Jeffrey Buntin Jr. has a bone to pick with the marketing industry’s endless chase for clicks, views and impressions. As CEO of Nashville’s Buntin, he’s spent three years quietly building evidence for what he calls “beyond attention, conviction”—the idea that getting noticed is just the opening act when lasting belief is the real performance.
The 53-year-old agency has been methodically proving that brands can move past the vanity metric buffet to build something deeper with humans. And the data backs it up.
The Real Cost of Chasing the Wrong Metrics
Buntin frames the problem in human terms. You’re walking down the street, and someone notices your clothes, then keeps walking. That’s attention. But when they stop, ask your name and start a conversation that leads to a genuine connection—that’s conviction.
“There’s fatigue around the shallow, jumpy chase for getting noticed as a hard stop,” Buntin explains. “We’re seeing the power of yes being agile and yes hustling and yes being quick, but also working that from a place that’s deep, not just shallow and fleeting.”
The costs add up in multiple ways—dollar inefficiency from metrics that don’t convert, trust erosion with clients when agencies represent vanity metrics as end goals, and what Buntin calls “human cost” in a world where people are desperate for something deeper.
Three Years of Quiet Experimentation
What started as a couple of strategy team members working on agency positioning became Buntin’s fourth strategic chapter in 53 years. The agency doesn’t choose positioning lightly—when they settle into a value proposition, they mine it thoroughly.
Buntin and his team conducted their own multi-year correlation analysis across five different client industries, studying brands with 2-20 year partnerships. They tracked conviction metrics against revenue growth and contraction, finding a clear two-way correlation.
“We didn’t call Ad Week. We didn’t tell anybody. We just quietly started our own experimental study into whether we could actually prove out that there is a correlation between conviction and client revenue,” Buntin says. “We saw both where things got better, revenue got better, things got softer, revenue got softer.”
The Four Drivers That Build Conviction
Buntin has identified four measurable drivers that create high conviction brands:
Practical: This brand makes my life easier
Emotional: This brand inspires my spirit
Personal: This brand engages with me as an individual
Causal: This brand invites me to help better the world
The weighting shifts by generation—younger audiences lean toward practicality and causality, while older generations respond more to emotional and personal connections. Buntin continuously rechecks these weightings based on the audiences they’re engaging.
“We’re not just doing marketing communication stuff. We’re helping them with customer experience, culture internally within the organization, innovation,” Buntin explains. “We want to be in the brand experience business, not the brand message business.”
Willie Nelson vs. One-Hit Wonders
Buntin uses music analogies that resonate in Nashville. Do you want to be a one-hit wonder or Willie Nelson, still performing at 90 with enduring authenticity? The strongest brand experiences should need the least marketing.
“We want to create experiences and behaviors for brands, not just tell their stories,” he says. “We want to build their stories.”
This approach isn’t limited to enthusiast brands like Patagonia or Yeti. Buntin believes conviction is available to brands in every category—from Tyson frozen chicken to light bulbs to tires. It’s about identifying the qualities that create conviction, making them measurable, then investing in those dimensions.
The Independent Agency Advantage
Buntin’s conviction platform highlights something deeper about independent agencies—their ability to get entire teams fired up around an idea faster and more holistically than larger organizations.
“I’ll take our 125 and put it up against 500 half-convicted people, and we’ll win,” Buntin says. “Clients feel that from independent shops. It’s not about compromising resources or how big we are, it’s about how good we can be, because we can pull something deeper together.”
The agency is now moving beyond measurement to prediction—using their conviction framework to forecast business outcomes for clients. It’s not just philosophy anymore, but a practical engine for transformation.
Buntin believes the future of agency-client relationships lies in deep cultural partnerships where both sides are all-in on something enduring. In a fragmented world fatigued by shallow jumps from one shiny object to the next, Buntin is betting on the long game of human conviction.
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Contact: conviction@buntingroup.com | (615) 244-5720
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