Great Content Still Needs a Media Strategy and a Real Audience

Happy Saturday. Welcome to the Marketing MadMen. Nick Constantino here, and I'm with Holly Wasson, the Chief Marketing Officer. Oh, dirty word, CMO. I'm sure we'll get into that. Short tenure. She's already been there for two years, so she's already made it past 98% of them out there. Chief Marketing Officer of Capital Investment Advisors. Holly, how you doing?

I'm great. Thanks for having me.

I'm happy to have you. Luckily, before this show we had breakfast and we covered a lot, as we probably will on this show. So I'm going to rip this script up for the first segment. As a 10-year Atlantan now, not born and raised here, not here through the business swings, the Olympics that I always hear about, I want to know about the Turner days.

Oh, wow.

I want to know, and more specifically, I'm going to try to say this as inoffensively as I can. There are two types of people in the marketing world that you meet as an Atlantan. You meet the Turner people and you meet the Coke people. I went on record and already said this. I have been relatively unimpressed by the Coke people I have dealt with, especially of a certain generation. They seem to be resting on their laurels, not really pushing boundaries, and applying principles that were from 25 years ago. The Turner people seem like the kind of people that are going to light something on fire just to get a conversation started, to rock and roll. So talk about the Turner years. Talk about your experience there. I think that will set us up for a lot of the ways that you look at marketing now.

Absolutely. First of all, I'm a native Atlantan, so it was a big dream of mine to work at Turner. And I was lucky to be there from 1997 to the end of 2014. I grew up there. And you're right. The culture that we grew up in there, it was like the wild, wild west in a good way. Meaning innovation was celebrated, taking risks was celebrated, but being really smart and learning from our failures. We saw so much during that time, from AOL buying us, Time Warner bought us, rolled AOL off. It was a very interesting time period. And then also going through the transition of our brands. We were general entertainment networks at TNT and TBS.

And Cartoon Network came in. Yeah, for sure.

So we had to understand brands. And so we got to be part of figuring out that TNT was the drama network, and there was a certain audience that wanted dramas. TBS got sports for a little while.

Yeah, and it has to, because you cannot cannibalize yourself. It's one of the hardest things to understand. There's a natural way to cannibalize yourself when you start another station, but you can't. You have to differentiate, right? Procter and Gamble exists because they're just competing with themselves in most categories, and that's a way to win. The consumer doesn't know; they just want this content, but you can't cannibalize it. So I think it's fascinating. I also think it's crazy. I was born in '82. In '92 or '93, I moved from Queens to the suburbs and I got cable TV. When I was a kid I didn't have cable TV. So I got cable TV and I'm like, what is this? Beavis and Butt-Head and WWE Wrestling. I lost my mind. The proliferation of cable was going on during that time period, right? The '90s were really when these stations were popping up, everybody was watching cable, and cable was without commercials and then they started putting in commercials. So talk a little bit about the pace of change, because I think that's huge. And talk about your biggest takeaways besides the people, because I know you're going to say the people, everyone says the people, and I get that part. What were your biggest takeaways from seeing how quickly that was moving and what you had to do in marketing?

First of all, the '90s, you're right, were amazing for cable. At TNT we were so focused on original movies, and we had some of the biggest name stars starring in these one-off original movies. And we moved quickly. We were doing 12 to 14 of these a year. We didn't have time to rest on our laurels. We didn't have a product plan 18 months to launch. We would get a script for a movie and it was in the middle of being shot, and we had to have it on the air in three to six months. So we had to move very quickly.

Yeah, but I would imagine that was a competitive advantage against the broadcast networks, who are much more bureaucratic, longer lasting, set in their ways, and didn't do as well with change. That became a competitive advantage for you.

Absolutely, it was a competitive advantage. But we also had some brilliant leaders during this time. I'm going to name Steve Koonin, who I absolutely adore, one of my favorite people I've ever worked for. He saw that we also needed more of a loyal audience. So then we morphed into having original series, but they were different on cable because we were able to get away with things that were different than broadcast. We were doing 12, 13 episode series, but still building a loyal fan base.

Yeah, remind me of some of those series. It's so long ago, they all blur in your head.

They do. Well, I was the brand director on The Closer with Kyra Sedgwick, and it was so much fun.

The 10 PM shows, right? A lot of these were those hour-long shows, because what you had was the very stagnant, what was it, Law and Order, and they were kind of the same show over and over, but you brought an edginess to it. They became a little bit closer to an R-rated movie, more of that stuff, right?

