Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers

0:00I start with attention because if you don't have any attention, you have nothing. You have no audience, you have no time, you have no engagement, you have no trust, no relationships. No one's even hearing you, no one's sampling. This is Right About Now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over 6 years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping necks and cashing checks? Well, it starts right about now. What's up, guys? Welcome to Right About Now. We're always talking about now, not about yesterday, not about the future, because look, it's about what works today in business, in marketing, and in life.

0:46We cover the gamut. And look, I get to choose who I want on this show, and that's what I love. Steve and I were just talking about this, and our next guest is someone that I've admired from afar. You know, like I don't know Steve. You're going to get to know Steve today. So am I. But I've been reading his book and going through it. And a lot of people I know pointed him my direction. And I'm like, this guy knows his shit. And you know what? You're going to know his shit, too, because he is Steve Pratt. He is the author of Earn It, Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers. I hope I'm brave.

1:24I'm going to learn today if I really am. Steve, welcome to the show. Hey, thanks for having me. I feel like I'm going to be like a shit distributor today. We're all going to know our shit. We're giving the shit to business. And look, we take the bullshit out of business. That's our tagline. No BS. No, there you go. I'm full of it. I'm going to empty it all out today. It's great. Yes. No, it's not. This is the business you need to know. And Steve is not going to drop anything but knowledge on us. But Steve, where are we today? I am in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada, and I am super excited to talk to you in South Carolina.

2:02I, uh, we were saying earlier, I love South Carolina. I used to go there all the time, the best. So, uh, yeah. Awesome to talk to you. I haven't been to Vancouver, but I need to, I, uh, I like the warm. It is not warm here now. It's come in the summer. It's like the nicest place on earth. Uh, right now there's, it's cold and dark and this is, unless you're a skier, don't come right now we're we're like 78 today uh it's actually warm for us for february we had the four seasons but uh uh it's a beautiful day in south carolina but it's a beautiful day for everybody listening wherever you are whenever you are however you're listening i'm pumped because we call it my favorite subject you know like having a business show that is marketing centered I don't always talk about marketing, but now I get to geek out a little bit.

2:55Steve, I mean, let's set the table for everybody. You wrote the book. You've got opinions on marketing. What the hell formed Steve Pratt's opinion on marketing? And what's been the lineage here for you, Steve? Well, I'll give you the short version is I come at it from a little bit of an unusual place as I come at it from the media background. So I did about 10 years of television. I worked in music television and children's television and journalism and things for about 10 years. And then I went and ran a digital music service for about 10 years at Canada's Public Broadcast. It was kind of like NPR music, but in Canada.

3:38And started podcasting in 2005, which is super early in this Innovation Lab thing. And I guess around like 2014, I left and it was a mix of different reasons. But part of it was because the media business model seemed pretty broken where so many advertisers were leaving for the digital space and so many audiences had tools to just bypass interruptive things that they didn't want. And I saw all these companies like Red Bull who were acting like their own media companies that they realized pretty early on, we don't need a media company. We don't need broadcast towers or licenses with the internet.

4:22We could just decide to make awesome stuff and build our own audiences. And I had this moment where I was like, you know what? I know how to do that. My whole career in media is I know how to make great shows and engage audiences. What if we went and helped teach a bunch of marketers how to do that and help companies build their own audiences and turn this into a business? And so I left. And then very shortly after Serial, this huge podcast came out. And podcasts were big in 2005, 2006. And they kind of dipped as YouTube and Facebook came up. And then they came roaring back with Serial. and we were like, let's make the weirdest business ever and double down on helping brands learn how to make podcasts.

5:12And we were the first people on the planet to, I think, to actually have a company that only did that. And a bunch of people almost had interventions with us because they thought we were going to go bankrupt and lose our houses. I think we got really lucky. We picked something at the right time and it turned into a really, really good, but also just really enjoyable and fascinating business helping figure out this whole space. So yeah, I did that for about eight or nine years. And then the last three years, I've kind of been on my own writing this book and going around helping companies do it, not just in podcasting, but figure out kind of broader content strategies for doing this stuff.

