Dan Salkey | Small World | Merging Marketing & Entertainment - Is It Right For Your Business?

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0:54I'm Mike Linton, the former Chief Marketing Officer, by eBay, Farmers Insurance, and Ancestry.com. Here today with my guest, Dan Salke. Today's topic, merging marketing and entertainment. Is it right for your business? Now, Dan is the co-founder and strategy partner of Small World, an agency focused on creating entertainment-first brands. So that's entertainment-first brands. He has been in the agency business since 2014 and also spent two years working on the Adidas brand in the UK. Dan, welcome to the show. Thanks for introducing me so brilliantly, Mike. What are you going to say? I'm practiced.

1:39So, and welcome to the show again. That's great to say. Before we get in to the topic, let's talk about and discuss exactly what you mean by entertainment. And let me also say, it's rare for marketers or any business for that matter to say, let's make our marketing and sales materials less entertaining. so let's be really clear on what you mean by entertainment totally um i'm really thankful for the question because it's the first time it made me sit down and actually write a proper definition because we do get this question often um and you know you assume as you just said there everybody wants to make their marketing more entertaining um but i think the main shift in this is it's not about being an entertainment brand it's about being entertaining so it's not about being an entertainment brand it's about being entertaining and i'll talk about that in a little bit more detail later on.

2:34But when you think about it like that, you can get this sort of definition for entertainment first brand building as the practice of crafting a brand that earns and owns its audience's attention. And they do that by behaving like a character, a content studio, a storyteller, anything but an advertiser. And those brands then create cultural value for humor, character, storytelling, spectacle, effectively leveraging entertainment value to grow faster, build distinction and win share of mind in a really fragmented media world and when we look at all of the brands that are deemed as entertaining i think they've become entertaining in response to three core truths one is this idea that reach is no longer guaranteed all attention today is effectively earned or you're paying out the nose for it which i've got some really good statistics on later on you're not just competing with other brands because of this fragmented media landscape you're now in this royal rumble with entertainment at large you're competing against the likes of Mr.

3:29Beast, Fortnite, Netflix, and therefore the bar for attention is far higher for what grabs attention from marketing is much higher. And lastly, and this has always been a truth, I think, people engage with media that entertains them, not media that sells to them. Hey, so that is a great definition. I'm glad we did a public service for you to write it down. I want to know, though, how do you know if you're entertaining? Like, so when you look at our podcast, obviously it's entertaining, but how do you, how do you know, how do we know we're doing an entertaining podcast? Yeah. I mean, really simply put again, if you want, if you want the layman's terms of it, like when we're deep, when we're judging a client's piece of work content, really anything out in the world, the main way that you know, whether something is entertaining or not is, is it being shared in your friend's group chat?

4:15I think ultimately, you know, has someone gone out of their way to say, yes, this thing is interesting enough to me to share it with another person. It's effectively word of mouth on steroids in the area of the internet, I suppose. But to me, that is what makes something genuinely entertaining. If somebody will go out of their way and share that piece of information with another person and show that to another marketplace. But that's the marketplace saying it's entertaining. If I want to think, I know it's entertaining before I release it or before I even shoot it or make it. How do I, is there a way to look at that or is really the marketplace the only arbiter of how to do this yeah i mean i would always say that the internet is the world's greatest democracy and what i mean by that i suppose is that it's ultimately that's the place you put something out into and you really know if it's going to work or not but if you wanted sort of a a grounding beforehand to know if something's vaguely going to be entertaining or not we did this piece of research called entertain or die which i'll give the proper plug for in a second but in that piece of research we track we surveyed 20 ,000 people across the world.