Absolutely. Yes, and building series that work together. The Closer would air at 9, and then afterwards, Saving Grace with Holly Hunter, which was a little bit more edgy.

Yeah, and these are names that are still talked about today, so there's a reason for that, right?

Absolutely.

Kyra Sedgwick is in shows today that are probably, to some capacity, still trying to grasp that audience you were creating back then.

Yes, and people loved her and loved that character. So growing up in this time, not only were we changing what we were airing, but the mediums, how we were promoting it, were changing.

The internet was popping right there. You needed that. You got your first glimpse. The MySpace world was probably '98, '99 when MySpace came about. Then you had competition too, because people were putting their own music and content there. It blew up. But at the same time, you're coming off of a recession, a bubble, the tech burst in '99. You're heading into turbulent wars and uncertain times also. So that's when CNN came into play. You timed it right also. Well, it was timed right; no one could predict any of that stuff happening. Talk about CNN a little bit, because what I remember, and what a lot of people talk about to this day, is when it hits the fan, and I'm not going to say the word, people turn to CNN because they have the boots on the ground. They are the ones with the hats on in the line of fire. That is what I remember during the Persian Gulf War, Desert Storm, Desert Shield, Afghanistan. It was CNN when the towers were hit. You turned to that for breaking news. The problem is that once people realized a plane hitting the Twin Towers was not breaking news anymore, Janet Jackson having her third illegitimate son somehow became breaking news, right? And she doesn't have that, I don't know why that came to my head. But everything now is breaking news. So talk about CNN a little bit.

I started my career at CNN in the audience and marketing research department. And it was so focused on hard news. It was the very beginning of the days when Fox News had just come out, MSNBC had just come out, but I remember we didn't even see them as threats because we had such a leg up on them. We had global coverage. We had huge names covering this news. And I was there during some crazy moments, through Monica Lewinsky.

Oh, I remember that. I was 13, 14 years old. I remember turning it on. Yeah.

Through JFK Junior's plane crash.

Yeah, OJ.

I was not there. OJ was before; I was not there for that. But unfortunately, I was there the moment we went to breaking news for the Columbine shooting. So yes.

And now we are so desensitized to them. They happen all the time. Columbine was insane.

It was shocking.

The backlash that happened. I remember personally, they were starting to blame rappers like Eminem for these things, and Marilyn Manson. That was the negative part. So again, we're desensitized to a lot of this now, but CNN was the only spot where you could find a lot of this stuff, because otherwise you had to wait for the 7 PM news on ABC and the broadcast networks. Right.

And so we were 24/7, and we were able to hit reporters on the ground no matter where they were. What we didn't see coming, what I didn't see coming, and I was a journalism major, so I wanted that pure journalistic review of what was happening, was that in order to get a leg up, you had these competitors that said, well, if CNN's going to own breaking news, let's own the commentary afterwards. And I think that's how Fox News and MSNBC made their name. Over the years, there would be breaking news, people would turn to CNN to see what happened, and then they would turn to one of the others to figure out, what should I think about this?

And I think that's because of what happens with the 24-hour news cycle: then cell phones started coming. So you're getting alerts on your phone. You don't even have to be watching; it just comes to you. And after that, what you want is the commentary. Because one thing we have bred, and we talked about this, unfortunately, talk about flaws of the education system, we breed sheep. We breed people that don't want to think for themselves and be self-starters. And I get it. It's part of the mechanism that makes money in capitalism. The problem is that when you start regurgitating information that is falsely sourced and built for propaganda, the war for money and for views, then it's a game of telephone. It always gets a little bit more distorted, and it comes out the other end a completely different story than it started with. So it's a shame to see it. So obviously you saw the journalism side. Talk about some of the similarities between journalism and marketing.

I wanted to be a journalist. That was my goal in life. I studied journalism. I wanted to be either Katie Couric or Oprah.

You shot high.

I shot real high.

That's good.

But then when I got my foot in the door in the audience and marketing research department, I realized that as marketers, we're telling stories, but we're just telling them on a larger scale, and oftentimes, especially in that day and age, in shorter segments. I realized what I enjoyed so much about journalism was understanding the audience, understanding what's going to capture their attention and what they need. That has helped me with my marketing career, because I will always preach, as your traditional marketing person: know your audience, know your audience, know your audience. I don't care what the shiny new thing is. Doesn't matter.

