You may have already seen the story this morning, but our parent publication’s most recent cover feature starred one Bill Grizack, agency con man and convicted felon.
We’re not going to reproduce the whole piece here because it is 3,000 words long, but since the story started on this blog we will include some of its key sections in the interest of facilitating discussion on the case.
We’ll start from the true beginning of Grizack’s fraud: late spring/early summer 2012, when he claimed to have won the Coke and Jack Daniel’s contracts. At the time, his then-employer The Variable (formerly PAVE Advertising) was pitching various other agencies to collaborate on Brand Forensics, the software product that may or may not have provided clients with data insights based on search engine results.
The Variable visited the Winston-Salem offices of Mullen, seeking a partner for the Brand Forensics project. Adweek acquired an internal email, dated June 5, 2012, in which [Variable partner and former McKinney ACD Joe] Parrish expressed his excitement about the meeting, writing: “McKinney has been our most profitable client for the past two years. We work well with other agencies. And Mullen’s network has more money than McKinney’s. This is an attempt to gain a local partner with deep pockets.” Parrish then reassured staffers: “No one is more wary of big agencies than yours truly.”
Remember that Parrish had been a member of McKinney’s creative department who left in 2010 to become a partner at PAVE. He was able to bring the two agencies together over their shared Qwest/CenturyLink account following the merger of those two companies.
For whatever reason, Mullen does not appear to have had any interest in Grizack’s allegedly “revolutionary” insights. Regarding that software, one former Griz co-worker described it as a rudimentary version of Google Analytics while a creative who got hired to work on one of the fake accounts told us: “During my time [at McKinney], not a single person I ever spoke with regarding the algorithm could explain how it worked or the benefit of its use.”
We have no direct knowledge of Brand Forensics, so we can’t speak to its validity. But we did interact with several people who worked at these agencies when it was operational, and all expressed some degree of skepticism. Grizack’s own summaries of the product very closely (and, we might argue, predictably) resembled this description of what he did during his next job at Egg Strategy: “We have created new technology that let’s [sic] Egg observe consumers in their natural habitat and use that insight to drive strategy for some of the world’s largest brands.”
We also got this take on the day he (allegedly) got caught:
According to a source, Grizack’s undoing came in the form of two disposable “burner” phones. One day in early 2013, when Grizack was not in the building, an unnamed employee who had become frustrated with his delays called the number listed on the Coca-Cola contract. A cellphone rang in Grizack’s office. He then attempted to contact Brown-Forman. Again, a cellphone rang.
From one of his former co-workers:
“At first, he is truly amazing. He talks fast and smooth, and sometimes you walk away thinking, what just happened? He knew the names of everyone’s children and spouses, and he asked about them. He was quite likeable.”
Believable. Here are a couple of additional bits and pieces we’ve received since completing the story. First there are Grizack’s Dailey Advertising business cards via a so-far anonymous Twitter user who seems to have worked with him there.
Going through my desk, found some business cards…wonder what ol griz is up to these days… pic.twitter.com/X2059Yb5a0
— Tone Lōquial (@NotTheRealKris) June 24, 2016
We also received a copy of his resume from someone who interviewed him for a job in California late last year.
Here’s the bio section. (Don’t bother looking for the portfolio. We already tried.)
Note the skill set from a guy who studied mechanical engineering in undergrad:
And the personal interests:
The most interesting part, though, may be his description of the work he did after leaving Dailey:
This is the first we’ve heard of Grizack working on Audi, MediaX and Thomson Reuters. The blurb also indicates that he spent several months working with Venables Bell & Partners in some capacity, though earlier statements implied that he’d joined the indie shop mere weeks or days before entering his guilty plea in North Carolina.
Of course one has to ask whether any of these claims have any validity … which leads to the central question in this case that keeps bugging us: was Bill Grizack both a malicious fraud and a competent or even excellent strategist? Are the two not mutually exclusive?
A lot of this information has already appeared in past Spy posts. And as we noted in the Adweek story itself, some big questions in the case remain unanswered. If we could talk to the man directly, we would ask him how he managed to keep his con going for 8 months with no interactions from the “clients” and whether anyone else knew what was really going on.
We might not be able to answer these questions as soon as we’d like, because Grizack’s lawyer told us that he would not be available for comment at any point in the foreseeable future. But something tells us that a man who so obviously relishes attention will eventually want to “set the record straight.”
Regardless, we will continue following this story and updating it whenever possible.