5:18Do you want to say something, Mike? Yeah, let's go right to the research because that was where I wanted to go anyway. So it's a perfect segue. You guys did this research on brands and entertainment. Tell us what you learned. Fantastic, yeah. So yeah, I think the first thing to say is we, and by we, my company Small World partnered with a brand tracking company called Tracksuit who run affordable, always on brand tracking. but they were also intently interested in what makes brands entertaining and whether that entertainment value kind of drives growth effectively but when we looked at the landscape there was literally no research done into that topic whatsoever there are loads of really lovely creative case studies that had been written about entertaining brand work and you know can lie and talks about creativity and towards no end but there's no real sort of data behind that and it doesn't take a macro look at what makes brands entertaining so we said cool let's do a piece of research that answers three questions one who are the most entertaining brands in the world two what makes those brands entertaining and then three does that entertainment value drive a lift in revenue growth and share price spoiler alert and i won't go into this in detail because again it's all in the report we'll put in the show notes etc um 96 of the brands in the top 30 of our index so the most deemed the most entertaining brands in the world had revenue growth last year and two-thirds of those brands had double-digit revenue growth and then if you look at what actually makes those brands entertaining which was your original question i've taken and if you want to throw any brand names out and then talk about what makes them entertaining that'd be great yeah sure i mean there were there were lots there were lots of brands in there that you would expect to be there so tick tock top the index for instance um you also had brands like netflix there in the top 10.

7:00You have brands like the NBA, for instance, lots of sports franchises. But there were interestingly, lots of brands in that index, perhaps, you know, a third of the top 30, for instance, who came from categories that you wouldn't expect. So I would expect their entertainment brands. So of course, they're not entertaining, you know, Netflix, the NBA aren't entertaining, they have a product problem. So let's go to the other ones. What are the other ones? of course well you've got brands like and again if i if i just put the categories on a table to you and said which of these categories are the most entertaining you probably wouldn't wouldn't pick them but if i actually put the brands there you would instantly recognize them as entertaining but canned water so liquid death one of the brands that's talked about as one of the most entertaining brands in the world and duolingo a client of ours as well um who are like you know language learning app basically um again um not not inherently an interesting or entertaining category you would you would you would suggest um but they by and large are one of the most entertaining brands in the world um there are other examples in there like visa um we purposely didn't include b2b brands in this edition of the index but it's something that we're trying to remedy for next year um that's just because we wanted to compare apples to apples in the overall index we're going to go category by category for for next year um and yeah ultimately there were four things that entertaining brands over indexed in when it came to driving entertainment values so we tracked seven attributes they're all in the report you can you can read them at your own leisure but there are four things in particular that they over indexed and if and if a brand scored really highly in two of these four things it meant that we knew they're inherently i know i've been i've really been teasing you haven't i yeah um so the the four things are um first is social and largely what we mean by that is is this a brand that feels or creates the most engaging content on social media um it doesn't matter what social media it could be any social media they were generally brands that mirrored content creators and felt like content creators um in the same way you know a netflix might be or in the same way that an individual personality might be as well so social was one of them uh second was uh attention or surprise what we called what we called surprise is this a brand that shocks me into attention is this a brand that captures my attention straight away because they do something shocking or edgy or something that feels out of the norm uh then we had um character which is the next thing which we'll talk about in more detail but generally and there's there's a fair few ways to be characterful but character characterful brands are those that felt like a character from a tv show or from a brand universe or a brand world effectively um you could call that a mascot but there's also lots of other ways that brands lean into doing that which i can mention later on um and then the last one uh was and apologies i should have this to hand because i should know this intimately myself um but if give me two seconds the last one is humor of course how can i forget humor uh and again there's been tons written about the power of humor within marketing um and i would like to make the point that not entertaining brands don't have to necessarily be funny but of the emotions humor definitely is the one that drives the most entertainment value so those are brands that were inherently funny um and you know felt like comedy basically so there's no surprise why you see brands at liquid death and duolingo score highly as a result of that got it hey can i go back to a little of the b2b stuff and also say there's some how do you know if your brand's going to benefit from an entertainment boost specifically let's give a couple examples i'm a b2b brand i'm marketing to surgeons or i'm an investment bank selling to cfos i so i get this target market um do i always want to go down the entertainment route or is that dangerous in some ways yeah so of course i'm biased but i would push back and say you cannot afford not to follow an entertainment first approach to marketing so going back to something that i mentioned earlier in the last decade alone cpms on platforms have risen 222 it's incredibly expensive to advertise solely through paid advertising no matter what channel you're on that's largely just because of the amount of brands that are trying to advertise today and the amount of people that you're trying to capture the attention of um the most successful platforms know that they kind of have brands by the proverbials um when when they want to when they want to uh effectively increase increase the price of using their platforms um therefore the only thing that you can do is own and earn people's attention and invest in trying to own and earn people's attention we therefore believe as we went back to that original definition that we had the best way to do that is by being an entertaining brand i would say though that again going back to that point around humor whenever i say to to people you need to be an entertaining brand the head of me immediately goes to liquid death duolingo to humor to things that are inherently risky i would say and and and for a b2b brand definitely make them feel like they're not to be taken seriously but i've actually got a really brilliant example that isn't necessarily all right let's hear it because in my head i've been going here's the new scalpel for surgeons delivered with a lot of edge and humor yeah well i still think that i still think that would do brilliantly well because surgeons at the end of the day are just people but i would like to make yeah a point as i said that you don't necessarily need to lean into humor to be entertaining and again it's one of the things that we've learned um as as a as a learning for entertain or die free when we release it so um do you know the brand net scout by any by any chance i do not okay cool well i'm good i've got a definition actually here so i can read it to you so net scout is a provider of application performance management and network performance management solutions as well as ddos protection and cyber security solutions so if i was read out to you inherently probably one of the most boring brands in a boring category i'll be taking a little nap now exactly exactly so uh net scout and sorry if anyone from net scouts out there i'm about to say something really positive about you guys as a brand and as a business uh net scout in 2017 wanted to promote their brand there were tons of things they could have done they could have gone down the traditional b2b route and done a linkedin b2b campaign instead they commissioned werner herzog to create a documentary called lo and behold the reveries of the internet all about the brilliant things of the internet and and how we uh interact with it and and why it is is so important um to us to promote their cyber security um service off the back of it for those of you don't know i'm sure lots of people listen to the famous director he's one of the most famous documentary directors of all time it's not a funny documentary at all it's very like weird and like a bit absurdist um but it's just a fantastic piece of entertainment and filmmaking it's got 92 % score on Rotten Tomatoes.

