Paisley Park to Boardroom - Jonathan Sackett

0:00Hey, welcome to the CMO Whisper Show. I'm your host Steve Olenski. Part marketing practitioner, part ad agency veteran, part journalist. I was a writer for Forbes for 10 years. I've had so many insightful conversations over the years with business leaders, to athletes, to celebrities, to, of course, CMOs. The only difference now is instead of sharing those insights through written form, I'm doing it this way. My guest this week is Jonathan Sackett, a former D1 track athlete turned music industry insider who recorded at Paisley Park and Flight Time before moving into advertising where he built award-winning work for giants, get this, Geico, Coca-Cola, Walmart, McDonald's, IBM, Harley-Davidson, Budweiser, Mars, and I'm out of breath, so I'm going to stop.

0:50He did it at agencies like FCB, the Martin Agency, DDB, and Ogilvie. He now partners with former NBA star, excuse me, Jamal Mashburn, as a board member of Mashburn Enterprises. And he serves as VP, head of Marcom, for the Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership, where he rebranded the org to NEI and launched the NEI Pioneer Podcast, which topped, drumroll, 6 million views last year. No media buy. No media buy either. Thank you, Jonathan. Well, welcome to the show, my very newfound friend and long-lost brother, Jonathan Sackett. Steve, I got to tell you, man, on the pre-show talking to you, that could have been the show.

1:36I swear to God. Now all the pressure is on for me to perform, I think. And besides that, you can read my resume back to me anytime. It makes me feel better about myself. You know, I say this in front of so many episodes, but I swear people are like, You have a burgeoning side business, meaning me, where I just read people's bios as they enter a stage or something. Well, yeah, and plus, seeing you, I've got Tom Petty peeking over your shoulder at me. Exactly. So I feel like I'm in the presence of greatness. All right, I want to start with your agency side, if we can. Yeah. Not to date you and say you're old, experienced, as I like to say, people of our age, but you were one of the first chief digital officers in the entire country.

2:18Yeah, I was number two. So there was a... Sorry, when you stepped into that role, what were brands and agencies failing to understand about digital? Oh, my God, everything. I think, you know, it was tough because if you take the typical agency structure, right, you've got analytics, account management, creative tech, consumer insights, you know, whatever, all those departments. They didn't know where to put me. So I didn't even know that I got a call from there was a magazine out called One to One magazine. And they said, hey, we're interviewing the first four chief digital officers. And I said, oh, really?

2:54What number am I? And they said, two. Number one was a guy named John. So I was number two to begin with. How about that? But John Philippe, I think, was the guy's name from Ogilvy, was the first and I was the second. But to answer your question, it's it was weird because the chief creative officer would tell his teams not to listen to me. Right. The tech guys would say, so you you're coming in to battles in every single strategic meeting. But I'm a creative guy. So, you know, and if you don't know the platform that you're on and you don't know the constraints of it. And I'll never forget my first day on the job.

3:31I was there till two in the morning because they had screwed up some. It was called Tag Testees. So you can make your own joke there. Remember Tag Body Spray? Oh, yeah. They built a website called tag testes dot com, which you get the meaning. I do. But what they did was they had outsourced it to a small digital shop and the digital shop guys called me and they said, hey, they told us to build the site in 3D software. I was like, what? You know how heavy that is? So you couldn't watch it. You couldn't open it when you could have had this person standing in front of a tile that would look like they're in a room.

4:07Right. But they didn't know that back then. So a lot of it was janitorial work, just trying to get people to understand the power and the limitations of digital itself. So I had to wear all hats, tech, creative, account management, everything all at once. OK, so I got to ask the follow up to that. That was then. What are brands and agencies still understand about digital now? You know, it's almost it's the same thing. You're kind of, you know, you got to have one foot in the future and you got to have one foot in today's reality. And I think what happens is there's always a flavor of the month.

4:39The flavor this month is AI. And AI is a great, useful, wonderful tool that's going to take us all out someday, I believe. But I think right now what's happening is it's the flavor of the month. But if you don't have sound business foundation, and I always say FUAS, right? Found, utilized, advocated, and shared. So you've got to start by working with SEO, GEO for AI. You've got to start there because if you're not found, the rest of it doesn't exist. So I think what happens is these flavor of the month come into these agencies, and the agencies are still coming after me to come back, and I would love to.

5:18But the problem is you can't unless you build that solid foundation and build upon it. So we're getting found. Search is working. Our digital ecosystem is there's no dead ends in it. You know, it's basic principles that are usually missing because somebody needs AI on their resume. And that's that's sad. But that's that's reality. Yeah. Now, as I mentioned before, you worked with some really big brands. You like credit, creative and strategy, Donald's Coke, Pet Progressive, Geico. So take us behind the curtain, you know, in some of those brand rooms and wall rooms, what it was like. Okay. Two in the morning, all the time.

