In today’s episode, Eric talks to author, podcaster and content marketing expert, Robert Rose about everything from whether your marketing function can become a profit center to the fate of traditional advertising as we know it.
As promised, here are Robert’s recommended business books, his “mini-marketing-MBA”:
The Practice of Management – Peter Drucker
The Management of Marketing Costs – James Culliton
Marketing Management – Philip Kotler
Thinking About Management – Theodore Levitt
The Marketing Imagination – Theodore Levitt
Marketing Myopia (White Paper) – Theodore Levitt
Integrated Marketing Communications – Don E. Schultz
Innovator’s Dilemma – Clayton Christensen
The End of Competitive Advantage – Rita Gunther McGrath
Discovery Driven Growth – Rita Gunther McGrath
Different – Youngme Moon
For more from Robert Rose, check out his brilliant podcast This Old Marketing with Joe Pulizzi, which has been downloaded more than two million times, or his website.
If you prefer to watch this episode, visit (and subscribe!) to Rival’s YouTube channel.
Transcript
Robert: Advertising is not a standard that we should be using anymore in terms of a cost of what marketing is, we should start establishing new ideas and new breakthrough ways of doing things that sort of reestablished new standards because quite frankly, it's just a different world.
Eric: I'm Eric Fulwiler. And this is scratch, bringing you marketing lessons from the leading brands and brands rewriting the rulebook from scratch for the world of today.
Everyone, My guest today is Robert Rose. Robert has served as the Chief Strategy advisor of the Content Marketing Institute, since it launched in 2010, helping guide it to be the leading global content marketing education and training organisation in the world. Robert was Chief Marketing Officer of CrownPeak, leading the marketing and product development for the world's first enterprise software as a service web content solutions. And his firm the content advisory has advised more than 500 companies, including 15 of the Fortune 100. Over the last 10 years, Robert is the author of three best selling books on marketing and content strategy in the co host of the popular and very good, I highly recommend you check this out marketing podcast, this old marketing with Joe Pulizzi, which has been downloaded more than 2 million times and 150 countries, something to aim for here at scratch. I really enjoyed this conversation with Robert, talk about bunch of different things he and I really share this philosophy and this mindset of how modern marketing is about thinking and acting more like a media company. So you'll hear from him on how he's doing that and advising his clients on doing it. We also talk about how marketing can be a profit centre. And that's something that Robert wrote about in one of his most recent books, you're going to hear about his media diet, how he stays up to date, with everything that's going on in the industry, we talk a bit about this transition from third party to a first party data led world and what that means for marketers, and how challenged or marketers are really viewing this as an opportunity and taking advantage of it. You'll hear right at the beginning some of his struggles and being a Cowboys fan over in the States. Please enjoy my conversation with Robert Rose. Hey, before we get to today's episode, I wanted to take just a second and ask a favour. 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 off the ground. And I really appreciate the support to ask an even bigger favour 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 on to the episode. Hey, Robert, thanks so much for joining me all the way from LA. How are you doing today?
Robert: Well, I don't know if all the way from LA because I'm actually here. And you know, I would say I'm doing
Eric: I'm joining you all the way from London. That's really that's really what
Robert: `exactly.
Eric: I mean, when you're in the US a world revolves around the US. So I get it.
Robert: That is true. And you know, and remember, I'm in Los Angeles and really in the US the world revolves around Southern California. So it is really, you know, I come by and honestly at least
Eric: so they say in Southern California. Yes. So Robert, there are very few guests that I have on this podcast that I can actually talk to about the NFL, American football for Brits over here. So I think that's not why people are tuning in, but at least wanting to throw that out there. Who's your team? Again, I know you and Joe on your podcasts have a bit of a riff going and he's a Browns fan, but who's your team?
Robert: Yeah, Yes, he is. He is unfortunate enough to be a Browns fan. You know, so I well, I mean, and certainly here come the jokes. I'm originally from Texas. And so the only thing I really bring with me from my you know, my origins of Texas is my affiliation with the Dallas Cowboys. So I have been a Dallas Cowboys fan since I was literally knee high. And yeah, so that's my team.
Eric: There you go.
