Marketing to Generations: Gen X and Boomers with Brent Rivard (Geezer Creative)

22:23Jim Stengel:So have you had any experience in dealing with that? Who's done that well? Who's tackled that? Because doing any company-wide initiative that transforms things, changes things, is a heavy lift. And that's where this word brave comes in, right? You need a brave marketer to be able to say, you know what? I don't have to. I was speaking to a VP of marketing at a large beverage company, I'll say. And you could hear, yes, yes, nodding. I understand. Yeah. Sure. young people aren't drinking flavored syrup anymore. In fact, they're pushing back against it and they're not drinking alcohol. It requires a brave marketer to, as you said, it's not just them waving their magic wand and saying, I'm going to get after the obvious.

23:11You've got to get all your colleagues on board. You got to go to the CMO with a bold thought. You have to change the way things have been done in that organization from years. Like talk about the first person at Procter & Gamble from your alma mater that, you know, no, actually, you know what, I don't think this way is the only way. I think, I know you've been doing it for 20 years, but you know what I think, Jim, is I think we should try doing it this way. That requires a brave person. I think once upon a time, going back to your first question about, you know, Gen X and we were grinders, we made our careers from wanting to disrupt, from wanting to do things differently.

23:48And that was the way to get the promotion, to get your name in Ad Age magazine or Adweek, and to really send your career on another trajectory. And I think somewhere, and I don't know where, but that changed. And I think that there's this safety of the same way of doing things and not wanting to gather R &D, HR, and everyone to say, I think we might be doing it wrong. Or maybe not. It's not even wrong. In no case am I recommending to marketers, you know what you need to do is you need to shift 100 % of your dollars away from Gen Z and into Gen X, right? No. But what I'm suggesting is there's a lot of money here with people that are buying your product and they're ignored.

24:39And just might you allocate some money, do a test and learn and be the most celebrated marketer in your building and start a trend. So I think it's just, I think people are just good is good enough. And I didn't grow up that way. And our generation wasn't represented by good is good enough.

25:01Jim Stengel:Now, hearkening back to my P &G days, we had a principle that I want you to talk about. And it was that it's critical to capture an enormous market share at the entry point of a category or a re-entry point of a category. So we were obsessed with the first diaper on a baby's bottom had to be Pampers. The first detergent that someone should try when they buy a new machine has to be tied. Same with Crest Toothpaste. The first toothbrush and toothpaste has to come from Crest. And we spent a lot of money on programs to be there at that entry point. And we often said when budgets are tough, times are tough, those are the last dollars to cut.

25:42Jim Stengel:So that does kind of naturally skew your spending young, you know, in most cases. So what's your take on that? Do you think that still holds true? Because obviously the theory at P &G was that first impression is deep and it's powerful and it sets the standard and brands that typically own entry point go on to have a dominant market share? I think there's still a role for it. There's no question. As I said, in no respect, do I want people to shift all of their spending to Gen X. But it's not as true as it once was. So, you know, there used to be a purchase funnel, right? And now there's kind of like a purchase mayhem, right?

26:22And it used to be that, you know, if you got the pampers on the baby for the first one, then they're going to buy Pampers exclusively for the rest of their parenting lives. But that's the part that's not true anymore. You have multiple opportunities to conquest and to gain a customer nowadays. We're not as loyal as we once were. That whole old playbook, that market has shifted so dramatically. But again, as I say, there's a role for that, though. I'm not suggesting that you don't talk to them to get the first. But what I'm suggesting is, is there's another opportunity, right, down the timeline that isn't being taken advantage of.

27:02And that's where, you know, I suggested from my last answer that there's fear that, oh, my God, what if I take away from because budgets are finite, too, right? Nobody's going and saying I need an incremental 50 million, right, to test and learn, you're gonna have to take money from your current activities, try it further down the timeline. But I think that's where the opportunity is currently being ignored. And that's where I think there's a massive amount of growth potential for so many marketers out there.

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28:52Jim Stengel:Now, let's talk about your personal story in approaching this for a minute. I mean, you had a long career in advertising. You worked as a CMO for a while, but you decided to jump, start your own firm with a couple of friends. You know, a lot of people dream of that. I mean, I left P &G and did a similar kind of thing. But, you know, a lot of people don't do it. I get a lot of calls to say, I'm thinking of doing something on my own. What have you learned? And it's always a good discussion. So you're passionate about this topic. You see a gap in the marketplace. You see what's happening in the advertising industry in terms of staffing.

