Joe Perello | The Credibility Challenge – Thoughts on Authenticity in an Artificial Marketplace

19:11CMO Confidential Host:Well, you're still an influencer because your business model is based on Trash and Linton's restaurant the next week.

19:20Joe Perello:Yes. Okay. Right? So you've got them all lined up. So I don't have to be as right as an influencer as I do on a creator. But that says inherent in that is the more narrow the creator. Yeah. The creator's on the line.

19:38CMO Confidential Host:They're on the line every day. If they, you know, maybe they get a pass if they recommend a crappy product and they do it twice, right? And they're done.

19:48Joe Perello:Give me an example of a creator that isn't an analogy, but it's a real one that people can plan to. I'll give you a great example, right?

20:01CMO Confidential Host:If it's okay, I'll use one of our clients as an example. I figured you probably would. I was just, that was going to happen. I only know how to do one thing. I think one of your clients, if you didn't use one of your clients, they'd be kind of peeps. So go ahead. Yeah, that's all you know how to do. AAA is one of our big clients, right? Everybody knows who AAA is. And one of the things that we discovered, which shouldn't be a shock, is that when you publish stories about road trips and adventure travel, that is the best way to get someone to consider becoming a AAA member. Right? It's not that complicated.

20:41CMO Confidential Host:Road trips, van life, that whole thing. So we found this great creator. His name is J.R. Switchgrass. and his life, his job is to drive across the country in a van with his girlfriend and he documents his whole life. He's a fantastic creator. He lives road trips, so he's a subject matter expert, but he doesn't have like a million followers or even half a million followers. He's just really good at driving across the country, someone perfect for a road trip story that is perfect for AAA. And when you take the distribution away from the creator, you now can just focus on high quality storytelling.

21:34CMO Confidential Host:When you have to merge them together like you do with influencers, right? You have to consider the creator, I mean, the the content they make and the people who are going to see it in the same equation. With creators, you're not doing that. You're taking the distribution out because you're going to handle the distribution. You're going to buy the paid media. You're going to do all that.

21:55Joe Perello:I see. So when the creator starts making a ton of money being a creator, how do they stay true to the creator ethos and not become thrown over to the influencer? because I know your belief. I mean, yeah, some of them don't.

22:14CMO Confidential Host:I'm sorry? Some of them don't. Some of them, they go over to the other side and they're like, I would rather, you know, I don't care Joe Schmo, I don't care what he says. I want to go do a deal with Pepsi. You know, that's fine. But many of them do.

22:31Joe Perello:So as a marketer, when I'm looking at this and I say, all right, here's the creators that, you know, I have. How do I, I know there's probably a lot of ways to figure out what creator is right for you, but how do I know when the creator has lost the audience and become a for sale influencer? I mean, we, how do you, how do we know that? Well, just give our users some kind of yardstick for saying, all right, I had Joe. He was a great creator about New York City. And then he got to be so famous in New York City that he has sold out. So he is inauthentic, right?

23:18CMO Confidential Host:You're asking me, how do you know if they're inauthentic or not?

23:21Joe Perello:How do you know? Yeah, how do you know? Like when your RV person has become so big that they're not a creator anymore. or are they actually a brand under themselves?

23:32CMO Confidential Host:Mike, it depends on what story you're asking them to tell. That's the easiest way to answer this question. So someone who has crossed over may still be able to tell an authentic story provided it is in parallel with their personality, their expertise, sort of what they do. if it let's let's imagine that bob vila was an influencer because we all know who bob vila is

24:05Joe Perello:right i'm not sure everybody knows but he does a lot with homes he created this old house you know

24:10CMO Confidential Host:like he's he redoes houses and he's famous for redoing old houses a tv show if you ask him and paid him, you know,$10 million to talk about makeup, it would be very authentic because the guy doesn't own anything except a flannel shirt. Right. So you, you follow me? Like if you paid him$10 million to talk about how the pro counter at Home Depot is amazing, that works. So it, It depends on what story you're asking the creator or the influencer to tell. And if you stick to their expertise, they will appreciate you more because they don't want to bullshit either, right? They want to be true to who they are.

