The Best Agencies Are as Picky About Clients as Clients Are About Them

Today's guest is Brooke McLean from MarketWake. We will unravel the complexities of agency landscapes, debate the future of marketing amidst economic shifts, and reveal insider strategies for thriving in an industry where creativity meets data. Don't miss out on this candid discussion on today's episode of the Marketing MadMen. They say marketing is a madman's game. So now we turn it over to the Marketing MadMen with Nick Constantino and Trip Jobe.

Happy Saturday. Welcome to the Marketing MadMen, Trip Jobe and Nick Constantino live from the Battery. And hey, we're going to have a little fun today.

Yeah, I think you missed the last one, Trip, when we met with somebody whose only job is to be the conduit between CMOs and agencies. Now, the last time I checked, the CMO's role is to find agencies, and the agency role is to find CMOs, but now there's a middleman. Did you know that?

You know, it's wonderful that someone has found a gap, but the problem is there shouldn't be the gap. So it's probably a great market. Sorry I missed that one. And I know they did well. But if CMOs doing their job right, then everything should be done between them and the agencies to begin with.

I agree. And I go side to side. First I'm like, oh my God, these CMOs are shooting themselves in the foot. And I'm like, oh my God, these agencies are set up this way. And honestly, the market just needs to find equilibrium. We're so scattered right now. There's so much fragmentation, so many people buying for pools of money and this and that. And then all of a sudden now the economy starts shrinking and those budgets get tighter and nobody knows what to do. It's just panic. So that being said, as usual in these instances, instead of you and I just trying to defend or talk one side of it, we will bring someone on that knows what the hell they're talking about. So with that being said, I will introduce Brooke McLean of MarketWake and she is going to explain to us how her agency is different and how to stand out in such a crowded group of people.

I'm thrilled to be here.

We're thrilled to have you.

And I listened to that episode. I know that guy.

You know that episode. That helps with the framing. So, you know, I think before you go into introducing yourself, give some context. Just how many agencies, what is it like bidding for business? I mean, what kind of conversations are you having? Just frame it and briefly, because I don't want to get too in the weeds to start, but just frame kind of what you're seeing in that sense and how we got here.

I was on the brand side for years and years. This is my first experience in agency world. And I think that gave me a very unique perspective on the pain that all of these CMOs have working with agencies. I was the CEO of a software company for a while and before that was working at a very, very large half a billion dollar firm. And we were interfacing with all kinds of agencies all the time. Some were specialists, some were generalists, some said that they were really good at one thing and turns out they weren't. And I said that there has to be another way, there has to be another model. And I found agencies really fell into two buckets, right? One was creative and they were excellent on the creative side. They had big ideas. They had no concept on how it related back to revenue or business line growth. And then the other was more analytical where maybe they understood what integrations look like, what the CMS needed to be, how everything integrated, but they really were not creative. And there was a huge gap because I think that if you're gonna make a name for yourself from a marketing perspective, you have to think about what your brand and then also how you drive bottom line.

But isn't that, I think that's the fundamental problem with marketing right now is the match of art and science and the mix of art and science is what people are having the hardest time with, right? All the old school creative CMOs have been forced and pushed out for all these analytical people, right? But the last time I checked, it is very hard to create an emotional connection with data. And they're trying.

And they're trying. Well, and that's funny. That was our tagline from the very get-go where data meets creativity, because there has to be both. And it's harder and harder the farther up you get. So the more enterprise you're working with, there's so much. separation between departments. There is the communications team, there's the PR team, there's the performance team, the analytics team.

You heard me rant a little earlier about some things I'm dealing with at our company.

I may have been listening.

Yes.

And I think in having, I understand the specialties that are needed and you want the best at those certain roles, but I think at a certain point you miss the whole picture and how all these different pieces are moving together. And that does make it hard for, you know, we're a brand strategy and a performance marketing firm. So we're trying to see the full funnel as best we can. But sometimes people bring us in for only one aspect of it, and that's fine. But as long as we know that someone in there has the full funnel view.

Yeah, one thing I applaud you that you've been on both sides. And one of my favorite friends in the industry was, he was a GM for many, many years building materials. And he finally said, hey, I want to build the agency that I always wanted to work with. And I assume that's kind of what you're doing?

That's it. And I also, I understand what it feels like to be frustrated on the brand side to say you are not listening. You are land grabbing. You are fighting for more that you really don't deserve. And can you just listen and can we collaborate on the same side of the table? And really, that's one of the biggest things at MarketWake is you're on the same side of the table with your agency or with your brand, period. You're not in contradiction. You're not fighting. You're not trying to get more. Your job is to add value as best you can to sit on the same side of the table, be on the same team.

