Exploring the Marketing Landscape with Mitch Joel

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Mark Evans: I'm Mark Evans, and welcome to Marketing Spark, a podcast that delivers insight for marketers and entrepreneurs in the trenches in twenty five minutes or less. It goes without saying the marketing landscape has dramatically changed over the past year. The disappearance of conferences, a go to channel for b to b companies, has been a game changer, forcing marketers to embrace virtual events, high quality content, newsletters, and social media. Who better to provide perspective on marketing today and where it's heading as well as how business is transforming the next jewel, an entrepreneur, investor, author, and trusted adviser. Welcome to Marketing Spark.

Mitch Joel: Good to hear from you, Mark, and nice to, quote, unquote, see you. I get to see your face because of the power of Clubhouse. Normally, not much, but good to see you.

Mark Evans: Likewise. It's been a long time, especially in these COVID times in which we're living where seeing people is a real treat. Let's start by exploring the state of digital marketing. As I said during the introduction, it's been a year of change, experimentation, and adapting to the new landscape. A loaded question, but what's been your take on marketing over the past twelve months?

Mitch Joel: You know, I don't know if it's so much twelve months as it is in general. And I wanna separate the idea of marketing and advertising because it's an easy trope to get into. So let's focus on the advertising side of it, and then maybe you can remind me we can pull it back in or or zoom out to the broader world of digital marketing. But from an advertising perspective, it's been pretty, I wanna use the word sad, it's somewhat sad. We lived in a world and you were there early on as I was where it felt like we would see a million flowers blossom. And suddenly we are in this world that professor Scott Galloway so rightfully called to these unregulated monopolies. It's a place where if you are playing with two players, namely Facebook and Google, and we could discuss and debate the other ones because they have merit. But that'll basically cover you. That'll basically get you the eyeballs and attention you need. And because of their data and the accumulation of the platforms that fall within both of those major brands, what you have is a world where the publishers also maintain so much data and information that they know exactly based off of keywords, intent, connections, etcetera. How much a keyword or key phrase or target audience is to any brand. They know more about the actual acquisition of a customer and the lifetime value of the customer, then probably the brand that's trying to do any semblance of advertising. And that creates a massive financial opportunity for the publishers. It provides the brands with a really good insight into how they can target or retarget their advertising and their messaging, but it doesn't provide a lot of flexibility. And with that, there's also the question of brand safety. What we've really seen in the past twelve months is a bit of a red herring. In one instance, brands have never been safe on social media. Their content has constantly been surrounded by however you wanna describe the content. Is it political? Is it too left? Is it too right? Is it too center? Or do we want our brands associated around these types of content, comments, user generated content, etcetera. But when it became the big banner that brands were floating everywhere, brand safety brand safety, we're gonna be pulling back our advertising from Facebook and Google. I felt like it's a bit of a red herring only because it fell at a time when the pandemic was really kicking off and getting hot and crazy and heavy for the world. And I felt like it was a good diversion from the reality that brands were probably gonna start retracting marketing and advertising budgets. They were probably gonna start laying people off and making pretty ugly announcements. But if they could yell very loudly about brand safety, it could push the onus back onto the platforms again, namely Facebook and Google in this instance. And I found that very frustrating from my own perspective. On the other hand, brands have never been more empowered as you and I have known and talked about for over a decade to build their own platforms. To get more engaged in their newsletters, to get more engaged in their own content creation, and to think about things differently. So you have a tale of two cities as we always have in these situations. You have the agnostic world of technology that is neither good nor bad, it just is. And you have many flare ups of issues and challenges that make it somewhat challenging for big brands to play in effectively and really troublesome for the smaller brands to even get on board. Which again, if you look at the smaller brands, then you can go down the larger view of digital marketing and look at an amazing opportunities and things like, for example, Shopify, another Canadian success story that I'm sure both of us are really proud of, but that enables and empowers anybody to become an entrepreneur. That has massive implications across the landscape as well. Because now you have younger startups who are thinking about building their own platform. They're engaged in the marketplace. They're adding apps onto it. They're trying to build that DTC, that direct to consumer relationship, and that creates a very fortuitous time. But as they move up into the scale of time to advertise on Google and Facebook, it can be very, very limiting. And again, what happens? Well, it lays a path for new startups like Clearbank, for example, again, another Canadian company. I'm being very pro Canadian today, but how do they think about venture? Well, the vast majority of new businesses are coming in and looking for venture for marketing, why not build a business like ClearBank, which essentially doesn't take ownership, but offers a loan against specifically targeted advertising in Facebook and Google with a premium on top of it that takes away from removing issues from the overall cap of the company and what they're looking at and provides a new venture and venue to to to advertise and connect. So I can go down a million tropes here if you want, Mark.