25:00CMO Confidential Host:So you've got to stick to their expertise.

25:05Joe Perello:Hey, thank you for that. I want to talk about all three of these together and how brands should think about it. But I want to start is, do consumers really get this distinction? I want to start large and say, if you look at the Super Bowl reel, there are so many celebrities and borrowed interest in that. A lot of times you have multiple, you know, Matthew McConaughey, Snoop Dogg, Matthew McConaughey, Bradley Cooper in a single ad. Those are all celebrities. do consumers get the difference between creators influencers and celebrities or is that just

25:45CMO Confidential Host:marketers i think once the mass of people know who a influencers they have they have merged into celebrity yeah so i i don't i don't think they are understanding the nuance the way the way I am describing it because I am describing it from a business model POV from a marketer's POV less so a consumer's POV. In terms of the Super Bowl right the Super Bowl is an exception right in every sense of the word. Yeah. It is the only place you can reach an exceptionally large number of people at the same time, you know, except for maybe other live sporting events and maybe the award shows. Otherwise, what else?

26:38CMO Confidential Host:It's still not even close to the Super Bowl. It's not even close, right? So that's an exception. What other show are the commercials part of the show?

26:51Joe Perello:Yeah, that's fair.

26:53CMO Confidential Host:There's none. So this is part of the show. There's like the NFL is putting on one show and all the brands are putting on another show. All right.

27:03Joe Perello:Let me rephrase my question, because that wasn't as good as it should have been. If I'm sitting there in my running a marketing shop. Yeah. Should I be looking at all three of these things? You know, influencers, celebrities and, you know, content creators. Like, how do I decide my brand or my business needs any combination of these three things? Absolutely.

27:34CMO Confidential Host:You should. If you can identify or associate yourself with a credible celebrity who adds value to your story, right, and adds credibility, and of course adds exposure, and you think that because of that celebrity, people are going to become aware of you or even trust you faster than they would without it, because that's what a celebrity is there for, then you should do it. And if you have the patience to find a hit with an influencer, because that's the business, the influencer business is the hit business, right? You're in the business and you've got to do a lot of deals with a lot of influencers and hopefully one or 10 hit.

28:26CMO Confidential Host:If you have the patience and the systems to do that, you should do an influencer strategy. If you pick the right ones, it's great, but it's like, it's sort of like PR, you know, you can't predict it. When's it going to happen. If you want to be in the business of driving belief every day, and you want to take on the obligation of distributing that message, which selfishly I think is the better way to do it, then you should be in the creator business because you have more control. And of those three, with the easiest one to measure is you recruit creators and you promote the content and you measure the con you measure how it performs and you can you can easily convince your cfo that the marketing investment was worth it harder to do with celebrities and harder to do with

29:25Joe Perello:because because if i hire the right chef and i'm selling a certain y 'all crater thing like like rv trips. I have a narrow audience. It's not like people are accidentally showing up to watch this. I have an audience that is hardwired into the topic versus hardwired into the person. How do I know if that's right for my brand? Is it better if I have a specific type of product or a high emotional involved product versus, you know, Joe Pirello is a great creator for paperclip usage or something? Yeah.

30:07CMO Confidential Host:Um, I think that if you're in the commodity business, you probably need to do, you know, two or three of those. yeah if your product is like every other product save for your brand then you need to be in two or three of those creators influencers and celebrities and then your budget is going to determine which ones you can be in and you know and look celebrity is the most expensive because you need to pay the celebrity and pay to promote it right influencers is is you don't know which one's going to work. Creators is this function of your media budget because you don't really have to pay creators a lot of money, but you've got to take on the burden of getting the credit benefit and promoting them.

