In this week’s episode, Scott Monty talks about his journey from premed student to marketing expert, and the elephant in the room – his amazing voice. Scott explains how understanding timeless human nature and psychology is key to effective communication and marketing. He encourages marketers to focus less on the platforms and more on the fundamentals, on storytelling and connecting to people.
Scott deeply believes in the often dismissed importance of taking the time to take stock and acting with integrity and warns of the danger of talking about brand purpose without truly embracing it at all levels of the business. He warns of the danger of “purpose” being the CSR of 2022.
Of the friction between the need to keep up with the latest marketing trends – from NTFs and beyond – to taking stock and doing things well, he says, “if you are confident in your purpose, in the values that drive your business, then moving quickly should not be a problem.” We couldn’t agree more. To hear more more Scott, subscribe to his newsletter at www.timelyandtimeless.com and visit his website at www.scottmonty.com.
To listen to this conversation on your preferred streaming platform, click here.
Transcript
Scott: It's creating order out of chaos. And I think that's what we're all looking for as the chaotic world around us. The new technologies, you name it, it's all flying at us. Well, we need to slow down. We need to put some context around it, just as you said, and to tell some stories to help people relate to what's going on, help them feel like they're part of something and that they can make sense out of it.
Eric: I'm Eric Full Weiler, and this is Scratch Bringing You Marketing lessons from the leading brands and brains rewriting the rule book from scratch for the world of today.
Hey everyone. My guest today is Scott Monty, a name you probably recognize. Scott became quite famous in our little corner of the marketing world when he became the first executive at Ford Motor Company to lead digital communications and social media. And he became a pretty well known thought leader and advocate for big brands and businesses using social media for marketing, which back then, and those of you who were around will remember, it was heavily debated and questioned. And so Scott did a lot of great work at Ford. We're going to hear him talk about his time there. Also, his time working with Alan Malawi, who is a fantastic CEO who came in and really helped to turn that business around. And since his time at Ford, Scott has done a ton of work and really interesting thinking and writing around marketing leadership and the meat of our conversation today, which is this concept of timeless human nature and adapting it to the trends of the day. So I really enjoyed this conversation. Really interesting to hear his thoughts on timeless human nature and how to use it for marketing, how to use it for professional and personal growth. And it's just refreshing to hear a little bit of a different perspective on what people should be thinking about. You will also hear about why Scott uses a 1937 typewriter and wears a bow tie. Please enjoy my conversation with Scott Monty.
Hey, before we get to today's episode, I wanted to take just a second and ask a favor if you're listening to this, I really appreciate it. This is a new podcast. We arrival our new company. It's hard to get this all off the ground, and I really appreciate the support to ask an even bigger favor of you if you could please, if you're enjoying the content that we're putting out, if you've listened to a couple episodes or even if you're new, could you please take a minute to share scratch with someone else that you think would enjoy it, that would mean so much to us? Get the word out, start to build our audience. I'd really, really appreciate it. So if you could just take a minute, you can pause this. Just think about is there someone else out there, another marketer who you think would find this content valuable? And please send this along to them. I really appreciate it. Now onto the episode. Hey Scott, welcome to the show. How are you doing today,
Scott: Eric, it's a pleasure to be here. I am doing just fine today. How are you?
Eric: I am doing really well, although I'm very self-conscious of my voice talking to you because I felt this way. And also, Leanne, our producer, flagged this in the brief for me. You have an amazing voice. I'm sure you've heard that before.
Scott: Well thank you very much. Yeah, I get it quite a bit. I've been podcasting since 2007, I think, and I'm no stranger to the microphone. I used to announce for halftime at Boston University back in my college years. Really? And oh, it's a fun, I just enjoy doing voiceovers whenever I can. It's more of a hobby than a anion at this point. But hey, you go with what you
Eric: So you tell me a couple more years in podcasting and I'll sound like you
Scott: Sure, sure. Whatever you say,
<laugh>.
Scott: Part of its God-given talent, part of its practice. I came out of the womb actually speaking like this. Hello mother.