5:54And, you know, because you've got to remember, I'm always in every new business pitch as well. So you've got to architect the challenge. I think back to so many times, like McDonald's. Let's take them, for example. Do you know why the McRib is a seasonal sandwich? I do not. And it sells out every time, right? Yeah. So the reason why it's a seasonal sandwich is McDonald's single-handedly depletes the world's pork supply. Okay? So you'll notice that McDonald's doesn't have it every October. No. They have it every time the price of pork goes down below a certain threshold. Then they buy it all up.

6:32Then they can't sustain it because they just force the price of pork to go through the roof. So they buy it. They sell it. Flavor of the month. They're done. You know, one of the things that saddened me about working with McDonald's was they were getting pig-piled. I call that when people online are all, you know, dissonant in some capacity. These guys, do you remember the whole thing with the chicken nuggets? And they're not real chicken. Oh, yeah. And, you know, they're constantly getting bombarded with that kind of stuff. Most of the chicken nuggets when I worked with them were pork. And the french fries, you know how many ingredients were in a french fry when I worked with them?

7:04Hit me. 17. Oh, my God. I heard it's 19 now. I don't know if that's true. But anyway, the reason I say that is because they have an executive chef at corporate there, and his name is Chef Dan. And I put together a YouTube channel for Chef Dan because I figured that would be a really good way to combat the pig piling, right? McDonald's is bad food. It's not real food, whatever. And Chef Dan, we launched it, and it was a huge success right from the get-go. And then McDonald's said, yeah, we don't want to do that anymore. So we did like two or three in the can, and then we never did it again because they thought it was getting them too much attention.

7:38which is odd. But if you start to go through all of them, like Geico, you learn all the industry secrets. You know what Geico stands for? I do. Government Employee Insurance Company, right? And the thing about Geico was everybody, whenever I would give speeches, you and I were talking about you were speaking at Harvard. And I spoke there a couple times. And what happens, the number one question I always get is, you guys don't make any sense. Why is there a caveman, a pig? there's pump day you know it's frenetic it's all over the place well the truth of the matter is when i was working with them horizon media did all the media buys the media budget for geico was a billion dollars a billion now you got to remember if we were doing commercials and just constantly throwing a gecko in there you'd kill us you did the brand would be so tired so you're constantly trying you always go by the value proposition of 15 minutes could save you 15 percent or more by switching your car insurance but the reason why we had to switch it up so often is because we did advertisement more than advertising and if you you can't just do one thing you know we lost half of our team because they they launched that caveman show i don't know if you remember that i do it did it didn't last very long and most of the team quit to go to hollywood and i tried to tell everybody look guys they're not going to listen to you man i'm telling you you're a guy who does commercials and that that's not the the bomb like you want it to be over in hollywood but you know that that's that's what happened with that i mean these oftentimes these brands when you're in these these strategy sessions and meetings you you you don't have legal in the rooms you can be up all night coming up with the stuff the next day tylenol next day we would meet with their legal team and they'd say we you can't do that you can't do this you can't do it.

9:28Talk to some listeners who are thinking something like this. Hey, that's great, Jonathan, you know, but I don't have anywhere near that budget, right? But I want to quote unquote, be different. I want to do this. I want to do that. How can a smaller brand, and when I say smaller, I don't mean small, smaller than McDonald's, Progressive, Coke, Geico, all those. What would you say to those brand leaders who go, that's great, but I don't have a billion dollars, So I'll just keep doing my little thing. You know, the truth of the matter is that that brings up I was working with all 16 brands of Tylenol.

10:05OK, and I was in a room with one of the brand managers. It was like children's Tylenol or something. And she was bidding on keywords online. Well, the price was going up as she was bidding for it. And I said, well, wait a minute. And I ran down the hallway and I saw one of the other brand managers for Tylenol PM or something was bidding against her. for the keywords. Okay. So the price is going up and they don't even know it. And the reason why I bring that up is if I'm in a situation right now, and it was a passion project for me to join Northeast Indiana and rebrand them. You're talking a marketing budget of less than$200 ,000, which is nothing.

10:46And I wanted to help. And I figured I could make a, make an impact and help them to punch up. So I rebranded it and launched the show and did all these things. There's certain things if you have a creative mind you can punch up and you can take people on and not just be a blip on the internet really simple basic things so what i did with the pioneer platform that we created was i reverse engineered from search so when people are looking to so what what what nei does is economic development right so get other countries and people to come to indiana So once I rebranded us, now we've reached people and corporations have come here from Japan, Germany, UK, Ireland, Brazil.

