Today in Digital Marketing - Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers

Episode Date: October 4, 2024

Today, Tod speaks with Steve Pratt, author of the new book “Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers.” His book is available at https://www.stevepratt.com/bookSteve is the co-founder of the Pacific Content branded podcast company and former head of digital audio at CBC Radio..📰 Get our free daily newsletter📈 Advertising: Reach Thousands of Marketing Decision-Makers🌍 Follow us on social media or contact us.GO PREMIUM!Get these exclusive benefits when you upgrade:✅ Listen ad-free✅ Back catalog of 20+ marketing science interviews✅ Get the show earlier than the free version✅ “Skip to story” audio chapters✅ Member-only monthly livestreams with TodAnd a lot more! Check it out: todayindigital.com/premium✨ Premium tools: Update Credit Card • Cancel.MORE🆘 Need help with your social media? Check us out: engageQ digital🌟 Rate and Review Us🤝 Our Slack.UPGRADE YOUR SKILLSGoogle Ads for Beginners with Jyll Saskin GalesInside Google Ads: Advanced with Jyll Saskin GalesFoxwell Slack Group and Courses.Today in Digital Marketing is hosted by Tod Maffin and produced by engageQ digital on the traditional territories of the Snuneymuxw First Nation on Vancouver Island, Canada. Associate producer: Steph Gunn.Some links in these show notes may provide affiliate revenue to us.Our Sponsors:* Check out Kinsta: https://kinsta.comPrivacy & Opt-Out: https://redcircle.com/privacy

It is Friday, October 4th. I'm Todd Maffin. Today, a special deep dive episode. They say that the world's most valuable commodity is attention. So, of course, as a marketer, all you need to do is get your audience's attention. Problem solved. Actually, the problem is that every other marketer, including your competition, are trying to stand out as well. How you earn that attention without alienating your buyers is at the heart of a new book by Steve Pratt called Earn It! Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers. Steve and I worked at CBC Radio, Canada's public broadcaster, together about 200 years ago. He was director of digital music for CBC Radio and head of the CBC Radio 3 network for more than a decade. He then co-founded Pacific Content,

one of the top branded podcast producers. And though he sounds and is young, I'll have you know he once worked for America Online, something that our younger listeners may even have to Google to understand the significance of that. He joins me from his office in Vancouver. Hello, Steve.

Hey, Todd. How's it going? It's good. Steve, why do you like charcuterie boards? Great question. I like charcuterie boards as an unusual way to convey XY graphs. I love that you opened with this question. When we had this branded podcast company, one of the things we looked for was almost

like a very short form recipe for how to find success making a podcast from a brand. And our CFO came up with this graph, again, very basic XY graph. On the bottom axis was creative bravery, which is our term for, are you going to make a real show? Are you going to get out of the way and stop making things that are about you and instead start making things that are from you that people are looking forward to and value? one company and market this thing effectively and put this creatively brave show out into the universe in front of the right people in a way that they're actually going to want to sample it. And we tried out the idea of like how to present this to a client in a restaurant with a charcuterie board.

So Slack, the messaging app in its early days was our very first client at pacific content and we wanted to kind of test run this idea and so we actually built the creative bravery commitment graph out of meat and cheese uh with a knife and a fork being the xy graph on a wooden block um in a restaurant and they loved it and we kind kind of, ever since then, every single session we had a new client, we opened by putting this giant XY graph on a whiteboard. And then as we developed the show and moved through different stages, we would keep coming back to the graph

and being like, where are we on the graph right now? Where's our creative bravery and where's our commitment? And it was a great way of using charcuterie to get people to do better work that earned more attention. Can I push back a bit on creative bravery? Yeah. I feel like every brand thinks they're being brave with their creative though. And really what's brave for a conservative brand looks very different than what's brave for a more free-flowing brand. How does a marketer know when they're pushing the boundaries far enough, creatively speaking, to move the sales needle without risking damage to the brand? Well, I think it's a great question because it is relative to

every brand and there's no universal scale of creative bravery. I think there's a couple tests. One is what's creatively brave for you could be a way of thinking about it. But really, most of it is thinking about who the end consumer of the content is, whether it's a podcast or a video or an email newsletter. Is this something that they're actually going to look forward to and appreciate? Is this going to create value for them? is this something that's coming from you but not about you and you know i i think of a lot of it as a gift is what is the gift that we can give that can only come from us that is intended and designed for the people you're trying to reach if it doesn't feel like it's a gift and it doesn't feel like it's going to create value your marketing is going to be ignored i mean there, there's, there's so many things that are vying for people's attention all day, every day. And it's not just marketing. It's like, it's everything. And I think about it a lot. Like, you know, people have built up like almost like these

fortresses around themselves to protect themselves and to protect their attention. And you have to be really, really good to be able to kind of get the pass to get let into the gates where it actually gets people's attention. And so when you think about creative bravery for you, it's almost like, is this good enough to get into the attention fortress? Is it going to earn its way in there?

