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Dragon Horse Agency Co-CEO P. Blake Renda has been named an Expert to Know by 50Pros, the B2B directory of top-rated agencies, service providers and professionals, where listings are backed by data, vetted profiles and real client feedback. The long-form interview is live on 50Pros now.
Most agency profiles cover the same ground: awards, headcount, a client logo wall. This one does not. The 50Pros conversation works through twenty questions about how an agency is actually run - hiring, pricing, the projects you turn down, the trends you refuse to chase - and Blake answers them the way he runs the business: directly.
The through-line of the interview is the model Dragon Horse was built on. Blake came out of institutional investment and the technology and media sectors before co-founding the agency with Julie W. Koester, and he founded it against a specific frustration: marketing that is disconnected from the business it is meant to grow. Dragon Horse calls the answer Business Marketing Services - strategy, operations and creative under one roof, with DragonONE as the platform that ties them together.
He makes a fair point in the piece about how that has aged. The large consultancies have spent the last several years buying and building their way toward the same integrated model. Dragon Horse got there first, from a standing start in Naples.
One of the more useful sections is about client selection. Dragon Horse vets prospective clients as carefully as it expects to be vetted - objectives, measures, professionalism, integrity. Blake's framing, borrowed from Steve Jobs, is that it's ok to say NO, and, in fact, probably better.
That is not posturing. An agency that takes every brief cannot do exceptional work on any of them.
The AI answers are the ones we expect will get quoted most. Blake is not an AI skeptic - the agency uses it every day - but he draws a hard line between AI as an amplifier and AI as a replacement. Modern marketing carries a load that no model handles on its own: technical execution, retraining people, choosing systems, and managing the organizational change that follows. His term for the role Dragon Horse plays is AI Aviators. Someone still has to fly the aircraft.
He is equally blunt about what is overhyped. Influencer marketing, in his view, is on borrowed time as audiences get better at spotting what has been bought. What replaces it is content that respects the reader's attention instead of interrupting it.
Two ideas from the interview say a lot about how the agency thinks. The first is Ubuntu - I am because we are - the principle behind the agency's flatter, circular structure, where accountability is shared rather than pushed downward. The second is what Blake calls the people who do the work: not marketers, but Marketing Engineers. Clients still arrive with Mad Men expectations of the industry. The reality is analytical, technical, and built.
The complete interview - including Blake's daily routine, the agency's pricing philosophy, its hybrid working model, and his prediction for where the industry lands in ten years - is on 50Pros: Expert to Know: P. Blake Renda.
If any of it sounds like a conversation you want to have about your own business, get in touch.