5:51Yeah, man. It's like the most used word, but the most appropriate word in marketing content. It's like we all hear it, I think. But it is what it is. Whether it's a podcast, whether it's social media, whether it's, I don't know, video, audio. I mean, it's all content. Some good, some bad, some brave, some not, some safe. And I think that's what it's about. It's a hard business, right? You think about how many messages we all get fired at us every single day as audience members and how picky we can be now compared to where we used to be 20 years ago. If you want to be one of the few things that people actually pay attention to, no matter what platform you choose, no matter what kind of content you make, it's hard.

6:45It's a really hard deal, but that's also kind of the fun of it. And it's figuring out how to make things that are actually valuable for people that they want to spend their time with. Because I don't know. I feel like people don't suffer through mediocrity anymore. They don't have to, which is nice. Yeah. I mean, choice is amazing. And back 15, 20 years ago, maybe even 25 years, I'm starting to age, Steve. I don't know about you. But my years are still ticking. I can't seem to keep it in pause. But, you know, you had so many channels to watch on TV. You know, being a guy, sports for me for the most part.

7:23But, yeah, you have your other cable channels and smartphones barely existed and definitely didn't have the video and data bandwidth that we have now that enables all of these things. I tell people all the time I was a pioneer of enablement, you know, working on smartphones in 2007 and 2008. but in the, but the throughput and now, like you said, you've got so many choices. You can, you either, I've been playing with this notion, Steve, and I think you'll get it. It's, it's similar to yours. It's kind of like either you're getting turned on or you're turned off as a brand and as content because people get to choose.

8:05And that's really what you're talking about, isn't it? I think it's a great way of phrasing it. I may have to borrow that. Mine is usually something like you're either earning attention or you're getting ignored. I have literally, I'm a creative guy. I mean, I haven't sketched the on button for our like relaunch of our company, Radical, like on the brand with an on play button. And you either get shoes to, you know, like it's that simple, right? Well, we were talking earlier about this idea of sampling, right? Like, I think you brought up, The goal of everybody is to get sampled, and then it's the job of the show to keep people listening afterwards or the video or the newsletter or whatever it is.

8:46Just getting sampled is the on button, right? It has to be so interesting that out of all the different options, all the Netflix tiles, all the Spotify podcasts, all the TikTok creators, that they're even willing to give you a shot to give you a second or two to get in there. That's a hard on button to get into, right? Yes. Oh, God. It's so hard. It's crazy how much competition there is. There's just unlimited content. And that's what I love about your book and the tenets of it. You got to earn it, baby. I mean, we all, it was, hey, back in the day, TV commercials, there's nothing else to watch.

9:23There's no phone distracting. Because now I make the joke, the TV, if you have one, 18 to 34-year-olds may not even fall in this. We might be talking 35 to 55 or 35 up. The TV is the radio and the smartphone is the television. That's where I think audio is actually more important in TV because your head's down. It's funny. Even in podcasting now, the video stuff is fascinating. I have a 22-year-old who loves podcasting, never listens. It's always on YouTube. Podcasting is like the new television on YouTube where she knows exactly what shows she watches, what days they drop, what time they drop, all of it.

10:15It's amazing. And to be able to get to that point where people know that about you and look forward to you, like appointment viewing or listening, that's really hard. Also, you have to be pretty awesome or pretty valuable to a very specific group of people to get in there. I'm fascinated by all of it. 18 to 34-year-olds listen and watch podcasts more than they do linear TV. Yeah, that checks. That checks. I mean, they're choosing what they want, when they want, and brands and people and anyone that's trying to market or get scale has to ultimately earn it. Steve, talk to me about the book. Talk to me about the tenets of really the fundamentals that you've put in this and what it takes to be brave.

