MSP Episode 7: Interview with Jay Acunzo from Unthinkable

In this episode I speak with Jay Acunzo founder of Unthinkable. Before founding Unthinkable Jay was Digital Media Strategist for Google and Head of Content for HubSpot. He’s now host of his podcast Unthinkable. Which was called “one of the hottest new podcasts out there” by Entrepreneur. In this episode we discuss content marketing, how to create exceptional content and the step by step process Jay goes through to test, experiment and understand how content is performing as he scales up.

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Last 5 questions:

What’s your best piece of marketing advice?
Focus on resonance not reach.

Can you recommend a book to our listeners?
Any collection of Calvin and Hobbs comics.

What software tool couldn’t you live without?
Evernote

What’s your favourite example of a marketing campaign?
Death Wish Coffee‘s Super Bowl campaign. It was the peak, the success story after years of struggling of a company that chose to do something differently and build and create the world’s strongest coffee. So Death Wish Coffee, the entire story would take me too long to explain, but you can go to my show. You can go to Unthinkable and you can listen to a podcast called Best Practices. It’s way back in the archives. But Death Wish is one of my favorite brands, and their Super Bowl ad was something to behold.

Which other podcasts do you listen to?
I love, it’s mostly nonbusiness business shows that I love, but one I’m really fascinated by and I’d love to imitate at some point to try my hand at it is a show called The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe, who is a former TV host. So the show is what he calls “the only podcast for the curious mind with a short attention span.” It’s maybe six-minute stories where he tells the backstory of something we’ve all heard of, but you haven’t heard it told this way. And at the end, he reveals what it was. So it’s a little bit of a guessing game. He’s an amazing storyteller. It’s just him scripting it and reading it. But he’s got a way with words. So it’s The Way I Heard It. You will not regret it. It’s really short, and it’s delicious.

Transcription:

Matt Byrom:
Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Marketing Strategies Podcast. Today I’m joined by Jay Acunzo. Jay has held prominent positions as digital marketing strategist for Google, head of content for Hubspot, and vice president of platform for the VC firm NextView Ventures. He’s now host of his podcast Unthinkable, which was called one of the hottest new podcasts out there by Entrepreneur and is now 74 episodes deep.

Jay is also a regular speaker at events such as Content Marketing World, Social Medial Marketing World, South by Southwest, and many others. It’s a pleasure to have some of your time today, Jay. How are you doing?

Jay Acunzo:
I’m well, Matt. Thanks so much for having me on. I appreciate everybody else who’s listening too.

Matt Byrom:
You’re welcome. Great to have you with us today. In this episode, I’d love to cover a few of the marketing tactics you’ve used in the past, things you’ve learned since you’re career has progressed. I’d really love to take a bit of time to talk about your podcast, the success you’ve had and how you market and promote it.

Jay Acunzo:
Sounds great.

Matt Byrom:
Cool. I’m going to start a little earlier in your career, though, at your time at Google. And your job was digital marketing strategist, which involved helping brands create ad campaigns online?

Jay Acunzo:
Correct. I worked on the AdWords team.

Matt Byrom:
Oh, the AdWords team. And what type of campaigns were you putting together for brands?

Jay Acunzo:
I worked for it with three different types of groups, depending on when in my Google tenure we’re speaking. So one was agencies, the other was CPG brands, and then the third were kind of small- to medium-size businesses that were just getting started with digital marketing. So you can imagine the first two groups were familiar with Google products, and they benefited from working with Google reps such as myself to understand the product and the trend behind why Google developed that product, whereas the small businesses were really just looking to understand digital and get started with their first search campaign, for example. So it was really split across search, display, mobile, and YouTube.

But to be honest, I hated it. I absolutely hated the job because I felt like every time I consumed the product of my work, I didn’t like this stuff. I didn’t want to be interrupted before I watched a YouTube video. I didn’t want to see ads all over a media site that popped out or spilled down or slid in. My own sensibilities had been on pause while I worked there because I loved the brand, I loved the people, I learned a ton. I think Google is a fantastic company, but doing that job, for me, anyway, just was, I don’t know, it was soul-sucking. It was doing everything I could to interrupt somebody’s flow instead of become the object of what they were trying to choose, which is content.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah, and I listened to one of your most recent podcasts episodes where you say that when you were working at Google, you found a great YouTube video. You gathered a bunch of friends to watch it, and while you were loading the video, you were bigging it up and getting the expectations higher and higher. And then when you finally got the video up on the screen, the pre-roll played before, and you just overwhelming frustration, and the anticipation had all been put on hold, and you saw something that you didn’t want to see in advance of the video that you did want to see.

Jay Acunzo:
Right.

Matt Byrom:
That was just really interesting for me that you would actually look at I guess the pre-roll that way, something that you had helped the customer create or suggested that they use, for example, and then you felt such frustration with seeing it in the first place. I mean, it’s interesting to learn that. How do you feel about that particular marketing tactic? It’s obviously had some success or it continues to have a lot of success for many brands. They say it’s almost like YouTube is the new TV, and these are the new adverts really. But many people feel the same frustration that you feel.

Jay Acunzo:
I feel like marketers today are still suffering from these echoes of mass media and mass media thinking. Even if the tactic itself isn’t actually mass media, like retargeting or something like that, because we obsess over big top-line numbers instead of productivity. And we obsess over point .01%. “Great campaign, guys. .01% click through our display ads,” whereas what about the 99.9% that either ignored you or outright hates you and also has a microphone to tell others how much they despise you?

And so I think hate is fine, but you have to do it tactfully. You have to create stuff people want because all of this stuff, marketing strategies and tactics, it sits on top of a foundational human layer or human insight that we need to get wise to, which is that because the consumer has all the power, meaning we have endless choice as consumers and millions of options within every little niche, and multiple screens, we don’t care about anything a brand has to tell us unless they tell us something we care about.

So in that story, I was trying to show my friends a great video and a pre-roll ad about a car popped up. Now, maybe somewhere tangentially in the minds of those marketers the car was relevant to the video, but in that moment, the expectation that I had didn’t match the message I received, which I think is how spam forms. It’s when your expectation doesn’t meet what happens. It’s fine to hear from an email newsletter if you expect it, if you subscribed, but if somebody added you and you didn’t ask for it, and they send you their email newsletter, that’s spam.

So it’s this disruption of your expectation as a consumer, and today the knee-jerk reaction is, “I hate you. I don’t want you, and I have millions of options to get around you.” So in that one instance, I recognized this pre-roll add as my friend at Google’s client. And I was like, “Oh my God, Eric, how could you?” Then I realized, well, hold on. I had the same job at Google that Eric had, which means that somebody somewhere hated a moment in their day because of something I did for a living.

We do a lot of mental gymnastics to justify why that’s fine: “Well, look, I have numbers to hit. My boss, my team, my client. Oh, look, 3% converted.” Ninety-seven percent we don’t seem to care about, by the way. But these mental gymnastics justify what I think is a tough pill we need to swallow, which is it’s not working. These are small numbers. And people don’t want it. People don’t like it. So I want to build a career based on creating things people actually do want, in other words, turning a low probability event, like a click through on an ad, into a high probability event, like subscribers coming back for more content.

Matt Byrom:
So interesting, and it’s also so easily forgotten. It’s that high percentage, the 95%, for example, that don’t convert on a page or don’t click on an ad. And I guess that all party comes down to context that you’ve mentioned and what context does that come? Is it a paid search ad in which case you’re actually typing something in, and you want to find something relevant following that? Or the other end of the spectrum might be the interruptive advert that shows where you don’t really want or expect it.

And I guess a question here would be, how do you think the world of marketing is improving with targeting to make sure that the adverts or the should I say the content that’s being displayed to people is more relevant to them and more useful to them as time moves on?

Jay Acunzo:
I guess retargeting or data to the degree that we can gather it today about the consumer, all of this stuff, these are just tactics that, again, sit on top of a more foundational layer, which is whoever gets closest to the customer wins. Imagine a world where you actually knew everybody you marketed to offline and in person. How easy would your job be? Obviously that world doesn’t exist, but you can get closer and closer to actually knowing who you’re trying to reach and more importantly who you’re trying to resonate with. And all of these tools and tactics and techniques, we obsess over, but they serve one cause, which is how do you understand the audience better than somebody else?

