Partnership-Powered Performance

Decades of experience and a belief in constant innovation have allowed Sequoia Media Group to grow rapidly since its 2023 inception.

Launched in 2023, Sequoia Media Group offers clients a competitive advantage through its ability to optimize across all media channels, the expertise of its executives, and the added value of exclusive, high-performance intake services.

The Sequoia team — led by George Young, CEO; Bryan Geidt, chief strategy officer; Billy Walters, chief legal and compliance officer; and TP McCabe, chief revenue officer — combined decades of direct response and performance marketing expertise from some of the industry’s biggest agencies to create an all-star team of leaders. While most agencies focus on a single media channel, Sequoia harnesses the power of television, radio, digital, and print to provide clients with a competitive and forward-thinking approach to performance advertising.

The agency’s focus on creative, marketing, intake, and results allows brands the peace of mind that their advertising will run on the highest-performing media channels, with resources strategically optimized and allocated across all channels.

The group also operates CASE Legal Media®,  a legal-focused direct response agency. The work done by CASE — under stringent regulatory scrutiny and serving powerful back-end needs among its clientele — only serves to make Sequoia’s offerings stronger.

Recently, Results caught up with Sequoia’s quartet of leaders to talk about its early history, position in the market, key services, and future plans.

Two years into your existence, has a differentiating cornerstone emerged in your agency’s pitch to clients and prospects?

George Young: We realized from the inception of our business plan that it was essential to have a clear differentiation of what Sequoia Media Group could bring to the table for our clients. We knew one of the key challenges out of the gate was going to be a desire to stay in our comfort zone, but we also recognized that direct response was evolving rapidly, and as such, we needed to build — from the ground up — an asset that would allow our clients to achieve greater profitability and return on investment from capital. Part of this strategy emerges when we discuss with clients more about our acumen and assets and how they can benefit them in their businesses.

From the very beginning, we knew that a siloed approach to media was obsolete, as the convergence of linear TV, connected television (CTV), social media, and all forms of digital advertising were already here. We understood that there was angst and frustration for clients in the industry having to use so many different agencies and companies to achieve their broad objectives, when really what they were looking for was someone who understood their business, and could apply the power of television, digital, the web, OOH, print, and other channels into a cohesive global strategy.

So, we built integrated linear and digital teams to achieve these objectives and brought assets in house that were unique to Sequoia and our prospects and clients, such as integrated creative production, integrated call center assets, and teams who understood how to manage and make sense of the client’s data to help them streamline their business to take revenue to new levels.

Bryan Geidt: The biggest change since COVID is how fast things are moving and how fast the landscape is changing. From new technology entering the space to an insane number of mergers and acquisitions, it’s more important than ever to be on top of industry trends as well as marketplace conditions. Part of our pitch is to be nimble and chase opportunity, and what has changed the most is that there is more opportunity than there has ever been before. It is truly an exciting time to be in this space. Unfortunately, with more opportunity comes more confusion about decision making, so it is incredibly important to have the right partners by your side.

Billy Walters: Not only did we want to bring the “big agency” capabilities to our own house in terms of relationships, strategy, buying, tracking, etc., but we also saw a dearth of in-house legal teams for a shop our size. We all have big-agency backgrounds, and we can all easily think back to when a campaign had to hit the brakes for the dreaded legal review. For a new shop of our size to have in-house counsel with big agency experience to help keep the momentum going means the legal holdups are rarely on our side. And that’s a nice bonus that we’ve been able to bring to clients who are used to all sorts of tangles that we can glide over.

TP McCabe: Sequoia was built on the principles of educating and understanding our clients’ goals and proving transparency with a hands-on client service experience — a true partnership. Educating brands in a fast-moving, ever-changing, omnichannel world is essential, making sure they understand the hows and whys of what we do. Customer service is paramount and unfortunately a lost art in our profession. Pitching Sequoia’s vast experience on the media, creative, and especially the operational side (backend logistics, analytics, campaign set-up) is enormously vital to help build and scale clients. The client can’t be just an invoice line. It’s imperative to know the client’s business, to understand how they operate internally to better educate the client on how to grow. Customer service, transparency, and education matters.

