Matthew Brown, ThumbStopper CEO and host of the BROWN on BRAND podcast, was recently a guest on Sean Halter’s The CMO Suite Podcast. Matt helped kick off the third season of Halter’s podcast where the two discussed how social media has upended traditional marketing and what brands need to do to adjust and succeed in the ever-changing marketing landscape.
Here are some highlights from the episode.
Before we get into the specifics, I'd love to actually just dig into how you got into this crazy business. Did you grow up in Florida?
Yeah, I’m originally from the Midwest, but I’ve spent most of my time in Florida. My grandparents migrated down here in the early 90s, and I followed as a child. I ended up on the west coast of Florida in Venice and Sarasota, and that was my old stomping ground.
Did you and your parents move down here, or did your grandparents live down here and you went to live with them?
Yeah, most of my mother's side of the family is in Florida today and my father's side is all up North, so we're a bit segmented as a family.
Brothers and sisters?
Yeah, I have two sisters and one brother. Two of them are in Florida and one of them is in the Midwest.
I think it's family that's sometimes critical in the marketing industry – you're certainly part of this industry in some extent – and it doesn't get any easier. I don't know anybody in marketing or advertising that just says 'this is easier than it was five years ago.' It just gets harder and harder.
Well the technology game is a young man's sport today. You've got pro athletes retiring at 45 years old. But just recently, I was stumbling around in marketing too, and it's a whole different sport than operations, accounting and sales. You can put methodologies in those fields, but marketing is like technology – it changes so fast. Understanding all of the nuances is certainly like a sport in of itself.
You don't really live in an analytical world, but you know that if you go from point A to point B, that those two things are supposed to line up. It’s hard to do that sometimes in marketing.
You’re exactly right: Marketing has been challenging. And it’s not just changes in marketing; The frustration that I've had is that we never really had the revenue to focus on marketing. As you’re building technology companies, they’re so labor-intensive that marketing automatically gets neglected.
Getting the early beta customers on a platform or technology that you’ve built is a challenge in of itself. But what the real challenge has been is getting the early majority of a vertical. It takes marketing to get that high early adoption rate. And when you figure out marketing, people start getting interested and you start getting those incoming leads.
As you know, we’ve had massive national clients of all shapes and sizes. There’s a beauty as a marketer to see you evolve from someone asking plenty of questions to make sure you understand marketing to someone who can have an extremely intricate conversation about how the levers actually work.
Over the last 18 months, the brands we work with are now using social media and digital advertising with us. So I've not only had to learn marketing for myself, but now we're deploying campaigns and ramping up our marketing team. It's now my biggest department by far.
I always found it easy to get on the phone with a potential customer and come up with a pitch – that’s how our sales department operates. But sales is a direct parallel path to a transaction. Marketing is completely different, with different nuances – like creative and copy.
