#“they seem to keep morphing into food” yeah that's certainly a trend
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As per the last ask about no in-betweens, Machete is s strawberry filled powdered doughnut due to his nose bleeds. Had to get that thought out into the world given they seem to keep morphing into food
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#“they seem to keep morphing into food” yeah that's certainly a trend#Machete is a strawberry filled powdered doughnut but what is Vasco in this comparison#like#a cinnamon roll?#answered#anonymous
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A Page Turner
Fun fact: if you go to @ravensflockofrobins and search Bette’s name, there’s one (1) post at the time I’m posting this. And it’s not even a shippy thing rip this drowning paper boat
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She didn’t know what compelled her to take a quick vacation, exactly.
Maybe it was the lack of crime. Maybe it was the disgustingly scorching heat that summer brought. Maybe it was that she needed a break before she accidentally zapped the TV and the horrid romance movie that Starfire was playing.
Whatever the reason, Raven made up her mind. opened her eyes and moved Silkie off her lap, teleporting to her room. She considered her options and started a particular spell, one that she’d admittedly used many times before. One of the few (very few, incredibly miniscule) perks of being Trigon’s daughter: interdimensional travel.
Sliding through the dimensions as easily as flipping pages of a book, a particular timeline called to her. It smelled of bookstores and crumpled daisies and Raven blinked as she stepped into this particular universe.
The Golden Age, she reminded herself, taking in the not-so-golden scenery around her. The world around her was the sheer definition of nostalgia: the colors muted in the most charming of ways, the whimsy of the backgrounds (she simply took the buildings fading into space at the edges as a perk), the blocked off rectangles where additions would be written.
Surely more of a comic book feel than the animated life she knew, but it felt right.
What didn’t feel right was the lack of yellow. Sure, some of the stores had signs with bold letters the color of pineapple flesh. And, yeah, the lemon paint job on some of the cars was impressive. But aside from the sprinkling of pollen from the just barely blooming flowers, Golden Age Gotham wasn’t the most golden of scenes.
Honestly, with such a heavy title this ‘golden age’ was falling flat.
Raven pulled her cloak around herself and sunk into the shadows, casually setting out to explore. She avoided the areas she already knew and delved into the thick of the city, grateful that their emotions didn’t press on her as strongly as her own dimension’s did. Food vendors, students clamoring on the sidewalks as they got the most of that wonderful time between school being let out and their parents calling them in for dinner, even some rats who scurried out from the sewers, all but sunbathing as they dragged dropped pieces of food and cigarette buds back to their hovels.
Not too different from the Gotham Raven knew, but she still stayed hidden, watching all that she could. A pout involuntarily curled her lips at the sight of her favorite pretzel food-truck, replaced with a dual newspaper and ‘shoe polishing on the go!’ stand.
There was a simultaneous groan from all the kids as a clock rang, their disappointment mingling with the adults’ sighs of relief.
Raven felt the muted mix of their emotions, her lips quirking up at how similar people were in their complaints, dimensionally different or not: “Man I can’t wait to get home,” a mustached man breathed as he observed his freshly polished loafers and tucked the afternoon paper under his arm; “What? You’re betting on the Yankees? Get outta here, ya freakin’ jag!” an incredulous teen cried at his friend, shoving his shoulder in horrified disbelief; “I swear, Debbie, all he ever says is ‘Aspic’s lookin’ good as you.’ Not tasty, or even pretty, but good! That carrot cake looks good but my aspics are gorgeous. The nerve of that man!” a big-haired woman bemoaned to her pencil skirt-clad companion.
Raven’s head tilted in confusion; what was aspic?
Before she could dwell on whatever food trends she obviously wasn’t privy to, the Bat symbol lit up the sky. At its appearance the crowd seemed to hustle home even quicker, the conversations muting to a murmur as the clouds darkened over Gotham.
The symbol was bright against the sky; one flicker, only a simple fix if this dimension was the same as her home. Raven hummed at the sight and melted even further into the inked on shadows, following the panels as she landed just beyond a bank.
An explosion sounded halfway across the city.
Half of the officers hesitated and the other half jumped into their cruisers, speeding towards the pillar of smoke. The rest glanced among themselves and followed. Raven frowned at them; it was probably a diversion.
Sure enough, she felt the giddy nerves of the bank robbers inside a few seconds later. The Titan laid her cheek in her fist and merely watched as they scrambled about, her head turning as she felt Batman’s unmistakable aura enter the page. A brow raised at the youth of his visible face, then her eyes widened to a comical size.
Oh. Oh.
The demoness froze in her spot, watching as Batman went gliding over the rooftops. But Robin wasn’t by his side. Neither was either of the Batgirls that she knew. No, this one must have been one she’d never met. Surprisingly, she didn’t display the Bat symbol on her chest at all; in fact, her crimsons and emeralds were a stark contrast to the rest of the comic, but her fit was odd.
Not quite made for being Batgirl, but inexplicably belonging in this golden age. How odd.
But her hair…
Raven swallowed the air in her throat. Well, that certainly answered why this place was the golden age.
Admonishing herself at the beginnings of a schoolyard crush that she could feel starting, Raven shifted in her spot. This wasn’t her dimension, she could potentially indulge with screwing everything up, right?
So, despite wanting to keep a low profile as she watched them fight, the empath turned into a bird and phased in just behind them, watching as this Batgirl fought. Not quite as endlessly sarcastic as Steph, not as eagerly critical as Babs, not as intense or skilled as Cass, but as excited as any Batgirl for the ability to fight alongside the Batman.
She didn’t even seemed fazed when bolded words popped up in unison with their punched and kicks. Both she and this Batman slid along the BAM!s, BIFF!s, POW!s, and WHAM!s that described their attacks without any hesitation, and within a few pages all the bank robbers were apprehended.
The blonde nodded at the police as they cuffed the men, tossing her pine cape over her shoulders. “Aw, too bad Robin missed this,” Batgirl grinned up at the cloaked vigilante, her bright smile making Raven’s heart flutter.
“We should team up more often, Batman!”
He glanced down at his sidekick for this fight, “Batwoman needs you far more than I do.”
The rejection didn’t deter her, although her grin did falter. Her hands went to her hips, “Then at least until Robin’s arm heals up. You shouldn’t have to fight alone.”
The dark knight’s head tilted in silent agreement.. “Hmmm, very well.” His masked eyes took in the groaning bodies and the sound of approaching police sirens, “Go continue patrol while I find out what these robbers know about that explosion.”
“On it!” She gave him a salute and sprinted off, a flash of blonde hair and christmas colors. She got a block away without trouble, her eyes glancing at the police as they zoomed by and her fingers curling into fists as she noted a bird following her.
Batgirl frowned. She zig-zagged through the panels but no amount of speed lines or ducking into the fading buildings stopped the little avian. So, the Gothamite dove just behind the city’s library. The secluded setting made the bird sloppy and the hero tossed two smoking batarangs, leaping and pinning the raven in place. There was a shift like one page flipping to the next and the bird’s eyes turned red. Batgirl gasped and jumped back, her fists up in a fighting stance as the bird morphed into a woman.
Blue eyes blinked, skeptical and amazed at the plum cloak and stunning lilac eyes. No, not a woman. A teenage girl, just about her own age. But Batgirl didn’t let this mystery girl’s looks perplex her for too long; she immediately sized Raven up, carefully watching how the shadows followed her every move.
This little excursion certainly wasn’t going to plan but something in the Gothamite’s face made the demoness decide to be honest, consequences be damned. A sigh escaped, then she awkwardly met the blonde’s gaze, “Uh, hello. I’m Raven.”
A stormy glare was her answer, then a terse introduction, “Bat-Girl.”
They both jumped as the Bat’s comm blared out. The empath let out a sigh, her words a bit strained, “I promise I’m not a threat.”
Bat-Girl narrowed her eyes and took out her comm. She kept the mystic out of the screen’s view as she nodded at Batman’s instructions. She noted how Raven paused as she quickly gave Batman her report, her stoic features blanching at the sound of the hero’s voice.
Raven bit back a shudder at how young the dark knight was, Certainly not quite to the point of being the gruff, sandpapery tough guy that he was in her dimension. For the first time Raven wondered if the Golden Age was on the same age basis as her reality was.
Bat-Girl signed off and tucked her comm away, muffling the one link back to the BatCave under three layers of pockets. Raven shook her head at the familiar sight, quietly musing to herself, “Figures Bruce would still be so obsessive this early on.”
She just barely dodged the kick Bat-Girl aimed her way, strands of black magic swirling around them and pinning the mortal to the bricks. Raven stayed out of arms’ reach and narrowed her eyes at the hero, trying not to spend any time taking too much stock in how defined her bare forearms were.
Refocusing, amethyst eyes searched the vigilante’s face. Raven crossed her arms over her chest, making sure that her magic didn’t squeeze the blonde to the point of discomfort. “Does Robin exist?”
A derisive snort was her answer, “You mean birds?”
“I mean Dick Grayson.”
Bat-Girl’s eyes glared behind her mask, the muscles in her arm twitching. Raven took that as an invitation to speak, “I’m a part of his team.”
“In the future?”
Raven shrugged, “Something like that.” She considered pulling back but the pulse of Bat-Girl’s emotions kept her close. The demoness raised a brow, “You don’t seem too surprised.”
“This is the golden age,” Her voice raised half a pitch as she let out an exasperated laugh, shifting under the tendril of magic pressed painfully snug to her throat. “We still get a narrator during our fights sometimes.”
She looked her animated visitor over, “Didn’t think Richie would team up with a…” She paused, taking a moment to consider just what kind of powers described Raven. “A spirit of some sort--no…” Her lips spread as she guessed, “A demon?”
“You’re perceptive.”
Blue eyes rolled but Bat-Girl didn’t stop the cocky grin from brightening her face, nonchalant to the hold she was in, “And you aren’t a threat.”
“I’m not.” The shadows that held her slunk away, “Dick and I are heroes in our dimension.”
She could feel the concern seeping out of the heroine, but still the blonde let out a sigh and rolled her fingers. If this Raven character really was a teammate of Richie’s, then perhaps she could let her guard down just a little. Although Batwoman and Batman would be disappointed in how quickly she was trusting this pretty face.
Bat-Girl rolled her jaw, “Well in this dimension I’m Bette. Bette Kane.”
Recognition lit up amethyst eyes but Raven didn’t speak and Bette didn’t question her. In fact, the not-yet retconned hero seemed to be opening up to the prospect of Raven being in her dimension, if just for a visit.
So the empath decided to test her luck. She jerked a thumb over her shoulder, “Would you mind showing me around, Bette? I’m not used to having to turn the page.”
“Pfft,” Bat-Girl snorted and Raven got the impression that she realized her words weren’t a metaphor. Instead, the teen readjusted her mask and motioned for Raven to follow, “Already got one sack of feathers to look after.”
“Well this one can take care of herself just fine.”
Her sleeved shoulders straightened at Raven’s words, affronted at the mere idea of not helping someone she could, “Doesn’t mean you should.”
“Spoken like a true bird, Miss Kane.”
Bette raised a brow, the movement moving her mask. But Raven didn’t explain and she shrugged, “Anywhere you want to see?”
“Anyplace with you there is fine with me.”
Bat-Girl ran a tongue over her teeth at the demon’s shameless attempt at flirting, trying and failing to keep a straight (hah!) face. An idea came to mind and her eyes lit up, watching as Raven’s gaze flicked to her mouth.
“You’re okay with other birds, right?”
When the superpowered teen merely shrugged she continued, “There’s a bunch of nests over on the gates around Wedgwood Museum. Gotham Academy’s music class has been holding their practices out in front.”
Raven smirked at that, “Taking advantage of tourist season?”
“Hey, tubas are expensive!” The blonde chuckled as she motioned for the Titan to follow her, the two of them easily gliding past the stiff backgrounds. Bette grinned at her flying guest as a flick of magic kept her grapple hook from falling out of a crumbling rooftop.
The sound of music got louder as they neared the gated house. Violet eyes shut as she tried to place where she’d heard that jazzy tune before, her attention on Bat-Girl as she murmured, “But they’ve really been getting better. Sometimes I like to listen in, feed some birds when crime is pretty low.”
Raven clicked her tongue at that. “Well I have some free time for a picnic, if you’d want.”
She glanced at Bette from the corner of her eye and felt that urge to be honest curl in her stomach again. A breath quickly escaped her before she was reminded of Batman’s instructions, “I read ahead. Apparently the robbers bought off the Riddler for a few of his bombs. Just a classic distraction case so they could get away clean.”
Bat-Girl tilted her head as Wedgwood came into view, lengthening her grappling hook until she skipped onto the ground. The two made their way towards the house in silence as Bette mused over her words, the mage’s shadows mingling with the tree’s shade to keep them from being spotted by any civilians.
“A picnic does sound nice,” Bette aimed a lazy smile Raven’s way, fiddling with the green triangles that adorned the ends of her sleeves. A gasp escaped as a disk of black magic appeared under her feet, lifting them up and levitating up to the large tree that hung just outside of Wedgewood’s gates.
Bat-Girl leaned against the mystic’s shoulder as they got settled just beyond the tree’s branches, hidden by the tulip tree’s waxy leaves. The tuba-heavy refrain started up again and Raven let herself get comfortable, clinging to the calming nerves that washed out of Bette. Her eyes slid open at the wave of nervousness and she turned to the Gothamite, “Is something wrong?”
She started to pull away, horrified that she might have made Bette uncomfortable. Bat-Girl’s hand wrapped around her wrist, preventing her from going too far. The blonde licked her lips, her words coming out faster than normal, “No, this is okay. But do you have to go after this?”
“Yeah, it’s probably getting late back at the Tower.” The cloaked teen sighed, sliding her hand down until her palm pressed against Bette’s. She weakly smiled, a lilt in her voice, “But I can always come back.”
Bette squeezed their hands, “Just to see me?”
“Just to see you.”
“Hmm,” Bat-Girl felt her smile widen as she guessed, “Perks of being a demon?”
She felt a heat curl up her face as Raven’s eyes flicked from her eyes to her lips and back again, “Something like that.”
#betterae#bette kane#raven#all the robraes#<-- means ALL of them#my writing#at first i was like.. fluff!!! then i was like no.. it’s e x p o s i t i o n time#i just?? i dont even know anymore. i’ll admit i have never read the golden age comics and i don’t know bette’s personality that well so im#wingin it. i feel like it came out pretty good tho#despite the fact that bette is bat-girl with a hypen. like none of the others separate it but she does so /shrug/#i assume the golden age was a few decades ago?? like big hair and yankees obv exist and hopefully aspics were still in season then#anyway PSA bc that sole pic of the batgirls really shows off bette’s arms. Like WOW dc we are sapphic af u can’t expect us not to notice#they went out of their way to put some definition in so appreciate it dammit. Actually you know what?#can i assign fanfic homework? go to randys robrae blog and search bette. go to the only post that pops up and look at those forearms#like holy sappho batman!!#visible arm strength AND a v neck?? sign rae tf up for krampus’ workshop bc there’s a goth elf that she’s got her eye on
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Transcript of How to Turn Marketing Costs Into Profit
Transcript of How to Turn Marketing Costs Into Profit
Transcript of How to Turn Marketing Costs Into Profit written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
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John Jantsch: I have seen the future of marketing, and it is killing me. Well, no. That’s not really true, but in this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast I do speak with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, authors of Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Costs into Profit.
Fascinating, something that obviously applies to the mammoth Netflix and Amazons of the world, but I think that this is an approach that actually might apply to just about any business going today and how to get them think completely differently about everything that they do in marketing. Check it out.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guests, yes that’s plural, Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, and Robert Rose, the chief strategy advisor of the same. We’re gonna talk about the new book by both of them today called Killing Marketing: How Innovate Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit. So Joe, Robert, thanks for joining me.
Joe Pulizzi: Thanks for having us.
Robert Rose: John, thank you so much. Oh, this is super fun. Appreciate it.
John Jantsch: Yeah. So this is … How many books for you guys together? Like three or four?
Robert Rose: I think it says 70 something.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah. It’s in the 70s.
Robert Rose: Actually, believe it or not, this is only our second book together.
John Jantsch: Only your second one together. Okay.
Robert Rose: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Jantsch: Did you do this one different? I know in this book you’ve kind of got here’s Joe’s chapter. Here’s Robert’s chapter. That’s not what you did in the last one though, is it?
Joe Pulizzi: No, the last one was completely different. The last one really was Robert’s brain child and I sort of tagged along with him. And the different thing about this one is we sort of came up with this concept almost at the same time, like this story has to be told. And we both had different areas of focus that we wanted to focus on, which worked out great and now we, as you said, we just sort of said Joe, you take this one. Robert, you take this one.
And it worked great for the audio book, too, because then I didn’t have to do the whole thing by myself. So, there you go.
John Jantsch: So, Joe. Your relationship, is that the right word, with Content Marketing Institute has changed a little. Is that something you can talk about?
Robert Rose: Yes, Joe. Tell us all about Content Marketing Institute.
Joe Pulizzi: I guess we can sort of talk about it now, so it’s kind of going public. I’m moving out of an operational role. Always a part of CMI, always gonna be at Content Marketing World, our big event, but I am looking to do some different things and spend more time with the family and do some more travel with my family and that will start in January.
And I’m going to leave basically all my duties to Robert, thankfully. And he is going to carry the torch the rest of the way. So, it’s been a great run, 10 years with Content Marketing Institute. and of course I’ll always be the founder, I’ll always be a part of this thing. But we’ve got some opportunities today and I really just wanted to make life hard on Robert. So, this is the best way to do that.
John Jantsch: Plus you’re just probably tired of content, right?
Joe Pulizzi: Oh my god, I can’t tell ya how tired I am of content marketing. No, actually it’s funny. So this is my fifth book between Robert’s and my individual books. And this is the one I’m most excited about because I think we finally hit on something that is going to change most organizations, small, medium and large, and they don’t even know it.
So I’m leaving in maybe the high point and then I’ll just kind go off into the shadows and I’ll check in on Robert on occasion.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I would agree. This is a big idea book and your other books were great books, or certainly the last book, Content Inc, in a lot of ways I think you were almost reporting on what is, whereas I think this book is more here’s what’s coming. That’s my assessment. I could be completely off, but that’s how it feels.
So early on in the book, you evoke one of my heroes Peter Drucker, talking about the purpose of a business. And actually that statement of the purpose of a business — to create, keep a customer — is probably the genesis of Duct Tape Marketing, believe it or not. That book, the Practice of Management, had a lot to do with forming my thinking.
That obviously hasn’t changed, but how we go about doing that seems to have changed. So how does that play out in Killing Marketing.
Robert Rose: Well first of all, let me just tell you that if I didn’t love you already, now I love you even more by bringing in my hero Peter Drucker into the whole mix here. The Practice of Management is probably one of the fundamental reasons that I’m in the career that I am in today.
And you’re right. It’s absolutely this. That has not changed. It’s funny because where marketing is today has really lost sight of what Drucker was talking about. When he was talking about the purpose of a business, creating a customer, that idea has become so morphed these days into persuasion, right? It has transformed marketing into how do we find people and persuade them that our product or services is worth doing?
And what he was talking about was literally creating a customer from nothing. In other words, creating a customer that comes to their own conclusion that your product or service is worth their time or their money and that being the purpose of a business.
What we set out to talk about in this book was we started with this fundamental question, which was … And this was something that we borrowed and it’s a quote that’s been attributed to Mark Twain. There’s no evidence that he actually ever said it, which is that it’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for absolute sure that does.
And the question we opened up with was what if everything we know about marketing today is what’s holding us back? And we started down this path and what started to see were these companies. And we’ve seen the trends, how companies today are rebooting what it even means to be build an audience first and use that as a valuable way of creating customers so that marketing itself can become a profitable part of the business.
So instead of just being the department that makes pretty pictures or the department that spews out advertising or that makes cold calls or that tries to convert customers using all manner of collateral material, marketing the function actually becomes that which builds and creates customers, which we’re now calling audiences.
John Jantsch: So a big part of this obviously, from both of your backgrounds too, is this idea of content and content marketing. I mean is this an evolution of how we’re coming to think about content? I know we used to say content is king, that was kind of cool for a while.
And then I think in a lot of ways it’s become air for every sort of channel and element and, even as you suggest in your last book, a business model in itself. Is this another evolution of content marketing? We’re going to come back to that term, content marketing, but I’ll let you answer that first.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, I’ll take this one, Robert. I think that if we just look at the traditional, say definition, but how most organizations think about content marketing, it’s oh we’re going to create valuable, relevant and compelling content. We’re going to distribute that on a platform and we’re going to build an audience in some way and we’re going to sell our product or service, which by the way is fine.
That’s great. If you do that, your successful with it, that’s basically content marketing. I think the difference is what we talk about in Killing Marketing is you don’t have to limit it to just that. We think there’s something bigger, as Robert talked about and you talked about, this is a business model change.
We believe instead of setting up your marketing organization for interruption, like it’s basically been set up for the last 50 years, what if we set it up around groups of audiences that we get really close to, we build loyal and trusted relationships with, and we don’t just create one revenue stream. We create four, five. We talk about 10 different revenue streams in the book and what we’re seeing a lot of companies out there do, they’re starting to dip their toe in the water and they’re coming up with new products and services because they have these audiences that they never dreamed they would do before.
You know Robert talks about BabyCenter.com from Johnson and Johnson all the time and how they created this standalone media property that enables them to not only sell more of their stuff but to create more products and services that they never thought was possible.
Kraft has done the same thing with Kraft Food and Family. So those types of things that we’re seeing where you can actually say, oh if we build an audience that’s loyal and trusting to us, and they start to look to us for guidance, we can actually transform the business into something that we weren’t even prepared to do. And by the way, this model is in full effect right now with Amazon.com.
Just so you know. It’s happening. And by the way, Amazon will be the most valuable company probably inside of five years in the world. And they’re doing it because they’re so focused on their customers and they’re not just saying this is what we want to sell. They’re saying well, if we get really close to that customer, what are the possibilities? And of course Jeff Bezos is showing us what those possibilities are.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I think just even this week the whole we can deliver inside your home thing is actually … Hopefully you’ve read about that [crosstalk 00:10:02]. I think a lot of that has to be hey, if we do this thing that we think will be more convenient, it will actually let us sell security systems, for example. And I maybe didn’t lay that out right but again, the first thought was this will be a service or a better experience for our customers, oh and look, it allows us to do x.
Joe Pulizzi: Well, what they’re doing, they’re putting six and a half billion dollars into … I mean Amazon won an Academy Award this year, or an Emmy award this year, excuse me. Here’s an online book store that sells some level of technology and now is really the online version of Walmart, and they’re winning Emmy awards for the creation of original content.
But if you look at their investment in content, the six and a half billion that they’re putting into things like all their original programming, they’re looking at that as a marketing cost in order to sell more Prime memberships, which of course is about buying things. And so they look at the investment in original content that they’re serving over the Prime streaming service as a marketing cost for them. So they’re turning into an integrated media platform before our very eyes but they’re looking at it as a way of pulling in an audience that they can monetize in other ways.
John Jantsch: So I realize this is a dangerous question, given who I’m talking to, but is the term content marketing really the wrong the term?
Robert Rose: Sure. Fine. I mean, if you don’t like it. We’ve never been that attached to the term but we have yet to find a better one.
John Jantsch: Here’s what I mean by that. It’s not that content marketing itself is a bad term. It’s just that if we look at that as a form of marketing, like social media marketing or mobile marketing, that it really is just marketing that happens to use content.
Robert Rose: No. The difference in the two that you mentioned … I realize this is semantics at some level, but the two that you mentioned are channel based, right? So it’s like saying TV marketing or newspaper marketing when I say social media marketing or mobile marketing.
And so that would be where I would draw those differentiations. When we say content marketing, what we’re describing … Whether we’re describing it well or not is for debate, but what we’re describing is the methodology of using an owned media platform to integrate into the everything else you’re doing as a business, right? So it’s a using the idea of our ability to create compelling, wonderful, engaging, inspiring, thought leadership-orientated content as a means of changing the behavior of a consumer.
So, it’s something that gets infused into the broader marketing strategy. Now, what I would concede, and I’m sure Joe would agree, is that at some point content marketing as a separate idea becomes subsumed into the broader topic of marketing and it just becomes a different way that we call marketing.
John Jantsch: Because social media marketing requires content.
Robert Rose: Exactly right. So does TV marketing and so does newspaper marketing and so does PDF marketing and fax marketing and everything else, yeah.
John Jantsch: Fax marketing, wow.
Robert Rose: I did it. Oh, absolutely. That used to be very important.
John Jantsch: If I had a fax machine, I would probably still get some [crosstalk 00:13:20].
Robert Rose: It’s funny we say fax marketing. Social media, it’s just channels. There’s no strategic method — You can say there’s a strategic methodology behind it depending, again it is semantics. But the reason why we call it content marketing is it is right now a fundamentally different approach to most organizations. If you just call it marketing or marketing the way we think it should be, they don’t get it. So we have to call it something different today and in five years we might not have to.
John Jantsch: So some of what you talk about in Killing Marketing, or I guess I should ask this rather than state it, will it require a company to … Because of the change that I think, even if it’s a mindset change, that it requires, will it also require in some cases for them to maybe cannibalize today’s profits?
Robert Rose: You know that’s a really interesting question because there’s two sides to that. The one side, I think it’s a really interesting point you bring up, which is does it immediately lean toward to creating new products and services?
And that’s one of the biggest push backs, quite frankly, is that if done right when we look at content marketing, it starts to look a lot like more product development methodology than it does campaign or traditional marketing-related methodology because you’re building a product extensively that you’re trying to build an audience for and monetize in multiple ways. And so it looks very much like a product and so that’s a really interesting question when we start talking about does it cannibalize the efforts of what we’re doing elsewhere?
However, there’s a flip side of that, the other side of that is can it actually begin to improve the margins of what we’re doing for other things, right? So you look at a manufacturing company where they maybe be looking at really lean margins, but if they can start to integrate media into their business, which of course has and enjoys quite high margins, can they actually add a pointer to their total bottom line by actually monetizing content and thought leadership and other things in a different way.
So I think there’s an opportunity for both things to be true.
John Jantsch: I can’t think of a great example but years ago the newspapers, they saw the train coming right at them but then they hung on to classified ads for example as a profit center because to just give them away, even though that train was heading towards them, was hard to do.
Robert Rose: John, that’s actually a great example. I mean I grew up in magazine publishing and we were so afraid … The executives in my company were so afraid to say okay, well we can do all this web stuff but make sure that we still sell those print pages. That’s the most important thing. So we deliberately were not cannibalizing our business.
We were trying to add oh, other lines, this will be great, but this is the core … I think that’s the problem with what newspapers didn’t do and magazine publishing, because they had the processes, they had the people, they had the content, they had the audience. They had everything to do what an Amazon.com is doing today. But they didn’t do it because they were afraid of cannibalization and I think today, you absolutely have to run at it and say we have to cannibalize ourselves before somebody else does.
Joe Pulizzi: And it’s wonder, you know, looking at it from the small business side for just a moment. One of the entrepreneurs that I admire most out there is Brian Clark and what he’s been able to do with CopyBlogger. If you look at what he started with, he built a media company first that had nice, wonderful high margins and built that media company.
And now he’s started to build products alongside that and become this integrated product and media company where his audience is telling him what products to sell, software, software as a service, other types of services that they’re now starting to offer, and education, etc.
Where he can now go into what might be a lower margin business because he started in such a high margin business. So there’s really interesting opportunities there but, to your point, it becomes interesting as to where you start cannibalizing from one or the other.
Robert Rose: I know a business called Duct Tape Marketing that’s done the same thing.
John Jantsch: Brian and I talk about this a lot. And Brian … I mean it’s great to call people that figured this out, did it and then everybody said they’re geniuses. I mean Brian would be the first to admit he wasn’t really sure where he was headed with this and then all of sudden it was like, oh, look what we did. Even some of the examples in your book are really companies that it wasn’t so much intentional as much as it was just trying to ride what seemed to be going on. And then all of a sudden woke up one day and went, wait a minute. This is a whole other business.
Robert Rose: Willingness to adapt is the key there.
Joe Pulizzi: I mean against the great example of Red Bull Media House. I know we talk about it all the time but that was a happy accident. Red Bull Media House becoming maybe one of the largest, most important sports media companies out there started because they wanted to do a print magazine at the racetrack. They wanted to do a show daily. That show daily turned into the Red Bull, which now has two million subscribers and then all the videos and the syndication and they’re having The New York Times and Wall Street Journal pay them money for some of their content.
I mean, that stuff happened from just an idea. So that’s how it mostly happens.
John Jantsch: So, let’s get to another really big idea in this book. I talked to a lot of marketers who still view marketing as an expense. Of course, I tried to convince them it’s an investment. But you’re going to suggest that it’s a profit center or can be a profit center.
Robert Rose: Absolutely, it can be both. It can be all of those things, right? I mean one of the things that we talk through in the book is not only … Because a lot of companies aren’t ready quite frankly for the revenue opportunities that building a media platform might provide. They’re looking simply at how do they make their marketing more efficient and a more efficient expense or, to your point, an investment.
And there are a lot of ways to do that. One of them of course is to start to leverage the asset that you call audience, when you start looking at how leveraging the value of an audience can help make the rest of your marketing better. Just a simple example. If you’ve got a viable subscribed and trusting audience, using that data to for example upload it to LinkedIn or Facebook or use it for retargeting, and make your media buy that you’re doing, you know your regular advertising media buy, more efficient.
And if you can save money because you’ve got the data that you’re using to target advertising in a more relevant way, well that’s making marketing more efficient and it’s taking more advantage of the investment that you’re putting in marketing more broadly.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah I’d just add on to that what we find, what Robert and I find when we go into these enterprises is that they absolutely aren’t even thinking about the possibilities of what happens when you have a loyal audience of subscribers. And just want them to think a little bit differently and that’s when we throw examples like hey, have you seen what SalesForce has done?
They’ve created maybe one of the most valuable events in the world called DreamForce, 175,000 people in San Francisco every year. And they started it from just a simple customer data base. If that were sold, it will sell for almost a billion dollars, I think, just that event. So it’s amazing what can happen and the problem is ourselves. We’re getting in the way. We’re not thinking about it when wow we’re doing these activities as part of marketing.
We can be paying for marketing plus … And Robert is right. Some companies aren’t ready but I think the bigger issue is they’re just not even thinking about it. That’s the problem.
John Jantsch: That kind of leads me in my next question. In your view, are there certain kinds of companies or companies that are set up a certain way or maybe they’re a service or a product that they’re maybe more ready to effectively take advantage of this approach?
Joe Pulizzi: I’ll start, Robert, and then you can go. From what I’ve seen … and Robert works with larger companies because I want to get his take, I work with a lot of the smaller companies. What I see in the larger companies, from a distance in a lot of cases, is that they can’t move the big ship. It’s very hard to cut through all the red tape and to get somebody that’s been 20, 30 years in marketing and go to them and say hey, we’d like to try this new, wacky thing. Can we go ahead and do that?
