Today we’d like to introduce you to Brandon Adams.
Hi Brandon, thanks for sharing your story with us. To start, maybe you can tell our readers some of your backstory.
Smoking Gun began with a simple belief. Creative should be beautiful, and it should prove that it works. That belief was shaped in Dallas, where I graduated from The Art Institute with a focus on 3D animation and multimedia. My first years were spent inside local agencies building websites, learning the craft from the inside out, and shipping projects that had to load fast, look right, and move people to act.
I then stepped into a different kind of storytelling. Working for Dr. Tony Evans, I developed marketing materials and branding that had to carry purpose with clarity. That season taught me how to respect the message, audience, and stewardship in equal measure.
Next came six years with Dr Pepper. I worked across branding, product development, and point of sale. Scale matters there. Timelines are real, packaging must sell, and the brand has to feel the same in a stadium, on a shelf, and on a screen.
I returned to pure brand building at a Dallas firm, creating identities from logo marks to consumer packaging. Then at The Marketing Arm, as a creative director, I built events and strategies for Frito Lay, Quaker Oats, and Cap’n Crunch. Live experiences leave no room for weak ideas or fuzzy plans.
For 13 years I served at the home of VEX Robotics and HEXBUG as creative director moving up to Vice President at Innovation First. I was asked to grow a small creative group. We built a team from three to more than thirty designers, writers, and marketers creating globally broadcast commercials, media, packaging, 3D and trade events. We learned to think with budget and to measure with discipline.
That led to a challenge I welcomed. How do you know what is working when many channels run at once? Turning everything off one by one is not practical. So we defined expected KPI ranges for each platform, built bell curves to set normal performance, and overlaid sequences across campaigns. We shuffled those sequences and measured the deltas. The model created a consistent way to see contribution without going dark. Analysts began to agree with what we were seeing. The issue was not intuition, the issue was translation to the stakeholder.
That was the spark. Clients deserve proof of truth. When I formed this agency, I made a promise to deliver that proof with total transparency. Deliver the Smoking Gun. We ask each client a basic question. What outcome matters, and what would make you smile. Is it impressions, engagement, qualified leads, return on ad spend, or revenue generated. We align creative and media to that outcome, instrument the journey, and share the view.
Today Smoking Gun blends craftsmanship with accountability. We bring the heart of storytelling, the rigor of measurement, and the humility to adjust in public. From ministry halls to national brands, from robotics to retail, the path has been consistent. Build what is right, show how it performs, and deliver with transparency.
We are a right brain, left brain company. We begin with brand and logo development, clarifying how you want to be perceived and comparing that to how your market actually sees you. From there we build a brand presence that presents you as intended. Your website serves two purposes: it represents your services clearly, and it guides customers through an easy, intuitive journey. We then build the engine behind it with SEO to generate leads and bring buyers to you. We set you up on Google for ranking and visibility. We run media across PPC and Local Services Ads for paid leads, plus social and Meta Ads. Finally, we track your data so we can make informed decisions together.
We tie ourselves to the community with our podcast The Blueprint by Smoking Gun, is a weekly conversation with industry leaders, entrepreneurs, and athletes about the real path to the top. Many guests being local to Dallas and Global leaders, each episode explores the pivotal decisions, setbacks, and breakthroughs that shaped their journey, revealing practical insights you can use right away. We talk about wins and losses, mindset and mechanics, craft and career moves, with thoughtful questions and a touch of humor. From boardrooms to locker rooms to studios, The Blueprint shows how people turn ideas into outcomes and ambition into action, offering an honest, engaging look at what it takes to build something from nothing.
Can you talk to us a bit about the challenges and lessons you’ve learned along the way. Looking back would you say it’s been easy or smooth in retrospect?
The struggle are the gaps between when you have the staff vs the work. as you grow your staff at points cant keep up with the volume that comes in and when to decide to staff up. I call those the gaps and the stretch.
Alright, so let’s switch gears a bit and talk business. What should we know about your work?
Most creatives live on one side of the fence or the other meaning using your creative for Corporate needs or Gallery production.
I do both I love that analytic side of data and what causes people to react for a purpose of driving a brand as well as causing some one to feel something in a painting for emotional release.
In the corporate world I am known for visuals that produce brand lift.
In the gallery world I am l know for creating brightly colored designs mostly centered around portraits that make people think and tell a story.
If you had to, what characteristic of yours would you give the most credit to?
Never quitting!
Contact Info:
- Website: nosmokenofire.com and badamsgallery.com
- Instagram: @badamsart
- Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/brandon.adams.5437/
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/brandon-adams-25375a3/
- Youtube: https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLFxj-nxwwUZJvTTp1VV_ncKd9QdfR6f7A
