The Chris Voss Show - The Chris Voss Show Podcast – Darrell Stern, Unleashing Marketing Magic with Video and Storytelling Wizardry

Episode Date: March 17, 2025

Darrell Stern, Unleashing Marketing Magic with Video and Storytelling Wizardry Stern.marketing About the Guest(s): Darrell Stern is a marketing expert who transitioned from a child voice actor to a marketing visionary, leveraging his unique background to revolutionize video marketing strategies. He started his career at the young age of a kid actor and was famously the voice of Scooter Computer on ABC's Schoolhouse Rock in 1983. Fast forward to his adult life, Darryl founded Stern.Marketing and Stern Marketing Agency. His innovative methods in digital marketing emphasize combining video content with strategic blogging to dominate search engines. Episode Summary: Join host Chris Voss in this riveting episode as he interviews Darrell Stern, a marketing guru with a unique approach to digital marketing. Once a child actor, Darrell shares insights from his journey from the world of ABC's Schoolhouse Rock to becoming a strategic force in video and content marketing. This episode is packed with actionable insights on how businesses can leverage video coupled with expertly crafted blogs to skyrocket their online presence. Darrell delves deep into how he helps entrepreneurs and businesses capture stories that resonate on a personal level, aligning with Google's search algorithms. Discover his revolutionary tactics of transcribing videos into articles that not only attract organic traffic but also build credibility and audience trust. Darrell explains this strategy through case studies like Saul, the mechanic who skyrocketed his business using video storytelling and smart SEO practices. Key Takeaways: Merging video and blog content is a powerful strategy for dominating Google's search results. Businesses should focus on creating relationships through authentic storytelling rather than traditional advertising methods. Sextons need to truly understand video marketing mechanics and storytelling to pull out potential viral stories. Darryl stresses the importance of continually appearing in social feeds to nurture leads and maintain brand presence. The value of expertise: Ensure your marketing reflects true proficiency and knowledge in your domain. Notable Quotes: "If you think sex is a pain in the ass, you're doing it wrong." "Video is everything. What is it? Video killed the radio star." "Every business person needs a little acting background. The show must go on." "The internet was invented so we could link all that together." "All of your stories are already inside of you. All I've got to do is pull them out of you."

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Now, here's your host, Chris Voss. I'm host Voss here from the Chris Voss show.com. Ladies and gentlemen, welcome to the big show. As always, the Chris Voss Show. The family loves you, but doesn't judge you at at least not as harshly as the rest of your family because we're just nicer people over here. Go to Goodreads.com for us, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com for Chris Foss, Spook.com for us, Chris Foss, all those crazy places.

Opinions expressed by guests on the podcast are solely their own and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the host or the Chris Foss Show. Some guests of the show may be advertising on the podcast, but it is not an endorsement or review of any kind. We have an amazing old man, Darrell Sterns, joining us today. He's going to be talking to us about his insights and how he used going from a voice actor as a child to growing up to becoming a marketing genius, as it were, when it comes to video and things of that nature.

Darryl, welcome to the show. Thank you very much, man. This is it. This is the big show. This is the big moment that I've been waiting for. So this is it. Darryl Stern, give us your dot coms or dot marketing. Where do you want people to find you on the interwebs?

Sure, if you want to check out all the work that I've done, you go to stern.marketing. And if you want to jump right in with me, you go to sternmark marketing. And if you want to get jump right in with me, you go to stern marketing dot agency. Ah, so give us a 30,000 overview. What you do there. Sure. I grew up in New Jersey.

I was a kid actor. Uh, I was the voice of scooter computer on ABC schoolhouse rack back in 1983, which was one of the first series of, of, you know, cartoons to feature this thing called a computer. So I introduced about 12 million American kids to computers. So all of the, those notifications on your phone are my fault. It's your fault. I apologize.

I blame you. It's my fault. So then fast forward, I quit all that to learn this thing called HTML, started a website design business in 2002. And then fast forward from that, people start making videos and they're not good. And then all of a sudden I start to accidentally coach them in how to act on camera. And then that changed my whole business around where you walk into the room.

Videos everything. What is it? Video killed the radio star? Yeah, most definitely. We love video. I mean, we were doing video on the podcast before. Most people were doing podcast videos because it was so hard to fucking crank it and put it across the internet and do everything. Most definitely.