Robert: Well deserve insert many jokes here. And yes, there's none of them that I haven't heard before. You know, 30 years and yada yada Jerry Jones and I get it right.
Eric: One day, one one day, I don't know.
Robert: Maybe this year
Eric: Maybe. All right. I wish that I had a smart segway but I don't so I'm just going to move on. So, Robert, I wanted to start the conversation. Pulling I think this is a bio from from your company website, the content advisory. So your purpose is to help companies, every company developed the same skills as a media company from operationalizing content strategies, hiring the right talent, measuring the efforts and creating the most powerful content driven customer experiences. So you and I emailed about a few different topics, and I think we are going to quickly run out of time and not get to all of them. But I at least wanted to start there. Because it's a big belief that I have about how modern marketing is more about building a media company around your brand thinking and acting more like a media company than a traditional kind of stereotypical marketer. And, you know, it seems like you are focused on and thinking about and doing work on the same front. So I'd love to just give you the platform for a minute to talk about what that means to you. And the type of work that you're doing with clients around helping them develop the same skills as a media company.
Robert: Yeah. So so first of all, thank you for that. It's, it's, it's, it's something that I've been doing for Well, I mean, unofficially been doing it for the last 20 years, because when I was the CMO of a, of a software startup, you know, typical Silicon Valley, two rounds of funding the whole thing, when you know, and my background is in the media business, I've started my career in television a million years ago. And, you know, what I discovered was that, you know, the way to differentiate was, in fact, to just exactly to your point was, you know, in this wall and sea of noise that is out there, you know, to actually look like a media company, develop content that is valuable, develop an audience develop the kinds of things that would jump the line, if you will, of consideration. And that was the way to sort of drive revenue, drive, sales, drive, loyalty, drive all parts of that customer's journey in a more optimal way. And after joining with my friend, Joe Pulizzi, in the Content Marketing Institute, in 2010, I started consulting on that, right, because it was sort of teaching people to do what I was doing. And I've spent the last 10 years, you know, really working with brands, you know, used to be all over the world, less all over the world these days, and a little bit more here in the 16 by nine world that I live in, in video. But the idea really it at its core, I think the challenge is that, in many ways, what has been interpreted from that is, we need to market like media companies. And that's not the case, the secret the challenge that businesses have the products and services businesses has is not in marketing, like media companies, because quite frankly, media companies market themselves as poorly as product companies do their you know, they have the same silos and challenges and crap and politics that every other company does. It's operating like a media company treating content as the strategic asset. And quite frankly, the app, the strategic operation, like media companies do, that's really the challenge. And that's what we ended up doing a lot of consulting on, which was, how do you start to develop the skill, the muscle within your organisation, to hire the right teams, create the right governance, create the right processes and workflow, the right technology, the right assets to operate like a media company, so that you can actually deliver the value that you want to deliver on whatever channel it is, but you have to develop that muscle first. And so few companies actually know how to do that. And that's, you know, to whatever success we've had has been because of that.
Eric: Yeah, and it's, you know, I think there's some ways to interpret or listen to the idea, or the concept of a media company versus thinking and acting like a traditional marketer and say, Well, you know, it's kind of a fine line, isn't it? But I actually think that there's a big fundamental shift, if you're thinking with kind of the CEO of a media hat on versus the CMO, hat on that really all comes down to the value exchange between the brand and the audience. And if you're thinking as a media company, you're thinking about how do I add value to this audience, so they will spend time with me, essentially. And then later on, you can monetize them, whether that's through your core business, or another topic that we'll get onto is actually in the monetization within marketing and turning marketing from a cost centre to a profit centre. And I guess kind of on that point, you know, one of the things that we come across and it's certainly an important aspect of this is, I think, in order to do it, right, you really do need to be focused on prioritising the value of the audience above your own in the short term. At the same time, the role of marketing is to drive growth of a business and so there needs to be some return or commercial tie in to that investment that you're making. So I think you can kind of see where I'm going. How do you have the ROI conversation with your clients about hey, you need to think an operational is marketing a bit differently? More like a media company? But how does the revenue or the profit come back to them? How do you navigate those conversations?