If you have a small business owner that believes that they need to be or they should be the leading expert in their industry over a particular content area to their audience, and if they do that, they could transform the business, they can transform their customers, help their customers lives, their jobs in some way. That is the lowest hanging fruit, in my opinion.
So, actually I think a lot of the innovation, even though all those big companies have in some cases unlimited budgets … From some small companies they look at us like wow, Nike and SalesForce, they have these unlimited budgets. But if you’re a small company, it’s easier for you to do this and start monetizing quickly. And I think you’re a great case study on that when you got started, John. I think we’re a great case study. In 2007, we didn’t have two nickels to rub together but then..
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John Jantsch: I have seen the future of marketing, and it is killing me. Well, no. That’s not really true, but in this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast I do speak with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, authors of Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Costs into Profit.
Fascinating, something that obviously applies to the mammoth Netflix and Amazons of the world, but I think that this is an approach that actually might apply to just about any business going today and how to get them think completely differently about everything that they do in marketing. Check it out.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guests, yes that’s plural, Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, and Robert Rose, the chief strategy advisor of the same. We’re gonna talk about the new book by both of them today called Killing Marketing: How Innovate Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit. So Joe, Robert, thanks for joining me.
Joe Pulizzi: Thanks for having us.
Robert Rose: John, thank you so much. Oh, this is super fun. Appreciate it.
John Jantsch: Yeah. So this is … How many books for you guys together? Like three or four?
Robert Rose: I think it says 70 something.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah. It’s in the 70s.
Robert Rose: Actually, believe it or not, this is only our second book together.
John Jantsch: Only your second one together. Okay.
Robert Rose: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Jantsch: Did you do this one different? I know in this book you’ve kind of got here’s Joe’s chapter. Here’s Robert’s chapter. That’s not what you did in the last one though, is it?
Joe Pulizzi: No, the last one was completely different. The last one really was Robert’s brain child and I sort of tagged along with him. And the different thing about this one is we sort of came up with this concept almost at the same time, like this story has to be told. And we both had different areas of focus that we wanted to focus on, which worked out great and now we, as you said, we just sort of said Joe, you take this one. Robert, you take this one.
And it worked great for the audio book, too, because then I didn’t have to do the whole thing by myself. So, there you go.
John Jantsch: So, Joe. Your relationship, is that the right word, with Content Marketing Institute has changed a little. Is that something you can talk about?
Robert Rose: Yes, Joe. Tell us all about Content Marketing Institute.
Joe Pulizzi: I guess we can sort of talk about it now, so it’s kind of going public. I’m moving out of an operational role. Always a part of CMI, always gonna be at Content Marketing World, our big event, but I am looking to do some different things and spend more time with the family and do some more travel with my family and that will start in January.
And I’m going to leave basically all my duties to Robert, thankfully. And he is going to carry the torch the rest of the way. So, it’s been a great run, 10 years with Content Marketing Institute. and of course I’ll always be the founder, I’ll always be a part of this thing. But we’ve got some opportunities today and I really just wanted to make life hard on Robert. So, this is the best way to do that.
John Jantsch: Plus you’re just probably tired of content, right?
Joe Pulizzi: Oh my god, I can’t tell ya how tired I am of content marketing. No, actually it’s funny. So this is my fifth book between Robert’s and my individual books. And this is the one I’m most excited about because I think we finally hit on something that is going to change most organizations, small, medium and large, and they don’t even know it.
So I’m leaving in maybe the high point and then I’ll just kind go off into the shadows and I’ll check in on Robert on occasion.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I would agree. This is a big idea book and your other books were great books, or certainly the last book, Content Inc, in a lot of ways I think you were almost reporting on what is, whereas I think this book is more here’s what’s coming. That’s my assessment. I could be completely off, but that’s how it feels.
So early on in the book, you evoke one of my heroes Peter Drucker, talking about the purpose of a business. And actually that statement of the purpose of a business — to create, keep a customer — is probably the genesis of Duct Tape Marketing, believe it or not. That book, the Practice of Management, had a lot to do with forming my thinking.
That obviously hasn’t changed, but how we go about doing that seems to have changed. So how does that play out in Killing Marketing.
Robert Rose: Well first of all, let me just tell you that if I didn’t love you already, now I love you even more by bringing in my hero Peter Drucker into the whole mix here. The Practice of Management is probably one of the fundamental reasons that I’m in the career that I am in today.
And you’re right. It’s absolutely this. That has not changed. It’s funny because where marketing is today has really lost sight of what Drucker was talking about. When he was talking about the purpose of a business, creating a customer, that idea has become so morphed these days into persuasion, right? It has transformed marketing into how do we find people and persuade them that our product or services is worth doing?
And what he was talking about was literally creating a customer from nothing. In other words, creating a customer that comes to their own conclusion that your product or service is worth their time or their money and that being the purpose of a business.
What we set out to talk about in this book was we started with this fundamental question, which was … And this was something that we borrowed and it’s a quote that’s been attributed to Mark Twain. There’s no evidence that he actually ever said it, which is that it’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for absolute sure that does.
And the question we opened up with was what if everything we know about marketing today is what’s holding us back? And we started down this path and what started to see were these companies. And we’ve seen the trends, how companies today are rebooting what it even means to be build an audience first and use that as a valuable way of creating customers so that marketing itself can become a profitable part of the business.
So instead of just being the department that makes pretty pictures or the department that spews out advertising or that makes cold calls or that tries to convert customers using all manner of collateral material, marketing the function actually becomes that which builds and creates customers, which we’re now calling audiences.
John Jantsch: So a big part of this obviously, from both of your backgrounds too, is this idea of content and content marketing. I mean is this an evolution of how we’re coming to think about content? I know we used to say content is king, that was kind of cool for a while.
And then I think in a lot of ways it’s become air for every sort of channel and element and, even as you suggest in your last book, a business model in itself. Is this another evolution of content marketing? We’re going to come back to that term, content marketing, but I’ll let you answer that first.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, I’ll take this one, Robert. I think that if we just look at the traditional, say definition, but how most organizations think about content marketing, it’s oh we’re going to create valuable, relevant and compelling content. We’re going to distribute that on a platform and we’re going to build an audience in some way and we’re going to sell our product or service, which by the way is fine.
That’s great. If you do that, your successful with it, that’s basically content marketing. I think the difference is what we talk about in Killing Marketing is you don’t have to limit it to just that. We think there’s something bigger, as Robert talked about and you talked about, this is a business model change.
We believe instead of setting up your marketing organization for interruption, like it’s basically been set up for the last 50 years, what if we set it up around groups of audiences that we get really close to, we build loyal and trusted relationships with, and we don’t just create one revenue stream. We create four, five. We talk about 10 different revenue streams in the book and what we’re seeing a lot of companies out there do, they’re starting to dip their toe in the water and they’re coming up with new products and services because they have these audiences that they never dreamed they would do before.
You know Robert talks about BabyCenter.com from Johnson and Johnson all the time and how they created this standalone media property that enables them to not only sell more of their stuff but to create more products and services that they never thought was possible.
Kraft has done the same thing with Kraft Food and Family. So those types of things that we’re seeing where you can actually say, oh if we build an audience that’s loyal and trusting to us, and they start to look to us for guidance, we can actually transform the business into something that we weren’t even prepared to do. And by the way, this model is in full effect right now with Amazon.com.
Just so you know. It’s happening. And by the way, Amazon will be the most valuable company probably inside of five years in the world. And they’re doing it because they’re so focused on their customers and they’re not just saying this is what we want to sell. They’re saying well, if we get really close to that customer, what are the possibilities? And of course Jeff Bezos is showing us what those possibilities are.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I think just even this week the whole we can deliver inside your home thing is actually … Hopefully you’ve read about that [crosstalk 00:10:02]. I think a lot of that has to be hey, if we do this thing that we think will be more convenient, it will actually let us sell security systems, for example. And I maybe didn’t lay that out right but again, the first thought was this will be a service or a better experience for our customers, oh and look, it allows us to do x.
Joe Pulizzi: Well, what they’re doing, they’re putting six and a half billion dollars into … I mean Amazon won an Academy Award this year, or an Emmy award this year, excuse me. Here’s an online book store that sells some level of technology and now is really the online version of Walmart, and they’re winning Emmy awards for the creation of original content.
But if you look at their investment in content, the six and a half billion that they’re putting into things like all their original programming, they’re looking at that as a marketing cost in order to sell more Prime memberships, which of course is about buying things. And so they look at the investment in original content that they’re serving over the Prime streaming service as a marketing cost for them. So they’re turning into an integrated media platform before our very eyes but they’re looking at it as a way of pulling in an audience that they can monetize in other ways.
John Jantsch: So I realize this is a dangerous question, given who I’m talking to, but is the term content marketing really the wrong the term?
Robert Rose: Sure. Fine. I mean, if you don’t like it. We’ve never been that attached to the term but we have yet to find a better one.
John Jantsch: Here’s what I mean by that. It’s not that content marketing itself is a bad term. It’s just that if we look at that as a form of marketing, like social media marketing or mobile marketing, that it really is just marketing that happens to use content.
Robert Rose: No. The difference in the two that you mentioned … I realize this is semantics at some level, but the two that you mentioned are channel based, right? So it’s like saying TV marketing or newspaper marketing when I say social media marketing or mobile marketing.
And so that would be where I would draw those differentiations. When we say content marketing, what we’re describing … Whether we’re describing it well or not is for debate, but what we’re describing is the methodology of using an owned media platform to integrate into the everything else you’re doing as a business, right? So it’s a using the idea of our ability to create compelling, wonderful, engaging, inspiring, thought leadership-orientated content as a means of changing the behavior of a consumer.
So, it’s something that gets infused into the broader marketing strategy. Now, what I would concede, and I’m sure Joe would agree, is that at some point content marketing as a separate idea becomes subsumed into the broader topic of marketing and it just becomes a different way that we call marketing.
John Jantsch: Because social media marketing requires content.
Robert Rose: Exactly right. So does TV marketing and so does newspaper marketing and so does PDF marketing and fax marketing and everything else, yeah.
John Jantsch: Fax marketing, wow.
Robert Rose: I did it. Oh, absolutely. That used to be very important.
John Jantsch: If I had a fax machine, I would probably still get some [crosstalk 00:13:20].
Robert Rose: It’s funny we say fax marketing. Social media, it’s just channels. There’s no strategic method — You can say there’s a strategic methodology behind it depending, again it is semantics. But the reason why we call it content marketing is it is right now a fundamentally different approach to most organizations. If you just call it marketing or marketing the way we think it should be, they don’t get it. So we have to call it something different today and in five years we might not have to.
John Jantsch: So some of what you talk about in Killing Marketing, or I guess I should ask this rather than state it, will it require a company to … Because of the change that I think, even if it’s a mindset change, that it requires, will it also require in some cases for them to maybe cannibalize today’s profits?
Robert Rose: You know that’s a really interesting question because there’s two sides to that. The one side, I think it’s a really interesting point you bring up, which is does it immediately lean toward to creating new products and services?
And that’s one of the biggest push backs, quite frankly, is that if done right when we look at content marketing, it starts to look a lot like more product development methodology than it does campaign or traditional marketing-related methodology because you’re building a product extensively that you’re trying to build an audience for and monetize in multiple ways. And so it looks very much like a product and so that’s a really interesting question when we start talking about does it cannibalize the efforts of what we’re doing elsewhere?
However, there’s a flip side of that, the other side of that is can it actually begin to improve the margins of what we’re doing for other things, right? So you look at a manufacturing company where they maybe be looking at really lean margins, but if they can start to integrate media into their business, which of course has and enjoys quite high margins, can they actually add a pointer to their total bottom line by actually monetizing content and thought leadership and other things in a different way.
So I think there’s an opportunity for both things to be true.
John Jantsch: I can’t think of a great example but years ago the newspapers, they saw the train coming right at them but then they hung on to classified ads for example as a profit center because to just give them away, even though that train was heading towards them, was hard to do.
Robert Rose: John, that’s actually a great example. I mean I grew up in magazine publishing and we were so afraid … The executives in my company were so afraid to say okay, well we can do all this web stuff but make sure that we still sell those print pages. That’s the most important thing. So we deliberately were not cannibalizing our business.
We were trying to add oh, other lines, this will be great, but this is the core … I think that’s the problem with what newspapers didn’t do and magazine publishing, because they had the processes, they had the people, they had the content, they had the audience. They had everything to do what an Amazon.com is doing today. But they didn’t do it because they were afraid of cannibalization and I think today, you absolutely have to run at it and say we have to cannibalize ourselves before somebody else does.
Joe Pulizzi: And it’s wonder, you know, looking at it from the small business side for just a moment. One of the entrepreneurs that I admire most out there is Brian Clark and what he’s been able to do with CopyBlogger. If you look at what he started with, he built a media company first that had nice, wonderful high margins and built that media company.
And now he’s started to build products alongside that and become this integrated product and media company where his audience is telling him what products to sell, software, software as a service, other types of services that they’re now starting to offer, and education, etc.
Where he can now go into what might be a lower margin business because he started in such a high margin business. So there’s really interesting opportunities there but, to your point, it becomes interesting as to where you start cannibalizing from one or the other.
Robert Rose: I know a business called Duct Tape Marketing that’s done the same thing.
John Jantsch: Brian and I talk about this a lot. And Brian … I mean it’s great to call people that figured this out, did it and then everybody said they’re geniuses. I mean Brian would be the first to admit he wasn’t really sure where he was headed with this and then all of sudden it was like, oh, look what we did. Even some of the examples in your book are really companies that it wasn’t so much intentional as much as it was just trying to ride what seemed to be going on. And then all of a sudden woke up one day and went, wait a minute. This is a whole other business.
Robert Rose: Willingness to adapt is the key there.
Joe Pulizzi: I mean against the great example of Red Bull Media House. I know we talk about it all the time but that was a happy accident. Red Bull Media House becoming maybe one of the largest, most important sports media companies out there started because they wanted to do a print magazine at the racetrack. They wanted to do a show daily. That show daily turned into the Red Bull, which now has two million subscribers and then all the videos and the syndication and they’re having The New York Times and Wall Street Journal pay them money for some of their content.
I mean, that stuff happened from just an idea. So that’s how it mostly happens.
John Jantsch: So, let’s get to another really big idea in this book. I talked to a lot of marketers who still view marketing as an expense. Of course, I tried to convince them it’s an investment. But you’re going to suggest that it’s a profit center or can be a profit center.
Robert Rose: Absolutely, it can be both. It can be all of those things, right? I mean one of the things that we talk through in the book is not only … Because a lot of companies aren’t ready quite frankly for the revenue opportunities that building a media platform might provide. They’re looking simply at how do they make their marketing more efficient and a more efficient expense or, to your point, an investment.
And there are a lot of ways to do that. One of them of course is to start to leverage the asset that you call audience, when you start looking at how leveraging the value of an audience can help make the rest of your marketing better. Just a simple example. If you’ve got a viable subscribed and trusting audience, using that data to for example upload it to LinkedIn or Facebook or use it for retargeting, and make your media buy that you’re doing, you know your regular advertising media buy, more efficient.
And if you can save money because you’ve got the data that you’re using to target advertising in a more relevant way, well that’s making marketing more efficient and it’s taking more advantage of the investment that you’re putting in marketing more broadly.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah I’d just add on to that what we find, what Robert and I find when we go into these enterprises is that they absolutely aren’t even thinking about the possibilities of what happens when you have a loyal audience of subscribers. And just want them to think a little bit differently and that’s when we throw examples like hey, have you seen what SalesForce has done?
They’ve created maybe one of the most valuable events in the world called DreamForce, 175,000 people in San Francisco every year. And they started it from just a simple customer data base. If that were sold, it will sell for almost a billion dollars, I think, just that event. So it’s amazing what can happen and the problem is ourselves. We’re getting in the way. We’re not thinking about it when wow we’re doing these activities as part of marketing.
We can be paying for marketing plus … And Robert is right. Some companies aren’t ready but I think the bigger issue is they’re just not even thinking about it. That’s the problem.
John Jantsch: That kind of leads me in my next question. In your view, are there certain kinds of companies or companies that are set up a certain way or maybe they’re a service or a product that they’re maybe more ready to effectively take advantage of this approach?
Joe Pulizzi: I’ll start, Robert, and then you can go. From what I’ve seen … and Robert works with larger companies because I want to get his take, I work with a lot of the smaller companies. What I see in the larger companies, from a distance in a lot of cases, is that they can’t move the big ship. It’s very hard to cut through all the red tape and to get somebody that’s been 20, 30 years in marketing and go to them and say hey, we’d like to try this new, wacky thing. Can we go ahead and do that?
If you have a small business owner that believes that they need to be or they should be the leading expert in their industry over a particular content area to their audience, and if they do that, they could transform the business, they can transform their customers, help their customers lives, their jobs in some way. That is the lowest hanging fruit, in my opinion.
So, actually I think a lot of the innovation, even though all those big companies have in some cases unlimited budgets … From some small companies they look at us like wow, Nike and SalesForce, they have these unlimited budgets. But if you’re a small company, it’s easier for you to do this and start monetizing quickly. And I think you’re a great case study on that when you got started, John. I think we’re a great case study. In 2007, we didn’t have two nickels to rub together but then..
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John Jantsch: I have seen the future of marketing, and it is killing me. Well, no. That’s not really true, but in this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast I do speak with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, authors of Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Costs into Profit.
Fascinating, something that obviously applies to the mammoth Netflix and Amazons of the world, but I think that this is an approach that actually might apply to just about any business going today and how to get them think completely differently about everything that they do in marketing. Check it out.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guests, yes that’s plural, Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, and Robert Rose, the chief strategy advisor of the same. We’re gonna talk about the new book by both of them today called Killing Marketing: How Innovate Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit. So Joe, Robert, thanks for joining me.
Joe Pulizzi: Thanks for having us.
Robert Rose: John, thank you so much. Oh, this is super fun. Appreciate it.
John Jantsch: Yeah. So this is … How many books for you guys together? Like three or four?
Robert Rose: I think it says 70 something.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah. It’s in the 70s.
Robert Rose: Actually, believe it or not, this is only our second book together.
John Jantsch: Only your second one together. Okay.
Robert Rose: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Jantsch: Did you do this one different? I know in this book you’ve kind of got here’s Joe’s chapter. Here’s Robert’s chapter. That’s not what you did in the last one though, is it?
Joe Pulizzi: No, the last one was completely different. The last one really was Robert’s brain child and I sort of tagged along with him. And the different thing about this one is we sort of came up with this concept almost at the same time, like this story has to be told. And we both had different areas of focus that we wanted to focus on, which worked out great and now we, as you said, we just sort of said Joe, you take this one. Robert, you take this one.
And it worked great for the audio book, too, because then I didn’t have to do the whole thing by myself. So, there you go.
John Jantsch: So, Joe. Your relationship, is that the right word, with Content Marketing Institute has changed a little. Is that something you can talk about?
Robert Rose: Yes, Joe. Tell us all about Content Marketing Institute.
Joe Pulizzi: I guess we can sort of talk about it now, so it’s kind of going public. I’m moving out of an operational role. Always a part of CMI, always gonna be at Content Marketing World, our big event, but I am looking to do some different things and spend more time with the family and do some more travel with my family and that will start in January.
And I’m going to leave basically all my duties to Robert, thankfully. And he is going to carry the torch the rest of the way. So, it’s been a great run, 10 years with Content Marketing Institute. and of course I’ll always be the founder, I’ll always be a part of this thing. But we’ve got some opportunities today and I really just wanted to make life hard on Robert. So, this is the best way to do that.
John Jantsch: Plus you’re just probably tired of content, right?
Joe Pulizzi: Oh my god, I can’t tell ya how tired I am of content marketing. No, actually it’s funny. So this is my fifth book between Robert’s and my individual books. And this is the one I’m most excited about because I think we finally hit on something that is going to change most organizations, small, medium and large, and they don’t even know it.
So I’m leaving in maybe the high point and then I’ll just kind go off into the shadows and I’ll check in on Robert on occasion.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I would agree. This is a big idea book and your other books were great books, or certainly the last book, Content Inc, in a lot of ways I think you were almost reporting on what is, whereas I think this book is more here’s what’s coming. That’s my assessment. I could be completely off, but that’s how it feels.
So early on in the book, you evoke one of my heroes Peter Drucker, talking about the purpose of a business. And actually that statement of the purpose of a business — to create, keep a customer — is probably the genesis of Duct Tape Marketing, believe it or not. That book, the Practice of Management, had a lot to do with forming my thinking.
That obviously hasn’t changed, but how we go about doing that seems to have changed. So how does that play out in Killing Marketing.
Robert Rose: Well first of all, let me just tell you that if I didn’t love you already, now I love you even more by bringing in my hero Peter Drucker into the whole mix here. The Practice of Management is probably one of the fundamental reasons that I’m in the career that I am in today.
And you’re right. It’s absolutely this. That has not changed. It’s funny because where marketing is today has really lost sight of what Drucker was talking about. When he was talking about the purpose of a business, creating a customer, that idea has become so morphed these days into persuasion, right? It has transformed marketing into how do we find people and persuade them that our product or services is worth doing?
And what he was talking about was literally creating a customer from nothing. In other words, creating a customer that comes to their own conclusion that your product or service is worth their time or their money and that being the purpose of a business.
What we set out to talk about in this book was we started with this fundamental question, which was … And this was something that we borrowed and it’s a quote that’s been attributed to Mark Twain. There’s no evidence that he actually ever said it, which is that it’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for absolute sure that does.
And the question we opened up with was what if everything we know about marketing today is what’s holding us back? And we started down this path and what started to see were these companies. And we’ve seen the trends, how companies today are rebooting what it even means to be build an audience first and use that as a valuable way of creating customers so that marketing itself can become a profitable part of the business.
So instead of just being the department that makes pretty pictures or the department that spews out advertising or that makes cold calls or that tries to convert customers using all manner of collateral material, marketing the function actually becomes that which builds and creates customers, which we’re now calling audiences.
John Jantsch: So a big part of this obviously, from both of your backgrounds too, is this idea of content and content marketing. I mean is this an evolution of how we’re coming to think about content? I know we used to say content is king, that was kind of cool for a while.
And then I think in a lot of ways it’s become air for every sort of channel and element and, even as you suggest in your last book, a business model in itself. Is this another evolution of content marketing? We’re going to come back to that term, content marketing, but I’ll let you answer that first.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, I’ll take this one, Robert. I think that if we just look at the traditional, say definition, but how most organizations think about content marketing, it’s oh we’re going to create valuable, relevant and compelling content. We’re going to distribute that on a platform and we’re going to build an audience in some way and we’re going to sell our product or service, which by the way is fine.
That’s great. If you do that, your successful with it, that’s basically content marketing. I think the difference is what we talk about in Killing Marketing is you don’t have to limit it to just that. We think there’s something bigger, as Robert talked about and you talked about, this is a business model change.
We believe instead of setting up your marketing organization for interruption, like it’s basically been set up for the last 50 years, what if we set it up around groups of audiences that we get really close to, we build loyal and trusted relationships with, and we don’t just create one revenue stream. We create four, five. We talk about 10 different revenue streams in the book and what we’re seeing a lot of companies out there do, they’re starting to dip their toe in the water and they’re coming up with new products and services because they have these audiences that they never dreamed they would do before.
You know Robert talks about BabyCenter.com from Johnson and Johnson all the time and how they created this standalone media property that enables them to not only sell more of their stuff but to create more products and services that they never thought was possible.
Kraft has done the same thing with Kraft Food and Family. So those types of things that we’re seeing where you can actually say, oh if we build an audience that’s loyal and trusting to us, and they start to look to us for guidance, we can actually transform the business into something that we weren’t even prepared to do. And by the way, this model is in full effect right now with Amazon.com.
Just so you know. It’s happening. And by the way, Amazon will be the most valuable company probably inside of five years in the world. And they’re doing it because they’re so focused on their customers and they’re not just saying this is what we want to sell. They’re saying well, if we get really close to that customer, what are the possibilities? And of course Jeff Bezos is showing us what those possibilities are.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I think just even this week the whole we can deliver inside your home thing is actually … Hopefully you’ve read about that [crosstalk 00:10:02]. I think a lot of that has to be hey, if we do this thing that we think will be more convenient, it will actually let us sell security systems, for example. And I maybe didn’t lay that out right but again, the first thought was this will be a service or a better experience for our customers, oh and look, it allows us to do x.
Joe Pulizzi: Well, what they’re doing, they’re putting six and a half billion dollars into … I mean Amazon won an Academy Award this year, or an Emmy award this year, excuse me. Here’s an online book store that sells some level of technology and now is really the online version of Walmart, and they’re winning Emmy awards for the creation of original content.
But if you look at their investment in content, the six and a half billion that they’re putting into things like all their original programming, they’re looking at that as a marketing cost in order to sell more Prime memberships, which of course is about buying things. And so they look at the investment in original content that they’re serving over the Prime streaming service as a marketing cost for them. So they’re turning into an integrated media platform before our very eyes but they’re looking at it as a way of pulling in an audience that they can monetize in other ways.
John Jantsch: So I realize this is a dangerous question, given who I’m talking to, but is the term content marketing really the wrong the term?
Robert Rose: Sure. Fine. I mean, if you don’t like it. We’ve never been that attached to the term but we have yet to find a better one.
John Jantsch: Here’s what I mean by that. It’s not that content marketing itself is a bad term. It’s just that if we look at that as a form of marketing, like social media marketing or mobile marketing, that it really is just marketing that happens to use content.
Robert Rose: No. The difference in the two that you mentioned … I realize this is semantics at some level, but the two that you mentioned are channel based, right? So it’s like saying TV marketing or newspaper marketing when I say social media marketing or mobile marketing.
And so that would be where I would draw those differentiations. When we say content marketing, what we’re describing … Whether we’re describing it well or not is for debate, but what we’re describing is the methodology of using an owned media platform to integrate into the everything else you’re doing as a business, right? So it’s a using the idea of our ability to create compelling, wonderful, engaging, inspiring, thought leadership-orientated content as a means of changing the behavior of a consumer.
So, it’s something that gets infused into the broader marketing strategy. Now, what I would concede, and I’m sure Joe would agree, is that at some point content marketing as a separate idea becomes subsumed into the broader topic of marketing and it just becomes a different way that we call marketing.
John Jantsch: Because social media marketing requires content.
Robert Rose: Exactly right. So does TV marketing and so does newspaper marketing and so does PDF marketing and fax marketing and everything else, yeah.
John Jantsch: Fax marketing, wow.
Robert Rose: I did it. Oh, absolutely. That used to be very important.
John Jantsch: If I had a fax machine, I would probably still get some [crosstalk 00:13:20].
Robert Rose: It’s funny we say fax marketing. Social media, it’s just channels. There’s no strategic method — You can say there’s a strategic methodology behind it depending, again it is semantics. But the reason why we call it content marketing is it is right now a fundamentally different approach to most organizations. If you just call it marketing or marketing the way we think it should be, they don’t get it. So we have to call it something different today and in five years we might not have to.
John Jantsch: So some of what you talk about in Killing Marketing, or I guess I should ask this rather than state it, will it require a company to … Because of the change that I think, even if it’s a mindset change, that it requires, will it also require in some cases for them to maybe cannibalize today’s profits?
Robert Rose: You know that’s a really interesting question because there’s two sides to that. The one side, I think it’s a really interesting point you bring up, which is does it immediately lean toward to creating new products and services?
And that’s one of the biggest push backs, quite frankly, is that if done right when we look at content marketing, it starts to look a lot like more product development methodology than it does campaign or traditional marketing-related methodology because you’re building a product extensively that you’re trying to build an audience for and monetize in multiple ways. And so it looks very much like a product and so that’s a really interesting question when we start talking about does it cannibalize the efforts of what we’re doing elsewhere?
However, there’s a flip side of that, the other side of that is can it actually begin to improve the margins of what we’re doing for other things, right? So you look at a manufacturing company where they maybe be looking at really lean margins, but if they can start to integrate media into their business, which of course has and enjoys quite high margins, can they actually add a pointer to their total bottom line by actually monetizing content and thought leadership and other things in a different way.
So I think there’s an opportunity for both things to be true.
John Jantsch: I can’t think of a great example but years ago the newspapers, they saw the train coming right at them but then they hung on to classified ads for example as a profit center because to just give them away, even though that train was heading towards them, was hard to do.
Robert Rose: John, that’s actually a great example. I mean I grew up in magazine publishing and we were so afraid … The executives in my company were so afraid to say okay, well we can do all this web stuff but make sure that we still sell those print pages. That’s the most important thing. So we deliberately were not cannibalizing our business.
We were trying to add oh, other lines, this will be great, but this is the core … I think that’s the problem with what newspapers didn’t do and magazine publishing, because they had the processes, they had the people, they had the content, they had the audience. They had everything to do what an Amazon.com is doing today. But they didn’t do it because they were afraid of cannibalization and I think today, you absolutely have to run at it and say we have to cannibalize ourselves before somebody else does.
Joe Pulizzi: And it’s wonder, you know, looking at it from the small business side for just a moment. One of the entrepreneurs that I admire most out there is Brian Clark and what he’s been able to do with CopyBlogger. If you look at what he started with, he built a media company first that had nice, wonderful high margins and built that media company.
And now he’s started to build products alongside that and become this integrated product and media company where his audience is telling him what products to sell, software, software as a service, other types of services that they’re now starting to offer, and education, etc.
Where he can now go into what might be a lower margin business because he started in such a high margin business. So there’s really interesting opportunities there but, to your point, it becomes interesting as to where you start cannibalizing from one or the other.
Robert Rose: I know a business called Duct Tape Marketing that’s done the same thing.
John Jantsch: Brian and I talk about this a lot. And Brian … I mean it’s great to call people that figured this out, did it and then everybody said they’re geniuses. I mean Brian would be the first to admit he wasn’t really sure where he was headed with this and then all of sudden it was like, oh, look what we did. Even some of the examples in your book are really companies that it wasn’t so much intentional as much as it was just trying to ride what seemed to be going on. And then all of a sudden woke up one day and went, wait a minute. This is a whole other business.
Robert Rose: Willingness to adapt is the key there.
Joe Pulizzi: I mean against the great example of Red Bull Media House. I know we talk about it all the time but that was a happy accident. Red Bull Media House becoming maybe one of the largest, most important sports media companies out there started because they wanted to do a print magazine at the racetrack. They wanted to do a show daily. That show daily turned into the Red Bull, which now has two million subscribers and then all the videos and the syndication and they’re having The New York Times and Wall Street Journal pay them money for some of their content.
I mean, that stuff happened from just an idea. So that’s how it mostly happens.
John Jantsch: So, let’s get to another really big idea in this book. I talked to a lot of marketers who still view marketing as an expense. Of course, I tried to convince them it’s an investment. But you’re going to suggest that it’s a profit center or can be a profit center.
