PMG’s Sam Bloom on Learning, Leading and Never Staying Still

In this episode, Adam Katz sits down with Sam Bloom, Head of Partnerships at PMG, to explore his career journey built on resilience, humility, and reinvention. From navigating the rise and fall of Blockbuster during its battle with Netflix to building Camelot's digital capabilities from the ground up and guiding it through a successful acquisition by PMG, Sam reflects on the lessons learned through challenges and reinvention.

Sam's story is one of adaptability and curiosity. He shares how early setbacks became opportunities for growth, how rolling up his sleeves and learning the ropes at Camelot prepared him for leadership, and how his passion for innovation drives PMG’s approach to technology and AI.

Key highlights:

• Candid lessons from Blockbuster’s rise and fall and how they shaped his perspective.
• How humility and a willingness to learn allowed him to build and lead successful teams
• Balancing tradition and innovation to stay ahead in a fast-changing industry.
• The importance of loving the process, staying adaptable, and embracing the unfinished work.

Sam’s grounded perspective, passion for the craft, and dedication to innovation make this a must-listen for anyone seeking inspiration to navigate challenges and build something extraordinary.

TRANSCRIPT

Adam Katz
Welcome to Breaking Through the Mayhem, episode 24 Hosted by Sightly. This is Adam Katz. I am very, very lucky today to have an industry legend, Sam Bloom, with us today. Just before we kick it off. Sam, why don't you tell the audience a little bit about yourself?

Sam Bloom
You got it. First of all, thanks for having me Adam. All right, Sam Bloom, I lead partnerships here at PMG. you know, a little bit of background. So, the firm I ran, Camelot. We were acquired by PMG about 13 months ago. I was a Camelot for 20 years, leading all the digital, Intel.

My two partners and I, you know, we did a management buyout of Camelot and then eventually, you know, went on a, through a process to solvent, you know, prior to that, you know, work for Mark Cuban for three and a half years of broadcast.com, helped start blockbuster online. you know, did some consulting before that, you know, in a big six consulting.

So, you know, lots of diversity, and a couple startup failed startups in there as well.

Adam Katz
What do you think you learned from the transition from Camelot to PMG? What would you say has been the biggest learnings?

Sam Bloom
You know, well, one is, you know, first of all, I was always really excited to be in, technology, tech forward, you know, company, which is what PMG is.

And so it's a lot of fun, being in a company where particularly in this day and age with AI and the things that are going on, I mean, you know, if you can dream it, you can do it. And I think that's the first piece it's been about that piece of it's been a lot of fun. I think the second piece is, you know, having been in only a media guy, you know, now I'm surrounded by tech, creative, SEO, you know, a whole bunch of other different skill sets.
And so I find that very stimulating. And then the other thing is, you know, just going from, you know, 170 person company to a 1000 person company, I mean, these are all new dynamics for me. And so, learning how to do things at scale, you know, it's been a, you know, it's been an interesting ride for me.

Adam Katz
Wow. and a question for you, based on all that, like, what happened at your time at Blockbuster, why don't you tell everybody a little bit more? I feel like Blockbuster has become like a big meme over the years. But also, people forget how actually revolutionary it really was and what it kind of turned everyone else into, like. But can you tell us a little bit about Blockbuster?

Sam Bloom
Well, so Blockbuster. So first of all, I think, one is, you know, our team is if you ever want to read a great book, there's a book called Netflixed There's a journalist that covered the whole blockbuster Netflix thing, and she wrote a book called Netflix, which turned into a podcast called From Business Wars, which turned into a movie called, Netflix Versus the World.

And so, you know, a lot has been written on this topic. I think the one thing that I would like to dispel that I think a lot of people don't understand. The blockbuster was certainly doomed in the end. But what people do understand is that Blockbuster was part of Viacom, and when Viacom spun off, they left Blockbuster with massive debt.

And those debt covenants ultimately were the things that did blockbuster in ultimately. You know, when you can't pay that out, you know, things go south pretty quickly. but I joined blockbuster, so blockbuster had gone through kind of its first.com or.com bomb. And when I joined Blockbuster, it was after I'd been a broadcast.com. And, you know, at the time when they in the first, dot com boom Blockbuster had like two floors that were, you know, people skateboarding around on scooters.