Robert: You know, it's it's, it's relatively straightforward if you can get over that initial mindset that you just framed up very well, which is, when you think of it from the CEO's perspective, or from the business strategy perspective, the difference is how we define customer, right? So what we have typically done in marketing and sales is to define customer as that who buys our classic product and service. And so we don't treat them as customers until they do that, you know, before then they are leads, they are opportunities, they fill their shopping cart with E commerce goods. But quite frankly, we expect a certain level of efficiency. And marketing was always built around that inefficiency, right? How many more people can I push through the funnel to become the classic customer is defined, the only thing we're doing is just you nailed this in terms of the way you described, it is treating those people as customers well, before they purchase something, right? We deliver that value exchange earlier, when they're simply audiences. And so we're treating them as customers earlier. Thus, we build trust. Thus, we can measure it in a number of ways. When we start talking about monetizing those audiences against some sort of return on investment. Well, it becomes how would we measure a customer before they become classic customers? A couple of examples of this might be, do more of them become classic customers than others. And we can measure that as a differential and say, more of these people who we treat as audiences actually buy more, they become customers faster, whatever, we can measure that differential against classic marketing and provide a return on investment there? Or do they become more loyal? In other words, do they create? Do we create more loyalty by establishing that trust earlier? Or do they evangelise us more earlier on and help us reach new audiences? The perfect example of this because, you know, it always gets mentioned, right? You know, I think contractually by law, I'd have to mention Red Bull. Because Red Bull has sort of the classic example of this operating like immediate company as as a soft drink. What they discovered, which was so amazing was that so first of all, we all have to agree that Red Bull tastes like crap, it just does. It's just an awful, awful tasting drink. However, what they discovered was, people who have never tried Red Bull, or tried it and didn't like it would actually recommend Red Bull to their friends based on the value of the content that they received through all their extreme sports and you know, every, you know, throwing guys that have spaceships and all the things that they do. So that added level of evangelism isn't something that can be bought with a 32nd spot, or established with a cold call, you have to do that by delivering value first, so that you build in that trust before and that's just treating them like customers before they become classic customers.
Eric: And I think the Red Bull example is a good one. Also, because the scale to which they've done it, you know, I'm certainly not saying that everybody should go out and try to do what they've done and buy sports teams and publish magazines and do cliff diving or whatever else, whatever else they're into these days. But you can see the difference. And this is one of the things for me, if I think, you know, building a media company around your brand is content marketing, and in large part of what you're actually doing. But it's more than that. Because for most people, you think a content marketing kind of old school inbound marketing that's still focused on how do you extract value from an audience Redbull as that case, like, they've literally built a media company. And then there is the beverage company. And so even if you're not at that scale, or not looking to make that investment, I think that operational to your point shift of okay, we're going to build a media company around our brand. And that's, that's what we're trying to do on a very small scale here with rival is I literally think of it as rival media, how do we put out content that's going to add value to the audience we're trying to reach? And eventually I think that's going to do good things for us as a business. But I do kind of put that hat on if I'm the CEO of a media company, when we're thinking about what content we want to do, what new properties we want to launch, how we distributed how we engage our audience and all that. Do you um, have you looked at the other example I always throw out is Michelin tires.
Robert: Oh, sure. Are you familiar with that one?
Robert: Yeah, of course.
Eric: I love that one also, because it's this isn't a new idea necessarily. I mean, maybe it is a differently in somehow, in some ways that people are doing it differently, but the concept of doing something to add value to your audience, because of how it will in the long term drive value for your business has been around on for at least 100 years, without example of Michelin putting out these fine dining guides to get people to drive more.
Robert: It's amazing, right? I mean, and in fact, I have just behind me on my bookshelf, I have the first edition of the Michelin travel guide that came out. Because it's, you know, it's such a quintessential and sort of great example of, of what we're talking about here. You know, it's, it's amazing to me, when you say the word Michelin these days, they're arguably better known for their stars and what they give restaurants than they are, you know, for being a tire company these days. And, and that's an interesting challenge in and of itself, too, you know, but you look to companies like Lego, right? Want you know, and of course, Lego is, is, you know, what people forget about Lego was, in the early 2000s, Lego was a moribund, you know, ready for bankruptcy, you know, very, very on the verge of failing brand. And by turning it around through the creation of magazine in those days magazines, and shifting their catalogue to a, you know, a magazine that kids love to get, and then ultimately, obviously, the movie and everything that they do now in digital media really became as that CEO said, you know, we are a media company that happens to manufacture plastic bricks. And that is the real shift the these days, you know, you look at a brand like Monster Energy that spends $0 in paid media in the North America, and is simply just a content brand, that basically has become one of the most popular, you know, energy drinks and brands out there. The power of this is not necessarily in going all in like Red Bull, or Lego or you know, or monster or, you know, or even Michelin, and to some cases, but it's what part of your portfolio is this? Right? You know it because it doesn't have to be the entirety of the portfolio of your marketing mix, but it should be some part of your, you know, of your portfolio.