13:47It was released at the Sundance Film Festival to critical acclaim. It is a brilliant piece of entertainment marketing, much better than lots of the things that were shown at Sundance that year that weren't tied to a brand whatsoever by Netscout, who is this incredibly boring brand. If someone from Netscout wants to reach out and say what kind of impact they had on their brand metrics and full funnel metrics, please, by all means, do. But I'm 100 % sure that that garnered a lot more owned and earned attention than running a LinkedIn B2B campaign would have done for you. You're happy to post the documentary in the comments if we get it.

14:21Let's talk about, so you decide your brand needs an entertainment boost. Let's do the best and the worst ways to do that because obviously all entertainment is not equal. There's probably a good way to do it and a not so good way give our listeners uh your best practices and worst hall of fame examples yeah of course um i'll be happy to hopefully none of them will come from my company um what is really important to mention i think first off the bat is this if i were to again none of this flies in the face of traditional marketing diagnosis knowing your customer strategy building a plan of attack and then tactics putting that all into action we would we'd follow the same approach when we do entertainment first brand building it's just the nuance of it is slightly different so first of all we need to know who we're making entertainment for who are those people we call them our fans audience people customers whatever you want to call them but in this case i think they are fans you know what what are they going to be fans of and sharing um as a result of who those people are and what they're interested in what form is that going to take is it a documentary that we're releasing at Sundance or is it a TikTok content strategy effectively?

15:35And then which platforms are we going to be releasing that on? Again, is it something that we're doing as a big IP project because we're going for maximum eyeballs like the Barbie movie or Minecraft movie? Or is it something that's going to be a smaller bet experiment that we're starting off as like a YouTube content series, for instance, or something on LinkedIn, for instance, wherever that might be. So I would say it's all about the who, what and the which. That's the way we kind of plan it out. And I would say the worst attempts that we see at entertainment first brand building are those which are self-obsessed.