11:10well i guess the the premise of the book is is that you have to earn attention that it if you actually want to get the business results you're looking for as a marketer there are not any shortcuts that are going to deliver the real deal um consumers have too many defense mechanisms to keep messages that they don't want out of their lives and if you think like a consumer or like an audience member yourself you know how picky you are about the things that you actually give your attention to like you know our level of time and attention that we have every day is finite there's a maximum number of things that we can possibly give our attention to and there's more and more and more things competing with it every day so we we can afford to be really picky and i think it just means that the quality bar is higher for everybody who's trying to earn someone's attention and the things you know you were talking about before you know the in in the past we just kind of had this deal where we would suffer through things we didn't want in the middle of our shows because that was the only way we could get them and that doesn't really apply anymore and so i think you know as as marketers and brands thinking about how we want to connect with people it puts us in a different mindset of having to make things that people genuinely want to spend time with and setting a really high bar for creating value first for the audience rather than things that are primarily about us and i think that there's you know there's a nice intersection like there's a venn diagram intersection between the job that we're hiring our marketing to do like the business outcomes that we want to achieve and the value that we're creating for audiences you know which i kind of like framing as a gift can you design gifts for the audience that they're really excited to spend time with on an ongoing basis that also accomplish your business outcomes that to me is this where modern marketing sits and you know where you can get marketing results and keep your job and and build an audience of people that are happy to spend time with you but the sad part is there's not really any super shortcuts and hacks to get there you actually have to do good work and it's hard work to do it uh it's fun but it's hard work.

13:26Yeah. And you nailed it. The problem I see, and this is where the bravery comes in, outcomes, business outcomes versus entertainment versus gifts, you know, whatever that looks like that earns their attention, you know, because you got CMOs and CEOs under more pressure than they've ever been under. So it takes real chutzpah, real bravery to put yourself out there and know that the outcome comes along if you get the right kind of attention. And I frame that specifically around the right kind of attention, Steve, because in one of my mentors in this, I wanted, you know, Christopher Lockhead, the godfather of category design.

14:14I believe in 80 % of what Chris believes in. He's a little bit stubborn, and I love him. He's a category pirates guy, right? Yeah, category pirates. Yeah, super smart. I love their stuff. I have had, I think, two guests on twice out of 600 episodes. He's one of them. Because talk about smart action, just like you, Steve. and I can see multiple with you because you got it, dude. The bravery is here. We're early. I'm going to let you re-decide that. I love the book too much. I love the book too much. But he, you know, this fine line of business outcomes and getting attention. Where do you fall on this?

15:03Because, you know, CMOs are all this pressure. They got to be brave to grab that attention, but then they got to get a business outcome. Um, again, I, and I'm only bringing Chris up because we've had this argument, you know, like getting the attention doesn't necessarily generate the outcome. If I'm just getting attention, then I've just got attention and attention is fleeting. Where do you fall on this pendulum, Steve? Well, I guess I start with attention because if you don't have any attention, you have nothing. You have no audience. You have no time. You have no engagement. You have no trust, no relationships.

15:37No one's even hearing you. No one's sampling. So without attention, you have nothing. And so I think you have to start by saying, are we going to make something that is worth people's attention? Because we all have these huge defenses set up. We have skip buttons, we have VPNs, we have ad blockers, we have subscription services. We can avoid all sorts of things we don't want. the unpopular opinion that i strongly believe in and have had lots of great success with is make stuff people love as a starting point because it's the only way you can get in and actually get the attention and you know if you have somebody come in and sample and it's mediocre or it feels salesy or whatever they're gone and they're never going to come back and you know if The secret to building trust and relationships to get customers to get revenue is to spend time with people on an ongoing basis and to have them come back.

