Adam Torres and Kevin Collins discuss Secret Walls.
Subscribe: iTunes / Spotify
Apply to be a guest on our podcast here
Show Notes:
Secret Walls is different from other live art events. In this episode, Adam Torres and Kevin Collins, CEO of Secret Walls, explore Secret Walls and how it’s captivating audiences worldwide.
About Kevin Collins
With over 20 years of experience in marketing communications, brand awareness, and experiential, Kevin is a global executive and entrepreneur who leads with vision, creativity, and passion.
As the Chief Executive Officer at Secret Walls, Kevin work alongside the founder and the wider team to scale the world’s preeminent live art entertainment universe, which has been delivering global battles, supporting local artists, and building community for almost two decades.
His mission is to expand our universe with a robust battle schedule, exclusive collaborations, unrivaled storytelling, and more, leveraging the power of live art as a cultural force and a catalyst for social change.
Kevin have a proven track record of successful leadership, team building, and business development, having previously held executive roles at Momentum Worldwide and MKTG, where he drove growth, innovation, and excellence for some of the world’s most iconic brands and events. Kevin always eager to learn, challenge myself, and explore new opportunities in the dynamic and evolving marketing industry.
About Secret Walls
Secret Walls is the Global Leader in Live Art Entertainment.
Built upon the spirit of art competition, founded in London in 2006, Secret Walls is continuing to organize around the best artists and communities in the world – blending IRL + URL Battles and producing the best in Live Art Entertainment, Programming and Storytelling.
Full Unedited Transcript
Hey, I’d love to welcome you to another episode of Mission Matters. My name is Adam Torres, and if you’d like to apply to be a guest of the show, just head on over to missionmatters. com and click on Be Our Guest to Apply. All right, so today’s guest is Kevin Collins, he’s CEO over at SecretWalls. Kevin, welcome to the show.
Adam, thanks, man. It’s great to be here. All right, man. So I’ve been looking forward to this and looking forward to learning more about the project. So I’ve been checking out over at secretwalls. world. So we’re going to get into that and much more. But before we do, we’ll start this episode the way that we start them all, with what we like to call our Mission Matters Minute.
So Kevin, at Mission Matters, our aim and our goal is to amplify stories for entrepreneurs, executives, entertainers and other business owners that we feel need to be heard. That’s our mission. Kevin, what mission matters to you? Well, here at Secret Walls, we’re all about supporting your local artist. You know, that as the driving force, the center of gravity of what we do at Secret Walls couldn’t be more important.
So that sila mentality that we call it really pushes us to think differently about the arts how we open up rooms, how we build stages, who we gather, you know, how we build community. And I think that kind of silo mentality support your local artists for us is what pushes us to, you know, do what we do at the level and scale of which we do it.
And drives us and kind of really defines our mission. And that’s awesome. Great to have you on, and I love bringing on mission based individuals to share why they do what they’re doing, how they do it, and really what we can all learn from that. So good to have you on, and I guess just to get us kicked off here, the idea for Seeker Walls, like how did all that come about?
It’s a great story. My partner, Terry Guy, founded Secret Walls in the streets of London back in 2006, very much at a time when, you know, the global contemporary art scene, the street art scene, the graffiti scene was You know, still under the cover of darkness, it was, you know, there wasn’t space for the art.
This was, you know, pre Mexican, before I exited the gift shop and, everything that’s come since. But, you know, really found an opportunity and a space in gathering the arts community to engage you know, in the creative process and the journey of, of these artists in new and unique ways. So, launched these live paint battles over 90 minutes as a centerpiece for Just a new way of engaging, bringing raw energy of the art space with a competitive edge into a burgeoning, growing, global art scene.
So it really came out of space making, I think, simply put, and trying to, you know, organize ways for, or new ways, I should say, for the art scene to be explored, discovered, and rallied around. Yeah, it’s great. It’s a great story. And for those that let’s go a little bit deeper for those that maybe haven’t and don’t, don’t know what a paint battle is like.
Let, let’s start there. . Yeah. They might be like, wait a minute, paint battle. I know. What is ? I know, I know. It’s, really funny. I mean, it’s like, I, jokingly say that friends and family and, you know, it’s 90 minutes of watching paint dry, but it’s so much more than that. I mean, it, it is, it’s being. At the chef’s table of your favorite restaurant, you know, it’s sitting in the room with a creator watching ingredients come together.
