Transformational Storytelling With Scott Monty
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
A good story is defined by whether you’ve moved somebody emotionally or not. When you bring the emotions out, you make your audience feel like they are part of it, and that could become the best customer experience you can ever design. On today’s podcast, John Livesay welcomes Scott Monty on the show to tell us more about transformational storytelling and the concept of creating emotions in the details. Scott is a Strategic Communications and Leadership Advisor helping executives become better communicators, better leaders, and better humans with timeless and timely advice.
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Listen to the podcast here
Transformational Storytelling With Scott Monty
Our guest on the show is Scott Monty, who’s an expert in storytelling from a historical point of view. His definition of a good story is whether or not somebody is moved by that story emotionally. He also said to people, “Do you want to read about a case story or do you want to be cutting- edge and be a case story, as I call them, versus case studies?” We have a great conversation about how you build trust through transparency. Enjoy the episode.
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Our guest is Scott Monty, who is a strategic communications and leadership coach and advisor, who helps the C-Suite embrace better communication with timeless and timely advice. A Fortune 10 leader whose background in classics positioned him to see through the shiny objects, Scott can drill down to understand the common human needs from throughout history that will still drive us all. He was ranked by The Economist as the number one, top of the list of 25 Social Business Leaders, and Alan Mulally, the CEO of Ford Motor Company called him a visionary.
Scott spent six years as an Executive at Ford, where he helped turn the company around with an uncanny ability to merge technology with humanity. He served as a strategic adviser across a variety of business functions, leading the company’s global social media strategy. He also has another decade and a half of experience in communications and marketing agencies. Scott’s clients have included companies such as Walmart, IBM, McDonald’s, Coca-Cola and Google. He writes the Timeless and Timely newsletter, which I can’t rave about it enough. I can’t tell you how lucky you are to get to hear Scott’s insights. Welcome, Scott.
Thank you, John. It’s a treat to be with you here.
We both love storytelling, marketing, messaging and both of us have a passion for arts, although yours is at a whole other level. Your in-depth knowledge of it is quite fascinating to me. Let’s start wherever you would like to in your own story of origin. You have some insights that might be interesting. I know a lot of my friends say, “When I have a kid, it brings back a lot of my own childhood memories, or I’m reliving my own excitement at whatever holidays coming up.” You can go back to childhood or school, wherever you want.
Transformational Storytelling: Luxury is not about the price, but anticipating a need before somebody knew they needed it.
There are many choices here. Let me start where it brings the most meaning. I went to school at Boston University. I grew up in New England. I gravitated to and stayed in Boston for twenty years after I graduated. While I was there, my intent was to go to medical school. I was pre-med. I didn’t want to major in Biology, Chemistry or the typical sciences because I figured, “I’ll be scienced out for the rest of my life if this is my career. Let me try something different.” I was at the College of Liberal Arts. It’s now the College of Arts and Sciences, but it was CLA. I said, “Let me try some classic liberal arts.”
I took a class in Greek Civilization. Maybe it was the professor or the material. I had three years of Latin in high school, so I understood the ancient world, but I was immediately hooked at that moment. This gets to the core of what you do here, and that is, “He was a storyteller. He brought the past to life.” To me, if you can take the past and make it relevant to what we’re experiencing, it’s the same. If you go to church and sit through a homily, nobody wants to hear the reading regurgitated. What you want to hear is what does it mean in respect of what I’m dealing with in my life now and the challenges that I have?
This professor was able to take that. I still remember the line he used because I had never heard a teacher use profanity before. We were talking about Oedipus and he said, “You have to understand that to the ancient Greeks, calling someone an Oedipus was the ultimate insult.” He paused and went, “Oedipus was a mother effer.” I went, “Now it’s relevant. I get it.” It was a smack in the face, but it suddenly hit me that there’s a whole world out there that happened before that can be brought to life in new and different ways. From there, I went on. I didn’t go to medical school. I went to business school focusing on the business side of medicine. I went into biotech, medical device consulting, and managed care. Ultimately, I ended up at an agency that did B2B marketing in healthcare and high-tech space.
That’s where I discovered social media back in the mid-2000s. I had to leave that agency because they couldn’t get it. They had a client who wanted a new way to tell their story. This is when podcasting had come out. My vision for them was to host a podcast, surround yourself with smart people, highlight your own type of thinking, and showcase it. They went, “We’re not sure. Have you got a case study on this?” I was like, “This was launched three weeks ago. Do you want to read a case study or do you want to be a case study?” She went, “We want to read a case study.”
[bctt tweet=”A good story is defined by whether you’ve moved somebody emotionally or not.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Removing the flat spot from my forehead from beating it against the wall, I left there and went to an agency that did strategic consulting with large brands to help them understand social media strategy. I did that for about a year and all of a sudden, I got a call from Ford Motor Company from their head of communications saying, “We’re behind the eight balls. We know digital communications and social is important. We need someone to come in here and lead it.” I said, “Do I have to move to Detroit?” I was in Boston at the time and working virtually with the agency I was with. We were all around the country. He said, “Yes. This is a high-level leadership position. We need your presence in the building.” I went, “I’m not interested.”
I’ll never forget his response. He didn’t say, “How dare you, sir? We are the Ford Motor Company. He said, “Are you sure?” which to me spoke of humility and willingness to let the other side explore their feelings. I said, “I’m pretty sure. The timing doesn’t feel right to me.” At the time, Alan Mulally had been the CEO of Ford for two years. He’d come from outside the auto industry and he transformed Ford or was about to transform Ford, which was on the ropes. The whole auto industry was in late 2007, early 2008. I followed Ford’s progress. They made some financial progress in that first quarter of 2008. The head of communications and I reconnected. He said, “We’ve talked to about 50 people. We still haven’t filled the role and your name keeps coming up. Why don’t you humor us? Come out here, spend 1.5 days with us, talk to 8 or 10 people to get a feel for what we’re all about, and then you can decide what’s right for you.” I did that.
John, I’ll never forget walking up the walkway to the glasshouse as it’s known Ford World Headquarters in Dearborn, which is probably about an 8th of a mile long and twelve-stories high. It’s an impressive building. You’re walking into history. Henry Ford put the world on wheels and by the 1920s, half of all vehicles in the world were Ford Motor Company vehicles. This is a storied past. When I met with everybody that day, they were intelligent, talented, but most of all, they were passionate. I thought, “You can’t just invent passion out of nothing. There’s something special happening here.” Long story short, I signed up and by July of 2008, I was the head of Global Digital Communications and Social Media for Ford.
I love the choices there of humility versus hubris, and how one question can say so much about a culture and a person, “Are you sure?” versus, “How dare you?” The other part of that was clearly they’re selling you. When we’re younger, I know for myself in my early twenties, if somebody ever tried to recruit me, I was flattered. I never stood back and analyzed whether that was something I should do or not. As we get a little more seasoned in our career, we think, “That’s not right for me. I’m not willing to move for that.” The premise of, “Let’s not get you to commit on the phone, humor us,” which is another humble way to phrase that, “Spend some time with us.” It is all part of the journey, whether it’s the funnel we’re creating in digital marketing or a social media way to start to get people to engage with us, where in fact, in actual sales call where you’re getting someone to “take a test drive.”
Transformational Storytelling: If you can take the past and make it relevant to what we’re experiencing today, that can be brought to life in new and different ways.
This was the ultimate test drive, which is what they do when they sell the cars. What a great metaphor of coming out. If you can get somebody to test drive and sit in the car, that’s what the whole goal of marketing and advertising has always been. After that, it’s up to the salesperson and the person’s criteria. If we get you in the car from an advertising standpoint, from my ad sales background, we’re like, “Our job was done. That’s all we need to do.” He knew that if we can get you here, we’re not at the top yet. We don’t have a yes, but it’s a much easier to ask than come here and interview.