Now, that being said, you coming from a different world, probably going into it because one of the problems in these agencies are put in a bad spot from the beginning because clients want more flexibility, clients want shorter term deals. These agencies are investing countless hours, time, money into these relationships to only get these short term things back. So again, that's why I say we need to reach a new state of equilibrium. There's too many agencies. You can't have eight different agencies all trying to do their own thing while the client is sitting there trying to track them down, right? The days of cattle calls of having them all in a room together, those don't happen anymore. Half the people are remote. No one's honest on a Teams call, half the people aren't wearing freaking pants. Like it's just a completely, it's just a complete, so that being said, okay, so I agree with everything that you're saying. When you're going bidding on a piece of business, how many people are involved? I mean, there are agencies in every direction. Are you getting, I'm sure people are bad-mouthing you, not realizing that that's the worst thing that can happen, bad-mouthing someone else. You know, ultimately, when are we going to get to the point? Like I learned about eight years ago, the one thing I was going to know about radio, it's a dying industry. So the rising tide lifts all ships. Somebody in the industry, I'll give my honest opinion. I will say, look, in these situations, the corporate structure might not be the best, but you have a bunch of people who look out every day and see pressure and a bad industry that is in trouble. Instead of helping each other, they're just trying to take each other down. When does that fix itself?

It has to be at an individual basis. I'm actually part of a CEO group with seven other CEOs of agencies. And we're working on this on a daily basis. Is there overlap between us? Yes. But are there plenty of areas where there's not, where we can actually provide better value to our clients because we trust the person who we're bringing to the table. Yes. So I think it has to happen at an individual basis for CEOs of agencies to just let go of their pride and ego in certain ways. And maybe as a woman, I can do that a little bit.

There you go.

Yeah, I guess that's it. That's it. That's how you get away with it.

What do you want to accomplish, right? And I think there's a lot of agency owners out there who what they want to accomplish is related to that ego. It could be around awards or whatever, or they want to accomplish, growing a business for their employees and for their clients. I mean, what are they looking for?

You can do that. And you can do it even more successfully when you are opening the opportunity for other agencies to come along with you. And really figuring, so we work with a very, very large client. They are global, Fortune 100, and they had three other agencies. We're only the performance marketing piece. We're only doing paid ads, right? Well, there's a group doing creative. There's a group doing SEO. That's fine. None of them are really talking. So we invited everyone to our office. One thing about MarketWake, we have been in office since really day one. And we're not remote, though we do have remote employees and that's fine. We find it so much better to be in office as much as we possibly can. And because of that, it's actually opened the door for us to bring in other clients and other opportunities and other agencies to use our office as kind of that home for collaboration. And that actually is one of the reasons why we acquired this company Punchlist to say, okay, what does it look like for MarketWake to be the home for collaboration in the tools that we use and in the relationships that we build? Because if we can solve that problem, marketing changes all the time. There's always something new. I mean, you just had an AI episode. It was phenomenal. It's moving so fast. Google just had their marketing conference yesterday. The data that came out of the Google conference was absolutely mind-blowing. Marketing is moving at such a rapid pace that the only way that we can really grow the rising tide lift all ships is to find ways to collaborate.

Yeah. Well, so I want you to do a test because I have a real belief. A great test taker. Going back to in-person versus remote. I want you to take your tool and we'll talk about it in a little bit with the AI that does the transcription and pulls everything together and record an in-person client meeting and then record a very similar Teams Zoom whatever meeting and see the difference of how much information actually gets shared. I mean, I.

Oh, we've done it. Okay, so we did this test.

I know what the answer's got to be.

Our in-person meetings average between 20 and 40 minutes. Our Zoom meetings typically are 30 to 60 minutes. There's so much dead space, they're not productive. We have to have two or three Zoom meetings for the same 20 minute in-person meeting. The detail of what they open up about what their issues are, what they're trying to accomplish is probably 3 to 4 fold in person.

You hold, look, you hold each other accountable, man. I mean, there's no other way to say this, right? The problem with Zoom is that it's hard to hold somebody accountable that is across the country on a TV screen. In a sales department marketing, you cannot hold, accountability is, hey, you make eye contact with me while I'm talking to you because I'm spending my time to share this information with you. cannot do that over Zoom. You just can't do it.

There's no way. This last week I did old school. We had an annual business interview with a client, and then there was one I had met, and I really were hoping to get some business eventually from them, and I just said, Hey, I'm gonna be up in your area about 30 miles away. He goes, Yeah, let's come, let's meet. Went to their office, I mean, literally. I asked like 3 questions. I mean, for 45 minutes he just told me everything about their business.

That's it.

That's the move. And it's like, you don't get that anymore.

Well, you've seen in Zoom and you can always tell when it gets a little brighter and their eyes start to kind of drift away from the camera. And it's like you're multitasking. You're looking at your e-mail right now. And that's why you have to have so many Zoom meetings to get the same work done in the 20 minutes. So I have this little trick that I do. It is Maybe there's a marketing conference going on. And I don't know if in these conferences it's always the best place to meet people because it's so busy, right? And so I'll reach out to a bunch of people and I'll say, hey, I'm going to be at this conference. And then I'll post up at this really nice bar, typically a rooftop, if I can. If you want a break, would you just want to come pop in and get a cocktail if you want a break? Well, I had no intention of going to the conference until I get four or five people to say, yes, I'll meet you for this, for cocktails afterwards. And I have a stacked group of meetings because they need a break from the conference. They want to meet in person. No one's willing to meet in person the same way. And it's been a phenomenal way to grow our network across the nation.