From the start, the Sequoia team — with veterans of the linear and CTV media spaces — has embraced digital advertising as performance media’s future. How is your agency building a bridge for clients between online and offline media?

Young: A core part of Sequoia’s unique approach comes from the success of CASE Legal Media, our legal-focused direct response agency. Through our work with attorneys and law firm partners, we developed a deep understanding of digital advertising for acquiring legal claims.

This proprietary process allows us to seamlessly blend online and offline media strategies into a cohesive media plan. This means we can dynamically adjust our strategies based on the KPIs our clients are seeing. We understand that factors like clearance levels, where we are in the media quarter, breaking news, and general agency obligations can significantly impact performance in the linear television world. Our ability to pivot between media strategies, thanks to our strong grasp of both offline and online media, enables us to optimize campaigns for maximum ROI.

Geidt: You hear the term “convergent media” a lot and — whatever you want to call it — it’s important that your media is working together. The user experience is ever evolving, and you need to be able to utilize best practices. The power of digital is really the data and how you use it. Linear TV has its place and strategy and can help bolster and lift the power of digital, and we love to use both when it’s appropriate. With digital, it’s very important to have short-term and long-term strategies so that the data you are building doesn’t go to waste. It can be used in so many ways within an agnostic media strategy.

Walters: Legally speaking, a lot of what passes for “compliant marketing” quite simply isn’t. Anyone involved in legal-specific marketing, advertising, and intake gets a crash course on that sooner or later. Add to that how fast large-language-modeling (LLM) platforms are changing the legal landscape for copy, buying, visual assets — even the agreements between agencies themselves — and it can be challenging for shops of our size to stay nimble yet competent. We’re lucky that we’re able to not only navigate and tie together the “new-world” connected space in terms of digital and offline attribution, but also the “old-world” elements of regulatory approval, federal and state compliance, and even working directly with the legal departments of our partners with a lot of speed.

McCabe: In today’s marketing environment, understanding how all media channels work together is essential to a client’s success. Every channel plays a role in building the brand, and it is imperative that they work together in a cohesive manner. Sequoia was built to manage an omnichannel client. Many agencies claim to be media agnostic, but digging deep, you find those departments are siloed, not talking to each other, or working for the benefit of the client. Sequoia is built from the CASE Legal model, which utilizes all channels for the benefit of the client and fluidly optimizes budgets to the working channels.

You’ve also embraced creative production as part of the agency’s business model. What prompted you to add these services?

Young: Our solutions often arise directly from challenges our clients face. For instance, during the peak of Camp Lejeune cases at CASE Legal Media, we relied on third-party call centers for our many law firm clients. When the largest intake center informed us they could no longer accommodate new clients, it became clear that building our own call center was the only viable solution.

This approach mirrors our strategy for creative production. We observed how difficult and costly it could be for clients to manage creative assets, especially when small campaign adjustments were needed. To provide the most innovative and effective resources in the DR industry, we recognized the importance of offering in-house creative services. This allows us to deliver creative and production assets more cost-effectively and efficiently, setting us apart in the industry.

Geidt: Going back to our methodology of chasing opportunities, we have found incredible success by having an in-house creative team. Often, a media strategy can start with two or three creatives, but you find that you need tweaks, and you need them often. Perhaps you want to add more audio or visuals, or you want to make a shorter or longer creative. You want to be able to test various URLs, phone numbers, QR codes. When opportunities come knocking, they don’t wait around. The team that can pivot and make changes the quickest is going to be able to make the most of opportunities.

We have also found great success in putting our creative team’s work against outside partners. We look at it from the angle of, “A rising tide lifts all boats.” If we are constantly challenging ourselves, our clients, and our partners, the best creative is going to come out on top — and it’s going to benefit everyone.