Yeah, and one of the problems, for me, I agree with you, but I tell people two things: know who you want your audience to be and know who your audience really is. Especially as a business owner, you're so jaded and biased by your own beliefs that sometimes you believe something not to be true. So I think you should have the aspirational audience of who you want it to be, but you should also know your real audience. We've got about a minute left in this segment. Talk briefly about what research and data looked like, because it's probably changed a little bit.

Yes, it has changed a little bit. I worked in that research group. We did a lot of focus groups. Especially at TNT and TBS, every time we had a movie coming out, we would do quantitative research studies, but then we would take that information and go hold focus groups and show them our series or our movies and our artwork, and we would do them in person. So that's what it looked like then. And then it gradually evolved into having online communities that we could test things in front of, and panels, if you will. But it was very much in person.

And I love it, right? Because I always say it's the art of science and magic, and here it's the same thing, quantitative and qualitative. Each one has its own merits. Each one has its own flaws. When you combine the two together, it works, because you can never match the sample size of the quantitative with the qualitative. So you were relying more on going deeper. The problem is that when you start incentivizing people, their incentives change no matter what, because the reason they're doing it is different. If you're paying somebody who wants to come back for a survey, they're likely to say either really good or really bad, because nobody cares about the middle. So we'll leave that as the cliffhanger. You're listening to the Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3. We'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3. We are here with Holly Wasson, the Chief Marketing Officer of Capital Investment Advisors. And Trip joined us. He hit some traffic, as Atlanta tends to do. But Trip's here now, so we're going to dive into this. First off, Trip, it's been a while. How you doing?

I'm doing well. New year, same thing with Atlanta traffic, right?

I don't know why people are still surprised. I feel like that excuse should be ripped up and thrown in the garbage. It's always going to take longer than you think. Rule one, never leave the highway. I don't care what anyone says. The second you leave the highway, it always takes longer for whatever reason. So stay on the highway, and have a car seat in your car with a stuffed animal in it that looks like a child, and you're always good.

You're taking me back to my days in LA 30 years ago, so you know.

Or now, or what I do every day when I drive, and I have two car seats, but that's a different story. All right, Holly, we talked about Turner, and I think it's great, because in the couple hundred episodes we've done, I don't think we've had that conversation about what made Turner special. So I'm glad we had it. Let's do a quick fast forward, from leaving Turner to Capital Investment Advisors. Talk about the middle, because that's another heritage brand, SunTrust.

Absolutely. In the middle, jumping out of Turner, I was at Edelman for a stint here in the Atlanta office, running their consumer marketing team. And then I had the opportunity to come over to SunTrust, because they were opening up this beautiful ballpark right here and they were going through a rebrand. So I got to work with SunTrust on rebranding to Confidence Starts Here, doing a lot of fun things, changing some of our media, moving a little less out of home, a little more Pinterest. Super interesting: people like to pin things they dream of, a dream house. Great place to advertise mortgages. And after SunTrust…

Let's pause for one second, because one thing is really important here. When you're talking about a bank and a company of that scale, you joke about, hey, we changed it. Talk about the glacial pace, and how hard movement is. As the SunTrust to Truist transition was happening, we were really involved. I remember sitting in brand demos and seeing why the color Truist purple existed, and the T in the T. I'm talking excruciatingly detailed stuff in the color platforms and the brand guide. So talk about, in a big company that size, leading a brand marketing team of that size, how much goes into making those decisions.

Well, I will say it was a big transition for me to go from 17 years in media…

And just pew pew.

Pew, yeah, we moved fast. Part of what we did every day was move fast and make decisions quickly. And I went to a regulated industry.

The only regulation on TNT is don't say ****.

And I will say they let it slip. I do know we aired a couple things where they accidentally aired the wrong version and let it slip a couple times.

So it's just a slap on the wrist.

Yes. So it was a big transition in my career to learn that pace, to learn what the bankers were interested in with marketing. And I think this is where I got really good at being able to show ROI, to account for every penny we spent. And you're right, the brand team that was working on the colors and what everything looks like, it was amazing, the layers of brand standards they went through and the groups of people who looked at it. I wasn't used to everything going as high up as the president at Turner.

Well, the analysis and over-analysis. I did spinoffs. I did rebrands, names, logos, all that. And at times it's almost paralysis by analysis.

I agree. I agree. And I don't want to say anything bad about SunTrust. I just think it was the industry, going from a media company to a bank.