Yeah, I'll say the same thing. When COVID happened because of some rule from like the 70s that said we were essential, we never shut this office down. I never missed one single day of work. And from that point on, do you know how many people would just meet with us because they wanted human connection so bad? Because they wanted, do you know how many different clients and vendors that I had that all they wanted to do was work for me because they were so bored and they didn't know what to do? Do you know how much this company grew from 2020? Now, the Braves winning the World Series at the end of 2021 helped a little bit, but the amount of work we got done simply because we were coming to the office and the haters out there, God, the haters, the haters. We could do a whole segment on the haters.

Oh, I would love to because I opened our office May 1st, 2020. Do you know how controversial that was? But at the end of the day, it's like people are going to follow the strongest leader in the room, right? And if I'm saying it is fine, we can come back in office, we can do it. We never had to go through the, they created habits at home. They never did create habits at home. It was only the first month and then we've been able to grow so fast.

Absolutely. We're going to dive a little into that and we want to dive in a little bit more about MarketWake when we come back from the break and you're listening to the Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3.

Now back to the Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3 FM.

Welcome back to the Marketing MadMen, Trip Jobe and Nick Constantino here with Brooke McLean of MarketWake. And boy, that was a fast and interesting discussion. And I love the fact that we can talk about going against the grain, and in your case, being back in the office. So, and I think going against the grain kind of got Nick just stewing. Okay, here we go.

All right, You say against the grain. Who decides that was the grain? I don't understand who decided. Look, we were in a brand new, uncharted territory as a country, as a world. Who decided that was the grain? Who the F do they think they are? We didn't know what was going to happen. There was a 50% chance we're wrong. You were wrong. And you know what I said when this all started? I go, man, Kemp's got some big kahunas, right? If he's right, he is going to reap the benefits. And to this moment, you know, that's the benefit of going against the grain most of the time. You know the crazy story? For all it's worth, my family's all from New York. My dad ran a hospital. I would visit there. They'd be looking at me. I cannot believe you're going nowhere. How dare you? I go, there's nobody in the battery. This is the safest place I can be. I do all this stuff, live my life. I fly to New York. Guess where I get freaking COVID. For my punk sister-in-law, who's an attorney and two higher than me, that's who I get COVID from. And I come back to Atlanta with COVID. So no one knew what was happening. So who decides what's the norm in the status quo? So that's what ****** me off.

Thanks, Nick, for your political commentary.

I didn't say anything about politics. I didn't say one word about it. You didn't say one thing. Now, let's get us back on track. I will do it this time trip instead of you. So you spoke about a group of seven CEOs, and you talk about how we're trying to get you as a working to get that rising tide to lift all the ships. Here's my question. It's a fragmented market. There are bad actors, and I don't mean it in the usual way, but there are people that their own agendas are screwing up the progress that the industry can make. How do you get the messaging from you 7 CEOs out? How do you get your messaging out? Because one of the things I find ironic is most marketing agencies don't do a good job marketing themselves. One, because the mechanisms aren't built there. Two, just because it is not B2B's job traditionally to market. It's changing. But how does that group of seven CEOs, like for example, I am in marketing. I have 12 people that work for me in marketing. Nobody's ever heard a word from you or your CEOs. That's not a bad thing. That means there's open, but how do you get your messaging out? Because one of the things I found about the marketing industry. And I have to choose my words wisely here because I have a very descriptive word that I'm not allowed to use. But it's just a bunch of people in the same industry smiling at each other and telling each other how awesome they are. That's all the industry is. Every award I go to, everything is just a bunch of people in a room, the same people saying, you guys are awesome. We do awesome work together. That's the whole thing. So how do you get the word out of you and your CEO cohort? How are you getting the word out for yourself? And then we will talk about how you're differentiating your agency.

We're selective. So people ask me that all the time and I think that the answer could be, hey, we are doing ads and we're doing conferences and we're doing speaking, we're doing radio. Yes, but I think that the best agencies are just as selective with the brands that they work with as the brand should be about the agencies that they work with. And so the agencies who say we want to grow really, really fast, great, that's awesome. And yes, you need to do excellent work. I also think that there's a relationship component and if you are being very selective on the brands that you're working with, that they are with you, actually have a little bit more control of your growth in your message. I don't necessarily want everyone to work with MarketWake. I don't think that we're the right fit for every single client or brand out there. And so some of it is a little bit of a slower roll where I think that B2C companies, their job is to get volume and B2B companies, there's a lot of volume played there. And for agencies, I think that there should be a little bit more of selective and meaningful growth outside of just we want to grow. And when that happens, you're not taking advantage of your brands the same way, because you're not always looking for that upsell. You're not always looking for that expansion. You're trying to figure out what does it look like for us to grow meaningfully, because it is also from a resource perspective, agencies lie to you if they say that they can take on any client at any time at any point. They cannot. They do not. Unless they've got a bunch of 1099 employees.

Or they're shipping it overseas, which I've seen happen time after time after time.

Crumbles every single time.

Or they're using AI and saying that it's real manpower, even though AI is doing it crappy in 10 seconds versus 2 hours, but there's no oversight. I mean, there's always a reason.

We only onboard clients the 1st and the 15th of the month. I mean, we have a rolling basis to say, who are we bringing on board and what does that look like? So I don't, we have not prioritized everyone needs to know about MarketWake because we want to have a little bit more control over who knows about MarketWake and when.