And if you can address your more fundamental insight about an audience member compared to a competitor, your audience will pay more attention to you because they’ll throw up their arms and say, “Finally somebody gets me. You’re speaking my language. You get why I’m buying or why I’m here.” Nobody buys a better pillow–they’re buying a better night sleep. But we’re obsessed with marketing the pillow because we’re marketers. People don’t care about that stuff unless it’s that small little percent that’s right there ready to buy. The vast majority of people you reach with your marketing, in other words, the way you build a thriving organization, is to actually fundamentally understand the audience, and what they’re going through, and why they should care about what you have to say.

So you mentioned, what is targeting do for that? I don’t know. I guess targeting is the manifestation of when you know the audience enough to go to market with that insight. But I think too often marketers don’t dig deep enough and have that insight. And, Matt, I’m getting a little long winded here. I’m happy to share some stories and case studies about exactly what I mean, but that’s the theory. It’s get to know the customer better than your competitors, and all the other tools and technologies help you do that.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there still are times when something pops up on, say, Instagram for me, or something pops up on a channel for me, and I’m like, “I didn’t ask for this, but this is actually really cool. This is actually something I’d be really interested in.” So I definitely still think there’s a place for some form of interruptive marketing that actually helps you discover new products, new services, new concepts or ways of doing things. But I totally, totally agree with you that actually-

Jay Acunzo:
For every … We’re playing the lottery. We’re scratching off a ticket hoping that, oh my God, at some point we’re going to hit $30 worth of value here. In our minds, our bosses want $30,000. But what you’re talking about is occasionally, once in a while it’s nice when, and every so often, right? What I’m talking about is every time you go to market, make the dollars count. Every time you do an activity, make the calories count. Do something worthwhile, not throw up a bunch of stuff onto the wall and hope something sticks, which has been the marketing mentality: I’m going to blanket the world in my message and hope that I catch some actual fish in this net. And really I either catch very little or I catch a bunch of garbage, look, here’s a couple fish. And I’m justifying that action.

Matt Byrom:

Matt Byrom: Hello, and welcome to this episode of the Marketing Strategies Podcast. Today I’m joined by Jay Acunzo. Jay has held prominent positions as digital marketing strategist for Google, head of content for Hubspot, and vice president of platform for the VC firm NextView Ventures. He’s now host of his podcast Unthinkable, which was called one of the hottest new podcasts out there by Entrepreneur and is now 74 episodes deep.

Jay Acunzo: I’m well, Matt. Thanks so much for having me on. I appreciate everybody else who’s listening too.

Matt Byrom: You’re welcome. Great to have you with us today. In this episode, I’d love to cover a few of the marketing tactics you’ve used in the past, things you’ve learned since you’re career has progressed. I’d really love to take a bit of time to talk about your podcast, the success you’ve had and how you market and promote it.

Jay Acunzo: Sounds great.

Matt Byrom: Cool. I’m going to start a little earlier in your career, though, at your time at Google. And your job was digital marketing strategist, which involved helping brands create ad campaigns online?

Jay Acunzo: Correct. I worked on the AdWords team.

Matt Byrom: Oh, the AdWords team. And what type of campaigns were you putting together for brands?

Jay Acunzo: I worked for it with three different types of groups, depending on when in my Google tenure we’re speaking. So one was agencies, the other was CPG brands, and then the third were kind of small- to medium-size businesses that were just getting started with digital marketing. So you can imagine the first two groups were familiar with Google products, and they benefited from working with Google reps such as myself to understand the product and the trend behind why Google developed that product, whereas the small businesses were really just looking to understand digital and get started with their first search campaign, for example. So it was really split across search, display, mobile, and YouTube.

Matt Byrom: Yeah, and I listened to one of your most recent podcasts episodes where you say that when you were working at Google, you found a great YouTube video. You gathered a bunch of friends to watch it, and while you were loading the video, you were bigging it up and getting the expectations higher and higher. And then when you finally got the video up on the screen, the pre-roll played before, and you just overwhelming frustration, and the anticipation had all been put on hold, and you saw something that you didn’t want to see in advance of the video that you did want to see.

Jay Acunzo: Right.

Matt Byrom: That was just really interesting for me that you would actually look at I guess the pre-roll that way, something that you had helped the customer create or suggested that they use, for example, and then you felt such frustration with seeing it in the first place. I mean, it’s interesting to learn that. How do you feel about that particular marketing tactic? It’s obviously had some success or it continues to have a lot of success for many brands. They say it’s almost like YouTube is the new TV, and these are the new adverts really. But many people feel the same frustration that you feel.

Jay Acunzo: I feel like marketers today are still suffering from these echoes of mass media and mass media thinking. Even if the tactic itself isn’t actually mass media, like retargeting or something like that, because we obsess over big top-line numbers instead of productivity. And we obsess over point .01%. “Great campaign, guys. .01% click through our display ads,” whereas what about the 99.9% that either ignored you or outright hates you and also has a microphone to tell others how much they despise you?

Matt Byrom: So interesting, and it’s also so easily forgotten. It’s that high percentage, the 95%, for example, that don’t convert on a page or don’t click on an ad. And I guess that all party comes down to context that you’ve mentioned and what context does that come? Is it a paid search ad in which case you’re actually typing something in, and you want to find something relevant following that? Or the other end of the spectrum might be the interruptive advert that shows where you don’t really want or expect it.

Jay Acunzo: I guess retargeting or data to the degree that we can gather it today about the consumer, all of this stuff, these are just tactics that, again, sit on top of a more foundational layer, which is whoever gets closest to the customer wins. Imagine a world where you actually knew everybody you marketed to offline and in person. How easy would your job be? Obviously that world doesn’t exist, but you can get closer and closer to actually knowing who you’re trying to reach and more importantly who you’re trying to resonate with. And all of these tools and tactics and techniques, we obsess over, but they serve one cause, which is how do you understand the audience better than somebody else?

Matt Byrom: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, there still are times when something pops up on, say, Instagram for me, or something pops up on a channel for me, and I’m like, “I didn’t ask for this, but this is actually really cool. This is actually something I’d be really interested in.” So I definitely still think there’s a place for some form of interruptive marketing that actually helps you discover new products, new services, new concepts or ways of doing things. But I totally, totally agree with you that actually-

Jay Acunzo: For every … We’re playing the lottery. We’re scratching off a ticket hoping that, oh my God, at some point we’re going to hit $30 worth of value here. In our minds, our bosses want $30,000. But what you’re talking about is occasionally, once in a while it’s nice when, and every so often, right? What I’m talking about is every time you go to market, make the dollars count. Every time you do an activity, make the calories count. Do something worthwhile, not throw up a bunch of stuff onto the wall and hope something sticks, which has been the marketing mentality: I’m going to blanket the world in my message and hope that I catch some actual fish in this net. And really I either catch very little or I catch a bunch of garbage, look, here’s a couple fish. And I’m justifying that action.

Matt Byrom: And we’ve got-

Jay Acunzo: No, I was just going to say I disagree that interruptive tactics because they’re interruptive can work. I think it’s still what are you putting into that channel that matters? And if it’s something people don’t want or not asking for, you’re like praying to the digital Gods that, “Oh God, please, if I just target people in this region or people of this profile, I hope a small percent actually buys because I have my numbers to hit.” And I get it, but we can turn that low probability event into a higher probability event if we actually understood the customer first and then delivered something that they actually wanted, right? Start with resonance because reach has never been easier.

Matt Byrom: We’re in the age now where we’ve got the tools and ability to really do this on a big scale actually is be personal and give people what they want from our brand more than … actually almost make friends with every single one of your customers no matter how many customers you have. We can do that these days.

Jay Acunzo: Amen. Yeah. That’s why I love podcasting because if you’re listening to this, it’s like a voice in your head. You might be fervently disagreeing with what I say if you feel like you’ve built a career on interruptions and it works and whatever, but whatever you’re doing, you’re taking a strong stance. You’re either feeling me or feeling something strong against me, and voice has that way of building intimacy, and in this case with podcasting, intimacy, that actually scales. It’s wonderful. It does, to your point, Matt, it makes you feel like I as a listener know the brand through these voices, and if they’re going to ask me to do something or if I see them elsewhere, you’re more likely to take an action.

I speak a lot, and so when I go to events, people will come up and will high five, hug, talk. And I’m like, “Oh no, I don’t remember this person, but they seem to know me.” And it’s because of my podcast they feel an actual human kinship with me like we met before. And it’s like that blew me away. I’m a writer by trade, and I’d never experienced that with my writing, even though I think I’m a decent writer. But podcasting has its way of just building intimacy that scales. It feels like an offline interaction in a way, even though it’s online or digital.