31:01CMO Confidential Host:But that comes with measurability. So if you're a commodity business, you need to be in two of those three. If you're in a specialty business where the product is the story. Yeah. Give me an example of a special thing. Tesla, right? Like three years ago, Tesla was the story. Can you believe that a car can do all these things is the story? Like they were undifferentiated. I mean, they were highly differentiated for a long time. And still today, you could make the case that Tesla is highly differentiated. So if the product is the story, then you don't need to rely on these things.

31:45Joe Perello:Okay. Okay, so Joe, who is doing creative marketing well that is not one of your clients? Give us a on-the-market example of somebody that you haven't worked your magic with. I will, I will. The best companies are the ones that delegate authority, some authority, right?

32:09CMO Confidential Host:They allow the creators to speak their own voice. They publish stories, not sales pitches, right? They may or may not use.

32:19Joe Perello:Yeah, like who? Give our listeners some examples they can go look at.

32:24CMO Confidential Host:I mean, the blog on Patagonia, the blog on Patagonia is one of the reasons why I got into this business. Tell me. The blog on Patagonia is not about Patagonia. it's about camping the environment um adventure right it is not about patagonia in any way yeah and it is all written by credible people who know how to ice fish right expert campers patagonia is why i got into this because they did it so well like i i wanted to do journalism but also direct market and they're the ones that that did it now they didn't put it all together right the way the way we eventually did but those are the ones those are the guys that do it great because they don't ask their creators to talk about Patagonia.

33:31CMO Confidential Host:They just tell amazing stories about what they know Patagonia customers want to read about.

33:40Joe Perello:It's the best. And circling back to how we started this whole chat, this allows consumers to trust them more because the brand is secondary to the content and the creator is the content.

33:54CMO Confidential Host:Mike, it's just natural to human interaction, right? When you meet someone, you find common ground before you go a step further and maybe ask them to hear a business pitch or ask them to add a date. Like you just establish common ground and, you know, the minimum amount of trust is all we're saying. We're not saying, you know, never talk about your brand. No, that's not what we're saying. We're saying just start a little bit of a conversation.

34:30Joe Perello:I think this, I got to ask one extra question before we get to our traditional last question. Do you have a way of measuring trust that works? or is trust still generally a field thing? Because you can measure sales, I can measure traffic, I can measure a lot of stuff. I mean, we have proxies.

34:49CMO Confidential Host:Give me a couple of proxies. The proxies are pretty basic, pretty basic direct marketing or performance marketing proxies. Like the first one is click-through rate, right? It clicked through rate and they didn't leave the page. So you click on something, right? A story for Dawn of Yosemite. The story loads. It was what we said it was going to be. And you stayed on the page. That is a minimum level of trust, right? That we have established. The second is, did you drop off after, you know, reading it for a certain amount of time? That's not a pure, you know, measurement of trust because maybe the content stunk, right?

35:45So it's more of trying to find performance marketing metrics that could indicate a high level of trust.

35:55CMO Confidential Host:And most of that is a form of what we call drop off. Okay. click but not stay? Did you stay but not buy? And when you measure those rates of who you got there, but who eventually bought, there's two factors. One is response rate was good and the trust was there. If the response rate's really good and the conversion rate is stinky, one of the reasons why is it could be the content stunk or the product stunk, but also trust could be really low. So it's not perfect. There are proxies. And over the long, you know, over years and years and years, you can use these proxies as an indicator of trust.

36:36Joe Perello:So engagement is a proxy for trust. And if you get stinky numbers, that's very bad.

36:44CMO Confidential Host:Stinky numbers, bad.

36:46Joe Perello:Okay. There you have it. You heard it here first on CMO Confidential. That brings us to our traditional last question, which Joe knows well. Practical advice. Enter our funniest story. you would like to share with our listeners? You know, obviously, funny story you can tell on the air. You can take one or both, but you must take at least one. And the practical advice is what we haven't talked about before.