Do you talk to your good clients and ask them for referrals for like type brands? Not in their space, but like-minded things. I mean, that's perfect.

It's perfect. And we do have some very nice incentives for them. And that's important because we want to take care of them, whether it's for their business or them personally, when they do give us those referrals, because that is the greatest honor if they're referring us over. But yeah, I mean, we're actually taking the model where we're a little bit more selective on who we work with. I mean, we're a 60, almost 70 person agency.

Yeah, so one of the things, it's very comparable to how we do business at this radio station and this group, the other side of marketing. But do you know how many clients that say no? Do you know how much power you have by saying no? Because what happens is, that the simple answer is, the reason I'm saying no is because some other schmuck will say yes. And what does that mean? Well, some people eat 99 cent shrimp cocktail and some people don't. We charge this price because we have the demand to justify it. You should give me less money. I'm leaving money on the table that somebody else will pay me a higher amount. That's how supply and demand works. Another problem in this freaking country, by the way, we know nothing about economics or supply-demand. Once you can apply real supply-demand principles and stifle your own supply to build demand, the world's pretty easy.

I was one credit away from being an economics minor.

I'm an economics major. But no, I mean, last week, multiple times, we tell clients we may not be right for you. And I get asked in a good way. I get someone who's looking at an acquisition and says, I really want this da da da da, and he goes, But I'm not at the stage I'm willing to pay anywhere near that amount for. I said, Well, I understand that, but when you're ready to get there, come back to me. This is what we charge. I'm like, I'm not going to give you this for nothing.

That's the price for value conversation.

And then this is where the economic model kicks in and it bites these brands in the *** because they want a cheap, they want a lower model and they want cheaper prices. And then that means we have to hire lower level.

And when it fails, then they have to hire you to fix it and then come in and do what you should have done in the 1st place.

And the greatest gift a mentor told me was it is the most powerful thing that you can do to say no in building a business. And I have carried that through all the way. I mean, there's a lot of advice that I have not taken, but that really stuff.

So that being said, you either have to start your business saying no or do a full transitional shift into saying no, because you can't start saying yes and then give a little a no and then a little a yes. It has to be in the ethos of the company. And most of these agencies at this point are so desperate for business that they're not in the business of saying no anymore. And it is so obvious, the ones. You meet with people. I can tell in the 1st 15 minutes of meeting, and not with a low-level person, with a media director or hire, if they are that kind of agency, that it just needs the business, because they think that one client will just fuel the growth and will be perpetual. And honestly, side of it, when you lose that big client, when you lose that $100 million client, what happens? The whole industry implodes. It has to go bye-bye. So I've seen both sides of it.

That's one of our rules: no one client can be more than 15% of our total revenue. And that's hard.

Concentration risk.

That's hard.

It's really, really hard. It's very motivating. That's not to say we won't take on these very, very huge clients, but then it's motivating for us to say, all right, we need to go get another one to balance this out, and we need to make sure that it's not going to sink. Diversification.

So we talked about your culture and kind of your vision and strategy. Let's talk a little bit about MarketWake and what makes you different and how you help clients.

There's an acquisition in here. I know you teased it earlier, but there's an acquisition that really helped. And I think, you know, talk about MarketWake, but also why your eyes were opened by that acquisition opportunity.

We are a brand strategy and performance marketing firm. That's really our focus. And the reason why we are both is a lot of people really focus on the performance marketing side, and that's great, but you have to say, what are you performing against? What is the story? What is the creative? What is the message? And so the brand strategy comes in to say, okay, what does the top of funnel actually look like? What is the story? Does the brand have a story worthy of telling? Is there something that we can use to actually convert? And so both sides of those are very important. We actually look for a lot of math majors, and a lot of people hire in marketing communications, and that was my background. So there's nothing wrong with communications, but what we're finding is that you really have to have a level of comfort in data and analytics and storytelling with data and analytics, especially with the rise of AI being able to produce content and content quickly. There has to be kind of an X factor. And so one of the X factors that we're looking for is to say, okay, how do we find patterns in data that make it very actionable? And I think that's one of the reasons, I mean, we're a six, almost 7 year old agency since the time we launched. And a lot of our clients have been with us for four plus years. And we've grown with them. Some clients started very small. Now they're 20, 40, $50 million and have been acquired. And so those are the success stories that we like is because we are able to grow with them at every phase and to kind of retell their story. It's like any celebrity out there, right? You have to reinvent yourself. Brands do too when they forget that.

Yeah, I think you bring up a really good point. And then we talk about this often about AI. People have misconceptions of how this works, right? So when you talk about finding data, telling stories, looking for these anomalies in data, AI can't do that. It's not even close to being able to do it. Now, that being said, if you train the models based on human intervention, that these are the things we're looking for. It will learn to pick up patterns. But you are years away from it going in and finding anomalies because what an anomaly is, this is a one, not a zero. That's not the anomalies you're looking for. You're looking at, okay, this was the month of May. Why didn't we sell bathing suits? This is the month of this. Was there, now you can go back and say, hey, was the weather play a factor here? Or is there something you did wrong? Did you fire somebody? You're looking in for those things. And I agree with the math majors. I also think you have to find something for them to freaking do because there's too many of them with not enough or jobs out there. But anyway, that is you cannot just think AI is going to come in. It doesn't matter how much you pay and just magically solve these problems for you. If you don't invest the manpower early and AI just adapts and learns with you. So the more manpower you put in now and the more you're growing, the cheaper it's going to be in the future. It's not the opposite. It's not going to get cheaper. You need manpower now to build your systems and your models. And if you do that, and I think people just don't understand that. They're doing it the opposite way. They're thinking about the future too early.

