The Genius of Amazon Owning The Washington Post

0:00Did you know that, obviously you know Amazon owns the Washington Post. Yes. No, Jeff Bezos owns Washington Post. Okay, but like, you know, Jeff Bezos and Amazon are kind of, you know, together a little bit, right? You would agree with that? Not as much. I actually think he really has stepped away. But he still owns a good chunk of Amazon. You would agree? Yes. So he has a vested interest. Of course. So, okay. This was on Twitter from Navalism. So it says, Bezos owning the Washington Post is the cheapest subtle political insurance that Amazon can buy. $250 million insures$700 billion against antitrust action.

0:36And it's like, if you think about it that way, it's like, oh. Wait, go back. I'm going to reread it again. Bezos owning the Washington Post is the cheapest subtle political insurance that Amazon can buy. $250 million for the acquisition of Valpo. Insures against$700 billion against antitrust action. Why$700 billion? Because that's what, I think, at the time, that's what Amazon was worth. Oh, got it. Yeah, because I'm like, they're a trillion plus dollar companies. Yeah, yeah, yeah. At the time. Yeah, yeah. So like 250 is a drop in the bucket on 700 billion or over a trillion. You know what I mean?

1:08And they haven't really changed WAPO. Like I've read a couple of things there. They haven't really changed it. They just kind of do their thing. But I think they kind of in the background, like they're just making sure, you know, there aren't any like crazy attacks on Amazon. Or if there are, maybe there's some defense. You know what I mean? But like, it just goes to show you like, okay, who owns CNBC? Who owns NBC? Who owns Fox? It's all like the owners at the end of the day are dictating their political views. to, you know, these media platforms. Did you know MSNBC was a partnership between Microsoft and NBC?

1:38I didn't know that. Oh yeah, MSNBC. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's because it's Microsoft. Yeah. What about it? No, I was just saying like these big corporations have been getting into media for a while. Yeah, because they know the influence is there and they can't become irrelevant, right? It's you go to where the attention is going. But it can hurt you as well. Like I look at Elon and the ex-acquisition, politically, I think it's hurt him more than helped him. You see what he said last week about, um, so he said something crazy about Harris. Yeah. Yeah. And then he, he, he deleted it. Yeah. But I'm just like, dude, that is like, I don't care who you are.

2:12I got to take a minute to tell you about the agency owners association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Alian, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds. Great experienced members, getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members, getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well.

2:45And so if you wanna grow your agency faster and you wanna peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. But speaking of Elon, I think what's going to work out well for United Airlines, which is every Asian person's favorite airline, you remember the doctor getting dragged out during COVID. So just to clarify, Eric's being sarcastic. Yes, I'm being facetious.

3:18I fly United. I fly everything. But I think what's going to work out well for United, by the way, is United Airlines, all the passengers get free Starlink. Have you used Starlink on a plane before? I have not. Oh my God, it's great. You can watch movies, you can do everything. You're basically working at home. You're working with super strong Wi-Fi. I flew with my mom back from Vegas once doing just JSX, right? And then my mom's just swiping on YouTube Shorts and it's smooth the whole time. And so I think that's one, when United, this partnership went live, that got millions and millions of impressions because Elon retweeted it.

3:53So they got millions of impressions and I think more and more people are going to talk about this and if other airlines don't adapt quickly which i think they will they probably will but right now it's going to be a boon for united because oh my god the wi-fi is so fast on united it's a marketing play it is a marketing play and i think the other airlines will catch up because right now eric and i travel quite a bit but if you go on an airline a lot of the airlines offer different internet packages including higher speed for streaming if you ever buy them and you try to stream it sucks it doesn't work yeah so i'm like so you're trying to charge me more for streaming and it barely loads a website up and decent speed.

4:29And it's just like the internet just sucks. I don't understand why it's so archaic. Yeah. But this is a good example. Like when the product's just really good, this is just product marketing and it's just purely word of mouth. And even the way I just talked about it right now, it kind of makes you want to use wifi on the plane. Right. I think what's like wifi like that level, but what we're going to lose is the ability. Sometimes when you don't have wifi, it's such a great moment where you can just spend time and think i don't know what you do during the downtime i just spend time i think i read a lot right you're probably just watching movies yeah i was like you're smiling i watch movies all day when i'm flying yeah you was like if you had starlink you'd just be working the whole time but like i think no no no even when the airplane has fast enough internet for me to work i use the ipad like you but you also use the laptop i know i just use the ipad on the plane no no i use the ipad for everything okay yeah so what i do is when you watch movies on your ipad I download them in advance I make them in a box in a corner I browse the internet and do my job like emails and all that kind of stuff on the corner but the trick is you play the movie before you turn on the internet because some of the platforms will be like oh you're not in the United States you can't watch that's smart Neil does this thing where he watches TV and works at the same time I can't do it so it's just different strokes for different folks but I think it's a good move for United I'm just surprised that nobody else got the jump on it You know what I mean?

5:52Yeah. The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, we have inflation that also means wage inflation right now. And it means that when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple of years because it's just become too cost prohibitive. And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing, they've been a great asset for us.