And for us, you know, that, that plate that table is the canvas. And so we bring global contemporary artists in the rooms with live audiences and we put 90 minutes on a clock and artists create freestyle. You know, one of one paintings over the course of that hour and a half and, you know, they’re voted on at the end.
There’s there’s guest judges. There’s a crowd vote. There’s an MC DJ, you know, merge all the things you would want in an amazing night out. Amazing new experience. with the centerpiece being the creative process. There’s no sketching, there’s no pencils, you know, everything is free style, everything is freehand there’s something very powerful about watching some of the biggest contemporary artists in the world like, face an audience and do it in a live setting.
You know, typically this stuff is done in an isolated studio but See the finished product in a gallery, everything in between, but rarely are you in the room smelling the paint, watching the process, and being able to be, you know, in a room watching a one on one get created. Can you talk a little bit about maybe the evolution of this?
I think it goes back to 2006, and I’m just, I’m just trying to picture in my head, like, these artists, you’re trying to get them to come together, or, you know, at some point, and you’re like, yeah, no, we’re gonna do it in front of a crowd, and there’s gonna be a DJ, and there’s gonna be this, or that, or whatever, how did this thing evolve into the juggernaut it is now?
Yeah, I think it was it’s and I was lucky enough to be a fan early like I Happened to trip into a battle at the village underground in London and shortage in like 2011 be Terry. Oh, wow Yeah, so just it was just coming up and you know, just kind of turning into this global phenomenon. I mean it was You really, you know, I don’t think, and I think like every amazing story, it wasn’t planned this way.
I think it was meant to be, you know, let’s throw a party, let’s bring the arts together. And then very quickly when you realized the importance of. Bringing artists into a room, not just like the fan engagement and the competitive side. Like that was fun, but it was meeting one another. It was the ability to like form crews, to lean on each other, to kind of use Tinker Walls as a catalyst to, you know, build.
a lot of these artists didn’t realize they needed for inspiration or you know, checking themselves on ideas for new opportunities, new installations, new, you know, brand deals or commercial opportunities and all that stuff in between. So what was meant to be this, you know, a one off party really, truly became this universe for artists to, you Come together and in a fun celebratory way and to, you know, bring fans around them and in unique and exciting ways but I think the arts community is the reason why it took off the way it did so So quickly the seagull walls went east before it came west So we kind of toured Europe and Asia before moving to the US and you know at the end of 2017 started 2018 so You know, I think the global nature, we’ve been in 50 countries, 150 cities, thousands of battles, and academies, and workshops, and everything in between has You know, been very humbling and in all the best ways.
And it’s so reassuring that what we’re doing makes a difference for so many artists in the career journey that they have. What do you think is kind of the secret sauce that keeps people coming back and that has made the successful? Like, and the only reason I ask this question is because there’s other entrepreneurs out there.
There’s other, we’re hearing this, this term of community building and creating communities like that. We’re both online and offline. Like, I think. You know, post covid, that’s been a really hot topic and buzz. And you know, there’s, there’s secrets and there’s things that you’ve been able to do to keep this community together.
You know, any tips or things that you can think of that have made this successful might help some others in building their own communities, whether it’s an art related or otherwise. Yeah. You know, I think , there’s an authenticity in what we do. You know, I talk a lot about like, what are you doing when nobody’s watching.
And, you know, I would argue what we do behind the scenes, the way we ask questions first to the arts community, you know, we talk to them about brand partnerships that are coming forward, or different rooms we want to open up, we try our best to stay always on, to explore new opportunities, and to really talk to the artists In a way that feels like we’re not just assuming anything and I think there’s you’re right like the community building buzzwords are Everywhere right now.
Yeah, I think you know what secret wallace has done. I mean the reason it’s Become successful is because we give a shit like we do very much care about You know how we go to market and we want to make sure that we’re not taking anything for granted because, you know, each room is a new opportunity to unlock the arts for that city and we need to, you know, hold that and work with with care and how we go to market and all those rooms and all those cities and opening up the dialogue, staying always on with artists asking them questions, soliciting their feedback, how to build community and trust and, You know, not for nothing, we’re part of their, you know, their career journeys and their families crash on our couches, like travel with us, like all that stuff in between, you know, is so important and community isn’t something you tell people to Be a part of.