Mark Evans: Well, ask a simple question. You don't get a simple answer, I guess, is the easy way to describe it. There's a lot of different ways we can go here. There are three words that came to mind when you were answering that question. One was flexibility, the other was creativity, and the other was innovation. Flexibility when it comes to advertising channels because you're absolutely right about the fact that there are two big players in town. And really when it comes to digital marketing, you either go with option a or option b. Last year, when a lot of brands jumped off Facebook, they said they would no longer advertise on the platform. You had to believe it was more, you know, show than go that, eventually, they just couldn't resist the power and size of the Facebook platform, and they eventually, many of them came back. Now a lot of them didn't publicize the fact that they'd they'd come back, but it was it was what it was. And the same thing goes for Google. Google has so much data. You have to be everywhere, and that is just the advertising landscape. The other thing comes down to creativity, and I am interested in, as a creative, getting your take on this. The fact that brands have to be so careful these days. You know, putting yourself out there, taking chances, embracing risk, doing things that may push the boundaries can put you offside pretty quickly, particularly in a world where we increasingly see the world in black or white. And wondering what your take is of the creative landscape when it comes to marketing.

Mitch Joel: Creatively, I really think we are seeing a high level of innovation. Only because, again, I zoom out and look beyond banner advertising and retargeting. But the ability to tell a story in a compelling way that attracts an audience, an audience to potentially being a customer, a first time customer, as my friend, Avanesh Kaushik, who's this analytics guru of an AI person at Google, likes to say customers usually someone who buys from you twice. So first time customer, and then a real customer, someone who's bought from you twice. And I see this every single day, and I love that level of creativity, and where am I seeing it? Well, am seeing it in places like in my newsletters. I am seeing it in the extension from the newsletter, which may or may not be attached to it. Again, I'll point to the Shopify blog as an example. It's really hard to find a more aggregated unique from diverse voices area to understand how to be an entrepreneur in modern times beyond the Shopify blog, which sounds crazy to say, but they've done an excellent job at really pushing it forward. When I think about a company like HubSpot, for example, very recently acquiring, I think they acquired the hustle. To me these are strong indicators of excellent thinking around creativity. You could extend it into physical creative and think about what Patagonia has done with their movies and their YouTube channels. Complex, very large media company. They launched this thing called Complexland, which is I mean, don't know how to explain it. Is it a video game? Is it an online learning? You go into this experience and you can shop and meet different vendors and go attend content speeches. There there has been a complete explosion of the ability to really build a brand in a creative way. You could even look at platforms like Cameo, which allows anybody to go in and get a celebrity to give a shout out to a friend for a birthday or whatever it might be. You could look at something like Masterclass is another great example of creative ways to build a brand and tell your story. I'll even go as far as I have a nerdy Mark knows me. I have many nerdy things, but one of my nerdy things is I've been trying to do another podcast. My main podcast is called Six Pixels of Separation, and I've been doing it. I think it's the longest running business podcast in the world, close to fifteen years. But I have another one that I've been doing for about five or six years, which is a monthly show called Groove the No Trouble podcast, where I'm trying to slowly build the largest oral history of bass players because I love bass and I used to be a player, but now I just love the music. And in that journey, I met this fantastic company called Scott's Bass Lessons, which seems like, oh, Scott teaching bass lessons online learning, great. Scott probably has the largest online instructional for any instrument in the world. Guitars, drums, you name it, beyond I mean, not including things like maybe Berkeley College of Music and things like that. And if you look at his creativity and his content, it's astounding. Even if he's retargeting you and ads, and by the way, I don't recommend typing in electric bass because you will be unless you really wanna be, you will be retargeted from Scott nonstop. But the what he does is he's not retargeting you with ads or promos to sign up or anything like that. It's always content and it's really good content. He'll do a video called the three times Jacko Pastorius went beast mode. Jacko Pastorius is a very famous electric bass player. He will take a very famous bass that some player used and do a history of that actual instrument with interviews. The content and creativity of what he's doing in seven, eight, fifteen minute videos that are essentially retargeted ads is super compelling. And so I'm a massive believer that you can do very very compelling things with creativity beyond the idea of it being just great copy and and a great picture or photo to go along with it.