McCabe: Creative content — and the ability to quickly create/change that content and messaging — is at the core of a successful campaign. Online and offline channel creative is vastly different, from length of messaging to the content shared. Sequoia having an in-house, affordable creative team allows us to work closely with clients to build out harmonious messaging on behalf of all their channels.

In times like these — with change the rule rather than the exception — what does innovation mean to Sequoia and to your clients?

Young: We are constantly inspired by great business leaders, and this guides us in building our business every day. A consistent theme in our model is that we exist as an asset for our clients, meaning our focus is entirely on helping our clients grow in every way possible.

Innovation is not just a buzzword for us; it’s the foundation of how we move forward and continue to create value for our clients. As we look to the future, the pace of change in our industry is accelerating, driven by the dramatic impact of artificial intelligence across virtually every business sector, including direct response advertising.

AI is reshaping how audiences are identified, how campaigns are optimized, and how messages are delivered with precision. For agencies like ours, it’s not simply about adopting new tools — it’s about reimagining what an agency can do for its clients. Interacting with an agency will increasingly become more seamless and automated, with processes from creative development to media attribution becoming faster, more data-driven, and more responsive.

We see this not as a challenge, but as an opportunity. Innovation is woven into our everyday thinking. By harnessing new technologies, refining our strategies, and streamlining how we work with our partners, we ensure that our clients benefit directly from the efficiencies and breakthroughs innovation provides.

Campaigns — like this one for client Wolf Mattress — are executed with a seamless omnichannel media strategy.

Geidt: Innovation today means seamlessly connecting campaigns across platforms — from linear TV and CTV to retail media, podcasts, social, and beyond. Consumers don’t live in one channel, and neither should advertising. The innovators aren’t just running media everywhere — they’re designing integrated strategies where each channel supports the next, creating a fluid ecosystem of messaging and measurement.

Innovation is also resilience and adaptability. Consumer behavior shifts quickly, platforms change rules overnight, and attribution models evolve constantly. We keep everything diverse and always have alternative routes to success. By building with optionality, you will never get stuck, and campaigns can remain agile even when the environment changes.

Walters: Innovation eventually pours into the U.S. court system. We’ve been watching that happen in earnest on the anti-trust side for digital and legacy media ownership in the past few years, especially. That ultimately rolls downhill into how agencies are forced to buy media in the various platforms and exchanges, build plans, and play within the lines of whatever new rules are coming for the industry as a whole. We watch all that through the lens of having a law license hanging on the wall that other shops of our size simply don’t have. New elements of media will constantly roll out, and beyond just being a shiny new toy, we’ll be able to determine what is and is not allowable within the existing frameworks to help our clients walk between the raindrops, as we like to say.

McCabe: ABC: always be changing. Clients have different goals and needs. And having the ability to listen to your clients and innovate with them is how true partnerships come together. Sequoia is not a “set it, and forget it” agency. We were built to be a team that can pivot quickly — which is extremely important to clients, especially in this day of ever-changing media landscapes.

How is Sequoia maximizing its tech stack in order to give clients unparalleled service?

Young: This idea is a center point of our current investment strategy. We’ve invested

heavily in building and strengthening our internal tech stack. From advanced CTV platforms that allow us to target and measure with unprecedented accuracy to proprietary software that streamlines campaign management, we are creating the kind of infrastructure that ensures our clients stay ahead of the curve. These assets aren’t just short-term tools — they are core to achieving our long-term objectives of delivering smarter, more efficient, and more scalable campaigns.

Geidt: Our tech stack is a direct correlation with the partnerships we build. Nothing is more important than building trust and understanding with all that is available out there. Our team is great at asking the tough questions to make sure we are not only using the right technology but also are educated in what everyone else is doing (or not).