When you think about it, whether it’s a sales or a management process, there are several leaders who feel like they need to be in control. They need to control the situation. The bottom line is when you’re dealing with an employee or a prospective employee, a lead or a prospective customer, the decision lies with them. They are going to do whatever it is they’re going to do. All you can do is create a culture around them to make the decision easier. For example, when Bill Ford decided to bring Alan Mulally in as the CEO, Bill Ford was the great-grandson of Henry Ford. The family’s name is still on the logo. It’s a family-owned company. Bill was the President, CEO and Chairman of the Board. He said, “Alan, if you come in, I want you to be the CEO.” This will be the first time somebody from outside of the auto industry as a CEO. He said, “I’m even willing to give up my chairman seat on the board for you.”
You talk about humility. Knowing that you come from the family that invented the moving assembly line, and you’re telling the world and the guy that’s going to replace you, that you’re not the right guy for the job. That’s leader humility right there out of Bill Ford. Alan said, “I don’t want to do this without you. I need you by my side to be the visionary. While I do the heads down, hard work to start changing the company, you have to be my cheerleader. You need to keep me in line.” This relationship between the two that it wasn’t all one or all the other, they were willing to give up some control in pursuit of excellence and their ultimate goal. You don’t see that a lot. Many times, people want to control, micromanage, steer you in a certain direction, and force you into a box. That old chestnut is true. If you love something, set it free. If it loves you, it will come back.
It sounds like Bill Ford love the company and the legacy enough to not let his ego get in the way of being the one to have to keep it going or adapt. What is fascinating is that Alan said to Bill, “I still need you to be my visionary.” He ended up hiring you and calling you a visionary. Alan surrounded himself with visionaries above him and reporting to him. That’s a nice way to look at what the story is as you told us like, “As a leader, I need visionaries in every corner, please.”
[bctt tweet=”Emotions are created in the details.” username=”John_Livesay”]
One of the first parts of leadership is to know that you don’t know everything. Many times, we promote people from within because they are a particularly good individual contributor. You would have the most sales, you designed the best product, or you got so far at customer satisfaction scores. How does that translate to management? Being a good individual contributor doesn’t necessarily mean that you know how to lead a team or how to motivate people. One of the first things you can do as a leader when you’re promoted is to say, “First of all, I’m new at this. I need to admit that I don’t know everything. I need to find the people that know more than I do about a whole lot of subjects and to complement my skills with other people around me, so together we form a cohesive team.”
I know you get hired a lot as a consultant, as well as the speaker. One of your topics is transformation storytelling. Since this show is all about storytelling and pitching with storytelling as a tool, I’d love to hear what you think is your definition of a good story.
I’m a big fan of history, as I mentioned. The difference between the recorded past and the remembered past, the recorded past is history that’s in the books. It’s a spiked cannon. It’s a statue, a monument. The remembered past is not what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago, but stories about what happened 200 or 2,000 years ago. To me, a series of events, a story well told becomes the difference between moving someone emotionally or not. If you want to take us back to our most basic level, consider early humans who were hunters and gatherers. There are two of them that are out in the woods and they hear a twig snap. All of a sudden, they turn and there’s a tiger there. The tiger is beginning to give chase.
One of the guys goes up a tree. The other guy gets mauled by the tiger and his neck snapped, and he’s gone. The guy up in the tree is quietly waiting for the tiger to finish his business and go elsewhere. He comes down and he returns to his tribe. He recounts the tale of being alone with his friend, Kevin. Kevin is there in the forest with them and how that twig snapping sound, how the hair raised on the back of their necks, and how his heart raced. By putting those different levels of details in there, by making his audience, which in this case was his tribe, feel like they were part of the action and embellishing that, not falsely, but bringing those details and the emotion out, he makes them feel like they were part of it.
Transformational Storytelling: When you work for the same company, it doesn’t make sense that you’re trying to outdo your colleagues. You should be out doing your competition, not your colleagues.
The tribe is able to say, “Now we’ve got a lesson. We know what to look for when we’re out. If we hear a twig snap, what does that mean to us? If we are chased, we know to seek out a tree.” These become life lessons for them. They become a cautionary tale to become something that’s handed down from generation to generation. If we can do that in the workplace with anything that happens to us, it could be a sales call that went bad. It could be the best customer experience we ever designed. You name it. This becomes part of the culture that we build around us. The challenge now, not only with the pandemic where we’re all separated, those water-cooler moments, those opportunities to chit chat in the hallway before a meeting is gone.
At the same time, we also see that in terms of workplace retention, people are jumping from job to job. There is a lack of institutional memory. There’s a lack of these stories, this oral tradition being upheld. To me, that’s why it’s important to capture these stories wherever we can in video, in audio and in written form, and make them part of the experience so that when a new generation or workforce comes on board, they can absorb these stories without having been part of them or without having been touched directly by the people who experienced them.
There’s a lot to unpack there. I love this line that a good story is defined by whether you’ve moved somebody emotionally or not. What great short criteria, whether it’s a commercial, social post, storytelling, did it move people emotionally, yes or no? That’s all we care about at this point. You then go on to tell us that the emotions are created in the details. That’s a thing that I see most people are completely unaware of when they’re learning storytelling is they’re like, “I need to be specific with the time, the day and the location, or what it felt like.” In order to describe someone’s problem, you have to describe how it felt for them so the people can see themselves in that story, that concept of emotions are created in the details. Once you believe and engage in the premise, that’s the whole criteria for a good story.
Most people don’t have an awareness of is that storytelling not only help you win new business but help you retain employees. That is a topic that not many people are talking about. I’ve experienced it myself, working with a healthcare tech company, by having all of their sales teams create a story of origin and then putting it into a repository map so that they can get to know each other personally and feel part of the culture and the tribe. Somebody took the time to ask me, “How I got into healthcare? What I did before I worked here? Anything that’s personal and that it’s valuable enough to be recorded to your point between remembered versus recorded history. It also allows new people to join the tribe or new hires to get a sense of, “Who am I working with here?”
[bctt tweet=”One of the first parts of leadership is to know that you don’t know everything.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I love that you talk about this need for storytelling to create a legacy that creates a culture that people then feel like they’re a part of it, whether they were there at the beginning or not. Working for a legacy brand like Ford, you’ve got to experience that full-time, which goes full circle back to what you were saying, that it wasn’t just a group of talented people, but a group of people who were passionate. My question there is do you think part of that passion came from them identifying themselves with a legacy story?
It was part of the legacy story, John, knowing that they were carrying on in the giant footsteps that they had to fill. Let’s not forget when Steve Jobs died in October of 2011, he was compared to two other businessmen that transformed the 20th Century: Thomas Edison and Henry Ford. If you’re one of those companies and you’re following in the founder’s footsteps, there’s got to be some passion there and some trepidation in terms of, “Am I living up to the legacy?” At the same time, there was this wonderful culture that Alan brought as the new CEO of a created a spirit of working together with Bil Ford until that time had become a series of silos of fiefdoms, where people were competing for knowledge, rather than sharing knowledge. They were hoarders of knowledge. They were thinking that they were outsmarting their colleagues. They were pushing them down.
Alan said, “We all worked for the same company. It doesn’t make sense that you’re trying to outdo your colleagues. You should be outdoing your competition, not your colleagues.” He very quickly made it clear that there was going to be One Ford and it was translated through very simply, “One team, one plan, one goal.” It was something that everyone could remember. The challenge of a leader, of a storyteller, is to take a complex issue and to boil it down in its simplest terms with emotion, but in a way that doesn’t make people feel like you’re talking down to them. That’s a talent. I’ve got kids and I’ve seen them go through various stages. I’ve got a seventeen-year-old all the way down to almost seven years old.
