What does it take for a two-person agency in Nashville to beat out well-known firms from Berlin and London for a global Sony account?

Ken Byers, founder and CEO of Confidant, has lived that story, and he's spent nearly a decade since turning it into a repeatable model.

In this episode of The Spark, Mark Scrivner sits down with Ken at Creative Assembly's East Nashville studio for a conversation that covers the full arc: from writing a sixth-grade term paper about working in advertising, to landing at Ogilvy & Mather, to going brand-side at Sony Electronics, to founding Confidant in 2016 and growing it into a creative velocity partner for global brands. Ken shares the lessons he learned from living on both sides of the agency-client relationship, what it really means to earn trust with major brands, how COVID forced a repositioning that made Confidant stronger, and where he sees AI fitting — and not fitting — into the creative process. Whether you're running an agency, building a brand, or navigating your own entrepreneurial inflection point, this episode is packed with hard-won perspective on what it takes to climb the next hill.

Episode Highlights
01:05 – Ken traces his journey from a sixth-grade term paper to Ogilvy & Mather
04:39 – The biggest cultural shift moving from agency life to Sony brand-side
14:08 – How a global Sony pitch launched Confidant and led to years of sleepless nights
20:04 – Why big brands are moving away from holding company agencies toward boutique specialists
25:51 – The origin of the name Confidant and the trust philosophy behind it
33:16 – Navigating COVID as an inflection point and how it reshaped Confidant's positioning
38:33 – Why "creative velocity" is now Confidant's positioning — and the insight that unlocked it
45:55 – How Ken approaches AI: research, operations, ideation, and production

Learn More & Connect:

Show Notes + Resources: https://creativeassembly.agency/ca-podcast/
Connect With Ken Byers: https://www.linkedin.com/in/kenbyers/ | https://www.confidant.co/
Connect with Mark Scrivner: https://www.linkedin.com/in/markscrivner | https://snapshot.agency/health
Our Sponsor - Snapshot: https://snapshot.agency/health

Follow The Spark: https://creativeassembly.agency/ca-podcast/

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