads work together, the GE takeover of every ad in The New York Times, why "harness your naivete" isn't about age, the Ritual campaign that won a Clio, and how Giant Spoon is running AI across the agency.

Watch the full episode on Spotify. Also on Apple Podcasts and YouTube.

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Talk soon,Dylan