Matt Byrom: Super cool. Coming back to this other story I guess that we’ve been talking about here, this ultimately, this issue that you sort of experienced, this led you to actually quit. This led you to leave Google.

Jay Acunzo: That’s true. Yes, I quit Google. I went to a small startup, and I was doing sales, same as Google. And the sales team was bloated. We had hired too many people too soon for the startup to support, given the revenue and the capital. And they laid off a bunch of salespeople, but this is kind of the story of my career: I had been doing a bunch of side projects within the business. Side projects I think are the only reason that you were interested in even talking to me today. Most of my career success is because I tinkered on the side of the day job. And in this instance, I had been creating content for the marketing team because I like to write, and I’d obviously seen a lot and heard a lot by talking to customers as a sales rep and then later an account executive.

And so I used that to write some blog posts, created some content, build a little bit of an audience for the company. And the head of product, because it was a media startup said, “Well, we’re laying off half the sales team, and you are probably going to be one of those people. Why don’t you actually move over to my team, Jay, and you can create content for a living.” And I was like, “Brilliant. This is exactly what I wanted to do in college. I wanted to be a writer.” And that’s when I started poking around the industry and found this term, “content marketing.” And I was like, “Oh my God, I don’t know about the whole marketing side of the world, but the word ‘content,’ yeah, let me latch onto that and start creating for a living.” So I like to say that they told me I could write, so I showed up the next day for work.

Matt Byrom: That’s awesome. I mean, it’s like being given your dream job, really, isn’t it? You go from the sales team to the marketing team, and you want to be a writer. Perfect.

Jay Acunzo: I just felt like I found a back door. Though my whole career I feel like I’m pulling one over on people, and I’m waiting for somebody, some suited authority to come to my door and say, “Sorry, sir, you’re actually not allowed to be creating these podcasts and shows and speeches and blog posts without first having worked for print publications for 10 years.” I’m waiting for someone to rip me out of the world I’m in, put me back in traditional media, and say, “Now pay your dues for decades.”

I found this back door into getting to create awesome stuff for a living because all these businesses were hungry for creative talent, because all these businesses have better business models than advertising-supported media. It feels like the back way in, but, ah man, I just feel so grateful that I found it.

Matt Byrom: Yeah. And you obviously clearly sort of not … I don’t mean at the bottom, but at the ground level, you were new into content marketing, for example. Where did you start? You very clearly had lots of success down the line. How did you understand what was working, and where did you [inaudible 00:16:18] see success?

Jay Acunzo: I think the first moment of success I had was in showing my bosses early on in my career in content strong qualitative reactions from audiences as case studies. So I think what we often want, especially when we’re early in our careers, is we want to point to a piece and say, “Look how many leads and views or shares.” Or we want to point to a campaign and say, “Look how many x, y, z metric.”

And I think what we undervalue, which we can get easier than ever before because we have direct access to an audience, is the reaction of that audience. It’s a powerful mechanism for understanding a couple things. Number one, is what you’re doing worth investing more in? In other words, can I show this to somebody and get more resources, or get promoted, or hire a freelancer, or whatever? And #2, is what I’m doing something that I should expand upon? In other words, I should not only invest resources and time and people into it, but I should put it in more places where people can find it. I should use this as the fodder for my paid. I should use this as multimedia. It was an article. Now it’s an episode, or what have you.

And so I think the big lesson I learned early on is to value and seek out a small number of people who don’t know you reacting in a big way to what you did because that signals you found something that you can expand upon. That’s the foundational layer that marketers often miss. And then now we can build towards reach and conversions.

So the analogy I use is like we’re digging holes in dry sand constantly. We’re in acquisition mode, and we’re just digging like crazy in this sand and trying to get deeper and deeper, but the walls keep caving in. It’s like this campaign, more pieces, more views, and the next day it seems to reset on us. But to build something that sticks, you have to start with resonance. You have to say, “Okay, this place in the ground is worth breaking ground in the first place because I have signal. This matters to people, and so I should invest more heavily there. I should lean into that instead of just frantically try to catch more and more and more.” So start out looking for a small number of people reacting in a big way. I think that’s the sign that you’re on the right path.

Matt Byrom: And where were you getting these signals? Or where were you getting the indications or the small groups of people that were reacting well? How do you come across this and identify these people?

Jay Acunzo: It’s very simple. I think we over complicate stuff way too much because we have great technology available, but it was in the comments section. It was on Twitter. It was on Facebook, offline events, emails. I would show my boss, “Hey, I got this email from a prospect. Look at what they said. They praised this article to no end. We should reach out to them as a marketer and say, ‘Thank you so much, and by the way we have some demos coming up.’ We should take the topic from that article and share it more liberally on social,” or what have you.

So it was all the places that you probably would think of, Matt, where you just can find people talking. And it wasn’t like a lot of people. It was 12, 15, 20 people, even though you want 12,000, 15,000, 20,000 eventually. And so it was really easy. I was shocked. And this is just what I was trying to do as a writer. It was to try and find strong signal, not passive, but massive, small and strong. And that, to me, is the difference between marketers who go on to build empires and marketers who constantly feel like they’re reacting to new trends to try to figure it out.

It’s you build on a strong foundation, a foundation that begins with these strong signals from audience members in very obvious places that they love what you’re doing. And, oh my God, what a great era to be a marketer when you can say, “My marketing is beloved by people,” because in the past that was obviously not the case. So this is me being optimistic instead of my earlier self on this interview, which was a little pessimistic and cynical. But I think it’s a great time to be a marketer because you can find that signal so easily and launch radically different experiments to do so. Once one hits, drop the rest, and invest more heavily in that direction because your audience is telling you, “We actually love what you’re doing here.”

Matt Byrom: What would you do from there? You would speak with the people and find out exactly what they liked, how you might extend that further or other types of content you could actually create to support their desire for what you’re creating?

Jay Acunzo: Yeah, exactly. So let’s make it real concrete. So the beacon or the North Star that I follow is when something works, don’t do more like it, do more with it. In other words, if an article you wrote that happened to be a long-form essay of thought leadership really, really worked, don’t try to write more long-form essays of thought leadership quite yet, maybe in the future, but take what you learned from that one piece. Rip out the information inside the container and try to distribute it in new places: quotes on social media, Q&As or AMAs on different online forums or offline events.

So for me with a podcast it’s incredibly high friction thing to do to create a full show. And I’m not talking about like disparate interviews, I’m talking about a show that has a journey, and a strong concept, and all these mechanics to make it like a program. So for me to justify building an episode, I need to know with more certainty than the average bear it’s going to work. So I send out a bunch of tweets, and these are strong, opinionated tweets, and I’m just looking for a reaction from people. If I don’t get it, that topic or that opinion should not become an episode.

If I do get it 5, 6, 7, 8, 9, 25 people responding, not just liking and retweeting, but saying something passionately, okay. Maybe I write an article. And that article becomes, great, more content. That’s awesome. I’m certain it’ll work, but if the article falls flat, I haven’t fleshed out that tweet into anything worth pursuing and fleshing out more into an episode. So that’s the model. It’s like, I’m going to try out all of these little directions with a topic or a concept. I want to look for the right phrasing. I want to look for the right topics. Then I’m going to continually look to put that in larger and larger and more public places.

Then when I’m done, when I feel like I’ve capped out, like a podcast episode, I go back down the chain. The episode becomes another few blog posts, which become more social content, and on and on. So you’re like testing your way up to the big thing and then distributing your way back down.

Matt Byrom: That’s very interesting, and I guess that makes it for quite an efficient production process where you’re constantly testing ideas on a very small scale and then expanding the ones that are gaining traction, are really working, and giving you those signals from people.

Jay Acunzo: Yeah. It’s involving the customer in the process too, the audience, in this case. I think it’s the height of insanity that we expect campaigns to work or we expect a big piece of content to stick when we don’t actually inform what we’re doing with the audience. We jump in a room somewhere and we brainstorm. Developing a podcast is a really good example. That’s a massive project. You know firsthand, Matt, this is a big project that you have to take on. And I know it’s a passion project for you. But it’s still bigger than, I don’t know, doing a Twitter chat with me instead.

Matt Byrom: Yeah.

Jay Acunzo: Sending me five questions over email for a blog article. It’s a bigger commitment for you. And so to justify that, wouldn’t it be great, almost like a standup comedian, very good analogy here. Standup comics don’t just launch a Netflix special and expect it to work. They go to small clubs, and they try out their material and also their performance of the material. And after a few times of doing that, they go to a bigger stage and a bigger stage until they’re like, “Okay. This is ready for a mass audience or a bigger audience,” whereas what we as marketers do is we go away. We build for a little while. We brainstorm. We “jump in a room,” and then we expect the big thing to get a big audience without having ever proved this with a small audience. That, to me, is insanity.

