NOTE: The recording of my conversation with Matt Sabljak at the end of this article is not completely safe for listening out loud as it has moments of profanity. You’ve been warned.
For this article, I interviewed Matt Sabljak of SRH, a brand / creative / media agency in the heart of the Walker’s Point Innovation District.
Matt describes SRH as an agency that helps brands become more memorable, with an in-house media team that gets real results.
SRH was one of the first tenants in the Eagleknit Building and the team now has 20 more people than when the agency started in Matt’s condo kitchen.
Matt’s been getting louder on LinkedIn with a video series with a thesis that brands that get remembered get chosen. He wears magenta in all of these videos.
I hadn’t even asked a question. Matt kicked off our interview with “pass.”
I mean, who the hell does that?
Matt Sabljak, that’s who.
Somewhere in our two decades of friendship he and I fine-tuned our banter. It takes all that we have to stay on track in any conversation. This interview no exception.
On this day, I caught him at the tail end of exhaustion from a huge pitch. he and the SRH crew had been working on for a couple of weeks. A couple of weeks of 16 hour days, including weekends.
On this day, Matt and I were sitting at a long table in a meeting room at the SRH global HQ, nestled perfectly in the Walker’s Point Innovation District.
It’s a space that any creative would dream to work in. A space that SRH signed a lease to in a season when other agencies were doing the opposite and going fully remote.
But for SRH, nothing replaces being together and bouncing ideas around the space.
“Brands that get remembered get chosen.”
That’s not just the thesis behind Matt’s videos, it’s the North star for SRH.
As Matt puts it, marketing has 2 jobs: build demand and harvest demand.
But somewhere over the last 25 years, the industry leaned so hard into harvesting, that it forgot how to help people like you and me get to know the brand in the first place.
So the question today becomes: how in will people remember you?
Steve: “What about AI?” Matt: “It’s changed nothing about the way we think about growing brands.”
I mean, I had to ask.
And Matt countered with, although AI is a powerful tool that’s changing how work gets done, it hasn’t changed the principles of brand growth.
Matt’s take is that every technology comes with the same panic. But, it’s not technology that matters in how brand’s get chosen; it’s memorability.
His own proof is simple.
He picked magenta, one of SRH’s colors, and wears only that in his videos. People often come up to him and say they love his pink videos.
Why aren’t more companies doing this?
Because it can feel too basic.
As Matt puts it, we’re surrounded by CRMs, tracking pixels, and accountability in the c-suite, so “be memorable” sounds too simple. B2B marketing pushes this even further.
His counterpoint to that, is this: we’re not rational thinkers who sometimes feel. We’re feeling creatures who sometimes think. Even if we’re buying heavy equipment or SaaS platforms.
He pointed out the Volvo with Jean-Claude Van Damme example of doing the splits between two moving semis. That was memorable.
The Saturday night Matt decided to start over.
If you’re ever struggling to make a point, make a music correlation.
Matt did.
He was telling me how close the SRH team was on completing a prospective client pitch deck late on a recent Saturday. Something wasn’t sitting well with him, so Matt decided to clear his head. He turned to the Oasis documentary to do so.
In watching how the two Gallagher brothers from the band came back together over a decades long argument that broke up the band, it hit Matt. “This whole pitch was like cover music,” he told me.
It wasn’t an SRH song. Their song is about who they are: a group of curious, passionate people who love the work and each other.
So he went back to the team to start over. They did.
At the time of our interview, they hadn’t heard a decision from that prospective client.
Milwaukee made it possible.
Near the end of our conversation, I asked Matt what this city means to him.
There was a long, heavy pause.
He’s born and raised here. His dad worked in the newspaper industry for 50 years. He shared stories of coming to downtown Milwaukee before condos and restaurants.
Then, he told me that Milwaukee felt accessible in a way that other cities didn’t. And that’s why he got into filmmaking. And launching his own creative agency.
His focus for SRH today is not to build a great Milwaukee agency. It’s to build a great agency that happens to be in Milwaukee.
If you want all of the above and more in a passionate, honest, vulnerable conversation, listen below or on Spotify.
After you listen, RSVP for a special AI vs. Brand discussion Matt and I are co-hosting with brand strategist and author Gair Maxwell at Great Lakes Distillery on Wednesday, October 28 from 7:30a-9:30a.
Love you, Milwaukee.