I made a note a while back for a newsletter or a blog post. It was titled Thirteen Minutes. The only note that I put under it is it takes my kid forever to tell a story. If you’ve ever been with a little kid, they ramble on and on without getting to the point, and you’re thinking to yourself, “This kid’s cute, but when are they going to get to the real meat of it here? I’m getting bored.” At the same time, when they go to tell a joke, they run forward to the punchline immediately. You get back to what we were talking about before, in terms of putting those details in there. When you’re telling a joke, the timing matters, but the level of details that you put in and the suspense that you build with people is an important emotion. Suspense is a little bit different from horror.
Transformational Storytelling: When you’re telling a joke, the timing certainly matters. The level of details you put in and the suspense you build with people is very important.
When somebody asked Alfred Hitchcock about what suspense means, he said, “It’s the difference between a bomb going off on a train and telling someone that there is a bomb planted somewhere on the train.” It’s how you build that emotion with them and how you craft it. You don’t want the story to stretch out for thirteen minutes. You want to do it in a way that keeps their attention, keeps them engaged, and ultimately, gets to that punchline.
I’m happy that you shared that phrase from Ford, the use of one. I’ve seen that with another client. I’ve worked with Gensler, their architecture firm, and they call themselves The One Firm Firm, meaning that they don’t want to be perceived as doing silos and practice areas. They want to be perceived as some company that can do all of the things you might need from marketing all the way up to designing your law office or your airport. Also, that culture is not about having a one-star name architect. When you look at companies, cultures and their whole business model, two CEOs and different cities, they’re the largest revenue of all the firms.
When you have defined your story is then not only do the right team members come but also then you can explain that to potential clients as what your point of differentiation is. Therefore, usually justify a premium price along with it. You’ve also consulted with Google, what a range from a new company to Ford, and I’m curious, without getting into anything proprietary, what’s the consistent things you see, whether it’s a Google or a Ford that they bring you in to do?
Initially, people are interested in what’s the latest thing you can tell me? What’s going on in the marketplace? What are people saying?
[bctt tweet=”If you have unquenchable curiosity, it will take you to heights unimaginable.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Is TikTok where we should be?
I will always begin with some grounding data. People are spending less time on traditional televisions and more time on handheld screens, whatever the data point is relevant to them. There comes a time in the presentation or in the engagement where we step back and say, “Let’s take the trends out of it because those will always be changing. Let’s step back and fundamentally, look at what it is that you’re doing now. How are you approaching this particular problem? Who do you have working on it? What are their points of reference? How are they going to market? What types of things are they sharing with their audience? In what format are they sharing them?” We look at the mix of paid, earned and owned media and all of that.
Fundamentally, if you can understand what it is that people want from you and you go back to Steve Jobs, nobody in 2003 or whenever the iPod came out was saying, “I need a thousand songs in my pocket.” It wasn’t there, but he knew people love music. People used Walkmans forever. What if he could create something new that met a need that wasn’t specifically expressed? To me, it’s a question behind the question and getting my clients to ask more questions and to not think that they already have the answer. I do this as a consultant. I ask a lot of questions. One is because I don’t know the answers, but two, I’m innately curious. Curiosity is one of the best traits of a leader, a marketer, a salesperson. If you have unquenchable curiosity, it will take you to heights unimaginable. Dorothy Parker once said that curiosity is the cure for boredom, and there is no cure for curiosity. If you have a curious spirit, you will never find yourself at a loss for information.
First of all, you said a phrase and it’s one of my all-time favorite phrases, which is the “What if?” question. When we ask people that, we get into the right brain where imagination and storytelling live. If we can ask and get them to imagine, “What if we did this? What if we created this?” What you’re saying about where the iPod came from, it’s coming up with a concept of Walkman was popular that people love the dots and be ahead of the puck, as Wayne Gretzky says. Anticipate where it’s going. The example I have is when I was working with the Banana Republic and they had the premise that their definition of luxury was not the price, but anticipating the need before somebody knew they needed it.
Transformational Storytelling: If you have a curious spirit, you will never find yourself at a loss for information.
With that, as their starting point, they then ask the questions. What could we do to give our top 20% of our clients that experience without having to raise our prices or anything? There’s some basic stuff like acknowledging their birthday with a card and things like that, but then they came up with the idea of allowing people to charge their phones in their Rockefeller store and their Banana Republic, Union Square store like, “No charge to charge your phone while you’re shopping as an unexpected luxury.” You’ll be like, “I need this. I didn’t know I could get it done here. This is great.” They’re never going to be Neiman Marcus in terms of service, but they can at least try to do something. Their sales went up so much in those stores because people kept shopping while they waited for their phone to fully charge, not just charge a little bit. That’s a great example of what you were describing the reasons people would want to bring you in for those kinds of outcomes.
It reminds me of one of my first meetings while I was at Ford. It was a couple of months into my tenure there. It was an all-employee town hall. I was standing at the back. I was standing next to the Chief Marketing Officer, Jim Farley. Incidentally, Jim was named the CEO of Ford. I said, “Jim, I will give you a great, free idea that you can take.” I don’t oversee this area. “When you go to a car dealership, wouldn’t it be great if they had free Wi-Fi?” This was 2008. Free Wi-Fi wasn’t like water as we have now. He immediately said, “Scott, it’s going to be too much. It’ll be too expensive for the dealers to complicate it.” I said, “Jim, you’re missing the boat on this, the bigger picture. If you create Wi-Fi experiences, you’re going to keep people in the dealership rather than wanting to take a courtesy car home.”
A few years ago, I had a client who is the number one Honda dealer in the country. He operates a single store out of Queens, New York. He came to me and he said, “Scott, I want to work with you.” I said, “Brian, you’re already number one. What do you have to prove at this point?” He said, “You don’t get it. The dealership model is broken.” I said, “You’ve got my attention. What do you propose to do about it?” He said, “I don’t know but we are getting hammered, not by other car dealerships, not by Tesla, but by Apple, Uber and Amazon because of the experience.” I went and took a tour of his storeroom, which is a typical New York place. It is crammed with vehicles and a postage stamp size lot. I said, “Tell me a little bit about your customers.” He said, “We’ve got 180,000 customers in our email database.” I said, “That’s interesting. Tell me about your service.” He went, “Our service, we’re doing oil changes and all the regular services were booked six weeks out. We’re open from 7:00 AM to 7:00 PM,” which is certainly better than the 9:00 to 5:00.
That is incredibly inconvenient when you think about it. He went, “We’re booked out from 7:00 to 7:00, six weeks in advance. We are 100% full. I said, “No, you’re not.” He went, “What do you mean?” I said, “You are 50% full. What about those other twelve hours of the day?” He went, “Who’s going to want to bring their car in at midnight?” I said, “Nobody, that’s why you’re going to go pick their cars up from them.” You almost saw his head explode. Logistically, we figured out how to do it. They have an on-demand service where they don’t tell you what openings they have. They ask you when you’re available. They send a valet out to pick your car up from your driveway, from your garage, from the street or your place of work at whatever time is convenient for you. They take it. They get it done. While the car is in there, they send you a text. When it’s arrived, they send you a selfie of the mechanic. They show you the parts they’ve taken out. They show you a picture of the parts they’re going to put in. It is complete transparency because transparency builds trust.
What is an auto dealership, but a black hole where you are convinced they are sucking money out of your bank account? As you’re sitting there in the waiting room in the old days without Wi-Fi, drinking their old coffee and eating their stale donuts, they’ll tell you it’s going to be an hour and you’re there two and a half hours. They’ll come out and tell you, “In addition to your oil change, John, we’ve discovered these three other things.” You’re ready to blow your lid and you go, “I have two questions, how much and how long?” You’re ready to say, “I’ll risk my life. I don’t care. I’m not spending a dime more with you guys at this.”
When you do this pickup and delivery with them, your home on your couch, and you’re getting these texts and they say, “It’s going to be an additional $212.70. Would you like us to do it? Hit here for yes. Hit here for a no.” That’s easy. Over time, Brian at Paragon Honda has seen their repair orders go up by 36% and has seen $1.5 million dropped to the bottom line that they weren’t getting otherwise. It is simply because they changed their perspective and wanted to make it more convenient for the customer. They seeded control. I said, “Let’s go with what the customer wants.” It created a completely new business for them. This was pre-pandemic. You look at all the dealers. This is what they’re doing because they have to. Brian was a few years ahead of the game on that.