Mark Evans: Now where do I go from there? We covered a lot of areas. We could talk about base playing and and online education. One of the things that you mentioned that obviously capture my attention is storytelling because I've been a long time storyteller as a journalist and a blogger and doing videos and newsletters. And there is a lot of talk about storytelling. If you did a search on Google, you get, I don't know, 100,000,000 results, like, within less than a second. Curious about what is actual brand storytelling. When you really boil it down to, and I think a lot of people struggle with this, is that storytelling and concept makes sense. Storytelling in the real world actually doing it is a whole other thing completely. So maybe you can define what good brand storytelling is and provide some examples of how it happens. You've already mentioned Patagonia as one example, and there's brands like Airbnb and GoPro that also do a great job. Give us your take on storytelling and and maybe even include why a lot of companies struggle with it.

Mitch Joel: Well, I'll simplify it, which is you live in a world, I live in a world, everybody listening lives in a world where you as a brand or individual can create content in text, images, audio, and video instantly. And what I mean by when I say for free is the distribution channel is primarily free. I mean there's there's there's modalities to that that we can discuss. Now you can do that also in long form or short form. Now in the world, I mean, we're recording this on Clubhouse, you can do it in a world where it's prerecorded and edited, or like this, live. And so when we talk about what do we mean by brand storytelling, I believe it's simply that. As a brand, you need to sit down and define who amongst us wants to tell a story about our brand, our business, our story in text, images, audio, video, long form, short form, live, prerecorded, what's the right mix for us, what makes sense. So if you look to me being a market of one, or me being the best example for me to use because I know it so well, I would argue that my output is text long form, audio long form. That's the core of what I do. I write long articles, blog posts, things like that, and then I do my hourly podcast every week and my other podcast, and that's my main thing. That doesn't mean I don't do three weekly national radio hits. It doesn't mean I don't tweet. It doesn't mean I don't post pictures of my walks on Instagram. It just means at the core, that's what I do. And by leveraging that understanding of what you do and creating a path forward, an editorial calendar, How are we gonna put this out? What does this look like? You start going down the path where you're no longer limited to the constraints of an ad, and you're thinking about your brand as a story, as a publishing entity. So when I was running my agency, which I did for over fifteen years with my business partners, it was called Twist Image. That's where we started Six Pixels of Separation the blog. That's where we started Six Pixels of Separation the podcast. From that, that's what led to speaking events, which I still do a lot of. That's what led to my book deal, so I had two books that I put out. But we looked at it at a meta perspective. We said, okay, we are an agency, Twist Image. It became Mirum in the end, so let's call it Mirum for consistency. Mirum manages two other brands. We also manage this thing that we called six pixels of separation, which was our content container for all of those things, the blog, the podcast, the speaking, etcetera. And we're also managing this brand called Mitch Joel. And I'm not gonna talk about myself in the third person like certain athletes do, but that was the attitude we brought to it. What are we doing to improve and place this brand of Mitch Joel and the storyteller, the face of it, the voice of it, into the zeitgeist. And so to me that that's a construct of how we create a storytelling environment. Now when we take it to the next level, what I think is really interesting about digital marketing and technology is we have the split of storytelling brand building against direct response advertising. And if I said to you, Mark, like Mark, what do you think would be the proper split for a start up or an established business in terms of the storytelling brand side versus the direct response advertising engine? You'd probably logically say fifty fifty, that's what makes sense, but it's not. It over indexes in a massive way towards direct response. If I buy a bunch of ads on Google and Facebook and target them, that's a better way to get sales and customer acquisition. But if you forego that brand, that storytelling, those components of it, you know, woe is you. It doesn't create the longevity you need. And so what happens in in the current world is the brands that are struggling are the ones that aren't paying enough attention to the brand and storytelling component. And what happens on the other side is because they're putting that 80%, let's say, on direct response and advertising is it becomes a more expensive game of customer acquisition, which speaks exactly to what we had before in the large multinational media universe of it's 08:00 on Thursday on NBC, and if you're not advertising on must see TV, the nation doesn't know you exist. And that became this game of spending and spending against these numbers, which is what we're essentially seeing on the direct response advertising side with the one caveat being you can tweak it a little bit. You can see if it's actually converting, and that's the drug of it. And that's why I think so many brands haven't been focused on storytelling because it's almost too easy to do the direct response side of it.

Mark Evans: Just to jump around a little bit, Mitch, because I know there's a lot of ground I wanna cover. You have done in the past a lot of public speaking. I suspect that you've probably done your fair share of of virtual speaking over the last twelve months. Trying to get your thoughts, and you're probably gonna speculate as much as anybody these days about the state of in person events and speaking. Do you have any sense from the people that you talk to, the bookings that you might be getting about when that might come back? And I would put this into context that in Canada, we're far behind the vaccination curve than The US. So my perspective is a bit different than what might be happening south of the border. How do you feel? What what's gonna go happen with you when it comes to in person speaking this year?