16:36And if you want people to come back, it's got to be the real deal. It can't be some bait-and-switch Trojan horse thing where it looks like it's a gift, but it's actually like a bunch of salespeople pouring out of the Trojan horse and trying to close you. I think that's where it falls apart, isn't it? The authenticity. It's like, okay, you can have this killer idea that grabs attention. but people can smell a trap from a mile away now and if it's not you know it's not just taking suit off and putting on the polo you know you didn't fool me yeah and it's it's like this is where it is this is where the piece is like it has to be a genuine gift it has to be a really good show and i think the part where you think about how do you tie that into a business outcome is it has to be a show that's from you.

17:28It has to be something that is a gift that only you can give that group that is somehow tied to the things that you want people to associate with your expertise or your brand or the things that you know that would be valuable for an audience that are going to help your business. And I think, I don't know, I was at a conference in Copenhagen earlier this month, and one of the speakers was from LinkedIn and she was talking about how 95 % of the people that you're reaching with your marketing aren't actually in buying mode right now that you may be like 5 % are actually going to buy. And I was like, this is amazing because that means 95 % of those people, you can just get to know them.

18:10You can get, you can create value for them. They're going to know what you stand for, what your voice is, what your values are, the areas that you're an expert in. and if you can create value for them by sharing those sorts of things and in a way that benefits them they're going to spend lots of time with you and they will build up trust for you and have a relationship and when they hit that five percent that are actually in the buying window if they spent hours and hours and hours with you and received a lot of value and benefit from spending time with you are they going to choose you or are they going to choose the one that is like screaming at them and interrupting them and following them around the internet like a disease or something like that.

18:45So, uh, it, it, it feels pretty obvious to me, but it's not the way most people market. And if you actually commit to doing it and think about yourself as an audience member, it works. Like it, it really works to be generous first by giving people things that only you can give them. Talking with Steve Pratt. He's the author of Earn It. Steve, I love the way you're teeing these things up. These are like all in my list of things that drive me crazy today. Short-termism is the greatest disease in marketing. It's the greatest disease. Performance marketing is the worst term and worst thing that ever happened to marketing.

19:32And look, I know that outcomes matter. We got to make the cash register ring. Marketing has to generate revenue. No one knows that more than me. But not everybody's buying today. Most people aren't. And people want to scoop up the bottom and keep scooping up the bottom to go to the people that are buying today. I got to have sales today. Sales today. Sales today. And I know. I get it. I have five companies, Steve. I got to sell a lot of shit. But you got to build brand or resonance or top of mind awareness or top of mind attention or earn the repeat comeback to get that business when they are buying.

20:17And this short termism that we deal with today is the greatest disease in marketing. And it's not because we don't understand that outcomes and sales matter. it's just you got to understand the buying patterns you got to understand the sales funnel and there still is a funnel cycle funnel whatever you want to call it and not everybody's at the bottom why is that so hard to understand i think everybody just wants to jump straight to the bottom right and it and it's like it is a race to the bottom though the marketing is a race to the bottom of all things you know my favorite thing is um i i look at the like if you just google right now you could go in and google what are the conversion rates on digital advertising they're almost all sub one percent right like like if like and i think about that that is considered successful and in marketing and i like i kind of zoom out and i'm like there's nothing else on the planet where one percent success would be considered awesome and where you'd be like hey we're doing a great job and we shouldn't explore any other alternatives to doing this.

21:27And I think about the 99 % and I'm like, if your job is to make people like you so that they want to buy from you because you're interesting and you're annoying or irrelevant to 99 % of the people you're reaching, why would you not be thinking about, is there a better way to do this stuff? And I think it's because people are very happy to annoy 99 % of the people in order to get that 1 % because they have short-term urgency. It's like we can get the 1 % over and over and over, and we don't really care how many of the 99 % we annoy. I just think there's a better way to do it where you can target the people that you really want to reach and be valuable to them and know, like you said, when they're in market, if you've already built a great amount of trust and a relationship with them, they will convert and become long-time customers, and it will pay for itself.