I was like, what do you think of the.com thing? So by the time I got there, people you know, had hired had on all things.com, and it was really about, you know, how do we figure out the business. And when I first got there, Netflix was a private company. And the first day I showed up, they handed me, you know, basically some papers saying they had bought a DVD company over a weekend and my job was to run it.

And, they bought kind of a mom and pop operation, very nice people. But it was no Netflix. And so, it was basically a year to incubate that business. And you know what? I when I first got in it took me a couple weeks to kind of like, get my arms around kind of what we were doing with this, and, you know, I went back to our CEO, John Antioco, and my boss was kind of Ed Stead who ran the digital counsel.

And I said, look, guys, it's like we need to use this as a lab more than you know, this is not a launch pad. This is a lab. And we need to learn about the business, and one of the first things we did in the early days was look at the customer file. I mean, at the time the company that we bought was called DVD Rental Central.

And I wanted to understand, you know, the overlap with Blockbuster customers. And it was interesting, on multiple fronts. The first thing I would tell you is it was interesting seeing their consumption of what movies people watched in a subscription service versus what they watched in a blockbuster. So if you remember walking into a Blockbuster, we had a new release wall, so we were all about the new releases.

When I looked at the customer file and DVD Rental Central, it was all what we called back catalog, the stuff that was in the middle of the store and where there would be 1 or 2 copies. And that was the first head scratcher for me and I. We didn't understand that behavior that was different. I think the second thing is we assumed we made a lot of assumptions around when people made their entertainment decisions and all the data and research we had said, oh, people make a decision, you know, 30 minutes before you walk into a Blockbuster, it's a movie night, right?

Well, when you're in a subscription program like this, you actually the way people did it is they would decide, you know, Monday or Tuesday what they wanted, and the DVD would be mailed to them and the DVD would be waiting for them on their DVD player. But that was foreign to us like we didn't understand that. And the other pieces, what we found is that these people wanted to consume a lot of content back to back.

That was not the nature of Blockbuster because we had new releases. It was like, oh my gosh, that release is now on Blockbuster. So there were a lot of behaviors that were really different. And because when you're the in enter pound gorilla in a category, you look at these things, you're like, these are anomalies. These are not the way people are going to behave.

Now if I fast forward today and you think about bingeing behavior on streaming and all those kinds of things, it all makes perfect sense to me. It did not make sense to me back then that, you know, that you would, you know, essentially pick content well before, you know, you got to your TV and because and and, you know, when I was growing up, you watched whatever was on what that's you know, you didn't.

So there were a lot of things. But I think the final thing, when we looked at the customer base, is that really that what we saw was that these kinds of DVD by mail services were sort of siphoning off what we'd call kind of heavy renters, and which was about 5 to 10% of their customer base. So we didn't think that much about it, because I think we looked at those folks, they were over consuming and certainly loyal.

But, you know, I think there were lots of Blockbuster spent a lot of time thinking about what we call dissatisfied ers. And what we didn't understand is that, you know, returning a video is a massive dissatisfier, but we thought that we could get over that with new releases, and that's just not the case. And so that's, you know, but look, I mean, a year of running that business, we learned a bunch of things.

I mean, we could never compete on the acquisition cost that Netflix had in no matter what we did. And when you put a blockbuster logo in front of people, they thought of it as a store, not as an online destination. And so, you know, we thought we would have to rethink, you know, everything, which we did in the original business plan that I wrote.

The idea was to have Blockbuster stores function as a distribution center, because if you know what to do in a Blockbuster store, basically Monday through Thursday, there's not a lot of activity. So the idea was you could use the CSRS of the people to work in the stores at those times to basically to stuff envelopes with DVDs, and we thought we could out Netflix, out, not, you know, Netflix, because we had a network of, you know, almost 3000 stores and we could literally overnight be a DVD drive mail company.

But what I underestimated was that the technology and the stores and the bandwidth for the stores, I mean, it was like two blue screens running, you know, the POS systems and they had HughesNet, satellite, lots of bandwidth going down. Not a lot of bandwidth growing up. So a very competent and massive CapEx, you know, project. And so we actually had to go get funding from Viacom, for a massive tech upgrade.