Matt Byrom: Yeah. Absolutely. I really love the North Star metric. We’re thinking do more with it. I think that’s almost like it could be a key takeaway of this. People are constantly creating content, new content on this topic, that topic, the other topic, but actually expanding out the content that’s working best into various different formats and channels is something that can be often overlooked.

For example, even ourselves, my brand Wyzowl, we create a video survey to find out how consumers and businesses are reacting to video, and we do this every single year, and we get some really, really interesting results. We just launched our 2018 survey in January, and it’s our best-performing piece of content by a long way; it gets us hundreds, and hundreds of referring links back to our site, and we have constantly people talking about it. And we get it on multiple different websites. It’s really a prominent piece of content for us. But we still have more that we could be doing with it. Still, we could repurpose further.

We don’t, for example, use SlideShare, and we don’t put enough on social regarding the results and things like that. So rather than actually looking for new things all the time, it’s stick with what’s working well and actually expand out.

Jay Acunzo: You just revealed something really powerful and I think great about yourself and your team, which is you’ve put aside your pride, and I think that, to me, is the biggest missing piece in a lot of marketing organizations is there’s too much pride at play. People believe that creativity is about brainstorming an idea or lightening strike moments, and they get the credit. I talked to a great CEO and prolific entrepreneur named David Cancel. He heads this company he founded, Drift.com, and David and I were talking about how he would rather personally and with his team be vaguely right and rather than like specifically wrong.

In other words, we’re so interested in having the answer that we don’t go about trying to find our own in our context. We want the best practice that we hold up and say, “I got it. It’s this methodology from this expert or from my own brain.” Instead, we should be investigators and try to constantly figure out what does the audience want.

So you’re always in this game of little pivots. You’re never correct. The line, the progress is going to look very jagged, but hopefully in the macro level it goes up and to the right. And so with David and his company at Drift, they’re constantly trying to talk to customers at events, do video calls. I do video calls probably five to six times a month with my listeners. It doesn’t “scale,” but it’s the most powerful thing I do because I’m always like, “Okay, last episode I tried to jog a little bit to the left with these topics. Okay. These five to six people said that that was only partially correct. I got to jog a little bit to the right.” And I’m always zigzagging. I want to be vaguely right, I’m heading in the right direction generally, instead of have this very specific answer that I came up with and it feels so good that I think I’m right or I’m right in the eyes of my boss or my client. But in reality it doesn’t work with the customer.

And to be right with the customer, like you did with that survey, Matt, you got to put aside your pride and be like, “You know what? I actually don’t know the answer. However, I know how to go find it, and it’s going to involve the audience.”

Matt Byrom: Absolutely. And it’s almost like a lean way of doing marketing really, I guess, isn’t it, by constantly getting feedback and insight from the people that are reading, the people that are consuming the content, and actually improving and developing and building from there.

Jay Acunzo: Yeah. I think of it like when the first caveman invented fire. All of a sudden you had this really nuanced way of keeping warm and defending yourself and cooking your food. You had this amazing tool that could evolve you as an individual and your clan as a bunch of cavemen and women. Then the other people who didn’t get the fire were out there trying to like club their dinners and lie next to each other under a blanket of skin is a primitive way of doing it. It’s a really primitive way of doing marketing to launch campaigns that die and to have some creative director say, “It’s this idea,” and then have the client decide, “Yes, you’re right.”

It’s just, we have these tools that are cheap and sometimes free to access the audience directly, and we’re scared to use them because we’re like, “What if we’re wrong?” The point is to make sure that you’re right eventually. So you have to be wrong a little bit first to get there. Put out some tweets as a big brand that don’t offend people, but they take little stances here and there. We’re so consumed with having some theoretical right answer and releasing it to the world to all kinds of joy and response that we chase that feeling. But that’s such a rare thing and a rare way to succeed.

Instead, we have this fire which is social, and we can use it in so many different ways to build a business, to protect our business, to do all kinds of stuff just like real fire can do for us. And there’s so many marketers that are like, “No. Me no like. Me launch campaign now.”

Matt Byrom: You got me there. I like the accent. So would you in that case say not to really worry about failure, then? Because if you’re failing, you’re failing small; it’s not really a big failure. It’s really just these are the failures required to actually get to the topic or the idea that really works?

Jay Acunzo: Bingo. It’s thinking big as in I see a mountain peak in the distance I want to get to, and it’s acting small, as in it’s one step at a time. Creativity doesn’t mean big. I don’t know where we lost our way and thought creativity means big, because we just see the final product of what Red Bull is today or American Express or Google, but they took all the little steps along the way. And so I think it is about these tiny little steps.

A good example is if you’re a marketer and you feel like your company squeezes the creativity out of you, or they do things in a traditional way, and you’re writing blog posts, what most marketers want is they want some boss to come in with a brand new attitude that day and say, “You get to write amazing stories and create,” I don’t know, “everything you’ve ever dreamed of creating.” Instead of wishing that would happen, this big change, could you just write the next five articles with a better opening paragraph? You control that. And that’s a tiny little step in the right direction to see, am I right? Am I not? What does the audience say? Did they react? Did they not? And just try little tests along the way.

And so to the extent that I’ve had success with my podcast, or you’ve had success with yours, or Red Bull is successful with their whole media house, all these things we can point to as marketers and say, “Well, they were successful, or they’re creative,” we’re looking at the sum total of a lot of little moments. And some of those moments were bad, and some of those moments were good. But it’s the sum total we’re seeing, and we have to focus instead on the little moments. It’s the reversal of what we view creativity as–it’s experimentation.

Matt Byrom: And creativity unfortunately can be very difficult to actually measure, really. It’s subjective in the way that people or one person will see it differently to the other person. What tools or what metrics are you using on a regular basis? What have you found that works for you to actually track?

Jay Acunzo: With my podcast as a good example, I look for, again, the same thing. I keep it real simple, Matt. I’m a very, very simple marketer and creator because I think that complexity is often born out of confusion, and I try to always find clarity in what I’m doing first and then keep it simple in my execution. So my simple approach is a fake metric that I made up. It’s real metric, but it’s a fake name for this metric because people have to take me seriously because of your interviewing me on your podcast. So I call it URR because if you don’t have an acronym, apparently it doesn’t exist in the marketing world, URR: unsolicited response rate.

If you put something out in the world that’s meant to resonate, like a podcast episode, in my case, and for me it’s a 40-ish-minute episode, a little bit less, lots of story and narration and music and multiple voices and sound effects and jokes. It’s my heart and soul in the world. And if I hear crickets, not the downloads, but if I don’t get any comments from people who listen on Twitter, over email, anywhere, offline, if nobody every mentions that episode to me in an unsolicited way, I don’t think it’s a success. So I’m not going to write more articles about that. I’m not going to include that in my book. I’m not going to use that on stages and speeches. So that’s what I use whenever I experiment or launch something is did I get a small number of people reacting in a big way? It’s right back to where we begin here. And if I did, I will invest more in that experiment. I’ll turn the tweet into a blog post or the article into an episode. Or I’ll turn that episode into multiple projects, or I’ll turn the whole podcast, like I’m doing now, into a book.

And, again, it’s this small but strong signal that we can access so easily and freely, but we fail to look at it, so I’m just laser focused on that because the audience is saying, “This is good. We want some more.” And I’m just trying to then deliver on the demand they’re telling me they already have.

Matt Byrom: And do you track this in a formal way, or like a spreadsheet, or are you using gut feel?

Jay Acunzo: No. To what end? To what end would I track it? I’m basically looking at a couple of metrics for my business, I’m looking at revenue, and I’m looking at the cost associated with generating that revenue. And if something is telling me, or if an audience member is telling me this is great, then that’s a proxy for this could generate revenue. So I don’t have like episode title in one cell, and then the next cell it’s the time it took me to create it, and then the third cell it’s number of unsolicited responses. I don’t look at that whatsoever. I have my little playbook for the life cycle of one episode, the culminating existence or the biggest possible version of an episode is I use it in a speech because speaking is a big revenue generator for me. And so I know where the story could go, provided it gets enough strong reaction. But that’s enough for me. So I don’t have a spreadsheet. I don’t track these things. My goal isn’t final success, my goal is just constant improvement.

