Candela Martos
CandelaMartos, is Director & Co-Founder of Dirty Jack.Dirty Jack is a creative agency that helps brands across the globe capture ludicrous amounts of attention with outrageous video ads.
- Tell us a little bit about your business…
Dirty Jack exists to create the most ridiculous video adverts on the planet, humour sells! From exploding paper machē buttholes to flame-throwers and farm animals. We’ve done over 200 million views for our clients. We’ve worked with brands like Air Landline, Surreal, Lumē deodorant, and BALLS, to name a few.
2. How did you get into the industry?
I freelanced for years as a video editor for entrepreneurs and self-help gurus. Once I understood the content space, I co-founded Dirty Jack to disrupt with humour.
3. What are the biggest opportunities and challenges in your industry?
The saturation of the agency space is a blessing and a curse. Because most teams produce the same boring work, our portfolio really stands out. But still, it’s challenging to get the trust of e-commerce clients because they’re constantly bombarded by proposals.
4. How would you describe your leadership style?
I tend to obsess over structure, flow, and operations. On the other hand, my (male) cofounders are fuelled by chaos. We balance each other out, I guess!
5. How do you get the most out of the people who work for you?
We’re super careful with the freelancers we work with, but when we find amazing talent, we do our best to trust them fully and not get in the way.
6. What are the most crucial elements to your business running smoothly and being successful?
Outreach. Outreach. Outreach. The backbone of Dirty Jack’s creative success is bureaucracy, we spend most of our time sending emails. Wooh!
7. How has the past 12 months been for you?
It feels like it’s been nonstop challenges and chaos, but on paper, it’s been our best financial year yet. Our portfolio finally started attracting inbound leads, and we’re slowly being recognised for “being the guys who made those ads”. One of our videos for the cereal brand ‘Surreal’ went bonkers viral on LinkedIn, which is nice.
8. What will the next 12 months look like for your business?
We love working with clients and have learned loads from them over the years. So much so, we’re itching to launch our own e-commerce brand! We’re really (really) excited about that.
9. What are the highlights of your career so far?
Our success with our client ‘Air Landline’ has been a joy. They’ve fully trusted us to go crazy with the ads, and we’ve built a passionate fan base around the work we’ve delivered. Every day hundreds of new customers comment on Air Landline’s campaign because they find the videos so funny. We treat his branding like a sitcom, in that there are ongoing characters and in-jokes for the community to be a part of.
10. What’s the biggest business mistake that you’ve learnt from?
It’s boring, but managing cash flow. We took our eye off the ball for a couple of months early on in our business and all of a sudden we owed £15k to collaborators after a client bailed on us.
Needless to say, we created systems after that to ensure it would never happen again.
11. What’s the best piece of business advice you’ve been given?
A very famous business guru told us that creative agencies are a pain in the arse to run. I probably should have listened. Seriously though, he gave us some great advice on how to make our lives easier. The only controllable in how successful we are is outreach.”