I could talk to you forever. I love that line, “Transparency builds trust.” Many people are always saying, “How can I build trust?” You gave us an amazing gem there. Do you have any last thoughts you want to leave us with? A quote, a favorite book, a favorite art piece, anything that you want to leave on?
I will give you my favorite marketing quote of all time, “If you wish to persuade me, you must think my thoughts, feel my feelings and speak my words.” This wasn’t said by Dale Carnegie. It wasn’t said by Seth Godin or any of the marketing and management gurus. This was said 2,000 years ago by Cicero, whose job was to orate, to be up in front of the Senate and to convince people to see things his way. He knew that he had to get inside their head and their heart to make them move.
It doesn’t get better than that. Scott, people can find you at ScottMonty.com. They can also figure out how to subscribe to Timeless and Timely, your newsletter. If they want to engage and hear more of this incredible content and delivery entertainment as a speaker or as a consultant, ScottMonty.com is the place to go. Thanks again, Scott.
Thank you, John. It was such a treat being with you here.
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Leveraging Emerging Technologies And Immersive Experiences With Amber Allen
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
What is augmented reality? In this episode, Amber Allen, founder of Double A Labs, joins John Livesay as they explore the world of augmented reality and leveraging immersive experiences for consumers. Amber and John talk about innovative ways how brands reach their customers and how Amber helps her clients make the impossible a reality. With a disruption at hand and every industry is thrown out of whack, learn how Amber and her team utilizes the digital world and successfully imitate live events in cyberspace. Tune in and get a glimpse of what’s to come in digital marketing, the advances in AR and reach your audience in ways you’ve never seen before.
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Listen to the podcast here
Leveraging Emerging Technologies And Immersive Experiences With Amber Allen
Our guest is CEO and Founder, Amber Allen. She’s a pioneer in emerging technologies and immersive experiences with a deep background in the entertainment and gaming industries. She started Double A Labs to elevate experiential marketing after spending time in-house at Disney, Warner Bros., and Riot Games. Double A Labs innovates immersive experiences for brands to reach and keep fanatics of gaming, eSports, entertainment, and emerging technologies. Fast thinking and always exploring new ideas, Amber envisions how to make the impossible a reality for her clients. Amber and her team have delivered over 1,000 global activations and over 4.6 million attendees for companies such as Apple, Dell, Disney, Google, Reddit, Twitch, and Warner Bros. It’s not unusual to find her wearing the latest gear, tinkering with a new gadget or playing the latest video game. Amber, welcome to the show.
Thank you. I’m excited to be here.
I always love to ask my guests their own little story of origin. Where’d you grow up? You can go back as far as childhood or college. What made you interested in the entertainment business and of course, this new technology of immersive experiences?
I grew up in a small town in East Texas. The entertainment was heading to Pizza Hut and getting to play Galaga or Pac-Man. Video games were our way of getting to bond with my dad as we were kids. I’m a big fan of the movie side and all that. There wasn’t a lot to do in our little town, so it’s a stroke of excitement for new technology and such because it took about ten years to get to us.
That’s quite a journey from a small town in East Texas to being in the heart of working for many big brands like Disney and Warner Bros. Where was that moment where you said, “I’m going to get out of Texas and I’m going to take Hollywood by storm with my expertise in technology.”
As kids we’ll get to the big city, we used to go to Dallas and it was, “I can’t wait to move to the big city.” I knew that when I was a little kid. When I moved to Dallas and I was working as a merchandiser and running a program for Disney. The opportunity came up where they asked if I wanted to move out to LA, and that was something that I had never thought about doing. I love exploring and I still even to this day, get that itch to move about every few years. I like to have new cultures, learn new things, and spread my wings.
I’m curious about transitioning from Disney to Warner Bros., where you got this big job as an event manager for their games. Let’s be completely transparent, there are not a lot of women, typically in this industry. Did you find yourself being the only woman sometimes in some of these meetings?
I’ve always had a passion and love for the technology side. When I was at Disney Mobile, it was one of the early times of mobile and when I was at Warner Bros., I wanted to get out of the event side and I was in the film business. To your point, yeah, there were about two of us at the time in a home video group, but I was lucky enough to have Netflix as a client. I got to see back in the day when they went more on the digital side. That announcement was made and I see, “This is going to be similar to music, how the consumers are going to want to be able to get their hands on it quicker.”
After that, I moved over to the video game side and did the event management and such, and I loved it. I got to work on amazing titles like Batman: Arkham and Mortal Kombat. Getting to see the passion was a real game-changer for me in my career and seeing the passion of the fanatic space is what we still play in. How do you get to share with the rest of the world why? I always say, “Why do your kids love Fortnite?” I feel like sometimes we’re back in that time in the ‘50s where our parents didn’t understand why the kids loved rock and roll. That is what that space and that time have opened up over the years and what we’ve done in my role is how do I get to share why gaming is such a passion for these kids and how it helps them with their careers later down the road, too. It’s an exciting space.
Having been in the corporate world myself for many years, it’s a big transition jump to being an entrepreneur and working for yourself. You’ve started Double A Labs several years ago. Going back to the beginning of that, what made you come up with the name? How did you decide that that was even something you were willing to do and leave that big comfort-y corporate world of the steady paycheck and all that?
Funny enough, when I first started, it was Amber Productions because I was still holding. It’s still our LLC. Double A events are where we had started and for the first 1.5 years, it was me being a consultant working on the brands and the strategy with different CEOs and CMOs of brand companies. I felt that as I was hiring certain groups and vendors, it wasn’t at the quality level that I knew we would expect being in-house, so I started to hire different employees. Funny enough though, that even the third employee was an engineer. We’ve always had a tech background. I saw that in the eSports and gaming side of how are we creating physical worlds and how is the digital world getting to feel like they’re a part of it? We see that all the time with watching a sport and getting into learning from it in eSports. As a company, that’s been one of the biggest goals with Double A Labs of figuring out where and how we get to bring new technology and get to build around it.
Would you say there were any bumps along the way to growing the company that you could share life lessons from?
[bctt tweet=”Getting to see the passion is a real game-changer for you in your career.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I find it fascinating and I laugh because if you’re an entrepreneur for even a hot minute, you know that there are a million bumps. Being a corporate kid for twelve years, this was my first entrepreneurial adventure to do. A lot of my mentors and advisors came from the corporate space. The advice that I thought was super valuable was how to set up a company so that you can scale. We had intranet sites because I was used always to have that. Those are the things that I set up but on the other side of that coin, knowing about investors or bringing in advisory boards. All of that was information I was not familiar with.
It has been an exciting time of how many people I can meet and pick their brain that I’ve done and how many books I can read. The biggest bump in that kind of way was even a line of credit. I didn’t realize how important a line of credit was until we had a major client that was going through some mergers and acquisitions and changes. We got stuck in the middle of it and $1.2 million was held up for about eight months. As a company in year three, I only had eight employees. At that time, it was a challenge for the company.
There are a lot of sleepless nights worrying about making payroll and all that good stuff, so that’s valuable insights. Let’s talk about some of the fun stuff you’ve done. What is a digital dinner party? If you can, share who hired you to do one?
We do a lot of these virtual experiences. A digital dinner party is when we are trying to do multiple different influencers for coming together. YouTube was wanting to bring and collaborate and still have that happen in a world, in a time that they could not do that in real life. We were able to create a space that was a lot of fun. We did Uber Eats, so they delivered different meals at the same time. We had games and contests and we hosted it inside of a virtual experience. Even since then, we have a product and a platform called Digital World, physical and digital. Think of SimCity and Fortnite if you are playing that. We’ve built it on a WebGL, so it’s a website. You can go to the website and you can interact and go inside of these worlds and play, watch live streams, and do video content, but you are the driver. You get to choose as the consumer that comes in what you want to interact with and play with.
