Mic Drop: Four Years, 190 Episodes, and the Radio Show’s Final Broadcast

Happy Saturday, welcome to the Marketing MadMen, Trip and Nick Constantino live from the battery, together again.

I feel like it's been an eternity, man. We've gone through more change, the two of us, in the past six months than I think anyone expected when we started doing this thing.

This thing started a little over four years ago. And we're speaking like this is the end, because unfortunately, for now, this is the end. This will be the last radio show for at least the foreseeable future. The time just doesn't allow it, and I don't mean the time wouldn't allow it at all, but it wouldn't be done to the quality I think we want to do it at.

Yeah, and I think it's something we can talk about, the challenges. You're seeing it now in your new role as CMO, and I saw it too, knowing when you need to break away from even a long-term commitment, when you need to move, switch things around.

It's so much harder nowadays because restarting something is so hard. There's got to be a YouTube show, there's got to be shorts, so many pieces, and without all of them you're not fully penetrating that mixed-funnel marketing. Recording the show is the easy part, honestly, it's the amount of people who've stopped me and said they heard it on YouTube, Instagram, LinkedIn, the radio, that's what we don't have time for anymore.

When we're able to do it to the ability we want, it's been fun. That's why we got to somewhere around 189 episodes, and I think it showed, the people who wanted to be involved, the comments we'd get.

We are going out as Jordan on the Bulls, not Jordan with the Wizards. I'll leave it at that with my only sports metaphor for the day.

We've had a lot of guests over the years, and if I look at this as a learning experience, I probably learned more from these hundred or so episodes than from anything else I've ever done, because you're taking people in the fire and getting their real perspective. We didn't talk to CMOs, because CMOs would give you the pre-canned response, the same six bullet points you have to have. They're not going to give you the oh-crap moments, the real peek behind the curtain. What turned out to be our biggest weakness turned out to be our biggest strength: not guarding people because of their name or their social media followers, letting genuine stories that hadn't been told come out.

And I think the other thing is, at times we also brought people on who had made a change, moved into something new, or had a fresh perspective on their learnings and how they were taking it into their new endeavor. Restaurants, agencies, entrepreneurs, people who got into charitable give-back type ideas, all with a reason for the shift and what they learned.

That disruption and change, if I'm talking about what I look for in employees, I don't look for a straight-A track record, I look for how someone handled adversity and came through it. There are no right answers anymore, not the way there were when money was free or when social media was brand new. The pace of change is so quick right now that anything that works spreads so fast it stops working almost immediately.

That goes back to the basics, not following trends or what someone else says worked.

TikTok is a great example, banned, unbanned, banned again. The easy answer is: are you targeting young people, do you have compelling content, and do you actually care if they convert or just show up? If you think a TikTok video magically turns into a sale, you're out of your mind, but if you're trying to reach a younger audience, you should be there regardless of the legal back-and-forth.

Yeah, and B2B sales processes are much slower, but I think one of the biggest things is finding real partners, people willing to take the punches with you instead of throwing you under the bus the second something goes wrong.

That's unfortunately the nature of business right now, everyone makes excuses. When you set up a partnership, are you both actually committed to a period of time, riding waves up and down together, or does someone blame the platform the second there's a hiccup?

Let's talk about agencies, because we were both so anti-agency going in, and we gave them a real chance to make the case across a dozen or so episodes.

I'd say a dozen, somewhere in that range.

I heard the same fourteen words restructured fourteen different ways. I'm understanding, because I walked into pretty much an ownership role myself, my payment structure is on profit, I don't care how many people came to the website, I'm concerned with whether the sales people have the tools to accomplish their goals. But running a business is hard, and the biggest problem is nobody wants to do the actual grunt work anymore. SEO sucks, it's thankless, thoughtless work, and everybody wants to strategize but nobody wants to execute. That's a cultural, structural problem with marketing, not strictly an agency problem, but agencies are the least equipped to handle the change that's coming.

I think there's the shiny-new-ball syndrome too, I've seen it for two or three decades, agencies chasing whatever's trending and promising they'll be the ones to do it differently.

I think the agencies that do it well are the ones who truly know what they are, unabashedly, this is what we do and this is what we don't do, instead of chasing every account they lost because they didn't offer some other service.

We have a real advantage: ninety percent of our traffic comes in from people Googling us by name. All the disruption you hear about with AI search and answer-engine optimization, if they're looking for you by name, none of that matters, the hard, heavy lifting was already done, because the brand was on radio for forty years. I'll stick to this to this day, the biggest problem is agencies are so singularly focused they don't understand the gold mine they were just handed. Pay-per-click works better because people already recognize you, social ads work better, the site is already SEO-optimized, and instead of realizing that, the instinct is to keep chasing new tactics.

I think being first-in on a new channel can be immensely valuable for a business, if you do it right, that's the key.

One of the things that drives me crazy is I'd rather someone lie to my face because they're a piece of crap than lie to me because they're naive. More and more, I don't think these people mean harm, they just don't know what they're talking about.

I think the agencies that make sense are the ones who truly know what they are, and unabashedly say this is what we do well and this is what we don't.

And from the other side, now that I'm in the CMO seat, CMOs also do things outside their core competency they shouldn't be doing. If your core competency is placing media, you're becoming less valuable by the day, because I can place media myself in six seconds. The hard part is connecting with an audience and designing pages that convert, so why am I paying somebody to do the easy part while I'm stuck doing the hard part?

Let's talk about sales and marketing alignment now that I've made the switch. If you're really giving someone the keys to the kitchen, you have to have the real numbers, lifetime value, average transaction, the leads coming in, the profit, or everything is just anecdotal. When I signed my contract, I negotiated full access to everything with an accountability mechanism attached to how I'm paid, and I contracted my actual marketing budget to move only with the company's profitability, not on someone's whim.

And sales and marketing leadership need to have that dialogue directly, understanding psychologically what motivates each person, not just talking business.

Once you understand what actually motivates the person you're working with, you can have an honest conversation instead of beating around the bush. That's just easier for everybody.

So tell me about the trade show, I think we've got a few minutes left.

We went to the largest jewelry trade show in the world this year, a couple thousand vendors, fifty or sixty thousand people, and probably seventy percent of the new jewelry in the world was in that building. We met with every one of our partners, and there were some heated conversations, because I have the search-console data, I know how many people are actually searching for any brand, and when a company tells me they're the number-one brand based on some vague award, I can just show them the real numbers instead.

Sounds a little higher-end than the traditional trade show.

It was immensely higher-end, and it was fun, and if you use those opportunities to actually learn instead of just attending, you come away absorbing an enormous amount about how an entire industry works.

Alright, we're coming to the final sign-off. Thank you to David Dickey for taking a chance on some local content and believing marketing might be of interest to anyone. Thank you to Tug Howard for taking us under his wing when we got started. Trip, thank you for the last four years, it's been a fun experience.

Thank you, all three of you, it's just been a fun experience the last four years.

I'd be remiss not to give a general thank-you to the radio industry, and to everyone who tuned in and made this worth doing. It's been one of the better accomplishments of my life, and while this is the last radio broadcast, the show, the podcast and this brand are going to keep going in whatever form comes next.

Thanks again, it's been a pleasure, and I've enjoyed all of it.

You've been listening to the Marketing MadMen, and we'll catch you at some point, at some point.