And let me ask this because performance marketing is a term that's pretty much come up in the last five years, give or take, right? And I think a lot of people think of it as, okay, it's the data and telling us how we performed, totally historical? How are you thinking about going back to what are the implications? How do you do that with your clients and give them perspectives of what they could be doing in the month ahead, in the quarter ahead, things of that nature through?

You just hit on something that is one of my soapboxes is we have to be vision casters, not defenders. And so often agencies fall into this pattern of we're defending the work that we've already done. Well, what that does is it only looks backwards. It's a controller versus a CFO, right? It's only looking backwards. And when you're not looking forward, when you're not anticipating, when you're not building strategies that are 6, 12, 18 months ahead, you're missing opportunities. And performance marketing, yes, has traditionally been how you're performing and here's why. But I think that so much context is missed when you're not also looking ahead and casting that vision to say, and here's what we're doing with that information. These are just facts now. This is how we're building a strategy based on those facts and based on your brand and based on the message and the roadmap that you have. This is what the next 12 months needs to look like. And I mean, sometimes even if we're just there for a project, we're still doing our best just to give them a strategy that is 12, 18 months ahead because people need to be thinking that far ahead. Things move too quickly. And if you don't have some level of North Star ahead, then all you're doing is defending the past and you're always going to feel one step behind.

And the irony is, I will say, if you're looking 18 months ahead, usually those are marketing fundamentals that really don't change as quickly. Right? Your 18 months is, man, we need more leads. We need more demand. We need more of this. We need our messaging. Oh my God, we had a really big PR snafu. We have to increase our likes. Those are fundamentals. The tactics that you use in month can change. But those 18 months down the road, people are saying, no, those are easy fundamentals of marketing. Nothing has changed since the 1950s about those fundamentals. We have to be more creative. We have to out, blah, blah, blah, blah. Those are, it's the tactics you use in month that change. So why would these people not have the foresight to do the easy part? The fundamentals are the easy part.

It's funny you were talking about, I think, the Giants, one of the podcasts that I was listening to recently of, okay, if you have an offensive coordinator, then they're moving every four years.

Oh crap, she really did listen.

I did, I did, and I'm not even a Giants fan.

Poor Daniel Jones. He just sucks. He can't even throw. Seven offensive coordinators somehow.

And if you're changing your agency every six months, every four months, it's like you fail.

That is the rapport conversation. And I will, this is a soapbox for me, right? You could only truly find out what is someone's keeping them up at night, problems they have if you have real rapport. The time it takes to get rapport with people has just grown because they're more sheltered, they're more worried about their own things. But once you do, and for me, it's about two years, believe it or not, until I have that client where the light finally goes off and I'm like, man, I'll never lose this person because they told me the deepest, darkest, where their real problems are. It takes that long.

I'll call you at 7 at night.

Seven at night. Thinking about a Monday, freaking 3:00 in the morning, like we're in Vegas. And he's like, dude, I just thought of something. I'm like, it's 6 o'clock in the morning here, dude. I appreciate that. I appreciate it. But anyway, but again, when you have that, when you have that consistency and you can build together, it's very hard to break those relationships. When you're going, like, look, if you're a CMO and you had six different marketing agencies in six years, maybe you're the problem.

Like, you know, I can't say that. You can.

I can.

But we could get off into sports and that's the GM just firing the coach or the head coach firing the coordinator and all to give themselves another year. I mean, we see it in every industry out there.

So, or the GM will make an acquisition and acquire a new player. So let's talk about, let's talk about Punchlist. Let's talk about, so you painted a really good picture of you're the unifier, you're the steady hand, you're bringing the people together to the table, say, hey, we need to work together in this client's best interest. One, secretly, the client's not stupid. They notice that. And they're like, okay, this is the only person that's really on my side. The rest of these schmucks can go take a walk. But realistically, you're providing value for everybody involved in this process. And life is about finding mutual value, right? Every time you go into a meeting, the answer is, how are we going to both benefit? If you go in saying, here's what's for you, you're screwed. Not, hey, this is what I heard from you. So you've created that. So talk about how Punchlist comes in and talk about how putting a system in place to help tangibly do this has benefited you guys.

Punchlist came in, I was looking, we were looking to make an acquisition in one of the areas with software. One of the problems that we find over and over and over again is collaboration. Think of how many tools you use to work with the agencies and the brands and the clients that you have. It is Slack, it's e-mail, it's Dropbox, it's Figma, it's AI files, there's 1000.

There's 1000 CRM systems, there's 100 of them speaking.

And then, where is that file?

Google Ad Manager, the programmatic space is a million times worse because there's a new thing coming in every side and there's analytics and there's ID 5 tags.