Eric: Everyone, just taking a quick minute out of today's episode to tell you about our partnership with a test. So rival has partnered with a test a powerful consumer research platform to start producing our own proprietary research. And what we're doing is highlighting some research from a test every week that's relevant to the guests that we have on and the conversation that I have with them. So for today's episode with Robert Rose, just one stat taken from a recent US consumer trends report that attests produced, which says that Americans say the top three types of messaging they want to hear from brands right now are humorous and entertaining 57% motivational and inspirational 47% and educational 34.5%. To find out more, head on over to askattest.com. Here, you can also run a free survey to access 110 million consumers in 49 markets to remove the guesswork from your business growth.
Eric: So you've written three best selling books on marketing and content strategy, the most use so -
Robert: much for saying it that way.That's so lovely, a view
Eric: It was in the contract, you told me to mention it right? Yeah, just kidding. You've written three best selling books, we found that out ourselves. And I wanted to mention it. Your most recent is killing marketing. And it's about how to turn marketing from a cost centre into a profit centre. So I'd love to expand on that a little bit. Because I've seen that firsthand. In my last role at 11:FS marketing was a profit centre. But I don't know how well I guess I'll let you kind of talk about it. But I'm curious from your experience and perspective, how much that's actually happening out there, versus it's kind of an aspirational opportunity for businesses to work towards.
Robert: I think it's mostly aspirational these days for most businesses, right. This is something where I think, you know, just to our previous discussion, it's it's one of those things where the opportunity is there, but it is not necessarily for everyone. But having said that, you know, whatever part of your portfolio, this becomes the opportunity to transform, or at least decrease your marketing costs and stop looking at marketing as only something that exists on the expense line is an incredible opportunity. You know, I look, you know, and it's not necessarily only relegated to big brands, right? You know, you think, Oh, this is something that only a Lego can do, or, Oh, this is something only, you know, a Red Bull or a monster can do. And it's not true, because you've got startup technology companies that are doing this. You've got, you know, hospitals that are doing this, you know, my favourite example of the last two years of a business doing this probably a company that gets this idea better than most is Cleveland Clinic. You know, they're obviously a well known brand and a hospital. But they're two content platforms, which literally started out as just a brand blog. It was just a blog that they renamed health essentials, transformed it into a health hub that would rival Will you know WebMD in terms of its depth and breadth, and what it tries to cover, and now it's a profit centre, they've now separated out their entire content team for their health library and the health essentials blog. They have salespeople selling ad space, they've got subscriptions, they've got money that they're getting from content syndication, and it's a profit Centre for them. And it's a whole, you know, it's as important to them as one of their service lines. And so it can be done. It's just looking at it from the right lens and trying to figure out, you know, how you actually apply this entire business model of a media company to your existing business
Eric: Through another example out there, a startup boutique consultancy, based in London that you might have heard of called rival? Yeah, I've heard their content too. So I mean, that really, you know, it's very small, we have one partner and Attest. And they're very aligned with kind of the business we want to build. And they're a partner for the research we're doing anyway. But we are somewhat monetizing, you know, the content that we're putting out. And that hasn't turned marketing into a profit centre yet. But if you put the hat on of, again, thinking like a media company, and trying to operationalize like a media company, if you were putting out content that's attracting an audience, chances are, they're someone who is interested in reaching that audience as well. And so you get to a point where you are Kind of generating revenue, to do the things that you'd want to do to drive growth or your business anyway. So that's kind of how I would think about it is I do think it's aspirational. And it's also a good thing to work towards, or have as a Northstar, because if you focus on that, whether you get there or not, it means that you are focused on creating valuable content, that at some point, in order for it to have the potential to be monetized, it needs to be good enough that people are going to spend time with it and engage with it. So I think it kind of steers, steers you in the right direction.
