Marketing Misfits

The Misfits continue the discussion on the power of sound and diverse listeners with special guest, Ted Serro, Account Director at Pandora. Manipulation is a strong word, the Misfits debate whether audio manipulates or influences decisions, go into a deep dive into podcasting and how podcasting has revitalized audio. The episode culminates with a discussion on music genres that define culture.

• 7:02 - Ted Serro’s hidden talent
• 10:50 - Why should marketers have a sound audio strategy
• 15:00 - How sound influences decisions 
• 22:20 - How is podcasting influencing audio growth and the difference between terrestrial radio, satellite radio and digital audio 
• 37:12 - The plus and minus of podcast advertising
• 42:20 - Which music genre is responsible for defining culture

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Diverse audio listeners are critical to the success and growth of audio platforms; in this episode of The Marketing Misfits, we chat with special guest Ted Serro, Account Director at Pandora and discuss the evolution of audio, tactics to win with diverse audio listeners and fraudulent activity that threatens the growth of audio streaming.

• 5:00 - Introducing special guest, Ted Serro, Account Director at Pandora  
• 7:35 - Amazon Studios partners with Howard University to create opportunities for minority students in the creative arts
• 18:39 - The threat fraudulent activity and monetization poses to streaming audio 
• 24:25: Tactics to combat fraudulent activity and monetization in audio streaming

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Mike Summers | Geoff McHenry | Yesenia Bello |

Stewart Cornelius | Dave Smith | LaToya Christian

In this episode, the Marketing Misfits discuss a variety of topics

• 2:30 Intros - Intro Song “Ye” Burna Boy
• 8:00 Black History Deep Month
• Beyond 28 Campaign
• 28 Days isn’t enough to celebrate Black History
• Black Culture influences the world
• Tom Steyer & Juvie
• McDonald’s 365Black.com
• Why do we need Black History Month?
• 14:00 Target & Honey Pot, All-Natural Plant Based Feminine Care Products owned by a black woman attacked and Black Twitter came to the rescue and saved their ratings and boosted sales
• What’s the downside of companies being blind to the black/brown?
• 19:15 Reference to interlude on Solange, “A Seat at the Table” with Tina Knowles speaking
• 20:15 The Drum: Stories of being black in advertising (most stories written by women) – Carol H. Williams 
•  How black culture lends itself to billion-dollar ideas
• How do we feel as people of color in the marketing/advertising industry?
• The Count
• Group M announced black woman CEO of organization in UK, Karen Blackett
• 28:25 Ad Age Year-Round Black History Month:
• Chevrolet, “Throw Like a Girl”, Monet Davis
• Cheerios, “Just Checkin In”, Bi-Racial Family
• Nike, “Equality”
• 44:55 Music Break “Anybody“ Burna Boy
• 47:15 Women’s History Month
• US Women’s Soccer Legal Dispute over unfair wages paid
• Coca-Cola and P&G have stepped in and said it’s problematic.
• Secret & Nike as well have spoken out
• Why aren’t they paying these women?
• 60:20 Megan The Stallion Contract Dispute. How is it different to market an artist in today's modern age. Do you still need labels or contracts?
• 67:00 Ad Week: 12 women’s history ads:
• KY The Pleasure is mine, #getwhatyouwant 
• Morning After Waffle / Blue Waffle (Mythical STD)
• Budweiser redid old ads to portray women in more positive light
•  70:00 Outro – “If” Davido

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Mike Summers | Geoff McHenry | Yesenia Bello |

Stewart Cornelius | Dave Smith | LaToya Christian

In this episode, the Marketing Misfits discuss a variety of topics

·       1:10 Intros – Intro Song: “Circles” Post Malone

·       3:40 Who is working from home? Coronavirus and the early marketing industry impact

o   Events are cancelled (postponed) SXSW, Coachella (Postponed), Ultra Music, Black Twitter Live

o   Significance of SXSW to Twitter – it was launched 13 years ago in Austin. SXSW is not doing refunds and vendors/performers have been sending out GoFundMe requests. Vendors are sending out virtual booths as well to gain awareness.

