5 Minutes of Actionable Marketing Advice

0:00Underpriced attention in 1998 was email. How many people here have done email marketing in their careers close enough to it that they could have a sense? Raise it high, just wanna get a set. Good. So this will make a lot of sense for a lot of people. In 1999, I had an email newsletter that had 200 ,000 people on it that had 90 % open rates. So for the people that don't follow email, you're crushing it today with 30 % open rates. Meaning, you've sent an email, 30 % of them actually open it and then there's a whole other thing do people even act on it. In 1998, I had 90 % of the people opening the email because in 1998, we hadn't ruined email yet.

0:40Right? You didn't get all the spam you've gotten in the last 25 years. We were opening it. And I realized very quickly, direct mail was working for me, but email was free. That's the underpriced attention of 1998. Having a website, doing email, and then finally, the day Google AdWords came out, I bought up every wine term you can imagine for six months there, it wasn't even 10 cents a click floor, it was five cents a click, and I crushed. And so in a very short period of time with absolutely no money, with no money, I was able to grow a very large business, and it became the foundation of how I think.

1:19As we sit here today, the following platforms are completely underpriced in both their organic reach and their paid media. Facebook, Twitter, Snapchat, Instagram, TikTok, YouTube, LinkedIn. This is profound. All of the platforms are underpriced on their organic reach and their media. What does this mean? How many people here have now gone viral on TikTok? You posted something and it got a million views. Raise your hand. Raise it. For the 7, 10 people here that raised their hand, they felt the impact of underpriced organic. They posted something, they had 20 followers, 100 followers, 1 ,000 followers, they posted something, and they got a million views.

2:15That is an enormously important thing for this group to talk about. In the history of marketing, that was never possible. You did not buy a full-page ad in the newspaper. You did not buy AdWords on Google. You did not buy a television ad on television. And they just miraculously gave you unlimited more awareness for more than you paid for. They didn't just give you 55 newspaper ads because you paid for one. They gave you one. This is why this is so important. A lot of you, including myself, grew up in an era where you would amass followers and and you would post and you would get a percentage of those followers to see it.

3:02It was more email marketing than it was social. We are now in the post-TikTokification of social media where you can absolutely get way more exposure than you've earned because you don't have to build a list or a community, you just have to make individual pieces of content strong. Everybody in our company is obsessed with PAC. Platforms and culture. What does that mean? It means that every single person in our agency has to know what every platform is doing every day. We have literally hundreds and hundreds of people every day obsessed about every single thing every platform is doing at the moment.

3:50And then an entire different group, yet one in the same sometimes if they have enough talent that's paying attention to culture. Which rappers, which athletes, which soda, which fashion brand, which everything. What is happening in culture? And not just youth culture, what are moms in Indonesia care about? What are people in Afghanistan consuming? Like literally global information on both platform and culture. And once that is your obsession and your ideas come from the framework of PAC, your ideas will do better. You will get more quantum quality feedback from that and that will create a collective wisdom of what you should be doing or what is touching the hearts and the minds because the only way someone does something, votes for someone, buys something, goes somewhere, is when that thing hits someone's relevance inside of them and led them to consider something.

4:55Marketing hasn't changed in a long time. The mediums and the creative strategies change. And the industry is holding on to yesterday for dear life. And I am intrigued by tomorrow. I'm intrigued by tomorrow. This industry is obsessed with yesterday. but I and my companies, we fucking dominate today. Tomorrow's interesting and we'll keep an eye on it because it's coming. Yesterday is a nice romantic story, but it's the easiest waste of money of all time. It's today that we focus on and I think that's what everybody should be focusing on.

5:48me