It's also just the size of the company. Any company you deal with of that size, put it this way: when you get to brand guides that have more than 20 pages, you know there's bureaucracy and things that have to be changed. The social media departments don't talk to the website departments. So everybody's putting these checks and balances in place, and all they do is delay the pace, which is hard, because like you said, Turner was moving at a lightning pace. Now, the financial industry, if you look, has not changed that much in 50 years, really even more than that, for a reason. You're talking about hundreds of millions and billions of dollars being exchanged. Brand messaging is incredibly important. The trust is important, because if you break it, like Wells Fargo, it is really hard to get those things back.

And at Turner, we were pushing content out. The difference with SunTrust, and why you need that big brand book, is not only that we had the huge website, which was the door to all of your accounts. We had brick and mortar. We had all of the materials that everyone who does business with the bank was getting, from your checking account to your mortgage.

Everybody had the polo on, the logo on their shirts. It's got to look the same in West Virginia as it does in California. I know SunTrust wasn't at that scale, but every branch you serve has to look the same. That's one of the reasons someone like McDonald's has been so successful, right? Even if you're in a foreign country, you have the feeling for it, because it's comfort, it's normal, it's regular.

But I think in any really broad consumer business, I'm curious. We used to have this adage: think global, which is the brand standards consistency, but act local. I would think across what is now the entire Truist footprint, there has to be local actions, local identity and things like that from the consumer interaction standpoint.

I would say at SunTrust, that's the way we did that. For example, here in Atlanta, opening up SunTrust Park. That was very local, the relationship with the Braves, the things we even did here.

That's why we had business. At 680, we had that pitch. We said, you just put a big billboard up on a stadium, what are you going to do with it? And luckily we were in front of Bill Rogers, who said, tell me more. And we got a big account because they really wanted to localize it. And just on that point, and I don't want to belabor it at all, but right after the merger, when Truist left Atlanta, they went from being number one to number three in this market. That is a very underrated, powerful tool, and if you mess it up… I don't imagine anybody at Truist ever expected or wanted to lose number one in probably the most important growth market in this country right now. So it just goes to show how important that local focus is. I also think it's cyclical. Beer money, for example, was very local for a long time. Then they wanted all these mega national campaigns, and, oh, that's not working, so then they go local again. Those ebbs and flows always happen. It's a natural progression. It probably follows economic patterns more closely than I'm actually giving it credit for, but it's an important point. So on that note, let's go to Capital Investment Advisors, because you saw what the big guy looks like. Talk a little bit about how you were recruited for the role and why you took it. Eighteen months is 10 minutes in the scope of business and how fast it moves. So talk a little bit about how that all set you up.

Well, I will definitely say what came between SunTrust and Capital Investment Advisors was one of the reasons I was recruited. I left SunTrust. Unfortunately, my father got sick, and I was on the road a lot and wanted to be a little closer to home. So I joined a brilliant founder, Stephanie Nadi Olson, who started We Are Rosie, which was a startup. So I went from these giant companies to a startup. The purpose of We Are Rosie was all the talent, especially women, who were jumping out of the media and advertising industry because it wasn't conducive to raising families. We had all this talent leaving. So We Are Rosie became a fractional talent agency where we worked with some of the biggest brands in the world and would put together entire ad teams of freelancers. We were working with Walmart and Google and Facebook, and it was amazing.

And probably project-based a lot of the time, right? Because that's what tends to slip through the cracks. They have projects, the agency's already overburdened, their in-house team can't handle it. So they put out these projects, which sometimes turn out to be bigger campaigns than the main campaigns they're running.

Absolutely. So I had that startup strength, which was amazing. It was a mission-based company. I really loved doing it. And after four years and all the hard work of the team, we were able to sell to a PE firm, which was fantastic. And that is when Capital Investment Advisors came in. I think I had the background of both the big company and the scrappiness of a startup. Capital Investment Advisors had been in Atlanta since 1996, when Mike Reiner founded the wealth management firm, and they had begun to expand. They were in Tampa, Dallas, Denver and Phoenix, and they were known for their content. We have Wes Moss, one of our managing partners. He does the Money Matters radio show on WSB. He's got a podcast. He's also on Clark Howard often and writes Forbes articles. So we had all of this amazing content, but they had never had true marketing to push that content. I came on board to help usher them into more of a marketing phase, especially because we were so well known in Atlanta and they were looking for that foothold in their other markets. Speaking of taking it local. And so we went into the digital age of how to do it.

Holly, take what you built over 10 years in Atlanta and try to do it in 10 days in Dallas.

They had built this over almost 30 years in Atlanta.

We have four months. Get it going.

Yeah. Why aren't we number two yet? I don't really understand.

How come we're not on every TV show, at the most popular station, with the most popular guy? I don't get it.