How do you get involved as a child in the school house rock thing? My dad was my first talent agent. So they put on the play Pippin, the musical in the seventies. And my dad was a philosophy professor at King University. And he said, my son will play the role of Theo. So he was my first casting agent. So he got me the part in the little musical and that was it. I was hooked by the time I was nine, I had a manager and an agent in New York City So I've been junior high school Parents get to call hey You've got an audition and they would pick me up from school a little bit early and zip me into New York City

My dad would drive around the block with enough phones They just drive around the block and I'd go up and audition So some of the most memorable ones for of that are I bet Stevenberg. I used him for the Goonies. That would have been a great thing to get. Almost, but I, but it was for the role of Chunk. So it wasn't like the really cool kid. It was like, you know what I mean? I don't know. It was always like, eh, I don't think it's actually, it might've been good that I didn't get it, but I worked with Chunk. I got offered the role of a big ogre guy and, but they wouldn't have

to put me in makeup. So of course you did. Perfect match. Yeah. I love it. I'm a dead ringer. Yeah. All kinds of different things.

I was in a TV commercial for the Atari 24. What was it? Atari 2600 is Pac-Man. The very first, you know, video game that you can play at home. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. So ABC had a mini series out called the winds of war and they paid like a billion dollars to have this on TV.

So I go to the mailbox one day and have my parents this envelope and it's a check for $8,500. Holy crap. And my parents said, maybe I want to send you more of those, you know, TV thing gigs and not so much theater stuff. Yeah. Plus you don't have to pay for food for this kid. He's got checks coming in.

Yeah. One hundred percent. So how did you keep from turning into one of those child actors that goes to hell and gets on drugs and that home alone guy, basically? Well, my parents were not stage parents. I remember being in New York City, sitting in the car and looking at the corner, you know, after I auditioned and there's a mom there with her little boy and I don't know what they were talking about, but she took her hand and just, you know, smacked him around

the face and you know, my parents were actually discouraging me. They said, you know, if you want to stop this, we can stop it at any time you want. And there's a lot, you know, driving in, driving in and out of the city and all this kind of stuff that we did. But I just loved it. And I mean, I also took vocal classes when I was very young, the future words like stack encyclopedias on my, you know, on my stomach so I can do pushups with my diaphragm and all of it ended up serving me a heck of a lot later when it comes to business and speaking to people and coming on camera and saying you know hey everything's super fantastic like you every day right it doesn't matter if you're having a bad day that mic goes on you know how it is and bam you're on you're on like another level so it helps every business person I believe to

have a little acting background. The show must go on. Most people don't know I cry when I'm not on the show and then I'm just really happy for that hour and then I go back to crying all the time in the fetal position. We cry when your show's not on. That's true. That's why we do three to four shows a day people. We're doing four today. So let's see. So you get into the video business and helping clients, talk to us about that. Well, sure. The most amazing thing happened in 2016 when I met a young

auto mechanic named Saul, he said, I want to be the number one auto mechanic in the whole state of Colorado. And I had this theory since Google owns YouTube and they also own, of course, blogging and searching. I'd seen all the bloggers come up and then there's these YouTubers coming up, but nobody was doing both at the same time. Nobody was vlogging and blogging at the same time. So what I did was I created them huge site with literally 60 landing pages, one for each and every type of car that there is.

And then I went down to a shop and started relentlessly videoing him, fixing the cars. Now in my generation, we might be about the same age. I'm 53. You know, we got into video on the internet. We started making commercials, right? Come on down to uncle Tom's barbecue. And we've got all the sauces that you like. And that's not how social marketing really works. It's more about creating relationships and proving it, showing that you could do it. So I just made videos in relentlessly fixing these

cars and explaining how he did it. But I also took the videos transcribed them and made them into articles at the same time. So pretty soon he was coming up number one, two, three, four, six, seven, eight, nine, 10 on Google for fixing just about every type of car. But the first one that we did was the luxury cars and he started scaling his business literally from 50 grand to 80 grand, 120 grand. And apparently I was right. And since then it's funny, cause I don't see anybody else doing this. And it's, it's pretty obvious to me if you Google something and there's not a video in the search that is a hole in the market and you can fill it. Pete Slauson

Ah, fill the holes in the market. Yeah, it's when we started the Chris Voss Show podcast, we started doing videos and we actually served them to iTunes. After a while, we gave up because we heard, at least on the podcast video, we do make videos, they go to YouTube, but serving them to iTunes, we quit doing and people just told us they didn't watch them. They listened to make videos, they go to YouTube, but serving them to iTunes, we quit doing. And people just told us they didn't watch them, they listen to the videos. Even on YouTube, they tell me they listen to the videos. But if you're doing something professional, you know, that's selling people or pitching them something, you've got to have something that can pitch them well. Yeah, 100%.