Precisely. And that's exhausting. And when you can't quickly access the files that you need or you can't quickly give feedback or you're writing emails that says, okay, on the top paragraph, change this line. I mean, that's an exhausting experience. And so we were really looking for a tool that said, what is, again, kind of reflective of MarketWake's ethos, what is a home for collaboration look like? How we can aggregate all of this feedback, all of this sometimes noise, but difference of opinion in a way that is actually productive. Because a lot of people have difference of opinion, and that is great. How do we make it productive? And when we found Punchlist, it was just this aha moment of, oh my gosh, this is what we've been looking for. So Punchlist is essentially a tool where you can load any file in, whether it's a website, a live website, PDF, a blueprint if you're an architect, and then you can send it out for free. People can come in and they can do collaboration. They can say, change this button to blue. Let's change this header, upload a photo. I would like to replace this photo. Everything is there. It integrates with project management tools. So I could go on and on about this tool. It was fantastic. Going through our first acquisition from a service company to a software, that's a story for another day because that was quite the learning curve and adoption. But one of the things that we found that we love about this is it has removed four, five, sometimes six different tools in our collaboration process because everything's there. There's also receipts, which as an agency is important. No, you did actually ask this to be blue and we can prove it right here. But it also is asynchronous. Everyone is on different time zones. Everyone works at different times, sometimes morning people, sometimes night people. Because it's asynchronous and you can collaborate at once, it makes all of our revision processes easier and people can hop into this tool whenever they want to and give their feedback. It's fantastic. We've actually found contractors, designers, interior designers, they're using it even more than agencies.

So how do you deal with, and collaboration is great, how do you deal with who has the final decision? Sometimes you have too many cooks in there.

So you do, you do. And a lot of that is honesty to say, hey, you might know your brand and your product the best. We know conversion the best. So where can we take your best and our best and find a middle ground? Because here's where we don't feel like you should compromise.

Yeah. And that's your job, I think, is to say in the end, who is making final decision before you start this process, right? There's some place that democracy shouldn't exist, right? If you've ever been on the board of an HOA, democracy shouldn't exist. 80 year old women who are just looking for something to do shouldn't be able to make decisions for an entire group of people that are trying to, besides that.

My mailbox has a number off of it right now and I will not hear the end of it.

That's over. That's over. But you have to establish who's making that final decision. You can give all the inputs somebody has to make that decision. So many other companies have problems with that, right? Here's all the inputs somebody's got to make that decision. Otherwise, what's the point of doing all this? My question, one of the things I think is it's agnostic because one of the biggest problems, like Microsoft offers a tool like that, but you know what? It makes you use all Microsoft stuff. And God forbid you bring Google into the fray, into a Microsoft thing. It'll purposely scramble, just to screw you. That's another problem with these AIs now. They're all trying to capture them to send the results back to themselves. So right, Microsoft has it. And it's like, Word is the best tool for this. Of course it is. It's like, I tried. That is 20 years behind what I want. So it's agnostic. So you're allowed to put these systems in place to really capture everything that's going on in there. And you as the agency now, realistically, it is benefiting you, the clients, the people, not the companies that are making these tools, which is important. It's important to delineate. I think receipts are important, but also that agnostic is really important.

The agnostic is so huge. It really is because everyone has a different suite, especially agencies. Everyone has a different tech stack. And that was one of the things when we were looking for an acquisition is we didn't want something tied to Salesforce. We didn't want something tied to Microsoft. We didn't want something tied to Google even because every single client that we work with has a totally different tech stack. It had to be standalone and it had to work nicely with all of those. So the integrations are fundamental to making this work. And it's completely agnostic of all of that. So, and I think that's one of the reasons why it's so easy to use. We're finding contractors and developers in a very different space than what we work in. They're adopting it.

And you license, so you bought it, so you're licensing it, so anybody can have access to it, and it's flexible to build in.

It's very accessible.

That's what they do. They give that free trial way to get you hooked and then you forget it's on your credit card for a little while. We know that. We know that model.

I feel like why we're…

As long as they don't start selling multiple subscriptions, I still got to go back and fix my McAfee. I've got three different charges.

You've dated yourself a little bit. I don't think anyone's talked about McAfee other than the guy that's sitting there with a wife beater on television. So let me ask you this question to close out. So one of the things that I think smart business owners do is they take upfront costs and spread them over time. And what it sounds like you're doing is you're seeing that the future is there, so you ate the cost up front of taking this acquisition on, saying this will only help in the future. And it sounds like you bought a tool that has the ability to grow and scale with you. Am I right in saying that? Was that your thought process here? And what do you think the future benefits will be?

Absolutely right. It's an investment. And also we're bootstrapped. We've never received outside funding. We have no debt. We have never received any VC money. And so this was a huge, huge deal for us to say, hey, is this something that we feel comfortable taking on? Can we fund it? Can we invest in it? It's not going to make us money maybe for the next.

Even when it does, it'll be hard to quantify on how much money it makes. Like how are you going to quantify? Yes, that tool may have been the reason that this deal was done. Can you really tie it up? So how are you going to quantify? It makes it hard.