Walters: We’re not just linear and CTV folks. We’re also digital buyers going back to 2005. So, not only have the vast array of off-the-shelf and custom tech stacks and their capabilities constantly evolved, so have we. Given that, the holy grail remains the same: being able to tie the message to performance. And we do that. Exactly how we do that continues to develop just like everyone in the industry, but it’s being done, and our clients already get the benefit of it.

McCabe: It’s not the tools, it’s how you use the tools. Every agency has access to similar tools: strategy and coms, CRMs, media planning, AI, analytics. But the tools themselves don’t guarantee a successful strategic approach. It’s how you leverage that tech stack. The strategy, creativity, and skill behind how you use the tech stack makes a difference. Sequoia is tech-stack agnostic — we are not tied to one (as many agencies are) and look to work with the most updated, current tech that benefits our clients.

The DNA of Sequoia has been built from your other firm — CASE Legal Media — and its specialization in the law firm marketing space. How does the success you’ve had in that area inform Sequoia’s work for brands in other vertical markets?

Young: Love this question. A lot of the DNA of Sequoia has indeed been shaped by the foundation we built with CASE Legal Media. In the legal marketing space, we learned how to thrive in one of the most competitive and highly regulated advertising environments — where precision, compliance, and measurable ROI are absolutely non-negotiable. Working with law firms and litigation funders demanded that we master attribution models, develop rigorous media strategies across linear television, connected television, and digital platforms, and create campaigns that could withstand intense scrutiny while still driving tangible client results.

That discipline, coupled with the ability to innovate within tight boundaries, has carried directly into the way Sequoia approaches work for brands and direct response clients in other verticals. The rigor we developed in legal — data-driven planning, accountability to performance, and an obsession with client outcomes — has become part of Sequoia’s DNA. At the same time, our legal experience gave us a head start in building sophisticated internal assets, particularly in CTV and digital, which now fuel our campaigns for clients across industries.

Bryan Geidt and George Young, on the road and ready for a day of client meetings.

Geidt: What I love about working on campaigns in the legal space is — with a successful media plan — how important the back end is. You really get a huge understanding in this vertical that the media is only a small portion of what leads to success. Understanding the intake and the follow up to move from a lead to a qualified lead, to a signed case, to a retainer is a process that most marketers are not going to understand. This has a lot of similarities to clients or brands in the DR space. What good is a lead if it doesn’t turn into value for the client down the road, over and over again.

Walters: A widely held misconception about doing marketing and case acquisition for law firms is that they’re unsophisticated in advertising. That may have been true 10 years ago, but it is absolutely not the case now. Some of the large firms we’ve worked with for years on the CASE Legal side have CMOs and marketing managers who were pulled directly from some of the biggest traditional agencies in the country. And they know what they’re doing.

If your agency has been tasked with finding high-value mesothelioma cases, or catastrophic trucking injuries, you learn very quickly that not only are those spaces incredibly crowded with capable competitors, but the firms themselves are willing to dig deep and find the honey holes for new cases at scale that we’re so good at finding. So that means we’re fire-forged and adept at creatively strategizing, designing, buying, and presenting to some of the most challenging clients around! There’s a direct line between what we’ve learned across the years on the legal marketing side to what we do at Sequoia — that type of marketing is direct response on steroids and we’re stronger for it.

McCabe: Sequoia was built on the success of CASE Legal. CASE is a media agnostic agency, and the legal vertical has a lot of moving parts: quickly creating the right messaging, identifying right media mix, being truly agnostic to your media approach — shifting media dollars to the channels that are driving lead, identifying and confirming these are the right leads, creating a 24/7/365 intake center to immediately have data on hand.

Sequoia mirrored this approach beyond legal clients, providing a truly, non-siloed media experience that is not seen in our industry.

How is a client-success focus a key differentiator for Sequoia?

Young: Our focus on client success is more than a service model — it’s our essential role and a true differentiator in a crowded marketplace. Where many agencies stop at delivering campaigns, we go deeper by committing to become students of our clients’ businesses. We take the time to learn their unique challenges, goals, and opportunities so that every strategy we develop is built on a foundation of understanding and alignment.