However, you're correct. I mean, podcasts are radio shows. That's what they were meant to do. They're invented by the guys that made the iPod Back in the day before the iPhone So it's kind of funny now how some people are pitching well here, you know buy this huge TV Studio for your business and you know, oh my god spend all this money producing this big TV show now and I go I don't think you really need to do that. Because I shot all my videos on a, you know, a phone with a clip on like this mechanic and we actually scaled his business.

So the production quality needs to be there. And I love you, Chris, because you're every time I turn on LinkedIn, every time I turn on anything, there it is. There's the Chris Walsh show. I mean, you kind of pop up every day. No, but it's a good, cause it just, it just a constant social is also like lead nurturing, right? It's like, I'm one day I'm going to come on the show or one day I might even listen to an episode. You never know, but you're always there. You're always coming up at all

the time. And that's what we want until it just becomes, Oh yeah. Chris Ross podcast. That's the first thing I think of now when I say the word podcast. Awesome. Wow. You're making your, I'm getting hard on just thinking about that. Thank you. I'm excited. Listen, sir, the late show doesn't start until 10 PM, but you can have me back. Yeah. The, you know, I've heard that a lot. People are like, you're everywhere. Like you just took over my LinkedIn and yada, yada, yada. And, and I mean, we do, we do a lot of stuff. We call ourselves the Netflix of podcasting because we do 10 to 15 shows a week. Sometimes more and we give people so much content and they'll, they'll binge the fuck out of it.

Like I had the prior guests on today. He said, so do you publish this in five months? And go dude, and he knows of course we don't do that But that's like dude is you can't publish every five months your audience goes and finds me and they're like hey This guy's got a lot of listen to you Let's do this and some people press play and they just I mean they consume 96% of our shows So they're just I think I think the 4% is they hear me, you start rapping their show at the end and they skip to the next. I think that's what.

Yeah. The next step would be to take those podcasts or at least the very, very best ones that you really like, like the ones with Daryl Stern and I'm in people like me and take those and transcribe them and make them into articles. Now I'm not talking about a summary. Some people post on the internet, the show notes and the little notes. I'm not talking about that. I'm talking about transcribe the whole thing and then go through it and then

see what words you are constantly being used and start to link them together. And then all of a sudden you'll have people that never heard of a podcast, but they're looking to learn ABCD or, and they'll find one of your episodes in there, or maybe a number of them, and you'll have a subscriber for life because your podcast episode actually helped them with a specific question because they want to get answered. Pete Slauson One of the things we had with the, we tried doing full subscriptions, transcriptions on the Chris Foss Show website, along with the show notes. And the web, I can't remember who shit the bed. I don't know if it interfered with

the serving of the things or shit the bed on the WordPress because the posts were too long. Because you don't have the digital marketing Jedi working on it. Wow, that's why. I mean, since you're a drop... So one of my jokes with, you know, cause I talk to videos and I talk stuff and people say, I did that. I tried that. You know, I did, we do videos. We tried that and all that. And I said, well, if you think sex is a pain in the ass, you're doing it wrong. Oh, all right. One of the two, I'm going to look back into that and do articles. Cause we, we have the show transcribed. Um,

into that and do articles. Cause we, we have the show transcribed. Um, so here's the, yeah. So here's the thing, Chris, it's if you, there's an old fashioned thing called books, okay. They're made at cross pieces of wood. I know some of your younger members, why not know those something called cages. Right.

So in the back of a book would be an index, right. And it says the Christmas show and all the words that you use throughout the, the podcast and what pages of it they're on. So the whole internet was invented so that we could link all that together. So that if your book mentions me, the person doesn't have to go back to the public library and go get out my book. It's all linked together one to the other and we can speed through all this information on the internet. That's why it was made. So it's not just transcribe it and you publish it and that's it.