29:26Jim Stengel:And you're saying it's not going to end well. So tell us a little bit about how it's going as a leader, as a person starting something up, even though the opportunity is big. What are you learning about yourself? What are you learning about your team? What are you learning about brands? as you have this discussion with them that, you know, they nod their heads, but some of them act and some of them don't. So tell us a little bit about what the last, what, two years has been like? Yeah, just about, yeah, a year and a half. Anyway, it's not for the faint of heart. I will never sit as a founder and an entrepreneur and say that this game is easy.

30:02You know that too well, Jim. But it's, the benefit is the learning. You know, I had the pleasure of doing an MBA some years ago. And I can tell you that one year of owning your own company is about 73 MBAs. And you trip and you fall and you learn, but you just, again, you keep grinding and you keep telling your story and you make sure that it's a sharp story. You know, advice for anyone out there trying to open an ad agency or any company. We all know strategy is more about what you choose not to do versus what you choose to do. And yeah, it's hard. It would be hard for me to say, no Skittles, I don't want your million dollar retainer.

30:42But you have to make tough choices. So I mean, my advice to anyone out there is get real specific. And what's haunting to me as well with advertising and the way it's gone is that when did we stop paying attention to our own brands, make your brand your first client, your own brand and sweat the details. And don't get frustrated, which is impossible. That's just actually, that's probably terrible advice. You're going to get frustrated. I get frustrated daily, if not hourly. So there's a lot of fulfillment that comes out of it. You know, when you start to, when you move a client from head nodding to saying, I'm going to give this a try.

31:16And we're grateful for the ones that we have that have, that have started with us. It's very fulfilling when you start seeing it work or you talk about the philosophy of your business, but you haven't taken it on a test drive yet. You know, one of our philosophies is, is once upon a time agencies used to love God. I hearken back to one of the companies I worked at, Lowe Roche, Jeffrey Roche was a creative director and founder at the time. He demanded eight weeks to come back with work to clients. I'm like, eight weeks? If you get eight days, you're blessed nowadays. And then it was the drop of the curtain.

31:50Ta-da, here is all of our wondrous thinking. Whereas the geezer philosophy is we'd rather meet 10 times over a three-week period and involve our clients in the process and iterating with us. And when you see that come to life and you see, wow, the rounds of revisions that we used to go through are gone. And it's very gratifying to go, it worked. Because we essentially took something from theory to practice. And that doesn't always work. And we know that, right? So in theory, every marketer should be allocating a significant amount of their margin. to testing this out and seeing if they're leaving money on the table.

32:31In practice, that's not happening at the level that we'd love to see it, but we are seeing it and we're grateful for it.

32:38Jim Stengel:You said a few moments ago about the importance of a sharp story. And I'd like you to go back to that for a moment. I talked to a lot of young companies. In fact, I was just with a very fast growth AI company who's rich with talent, lots of clients growing like crazy. Their story's not sharp. No. And then you see that a lot of the tech world. Yeah. And it's like, that might be okay for now, but once you have a few competitors pop up, how are you different? What sets you apart? And I just find that is such a, you know, it's obviously it's hammered into you when you, when you're a PNG about how's your brand different?

33:17Jim Stengel:What's your point of difference? What's your purpose? How are you meaningful? And what's your sustainable competitive advantage, all that good stuff. So could you talk a bit about arriving in a sharp story? Yeah, it's hard. I can't remember who the writer was that had the quote. I'm sorry, I wrote you a long letter. I didn't have time to write you a short one. I think it was Abe Lincoln, actually. Oh, it was. Amazing. There you go. But that's just a fascinating way to look at. I mean, you need to start with your long story and then you really need to be honest with yourself and keep revisiting it.

33:46I think that the Geezer thesis is so simple, which is it took us a long time to get there, though. It wasn't that simple, right? And you have to make some hard choices about what you're not going to do, what you're going to do, who you're for, who you're not, who's the company you want to keep, who's the company you don't want to keep, who would we be great for, but who would we be terrible for? And just, right. You think of how many companies, God, I've worked for how many ad agencies, and they all at one point in time, we're not going to pitch. All they do is pitch, right. But that's a hard decision, right.

