Jesse James Wroblewski he has been at the helm of a NY marketing agency for close to 3 decades. His often offbeat work has been featured in Rolling Stone, the book "505 Weirdest Websites Ever" and Fangoria as well as a plethora of other media outlets. After the realization that the entire marketing industry had gone insane, he retooled, reimagined and reemerged as something different, something more powerful than the marketing world has ever seen. Eager to share his new vision for the world and to spark a marketing revolution he created the call to arms called Marketing For Supervillains. Jesse lives in a supervillain lair on Long Island which he has dubbed Chainsaw Estates with his trophy wife Florence. (the opposite of sex is always attracted to danger!)
Where were you born and raised? Where do you currently reside? How has your life today been influenced by where you grew up and perpetuate from where you live now?
I was born in Flushing Queens, raised in Queens and then Ronkonkoma, NY. Being about 60 miles outside the marketing capital of the world, NYC, I began my career in a very weird place in the business world. Long Island is an anomaly when it comes to business I cant put my finger on it without offending most Long Island business owners but let’s just say it is more different than anywhere else on the planet.
You have been in the marketing industry for decades. Tell us a story about your experience that would shock us. It can be about business, the services, the clients, the staff, the money or otherwise.
According to the Joker, the only thing that separates him from the rest of us is ONE BAD DAY. We’re all one bad day away from birthing our inner supervillain. Running an agency for 25 years I’ve had a lot of bad days, I’ve had multiple clients land in prison and call an emergency PR campaign to wipe the news from the internet, (my financial advisor and client is still rotting behind bars.) I’ve had brushes with mafia (story from my book,) lived with the most hated band in the world, The Insane Clown Posse, the list goes on and on however there is always that one day… The day that forced me to realize I had to make a major shift in my professional life. That day was April 29, 2019 and I have video footage of it.
At this point you are running a marketing agency for decades, but what is the story behind Decomotitized? Where did that come from in recent history?
When coivd hit, like everyone I had my bouts of self reflection. My agency that did everything under the sun wasn’t exciting me anymore. Our amazing headquarters which served as one of differentiators was shut down and I was relegated to being another web guy in a zoom box. Being average never suited me nor did just surviving.
I wanted an unfair advantage.
I wanted clients who chose to “go in another direction” to lose sleep over the thought of “what if I did hire Jesse…?”
No one loses sleep over not hiring one generalist firm vs another. I consciously wanted to stack the deck in my favor. So I rewound the past 25 years and reviewed what projects not only gave me fulfillment but also made my clients the most money leaving them fulfilled.
I realized those projects were ones where I was tasked with taking a boring product or service and injecting so much life and personality into it that it actually became “cool.”
Multiple coaches told me I couldn’t be the guy who works specifically with boring businesses as no one would ever self-identify as being boring. I tweaked the strategy into rescuing businesses who have become commoditized, aka those businesses who customers really cant tell the difference between one brand and another and thus choose solely on price.
Once I had my mission it was a process of reading everything I could find on the topic, go down the rabbit hole of self-realization as to why Ive gravitated to differentiated things my entire life and begin to codify it all into a process and then an entertaining book.
What is a prediction or forecast about the future of the consumer experience? How do you explain the evolution of consumer behavior to your customers?
When the internet came along we all experienced an “Explosion of Choice” as Seth Godin puts it. You would think as a human being having more choices opposed to less is a good thing but it isn't. I can scientifically prove to you that having more choices makes you less happy.
As a business owner, more choices in the market meant you truly had to differentiate yourself in order to compete. Flash forward to today, we now have too many choices, so much so that human beings for the first time in history are choosing to pay more for less. A prime example is this: do you know anyone that would pay $5/month for say the BBC as opposed to a cable tv package with hundreds of channels which mathematically would equate to 10% of that cost per channel? Humans are now overloaded with choices and we are just starting to see the advent people willing to pay for someone to curate the mass amount of content for them. With the ai revolution coming and the creation of content exponentially increasing audiences are not only going to swipe left on uninteresting content they will go out of their way to eliminate it from their lives completely. There’s just too much of it, we have no choice.
To those businesses posting mindless content on social just to be top of mind and part of the conversation will now effectively be killing their brand instead of helping it as bored, overloaded consumers will seek to cull the non-essential crap from their lives.
All that said, being truly differentiated in your space will become more valuable than ever and essential to surviving in the future.
You designed Marketing for Super Villains as a methodology for folks to follow when trying to create a brand, above all else. Give a small piece of the book away.
Hands down the biggest mistake I see clients make is they come to me with their new venture and point at the name brand in their vertical and say “we want to look like them.”
In almost all cases the name brand has 100x resources and an incredible head start in their business journey. Needless to say, emulating a name brand and trying to outspend them, out “seo” them or do just as much social media with significantly less resources is a recipe for disaster.
You likely got into business to do things your way… why would you automatically want to try and emulate someone else?
On the creative side my mantra is “I am not here to do what has already been done.” There are thousands of other agencies out there that will cut copy and paste you into the industry template, if you truly want an alternative then I am your guy.
I soon realized this mindset is so counter-intuitive to what almost the entire population thought. I felt as though I had some sort of advanced perspective on marketing that didnt sit well with most… are you starting to see the parallels to supervillainy? Or maybe its just the fact that after 25 years in the marketing industry I’ve officially gone insane.
Besides the Business and the book, you are also a martial artist, oddities collector and passionate public speaker and have all sorts of hobbies. What are you drawn to these days and why?
They say if you can do something you love for a living you’ll never “work” a day in your life. Total bullshit. In my early career I created my own line of horror-themed toys. Got them mass-produced, carried in major retailers like Spencer Gifts all across the nation.
What could be more fun than 100% ownership of your very own toy company? It sucked. Bottom line it was work and it completely turned me off of creating art for my own personal joy.
I’ve since returned to creating art solely for my own fulfillment, only selling pieces I have absolutely no room for in my house (which I call Chainsaw Estates - it has it’s own instagram.)
Commissions and creating production art (doing the same thing over and over) are a no-no. On the outside it may seem like Im an ADHD suffering from shiny object syndrome jumping from one thing to another. I just like to avoid repetition. Oh, and I start professional wrestling school July 2 lol. Never stop learning.
How can people follow your work and what advice do you have for young people in pursuit of lofty goals?
I regularly create content that is authentic to me, which is why I likely dont have a mass following. If it were the other way around guess what? Creating content would feel like work and I would use every excuse in the world to put it off and never make it.
My advice is to find something authentic to you and go a mile deep on it. Approach your marketing with a reductive mindset, instead of trying to tweak everything in your personal brand to appeal to more people and a wider audience do the opposite. What can you create that will resonate with the few and find your true ride-or-die raving fans. The gold standard of branding is to get someone to say “Holy shit, this guy (girl, company etc) gets me.” Watered down messaging that appeals to everyone is messaging that resonates with no one.
I can be found on IG and TikTok under @marketingsupervillain
My top recommendation is youtube which is under decommoditized which is where Im bound by no aspect ratios or time limits and I can go nuts.
And my linkedin under my name.
Websites: marketingforsupervillains.com - the book decommoditized.com - the consultancy generationsbeyond.com - the agency
