Ryan Reynolds, Authentic Marketing, and a Billion-Dollar Empire

Ryan Reynolds is showing us the blueprint for Authentic Marketing, but since he's a celebrity a lot of people might write off his success and miss the opportunity to learn from someone who is one of the great marketing minds of today.

Authentic Marketing is all about mastering three things: 1) Knowing your endgame (ie, strategy); 2) understanding your target audience; and 3) executing with authenticity. These three principles are the foundation for all of The Courtside Group’s client engagements, and as simple as these principles appear to be, mastering them is difficult. Prioritizing long-term success over short-term wins is something that only the most successful individuals can do, as evidenced by the Stanford Marshmallow Experiments. Understanding your target audience isn’t rocket science, but have you ever been into a marketing meeting where you’re discussing who any given campaign is targeting? Maybe you’ve heard something like “we should have something in there for potential investors,” or “yes, our typical client is a 25-year-old male, but last week a 60-year-old woman made a purchase, shouldn’t we have some messaging for her?” Understanding and staying focused on your audience is difficult. Last, executing with authenticity may be the only piece of our framework that everyone understands is difficult. Simply replicating another brand’s content strategy won’t connect. Brands must work to differentiate themselves while staying true to who they are.

Now that you know what we mean when we reference ‘Authentic Marketing’, let’s get back to Reynolds. In 2018, he signed with a relatively unknown gin brand called Aviation Gin, took the seat as creative director and co-owner, and helped them secure an exit worth over $600m just a couple years later. He used his personal brand to bolster the company's brand, but didn't stop there. Aviation Gin created one of the best ads I've ever seen when they hired the 'Peloton Girl' for an ad just days after Peloton's Christmas ad caught so much flack. Check it out here. A great example of seizing an opportunity but doing so in a way that is authentic to the brand ethos. This ad wouldn’t work for many companies. In fact, it wouldn’t have worked for most brands! That’s the difficult aspect of executing with authenticity- a lot of awareness, diligence, and creativity are required to do it well.

Mint Mobile has been amazing to watch over the last couple of years. Commercials are funny, they're light, they allow Ryan to play a stereotype that makes people trust him. They're wildly different from every other telecom provider commercial, and that’s probably why they work. They built a brand that makes people put their guard down, and they know exactly who their audience is and how to speak to them. Apparently, it worked! Mint Mobile just sold for over $1.3 billion. 

Reynolds makes a lot of money from movies, but that pales in comparison to his earnings in the business world. Reynolds will reportedly make ~300mm from the Mint Mobile sale, and with his knack for being able to produce content that people actually want to watch, he'll likely be a billionaire many times over in the next decade. One thing I find interesting is that Reynolds’s marketing company, Maximum Effort, is that they state that they make content ‘for the personal amusement of Hollywood Star Ryan Reynolds’, and that they ‘occasionally release them to the general public’. This stands in stark contrast to the typical content strategy that involves attempting to hack algorithms and chase fleeting trends. Although this takes extreme skill and creativity, I believe that this is one of the main reasons that Reynolds’s companies stand head and shoulders above competitors when it comes to content creation and marketing.

Reynolds’s approach also reminds me of this legendary quote from comedian Jerry Seinfield when Harvard Business Review challenged his writing process. Sometimes, the only way to create original, authentic, and engaging content is by taking the long way. It involves hard work with no shortcuts. 

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A lot of people will argue that his business success is just the product of his fame. While his fame certainly plays an important part in his success, it teaches us nothing if we just attribute everything to that. Ryan is a master at what we call Authentic Marketing. Marketing that has an endgame in mind, communicates with a clear customer persona in mind, and doesn't follow anyone else's playbook (it's authentic). 

Here at The Courtside Group, we don’t claim to possess the natural genius that Ryan Reynolds has, but we do work hard to tailor strategies for our clients that align to our Authentic Marketing framework. If you’d like to learn more about how to leverage Authentic Marketing to drive more sales at higher margins, get in touch by submitting a form on our website or emailing info@thecourtsidegroup.com.

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