There is a
method to this.
A deliberate point of view about what a marketing practice should be.
Method was founded in 2020, but it was more than four decades in the making. The premise was deliberate: the most valuable thing a marketing practice can offer isn't execution. It's thinking.
The kind of thinking that starts with understanding what a business is trying to become and works outward from there. The name isn't a brand exercise. It's a description of how we work. Methodical. Inside-out. Substance over sizzle.
Every engagement begins the same way, with the questions most practitioners skip because they're eager to start producing. What is this business trying to become? Who is the right audience? What does that audience need to believe? What is the clearest, most honest way to say it? The answers to those questions determine everything that follows.
The brand. The positioning. The content. The channels. The execution. None of it's imposed from the outside. All of it's derived from the inside out.
Method works with a small number of clients at any given time, four or five, because that's what significant depth requires. Every engagement gets senior thinking, direct access, and consistent attention. That's the arrangement, and it isn't going to change.
Gary
Hopkins.
More than four decades.
Every phase of the medium.
Gary Hopkins has worked in marketing for more than forty years, through print, broadcast, direct mail, the early web, email marketing, search, social media, content, and now AI. He has guided clients through every major transition in the discipline, not as a technologist chasing tools, but as a strategist who understands what changes and what doesn't.
The tools and techniques have changed. The game hasn't. Reaching the right people with the right message at the right time is still all it is. Knowing that's what forty years buys you.
Gary began his career in Southern California, where he co-founded F Space, a full-service creative agency he and his partner built side by side and led for nineteen years. The agency served major brands including Farmer Bros. Coffee, Yamaha Motorsports, El Portal Luxury Leather Goods, and Rodenstock, among many others. It was a formative run: building a creative practice from the ground up, learning what great looks like, and developing the judgment that comes from doing serious work for serious clients over a long period of time.
From there, Gary moved to the client side, first as Marketing Director for a regional home furnishings retailer, then as VP of Marketing for a Southeast-based large-scale commercial construction company. Those years on the other side of the table were instructive in ways that agency life cannot replicate. They showed him how marketing decisions actually get made inside a business: the budgets, the internal dynamics, the gap between what gets promised and what gets delivered.
He founded Method in 2020, drawing on all of it. The creative direction of the agency years. The business sensibility of the client-side years. The strategic discipline of more than four decades of practice. The result is a practice that thinks like a CMO and works like a creative director, which is, in the end, exactly what the right clients need.
Gary is directly involved in every Method engagement. Not as an account supervisor. Not as the person who pitches and disappears. As the strategist and creative director doing the actual work. That's the arrangement.
In 2017, more than three decades into practicing marketing, Gary went back to study it. He completed a Bachelor of Business Administration in Marketing at Kennesaw State University over five years while running the practice, graduating summa cum laude in 2022 with a 4.0, and picking up the university's best emerging new writer award as a freshman along the way. He's methodical. It's been said of him so many times it became the name on the door.
Outside the practice, Gary has a tinkerer's heart, which is why he's spent a lifetime restoring things by hand: first vintage motorcycles, then bicycles. The same instinct shows up in how he works over a sentence until it's right. He's a lifelong bass player and still plays in a rock band, because rock and roll dreams die hard, and because everything worth knowing about teamwork and communication can be learned in a band. He holds his own at disc golf against his son and his son's friends, a fact he'll mention if given the opening. And he's been married to a superhero badass woman for thirty-five years.
Most of what Gary knows about brands and craft he learned in his father's studios, from the stat camera up. That story is longer, and it lives here: Where Discernment Comes From →
Gary on LinkedIn: linkedin.com/in/gary-hopkins-brand