Episode Four is an ad agency started by two serial entrepreneurs who are using the data accumulated over the years to launch an AI-based product, RYA. The success of Episode Four is based on their unique investment in proprietary survey data that helped them discover what people want to spend their extra time and money on. The data set that they have compiled over the years represents a statistically significant portion of the US population and was the foundation for some of their creative campaigns for major brands like Invesco, Charles Schwab, and many others. Pulse 2.0 interviewed Episode Four co-founder partner Mark Himmelsbach to learn more about the company.
Mark Himmelsbach’s Background
What is Himmelsbach’s background? Himmelsbach said:
“I have been fortunate to have an interesting career path. I started as a consultant to the US Secret Service, I was one of the first people in the advertising industry to have a Facebook account, and now help to lead a few companies – an advertising agency (Episode Four), an AI SaaS startup (RYA), and a golf apparel brand (Heathlander).”
“I am incredibly fortunate to have a business partner in all of these ventures, my co-founder Teddy Lynn. Teddy and I met in advertising decades ago and worked together at storied agencies like BBDO and Ogilvy before founding our own companies 7 years ago.”
“Teddy also has an unusual career path before advertising. He was a film and television producer and produced everything from Spice Girls music videos to the Oscar-nominated film Pleasantville.”
Formation Of Episode Four
How did the idea for Episode Four come together? Himmelsbach shared:
“Seven years ago, Teddy and I decided to build a company by reverse-engineering our favorite advertising project and building a way to make hits for brands. In our careers, we had made hit records, hit movies, and hit game shows (etc.) for brands. How could we replicate that in our own company?”
“To create these hits, we knew we needed two things – better data on people and better ideas than our competition.”
“Better data. To understand the best places to make hits, we decided to ask our audience. We have an ongoing proprietary survey that asks 1,000 people per week a very simple question – where would you spend your free time or extra money? While the question is simple, the answers are robust because we prompt people with over 200 different genres or things you can watch, read, listen to, attend, eat, and so on.”
“Better ideas. From this data, we know what people are most into, and from that, we can create ideas based on this data. But we also take an ‘arts and science’ approach here. We have cataloged over 1,200 entertainment formats (for food formats think things like Nailed It, Chef’s Table, pop up food trucks, Aspen Food & Wine, and so on). We apply these formats to our creative process and come up with twists on genres or ideas that no one has thought of before.”
“After running a successful advertising agency for years, we realized brands don’t need agencies like ours – they could leverage our data and ideas to be better marketers. As such, we have built RYA and trained it on our proprietary audience insights and creative formats. This allows anyone to better understand their target market and develop ideas that would make them act.”
Favorite Memory
What has been Himmelsbach’s favorite memory working for the company so far? Himmelsbach reflected:
We treat every meeting as an opportunity to try and make clients’ eyes light up. My favorite moments are when they are surprised and thrilled by what we show them. Some examples:
Customer Success Stories
After asking Himmelsbach about customer success stories, he highlighted:
“When we suggested building a muscle car to give away to the winner of the Charles Schwab Challenge, our clients thought we were being silly. When we showed them that golf fans love classic cars, they realized they had the permission to be in the classic car business. Each year, the car generates hundreds of millions in net new assets for Schwab and billions of PR impressions for the firm. Now we are about to give away another car this May.”
“People who are into investing are also obsessed with celebrity chefs. This gave Invesco the permission to partner with superstar chefs to create a show focused on innovation in cooking. While we just launched, early indications show that over 90% of people watch the entire video, and the videos are blowing the site visits and engagements out of the water!”
“If you are a cruiser you are most likely into board games and cartology (yes, maps!). We partnered with Windstar Cruises to create an expansive digital treasure hunt that involved people sorting through 180 clues to win the trip of a lifetime. This was voted the most viral campaign of the year and helped sell out cruises 18 months in advance!”
“In fact, it was these moments of surprise and thrill that led us to start RYA. What if we could make all marketing as insightful and compelling as the ideas from Episode Four?!”
Core Products
What are the company’s core products and features? Himmelsbach explained:
1.) RYA is an AI powered tool that can generate both breadth and depth of divergent strategic and creative outputs to help marketers create radical yet acceptable content and experiences – in other words: more effective marketing – for any audience.
2.) RYA has two core products – Insights and Ideas
a.) RYA Insights. Insights helps marketers better understand and engage audiences that they care about. RYA Insights are based on survey data that reveals how any audience wants to spend their free time or extra money. We can tell you what they want to watch, see, hear, read, play, eat, or do through the lens of hundreds of genres and actions. Because RYA has hundreds of thousands of respondents in our database and it continually collects data from 1,000 respondents every week, we can provide insights on any audience, down to 1% of the U.S. population.
b.) RYA Ideas. We trained our AI model to learn the art of creativity from 1,000s of breakthrough and successful ideas that we’ve developed for brands based on twists of these genres and actions. Our tool extracts familiar formats and mechanics from genres and actions and mixes and matches them in endless combinations to turn the familiar into something interesting and unexpected. Or, as we like to say – radical yet acceptable – every time. RYA only suggests ideas that your audience actually wants to engage with. No more interruptive marketing that irritates your target audience.
RYA Insights and Ideas work together to create radical yet acceptable breakthrough marketing at the touch of a button. Something every brand can use.”