So it was a great opportunity, because this is such a family-friendly, mission-based wealth management firm. As we were talking earlier, when you walk in, advisors don't say, how much money do you have for retirement? They say, what do you want to do in retirement? What does your happy retirement look like? And they start planning from there. So it was an amazing opportunity. I was so impressed with the amount of content. I think content is the hardest part to get, and they had that down. So then it was just going in and adding some digital marketing, amplifying that.

Content, you can't train somebody to do content. You can't train somebody to do these things. That's one of the things Trip and I talk about all the time. First of all, if you think you're going to do content and be good on day one, just don't even start. If you're not going to do this 200, 300 times, get it out of the way, take criticism, listen to yourself, don't listen to yourself, then don't do it. So I agree with you, you cannot train somebody to do content. But once you have good content, it lives forever. It is for SEO. It is for thought leadership. It is for spurts. And once you start realizing that, it's insane.

Nick and I probably have our opinions, but when you see content that doesn't connect, what are the watch-outs you see often in poorly generated content?

I don't think you should generate content just for content's sake. You have to have a reason for it. I compare that to the shiny new object, where I think marketers fail in a lot of different mediums. You have to have a reason you're doing it, you have to have a message, and it does have to connect back to your brand. I think when you fail is when you're just like, oh, everybody has a podcast, let's make a podcast. I don't think people understand what it takes, the work behind a podcast. I know you do, but I watch how hard our content team works week in and week out.

You only see the manifestation of it when you either stop or you reach a critical mass, and you never reach critical mass, because what happens is you just get more ambitious. You're like, wait a second, what is this TikTok thing? Wait, how did I just get this many views? Now I want to be a TikToker. Not everybody. But what happens when you get the content bug is you're like, oh my God, look at this, 14 women in Nebraska like my podcast, I've got to focus on Nebraska now. It's just the nature of it.

Well, and I think what you're saying is some people are either chasing views or chasing the shiny new object, and they forget the connection point you talked about. Is there a call to action? It doesn't have to be a hard call to action about your firm or whatever, but there has to be something that starts to create that connection, where either that person is going to come back because they want more content, or, back to yours, oh, I hadn't really thought about what I want to do in retirement, that's got me thinking, maybe I need to talk to someone. There's got to be that. And that's why I say a lot of content doesn't.

You said marketing, right? Because that's the same thing with marketing. You can't just put out a commercial to be fluff. There needs to be call to action messaging. I think one of the biggest problems with content is the roles switched so much. Twenty years ago I was in a film production studio, and making content was really expensive. Distribution points actually weren't that expensive. What has happened now is everybody with a phone can make content, but not everybody with a phone wants to watch said content. So all the money actually has to go into either being so much better than everybody else or buying the eyeballs. I can't tell you how many people I meet with who say, oh no, we're not going to do radio, we're going to make a video. I'm like, who's going to watch your video? How are you going to find the people? Oh, we'll send it to our email blast. So you're finding the same customers you've already had. When they think it through, they go, oh my God, why would we make a video? So part of the problem is the distribution mechanisms to get it in people's hands. And probably because Facebook and Google have a monopoly on those eyeballs and views and attention spans, they purposely make it expensive to benefit them, whereas it used to be, make good content, put it out, people will find it. That world has changed very quickly. All right, so the question I have for Capital Investment Advisors, I think, will get us going. Let's take you back 18 months ago, correct?

Yes.

Okay, let's take you back 18 months. When you got in there and started walking around the hallways and seeing this content, how long did it take you to realize, okay, this place is a little bit different? And where was your formulation of what this marketing plan was going to look like? Was it adapting? Did you have a vision three weeks in, like, I know what I've got to get to, I just have to figure out how to get there?

Yes. Well, first, walking through the hallways, I was very impressed, because I could tell it was a very different place. It had a family friendliness to it, and you could tell that the advisors really cared about the families they served. That's just different, I think, when you think of any type of financial role, and I felt that immediately. And then the content blew me away. I think that's one of the reasons I even took the job, just meeting Wes, meeting his content team, seeing how good it was. But because I'd been in marketing for so long, it was pretty easy to walk around and say, oh, well, what they don't have is media strategy. We had all of this content, no media strategy, and we didn't have that research. And we just talked about research. We had the research of knowing who our current families were, but we needed to do more research. So we conducted some research studies. Wes Moss always calls our families the millionaires next door, because these are the unassuming people who have, over time, saved up a million dollars or so, and they're investing with us, and they're frugal, and…

Pensions from the older companies, worked hard. The opposite of what you perceive millionaires to be today.

