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From Micro Celebrities to The Terminator: Leveraging Influencers for Maximum Impact | Sean Bacastow
28 Plays5 months ago
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The Efficient Spend Podcast helps start-ups turn media spend into revenue. Learn how the world's top marketers are managing their media mix to drive growth!
In this episode of the Efficient Spend Podcast, Sean Bacastow, a tech marketing veteran and founder of PeerFunnel, shares the intricacies of influencer marketing and the real value behind social media metrics. He also discusses how his experience with celebrities like Arnold Schwarzenegger shaped his advertising approach.
About the Host: Paul is a paid marketing leader with 7+ years of experience optimizing marketing spend at venture-backed startups. He's driven over $100 million in revenue through paid media and is passionate about helping startups deploy marketing dollars to drive growth.
About the Guest: Sean Bacastow is a seasoned marketer with a decade of experience in tech marketing, including leadership roles at companies like Represent and Cameo. He's now the founder of PureFunnel, where he helps tech startups grow through strategic advertising across platforms like Facebook, Instagram, Google, and more.
VISIT OUR WEBSITE: https://www.efficientspend.com/
CONNECT WITH PAUL: https://www.linkedin.com/in/paulkovalski/
CONNECT WITH SEAN: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanbacastow/
EPISODE LINKS:
https://purefunnel.com/#calendly
https://www.cameo.com/about
https://www.diewithzerobook.com/welcome
https://ads.google.com/intl/en_PH/home/?pli=1
https://www.coca-colacompany.com/
https://garyvaynerchuk.com/
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Transcript
The Importance of Clarity in Advertising
00:00:00
Speaker
And so I always say like clarity over cleverness, right? It's like, don't get cutesy. You're not making a Super Bowl commercial. You know, like your goal is not to make people laugh. It's you want it to be very clear about what your product is. So I usually say it's like, what is your product? Who is it for? Why should they choose your product over the competitors? And how can they take action? And somewhere in your creative, those questions should be in.
Sean’s Journey in Tech Marketing
00:00:31
Speaker
Sean, welcome to the show. Thanks so much for having me. Really excited to chat today. I would love if you could give the audience just a brief background into your experience as a marketer. Yeah, definitely. I've been in tech marketing for about 10 years. you know My career started as as like a growth associate running Facebook ads for a company called Represent. That kind of started my my you know love for digital advertising.
00:00:54
Speaker
Eventually, over the years, we had a marketing for Represent. We were partnering with celebrities and helping them build and sell products online. So people like Leonardo DiCaprio, Jennifer Aniston, Arnold Schwarzenegger, you know they had causes they wanted to support. And as a way to do that, we would partner with them, create merchandise collections, and then help them sell it. And we were then purchased by a company called Cameo. We started overseeing Cameo's merch department marketing, as well as their spend on Facebook and Instagram, and doing you know more work with celebrities, and a lot of people are familiar with their video products.
00:01:29
Speaker
And then recently this year started PeerFunnel, an agency. you know I get to work with a lot of different tech startups and help them grow with advertising on Facebook and Instagram and Google, TikTok, LinkedIn, all all that good stuff. A little bit about me. Yeah. I definitely want to dive deep into the influencer marketing space today and talk in in more detail about the the way that you structured those those campaigns.
Optimizing Conversion Rates Across Media Channels
00:01:56
Speaker
you know The way that I think about media at a high level is we're trying to get to a good conversion rate where we're taking an eyeball and then converting it into an action. And so as much as there is there's different dynamics at play, you have different metrics across the the funnel that you're looking to to optimize towards. And you can overemphasize vanity metrics
00:02:27
Speaker
and ignore things like CAC and profitability if you're doing it wrong. Just to give an example, if you were to optimize towards the lowest CPM channel, you could be driving a lot of impressions, but if you're not getting conversions, then then you're kind of making a mistake. The quality of an impression of a single impression can vary widely right depending on who's seeing it, who the audience is, and also what they're seeing. The difference between showing an impression of Arnold Schwarzenegger you know validating a product to a Arnold Schwarzenegger fan is very different than some random influencer that they may not be familiar with. And so I would pay more for that impression because I
00:03:13
Speaker
think that I'm going to get a better conversion rate there. So I think there's a lot to be said about just like the quality of creative as it relates to leveraging influencers. Maybe you just give me a sense of when you kind of got started with this and started working with with the celebrities, what were some of your initial kind of learnings as you started to to work with them and intended to sell their products?
Celebrity Influence: Engagement vs. Follower Count
00:03:38
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. So it was really fascinating because a lot of the times, like to your to your point about impressions and like the value and quality of them, like we would have clients that would have 40 million Instagram followers and we would launch a collection with them and it would bomb. And then we'd have someone with 1 million you know YouTube subscribers or even Instagram followers and they would sell 50,000 units of something. And that was like the first time where I was like, wow,
00:04:08
Speaker
that like followers can just totally be a vanity metric. And so much of our job at Represent was trying to figure out who has these fan bases, these pockets of people who are just these rabid fans and they're super monetizable. And it it was usually comments that was like our our leading indicator of like, if we're thinking about partnering with someone, it's like, okay, who who has the most comments on a given post um consistently?
00:04:36
Speaker
And, uh, but it was always, you know, we would have, we never quite cracked the code of will this, we can definitively say this person will be able to sell or not. It was always kind of this black magic of us, us trying to deduce, okay, how, how much do their, you know, their fans really care about them? So I think that was really an interesting learning early on and.
Organic vs. Paid Marketing Strategies
00:05:00
Speaker
You know, a lot of my job at Represent was, it was kind of two sided. It was sales enablement. So like helping the client understand how to post best organically. So we had like a playbook of you have this merch collection. Here's your 14 day plan of like post on this day, post on this day. Here's roughly what you'll say. Sometimes we would literally write the post for them. And then on top of that, we had like a media mix that we were.
00:05:25
Speaker
trying to maximize sales with ads and email, SMS, et cetera. So it was kind of that pulling the two levers of how can we best educate the clients that they have a lot of success on their organic channels, which are going to be their best selling channels. and That was always the case for us. And then how do we layer on an additional 30, 40% of sales with these, with these more, the marketing levers we can pull.
00:05:49
Speaker
Can you maybe give me a specific example of a celebrity that that you worked with, maybe like a really strong case study?
Case Study: Arnold Schwarzenegger Campaign
00:05:57
Speaker
Yeah. I mean, we worked with Arnold Schwarzenegger for many years, probably five plus years. And he was great because he was always willing to try new things and very, you know, some people were very involved in a good way.
00:06:13
Speaker
And some were people were not involved at all, others people were way too involved in a bad way. And he was kind of like the nice blend of he cared about it, but he wasn't micromanaging. And we we did a shirt with him that was really the company's, I would say, first big success in terms of, okay, we can partner partner with these celebrities and sell a lot of, you know, a given product. So We did a shirt with him that said, come with me if you want to lift. And it was like kind of for people who like going to the gym and it's like him with his arm outstretched with like a weight in his hand. I think we sold like 70,000 units of that t-shirt over time. And then, you know, as represent, you know, time went on and represent, we got more sophisticated. We were building out like big product merchandising collections for him, like protein shakers and gym bags and, you know, anything you can think of. And we would.
00:07:04
Speaker
you know, create these kind of kitschy sayings and and put them on the items. But Arnold was great because, you you know, we had such a big list for him. So we were really able to leverage the email, the SMS and advertising on top of what he was doing on the org NHS.
00:07:19
Speaker
So what did those economics look like and what did that strategy look like in a little bit more detail? You had the organic side where he was posting and then you also leveraged paid. What were the kind of KPIs that you wore were optimizing towards and how are you you know um allocating those that budget and resources?
Blending Organic and Paid Ads for Revenue Maximization
00:07:41
Speaker
Yeah, definitely. So, I mean, essentially most of it was backed into a like CPA goal. So we were, for Arnold, one part of the job was just how much volume can we drive with his organic post, which is again, like the the content plan and arming him to be successful. But then.
00:07:59
Speaker
you know, the the ads and email and SMS, that was really, can we drive a conversion for less than, let's say, you know, 10, $15. And, you know, the nice thing about working with the celebrities, it kind of felt like a cheat code at times because it's like, they have these, you know, rabid fan bases who really care about them and and some Some of the people we worked with, they would buy almost you know anything that they they put out. So we had these big lists, and that was that was really nice. But yeah, it was my job was, can we add 20 plus percent of revenue on top of what they're doing with these paid channels?
00:08:37
Speaker
under a certain CPA goal of let's say $10, it really depended on ah client the the collection, like what the AOB for the overall collection was. Like some people were just selling t-shirts, others were had these much wider collections with like skateboard decks or these autograph posters, these much higher ticket items.
00:08:59
Speaker
Sure. And maybe for Arnold's example, and you know, if I'm getting to and in the weeds here, let me know, but we'd love to know like what channels you were running, how you were structuring the campaigns, where you were driving, and then the creative you were using. Yeah, definitely.
Targeted Ads Using Celebrity Images
00:09:14
Speaker
So with, with someone like Arnold, it was really, so Facebook, Instagram, Google, email, SMS, those were kind of our bread and butter channels that we would run for anyone of a certain size. So most of our clients.
00:09:29
Speaker
We were probably spending on a given collection, we would probably spend $25,000 to $100,000 on paid. For someone like Arnold, we probably had a ah list of 250,000 to 500,000 people between email, SMS.
00:09:45
Speaker
so Essentially, you know, we had our 14 day plan or whatever. Like a lot of the represents thing was kind of these limited time flash sale collections. So they would only be available for, let's say 14 days. So we would have his organic plan, but we would also have our paid plan layered on top of that. So like day one, it's like the intro.
00:10:05
Speaker
email, and we start running ads. The creative for the ads was typically very heavy on just photos of the celebrity in the product. like That was like the gold for us, and it was so funny because we would that was always pulling teeth for some clients. Not for Arnold, he was great, but like they would send us like photos in their mom's kitchen or something, like a so a really bad selfie where like the lighting is horrible.
00:10:30
Speaker
And all of us would just cringe when we got them, you know, because that's nothing was better than that. It was just like the celebrity in the product and where they look happy. And, you know, hopefully we would get 10 images or so we could deploy those across email and ads. But that that was really like almost all of our advertising was was just photos of the celebrities. And like broad audience targeting. Were you spending to retarget audiences? How are you doing that?
00:10:57
Speaker
Yeah. So this is a few years ago now, which was before really like the, before broad was kind of a best practice. So it was always funny. I would talk to our meta reps, right? And they'd be like, you need to be using more lookalike audiences.
00:11:12
Speaker
And that's really when Meadow is pushing lookalikes. And every time I would test, lookalikes were just underperforming interest groups. And so the nice thing about working with an Arnold Schwarzenegger is there is an Arnold interest you know that I can target. So that interest group would just crush for us. And and I would do things like you know major movies that he had been in, like Predator or something, or True Lies, whatever.
00:11:37
Speaker
And those interest groups just killed it for us and lookalikes didn't really. And it was before broad was like as much of a viable strategy. So it was really that like the old school, you know, Facebook advertising with ah like interest group segmentation and that that type of thing. That's funny. Yeah. I mean, whatever works, right? I know that now audience targeting has become a lot more automated.
Reallocating Ad Spend to Organic Content
00:11:59
Speaker
You know, as, as you're, you're talking and I'm thinking about kind of the the strategy. One thing that I've been thinking about a little bit more stepping back from a performance marketer lens and looking at marketing even from like ah a CMO lens is that I actually think that a lot of brands could trade off media dollars for dollars spent in organic content. And you know you can the way you can think about this is
00:12:26
Speaker
If I'm going to spend $20,000 on Facebook ads and it's going to be at the CPM, I'm going to drive this many impressions. you know Here's what my conversion rate might be. You could also say, I'm going to deploy that $20,000 against content creators and here's the estimated reach. And you can kind of start to get a sense of like what your conversion rate could be.
00:12:47
Speaker
Now the job of marketers to optimize that, right. And like you need to do a little bit, a little bit of both, you know, even like more, more granularly than that. It's like the, the percentage of spend to deploy against like influencers. There's probably some good benchmarks you could think about developing there. What I mean by that is if you're spending $5 million dollars a month on, on media.
00:13:13
Speaker
you're probably spending a good amount of money on ad production. right If you thought about it, maybe trading off some of that ad production costs to spend on a celebrity might be a better long-term business value for you. right it's It's really interesting. it's like Smaller startups, that it might be harder, but yeah, it's a question. right like do if you're If you're even like a seed stage startup and you're raising a round, do you want to put 5% of your budget into just a celebrity deal and is that worth it for you?
00:13:50
Speaker
I think in an ideal world, you can do both and they're symbiotic, right? Like if you if you're paying someone to be the spokesperson for your product and you're really leveraging like ah the appeal to authority, right? Like people love seeing authority figures in their space, like talk about a product and that's just like hardwired into our brain.
00:14:10
Speaker
and if you're you know If you're a startup and there's that one person in your space, you're you're like, wow, if if that person was talking about our product, it would just that would really affect growth for us. right That would be a ah ah really worthwhile lever to pull. You can also support that content with pay. And it doesn't necessarily have to be a celebrity. It could be 10 creators that you're paying to generate content.
00:14:33
Speaker
And then you can turn around and use that content, put spend behind that content and use it in your advertising. And I think that's where it gets really interesting nowadays it is it doesn't have to be just this like influencer marketing versus, versus paid. It's like, you know, one of the companies I work with is a travel app and.
00:14:52
Speaker
we partner with this creator, she generates content, and then we that's always our best performing act. It's just like her kind of organic feeling UGC TikTok style content that she produces. So it's um you're kind of killing two birds with one stone.
The Power of Clarity and Social Proof in Ads
00:15:09
Speaker
Right. from From your perspective, you know having a background and doing a lot of stuff with with celebrities and influencers and now um owning your own startup and working with a ah lot of clients, when you think about the components of of a great ad, but is this what are some of the things that you think about?
00:15:28
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good question. I i tend to gravitate towards advertising, especially on like Facebook, Instagram, that is very, very clear cut, very literal. Like you don't have very much time to to make an impression on someone. And so I always say like clarity over cleverness, right? It's like, don't get cutesy. You're not making a Super Bowl commercial. You know, like your goal is not to make people laugh or like it's, it's, you want it to be very clear about what your product is. So I usually say it's like, what is your product?
00:15:58
Speaker
Who is it for? Why should they choose your product over the competitors? And how can they take action? And somewhere in your creative, those questions should be answered. And then I think there's a lot of psychological levers you can pull and you know things that you can pepper in your ads, like particularly social proof. I just think like social proof is the easiest brain hack ever. It's like we are still hardwired from 100,000 years ago to want to know that someone has tried something before
00:16:28
Speaker
we do because we we don't want to you know have a bad outcome outcome. So if you can put reviews, testimonials, trust indicators like your star rating or even like trust pilot icons are ah logos, you know, it's like things like that go a long way and just building trust with people and getting their attention. So I think it's kind of being very clear about what it is you're offering and who you're offering it for and then layering on those psychological principles that kind of are like the brain buttons that you can push.
00:17:00
Speaker
Right. I love that. I also think Hermosia actually came up with this, but something I've been thinking about recently is if you think about your product or service and you think about all of the objections that a potential prospect could have to to puring purchasing this,
00:17:18
Speaker
How can you address all of those um as much as possible? right And I think it depends on the like specific asset we're talking about. You're not going to do that in ah in a Facebook ad, but perhaps on a landing page. It's like, what are the reasons why they're they're not going to purchase? And like how can you get them to respond to that? Social proof.
00:17:41
Speaker
is is a large one I don't you know trust. right like i don't I don't trust this product. I don't think it's going to work for me. And so that's a big one. But yeah, that's something I've been thinking about. you know when we When we talk about kind of performance creative strategy and building out kind of an experimentation and and testing plan,
00:18:02
Speaker
It can get pretty sophisticated specifically as you're operating at at scale and you're thinking about testing a couple of things. I feel like marketers can go in a couple of different ways. One way is we're going to throw the kitchen sink at this and we're going to create thousands of ads. And now with AI, you're able to do that, right? You can create a bunch of different copy variations, a bunch of things.
00:18:26
Speaker
Another route is we're going to pick the three to five value props or benefits that we know that they work. And then we're going to just kind of continue to put those out into the the market. Six or 12 months ago, I would have said it's more about testing velocity. I want to test a bunch of different things and and know it works. But I think there's a trade off there. And the reason that I say that is that I believe that Well, I don't believe it's fact that customers will need multiple conversions multiple impressions to convert and they need to hear the same messaging reiterated over and over and over again and drilled into their brain. How do you think about that kind of dichotomy of like testing velocity to learn a bunch of things versus the repetitive nature of messaging that you know ultimately leads to
Testing Messaging Pillars and Angles
00:19:23
Speaker
conversions?
00:19:23
Speaker
Yeah, that's a great question. I think you know when I'm approaching a brand, the initial research phase is is really saying, you know what are the core pillars? What are the um are buckets, if you will, what are the three buckets of messaging that we want to focus on? so it's like it It kind of goes back to that, you know what is the product? Who is it for? That sort of that sort of thing. you pick You pick the pillars, like the content pillars of you know how what what are the what are the things that really that what are the value props that really appeal to people, right? And then you can take each of those buckets and say, OK, we're going to message those three things. We're going to message them in very different ways. And that's kind of like the angles and like picking out different features that you can highlight that
00:20:09
Speaker
speak to those you know wider content pillars. So that research in the beginning really has so many downstream effects. like it's I think to your question of like how do you balance the dichotomy, it's it's everything will come back to those three main things that we're just hitting people over the head with. But we're going to say it in in different ways. And we're going to highlight different features and benefits and different niche groups that you know the product might appeal to. And then it's it's kind of just testing, I think you can do both. I think you can both hit people over the head with things many times, like get that repetition in, but also do it in ways that maybe they don't even think of it as they're being it's being repeated. It's not like annoying. it'ss It's through all these different framings and lenses and and angles. And you're kind of just seeing what resonates amongst those angles within your your wider content pillars.
00:21:04
Speaker
as you As you think back to you know the clients that you've worked with and all the the channels that you you've managed, can you think of a couple of ads that really just like crushed it or were memorable for for you? And maybe maybe if we want to go to some of the celebrity stuff or yeah, take that in any way that you want. Yeah.
00:21:26
Speaker
Well, one that I'm working on right now that i I'm really enjoying is I work with staff and company called Persona, and they basically find they have this really interesting algorithmic process to discover elite talent globally, and then staff them at tech companies in the U.S., right?
Bold Messaging Strategies in Ad Campaigns
00:21:44
Speaker
rather than kind of go the, you know, I think people think staffing and it can kind of be like conservative and and kind of stodgy, whatever. We went the opposite route of, okay, we're going to run Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn ads that with things that say like, hiring sucks, we'll do it for you. Or, you know, I love hiring, no one ever. And then it's we We realized that started resonating way more than anything. like We had probably tested 50 different ads and and those were just like super stand out. So then it's like, okay, well, how can we iterate around those you know those concepts? Because those were like those are really strong concepts.
00:22:24
Speaker
We'll put 50 different backgrounds on I love hiring. No one ever, you know, 50 different backgrounds on hiring sucks. We'll do it for you. And, and I think that's so much the the process that I enjoy is like, okay, we're seeing something that's working now. How do we reinvent it so that it's fresh?
00:22:42
Speaker
With the celebrities, it was a little more straightforward in that you you know most of the ads were, like the copy was almost more interesting to me because so many of the ads were just the photos of the celebrities in the gear. like it wasn't I wasn't having to put as much thought into the actual creatives.
00:23:01
Speaker
Yeah. And exactly. like now Nowadays, my work is with startups, which you know a lot of them don't have brand recognition necessarily. So it's just more challenging to break through to people and to kind of get them to stop that scroll and to pique their interest and get them to click through to a website. So things like that, where it's just How do we take an industry that necessarily like doesn't necessarily, isn't associated with bold marketing and, and you know, insert some, some intrigue. Right. Exactly. Yeah. And i the reality is for much of the audience listening to this, that they are marketing, you know, products or services that require more explanation. You know, as you were talking about the the hiring example, I thought about.
Expanding Messaging Across Channels
00:23:49
Speaker
my approach to creative production and and testing. So if we assume that you're a startup running a multi-channel media mix, you're doing some paid search, some paid social ads on on Facebook, TikTok, et cetera. You're doing TV. You might even be doing affiliate marketing, direct mail. you know you're You're testing within a bunch of formats and you want to launch a new product.
00:24:14
Speaker
You have to figure out how am I going to launch this across my active media mix with a bunch of different channels. My approach and what I really like to do is think about let's learn and understand what are those main messaging value props, like those big, bold things that work. And let's use page search, Facebook ads, image ads,
00:24:36
Speaker
simple stuff to understand it, and then we can extrapolate that and create more interesting concepts on places like TikTok and and TV. So like an example of of this in in your case, if we know that you know we're launching on Facebook and we test a bunch of different things around hiring, right? we could One thing could be like hiring sucks, don't do it. One thing could be like you're overpaying for talent in the you know United States. um why Why are you doing this? Different things. Once you get those learnings and you find out hiring sucks, it's like, okay, now let's create the concept of hiring sucks with ah a video ad and let's go a little bit more exaggerated into it. 100%. And I think that's the smart way to do it. like Sometimes with clients, if if we sometimes it's kind of obvious like what they're the the messaging angles are going to be, or at least the ones we start with and and start testing with. But sometimes it's it's there's 10 possibilities or five, 10 possibilities. and And that is where
00:25:40
Speaker
you know, sometimes I'll just run essentially headline tests. I'll just put a messaging headline on the same background, 10 different headlines and see what resonates. And then exactly you what you said, it's like, it's that process of, okay, now we know that X, Y, and Z are intriguing to people and um leading to conversions. It's like, now let's go to the whiteboard and figure out How do we deploy those messaging angles across like a wide variety of channels? And even just within like Facebook, like the meta ecosystem, it's like across a different like placements or, you know, a carousel, a video, statics, you know, that sort of thing. So I a hundred percent agree. Like that's my process as well, particularly for some clients where it's like define the messaging and then figure out how to scale it horizontally.
00:26:33
Speaker
you know as you As you think about working within more competitive spaces and kind of developing messaging that differentiates a brand, do you have any strong perspectives there? Do you spend a lot of time as part of your research process looking at what competitors are saying, or do you think it's kind of more about you know the unique ah but whatever is going to work for that brand, and we can just like hone in on that messaging?
00:27:00
Speaker
Yeah, it's a good question. I do look at what competitors are kind of how they're positioning themselves and where you know the blue space, if you will, is in the market.
Crafting Attractive Offers with Brand Understanding
00:27:10
Speaker
I do think for me, it's more I spend more time unearthing what is special about the company that I'm working with. so you know talking to customers, figuring out like review mining, like going through reviews, seeing how are people describing. like Even talking to internal team members is really is really helpful. like What do they think is special about what they're doing? And then you kind of, over time, get a feel for, here's why this offer is attractive to someone, or should be, or we think it will be attractive to someone. And you have, let's say, those three angles. So for staffing, maybe it's like higher quality talent than
00:27:48
Speaker
then you can source yourself, saves you time. People don't want to hire and saves you money. Right. And it's like, okay, those are the angles we're going to hit. Now let's, let's iterate on those. Let's think of the best ways that we can deploy those and and see what's resonating. And then just, you know, cut the losers scale, the winners and and go from there.
00:28:09
Speaker
For sure. Another thought too, you know if you're a consumer and you're if you think about your own kind of consumer psychology and how you make decisions, often you're not doing this very like competitive comparison chart, looking at all of the different things in in too much detail. I think when marketers develop creative, they kind of forget that a little bit and they think Hey, we have to over explain these these value props, where it may be that if you take product A and B, like let's just say Coke and Pepsi, for example, that the brand of Coke, and if Coke were to hire a celebrity that you admire,
00:28:54
Speaker
That in itself will improve conversion rate more than it has 50 less calories or whatever it is. So in terms of like the the the reasoning for choosing a ah product, it there there's all there are these like emotional, psychological components.
00:29:11
Speaker
that might be more qualitative, you know? Totally. I mean, I think the best advertisers in the world, like the Nikes and the Cokes, and you know, they they have that figured out where it's like, a lot of times I'll see, what they have figured out is that emotion plays such a ah large role and that overrides, like our brains are just, we're emotional creatures, right? More so than logical. And that will always override. I do see like a lot of times like,
00:29:37
Speaker
ads and landing pages just way over focusing on features, which I always think is is very funny. As a consumer, you just care so much more about benefits than these these individual features. And the companies that I think are really great advertisers can both tell you enough about their products to make you interested and understand why it's valuable to you, but also not overdo it with like the minutia of the features.
00:30:06
Speaker
Right. You know, it's funny. this This probably is going to come completely off topic.
Nostalgia in Advertising for Brand Loyalty
00:30:11
Speaker
But i I've been getting into this ah this concept. It's a book. It's called Die with Zero. And it's the idea um that you, instead of saving a bunch for retirement um and over saving and dying with a bunch of money, you should aim to optimize your life around fulfillment. One of the concepts within the book is this idea of a memory dividend. And the idea of a a memory dividend is like stocks pay interest in compound over time. Memories also pay interest in compound over time, meaning the ski trip that you take with your your buddies at 28 years old, you're going to have a benefit within that time period, but then you're going to have memories that you think back on and it's going to provide you with that tangible benefit, right? The application from a marketing perspective is that
00:31:06
Speaker
When you have ah a positive brand experience, it's almost like a memory dividend in in a way. And then when you think back and you have that positive experience, it kind of like pays you back. And so you know taking the example like like Coke, it's so hard for somebody to think about choosing another soda when they think about Coke and these emotional kind of connections come up to,
00:31:33
Speaker
I remember being a kid riding my bike when I was like 12 years old and vanilla co came out and it was like this thing that we had to go get right. And there's there's no like, yeah, it's hard to quantify the the impact of something like that. And if you think about that then you you know you you look at the impact that like working with a certain celebrity can have that's been around for a while. Or even Gary Vaynerchuk talks about you know buying these brands that have a lot of nostalgia associated with them. There's a lot of brand equity there. you know It's so funny. I was going to mention Gary Vee, too, because that's exactly where my my brain went. is like you know He talks about the power of nostalgia, and that's why he buys those brands. and I think that goes back to you know what we were saying about
00:32:19
Speaker
The emotion behind advertising is nostalgia is so powerful and it's also so subtle. Like I think nowadays, especially as like digital marketers, we think of, we want to be able to quantify everything, but it's so hard to quantify the user journey that you've had.
00:32:36
Speaker
over however many years of your life with a given brand like a Coke, right? there's just It's so layered. It's so complex. It's not you clicked on a Facebook ad and then a Google ad and whatever. It's like it's so multifaceted.
00:32:51
Speaker
and you know it's it's It's interesting you mentioned that book because that's been recommended to me a few times and I really want to read that. I think it's like I'm i'm very into you know personal finance and a lot of those you know personal finance books and I think it's very contrarian so I want to read that and kind of get a different perspective on that.
00:33:11
Speaker
Cool. Yeah. i'll I'll share a couple podcasts with you as well and I'll leave them in the in the show like in the show notes. That'd be great.
Connect with Sean Beck
00:33:19
Speaker
Yeah. it's It's frustrating me too, even from like a data and analytics perspective. you know We'll look at things like on it from ah on a channel mix and we'll say, okay, the LTV of but We'll look at GA4 data, last click data, and then say, okay, Facebook, last click, LTV is X, Google last click, LTV is Y. And then we talk about these users like, oh, these are the Facebook users, and these are the Google users. And it's like, I don't know if that's the case. It's it's just that Facebook got that, captured that click last, and then we're going to extrapolate quality there. I don't know, it's tough. But anyway,
00:33:56
Speaker
Sean, thank you so much for for being on the show. This was a really fun conversation. but Thank you for having me. It was great. Where can folks find you? Yeah, so my website, purefunnel dot.com, probably the best place. LinkedIn, Sean Beck. So those are those you know the places probably the best to go.