Eric: There you go. There you go. Well, listen, Scott, we've only hung out a couple times, but I was really looking forward to this conversation and I really appreciate you making the time. I've known of you for a long time coming up in the early days of Web 2.0 as we called it back then, social media. You were kind of one of the big guys, one of the big names in all the work that you did at Ford, and I'm sure that we'll touch on that a little bit. But where I think we want to focus the conversation today is a lot of the thinking, the writing, the content, and the work that you're now doing as CEO o and principle of Scott Monte strategies and really focused on this initiative and topic of timeless human nature. So I've got some notes in here of things that we'll touch on and kind of segments that will take branching out of that overarching topic. But I'd love to just start there, maybe just a bit of an overview for people who haven't heard of you before or maybe people who want to know what you're up to these days. And then I'd love if you could just spend a minute or two unpacking this topic of timeless human nature, what it means to you and why you think it's so important.
Scott: Yeah, absolutely Eric. So in order to frame this, I'm going to go way back to my college years. I mentioned going to Boston University. While I was there, my intention was actually to become a doctor. I was following the pre-med pathway, which isn't a major. You have to choose a major. And after listening to the Ill-advised advisor who said, well, why don't you choose biology like everyone does? I switched out of biology and I chose classics because I had taken couple of years of Latin as a high schooler. I always enjoyed history. And I thought, well, what a great opportunity now to explore the breadth that a liberal arts college allows me to do while pursuing a pre-med path. Well, it turns out that I actually enjoyed that more than I enjoyed the sciences. I went on to get a master's in medical science and an MBA in healthcare administration.
But I always had this background in history and literature and philosophy that was just kind of simmering underneath. And to me, the interesting part of medicine actually ties in with marketing because it's all about the psychology of the client, the customer, the patient. It's understanding what motivates people. It's it for me, on the medical side, it was sitting with patients and taking histories and understanding where they were coming from, understanding their perspective. And that's the exact same kind of mindset you need if you're in communications or marketing. So in some ways, there was this kind of zigzaggy approach to my career early on, but decades later, it's all kind of come full circle and come back together again. I was doing consulting with big brands on social media back in 2006, 2007 with a boutique agency. And evidently Ford Motor Company got word of this and knew that they needed to get smart about social media. And so the chief communications officer reached out to me and said, we've got this position we're interested in talking to you about it. Now, I was living in Boston at the time. I had been there for 20 years, really never thought I'd have to leave Boston or New England. It seemed to have just about everything I could want. And when he said we've got this big executive job, my question was, do I have to move to Detroit? And he's like yeah, this is at the world headquarters. It's like a serious thing. And I'm like, Hmm, yeah, not interested. And he goes, are you sure? And I go, yeah, I'm, I'm not feeling it right now. The timing just isn't there. It's an interesting opportunity, but I just dunno if it's right for me. So a few months went by, we got back together they still hadn't filled the position. He said they talked to about 50 people and my name kept coming up, so I just fly out and humor them and talk to a few people. No strings attached. So I did. Well, lo and behold, I fell in love with the company. I was wowed with the business plan. I was even more impressed with the people on the team there, all of whom seemed to be talented, but most of all, they were excited, they were motivated. And I'm like, you can't create that kind of passion out of nothing. There's really something special going on here. So a couple of months later I joined and 10 days after that, the company filed its largest ever quarterly loss and the car apocalypse was on in 2008. So I spent six years there at Ford heading up social media and digital communications globally with a wonderful team of people who really advanced not only Ford in what it was trying to do and telling our story, but advanced a number of industries as the company. And our team became examples just across all kinds of other industries. And since then I've been out on my own consulting and just last March I joined Chameleon Collective where we're all freelancers, but we kind of pool our services together to collaborate on projects when needed.
Eric: Amazing. So a couple things that I'll pick out of that, and then we can go into talking about timeless human nature. So the first is, and I mentioned this the last time we chatted, one of my favorite business books is called American Icon, and it's the story of Alan Malawi coming into Ford. And so one, I'd really recommend people to go and read that, but two, maybe you could just spend a minute or two, and I know you mentioned this to me when we chatted, but kind of your experience of this guy who is pretty well known as a fantastic ceo, someone who came in and at least in terms of how they tell the story, helped to turn the company around. What was some of your experience and how did his leadership style, knowing that you worked really closely with him, impact your thoughts on leadership and this topic of timeless human nature that we're going to get into?