It makes it really hard and it's a totally different group of people that now we're managing. Okay, we've got the software people who are focused on the singular product and then we have our services people who are focused on serving. But yes, that's exactly. I think that in any acquisition, if you are not realistic about the fact that you are going to lose money for a little bit, that this is going to be an investment, you're probably not ready for an acquisition. And so this is one of the things that we decided as a team. All right, we're ready for this. We're going to invest in it. And we believe that it will help people. We believe that it will add value. And we believe that it is in line with who MarketWake wants to be in the future. Now, I think that Punchlist has the opportunity to really become a standalone tool over time to say it's going to add on features. And I think Punchlist could be its own entity. But for right now, it's really just to aggregate the feedback that we're getting from so many different of our clients.

And to make it through there. But what this tool would be for the masses is still similar to the tool you need for yourself.

Yes.

Yes, it brings everything together, and there are not platforms that do that. We, again, if you look at the world, we're a divisive world right now. It's about breaking people apart, not bringing anything together. So I commend you for it.

But if there's companies out there that want to know about it and not necessarily don't need an agency today, sounds like it's available.

It's available. You don't need to talk to us.

Yeah.

Go straight to that. Punchlist.com.

All right, you know what? Throw out how people find you and MarketWake because we're going to have some fun with the last segment. We're going to catch you off guard a little bit.

Oh, man. Well, you can find me at MarketWake. MarketWake.com and then LinkedIn, I think Brooke, Beach, McLean, I think three names there. And if you want to reach out to me and e-mail, it's Brooke at MarketWake.com.

Yeah, love it. And I will say, if you're listening and you're enjoying the conversation, please listen, subscribe, leave a review. It's the best way, especially for the podcast, just to spread the word. We're trying to do good work out here. The marketing world needs some help. We're too fragmented. We're not talking. We're not having conversations that lift the tides that lift all ships. So give us a listen, like, subscribe, keep listening to the radio station. You've been listening to Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3 and we'll be right back for the final session.

Now back to the Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3 FM.

Welcome back to the Marketing MadMen, Trip Jobe and Nick Constantino here, and we are with Brooke McLean of MarketWake. And we've heard a lot of wonderful things about what you're doing and how you look at clients. As you're talking to new clients or your existing clients today, I mean, think about this year. I mean, it's gone from what I've seen of clients being very, very hesitant in Q1, right? They weren't sure what was going to happen. When were rates going to drop? What was the economy going to do? People started to get excited, thinking things were going to turn, then they've kind of gone south again. What are you seeing today? What's the vibe in the marketplace?

That there's no pattern. There's no pattern. There's no rhyme or reason. I'm truly trying to find it. But that's exactly what we've seen, where we actually saw an uptick in Q1. It was great in Q1. I think people started and they said, oh, we're so tired of this recession talk. We've been under this recession talk for 18 months. Is it? Is it not?

And that makes sense for you. What you were seeing in Q1 is what I'm seeing in Q2. Right? What she's seeing at the planning level was what gets the implementation level in Q2. So that's a long timeline. Yeah, for sure.

And the budgets were, I mean, you're given some budget. So open the year, start. Hey, let's all face it, marketing usually 40% of spending is probably done in Q1, maybe even higher than that in many brand marketing budgets.

That being said, I think something has shifted about the holidays, the after holidays, the January, February. November, December takes so much out of people mentally and all these things. January and February are pretty slow, not for planning, but for execution and implementation and sales and call to action. It slows down. Home improvement fades to almost nothing. And you know the funny thing is, again, supply demand. You know what your message should be? You know when Wendy's said they were going to surge price? You know Wendy's botched it. Don't say it's going to cost more, stupid. Say when there's less people, it will cost less to drive people when there's less people. Who on Christ's earth wants to go and pay more money and wait more time? I don't understand. So people should apply those principles. And in January, February when it's slower, that's when you lower your rate. You're not saying it's on sale or discount. You're saying there's less demand, so we're charging less. How did we get here? What the hell was I talking about? What are we talking about?

Pull us out of this, please. Sorry, what else are you, what do you think for the rest of the year? What do you envision happening?

I think that the best thing that we're doing right now is proactively not putting our eggs in a single sector, because I think that whenever a recession happens, it's typically sector driven. Banks in the home crisis before, the dot-com crisis before, there are patterns in sectors. And so what we're trying to do is just get as many different types of businesses as we can as clients, because I'm not sure what the sector is going to be. Like, yes, banking, but what is the sector that's really going to get the brunt of this? I'm not sure. I wish I could tell you if I could.

I will make some guesses since we're here. Restaurants are going to get demolished. There's too many restaurants that are charging too much money and you're going to see it. You're going to see something similar to your recessions previously where that middle of the road are the ones that get killed. The ones they find out their $5 value meals will do really fine. The really high end steakhouses will do fine. That middle tier that is undifferentiated, they will have a really hard time in this thing. And then I think banks, you're going to see the demise of the regional bank. You will have hyper local small or they'd consolidate their way up to be too big to fail because of previous things. So those are just two. From what I'm seeing out there, the radio stations will cease to exist, but that's neither here nor there.

Well, Target came out earlier last week, and so they're slashing all of their prices, minimum 30% on every single product.

Isn't it?

Did they raise them 25% before? Probably.

That's exactly what they raised.