22:16you just need to actually get away from the short-termism that you're talking about bingo if uh i say this a lot if i was at a southern baptist church i'm the deacon in the back going amen praise the lord you just when the pastor says something you agree with that's uh amen brother that's the highest compliment i can give you uh you need to I want like a soundboard with the amen on it. I know. I've thought about it. My team says, I don't know. But I want to, you know, I got to lean into my difference, Steve. That's what they say. But, Steve, how do we do this? So I think everybody's getting the premise.

22:56So how do we do this? What are the fundamentals? How do we be brave and how do we connect these dots? What drives attention? I mean, how do we do it? i guess that so the first thing is i think if you want to find success in marketing like you again what does it look like to earn attention you have to set a high quality bar for yourself and so i use the term creative bravery is kind of my my lingo for making something that's going to stand out and that is worth people's time and you can kind of think of like you know on a scale of 1 to 100 or 1 to 10 or whatever it is, how creatively brave are we being with the podcast or the video or the newsletter, whatever we're putting out?

23:42Is this a real show? Or is this something that feels like an infomercial for our products and services? And I think, you know, you can ask yourself some test questions to be like, are we making a real show? Are we making something that has a high level of creative bravery or not? Would you listen or watch or read this if you didn't work here like if you had no tie to the company is this worth telling other people about um is it so good that you would tell other people about it that's a really high bar and and but to me that is what it takes to do that stuff and i think most marketing wouldn't pass that test um would you remember this in a week or a month or a year or five years if we changed the things we were putting out and think about how different the stuff that you would make would be if you designed something that people would remember it in five years and how good that would have to be to do that stuff and maybe one other one is you know like at the end of spending time with the thing you're putting out would people say that was time well spent if they had a chance to go back in a time machine and make the same choice again knowing what they were going to get would they choose the same thing because it was a valuable use of their time you kind of have to pass those bars these days and i think setting that bar appropriately high is a great starting point and there's a whole bunch of things we could dig into a whole bunch of nerdy stuff if you want around like how to think about differentiating shows and making things that stand out and and pop in there but i think let's go down let's go down that one a little bit i want you to go on that one a little bit because i think that's important in detail so you let me know where i go too deep in this and we can we can pull out and go back to shallower waters but um so i think one you have to know your audience and choose a very specific audience um and the more you know about the audience the better and you need to look at who else is out there and where they're being served and whether they're being well served in all the different areas.

25:54And then you need to look at yourself and ask yourself who you are, what's your voice, what are your values, why do you exist, what are your superpowers or your weird areas of expertise relative to your competition. And you've got to spend some time in front of a whiteboard or whatever it is with a group of people in a room and figure out what are we going to be able to do that is going to create huge value for that group of people that is not already being addressed by other competition that can only come from us and you know generally speaking that will come up with some sort of subject matter or approach that you can take you know for a like this is what the sort of stuff we're going to talk about once you know what you're going to talk about i feel like there's a lot of opportunities to set yourself apart and make something that is differentiated and it's not just the subject matter, but it's like, what's the format of the show or the newsletter or video or whatever it is?

26:52How are we going to present this information in a really interesting way? And so when I think, you know, when we're talking about that idea of a gift, how are you going to wrap the gift? You can take the same information and you can present it in 10 different ways. And some of them are going to be really boring and conventional, and some of them you can make really, really exciting and interesting. So I'll give you a weird example. We worked with a company called McAfee that you may know. They're a software company that helps people avoid cybersecurity threats and viruses and things like that.

27:25It's a documentary about their founder. Yeah, so this is not about the founder. That's a whole different television. It's been sold a few times, I think, since then. Yeah. He was different. He leaned into it. This is not the story of the McAfee founders. No, the business. that's been now owned by who knows who. Yes. So the business outcome they wanted was to, you know, kind of establish their brand positioning as cybersecurity experts and not just preventing viruses. And to help consumers understand how to protect themselves about what they should worry about or not worry about from cybersecurity threats.

