hi there. my name is danny agnew.
I specialize in telling stories that make people feel a certain way and then do a certain thing.
You can call it branding, you can call it marketing, you can call it content — hell, you can probably even call it manipulation, but only if you really want to be a jerk about it.
I just like to think of it as good old fashioned advocacy.
I’ve been obsessed with telling stories since I was a little boy. It’s probably owed to the fact that my mom was shoving books into my hands from a very, very young age (thanks, Mom!) but seriously, ask anyone who ever had to take care of me — I was (and still am) obsessed with creating a dialogue and largely incapable of shutting up.
Eventually I took my storytelling obsession to film school at the University of Southern California, where I learned from some very smart and talented teachers how to take the ideas in my head, give them some structure, and refine them into proper narratives.
I may not have become the next Judd Apatow or Ryan Coogler (both fellow USC film grads), but I learned an awful lot and also got to make a hilariously bad student film starring my friend Brian as a serial killer.
After college I fell ass backward into the Los Angeles apparel industry, first getting a masterclass in brand building during a stint at Von Dutch (yes, that Von Dutch) before eventually launching my own brand, Kid Dangerous, with three of my childhood friends in 2005.
We built the entire thing from the ground up and I got yet another crash course, this time in how to be a creative director (not a term I even knew to use back then, if I’m being candid).
Kid Dangerous (and its sister line Girl Dangerous) can still be found in major retailers all over the world, and I’m damn proud of that.
And if you’d like to learn a bit more about that (and see some cool campaign images we shot), please feel free to step right this way.
After a move to New York, I wound up in the world of digital media — I was hired as one of two co-founding editors of the lifestyle publication InsideHook, and got to leverage both what I had learned about telling compelling stories and what I had learned about building a brand to create a digital media darling that quickly found favor with readers and advertisers alike.
And while I cut my teeth on the editorial side of the business (first as a senior editor and then as editorial director), we were a small and lean team and I got to be involved in pretty much every aspect of the company. Sales in particular, where I helped to build InsideHook’s branded content program and send our revenue through the roof.
Eventually I took over as InsideHook’s creative director and was responsible for all creative aspects of the brand across editorial, design, sales and marketing, as well as the continued growth of our branded content division.
I also got to get my picture taken by really talented people who managed to make me look, according to my mother, “quite handsome and dapper.”
If you’d like to learn more about my time at InsideHook and see some of the work I did there, please step right this way.
After ten plus years in the world of digital media, I left InsideHook to take over as Chief Creative Officer at FEVO, an e-commerce software company in the ticketing space.
I built FEVO’s creative/brand department (pictured) from scratch, overseeing a team of massively talented designers, writers, producers and strategists.
We led the organization in a wholesale reimagining of the FEVO brand identity before spearheading and overeeing all sales and marketing content initiatives, partner campaigns and experiential brand activations.
I also oversaw our product design team, and while I would be the first to tell you that what I don’t know about that discipline could just about be squeezed into the Grand Canyon, I very much enjoyed working with them, learning about their world, and helping to guide their process from a brand perspective.
If you’d like to learn more about my time at FEVO and see some of the work I did there, please step right this way.