This is what I find fascinating because a lot of the entertainment industry is saying, “We’re going to have to create multiple endings to a movie and allow people to decide how they want that movie to end depending on what they choose.” It comes from gaming and now it’s immersing into a lot of other things. Let’s talk about your business card. Tell us what you have created and then other people can create with the ability to turn a business card into almost a hologram, right?
That’s exactly what it is. Everybody in their mind thinks Star Wars, Princess Leia pops up. That’s exactly what my card does. It is augmented reality. It’s our logo, the A. You can do it right off of our website, funny enough, so you don’t even have to have my business card. That’s the biggest thing, you get business cards and you are like, “Who is this person and what did they do again?” On our card, you hold it up through where they are posted up and it’ll have a hologram of myself with little bubbles flying around. As you click on the bubbles, each of the bubbles explains what the company does, whether it be a video, our Sizzle, or animation, which represents our digital worlds or a different style of animated logos.
For people who may not be as tech-savvy as you are, it’s almost like using your phone to get a virtual menu at a restaurant correct. You don’t have to have any fancy stuff. You just take your phone, put it to photo, put your camera over your logo, and you pop up. Is that the gist of it?
For my card, we have it as an app. That way, we can deliver new content all the time without pushing it out but to your point, we are doing exactly that. Just like at a restaurant where people have a QR code, we can do that as well. We’re doing that for a concert where a well-known musician is going to be made into a hologram and that show will only last for a short amount of time. As it pops up, you can watch them as a live concert in your room and it’s all triggered from the camera phone to the QR.
There’s been so much demand even for celebrities and musicians that are no longer with us, whether it’s Elvis Presley or all kinds of people. I’m thinking that’s a new whole new way to bring that, in the past, people have been going to Vegas to see a hologram perform. Imagine you could do it from your phone, people would pay for that, especially if you happen to be a die-hard fan. Let’s share some of these on the road hybrid experiences where a brand is wanting to make a big splash. What does that look like?
What we have done in the past, speaking of the digital space, where everyone can be a part of that, the reason that it’s called Digital World is that we can do something in a live environment. We’re all used to a Comic-Con style and pop up experience. We can host an event and have it to wherein one of the worlds that we worked with, we created an entire thing that looked like a TV set. People could walk through one of them. They had AR, Augmented Reality triggers like with Pokémon. We had it to that brand and you could collect them like a scavenger hunt. We created an entire VR world where you put a headset on and go into the mind of this serial killer. It was one of the movies.
How do you make technology not be scary, but incorporated all the way through? In a live environment, one of the things that we’ve had a lot of fun playing with is creating a digital world where people can walk through that same space, but then feel like they’re changing what happens in a physical environment. We did one where we had a live stream and an event where someone is on a surfboard. You’re getting to play Pong, old school and you’re trying to balance on the surfboard. The live stream is watching and they have a little ESPN, a little digital label. “Click on this. You’ve got ten seconds. Do you want to throw cats and dogs at him? Do you want to do cones? Do you want to do snowballs?” After ten seconds, the majority wins, and that is what happens in the physical environment. Over 3.7 million people in three days of interactively play.
Because we feel like we’re playing and we’re making an impact. If I were to sum up what you said, it would be technology can be immersive and make people feel like they have an impact on the experience they are watching.
[bctt tweet=”As an entrepreneur, don’t drink your own Kool-Aid.” username=”John_Livesay”]
We are no longer in the environment and it no longer resonates logos and impressions. We don’t want to be spoon-fed. We want to play with our food. We don’t watch commercials as a Gen Z and Millennial and even Gen X and Baby Boomers. If you’re interactive, you want to do stuff and you want to get your hands on things. How are we creating environments that let people be a part of the story? We grew up on Choose Your Own Adventure. If you taught us to choose your own adventure and I get to choose my own ending, then anybody wants to be able to be a part of the story. Creating things where you get to change it, be a part, or interact with it is what resonates with someone. It’s more about what they’re playing with not what they’re supposedly seeing in their peripheral vision.
What I love about what you’re doing is it’s not just for the entertainment industry, which is clearly all about trying to get people to watch a new movie or watch a new TV show and come up with some interactive things to do on social media. I saw one where you’re trying to throw popcorn into your mouth and have to hold your mouth a certain way. You also help companies. Let’s talk about a healthcare company. How does what you’re doing help them interact or learn some things in the operating room, for example?
One of the big ones that we were able to do for a medical world is we were doing internally for their 60,000 employees. We wanted to create something that explains what their product was that was rolling out. One, for example, was ophthalmology. In creating this internal app that was only available on their internal store for their employees, we were able to create some kind of hologram where someone popped up and had the bubbles around them. In each of those experiences that a person would click on, they would tell a story. One was a four-page white paper that was turned into a 60-second animation. Unlike a video, which is just 2D, you could walk around it and you could see it.
As the story unfolded, you could turn on a button on your phone and you would see that experience in augmented reality of what it looked like to have cataracts or myopic degenerative disease. You would see it in four different ways. If you had that eye disease, this is how you see the world. This is where technology is coming in not only on the empathy side but educating why something has to be dense that a person cannot quickly understand? We are visual learners. In a visual way, I can walk us a day in your step, then I’m going to understand what you’re experiencing and be able to then create a better environment around it.
I love that on many levels. First, the soundbite of the day, augmented reality is an empathy tool. I’ve never heard it phrased like that before and my mom is dealing with some vision issues. All I can do is offer some sympathy because I can try to imagine what it’s like not to be able to read or see stuff as well as you did and it’s way beyond just needing glasses. If there were some augmented reality experiences that I could imagine to have cataracts. In her case, it’s a macular degenerative disease, which is what Steve Wynn had, then it’s a more immersive experience for me to go, “Now I know why you can see this or that or how blurry that is for you and how frustrating it must be.”
It’s in your environment. That’s the thing. In VR, we close off to the world and we play inside of a closed environment. With augmented reality, is I get to be a part of my world. I get to see you, but it’s enhanced. I can see things whether it be at a conference and you see someone coming out and you’re like, “What was that person’s name again?”
You click a bubble. I want to go back to something you said and I’m trying to imagine what the readers are thinking. I’m like, “I can go to the DoubleALabs.com and hover my phone over your logo and I’ll get a hologram?” Explain that a little bit for somebody who’s ever done that. What is that?
We’ll have multiple different experiences there. What we do is one of the experiences is through the Double A Labs app. If you go and download it off at the store, Double A Labs is an app. This has made it to where it makes augmented reality a lot less expensive. We’re doing one for the medical space. If you go to our site and you hold up the Double A Labs app and it has A logo, it will come alive. It’ll be a digital experience.
We need to download your app and not just go to your website to have this experience?
Yeah.
I just wanted to clarify that for everybody because I know everyone’s going to want to experience this. We’ve all seen Princess Leia and the fact that we can have that in our own world would be fantastic. What do you see in the future? The Minority Report movie and Google Glass try to take off. Are the headsets for VR going to go away or is it all going to be augmented? What do you think’s coming?
It’s interesting that you bring up Google Glass. They were one of the first clients that we worked with Double A Labs. I found it fascinating that the red light is what freaked everyone out. Going back to what we talked about. Remember that story of growing up in East Texas. How do you make technology less scary and more adaptable? That is the one thing with Google Glass. When you walked around and I would see you wearing the glasses, you’d be looking at me and if I saw that red light, I’d know you’re recording me. Think about that. There’s something that’s not what we’re used to. Understanding what it is that scares people in technology and what helps them adapt it is one of the biggest things that is the mission and vision of our company.