o   Sport events shutting down. March Madness cancelled ultimately but at this point when we recorded in time the kids were playing for empty crowds.

o   Are they Olympics even going happen? How does it affect NBC, the host country and local economy?

o   Corona doubters, be leery of them

o   Reperatrions!!! The Blacks (African continent & the limited cases of the Rona)

o   Coronavirus in the states – reference The Daily (podcast) “Why the U.S. Wasn’t ready for the Coronavirus”

o   Traveling with corona as a global pandemic – I Stand with Naomi

·       17:35 Music Break – “Tap” Meek Mill

·       18:38 New York Knicks

o   Rebrand & Steve Stoute

o   Spike Lee & the employee entrance

o   A Knicks Fan Rant

o   Net vs. Knicks

o   Player Attractiveness

o   Can you separate the COMPANY’s brand from the FOUNDER’s brand?

·       26:10 Dwyane Wade

o   Documentary on ESPN for 10 years of his life & career

o   D.Wade’s daughter, Zaya

o   Lil Boosie’s comments on Zaya

o   P&G add Dad supporting transgender son in 1st shave

·       33:00 Wilder vs. Fury II

o   The Decision

o   That’s kinda racist

o   Branding of the fight

o   The future of boxing 

o   Nashville

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 Mike Summers | Geoff McHenry | Ryan Chappell | Yesenia Bello | Stewart Cornelius

On this episode we break down @GoodMarketingHQ analyis of Lil Nas X’s rise from college dropout with little musical experience to superstar in 1 year.

Most musicians think like failed startups. Too much time creating. Not enough time promoting. When Lil Nas X dropped out of college to pursue music he didn’t create much. Instead, he lived on Twitter, made online friends and got popular posting memes. His account quickly grew to 30,000 followers. The plan was to use his following to promote his music. But it wasn’t that simple. In Nas’s words: I’d post a funny meme and get 2,000 retweets. Then I’d post a song and get 10. So Nas got creative. He stopped tweeting SoundCloud links and started writing a song he could promote through memes. In his words: It had to be short. It had to be catchy. It had to be funny. Old Town Road was the result. And on the 3rd December 2018 Nas paired it with a video of a dancing cowboy and shared it with his followers:

country music is evolving

The video went viral. So Nas stuck to this formula: Short viral videos. To the tune of Old Town Road. With the full song linked underneath.

As an unknown artist, it was the only way he could get the word out. And the views started piling up:

Inspired by Old Town Road's success on Twitter it spread to TikTok, and then onto Billboard’s country music charts. Yes, the country music charts. Nas listed it as a country song aware that the charts were less competitive. One week later Billboard removed it for “not being a country song”. Ironically, this was the best thing that could have possibly happened. Billboard's decision turned Old Town Road into a national talking point and two weeks later it was No. 1. Nas wasn't stopping. He began lining up remixes with some of music's biggest stars.

Billboard has a loophole whereby remix plays count towards the original song's chart placement. With every remix millions more streams poured in, and Old Town Road became impossible to budge. 17 weeks later he'd broke Mariah Carey’s record for the most consecutive weeks at No. 1. It’s easy to forget quite what an extraordinary achievement this is. Five months earlier, Nas was a college dropout sleeping on his sister’s couch with a negative balance in his Wells Fargo account.

On my first day researching Old Town Road I read a quote from Nas: A lot of people like to say “a kid accidentally got lucky”. No. This was no accident. The more I learned about Nas the more I believed him. A key moment in Old Town Road's rise was a video of a man standing on a galloping horse going viral on Twitter. The audio was set to Old Town Road. Different versions of the video were viewed millions of times. I wanted to know how the video spread, so I did some digging and found it first posted on the 24th December:

here’s the full song

https://twitter.com/lilnasxx/status/1077239871620743169?s=21 …

I asked the Twitter user why he made the video. He told me that Nas sent it to him. But it doesn't end there. Aware that people watching the video would search for the full song, Nas changed the song title on YouTube and SoundCloud to include the lyric from the viral video — “I got the horses in the back”. He also posted on the NameThatSong subreddit which ranked on Google. Now, anyone searching from the video had an easy route to the song.