Matt Byrom: And I guess when you’re testing so frequently at a very small scale, it actually becomes impractical to really track everything on such a macro level, really.

Jay Acunzo: I just, I never want to know, and I don’t think you can know. I think when we have a best practice, that’s what we’re striving for when we track stuff: It worked to write a list article; write more list articles. I think when you do things that way, you tend to get really stale, and you tend to copy what others are doing. That leads to average work. And I know nobody aspires to do average work, or feel average fulfillment, or get average results, but when we’re looking to stop growing, you become this hardened cell that’s in protect mode. It’s sort of like just do what the data said worked before over and over again. You stop experimenting and stop growing.

And so it’s my opinion that when we make the process the point instead of end results, when we make learning the point, you tend to get better end results because you’re voracious about the process. You seek it out more. You love it. You want to do it better. You experiment with it. Instead of saying, “We have to grow our followers on Twitter this percent by this date,” now you’re like, “Oh my God, I’ll do anything, anything. It doesn’t matter.” The process to me doesn’t matter. You’re telling me I can press this button and get the results? Great. But you didn’t learn anything along the way, so the next time you have a different goal, it’s like, “Oh my God, was starting from panic again. I got to start from scratch.”

I love the process. I’m fortunate that I found a job that lets me like the process. I realize not everybody has that luxury or has that yet. And I hope you do find it, but for me, I think whether you have a boss pressing down upon you for a results right now or you had a solo individual kind of entrepreneurial path, if you make learning and constant improvement the goal, the results tend to follow because the only way you improve is by holding yourself accountable and trying to improve on whatever happened before in your own context. And so over time it compounds. So make lifelong learning a goal instead of some sort of quick hit result.

Matt Byrom: Yeah. I totally understand that as well. I totally feel the same way. A sales manager at a company I used to work for, he had a little theory that was if you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got. But what that basically means is if you keep doing what you always do, then you’ll never really learn, and you never really improve because you’re just doing what you think works. And ultimately in marketing, those things that work don’t last very long ever. So you always need to constantly be trialing and testing the new things to actually really understand what’s resonating and working with people moving forward.

Jay Acunzo: Yeah. Exactly. I wish, I desperately want to know who said this quote. It wasn’t me, so I have to defer credit here, but I don’t know the person who said this, so I apologize if someone listening actually knows, but you have the old I think Einstein adage about the definition of insanity, which is doing the same things and expecting different results. This person that I fail to remember said, especially in marketing, doing the same things you did before and expecting the same results, that is the definition of insanity. And that seems to be our goal in marketing: It’s how close can we get to not having to think anymore? How close can we get to not having to do the hard work of experimentation, or talking to customers, or keeping up with our craft?

We want to get to the point where all that we have to do forever from here on out is write list articles, as one example. And what that tells me is you just want your job to be done. You just want to go home. You just want to get rid of this work from your plate. So maybe you take a hard look in the mirror and think about why we’re acting that way. Do we not like our boss, or client, our team that we manage, the company, the industry?

To me, that feels like it’s from a place of fear or unhappiness. And that’s just such a shame because we only get one life. You don’t want to spend your career working from a place of fear or unhappiness. And obviously there’s mitigating circumstances. Some people need money for other things, and get that. Sometimes you just need a job, but when all we want is to be done learning, when all we want is to know the way that we put on repeat to get the same result we got before, it’s almost like you stop mattering in that work. And that, I don’t know, that’s just a shame.

Matt Byrom: I agree. I totally agree. I’d love to start talking about your podcast, if that’s okay.

Jay Acunzo: For sure.

Matt Byrom: For anybody who hasn’t listened yet, it’s called Unthinkable. You’ve had phenomenal success with it. You started the podcast in 2016, in March 2016. You’ve got five-star ratings, and it’s been critically acclaimed by many people and publications. So tell me more. Why did you decide to start the podcast?

Jay Acunzo: For sure. I used to struggle with this question because I think what people want is some kind of really strategic answer about how it would benefit my business, but the real truth is it looked like a lot of fun. It looked like a lot of fun to launch a podcast and try and imitate some of the things I admire from Radio Lab, and This American Life, and Reply All, and some of the shows that I love that have a production quality to them.

So I just wanted to try and have fun, and I also wanted to send up a little bit of a flare to at first the marketing world. It’s really expanded since then, but I started the show as a journey to understand this gap that exists in a lot of our work. It’s this gap between the work we’re doing now and the work we want to do. We don’t want to be average, but we allow ourselves or fall victim to a lot of average tactics and best practices and conventional thinking, and that informs our work, and so we just a 5 out of 10 over and over again. But we want to be a 10 out of 10.

So I’m like, I don’t want to help you get up to speed. I don’t want to the one on one, tips and tricks, how-to stuff on my show. Let me go find people whose work has been a tremendous success for them, however they define it, but it looks crazy from the outside. And then when I tell their story, every time it’s not crazy at all. They just know something about their context, about their situation that we don’t know. All we know is the best practice, and in general the best practice works.

Nobody operates in a generality. Let’s hear about a specific situation. It’s Matt on his podcast, and Matt knows x about his customer. You couldn’t possibly know that. Matt used that in his work, and he found a better answer or a better result than any best practice could’ve delivered. And so that’s the cause. That’s the reason. It’s really a human desire. I wanted to have fun. I wanted to serve this audience. And the results were a nice benefit.

Matt Byrom: Yeah. And I guess these unexpected results can come out of people’s passion really.

Jay Acunzo: I think exclusively. I especially when it’s a creative craft, it’s really obvious when you were having a bad day, or you were sick, or you were annoyed or stressed. It’s just you are the work, and the work isn’t you, it’s subtle difference, it’s just what you’re doing right now, but if I plucked you out of that work and replaced you with somebody who was similar but still different, that work would change in some way.

I think if you were an owner of a business, you might want people at your business to act more like cogs in a machine that are interchangeable. But the fact is it is you. It is something that it matters the person doing the work. So I don’t know if results can come from a place of no passion at all. At least that’s been my experience.

Matt Byrom: And what strategies do you use to promote the podcast? What did you use when you first started, for example, to promote episode 1? What did you do?

Jay Acunzo: For sure. So the first thing I did was I wrote a blog post just declaring why I was doing this, and so I wrote this article titled “How to Work in Marketing When You’re Bothered by Suck.” And I explained for me it always starts with a side project, and that’s when I know. If I’m launching a side project and I have a day job, something at the day job isn’t satisfying me. And I just explain my own personal journey in marketing and some of the annoyance I felt towards a lot of the hucksters, and the hype, and the shortcut-seeking that we feel either because we feel stressed or because we don’t care about the audience, for some, which, again, is a shame. But I just felt there wasn’t a home base that I had in the industry, and so I wanted to create it, create something I wanted to exist and send up a flare and see if others would come running towards it and say, “Oh, I want that to exist too.”

So I started with this article that I wrote. And then, to be honest, it’s just been producing a better and better episode every time. The best marketing I’ve done is improving the product, is making it more worthy of people’s time, getting more people who start the episode to finish the episode too, because I think all we want is more and more bigger, bigger, but if you can make something deeper and better, that tends to be the byproduct is it grows bit by bit, and the people it grows to, they don’t churn through it and then they’re on to the next competitor, because that’s like digging a hole in dry sand. That’s most of marketing.

I think the people it expands to, albeit more slowly, stick around. They become the people who go from the show to the newsletter. And then I write this weekly newsletter. It’s got one big idea for being better than best practices, and then some kind of roundup from the show. And so it’s like those things, again, it’s like I’m sort of like, people like this, I’m putting it on my newsletter. People like that, I’m putting it in my speeches. And it’s like, can I slowly grow these concentric circles from the original crew that came with me on this journey to more and more people? But I never want that circle to grow in the opposite direction and then I have to start all over. I always want to catch 10 people, 12 people, 100 people at a time that stay instead of 100,000, and then I’m starting from scratch, because I’ve experienced the opposite, Matt.

I’ve experienced writing a blog post on Medium, getting featured on the homepage, getting two million views on that article and tons of shares and famous people sharing it, and then no one sticks around because they don’t actually care. So I’m in the mode of making them care. So honestly the best marketing I have is twofold: one, I make the show better every time, and two, I do video calls with a small number of listeners so I can continue to improve the show. And it seems to have worked from there.

Matt Byrom: That’s really interesting about the video calls. So you’ll actually hold a video call with how many people?