Scott: So the first thing you have to understand about Alan is what you see is what you get. A lot of people would see this cheerful, rosy demeanor. A guy who just seemed so likable, so affable, that's exactly how he was behind the scenes. I mean, he could be tough. Obviously we needed to show results. We needed to make progress on our plan, but he had a way about him that simply made you want to succeed. It made you not want to disappoint Alan, right? It became very personal in its nature because Alan was very personally interested and personally involved in so many of his employees. I would walk down the hall with him after some big meeting, and this is the first floor of the world headquarters of Ford. People are pouring out of the cafeteria, whatever. And Alan would stop. He would go up to them and shake their hand and go, hi, I'm Alan. And I'm like, yeah, we kind of all know who you are.
Eric: There's a couple stories like that in the book as well.
Scott: A absolutely a, and the thing is, Alan wasn't doing that to convey information about who he was, but everybody knew who he was. He was conveying information about how he saw other people, how he saw the relationship and the dignity that he assigned to each relationship that became part of his signature being right. And people eminently wanted to be part of a team like that. And Alan came from outside of the auto industry. He came from the airline industry. So there was a lot of doubt with Alan early on, big town hall meeting on his first day. And it was either a reporter, an employee who said, Mr. Malawi, the auto industry is very different than what you're used to. And he said, yeah, I get that. It's a very complex industry, but we're kind of parallel the auto industry and the airline industry. I had to deal with big manufacturing.
I had to deal with unions, had to deal with a lot of laws and regulations, had to had hundreds of thousands of employees. But here's the deal. I understand a car has about 30,000 moving parts that need to be kept together and the car needs to be kept on the road. And they said, yeah, yeah, yeah, that's right. And he said, well the Boeing 747 had about a million parts and we needed to keep it airborne six miles above the earth. So I think I'm going to be okay. So a little bit of snark there from Alan, but not too much. I mean, you could understand where he was coming from, but he made the point that he was a competent engineer. He was a competent leader, and what he did was motivate people to work together. And that's universal. No matter what kind of industry you're in,
Eric: I think there's something to be said about what you see is what you get. It's one of the things that I say when people ask me what it was like to work with Gary Vaynerchuk. Now I also say there's a whole other dimension, and he's got a little bit more of a external personality than Alan does that's say, and you can't really know what it's like to work with him or be in a room or have him be your mentor or your manager or your boss or all that stuff. But I think with leaders, and actually we talk a lot about brand purpose. I know we're going to touch on that later in the conversation. There's probably an extension to brands as well. What you see, the best ones, the strongest ones, the most consistent ones, what you see is what you get because they are just living who they are. They're not trying to create something that's not real, that's not there
Scott: Exactly. And Eric, that's just it. When there's that level of consistency there, when you don't feel like there's bait and switch, when you don't feel like, who am I going to get at this meeting or at this experience, that's what builds loyalty and trust. And people love to feel like they are part of an ongoing story. And if they know where they are in the story, beginning, middle, or end, then a lot of uncertainty gets reduced. And believe me, in the era we're living in right now, we need a lot less uncertainty out there.
Eric: The other thing I wanted to touch on, which is a bit of a rapid hole, but I'm actually curious your perspective on this, having been in the industry for a while, chameleon Collective, I've heard of them, and I think there are a lot of businesses being set up that are this kind of proven freelancers who kind of work together, but it's not the, Hey, we're going to build a team of a hundred full-time employees. What's your perspective on that, both in terms of how it's been for you and just the industry in general? Do you see more of the creative services side of moving to more of the freelance approach?
Scott: So if you feel like you can take on five clients at a time and manage that and work on weekends and work nights or split shifts based on time zones, whatever, great. If you want to work fewer hours, if you want to have time to spend with your kids in the morning before they go to school or to do elder care, whatever it is you, this kind of model is built in to accommodate people's lifestyles and for them to be able to make the decisions on the types of clients that they want. So you've got more autonomy, you've got more certainty, you've got more flexibility. And I think those are the things that are tied to the kinds of purpose that especially freelancers are looking for. And in addition to being able to choose clients that match your values,
Eric: And I think we're seeing more and more of that as the battle for top talent increases with everybody moving around, everybody having so many more options. It's not just full-time roles at an agency in your city. It's roles anywhere in the world for a lot of companies that are going remote like we are, and then also full-time or part-time more flexible or freelance, there's so many more options for people. And so there's more choice, which means they can choose to not just work at a company that pays them well and does good work, but also works with brands that they want to associate with.