They're still paying more. So those things don't change, right? So what we do is we get to a point where the word inflation comes and all inflation is corporate America taking control back away from the consumers. Okay, they do it and then all of a sudden people won't pay and they go, my God, we can't do this anymore. We need to be bailed out. It's the story as old as time. What does Delta charge for a flight right now? $600 to go to New York and then they're going to wonder when everyone stops flying and then they're going to come back to us and say we need to be bailed out. And how many times will we do the same stupid cycle?

And the other thing is there's you get cutbacks in products. So I mean, I've again, I'm in the paper industry now and I look at what's going on prices and I've noticed it's you probably started to see this in the last month. If you go buy toilet paper or towels, the rolls are smaller. So guess what? It's the same price that you paid three months ago, but now you're getting 10% less, 8% less, number of sheets and things like that. And that's how the brands have looked to deal with that.

I'm really seeing it in salaries, which no one really wants to talk about salaries, but we're seeing a massive inflation in these large companies where they just said, okay, we're going to throw a ton of money at younger people and give them crazy salaries that really, really, really damages small businesses where you can't compete with that. And also, I don't know if you'd want to compete with some of the salaries that you're in, but now layoffs are happening for those people. And so there will also be a level of regulation on these high salaries that have come out with all these massive companies saying, okay, go get the best talent, throw money at it. And now they're realizing, we can't actually sustain this.

Yeah, I agree. And especially at states like Georgia where it's an at-will state where you can do whatever you want to. That contract means nothing. So I think that's more, but I think you're right. Look, it was a talent grab. You have the money to do it. It's a short-term goal. It's not guaranteed money. Like it's just a short-term thing.

We've seen a couple periods of the exact same thing.

But look, the truth is cream always rises to the top. I've had interviews of people from corporate America that say they want to work here. I'm like, you have a great job at a gigantic corporation and a position above me. Why are you coming in here asking me for a job? Like, I don't understand. And that's the answer is because, so realistically, you see the writing on the wall because you're probably underperforming. So you want to come work here. Tell me about what are your experiences and you got to see the looks I get. Tell me about 6 clients that you've dealt with in Atlanta that you can bring over here. The looks, the stares I get. How much money you want? $250,000. So look, you've added no value to my bottom line. You're leaving something you say is great. This doesn't make any sense. Now luckily, I just don't care. So I can actually have that conversation with people and their face is amazing when I do. I bet. We got off topic.

Honest conversations, though, which goes back a little bit to what you're dealing with your clients.

Completely. Well, and going back to those exact salary conversations, I mean, that is where we're seeing there's a discrepancy in brands who want to save costs by hiring agencies. And this is a cost-cutting mechanism to say, okay, well, we're not going to hire in-house. We're going to hire this agency. Thinking through that process and that mechanism, okay, if this is a cost saving exercise, then you have to be realistic as a brand to say, okay, what type of support am I looking for? Tactical? In which case, maybe it is cost savings. Or are you looking for strategic? In which case, maybe it's not cost savings. And having different buckets of that where we can be honest and realistic, because that's what I do with a brand to say, hey, based on the budget, it looks like you're going to need more tactical oriented work. That's fine. It's probably going to be a juniorish team. That's fine. If you want to have more strategic full funnel work, that's going to be a different cost. And you have to be honest with those conversations or a brand is going to come in and they're going to think that they're getting strategy and they're going to get tasked.

What do you want to accomplish? Exactly. If you're going to take any business, you can, then you're not having that conversation. So what do you think about the fractional CMO? Because all those conversations you just talked about, we talked about trends. I think that there is nothing dumber. I think that saying a fractional CMO is easy way for a vice president of marketing to get a freaking title on them. But really, they're not doing anything but either taking on too much burden or not doing enough. So now in some hyper niche industries, for example, the guys at Prize Picks brought a fractional CMO that had experience at DraftKings. So you're taking somebody with experience in an industry and just bringing him here because you don't maybe can't afford to pay. That kind of makes sense because that's a small issue. There's not a lot of those kind of companies. But in most situations, when I see fractional CMO, I look and see a really crappy resume. If you're a consultant, then just say it's a consultant.

Oh, Nick, the first, the second we see one of our brands get a fractional CMO, I'm like, all right, put the clock on. We've got probably a month left. Because what they do is they come in and in order to prove themselves, they change everything. And it's like, this agency is fired and this agency is fired and we're going to completely change. And they make these big bold claims with zero knowledge of how the business works.

Because then they can skate away.

Because then they can skate away. They have no responsibility. And that's where as a CEO, I want to get all these CEOs and be like, you just hired someone with zero responsibility for the rest of the business. Like, do you really want that? They're not financially engaged.

CMOs are always C-suite, so they're not afraid of getting fired, and they're not…

Afraid of getting fired because they're already going to be fired.

Well, because another 100 ******** that'll put them as a fractional CMO of their business.

They're just looking at their BD.

Did you say they have VD?

They want their three or four clients, and frankly, if they get two, they're happy.

Is that because of their VD?

That's another podcast that Nick's got on the side. So with that, let's wrap this up. Brooke, thanks so much. It's been great to have you on. definitely learn more about MarketWake out there. So you've been listening to the Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3. We'll be back.