Jay Acunzo: So I send out an invite list. I got away from it the last couple of months because I started my book, but I really, every month I’d send out an invite list for, I don’t know, maybe six calls throughout the month, maybe a little bit more. They’d be one-on-one calls, so it’s one person signing up for a spot. I used the first half to ask questions of the individual, and the second half we talk about whatever they want to talk about.

And the first half I evolve constantly. So it started with just like, “Why did you listen to the show?” I’m trying to get a feel for what purpose in their life is my show serving. How do I make sure that I articulate that so I can catch some new listeners and also live up to that for my existing listeners every time?

And then based on what I learn in the first few calls, I change the questions I ask to constantly learn more things about my audience so that I can go deeper and deeper with them. I can reference things. And that affects big stuff like, for example, the types of episodes and the style, but you’d be surprised, it also affects little things that have big results, like I use the word “refreshing” a lot to refer to my show and my company that builds podcasts for brands, Unthinkable Media.

And “refreshing” is not word I’d normally use to describe my own work, but because of these video calls, I heard them say it time and time again, so I’m just reflecting back the words that my listeners used to describe why they liked my show. And now it’s just like great marketing positioning. So talking to your actual audience can affect the big stuff, but it could also affect something really small and unexpected like a single word you use that helps get the results you want from that audience.

Matt Byrom: That’s a really interesting marketing strategy, really, that you’re holding effectively, focus sessions, really one-on-one focus sessions with your listeners to actually understand deeply what they like, and what they don’t like, and what they think about your podcast, but then actually using that for only half the time of the call so they get the value on the other half of the call by asking you questions and understanding learning things from you, really, so it’s a win-win really.

Jay Acunzo: Oh, 100%. And Matt, I never wanted to be just a pull from you to me, “Hey, I want that value. I want that information.” I like it to be give and take. And so I think a podcast is a great medium, but I think all content really is this where it is a give and take even though unlike a video call one on one you might not see the audience. It’s a give and take in that while I’m speaking right now, you’re making judgments about my voice, the speed at which I’m talking, the nuance of what I’m saying, how right or wrong I am as it applies to you. It’s a give and take whether you want it or not, and, again, I think at a macro level, brands don’t care about that, they don’t recognize that. It’s the fire they’re scared of, and they just want it to be a push model. I’m going to push my thing to you, and I’m going to pull out the value in dollars. That’s not the way of the world anymore. The way of the world is these little moments of give and take that, again, if you zigzag a little bit but ultimately head roughly in the right direction, that’s where you get an audience that cares and all the results that follow. And so that’s how I structure my show or my video calls.

Matt Byrom: And it’s not like a highly scalable tactic, but it’s deeply personal, which comes back to the whole undertone of what we’ve been speaking here today about.

Jay Acunzo: Well, I question that idea of what’s scalable. So what isn’t scalable about the video calls? I’m curious because I have … I think I know what you mean, but what about me doing those video calls doesn’t scale? Because then I have an idea that I want to share after this. But I’m curious to learn more about that comment. What doesn’t scale?

Matt Byrom: I guess from my point of view, I’m thinking that a video call is fairly time consuming, minimum probably an hour with a bit of prep involved on both sides so that you can get most value from what you’re doing. And then I guess you’ll have to understand or write up a document of what you’ve learnt so that then you can iterate on that moving forward. So it’s not necessarily a one-minute, two-minute thing. You could only do a limited amount of those per day.

Jay Acunzo: Right. Exactly. So it’s the construct. It’s the channel or the container doesn’t scale, right? It’s a video call that lasts an hour. Or I think I actually do half an hour, and it’s five to six people. It’s the mechanics of setting it up, scheduling it, writing the notes, reflecting on the notes. That is the kind of container; it’s the construct of the mechanics of these calls. That does not scale. It’s like a rigid piece of, I don’t know, Tupperware that’s like you can’t just move the walls to the left and the right. It does not scale. Correct.

But what scales, back to my point before of if something works, do more with it, is the stuff inside the container, so I learn from these people in such a deep way, in such a transformative way because it’s an actual conversation, that I can pluck that out of one interaction or pluck it out of 12 interactions, and that information that I learn scales magically because I can use it, like I mentioned with the word “refreshing,” I can use that on the microphone, in my writing, talking to you as an interviewee on your show, Matt, on the paraphernalia or a brochure where that I use to promote Unthinkable Media, in my book. Everywhere I am I can use the word “refreshing.” That scales amazingly well.

So it’s bits like that that when people talk, “Oh, that doesn’t scale, what are they talking about? I think they’re talking about the container instead of the benefit of what’s inside. But the benefit of what’s inside is what people want. They want the good … They want the education or the entertainment value of the article, not an article. And so you could rip it out of the article and put it in other articles, or social channels, or podcasting, et cetera.

So when we talk about that won’t scale, I think we just need to be more aware or sensitive to what we’re talking about. And so I love doing the non-scalable thing because I came out of the startup world. Turns out the non-scalable things teach you the stuff that get you to scale.

Matt Byrom: Yeah. That makes total sense as well. You’ll never find out what those scalable things are unless you’re doing the things that won’t scale in the first place.

Jay Acunzo: Right. You’re like preparing to be awesome before you’re okay, right? It’s like, “Well, I don’t know if this is a big enough room for my home gym. It’s not going to be able to fit 12 different workout machines.” It’s like, you’re not even exercising at all right now. Can you just fit one exercise machine and do like one day a week for a little while? Yeah, it’s funny, you don’t ever skip to the end, but it’s funny how much we want to skip to the end in marketing, so much so that it affects like our storytelling.

We say, “This is the way of the world, so buy our product.” And we skip the middle of the story, which gets people to buy the product. “This is the way of the world, and this causes all this conflict. And so here’s why you’re going through that strife and struggle. And we get it, and it’s this and this and this. And, oh, by the way, the resolution to that conflict is this way of the world. And, oh, by the way again, we have a product for that.”

Every little moment in marketing from the stories we tell, to the way we treat our channels and tactics, to the way we measure, it’s like we’re trying to skip the middle part, and instead of starting at the beginning, we want to start at the end: Results right now. Press the button. It comes out. So I don’t think anybody that you look at as an innovator in marketing, they don’t see around corners, they just see the world the way it is right now, which is start at the beginning and inform every other step with the audience.

Matt Byrom: And then out of the podcast, you’re now helping people throughout … You’re about the launch Unthinkable Media to help people with their podcast and their business as well. Please tell us a little bit more about that.

Jay Acunzo: Yeah. Thank you for asking. A funny thing happened when I started the show. It didn’t grow a big audience, but it grew a resonant one, one that was passionate and engaged. And so I started digging into the mechanics of how you create those experiences. Instead of pumping out a lot of episodes to rank higher on Apple Podcast, how do you create episodes that people want to reach out to you afterwards or they want to subscribe to stick around.

In other words, how do you get people to the end of an episode? Because that’s what episodes are. That’s what most content is: Get them to the end. And so as I dug into that stuff, I realized a lot of this is hard. A lot of this is teachable. Is this important to marketers? And if you step back a moment, you realize that we’re living through this shift in marketing that’s more fundamental than most of us talk about. Most of us talk about the industry’s reaction to the shift, which are things like content marketing, social media, and influencers. But the shift or the foundation under that is this movement from marketers having to care about acquisition, in other words acquiring people’s attention over to people having, in marketing, having to get good at holding attention, time spent, which builds trust, which builds an audience, which gets all the conversions people are looking for in marketing.

So we’re so obsessed with acquiring attention, we don’t often think about holding attention, but that’s what marketers have to master today to be effective. And so it turns out a great vehicle for holding attention is create a great show. So that’s kind of the strategic reason I launched Unthinkable Media. It’s to teach those mechanics and also help test and incubate new shows along with brand partners in the B2B space.

But aside from the strategic reason, there is a personal reason, which is I just get so frustrated that we all feel such meaning and emotion in the work that we do, but the content about the working world fails to deliver on that. It’s flat. It’s redundant. It’s boring. And so I envision a world where media about work is just as entertaining and refreshing as, and there’s that word again, “refreshing,” but as all the other stuff, sports, entertainment, you name it. So I found the Venn diagram overlap of a personal desire to create entertaining shows about work and a strategic reason that others in marketing would care, which is we have to master the ability to hold attention. And out came Unthinkable Media.

So it’s an education company that also incubates probably 10 shows a year with B2B brands. And the goal is let’s test our way forward, involve the audience, and let’s create like head-turning programs about the working world.

Matt Byrom: That’s phenomenal. I love the elephant concept there, and can people actually contact you and apply to be on these programs with you?