Scott: Exactly
Hey, just want to take a quick break from the episode to talk to you about our partnership with attest. We have partnered with attest, a powerful consumer research platform to start producing our own proprietary research on challenger marketing. Each week on Scratch, we are highlighting in attest report that adds context to the conversation with that guest and that episode. So for today's conversation with Scott, I wanted to highlight a stat from attest's Marketing Today study that talks about how Facebook is the preferred social platform for 58% of consumers, but only 34% agree that they can trust meta with their personal information. So everything I'm talking to Scott about when it comes to timeless human nature and how important those mechanics of human psychology and behavior, actually trust is such a huge piece of it. To find out more about this study or attest in general, head on over to askattest.com here. You can run a free survey to access 110 million consumers in 49 markets to remove the guesswork from your business growth. So Scott, timeless Human Nature, unpack that for us. What does it mean to you? Why is it so important and how does it tie it to modern marketing.
Scott: Well, it's interesting. Part of this sprung out I, I've been doing a newsletter for a weekly newsletter for the better part of a decade or so. I've had a blog for many years, and I did a newsletter where I looked at this week in social media, then I changed the focus to digital, then I simply called it the full Monty. And it was a kind of links roundup as to what was going on every single week, and people found value in that. But what I found during the time, and what I found during my career at Ford is we were having the same conversations over and over again. New companies would sprout up, new team members would be added. They didn't necessarily have the longer view as to what happened in the evolution of digital and social in say 2007, 2009, and they come in 2014 or beyond or whatever, and they were like, oh, I've just discovered fire. Well, guess what kids it's been done before. And if you look back if beyond the specific technologies, if you look at the behaviors that we're talking about, a lot of this stuff is history on repeat. And it suddenly dawned on me that with my love of history and my love of literature, there are tons of stories out there, stories waiting to be told or retold to new audiences with a context being put on them to apply them to current day. So I began to delve into some of my favorite stories, characters of history and literature, and thinking back to my days in class as a classics major, what do the great philosophers teach us? The lessons that we have are timeless. They still apply, and I've said this for years, that if you look back at human nature and 3,500 bc, still pretty much the same today. We're all looking out for our own. We want what's best for us. We want to be something bigger. We want to be able to build something, but ultimately the relationships that we create are what matter to us in the end. And that's the undergirding of marketing and communications. One of my favorite marketing quotes is, if you wish to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings, and speak my words. Pretty basic stuff. Now, that was said 2000 years ago by Marcus Tully Cicero, right? And if it's good for the Roman Empire in 65 bc, I think it's good for us today in 2022.
Eric: I'm a big fan of fundamentals. So what we do at Rival is a lot around what I call marketing innovation, trying to take strategies, tactics, mindsets, models from the startup world that we know into businesses that are looking to innovate with how they do their marketing. But actually a lot of it is kind of back to basics in a way, because to what you said there, and also to what you said about your background and your interest in the sciences and looking at becoming a doctor, it's human behavior, it's human psychology. Marketing is about changing perception and behavior to drive business results. There's a lot of other professions and disciplines that focus on perception and behavior for other results, but that's really what it's all about. And so your word context, the context of the media landscape, the technological landscape, the competitive landscape, the cultural landscape, that stuff is constantly changing and faster and faster it seems every year. And so you need to understand that to be able to deliver effective marketing. But actually what makes up effective marketing goes back to these fundamentals that haven't changed in a long time because human beings in the way that we're wired haven't changed for a long time. So very much on the same wavelength with that is a lot of what I think about. And in some ways it's ironic, I guess, in a way because a lot of what we're known for and what we do is innovation and new thinking. But you even said this in one of the notes that you sent over to us about how this topic of timeless leadership and looking back to look forward seems like an oxymoron on the surface, but it's a dichotomy that has great consistency and great meaning. So I think it's a really interesting point of view and a really interesting topic that you're digging into.