It's that then you go in and you really optimize that content by interlinking different things together that you say. And then you never know. You might not even know if I told you what's the top, you know, topic that you talk about, you might think it's this, but if you actually do it, you might say, wait a minute, no, I talk about this a whole lot more than that. You know what I mean? And all those kinds of things. Yeah.

It might tie into, one of the things we like is the big, like when we make our video, you can see that there's my face, your face, there's the Chris Fosha logo. And then with a book author, we usually have their book in the screen too. We call it the big SEO, Google SEO grab. You know, the SEO will pick up all that stuff on the video, but maybe we should do something like that with an article. I'll have to figure out why the, a lot of people, when they do the, oh, I suppose you don't have to publish the whole transcript for an article. You just publish the pieces. Like Bob said on the show, yada,

yada, yada. Nope, it's the whole thing. The whole thing, okay. So, the point of it is, because where you get stuck is you think who's going to read that or isn't that too long, whatever. The point of it is not that they're going to read it. The point of it is that Google is going to read it and index it and all those kinds of things.

And it's just amazing how many pages, if you did write it out, you know what I mean of content you have said, right? How many pages do you think it is? 50,000, 250,000 pages. You've written the longest book on, on doing business and making podcasts and all that, that anybody ever has. And then eventually you can take that and string them together and actually publish a book of your best interviews. And now we've got another bestseller.

Oh, yeah. I'm going to look into it. I'll have to try and figure out why the WordPress is shitting the bed. For some reason, I like it totally went ape. We did about 10 of them and it kind of shit those beds. You help clients with this, talk to about some of the services you offer to clients. Who do you work with? Does they need to have a certain amount of spend or a certain amount of size? Yeah.

You know, that sort of thing. Sure. So it's really funny because people also ask, you know, like your niche, you're here as target audience, target, you know, person and all that. And I say, I work with experts. And it's really funny when we talk about influencer, the hottest topic in the world for the past 10 years or so. And I say, well, influencers is someone who demonstrates their expertise, meaning that most influencers should be at least for something, an expert at something. So my auto mechanic had two PhDs, one for physics and one for engineering.

The lady that I helped sell 6558 of her course on curing cancer, again has two PhDs, you know, and Dr. Jacoby here in Scottsdale who proved that sugar is not the root of all disease because it causes nerve compression, you know, high end doctor and all those kinds of things. If you're trying to market something, make sure you're good at it first. If that makes any sense, because sometimes there's all kinds of stuff flashing on the internet now, oh, buy this kit, you know, make this type of funnel and you're in business. I go, okay, great. But then when it comes down to actually doing it or serving the customer or, you know, getting

feedback from people that you have as clients, if you're not that good and you don't know what you're doing, then none of it's going to be worth it, any of this marketing. So that was, yeah. Yeah. It'll do that. So you helped them, you helped them do their videos. You mentioned you came back from someplace and you were helping a client do 200 videos,

did you say? Yeah. So I was just at ClickFunnels, which is supposedly the last one they're going to do. Russell Brunson's big thing that he's been doing for 10 years called ClickFunnels Live. There's about 5,000 of us marketers there all in one room. And I caught this one guy in the shoulder. He's way taller than me. It turns out that he's from Nebraska and I gave him all gave him all my stuff. And the next day he said, that looks good.

And then I got to know him now over this weekend, cause I actually shot 200 videos of him in one weekend and he's all online course. So I just got back from where I live this morning from doing that. And what is this all about? So all of your stories are already inside of you. All I've got to do is pull them out of you, get them organized and then work on them with you one after another, after another, after another. And believe it or not, we can shoot 200 of these in two days and all the videos that you need for the entire, all your marketing are done for the next six months in two days.