And when we went to go do that, we realized that we wouldn't even scratch the surface because there was so much, you know, technology and bandwidth we had to put into a store. So we had to, you know, rethink how we were going to go to market. We couldn't use the stores initially. And so for the first year of the business, it was simply an online business.

And it didn't fare well. But then, Johnny Giancarlo, our CEO, got a pretty brilliant idea: how do you know? What we would essentially do is give people gift certificates, if you will, or certificates to rent in the store and get online, and that we can make a value proposition that was basically when you think about the stores, you can get your new releases, when you think about your online, you can get your catalog.

Adam Katz
So you were starting to think you're starting to think about a loyalty program in some ways.

Sam Bloom
That's right. But also more importantly, like we knew Netflix couldn't compete with us on new releases. And so what a lot of people don't realize is when this was about the time when we eventually turned that little business, I had that little business that I ran basically got shuttered.

Blockbuster built it up its, we hired a big consulting firm, both of our own technology and eventually with the market that first year, going to market was simply Blockbuster online. Then we started to add the stores and from a value proposition, it was like, you can come and rent in the store, or you could do it online all day.

Adam Katz
Today, you would have built your own retail media network. You know, you would have had a whole-

Sam Bloom
Blockbuster had a retail media network where I was where I was going, what this is about that time Netflix went public. And what most people don't realize is when Netflix went public, we had two quarters where we kicked the living daylights out of Netflix and Netflix was almost dead. because

Adam Katz
It was like the month, the Monday Night Wars in wrestling, right?

Sam Bloom
So, I mean, but then, you know, look, when your financing runs dry and you can't continue spending like a drunken sailor you know, that's when, you know, we took our foot off their throats. And we eventually got to not just beat but beat badly. incredible lesson.

Adam Katz
What do you think? So how did you transition to Camelot? What's the backstory? That, what would you say? What would you say? You know, when you kind of tie that in, what would you say were your the biggest things you learned in those experiences that you made sure not to bring to Camelot?

Sam Bloom
Well that's funny. Well, so one is, I wouldn't call my time at Blockbuster particularly successful.

I'm not sure anybody at Blockbuster these days would say that either. But what happens is. So I ran business development, and I made a number of venture investments that did not go well. and, I sort of arm wrestled with the head of strategy to run the DVD by mail business, and I lost that.

And so it was at that point I got approached about, hey, you'd be great in our ad agency. And I was like, What? And so the CEO said, yeah, you should talk to Tom Kalahar, who owns this agency called Camelot, they do our TV. He wants to start a digital team. So I was completely befuddled because I was basically being asked to leave.

But, so I, you know, I met with Tom Kalahar, the founder of Camelot. I fell instantly in love with him. And for about seven months we talked, and what Blockbuster and Camelot agreed to is that I would work at both companies for a year and they would share my salary. And so for a year one, I had an office of blockbuster office at Camelot.

And, you know, at Blockbuster, I was closing out all my BD deals and, my business development, you know, relationships, Camelot. By day, I was, you know, in ad server, trafficking ads, doing analytics, running campaigns and doing it all my own. And so for the first couple of years, I mean, I did everything myself and I, you know, Tom’s son Pat, along with our first hires named Alex worked who eventually was one of my partners.

But, I mean, you know, I'll be honest with you, that was a career piece where I look back at the time, I had my tail between my legs. I felt that I'd failed at Blockbuster and what I really wanted to do was learn a trade. And the reason I looked like agency a lot is I felt that I could do something, a repeatable process, and learn, but, you know, get a process down and something, you know, hands or hands on that I could master.

And there was enough creativity and enough change that kept it interesting. But the fundamentals were the same, which is that every ad has to get trafficked. You know, you got to read analytics. And I kind of gamified it for myself because we had a lot of performance oriented clients like Blockbuster and Southwest Airlines and some, some others that spent a lot of money.

But, you know, it was early days in the digital space and it was a lot of fun. And it was kind of wild, wild West. And so, you know, the lesson for me, and to be honest with you, when things like that happen, you think it's the end of the world and maybe an opening of a door. And that's really what it was for me.

