Selected Impact
Three different problems. One instinct: find what isn't working and rebuild it around what people actually need.
Magnite
Executive Exchange
The situation
Years earlier, I'd built the Automation Summit, a program that brought media buyers, publishers, and technology partners together to learn everything the Magnite platform could do. It worked. We ran it in Sydney, Sao Paulo, London, Madrid, Paris, and Los Angeles, and it helped grow the business substantially.
But I noticed the room changing. Senior decision makers stopped showing up. Companies were sending their younger team members to get educated instead. That was good for those employees, but it didn't stop the company from working with our competitors too. Education wasn't the same as loyalty.
What I changed
So I started asking questions, and found the real problem: media buyers and publishers weren't having honest one-on-one conversations, because neither side wanted to expose their position to the other. That meant the hardest problems, the ones involving multiple parties, never got solved at all.
I built Executive Exchange to fix exactly that: a closed-door, confidential room for our top buyers and top publishers only. We'd open with a topic and a few pointed questions, then get out of the way and let the room work through it themselves.
The result
The result was electric. Issues that had gone unsolved for years got resolved in a single session. Buyers and publishers started trusting each other enough to make more deals, and that trust made Magnite harder to leave.
24%
Lift in enterprise deal flow
What it proves
When a program stops changing behavior and starts just delivering information, it's already becoming obsolete. The fix isn't a bigger version of the same room. It's a different room entirely.
CLIO Awards
Nielsen Business Media
Fifty years of prestige, rebuilt
Most profitable year in 51 years
The situation
CLIO had prestige. It also had a problem: fifty years old, and treated by an entire industry as a legacy institution, respected out of habit rather than genuine relevance. Entries were flat, and the show itself had become a slog: 450 awards, one by one, on one stage.
Instead of starting with the spreadsheet, I started with chief creative officers and asked what they actually wanted from an award. The answer surprised me. They wanted to feel honored. They wanted the red carpet. What they didn't want was to sit through four hundred names read aloud before their turn came.
What I changed
So we rebuilt the show around that distinction. Most winners were announced online ahead of the show, and the live ceremony was reserved for what actually deserved a stage: the Grand Clios, Advertiser of the Year, Agency of the Year, and a handful of honorary Clios given to celebrities to make the night glamorous.
Afterward, at the after-party, winners who hadn't been called to the stage picked up their trophies at what became known as the trophy bar. We hired a celebrity host, moved the show to a location with real weight, the Museum of Natural History, and modernized the category structure to match how creative work actually gets made today.
The result
Entries and revenue both grew, and CLIO closed its best year in fifty-one years of existence.
What it proves
Prestige doesn't survive on its own reputation. It survives on someone asking the people who actually care what they're still showing up for, and having the nerve to cut the rest.
Shorty Awards
Pandemic Rebuild
Almost 80%
Lower production costs
More than 2x
Digital reach
The situation
March 2020 didn't leave the Shorty Awards a good option. It was a live industry program built around a room full of people, and the room was gone. Sponsors had paid for visibility that no longer existed. Cancel it, and years of sponsor trust and industry standing went with it.
What I changed
The answer was staring at us. The Shortys exist to honor the best work in social media, so I rebuilt the show entirely on social media itself. Winners were announced on Twitter. Panel sessions ran live on Clubhouse. Winning work got showcased on Facebook. Teasers built anticipation on Instagram.
The show wasn't just about social media anymore. It was happening inside it, on the same channels the work being honored actually lived on.
The result
The rebuilt format cut production costs by almost 80 percent while expanding digital reach more than double what the live show had ever reached, and it worked well enough that it became the program's ongoing operating model, not just a pandemic workaround.
What it proves
Constraint isn't always the enemy of good work. Sometimes it's the only thing that forces you to ask what an experience is actually for, instead of just repeating what it's always looked like.
Contact
Let's talk about what your customers already know and nobody's asked them yet.
karl.vontz@gmail.com ยท linkedin.com/in/karlvontz