16:01They inherently think that their product and their brand is going to be the most entertaining thing in the world. Want to throw an example out there? Can you throw an example out? I don't really want to dig out any particular brands, but I think it just from a category first approach, at least you see this a lot from tech companies. And we work with a lot of tech companies to help them change that and remedy that. I would say it's something that you would, yeah, you tend to see from a lot of SaaS companies. They tend to think that, you know, their invention, what they've come up with, their piece of technology, is the most amazing thing in the world because they have to.

16:33When I hang around with my friends, we talk about SaaS and middleware endlessly and how entertaining and amazing it is. Hey, what about all the borrowed interests you see where brands are trying to get entertaining through particularly celebrities? I mean, in the Super Bowl ads, you saw, you know, Matthew McConaughey had, you know, a huge amount of stuff. Yeah, yeah. Tell us about that. Totally. I mean, I've got, yeah, again, I've got an anecdote I want to put at the end, which is all about the Super Bowl and maybe the effect or lack of effect thereof of necessarily investing in one of those traditional ads.

17:11But, yeah, ultimately, I would always rather own 10 ,000 eyeballs than rent 100 ,000 eyeballs. I think that is the way that I always think about it. We can talk about that a little bit more in the measurement section. But effectively what you're doing when you're buying a Super Bowl spot is that you are renting millions and millions of eyeballs with no guarantee that they were actually effectively paying or clicking or subscribing to watch what you want to say. And a lot of the time you can break through that. It's the same way when you partner with a celebrity to an extent. You are renting the people who like that celebrity and you have a chance of maybe ingratiating yourself to the people that they know.

17:50And I still think it's important, you know, celebrity spokespeople have a place. But the success of, you know, brand mascots, for instance, and there's tons of research and insight done into it. And I know we'll talk about it in a little bit more detail later on. Brand mascots are a lot cheaper than celebrities. Exactly. They can be if they turn into a successful brand asset, I guess. But yeah, there is both benefit and negative to renting an audience and working with celebrity. my point of view would just be that you know it's a lot harder to do this but i would always rather own 10 000 eyeballs than rent 100 000 let's talk about measures you touched on a little bit but how do i understand how what entertainment is doing for me um and then how do i separate entertainment from the other marketing say the werner herzog film i've got a lot of sales people running around i've got like a probably i'm going to a lot of conventions how do i measure this component of it and how do I isolate the variable?

18:49Yeah. So first of all, you do tend to see the impact of entertainment first strategies and tactics across the full funnel. So again, there's some brilliant tracksuit data on Duolingo, which I can give you, which we tracked over the last year to see, okay, well, Duolingo have over-committed to this sort of entertainment first approach. Are their funnel metrics improving at the same time? Yes, they are. really positive results up like 11%, 10%, 12 % over the period of time when we've been tracking them. So definitely get that from me and we can put it in the show notes to show how an entertainment first brand, a top rated entertainment first brand is actually growing across the full funnel.