It’s something that just, that happens naturally, organically when like-minded people rally around the same campfire and, that’s what we’ve done, and we’ll nurture it and treat it with the utmost care and respect. Yeah, I think that’s a great point. , and I, don’t think it can be underestimated the, concept of authenticity and that your community can tell.
Like they can tell what you’re doing. They can tell, you know, if something’s on brand or off brand, if you’re just throwing something against the wall to see if it sticks, like they, they can tell. And, it takes so long to build trust within a community, but you can lose it real quick, real quick, by doing something silly or taking a brand deal or something else that’s Just that right.
So, like, you know, decades of, it takes decades of of delivering and you can lose it real quick. Real quick, yeah, real quick. Let’s talk a little bit about , your role as CEO. First off approximately how long have you been CEO? So I joined formally at the start of 2022. So I come out of 20 years in the creative agency world, holding companies, you know, for the past, I’d say since 2011, when I went to my first battle, I’ve been supporting Moonlighting, you know, working with Terry in the background.
I love stories like this, by the way, when somebody is like, , you were a fan at first and participant and like everything else. And then, and then, you know, they roped you in at some point Well, you know, I think, yeah, I think we were coming out of out of COVID. Like it was life changing for me.
There was this, and artists were leading. That’s all back to Main Street, right? They were tinkering with the new technology. They were like celebrating the power of local storytelling and the power of community. And so you could just see this sort of like burgeoning, like the reimagination of the art space.
And I was, I was pretty bullish when thinking about Secret Walls in that context and the opportunity where I think this is the moment to jump over. Because I’d always, you know I was toying with the idea for so long and Terry was growing in a great way and it just felt like a good time to jump over and support and see what our next horizon point could be.
So I spent, you know, 20 years in the agency world, running sport, culture, entertainment brands from Nike to Beats by Dre to, you know, all the leagues and everything in between. So it kind of sport, at the center of what I do and just brought all of that over to secret walls to see how I could take what I was good at and bring it into the arts community.
And you’re right. You just made a point on You know, one wrong brand deal. Like I’m now the commercial guy, right? Like I’m, I’ve got an agency background. I need to really stop and make sure that as we grow, we’re growing the right way with the artists around us and that everything makes sense. So I have to, you know, over communicate with the arts community as kind of the new guy of like, do this brand deal makes sense for you, for us, you want to be in a room like this, you know, how does this before we say yes to anything, I need to make sure.
You know, I’m pulling the, the art community that supports us, empowers us as well. And so I’m, I’m not kind of taking that for granted, but, yeah. You know, I think we’re pushing into a really fun, exciting time for what Sequel Walls can be. And, you know, the art of competition, we’re on tour right now. I think there’s this kind of whole world that we’re unlocking right now that is, is exciting to watch happen.
So speaking of partnerships or even marketing strategies, I mean, any, any successful marketing strategies that you’ve implemented that you could share or, or just notable partnerships along the way? Yeah. You know, I think we, we, I came into the role with the goal of kind of finding partnerships that weren’t just projects or one offs really like deeply rooting, like we’re supporting the arts.
Here’s why. We want to support it through secret walls. Here’s why. And so, you know, we’re lucky enough to be going to market with monster energy and Posca paint markers, uni ball, you know, there’s some really fun new brand announcements that we’ll make here shortly where, you know, it’s the, it’s brands that are authentically supporting the scene as well.
They are brands, you know, are in a lot of our rooms already. They’re brands that share community with us so that when we do show up, it doesn’t feel like. You know, we’re forcing a logo onto a stage or onto a t shirt, which you know, isn’t a good look It looks it looks like it wasn’t thought through and or You know, it doesn’t land the way anybody wants it to.
So we’re trying to be really careful and thoughtful in how we go to market. But I think we’re, you know, really organizing the story that, that we tell as well. And I think the strategy for me was, you know, if we’re building the house and kind of the front door of the house is our battle universe, it’s what we’ve become known for.
And, you know, it’s this really exciting, visceral way in to the arts. Once you’re in the house though, there’s this infinite space to play. where, whether it’s secret walls academy, which is our workshop kind of curriculum led programming that focuses on aspiring artists and next generation. It’s, you know, secret walls as an agency partner where we’ll help helping bridge the gap between artists and big brands for through the line campaigns.
That’s, you know, it’s a lot of different ways to program with us. And I think reframing the story that way was helpful. And I think it gives, You know, brands and partners, like a clear way in and how to program with them. Correct me if I’m off here. Is your headquarters in LA? We are. Yeah. Yeah. We’re in Koreatown, Harvard Heights, right on the corner of Venice and Western.