11:30And that's because we found what's on people's minds, their vernacular, the vernacular that they're using to search for you and things like that. And I just started to feed the content engine with the things that people were looking for. Oftentimes these companies, the smaller companies, they're trying to punch up so hard and they're trying to be creative. But what they're not understanding is the vernacular and tonality that their customers are using. Just by matching that, you're going to punch up. Yeah, and thank you for that segue into because I want to talk about NEI next about, you know, and you mentioned it's a passion project, right?

12:05So you kind of already answered that why at this point in your career you're doing this in addition to the other stuff. But I'm curious, when you first started at NEI, was it a blank slate? You had to fix everything all at once? Walk us through what you walked into. Yeah. Again, I come in and I make a lot of changes. I get the impression, Steve, you would do the same thing. But the truth of the matter is that they had – so you've got NERP. They were called NERP, Northeast Indiana Regional Partnership. and I was not going to be called NERP. Okay? So make your own joke on that one. So what I said was there was an agency that did NEI, and right a floor below us is GFW, which is the Greater Fort Wayne Chamber of Commerce.

12:55And they used the same color in the two logos, and it was a crappy green. We were called NERP. We had an agency that was holding our website hostage, so every time I wanted to update anything, I was on the clock, so I couldn't get access to the own back end of our website. Our color palettes were terrible. We were predominantly doing direct mail pieces and just cards. I found 10 ,000 cards in the back room. I'm like, you guys, we're switching everything. So I asked the agency to give me an estimate. Here, we're going to launch a new website. Okay,$75 ,000. I said, you guys, we're a nonprofit. So I called my guys in L.A.

13:39who've worked with me in the past and said, I need to build two websites, Pioneer Starts Here dot com, where I showcase all of our video and our awards and the show and everything. And then any indiana dot com, which is the business site. Right. Find properties, why you should move your tax benefits, whatever. You're going to divide those two markets. So I gutted the place that I got to tell you, they wanted to throw me out the window. And here, you know, you think you were talking about my resume earlier. I was thinking the same thing. I'm walking in there going, yeah, but wait a minute. How come I'm good enough for Coke and Geico and everything, but I'm not good enough for Northeast Indiana?

14:15And, you know, that was a reality check for me. But what ended up happening was all of a sudden this momentum, it just took off. People didn't like the colors that I chose, which was a Tiffany blue, black, charcoal, cream. You know, you've seen the stuff. If you ever do an image search for NERP or N-E-I-R-P, you'll see we had no tagline, no logo, no nothing. And the thing about what I established there that I was out to do was the disassembly. So N-E-I could mean nearly everything Indiana. It could mean nearly everything innovative. And then Pioneer starts here. What we've got is a rotator, a video rotator.

14:51So when I'm talking to the founder of the brand's chocolates, she says Pioneer chocolatiers here, Pioneer manufacturers here, MedTechs here. So I wanted to create a truly extensible brand that was going to give the audience what they wanted. And that, to me, I'm as proud of that work as I am anything else I've ever done. That's fantastic. I love that. Jamal Mashburn, for those not familiar, he's a college star, MBA star. How and what made you want to go in business with him? And what does he see in you that he wanted? Well, he sees an incredibly handsome dude, for one. No, no. So, okay. So I started to tell you about TI.

15:29The rapper, right? So Jamal had some mutual attorneys that I had. And I was living in New York on 42nd Street at the time. And they said, hey, T.I. wants to have dinner with you because he was on some reality show. I know he did T.I. and Tiny, but he was something else. So I had dinner with him. The next morning, one of my attorneys came over and he said, hey, T.I. stiffed him on the bill. You got to pay the dinner bill. And I was like, what? And I said, OK, well, how much is it? $1 ,400. $1 ,400? We didn't eat that much. Oh, he took a bunch of dinners to go for his posse back at the hotel. And I was like, okay.

16:03So then in the next sentence after I called the restaurant and paid the bill, they said, oh, Jamal Mashburn wants to have dinner with you. And I go, why do I know that name? And they go, he was a basketball player. I go, so I get stiffed by a rapper, and now I'm going to get stiffed by an NBA guy. Is that where this is going? So they were trying so hard to get us together, and then I went to the restaurant two times and Jamal did the show. And I was like, I'm not doing this. you know i'm busy i don't have time for this so jamal calls me and he says hey i'm so sorry because he lives in miami and he's like i'm so sorry about this dude uh the guys really want to get us together so you know let's let's have dinner okay so now he's flying up because he was going to see his mom uh she's since passed but um she still lived in harlem so he shows up we have a wonderful dinner in the basement of my building i was coming to the end of my contract with ogilvy and now they had to decide what to do with me within the WPP family, right?