19:26But we also understood and us and Tracti understood that the day-to-day impact of entertainment first efforts are what you need to track. If we're in this world where we are consistently putting our entertaining content, you need clever ways of tracking whether it's being successful and i don't think uh impressions and reach and views are necessarily the right way to do that i i think they're bullshit to be put to put be put blunt um they can also be suppressed by platforms uh to make you want to you know pay to to put your content in a certain place and an impression ultimately is three seconds of someone's time looking at something is it's intentionally an inflated metric which helps us show that we've had an impact from marketing on these platforms and ultimately gets more people to spend on a lot of times those are vanity metrics so what metrics should i be looking at exactly it's the shares it's the it's the actual sales it's what else yeah so i would say it says there's two things i would i would look at i would look at um so people obviously talk about cpm cost per mil cost per thousand i would look at attentive cost per thousand which is a metric that's been popping up um that is kind of a view that is over uh well 10 seconds but up to 30 seconds in view depends on the length of whatever piece of content you're creating but it goes beyond that three second count um mr beast really loves that metric and he's super analytical with his team about where there's drop-off within the content that's being watched and how engaged people are across that whole timeline of somebody watching a video and they know that it's important to keep people engaged throughout and they're not just focused on getting an impression of three seconds at the beginning and i think that counts for any platform but then ultimately if you're looking at social which is obviously one of the breeding grounds of entertainment first marketing because it's owned and earned um the the metrics that matter for me i would say are likes and comments which is engagement but then more importantly shares and saves um and again there's a really good ratio that lots of brands use we use it with with our brands as well um liquid death also use it quite a lot there's again another post i'll i'll put from there founder mike cesario where he talks about this but um if your post has a two percent or higher likes to comments uh or likes to views ratio you know it's probably going to be a success and you know that it's probably not just like bot bot views effectively we're moving from impression to i'll just roll them on their depth and quality of impression depth and quality of impression yeah but then the shares and saves is the one that I'd really be looking at, which is like, as I said, has somebody gone out of their way to share this thing in their friend's group chat?

21:54And I think any, if you're looking at anywhere between 1 % to 3 % of saves to kind of likes, for instance, as someone who took the time to double tap on it compared to someone who actually took the time to share it, you know, that's a real winner in terms of a piece of content, regardless of what the views are. Got it. Let's shift to, we talked about creating your own brand, you know, mascot or character, like, you know, Snap, crackle and pop or Tony the Tiger and how much easier it might be to have your own character. What's your recommendation on people that want to think about that? Yeah, I mean, again, we talked about the power of brand mascots.