Because otherwise you're going to be ignored and a lot of the stuff you're making is kind of for naught. Yeah, you mentioned in the book, your time at America Online, where they were using these full screen pop-up ads and then they pulled their users and the users say, we hate them. And it's like, yeah, well, that's great, but we're going to keep using them because they work. You know, it reminded me, we have a client in the healthcare sector and one of their ads is an older guy with a Southern drawl and he's almost in tears because his client's product worked for him and

now he doesn't have pain. And we field hundreds of complaints about this ad on social media a week from people who see it. And they see it a lot because our client is using, you know, there's high frequency there. So when this first started, we reported it to our client who said, sure, they hate it, but this is our top performing ad of all time in terms of sales. We're going to keep running it. Steve, who's right here, the consumer or our client? You know what? I have to say it depends.

I don't know what the proportions are of how many people they are annoying versus how many people they're finding that are the right people. I would say if there's a whole bunch of people being annoyed, they're wasting money in some way, shape or form by targeting the wrong people or they're hitting them over and over and over again with a message that they don't want. And I would say my concern, if I was talking to your client would be, there's a lot of people out here that like the thing that you're, that you're spending money to put out is, is annoying people and creating a negative brand perception and when i look at you know if you just research a little bit about conversion rates of some of these things i think you would probably

know better than i would um on all the different platforms a lot of them are kind of like sub one percent yeah conversion rates so it's you know to get the 1% or maybe the 1% becomes 2%, are you willing to annoy or give 98, 99% of the people exposed to it a negative brand impression? I just think there's a better option, which is why don't you make things that people love? Like, you know, you don't have to interrupt people and make things that annoy them. You don't have to, you know, drill the same message in over and over and over again, like it's some, you know, sort of cult or something like that, or, you know, a propaganda campaign. You don't need to follow people around the internet, you know, like a private investigator, you can decide to actually make things that people want to spend time with and where they're grateful that you made something. And there's no better brand perception or beginning of trust and relationships and eventual customers than making things that people really enjoy spending time with. And I think one of the questions that people could

ask themselves more often is at the end of spending time with the marketing I think one of the questions that people could ask themselves more often is at the end of spending time with the marketing that we put out, would people say that that was time well spent? If they had a chance to do it again, would they say like, yeah, I would do that again if I had the choice and I knew what I was going to get out of it? It sounds like a lot of people at your client's company would say, absolutely not. I would actively try and avoid any interaction with that in the future. And I don't think that does anybody any favors. The fact we're even talking about it is not great because, you know, there's positive word of mouth. And then there's, if I see that frigging ad one more time, you know, it's not a good look.

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business insurance? If not, how would you pay to recover from a cyber attack, fire damage, theft, or a lawsuit? No business or profession is risk-free. Without insurance, your assets are at risk from major financial losses, data breaches, and natural disasters. Get customized coverage today starting at $19 per month at zensurance.com. Be protected. Be Zen. I wonder if we'll ever on Meta's ad platform or any of these ad platforms, we've got columns that are conversion rate and frequency and impressions and reach and all that. I wonder if our industry needs a metric for, I don't know, percentage of pissed off. Well, yeah, I think you could flip half the numbers in there of conversion to know that the opposite of that is probably people pissed off.

Yeah. Yeah. Or just the wrong people or not the right fit and i think one of the counterintuitive things that i talk about it a lot is you know if you really zoom out and think about this differently some of the core metrics are you know like about reach are you know are worth a second look, um, from my perspective anyways, like I, I, I'm always a champion of thinking about time and engagement, um, versus reach because the reach number is something that's like easy.

