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The Story Behind Agency Matchmaking Docuseries 'The Golden Era of the Unusual Suspects'
Creators Rachel Segall and Simone Mandel of consultancy NBZ host the show
We’ve seen shows about matchmakers before but never one quite like The Golden Era of the Unusual Suspects.
The docuseries—created by its stars, Rachel Segall and Simone Mandel—finds the pair helping marketers find the right agency partners. Co-founders of the search consultancy NBZ, the duo specialize in uplifting smaller shops, which they lovingly refer to as Unusual Suspects.
Segall and Mandel produced the video project on their own dime, creating a slick, informative behind-the-scenes look at their work. Here, the pair discuss the making of The Golden Era of the Unusual Suspects, which can be seen on YouTube:
What inspired you to produce this documentary series?
Rachel Segall: There was a gap between the conversations happening publicly in our industry and what happens privately. The number of agencies has exploded. Marketers have more choice than ever and less clarity about how to navigate it. Agencies are constantly being told they need to differentiate, but very few people show them what marketers are actually looking for, how those decisions get made or what happens after the agency leaves the room.
Simone Mandel: We occupy a unique vantage point. We work deep inside agencies helping them grow. We sit alongside marketers figuring out exactly what they need from a partner. We help build the list. We watch the presentations. And then, after the agency leaves, we’re still in the room. At some point it started to feel irresponsible not to share what we were seeing. But there was something more emotional underneath it, too. We believe we are living through a specific era in advertising. There are people building companies right now who we think will become the legendary names of this period.
How did you come up with the title The Golden Era of the Unusual Suspects?
Rachel Segall: Unusual Suspects became our shorthand for agencies with a specific, ownable and sometimes provocative view of the world. It does not mean “independent agency.” There are thousands of independent agencies that have no more reason to exist than thousands of holding company agencies do. Independence alone is not a differentiator. To us, an “Unusual Suspect” is an agency that can answer: Why you? Why now? Why should this company exist in a world that already has more agencies than anybody could possibly need?
Simone Mandel: The “Golden Era” came from what we were hearing from marketers. They wanted fresh thinking, different operating models, more specificity, people with conviction. And yes, we absolutely believe this is their golden era. But the series also forced us to confront how complicated that thesis actually is.
One of the searches we began documenting was for a massive Fortune 100 company. It was the biggest client that had ever hired us, and they initially came to us explicitly wanting Unusual Suspects. Then, as the search developed, they also wanted to put large holding company agencies into the same process.
Rachel Segall: That is something we feel very strongly about. We don’t believe in putting a small independent agency against a giant holding company network just to “see what happens.” To us, if those are both equally viable answers, you probably haven’t gotten specific enough about what you need. And there is a real cost to that ambiguity. Independent agencies can invest an extraordinary amount of money and time creating work for a pitch. Asking them to make that investment simply so a marketer can preserve every possible option is something we’re not comfortable facilitating. So we parted ways with the client.
We had just named this series The Golden Era of the Unusual Suspects, and here was one of the biggest companies in the world essentially saying, “We want Unusual Suspects, but we’re not prepared to bet exclusively on them.”
That made the thesis better because it made it less naïve. It is the golden era of the Unusual Suspects. But that doesn’t mean the old system has disappeared. And it definitely doesn’t mean every independent agency gets to participate simply because it exists.
Simone Mandel: We talk about Liquid Death a lot for exactly this reason. Nobody could possibly argue that the world needed another brand of bottled water. It was already one of the most saturated, commoditized categories imaginable. And then Liquid Death showed up with such a specific point of view that it created space for itself. That’s how we think about agencies. The fact that there are too many of them doesn’t mean there isn’t room for another. It means there’s no room for another one without a reason to exist.
How difficult or easy was it to get people, especially clients, to participate in this docuseries? Marianne Raphael [now a partner at NBZ and former VP of marketing at NBC News] let you document the process of working with her.
Rachel Segall: It became easier as the project went on because people could finally see what we meant. But Marianne Raphael was different. We actually captured the NBC News process before we knew whether we would ever be allowed to use it. That was our methodology throughout the series: document what is happening now, because you cannot recreate reality six months later once you know which moments mattered. Then we showed Marianne what we were working on and asked whether she would trust us enough to let the search become part of the story.
Her saying yes changed the series. Suddenly, we weren’t telling people how an agency search works. We could show them.
There is a lot of useful info in the docuseries, but you also have fun, like your quest to find transportation to the airport in Cannes. Why was it important to include some of those humorous moments?
Simone Mandel: We never wanted to make a corporate documentary where everyone is perfectly lit and speaks very seriously about “the future of creativity.” The work matters enormously to us. But the lived experience of doing the work can also be ridiculous. You can be having an incredibly high-stakes conversation about the future of somebody’s business one minute and dragging six suitcases around Cannes desperately trying to find a car the next. Both belong in the story.
Docuseries are made in the edit suite. Can you talk about the challenges you faced while editing the series?
Rachel Segall: The edit nearly killed us. We originally thought each episode might cost $10,000 and that we could finish the series in six months. That assumption disappeared quickly. Episode one cost about $10,000. By episodes two and three, another roughly $45,000 had gone directly into editing alone. Then there were production costs, flights, hotels, repeated trips to work side by side with editors and an enormous amount of our own time.
It became a very expensive passion project. More importantly, it became emotionally expensive. Every early edit we received was, in some meaningful way, not the story we thought we had made. And that eventually creates an existential question: Maybe there isn’t a story here. Maybe the footage isn’t good enough. Maybe nobody actually wants to watch us talking to each other in a hotel room.
There was a stretch during episodes two and three where I was repeatedly flying across the country and spending entire weekends in edit rooms trying to get the story into shape. We had publicly said we were making a three-part series. We had spent a lot of money. We had spent almost a year of our lives. And we still felt incredibly far away from something we were proud enough to release.
There was never really a conversation about quitting, though. We had said we were making three episodes. We do what we say we’re going to do.
What did you learn about yourselves or the industry from this project?
Simone Mandel: Documentation changes the way you understand something. You live a moment one way. Then months later, you watch it knowing what happened next and suddenly see an entirely different story. There is a roundtable in episode three with a group of founders we admire enormously, including Jaime Robinson and Lisa Clunie, who at the time were appearing together as the founders of JOAN. Months later, the industry learned Jaime would be leaving the agency.
Watching that conversation after knowing where the story went was incredibly emotional. Things that seemed like interesting observations in the moment suddenly carried completely different weight. And we later learned that the transition was already underway. The world just didn’t know it yet. Without realizing it, we had captured one of the last conversations with them in that particular chapter of the company. That changed the way we thought about the project. We weren’t only documenting pitches or making an argument about agency growth. We were accidentally creating a time capsule of an industry changing in real time.
Have you tried to sell this docuseries to CNBC or another network or streamer?
Rachel Segall: We have approached nobody. Nobody has approached us. We took what was probably the least commercially rational route possible, which was to make the thing first. But yes, we would absolutely love for it to become a real television property. The version we made is deliberately inside baseball. It assumes the audience understands advertising. A mainstream version would need to translate that world without losing what makes it interesting.
We sometimes describe the potential as a kind of Selling Sunset of advertising—not because we want to manufacture drama, but because that show took a professional world most people know nothing about and made the personalities, competition and stakes understandable to everyone.
Advertising already has all of those ingredients—huge personalities, money, competition, rejection, ego, creativity, founders betting everything, marketers making decisions that can transform companies, agencies winning and losing millions of dollars of business in a room. We absolutely believe there is a show there.
Related: 5 Ways Agencies Can Message Their Way to a Win