34:17To say, we're going to put our foot down and say, we're not going to do this in favor of that. So, and too few companies do it. And I think too few companies know, you know, I think the tech world, they're just not wired as marketers, right? And that's a good line of hire people that aren't like you. I don't need to hire another four versions of me. That would be terrifying. But hire people that aren't like you. So the tech people need to start hiring marketers and understand how to build brands and brand equity and build shareholder value in a different way. But I think that the knee jerk is, is we are going to surround ourselves with a bunch of ai phds and techies and then what happens is is when you go to 10 of their websites they all look the same they all use the same ai program to create the website the colors are kind of the same they just end up blending in and i think we went away from you know i'm not against performance marketing either but when you dialed it in a hundred percent i think we all lost a lot of brand and you know you've done it how many times have i stood up in front of a audience as a speaker and said, I know people are sick of hearing us talk about Nike and Apple, but they're kind of still the only ones doing it right.

35:26Shockingly, even though they wrote the playbook for everybody to follow. I'm hoping we're going to see a shift and that we're going to see people dial back to brand and start caring about their purpose. Even you had a great segment for listeners out there. You had some fantastic guests talking about brand purpose and whether it's dead or not. And I think it's dialing back to the role of it. But at the same time, the maker of this glass doesn't need to have a brand purpose, right? It's marketers at one point, everybody shifted, everybody needs a purpose. But I think we're seeing the dialing back to, oh, maybe I do need to be more specific with who I am as a company, who we are and who we're not.

36:01And it just makes selection better overall for you and for the customer.

36:05Jim Stengel:Now for the senior marketers listening and are inspired by, hey, maybe I haven't thought about my audience creatively enough or thoughtfully enough, or where's the spending or where's the spending going? What would be your playbook for that CMO? And if you're working with someone now who's doing it well, and you can talk about that, beautiful. If not, just pull some principles. But what should they go do if they're thinking? Get curious. I mean, this is the other thing. Remember why you got in this business? I love marketing. I love advertising. I love business. like it's an obsession like get curious like just ask yourself the question am i potentially leaving growth on the table what that's what you get paid for get excited about it dig right all we have now is data we don't even know what to do with it once upon a time by the time your data was telling you anything it was too late right it was months and months and months of taking primary data and somebody coming to you and presenting what that said.

37:05And even oftentimes that was opinion, but the speed of AI out there right now with how we can, how we can scour markets, billions and millions of data points in the blink of an eye. I mean, it's not even, it's not even that much work, but it starts with you. It starts with get curious about whether you're leaving money on the table. You might not be, but if you are, you know, get some data, get a whiteboard and a marker, get some smart people around you and start talking and do what it is that we set out to do in this business, which is find another market. And if it's there, fantastic. How rewarding is that?

37:40How many marketers really nowadays are saying, oh, I delivered 12 % year over year growth. I can't name one. Right. So get excited about that maybe being the end of the story.

37:52Jim Stengel:Simple stuff, right? Get a team together, get curious, ask some fundamental questions. That's the beautiful part about this function, right? It's one of the few in business that that's their brief. And then again, if it's, hey, call me, I'd love to do business with you. But if it's not, don't let it end there. Don't then do the old playbook of, oh, now I'm going to get, you know, the top 10 agencies in the country to pitch. No, find a partner that can deliver on that problem with the confidence that you require to help you because don't trip over that process now. I think we're just at the point where the old playbooks are really going away.

38:27And AI, I think, didn't even know that it was going to be part of its benefit. I think AI is forcing everyone to just kind of relook at everything and going, maybe it's not the right way that we did 20 years ago, isn't the right way today. And again, that's about getting curious as well, right?

38:53Jim Stengel:Brent, let's flip into the creative brief. You had a long career in advertising, I think like 18 years and a couple of years, three or four as CMO. As you reflect on that, you worked at all these blue chip agencies, had great accounts. Could you speak to one or two initiatives or campaigns that you worked on that you reflect now at this point in your career and say that was very meaningful to me or very, very important to my development? Yeah. Anomaly, when I went on board with Anomaly and we opened the Toronto office together with the partners and Frankie Rodriguez was the CEO at the time who's from here in New York, that was kind of game changing for me.