You can just kind of do a spray and pray campaign and just get it out to a lot of people, but you end up with a lot of people who are not the right people or a lot of people where you're annoying them because it's not the again, not the right fit. I think there's ways to do, you know, and digital has done a lot better than broadcasting in this space, but to be very targeted and thinking about value creation for the people you're trying to reach where they're actually very pleasantly surprised that they have an interaction with you with something that they're looking forward to or grateful that they've spent time with. And if you're putting content out there, and whether it's in a video or whether it's a podcast, looking at metrics like the amount of time that people spend with you or a completion rate are a signal of whether you're creating value for people or not. A lot of podcasts, you can see a completion rate where it's, you know, again, a very basic X, Y graph, but just the amount of time in the video or the podcast episode on the bottom and a percentage of how many people are still there listening to it

or watching it. And a lot of things just start shedding audiences within the first minute, because people are coming in and sampling and figuring out is this going to be worth my time and attention am i going to stick around for it and stuff that's mediocre or boring or conventional or doesn't have kind of a value proposition right out of the gate for it people start leaving and when you start thinking audience first and attention first as a kind of an attention strategy for the stuff you're putting out there you can get things where you get people like 80 90 95 percent of the way through a piece of content over and over and over again where they're spending tons and tons of time with your brand and suddenly they kind of have a relationship with you they know who you are they know what you

stand for they know what your voice is they look forward to hearing from you. And when it comes time to become a customer, when they have a problem that you can solve, it's very, very likely they're going to choose you, the people that they've spent lots and lots of time with, where you've been generous and created something great for them first, that they will choose you over your competitors that they, you know, might be getting spammed with on the internet. So all of that is great. At some point, we've got to create the thing, though, whether it's a podcast or a video ad or a series of images in a carousel. So you're at the planning table.

You've got your client or your boss there. You have an absolutely killer question that I had never thought of. In fact, I don't think I've ever heard in a business meeting. And as soon as I read it, I could see how it could turn a creative planning meeting around. What is that question? The question is, you know, insert your medium here. Would you read this, watch this or listen to this if you didn't work here? And, you know, would you tell other people about this if you didn't work here because you know would you tell other people about this if

you didn't work here because it's so good or so interesting or so valuable um if you really look in the mirror the answer is often no um and it's obvious why because it's usually about you and not from you or it is usually designed with your needs at the center of it and you need to have a job to get done obviously like there's a marketing job to get done but i think the piece that is missing is thinking about like we actually have to earn our way into the conversation to talk about why you know why we're interesting or why we're valuable first if if if we never get any time or attention, again, everything is for naught. Yeah. The first chunk of your book is sort of about these broad concepts, which I think are really valuable. You then get into the production side of things, how to shoot, how to edit, and so on later on in the book. But before we get into that sort of more tactical part, one thing that

I thought was really interesting is there's a form of therapy out there called dialectical behavior therapy. It helps people with personality disorders. I'm sure you were not merging or suggesting that marketers have personality disorders, but I think you think that it can help marketers. How? So, yeah, so it's a great,

it's a, you know what? It's funny because it is for, for people like personality disorders and also emotional regulation issues and things like that. Okay. So it is a great, it's a, you know what? It's funny. Cause it is for, for people like personality disorders and also emotional regulation issues and things like that. Oh, okay. So it is for marketers. Yeah, there you go.

Uh, it's, they're just really fabulous skill sets that honestly I've like, the more I've learned about it, the more I'm just like, this is like a, a really valuable set of skills that people should just know period. Anyways, one of the skill sets is called do the opposite or, you know, like opposite action. And it's kind of like if something isn't working for you on an ongoing basis, or you're actively avoiding something that you know you should be doing, do the opposite, go do the thing that you're actively avoiding doing or do the opposite of the thing that is not working. And that's always been a really helpful idea for me that I've known kind of in

the back of my head. And, you know, there's a great Seinfeld episode called the opposite where George Costanza decides everything in his life isn't working and he decides to do the opposite and ends up, you know, dating a fabulous woman and getting a new job at the Yankees and all sorts of other things about it. That one's kind of a joke, but like, when you think about a continuing to double down on things that are not working, or doing things that are the same as everybody else, or that are not cutting through and giving you the results that you want to do, leaning into being different and doing the opposite is actually a really good strategy a lot of the time.

And, you know, we've talked about, you know, just as one example, like focusing on time over reach is a fairly big opposite for most marketers. All right. So we've decided that we're going to do something, flip things on its head and be and do things a little bit more opposite. We've decided that we're going to take a chance and be creatively brave. Let's talk about the actual production here. And these things usually start with the concept of a brand story. What is a story?

A story is something. Well, I mean, there's so many different ways you can talk about a story but for me it is a journey towards resolving a problem and something where you don't know how it's going to end and you know there's when i say a journey that you know it's the structure of a like the most basic structure of a story is kind of like there's a quest or a problem to be solved and someone is thrown into the mix who's you know often against their will has to go out and someone is thrown into the mix who's, you know, often against their will has to go out and try and figure out how to solve it. And they keep finding escalating challenges that are on their route to trying to solve this problem that they must overcome on the journey. They're often guides on the journey that are going to help them figure out how to overcome

those obstacles. And at the end, they either solve it or they don't solve it, but they end up changed as a person from having gone on the journey. And there's often a lesson or a moral that comes out of it. Oftentimes, stories are a phenomenal way to communicate marketing ideas because you can put ideas. Like I said, you know, there's a journey that has these obstacles in it that often has a lesson at the end. Stories communicate ideas very, very effectively because when you start a story and you don't know how it ends, we kind of have this need for resolution where we will keep listening and being like, how is this going to end? How is this going to end?

