Today we’d like to introduce you to Michael Cunnifff.
Hi Michael, can you start by introducing yourself? We’d love to learn more about how you got to where you are today?
I’m Michael Cunniff. Fort Lauderdale born and raised. Twenty years in the game.
I started where most agency guys start. Hustling creative work for local brands that everyone in South Florida knew and loved. But the market here has a way of fast-tracking talent. Before long I was running full marketing strategy for the kind of names that turn heads.
The New Auto Toy Store. United Health. Blue Martini, Boca Grove Country Club. VanDutch Yachts, Las Olas Capital, Ella Cafe, Inspected.com. Brands that do not settle for average and needed an agency that matched their energy.
That work built my reputation. Five consecutive Best of Fort Lauderdale wins in advertising, PR, and video production confirmed it. But more importantly, it taught me something that most agencies never figure out.
Prestige brands are not built on ads. They are built on authority.
The way a McLaren, Rolls-Royce, or Lamborghini looks under the lights at Jonathan Frank’s The New Auto Toy Store. That presence. That magnetism. It has to translate digitally into their life and lifestyle or it disappears. And for a long time, most brands were invisible online because nobody was treating search engine optimization as a luxury asset.
That realization became The Super Agency. It is the foundation. We build the kind of search presence that matches the brand on the ground. The website, the video, the platform strategy, the content engine. All of it working together so that when someone searches for the best in your category, you are the answer they find.
I served four years as the Marketing Director at Fairway Independent Mortgage Home.com, $2B in team production, working alongside top one percent producers nationwide.
I lead Macken Realty Las Olas Team in the East Fort Lauderdale luxury market. We are hockey players, hard rock employees, bartenders, fun and creative people, that have come together to build a career in real estate. We are very selective with who can join us because of the responsibility that comes with being in real estate.
Three lanes. One ecosystem.
Built for brands that refuse to be invisible.
We all face challenges, but looking back would you describe it as a relatively smooth road?
Smooth? No.
Worthwhile? Absolutely.
Twenty years in this industry means twenty years of lessons that did not come cheap. Partnerships that looked great on paper and fell apart in execution. Moments where I had to rebuild from scratch with nothing but reputation and work ethic holding things together.
The hardest part early on was being great at the craft but not yet great at the business. I could produce content that stopped people cold. I could walk into a boardroom and reposition an entire brand in an hour. But pricing my value correctly, protecting my time, building systems that scaled without me being in every room, those things took years to figure out.
South Florida is also a specific kind of market. It is glamorous on the surface and brutally competitive underneath. Everyone here knows everyone. Your reputation travels faster than your resume. That cuts both ways. It pushed me to be excellent but it also meant that every stumble was visible.
There were seasons where I was doing everything for everyone and neglected building the brand for myself. Agency work can swallow you whole if you let it. You are running full campaigns for clients generating hundreds of millions in revenue and you are going home wondering why your own infrastructure does not look the same.
That tension is actually what built The Super Agency.
I got tired of watching brilliant professionals, mortgage advisors, attorneys, financial experts, people with real results and real credibility, get outranked online by someone with a bigger ad budget and less expertise. The system was broken and I knew how to fix it.
So I stopped playing inside someone else’s game and built my own.
That shift was not easy. Walking away from comfort to bet on a system you believe in requires a level of faith that is hard to explain to people who have not done it. But I had twenty years of proof behind me. And I had seen enough to know that authority built the right way does not fade.
That was the bet. And it is paying off.
Thanks for sharing that. So, maybe next you can tell us a bit more about your work?
Let me start with who I am before I tell you what I do.
Born and raised in South Florida. Fort Lauderdale is not just where I live. It is who I am. I am an ambassador for this place in every room I walk into. The culture. The water. The energy. The people. I carry all of it.
I played quarterback. I was a center on the ice. I was a state qualifying wrestler. I have always been someone who leads from the front and takes the hit when the play calls for it. That mentality did not stay on the field. It came with me into business.
What I do is build digital authority for brands and professionals who are already the best at what they do. Websites. Video. SEO. Content infrastructure. Platform strategy. All of it connected. All of it built to make the right people impossible to ignore online.
But what I am known for is something harder to put in a deck.
I am known for seeing a person or a brand before it sees itself.
And the story that proves that best?
VanDutch Yachts.
I was running marketing for VanDutch North America thanks to my mentor Anko. Beautiful vessels. World class engineering. But I saw an opportunity to do something nobody had done. I positioned the brand with Heineken, Chanel, Stella Artois, Prestige Imports, RedBull McClaren & F1 in port Hercules, it was even featured in Entourage The Movie.. but the coolest? The GROOT on the 55VD. We used it for a movie premiere with VinDiesel, it’s his characters name and means “big” in Dutch. David Grutman, aka Groot-man, saw it. Liked it so much we traded him his 40VD for that 55VD. And not long after, he renamed his entire business from Miami Marketing Group to Groot Hospitality.
You will not read that in any book. It lives between the pages. I have the photos and the receipts to prove it. My friend from UCF Brett David owns the brand today. Humble. Kind.
Miami is funny like that. The moves that shape culture rarely get credited publicly. They just become the culture.
That is the work I am most proud of. Not the campaigns you can Google. The ones that quietly changed the trajectory of something bigger than the original brief.
Beyond that, what I am most proud of is the relationships. I am insanely rich in friendships and experiences. People I have become battle tested with in business. People who trusted me with their brand when it was just a vision. People who are now running some of the most recognizable operations in South Florida and beyond.
That network was never built through networking. It was built through showing up. Doing the work. Being a real human being in a world full of performers.
That is what sets me apart.
Anyone can run an ad. Anyone can build a website. Very few people can walk into a room, understand the soul of a brand in twenty minutes, connect it to the right people and the right moment, and watch something iconic happen.
That is the gift. And after twenty years, I am just getting started
Networking and finding a mentor can have such a positive impact on one’s life and career. Any advice?
Find the best. Work with the best.
That is the whole answer. Everything else is a footnote.
But here is what most people get wrong. They approach mentorship like a transaction. They find someone they admire and immediately ask what that person can do for them. That is backwards. That is a hand out mentality and it will close more doors than it opens.
The best mentors I have ever had never knew they were mentoring me. I got close by being useful. By showing up with something to offer before I ever asked for anything in return. I studied what they were building. I found the gap. And I filled it.
That is how you earn proximity to greatness.
South Florida taught me that. This market runs on relationships but it has zero tolerance for people who only show up when they need something. The people who last here, the ones who build real equity in this community, they are the ones who give first. Consistently. Without keeping score.
Networking gets a bad reputation because most people do it wrong. They collect business cards at events and call it a relationship. Real networking is being the kind of person that people want to call. It is being memorable for what you contributed, not for what you were looking for.
My advice is simple.
Get in the room. Add value before you ask for anything. Be genuinely curious about what the people around you are building. And play the long game. The relationships that have shaped my career most did not pay off in thirty days. Some took years to become what they are today.
My story did not happen because I asked for access. It happened because I brought an idea that was bigger than the brief and executed it at a level that could not be ignored.
That is the move. Always.
Be so valuable, so present, and so authentic that the mentorship finds you.
Pricing:
- You must qualify
- Free community
- Always supporting others
- Available for consulting
- Available for questions
Contact Info:
- Website: https://TheSuperAgency.com
- Instagram: @DukesAllDay_ & @TheSuperAgency_ & @theAuthorityLab
- LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thesuperagency
- Youtube: https://youtube.com/@thesuperagencyfl