[bctt tweet=”Don’t listen to the naysayers. What you listen to are the numbers.” username=”John_Livesay”]
When you’re talking about where I see the future of augmented reality, I believe like Apple and other consumers out there we’ve heard and they’re working on things like that in the market. We all have our phones on us at all times. It’s easy. The more mobile AR that we’re playing in and such, you don’t have to download an app and can’t hold up something. The easier it becomes and the less friction that there is, the more the adaptability and greatness. If I can’t get a headset and I don’t know how to map a room for virtual reality, then how am I ever going to adopt it? With a phone, we are having that all the time and we know what to do. This is why augmented reality is becoming more adaptable and picks up quicker.
I used to sell advertising in the fashion industry and we were talking about how retailers enhance that experience. They were talking about the future where you would walk in and maybe eventually, we don’t have to wear glasses. We can hold our phone up and the phone will scan us for our sizes, and then we hold the phone out to the whole area and say, “Here are all the clothes that are your size,” without you having to sort through a bunch of clothes. Your shopping experience will be more customized and efficient that way.
It’s interesting you said that. It’s what we are building inside of the virtual world. It’s like SimCity, the virtual style. We’re looking at building a retail environment. As you walk through this, imagine you’ve got to go into Whole Foods. You and I both know whenever I go into Whole Foods, I’m going to go to olives, and then I’m going to palms. I’m going to see capers and I’m going to get olives. I’ll go on Instacart or one of those online shopping and I ordered it all because I’m not visually seeing all the things around it. I’m not going to remember all that, environments that you can walk in, see it as a store, be able to click on it, and add it into your cart. It goes back to what you’re talking about, however, you can also do augmented reality on top of it, “I love those earrings.” Click it. Now the earrings are on my ears. “I love it. Let’s see it in a different color.” You didn’t have to put them in your ears or the hat.
You can ask your best friends. “Do I look good in these,” before you would click the buy and all that stuff? That’s what I’m excited about with all of this.
The technology is there.
Do you do big, long forecasts for growing your company? Do you have a 1-year or 3-year plan? Any tips for entrepreneurs on how to plan for the future since it’s always changing and evolving?
Our business plan of what we thought would be in the digital and virtual worlds of over a two-year plan has happened in six months.
That’s how fast technology is changing, right?
Exactly. The environment of what a consumer may have been scared of has been taken away with what they have to do digitally. One of the biggest things I always say is I make a plan as the CEO of this company and we go toward that, but not being scared to pivot and change. We were lucky enough that we were already a technology and event company. It’s a little early to market on some of our stuff but we didn’t have to pivot. We were ready for this time. However, as an entrepreneur, I’ve learned the biggest thing for me is don’t drink your own Kool-Aid.
The biggest piece is I can love a product that we’re doing but if it cannot be up to the level or that a client or that we expect as a brand at Double A, then I have to be okay with saying, “We’re going to put that one on the shelf and we’re going to do this,” or the numbers are not backing it up. That’s the biggest thing that has made us have 100% growth year over year. We’re at 286% growth in our tech and that is because it’s making a point of like, “This is working or this is not,” and not falling so much in love with it that you can’t listen to the numbers.
Don’t fall in love with your new products so much that you can’t let them go.
You have to have the numbers and the data to back it. That doesn’t mean everybody may say, “You’re too early. It doesn’t work.” I don’t listen to the naysayers. What you listen to are the numbers. What is the market like? What are my clients saying? What are my mentors saying? Putting that all together as a formula helps me understand what the projected growth is and where we’re taking the company.
That’s a great place to end. Don’t listen to the naysayers, listen to the data. People can find you at DoubleALabs.com. They can Google your name. Is there any other way that you want people to follow you on any social media platforms?
Yeah, I do a lot of blog posts on LinkedIn as well as on my Twitter account.
Amber, thanks for being such a great guest.
Thank you for having me.
Important Links
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Secrets From The CEO Whisperer With Cameron Herold
Posted by John Livesay in podcast | 0 comments
Now more than ever, people are starving for leadership. In this episode, the CEO whisperer, Cameron Herold joins the pitch whisperer, John Livesay, as they reveal the secrets to inspire and upgrade your organization and achieve that exponential growth. Get to know Cameron and how he got his moniker as he takes us through his story of origin and his expertise for crazy growth that he’s more than willing to share with the most dynamic business leaders. John and Cameron talk about the work Cameron does by helping leaders be better CEOs and lead better teams. Tune in and learn the secrets to grow your business to heights you’ve only dreamed of before.
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Listen to the podcast here
Secrets From The CEO Whisperer With Cameron Herold
Cameron Herold is known as the CEO Whisperer and he gives keynote talks. One of which is what he would write to his younger self from lessons learned being the COO of a top company. He would say to himself, “Don’t take things quite seriously.” He said, “Now more than ever, people are starving for leadership. If you’re ready, raise your hand and start leading.”
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Our guest is Cameron Herold and he’s known as the CEO Whisperer so you can imagine how happy I am to be talking to the CEO Whisperer as the Pitch Whisperer. He was the COO of 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and was able to get on Oprah and had incredible growth. They were the number two company in Canada. He’s also spoken in over 26 countries across six continents. He has five books and one of which is called Free PR. Cameron, welcome to the show.
John, thanks for having me. I appreciate it.
It’s great to get to be with somebody who is making the world better. I say the world because those silos between who we are personally we can deny versus who we are at work have broken down. If you’re helping people have better lives, be better CEOs, and lead better teams, that impacts everything. Let’s go back to your own story of origin. You’ve got such a great story and I’ll let you decide where you want to start. You can take us back to your dad grooming you to be an entrepreneur or this opportunity of a lifetime, or wherever you want to start.
I’ll start with the whole idea of the separation of business and personal. I grew up in a small town with small-town values. I’d go to the big city once in a while and look around and go, “It’s so big.” I didn’t know that there was a separation of business and personal. I didn’t know that you had a business persona. I thought people were people, so I’ve always just been me and I’ve never known anything but. People go like, “You should be vulnerable.” I’ll hear that but I’m like, “I’m always vulnerable.” I don’t understand what vulnerable means. Just be yourself. I’ve always been that way.
I was groomed as an entrepreneur. My dad raised my brother, sister, and myself all to be entrepreneurs and that’s all we’ve ever done. We started running our own companies and all three of us run our own companies. We’ve all run our own businesses for many years. We were told that having a job was a bad idea and that being in control of our own destiny and having the free time and the ability to make money was better. That’s all we’ve ever done. I did a talk that’s on the main TED.com site about raising entrepreneurial kids.
I talked about the fact that I’ve done about sixteen different businesses by the time I was eighteen years old. When I was 21 years old, I had my first full-time company with twelve employees. I ran that business for three years while I was in university. I graduated from university with no debt and bought a house that year with the money that I’d made running my own business. I paid my own way through university and then started coaching entrepreneurs. I’ve been coaching entrepreneurs of real companies and I started coaching them in 1989.
[bctt tweet=”Culture is a system that you put in place that aligns people with a vision.” username=”John_Livesay”]
By the time I was 28 years old, I’d coached 120 entrepreneurs where I’d coach them week after week through success. I ended up leading a group called College Pro Painters where I was running a lot of their franchises and opened the West Coast of the United States for them. I ended up opening up a franchising group for an auto body chain, which is called Gerber Auto Collision in the US and it’s called Boyd Auto Body in Canada. We built that company up and took it public, then I was hired as the president of a private currency company. I helped build that up and we sold that company.
I joined my best friend to help build his company. It’s a small business at the time. He had fourteen employees and I was employee number fourteen. We started a business called 1-800-GOT-JUNK? When I came in, we had twelve locations and we were doing $2 million in revenue. When I left 6.5 years later, we had 3,100 employees. We were operating in 330 cities and we’d gone from $2 million to $106 million in six years. I’m the chief operating officer for that entire time. When I left there, I started coaching real CEOs of real businesses and their leadership teams on helping them grow their companies globally. I’ve done paid speaking events in 26 countries on six continents. I’ve written five books and started a podcast called the Second-in-Command podcast. That’s my story.