I mean, and I, you know, look, I, you know, I also look back at those days. There is no, nothing like getting your hands in the dirt, to learn a trade. And there's nothing wrong with that. That's that's all part of, you know, your development is becoming an expert in something. So.

Adam Katz
That's fascinating. I mean, as you transitioned into Camelot, what made you realize that you thought Camelot was in a position that you wanted to go bigger?

Sam Bloom
That’s a great question. So, well, Tom, the founder of Camelot Tom Kalahar, first of all, one of the kindest, smartest people I know. Tom knew that I had kind of an entrepreneurial streak. And and then we'll tap into this. But I also, you know, my family have been in advertising, both my grandfather and my father.

Adam Katz
Wow.

Sam Bloom
And so, I think Tom saw in me something I didn't see in myself.

But the second piece is Tom basically said, I'll give you a legal, I’ll give you financials, you know, all the accounting and resources you need. He said, go start a digital team. And he said, you know, I'm going to, you know, be hands off and guide you where you need to be guided and teach you about marketing. but he, you know, he basically said, you know, go start something and figure it out.

And that satisfied the startup guy in me. But at the same time, you know, I realized when I got there, you know, I remember the first time I worked in Camelot, they were doing some work on Southwest Airlines, and they were doing some customer analysis. And they had a room called the Star Trek Room, and it literally had Captain Kirk and Spock and several other things, but they had big screens where they were analyzing dots on the map were represented by customers like click and save customers versus reward customers.

And they were looking at trade zones. I had never seen anything quite like that, and it just sort of blew my head up. And I was like, this is something I can learn. And so I really wanted it. Like, that's the piece of it. That was very exciting to me. But what was interesting in those days and digital, it was all about the clicks and the impressions, but nobody was really doing a lot of geo targeting or thinking through trade zones or thinking through, you know, customer resources, deep levels, you know?

So bringing the art of the offline stuff to the digital world was very intriguing to me.

Adam Katz
That's awesome. When you think about like the that transition from Camelot, PMG, etc., don't you feel like nowadays everything that you went through was just accelerated in such a, in such a different way. So how do you try to take what you learned in the past, not overly analyze the future, but balance it like what's your what's your mindset there?

Sam Bloom
Well, so one is, you know, you hear the expression in all the times that people see the games slowed up, the game slows down for them. And I would say having done this for 20 years, I would say there are many aspects of the game that slowed down. I mean, I don't think I'm the smartest or the best at the game, but I do think I've seen enough, you know, you know, enough hours of the game to kind of know what I'm seeing.

And what I would sort of say to you is, you know, having seen the first piece was sort of, you know, desktop digital. Then we saw, you know, social and then mobile and then CTV and, you know, when you see these cycles of innovation, they all start to look similar. And so I think of them as like waves.
And so the way to think about it is you have to decide which waves you're going to ride, and you have to equally decide which waves you don't want to ride. And so over time, you know, it became very clear to me, like, you can see something coming. And I would say, I think, where I have one skill, you know, that I think is, is just the willingness to try stuff and fail and, you know, you know, and I think that that's been very helpful when you see something with that opportunistic approach.

That's really what I try to take in just about everything I've done. And so, you know, that's what's exciting. I mean, like right now that's a good example. We can all see the AI stuff coming, and it's now starting to infiltrate lots of places, you know, in our marketing and media and creative suites. And so -

Adam Katz
Quick question on the AI front, I saw, you know, you always talking about how there's no one size fits all strategy for anybody and that it's critical to be able to be prepared for customized and tailored solutions or bespoke situations.

How do you think about that? How do you weave that into your work? What are some of the best places that you've seen success there, and what kind of people do you look for to be able to think like that?

Sam Bloom
These are all great questions. So one is so when I got to Camelot, Tom always talked about top down, you know, marketing versus bottoms up marketing.

And I say the first piece is the bottom up marketing is truly, you know, taking client data. And when I'm talking about client data, really customer data and business data. And you got to learn the business and you gotta learn the customers and if you do that then you know, the playbook sort of appears to you. And I'll give you some examples of that.

and just about every client I've analyzed over the last 20 plus years, you know, even if they're a brand that everyone's heard of, it doesn't mean that they have that their national footprint is the same everywhere. And so, you know, typically there's concentrations of customers either demographically, geographically, you know, so forth, you know, so, you know, socio economically.