37:07CMO Confidential Host:Okay, I'll try and tell you a funny story, and then together we can find our way to practical advice with it. Okay. So I was CMO of the city of New York, right? We did a$166 million deal with staff. Right. We made them the official -

37:24Joe Perello:That's a lot of Snapple, man.

37:25CMO Confidential Host:That's a lot of Snapple. This is all money, Mike. This is all money. Not even get paid in Snapple. But we did something really good. We replaced all the soda, carbonated soft drinks that were in public schools with water and apple juice. And we also put machines everywhere we could in the city. And the city's big. All that money funded middle school sports. Yeah. Right? And it gave us a tourism budget, a budget. For the first time, we actually were now funneling the city's money into a marketing campaign that eventually drove 50 million visitors a year. So it was a very good deal, very Bloomberg-esque deal, right?

38:15CMO Confidential Host:All business. We bundled the city assets together, and we delivered real value for Snapple, which is why they were willing to pay us that much money. so they wanted to do a big activation in union square right they're launching some new i don't know frozen popsicle flavor and they said we're gonna is this is like may and they're like we're going to create a massive popsicle in union square and i was like well that involves ice They're like, no, no, no. We have this material that is going to not melt. It looks like a popsicle. We pump it into this mold and it stays in there and it's going to be good for a day.

38:59CMO Confidential Host:And I was like, great. Sounds awesome. um so they were wrong we close off we close off union square right i have the cops i got d.o.t i got fire guys like we really wanted to show snapple that look you got the city of new york as a partner we're gonna deliver baby and we have surrounded this popsicle with all of our service police escorts man we are we have this place comfort they put the popsicle up in union square you know the park is like closed and people out of goodness how big is this popsicle like 100 feet 50 feet oh it was like many stories high like figure two stories three stories high okay so we're talking like 50 feet like 25 50 feet up in the air okay and long story short the freaking thing melts it doesn't hold up it doesn't work and like there were like tens of thousands of gallons of this like it was like jello with sand in it that just it totally took over all of you didn't square and i was obviously hugely embarrassed we we cleaned it up i had to bring and did you arrest the popsicle for self-easons went on with sanitation clean this whole thing up huge failure but the next day the new york post you know puts this on like page two page i was like at least we didn't have the cover yeah the new york post page two we get this huge um outpouring and nobody actually like gave us any crap like they all thought it was like yeah yeah yeah stupid snapple but snapple was so beloved as a new york brand that everybody sort of gave us gave us a pass like nobody nobody really gave us any crap nobody really said you idiots i can't believe this the press was like one day hit new york post was like ah those guys what are they doing they had the bond and that was all over it was done i can't believe the onion

41:24Joe Perello:didn't pick that up as a headline story oh well those guys have said other things about me at the time that i'm sure they have right well i i you know this is the first time we have ever discussed a 50-foot popsicle on the show. So, Joe, thank you for breaking through. I think that is a great way to end the show. Thanks for joining us, Joe, and thanks to everyone for listening to CMO Confidential. New shows drop every Tuesday, and you can find our entire catalog of more than 160 shows on Spotify, Apple, and YouTube, which include Agency Economics in the Age of AI, Marketing at Meta, The View from the Eye of the Storm, Your customers aren't as loyal as they think as you think they are.

42:10Joe Perello:The fragile nature of loyalty and Joe's first show. What I learned as the first ever CMO for New York City working for Michael Bloomberg. Hey, all you marketers, stay safe out there. This is Mike Linton signing off for CMO Confidential. Typeface is changing the way to think about brand marketing at scale. Their marketing orchestration engine is the first of its kind and built specifically for the enterprise. The orchestration engine uses shared brand intelligence designed to turn brand guidelines into personalized voice, visuals, and messaging delivered in a way that fits the context of your audience.

42:49Joe Perello:It's how brands like ASICs and Post Holdings scale what works without sacrificing quality. Start orchestrating your brand at typeface.ai slash CMO.