28:10And so the super obvious way to do it would be to, like, have some cyber security expert on the show every week and interview that person and they just tell you here's why you shouldn't use public wi-fi because you're going to get hacked and here's all the things they can get out of it if you go to a coffee shop and use public wi-fi or something like that right that is not what they did they like you could take that same information they instead created a show called hackable and it's kind of a mix of two different formats it's like part um uh myth busters so that you know the tv show where they look at urban myths and legends and being like is this real like we're gonna investigate and find out whether these urban legends are real or not and then part mr robot which is the show about hacker culture and they kind of took a different situation from pop culture like the the wi-fi in the coffee shop for example and said should you be worried about it we're gonna actually put the host of the show in a coffee shop on public Wi-Fi, and then we're going to get a hacker to go in and see what they can find out, you're going to get the exact same information about how to protect yourself.

29:18But you're also going to have a fun narrative watching this host get hacked by a hacker. And it's a bit of a spoiler, but the host almost always gets hacked by the hacker. So the packaging and the wrapping that you put around shows is also a really big way to stand out and earn attention relative to other things that are that are out there and then there's a whole other kettle of fish out there for like how you market it because if you make a great show and you don't tell anybody about it you'll have this little tiny pocket of people that love it and if you have a crappy show that has no creative bravery and you market the hell out of it and a ton of people come in and sample it, thinking like, this is horrible and I'm never coming back.

30:02You kind of need to have awesome creative bravery and you need to market it well to exactly the right people. That's where you find a lot of success with this stuff. There you go. So are the riches in the niches? Am I hearing that? I know it was much broader and deeper than that, but is that true, the riches in the niches? i love the niches honestly um i i had i'll tell you two relatively short stories about how i learned this and then forgot it um so when i was working at the that music service the the innovation lab um at the public broadcaster we made the worst radio station like in the history of radio stations it was it was the it broke every rule it was so dumb so the radio station was not on AM or FM, so it wasn't on radio.

30:53It eventually got on satellite radio, but so no radio, horrible. It only played Canadian music. Like no one wants that, right? Like no one listens to music by nationality. That's just not a thing. You think about radio station formats, they're all by genre. This radio station in an hour, you could hear rock, pop, hip hop, country, death metal, electronic singer-songwriter, like all mixed together. Horrifically dumb from music programming standpoint. It was only new music by new artists. So there were no hits and no big name artists. So again, that is not how people listen to music. We like familiar stuff with just tiny sprinkles of unfamiliar things in there.

31:41And then the dumbest thing is we decided to put out this thing called a podcast in 2005, And like the guy who was hosting the show is amazing. But he was like, I don't even know what a podcast is. This is such a waste of my time. I should be on radio. I don't get it. Why are you making me do this stupid thing called a podcast? So it turns out the podcast went to number one podcast in the country and ended up getting like 80 to 100 ,000 downloads a week in 2005, which is crazy. And we're like, how is this happening? why is this happening it makes no sense this is like it all is horrible like no radio station on earth would ever do any of those things that we did and it turns out there is a group of people who love that thing they're just not a giant audience that you would normally target with a radio station they are music super fans who are omnivores for different genres of music and they like all the new stuff because they want to hear it first so that they can tell other people about it.

32:46And no one had made a show like that for them before. And so we were kind of the only gift that was out there for an underserved niche. And when you aggregate little pockets of music super fans all over the world, it turns into a really big audience. So for me, that was like my giant first lesson in like, uh, super serving and underserved audience and the, and the value of doing that. But then I forgot it when I was at this podcast company. We were working with Red Hat, which is in headquartered in Raleigh, North Carolina. And they're, you know, provider of open source software solutions. And they said, we want to make a podcast only for open source enthusiasts.

33:33And I was like, that is that sounds like a bad idea. Like, I don't know if there's enough people out there who care about open source software to make a show and they're like trust us and of course they knew their stuff inside out they knew they knew their audience they knew their subject matter it was not incredibly hard to make a fantastic show about open source for all the open source enthusiasts in the world because not a lot of people were serving that group and you aggregate that thing that show had a bigger audience than a lot of the shows that we made that were for a mainstream audience.