Scott: Thank you. And one of the just sprung to me while you were talking, one of the interesting overlaps of say science and literature comes from Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I'm a huge Sherlock Holmes fan, and Conan Doyle was a struggling doctor in his early years, and he had no patience coming into his waiting room. So what would he do during that time? Right? Well, he was inspired by one of his medical school professors, a guy by the name of Joseph Bell, who would demonstrate these amazing abilities to students where he would bring someone in, he would observe them, he would ask them a couple of questions, and even without asking questions, he could say where they came from or what their profession was. And people were astounded at how he could do this. And then he would tell them exactly what the visual cues were or how he got his information. And suddenly it became revealed to them how the scientific process could actually be applied to, well, in Conan Doyle's case to storytelling. And that's how he created the character of Sherlock Holmes. And again, it's creating order out of chaos. And I think that's what we're all looking for as the chaotic world around us. The new technologies, the web three, you know, talked about web two before, now we're onto web three, cryptocurrency, NFTs, you name it, it's all flying at us. Well, we need to slow down. We need to put some context around it, just as you said, and to tell some stories to help people relate to what's going on, help them feel like they're part of something and that they can make sense out of it.
Eric: How are you applying this thinking? And I think you were kind of going in that direction with what you were saying at the end there, but how are you applying this concept of timeless human nature and your perspective and thinking about it to marketing and driving growth of the business for the clients that you're working with?
Scott: Well, largely, and this is something <laugh> been saying for 15 years or more, is for people not to focus, for marketers, not to focus so heavily on the platforms, on the tools to focus on the fundamentals, just as you said before, it's about building a relationship. It's about telling a story that people want to hear. And look, I get it. Every brand manager wakes up excited about what it is that they're working on the project they're launching, the new website release, but really for the rest of us that are not the manager of that brand, does it really matter? Does it bring us any value to know that you know you've launched a website or that you've got a new product? Well, probably not unless you're Starbucks, people don't wake up thinking about your brand. So how you actually take that and contextualize it for people, give them a sense as to how it helps make their life better, how you save them time, how you save them money, how you do something that relates to something that matters to them. And it could be something purpose-driven too, if that's the way people are seeking out your product, but keeping that in mind rather than saying, Hey, we've got an N F T. Well, most people don't even know what an NFT is, let alone what it's useful for. And as excited as you may be about that new development, you got to realize where most of the real world is living
Eric: It's perspective, and which so much innovation comes back to, whether it's on the product side or the marketing side, it's really understanding. And it talked about empathy and kind of really understanding, stepping into the shoes of your customer so much. And I probably argue almost all good marketing comes from that. It's interesting I met today with a scale up here in the uk, and one of the conversations that we were having is they're trying to understand the transition from a third party cookie driven performance marketing world, because they built a lot of their business on the back of Facebook and Instagram ads over the last couple years. And obviously that is changing very quickly. And what this means in a world where it just gets a lot more expensive and a lot harder to acquire new customers that way. And I actually think that this, to your point of not focusing on the platforms and focusing on the fundamentals, I think the brands that win are the ones that execute the fundamentals really well, that have a brand that stands for something that people care about, that put out content and experiences that people actually want to spend time with, and that actually build a relationship. So if you're on the wrong side of that, it's going to be more challenging and it will be for everybody to a certain extent. But I think the advice that I gave to him and the advice that I give to people listening around this topic, which we're spending a lot of time looking at, is if you can put out good marketing, the fundamentals of marketing, and if you can focus on building those relationships, call it first party data, but really just relationships and being able to have a meaningful rapport with the customers you're trying to reach, that is going to set you up well in the long term. So in some ways, it's actually a good thing that this is happening because I think the cream will rise to the top.