16:57The basement of my building had a full-size basketball court. So Jamal and I go to dinner with three attorneys, all wearing suits, and Jamal and I aren't. And we end up in the basement shooting baskets at 2 in the morning and drinking Blanton's bourbon. You know, the one with the little jockey on top. So we're sitting there shooting baskets, and he goes, so your contract's almost up at Ogilvy? Yeah. What are you going to do next? I go, I don't know. I haven't thought about it yet. I said, we'll see if they come to me with something. And he said, well, why don't you join me? Because at the time, he owned over 100 Papa John's.

17:29He owns all the Lexus dealerships in Kentucky and California. Over 100 Dunkin' Donuts. And then a bunch of other projects. E-Coach we launched. Uptime Energy Drink we launched. So he had his own things going on. And he felt like the marketing firms he was working with weren't very good or weren't telling him what they were doing or whatever. So I started the agency, which now operates all of his businesses. So that's how it started. And it just started because he's a wonderful guy. He's one of the smartest businessmen you'll ever meet. And you know what's a really good one to watch on him is we actually launched a TV show called Falling Forward, but that ended up becoming 30 for 30 with ESPN.

18:09Because Jamal is very shy when it comes to media attention. He feels like he's putting a bullseye on his family's back, and he doesn't want that. Interesting. Yeah, but since then, now he's investing in some opportunities in Indiana. Club 720 is one of them. Really interesting business models and things. So now it's like we're both doing our own thing, and then we come back together, and we figure it out. Then we do our own thing, and it works. Yeah, I was going to ask you about how does the partnership with him show up in what you're doing at Indiana? Well, yeah, because anything, these international companies and things, Indiana, believe it or not, is a really hot commodity right now because it's like the depending upon which list you go to, it's in the top five or six of places to move your business because they have so much land.

18:58They have so much resource. There's 10 higher educational facilities in our backyard. So, you know, what you've got is a perfect storm for incubation. So what Jamal did is he figured out pretty quickly that the cost of operating business out of Indiana is cheaper. So when I get wind of opportunities or things to invest in, we're doing a lot of med tech stuff. I tell Jamal about it. I say, hey, man, if you're interested, you should check this out. And he always does his homework. And if it makes sense in his portfolio, he does it. I love it. Yeah. Now, you've been in rooms with some really big entertainers, Prince, Janet Jackson, Call Room Me Bad, CeCe Peniston, right?

19:35Yep. What is something in those rooms that advertising never teaches you, something you saw and experienced? Well, you know, there's a good side and a dark side. to entertainment. And honestly, everybody that you mentioned, I never saw anything bad from that. I know that, you know, they used to call it horse track racing. And what that is, is when you go up to the control board, some of the engineers, they line up cocaine and they see who can do it longer across the board. And, you know, you start to see truly talented musicians fall apart just because of the pressures and because of the, you know, it's it's a different world it's it's a different world that they're brought up in jamal would always tell me stories of you know he keeps his son off of certain brands because they pay that he didn't want jamal jr to be getting paid and stuff and jamal grew up in that he didn't even own a basketball so i could tell you that one he how he got a basketball but the thing is is that you're meeting people that have just such a different set of reality yeah that that they just don't know the common things.

20:45You know, I remember there was one person, I better not bring up her name, but she was a famous rock star, and she didn't know that you could order a pizza and get it delivered. Wow. She had no idea. So I don't know if it's just being sheltered or if you're brought up that way or whatever. Jamal always tells me the story about his daughter that she was complaining once about the car because he got her a new Lexus, but her friends were all driving Ferraris. Oh, my God. And he said, how do I explain to my daughter that I didn't even own a basketball until I was in college? And I'm sorry your friends have Ferraris.

21:19Wow. And you quote only have a Lexus. And you only have a brand new, you know, top of the line whatever. Wow. But, you know, again, that's the reality. If you're brought up in that, you can't shield your kids from the reality. Hey, what are some things that Prince specifically taught you, you think, you learned from him? You know, a whole bunch of stuff. I think, you know, being around that circle. So I was out there when the Super Bowl was there. Was that 92, maybe, since we're dating ourselves? So I was the act on the main stage that night. And, you know, Prince would always tell people he would have a vision of you.

