Hesh Rephun, Justo Diaz, Ernie Noh
By Diane Vacca, ComedyBeat | When ComedyBeat heard about an ad agency that was using comedy in their ads, claiming that standup comedy is integral to its work of promoting brands, we had to check it out. Raging Artists is a California company based in Los Angeles, the world’s entertainment capital and the birthplace of unusual ideas. ComedyBeat asked the founders of the agency: CEO Justo Diaz, CCO Hesh Rephun and CFO Ernie Noh to explain the connection they make between standup and marketing. (Our conversation has been edited for the sake of brevity and clarity.)
How did you get into comedy?
Justo: We’d been doing online marketing for a while. Over time we got known for producing funny articles. We live in L.A., and as you know, everyone here is a comedian. In order to compete in our field, we decided to start doing standup six months ago.
But that had nothing directly to do with your PR and advertising work, right?
Justo: It did, actually. We found a niche market here in L.A., where people wanted to create content for the Web that was particularly funny. As time went on, the articles started to become videos, and in doing the videos we realized that pinnacle of comedy is standup, so we started using standup to prop up our writing. That became its own little monster: we started to get shows. People started inviting us to perform.
So now are you an ad agency or are you comedians?
Justo: Both. We’d used comedy for years, but now we’re in a niche market, where people will say You want something funny? Go to Raging Artists. So it’s the same thing for us. As we write bits for the stage, we incorporate that style of comedy into our marketing videos.
Though comedy— being on stage— is relatively new for us, it’s taking up 50 percent of our time.
Do all three of you perform?
Justo: Yes. The three of us perform and write in collaboration.
You spend half your time preparing and performing standup?
Justo: Yes. Obviously, that’s not sustainable, so we’ve had to say no to some gigs. Hesh can do impressions and accents, so we started to get a lot of gigs because of him. In the time that we’ve been doing standup on stage, we’ve gotten work through it.
If we were going to be known for our comedy writing in terms of marketing, standup seemed clearly the way to go to stand out amongst all other comedy writers. I’ve been working with Hesh on marketing for over a decade, but we’ve always skewed towards comedy (but not standup). Now our comedy has taken on a life of its own. We’re going to see where it takes us.
Are you tempted to focus on comedy exclusively?
Justo: It’s more than a temptation. We’ve committed part of our time to standup. Leaving it would actually hurt our business now since our reputation is based on it.
Humorous commercials are not uncommon (e.g., the Geico gecko), so when you say you’re doing something that’s never been done before, are you referring to standup?
Justo: Yes. We have themes in our standup that reveal our brand of comedy. For instance, I talk a lot about having kids and racism, while Hesh deals with a more global perspective on just being a man. Products for men are something we can market that we couldn’t market before, because we didn’t have the reputation for tapping into the male psyche as we now have with standup. We also talk about our wives and women in general, and we’ve been able to incorporate that with some of our clients like one that sells women’s shoes.
Standup is our competitive advantage, because other agencies won’t go there. Their credibility is based on fact that they don’t take risks. They know what will be successful.
Hesh: Right before the recession, everybody in advertising was very, very adventurous. People were taking risks and there were very exciting, funny and daring commercials. Then the recession hit and everybody got conservative and everybody got scared; consumers were spending less money and so were advertisers. As a result, agencies couldn’t take chances as they had before. That hasn’t changed. We never had a lot of money to play with, so we always took chances. We’re just trying to err on the side of being as bold as we can in our own creative pursuits so that when it comes time for a brand to take a risk, they’ll turn to us because they know we’re willing to do it. And we’re going to push them where they really want to go.
You’ve written, “Comedy is about pain, and nothing reflects that truth more than standup. It is the most visceral connection an audience can have with a performer, which is why there is a secret wish in the advertising industry for comedians to be marketers and for marketers to be comedians.” Please talk about the pain in standup.
Hesh: What we really go for and what we’ve always been about is truth. If you’re going to get to the absolute truth about a client or a brand or anything, you really have to be willing to expose the pain, the underside— whatever is at the core of the emotions that are expressed by a brand or a person. And that’s what comedy does: it cuts through all the bullshit. You bare yourself on stage.
Ernie: We do standup to train ourselves.
You train yourselves to …?
Ernie: To be honest.
With the writing? Because the performance won’t go into an ad.
Ernie: No, but the performance is the incentive to write well. You write badly, or we don’t take the kind of risks that we need to take, the performance suffers. So the performance is basically the guideline we use to measure whether something we said is funny. The audience tells us. It’s like a focus group every single week. We defy any other agency to produce that on their own without spending money. We get paid to perform in front of a focus group so we can say we know what’s funny and here’s the proof.
We also found through a lot of research that successful comics are very honest and open about themselves. Doing standup and writing bits is an exercise for us in learning to be honest with ourselves and who, let’s say, Ernie Noh is. There’s a brand, there’s a person. That honesty carries over to our writing for our clients, their brands and their message and their culture and who they are. There’s no way to fake that, to fake what their culture and message is.
Justo: It’s a painful trip to go from telling people what the brand wants to say to telling what the brand doesn’t want to say. It’s painful because we have to tell the brand that and it’s painful for us because we have to prove it.
Our mission statement says that we’ve learned that a client’s willingness to fail makes success an option. That really defines who we are now. That’s how we approach every client. Other agencies are hitting a road block— they don’t want to fail; that’s a risk for them. For us, without the client’s willingness to fail, we can’t take the risk we need to take to make the brand known. That’s the stance we’ve taken and it’s worked out for us, at least from a marketing perspective. And that comes from being on stage. You have to take risks on stage in order to be noticed, otherwise you’ll just be ignored as a comic. That’s what Ernie was saying— that without the stage we have absolutely no way to measure our level of risk or our level of truthfulness or of approval.
Hesh: For example, I turned the corner in standup when I did 10 minutes talking about nothing but ass, which is a very big risk, especially if you haven’t written it yet. I called it “ass comedy.” Most of the jokes I did were an experiment to test myself, to be willing to be afraid. But you’d be amazed how funny ass is. That’s what I learned: the risk is the reward. You take the risk and right away, people say, OMG, that guy’s out on a limb, he’s putting himself out there. He may well fail. And they reward you by laughing.
Have you ever failed? Have you put together something that just bombed?
Justo: OMG. I’m famous for bombing. The approach we took was we all had to get on stage and basically do something that could potentially bomb. In other words, either something so abstract or so wild— like Hesh’s ass comedy— that the audience would either laugh very hard or be offended. I chose racism as my 10 minutes of craziness, and I don’t think the audience really took that well. But we were able to take that reaction and create a joke out of it.
So now when I speak of race, people do laugh. But if I hadn’t taken that chance, I wouldn’t have known what the borders were. Hesh, on the other hand, had the exact opposite experience. He went up to do 10 minutes of ass comedy, and the audience was very quiet, but the producers were so impressed by his level of wit, that they put him in a show.
Ernie: We were surprised by our early success. We had a few advantages. One was the teamwork: we go as a team to workshop together. Also, we found that as a group, we definitely were on the older side. We were surprised at how much it’s helped our business and our writing in the last six months. And how much success we’ve had in doing standup.
ComedyBeat looks forward to seeing how Raging Artists and their innovative marriage of standup and marketing evolve.
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