22:32I was actually just the other day and it's on my LinkedIn, if anyone wants to go and look at it, interviewed for a brilliant documentary on the rebirth of brand mascots, effectively, how they've gone away in marketing and how they're actually now coming back. it's from a guy called steph hammer link um and i think it's just called brand mascots um but it's again i'll provide it as a link for the show notes um it's going to be a very long show notes at this at this point in time um but effectively um you know it's all about having characterfulness as as an entertainment brand as we said that's one of the four main drivers for for being an entertaining brand it drives entertainment value um so yes that can take the form of a mascot but it could also be a cast of characters so mark jacobs for instance do this really well they work with relatively unknown sort of internet celebrities who have a little bit of fame but don't so i go make my own i go make my own or i i go and like when when you when they were i'm gonna go find an influencer and build that influencer up for me yeah exactly so you're gonna not you're not gonna go for the big big big person the macro celebrity yeah yeah there's no point going for mr bees he has his own brand he has his own personality you can't mold him in your image but you definitely can if you go and find your own cast of creators basically so physical people or if you don't use physical people you can create your own mascot as we talked about there but it's all about brand characters basically building brand characters equally you can build a brand world that feels like a character in itself so liquid death do that really well they've built this kind of murder land if you will where all of these things happen within within liquid death and the individual characters are less important but you know that when a celebrity for instance steps into that world they're going to be doing something uniquely liquid death so like when martha stewart steps into the world of liquid death she sells severed hand candles which is like a uniquely liquid death distinctly unique uniquely liquid death thing to do all right let's talk about when your entertainment goes sideways you have a celebrity who doesn't do it right or you take a stand that blows up some of your audience the bud wise bud light case is an easy example um what do you do when your entertainment goes sideways yeah brilliant question and i guess i would start by slightly challenging the the budweiser of it all and saying you know budweiser budweiser's flip-flopping decision in that case um had a lot of elements of the streisand effect to it and that's to say that they attracted more derision and attention to it because of their handling of the situation when they probably could have you know it's swept under the rug so to speak we did a whole show they did like four mistakes in a row yeah and um you know the first mistake they didn't even know they had done which was an interview where they the vp of marketing or whoever it was it basically trashed the current customer group on video yeah yeah yeah yeah so yeah a comedy of errors as they say um but i'd actually argue that that's less of a failure of brand entertainment and more of a failure of brand purpose um it you know wasn't necessarily a piece of entertainment first marketing but um if they were trying to engage that core that that core that partnership and execution is probably the wrong way of going about it but when we do see entertainment first brands or entertaining brands go wrong um what they always do and i think this is again what some of the best comedians do as well is whatever that negativity is they use it as fuel effectively they use it for fuel to do more they really lean into the risk they commit to the bit and they get rewarded for doing so so again if we look at a brand like um liquid death um they in their early days got loads of hate hate comments as you can imagine from a brand called liquid death it's quite divisive you have lots of kind of evangelical christians you have lots of uh i guess you'd say like quite uh goody two shoes laced up people who think that the brand is a disgrace and they comment about how ridiculous it is and how much they hate it and instead of kind of hiding those comments deleting those comments or replying to them in a very placid customer servicey type way they turned all of those hate comments uh into entertainment they turned it into i think they've got four albums now of of uh hate comments which they've turned into songs um that makes perfect sense you gotta lean into your brand but you have to be genuine about it yeah you have to commit to the bit basically which is where I think a lot of this starts from understanding who you are who you are trying to entertain and equally who you aren't trying to entertain right if I was trying to as you said in that Budweiser example right um if my core is goody two shoes uh uh goody two shoes um uh soccer mums effectively who I know are going to be really offended by that then that is completely the wrong strategy to take and to lean into that is to the detriment and the death of my brand effectively but liquid death knew that that was the opposite of who they're trying to attract and actually the people they are their heartland audience effectively would find that very funny that they were annoying that audience so it all goes back to again starting you got to take a stand and hold on to the stand um let's go we are we're almost at time so i'm going to go to our traditional last question it's a two-parter you have to take one or both but you have to take at least one practical advice for our listeners we haven't discussed yet and or the funniest story you would like to share on the air or you can share on the air yeah um i feel like a lot of my funny stories i can't share on the air so i'm gonna have to go for practical advice um and hopefully this also reveals a ridiculously impressive statistic um to everybody um which is not just relevant to entertainment first brown brand building but um we talked about the super right earlier yeah uh do you know 24 hours after the super bowl happened uh do you know what moment stole 84 of all the conversation around all of the brands at the super bowl a day after it happened i do not okay and i don't blame you for not knowing that um it was duolingo killing their owl mascot uh which i think sums up a lot of things that we've spoken about in this conversation like liquid death was somehow involved with the severed hand candle but yeah perhaps maybe martha stewart was was one of the suspects um but i think it just it serves to show that in the world that we live in today um it is so hard to be remembered as a brand so your only hope is to lean into this world of what we call a lot of lots of littles a lot of littles um and duolingo have been brilliant at understanding that so they know that it's all about winning maximum minutes on the internet every single day.

29:07All entertaining brands have found a way of building a system that allowed them to buy lots of tickets for the raffle every single time. So that's kind of what I would advise you as an entertainment brand, entertaining brand. What you need to do is to think in this world of lots of littles. You need to be entertaining every single day and you need to build a kind of effectively a content system. And this is what we help lots of our clients do, but a content system that allows you to think of an idea and then within 72 hours, within three days, come up with something, put it out into the world, because nothing's ever as good or as bad as it seems.

29:38Equally, something that is talked about all day, every day, one day on the internet is then forgotten about the very next day. So the only way that you can hope to survive is by approaching marketing with this sort of writer's room style approach, where you're, you know, effectively building more chances to go viral, more moments for success. I think that's a great way to end the show speed and depth of content all the time. So thank you, Dan. And thanks to everyone for listening to CMO Confidential. Look for all of our other shows on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube, including marketing, the battle between believers and non-believers, parts one and two.

30:21It's a bird. it's a plane holy shit it's ai parts one and two your next best customer could be an ai bot and synthetic influencers should brands do it themselves hey all you marketers stay safe out there this is mike linton signing off for cmo confidential