Product Benefits
What are the product benefits? Himmelsbach pointed out:
“In terms of RYA, we believe that RYA is going to eliminate the need for creative agencies’ marketing ideas.”
“Current marketing AI is focused on tools to make incremental improvements in the current process – making better headlines, generating faster imagers, finding efficiencies within workflows.”
“RYA is a new process – it allows brands to generate ideas based on proprietary data and find the best experts to produce those ideas. RYA enables brands to create content, experiences, activations, and events without the need for agencies as the middlemen.”
“Since it is trained on a decade’s worth of proprietary audience data and successful creative executions, brands themselves can concept and then create breakthrough ideas without the need for the cost and slowdown of agencies.”
“We know that RYA works because it has been trained on fresh, unique, and proprietary audience data as well as creative, out-of-the-box, and successful marketing ideas.”
Challenges Faced
What challenges has Himmelsbach faced in building the company? Himmelsbach acknowledged:
“Like most sectors, marketing is awash in the promises of AI, and many products have shown incredible potential. Many of those AI implementations are in industries where it is obvious if the technology is improving the outcome – AI is performing better than some doctors in detecting eye problems, AI is helping to read burned ancient scrolls and so on.”
“Unlike science, advertising is almost completely subjective. An idea is only good if someone buys something because of it. The biggest challenge is to make sure that RYA is creating ideas that are not only interesting to the people making the ads, but also compelling to those seeing the ads.”
“As such, we have started testing RYA’s outputs in the real world with real consumers. Thankfully, it works! People are engaging with the ideas created by RYA and those ideas are driving better business results for brands.”
Evolution Of Episode Four’s Technology
How has Episode Four’s technology evolved since launching? Himmelsbach noted:
“RYA has taken full advantage of the evolution of AI. Originally, RYA technology would now be considered somewhat quaint and old school. We used PostgreSQL, Laravel, and Vue 3.”
“Now we are building on top of OpenAI’s ChatGPT. Most significantly, RYA used to only be available to people at Episode Four. Now, we are building it so that we can authenticate thousands of users who can use the product concurrently around the world.”
Significant Milestones
What have been some of the company’s most significant milestones? Himmelsbach cited:
“RYA is starting to beta test now and is launching to marketers-at-large this summer!”
Funding/Revenue
After asking Himmelsbach about funding and revenue information, he revealed:
“Currently, RYA is funded through Episode Four. This allows us to have full ownership and control over the development of the product.”
“We are pre-revenue; however, we are using RYA in our agency process so in effect clients are already paying for the outputs.”
Total Addressable Market
What total addressable market (TAM) size is the company pursuing? Himmelsbach assessed:
“There are nearly 14,000 advertising agencies in the United States. From our experience, brands pay anywhere from $10,000 to $3 million per month as a retainer for its agencies. And then additional money for production, media planning and buying, PR, etc.”
“Since we believe RYA can replace agencies that create content, experiences, events, and sponsorships, we believe marketers can significantly reduce their agency costs by subscribing to RYA.”
Differentiation From The Competition
What differentiates the company from its competition? Himmelsbach affirmed:
“We believe we have three main competitors: AI marketing tools, advertising agencies, and traditional belief systems at brands.”
“Current AI marketing tools are fine – they can write hundreds of headlines and blog posts and generate near-infinite number of photos and videos. However, while these tools are useful, RYA provides better strategic insight and creative ideas since it’s trained on data that we know works and that is not available anywhere else. RYA is a higher-order product that allows marketers to do more than current tools on the market. In fact, we have seen alpha testers using RYA to generate prompts for ChatGPT, Midjourney, etc. to help them with headlines and imagery once RYA suggests an idea.”
“Advertising agencies have always been the bastion of creativity and have developed some of the most famous marketing campaigns in history. However, the ad agency process is slow and expensive. Too many people doing too many subdivided tasks and charging clients by the hour (or monthly retainers). In order to make their money, agencies need the process to take a long time. RYA shortcuts the process and we have seen it generate ideas that are at the same level as an agency. While RYA will never replace creative humans, we believe that these creative humans can exist at a brand (using RYA) as well as at an agency.”
“Inertia is a big deal at brands. Many marketers feel that there is a need for hyper-specialism and numerous people need to each do specific tasks as a part of a larger process. RYA helps break down this myth and shows that anyone – people we call ‘strategists with creative taste’ – can understand an audience in a new way and generate compelling creative ideas in just moments with RYA.”
Future Company Goals
What are some of the company’s future company goals? Himmelsbach concluded:
“Our ambition is high. We believe we are building true creative AI for everyone.”
“Currently in the creative industry, the hype hasn’t matched the results. We hear how everyone’s job is in trouble. ChatGPT will replace copywriters, Midjourney will replace art directions, and Pika will replace filmmakers.”
“But then we hear that none of these tools can really be creative. All are trained on the same data sets. Most don’t have any proprietary data. And none can yet generate human-level ideas worth showing a brand.”
“That’s about to change – we think we have built and trained an AI to be creative. We think as creative as humans and certainly more impressive than building on offerings from OpenAI, Meta, Google, and so on.”
“Our single goal is focused on launching RYA this summer. Creative AI built on proprietary audience and creative data that we have collected and leveraged for decades. Quality ideas to market faster and at a volume the industry has never seen before.”