Robert Rose: Absolutely, it can be both. It can be all of those things, right? I mean one of the things that we talk through in the book is not only … Because a lot of companies aren’t ready quite frankly for the revenue opportunities that building a media platform might provide. They’re looking simply at how do they make their marketing more efficient and a more efficient expense or, to your point, an investment.
And there are a lot of ways to do that. One of them of course is to start to leverage the asset that you call audience, when you start looking at how leveraging the value of an audience can help make the rest of your marketing better. Just a simple example. If you’ve got a viable subscribed and trusting audience, using that data to for example upload it to LinkedIn or Facebook or use it for retargeting, and make your media buy that you’re doing, you know your regular advertising media buy, more efficient.
And if you can save money because you’ve got the data that you’re using to target advertising in a more relevant way, well that’s making marketing more efficient and it’s taking more advantage of the investment that you’re putting in marketing more broadly.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah I’d just add on to that what we find, what Robert and I find when we go into these enterprises is that they absolutely aren’t even thinking about the possibilities of what happens when you have a loyal audience of subscribers. And just want them to think a little bit differently and that’s when we throw examples like hey, have you seen what SalesForce has done?
They’ve created maybe one of the most valuable events in the world called DreamForce, 175,000 people in San Francisco every year. And they started it from just a simple customer data base. If that were sold, it will sell for almost a billion dollars, I think, just that event. So it’s amazing what can happen and the problem is ourselves. We’re getting in the way. We’re not thinking about it when wow we’re doing these activities as part of marketing.
We can be paying for marketing plus … And Robert is right. Some companies aren’t ready but I think the bigger issue is they’re just not even thinking about it. That’s the problem.
John Jantsch: That kind of leads me in my next question. In your view, are there certain kinds of companies or companies that are set up a certain way or maybe they’re a service or a product that they’re maybe more ready to effectively take advantage of this approach?
Joe Pulizzi: I’ll start, Robert, and then you can go. From what I’ve seen … and Robert works with larger companies because I want to get his take, I work with a lot of the smaller companies. What I see in the larger companies, from a distance in a lot of cases, is that they can’t move the big ship. It’s very hard to cut through all the red tape and to get somebody that’s been 20, 30 years in marketing and go to them and say hey, we’d like to try this new, wacky thing. Can we go ahead and do that?
If you have a small business owner that believes that they need to be or they should be the leading expert in their industry over a particular content area to their audience, and if they do that, they could transform the business, they can transform their customers, help their customers lives, their jobs in some way. That is the lowest hanging fruit, in my opinion.
So, actually I think a lot of the innovation, even though all those big companies have in some cases unlimited budgets … From some small companies they look at us like wow, Nike and SalesForce, they have these unlimited budgets. But if you’re a small company, it’s easier for you to do this and start monetizing quickly. And I think you’re a great case study on that when you got started, John. I think we’re a great case study. In 2007, we didn’t have two nickels to rub together but then..
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Transcript of How to Turn Marketing Costs Into Profit
Transcript of How to Turn Marketing Costs Into Profit
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John Jantsch: I have seen the future of marketing, and it is killing me. Well, no. That’s not really true, but in this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast I do speak with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, authors of Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Costs into Profit.
Fascinating, something that obviously applies to the mammoth Netflix and Amazons of the world, but I think that this is an approach that actually might apply to just about any business going today and how to get them think completely differently about everything that they do in marketing. Check it out.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guests, yes that’s plural, Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, and Robert Rose, the chief strategy advisor of the same. We’re gonna talk about the new book by both of them today called Killing Marketing: How Innovate Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit. So Joe, Robert, thanks for joining me.
Joe Pulizzi: Thanks for having us.
Robert Rose: John, thank you so much. Oh, this is super fun. Appreciate it.
John Jantsch: Yeah. So this is … How many books for you guys together? Like three or four?
Robert Rose: I think it says 70 something.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah. It’s in the 70s.
Robert Rose: Actually, believe it or not, this is only our second book together.
John Jantsch: Only your second one together. Okay.
Robert Rose: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Jantsch: Did you do this one different? I know in this book you’ve kind of got here’s Joe’s chapter. Here’s Robert’s chapter. That’s not what you did in the last one though, is it?
Joe Pulizzi: No, the last one was completely different. The last one really was Robert’s brain child and I sort of tagged along with him. And the different thing about this one is we sort of came up with this concept almost at the same time, like this story has to be told. And we both had different areas of focus that we wanted to focus on, which worked out great and now we, as you said, we just sort of said Joe, you take this one. Robert, you take this one.
And it worked great for the audio book, too, because then I didn’t have to do the whole thing by myself. So, there you go.
John Jantsch: So, Joe. Your relationship, is that the right word, with Content Marketing Institute has changed a little. Is that something you can talk about?
Robert Rose: Yes, Joe. Tell us all about Content Marketing Institute.
Joe Pulizzi: I guess we can sort of talk about it now, so it’s kind of going public. I’m moving out of an operational role. Always a part of CMI, always gonna be at Content Marketing World, our big event, but I am looking to do some different things and spend more time with the family and do some more travel with my family and that will start in January.
And I’m going to leave basically all my duties to Robert, thankfully. And he is going to carry the torch the rest of the way. So, it’s been a great run, 10 years with Content Marketing Institute. and of course I’ll always be the founder, I’ll always be a part of this thing. But we’ve got some opportunities today and I really just wanted to make life hard on Robert. So, this is the best way to do that.
John Jantsch: Plus you’re just probably tired of content, right?
Joe Pulizzi: Oh my god, I can’t tell ya how tired I am of content marketing. No, actually it’s funny. So this is my fifth book between Robert’s and my individual books. And this is the one I’m most excited about because I think we finally hit on something that is going to change most organizations, small, medium and large, and they don’t even know it.
So I’m leaving in maybe the high point and then I’ll just kind go off into the shadows and I’ll check in on Robert on occasion.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I would agree. This is a big idea book and your other books were great books, or certainly the last book, Content Inc, in a lot of ways I think you were almost reporting on what is, whereas I think this book is more here’s what’s coming. That’s my assessment. I could be completely off, but that’s how it feels.
So early on in the book, you evoke one of my heroes Peter Drucker, talking about the purpose of a business. And actually that statement of the purpose of a business — to create, keep a customer — is probably the genesis of Duct Tape Marketing, believe it or not. That book, the Practice of Management, had a lot to do with forming my thinking.
That obviously hasn’t changed, but how we go about doing that seems to have changed. So how does that play out in Killing Marketing.
Robert Rose: Well first of all, let me just tell you that if I didn’t love you already, now I love you even more by bringing in my hero Peter Drucker into the whole mix here. The Practice of Management is probably one of the fundamental reasons that I’m in the career that I am in today.
And you’re right. It’s absolutely this. That has not changed. It’s funny because where marketing is today has really lost sight of what Drucker was talking about. When he was talking about the purpose of a business, creating a customer, that idea has become so morphed these days into persuasion, right? It has transformed marketing into how do we find people and persuade them that our product or services is worth doing?
And what he was talking about was literally creating a customer from nothing. In other words, creating a customer that comes to their own conclusion that your product or service is worth their time or their money and that being the purpose of a business.
What we set out to talk about in this book was we started with this fundamental question, which was … And this was something that we borrowed and it’s a quote that’s been attributed to Mark Twain. There’s no evidence that he actually ever said it, which is that it’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for absolute sure that does.
And the question we opened up with was what if everything we know about marketing today is what’s holding us back? And we started down this path and what started to see were these companies. And we’ve seen the trends, how companies today are rebooting what it even means to be build an audience first and use that as a valuable way of creating customers so that marketing itself can become a profitable part of the business.
So instead of just being the department that makes pretty pictures or the department that spews out advertising or that makes cold calls or that tries to convert customers using all manner of collateral material, marketing the function actually becomes that which builds and creates customers, which we’re now calling audiences.
John Jantsch: So a big part of this obviously, from both of your backgrounds too, is this idea of content and content marketing. I mean is this an evolution of how we’re coming to think about content? I know we used to say content is king, that was kind of cool for a while.
And then I think in a lot of ways it’s become air for every sort of channel and element and, even as you suggest in your last book, a business model in itself. Is this another evolution of content marketing? We’re going to come back to that term, content marketing, but I’ll let you answer that first.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, I’ll take this one, Robert. I think that if we just look at the traditional, say definition, but how most organizations think about content marketing, it’s oh we’re going to create valuable, relevant and compelling content. We’re going to distribute that on a platform and we’re going to build an audience in some way and we’re going to sell our product or service, which by the way is fine.
That’s great. If you do that, your successful with it, that’s basically content marketing. I think the difference is what we talk about in Killing Marketing is you don’t have to limit it to just that. We think there’s something bigger, as Robert talked about and you talked about, this is a business model change.
We believe instead of setting up your marketing organization for interruption, like it’s basically been set up for the last 50 years, what if we set it up around groups of audiences that we get really close to, we build loyal and trusted relationships with, and we don’t just create one revenue stream. We create four, five. We talk about 10 different revenue streams in the book and what we’re seeing a lot of companies out there do, they’re starting to dip their toe in the water and they’re coming up with new products and services because they have these audiences that they never dreamed they would do before.
You know Robert talks about BabyCenter.com from Johnson and Johnson all the time and how they created this standalone media property that enables them to not only sell more of their stuff but to create more products and services that they never thought was possible.
Kraft has done the same thing with Kraft Food and Family. So those types of things that we’re seeing where you can actually say, oh if we build an audience that’s loyal and trusting to us, and they start to look to us for guidance, we can actually transform the business into something that we weren’t even prepared to do. And by the way, this model is in full effect right now with Amazon.com.
Just so you know. It’s happening. And by the way, Amazon will be the most valuable company probably inside of five years in the world. And they’re doing it because they’re so focused on their customers and they’re not just saying this is what we want to sell. They’re saying well, if we get really close to that customer, what are the possibilities? And of course Jeff Bezos is showing us what those possibilities are.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I think just even this week the whole we can deliver inside your home thing is actually … Hopefully you’ve read about that [crosstalk 00:10:02]. I think a lot of that has to be hey, if we do this thing that we think will be more convenient, it will actually let us sell security systems, for example. And I maybe didn’t lay that out right but again, the first thought was this will be a service or a better experience for our customers, oh and look, it allows us to do x.
Joe Pulizzi: Well, what they’re doing, they’re putting six and a half billion dollars into … I mean Amazon won an Academy Award this year, or an Emmy award this year, excuse me. Here’s an online book store that sells some level of technology and now is really the online version of Walmart, and they’re winning Emmy awards for the creation of original content.
But if you look at their investment in content, the six and a half billion that they’re putting into things like all their original programming, they’re looking at that as a marketing cost in order to sell more Prime memberships, which of course is about buying things. And so they look at the investment in original content that they’re serving over the Prime streaming service as a marketing cost for them. So they’re turning into an integrated media platform before our very eyes but they’re looking at it as a way of pulling in an audience that they can monetize in other ways.
John Jantsch: So I realize this is a dangerous question, given who I’m talking to, but is the term content marketing really the wrong the term?
Robert Rose: Sure. Fine. I mean, if you don’t like it. We’ve never been that attached to the term but we have yet to find a better one.
John Jantsch: Here’s what I mean by that. It’s not that content marketing itself is a bad term. It’s just that if we look at that as a form of marketing, like social media marketing or mobile marketing, that it really is just marketing that happens to use content.
Robert Rose: No. The difference in the two that you mentioned … I realize this is semantics at some level, but the two that you mentioned are channel based, right? So it’s like saying TV marketing or newspaper marketing when I say social media marketing or mobile marketing.
And so that would be where I would draw those differentiations. When we say content marketing, what we’re describing … Whether we’re describing it well or not is for debate, but what we’re describing is the methodology of using an owned media platform to integrate into the everything else you’re doing as a business, right? So it’s a using the idea of our ability to create compelling, wonderful, engaging, inspiring, thought leadership-orientated content as a means of changing the behavior of a consumer.
So, it’s something that gets infused into the broader marketing strategy. Now, what I would concede, and I’m sure Joe would agree, is that at some point content marketing as a separate idea becomes subsumed into the broader topic of marketing and it just becomes a different way that we call marketing.
John Jantsch: Because social media marketing requires content.
Robert Rose: Exactly right. So does TV marketing and so does newspaper marketing and so does PDF marketing and fax marketing and everything else, yeah.
John Jantsch: Fax marketing, wow.
Robert Rose: I did it. Oh, absolutely. That used to be very important.
John Jantsch: If I had a fax machine, I would probably still get some [crosstalk 00:13:20].
Robert Rose: It’s funny we say fax marketing. Social media, it’s just channels. There’s no strategic method — You can say there’s a strategic methodology behind it depending, again it is semantics. But the reason why we call it content marketing is it is right now a fundamentally different approach to most organizations. If you just call it marketing or marketing the way we think it should be, they don’t get it. So we have to call it something different today and in five years we might not have to.
John Jantsch: So some of what you talk about in Killing Marketing, or I guess I should ask this rather than state it, will it require a company to … Because of the change that I think, even if it’s a mindset change, that it requires, will it also require in some cases for them to maybe cannibalize today’s profits?
Robert Rose: You know that’s a really interesting question because there’s two sides to that. The one side, I think it’s a really interesting point you bring up, which is does it immediately lean toward to creating new products and services?
And that’s one of the biggest push backs, quite frankly, is that if done right when we look at content marketing, it starts to look a lot like more product development methodology than it does campaign or traditional marketing-related methodology because you’re building a product extensively that you’re trying to build an audience for and monetize in multiple ways. And so it looks very much like a product and so that’s a really interesting question when we start talking about does it cannibalize the efforts of what we’re doing elsewhere?
However, there’s a flip side of that, the other side of that is can it actually begin to improve the margins of what we’re doing for other things, right? So you look at a manufacturing company where they maybe be looking at really lean margins, but if they can start to integrate media into their business, which of course has and enjoys quite high margins, can they actually add a pointer to their total bottom line by actually monetizing content and thought leadership and other things in a different way.
So I think there’s an opportunity for both things to be true.
John Jantsch: I can’t think of a great example but years ago the newspapers, they saw the train coming right at them but then they hung on to classified ads for example as a profit center because to just give them away, even though that train was heading towards them, was hard to do.
Robert Rose: John, that’s actually a great example. I mean I grew up in magazine publishing and we were so afraid … The executives in my company were so afraid to say okay, well we can do all this web stuff but make sure that we still sell those print pages. That’s the most important thing. So we deliberately were not cannibalizing our business.
We were trying to add oh, other lines, this will be great, but this is the core … I think that’s the problem with what newspapers didn’t do and magazine publishing, because they had the processes, they had the people, they had the content, they had the audience. They had everything to do what an Amazon.com is doing today. But they didn’t do it because they were afraid of cannibalization and I think today, you absolutely have to run at it and say we have to cannibalize ourselves before somebody else does.
Joe Pulizzi: And it’s wonder, you know, looking at it from the small business side for just a moment. One of the entrepreneurs that I admire most out there is Brian Clark and what he’s been able to do with CopyBlogger. If you look at what he started with, he built a media company first that had nice, wonderful high margins and built that media company.
And now he’s started to build products alongside that and become this integrated product and media company where his audience is telling him what products to sell, software, software as a service, other types of services that they’re now starting to offer, and education, etc.
Where he can now go into what might be a lower margin business because he started in such a high margin business. So there’s really interesting opportunities there but, to your point, it becomes interesting as to where you start cannibalizing from one or the other.
Robert Rose: I know a business called Duct Tape Marketing that’s done the same thing.
John Jantsch: Brian and I talk about this a lot. And Brian … I mean it’s great to call people that figured this out, did it and then everybody said they’re geniuses. I mean Brian would be the first to admit he wasn’t really sure where he was headed with this and then all of sudden it was like, oh, look what we did. Even some of the examples in your book are really companies that it wasn’t so much intentional as much as it was just trying to ride what seemed to be going on. And then all of a sudden woke up one day and went, wait a minute. This is a whole other business.
Robert Rose: Willingness to adapt is the key there.
Joe Pulizzi: I mean against the great example of Red Bull Media House. I know we talk about it all the time but that was a happy accident. Red Bull Media House becoming maybe one of the largest, most important sports media companies out there started because they wanted to do a print magazine at the racetrack. They wanted to do a show daily. That show daily turned into the Red Bull, which now has two million subscribers and then all the videos and the syndication and they’re having The New York Times and Wall Street Journal pay them money for some of their content.
I mean, that stuff happened from just an idea. So that’s how it mostly happens.
John Jantsch: So, let’s get to another really big idea in this book. I talked to a lot of marketers who still view marketing as an expense. Of course, I tried to convince them it’s an investment. But you’re going to suggest that it’s a profit center or can be a profit center.
Robert Rose: Absolutely, it can be both. It can be all of those things, right? I mean one of the things that we talk through in the book is not only … Because a lot of companies aren’t ready quite frankly for the revenue opportunities that building a media platform might provide. They’re looking simply at how do they make their marketing more efficient and a more efficient expense or, to your point, an investment.
And there are a lot of ways to do that. One of them of course is to start to leverage the asset that you call audience, when you start looking at how leveraging the value of an audience can help make the rest of your marketing better. Just a simple example. If you’ve got a viable subscribed and trusting audience, using that data to for example upload it to LinkedIn or Facebook or use it for retargeting, and make your media buy that you’re doing, you know your regular advertising media buy, more efficient.
And if you can save money because you’ve got the data that you’re using to target advertising in a more relevant way, well that’s making marketing more efficient and it’s taking more advantage of the investment that you’re putting in marketing more broadly.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah I’d just add on to that what we find, what Robert and I find when we go into these enterprises is that they absolutely aren’t even thinking about the possibilities of what happens when you have a loyal audience of subscribers. And just want them to think a little bit differently and that’s when we throw examples like hey, have you seen what SalesForce has done?
They’ve created maybe one of the most valuable events in the world called DreamForce, 175,000 people in San Francisco every year. And they started it from just a simple customer data base. If that were sold, it will sell for almost a billion dollars, I think, just that event. So it’s amazing what can happen and the problem is ourselves. We’re getting in the way. We’re not thinking about it when wow we’re doing these activities as part of marketing.
We can be paying for marketing plus … And Robert is right. Some companies aren’t ready but I think the bigger issue is they’re just not even thinking about it. That’s the problem.
John Jantsch: That kind of leads me in my next question. In your view, are there certain kinds of companies or companies that are set up a certain way or maybe they’re a service or a product that they’re maybe more ready to effectively take advantage of this approach?
Joe Pulizzi: I’ll start, Robert, and then you can go. From what I’ve seen … and Robert works with larger companies because I want to get his take, I work with a lot of the smaller companies. What I see in the larger companies, from a distance in a lot of cases, is that they can’t move the big ship. It’s very hard to cut through all the red tape and to get somebody that’s been 20, 30 years in marketing and go to them and say hey, we’d like to try this new, wacky thing. Can we go ahead and do that?
If you have a small business owner that believes that they need to be or they should be the leading expert in their industry over a particular content area to their audience, and if they do that, they could transform the business, they can transform their customers, help their customers lives, their jobs in some way. That is the lowest hanging fruit, in my opinion.
So, actually I think a lot of the innovation, even though all those big companies have in some cases unlimited budgets … From some small companies they look at us like wow, Nike and SalesForce, they have these unlimited budgets. But if you’re a small company, it’s easier for you to do this and start monetizing quickly. And I think you’re a great case study on that when you got started, John. I think we’re a great case study. In 2007, we didn’t have two nickels to rub together but then..
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John Jantsch: I have seen the future of marketing, and it is killing me. Well, no. That’s not really true, but in this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast I do speak with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, authors of Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Costs into Profit.
Fascinating, something that obviously applies to the mammoth Netflix and Amazons of the world, but I think that this is an approach that actually might apply to just about any business going today and how to get them think completely differently about everything that they do in marketing. Check it out.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guests, yes that’s plural, Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, and Robert Rose, the chief strategy advisor of the same. We’re gonna talk about the new book by both of them today called Killing Marketing: How Innovate Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit. So Joe, Robert, thanks for joining me.
Joe Pulizzi: Thanks for having us.
Robert Rose: John, thank you so much. Oh, this is super fun. Appreciate it.
John Jantsch: Yeah. So this is … How many books for you guys together? Like three or four?
Robert Rose: I think it says 70 something.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah. It’s in the 70s.
Robert Rose: Actually, believe it or not, this is only our second book together.
John Jantsch: Only your second one together. Okay.
Robert Rose: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Jantsch: Did you do this one different? I know in this book you’ve kind of got here’s Joe’s chapter. Here’s Robert’s chapter. That’s not what you did in the last one though, is it?
Joe Pulizzi: No, the last one was completely different. The last one really was Robert’s brain child and I sort of tagged along with him. And the different thing about this one is we sort of came up with this concept almost at the same time, like this story has to be told. And we both had different areas of focus that we wanted to focus on, which worked out great and now we, as you said, we just sort of said Joe, you take this one. Robert, you take this one.
And it worked great for the audio book, too, because then I didn’t have to do the whole thing by myself. So, there you go.
John Jantsch: So, Joe. Your relationship, is that the right word, with Content Marketing Institute has changed a little. Is that something you can talk about?
Robert Rose: Yes, Joe. Tell us all about Content Marketing Institute.
Joe Pulizzi: I guess we can sort of talk about it now, so it’s kind of going public. I’m moving out of an operational role. Always a part of CMI, always gonna be at Content Marketing World, our big event, but I am looking to do some different things and spend more time with the family and do some more travel with my family and that will start in January.
And I’m going to leave basically all my duties to Robert, thankfully. And he is going to carry the torch the rest of the way. So, it’s been a great run, 10 years with Content Marketing Institute. and of course I’ll always be the founder, I’ll always be a part of this thing. But we’ve got some opportunities today and I really just wanted to make life hard on Robert. So, this is the best way to do that.
John Jantsch: Plus you’re just probably tired of content, right?
Joe Pulizzi: Oh my god, I can’t tell ya how tired I am of content marketing. No, actually it’s funny. So this is my fifth book between Robert’s and my individual books. And this is the one I’m most excited about because I think we finally hit on something that is going to change most organizations, small, medium and large, and they don’t even know it.
So I’m leaving in maybe the high point and then I’ll just kind go off into the shadows and I’ll check in on Robert on occasion.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I would agree. This is a big idea book and your other books were great books, or certainly the last book, Content Inc, in a lot of ways I think you were almost reporting on what is, whereas I think this book is more here’s what’s coming. That’s my assessment. I could be completely off, but that’s how it feels.
So early on in the book, you evoke one of my heroes Peter Drucker, talking about the purpose of a business. And actually that statement of the purpose of a business — to create, keep a customer — is probably the genesis of Duct Tape Marketing, believe it or not. That book, the Practice of Management, had a lot to do with forming my thinking.
That obviously hasn’t changed, but how we go about doing that seems to have changed. So how does that play out in Killing Marketing.
Robert Rose: Well first of all, let me just tell you that if I didn’t love you already, now I love you even more by bringing in my hero Peter Drucker into the whole mix here. The Practice of Management is probably one of the fundamental reasons that I’m in the career that I am in today.
And you’re right. It’s absolutely this. That has not changed. It’s funny because where marketing is today has really lost sight of what Drucker was talking about. When he was talking about the purpose of a business, creating a customer, that idea has become so morphed these days into persuasion, right? It has transformed marketing into how do we find people and persuade them that our product or services is worth doing?
And what he was talking about was literally creating a customer from nothing. In other words, creating a customer that comes to their own conclusion that your product or service is worth their time or their money and that being the purpose of a business.
What we set out to talk about in this book was we started with this fundamental question, which was … And this was something that we borrowed and it’s a quote that’s been attributed to Mark Twain. There’s no evidence that he actually ever said it, which is that it’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for absolute sure that does.
And the question we opened up with was what if everything we know about marketing today is what’s holding us back? And we started down this path and what started to see were these companies. And we’ve seen the trends, how companies today are rebooting what it even means to be build an audience first and use that as a valuable way of creating customers so that marketing itself can become a profitable part of the business.
So instead of just being the department that makes pretty pictures or the department that spews out advertising or that makes cold calls or that tries to convert customers using all manner of collateral material, marketing the function actually becomes that which builds and creates customers, which we’re now calling audiences.
John Jantsch: So a big part of this obviously, from both of your backgrounds too, is this idea of content and content marketing. I mean is this an evolution of how we’re coming to think about content? I know we used to say content is king, that was kind of cool for a while.
And then I think in a lot of ways it’s become air for every sort of channel and element and, even as you suggest in your last book, a business model in itself. Is this another evolution of content marketing? We’re going to come back to that term, content marketing, but I’ll let you answer that first.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, I’ll take this one, Robert. I think that if we just look at the traditional, say definition, but how most organizations think about content marketing, it’s oh we’re going to create valuable, relevant and compelling content. We’re going to distribute that on a platform and we’re going to build an audience in some way and we’re going to sell our product or service, which by the way is fine.
That’s great. If you do that, your successful with it, that’s basically content marketing. I think the difference is what we talk about in Killing Marketing is you don’t have to limit it to just that. We think there’s something bigger, as Robert talked about and you talked about, this is a business model change.
We believe instead of setting up your marketing organization for interruption, like it’s basically been set up for the last 50 years, what if we set it up around groups of audiences that we get really close to, we build loyal and trusted relationships with, and we don’t just create one revenue stream. We create four, five. We talk about 10 different revenue streams in the book and what we’re seeing a lot of companies out there do, they’re starting to dip their toe in the water and they’re coming up with new products and services because they have these audiences that they never dreamed they would do before.
You know Robert talks about BabyCenter.com from Johnson and Johnson all the time and how they created this standalone media property that enables them to not only sell more of their stuff but to create more products and services that they never thought was possible.
Kraft has done the same thing with Kraft Food and Family. So those types of things that we’re seeing where you can actually say, oh if we build an audience that’s loyal and trusting to us, and they start to look to us for guidance, we can actually transform the business into something that we weren’t even prepared to do. And by the way, this model is in full effect right now with Amazon.com.
Just so you know. It’s happening. And by the way, Amazon will be the most valuable company probably inside of five years in the world. And they’re doing it because they’re so focused on their customers and they’re not just saying this is what we want to sell. They’re saying well, if we get really close to that customer, what are the possibilities? And of course Jeff Bezos is showing us what those possibilities are.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I think just even this week the whole we can deliver inside your home thing is actually … Hopefully you’ve read about that [crosstalk 00:10:02]. I think a lot of that has to be hey, if we do this thing that we think will be more convenient, it will actually let us sell security systems, for example. And I maybe didn’t lay that out right but again, the first thought was this will be a service or a better experience for our customers, oh and look, it allows us to do x.
Joe Pulizzi: Well, what they’re doing, they’re putting six and a half billion dollars into … I mean Amazon won an Academy Award this year, or an Emmy award this year, excuse me. Here’s an online book store that sells some level of technology and now is really the online version of Walmart, and they’re winning Emmy awards for the creation of original content.
But if you look at their investment in content, the six and a half billion that they’re putting into things like all their original programming, they’re looking at that as a marketing cost in order to sell more Prime memberships, which of course is about buying things. And so they look at the investment in original content that they’re serving over the Prime streaming service as a marketing cost for them. So they’re turning into an integrated media platform before our very eyes but they’re looking at it as a way of pulling in an audience that they can monetize in other ways.
John Jantsch: So I realize this is a dangerous question, given who I’m talking to, but is the term content marketing really the wrong the term?
Robert Rose: Sure. Fine. I mean, if you don’t like it. We’ve never been that attached to the term but we have yet to find a better one.
John Jantsch: Here’s what I mean by that. It’s not that content marketing itself is a bad term. It’s just that if we look at that as a form of marketing, like social media marketing or mobile marketing, that it really is just marketing that happens to use content.
Robert Rose: No. The difference in the two that you mentioned … I realize this is semantics at some level, but the two that you mentioned are channel based, right? So it’s like saying TV marketing or newspaper marketing when I say social media marketing or mobile marketing.
And so that would be where I would draw those differentiations. When we say content marketing, what we’re describing … Whether we’re describing it well or not is for debate, but what we’re describing is the methodology of using an owned media platform to integrate into the everything else you’re doing as a business, right? So it’s a using the idea of our ability to create compelling, wonderful, engaging, inspiring, thought leadership-orientated content as a means of changing the behavior of a consumer.
So, it’s something that gets infused into the broader marketing strategy. Now, what I would concede, and I’m sure Joe would agree, is that at some point content marketing as a separate idea becomes subsumed into the broader topic of marketing and it just becomes a different way that we call marketing.
John Jantsch: Because social media marketing requires content.
Robert Rose: Exactly right. So does TV marketing and so does newspaper marketing and so does PDF marketing and fax marketing and everything else, yeah.
John Jantsch: Fax marketing, wow.
Robert Rose: I did it. Oh, absolutely. That used to be very important.
John Jantsch: If I had a fax machine, I would probably still get some [crosstalk 00:13:20].
Robert Rose: It’s funny we say fax marketing. Social media, it’s just channels. There’s no strategic method — You can say there’s a strategic methodology behind it depending, again it is semantics. But the reason why we call it content marketing is it is right now a fundamentally different approach to most organizations. If you just call it marketing or marketing the way we think it should be, they don’t get it. So we have to call it something different today and in five years we might not have to.
John Jantsch: So some of what you talk about in Killing Marketing, or I guess I should ask this rather than state it, will it require a company to … Because of the change that I think, even if it’s a mindset change, that it requires, will it also require in some cases for them to maybe cannibalize today’s profits?
Robert Rose: You know that’s a really interesting question because there’s two sides to that. The one side, I think it’s a really interesting point you bring up, which is does it immediately lean toward to creating new products and services?
And that’s one of the biggest push backs, quite frankly, is that if done right when we look at content marketing, it starts to look a lot like more product development methodology than it does campaign or traditional marketing-related methodology because you’re building a product extensively that you’re trying to build an audience for and monetize in multiple ways. And so it looks very much like a product and so that’s a really interesting question when we start talking about does it cannibalize the efforts of what we’re doing elsewhere?
However, there’s a flip side of that, the other side of that is can it actually begin to improve the margins of what we’re doing for other things, right? So you look at a manufacturing company where they maybe be looking at really lean margins, but if they can start to integrate media into their business, which of course has and enjoys quite high margins, can they actually add a pointer to their total bottom line by actually monetizing content and thought leadership and other things in a different way.
So I think there’s an opportunity for both things to be true.
John Jantsch: I can’t think of a great example but years ago the newspapers, they saw the train coming right at them but then they hung on to classified ads for example as a profit center because to just give them away, even though that train was heading towards them, was hard to do.
Robert Rose: John, that’s actually a great example. I mean I grew up in magazine publishing and we were so afraid … The executives in my company were so afraid to say okay, well we can do all this web stuff but make sure that we still sell those print pages. That’s the most important thing. So we deliberately were not cannibalizing our business.
