The Agency That Learned to Turn Up the Right Kind of Noise

A song by Lil Yachty, a six-second Vine clip, and a young founder running something he called “MTV on social media” make an unlikely business-school case. But they explain NOISE better than a parade of agency jargon ever could. Joe Laresca was operating Snap TV, a social video company with shows about music, influencers, and glossy homes, when he became preoccupied with how cheaply culture could travel. A tiny clip had helped a song erupt. The media budget, for all practical purposes, was zero. The distribution system was people.

Laresca called it the “Lil Yachty effect.” He did not keep Snap TV frozen in amber. In 2018, he pivoted it into NOISE, initially a tech-enabled entertainment, media, management, and production business. The first model was less a failure than a container he had outgrown. Watching social media move music changed his mind about the size of the opportunity: why own a few shows when you could build the machine that helps other people, products, and places become visible?

The company became the handoff

Today, NOISE describes itself as a full-service advertising agency and venture studio. “Full-service” often means an agency has collected enough nouns for a capabilities deck. Here it means something more operational. The firm lists campaign strategy, art direction, copywriting, social, influencer partnerships, visual identity, packaging, environmental design, photography, video, post-production, events, fabrication, animation, music, public relations, press planning, and crisis management.

The customer is not one tidy species. NOISE has named Amazon, Red Bull, Diageo, Cadillac, Forbes, and Stoli alongside Nick Jonas, Ryan Serhant, real estate developers, hotel groups, restaurants, and nightlife. The problem being solved is usually the same even when the deliverable changes: a brand has to become recognizable, relevant, and coordinated across too many channels at once. Hiring one shop can remove the little translation failures that occur when the strategy firm passes to the design firm, which passes to production, which passes to social, where the original idea is found wearing someone else’s coat.

The business model follows the work. Client projects and retainers fund the agency, with fees shaped by custom scope rather than a posted menu. The company’s public price tags belong to its merchandise shop - $30 hats, $70 hoodies, an $85 crewneck. This is work sold on talent, access, and the size of the assignment, not software seats. Buyers considering NOISE are comparing it with a small federation of specialist agencies as much as with another full-service firm.

Then the agency became its own client

The venture studio is where NOISE stops looking like a familiar agency. In 2020 it built BOOST, an immunity vitamin, from research and product development through brand architecture, packaging, communications, social, and digital marketing. NOISE says the product sold through several production runs and collected design and communications recognition. In 2021 came Bentley Architecture + Design, a studio involved in interiors and hospitality spaces. In 2022, NOISE helped launch Virgo, a Lower East Side house-music club where it is both partner and agency of record. It also identifies itself as an investor in Major Food Group.

This changes the agency-client conversation. It is easier to recommend a brave launch when you have never paid for inventory. It is different when the cap, carton, copy, supply run, and sell-through belong to the same experiment. Venture work can teach an agency where an attractive deck meets the unglamorous physics of a product. It can also blur priorities. A service company that takes stakes and builds its own brands must decide, repeatedly, whether it is adviser, owner, or both.

“We’re not just another agency that’s going to give a client the blanket ‘digital marketing strategy.’”Joe Laresca, describing the early NOISE model

“Latin” is not an audience

NOISE Latin, launched in 2023, supplies the company’s clearest argument. The division works in Spanish and Spanglish and is meant to help brands understand and reach Latin audiences. The plural is the point. Laresca, a first-generation Latin American raised by a mother from Ecuador, has criticized marketing that treats “the Latin consumer” as a single group and decorates campaigns with the same familiar cues. A language can be shared while countries, dialects, generations, jokes, and buying contexts remain stubbornly different.

The work named publicly includes a bespoke Luar capsule for Amazon and Latin-specific campaigns for Red Bull. The division has also talked about developing Latin-inspired brands in food and fashion. Its service pledge gives the positioning some consequence: NOISE says it donates $100,000 in creative and marketing work each year to Latin organizations, a ten-year scale later presented in coverage as a $1 million commitment.

This is where NOISE fits in the market. It is smaller than a global holding-company network and broader than a boutique design studio. It can sell proximity to a founder, a compact team, and several production disciplines, while its MBE certification and Latin ownership support multicultural briefs. The advantage is cultural and organizational closeness. The risk is the same breadth that makes the pitch attractive: “we do everything” works only when the buyer can see who is excellent at each thing.

The part worth stealing

The surface details are easy to imitate: black backgrounds, neon rooms, celebrity photographs, a name in capital letters. The operating lessons are less decorative.

1. Let the first model teach the second. Snap TV gave Laresca a close view of distribution. The pivot preserved the insight and discarded the container.
2. Make specificity a product. NOISE Latin does not merely translate copy. Its premise is that segmentation must survive contact with culture.
3. Own enough execution to protect the idea. Strategy becomes more valuable when the people proposing it understand filming, fabrication, feeds, and opening night.
4. Turn service knowledge into controlled experiments. A venture like BOOST makes branding accountable to inventory and customers, not just approval meetings.

There are conditions. Consolidation helps when a client wants one accountable partner and the agency truly has senior talent across disciplines. It helps less when a narrow technical problem demands the deepest specialist, when internal teams already coordinate vendors well, or when a broad scope outruns a compact staff. Cultural fluency cannot be borrowed for the pitch and returned after production. Venture investing also asks for capital, patience, and a tolerance for conflicts that ordinary client service avoids.

Laresca once answered a question about NOISE’s quick rise with two words: “Brute force.” The company’s later history suggests a refinement. Force gets attention. Listening tells you which kind of attention is worth having. The six-second lesson was never simply that the internet is loud. It was that the right fragment, moving through the right people, can carry farther than anyone planned.