Mitch Joel: I don't know. You know, similar to you, I don't think it's going to work for me unless I have both vaccinations and things are reasonable here. I'm a I'm a family person. I'm a parent happily, and we've got young kids in Canada. Like you said, it's a bit different in that. In The States, everything's open, but the schools are closed in Canada. Everything's closed, the schools are open. Then we could have a debate about whether that's good or bad, but I want my kids in school and anything that I do that might have to have them removed from school for multiple weeks due to quarantine and things like that are off the table for me. So my reaction is right now in The States, it looks like there are some small and local events that are going forward. I've seen even evidence of large events that are happening. Are those international events? Probably not. Are they great ideas? That's not for me to judge or decide on. I have my own perspective, but I don't think it's germane to the conversation. But I can't see myself getting on a plane, in particular leaving the country until I'm fully vaxxed. And I'm at the mercy of governments and decisions about borders and how that works. That being said, my perspective about what's going to happen is different usually than most of my peers. Most of my peers are in this headspace of virtual, hybrid or physical events, and I think that that's the wrong perspective. What's happened and it's actually relevant to what we're talking about in relation to marketing is the world shut down. Let's call it mid March of last year. And every single business went into survival mode. And I believe that there are three S's here. So that's the first S is survival mode. Everything went virtual, we're all on Zoom, that's life. In August, I think we shifted from survival mode into sustain mode. This is gonna be a longer haul. We don't know. There's a lot of uncertainty, second waves, third waves. So how do we sustain? And I think when we talk about sustain at a corporate level, it becomes two directions. Direction one is how do we as a company engage our employees if we have to sustain this as we have been and as we will for a little bit while longer or maybe much longer. Two is how do we engage our customers? And I think the reaction from that is going to be because we're still in sustain mode. By the way, the third s is strive. Strive is where we probably were in December. I think that sustain mode is gonna create a different model. And so my gut tells me, my brain a little bit too, that there's gonna be three paths. Path one is the CFO speaks to the CEO and goes look, we didn't do that 300 person event down in Boston, we did it online and we had 1,500 people come in or 15,000 people join. Now we have this content, we can keep reusing this content and pushing this content out there. Why would we ever go physical if we could reach a larger base in a virtual world? So I do think that there is this push towards much more virtual only types of events. I put events in air quotes. The next one is going back to this idea of how do we gauge our employees? How do we gauge our customers? I think slowly what they're going to realize, because part of the workforce will remain remote, some people will have moved and changed around, they're gonna do a lot more what I'll call local and smaller events. So more regionalized events with a higher level of frequency. Instead of doing that big big event, we'll do two or three in different parts of the country or or in different countries and keep it really, really tight and small. This way, they're not falling offside in terms of insurance and worried about gatherings that are too large and making people slowly comfortably edge into this. And then the third one is what I typically do, which is I fly somewhere and I speak to an audience of any size from five to 15,000 people. And I think those are gonna be exceptionally popular. I think there's a pent up demand that people who complain, oh I got another conference in Las Vegas are gonna be like, how do I get on that plane faster than before? And so what I think is happening is too many people are thinking well which one will it be? And my answer is it will be all three. And so if you are a good speaker and a prepared speaker, you suddenly have two new paths that you may not have had before in in any mix up. So for me, the two new paths would be virtual only and the more local small regional ones on top of what I was typically doing. So I really believe if you're an event planner, if you're in the speaking business, if you're a professional speaker and you're well positioned, what could happen is you could be busier than ever and have more and more opportunities to speak and grow that business. And this tends to be my overall feeling in general about digital, which is this forced innovation that happened for businesses to survive in that first phase, and then shift into sustain, have probably created a myriad of new business models and opportunities for businesses to pursue. And my hope is that as we come out of this, and I think we're all seeing some light here at the end of this tunnel, that they will sustain those and really push them into the strive mode. You have restaurants that were doing Zoom lessons, they're suddenly in the online education space, and that might be an entirely brilliant new part of business. So I get really excited when I think about what happened through this, what I call this great compression of time to be very opportunistic when it comes to how businesses can grow and expand beyond it.

Mark Evans: It would be remiss if I didn't ask you about LinkedIn and Clubhouse. Over the past year, I've doubled down on LinkedIn. It has been a tremendous medium to connect with people, have I probably talked to more than a 100 people, probably a 150 people directly as a result of LinkedIn connections, and it's really done my business a lot of good. And, my brand awareness is is through the roof. Clubhouse, I'm ambivalent, to be honest with you. I'm not quite sure. Although, I'm sure you have a different perspective because you're quite active, and it looks like you you you brought your tribe with you. Give me some perspective on the way that LinkedIn has evolved and and what do you think of Clubhouse's potential? Because I think that's kind of like the big wild card right now for a lot of individuals in terms of people who are influencers and brands.