And so I think that's the first piece is, you know, no two brands are the same. And I think what happened in media for many, many years, there was a line of demarcation around efficiency that you either went national or one way, you know, if you were in 12, 13, 14 Dmas you were heavily penetrated and made zero sense to go locally.

And so, you know, things got very, you know, the line of demarcation was national versus local and the world of digital, and you can make the impressions sort of all over the customers or the opportunities are right. And I think that that's the first piece. The second piece is, you know, your question is like over the years, what I found is you don't hire for position, you hire for upside and skill sets.

And I always loved, what I always call amphibians, people that can do and think right and analyze. And what you want are people that enjoy the analytical aspects of what you're doing. And then you can, you know, basically take that analysis and then go action it. And, you know, I always think those kinds of people thrive really well.

And they love, you know, not only do they love doing the work around the analytical pieces, but they love the doing just as much. And then the other thing is that if you like the doing, you want to be great at your craft. And then and what I found is when you find those kinds of people, they become role crafts people.

And I think that's the piece that I most admire in our industry is when I find people that are equally, you know, as, you know, as excited about being masters of the craft as I am. I mean, I know that, but I think that's the piece of it is you want you got you want to learn the technology and the techniques and all the things you can do to be great at doing that thing, right.

Adam Katz
I mean, listen, you know, as I speak to you, we've had some amazing guests on the podcast and we always kind of look to the different people for different things. One of the things I find extremely unique about getting to know you, hopefully more and more over the next few years, is that you're pretty, pretty prepared no matter what.

And confident, right? Would you say that you started out that way, or how did you become stronger in your confidence, your security, your public speaking? And what advice do you have to others that are moving into that lane?

Sam Bloom
Well, look, I can definitely say that's not the case. I would say the first piece is, you know, I always view myself with the you heard the expression, Groucho Marx always said he said I would never join a club that would have me as a member kind of thing.

I think the first piece is, you know, I sort of subscribe to that school of thought. but I also think, you know, Tom, Tom always told me to speak your mind. but he also said, when you're talking, you're losing. So there's a balance between two things. I think the first piece is you've got to be grounded in facts.

And I think if you're if you really understand your craft, that builds a lot of confidence. And I think that's really important and that, you know, what I would want to say when I made the career switch, we were talking about Blockbuster to Camelot. I was in my mid 30s and I thought that I had missed, you know, the boat.

and I think the first piece is you don't you know, there's no such thing as making a mistake before the age of 90. So, you know, you you know, you can,

Adam Katz
That's a classic quote. Have you taught yourself then to compartmentalize things and not ride the highs and lows as much? Because squarely I -

Sam Bloom
Yeah, I do ride the highs and lows. I'm very emotional, about the work and about the people. And you know, about service and clients. Those are all things. I mean, but what you want to do is play with passion.

If you watch sports, you can see that passion, you know, overtakes some people. So I think you got to leave it on the field to a certain extent.

Adam Katz
Speaking of sports, because you're such a big fan, who, who are your idols?

Sam Bloom
It's a good question too, well, so I have two sports. Well, I'm a Dallas Cowboys fan. and not a very happy one at the moment.

Adam Katz
I'm a Knick Jet Ranger Met fan, so I have nothing to say to you.

Sam Bloom
All right. Look, I mean, so I grew up, you know, Roger Staubach, Tony Dorsey, you know, Truman Pearson, you know, that era of cowboys. And, of course, you know, there's reports, you know, Aikman, Irvin and, and, well, I loved the Cowboys growing up, I do love watching the Cowboys there, but they're also a source of a lot of frustration.

On Monday mornings, my other passion, soccer. So I played, you know, collegiate soccer. I was on an Olympic team when I was, you know, and national teams and so forth, and played a pretty high level of soccer. but I was always reminding people I was a goalie, not an athlete. And so there's a difference between the two.

But, you know, today I, you know, I watch a lot of English Premier League soccer and you ask him about players a lot. I mean, I follow the team, I follow Arsenal, but I love watching international soccer. There's nothing more fun than going to an international game. Some and some far off points. And then I went to Qatar for the World Cup final this past summer.