Scott: And I think that those are all fantastic suggestions, Eric, particularly, you didn't state this explicitly, but under first party data email, I mean, it sounds boring, it sounds unsexy, but my gosh, it still works. People spend more time in their inbox than they do on any one app. And if the app tends to change its algorithm or changes its rules for some reason, you're out of luck if you have an email relationship or even better. One of the things I always get responses from is when I send a handwritten or a typewritten letter, if any of your listeners happen to be viewing the video here I've got a typewriter on the desk behind me. I actually use a typewriter. And people are astounded. Why? Well, part, it's part of the brand timeless and timely, but it's different than anything anyone is doing today. I wrote about a CEO last year who has, gosh, maybe 9,000 employees, he hand writes a birthday card to every single one of his employees, and it's personalized. It's not just a form thing out of a script. He actually does that. So people wonder about, well, can you scale this? Well, look, one guy's doing it almost 10,000 times a year. I'm sure you can do that for at least a portion of your customer base, maybe the most loyal, maybe the most at risk, right? I mean, you make the assessment, but it's an opportunity to communicate with them in a different and personalized way that underlines the importance of that relationship.
Eric: And I think that's kind of the point in itself. Can you scale this? That's where the opportunity is. The opportunity is in the things ironically, that actually are harder to scale because then people know that it's more valuable that you've actually spent the time. And so oftentimes, and a lot of what we do does need to focus on how do you make things more efficient? But that's not always the right question to answer. And it is important, increasingly important in today's day and age when there's so many more brands, so many more products, so much more noise in the system to actually stand out in a good way. So we always talk about a brand needs to be relevant, but it also needs to be differentiated. And that's becoming increasingly important as there's more and more brands that are still relevant to everybody. How do you actually stand out by doing something different?
Scott: And this notion of reach, I think that this is why we still rely on television, why people look at influencers with big numbers. And to me, it's a losing game. Pliny the elder no, Pliny, the younger in one 10 AD said, men are more generally pleased with a widespread than a great reputation. We'd rather be famous than retain our integrity in some ways. And I think marketers do the same thing. They chase these big numbers rather than on the smaller things that may not be scalable, but my gosh, they probably have a much bigger impact. When you actually look at the efficacy.
Eric: One of the topics that comes up in. I think it's come up in every conversation on the podcast today, maybe not Gary, when we were talking about his N F T project, but every other CMO I've talked to has touched on or focused the entire conversation on purpose. I'm curious to get your perspective on that in general. And obviously a lot of what we're talking about ties into that. So maybe it's about tying some of these threads into your perspective on purpose, but from where you're coming from, your background, the work you do, and within the framework of this topic of timeless human nature, for the people listening, how would you recommend that they think about, go try to find and activate effectively brand purpose?
Scott: Well, I think there's great danger right now in purpose being the C S R of 2022. Corporate social responsibility became really in vogue over the last decade or so. But you saw is a lot of brands would do things for their CSR marketing that they fundamentally didn't believe or that they weren't practicing at the business level. And again, this gets back to that level that notion of consistency. If you're doing one thing with your marketing and doing another thing with your business practices, well that doesn't match and you're whitewash or greenwashing as the sustainability world would say. So I would think purpose washing would be the same kind of thing. So again, we're seeing the same thing happen. Well, different flavor or different label to it. So if you want to talk about purpose-driven marketing, you need to think first about purpose-driven business. And if your business is founded on principles and you are practicing those throughout your supply chain, throughout your vendors, throughout everything that you do, then that level of consistency will come out and you'll have a great story to tell. But if you're doing something just because it's the flavor of the month and you're trying to get on board because everybody else has a purpose and you need a purpose too, well, then you're chasing rainbows, my friend.
Eric: And I think it also doesn't always need to be CSR in the connotation that most people think of it. It doesn't need to be that you're saving the planet or have this put a dent in the universe type of vision for your company. And I think that's where a lot of people go awry is again, to what we were talking about before, they look externally and try to go after something and create something that they think people want to hear as opposed to looking internally and having that almost organizational or business brand and then trying to build out words from that. I'm curious to get your thoughts on a lot of what we're talking about with timeless human nature, and I think you even said it to a certain extent, has to do with kind of slowing down, taking stock, looking within understanding, right? Maybe measuring twice. Cut once my words, not yours, but I'm also a big believer, again, we talked about challengers, startups scale up that mentality, and you see this a lot coming from the world of Silicon Valley or just that us kind of hustle culture. I do think there is value in moving quickly but at the same time there is clearly a ton of value at what you are talking about as well. How do you reconcile timeless human nature with the need, fo really, any business not just start ups to be able to move quickly, stay agile constantly learning.
Scott:
