30 Hours of Dead Ends, Then AI Got Him 70% There | John Mitchell, Irving Park Marketing John Mitchell spent years inside two of the most recognized shops in advertising. Goodby, Silverstein & Partners, and then Commonwealth McCann in Detroit working on Chevy and Pure Michigan. Before that he was in Oregon on Nike, Columbia Sportswear, Keen, and Norwegian Cruise Lines. By most measures that’s a career people spend decades trying to build. He left because the job had stopped being the work. He was running digital, CRM, and the catalog team, with dotted lines into social and other agencies, and most of his day went to personnel and process. The part he actually loved, sitting with creative teams and building solutions, had been squeezed out. So he moved back to Oregon, called the clients he’d worked with before, and started Irving Park Marketing, named after the neighborhood park where he grew up. The conversation gets interesting when he explains how he sequences an engagement. At Irving Park, creative is the third or fourth step, not the first. Objectives, KPIs, budget, and timeline come before anyone opens a design file. His view is that clients are so deep in daily firefighting that nobody is looking at the bigger picture, and that most brands assume the market knows far more about them than it does. His line on that: most people don’t know five percent of your brand. On AI, John gives one of the more useful real-world accounts I’ve gotten on this show, because it comes with a number attached. He was doing pro bono brand work for a psychologist opening her own practice. His team had already put roughly thirty hours into logo and palette directions that weren’t landing. He gathered the adjectives, the persona, and her intent, fed all of it in, and pulled out about half a dozen strong directions she could react to immediately. That got them about seventy percent of the way. His creative team finished the last thirty percent, which is where the taste and the fine touches live. Time saved, cost saved, human judgment still deciding. We also get into how he competes with fifty-person shops using a small core team and a deep vetted stable of contractors, why he refers clients to good hires even when it costs him the engagement, and what he thinks separates real customer-centricity from the version that lives on a company’s About page. What we cover: ✅ Why he left two of the biggest names in advertising to build something smaller ✅ The three pillars at Irving Park, and why strategy runs so wide ✅ Sequencing an engagement so creative comes after the objectives are clear ✅ Representing the market back to the client instead of taking orders ✅ A concrete AI workflow: thirty hours of dead ends to six usable directions ✅ Why the last thirty percent still belongs to people ✅ Competing without a big team through a vetted contractor network ✅ Two kinds of storytelling, and what actually makes loyalty work ✅ Where the agency landscape goes next, and what consumers will reward Connect with John Mitchell: 🌐 https://irvingparkmarketing.com 📧 john@irvingparkmarketing.com 🎙️ About Main Street AI: Exploring how AI creates opportunities for traditional businesses to grow and scale while maintaining humanity. Subscribe for conversations about AI and its transformational impact on real world businesses. ➡️ To learn more about implementing custom AI solutions for your business, schedule a free consultation: https://satoricoach.io #AIForBusiness #MarketingStrategy #CreativeDirection #AgencyLife #SatoriCoach