How is this going to end? And if there's a core idea, especially one that is related to your business that you're an expert in where you know some of the ideas that you want to convey and you can tell them in stories. Here's how other people have solved these challenges or here's compelling ways that people have figured out how to do interesting things that might be relevant to our business and to you as a listener or a viewer. That's a great way to earn attention rather than having experts just talk about ideas or read white papers out loud or those sorts of things.

Right. But how do I make that into a 30 second ad? I think there's honestly, I think the number one thing, the start matters so much is, you know, we talk about attention and, you know, when I was talking about that, that completion graph, uh, completion rates on where you can just see people sampling and leaving right away if it's not good dump people into a story right away like grab their attention with a big hook it's either you know the start of a story where you're like i need to know what this ends promise them what they're going to get if they stick around it doesn't have to be massive giant epic stakes

like a three-hour Lord of the Rings thing. You can figure out how to tell stories or how to convey an idea in any time length. I think it has to just be something that is surprising or unexpected or breaks a pattern or promises something that you're going to stick around to until the end of it. That's kind of where your creativity comes in is what's the right format for the story we want to tell or the idea we want to convey? What are our resources? What's sustainable for us? And what's the right way to play to the strengths of each medium? talk about behavioral science in a lot of depth around how people make decisions or where are cognitive blind spots or things like that, that's hard to do in 30 seconds. Some of these things require unpacking and that may not be the best choice of medium. Maybe a podcast or a YouTube video or an email newsletter might be better suited to that. But if you're looking for, I don't know, tips for packing efficiently on a vacation somewhere from an airline, you can do great 30-second stories for that on TikTok or Instagram Reels or threads that are perfectly packaged and play to the strengths of that medium.

I promise myself I'll never watch another Mr. Beast video again. Not that I don't enjoy them, but because I know that I will be sucked in for the entire length of it. You know, as much grief as or as much, you know, of a cliche, I think his work has become. It is a masterclass. Any of his videos are masterclasses in maintaining attention. And you show those charts in the book, the ones where, you know, over time, are people are people dropping off or they staying it? All right, so we've so we've decided that we're going to do something in the opposite, we're going to be creatively brave, we've got our editing down, Pat, we're doing all the right things in the first 30 seconds, you've got the draft, you're sitting in the boardroom, you screen it, you're ready to go, Steve. And then the CEO walks in and wants to be in it. How do you make this work?

Well, it's a good question. And I'll add one other element to it, which is the other caveat to the CEO wants to be in it is we'd like to name it after our corporation or have our logo, you know, as the giant poster art for sure. Yeah. Like some big, huge, you know, high executive mandatory that you didn't see coming. The place that I would always go in, in a meeting like that is, is your presence in this and whether it is the CEO or whether it is your logo or whether it is the name of the YouTube series or podcast, is this going to help people? Is it going to be additive? Is it going to be an attractive thing that's going to help people decide to say, yes, I would like to sample this show and come in and

spend time with you? And the answer is more often than not, no, it will be a repellent. Like, you know, this is the really hard truth for anyone in marketing. And I think particularly in branded content, it's a really, really hard job because, you know, like the toughest truth is no one wants to hear from you. No one is waiting to be like, I cannot wait to hear the CEO of a large company host a YouTube series. Um, and when you think about the, the job that you were hiring this marketing to do is often, again, it's useless if there's no attention

is to change the way people feel about your brand or your company or to introduce them to ideas that are going to help them become a customer or change the way that they think about things in a way that is beneficial to you to you and your business um any barrier that you put in the way that stops people from hitting play or opening an email is not doing your business any favors. And in a way, when I use examples a lot about thinking more like a media company, and we'll use examples like HBO is a great one because a lot of people know what it is and they kind of associate it with quality storytelling, but you could use anybody's favorite show. And you'd be like, oh, who makes that show?