I want to go into your youth. You said at 21, you had twelve people working for you. Were they your age or were they older?
They were mostly my age and a little bit older. They’re around my age within 2 or 3 years, plus or minus. They were all in their twenties.
Now that you have so much experience and have been involved in so much growth, do you see a challenge sometimes when certain people have to report to someone younger than they are?
I’ve seen a problem where there’s a generational divide of anxiety and jealousy that the Baby Boomers are a little bit anxious looking across Gen X and into Gen Y. A 57-year-old youngest age Baby Boomer having to report to a 34-year-old Gen Y is freaking them out. Having to understand that they did not adapt to technology, they don’t understand how to leverage technology. They don’t understand the modern way of running companies and they’re becoming more of a worker reporting into a younger skilled group. That’s tough for them. Prior to technology, I didn’t want to report to someone younger because how could they be smarter when they’re younger? You had to be the one that knew everything at that young age. You have to know where to access and how to find that information, but you no longer have to be the smartest person at the table. They’re different because they grew up in a different paradigm.
Free PR: How to Get Chased By The Press Without Hiring a PR Firm
Access to information and things are changing fast. We touched on this concept of you getting 1-800-GOT-JUNK? to get on Oprah and you’ve written a book, Free PR: How to Get Chased By The Press Without Hiring a PR Firm. I love that subtitle. What tips did you learn from getting on Oprah and watching that impacted head-on growth as the COO that you think made you want to write this book about free PR?
I’ve been generating free PR for about fifteen years prior to joining Brian. I understood the game of getting free publicity and how to leverage that, and the third-party credibility and how to tie it in with your marketing and sales. When we then did it at 1-800-GOT-JUNK?, it was like, “How do we do it faster?” I’ll tell you an interesting story that I don’t think I’ve shared about Oprah, but what I learned about the media and being on Oprah was that it doesn’t matter what story you get. No one cares. It’s what you do with that story and how you leverage that story that gets you the real upside in terms of your revenue, culture, or brand awareness.
Being on Oprah was great and it was big for a couple of days, and then it went away. The fact that I’ve been able to talk about it for many years has been where the real leverage has come from. The fact that we can put it in front of our customers, suppliers, and franchise prospects. It was what we did with the press that’s important. I talked about this a little bit in the book Free PR and I wrote it with a co-author, good friend, and former client of mine, Adrian Salamunovic. Adrian was the CEO of a company called CanvasPop.
One of the things I talked about in there was almost like putting a log on a fire that a story that you get in the media is just a log, but if you don’t light it on fire, nothing happens. If you’ve got a whole bunch of logs and you’ve lit them on fire, that’s good but if you pour gas on it, that thing lights up. What I learned about the media is it’s not about being on Oprah. It’s what I do with it, and then it’s about how do I pour gas on what I’ve done with it to take it to the next level.
What did you do to pour gas on your Oprah appearance besides being able to talk about it with clients? How did that impact the marketing and sales? You started using it on presentations and people had it seen and whip and all those things.
I’ll talk about what we did with it and what I would do with it because it’s a different era. When we landed it, it was 2003. Facebook didn’t launch until 2006 and Twitter didn’t launch until 2008, so we didn’t have social media as a place to share it. YouTube had just launched, so we didn’t have places for it to be shared. What we did was we talked about it with franchisees and in our marketing. We showed it to franchisees and potential employees. We put it up on our wall that we’ve done it. That was what we did with it. What we would do now with it is we would put it on Facebook, LinkedIn, Instagram, Twitter, Reddit, and Medium.
[bctt tweet=”Culture is about firing the jerks even though they get results.” username=”John_Livesay”]
We would buy it and we’d put it on YouTube, and then we would purchase traffic towards it. We would link it to our webpage so that Oprah would be linking back to our website, and then we would share it on all those social media platforms 3 to 5 times a year. It’s the amplification of what we would do and we call that the digital trifecta. In the book Free PR, we talked about the digital trifecta, and it’s how you leverage the press that you’re getting. We landed 5,200 stories about our company in six years and that was prior to Facebook even starting. If we had done it with the 5,200 stories and had social media, it’ll be a huge revenue shift.
One of the chapters in Free PR, you talked about crafting your strategy and creating your pitch, so that’s the perfect fit for this show. When I was getting publicity for my book, which is Better Selling Through Storytelling, I will talk about how to go from invisible to irresistible, and in the middle of the rung is interesting. When I was working on how to craft a pitch around that, I said, “It’s like being stuck at the friendzone at work.” Salespeople get excited, “Someone said they’re interested in this sense of information,” and then it’s crickets. We crafted this whole concept of three ways to tell you’re stuck at the friend zone at work and three ways to get out. Both Fortune and Inc. picked that up. I know there must be something that you can share with, how important is it to come up with a soundbite that hooks people in and then that flushes out the story for the journaling?
It’s important. There are two pitches that we use. The first is, how do you get the journalist to talk to you and listen to your story? How do you get them to listen to your pitch? It’s like the pre-pitch pitch. Can you get these on the phone for two minutes? What we do is we call them up; we don’t email them. If you think about it as an example, how many times has your phone rung?
Minimal.
Mine has rung twice. How many emails have you received now? I received 100 emails. If somebody emails me, they have a 1 in 100 chance of me noticing. If they phone me, they have a 33% chance I’m going to get the phone call. If I leave them a message or I talk to them, I’d say the same thing. “It’s Cameron calling from COO Alliance. I have a great story for you. Do you have two minutes?” I’m not going to tell them what the story is. I’m just saying, “I have a good story for you. Do you have two minutes?” Every journalist on the planet is going to say 1 of 2 things. They’re either going to say, “Yes. What’s the story?” or, “I’m too busy.” If they say, “I’m too busy,” say, “Can I call you with the story idea tomorrow or Friday?”
They want the story idea because every day, they have to come up with something else to write about, so they’re going to take your call. That’s how I get the pitch to open the door to be able to then talk to them. When I give them the story, I try to give them the headline that might be written over the story. Let’s say the story was a TV piece or a radio piece or a blog piece or a newspaper article. I’ll give them the story. As an example, for the COO Alliance, we have the only network of its kind in the world for the Second-in-Command. If I said, “John, I have a good story for you.” You go, “What is it?” “It’s about a mastermind group where no CEOs are allowed or it’s about a leadership training program where CEO applications are thrown out.” Journalists don’t like CEOs in the first place.
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I’m making the story about something and they don’t get to come in. Whereas normally, I wouldn’t say that. I’d be like, “It’s a story about COOs. It’s only a group for COOs.” The way I get their attention is to say, “No lawyers allowed, no CEOs allowed, or no Trump fans allowed.” You have to push the button a little bit, and then I give them the five core points. These are the five core things that story revolves around, and then I shut up and I say, “What do you think?”
I see this not only works for coverage and established print online but also TV segments, especially when the TV segment is only going to be 3 or 4 minutes. If you can help and almost do the producer’s job for them and paint a picture so that you’re not just a talking head and you might have some ideas of what the visuals would be. “Here are some questions and some short answers.”
They want to engage with you because you’re making it easier.
I was interviewed about how to get more than a one-word answer from your child when they come home from school. Back to school time, so you try to tie your pitch to what’s going on in the news. Every parent has experienced kids saying, “Fine. Okay.” One-word answers. Having a little hook of asking a different question. “Tell me a story about the best part of your day.” Something that can take away and start trying out. That’s another thing I wanted to ask you about. How important are these takeaways? Whether it’s on TV or in print that it’s not just something people have heard 100 times and be like, “I can try that.”