Jay Acunzo: We don’t take inbound guest requests, but I am obviously looking for partners all the time, both co-marketing partners, distributions partners, and clients, and so the way I work with these clients is I’ve created what I call the small comedy club for branded podcasts. So back to the comedian example, you go to small clubs and work on that material and work on your performance. Then you make the big stink about the big special on Netflix.

So I created something called the Maker Channel, which launches this spring, and the Maker Channel is one podcast feed with a bunch of shows that are in development all running simultaneously in that feed. Maybe twice a week you get a different episode. And the goal is with a brand, we’re going to distill your brand down to its bare bones. Why do you exist? What better world are you building? And how is that different from your competitors? Then we build up a concept that we think is different, entertaining, refreshing. Then we test that concept in the Maker Channel.

So whether you’re the host, or I’m the host, or we bring in another host, the goal is let’s launch, learn, and iterate rapidly the lean startup methodology way to improve this show such that when we launch, it’s not a 5 out of 10, it’s as close to a 10 out of 10 as humanly possible. And so that’s how I work with these companies. We go from scratch to testing mode, and then we kind of send them on their way.

The analogy I use aside from the comedian thing is some agencies want to build you a plane, and that’s what they charge for. We want to help people test pilot that plane with a few passengers that are excited to be onboard in these risky early days, and get feedback and all that good stuff so that your launch will be way more successful.

Matt Byrom: And where can people find out more about this?

Jay Acunzo: We launched the website at the end of February. It’ll be unthinkablemedia.com. In the meantime you can just shoot me an email. It’s just jay@unthinkablemedia.com. Or you could follow along. I’m actually doing a behind-the-scenes diary of building the business in my podcast Unthinkable.

Matt Byrom: Okay. So I’m going to jump into our last five questions here, five quickfire questions. Number one: What’s your best piece of marketing advice?

Jay Acunzo: Focus on resonance not reach.

Matt Byrom: Number two: Can you recommend a book to our listeners?

Jay Acunzo: Any collection of Calvin and Hobbs comics.

Matt Byrom: Number three: Which software tool couldn’t you live without?

Jay Acunzo: Evernote.

Matt Byrom: Perfect. Number four: What’s your favorite example of a marketing campaign?

Jay Acunzo: I’m going to go with Death Wish Coffee’s Super Bowl campaign. It was the peak, the success story after years of struggling of a company that chose to do something differently and build and create the world’s strongest coffee. So Death Wish Coffee, the entire story would take me too long to explain, but you can go to my show. You can go to Unthinkable and you can listen to a podcast called Best Practices. It’s way back in the archives. But Death Wish is one of my favorite brands, and their Super Bowl ad was something to behold.

Matt Byrom: Cool. I’ll definitely check that out. And lastly, which other podcasts do you listen to?

Jay Acunzo: I love, it’s mostly nonbusiness business shows that I love, but one I’m really fascinated by and I’d love to imitate at some point to try my hand at it is a show called The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe, who is a former TV host. So the show is what he calls “the only podcast for the curious mind with a short attention span.” It’s maybe six-minute stories where he tells the backstory of something we’ve all heard of, but you haven’t heard it told this way. And at the end, he reveals what it was. So it’s a little bit of a guessing game. He’s an amazing storyteller. It’s just him scripting it and reading it. But he’s got a way with words. So it’s The Way I Heard It. You will not regret it. It’s really short, and it’s delicious.

Matt Byrom: Excellent. I’ll definitely check that out as well. Thank you very much, Jay. It’s been an absolute pleasure, and I feel like I could care on talking to you for quite a long time [crosstalk 00:59:54]. But really nice to have you on the show today. And everyone check out Unthinkable. Check out Unthinkable Media when the website launches in a few weeks. And also look out in the next few months for a book that Jay’s launching off the back of the podcast as well. Does that have the same name, Unthinkable?

Jay Acunzo: The book is called Break the Wheel, and it’s about getting out of this endless cycle of best practices, conventional wisdom, and trendy tactics. So Break the Wheel, that’ll be this fall.

Matt Byrom: Awesome. Thanks very much, Jay. Pleasure to have you on today.

Jay Acunzo: So much fun, and if you listened all the way to the end, thank you, thank you, thank you for listening. Thank you guys.

Jay Acunzo:
No, I was just going to say I disagree that interruptive tactics because they’re interruptive can work. I think it’s still what are you putting into that channel that matters? And if it’s something people don’t want or not asking for, you’re like praying to the digital Gods that, “Oh God, please, if I just target people in this region or people of this profile, I hope a small percent actually buys because I have my numbers to hit.” And I get it, but we can turn that low probability event into a higher probability event if we actually understood the customer first and then delivered something that they actually wanted, right? Start with resonance because reach has never been easier.

Matt Byrom:
We’re in the age now where we’ve got the tools and ability to really do this on a big scale actually is be personal and give people what they want from our brand more than … actually almost make friends with every single one of your customers no matter how many customers you have. We can do that these days.

Jay Acunzo:
Amen. Yeah. That’s why I love podcasting because if you’re listening to this, it’s like a voice in your head. You might be fervently disagreeing with what I say if you feel like you’ve built a career on interruptions and it works and whatever, but whatever you’re doing, you’re taking a strong stance. You’re either feeling me or feeling something strong against me, and voice has that way of building intimacy, and in this case with podcasting, intimacy, that actually scales. It’s wonderful. It does, to your point, Matt, it makes you feel like I as a listener know the brand through these voices, and if they’re going to ask me to do something or if I see them elsewhere, you’re more likely to take an action.

Matt Byrom:
Super cool. Coming back to this other story I guess that we’ve been talking about here, this ultimately, this issue that you sort of experienced, this led you to actually quit. This led you to leave Google.

Jay Acunzo:
That’s true. Yes, I quit Google. I went to a small startup, and I was doing sales, same as Google. And the sales team was bloated. We had hired too many people too soon for the startup to support, given the revenue and the capital. And they laid off a bunch of salespeople, but this is kind of the story of my career: I had been doing a bunch of side projects within the business. Side projects I think are the only reason that you were interested in even talking to me today. Most of my career success is because I tinkered on the side of the day job. And in this instance, I had been creating content for the marketing team because I like to write, and I’d obviously seen a lot and heard a lot by talking to customers as a sales rep and then later an account executive.

Matt Byrom:
That’s awesome. I mean, it’s like being given your dream job, really, isn’t it? You go from the sales team to the marketing team, and you want to be a writer. Perfect.

Jay Acunzo:
I just felt like I found a back door. Though my whole career I feel like I’m pulling one over on people, and I’m waiting for somebody, some suited authority to come to my door and say, “Sorry, sir, you’re actually not allowed to be creating these podcasts and shows and speeches and blog posts without first having worked for print publications for 10 years.” I’m waiting for someone to rip me out of the world I’m in, put me back in traditional media, and say, “Now pay your dues for decades.”

Matt Byrom:
Yeah. And you obviously clearly sort of not … I don’t mean at the bottom, but at the ground level, you were new into content marketing, for example. Where did you start? You very clearly had lots of success down the line. How did you understand what was working, and where did you … see success?

Jay Acunzo:
I think the first moment of success I had was in showing my bosses early on in my career in content strong qualitative reactions from audiences as case studies. So I think what we often want, especially when we’re early in our careers, is we want to point to a piece and say, “Look how many leads and views or shares.” Or we want to point to a campaign and say, “Look how many x, y, z metric.”

Matt Byrom:
And where were you getting these signals? Or where were you getting the indications or the small groups of people that were reacting well? How do you come across this and identify these people?

Jay Acunzo:
It’s very simple. I think we over complicate stuff way too much because we have great technology available, but it was in the comments section. It was on Twitter. It was on Facebook, offline events, emails. I would show my boss, “Hey, I got this email from a prospect. Look at what they said. They praised this article to no end. We should reach out to them as a marketer and say, ‘Thank you so much, and by the way we have some demos coming up.’ We should take the topic from that article and share it more liberally on social,” or what have you.

Matt Byrom:
What would you do from there? You would speak with the people and find out exactly what they liked, how you might extend that further or other types of content you could actually create to support their desire for what you’re creating?

Jay Acunzo:
Yeah, exactly. So let’s make it real concrete. So the beacon or the North Star that I follow is when something works, don’t do more like it, do more with it. In other words, if an article you wrote that happened to be a long-form essay of thought leadership really, really worked, don’t try to write more long-form essays of thought leadership quite yet, maybe in the future, but take what you learned from that one piece. Rip out the information inside the container and try to distribute it in new places: quotes on social media, Q&As or AMAs on different online forums or offline events.