Are the executives for that show in there? Like, are there HBO executives in Game of Thrones? Like, are there HBO executives starring in Curb Your Enthusiasm? Of course there aren't. It would be ridiculous if there were. If it was, you know, Sopran HBOs, like no one's going to watch it if it's a kind of a thinly veiled infomercial for HBO. And yet we all know that HBO put out all these shows and we all know that HBO stands for premium storytelling. And we all know that HBO does a really good job of letting people know about these shows that they're on HBO without having to talk about how great HBO is. They sell the content and they sell the show. They don't sell the people making it. And again, the idea that this is from

you, not about you, it doesn't literally have to be from your CEO. It has to be something that is a gift from your company. So, you know, some of these things I have to say, like they're hard truths to talk about, but if you're spending lots and lots of time and money to put something that you want to have an impact out in the world, really thinking about, again, maybe your question is would would you watch or listen or or read this if it was coming from our ceo versus from somebody else um i'll give you one other just super quick example because it's a really great story as an example for this we're really lucky to work with um dell technologies when they first merged dell with EMC and VMware and a bunch of other

companies. And they wanted to change the brand perception of Dell kind of being a laptops and servers company into a company that really understood deeply digital transformation and innovation and disruption, where they could help companies avoid being Ubered in their industry by an upstart. And they knew exactly who their audience was. It was senior IT business decision makers and C-suite executives who were concerned about being disrupted. And they very clearly did research and knew that those people wanted great stories about innovation and disruption told by the people

who were actually in their industries and companies when it was happening. They did not want tips and tricks and listicles and things like that. And so we designed this show called Trailblazers that was the history of a different industry, you know, and all the different points of disruption and innovation and transformation that happened in it told by the people who were there and the question was who's going to host this thing and it could have very easily been michael dell michael dell would have done that he had a huge network he could have got amazing guests he knew his stuff inside out he would have been a great great host and the dell team was brave enough to say like that may change the way people see this show. Let's think about who would be the best person period to host this show that is going to get

more people to listen to it. And that wouldn't be a barrier for any reason. And we ended up reaching out to Walter Isaacson, who, you know, is the guy who wrote all the biographies of Steve Jobs and Elon Musk. Yeah. That guy is an objective, amazing journalist who's associated deeply with innovators and understanding stories of innovation. He hosted the show and did an amazing job. And it ended up like this podcast that came from Dell Technologies has ended up as curriculum in business programs at universities because it's a real show. And one step further, if you look at the logo for the show trailblazers with Walter Isaacson, there's a very big thing

missing. There is no Dell logo anywhere on there. Uh, you know, you can see in the metadata, it's from Dell, like they're the producers of it exactly the same way you would know that like if something came out it was from hbo and to me that is the other way that i talk to people when they come in a room and being like let's put our ceo in here is to talk about the examples that are really successful of big companies that have had massive success by doing the exact opposite of that um and it's almost like when you set the table stakes of like, this is how to do it properly. And here's a whole bunch of examples of all these big companies that you probably know and love doing it this way. It makes it really hard to be like, I'd still like

to be in the spotlight and be the host of this show. And to use the vernacular of your book, that's the gift, I guess, that you're giving the audience is that is respectful of their time and its actual value. Yeah, exactly. You nailed it. We're coming up on our time, Steve, but I have one last question. Part of your book includes a section on how to interview someone correctly. My last question, Steve, how badly did I fuck this up? You have done I got to say you've done a great job.

I am not surprised at all about this, but like you've done your research you've read the book you came prepared with actual questions that were really smart and insightful and it made me think a lot like opening with charcuterie board boom like that like i'm just gonna call that one out as that's a weird first question that will earn people's attention i hope uh because, because it's that plant. I think like, why are you asking about a charcuterie board at the top of a podcast about marketing and a book about marketing? This is the sign of a journalist pro. Come on. That's too many compliments. As a Canadian, I'm going to edit all this out. Steve, thank you for joining me. Thanks for having me.

Steve Pratt is the author of Earn It! Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers. It is available now wherever you get your books. That will do it for the week. Today in Digital Marketing is produced by EngageQ Digital on the traditional territories of this new nameic first nation on Vancouver Island. Our associate producer is the intrepid Steph Gunn. Our production coordinator is Sarah Guild.

Ad coordination by Red Circle. Mark Blevis is the satisfying click your phone makes when you lock it. I'm Todd Maffin. Thanks for listening. Have a restful weekend, friends. I'll see you on Monday. It's the season for new styles, and you love to shop for jackets and boots. So when you do, always make sure you get cash back from Rakuten. And it's not just clothing and shoes. You can get cash back from over 750 stores on electronics, holiday travel, home decor, and more. It's super easy. And before you buy anything, always go to Rakuten first. Join free at rak C-A. Start shopping and get your cash back sent to you by check or PayPal.

Get the Rakuten app or join at Rakuten dot C-A. R-A-K-U-T-E-N dot C-A.