Mitch Joel: Yeah. It's an interesting question too because we're we're talking about this in the middle of this other thing that's sitting out there, which is rumors that Discord, which I would say is the grandfather of what we're seeing here on Clubhouse in terms of social audio is potentially being sold to Microsoft for $10,000,000,000. There's a rumor. You never know anything like this, but Microsoft clearly owns LinkedIn. And so the connections there are very curious and interesting to me. If Microsoft wanted some kind of clubhouse competitor or asset, this would be interesting. And the integration of it into a LinkedIn, coupled with the fact that they own Office, could be a very compelling asset for them to have in that portfolio of companies. LinkedIn is a challenge for me because I was in there so early and I basically allowed or connected with everybody thinking that, well, let's just use this as my open space and anytime I blog or podcast, I'll just pump it in there and that'll push it out to thousands and thousands of people. Well, now you fast forward well over a decade and it's a hot mess for me. So my feed is not clean, it's not clear, it's very problematic for me. I get a lot of inbox spam from people wanting to have fifteen minutes phone call with me to sell me some SaaS service that I have no interest in. So my LinkedIn experience isn't as powerful as yours is. I'll caveat that now by saying that my peers, people like you and other friends, and just in general anecdote and usage are loving it more and more every day, and I can see why. It is a great place to be that professional and to share content and have it be really relegated to business. And when I looked looked at LinkedIn now, it feels like this weird hybrid of like business two point o, fast company, and wired magazine all in one, which if that's the space you occupy, and a lot of us do, it's really really compelling. In terms of Clubhouse, it's a bit of a different thing. And I think it's what you bring to Clubhouse. Like I have many thoughts about what Clubhouse is, which stand outside of what it satiates for me. So what does Clubhouse say Clubhouse satiate for me? Well, I do three national or international radio hits every Monday morning, one after the other, And I find it really hard to be quote unquote hot on the mic and really good live like out of the box, especially on a Monday morning, and I don't really practice the rest of the week to be live, but now I do. So when you contacted me for this podcast, my desire to do it here is it's forcing me to act and be who I am, but who I am when it's live in front of an audience, and that provides me a place to practice. So Clubhouse for me is a place to get my reps in. The next thing I love about it is that it's live, and I do love the energy of live. So how often have I thought I'd love to do one of my shows in a beautiful theater with a great audience and after we all get to hang out, it'd be so much fun, but I get nervous and I would never pull the trigger on that because I worry that nobody would show up. But now I can do that and I've done it multiple times and we're doing it again here on Clubhouse, which I really really like, that ability to create the live interaction, bring people and have questions, and I just like that energy. So there's that. And then the third is, it's the business that I'm in. My job is I help people decode the future. I look at what's happening, where's the world going, what can I play with? And so when Clubhouse came along, I recognized that the Discord platform wasn't for me because while I understand the gaming world, I'm not much of a gamer. This felt like the non gamer version of that. I was slow to adopt it. I was given an invite on I think October, but it's only been really a couple months that I've come on here to be active. And I like that part of it. I like bringing that energy to it, that I can have these different types of conversations. I've also met some really incredible people here. I find the platform much more diverse in terms of gender, in terms of race, in terms of where I live, in terms of how I think, and I welcome those voices. It's nice to see rooms that have that diversity. I worry that it's gonna get more and more homogenous as it grows, and I worry that the tech infrastructure beneath it will push it in another direction, but I'm hopeful that I can still find those different rooms that add to my ability to learn more and more about not just diversity, but my desire to understand others better. And I've learned a lot over the past couple years. I mean, used to be the person who said, oh, I'm not racist. I've got friends from all over, I wrote for the hour, the alternative weekly for years, I've been all true. But the other part is the systemic part. The systemic part is me being able to acknowledge that as someone who I self declare as male, pale and stale, middle aged white guy with a ton of privilege, that I've had that privilege, that the system is set up so that I do have a certain level of privilege that I took advantage of, of course. And so my perspective changes and it's changed a lot because the conversations that happen here in Clubhouse. So that's the third part of it. Your reason might be really different. You might be I just wanna hang out in cool tech rooms and meet interesting people and speak to other marketers. Fantastic. So that's what makes a social network powerful is finding what your reason for being here would be.

Mark Evans: We've covered a lot of ground in thirty minutes, and I wanna thank everybody for listening to another episode of Marketing Spark. If you enjoyed the conversation, leave a review and subscribe by iTunes and Spotify for your favorite podcast app.