Exactly.

You made your money in crypto, you bought a Rolex and a Lamborghini, and they think you're wealthy. Right. Until Thursday.

And they were not splurging on crazy luxury. They were vacationing and just enjoying their time. So we did that research on understanding, as people age, and I hate to even say it because I'm in this group that's aging, getting closer to retirement, what's our next audience? We're calling them the modern millionaire next door. These are people like me. I am very comfortable with technology and the way I interact, and we are willing to splurge if it is worth the value.

Yeah, perceived value, which is different from person to person, but you have to understand what those value propositions are for that customer base and that generation. Even I, and I'm going to throw the air quotes, I'm a millennial, right? But I'm the elderly millennial, so what I have in common with the youngest millennial is almost nothing. If you're just going to look at millennials as a group and say they do the same things, that's not even close to true, right? I came up and saw the recession of 2007. A young millennial was 8, 9, 10 years old. They had no idea what happened. So the data sets you're looking at have shrunk to where you have to actually see the impact.

Right. They may be in the same generation, but they have different mindsets because of what they've seen.

Yeah. The summer before my senior year in college, I worked at what is now Raymond James. It was Interstate Johnson Lane. I got to know all the brokers, the advisors. I actually did the Series 7 training, and then October of that fall was Black Monday. So essentially it sets an experience in your mind, seeing all these people and all this wealth basically go away in one day.

Absolutely. So that research was very important, to understand not only who we were working with, but who is our next group of people who are going to be seeking retirement, and then understanding the life catalysts that drove them through our doors. I like to say our sweet spot is somewhere between 50 and 65, and something major happens in your life that makes you realize, I probably should speak to an advisor. Maybe you're an empty nester. Maybe you got that last kid out of college, and you're thinking about downsizing your home.

You just got a whirlwind of inheritance, which is going to be the biggest passive wealth transfer ever. The baby boomers passing it down to their kids will be the biggest exchange of wealth in history.

You get divorced. There are these life catalysts. So it was a mindset understanding, and that was a big part of it. And then taking all of that knowledge and putting it into digital. We completely revamped our website. We had this amazing content, so we wanted to have one place where everybody could get all of this content, made it stickier, and then found people and drove them there. And I think the big thing we're trying to learn now is, how long is that consumer journey? Because people come in and trust us with their money and with helping advise them on it. It's not a, hey, I'm going to go buy a Coke, consumer journey. It's, I want to think about this for a long period of time. So we're figuring that out now. We had people who would call in after listening to Wes and say, I've been listening to Wes Moss on the radio for eight years, I'm ready to talk to an advisor. So we're trying to figure out, what is that length of time in digital?

So what are some learnings you've found about the other markets? Was it length of time? Was it tactics and strategy? What are you learning about how to really replicate the success that was built here over 30 years in these other markets?

We're working on that now. The big thing is you can't reproduce a radio show that's been in this market almost 30 years. You just can't do that, because you have the brand recognition here, and this is our home. But we're trying to figure that out in our second homes. While we want to have a consistent brand, we're also trying to figure out what the little things are that are very local, that make these different markets tick. For example, we do a lot with Clark Howard. Wes is on his podcast often, and we do some media buys with them. So our question is, are there influencers in these other markets who talk about either consumer behavior or finances that we can partner with, who really relate and resonate with these different markets?

In this market, it is part of the content. Those relationships don't just grow on trees. Every person on earth wants to be part of the content. You have the trust here from building the relationship over years. So the barrier to entry is incredibly high to be able to do that. As somebody who does this for a living and has been around these circumstances: we talk about somebody like Ray Giudice, one of my favorite people. He was a DUI attorney, and his shtick was he gave his phone number out on the air. And he honestly always answered his phone. Luckily I stayed out of trouble, but I knew a couple of people who needed help, and he answered his phone at 4 o'clock in the morning. He always answered his phone. That was his shtick, right? But he was so good at content that we gave him abilities to do things that we wouldn't give to someone who was just paying. So you can't buy your way into those opportunities. Now, that being said, you can go to a magazine, because they'll give you whatever you want for an advertorial. But what I'm saying is that everyone wants that, right? It is the number one commodity that picks people up and changes behavioral patterns, being part of the content they absorb. Everybody wants to do that. Everyone wants content integration. You cannot go to another market and buy your way into it, even if you say, I know Clark Howard. They'll say, I don't care who he is. Who cares? It doesn't work that way.

