About

We are Matinee.

More to the point, we are Matt Gonzales and Amy McAdams-Gonzales: a copywriter-designer team with decades of marketing and creative experience. We do branding, campaign development, packaging design, and just about anything else that requires a writer, a designer, or both.

Let's cut the bullshit.

In his 1986 treatise “On Bullshit,” philosopher Harry Frankfurt explained the difference between “lies” and “bullshit.”

A lie, he argued, is a deliberate effort to hide the truth. Bullshit, on the other hand, is wholly unconcerned with the truth. “It is just this lack of connection to a concern with truth—this indifference to how things really are—that I regard as the essence of bullshit,” he wrote.

He continued: “The realms of advertising and of public relations…are replete with instances of bullshit so unmitigated that they can serve among the most indisputable and classic paradigms of the concept.”

Unmitigated indeed.

In our experience, marketing (the umbrella under which advertising and PR live) is so mired in Frankfurtian bullshit that just about everyone—agencies and clients—accepts it as a cost of doing business.

We won’t lie. Early in our careers, we played along. We sat in fluorescent-lit conference rooms as clients sniffed out our bullshit. And a lot of times, instead of saying, “Get that bullshit out of here,” or “Screw that bullshit,” they bought it. Probably because it was better than the bullshit other agencies tried to sell them.

And that sucks. So when we launched Matinee, we decided: No. more. bullshit.

With that in mind, we aim to provide 100% bullshit-free creative services. We have a great deal of marketing experience, and it informs how we work. But the marketing world is so blighted by bullshit that we’ve soured on the word.

Instead, we prefer to say we approach our work from a business perspective. We understand that people hire us because they have to generate attention, leads, or sales. We do our best to help make it happen. And we do it by doing really, really great creative work.

But we’re not going to make bullshit promises. Or give bullshit answers to questions on topics that fall outside our expertise. If you hire us, we’ll listen closely, deliver the project, revise as necessary, and deliver again. And we’ll do it on time, with no ego.

And no bullshit.