We’ve got a Beautiful property, mural yard, warehouse, white box gallery, coffee shop. Man, I thought you were, because when I saw the intake form, I’m like, Wait a minute, they’re in LA, how come I haven’t been to one of these things yet? I’m, I’m right there downtown across from the Grammy Museum, so , we’re a couple miles away from each other.
This is awesome. What kind of, what kind of events, what kind of, what kind of things do you have going on? Yeah, we program quite a range. Right now we’re out on tour, so we’re all across the country. But typically there’s, you know, we’ll host a battle a month. We host a lot of SQL Academy workshops out of HQ.
, we help you know, program a lot of culture led events as well from so far sound company nights to, you know, everything in between. So it’s a very much an epicenter, especially in that neighborhood for the creative art scene on a number of different levels. Yeah, it’s a great neighborhood and, we’re, you know, excited to see what more we can do with the space.
So we’ve got some plans to, you know, keep leveling up, especially as LA comes more and more into focus from World Cups, the Olympics and everything in between. You know? Yeah. So speaking of being on tour what talk maybe a little bit more about the strategy and like what you’re doing to continue to expand globally.
Like talk about that. Yeah, sure. I mean, , we’re trying to ensure that when we and how we expand that it’s done, you know, kind of the theme of the conversation done the right way. It’s done authentically that we’re not just spraying programming into the. You know, into the world and hoping it sticks, but rather with care and ensuring that it lands in these markets the right way.
So I think you know, a great example of us being out on our North American tour right now, which is the second iteration of, of taking our IP out on the road to major markets across the country and, you know, ultimately expanding this into back into Europe and Asia and a bigger way is, you know, it’s, making sure that we.
Are kind of always thinking of new creative ways to program cities. So the tour that we’re on right now isn’t just the battle sequence, which was what it was in 2022. We toured 30 markets in 60 days. It was a grind. It was all battles. We were in and out. This time we’re going in. And on day one, we’ve got a single walled academy, you know, workshop somewhere.
We’re hosting artists dinners bringing everyone together to break bread, you know, beyond just the battles. And then we’ll have the battle sequence usually on the second night, you know, there’s a lot of merge pop up retail and all that good stuff in between that comes on tour with us. So we’re starting to, you know, perfect the platform.
And then as we got it, you know, Fine tune, start bringing it into some of these more global markets. We’re testing programming down in Bogota, Colombia with, with a really wonderful partner of ours down there and just looking at kind of how everything retranslates because we’ve been in all these cities across the world, everywhere, but you know, as we restate some of this IP, that when we go back into market, that it.
Translates the way we hope it will. Man, this is awesome. Well, I’m excited to, excited to continue to follow this story. Let’s see what’s up with secret walls. And when you head back, I’m definitely going to come. I’m definitely going to come in and check it out. I might have to shoot some content down there.
This will be a lot of fun. That being said, Kevin, if somebody’s listening or watching this and they want to learn more and they want to connect, I guess I’d ask you from two different sides here. Brand partnership, you’re welcome. Yep. That’d be maybe one angle, another angle, artists, artists and fans.
Like how, how does everybody connect? Yeah. Well, you know, first secret walls that world, there’s a artist signup page. We get, you know, dozens of portfolios a week submitted. And it’s not just battles, like I said, it’s. You know, it’s direct to brand programming, it’s, hosting academies or workshops.
There’s a lot of different ways to interact with Secretwalls. You know, my email is kevin at the secretwalls. com. I do a lot of the frontline work with brand partnerships and kind of organizing deals that make sense for our universe and the artists within it and our programming. You know, at Secretwalls on Instagram, we’re, , you know, pretty active.
That’s kind of our main Platform. We’re pushing more into TikTok and a few others as well. But Yeah, please come check us out, DM us, follow us, awesome, that’s what I’m talking about. Well Kevin, again, appreciate you coming on the show today. And for everybody listening, just so you know, we’ll put the links to the website and the show notes, so you can just click on the link and head right on over.
And speaking of the audience, if this is your first time with Mission Matters and you haven’t done it yet, hit that subscribe button. This is a daily show. Each and every day we’re bringing you new content, new ideas, and hopefully new inspiration. and your journey. So again, hit that subscribe or follow button and Kevin, thanks so much for coming on.
Thanks, Adam.