So that's going back to your research, right? And then I think the other piece you're probably trying to figure out is, what is the brand? Is it Capital, or is it an advisor in Phoenix who's been there for 14 years?

Our brand is definitely Capital Investment Advisors. Yes, the advisors carry our brand, but I say that's a lot like how we behaved at SunTrust. We had mortgage people all over the country, but they definitely were representing the SunTrust brand. So that's how we're making sure it goes out. And plus, most of our offices haven't been around for 14 years. They're new. So that's what we're trying to do. And you're right, we can't buy our way into the content. One good thing is our content is so good that we do have national stages. We are publishing in Forbes and places like that, and that helps us. But we are definitely working on how we localize this outside of Atlanta.

Yeah, I love it. Take Mercedes-Benz. Everyone loves last-click attribution, but nobody buys Mercedes-Benz because they saw a banner ad. They buy a Mercedes-Benz because since they were 15 years old and first loved cars, they've been aspirationally marketed to: I want a Mercedes-Benz. So when you talk about last-click attribution at the bottom of the funnel, yes, it is imperative. It's how business wins, it's ROI, it's all that stuff. But if you're not planting those seeds over the whole length of that journey, you're just going to let BMW pass you by. And that happens often. So on that note, we had our conversation about aspirational purchases and the journey. You've been listening to the Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3, and we'll be right back.

Welcome back to the Marketing MadMen. Trip Jobe and Nick Constantino here with Holly Wasson of Capital Investment Advisors. We finished up talking about aspirational. Don't aspire to be a CMO. Right. Well, I was going to say, as someone in marketing, was that an aspiration? How do you look at the CMO office? Do you aspire to hit the three-year mark, which would probably put you in the 2% category? Or what is your aspiration, Holly?

Well, it was my aspiration to be a CMO. I love marketing. I light up. I'm very passionate about it. It gets me excited. I'm nerded out on it. I laugh with my daughter. My daughter is a junior at the University of Tennessee, also studying advertising, and I get no more joy than when she calls me and talks about a project she's working on and we nerd out on strategy. So yes, I love this role, but it is not easy. And I do want to stay at Capital Investment Advisors. I do want to hit that year three plus plus plus. They are an amazing group to work with. But the same role, I think if you speak to anybody, no, it is not easy. I think it's just how rapidly it has expanded and changed.

Yeah. I think we do a lightning round, go around and say some of the observations we have. But before we do, give an idea of how big Capital Investment Advisors is. Because when you hear CMO, sometimes it's, this is a 13-person home improvement company and I'm the CMO. Just give an idea of scale, because I think that helps explain the complexity of being a CMO.

Yes. We are a 6.4 billion AUM wealth management firm. We have 110-plus employees. We serve 4,600 families nationwide. And we are growing exponentially.

And if you had to guess how many regulations you are held accountable to in your marketing, would it be in the dozens or hundreds?

Hundreds.

So it is not an easy task. With that note, my two quick things on why CMO tenure has changed. Number one, you're seeing a generational change away from brand creative marketing to data-driven performance marketing. And it is a huge divide in generations. I would probably say that the 55, 60-plus CMOs who have been in those roles forever, it is almost impossible for them to understand the data revolution, because they didn't understand the cell phone revolution. So that is a huge divide. I think CEOs and CFOs made a huge mistake in removing those people, because the problem with data and all that stuff is it only tells half the story. If you don't have the magic and the emotional connection, you're screwed. Number two, I think it is the rise in the power of the CFO, where everything is looked over by a CFO whose job is to not freaking understand marketing, right? If you're a CFO, your job is to look at numbers. Marketing does not tell stories about numbers. Numbers can be part of it, but that's not the story it tells. So there's my rant. Trip, what you got, bud?

Well, I think you're on to something. I think the key is marketers today compared to when I came up. I was a generalist, and I was in sales and a lot of things. You're not taught how to have those crucial business conversations. You may be really, really smart, you may be in your 30s and know data left and right, but you probably don't know the background. Where were you taught how to have that conversation with the C-suite? I think that's missing in the generation that's in between right now. I agree with you, there are some of the creative generation, my age, that I came up with, that can't talk data, and a lot of them are slowly moving into the retirement phase. But I think people don't know how to have that conversation, and they don't know how to defend themselves and when to push back.