Robert: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, another great example of this is the startup company terminus, you know, they're an Account Based Marketing startup, you know, technology company. And when they launched, you know, like every startup technology company, they wanted to try and figure out how to do this marketing thing. And their, you know, their thing was all around Account Based Marketing. And so they started developing content brands, and one of them the flip my funnel brand, became a great podcast, it became a great blog, and then ultimately, which was the real sort of tipping point for them, they launched an event. And they launched the flip my funnel event, and the first thing they did just exactly to your point was to go out and find people who were interested in reaching the same people that they were interested in reaching, and got them to sponsor the event. And so they brought in, you know, let's call them frenemies, because I don't think they were direct competitors, per se, but they brought in other software companies that wanted to sponsor and be part of this event. And they not only got new customers, which were wonderful, of course, but they created loyalty with their existing customers by putting on a really great knowledge event that helped them use their software better. And quite frankly, they got money, they got revenue, they it was an event that paid for itself. And so ultimately, they got to a point where the content part of the business was as important as the software part of the business. And they got funding for both, they got venture capital for both and separated the organisation into two different organisations.
Eric:Yeah,think there's something there too, regardless of the scale, to which you expect to build your media company. And regardless, whether you plan on monetizing or not, I think just thinking about it, that way, is going to lead you in the right direction. And that's something anybody can do. It doesn't matter if you're a Red Bull, it doesn't matter if you're a two person startup, whatever marketing you're doing that involves content, thinking of it as if it was a media company that you're building around your brand. I think it's going to, I think it's going to help you long term. Yeah. So Robert, let's shift gears a little bit. One of the other topics that I hadn't are less than I'd love to get your thoughts on is this transition from a you know, third party, cookie driven, heavily tracking performance marketing world to one that is past that with all the ios changes and everything that's come about in the last 12 months, I'd love to get your thoughts on that. And any advice that you have for marketers listening on what they should be thinking about what they should be doing differently, to stay competitive and continue to grow in this new world?
Robert: Again, it all comes down to value, right? Yeah, in order to get absolutely entice you to share their data, you need to be the brand, or the destination that is offering more value than what they can get from a competitor. And I think it's also interesting, you know, I think that startups that are born now, five years from now, like, there's going to be companies that are like, wait, you had what, how did it work in 2010, and 2015. And I think, you know, this principle of kind of Challenger marketing, at least how we think about a challenger mindset and challenger model, it's about thinking about the world from scratch, hence the name of the podcast, for the way that it exists today, and not being tied to legacy perspectives, Legacy strategies, Legacy results of what you used to be able to get out of your performance marketing. And that's why startups inherently have an advantage over incumbents is because they're not tied to anything. They're only born into a world that looks like this. But even if you are an established company, regardless of the size, that's how you need to be challenging yourself and thinking about things as if you were starting over from scratch today, how would you do it given the technological the consumer and the cultural landscape that you face right now?