6:21And I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketing school.io slash hire. Again, it's marketing school.io slash hire to learn more. You can fill out the form there and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find. This guy tweeted, so co-founder of Chubby, she started tweeting Preston Rutherford. And he talks about, this is kind of the new, he tweets like these CEO, CMO interactions. I'm going to read off this interaction and see if we can get a key takeaway here. So he says, CEO, I can't approve, I can't approve quote unquote brand marketing spend if I can't measure the return, even if it's needed to get out of stage three.

7:01New CMO, I agree. I think brand marketing is BS. CEO, what? CMO, when CFOs and CEOs hear brand marketing, they think unaccountable, expensive and money wasting. The vocab's got to change. CEO, you're not wrong. And then CMO, it's a classic story. Team gets approval to do a brand campaign. They go off, find an agency, create an expensive ad, and run it on TV. Then they wait. Ultimately, everyone ends up asking, so what happened? And so I'm not going to read the whole thing here, but I think what he's basically saying here.

7:33I'm just reading this. Okay, so I'm scrolling down a little bit. So then the conversation moves on a little bit. CEO says, great. The main goal for 2024 is sustainable profitability. CMO, so let's drill down on the three business results that best accomplish that goal. First, do you agree that being able to discount less and not lose customers helps us get more profitable? CEO, obviously. CMO, second, since you know how much higher the revenue per session of branded organic search traffic is, would you agree we want to increase it as much as we can? Low-key getting integration, interrogation vibes, but yes.

8:04CMO, and third, we want to be able to expand into wholesale and show up the way we want, right? CMO, just spoke with another founder. It's our most profitable channel. Finally, do you think the product discount offer and urgency-driven creative we use accomplishes these goals? CEO, you sly dog. I see what you did there. No, definitely not. CMO, now that we're on the same page, let's talk execution. CEO interrupting. It's finally clicking. Let me freestyle on the mic for a sec. Right? So I think I need to read this part. So CMO starts beatboxing. And then CEO says, like every goal we've accomplished as a brand, the tactics were never immediately obvious.

8:39We committed to a feedback loop and tried things to reach that goal. Our approach is simple. Do more of what works. For a quote-unquote brand, we were never clear on the specific financial results we aimed to drive. So we didn't have a feedback loop. Our attempts fell flat and were viewed as a failure. While specific tactics aren't immediately obvious here either, we're used to that. We'll apply the same process we applied throughout our history. CMO, happy tears. That was beautiful. Didn't rhyme. And you didn't rap at all. But you got a Grammy in my heart. Oh, that's cool. What's your reaction to this?

9:09I think it's spot on, but a lot of businesses in today's world are leveraging marketing strategies and tactics that are actually trackable. For example, if you're running TV, you can do CTV and a lot of it's trackable and you can get the ROI. For example, if you're running ads on Tatari, Tatari will tell you which one of those IP addresses from someone who watched that ad went to your website and then ended up converting into a customer. A lot of marketing is much more trackable than it was a few years ago or five years ago. And whether it's a brand campaign or it's a performance marketing campaign, you can put a lot of ROI to channels that you don't think that you really could have in the past.

9:51My takeaway from this is you need to have a methodology for branding. It seems like before and people just say, OK, let's just throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks for brand. Right. And then, like, did it work? Not really sure if it worked. but they're just saying, Hey, like, you know, there needs to be, what is our, what is our financial target here? Okay. What are the goals exactly? It's almost like you, how you'd run a performance marketing campaign. Right. And then to your point, you should track what you can track, but it's also okay if you can't track everything, but you shouldn't, you shouldn't start with, Oh, it's okay.

10:19We don't need to track everything. Cause I think a lot of marketers are kind of going towards that now. It's like, no, no, no, no. You still need to track what you can track, but it doesn't need to be hardcore. Like everything. If you've ever built a website, you know how tough it can be to keep a strong design while ensuring site performance is fast. That's where Framer comes in, and it totally changes the game. Framer is the design-first, no-code website builder that lets anyone ship a production-ready site in minutes. I recently built a custom landing page in just a few hours. Animations, fast load times, responsive layouts, all without writing a single line of code.

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12:29Go to shopify.com slash marketing school. Shopify.com slash marketing school. No, it doesn't even be hardcore, but anytime you're doing a marketing campaign, you should have KPIs in mind. What are you trying to achieve from this campaign? Because then you can present it. the biggest problem executives have and corporations have about marketing is a lot of campaigns are run with no objectives in mind. So at the end, they just look at a lot of things as failures when they could be successes. And they look at a lot of campaigns as successes when it got a lot of coolness or notoriety or awards, but it didn't really do anything from the bottom line.

13:06Yep. Anyway, that is it for today, everyone. This is live from us at Inbound 2024. This is how seriously we take it, guys. Neil had to speak at a couple things I have four things to speak at today this is the third one I have one more but please don't forget to rate, review and subscribe it helps us grow go to markingschool.io slash agency to apply for the agency owners association you can have a call with our guy Austin and we will see you tomorrow