We’re excited to introduce you to the always interesting and insightful Ryan Kleier. We hope you’ll enjoy our conversation with Ryan below.
Ryan, thanks for joining us, excited to have you contributing your stories and insights. The first dollar your business earns is always special and we’d love to hear how your brand made its first dollar of revenue.
In the summer of 2011 the Occupy Wall Street protests where in full swing, and I was scurrying to find any freelance work I could — making short DJ Equipment demos for a retailer and short marketing demos. It was rarely creative and not particularly fulfilling.
My brother was just starting his acting career, which meant he was waiting tables, but had all this free time during the day. He’d just finished a book by Harvard Political Science professor Lawrence Lessig called “Republic Lost” which he’d passed on to me. It’s dense, but clarified these Occupy Wall Street protests in our eyes.
The rich were hoarding money and then using that money to influence the political system. Since government is the only thing We The People can use to regulate big business, we’d need to get money out of politics to even the playing field.
So he went down to the protests thumping the book trying to get anyone to listen, and many in Zuccotti park at the time would rather bang drums than listen to him. But he found two fellas about to start a non-profit doing exactly that kind of Pro-Democracy, money-out-of-politics work we wanted to support.
Within a few months we made them this little short called “S#%@ Lobbyists Say” and they were able to secure a large grant off that one video which helped fund more of our work.
They’re still our client to this day.
Ryan, love having you share your insights with us. Before we ask you more questions, maybe you can take a moment to introduce yourself to our readers who might have missed our earlier conversations?
My brother Sean and I strongly believe in applying our talents to causes we believe in — which unfortunately cancels out a lot of possible work.
We started Kleier Brothers Creative Agency to craft high-impact creative campaigns that put brands and non-profits on the map. We both come from comedic and creative backgrounds — worked in TV production, Sean as an Actor, Ryan as a Commercial Director/Editor — but our shared love and training at UCB NY helped warp our sensibilities to the satirical and absurd.
If you’re a cause, brand or candidate and you’re looking to serve your community, most often your ideas are going to be met with resounding silence. Because let’s be honest, if the most impactful or effective solution was the most popular, we wouldn’t be in the messes we’re in today.
We take the authentic core of your message, dress it in a package that gets the internet talking, and put together a launch strategy to get this message into the hands of as many people as possible with humor, relevance and verve.
We love a challenge — so often times the driest of messages can achieve internet fame for a day, putting your brand at the center of a larger discussion.
Our knowledge of storytelling means we can thread the needle of nuance and specificity to land the perfectly timed joke, or memorable image that will cement your messaging into the minds of millions.
We’ve worked with brands like The ACLU, Drug Policy Alliance, RepresentUs, and Wildcard Alliance and our work has been featured on Good Morning America, CBS Sunday Morning, Fox & Friends, New York Times, Time, Variety and Rachel Maddow.
Word of mouth has spread our campaigns to over 265 million people (and counting), and our clients tend to keep us around because they just like working with us.
We keep all our favorite work at www.kleierbrothers.com
How about pivoting – can you share the story of a time you’ve had to pivot?
We’re actually in the middle of that pivot right now.
There’s been a lot of turmoil in the non-profit world, with funding shifting away from ‘Nice to have’ solutions to ‘Hair-On-Fire’ right now solutions. It’s a tectonic shift in how a lot of organizations are being funded and what their communications goals are.
We’ve been expanding our network over the last year, into political donor circles and political consultants, to apply our creative methodology to political candidates.
It’s a completely different vertical, though there’s plenty of overlap — and we’ve been struggling to convince an entrenched political establishment to change their long-held beliefs on how candidates should communicate and what kinds of platforms they belong on.
It’s truly wild. But we’re creating breakthroughs — it’s just taking much longer than we’d anticipated. But we’ve long held that all it’s going to take is a proof of concept before everyone wants what we’re selling. If you’re looking to run in 2026, we can help get you noticed.
What do you think helped you build your reputation within your market?
I can tell you what our original assumption was going to be — that our work would go viral and people would call us up. Our work continues to go viral and some of our campaigns are designed to be recycled and evergreen — but our phone has never rung off the hook because of actual success.
Building our reputation has been a networking exercise and takes continually meeting up with, pitching and presenting our philosophy and methodology to people. Rebranding ourselves as “The Kleier Brothers” has been helpful in that respect, because it’s what people had always called us when we weren’t around anyway — so let’s lean into that.
But working in marketing and pitching comedy is tricky. It’s easy to come off as aloof or have your creative misinterpreted. The space between a joke landing or satire hitting perfectly could be a matter of a few frames, or setting up the concept in the right way and the new strategy we’ve employed has been to focus on our creative strategy when talking with new clients.
We’re not ‘funny guys’ here to make fart jokes. I mean, we are, and we do.
But the reasons why a concept connects with a wide audience and gets passed around the internet is as much art as it is science, and when a client or connection understands both, it gives them the confidence in us we’d need to pitch our silly ideas. We believe in what we do, so everything about the process of connecting with others in our space is the fun part.
Contact Info:
- Website: https://www.kleierbrothers.com
- Instagram: @kleierbrotherscreative
- Linkedin: https://www.linkedin.com/company/kleier-brothers