We were trying to add oh, other lines, this will be great, but this is the core … I think that’s the problem with what newspapers didn’t do and magazine publishing, because they had the processes, they had the people, they had the content, they had the audience. They had everything to do what an Amazon.com is doing today. But they didn’t do it because they were afraid of cannibalization and I think today, you absolutely have to run at it and say we have to cannibalize ourselves before somebody else does.
Joe Pulizzi: And it’s wonder, you know, looking at it from the small business side for just a moment. One of the entrepreneurs that I admire most out there is Brian Clark and what he’s been able to do with CopyBlogger. If you look at what he started with, he built a media company first that had nice, wonderful high margins and built that media company.
And now he’s started to build products alongside that and become this integrated product and media company where his audience is telling him what products to sell, software, software as a service, other types of services that they’re now starting to offer, and education, etc.
Where he can now go into what might be a lower margin business because he started in such a high margin business. So there’s really interesting opportunities there but, to your point, it becomes interesting as to where you start cannibalizing from one or the other.
Robert Rose: I know a business called Duct Tape Marketing that’s done the same thing.
John Jantsch: Brian and I talk about this a lot. And Brian … I mean it’s great to call people that figured this out, did it and then everybody said they’re geniuses. I mean Brian would be the first to admit he wasn’t really sure where he was headed with this and then all of sudden it was like, oh, look what we did. Even some of the examples in your book are really companies that it wasn’t so much intentional as much as it was just trying to ride what seemed to be going on. And then all of a sudden woke up one day and went, wait a minute. This is a whole other business.
Robert Rose: Willingness to adapt is the key there.
Joe Pulizzi: I mean against the great example of Red Bull Media House. I know we talk about it all the time but that was a happy accident. Red Bull Media House becoming maybe one of the largest, most important sports media companies out there started because they wanted to do a print magazine at the racetrack. They wanted to do a show daily. That show daily turned into the Red Bull, which now has two million subscribers and then all the videos and the syndication and they’re having The New York Times and Wall Street Journal pay them money for some of their content.
I mean, that stuff happened from just an idea. So that’s how it mostly happens.
John Jantsch: So, let’s get to another really big idea in this book. I talked to a lot of marketers who still view marketing as an expense. Of course, I tried to convince them it’s an investment. But you’re going to suggest that it’s a profit center or can be a profit center.
Robert Rose: Absolutely, it can be both. It can be all of those things, right? I mean one of the things that we talk through in the book is not only … Because a lot of companies aren’t ready quite frankly for the revenue opportunities that building a media platform might provide. They’re looking simply at how do they make their marketing more efficient and a more efficient expense or, to your point, an investment.
And there are a lot of ways to do that. One of them of course is to start to leverage the asset that you call audience, when you start looking at how leveraging the value of an audience can help make the rest of your marketing better. Just a simple example. If you’ve got a viable subscribed and trusting audience, using that data to for example upload it to LinkedIn or Facebook or use it for retargeting, and make your media buy that you’re doing, you know your regular advertising media buy, more efficient.
And if you can save money because you’ve got the data that you’re using to target advertising in a more relevant way, well that’s making marketing more efficient and it’s taking more advantage of the investment that you’re putting in marketing more broadly.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah I’d just add on to that what we find, what Robert and I find when we go into these enterprises is that they absolutely aren’t even thinking about the possibilities of what happens when you have a loyal audience of subscribers. And just want them to think a little bit differently and that’s when we throw examples like hey, have you seen what SalesForce has done?
They’ve created maybe one of the most valuable events in the world called DreamForce, 175,000 people in San Francisco every year. And they started it from just a simple customer data base. If that were sold, it will sell for almost a billion dollars, I think, just that event. So it’s amazing what can happen and the problem is ourselves. We’re getting in the way. We’re not thinking about it when wow we’re doing these activities as part of marketing.
We can be paying for marketing plus … And Robert is right. Some companies aren’t ready but I think the bigger issue is they’re just not even thinking about it. That’s the problem.
John Jantsch: That kind of leads me in my next question. In your view, are there certain kinds of companies or companies that are set up a certain way or maybe they’re a service or a product that they’re maybe more ready to effectively take advantage of this approach?
Joe Pulizzi: I’ll start, Robert, and then you can go. From what I’ve seen … and Robert works with larger companies because I want to get his take, I work with a lot of the smaller companies. What I see in the larger companies, from a distance in a lot of cases, is that they can’t move the big ship. It’s very hard to cut through all the red tape and to get somebody that’s been 20, 30 years in marketing and go to them and say hey, we’d like to try this new, wacky thing. Can we go ahead and do that?
If you have a small business owner that believes that they need to be or they should be the leading expert in their industry over a particular content area to their audience, and if they do that, they could transform the business, they can transform their customers, help their customers lives, their jobs in some way. That is the lowest hanging fruit, in my opinion.
So, actually I think a lot of the innovation, even though all those big companies have in some cases unlimited budgets … From some small companies they look at us like wow, Nike and SalesForce, they have these unlimited budgets. But if you’re a small company, it’s easier for you to do this and start monetizing quickly. And I think you’re a great case study on that when you got started, John. I think we’re a great case study. In 2007, we didn’t have two nickels to rub together but then..
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John Jantsch: I have seen the future of marketing, and it is killing me. Well, no. That’s not really true, but in this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast I do speak with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, authors of Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Costs into Profit.
Fascinating, something that obviously applies to the mammoth Netflix and Amazons of the world, but I think that this is an approach that actually might apply to just about any business going today and how to get them think completely differently about everything that they do in marketing. Check it out.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guests, yes that’s plural, Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, and Robert Rose, the chief strategy advisor of the same. We’re gonna talk about the new book by both of them today called Killing Marketing: How Innovate Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit. So Joe, Robert, thanks for joining me.
Joe Pulizzi: Thanks for having us.
Robert Rose: John, thank you so much. Oh, this is super fun. Appreciate it.
John Jantsch: Yeah. So this is … How many books for you guys together? Like three or four?
Robert Rose: I think it says 70 something.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah. It’s in the 70s.
Robert Rose: Actually, believe it or not, this is only our second book together.
John Jantsch: Only your second one together. Okay.
Robert Rose: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Jantsch: Did you do this one different? I know in this book you’ve kind of got here’s Joe’s chapter. Here’s Robert’s chapter. That’s not what you did in the last one though, is it?
Joe Pulizzi: No, the last one was completely different. The last one really was Robert’s brain child and I sort of tagged along with him. And the different thing about this one is we sort of came up with this concept almost at the same time, like this story has to be told. And we both had different areas of focus that we wanted to focus on, which worked out great and now we, as you said, we just sort of said Joe, you take this one. Robert, you take this one.
And it worked great for the audio book, too, because then I didn’t have to do the whole thing by myself. So, there you go.
John Jantsch: So, Joe. Your relationship, is that the right word, with Content Marketing Institute has changed a little. Is that something you can talk about?
Robert Rose: Yes, Joe. Tell us all about Content Marketing Institute.
Joe Pulizzi: I guess we can sort of talk about it now, so it’s kind of going public. I’m moving out of an operational role. Always a part of CMI, always gonna be at Content Marketing World, our big event, but I am looking to do some different things and spend more time with the family and do some more travel with my family and that will start in January.
And I’m going to leave basically all my duties to Robert, thankfully. And he is going to carry the torch the rest of the way. So, it’s been a great run, 10 years with Content Marketing Institute. and of course I’ll always be the founder, I’ll always be a part of this thing. But we’ve got some opportunities today and I really just wanted to make life hard on Robert. So, this is the best way to do that.
John Jantsch: Plus you’re just probably tired of content, right?
Joe Pulizzi: Oh my god, I can’t tell ya how tired I am of content marketing. No, actually it’s funny. So this is my fifth book between Robert’s and my individual books. And this is the one I’m most excited about because I think we finally hit on something that is going to change most organizations, small, medium and large, and they don’t even know it.
So I’m leaving in maybe the high point and then I’ll just kind go off into the shadows and I’ll check in on Robert on occasion.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I would agree. This is a big idea book and your other books were great books, or certainly the last book, Content Inc, in a lot of ways I think you were almost reporting on what is, whereas I think this book is more here’s what’s coming. That’s my assessment. I could be completely off, but that’s how it feels.
So early on in the book, you evoke one of my heroes Peter Drucker, talking about the purpose of a business. And actually that statement of the purpose of a business — to create, keep a customer — is probably the genesis of Duct Tape Marketing, believe it or not. That book, the Practice of Management, had a lot to do with forming my thinking.
That obviously hasn’t changed, but how we go about doing that seems to have changed. So how does that play out in Killing Marketing.
Robert Rose: Well first of all, let me just tell you that if I didn’t love you already, now I love you even more by bringing in my hero Peter Drucker into the whole mix here. The Practice of Management is probably one of the fundamental reasons that I’m in the career that I am in today.
And you’re right. It’s absolutely this. That has not changed. It’s funny because where marketing is today has really lost sight of what Drucker was talking about. When he was talking about the purpose of a business, creating a customer, that idea has become so morphed these days into persuasion, right? It has transformed marketing into how do we find people and persuade them that our product or services is worth doing?
And what he was talking about was literally creating a customer from nothing. In other words, creating a customer that comes to their own conclusion that your product or service is worth their time or their money and that being the purpose of a business.
What we set out to talk about in this book was we started with this fundamental question, which was … And this was something that we borrowed and it’s a quote that’s been attributed to Mark Twain. There’s no evidence that he actually ever said it, which is that it’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for absolute sure that does.
And the question we opened up with was what if everything we know about marketing today is what’s holding us back? And we started down this path and what started to see were these companies. And we’ve seen the trends, how companies today are rebooting what it even means to be build an audience first and use that as a valuable way of creating customers so that marketing itself can become a profitable part of the business.
So instead of just being the department that makes pretty pictures or the department that spews out advertising or that makes cold calls or that tries to convert customers using all manner of collateral material, marketing the function actually becomes that which builds and creates customers, which we’re now calling audiences.
John Jantsch: So a big part of this obviously, from both of your backgrounds too, is this idea of content and content marketing. I mean is this an evolution of how we’re coming to think about content? I know we used to say content is king, that was kind of cool for a while.
And then I think in a lot of ways it’s become air for every sort of channel and element and, even as you suggest in your last book, a business model in itself. Is this another evolution of content marketing? We’re going to come back to that term, content marketing, but I’ll let you answer that first.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, I’ll take this one, Robert. I think that if we just look at the traditional, say definition, but how most organizations think about content marketing, it’s oh we’re going to create valuable, relevant and compelling content. We’re going to distribute that on a platform and we’re going to build an audience in some way and we’re going to sell our product or service, which by the way is fine.
That’s great. If you do that, your successful with it, that’s basically content marketing. I think the difference is what we talk about in Killing Marketing is you don’t have to limit it to just that. We think there’s something bigger, as Robert talked about and you talked about, this is a business model change.
We believe instead of setting up your marketing organization for interruption, like it’s basically been set up for the last 50 years, what if we set it up around groups of audiences that we get really close to, we build loyal and trusted relationships with, and we don’t just create one revenue stream. We create four, five. We talk about 10 different revenue streams in the book and what we’re seeing a lot of companies out there do, they’re starting to dip their toe in the water and they’re coming up with new products and services because they have these audiences that they never dreamed they would do before.
You know Robert talks about BabyCenter.com from Johnson and Johnson all the time and how they created this standalone media property that enables them to not only sell more of their stuff but to create more products and services that they never thought was possible.
Kraft has done the same thing with Kraft Food and Family. So those types of things that we’re seeing where you can actually say, oh if we build an audience that’s loyal and trusting to us, and they start to look to us for guidance, we can actually transform the business into something that we weren’t even prepared to do. And by the way, this model is in full effect right now with Amazon.com.
Just so you know. It’s happening. And by the way, Amazon will be the most valuable company probably inside of five years in the world. And they’re doing it because they’re so focused on their customers and they’re not just saying this is what we want to sell. They’re saying well, if we get really close to that customer, what are the possibilities? And of course Jeff Bezos is showing us what those possibilities are.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I think just even this week the whole we can deliver inside your home thing is actually … Hopefully you’ve read about that [crosstalk 00:10:02]. I think a lot of that has to be hey, if we do this thing that we think will be more convenient, it will actually let us sell security systems, for example. And I maybe didn’t lay that out right but again, the first thought was this will be a service or a better experience for our customers, oh and look, it allows us to do x.
Joe Pulizzi: Well, what they’re doing, they’re putting six and a half billion dollars into … I mean Amazon won an Academy Award this year, or an Emmy award this year, excuse me. Here’s an online book store that sells some level of technology and now is really the online version of Walmart, and they’re winning Emmy awards for the creation of original content.
But if you look at their investment in content, the six and a half billion that they’re putting into things like all their original programming, they’re looking at that as a marketing cost in order to sell more Prime memberships, which of course is about buying things. And so they look at the investment in original content that they’re serving over the Prime streaming service as a marketing cost for them. So they’re turning into an integrated media platform before our very eyes but they’re looking at it as a way of pulling in an audience that they can monetize in other ways.
John Jantsch: So I realize this is a dangerous question, given who I’m talking to, but is the term content marketing really the wrong the term?
Robert Rose: Sure. Fine. I mean, if you don’t like it. We’ve never been that attached to the term but we have yet to find a better one.
John Jantsch: Here’s what I mean by that. It’s not that content marketing itself is a bad term. It’s just that if we look at that as a form of marketing, like social media marketing or mobile marketing, that it really is just marketing that happens to use content.
Robert Rose: No. The difference in the two that you mentioned … I realize this is semantics at some level, but the two that you mentioned are channel based, right? So it’s like saying TV marketing or newspaper marketing when I say social media marketing or mobile marketing.
And so that would be where I would draw those differentiations. When we say content marketing, what we’re describing … Whether we’re describing it well or not is for debate, but what we’re describing is the methodology of using an owned media platform to integrate into the everything else you’re doing as a business, right? So it’s a using the idea of our ability to create compelling, wonderful, engaging, inspiring, thought leadership-orientated content as a means of changing the behavior of a consumer.
So, it’s something that gets infused into the broader marketing strategy. Now, what I would concede, and I’m sure Joe would agree, is that at some point content marketing as a separate idea becomes subsumed into the broader topic of marketing and it just becomes a different way that we call marketing.
John Jantsch: Because social media marketing requires content.
Robert Rose: Exactly right. So does TV marketing and so does newspaper marketing and so does PDF marketing and fax marketing and everything else, yeah.
John Jantsch: Fax marketing, wow.
Robert Rose: I did it. Oh, absolutely. That used to be very important.
John Jantsch: If I had a fax machine, I would probably still get some [crosstalk 00:13:20].
Robert Rose: It’s funny we say fax marketing. Social media, it’s just channels. There’s no strategic method — You can say there’s a strategic methodology behind it depending, again it is semantics. But the reason why we call it content marketing is it is right now a fundamentally different approach to most organizations. If you just call it marketing or marketing the way we think it should be, they don’t get it. So we have to call it something different today and in five years we might not have to.
John Jantsch: So some of what you talk about in Killing Marketing, or I guess I should ask this rather than state it, will it require a company to … Because of the change that I think, even if it’s a mindset change, that it requires, will it also require in some cases for them to maybe cannibalize today’s profits?
Robert Rose: You know that’s a really interesting question because there’s two sides to that. The one side, I think it’s a really interesting point you bring up, which is does it immediately lean toward to creating new products and services?
And that’s one of the biggest push backs, quite frankly, is that if done right when we look at content marketing, it starts to look a lot like more product development methodology than it does campaign or traditional marketing-related methodology because you’re building a product extensively that you’re trying to build an audience for and monetize in multiple ways. And so it looks very much like a product and so that’s a really interesting question when we start talking about does it cannibalize the efforts of what we’re doing elsewhere?
However, there’s a flip side of that, the other side of that is can it actually begin to improve the margins of what we’re doing for other things, right? So you look at a manufacturing company where they maybe be looking at really lean margins, but if they can start to integrate media into their business, which of course has and enjoys quite high margins, can they actually add a pointer to their total bottom line by actually monetizing content and thought leadership and other things in a different way.
So I think there’s an opportunity for both things to be true.
John Jantsch: I can’t think of a great example but years ago the newspapers, they saw the train coming right at them but then they hung on to classified ads for example as a profit center because to just give them away, even though that train was heading towards them, was hard to do.
Robert Rose: John, that’s actually a great example. I mean I grew up in magazine publishing and we were so afraid … The executives in my company were so afraid to say okay, well we can do all this web stuff but make sure that we still sell those print pages. That’s the most important thing. So we deliberately were not cannibalizing our business.
We were trying to add oh, other lines, this will be great, but this is the core … I think that’s the problem with what newspapers didn’t do and magazine publishing, because they had the processes, they had the people, they had the content, they had the audience. They had everything to do what an Amazon.com is doing today. But they didn’t do it because they were afraid of cannibalization and I think today, you absolutely have to run at it and say we have to cannibalize ourselves before somebody else does.
Joe Pulizzi: And it’s wonder, you know, looking at it from the small business side for just a moment. One of the entrepreneurs that I admire most out there is Brian Clark and what he’s been able to do with CopyBlogger. If you look at what he started with, he built a media company first that had nice, wonderful high margins and built that media company.
And now he’s started to build products alongside that and become this integrated product and media company where his audience is telling him what products to sell, software, software as a service, other types of services that they’re now starting to offer, and education, etc.
Where he can now go into what might be a lower margin business because he started in such a high margin business. So there’s really interesting opportunities there but, to your point, it becomes interesting as to where you start cannibalizing from one or the other.
Robert Rose: I know a business called Duct Tape Marketing that’s done the same thing.
John Jantsch: Brian and I talk about this a lot. And Brian … I mean it’s great to call people that figured this out, did it and then everybody said they’re geniuses. I mean Brian would be the first to admit he wasn’t really sure where he was headed with this and then all of sudden it was like, oh, look what we did. Even some of the examples in your book are really companies that it wasn’t so much intentional as much as it was just trying to ride what seemed to be going on. And then all of a sudden woke up one day and went, wait a minute. This is a whole other business.
Robert Rose: Willingness to adapt is the key there.
Joe Pulizzi: I mean against the great example of Red Bull Media House. I know we talk about it all the time but that was a happy accident. Red Bull Media House becoming maybe one of the largest, most important sports media companies out there started because they wanted to do a print magazine at the racetrack. They wanted to do a show daily. That show daily turned into the Red Bull, which now has two million subscribers and then all the videos and the syndication and they’re having The New York Times and Wall Street Journal pay them money for some of their content.
I mean, that stuff happened from just an idea. So that’s how it mostly happens.
John Jantsch: So, let’s get to another really big idea in this book. I talked to a lot of marketers who still view marketing as an expense. Of course, I tried to convince them it’s an investment. But you’re going to suggest that it’s a profit center or can be a profit center.
Robert Rose: Absolutely, it can be both. It can be all of those things, right? I mean one of the things that we talk through in the book is not only … Because a lot of companies aren’t ready quite frankly for the revenue opportunities that building a media platform might provide. They’re looking simply at how do they make their marketing more efficient and a more efficient expense or, to your point, an investment.
And there are a lot of ways to do that. One of them of course is to start to leverage the asset that you call audience, when you start looking at how leveraging the value of an audience can help make the rest of your marketing better. Just a simple example. If you’ve got a viable subscribed and trusting audience, using that data to for example upload it to LinkedIn or Facebook or use it for retargeting, and make your media buy that you’re doing, you know your regular advertising media buy, more efficient.
And if you can save money because you’ve got the data that you’re using to target advertising in a more relevant way, well that’s making marketing more efficient and it’s taking more advantage of the investment that you’re putting in marketing more broadly.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah I’d just add on to that what we find, what Robert and I find when we go into these enterprises is that they absolutely aren’t even thinking about the possibilities of what happens when you have a loyal audience of subscribers. And just want them to think a little bit differently and that’s when we throw examples like hey, have you seen what SalesForce has done?
They’ve created maybe one of the most valuable events in the world called DreamForce, 175,000 people in San Francisco every year. And they started it from just a simple customer data base. If that were sold, it will sell for almost a billion dollars, I think, just that event. So it’s amazing what can happen and the problem is ourselves. We’re getting in the way. We’re not thinking about it when wow we’re doing these activities as part of marketing.
We can be paying for marketing plus … And Robert is right. Some companies aren’t ready but I think the bigger issue is they’re just not even thinking about it. That’s the problem.
John Jantsch: That kind of leads me in my next question. In your view, are there certain kinds of companies or companies that are set up a certain way or maybe they’re a service or a product that they’re maybe more ready to effectively take advantage of this approach?
Joe Pulizzi: I’ll start, Robert, and then you can go. From what I’ve seen … and Robert works with larger companies because I want to get his take, I work with a lot of the smaller companies. What I see in the larger companies, from a distance in a lot of cases, is that they can’t move the big ship. It’s very hard to cut through all the red tape and to get somebody that’s been 20, 30 years in marketing and go to them and say hey, we’d like to try this new, wacky thing. Can we go ahead and do that?
If you have a small business owner that believes that they need to be or they should be the leading expert in their industry over a particular content area to their audience, and if they do that, they could transform the business, they can transform their customers, help their customers lives, their jobs in some way. That is the lowest hanging fruit, in my opinion.
So, actually I think a lot of the innovation, even though all those big companies have in some cases unlimited budgets … From some small companies they look at us like wow, Nike and SalesForce, they have these unlimited budgets. But if you’re a small company, it’s easier for you to do this and start monetizing quickly. And I think you’re a great case study on that when you got started, John. I think we’re a great case study. In 2007, we didn’t have two nickels to rub together but then..
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Transcript of How to Turn Marketing Costs Into Profit
Transcript of How to Turn Marketing Costs Into Profit
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John Jantsch: I have seen the future of marketing, and it is killing me. Well, no. That’s not really true, but in this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast I do speak with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, authors of Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Costs into Profit.
Fascinating, something that obviously applies to the mammoth Netflix and Amazons of the world, but I think that this is an approach that actually might apply to just about any business going today and how to get them think completely differently about everything that they do in marketing. Check it out.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guests, yes that’s plural, Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, and Robert Rose, the chief strategy advisor of the same. We’re gonna talk about the new book by both of them today called Killing Marketing: How Innovate Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit. So Joe, Robert, thanks for joining me.
Joe Pulizzi: Thanks for having us.
Robert Rose: John, thank you so much. Oh, this is super fun. Appreciate it.
John Jantsch: Yeah. So this is … How many books for you guys together? Like three or four?
Robert Rose: I think it says 70 something.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah. It’s in the 70s.
Robert Rose: Actually, believe it or not, this is only our second book together.
John Jantsch: Only your second one together. Okay.
Robert Rose: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Jantsch: Did you do this one different? I know in this book you’ve kind of got here’s Joe’s chapter. Here’s Robert’s chapter. That’s not what you did in the last one though, is it?
Joe Pulizzi: No, the last one was completely different. The last one really was Robert’s brain child and I sort of tagged along with him. And the different thing about this one is we sort of came up with this concept almost at the same time, like this story has to be told. And we both had different areas of focus that we wanted to focus on, which worked out great and now we, as you said, we just sort of said Joe, you take this one. Robert, you take this one.
And it worked great for the audio book, too, because then I didn’t have to do the whole thing by myself. So, there you go.
John Jantsch: So, Joe. Your relationship, is that the right word, with Content Marketing Institute has changed a little. Is that something you can talk about?
Robert Rose: Yes, Joe. Tell us all about Content Marketing Institute.
Joe Pulizzi: I guess we can sort of talk about it now, so it’s kind of going public. I’m moving out of an operational role. Always a part of CMI, always gonna be at Content Marketing World, our big event, but I am looking to do some different things and spend more time with the family and do some more travel with my family and that will start in January.
And I’m going to leave basically all my duties to Robert, thankfully. And he is going to carry the torch the rest of the way. So, it’s been a great run, 10 years with Content Marketing Institute. and of course I’ll always be the founder, I’ll always be a part of this thing. But we’ve got some opportunities today and I really just wanted to make life hard on Robert. So, this is the best way to do that.
John Jantsch: Plus you’re just probably tired of content, right?
Joe Pulizzi: Oh my god, I can’t tell ya how tired I am of content marketing. No, actually it’s funny. So this is my fifth book between Robert’s and my individual books. And this is the one I’m most excited about because I think we finally hit on something that is going to change most organizations, small, medium and large, and they don’t even know it.
So I’m leaving in maybe the high point and then I’ll just kind go off into the shadows and I’ll check in on Robert on occasion.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I would agree. This is a big idea book and your other books were great books, or certainly the last book, Content Inc, in a lot of ways I think you were almost reporting on what is, whereas I think this book is more here’s what’s coming. That’s my assessment. I could be completely off, but that’s how it feels.
So early on in the book, you evoke one of my heroes Peter Drucker, talking about the purpose of a business. And actually that statement of the purpose of a business — to create, keep a customer — is probably the genesis of Duct Tape Marketing, believe it or not. That book, the Practice of Management, had a lot to do with forming my thinking.
That obviously hasn’t changed, but how we go about doing that seems to have changed. So how does that play out in Killing Marketing.
Robert Rose: Well first of all, let me just tell you that if I didn’t love you already, now I love you even more by bringing in my hero Peter Drucker into the whole mix here. The Practice of Management is probably one of the fundamental reasons that I’m in the career that I am in today.
And you’re right. It’s absolutely this. That has not changed. It’s funny because where marketing is today has really lost sight of what Drucker was talking about. When he was talking about the purpose of a business, creating a customer, that idea has become so morphed these days into persuasion, right? It has transformed marketing into how do we find people and persuade them that our product or services is worth doing?
And what he was talking about was literally creating a customer from nothing. In other words, creating a customer that comes to their own conclusion that your product or service is worth their time or their money and that being the purpose of a business.
What we set out to talk about in this book was we started with this fundamental question, which was … And this was something that we borrowed and it’s a quote that’s been attributed to Mark Twain. There’s no evidence that he actually ever said it, which is that it’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for absolute sure that does.
And the question we opened up with was what if everything we know about marketing today is what’s holding us back? And we started down this path and what started to see were these companies. And we’ve seen the trends, how companies today are rebooting what it even means to be build an audience first and use that as a valuable way of creating customers so that marketing itself can become a profitable part of the business.
So instead of just being the department that makes pretty pictures or the department that spews out advertising or that makes cold calls or that tries to convert customers using all manner of collateral material, marketing the function actually becomes that which builds and creates customers, which we’re now calling audiences.
John Jantsch: So a big part of this obviously, from both of your backgrounds too, is this idea of content and content marketing. I mean is this an evolution of how we’re coming to think about content? I know we used to say content is king, that was kind of cool for a while.
And then I think in a lot of ways it’s become air for every sort of channel and element and, even as you suggest in your last book, a business model in itself. Is this another evolution of content marketing? We’re going to come back to that term, content marketing, but I’ll let you answer that first.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, I’ll take this one, Robert. I think that if we just look at the traditional, say definition, but how most organizations think about content marketing, it’s oh we’re going to create valuable, relevant and compelling content. We’re going to distribute that on a platform and we’re going to build an audience in some way and we’re going to sell our product or service, which by the way is fine.
That’s great. If you do that, your successful with it, that’s basically content marketing. I think the difference is what we talk about in Killing Marketing is you don’t have to limit it to just that. We think there’s something bigger, as Robert talked about and you talked about, this is a business model change.
We believe instead of setting up your marketing organization for interruption, like it’s basically been set up for the last 50 years, what if we set it up around groups of audiences that we get really close to, we build loyal and trusted relationships with, and we don’t just create one revenue stream. We create four, five. We talk about 10 different revenue streams in the book and what we’re seeing a lot of companies out there do, they’re starting to dip their toe in the water and they’re coming up with new products and services because they have these audiences that they never dreamed they would do before.
You know Robert talks about BabyCenter.com from Johnson and Johnson all the time and how they created this standalone media property that enables them to not only sell more of their stuff but to create more products and services that they never thought was possible.
Kraft has done the same thing with Kraft Food and Family. So those types of things that we’re seeing where you can actually say, oh if we build an audience that’s loyal and trusting to us, and they start to look to us for guidance, we can actually transform the business into something that we weren’t even prepared to do. And by the way, this model is in full effect right now with Amazon.com.
Just so you know. It’s happening. And by the way, Amazon will be the most valuable company probably inside of five years in the world. And they’re doing it because they’re so focused on their customers and they’re not just saying this is what we want to sell. They’re saying well, if we get really close to that customer, what are the possibilities? And of course Jeff Bezos is showing us what those possibilities are.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I think just even this week the whole we can deliver inside your home thing is actually … Hopefully you’ve read about that [crosstalk 00:10:02]. I think a lot of that has to be hey, if we do this thing that we think will be more convenient, it will actually let us sell security systems, for example. And I maybe didn’t lay that out right but again, the first thought was this will be a service or a better experience for our customers, oh and look, it allows us to do x.
Joe Pulizzi: Well, what they’re doing, they’re putting six and a half billion dollars into … I mean Amazon won an Academy Award this year, or an Emmy award this year, excuse me. Here’s an online book store that sells some level of technology and now is really the online version of Walmart, and they’re winning Emmy awards for the creation of original content.
But if you look at their investment in content, the six and a half billion that they’re putting into things like all their original programming, they’re looking at that as a marketing cost in order to sell more Prime memberships, which of course is about buying things. And so they look at the investment in original content that they’re serving over the Prime streaming service as a marketing cost for them. So they’re turning into an integrated media platform before our very eyes but they’re looking at it as a way of pulling in an audience that they can monetize in other ways.
John Jantsch: So I realize this is a dangerous question, given who I’m talking to, but is the term content marketing really the wrong the term?
Robert Rose: Sure. Fine. I mean, if you don’t like it. We’ve never been that attached to the term but we have yet to find a better one.
John Jantsch: Here’s what I mean by that. It’s not that content marketing itself is a bad term. It’s just that if we look at that as a form of marketing, like social media marketing or mobile marketing, that it really is just marketing that happens to use content.
Robert Rose: No. The difference in the two that you mentioned … I realize this is semantics at some level, but the two that you mentioned are channel based, right? So it’s like saying TV marketing or newspaper marketing when I say social media marketing or mobile marketing.
And so that would be where I would draw those differentiations. When we say content marketing, what we’re describing … Whether we’re describing it well or not is for debate, but what we’re describing is the methodology of using an owned media platform to integrate into the everything else you’re doing as a business, right? So it’s a using the idea of our ability to create compelling, wonderful, engaging, inspiring, thought leadership-orientated content as a means of changing the behavior of a consumer.
So, it’s something that gets infused into the broader marketing strategy. Now, what I would concede, and I’m sure Joe would agree, is that at some point content marketing as a separate idea becomes subsumed into the broader topic of marketing and it just becomes a different way that we call marketing.
John Jantsch: Because social media marketing requires content.
Robert Rose: Exactly right. So does TV marketing and so does newspaper marketing and so does PDF marketing and fax marketing and everything else, yeah.
John Jantsch: Fax marketing, wow.
Robert Rose: I did it. Oh, absolutely. That used to be very important.
John Jantsch: If I had a fax machine, I would probably still get some [crosstalk 00:13:20].
Robert Rose: It’s funny we say fax marketing. Social media, it’s just channels. There’s no strategic method — You can say there’s a strategic methodology behind it depending, again it is semantics. But the reason why we call it content marketing is it is right now a fundamentally different approach to most organizations. If you just call it marketing or marketing the way we think it should be, they don’t get it. So we have to call it something different today and in five years we might not have to.
John Jantsch: So some of what you talk about in Killing Marketing, or I guess I should ask this rather than state it, will it require a company to … Because of the change that I think, even if it’s a mindset change, that it requires, will it also require in some cases for them to maybe cannibalize today’s profits?
Robert Rose: You know that’s a really interesting question because there’s two sides to that. The one side, I think it’s a really interesting point you bring up, which is does it immediately lean toward to creating new products and services?
And that’s one of the biggest push backs, quite frankly, is that if done right when we look at content marketing, it starts to look a lot like more product development methodology than it does campaign or traditional marketing-related methodology because you’re building a product extensively that you’re trying to build an audience for and monetize in multiple ways. And so it looks very much like a product and so that’s a really interesting question when we start talking about does it cannibalize the efforts of what we’re doing elsewhere?
However, there’s a flip side of that, the other side of that is can it actually begin to improve the margins of what we’re doing for other things, right? So you look at a manufacturing company where they maybe be looking at really lean margins, but if they can start to integrate media into their business, which of course has and enjoys quite high margins, can they actually add a pointer to their total bottom line by actually monetizing content and thought leadership and other things in a different way.
So I think there’s an opportunity for both things to be true.
John Jantsch: I can’t think of a great example but years ago the newspapers, they saw the train coming right at them but then they hung on to classified ads for example as a profit center because to just give them away, even though that train was heading towards them, was hard to do.
Robert Rose: John, that’s actually a great example. I mean I grew up in magazine publishing and we were so afraid … The executives in my company were so afraid to say okay, well we can do all this web stuff but make sure that we still sell those print pages. That’s the most important thing. So we deliberately were not cannibalizing our business.
We were trying to add oh, other lines, this will be great, but this is the core … I think that’s the problem with what newspapers didn’t do and magazine publishing, because they had the processes, they had the people, they had the content, they had the audience. They had everything to do what an Amazon.com is doing today. But they didn’t do it because they were afraid of cannibalization and I think today, you absolutely have to run at it and say we have to cannibalize ourselves before somebody else does.
Joe Pulizzi: And it’s wonder, you know, looking at it from the small business side for just a moment. One of the entrepreneurs that I admire most out there is Brian Clark and what he’s been able to do with CopyBlogger. If you look at what he started with, he built a media company first that had nice, wonderful high margins and built that media company.
And now he’s started to build products alongside that and become this integrated product and media company where his audience is telling him what products to sell, software, software as a service, other types of services that they’re now starting to offer, and education, etc.
Where he can now go into what might be a lower margin business because he started in such a high margin business. So there’s really interesting opportunities there but, to your point, it becomes interesting as to where you start cannibalizing from one or the other.
Robert Rose: I know a business called Duct Tape Marketing that’s done the same thing.
John Jantsch: Brian and I talk about this a lot. And Brian … I mean it’s great to call people that figured this out, did it and then everybody said they’re geniuses. I mean Brian would be the first to admit he wasn’t really sure where he was headed with this and then all of sudden it was like, oh, look what we did. Even some of the examples in your book are really companies that it wasn’t so much intentional as much as it was just trying to ride what seemed to be going on. And then all of a sudden woke up one day and went, wait a minute. This is a whole other business.
Robert Rose: Willingness to adapt is the key there.
Joe Pulizzi: I mean against the great example of Red Bull Media House. I know we talk about it all the time but that was a happy accident. Red Bull Media House becoming maybe one of the largest, most important sports media companies out there started because they wanted to do a print magazine at the racetrack. They wanted to do a show daily. That show daily turned into the Red Bull, which now has two million subscribers and then all the videos and the syndication and they’re having The New York Times and Wall Street Journal pay them money for some of their content.
I mean, that stuff happened from just an idea. So that’s how it mostly happens.
John Jantsch: So, let’s get to another really big idea in this book. I talked to a lot of marketers who still view marketing as an expense. Of course, I tried to convince them it’s an investment. But you’re going to suggest that it’s a profit center or can be a profit center.
Robert Rose: Absolutely, it can be both. It can be all of those things, right? I mean one of the things that we talk through in the book is not only … Because a lot of companies aren’t ready quite frankly for the revenue opportunities that building a media platform might provide. They’re looking simply at how do they make their marketing more efficient and a more efficient expense or, to your point, an investment.
And there are a lot of ways to do that. One of them of course is to start to leverage the asset that you call audience, when you start looking at how leveraging the value of an audience can help make the rest of your marketing better. Just a simple example. If you’ve got a viable subscribed and trusting audience, using that data to for example upload it to LinkedIn or Facebook or use it for retargeting, and make your media buy that you’re doing, you know your regular advertising media buy, more efficient.
And if you can save money because you’ve got the data that you’re using to target advertising in a more relevant way, well that’s making marketing more efficient and it’s taking more advantage of the investment that you’re putting in marketing more broadly.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah I’d just add on to that what we find, what Robert and I find when we go into these enterprises is that they absolutely aren’t even thinking about the possibilities of what happens when you have a loyal audience of subscribers. And just want them to think a little bit differently and that’s when we throw examples like hey, have you seen what SalesForce has done?
They’ve created maybe one of the most valuable events in the world called DreamForce, 175,000 people in San Francisco every year. And they started it from just a simple customer data base. If that were sold, it will sell for almost a billion dollars, I think, just that event. So it’s amazing what can happen and the problem is ourselves. We’re getting in the way. We’re not thinking about it when wow we’re doing these activities as part of marketing.
We can be paying for marketing plus … And Robert is right. Some companies aren’t ready but I think the bigger issue is they’re just not even thinking about it. That’s the problem.
John Jantsch: That kind of leads me in my next question. In your view, are there certain kinds of companies or companies that are set up a certain way or maybe they’re a service or a product that they’re maybe more ready to effectively take advantage of this approach?
Joe Pulizzi: I’ll start, Robert, and then you can go. From what I’ve seen … and Robert works with larger companies because I want to get his take, I work with a lot of the smaller companies. What I see in the larger companies, from a distance in a lot of cases, is that they can’t move the big ship. It’s very hard to cut through all the red tape and to get somebody that’s been 20, 30 years in marketing and go to them and say hey, we’d like to try this new, wacky thing. Can we go ahead and do that?
If you have a small business owner that believes that they need to be or they should be the leading expert in their industry over a particular content area to their audience, and if they do that, they could transform the business, they can transform their customers, help their customers lives, their jobs in some way. That is the lowest hanging fruit, in my opinion.
So, actually I think a lot of the innovation, even though all those big companies have in some cases unlimited budgets … From some small companies they look at us like wow, Nike and SalesForce, they have these unlimited budgets. But if you’re a small company, it’s easier for you to do this and start monetizing quickly. And I think you’re a great case study on that when you got started, John. I think we’re a great case study. In 2007, we didn’t have two nickels to rub together but then..
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John Jantsch: I have seen the future of marketing, and it is killing me. Well, no. That’s not really true, but in this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast I do speak with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, authors of Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Costs into Profit.
Fascinating, something that obviously applies to the mammoth Netflix and Amazons of the world, but I think that this is an approach that actually might apply to just about any business going today and how to get them think completely differently about everything that they do in marketing. Check it out.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guests, yes that’s plural, Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, and Robert Rose, the chief strategy advisor of the same. We’re gonna talk about the new book by both of them today called Killing Marketing: How Innovate Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit. So Joe, Robert, thanks for joining me.
Joe Pulizzi: Thanks for having us.
Robert Rose: John, thank you so much. Oh, this is super fun. Appreciate it.
John Jantsch: Yeah. So this is … How many books for you guys together? Like three or four?
Robert Rose: I think it says 70 something.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah. It’s in the 70s.
Robert Rose: Actually, believe it or not, this is only our second book together.
John Jantsch: Only your second one together. Okay.
Robert Rose: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Jantsch: Did you do this one different? I know in this book you’ve kind of got here’s Joe’s chapter. Here’s Robert’s chapter. That’s not what you did in the last one though, is it?
Joe Pulizzi: No, the last one was completely different. The last one really was Robert’s brain child and I sort of tagged along with him. And the different thing about this one is we sort of came up with this concept almost at the same time, like this story has to be told. And we both had different areas of focus that we wanted to focus on, which worked out great and now we, as you said, we just sort of said Joe, you take this one. Robert, you take this one.
And it worked great for the audio book, too, because then I didn’t have to do the whole thing by myself. So, there you go.
John Jantsch: So, Joe. Your relationship, is that the right word, with Content Marketing Institute has changed a little. Is that something you can talk about?
Robert Rose: Yes, Joe. Tell us all about Content Marketing Institute.
Joe Pulizzi: I guess we can sort of talk about it now, so it’s kind of going public. I’m moving out of an operational role. Always a part of CMI, always gonna be at Content Marketing World, our big event, but I am looking to do some different things and spend more time with the family and do some more travel with my family and that will start in January.
And I’m going to leave basically all my duties to Robert, thankfully. And he is going to carry the torch the rest of the way. So, it’s been a great run, 10 years with Content Marketing Institute. and of course I’ll always be the founder, I’ll always be a part of this thing. But we’ve got some opportunities today and I really just wanted to make life hard on Robert. So, this is the best way to do that.
John Jantsch: Plus you’re just probably tired of content, right?
Joe Pulizzi: Oh my god, I can’t tell ya how tired I am of content marketing. No, actually it’s funny. So this is my fifth book between Robert’s and my individual books. And this is the one I’m most excited about because I think we finally hit on something that is going to change most organizations, small, medium and large, and they don’t even know it.
So I’m leaving in maybe the high point and then I’ll just kind go off into the shadows and I’ll check in on Robert on occasion.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I would agree. This is a big idea book and your other books were great books, or certainly the last book, Content Inc, in a lot of ways I think you were almost reporting on what is, whereas I think this book is more here’s what’s coming. That’s my assessment. I could be completely off, but that’s how it feels.
So early on in the book, you evoke one of my heroes Peter Drucker, talking about the purpose of a business. And actually that statement of the purpose of a business — to create, keep a customer — is probably the genesis of Duct Tape Marketing, believe it or not. That book, the Practice of Management, had a lot to do with forming my thinking.
That obviously hasn’t changed, but how we go about doing that seems to have changed. So how does that play out in Killing Marketing.
Robert Rose: Well first of all, let me just tell you that if I didn’t love you already, now I love you even more by bringing in my hero Peter Drucker into the whole mix here. The Practice of Management is probably one of the fundamental reasons that I’m in the career that I am in today.
And you’re right. It’s absolutely this. That has not changed. It’s funny because where marketing is today has really lost sight of what Drucker was talking about. When he was talking about the purpose of a business, creating a customer, that idea has become so morphed these days into persuasion, right? It has transformed marketing into how do we find people and persuade them that our product or services is worth doing?
And what he was talking about was literally creating a customer from nothing. In other words, creating a customer that comes to their own conclusion that your product or service is worth their time or their money and that being the purpose of a business.
What we set out to talk about in this book was we started with this fundamental question, which was … And this was something that we borrowed and it’s a quote that’s been attributed to Mark Twain. There’s no evidence that he actually ever said it, which is that it’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for absolute sure that does.
And the question we opened up with was what if everything we know about marketing today is what’s holding us back? And we started down this path and what started to see were these companies. And we’ve seen the trends, how companies today are rebooting what it even means to be build an audience first and use that as a valuable way of creating customers so that marketing itself can become a profitable part of the business.
So instead of just being the department that makes pretty pictures or the department that spews out advertising or that makes cold calls or that tries to convert customers using all manner of collateral material, marketing the function actually becomes that which builds and creates customers, which we’re now calling audiences.
John Jantsch: So a big part of this obviously, from both of your backgrounds too, is this idea of content and content marketing. I mean is this an evolution of how we’re coming to think about content? I know we used to say content is king, that was kind of cool for a while.
And then I think in a lot of ways it’s become air for every sort of channel and element and, even as you suggest in your last book, a business model in itself. Is this another evolution of content marketing? We’re going to come back to that term, content marketing, but I’ll let you answer that first.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, I’ll take this one, Robert. I think that if we just look at the traditional, say definition, but how most organizations think about content marketing, it’s oh we’re going to create valuable, relevant and compelling content. We’re going to distribute that on a platform and we’re going to build an audience in some way and we’re going to sell our product or service, which by the way is fine.
That’s great. If you do that, your successful with it, that’s basically content marketing. I think the difference is what we talk about in Killing Marketing is you don’t have to limit it to just that. We think there’s something bigger, as Robert talked about and you talked about, this is a business model change.
We believe instead of setting up your marketing organization for interruption, like it’s basically been set up for the last 50 years, what if we set it up around groups of audiences that we get really close to, we build loyal and trusted relationships with, and we don’t just create one revenue stream. We create four, five. We talk about 10 different revenue streams in the book and what we’re seeing a lot of companies out there do, they’re starting to dip their toe in the water and they’re coming up with new products and services because they have these audiences that they never dreamed they would do before.
You know Robert talks about BabyCenter.com from Johnson and Johnson all the time and how they created this standalone media property that enables them to not only sell more of their stuff but to create more products and services that they never thought was possible.
Kraft has done the same thing with Kraft Food and Family. So those types of things that we’re seeing where you can actually say, oh if we build an audience that’s loyal and trusting to us, and they start to look to us for guidance, we can actually transform the business into something that we weren’t even prepared to do. And by the way, this model is in full effect right now with Amazon.com.
Just so you know. It’s happening. And by the way, Amazon will be the most valuable company probably inside of five years in the world. And they’re doing it because they’re so focused on their customers and they’re not just saying this is what we want to sell. They’re saying well, if we get really close to that customer, what are the possibilities? And of course Jeff Bezos is showing us what those possibilities are.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I think just even this week the whole we can deliver inside your home thing is actually … Hopefully you’ve read about that [crosstalk 00:10:02]. I think a lot of that has to be hey, if we do this thing that we think will be more convenient, it will actually let us sell security systems, for example. And I maybe didn’t lay that out right but again, the first thought was this will be a service or a better experience for our customers, oh and look, it allows us to do x.
Joe Pulizzi: Well, what they’re doing, they’re putting six and a half billion dollars into … I mean Amazon won an Academy Award this year, or an Emmy award this year, excuse me. Here’s an online book store that sells some level of technology and now is really the online version of Walmart, and they’re winning Emmy awards for the creation of original content.
But if you look at their investment in content, the six and a half billion that they’re putting into things like all their original programming, they’re looking at that as a marketing cost in order to sell more Prime memberships, which of course is about buying things. And so they look at the investment in original content that they’re serving over the Prime streaming service as a marketing cost for them. So they’re turning into an integrated media platform before our very eyes but they’re looking at it as a way of pulling in an audience that they can monetize in other ways.
John Jantsch: So I realize this is a dangerous question, given who I’m talking to, but is the term content marketing really the wrong the term?
Robert Rose: Sure. Fine. I mean, if you don’t like it. We’ve never been that attached to the term but we have yet to find a better one.
John Jantsch: Here’s what I mean by that. It’s not that content marketing itself is a bad term. It’s just that if we look at that as a form of marketing, like social media marketing or mobile marketing, that it really is just marketing that happens to use content.
Robert Rose: No. The difference in the two that you mentioned … I realize this is semantics at some level, but the two that you mentioned are channel based, right? So it’s like saying TV marketing or newspaper marketing when I say social media marketing or mobile marketing.
And so that would be where I would draw those differentiations. When we say content marketing, what we’re describing … Whether we’re describing it well or not is for debate, but what we’re describing is the methodology of using an owned media platform to integrate into the everything else you’re doing as a business, right? So it’s a using the idea of our ability to create compelling, wonderful, engaging, inspiring, thought leadership-orientated content as a means of changing the behavior of a consumer.
So, it’s something that gets infused into the broader marketing strategy. Now, what I would concede, and I’m sure Joe would agree, is that at some point content marketing as a separate idea becomes subsumed into the broader topic of marketing and it just becomes a different way that we call marketing.
John Jantsch: Because social media marketing requires content.
Robert Rose: Exactly right. So does TV marketing and so does newspaper marketing and so does PDF marketing and fax marketing and everything else, yeah.
John Jantsch: Fax marketing, wow.
Robert Rose: I did it. Oh, absolutely. That used to be very important.
John Jantsch: If I had a fax machine, I would probably still get some [crosstalk 00:13:20].
Robert Rose: It’s funny we say fax marketing. Social media, it’s just channels. There’s no strategic method — You can say there’s a strategic methodology behind it depending, again it is semantics. But the reason why we call it content marketing is it is right now a fundamentally different approach to most organizations. If you just call it marketing or marketing the way we think it should be, they don’t get it. So we have to call it something different today and in five years we might not have to.
John Jantsch: So some of what you talk about in Killing Marketing, or I guess I should ask this rather than state it, will it require a company to … Because of the change that I think, even if it’s a mindset change, that it requires, will it also require in some cases for them to maybe cannibalize today’s profits?
Robert Rose: You know that’s a really interesting question because there’s two sides to that. The one side, I think it’s a really interesting point you bring up, which is does it immediately lean toward to creating new products and services?
And that’s one of the biggest push backs, quite frankly, is that if done right when we look at content marketing, it starts to look a lot like more product development methodology than it does campaign or traditional marketing-related methodology because you’re building a product extensively that you’re trying to build an audience for and monetize in multiple ways. And so it looks very much like a product and so that’s a really interesting question when we start talking about does it cannibalize the efforts of what we’re doing elsewhere?
However, there’s a flip side of that, the other side of that is can it actually begin to improve the margins of what we’re doing for other things, right? So you look at a manufacturing company where they maybe be looking at really lean margins, but if they can start to integrate media into their business, which of course has and enjoys quite high margins, can they actually add a pointer to their total bottom line by actually monetizing content and thought leadership and other things in a different way.
So I think there’s an opportunity for both things to be true.
John Jantsch: I can’t think of a great example but years ago the newspapers, they saw the train coming right at them but then they hung on to classified ads for example as a profit center because to just give them away, even though that train was heading towards them, was hard to do.
Robert Rose: John, that’s actually a great example. I mean I grew up in magazine publishing and we were so afraid … The executives in my company were so afraid to say okay, well we can do all this web stuff but make sure that we still sell those print pages. That’s the most important thing. So we deliberately were not cannibalizing our business.
We were trying to add oh, other lines, this will be great, but this is the core … I think that’s the problem with what newspapers didn’t do and magazine publishing, because they had the processes, they had the people, they had the content, they had the audience. They had everything to do what an Amazon.com is doing today. But they didn’t do it because they were afraid of cannibalization and I think today, you absolutely have to run at it and say we have to cannibalize ourselves before somebody else does.
Joe Pulizzi: And it’s wonder, you know, looking at it from the small business side for just a moment. One of the entrepreneurs that I admire most out there is Brian Clark and what he’s been able to do with CopyBlogger. If you look at what he started with, he built a media company first that had nice, wonderful high margins and built that media company.
And now he’s started to build products alongside that and become this integrated product and media company where his audience is telling him what products to sell, software, software as a service, other types of services that they’re now starting to offer, and education, etc.
Where he can now go into what might be a lower margin business because he started in such a high margin business. So there’s really interesting opportunities there but, to your point, it becomes interesting as to where you start cannibalizing from one or the other.
Robert Rose: I know a business called Duct Tape Marketing that’s done the same thing.
John Jantsch: Brian and I talk about this a lot. And Brian … I mean it’s great to call people that figured this out, did it and then everybody said they’re geniuses. I mean Brian would be the first to admit he wasn’t really sure where he was headed with this and then all of sudden it was like, oh, look what we did. Even some of the examples in your book are really companies that it wasn’t so much intentional as much as it was just trying to ride what seemed to be going on. And then all of a sudden woke up one day and went, wait a minute. This is a whole other business.
Robert Rose: Willingness to adapt is the key there.
Joe Pulizzi: I mean against the great example of Red Bull Media House. I know we talk about it all the time but that was a happy accident. Red Bull Media House becoming maybe one of the largest, most important sports media companies out there started because they wanted to do a print magazine at the racetrack. They wanted to do a show daily. That show daily turned into the Red Bull, which now has two million subscribers and then all the videos and the syndication and they’re having The New York Times and Wall Street Journal pay them money for some of their content.
I mean, that stuff happened from just an idea. So that’s how it mostly happens.
John Jantsch: So, let’s get to another really big idea in this book. I talked to a lot of marketers who still view marketing as an expense. Of course, I tried to convince them it’s an investment. But you’re going to suggest that it’s a profit center or can be a profit center.
Robert Rose: Absolutely, it can be both. It can be all of those things, right? I mean one of the things that we talk through in the book is not only … Because a lot of companies aren’t ready quite frankly for the revenue opportunities that building a media platform might provide. They’re looking simply at how do they make their marketing more efficient and a more efficient expense or, to your point, an investment.
And there are a lot of ways to do that. One of them of course is to start to leverage the asset that you call audience, when you start looking at how leveraging the value of an audience can help make the rest of your marketing better. Just a simple example. If you’ve got a viable subscribed and trusting audience, using that data to for example upload it to LinkedIn or Facebook or use it for retargeting, and make your media buy that you’re doing, you know your regular advertising media buy, more efficient.
And if you can save money because you’ve got the data that you’re using to target advertising in a more relevant way, well that’s making marketing more efficient and it’s taking more advantage of the investment that you’re putting in marketing more broadly.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah I’d just add on to that what we find, what Robert and I find when we go into these enterprises is that they absolutely aren’t even thinking about the possibilities of what happens when you have a loyal audience of subscribers. And just want them to think a little bit differently and that’s when we throw examples like hey, have you seen what SalesForce has done?
They’ve created maybe one of the most valuable events in the world called DreamForce, 175,000 people in San Francisco every year. And they started it from just a simple customer data base. If that were sold, it will sell for almost a billion dollars, I think, just that event. So it’s amazing what can happen and the problem is ourselves. We’re getting in the way. We’re not thinking about it when wow we’re doing these activities as part of marketing.
We can be paying for marketing plus … And Robert is right. Some companies aren’t ready but I think the bigger issue is they’re just not even thinking about it. That’s the problem.
John Jantsch: That kind of leads me in my next question. In your view, are there certain kinds of companies or companies that are set up a certain way or maybe they’re a service or a product that they’re maybe more ready to effectively take advantage of this approach?
Joe Pulizzi: I’ll start, Robert, and then you can go. From what I’ve seen … and Robert works with larger companies because I want to get his take, I work with a lot of the smaller companies. What I see in the larger companies, from a distance in a lot of cases, is that they can’t move the big ship. It’s very hard to cut through all the red tape and to get somebody that’s been 20, 30 years in marketing and go to them and say hey, we’d like to try this new, wacky thing. Can we go ahead and do that?
If you have a small business owner that believes that they need to be or they should be the leading expert in their industry over a particular content area to their audience, and if they do that, they could transform the business, they can transform their customers, help their customers lives, their jobs in some way. That is the lowest hanging fruit, in my opinion.
So, actually I think a lot of the innovation, even though all those big companies have in some cases unlimited budgets … From some small companies they look at us like wow, Nike and SalesForce, they have these unlimited budgets. But if you’re a small company, it’s easier for you to do this and start monetizing quickly. And I think you’re a great case study on that when you got started, John. I think we’re a great case study. In 2007, we didn’t have two nickels to rub together but then..
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John Jantsch: I have seen the future of marketing, and it is killing me. Well, no. That’s not really true, but in this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast I do speak with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, authors of Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Costs into Profit.
Fascinating, something that obviously applies to the mammoth Netflix and Amazons of the world, but I think that this is an approach that actually might apply to just about any business going today and how to get them think completely differently about everything that they do in marketing. Check it out.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guests, yes that’s plural, Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, and Robert Rose, the chief strategy advisor of the same. We’re gonna talk about the new book by both of them today called Killing Marketing: How Innovate Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit. So Joe, Robert, thanks for joining me.
Joe Pulizzi: Thanks for having us.
Robert Rose: John, thank you so much. Oh, this is super fun. Appreciate it.
John Jantsch: Yeah. So this is … How many books for you guys together? Like three or four?
Robert Rose: I think it says 70 something.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah. It’s in the 70s.
Robert Rose: Actually, believe it or not, this is only our second book together.
John Jantsch: Only your second one together. Okay.
Robert Rose: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Jantsch: Did you do this one different? I know in this book you’ve kind of got here’s Joe’s chapter. Here’s Robert’s chapter. That’s not what you did in the last one though, is it?
Joe Pulizzi: No, the last one was completely different. The last one really was Robert’s brain child and I sort of tagged along with him. And the different thing about this one is we sort of came up with this concept almost at the same time, like this story has to be told. And we both had different areas of focus that we wanted to focus on, which worked out great and now we, as you said, we just sort of said Joe, you take this one. Robert, you take this one.
And it worked great for the audio book, too, because then I didn’t have to do the whole thing by myself. So, there you go.
John Jantsch: So, Joe. Your relationship, is that the right word, with Content Marketing Institute has changed a little. Is that something you can talk about?
Robert Rose: Yes, Joe. Tell us all about Content Marketing Institute.
Joe Pulizzi: I guess we can sort of talk about it now, so it’s kind of going public. I’m moving out of an operational role. Always a part of CMI, always gonna be at Content Marketing World, our big event, but I am looking to do some different things and spend more time with the family and do some more travel with my family and that will start in January.
And I’m going to leave basically all my duties to Robert, thankfully. And he is going to carry the torch the rest of the way. So, it’s been a great run, 10 years with Content Marketing Institute. and of course I’ll always be the founder, I’ll always be a part of this thing. But we’ve got some opportunities today and I really just wanted to make life hard on Robert. So, this is the best way to do that.
John Jantsch: Plus you’re just probably tired of content, right?
Joe Pulizzi: Oh my god, I can’t tell ya how tired I am of content marketing. No, actually it’s funny. So this is my fifth book between Robert’s and my individual books. And this is the one I’m most excited about because I think we finally hit on something that is going to change most organizations, small, medium and large, and they don’t even know it.
So I’m leaving in maybe the high point and then I’ll just kind go off into the shadows and I’ll check in on Robert on occasion.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I would agree. This is a big idea book and your other books were great books, or certainly the last book, Content Inc, in a lot of ways I think you were almost reporting on what is, whereas I think this book is more here’s what’s coming. That’s my assessment. I could be completely off, but that’s how it feels.
So early on in the book, you evoke one of my heroes Peter Drucker, talking about the purpose of a business. And actually that statement of the purpose of a business — to create, keep a customer — is probably the genesis of Duct Tape Marketing, believe it or not. That book, the Practice of Management, had a lot to do with forming my thinking.
That obviously hasn’t changed, but how we go about doing that seems to have changed. So how does that play out in Killing Marketing.
Robert Rose: Well first of all, let me just tell you that if I didn’t love you already, now I love you even more by bringing in my hero Peter Drucker into the whole mix here. The Practice of Management is probably one of the fundamental reasons that I’m in the career that I am in today.
And you’re right. It’s absolutely this. That has not changed. It’s funny because where marketing is today has really lost sight of what Drucker was talking about. When he was talking about the purpose of a business, creating a customer, that idea has become so morphed these days into persuasion, right? It has transformed marketing into how do we find people and persuade them that our product or services is worth doing?
And what he was talking about was literally creating a customer from nothing. In other words, creating a customer that comes to their own conclusion that your product or service is worth their time or their money and that being the purpose of a business.
What we set out to talk about in this book was we started with this fundamental question, which was … And this was something that we borrowed and it’s a quote that’s been attributed to Mark Twain. There’s no evidence that he actually ever said it, which is that it’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for absolute sure that does.
And the question we opened up with was what if everything we know about marketing today is what’s holding us back? And we started down this path and what started to see were these companies. And we’ve seen the trends, how companies today are rebooting what it even means to be build an audience first and use that as a valuable way of creating customers so that marketing itself can become a profitable part of the business.
So instead of just being the department that makes pretty pictures or the department that spews out advertising or that makes cold calls or that tries to convert customers using all manner of collateral material, marketing the function actually becomes that which builds and creates customers, which we’re now calling audiences.
John Jantsch: So a big part of this obviously, from both of your backgrounds too, is this idea of content and content marketing. I mean is this an evolution of how we’re coming to think about content? I know we used to say content is king, that was kind of cool for a while.
And then I think in a lot of ways it’s become air for every sort of channel and element and, even as you suggest in your last book, a business model in itself. Is this another evolution of content marketing? We’re going to come back to that term, content marketing, but I’ll let you answer that first.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, I’ll take this one, Robert. I think that if we just look at the traditional, say definition, but how most organizations think about content marketing, it’s oh we’re going to create valuable, relevant and compelling content. We’re going to distribute that on a platform and we’re going to build an audience in some way and we’re going to sell our product or service, which by the way is fine.
That’s great. If you do that, your successful with it, that’s basically content marketing. I think the difference is what we talk about in Killing Marketing is you don’t have to limit it to just that. We think there’s something bigger, as Robert talked about and you talked about, this is a business model change.
We believe instead of setting up your marketing organization for interruption, like it’s basically been set up for the last 50 years, what if we set it up around groups of audiences that we get really close to, we build loyal and trusted relationships with, and we don’t just create one revenue stream. We create four, five. We talk about 10 different revenue streams in the book and what we’re seeing a lot of companies out there do, they’re starting to dip their toe in the water and they’re coming up with new products and services because they have these audiences that they never dreamed they would do before.
You know Robert talks about BabyCenter.com from Johnson and Johnson all the time and how they created this standalone media property that enables them to not only sell more of their stuff but to create more products and services that they never thought was possible.
Kraft has done the same thing with Kraft Food and Family. So those types of things that we’re seeing where you can actually say, oh if we build an audience that’s loyal and trusting to us, and they start to look to us for guidance, we can actually transform the business into something that we weren’t even prepared to do. And by the way, this model is in full effect right now with Amazon.com.
Just so you know. It’s happening. And by the way, Amazon will be the most valuable company probably inside of five years in the world. And they’re doing it because they’re so focused on their customers and they’re not just saying this is what we want to sell. They’re saying well, if we get really close to that customer, what are the possibilities? And of course Jeff Bezos is showing us what those possibilities are.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I think just even this week the whole we can deliver inside your home thing is actually … Hopefully you’ve read about that [crosstalk 00:10:02]. I think a lot of that has to be hey, if we do this thing that we think will be more convenient, it will actually let us sell security systems, for example. And I maybe didn’t lay that out right but again, the first thought was this will be a service or a better experience for our customers, oh and look, it allows us to do x.