Because you already have all the gifts in you, you already have the stories, I just got to pull them out. So this is why my business, I love it because it's directing again, it's directing actors. And that's what I used to do when I had a marionette puppet, you know, Mickey Mouse when I was three years old and I'd make little shows and bring the, you know, my parents had to sit through the thing over and over. They were the only audience I would make them sit down and watch the marionette

puppet show. But, but it's just something that I'm naturally gifted at. So another part of it, Chris, is, you know, did you pretend to be on the radio when you were a kid? Do you know what I mean? Did you pretend that I say, okay, great, this is why he's really doing this. This is why it's so much in alignment is because he saw himself doing it decades before there even was a computer, you know, whatever, a YouTube or a podcast or whatever. And that what makes this show so viral and so well known. You think all it's good marketing or how, you know, they think it's all mechanics. Like this is because they marketed this or they posted this many times or whatever. And I go, no, it's because Chris has been a radio show host since he was five years old. Kind of. That's why it's so good. I used to live next to the radio and, you know, try and get him to play my song. And I'd call in and then I'd sit

there going, they're going to play Rush and they never play Rush. Exactly. And which created your desire to say, I want to be the guy on the radio because I want a Rush station 24-7. Yeah. I don't know what you're doing interviewing all of us. You should just make your Rush station and be like, and now guess what we're going to play guys? That's what we're going to play.

More Rush. More Rush. So by the way, guys, it's music time. We'll be lighting up some Rush here, putting on the LP, the Rush LP here in a bit. I can't do a radio bit right now. So what more do we need to know about your service, how you work with others, what clients are good for you, et cetera, et cetera?

Sure. I teach marketing as well. I run a marketing academy. Now with this newfangled AI, I figured out a way to take a transcription of the video that you can get it for free and then actually write it out double spaced with the bullet points and the emojis and all that kind of stuff in the format that will go viral. I can get you up and running in literally an hour and doing your marketing much more efficiently than you are now, in a way that's actually going to attract people in and get

them to talk to you all the way up to full scale projects like coming to visit with you and filming all these videos and then putting them out and all this kind of stuff. No matter what level you're at. But I say all of us need to have a base level, learn this stuff by now. And there's a lot of us in our in my generation, Generation X, probably yours, you know, they just kind of skip this, they skip the internet. They just kind of skip this they skip the internet and now with a inflation high and we're realizing You know, we don't have enough money when we were supposed to retire now all of us are going. Oh crap Yeah, I've got to try and do this and I don't know a thing about it now because I missed it I skipped it so I kind of like bridge the generations because I make it so easy You know to learn and understand through philosophy because my father was a philosophy professor. No matter what your level, I just like to teach this stuff. I love it teaching. My parents were teachers.

Pete So, as we go out, give people your final thoughts, your final pitch out, where can they onboard with you, etc., etc. David Sure. If you take out your phone and you text SEO to 321-421-5213, You'll get a bunch of lessons from me and an invitation to audition to go Stern Storming. Now, my parents spelled my name the French way, so it's D-A-R-R-E-L-L. And my last name is Stern. So you can look me up at any of these social media things. My favorite is LinkedIn. they go over there and look me up. And I can't wait to talk to you more

and for us to see how many stories in you that you're skipping over that are your viral stories that are a gift to the world. And I imagine you help a lot of companies maybe tell their story. I mean, that's a big thing now where companies need to tell their stories. Sure, Zig Ziglar said you hire people

so they can build your company. You know, right? You don't hire, you don't put people in the company so the company will grow itself and people do it. Right, so I've worked with Osteostrong, the largest biohack franchise in the world. Went to 42 of their centers from 775 video testimonials and stories from the franchise owners.

This group, they're a B2B company that does epicor implementation. So I went and filmed all of their people, all of your people know their stuff and have these stories that can drive the revenue of the entire organization. Wow. The stories of the business and everything. Yeah. It brings a human element to everything. Yeah. It also brings,

it lets everybody know that it's not a, they're extroverts. And I'm not, you know, they're in show business, but I don't do that. Everybody has great stories and the more people that normally wouldn't hear from finally speak up, the more we can get things done, the more businesses can grow and the more the world will expand. Everybody wins. Everybody wins. Thank you very much for coming to the show.

We really appreciate it, man. I appreciate you, Chris. Keep rocking it. Thanks, Terrell. And thanks to our audience for tuning in. Go to Goodreads.com, Forchess, Chris Foss, LinkedIn.com, Forchess, Chris Foss. Chris Foss won the TikTok and he all those crazy places, and it'd be good to each other. Stay safe. We'll see you next time. And that's your episode, man.