We also recognize the shifting landscape: many brands are weighing whether to bring advertising in-house. That reality drives us to operate not as a vendor, but as an extension of our clients’ teams. We strive to be a trusted partner, fully invested in their success, with the kind of institutional knowledge and day-to-day dedication that makes us a genuine asset to their business.

By combining that level of immersion with our expertise across television, CTV, and digital, we deliver not only effective campaigns but also the confidence that our clients have a partner who is as committed to their outcomes as they are themselves. That commitment to client success — built on education, partnership, and accountability — is what sets Sequoia apart.

Geidt: We take a lot of pride of getting under the hood of our clients’ business models. It is important for us to be a collaborative partner with them and not just someone who spends their money. We also recognize it takes a village. We want our clients to have access to everyone on our team and any trusted partners that can help their end goal. We truly value time with our clients. These relationships are so much more than transactions. We want our clients to be successful in business and in life.

Sequoia Media Group team members Glen Sorenson and Alex Young enjoy time on the road with executives George Young and TP McCabe.

McCabe: The entire Sequoia team comes from the competitive set. We understand what works and what doesn’t at those prospective agencies. And we brought over insight to the changes we collectively saw that needed to happen with clients. All of us were instrumental in helping build those agencies and the various brands over the past 20-plus years: from a business development aspect, to onboarding and backend logistics, to media. We’ve been able to pull the best out of those agencies and turn that knowledge into Sequoia’s.

As you look ahead to 2026 and beyond, what do you think Sequoia’s position of strength is today? And where do you see it being by 2028?

Young: We are not burdened by legacy systems or outdated ways of thinking. While our leadership team comes from legacy direct response agencies and carries decades of expertise in traditional and digital media, Sequoia itself is a newer agency. That allows us to approach the marketplace with a lean, nimble mindset — one that embraces innovation and seeks out the tools that can give our clients an unfair advantage in a highly competitive space.

When we consider the future, we often ask ourselves: how have great companies like Amazon, Google, and Meta been able to scale? The answer is clear: they’ve automated their service models to reach the greatest number of people in the most efficient way possible. That same principle is coming to our industry. The status quo — reliance on manual processes, slow attribution, and fragmented systems — will not last much longer. Recognizing that, we are building Sequoia for the long haul by constantly innovating, automating, and finding new ways to add measurable value to our clients.

That innovation will unquestionably be led by technology. We are already investing in our tech stack to streamline planning, execution, and measurement, and we are actively developing a vision where clients can access a graphical user interface in a web-based model that simplifies the process of acquiring direct response media across both offline and online channels. This will make media buying more transparent, more efficient, and ultimately more effective for our clients.

By 2028, we see Sequoia standing at the forefront of this evolution — an agency that combines the credibility and expertise of legacy direct response with the automation, efficiency, and client empowerment of a modern technology company. That balance of deep knowledge and innovative execution is our greatest position of strength today, and it will be the engine of our growth well into the future.

McCabe: The ability to pivot quickly with our clients is a big and rare strength. The seasoned Sequoia team that grew up in direct response — that has helped build more than 500 brands the past two decades — has us right at the top of any list of performance agencies. We all grew up in the medium and have seen what to do and what not to do. The difference is Sequoia can pivot quickly, provide top knowledge, and work closely with the clients.

Educating clients in this fast-moving world is instrumental for brands to succeed,. Many agencies push their clients to use programmatic platforms, not caring or teaching them: what, how, why. It has become a commoditized model. Agencies are not taking the time to work with clients or be transparent with all aspects.

Sequoia is built with sherpas that have scaled the mountaintop many times over. We know the path — let us take you by the hand and show you.

San Diego | Chicago | Houston

 

Phone: 858-304-2773

 

Website: sequoiamediagroup.com