It depends on the media outlet and who their customer is because some media outlets are about sensationalism. Learn nothing, no take-homes. If it bleeds, it leads. Some news outlets are about the tear-jerker like The Oprah. She’s not a news outlet and she has no real takeaways, but it’s about inspiring or tugging on your heartstrings. In other outlets, it depends on who their reader or listener is. If you’re Forbes Magazine or Fortune Magazine or CNN or Inc. Magazine, it’s different. It’s thinking about their audience and what can their audience most benefit from because some want inspiration, education, or a story that they can then make their own.
The other part of your whole career is how often you’re speaking and why you’re in such demand. Whenever I get hired to speak in front of sales teams, they tell me what the criteria was, “You’ve been in our shoes. You’ve had a sales career. You just didn’t write a book about it. You know what it’s like to have quotas, deadlines, stress, rejection, and all that stuff.” From what I can see, that seems to be your sweet spot. You’re not just a theory speaker. You’re an actual, “Let me tell you how to grow this company because I’ve done it many times.”
[bctt tweet=”When you evangelize, that’s when you’ve created a cult.” username=”John_Livesay”]
I’m tactical and specific step by step instructions that I teach companies and their teams on how to grow a company for sure. It’s more about giving them the take-home systems that they can then use.
What are your topics?
A lot of work for entrepreneurial organizations, entrepreneurial companies, or big companies that want to embrace a lot of the entrepreneurial skills.
One of your topics that fascinates me is this concept of writing a letter to your younger self. Can you give one thing of what would be in that letter and encourage people of any age to write that letter?
I wrote about 67 letters to myself back when I’d left 1-800-GOT-JUNK? and was taking about 3 or 4 months off before starting on what I do. At that time, I wanted to reflect on what lessons did I know as a 42-year old that I wish I’d known at 21. I wrote a series of letters to myself. One was, “Don’t take myself seriously.” At the end of the day, none of this matters. We’re all going to die. This is what we do to make money, have a little fun along the way, laugh a little, and not feel like, “I have to work or everything I knew is important.” That was a big lesson that I wish I knew earlier.
Let’s talk about one of our other topics, which is not just creating a good culture but a world-class culture. What do you mean by world-class? How do you define that?
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World-class is a company that is winning the awards as best places to work in your state or in your country. I coached a client for a couple of years that ranked as the number two company to work for on Glassdoor in the United States. One of my other coaching clients that I’d coached for four years ranked as the number twelve company to work for in the United States on Glassdoor. I’ve coached two companies that ended up going on to win number one to work for in Australia. I coached one company that was five years in a row as the best company to work for in Canada.
When I’ve touched that many companies, I know what it takes to build an award-winning culture where your employees rave about you and it has nothing to do with the free perks that you give them. It’s not about the massages and it’s not about the free lunches. It has nothing to do with the amount of vacation time. That culture is a system that you put in place that aligns people with a vision that aligns them with the Big Hairy Audacious Goal and core purpose and gives them a framework to understand where they fit in all of that. It’s about firing the jerks and hiring more great culture people that want to make the vision come true. I systemized a lot of that.
It’s fascinating because I’ve been fortunate to speak to some companies that have great cultures like Redfin, the real estate tech company. The whole framework of putting their values up on the wall, almost like what you’re describing when you did with your press with Oprah, that it’s not just hidden somewhere. These are like a cloud, how certain words are bigger than others. They had that on their wall and you could tell people, “We’re happy to be there and felt grateful.”
Enron had them on their wall, but Enron wasn’t a core because they didn’t live them. If you want to become a world-class culture, you have to fire people that don’t break the core values, all the way up to the CEO. I happen to be Republican. I happen to like what’s going on with our market because I’m making a ton of money. Economically, we’re in a rough place but I don’t like Trump as a human being because of his culture and core values. I don’t like him as a person. I like a lot of what he’s done for our country or the net result of what’s happened, but I couldn’t ever have him work in my companies no matter how good his results are. Culture is about firing the jerks even though they get results because then you’ll bring in all of the A-players who are culture fits and get results.
That’s one of the things that you should promise as a takeaway, the secrets to attracting the A-players from competitors. Is there a little sneak peek of what you do? I know that’s the challenge. How do I attract them and how do I keep them? They’re two separate skillsets but most people think, “We have to offer them more money to get them not to leave.” That’s usually not that at all.
No one of them is definitely the alignment with your vivid vision, so it’s crafting the 4 or 5-page written document that describes what your company looks like, acts like, and feels like in the future. You have that 4 or 5-page document describing your company. You share that with all of your potential employees so they can now see what you can see. They can see what the future looks like and they see that they fit that or they don’t. You’re trying to start attracting the right people in and then when you roll out your vision internally, it should repel some of your current employees, so they want to quit. It’s about getting rid of the wrong people, attracting the right people, and constantly the bit of that yin and yang approach happening, “I’m getting rid of a bad one. I’m bringing a great one.” Until all of a sudden, you’ve built that cult, and then culture starts to build out of that.
[bctt tweet=”Too often, people are worried about having to please everybody that it ends up pleasing no one at all.” username=”John_Livesay”]
Do you see a lot of that being done through employees recommending their friends to come work there?
Yeah. I love the whole nepotism idea of building a company. When you hire an A-player, hire three of their friends, and then I’ll hire three of those people’s friends. As long as they have the same core values fit and they get results culturally, everybody’s great.
Based on your book, generating free PR for the business, this line about turning a normal employee into a skilled PR evangelist is fascinating to me because what I see a lot of people at corporate executive levels unless they’ve had a lot of media training, struggle. They get nervous when they’re on TV. Let alone a normal employee somehow becoming a PR evangelist. What is it that you are able to help people with on that?
It’s interesting this is back around 2003. I was speaking with Guy Kawasaki. He’s a well-known speaker and a former Apple employee back in the ‘80s. He markets himself still as a former technical evangelist for Apple and he’s built this massive brand around himself as being the technical evangelist for Apple. What people don’t know is that Steve Jobs at a meeting that Guy was at said to every employee, “Going forward, every single one of you is a technical evangelist for Apple. You can put it on your business cards. That is your role. You are the technical evangelist and you have to evangelize the company.”
Guy went back to his desk and had technical evangelist put on all of his marketing and sooner or later, he was being called by the media and asked and then he started speaking. Nobody cared because he was doing exactly what he was told. When you evangelize, that’s when you’ve created a cult. The only way they do that is if they’re excited. The only way they stay excited is by getting rid of the jerks, aligning them, inspiring them, rolling them, and getting out of their way.
I saw that when I called on Nike for advertising. I go to their corporate offices and I’m saying, “It’s probably better phrased as a campus with different buildings named after athletes that they’ve sponsored and people getting the swish tattoo on their ankle.” It’s quite the culture and it continues to be with their messaging, what they stand for, and what they stand against. It reminds me of what you’re saying about, “Don’t be afraid to repel certain employees based on your messaging.” They have that same philosophy in their advertising.
Better Selling Through Storytelling
You have to be okay with repelling some knowing that will attract others. Too often, people are worried about having to please everybody that it ends up pleasing no one at all.
Any last thoughts or quotes that you want to share with us before we say goodbye?
I’d say not to take ourselves so seriously and have fun along the way. Remember, this is what we do to make money and none of us are getting out of this alive. If we could do this and have fun, wouldn’t it be a way better journey for everybody? It would certainly be one. Another one, because of the time that we’re in, is that every employee is looking for a leader to show up. They’re starving to be led more than anything. When you show up as a leader, you’ll win, whether it’s a company or within an industry or within your division. People are looking to be led. They’re stuck, nervous, and uncertain. If you lead and you decide to put your hand up or show up, you win.
Cameron, I can’t thank you enough. The website is CameronHerold.com.
John, thanks for having me.
Important Links
- Cameron Herold
- 1-800-GOT-JUNK?
- Free PR
- TED.com – Cameron’s talk
- College Pro Painters
- Second-in-Command
- Better Selling Through Storytelling
- Redfin
- Better Selling Through Storytelling Method Online Course
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