Robert: You know, it speaks to I mean, look, it's going to be it's a if I'm one of those people who looks at this challenge as as one that is welcome. And you know, it's not that it's not going to be difficult because it is, you know, living without that third party cookie and and some of the first party privacy data privacy issues, and certainly those things that are way more prevalent in Europe right now than they are here in the US. You know, us we've been a little busy. You know, we had that other guy to do deal with for the last five years. So we didn't really put a lot of attention to data privacy, but I think it's going to come back in a big way in the in the next year or two, but certainly GDPR, and in Europe and elsewhere, is going to cause a huge disruption in the way that we look at this. And this is going back to our previous conversation about the ROI, you know, of content marketing, this is it in a nutshell, to say, if you value having data, in order to be able to personalise experiences for your ecommerce experience, or for your customer service experience, or for your marketing experience, how do you get that data that's not only within the letter of the law in the case of GDPR, but also in the spirit of that idea, in the case of everywhere else, and content marketing is it because as you so rightly framed it, it's a value exchange, right. And so treating those people as customers leaning in to the idea of saying, hey, I want your data, but I'm giving you value in return a subscription to a great thought leadership blog, or a subscription to an entertaining magazine, or to a you know, a channel of videos, or whatever it is, is the idea. That's how media companies are really looking at the acquisition of their audiences in the first party data, which of course, isn't inordinately valuable to them as media companies, and inordinately valuable to us as product and service companies. And as that becomes more difficult to attain, certainly the third party is it goes away. And second party, I would argue, you know, that what you would get from a conference or from you know, a partner that would give you their database to utilise or whatever, that's going to go away as well, why because first party is going to become so much more valuable. And handing it off to a partner is sort of dilutes that value quite a bit. So we're going to become much more proprietary. And the trend, and you can already start to see this happening is for those that are in this world, and let's just face it, that's Facebook, Google, you know, Amazon, et cetera, they're going to become much more of a walled garden, that's the other side of that blade. And so as they become much more walled garden like and turning to trap us in their own ecosystems, we as independent companies, as media buyers, as marketers have to fight against that and create our own ecosystems of this so that we can actually start to counterbalance that. So that Google, Amazon, and Facebook don't become the only places we can reach our customers. And that's, that's where I think the big, you know, the big challenge for us in the 20s are going to be is going to be how do we start to create our own ecosystems where we can hold attention with audiences, and not have to rely so much on the Big Five, in order to in order to reach the people we need to reach?
Eric: Again, it all comes down to value, right? Yeah, in order to get absolutely entice you to share their data, you need to be the brand, or the destination that is offering more value than what they can get from a competitor. And I think it's also interesting, you know, I think that startups that are born now, five years from now, like, there's going to be companies that are like, wait, you had what, how did it work in 2010, and 2015. And I think, you know, this principle of kind of Challenger marketing, at least how we think about a challenger mindset and challenger model, it's about thinking about the world from scratch, hence the name of the podcast, for the way that it exists today, and not being tied to legacy perspectives, Legacy strategies, Legacy results of what you used to be able to get out of your performance marketing. And that's why startups inherently have an advantage over incumbents is because they're not tied to anything. They're only born into a world that looks like this. But even if you are an established company, regardless of the size, that's how you need to be challenging yourself and thinking about things as if you were starting over from scratch today, how would you do it given the technological the consumer and the cultural landscape that you face right now?
Robert: It's such a great point. I mean, that is such a wonderful point. Because, you know, I've often had this conversation with CMOS of, of, of, you know, especially of larger, you know, matrix siloed global organisations, where, somewhere along the line, you know, in the last 3040 50 years, the price of advertising and conversion rates and expectations around those things, those numbers became the standard, right, of which we measure everything. So, in other words, if you if you proposed something to your boss, that was over the standard, you know, point oh 1% click through rate and point you know, 5% click through rate and, you know, reaching you know, three times before they convert and, you know, media rates and CPMs And you know, all of those things that we sort of grew up on is sort of the standard bearers of cost and efficiency, you were thrown out of the office, unless you could beat those numbers. And one of the things that I think we just have to realise, and this, again, to your point is why startups have such an advantage here is that we have to rethink all of that, right? It is, you know, advertising is not a standard that we should be using anymore in terms of a cost of what marketing is, we should start establishing new ideas and new breakthrough ways of doing things that sort of reestablish new standards, because quite frankly, it's just a different world. You know, and if we, if we base our entire marketing strategy on, hey, it's an $18. CPM, or it's a $25. CPM, or it's $150. CPM, you're gonna find yourself spending way more on marketing and advertising than you might need to. But even more importantly, you'll be less effective, you're gonna just be, you're going to be less effective. And you're, you're buying right into that classical myth. So yeah, it's it's one of those things where you really do need to look at, and again, it comes back to how much of you know, because I'm not suggesting that advertising is dead. Though, the idea of how we actually measure it, maybe what we need to start to look at is, where can we start to establish our own best practices about what works and what doesn't work and start to make as part of our portfolio, some of these new approaches content marketing, certainly one influencer is another, looking at different, you know, ideas of account based when we're b2b, looking at different ways of doing consumer based, you know, ecommerce, and media is another, all of those things are changing the face of marketing, as it always has, but really in a pronounced way here in the 20s.
Eric: So to that point, you've said in the past that with all the billions of people coming online in the next few years, and I quote, the marketing departments that are getting it are evolving. So maybe to what we were just talking about, and to that, quote, as a jumping off point, what are a few things that traditional CMOs are doing wrong? Or if you want to take it a different direction? Some of the more progressive CMOs that get it? What are they doing right?
Robert: I think the CMOS that are getting it are one of the things that is a is truly I think indicative of of a business because it's I think of the CMO, I think of as you know, at the upper levels with the CEO, as business strategist, is understanding how fundamentally the process and operations of marketing has changed. And that's, you know, at its core, whether your business is organised in a functional or divisional type of approach, and their you know, there are arguments for back and forth, I was just listening to the, I think is Brian Chesky, the CEO of Airbnb, who was talking about his own battle between reorganising Airbnb versus a functional versus a divisional and how the pandemic really changed all of that. And one of the things that he really talked through was how fundamentally the operations of marketing changed. And that's to me, when I see a CMO that gets it is that they're, that's where they're changing things, right? Gone are the days where you, you come in, you redesign the website, you hire a new agency of record, and you get you know, your, you know, by channel organised, you know, your team's by, you know, digital versus offline, or, you know, you've got web versus email versus, you know, social media, those days are gone and over, and you have to re evolve the operations of how you're approaching things from not just a content marketing, but a full on operational of marketing content. That means advertising that means one sheets, it means brochures, it means websites, it means all of those things, and how are you changing the way that people work? To me when I see those shifts happening in a business, and I can point to examples of that, that's when I see companies that are outperforming the stock market, I see that they're succeeding, I see that they're agile, they're evolving, and they're actually, you know, they're changing the way that they do business.
Eric: You're clearly very on top of a lot of the things that are going out there going on out there and the businesses that are doing it right doing it wrong. I'm just curious to take a little bit of a sidebar here. How do you stay on top of everything? What is your kind of media diet consists of where you get this information and develop these insights. What's that process look like?
Robert: I you know, I listen to a lot of podcasts. There's certainly that and, you know, the I think the other the other thing that I do is I'm a bit of a business book junkie. And so I read a lot A lot of business books. You know, I think the business book genre is one that is you talk about a genre that is ripe for disruption. You know, so, but I do read a lot of that, especially classics, right? So I go back and I balanced my my business book consumption with, you know, sort of older, literally, you know, my, my bookshelf, and behind me there is filled with, you know, books from the 50s and 60s to talk about marketing, management and sort of the classics, because I see how those things have evolved. And then, you know, as you might expect, I subscribe to just about everything that's out there from, you know, from the ad weeks to the adage, you know, basically the, what I call the Madison Avenue industrial complex, I subscribed to all of that as sort of cautionary tales to be quite honest. And then I of course, all of the new stuff, you know, a16z you know, is a great, you know, the the you know, to keep up with Silicon Valley and some of the tech stuff and a lot of the mahr tech types of of, of blogs and email newsletters, I also subscribe to I subscribed to a lot, I'm a bit of a news junkie, when it comes to that stuff.
Eric: What are a few of your recommendations for those 1950s 1960s marketing classics that people should check out
Robert: I can send I would send you a long long list.
Eric: The ones send it over, we'll put it in the show notes for
Robert; you. It is one of my favourite things to do is to recommend classic marketing because honestly, it's how I was educated. I did not go to university for a for a marketing education. I you know, I came out with an English literature education. But when I got my first job in marketing in television, the first thing I did was immerse myself for two years in the classics, and read everything and sort of gave myself a homegrown MBA, if you will, in marketing and have since leaned on that a lot in terms of you know, the way I've sort of formed my point of view on marketing and sales and how it works. So I would be very, very glad to send you a long list of of classics that I believe are required reading for every marketer.
Eric: That'd be great. So Robert, I know that we are, we only got a few minutes left on our time together. You know, as predicted, we did not get through the long list of topics that I would love to hear your perspective on, maybe we'll do a follow up session at some point. But with the few minutes that we do have left? Is there anything that we haven't touched on that you are particularly passionate about right now I know you and Joe have your rant and rave section. So maybe you can think of this as a little bit like that? What what's top of mind for you these days that we haven't touched on that you think our audience would be interested to hear?