Things didn’t happen to Nas. Things happened because of Nas. Virality is not mystical. The story of Old Town Road is not magical. Look behind the curtain: Nas is sitting in his underpants, on his sister's couch, iPhone in hand, making the whole thing happen. No one knew him. No one wanted to check out his song. No one promoted anything for him. He made friends, made them laugh, and built an audience. Then he packaged his song in a way that fit into their life. The rest is history.

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 Mike Summers | Geoff McHenry | Ryan Chappell | Yesenia Bello | Stewart Cornelius

On this Episode, the crew discusses a bit of their lack of excitement for CES and Yesenia’s experience visiting. And then we spend a bit more time discussing thoughts on Mike’s takeaways from the Brand Storytelling Conferences at Sundance Film Festival.

In January 2020 I had the pleasure of visiting the Brand Storytelling Conference as a part of Sundance Film Festival. Coming off the heels of it, I wanted to share a few takeaways with a random assortment of my larger team, friends and family.  It was an amazing conference that I would highly recommend focusing on longform content. 

There are a few reasons I would suggest going:

• Creative inspiration
• Understanding value of long form content
• Exposure to new creative partners
• Exposure to differentiated content development approaches from brands

This is of course a tip of the iceberg, but I’ve attempted to summarize some key takeaways that really stuck out for me. If you have any questions, please let me know and happy to continue the discussion!

There has been a consumer shift from gaining attention to garnering emotion.

Agency: Twitter

Mike’s 2 Cents: We have become hyper focused on short attention spans and how to communicate a message in 2 seconds. However, as we see behaviors emerging like IGTV and binge watching on streaming platforms—there becomes the question of how you can evoke enough emotion in consumers to incent them to watch a 2-minute video instead. Twitter positioned two key ways of doing this are to humanize your voice and/or exchange value.  Disney+ executed this on twitter creating a super thread of nearly every Disney property interacting with Disney+ after announcing their launch. Consumer interaction with use of the word “nostalgia” or “childhood” went through the roof.

Begin with ideas and content over brand?

Agency: The Marketing Arm

Mike’s 2 Cents: As marketers we can consistently be so focused on building a message that we want to communicate—that we can at times miss the plethora of amazing stories and ideas already in existence that consumers are looking for. In addition, the industry’s agency model has fallen out of whack in many ways as we have cut costs and are asking huge agencies/companies driven by profitability to stretch creativity—which in many ways are contradictory goals. A differentiated way of approaching this is to explore creators with an excellent idea and explore how we can use our funding and branding to be a catalyst to this. An excellent example of this is the 5B documentary series executed by our J&J corporate equity team in collaboration with UM Studios, Highway 61 films and Saville where J&J corporate commissioned a project to speak about the heroic nurses taking on AIDS in it’s earliest days. The film went on to win the Entertainment Lions Grand Prix at Cannes and was sold to RYOT netting out for no cost.

There are many ways of executing affective longform media.

Agency: Warner Media

Mike’s 2 Cents: As brand owners we can struggle at times with discussing long form content. The reason is because the approach can at time seem daunting (what should it look like?) and we struggle with understanding how to measure ROI when short form content seems more effective and efficient to create in our measurement approaches. Here are some examples of different approaches to long form content that were successful as judged by different success metrics:

• Documentary Style:  Invesco QQQ funded a project to share the story of a 13-year-old entrepreneur who developed his own clothing line. 
• Results: The success of this campaign led to an organic interview on Fox News (a competitor of Warner) and much more earned media.
• Experiential: Hulu developed content promoting the 3rd season of The Handmaids Tail by taking on NYC statue inequities. Acknowledging that of the 150 statues erected in NYC only 5 represented women—Hulu created an experiential activation leveraging 140 mirrors in the style of women silhouettes. This allowed women to visually see themselves through this interpretation.
• Success: I have not located the results online, but it was touted that this led to the erection of a new woman statue in Central Park and replication of this activation nationwide.
• Sales Driving: ASICS developed a long form piece of content focused on a consumer experience of preparing for a marathon with their gear and then made every piece of clothing available for purchase through the content at the end. (unable to locate video online)
• Success: Sales driving

Leverage talent and influencers as a central piece of your product offering to maximize effectiveness.

Agency: Fullscreen

Mike’s 2 Cents: It can be very easy for us to think of leveraging influencers or talent as a way to amplify our messages—however there can be tremendous value in integrating talent as an upfront piece of the content development and even product development process. This was the approach Hot Wheels took when leveraging their partnership with YouTube influencer and teenage car enthusiast Tanner Fox including the execution of custom merch, custom Hot Wheels cars, YouTube content and even TV. With this, they were forced to relinquish a lot of creative freedom and collaborate with their legal team in a very different way. 

• Success: This has led to Hot Wheels YouTube channel being their #1 driver of sales of all media tactics.

VR has provided new unknown opportunities for long-form content.

Agency: RYOT at Verizon Media 

Mike’s 2 cents: Leveraging technological advancements in VR and AR can be a method of elevating the emotional effectiveness of content in new ways:

• P&G: Expands their “The Look” campaign by putting consumers into a music video that continues to become more exciting as it becomes more diverse.
• Lil Dicky: Quickly created his “Earth” music video by leveraging technology to scan his body movements and place him in a CG world instead of developing all animation from scratch.
• The March will offer audiences an unprecedented opportunity to experience the historic 1963 March on Washington for Jobs and Freedom and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s iconic “I Have a Dream” speech in groundbreaking room-scale, interactive virtual reality.

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In this new episode, the Marketing Misfits dive into this year’s Black History Month brand campaigns from tech giants, Google and Facebook and Michael Bloomberg as he tries to win the Black vote. The Misfits also share some Black History as they review Netflix’s new show, Who Killed Malcolm X. 

Episode Time-stamps:

• 6:40 - BHM Google Spot
• 12:08 - BHM Facebook Spot
• 15:43 - Netflix's Who Killed Macolm X 
• 31:45 - BHM Michael Bloomberg

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On this Episode we welcome Kenny St. George to the pod to discuss a project he has build for Black History Month that has flooded all of the Misfit’s IG timelines.

Mike Summers | Geoff McHenry | Ryan Chappell | David Smith | Stewart Cornelius

“Since the start of the new year, I’ve been really thinking about how I can find ways to begin to create for impact. While the brand work, shooting athletes, and musicians is great, I feel like the truly great artists are able to create imagery that affect their communities in a positive way for decades to come. -

With that being said, I present to you the #OurSeat campaign. A lot of people don’t know that individuals that identify as African American only make up 5% of of the advertisement and mass media industry. Over the past 4 weeks, I’ve been traveling to different companies on the east coast capturing portraits of that amazing 5% ; uplifting and illuminating the people that truly make this engine run. -

Stay tuned over the next week to not only see some of the beautiful black faces that I was able to capture, but to also hear about my experience during each stop of the tour. Happy Black History Month! #OurSeat” 

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The Misfits celebrate and continue to discuss beer and spirit brands with a couple special guests! David Smith Brand Manager - Heineken USA  and Joel Paulino - Marketing Director Anheuser-Busch discuss and unpack the brands and marketing behind them covering experience & talent integration in the second half of this two part episode.

3:03 - Introductions 

6:26: Experiential & Activation 

Hennessy x ComplexCon 

13:50: Heineken House x Coachella 

16;06: Governors Ball x Bud Light 

17:00: Talent & Influencer Integration 

25:53: Talent Selection & Music Collaboration 

36:10: Sports Collaboration

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