39:31And what's interesting is, is that you talk about inspiration that, you know, Anomaly at the time was very clear with who they were and who they weren't. The name was the idea. So as I look at Geezer Creative, the name is the idea, right? There's a lot of similarities in how this works. And the interesting thing about the Canadian market is, and not to be critical of the US market, but the Canadian market doesn't have one-tenth of the budgets that the US market has. So the creative that comes out of Canada doesn't start with a Tom Hanks voiceover and a Fleetwood Mac track under, right? That doesn't happen.

40:08It doesn't even happen with a Canadian artist that's like a B-level. It just doesn't. So you have to outthink instead of outspend. And at the time, the CMO at the time of Labatt, Jorn Soket, who I give a lot of credit to, gave me the clearest creative brief I've ever been given in my life. We're a big American brand in Canada against our number one competitor named Molson Canadian. Right? We've just lost the rights to the NHL. And 40%, 4-0 % of beer is consumed in Canada while watching hockey. we need to own hockey go that was our brief and i'm like bless you for the clearest creative brief that we have to come up to we came up with the insight uh which is clear as it's clear in every sport nowadays it's clear in concerts now that the real fans aren't in the arena right the real fans are in their garage the real fans are down in their basements and the most elated part of the game is when a goal scored and there's this great symbol which is the goal light in behind the net that goes off and of course the loud horn that sounds and gets everybody excited so we decided instead of marketing at people with another beer ad that we were going to make a piece of branded utility and we crafted an actual physical goal light that synced up with your phone to your favorite team and when they scored that had the horn noise and the light would go off we thought we were on to something clever but i mean these things sold out in minutes we crashed our website the day of releasing.

41:39Famous people everywhere were referencing it. Goaltenders were like, sorry for your bud red light going off too much last night. That was my bad. And so that was probably some of the proudest work that we've done. And then, you know, I could go on for hours about the next wave of the campaign. But that was some of my proudest work because, again, it was not conventional. We looked for other solutions. We got curious in a hurry. and we landed on something, we had the right clients aligned with the right agency. That was where you felt trust and you felt a tremendous amount of gratitude in a room working with people that were smarter than you, teaching you about their business.

42:20And it made a difference and it made a huge difference. Still lives on today. It's still part of the campaign. That was God 10 years ago.

42:26Jim Stengel:And there was, you know, you said it was a great brief and a clear brief. It also had a clear constraint. Yes, 100%. Yeah. And it had an enemy. Yeah, right, right. And a ton of tension. Yeah. About five years ago, you left advertising and went to be CMO of a travel group and a large one. Why did you do that? And was that challenging, that transition? Yes. Yeah, okay. Why I did that was, again, it was out of curiosity. I got a call from a friend of mine that J.D. O 'Hara, who's the CEO of Internova Travel group and said, hey, you know, I'm thinking of bringing in a CMO. You know, I've admired your work that you've done over your career.

43:08We stayed close to each other. We're, you know, why don't you take a crack at this coming this way and being a client? And I'd always wondered, you know, you always had those questions in your head of, you know, what's going on in that building? And clients always telling you, guys, only 15 % of my job is advertising. It was an appropriate amount of fear, right? And anxiety to be like client. I mean, I'm pretty comfortable in the role that I've been doing in advertising for years. So it took me out of my comfort zone and yeah, it was challenging. Navigating the client world is incredibly different.

43:41There's a lot of good in it and there's a lot of challenges in it. And I think that it also helped me reflect and get excited about going back into advertising because I realized that ad people, like we started this discussion, Gen X people are different. Ad people are different too, right? Ad people start with nothing's impossible and I spent a lot of time having to convince a lot of people to do things a certain way because again they're stuck in their way so I think what it's done for me as a professional and as an ad agency owner is I have a tremendous amount of empathy for the CMO role and the marketing function within a building that wherever in a world where everything's ROI next week Thursday right nobody's nobody's doing play in the long game so it taught me an awful lot and And again, it was a lot of fun.

44:26I enjoyed it. I'm really grateful for those years.

44:28Jim Stengel:How did you evolve as a leader? I mean, did it make you more patient? Did it make you more, you said more empathetic? Yeah. And I think what it did, what it does for me in my role is that I can be tremendously helpful by saying, ooh, I know what you're worried about going into that meeting with the CEO who speaks one language and that's finance. So I've actually shared that experience with a few clients and it's been successful where I've said, you need to speak in their language, right? You need to speak in ROI, right? You don't push back against it. Don't come up with the reason why they shouldn't be focused on that first.