21:56He had a vision of everybody, and he would tell you how to be cool. And he would tell you how to be cool by always keep one hand in your pocket. That's cool. Like, he would teach you things like that. But I'll tell you something. Watching him in the studio was unbelievable because he did everything with foot pedals. So he would just sit on a stool, whether it's a bass or a regular guitar or whatever. He was playing drums. He was a fabulous drummer. And he would operate everything from the foot pad. The thing about the guy was he worked every single day. And if he taught me one thing, it was to have a great work ethic because that guy worked harder than anybody I've ever met in my entire life, for sure.

22:33and talk about talent. Oh, my God. You know, I heard a version he did. Did you ever know about the whole Bad song by Michael Jackson? No. So Michael wanted that to be a duet with him and Prince. And he had sent a tape to Prince to listen to it. Prince hated the song. And he had a quote about the Bad album. He said, do you know why it says bad on the cover? Because there's not enough room for pathetic. I remember that one. So he had a bone in his side with Michael. But he re-recorded the bad song and sent it back to Michael and said, this is the way it should be. So, you know, Prince was, that's why he was never on shows.

23:14He was never on The Voice or things like that because he could never get past, he could never get past the way the song was constructed and he would always disagree with it. Yeah. So he couldn't critique your voice because he's listening to everything else. Right. It was crazy. It was good times though. If you were to connect your music to your advertising to the economic development life, Is there a through line? Yeah, I think so. I think, you know, I've always said, you know, when you're in school, you learn the four or five P's of the marketing mix, right? Product price, promotion, place packaging.

23:45I always said it's passion, patience, persistence, and perseverance. And if you have those elements, you pay it forward, which would be the final P. I think if, you know, running track, playing football, growing up an athlete, I had a little bit of a spotlight on me for local things like that. Nothing huge. But I think what it learned and it taught me was you're responsible for yourself. So when I would go on stage, I wouldn't be nervous. I'd be excited. Or when I'm going into a presentation to land Expedia, you know, which we landed. It taught me to always be confident and to believe in myself.

24:23And I know that sounds cliche, but somewhere along the line, people miss that. They feel that you have to have an attitude to be confident. Well, I think quiet confidence is 10 times more powerful. And I think that if I wouldn't have gotten my butt kicked a couple times on the track, if I wouldn't have gotten rejected by music labels when I was recording before Prince's guys found me, if I wouldn't have had that rejection, I wouldn't have persevered. Yeah. I mean, and look, not to go down this rabbit hole, but this is long before the days of participation trophies. Oh, my God. There was, you would get, I remember I came home from a track meet, you know, in high school, and my dad said, how'd you do?

25:04And I said, I took second. And he goes, you know what second is? First place loser. So my dad taught me right away that second place was never going to be good at all. Yeah. Right? Yeah. I want to pivot to something that you did in college. You work with Special Olympics. Yes. And I know that's very important to you. And I want to just start with what first got you into that? Well, because when you're getting money from the school, they typically give you a job, which is kind of BS, right? Go watch the sprinklers turn on and here's your check, right? So one of the things, we hosted the finals, national finals for the Special Olympics.

25:41And I've always had this place in my heart because I was a sprinter. And, you know, when I would see people to this day, even, I get very emotional because if somebody can't walk and I'm sitting here sprinting and training and running my butt off and taking it for granted that I can do all these things. And when I got the opportunity, they said, hey, would you want to work this? I said, please. So I worked at all four years that I was out there and just being around that and seeing the joy, pure joy on these athletes faces. It was unbelievable. And it's held such a spark for me that last week, believe it or not, there's a company in Indiana called Turnstone.

26:23And what Turnstone does is they help the disabled through sports and through things like that. Well, they were the first ones to host in the United States ever the para-volleyball championships. So, you know, they sometimes call it butt-volleyball because, you know, you're sitting down and blah, blah, blah. So I tried it, and it's harder than you think. But just being around that and meeting them, meeting the athletes and the people, even when they lose, they're just so joyous and happy to be there that it makes me check myself a little bit, you know? So tell us about Eddie. Oh, my God. This has changed my life.

27:01Eddie was, he would, so he was a fan. He was in one of those little wheelchairs. They're like, I don't even know what you call them. They're high but small. And he could never compete, but track and field was his thing, and so was Superman. He would always have, and I made a mistake. I called it a doll. It's an action figure. So there we go. So what happened was he was such a track and field fan, and his parents were pretty independently wealthy. His dad had his own plane, and he was the CEO of a tech company in Denver. Yeah, it was Denver, Colorado. So anyway, I meet Eddie. He's a big fan. So he and his family start showing up at my track meets around the country just to watch me compete.