I think you're right, but I also think they don't know how to talk. Ultimately, Holly, your job is to get your salespeople leads. What they don't understand is the correlation between the marketing team and the sales team. When you are a CMO, you look good when the CRO or the sales guy comes to you and says, you're doing a great job. Screw the CEO at that point, because the CEO is not involved in the day-to-day sales. That sales manager, those salespeople, if you can maintain the relationship… Like you said, and we talk about this all the time, I believe it is much easier to be a sales guy who learns marketing than a marketing guy who learns sales. I believe it's much easier. Sales is innate. Marketing you can learn. You can trick yourself into learning marketing. I did. I never had an intention of being a marketer, but I've been around selling marketing for so long, doing the show, you pick little tidbits up here and there. I liken it to a web; you just have to know how to place things on the web. The web all comes back to you, but you can learn that. You can't train a marketer how to be a salesperson. Holly.

It's funny. I am the daughter of an English teacher and a salesperson, so I feel like that makes a marketer. I think you've hit some of the key points. The division of brand versus performance marketing: one reason, you asked me why Turner was so good, is we had an amazing marketing research department, and I always had a research person joined at my hip who could help me analyze the data and make sure I was looking at it correctly. You're right, we don't have that in most companies anymore, and I think that's lacking. And I do think anybody who has grown up just on the performance side, or just on the brand side, is only seeing part of it. They have to work together. So I think that's one thing. The next thing is you talked about the CFO, and how you have these conversations. It is very difficult when sales has been working on its own and has one funnel, because you have salespeople making sales on the ground really fast. So I think a CFO is thinking, why don't I just add more salespeople? Why do I need marketing? Well, the problem is, if you have a very specific client base you're pulling from that your salespeople are talking to, and that channel goes away overnight, it could be disastrous.

It depends on what you want your scalability to be. Some people don't want to scale, and if you don't want to scale, then that funnel is probably big enough. But if your ambition is to grow, you need the larger funnel. You need to pull people in from a larger base, whether geographically, demographically or by income level. You need to expand your base, and the only way to do that is by marketing.

Absolutely. And I always will say the marketing head and the sales head need to be best friends. I have a really good relationship with the head of our biz dev group. We understand each other. We get it. We understand the relationship. That's key, and that's not always the case in a lot of companies.

Yeah, I would say more often than not, it's not. In some cases, whether they call it a chief revenue officer or not, one person has both. I've seen it both ways. A lot of times you see a CRO who is a salesperson, and marketing becomes sales support. Occasionally you'll see a marketing person who doesn't understand the customers. And then sometimes you get someone who really does know it all, and I think that's where you see high performance.

Well, you just mentioned that you are a generalist marketer. And I don't think generalist marketers are even born anymore. I feel like, and I was too…

They're probably born. They're not trained, that's for certain.

They're not trained, but I feel like that's how we were trained. And I think it was to my benefit that as I went through being trained in traditional media, that's when digital was born, and we were on the cusp of it and learning it all. I feel like you don't see as much of that generalist anymore, because people either go straight to digital or straight to social and they don't have the whole big picture.

Buzzwords. Everyone wants to be in the hot area.

They do. They want to be in what's new and different.

Your daughter's in Tennessee. What are people crawling over each other to get internships in?

Oh, she absolutely wants to work on social media, and with the whole TikTok debacle going on right now, she's pulling her hair out.

And they banned it in India. So it's coming, man. I think we don't have enough time.

I was going to ask what our opinions are.

I think Zuckerberg is cozying up with Trump for a reason. They want everyone to go to Instagram. Everything you're reading is trying to push people away from TikTok to Instagram. If you're Zuckerberg, an American-based company, get China out of there. Either that, or the worst thing they're going to do is spin it off, and then the only people who can afford it are somebody who already has a monopoly. So you're just digging yourself deeper into a hole. We're screwed no matter what. That's why I love what Google's doing. They're saying spin off Chrome. Well, who's going to buy it? The only other people who can buy it are someone who has a monopoly in tech. So you're taking one monopoly away from one company because the other probably pays more money to your lobbying campaign. All right, well, we had our government rant. Holly, this has been an absolute pleasure. We covered a lot. Tell everybody where to find Capital Investment Advisors, websites, social channels, everywhere they can find you. When's Wes on again?

Yourwealth.com is where you can find us. And you can hear Wes on Money Matters on WSB on Sundays.

Wonderful. And social handles, are you guys on social media at all?

Yes, we're across social media, as Your Wealth or Capital Investment Advisors.

Love it. Well, we appreciate it. Trip, always a pleasure, my man. Holly, it's been wonderful. We will catch you next week. You've been listening to the Marketing MadMen on Xtra 106.3.