Robert: Well, I'll mentioned two things, one of which feeds off of the conversation we've been having for the last half hour or so, which is the idea of content. And I think one of the things that we can learn, and we can talk more about this, if you like is that the the, the idea of what it is we're producing, I think has fundamentally shifted over the last two years because of the pandemic. And I think, you know, there used to be this idea of content marketing would be sort of answering every question your customer would ever have, you know, and feeding them with more research and more information and more data and more, you know, basically to fuel this quote unquote, asymmetric relationship that we now have with the customer who has more data points and more information about our product, and our salespeople do and all of that stuff. And I think that's a myth. And I've been talking about the myth of the Empowered buyer lately. And that's something I've been talking a lot about and writing a lot about over the last few weeks. The second thing is, of course, the you know, the giant blockchain the elephant in the room, which is of course, you know, the the advent of web 3.0 and NFT's and, and those kinds of things. I'm down the rabbit hole on that stuff. So it's something that I've been spending a lot of time on.
Eric: Yeah, and I think down the rabbit hole is the place to be with that I've gone a couple steps down the rabbit hole, but I really do need to make time to spend, you know, just just immerse myself in it. And then actually, the thought that I had over the last couple weeks is, you know, I kind of came up and got self educated on marketing in the earlier days of web 2.0 in New York, and a little bit of San Francisco. And I kind of feel like you know, just kind of fell into it. And I was there from scratch when it started. And a lot of my career has been built on connections and learnings and, you know, me kind of, I guess, being positioned in that world. And I feel like this is kind of the next chapter of where potentially things are going and I want to make sure I don't get stuck in the 2.0 world that I know so well. So I'm trying to challenge myself a little bit to kind of think about things from scratch and if I was starting my career or the business over again from scratch right now, I think it's really smart to just be down a rabbit hole with that stuff, because as I've heard you talk about, and I definitely share this perspective, there's a lot to still sort out in terms of what's going to still be here, when you know, the dust settles a little bit on what is a very kind of bubbly time, particularly within F and within NFTs. But much like web 1.0, the underlying foundation of what it is building is going to be transformational for so many different businesses, and certainly for how we build brand and drive business growth, through marketing. So anybody who's in this space, and plans to still be working in the next five years, I think, really needs to be wrapping their head around it
Robert: absolutely 100 100% agree. And it's one of those things where, you know, I mean, I grew up so I started in television in the mid 90s, when cable TV was still a thing. And, you know, when I first started getting into the web in 1996 1997, and really cut my teeth, you know, I was overwhelmed with the with the technology with the opportunities with the just unknowns of all of it was going and as I've said, I haven't had that feeling again, like I didn't have it in oh eight and oh nine when social media got to be a thing. And I missed, I sort of missed that whole 2.0 shift. I mean, I wrote along with it, but I was not there for the beginning of it like I was in web 1.0. And I haven't felt like that since night, like I do now, like since 1996, when I was trying to figure out what HTML meant. And you know how to do Perl. And, you know, we were still doing hits, we were still calling them hits. And we all had hit counters on our websites. And we had to scrape that data from our web servers overnight. And you know, and there were companies like you, you net and you know, all these really early things that were just the early days of the beginning. And it feels like that right now where there's just there's too much, there's so much going on that you can't really keep up. And that's what's really exciting to me is that I'm in this constant feeling of I'm a bit behind right. No matter how much I immerse myself. I feel like I'm a bit behind.
Eric: Robert, thanks so much for making the time today. Great to get into this with you. I really appreciate it
Robert: Absolutely. My pleasure. Thank you so much for having me on.
Eric: Talk soon have a good day. Scratch is a production of rival. We are a marketing innovation consultancy that helps businesses develop strategies and capabilities to grow faster. If you want to learn more about us check out we are rivals.com If you want to connect with me, email me at Eric at we are rivals.com or find me on LinkedIn. If you enjoyed today's show, please subscribe, share with anyone you think might enjoy it. And please do leave us a review. Thanks for listening and see you next week.