Joe Pulizzi: Well, what they’re doing, they’re putting six and a half billion dollars into … I mean Amazon won an Academy Award this year, or an Emmy award this year, excuse me. Here’s an online book store that sells some level of technology and now is really the online version of Walmart, and they’re winning Emmy awards for the creation of original content.
But if you look at their investment in content, the six and a half billion that they’re putting into things like all their original programming, they’re looking at that as a marketing cost in order to sell more Prime memberships, which of course is about buying things. And so they look at the investment in original content that they’re serving over the Prime streaming service as a marketing cost for them. So they’re turning into an integrated media platform before our very eyes but they’re looking at it as a way of pulling in an audience that they can monetize in other ways.
John Jantsch: So I realize this is a dangerous question, given who I’m talking to, but is the term content marketing really the wrong the term?
Robert Rose: Sure. Fine. I mean, if you don’t like it. We’ve never been that attached to the term but we have yet to find a better one.
John Jantsch: Here’s what I mean by that. It’s not that content marketing itself is a bad term. It’s just that if we look at that as a form of marketing, like social media marketing or mobile marketing, that it really is just marketing that happens to use content.
Robert Rose: No. The difference in the two that you mentioned … I realize this is semantics at some level, but the two that you mentioned are channel based, right? So it’s like saying TV marketing or newspaper marketing when I say social media marketing or mobile marketing.
And so that would be where I would draw those differentiations. When we say content marketing, what we’re describing … Whether we’re describing it well or not is for debate, but what we’re describing is the methodology of using an owned media platform to integrate into the everything else you’re doing as a business, right? So it’s a using the idea of our ability to create compelling, wonderful, engaging, inspiring, thought leadership-orientated content as a means of changing the behavior of a consumer.
So, it’s something that gets infused into the broader marketing strategy. Now, what I would concede, and I’m sure Joe would agree, is that at some point content marketing as a separate idea becomes subsumed into the broader topic of marketing and it just becomes a different way that we call marketing.
John Jantsch: Because social media marketing requires content.
Robert Rose: Exactly right. So does TV marketing and so does newspaper marketing and so does PDF marketing and fax marketing and everything else, yeah.
John Jantsch: Fax marketing, wow.
Robert Rose: I did it. Oh, absolutely. That used to be very important.
John Jantsch: If I had a fax machine, I would probably still get some [crosstalk 00:13:20].
Robert Rose: It’s funny we say fax marketing. Social media, it’s just channels. There’s no strategic method — You can say there’s a strategic methodology behind it depending, again it is semantics. But the reason why we call it content marketing is it is right now a fundamentally different approach to most organizations. If you just call it marketing or marketing the way we think it should be, they don’t get it. So we have to call it something different today and in five years we might not have to.
John Jantsch: So some of what you talk about in Killing Marketing, or I guess I should ask this rather than state it, will it require a company to … Because of the change that I think, even if it’s a mindset change, that it requires, will it also require in some cases for them to maybe cannibalize today’s profits?
Robert Rose: You know that’s a really interesting question because there’s two sides to that. The one side, I think it’s a really interesting point you bring up, which is does it immediately lean toward to creating new products and services?
And that’s one of the biggest push backs, quite frankly, is that if done right when we look at content marketing, it starts to look a lot like more product development methodology than it does campaign or traditional marketing-related methodology because you’re building a product extensively that you’re trying to build an audience for and monetize in multiple ways. And so it looks very much like a product and so that’s a really interesting question when we start talking about does it cannibalize the efforts of what we’re doing elsewhere?
However, there’s a flip side of that, the other side of that is can it actually begin to improve the margins of what we’re doing for other things, right? So you look at a manufacturing company where they maybe be looking at really lean margins, but if they can start to integrate media into their business, which of course has and enjoys quite high margins, can they actually add a pointer to their total bottom line by actually monetizing content and thought leadership and other things in a different way.
So I think there’s an opportunity for both things to be true.
John Jantsch: I can’t think of a great example but years ago the newspapers, they saw the train coming right at them but then they hung on to classified ads for example as a profit center because to just give them away, even though that train was heading towards them, was hard to do.
Robert Rose: John, that’s actually a great example. I mean I grew up in magazine publishing and we were so afraid … The executives in my company were so afraid to say okay, well we can do all this web stuff but make sure that we still sell those print pages. That’s the most important thing. So we deliberately were not cannibalizing our business.
We were trying to add oh, other lines, this will be great, but this is the core … I think that’s the problem with what newspapers didn’t do and magazine publishing, because they had the processes, they had the people, they had the content, they had the audience. They had everything to do what an Amazon.com is doing today. But they didn’t do it because they were afraid of cannibalization and I think today, you absolutely have to run at it and say we have to cannibalize ourselves before somebody else does.
Joe Pulizzi: And it’s wonder, you know, looking at it from the small business side for just a moment. One of the entrepreneurs that I admire most out there is Brian Clark and what he’s been able to do with CopyBlogger. If you look at what he started with, he built a media company first that had nice, wonderful high margins and built that media company.
And now he’s started to build products alongside that and become this integrated product and media company where his audience is telling him what products to sell, software, software as a service, other types of services that they’re now starting to offer, and education, etc.
Where he can now go into what might be a lower margin business because he started in such a high margin business. So there’s really interesting opportunities there but, to your point, it becomes interesting as to where you start cannibalizing from one or the other.
Robert Rose: I know a business called Duct Tape Marketing that’s done the same thing.
John Jantsch: Brian and I talk about this a lot. And Brian … I mean it’s great to call people that figured this out, did it and then everybody said they’re geniuses. I mean Brian would be the first to admit he wasn’t really sure where he was headed with this and then all of sudden it was like, oh, look what we did. Even some of the examples in your book are really companies that it wasn’t so much intentional as much as it was just trying to ride what seemed to be going on. And then all of a sudden woke up one day and went, wait a minute. This is a whole other business.
Robert Rose: Willingness to adapt is the key there.
Joe Pulizzi: I mean against the great example of Red Bull Media House. I know we talk about it all the time but that was a happy accident. Red Bull Media House becoming maybe one of the largest, most important sports media companies out there started because they wanted to do a print magazine at the racetrack. They wanted to do a show daily. That show daily turned into the Red Bull, which now has two million subscribers and then all the videos and the syndication and they’re having The New York Times and Wall Street Journal pay them money for some of their content.
I mean, that stuff happened from just an idea. So that’s how it mostly happens.
John Jantsch: So, let’s get to another really big idea in this book. I talked to a lot of marketers who still view marketing as an expense. Of course, I tried to convince them it’s an investment. But you’re going to suggest that it’s a profit center or can be a profit center.
Robert Rose: Absolutely, it can be both. It can be all of those things, right? I mean one of the things that we talk through in the book is not only … Because a lot of companies aren’t ready quite frankly for the revenue opportunities that building a media platform might provide. They’re looking simply at how do they make their marketing more efficient and a more efficient expense or, to your point, an investment.
And there are a lot of ways to do that. One of them of course is to start to leverage the asset that you call audience, when you start looking at how leveraging the value of an audience can help make the rest of your marketing better. Just a simple example. If you’ve got a viable subscribed and trusting audience, using that data to for example upload it to LinkedIn or Facebook or use it for retargeting, and make your media buy that you’re doing, you know your regular advertising media buy, more efficient.
And if you can save money because you’ve got the data that you’re using to target advertising in a more relevant way, well that’s making marketing more efficient and it’s taking more advantage of the investment that you’re putting in marketing more broadly.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah I’d just add on to that what we find, what Robert and I find when we go into these enterprises is that they absolutely aren’t even thinking about the possibilities of what happens when you have a loyal audience of subscribers. And just want them to think a little bit differently and that’s when we throw examples like hey, have you seen what SalesForce has done?
They’ve created maybe one of the most valuable events in the world called DreamForce, 175,000 people in San Francisco every year. And they started it from just a simple customer data base. If that were sold, it will sell for almost a billion dollars, I think, just that event. So it’s amazing what can happen and the problem is ourselves. We’re getting in the way. We’re not thinking about it when wow we’re doing these activities as part of marketing.
We can be paying for marketing plus … And Robert is right. Some companies aren’t ready but I think the bigger issue is they’re just not even thinking about it. That’s the problem.
John Jantsch: That kind of leads me in my next question. In your view, are there certain kinds of companies or companies that are set up a certain way or maybe they’re a service or a product that they’re maybe more ready to effectively take advantage of this approach?
Joe Pulizzi: I’ll start, Robert, and then you can go. From what I’ve seen … and Robert works with larger companies because I want to get his take, I work with a lot of the smaller companies. What I see in the larger companies, from a distance in a lot of cases, is that they can’t move the big ship. It’s very hard to cut through all the red tape and to get somebody that’s been 20, 30 years in marketing and go to them and say hey, we’d like to try this new, wacky thing. Can we go ahead and do that?
If you have a small business owner that believes that they need to be or they should be the leading expert in their industry over a particular content area to their audience, and if they do that, they could transform the business, they can transform their customers, help their customers lives, their jobs in some way. That is the lowest hanging fruit, in my opinion.
So, actually I think a lot of the innovation, even though all those big companies have in some cases unlimited budgets … From some small companies they look at us like wow, Nike and SalesForce, they have these unlimited budgets. But if you’re a small company, it’s easier for you to do this and start monetizing quickly. And I think you’re a great case study on that when you got started, John. I think we’re a great case study. In 2007, we didn’t have two nickels to rub together but then..
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Transcript of How to Turn Marketing Costs Into Profit
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John Jantsch: I have seen the future of marketing, and it is killing me. Well, no. That’s not really true, but in this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast I do speak with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, authors of Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Costs into Profit.
Fascinating, something that obviously applies to the mammoth Netflix and Amazons of the world, but I think that this is an approach that actually might apply to just about any business going today and how to get them think completely differently about everything that they do in marketing. Check it out.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guests, yes that’s plural, Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, and Robert Rose, the chief strategy advisor of the same. We’re gonna talk about the new book by both of them today called Killing Marketing: How Innovate Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit. So Joe, Robert, thanks for joining me.
Joe Pulizzi: Thanks for having us.
Robert Rose: John, thank you so much. Oh, this is super fun. Appreciate it.
John Jantsch: Yeah. So this is … How many books for you guys together? Like three or four?
Robert Rose: I think it says 70 something.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah. It’s in the 70s.
Robert Rose: Actually, believe it or not, this is only our second book together.
John Jantsch: Only your second one together. Okay.
Robert Rose: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Jantsch: Did you do this one different? I know in this book you’ve kind of got here’s Joe’s chapter. Here’s Robert’s chapter. That’s not what you did in the last one though, is it?
Joe Pulizzi: No, the last one was completely different. The last one really was Robert’s brain child and I sort of tagged along with him. And the different thing about this one is we sort of came up with this concept almost at the same time, like this story has to be told. And we both had different areas of focus that we wanted to focus on, which worked out great and now we, as you said, we just sort of said Joe, you take this one. Robert, you take this one.
And it worked great for the audio book, too, because then I didn’t have to do the whole thing by myself. So, there you go.
John Jantsch: So, Joe. Your relationship, is that the right word, with Content Marketing Institute has changed a little. Is that something you can talk about?
Robert Rose: Yes, Joe. Tell us all about Content Marketing Institute.
Joe Pulizzi: I guess we can sort of talk about it now, so it’s kind of going public. I’m moving out of an operational role. Always a part of CMI, always gonna be at Content Marketing World, our big event, but I am looking to do some different things and spend more time with the family and do some more travel with my family and that will start in January.
And I’m going to leave basically all my duties to Robert, thankfully. And he is going to carry the torch the rest of the way. So, it’s been a great run, 10 years with Content Marketing Institute. and of course I’ll always be the founder, I’ll always be a part of this thing. But we’ve got some opportunities today and I really just wanted to make life hard on Robert. So, this is the best way to do that.
John Jantsch: Plus you’re just probably tired of content, right?
Joe Pulizzi: Oh my god, I can’t tell ya how tired I am of content marketing. No, actually it’s funny. So this is my fifth book between Robert’s and my individual books. And this is the one I’m most excited about because I think we finally hit on something that is going to change most organizations, small, medium and large, and they don’t even know it.
So I’m leaving in maybe the high point and then I’ll just kind go off into the shadows and I’ll check in on Robert on occasion.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I would agree. This is a big idea book and your other books were great books, or certainly the last book, Content Inc, in a lot of ways I think you were almost reporting on what is, whereas I think this book is more here’s what’s coming. That’s my assessment. I could be completely off, but that’s how it feels.
So early on in the book, you evoke one of my heroes Peter Drucker, talking about the purpose of a business. And actually that statement of the purpose of a business — to create, keep a customer — is probably the genesis of Duct Tape Marketing, believe it or not. That book, the Practice of Management, had a lot to do with forming my thinking.
That obviously hasn’t changed, but how we go about doing that seems to have changed. So how does that play out in Killing Marketing.
Robert Rose: Well first of all, let me just tell you that if I didn’t love you already, now I love you even more by bringing in my hero Peter Drucker into the whole mix here. The Practice of Management is probably one of the fundamental reasons that I’m in the career that I am in today.
And you’re right. It’s absolutely this. That has not changed. It’s funny because where marketing is today has really lost sight of what Drucker was talking about. When he was talking about the purpose of a business, creating a customer, that idea has become so morphed these days into persuasion, right? It has transformed marketing into how do we find people and persuade them that our product or services is worth doing?
And what he was talking about was literally creating a customer from nothing. In other words, creating a customer that comes to their own conclusion that your product or service is worth their time or their money and that being the purpose of a business.
What we set out to talk about in this book was we started with this fundamental question, which was … And this was something that we borrowed and it’s a quote that’s been attributed to Mark Twain. There’s no evidence that he actually ever said it, which is that it’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for absolute sure that does.
And the question we opened up with was what if everything we know about marketing today is what’s holding us back? And we started down this path and what started to see were these companies. And we’ve seen the trends, how companies today are rebooting what it even means to be build an audience first and use that as a valuable way of creating customers so that marketing itself can become a profitable part of the business.
So instead of just being the department that makes pretty pictures or the department that spews out advertising or that makes cold calls or that tries to convert customers using all manner of collateral material, marketing the function actually becomes that which builds and creates customers, which we’re now calling audiences.
John Jantsch: So a big part of this obviously, from both of your backgrounds too, is this idea of content and content marketing. I mean is this an evolution of how we’re coming to think about content? I know we used to say content is king, that was kind of cool for a while.
And then I think in a lot of ways it’s become air for every sort of channel and element and, even as you suggest in your last book, a business model in itself. Is this another evolution of content marketing? We’re going to come back to that term, content marketing, but I’ll let you answer that first.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, I’ll take this one, Robert. I think that if we just look at the traditional, say definition, but how most organizations think about content marketing, it’s oh we’re going to create valuable, relevant and compelling content. We’re going to distribute that on a platform and we’re going to build an audience in some way and we’re going to sell our product or service, which by the way is fine.
That’s great. If you do that, your successful with it, that’s basically content marketing. I think the difference is what we talk about in Killing Marketing is you don’t have to limit it to just that. We think there’s something bigger, as Robert talked about and you talked about, this is a business model change.
We believe instead of setting up your marketing organization for interruption, like it’s basically been set up for the last 50 years, what if we set it up around groups of audiences that we get really close to, we build loyal and trusted relationships with, and we don’t just create one revenue stream. We create four, five. We talk about 10 different revenue streams in the book and what we’re seeing a lot of companies out there do, they’re starting to dip their toe in the water and they’re coming up with new products and services because they have these audiences that they never dreamed they would do before.
You know Robert talks about BabyCenter.com from Johnson and Johnson all the time and how they created this standalone media property that enables them to not only sell more of their stuff but to create more products and services that they never thought was possible.
Kraft has done the same thing with Kraft Food and Family. So those types of things that we’re seeing where you can actually say, oh if we build an audience that’s loyal and trusting to us, and they start to look to us for guidance, we can actually transform the business into something that we weren’t even prepared to do. And by the way, this model is in full effect right now with Amazon.com.
Just so you know. It’s happening. And by the way, Amazon will be the most valuable company probably inside of five years in the world. And they’re doing it because they’re so focused on their customers and they’re not just saying this is what we want to sell. They’re saying well, if we get really close to that customer, what are the possibilities? And of course Jeff Bezos is showing us what those possibilities are.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I think just even this week the whole we can deliver inside your home thing is actually … Hopefully you’ve read about that [crosstalk 00:10:02]. I think a lot of that has to be hey, if we do this thing that we think will be more convenient, it will actually let us sell security systems, for example. And I maybe didn’t lay that out right but again, the first thought was this will be a service or a better experience for our customers, oh and look, it allows us to do x.
Joe Pulizzi: Well, what they’re doing, they’re putting six and a half billion dollars into … I mean Amazon won an Academy Award this year, or an Emmy award this year, excuse me. Here’s an online book store that sells some level of technology and now is really the online version of Walmart, and they’re winning Emmy awards for the creation of original content.
But if you look at their investment in content, the six and a half billion that they’re putting into things like all their original programming, they’re looking at that as a marketing cost in order to sell more Prime memberships, which of course is about buying things. And so they look at the investment in original content that they’re serving over the Prime streaming service as a marketing cost for them. So they’re turning into an integrated media platform before our very eyes but they’re looking at it as a way of pulling in an audience that they can monetize in other ways.
John Jantsch: So I realize this is a dangerous question, given who I’m talking to, but is the term content marketing really the wrong the term?
Robert Rose: Sure. Fine. I mean, if you don’t like it. We’ve never been that attached to the term but we have yet to find a better one.
John Jantsch: Here’s what I mean by that. It’s not that content marketing itself is a bad term. It’s just that if we look at that as a form of marketing, like social media marketing or mobile marketing, that it really is just marketing that happens to use content.
Robert Rose: No. The difference in the two that you mentioned … I realize this is semantics at some level, but the two that you mentioned are channel based, right? So it’s like saying TV marketing or newspaper marketing when I say social media marketing or mobile marketing.
And so that would be where I would draw those differentiations. When we say content marketing, what we’re describing … Whether we’re describing it well or not is for debate, but what we’re describing is the methodology of using an owned media platform to integrate into the everything else you’re doing as a business, right? So it’s a using the idea of our ability to create compelling, wonderful, engaging, inspiring, thought leadership-orientated content as a means of changing the behavior of a consumer.
So, it’s something that gets infused into the broader marketing strategy. Now, what I would concede, and I’m sure Joe would agree, is that at some point content marketing as a separate idea becomes subsumed into the broader topic of marketing and it just becomes a different way that we call marketing.
John Jantsch: Because social media marketing requires content.
Robert Rose: Exactly right. So does TV marketing and so does newspaper marketing and so does PDF marketing and fax marketing and everything else, yeah.
John Jantsch: Fax marketing, wow.
Robert Rose: I did it. Oh, absolutely. That used to be very important.
John Jantsch: If I had a fax machine, I would probably still get some [crosstalk 00:13:20].
Robert Rose: It’s funny we say fax marketing. Social media, it’s just channels. There’s no strategic method — You can say there’s a strategic methodology behind it depending, again it is semantics. But the reason why we call it content marketing is it is right now a fundamentally different approach to most organizations. If you just call it marketing or marketing the way we think it should be, they don’t get it. So we have to call it something different today and in five years we might not have to.
John Jantsch: So some of what you talk about in Killing Marketing, or I guess I should ask this rather than state it, will it require a company to … Because of the change that I think, even if it’s a mindset change, that it requires, will it also require in some cases for them to maybe cannibalize today’s profits?
Robert Rose: You know that’s a really interesting question because there’s two sides to that. The one side, I think it’s a really interesting point you bring up, which is does it immediately lean toward to creating new products and services?
And that’s one of the biggest push backs, quite frankly, is that if done right when we look at content marketing, it starts to look a lot like more product development methodology than it does campaign or traditional marketing-related methodology because you’re building a product extensively that you’re trying to build an audience for and monetize in multiple ways. And so it looks very much like a product and so that’s a really interesting question when we start talking about does it cannibalize the efforts of what we’re doing elsewhere?
However, there’s a flip side of that, the other side of that is can it actually begin to improve the margins of what we’re doing for other things, right? So you look at a manufacturing company where they maybe be looking at really lean margins, but if they can start to integrate media into their business, which of course has and enjoys quite high margins, can they actually add a pointer to their total bottom line by actually monetizing content and thought leadership and other things in a different way.
So I think there’s an opportunity for both things to be true.
John Jantsch: I can’t think of a great example but years ago the newspapers, they saw the train coming right at them but then they hung on to classified ads for example as a profit center because to just give them away, even though that train was heading towards them, was hard to do.
Robert Rose: John, that’s actually a great example. I mean I grew up in magazine publishing and we were so afraid … The executives in my company were so afraid to say okay, well we can do all this web stuff but make sure that we still sell those print pages. That’s the most important thing. So we deliberately were not cannibalizing our business.
We were trying to add oh, other lines, this will be great, but this is the core … I think that’s the problem with what newspapers didn’t do and magazine publishing, because they had the processes, they had the people, they had the content, they had the audience. They had everything to do what an Amazon.com is doing today. But they didn’t do it because they were afraid of cannibalization and I think today, you absolutely have to run at it and say we have to cannibalize ourselves before somebody else does.
Joe Pulizzi: And it’s wonder, you know, looking at it from the small business side for just a moment. One of the entrepreneurs that I admire most out there is Brian Clark and what he’s been able to do with CopyBlogger. If you look at what he started with, he built a media company first that had nice, wonderful high margins and built that media company.
And now he’s started to build products alongside that and become this integrated product and media company where his audience is telling him what products to sell, software, software as a service, other types of services that they’re now starting to offer, and education, etc.
Where he can now go into what might be a lower margin business because he started in such a high margin business. So there’s really interesting opportunities there but, to your point, it becomes interesting as to where you start cannibalizing from one or the other.
Robert Rose: I know a business called Duct Tape Marketing that’s done the same thing.
John Jantsch: Brian and I talk about this a lot. And Brian … I mean it’s great to call people that figured this out, did it and then everybody said they’re geniuses. I mean Brian would be the first to admit he wasn’t really sure where he was headed with this and then all of sudden it was like, oh, look what we did. Even some of the examples in your book are really companies that it wasn’t so much intentional as much as it was just trying to ride what seemed to be going on. And then all of a sudden woke up one day and went, wait a minute. This is a whole other business.
Robert Rose: Willingness to adapt is the key there.
Joe Pulizzi: I mean against the great example of Red Bull Media House. I know we talk about it all the time but that was a happy accident. Red Bull Media House becoming maybe one of the largest, most important sports media companies out there started because they wanted to do a print magazine at the racetrack. They wanted to do a show daily. That show daily turned into the Red Bull, which now has two million subscribers and then all the videos and the syndication and they’re having The New York Times and Wall Street Journal pay them money for some of their content.
I mean, that stuff happened from just an idea. So that’s how it mostly happens.
John Jantsch: So, let’s get to another really big idea in this book. I talked to a lot of marketers who still view marketing as an expense. Of course, I tried to convince them it’s an investment. But you’re going to suggest that it’s a profit center or can be a profit center.
Robert Rose: Absolutely, it can be both. It can be all of those things, right? I mean one of the things that we talk through in the book is not only … Because a lot of companies aren’t ready quite frankly for the revenue opportunities that building a media platform might provide. They’re looking simply at how do they make their marketing more efficient and a more efficient expense or, to your point, an investment.
And there are a lot of ways to do that. One of them of course is to start to leverage the asset that you call audience, when you start looking at how leveraging the value of an audience can help make the rest of your marketing better. Just a simple example. If you’ve got a viable subscribed and trusting audience, using that data to for example upload it to LinkedIn or Facebook or use it for retargeting, and make your media buy that you’re doing, you know your regular advertising media buy, more efficient.
And if you can save money because you’ve got the data that you’re using to target advertising in a more relevant way, well that’s making marketing more efficient and it’s taking more advantage of the investment that you’re putting in marketing more broadly.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah I’d just add on to that what we find, what Robert and I find when we go into these enterprises is that they absolutely aren’t even thinking about the possibilities of what happens when you have a loyal audience of subscribers. And just want them to think a little bit differently and that’s when we throw examples like hey, have you seen what SalesForce has done?
They’ve created maybe one of the most valuable events in the world called DreamForce, 175,000 people in San Francisco every year. And they started it from just a simple customer data base. If that were sold, it will sell for almost a billion dollars, I think, just that event. So it’s amazing what can happen and the problem is ourselves. We’re getting in the way. We’re not thinking about it when wow we’re doing these activities as part of marketing.
We can be paying for marketing plus … And Robert is right. Some companies aren’t ready but I think the bigger issue is they’re just not even thinking about it. That’s the problem.
John Jantsch: That kind of leads me in my next question. In your view, are there certain kinds of companies or companies that are set up a certain way or maybe they’re a service or a product that they’re maybe more ready to effectively take advantage of this approach?
Joe Pulizzi: I’ll start, Robert, and then you can go. From what I’ve seen … and Robert works with larger companies because I want to get his take, I work with a lot of the smaller companies. What I see in the larger companies, from a distance in a lot of cases, is that they can’t move the big ship. It’s very hard to cut through all the red tape and to get somebody that’s been 20, 30 years in marketing and go to them and say hey, we’d like to try this new, wacky thing. Can we go ahead and do that?
If you have a small business owner that believes that they need to be or they should be the leading expert in their industry over a particular content area to their audience, and if they do that, they could transform the business, they can transform their customers, help their customers lives, their jobs in some way. That is the lowest hanging fruit, in my opinion.
So, actually I think a lot of the innovation, even though all those big companies have in some cases unlimited budgets … From some small companies they look at us like wow, Nike and SalesForce, they have these unlimited budgets. But if you’re a small company, it’s easier for you to do this and start monetizing quickly. And I think you’re a great case study on that when you got started, John. I think we’re a great case study. In 2007, we didn’t have two nickels to rub together but then..
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John Jantsch: I have seen the future of marketing, and it is killing me. Well, no. That’s not really true, but in this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast I do speak with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, authors of Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Costs into Profit.
Fascinating, something that obviously applies to the mammoth Netflix and Amazons of the world, but I think that this is an approach that actually might apply to just about any business going today and how to get them think completely differently about everything that they do in marketing. Check it out.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guests, yes that’s plural, Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, and Robert Rose, the chief strategy advisor of the same. We’re gonna talk about the new book by both of them today called Killing Marketing: How Innovate Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit. So Joe, Robert, thanks for joining me.
Joe Pulizzi: Thanks for having us.
Robert Rose: John, thank you so much. Oh, this is super fun. Appreciate it.
John Jantsch: Yeah. So this is … How many books for you guys together? Like three or four?
Robert Rose: I think it says 70 something.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah. It’s in the 70s.
Robert Rose: Actually, believe it or not, this is only our second book together.
John Jantsch: Only your second one together. Okay.
Robert Rose: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Jantsch: Did you do this one different? I know in this book you’ve kind of got here’s Joe’s chapter. Here’s Robert’s chapter. That’s not what you did in the last one though, is it?
Joe Pulizzi: No, the last one was completely different. The last one really was Robert’s brain child and I sort of tagged along with him. And the different thing about this one is we sort of came up with this concept almost at the same time, like this story has to be told. And we both had different areas of focus that we wanted to focus on, which worked out great and now we, as you said, we just sort of said Joe, you take this one. Robert, you take this one.
And it worked great for the audio book, too, because then I didn’t have to do the whole thing by myself. So, there you go.
John Jantsch: So, Joe. Your relationship, is that the right word, with Content Marketing Institute has changed a little. Is that something you can talk about?
Robert Rose: Yes, Joe. Tell us all about Content Marketing Institute.
Joe Pulizzi: I guess we can sort of talk about it now, so it’s kind of going public. I’m moving out of an operational role. Always a part of CMI, always gonna be at Content Marketing World, our big event, but I am looking to do some different things and spend more time with the family and do some more travel with my family and that will start in January.
And I’m going to leave basically all my duties to Robert, thankfully. And he is going to carry the torch the rest of the way. So, it’s been a great run, 10 years with Content Marketing Institute. and of course I’ll always be the founder, I’ll always be a part of this thing. But we’ve got some opportunities today and I really just wanted to make life hard on Robert. So, this is the best way to do that.
John Jantsch: Plus you’re just probably tired of content, right?
Joe Pulizzi: Oh my god, I can’t tell ya how tired I am of content marketing. No, actually it’s funny. So this is my fifth book between Robert’s and my individual books. And this is the one I’m most excited about because I think we finally hit on something that is going to change most organizations, small, medium and large, and they don’t even know it.
So I’m leaving in maybe the high point and then I’ll just kind go off into the shadows and I’ll check in on Robert on occasion.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I would agree. This is a big idea book and your other books were great books, or certainly the last book, Content Inc, in a lot of ways I think you were almost reporting on what is, whereas I think this book is more here’s what’s coming. That’s my assessment. I could be completely off, but that’s how it feels.
So early on in the book, you evoke one of my heroes Peter Drucker, talking about the purpose of a business. And actually that statement of the purpose of a business — to create, keep a customer — is probably the genesis of Duct Tape Marketing, believe it or not. That book, the Practice of Management, had a lot to do with forming my thinking.
That obviously hasn’t changed, but how we go about doing that seems to have changed. So how does that play out in Killing Marketing.
Robert Rose: Well first of all, let me just tell you that if I didn’t love you already, now I love you even more by bringing in my hero Peter Drucker into the whole mix here. The Practice of Management is probably one of the fundamental reasons that I’m in the career that I am in today.
And you’re right. It’s absolutely this. That has not changed. It’s funny because where marketing is today has really lost sight of what Drucker was talking about. When he was talking about the purpose of a business, creating a customer, that idea has become so morphed these days into persuasion, right? It has transformed marketing into how do we find people and persuade them that our product or services is worth doing?
And what he was talking about was literally creating a customer from nothing. In other words, creating a customer that comes to their own conclusion that your product or service is worth their time or their money and that being the purpose of a business.
What we set out to talk about in this book was we started with this fundamental question, which was … And this was something that we borrowed and it’s a quote that’s been attributed to Mark Twain. There’s no evidence that he actually ever said it, which is that it’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for absolute sure that does.
And the question we opened up with was what if everything we know about marketing today is what’s holding us back? And we started down this path and what started to see were these companies. And we’ve seen the trends, how companies today are rebooting what it even means to be build an audience first and use that as a valuable way of creating customers so that marketing itself can become a profitable part of the business.
So instead of just being the department that makes pretty pictures or the department that spews out advertising or that makes cold calls or that tries to convert customers using all manner of collateral material, marketing the function actually becomes that which builds and creates customers, which we’re now calling audiences.
John Jantsch: So a big part of this obviously, from both of your backgrounds too, is this idea of content and content marketing. I mean is this an evolution of how we’re coming to think about content? I know we used to say content is king, that was kind of cool for a while.