45:04You're not going to win that argument. So I've been able to be very empathetic and very helpful to clients on how to navigate, you know, a discussion with a CFO and a CEO that come from the finance world on why they should be investing an incremental$20 million with you, right? That's a, that's not an easy discussion. So I've helped, I've helped out that way, but it's, it's a, very different world. And I think, again, it's been a tremendous amount of growth for me.

45:28Jim Stengel:What's the first brand, Brent, you remember making an impact on you as a small boy? It was just those pure white Nikes with the black stripe. I was obsessed. And maybe that's what sucked me into the world of advertising and brands, because that was the, I know it's such a typical answer from an ad guy, but it's the truth. And the other one that's funny is the other one is the rock band Kiss. I remember as a very six, seven-year-old being obsessed. You know, and I was like, but if you look at them, they're a big brand and they still are. They learned merchandise. They were the original marketers.

46:02And, you know, we think of the Taylor Swifts and the Madonnas of the world that have been successful. Like you go back in time, they were kind of the original.

46:09Jim Stengel:Gen X, baby, Nike and Kiss. Yeah, there you go. As you said, you're typical. Yeah, I sure am. So, Brian, who has been the most inspiring person in your life? My wife. Challenges. Had my wife go through some health problems. And that whole, like, I can lay down in the corner or I can get up, dust myself off and get back after it. So, really inspiring. Is she an advertising person? Yes. She's the president of an ad agency. It'll remain unnamed. There you go. Resilient, right? Gen X? Yeah, Gen X. Gen X, yeah. It's going through. Well, Bren, thank you for this. Kicking off our series about different audiences.

46:49Jim Stengel:I mean, this whole show has been about one really fundamental question. Are you thoughtful enough about who you're designing for, who you're marketing to, whose life you're trying to make better? And I love the depth we went on that. And I love that as a question we can leave this show with and go back to your teams. Are you curious enough? And do you feel like you have the audiences that will help you exceed your growth targets over and out? Give it a shot. I mean, all you can be is wrong. Again, in this day and age, you don't have to spend millions of dollars to test something, right? You can spend hundreds of dollars on a meta platform and get some pretty interesting feedback that same day, right?

47:30Jim Stengel:All right, Brent. Well, I hope April Fool's Day goes well for you and no one plays any tricks. We'll both behave. Yes, we will. Yes. All right. Thanks, man. Thanks for this. It was really, really terrific. Yeah, I appreciate this. Thanks for having me. I'm a huge fan of the show. And this has been a good one for me. That was my conversation with Brent Rivard. Three takeaways from this one for your business brand in life. And the first one is a simple one, and we hear it a lot in the show. Be curious. A key, key, key characteristic of top leaders we hear again and again in the show is their curiosity.

48:02Jim Stengel:When I asked Brent for advice on what a CMO should do to pick the right audience for their brand and not be obsessively youth-focused, he just said, be curious, ask deep questions, get your team together, get some creative people around the table, and ask some fundamental questions. Second takeaway, and relate it, hire a team for your business or brand that represents the consumers, the people that you want to market to. It's a diversity point, but it's also a point that's just so, so simple. If you want to appeal to an audience that's not like you, you need to populate your team with people who are not like you.

48:37Jim Stengel:And third takeaway, the importance of a sharp story for every company. As I talked to Brent about starting his own company after many years at big agencies and one stint as a CMO, he talked about how important it is to have your story sharp. Who are you? Why are you here? And how are you different? I think that's important for companies of two or three people up to companies with two or 300 ,000 people. Thanks, as always, for listening. And remember, this is part of a series of episodes that we will be doing over the next several months about choosing the right audience for your brand. So listen up.

49:11Jim Stengel:We won't be dropping one of these every week. We will sprinkle them among our more traditional classic episodes. But we want to do several episodes about this very fundamental marketing choice that we are sometimes not as thoughtful about as we need to be. who is the right audience for your business looking forward with your growth goals in mind.

49:32Jim Stengel:That's it for this week's episode of the CMO Podcast. As always, I would be grateful if you shared our show with your friends, along with subscribing and leaving a review on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen. The CMO Podcast is a Vive Original Production.