Meet Ken Byers of Confidant

Today we’d like to introduce you to Ken Byers.

Hi Ken, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today.
My name is Ken Byers and I’m the Co-founder and Principal of Confidant. As we like to say, Confidant is named for the role we play with brands, working alongside brands through a full range of core brand building and ongoing content creation and production initiatives.

Having previously built the Brand Experience team within Sony Electronics on the West Coast and having worked in the New York ad agency world (at Ogilvy & Mather), I saw an opportunity brewing in Nashville to have an ad agency capable of serving national and international creative for major brands. In a few visits to Nashville in the 2000s, I started to see the makings of a great design and production scene growing by the day. And I knew that Confidant could be a conduit for creative talent to bring our collective know-how to marquee brands.

Fast forward to today and we’re a 25-plus-person organization serving brands like Amazon, Sony, Diageo, ShakeShack, MadeGood, Birchbox, the Harlem Globetrotters, and many more.

Would you say it’s been a smooth road, and if not what are some of the biggest challenges you’ve faced along the way?
There have been several major inflection points along our journey. I believe that our ability to push through challenges and obstacles has been what has defined the very DNA of Confidant.

Our first major test: within our first year of existence, we were invited to pitch Sony Electronics to be their primary ad agency creating all their global advertising campaigns for their headphone products. They ran the project out of their Europe headquarters, with heavy involvement from their global headquarters in Japan. Confidant, then only a team of two, played David to best five other Goliath-sized agencies in Europe. One by one we encountered challenges every step of the way. We were a team of two. We had to be awake and aware during Tokyo, London, and LA time.

We had to convince production partners to work with us. We had to manage million-dollar-plus cash moves without access to any capital. We made it through every challenge. Now, seven years later we’re still handling each campaign that comes our way for them, having produced upwards of 15 different initiatives.

Our second major test: as Sony dominated our energy for 2016-2019, we were about to head into 2020, a year when production would slow to a COVID halt. But as much as it seemed like an obstacle, it ended up being the next major catalyst. Having been too Sony-centric before COVID it had us doing a lot of ad campaigns, but we were missing out on doing branding projects with a wider range of clients. COVID changed that.

Now, with shoots and live-action opportunities on pause, we started doing my more design-centric projects, more 3D VFX-driven content work, and more animated content work. It’s in this context that Amazon came along, having started to expand its grocery store presence with Amazon Fresh. And soon ShakeShack followed as they were moving their emphasis towards direct orders through their app. And soon came a whole range of food and beverage-based clients, all changing the way they would reach people during COVID.

Now from 2021 to 2023, our team can play at every stage of a brand’s journey, from building the brand foundations to guiding its ongoing initiatives. And we now play across many industries, like consumer tech, entertainment, food and beverage, consumer package goods, and direct-to-consumer, to name a few.

Appreciate you sharing that. What should we know about Confidant?
The greatest superpower of Confidant is that we can step into often-complex dynamics within any organization and we figure out ways to align teams behind a creative vision. In any creative organization, our ability to put the best caliber work into the world has a lot to do with our ability to work through the people dynamics of the organizations whom we serve.

We like to say that we are in search of the galvanizing truth at the core of any initiative and we work through a range of dynamics within teams to align everyone behind a conviction — a unique or galvanizing idea or perspective that will position their brand to stand apart. This is important within the work of all organizations, from early stage start-ups to large, multinational organizations. Companies like Sony or Amazon have so many departments and so many people with different agendas, the work of aligning them behind a creative vision is important. Or young start-ups may have both founders and investors who want a clear brand vision.

Brand storytelling will travel across so many different marketing channels, we spend a lot of time clarifying the core elements of any given initiative so that we can define what success will look like. And we put a lot of work into mapping out our creative vision so that teams trust both the process and the work. In the end, we just want to make brands look great and we want to tell compelling stories, but our work is not just about the creative that we make — it’s about how we make it and who we are making it with.

Are there any books, apps, podcasts, or blogs that help you do your best?
I loved a book called Shoe Dog, written by the founder of Nike, Phil Knight. In the book, you realize that he was a pretty normal guy, who had a knack for breaking through obstacles.

Of course, now, the movie Air will popularize his story, but reading the book and hearing it from his voice was riveting. I also have loved the wisdom of Tim Brown, one of the founders of the famous design consultancy, IDEO. They have been one of the most forward-thinking companies on the planet and he writes a lot about creative ideas, innovation, and team building in books like Change by Design, Creative Confidence, and The Art of Innovation. And then there’s a great book from another IDEO Co-founder, Tom Kelley, called The Ten Faces of Innovation.

I do also love watching Master Class and Ted Talks. There’s so much to learn from the great thinkers who grace those episodes.

Contact Info:

• Website: Confidant.co
• Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/weareconfidant/
• Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/confidant-