And then I think in a lot of ways it’s become air for every sort of channel and element and, even as you suggest in your last book, a business model in itself. Is this another evolution of content marketing? We’re going to come back to that term, content marketing, but I’ll let you answer that first.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, I’ll take this one, Robert. I think that if we just look at the traditional, say definition, but how most organizations think about content marketing, it’s oh we’re going to create valuable, relevant and compelling content. We’re going to distribute that on a platform and we’re going to build an audience in some way and we’re going to sell our product or service, which by the way is fine.
That’s great. If you do that, your successful with it, that’s basically content marketing. I think the difference is what we talk about in Killing Marketing is you don’t have to limit it to just that. We think there’s something bigger, as Robert talked about and you talked about, this is a business model change.
We believe instead of setting up your marketing organization for interruption, like it’s basically been set up for the last 50 years, what if we set it up around groups of audiences that we get really close to, we build loyal and trusted relationships with, and we don’t just create one revenue stream. We create four, five. We talk about 10 different revenue streams in the book and what we’re seeing a lot of companies out there do, they’re starting to dip their toe in the water and they’re coming up with new products and services because they have these audiences that they never dreamed they would do before.
You know Robert talks about BabyCenter.com from Johnson and Johnson all the time and how they created this standalone media property that enables them to not only sell more of their stuff but to create more products and services that they never thought was possible.
Kraft has done the same thing with Kraft Food and Family. So those types of things that we’re seeing where you can actually say, oh if we build an audience that’s loyal and trusting to us, and they start to look to us for guidance, we can actually transform the business into something that we weren’t even prepared to do. And by the way, this model is in full effect right now with Amazon.com.
Just so you know. It’s happening. And by the way, Amazon will be the most valuable company probably inside of five years in the world. And they’re doing it because they’re so focused on their customers and they’re not just saying this is what we want to sell. They’re saying well, if we get really close to that customer, what are the possibilities? And of course Jeff Bezos is showing us what those possibilities are.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I think just even this week the whole we can deliver inside your home thing is actually … Hopefully you’ve read about that [crosstalk 00:10:02]. I think a lot of that has to be hey, if we do this thing that we think will be more convenient, it will actually let us sell security systems, for example. And I maybe didn’t lay that out right but again, the first thought was this will be a service or a better experience for our customers, oh and look, it allows us to do x.
Joe Pulizzi: Well, what they’re doing, they’re putting six and a half billion dollars into … I mean Amazon won an Academy Award this year, or an Emmy award this year, excuse me. Here’s an online book store that sells some level of technology and now is really the online version of Walmart, and they’re winning Emmy awards for the creation of original content.
But if you look at their investment in content, the six and a half billion that they’re putting into things like all their original programming, they’re looking at that as a marketing cost in order to sell more Prime memberships, which of course is about buying things. And so they look at the investment in original content that they’re serving over the Prime streaming service as a marketing cost for them. So they’re turning into an integrated media platform before our very eyes but they’re looking at it as a way of pulling in an audience that they can monetize in other ways.
John Jantsch: So I realize this is a dangerous question, given who I’m talking to, but is the term content marketing really the wrong the term?
Robert Rose: Sure. Fine. I mean, if you don’t like it. We’ve never been that attached to the term but we have yet to find a better one.
John Jantsch: Here’s what I mean by that. It’s not that content marketing itself is a bad term. It’s just that if we look at that as a form of marketing, like social media marketing or mobile marketing, that it really is just marketing that happens to use content.
Robert Rose: No. The difference in the two that you mentioned … I realize this is semantics at some level, but the two that you mentioned are channel based, right? So it’s like saying TV marketing or newspaper marketing when I say social media marketing or mobile marketing.
And so that would be where I would draw those differentiations. When we say content marketing, what we’re describing … Whether we’re describing it well or not is for debate, but what we’re describing is the methodology of using an owned media platform to integrate into the everything else you’re doing as a business, right? So it’s a using the idea of our ability to create compelling, wonderful, engaging, inspiring, thought leadership-orientated content as a means of changing the behavior of a consumer.
So, it’s something that gets infused into the broader marketing strategy. Now, what I would concede, and I’m sure Joe would agree, is that at some point content marketing as a separate idea becomes subsumed into the broader topic of marketing and it just becomes a different way that we call marketing.
John Jantsch: Because social media marketing requires content.
Robert Rose: Exactly right. So does TV marketing and so does newspaper marketing and so does PDF marketing and fax marketing and everything else, yeah.
John Jantsch: Fax marketing, wow.
Robert Rose: I did it. Oh, absolutely. That used to be very important.
John Jantsch: If I had a fax machine, I would probably still get some [crosstalk 00:13:20].
Robert Rose: It’s funny we say fax marketing. Social media, it’s just channels. There’s no strategic method — You can say there’s a strategic methodology behind it depending, again it is semantics. But the reason why we call it content marketing is it is right now a fundamentally different approach to most organizations. If you just call it marketing or marketing the way we think it should be, they don’t get it. So we have to call it something different today and in five years we might not have to.
John Jantsch: So some of what you talk about in Killing Marketing, or I guess I should ask this rather than state it, will it require a company to … Because of the change that I think, even if it’s a mindset change, that it requires, will it also require in some cases for them to maybe cannibalize today’s profits?
Robert Rose: You know that’s a really interesting question because there’s two sides to that. The one side, I think it’s a really interesting point you bring up, which is does it immediately lean toward to creating new products and services?
And that’s one of the biggest push backs, quite frankly, is that if done right when we look at content marketing, it starts to look a lot like more product development methodology than it does campaign or traditional marketing-related methodology because you’re building a product extensively that you’re trying to build an audience for and monetize in multiple ways. And so it looks very much like a product and so that’s a really interesting question when we start talking about does it cannibalize the efforts of what we’re doing elsewhere?
However, there’s a flip side of that, the other side of that is can it actually begin to improve the margins of what we’re doing for other things, right? So you look at a manufacturing company where they maybe be looking at really lean margins, but if they can start to integrate media into their business, which of course has and enjoys quite high margins, can they actually add a pointer to their total bottom line by actually monetizing content and thought leadership and other things in a different way.
So I think there’s an opportunity for both things to be true.
John Jantsch: I can’t think of a great example but years ago the newspapers, they saw the train coming right at them but then they hung on to classified ads for example as a profit center because to just give them away, even though that train was heading towards them, was hard to do.
Robert Rose: John, that’s actually a great example. I mean I grew up in magazine publishing and we were so afraid … The executives in my company were so afraid to say okay, well we can do all this web stuff but make sure that we still sell those print pages. That’s the most important thing. So we deliberately were not cannibalizing our business.
We were trying to add oh, other lines, this will be great, but this is the core … I think that’s the problem with what newspapers didn’t do and magazine publishing, because they had the processes, they had the people, they had the content, they had the audience. They had everything to do what an Amazon.com is doing today. But they didn’t do it because they were afraid of cannibalization and I think today, you absolutely have to run at it and say we have to cannibalize ourselves before somebody else does.
Joe Pulizzi: And it’s wonder, you know, looking at it from the small business side for just a moment. One of the entrepreneurs that I admire most out there is Brian Clark and what he’s been able to do with CopyBlogger. If you look at what he started with, he built a media company first that had nice, wonderful high margins and built that media company.
And now he’s started to build products alongside that and become this integrated product and media company where his audience is telling him what products to sell, software, software as a service, other types of services that they’re now starting to offer, and education, etc.
Where he can now go into what might be a lower margin business because he started in such a high margin business. So there’s really interesting opportunities there but, to your point, it becomes interesting as to where you start cannibalizing from one or the other.
Robert Rose: I know a business called Duct Tape Marketing that’s done the same thing.
John Jantsch: Brian and I talk about this a lot. And Brian … I mean it’s great to call people that figured this out, did it and then everybody said they’re geniuses. I mean Brian would be the first to admit he wasn’t really sure where he was headed with this and then all of sudden it was like, oh, look what we did. Even some of the examples in your book are really companies that it wasn’t so much intentional as much as it was just trying to ride what seemed to be going on. And then all of a sudden woke up one day and went, wait a minute. This is a whole other business.
Robert Rose: Willingness to adapt is the key there.
Joe Pulizzi: I mean against the great example of Red Bull Media House. I know we talk about it all the time but that was a happy accident. Red Bull Media House becoming maybe one of the largest, most important sports media companies out there started because they wanted to do a print magazine at the racetrack. They wanted to do a show daily. That show daily turned into the Red Bull, which now has two million subscribers and then all the videos and the syndication and they’re having The New York Times and Wall Street Journal pay them money for some of their content.
I mean, that stuff happened from just an idea. So that’s how it mostly happens.
John Jantsch: So, let’s get to another really big idea in this book. I talked to a lot of marketers who still view marketing as an expense. Of course, I tried to convince them it’s an investment. But you’re going to suggest that it’s a profit center or can be a profit center.
Robert Rose: Absolutely, it can be both. It can be all of those things, right? I mean one of the things that we talk through in the book is not only … Because a lot of companies aren’t ready quite frankly for the revenue opportunities that building a media platform might provide. They’re looking simply at how do they make their marketing more efficient and a more efficient expense or, to your point, an investment.
And there are a lot of ways to do that. One of them of course is to start to leverage the asset that you call audience, when you start looking at how leveraging the value of an audience can help make the rest of your marketing better. Just a simple example. If you’ve got a viable subscribed and trusting audience, using that data to for example upload it to LinkedIn or Facebook or use it for retargeting, and make your media buy that you’re doing, you know your regular advertising media buy, more efficient.
And if you can save money because you’ve got the data that you’re using to target advertising in a more relevant way, well that’s making marketing more efficient and it’s taking more advantage of the investment that you’re putting in marketing more broadly.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah I’d just add on to that what we find, what Robert and I find when we go into these enterprises is that they absolutely aren’t even thinking about the possibilities of what happens when you have a loyal audience of subscribers. And just want them to think a little bit differently and that’s when we throw examples like hey, have you seen what SalesForce has done?
They’ve created maybe one of the most valuable events in the world called DreamForce, 175,000 people in San Francisco every year. And they started it from just a simple customer data base. If that were sold, it will sell for almost a billion dollars, I think, just that event. So it’s amazing what can happen and the problem is ourselves. We’re getting in the way. We’re not thinking about it when wow we’re doing these activities as part of marketing.
We can be paying for marketing plus … And Robert is right. Some companies aren’t ready but I think the bigger issue is they’re just not even thinking about it. That’s the problem.
John Jantsch: That kind of leads me in my next question. In your view, are there certain kinds of companies or companies that are set up a certain way or maybe they’re a service or a product that they’re maybe more ready to effectively take advantage of this approach?
Joe Pulizzi: I’ll start, Robert, and then you can go. From what I’ve seen … and Robert works with larger companies because I want to get his take, I work with a lot of the smaller companies. What I see in the larger companies, from a distance in a lot of cases, is that they can’t move the big ship. It’s very hard to cut through all the red tape and to get somebody that’s been 20, 30 years in marketing and go to them and say hey, we’d like to try this new, wacky thing. Can we go ahead and do that?
If you have a small business owner that believes that they need to be or they should be the leading expert in their industry over a particular content area to their audience, and if they do that, they could transform the business, they can transform their customers, help their customers lives, their jobs in some way. That is the lowest hanging fruit, in my opinion.
So, actually I think a lot of the innovation, even though all those big companies have in some cases unlimited budgets … From some small companies they look at us like wow, Nike and SalesForce, they have these unlimited budgets. But if you’re a small company, it’s easier for you to do this and start monetizing quickly. And I think you’re a great case study on that when you got started, John. I think we’re a great case study. In 2007, we didn’t have two nickels to rub together but then..
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John Jantsch: I have seen the future of marketing, and it is killing me. Well, no. That’s not really true, but in this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast I do speak with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, authors of Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Costs into Profit.
Fascinating, something that obviously applies to the mammoth Netflix and Amazons of the world, but I think that this is an approach that actually might apply to just about any business going today and how to get them think completely differently about everything that they do in marketing. Check it out.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guests, yes that’s plural, Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, and Robert Rose, the chief strategy advisor of the same. We’re gonna talk about the new book by both of them today called Killing Marketing: How Innovate Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit. So Joe, Robert, thanks for joining me.
Joe Pulizzi: Thanks for having us.
Robert Rose: John, thank you so much. Oh, this is super fun. Appreciate it.
John Jantsch: Yeah. So this is … How many books for you guys together? Like three or four?
Robert Rose: I think it says 70 something.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah. It’s in the 70s.
Robert Rose: Actually, believe it or not, this is only our second book together.
John Jantsch: Only your second one together. Okay.
Robert Rose: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Jantsch: Did you do this one different? I know in this book you’ve kind of got here’s Joe’s chapter. Here’s Robert’s chapter. That’s not what you did in the last one though, is it?
Joe Pulizzi: No, the last one was completely different. The last one really was Robert’s brain child and I sort of tagged along with him. And the different thing about this one is we sort of came up with this concept almost at the same time, like this story has to be told. And we both had different areas of focus that we wanted to focus on, which worked out great and now we, as you said, we just sort of said Joe, you take this one. Robert, you take this one.
And it worked great for the audio book, too, because then I didn’t have to do the whole thing by myself. So, there you go.
John Jantsch: So, Joe. Your relationship, is that the right word, with Content Marketing Institute has changed a little. Is that something you can talk about?
Robert Rose: Yes, Joe. Tell us all about Content Marketing Institute.
Joe Pulizzi: I guess we can sort of talk about it now, so it’s kind of going public. I’m moving out of an operational role. Always a part of CMI, always gonna be at Content Marketing World, our big event, but I am looking to do some different things and spend more time with the family and do some more travel with my family and that will start in January.
And I’m going to leave basically all my duties to Robert, thankfully. And he is going to carry the torch the rest of the way. So, it’s been a great run, 10 years with Content Marketing Institute. and of course I’ll always be the founder, I’ll always be a part of this thing. But we’ve got some opportunities today and I really just wanted to make life hard on Robert. So, this is the best way to do that.
John Jantsch: Plus you’re just probably tired of content, right?
Joe Pulizzi: Oh my god, I can’t tell ya how tired I am of content marketing. No, actually it’s funny. So this is my fifth book between Robert’s and my individual books. And this is the one I’m most excited about because I think we finally hit on something that is going to change most organizations, small, medium and large, and they don’t even know it.
So I’m leaving in maybe the high point and then I’ll just kind go off into the shadows and I’ll check in on Robert on occasion.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I would agree. This is a big idea book and your other books were great books, or certainly the last book, Content Inc, in a lot of ways I think you were almost reporting on what is, whereas I think this book is more here’s what’s coming. That’s my assessment. I could be completely off, but that’s how it feels.
So early on in the book, you evoke one of my heroes Peter Drucker, talking about the purpose of a business. And actually that statement of the purpose of a business — to create, keep a customer — is probably the genesis of Duct Tape Marketing, believe it or not. That book, the Practice of Management, had a lot to do with forming my thinking.
That obviously hasn’t changed, but how we go about doing that seems to have changed. So how does that play out in Killing Marketing.
Robert Rose: Well first of all, let me just tell you that if I didn’t love you already, now I love you even more by bringing in my hero Peter Drucker into the whole mix here. The Practice of Management is probably one of the fundamental reasons that I’m in the career that I am in today.
And you’re right. It’s absolutely this. That has not changed. It’s funny because where marketing is today has really lost sight of what Drucker was talking about. When he was talking about the purpose of a business, creating a customer, that idea has become so morphed these days into persuasion, right? It has transformed marketing into how do we find people and persuade them that our product or services is worth doing?
And what he was talking about was literally creating a customer from nothing. In other words, creating a customer that comes to their own conclusion that your product or service is worth their time or their money and that being the purpose of a business.
What we set out to talk about in this book was we started with this fundamental question, which was … And this was something that we borrowed and it’s a quote that’s been attributed to Mark Twain. There’s no evidence that he actually ever said it, which is that it’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for absolute sure that does.
And the question we opened up with was what if everything we know about marketing today is what’s holding us back? And we started down this path and what started to see were these companies. And we’ve seen the trends, how companies today are rebooting what it even means to be build an audience first and use that as a valuable way of creating customers so that marketing itself can become a profitable part of the business.
So instead of just being the department that makes pretty pictures or the department that spews out advertising or that makes cold calls or that tries to convert customers using all manner of collateral material, marketing the function actually becomes that which builds and creates customers, which we’re now calling audiences.
John Jantsch: So a big part of this obviously, from both of your backgrounds too, is this idea of content and content marketing. I mean is this an evolution of how we’re coming to think about content? I know we used to say content is king, that was kind of cool for a while.
And then I think in a lot of ways it’s become air for every sort of channel and element and, even as you suggest in your last book, a business model in itself. Is this another evolution of content marketing? We’re going to come back to that term, content marketing, but I’ll let you answer that first.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, I’ll take this one, Robert. I think that if we just look at the traditional, say definition, but how most organizations think about content marketing, it’s oh we’re going to create valuable, relevant and compelling content. We’re going to distribute that on a platform and we’re going to build an audience in some way and we’re going to sell our product or service, which by the way is fine.
That’s great. If you do that, your successful with it, that’s basically content marketing. I think the difference is what we talk about in Killing Marketing is you don’t have to limit it to just that. We think there’s something bigger, as Robert talked about and you talked about, this is a business model change.
We believe instead of setting up your marketing organization for interruption, like it’s basically been set up for the last 50 years, what if we set it up around groups of audiences that we get really close to, we build loyal and trusted relationships with, and we don’t just create one revenue stream. We create four, five. We talk about 10 different revenue streams in the book and what we’re seeing a lot of companies out there do, they’re starting to dip their toe in the water and they’re coming up with new products and services because they have these audiences that they never dreamed they would do before.
You know Robert talks about BabyCenter.com from Johnson and Johnson all the time and how they created this standalone media property that enables them to not only sell more of their stuff but to create more products and services that they never thought was possible.
Kraft has done the same thing with Kraft Food and Family. So those types of things that we’re seeing where you can actually say, oh if we build an audience that’s loyal and trusting to us, and they start to look to us for guidance, we can actually transform the business into something that we weren’t even prepared to do. And by the way, this model is in full effect right now with Amazon.com.
Just so you know. It’s happening. And by the way, Amazon will be the most valuable company probably inside of five years in the world. And they’re doing it because they’re so focused on their customers and they’re not just saying this is what we want to sell. They’re saying well, if we get really close to that customer, what are the possibilities? And of course Jeff Bezos is showing us what those possibilities are.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I think just even this week the whole we can deliver inside your home thing is actually … Hopefully you’ve read about that [crosstalk 00:10:02]. I think a lot of that has to be hey, if we do this thing that we think will be more convenient, it will actually let us sell security systems, for example. And I maybe didn’t lay that out right but again, the first thought was this will be a service or a better experience for our customers, oh and look, it allows us to do x.
Joe Pulizzi: Well, what they’re doing, they’re putting six and a half billion dollars into … I mean Amazon won an Academy Award this year, or an Emmy award this year, excuse me. Here’s an online book store that sells some level of technology and now is really the online version of Walmart, and they’re winning Emmy awards for the creation of original content.
But if you look at their investment in content, the six and a half billion that they’re putting into things like all their original programming, they’re looking at that as a marketing cost in order to sell more Prime memberships, which of course is about buying things. And so they look at the investment in original content that they’re serving over the Prime streaming service as a marketing cost for them. So they’re turning into an integrated media platform before our very eyes but they’re looking at it as a way of pulling in an audience that they can monetize in other ways.
John Jantsch: So I realize this is a dangerous question, given who I’m talking to, but is the term content marketing really the wrong the term?
Robert Rose: Sure. Fine. I mean, if you don’t like it. We’ve never been that attached to the term but we have yet to find a better one.
John Jantsch: Here’s what I mean by that. It’s not that content marketing itself is a bad term. It’s just that if we look at that as a form of marketing, like social media marketing or mobile marketing, that it really is just marketing that happens to use content.
Robert Rose: No. The difference in the two that you mentioned … I realize this is semantics at some level, but the two that you mentioned are channel based, right? So it’s like saying TV marketing or newspaper marketing when I say social media marketing or mobile marketing.
And so that would be where I would draw those differentiations. When we say content marketing, what we’re describing … Whether we’re describing it well or not is for debate, but what we’re describing is the methodology of using an owned media platform to integrate into the everything else you’re doing as a business, right? So it’s a using the idea of our ability to create compelling, wonderful, engaging, inspiring, thought leadership-orientated content as a means of changing the behavior of a consumer.
So, it’s something that gets infused into the broader marketing strategy. Now, what I would concede, and I’m sure Joe would agree, is that at some point content marketing as a separate idea becomes subsumed into the broader topic of marketing and it just becomes a different way that we call marketing.
John Jantsch: Because social media marketing requires content.
Robert Rose: Exactly right. So does TV marketing and so does newspaper marketing and so does PDF marketing and fax marketing and everything else, yeah.
John Jantsch: Fax marketing, wow.
Robert Rose: I did it. Oh, absolutely. That used to be very important.
John Jantsch: If I had a fax machine, I would probably still get some [crosstalk 00:13:20].
Robert Rose: It’s funny we say fax marketing. Social media, it’s just channels. There’s no strategic method — You can say there’s a strategic methodology behind it depending, again it is semantics. But the reason why we call it content marketing is it is right now a fundamentally different approach to most organizations. If you just call it marketing or marketing the way we think it should be, they don’t get it. So we have to call it something different today and in five years we might not have to.
John Jantsch: So some of what you talk about in Killing Marketing, or I guess I should ask this rather than state it, will it require a company to … Because of the change that I think, even if it’s a mindset change, that it requires, will it also require in some cases for them to maybe cannibalize today’s profits?
Robert Rose: You know that’s a really interesting question because there’s two sides to that. The one side, I think it’s a really interesting point you bring up, which is does it immediately lean toward to creating new products and services?
And that’s one of the biggest push backs, quite frankly, is that if done right when we look at content marketing, it starts to look a lot like more product development methodology than it does campaign or traditional marketing-related methodology because you’re building a product extensively that you’re trying to build an audience for and monetize in multiple ways. And so it looks very much like a product and so that’s a really interesting question when we start talking about does it cannibalize the efforts of what we’re doing elsewhere?
However, there’s a flip side of that, the other side of that is can it actually begin to improve the margins of what we’re doing for other things, right? So you look at a manufacturing company where they maybe be looking at really lean margins, but if they can start to integrate media into their business, which of course has and enjoys quite high margins, can they actually add a pointer to their total bottom line by actually monetizing content and thought leadership and other things in a different way.
So I think there’s an opportunity for both things to be true.
John Jantsch: I can’t think of a great example but years ago the newspapers, they saw the train coming right at them but then they hung on to classified ads for example as a profit center because to just give them away, even though that train was heading towards them, was hard to do.
Robert Rose: John, that’s actually a great example. I mean I grew up in magazine publishing and we were so afraid … The executives in my company were so afraid to say okay, well we can do all this web stuff but make sure that we still sell those print pages. That’s the most important thing. So we deliberately were not cannibalizing our business.
We were trying to add oh, other lines, this will be great, but this is the core … I think that’s the problem with what newspapers didn’t do and magazine publishing, because they had the processes, they had the people, they had the content, they had the audience. They had everything to do what an Amazon.com is doing today. But they didn’t do it because they were afraid of cannibalization and I think today, you absolutely have to run at it and say we have to cannibalize ourselves before somebody else does.
Joe Pulizzi: And it’s wonder, you know, looking at it from the small business side for just a moment. One of the entrepreneurs that I admire most out there is Brian Clark and what he’s been able to do with CopyBlogger. If you look at what he started with, he built a media company first that had nice, wonderful high margins and built that media company.
And now he’s started to build products alongside that and become this integrated product and media company where his audience is telling him what products to sell, software, software as a service, other types of services that they’re now starting to offer, and education, etc.
Where he can now go into what might be a lower margin business because he started in such a high margin business. So there’s really interesting opportunities there but, to your point, it becomes interesting as to where you start cannibalizing from one or the other.
Robert Rose: I know a business called Duct Tape Marketing that’s done the same thing.
John Jantsch: Brian and I talk about this a lot. And Brian … I mean it’s great to call people that figured this out, did it and then everybody said they’re geniuses. I mean Brian would be the first to admit he wasn’t really sure where he was headed with this and then all of sudden it was like, oh, look what we did. Even some of the examples in your book are really companies that it wasn’t so much intentional as much as it was just trying to ride what seemed to be going on. And then all of a sudden woke up one day and went, wait a minute. This is a whole other business.
Robert Rose: Willingness to adapt is the key there.
Joe Pulizzi: I mean against the great example of Red Bull Media House. I know we talk about it all the time but that was a happy accident. Red Bull Media House becoming maybe one of the largest, most important sports media companies out there started because they wanted to do a print magazine at the racetrack. They wanted to do a show daily. That show daily turned into the Red Bull, which now has two million subscribers and then all the videos and the syndication and they’re having The New York Times and Wall Street Journal pay them money for some of their content.
I mean, that stuff happened from just an idea. So that’s how it mostly happens.
John Jantsch: So, let’s get to another really big idea in this book. I talked to a lot of marketers who still view marketing as an expense. Of course, I tried to convince them it’s an investment. But you’re going to suggest that it’s a profit center or can be a profit center.
Robert Rose: Absolutely, it can be both. It can be all of those things, right? I mean one of the things that we talk through in the book is not only … Because a lot of companies aren’t ready quite frankly for the revenue opportunities that building a media platform might provide. They’re looking simply at how do they make their marketing more efficient and a more efficient expense or, to your point, an investment.
And there are a lot of ways to do that. One of them of course is to start to leverage the asset that you call audience, when you start looking at how leveraging the value of an audience can help make the rest of your marketing better. Just a simple example. If you’ve got a viable subscribed and trusting audience, using that data to for example upload it to LinkedIn or Facebook or use it for retargeting, and make your media buy that you’re doing, you know your regular advertising media buy, more efficient.
And if you can save money because you’ve got the data that you’re using to target advertising in a more relevant way, well that’s making marketing more efficient and it’s taking more advantage of the investment that you’re putting in marketing more broadly.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah I’d just add on to that what we find, what Robert and I find when we go into these enterprises is that they absolutely aren’t even thinking about the possibilities of what happens when you have a loyal audience of subscribers. And just want them to think a little bit differently and that’s when we throw examples like hey, have you seen what SalesForce has done?
They’ve created maybe one of the most valuable events in the world called DreamForce, 175,000 people in San Francisco every year. And they started it from just a simple customer data base. If that were sold, it will sell for almost a billion dollars, I think, just that event. So it’s amazing what can happen and the problem is ourselves. We’re getting in the way. We’re not thinking about it when wow we’re doing these activities as part of marketing.
We can be paying for marketing plus … And Robert is right. Some companies aren’t ready but I think the bigger issue is they’re just not even thinking about it. That’s the problem.
John Jantsch: That kind of leads me in my next question. In your view, are there certain kinds of companies or companies that are set up a certain way or maybe they’re a service or a product that they’re maybe more ready to effectively take advantage of this approach?
Joe Pulizzi: I’ll start, Robert, and then you can go. From what I’ve seen … and Robert works with larger companies because I want to get his take, I work with a lot of the smaller companies. What I see in the larger companies, from a distance in a lot of cases, is that they can’t move the big ship. It’s very hard to cut through all the red tape and to get somebody that’s been 20, 30 years in marketing and go to them and say hey, we’d like to try this new, wacky thing. Can we go ahead and do that?
If you have a small business owner that believes that they need to be or they should be the leading expert in their industry over a particular content area to their audience, and if they do that, they could transform the business, they can transform their customers, help their customers lives, their jobs in some way. That is the lowest hanging fruit, in my opinion.
So, actually I think a lot of the innovation, even though all those big companies have in some cases unlimited budgets … From some small companies they look at us like wow, Nike and SalesForce, they have these unlimited budgets. But if you’re a small company, it’s easier for you to do this and start monetizing quickly. And I think you’re a great case study on that when you got started, John. I think we’re a great case study. In 2007, we didn’t have two nickels to rub together but then..
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Transcript of How to Turn Marketing Costs Into Profit
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John Jantsch: I have seen the future of marketing, and it is killing me. Well, no. That’s not really true, but in this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast I do speak with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, authors of Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Costs into Profit.
Fascinating, something that obviously applies to the mammoth Netflix and Amazons of the world, but I think that this is an approach that actually might apply to just about any business going today and how to get them think completely differently about everything that they do in marketing. Check it out.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guests, yes that’s plural, Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, and Robert Rose, the chief strategy advisor of the same. We’re gonna talk about the new book by both of them today called Killing Marketing: How Innovate Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit. So Joe, Robert, thanks for joining me.
Joe Pulizzi: Thanks for having us.
Robert Rose: John, thank you so much. Oh, this is super fun. Appreciate it.
John Jantsch: Yeah. So this is … How many books for you guys together? Like three or four?
Robert Rose: I think it says 70 something.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah. It’s in the 70s.
Robert Rose: Actually, believe it or not, this is only our second book together.
John Jantsch: Only your second one together. Okay.
Robert Rose: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Jantsch: Did you do this one different? I know in this book you’ve kind of got here’s Joe’s chapter. Here’s Robert’s chapter. That’s not what you did in the last one though, is it?
Joe Pulizzi: No, the last one was completely different. The last one really was Robert’s brain child and I sort of tagged along with him. And the different thing about this one is we sort of came up with this concept almost at the same time, like this story has to be told. And we both had different areas of focus that we wanted to focus on, which worked out great and now we, as you said, we just sort of said Joe, you take this one. Robert, you take this one.
And it worked great for the audio book, too, because then I didn’t have to do the whole thing by myself. So, there you go.
John Jantsch: So, Joe. Your relationship, is that the right word, with Content Marketing Institute has changed a little. Is that something you can talk about?
Robert Rose: Yes, Joe. Tell us all about Content Marketing Institute.
Joe Pulizzi: I guess we can sort of talk about it now, so it’s kind of going public. I’m moving out of an operational role. Always a part of CMI, always gonna be at Content Marketing World, our big event, but I am looking to do some different things and spend more time with the family and do some more travel with my family and that will start in January.
And I’m going to leave basically all my duties to Robert, thankfully. And he is going to carry the torch the rest of the way. So, it’s been a great run, 10 years with Content Marketing Institute. and of course I’ll always be the founder, I’ll always be a part of this thing. But we’ve got some opportunities today and I really just wanted to make life hard on Robert. So, this is the best way to do that.
John Jantsch: Plus you’re just probably tired of content, right?
Joe Pulizzi: Oh my god, I can’t tell ya how tired I am of content marketing. No, actually it’s funny. So this is my fifth book between Robert’s and my individual books. And this is the one I’m most excited about because I think we finally hit on something that is going to change most organizations, small, medium and large, and they don’t even know it.