I went to the euros after Cannes and that was really fun. I mean, I, I would go anywhere, any time for, you know, to go see, derby, other import, you know, for soccer.

Adam Katz
I love that. So, kind of closing out here for our audience. I mean, we've learned a lot today about you, about the future, about where things are going.

What excites you for A) PMG, going into the next phase of growth and what excites you that keeps you going, that makes you excited about the future of our industry?

Sam Bloom
Well, look, we got we have incredible leadership. George, our CEO is unbelievable and he's got great vision around media and tech. And I and I think, George, I share George's belief that we believe that software at the end of the day, is going to be really important to the future.

You know, of, you know, media and marketing. I like PNG's hand a whole lot. I mean, we're an independent agency, you know, we have no outside investors. We've grown, you know, organically. I'd like to think that we, you know, we do something slightly different than our peers being, you know, one is a big one for me is, you know, we don't, you know, we don't take principled interest, you know, and we don't mark up media.

We don't markup tech. So and so one is philosophically, I love our position. I mean, we are truly an independent player and can provide. You ask me about confidence. Confidence comes from knowing that you're going to provide a client, you know, the best plan. You possibly can. And the way you earn their keep is by performing. And so I love that.

And we have and you know, we're PMG is one of four companies inside of a momentum portfolio. We've got three other companies that are equally interesting. but I think the other piece is, you know, you know, we're a 14 year old agency and we don't have a legacy that a lot of other agencies have. And so, you know, part of what I think about what it's going to take to build a great agency, and one is we've had an incredible platform and formerly called ally?

And while I don't think we've, it's nearly finished in any way, shape or form, I like our hand because we know that it's not finished and we know that we've got to continue to build software and ship software. That's the first piece I think the second piece is, you know, we love to game and compete. And I think that's the other piece is that, you know, we're not resting on our laurels.

PMG has a history, you know, someone who came along where we like to kind of go break and innovate. And, you know, there's a little bit of difference between playing offense versus defense. I love being on the offensive side of the ball. And I think, you know, that's a great hand.

Adam Katz
Funny. It is also funny for you to wrap up, being on the offensive side of the ball when you're a goalie now.

Sam Bloom
That's right. All goalies dream of scoring goals, by the way.

Adam Katz
Is that why I always see Igor Shesterkin on the Rangers trying to shoot from one end to the other.

Sam Bloom
150%. Are you kidding? Absolutely. But look, I mean, we're entering a really interesting time period industry because there's going to be a lot of disruption over the next two years.

And the reason I think that is a lot of business models, you know, one is, you know, it's a little bit like how I think about Sightly I mean, you guys were I don't know how old two years, three years, four years old. Somewhere on there. How old is the company?

Adam Katz
The company is around for over a decade, but the platform started in 2020.

Sam Bloom
So think about what you guys have done in four years. And you built an incredible platform. And I think we're in this age where, you know, you're going to be able to build and ship software quickly and build products really quickly to meet market needs. And that's only going to speed up. And, you know, one of my partners says something is like, this is the worst AI is ever going to be is right now.

So when you think about, you know, where that grows. But I think, you know, like, I mean, we're in amazing time period where a lot of one is you can start to see there's going to be massive consolidation in our business. as it relates to media, there's going to be a whole host of new regulatory issues. And of course AI is going to enter.

And so, you know, that mix along with, you know, consumption changes, media changes, there's so much going on. And when there's that kind of disruption going on, that means there's a lot of opportunity. And that's where to your earlier question, you know, having been around this, you know, it's fun to try to pick the waves to go right in.

And there's some big ones coming and so I'm pretty excited about that.

Adam Katz
I'll tell you right now. I'm excited to ride in with you. Our guests are lucky today to have heard all those stories. Your humbleness to explain your ups and downs, to understand how you're going to navigate the future. And also just they hear your eagerness to continue to learn.

I think it's super cool. So thank you, Sam, so much for joining us today. I'm honored to have had you. Thank you so much.

Sam Bloom
Thank you Adam. Appreciate it.

Adam Katz
Your the best.