We recently connected with Allan Pham and have shared our conversation below.

Allan, appreciate you joining us today. Let’s jump right into how you came up with the idea?

Before any of this agency stuff was created, I was a pre-pharmacy student at CSULB with a hobby in travel videography back in 2017. This story was previously covered here: https://shoutoutla.com/meet-allan-pham-filmmaker-photographer/

Fast forward to Spring 2022, I got hit up by my good homies at LA Rookies to produce campaign content for their e-commerce brand, “LA Rookies” but during that time I was only interested in travel content so I hit up my friends Luis and Omar who are also content creators to help me with the content production. What I noticed right away was that we all specialized in different categories of content production.

I was good in FPV Drone piloting and videography, Luis was proficient in both filmmaking and photography with a hint of design skill, and Omar was hella talented with photography, lighting setups, and great at social media growth.

During the “LA ROOKIES” campaign, we also met another friend that day, “Brandon Nguyen” who also owned his own agency and recommended us to start our own creative agency, too since he saw how we worked that day together and he liked what he saw. I decided to take that leap into creating “UNTAPPED AGENCY” that same month and legalized the company. It was a huge learning curve for me because it was my first time learning all the legal business stuff, but shoutout to Brandon for guiding us in the right direction with his tips.

In the beginning, we were a bit confused on what to offer for our services but we know we loved to produce innovative video and photo content. We were seeing exponential social growth on our own personal brands and then I had the idea of offering social growth and branding for both local and global brands. I knew we were onto something once we had a more clear direction for UNTAPPED AGENCY.

We named it UNTAPPED AGENCY because of how many local businesses in our Orange County area who aren’t even marketing online yet. Brands who aren’t online are dying, and that’s why we created this agency to bring businesses onto the digital space. Our goal is to bring untapped businesses into the digital space and give them their brand voice and image. If we were able give our personal brand a voice and image online, why don’t we offer it as a service for these businesses, too?

We apply innovative content with a creative strategy to produce data driven results for the brands we’ve partnered with so far. The way Untapped Agency does lead generation is through our personal brands that we already have. Everything has been organic and have spent $0 on paid ads. We’ve already added really big global and local brands (Meta, Insta360, Kei Concepts, etc.) onto our work roster and it’s pretty amazing to see where Untapped Agency is heading into its 2nd year. We’ve just completed our first year in May 2023 and really excited to see where we’re growing into the next years and beyond.

I knew creating this agency would be worth it because of the direction of businesses are choosing to go online and it’s still a new industry. Our team sticks out for sure because I also offer FPV drone services which is a super rare service to find especially in the Orange County, CA area and it’ll make brand marketing videos stand out.

Awesome – so before we get into the rest of our questions, can you briefly introduce yourself to our readers.

I got into this creative agency business all from luck and right timing. I met Omar and Luis before awhile ago but didn’t get into the idea of creating the agency til 2022. We didn’t even know what to offer besides telling people we do photo and video production. Just figured it out as we go and talked to more people on what they need. I was just trying to fill in a gap in the market.

Untapped Agency currently offers creative marketing:
Social strategy, video + photo production, content creation, editing retainers, story-driven ad campaigns, website creatives + social ads

Something that my clients have been raving about to us about is our ability to make them stand out from their competition. I personally offer FPV drone video services for their brand marketing to make their content unique. For people who don’t know what FPV drones are, it’s first person view drones which can be flown indoors and outdoors with acrobatic-like movement. A 4K action camera is mounted onto the FPV drones and it gives a viewers a unique experience when watching the video. It’s been a great selling point for our agency.

I’m most proud of our team at Untapped Agency for handling their respective lanes. I would not have been able to pull this off alone for sure, so shoutout to Luis and Omar for starting this journey with me. Each and every one of us specializes in different skills so that’s what’s been helping us scale so efficiently within the first year. Everyone just stays in their lanes and sticks to what they’re actually good at instead of trying to do everything.

Any insights you can share with us about how you built up your social media presence?

I was on a PNW road trip with my agency homies and I was using Omar’s social strategy on creating Instagram reels with my FPV drone videos. There was a certain way to create these videos regarding the length of the video, the hook, and results of the video reel. I also batched up a bunch of video reels to post consistently throughout the month of May. In the first two weeks of posting IG reels, I saw explosive growth in my personal brand going from 1k followers upwards of 20k followers all within a month of consistently posting. Also, just having unique content will just give you a higher chance to blow up so just be yourself because you can’t burnout being yourself.

We’d love to hear about how you met your business partner.

I met Luis on a different project from my friend Hieu who now owns a business called the Jade Jewelers. I met Hieu a long time ago when we were in different high schools through breakdancing. Fast forward to 2020, Hieu hit me up on instagram to help him on a personal video project and that’s when I met Luis that day.

I met Omar at another shoot my friend Bryan had for his DJ event at a club. I walked in with my video camera set up and he was there doing photography. We just chopped it up there and then went out the next week together to shoot in DTLA like a week before covid became a thing and got locked down.

Contact Info:

• Website: utdagency.com
• Instagram: instagram.com/bgpham
• Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCU3MWKNpioEmtHQjkKy1Llw
• Other: instagram.com/untappedagency instagram.com/omarmaliksalah instagram.com/luislopez.media

Image Credits
All images belong to me