So I’m leaving in maybe the high point and then I’ll just kind go off into the shadows and I’ll check in on Robert on occasion.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I would agree. This is a big idea book and your other books were great books, or certainly the last book, Content Inc, in a lot of ways I think you were almost reporting on what is, whereas I think this book is more here’s what’s coming. That’s my assessment. I could be completely off, but that’s how it feels.
So early on in the book, you evoke one of my heroes Peter Drucker, talking about the purpose of a business. And actually that statement of the purpose of a business — to create, keep a customer — is probably the genesis of Duct Tape Marketing, believe it or not. That book, the Practice of Management, had a lot to do with forming my thinking.
That obviously hasn’t changed, but how we go about doing that seems to have changed. So how does that play out in Killing Marketing.
Robert Rose: Well first of all, let me just tell you that if I didn’t love you already, now I love you even more by bringing in my hero Peter Drucker into the whole mix here. The Practice of Management is probably one of the fundamental reasons that I’m in the career that I am in today.
And you’re right. It’s absolutely this. That has not changed. It’s funny because where marketing is today has really lost sight of what Drucker was talking about. When he was talking about the purpose of a business, creating a customer, that idea has become so morphed these days into persuasion, right? It has transformed marketing into how do we find people and persuade them that our product or services is worth doing?
And what he was talking about was literally creating a customer from nothing. In other words, creating a customer that comes to their own conclusion that your product or service is worth their time or their money and that being the purpose of a business.
What we set out to talk about in this book was we started with this fundamental question, which was … And this was something that we borrowed and it’s a quote that’s been attributed to Mark Twain. There’s no evidence that he actually ever said it, which is that it’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for absolute sure that does.
And the question we opened up with was what if everything we know about marketing today is what’s holding us back? And we started down this path and what started to see were these companies. And we’ve seen the trends, how companies today are rebooting what it even means to be build an audience first and use that as a valuable way of creating customers so that marketing itself can become a profitable part of the business.
So instead of just being the department that makes pretty pictures or the department that spews out advertising or that makes cold calls or that tries to convert customers using all manner of collateral material, marketing the function actually becomes that which builds and creates customers, which we’re now calling audiences.
John Jantsch: So a big part of this obviously, from both of your backgrounds too, is this idea of content and content marketing. I mean is this an evolution of how we’re coming to think about content? I know we used to say content is king, that was kind of cool for a while.
And then I think in a lot of ways it’s become air for every sort of channel and element and, even as you suggest in your last book, a business model in itself. Is this another evolution of content marketing? We’re going to come back to that term, content marketing, but I’ll let you answer that first.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, I’ll take this one, Robert. I think that if we just look at the traditional, say definition, but how most organizations think about content marketing, it’s oh we’re going to create valuable, relevant and compelling content. We’re going to distribute that on a platform and we’re going to build an audience in some way and we’re going to sell our product or service, which by the way is fine.
That’s great. If you do that, your successful with it, that’s basically content marketing. I think the difference is what we talk about in Killing Marketing is you don’t have to limit it to just that. We think there’s something bigger, as Robert talked about and you talked about, this is a business model change.
We believe instead of setting up your marketing organization for interruption, like it’s basically been set up for the last 50 years, what if we set it up around groups of audiences that we get really close to, we build loyal and trusted relationships with, and we don’t just create one revenue stream. We create four, five. We talk about 10 different revenue streams in the book and what we’re seeing a lot of companies out there do, they’re starting to dip their toe in the water and they’re coming up with new products and services because they have these audiences that they never dreamed they would do before.
You know Robert talks about BabyCenter.com from Johnson and Johnson all the time and how they created this standalone media property that enables them to not only sell more of their stuff but to create more products and services that they never thought was possible.
Kraft has done the same thing with Kraft Food and Family. So those types of things that we’re seeing where you can actually say, oh if we build an audience that’s loyal and trusting to us, and they start to look to us for guidance, we can actually transform the business into something that we weren’t even prepared to do. And by the way, this model is in full effect right now with Amazon.com.
Just so you know. It’s happening. And by the way, Amazon will be the most valuable company probably inside of five years in the world. And they’re doing it because they’re so focused on their customers and they’re not just saying this is what we want to sell. They’re saying well, if we get really close to that customer, what are the possibilities? And of course Jeff Bezos is showing us what those possibilities are.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I think just even this week the whole we can deliver inside your home thing is actually … Hopefully you’ve read about that [crosstalk 00:10:02]. I think a lot of that has to be hey, if we do this thing that we think will be more convenient, it will actually let us sell security systems, for example. And I maybe didn’t lay that out right but again, the first thought was this will be a service or a better experience for our customers, oh and look, it allows us to do x.
Joe Pulizzi: Well, what they’re doing, they’re putting six and a half billion dollars into … I mean Amazon won an Academy Award this year, or an Emmy award this year, excuse me. Here’s an online book store that sells some level of technology and now is really the online version of Walmart, and they’re winning Emmy awards for the creation of original content.
But if you look at their investment in content, the six and a half billion that they’re putting into things like all their original programming, they’re looking at that as a marketing cost in order to sell more Prime memberships, which of course is about buying things. And so they look at the investment in original content that they’re serving over the Prime streaming service as a marketing cost for them. So they’re turning into an integrated media platform before our very eyes but they’re looking at it as a way of pulling in an audience that they can monetize in other ways.
John Jantsch: So I realize this is a dangerous question, given who I’m talking to, but is the term content marketing really the wrong the term?
Robert Rose: Sure. Fine. I mean, if you don’t like it. We’ve never been that attached to the term but we have yet to find a better one.
John Jantsch: Here’s what I mean by that. It’s not that content marketing itself is a bad term. It’s just that if we look at that as a form of marketing, like social media marketing or mobile marketing, that it really is just marketing that happens to use content.
Robert Rose: No. The difference in the two that you mentioned … I realize this is semantics at some level, but the two that you mentioned are channel based, right? So it’s like saying TV marketing or newspaper marketing when I say social media marketing or mobile marketing.
And so that would be where I would draw those differentiations. When we say content marketing, what we’re describing … Whether we’re describing it well or not is for debate, but what we’re describing is the methodology of using an owned media platform to integrate into the everything else you’re doing as a business, right? So it’s a using the idea of our ability to create compelling, wonderful, engaging, inspiring, thought leadership-orientated content as a means of changing the behavior of a consumer.
So, it’s something that gets infused into the broader marketing strategy. Now, what I would concede, and I’m sure Joe would agree, is that at some point content marketing as a separate idea becomes subsumed into the broader topic of marketing and it just becomes a different way that we call marketing.
John Jantsch: Because social media marketing requires content.
Robert Rose: Exactly right. So does TV marketing and so does newspaper marketing and so does PDF marketing and fax marketing and everything else, yeah.
John Jantsch: Fax marketing, wow.
Robert Rose: I did it. Oh, absolutely. That used to be very important.
John Jantsch: If I had a fax machine, I would probably still get some [crosstalk 00:13:20].
Robert Rose: It’s funny we say fax marketing. Social media, it’s just channels. There’s no strategic method — You can say there’s a strategic methodology behind it depending, again it is semantics. But the reason why we call it content marketing is it is right now a fundamentally different approach to most organizations. If you just call it marketing or marketing the way we think it should be, they don’t get it. So we have to call it something different today and in five years we might not have to.
John Jantsch: So some of what you talk about in Killing Marketing, or I guess I should ask this rather than state it, will it require a company to … Because of the change that I think, even if it’s a mindset change, that it requires, will it also require in some cases for them to maybe cannibalize today’s profits?
Robert Rose: You know that’s a really interesting question because there’s two sides to that. The one side, I think it’s a really interesting point you bring up, which is does it immediately lean toward to creating new products and services?
And that’s one of the biggest push backs, quite frankly, is that if done right when we look at content marketing, it starts to look a lot like more product development methodology than it does campaign or traditional marketing-related methodology because you’re building a product extensively that you’re trying to build an audience for and monetize in multiple ways. And so it looks very much like a product and so that’s a really interesting question when we start talking about does it cannibalize the efforts of what we’re doing elsewhere?
However, there’s a flip side of that, the other side of that is can it actually begin to improve the margins of what we’re doing for other things, right? So you look at a manufacturing company where they maybe be looking at really lean margins, but if they can start to integrate media into their business, which of course has and enjoys quite high margins, can they actually add a pointer to their total bottom line by actually monetizing content and thought leadership and other things in a different way.
So I think there’s an opportunity for both things to be true.
John Jantsch: I can’t think of a great example but years ago the newspapers, they saw the train coming right at them but then they hung on to classified ads for example as a profit center because to just give them away, even though that train was heading towards them, was hard to do.
Robert Rose: John, that’s actually a great example. I mean I grew up in magazine publishing and we were so afraid … The executives in my company were so afraid to say okay, well we can do all this web stuff but make sure that we still sell those print pages. That’s the most important thing. So we deliberately were not cannibalizing our business.
We were trying to add oh, other lines, this will be great, but this is the core … I think that’s the problem with what newspapers didn’t do and magazine publishing, because they had the processes, they had the people, they had the content, they had the audience. They had everything to do what an Amazon.com is doing today. But they didn’t do it because they were afraid of cannibalization and I think today, you absolutely have to run at it and say we have to cannibalize ourselves before somebody else does.
Joe Pulizzi: And it’s wonder, you know, looking at it from the small business side for just a moment. One of the entrepreneurs that I admire most out there is Brian Clark and what he’s been able to do with CopyBlogger. If you look at what he started with, he built a media company first that had nice, wonderful high margins and built that media company.
And now he’s started to build products alongside that and become this integrated product and media company where his audience is telling him what products to sell, software, software as a service, other types of services that they’re now starting to offer, and education, etc.
Where he can now go into what might be a lower margin business because he started in such a high margin business. So there’s really interesting opportunities there but, to your point, it becomes interesting as to where you start cannibalizing from one or the other.
Robert Rose: I know a business called Duct Tape Marketing that’s done the same thing.
John Jantsch: Brian and I talk about this a lot. And Brian … I mean it’s great to call people that figured this out, did it and then everybody said they’re geniuses. I mean Brian would be the first to admit he wasn’t really sure where he was headed with this and then all of sudden it was like, oh, look what we did. Even some of the examples in your book are really companies that it wasn’t so much intentional as much as it was just trying to ride what seemed to be going on. And then all of a sudden woke up one day and went, wait a minute. This is a whole other business.
Robert Rose: Willingness to adapt is the key there.
Joe Pulizzi: I mean against the great example of Red Bull Media House. I know we talk about it all the time but that was a happy accident. Red Bull Media House becoming maybe one of the largest, most important sports media companies out there started because they wanted to do a print magazine at the racetrack. They wanted to do a show daily. That show daily turned into the Red Bull, which now has two million subscribers and then all the videos and the syndication and they’re having The New York Times and Wall Street Journal pay them money for some of their content.
I mean, that stuff happened from just an idea. So that’s how it mostly happens.
John Jantsch: So, let’s get to another really big idea in this book. I talked to a lot of marketers who still view marketing as an expense. Of course, I tried to convince them it’s an investment. But you’re going to suggest that it’s a profit center or can be a profit center.
Robert Rose: Absolutely, it can be both. It can be all of those things, right? I mean one of the things that we talk through in the book is not only … Because a lot of companies aren’t ready quite frankly for the revenue opportunities that building a media platform might provide. They’re looking simply at how do they make their marketing more efficient and a more efficient expense or, to your point, an investment.
And there are a lot of ways to do that. One of them of course is to start to leverage the asset that you call audience, when you start looking at how leveraging the value of an audience can help make the rest of your marketing better. Just a simple example. If you’ve got a viable subscribed and trusting audience, using that data to for example upload it to LinkedIn or Facebook or use it for retargeting, and make your media buy that you’re doing, you know your regular advertising media buy, more efficient.
And if you can save money because you’ve got the data that you’re using to target advertising in a more relevant way, well that’s making marketing more efficient and it’s taking more advantage of the investment that you’re putting in marketing more broadly.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah I’d just add on to that what we find, what Robert and I find when we go into these enterprises is that they absolutely aren’t even thinking about the possibilities of what happens when you have a loyal audience of subscribers. And just want them to think a little bit differently and that’s when we throw examples like hey, have you seen what SalesForce has done?
They’ve created maybe one of the most valuable events in the world called DreamForce, 175,000 people in San Francisco every year. And they started it from just a simple customer data base. If that were sold, it will sell for almost a billion dollars, I think, just that event. So it’s amazing what can happen and the problem is ourselves. We’re getting in the way. We’re not thinking about it when wow we’re doing these activities as part of marketing.
We can be paying for marketing plus … And Robert is right. Some companies aren’t ready but I think the bigger issue is they’re just not even thinking about it. That’s the problem.
John Jantsch: That kind of leads me in my next question. In your view, are there certain kinds of companies or companies that are set up a certain way or maybe they’re a service or a product that they’re maybe more ready to effectively take advantage of this approach?
Joe Pulizzi: I’ll start, Robert, and then you can go. From what I’ve seen … and Robert works with larger companies because I want to get his take, I work with a lot of the smaller companies. What I see in the larger companies, from a distance in a lot of cases, is that they can’t move the big ship. It’s very hard to cut through all the red tape and to get somebody that’s been 20, 30 years in marketing and go to them and say hey, we’d like to try this new, wacky thing. Can we go ahead and do that?
If you have a small business owner that believes that they need to be or they should be the leading expert in their industry over a particular content area to their audience, and if they do that, they could transform the business, they can transform their customers, help their customers lives, their jobs in some way. That is the lowest hanging fruit, in my opinion.
So, actually I think a lot of the innovation, even though all those big companies have in some cases unlimited budgets … From some small companies they look at us like wow, Nike and SalesForce, they have these unlimited budgets. But if you’re a small company, it’s easier for you to do this and start monetizing quickly. And I think you’re a great case study on that when you got started, John. I think we’re a great case study. In 2007, we didn’t have two nickels to rub together but then..
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Transcript of How to Turn Marketing Costs Into Profit
Transcript of How to Turn Marketing Costs Into Profit
Transcript of How to Turn Marketing Costs Into Profit written by John Jantsch read more at Duct Tape Marketing
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John Jantsch: I have seen the future of marketing, and it is killing me. Well, no. That’s not really true, but in this episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast I do speak with Joe Pulizzi and Robert Rose, authors of Killing Marketing: How Innovative Businesses are Turning Marketing Costs into Profit.
Fascinating, something that obviously applies to the mammoth Netflix and Amazons of the world, but I think that this is an approach that actually might apply to just about any business going today and how to get them think completely differently about everything that they do in marketing. Check it out.
Hello and welcome to another episode of The Duct Tape Marketing podcast. This is John Jantsch and my guests, yes that’s plural, Joe Pulizzi, founder of Content Marketing Institute, and Robert Rose, the chief strategy advisor of the same. We’re gonna talk about the new book by both of them today called Killing Marketing: How Innovate Businesses are Turning Marketing Cost into Profit. So Joe, Robert, thanks for joining me.
Joe Pulizzi: Thanks for having us.
Robert Rose: John, thank you so much. Oh, this is super fun. Appreciate it.
John Jantsch: Yeah. So this is … How many books for you guys together? Like three or four?
Robert Rose: I think it says 70 something.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah. It’s in the 70s.
Robert Rose: Actually, believe it or not, this is only our second book together.
John Jantsch: Only your second one together. Okay.
Robert Rose: Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
John Jantsch: Did you do this one different? I know in this book you’ve kind of got here’s Joe’s chapter. Here’s Robert’s chapter. That’s not what you did in the last one though, is it?
Joe Pulizzi: No, the last one was completely different. The last one really was Robert’s brain child and I sort of tagged along with him. And the different thing about this one is we sort of came up with this concept almost at the same time, like this story has to be told. And we both had different areas of focus that we wanted to focus on, which worked out great and now we, as you said, we just sort of said Joe, you take this one. Robert, you take this one.
And it worked great for the audio book, too, because then I didn’t have to do the whole thing by myself. So, there you go.
John Jantsch: So, Joe. Your relationship, is that the right word, with Content Marketing Institute has changed a little. Is that something you can talk about?
Robert Rose: Yes, Joe. Tell us all about Content Marketing Institute.
Joe Pulizzi: I guess we can sort of talk about it now, so it’s kind of going public. I’m moving out of an operational role. Always a part of CMI, always gonna be at Content Marketing World, our big event, but I am looking to do some different things and spend more time with the family and do some more travel with my family and that will start in January.
And I’m going to leave basically all my duties to Robert, thankfully. And he is going to carry the torch the rest of the way. So, it’s been a great run, 10 years with Content Marketing Institute. and of course I’ll always be the founder, I’ll always be a part of this thing. But we’ve got some opportunities today and I really just wanted to make life hard on Robert. So, this is the best way to do that.
John Jantsch: Plus you’re just probably tired of content, right?
Joe Pulizzi: Oh my god, I can’t tell ya how tired I am of content marketing. No, actually it’s funny. So this is my fifth book between Robert’s and my individual books. And this is the one I’m most excited about because I think we finally hit on something that is going to change most organizations, small, medium and large, and they don’t even know it.
So I’m leaving in maybe the high point and then I’ll just kind go off into the shadows and I’ll check in on Robert on occasion.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I would agree. This is a big idea book and your other books were great books, or certainly the last book, Content Inc, in a lot of ways I think you were almost reporting on what is, whereas I think this book is more here’s what’s coming. That’s my assessment. I could be completely off, but that’s how it feels.
So early on in the book, you evoke one of my heroes Peter Drucker, talking about the purpose of a business. And actually that statement of the purpose of a business — to create, keep a customer — is probably the genesis of Duct Tape Marketing, believe it or not. That book, the Practice of Management, had a lot to do with forming my thinking.
That obviously hasn’t changed, but how we go about doing that seems to have changed. So how does that play out in Killing Marketing.
Robert Rose: Well first of all, let me just tell you that if I didn’t love you already, now I love you even more by bringing in my hero Peter Drucker into the whole mix here. The Practice of Management is probably one of the fundamental reasons that I’m in the career that I am in today.
And you’re right. It’s absolutely this. That has not changed. It’s funny because where marketing is today has really lost sight of what Drucker was talking about. When he was talking about the purpose of a business, creating a customer, that idea has become so morphed these days into persuasion, right? It has transformed marketing into how do we find people and persuade them that our product or services is worth doing?
And what he was talking about was literally creating a customer from nothing. In other words, creating a customer that comes to their own conclusion that your product or service is worth their time or their money and that being the purpose of a business.
What we set out to talk about in this book was we started with this fundamental question, which was … And this was something that we borrowed and it’s a quote that’s been attributed to Mark Twain. There’s no evidence that he actually ever said it, which is that it’s not what you don’t know that gets you into trouble, it’s what you know for absolute sure that does.
And the question we opened up with was what if everything we know about marketing today is what’s holding us back? And we started down this path and what started to see were these companies. And we’ve seen the trends, how companies today are rebooting what it even means to be build an audience first and use that as a valuable way of creating customers so that marketing itself can become a profitable part of the business.
So instead of just being the department that makes pretty pictures or the department that spews out advertising or that makes cold calls or that tries to convert customers using all manner of collateral material, marketing the function actually becomes that which builds and creates customers, which we’re now calling audiences.
John Jantsch: So a big part of this obviously, from both of your backgrounds too, is this idea of content and content marketing. I mean is this an evolution of how we’re coming to think about content? I know we used to say content is king, that was kind of cool for a while.
And then I think in a lot of ways it’s become air for every sort of channel and element and, even as you suggest in your last book, a business model in itself. Is this another evolution of content marketing? We’re going to come back to that term, content marketing, but I’ll let you answer that first.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah, I’ll take this one, Robert. I think that if we just look at the traditional, say definition, but how most organizations think about content marketing, it’s oh we’re going to create valuable, relevant and compelling content. We’re going to distribute that on a platform and we’re going to build an audience in some way and we’re going to sell our product or service, which by the way is fine.
That’s great. If you do that, your successful with it, that’s basically content marketing. I think the difference is what we talk about in Killing Marketing is you don’t have to limit it to just that. We think there’s something bigger, as Robert talked about and you talked about, this is a business model change.
We believe instead of setting up your marketing organization for interruption, like it’s basically been set up for the last 50 years, what if we set it up around groups of audiences that we get really close to, we build loyal and trusted relationships with, and we don’t just create one revenue stream. We create four, five. We talk about 10 different revenue streams in the book and what we’re seeing a lot of companies out there do, they’re starting to dip their toe in the water and they’re coming up with new products and services because they have these audiences that they never dreamed they would do before.
You know Robert talks about BabyCenter.com from Johnson and Johnson all the time and how they created this standalone media property that enables them to not only sell more of their stuff but to create more products and services that they never thought was possible.
Kraft has done the same thing with Kraft Food and Family. So those types of things that we’re seeing where you can actually say, oh if we build an audience that’s loyal and trusting to us, and they start to look to us for guidance, we can actually transform the business into something that we weren’t even prepared to do. And by the way, this model is in full effect right now with Amazon.com.
Just so you know. It’s happening. And by the way, Amazon will be the most valuable company probably inside of five years in the world. And they’re doing it because they’re so focused on their customers and they’re not just saying this is what we want to sell. They’re saying well, if we get really close to that customer, what are the possibilities? And of course Jeff Bezos is showing us what those possibilities are.
John Jantsch: Yeah, I think just even this week the whole we can deliver inside your home thing is actually … Hopefully you’ve read about that [crosstalk 00:10:02]. I think a lot of that has to be hey, if we do this thing that we think will be more convenient, it will actually let us sell security systems, for example. And I maybe didn’t lay that out right but again, the first thought was this will be a service or a better experience for our customers, oh and look, it allows us to do x.
Joe Pulizzi: Well, what they’re doing, they’re putting six and a half billion dollars into … I mean Amazon won an Academy Award this year, or an Emmy award this year, excuse me. Here’s an online book store that sells some level of technology and now is really the online version of Walmart, and they’re winning Emmy awards for the creation of original content.
But if you look at their investment in content, the six and a half billion that they’re putting into things like all their original programming, they’re looking at that as a marketing cost in order to sell more Prime memberships, which of course is about buying things. And so they look at the investment in original content that they’re serving over the Prime streaming service as a marketing cost for them. So they’re turning into an integrated media platform before our very eyes but they’re looking at it as a way of pulling in an audience that they can monetize in other ways.
John Jantsch: So I realize this is a dangerous question, given who I’m talking to, but is the term content marketing really the wrong the term?
Robert Rose: Sure. Fine. I mean, if you don’t like it. We’ve never been that attached to the term but we have yet to find a better one.
John Jantsch: Here’s what I mean by that. It’s not that content marketing itself is a bad term. It’s just that if we look at that as a form of marketing, like social media marketing or mobile marketing, that it really is just marketing that happens to use content.
Robert Rose: No. The difference in the two that you mentioned … I realize this is semantics at some level, but the two that you mentioned are channel based, right? So it’s like saying TV marketing or newspaper marketing when I say social media marketing or mobile marketing.
And so that would be where I would draw those differentiations. When we say content marketing, what we’re describing … Whether we’re describing it well or not is for debate, but what we’re describing is the methodology of using an owned media platform to integrate into the everything else you’re doing as a business, right? So it’s a using the idea of our ability to create compelling, wonderful, engaging, inspiring, thought leadership-orientated content as a means of changing the behavior of a consumer.
So, it’s something that gets infused into the broader marketing strategy. Now, what I would concede, and I’m sure Joe would agree, is that at some point content marketing as a separate idea becomes subsumed into the broader topic of marketing and it just becomes a different way that we call marketing.
John Jantsch: Because social media marketing requires content.
Robert Rose: Exactly right. So does TV marketing and so does newspaper marketing and so does PDF marketing and fax marketing and everything else, yeah.
John Jantsch: Fax marketing, wow.
Robert Rose: I did it. Oh, absolutely. That used to be very important.
John Jantsch: If I had a fax machine, I would probably still get some [crosstalk 00:13:20].
Robert Rose: It’s funny we say fax marketing. Social media, it’s just channels. There’s no strategic method — You can say there’s a strategic methodology behind it depending, again it is semantics. But the reason why we call it content marketing is it is right now a fundamentally different approach to most organizations. If you just call it marketing or marketing the way we think it should be, they don’t get it. So we have to call it something different today and in five years we might not have to.
John Jantsch: So some of what you talk about in Killing Marketing, or I guess I should ask this rather than state it, will it require a company to … Because of the change that I think, even if it’s a mindset change, that it requires, will it also require in some cases for them to maybe cannibalize today’s profits?
Robert Rose: You know that’s a really interesting question because there’s two sides to that. The one side, I think it’s a really interesting point you bring up, which is does it immediately lean toward to creating new products and services?
And that’s one of the biggest push backs, quite frankly, is that if done right when we look at content marketing, it starts to look a lot like more product development methodology than it does campaign or traditional marketing-related methodology because you’re building a product extensively that you’re trying to build an audience for and monetize in multiple ways. And so it looks very much like a product and so that’s a really interesting question when we start talking about does it cannibalize the efforts of what we’re doing elsewhere?
However, there’s a flip side of that, the other side of that is can it actually begin to improve the margins of what we’re doing for other things, right? So you look at a manufacturing company where they maybe be looking at really lean margins, but if they can start to integrate media into their business, which of course has and enjoys quite high margins, can they actually add a pointer to their total bottom line by actually monetizing content and thought leadership and other things in a different way.
So I think there’s an opportunity for both things to be true.
John Jantsch: I can’t think of a great example but years ago the newspapers, they saw the train coming right at them but then they hung on to classified ads for example as a profit center because to just give them away, even though that train was heading towards them, was hard to do.
Robert Rose: John, that’s actually a great example. I mean I grew up in magazine publishing and we were so afraid … The executives in my company were so afraid to say okay, well we can do all this web stuff but make sure that we still sell those print pages. That’s the most important thing. So we deliberately were not cannibalizing our business.
We were trying to add oh, other lines, this will be great, but this is the core … I think that’s the problem with what newspapers didn’t do and magazine publishing, because they had the processes, they had the people, they had the content, they had the audience. They had everything to do what an Amazon.com is doing today. But they didn’t do it because they were afraid of cannibalization and I think today, you absolutely have to run at it and say we have to cannibalize ourselves before somebody else does.
Joe Pulizzi: And it’s wonder, you know, looking at it from the small business side for just a moment. One of the entrepreneurs that I admire most out there is Brian Clark and what he’s been able to do with CopyBlogger. If you look at what he started with, he built a media company first that had nice, wonderful high margins and built that media company.
And now he’s started to build products alongside that and become this integrated product and media company where his audience is telling him what products to sell, software, software as a service, other types of services that they’re now starting to offer, and education, etc.
Where he can now go into what might be a lower margin business because he started in such a high margin business. So there’s really interesting opportunities there but, to your point, it becomes interesting as to where you start cannibalizing from one or the other.
Robert Rose: I know a business called Duct Tape Marketing that’s done the same thing.
John Jantsch: Brian and I talk about this a lot. And Brian … I mean it’s great to call people that figured this out, did it and then everybody said they’re geniuses. I mean Brian would be the first to admit he wasn’t really sure where he was headed with this and then all of sudden it was like, oh, look what we did. Even some of the examples in your book are really companies that it wasn’t so much intentional as much as it was just trying to ride what seemed to be going on. And then all of a sudden woke up one day and went, wait a minute. This is a whole other business.
Robert Rose: Willingness to adapt is the key there.
Joe Pulizzi: I mean against the great example of Red Bull Media House. I know we talk about it all the time but that was a happy accident. Red Bull Media House becoming maybe one of the largest, most important sports media companies out there started because they wanted to do a print magazine at the racetrack. They wanted to do a show daily. That show daily turned into the Red Bull, which now has two million subscribers and then all the videos and the syndication and they’re having The New York Times and Wall Street Journal pay them money for some of their content.
I mean, that stuff happened from just an idea. So that’s how it mostly happens.
John Jantsch: So, let’s get to another really big idea in this book. I talked to a lot of marketers who still view marketing as an expense. Of course, I tried to convince them it’s an investment. But you’re going to suggest that it’s a profit center or can be a profit center.
Robert Rose: Absolutely, it can be both. It can be all of those things, right? I mean one of the things that we talk through in the book is not only … Because a lot of companies aren’t ready quite frankly for the revenue opportunities that building a media platform might provide. They’re looking simply at how do they make their marketing more efficient and a more efficient expense or, to your point, an investment.
And there are a lot of ways to do that. One of them of course is to start to leverage the asset that you call audience, when you start looking at how leveraging the value of an audience can help make the rest of your marketing better. Just a simple example. If you’ve got a viable subscribed and trusting audience, using that data to for example upload it to LinkedIn or Facebook or use it for retargeting, and make your media buy that you’re doing, you know your regular advertising media buy, more efficient.
And if you can save money because you’ve got the data that you’re using to target advertising in a more relevant way, well that’s making marketing more efficient and it’s taking more advantage of the investment that you’re putting in marketing more broadly.
Joe Pulizzi: Yeah I’d just add on to that what we find, what Robert and I find when we go into these enterprises is that they absolutely aren’t even thinking about the possibilities of what happens when you have a loyal audience of subscribers. And just want them to think a little bit differently and that’s when we throw examples like hey, have you seen what SalesForce has done?
They’ve created maybe one of the most valuable events in the world called DreamForce, 175,000 people in San Francisco every year. And they started it from just a simple customer data base. If that were sold, it will sell for almost a billion dollars, I think, just that event. So it’s amazing what can happen and the problem is ourselves. We’re getting in the way. We’re not thinking about it when wow we’re doing these activities as part of marketing.
We can be paying for marketing plus … And Robert is right. Some companies aren’t ready but I think the bigger issue is they’re just not even thinking about it. That’s the problem.
John Jantsch: That kind of leads me in my next question. In your view, are there certain kinds of companies or companies that are set up a certain way or maybe they’re a service or a product that they’re maybe more ready to effectively take advantage of this approach?
Joe Pulizzi: I’ll start, Robert, and then you can go. From what I’ve seen … and Robert works with larger companies because I want to get his take, I work with a lot of the smaller companies. What I see in the larger companies, from a distance in a lot of cases, is that they can’t move the big ship. It’s very hard to cut through all the red tape and to get somebody that’s been 20, 30 years in marketing and go to them and say hey, we’d like to try this new, wacky thing. Can we go ahead and do that?
If you have a small business owner that believes that they need to be or they should be the leading expert in their industry over a particular content area to their audience, and if they do that, they could transform the business, they can transform their customers, help their customers lives, their jobs in some way. That is the lowest hanging fruit, in my opinion.
So, actually I think a lot of the innovation, even though all those big companies have in some cases unlimited budgets … From some small companies they look at us like wow, Nike and SalesForce, they have these unlimited budgets. But if you’re a small company, it’s easier for you to do this and start monetizing quickly. And I think you’re a great case study on that when you got started, John. I think we’re a great case study. In 2007, we didn’t have two nickels to rub together but then..
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