Matt Byrom:
That’s very interesting, and I guess that makes it for quite an efficient production process where you’re constantly testing ideas on a very small scale and then expanding the ones that are gaining traction, are really working, and giving you those signals from people.

Jay Acunzo:
Yeah. It’s involving the customer in the process too, the audience, in this case. I think it’s the height of insanity that we expect campaigns to work or we expect a big piece of content to stick when we don’t actually inform what we’re doing with the audience. We jump in a room somewhere and we brainstorm. Developing a podcast is a really good example. That’s a massive project. You know firsthand, Matt, this is a big project that you have to take on. And I know it’s a passion project for you. But it’s still bigger than, I don’t know, doing a Twitter chat with me instead.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah.

Jay Acunzo:
Sending me five questions over email for a blog article. It’s a bigger commitment for you. And so to justify that, wouldn’t it be great, almost like a standup comedian, very good analogy here. Standup comics don’t just launch a Netflix special and expect it to work. They go to small clubs, and they try out their material and also their performance of the material. And after a few times of doing that, they go to a bigger stage and a bigger stage until they’re like, “Okay. This is ready for a mass audience or a bigger audience,” whereas what we as marketers do is we go away. We build for a little while. We brainstorm. We “jump in a room,” and then we expect the big thing to get a big audience without having ever proved this with a small audience. That, to me, is insanity.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah. Absolutely. I really love the North Star metric. We’re thinking do more with it. I think that’s almost like it could be a key takeaway of this. People are constantly creating content, new content on this topic, that topic, the other topic, but actually expanding out the content that’s working best into various different formats and channels is something that can be often overlooked.

Jay Acunzo:
You just revealed something really powerful and I think great about yourself and your team, which is you’ve put aside your pride, and I think that, to me, is the biggest missing piece in a lot of marketing organizations is there’s too much pride at play. People believe that creativity is about brainstorming an idea or lightening strike moments, and they get the credit. I talked to a great CEO and prolific entrepreneur named David Cancel. He heads this company he founded, Drift.com, and David and I were talking about how he would rather personally and with his team be vaguely right and rather than like specifically wrong.

Matt Byrom:
Absolutely. And it’s almost like a lean way of doing marketing really, I guess, isn’t it, by constantly getting feedback and insight from the people that are reading, the people that are consuming the content, and actually improving and developing and building from there.

Jay Acunzo:
Yeah. I think of it like when the first caveman invented fire. All of a sudden you had this really nuanced way of keeping warm and defending yourself and cooking your food. You had this amazing tool that could evolve you as an individual and your clan as a bunch of cavemen and women. Then the other people who didn’t get the fire were out there trying to like club their dinners and lie next to each other under a blanket of skin is a primitive way of doing it. It’s a really primitive way of doing marketing to launch campaigns that die and to have some creative director say, “It’s this idea,” and then have the client decide, “Yes, you’re right.”

Matt Byrom:
You got me there. I like the accent. So would you in that case say not to really worry about failure, then? Because if you’re failing, you’re failing small; it’s not really a big failure. It’s really just these are the failures required to actually get to the topic or the idea that really works?

Jay Acunzo:
Bingo. It’s thinking big as in I see a mountain peak in the distance I want to get to, and it’s acting small, as in it’s one step at a time. Creativity doesn’t mean big. I don’t know where we lost our way and thought creativity means big, because we just see the final product of what Red Bull is today or American Express or Google, but they took all the little steps along the way. And so I think it is about these tiny little steps.

Matt Byrom:
And creativity unfortunately can be very difficult to actually measure, really. It’s subjective in the way that people or one person will see it differently to the other person. What tools or what metrics are you using on a regular basis? What have you found that works for you to actually track?

Jay Acunzo:
With my podcast as a good example, I look for, again, the same thing. I keep it real simple, Matt. I’m a very, very simple marketer and creator because I think that complexity is often born out of confusion, and I try to always find clarity in what I’m doing first and then keep it simple in my execution. So my simple approach is a fake metric that I made up. It’s real metric, but it’s a fake name for this metric because people have to take me seriously because of your interviewing me on your podcast. So I call it URR because if you don’t have an acronym, apparently it doesn’t exist in the marketing world, URR: unsolicited response rate.

Matt Byrom:
And do you track this in a formal way, or like a spreadsheet, or are you using gut feel?

Jay Acunzo:
No. To what end? To what end would I track it? I’m basically looking at a couple of metrics for my business, I’m looking at revenue, and I’m looking at the cost associated with generating that revenue. And if something is telling me, or if an audience member is telling me this is great, then that’s a proxy for this could generate revenue. So I don’t have like episode title in one cell, and then the next cell it’s the time it took me to create it, and then the third cell it’s number of unsolicited responses. I don’t look at that whatsoever. I have my little playbook for the life cycle of one episode, the culminating existence or the biggest possible version of an episode is I use it in a speech because speaking is a big revenue generator for me. And so I know where the story could go, provided it gets enough strong reaction. But that’s enough for me. So I don’t have a spreadsheet. I don’t track these things. My goal isn’t final success, my goal is just constant improvement.

Matt Byrom:
And I guess when you’re testing so frequently at a very small scale, it actually becomes impractical to really track everything on such a macro level, really.

Jay Acunzo:
I just, I never want to know, and I don’t think you can know. I think when we have a best practice, that’s what we’re striving for when we track stuff: It worked to write a list article; write more list articles. I think when you do things that way, you tend to get really stale, and you tend to copy what others are doing. That leads to average work. And I know nobody aspires to do average work, or feel average fulfillment, or get average results, but when we’re looking to stop growing, you become this hardened cell that’s in protect mode. It’s sort of like just do what the data said worked before over and over again. You stop experimenting and stop growing.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah. I totally understand that as well. I totally feel the same way. A sales manager at a company I used to work for, he had a little theory that was if you always do what you always did, you’ll always get what you always got. But what that basically means is if you keep doing what you always do, then you’ll never really learn, and you never really improve because you’re just doing what you think works. And ultimately in marketing, those things that work don’t last very long ever. So you always need to constantly be trialing and testing the new things to actually really understand what’s resonating and working with people moving forward.

Jay Acunzo:
Yeah. Exactly. I wish, I desperately want to know who said this quote. It wasn’t me, so I have to defer credit here, but I don’t know the person who said this, so I apologize if someone listening actually knows, but you have the old I think Einstein adage about the definition of insanity, which is doing the same things and expecting different results. This person that I fail to remember said, especially in marketing, doing the same things you did before and expecting the same results, that is the definition of insanity. And that seems to be our goal in marketing: It’s how close can we get to not having to think anymore? How close can we get to not having to do the hard work of experimentation, or talking to customers, or keeping up with our craft?

Matt Byrom:
I agree. I totally agree. I’d love to start talking about your podcast, if that’s okay.

Jay Acunzo:
For sure.

Matt Byrom:
For anybody who hasn’t listened yet, it’s called Unthinkable. You’ve had phenomenal success with it. You started the podcast in 2016, in March 2016. You’ve got five-star ratings, and it’s been critically acclaimed by many people and publications. So tell me more. Why did you decide to start the podcast?

Jay Acunzo:
For sure. I used to struggle with this question because I think what people want is some kind of really strategic answer about how it would benefit my business, but the real truth is it looked like a lot of fun. It looked like a lot of fun to launch a podcast and try and imitate some of the things I admire from Radio Lab, and This American Life, and Reply All, and some of the shows that I love that have a production quality to them.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah. And I guess these unexpected results can come out of people’s passion really.

Jay Acunzo:
I think exclusively. I especially when it’s a creative craft, it’s really obvious when you were having a bad day, or you were sick, or you were annoyed or stressed. It’s just you are the work, and the work isn’t you, it’s subtle difference, it’s just what you’re doing right now, but if I plucked you out of that work and replaced you with somebody who was similar but still different, that work would change in some way.

Matt Byrom:
And what strategies do you use to promote the podcast? What did you use when you first started, for example, to promote episode 1? What did you do?

Jay Acunzo:
For sure. So the first thing I did was I wrote a blog post just declaring why I was doing this, and so I wrote this article titled “How to Work in Marketing When You’re Bothered by Suck.” And I explained for me it always starts with a side project, and that’s when I know. If I’m launching a side project and I have a day job, something at the day job isn’t satisfying me. And I just explain my own personal journey in marketing and some of the annoyance I felt towards a lot of the hucksters, and the hype, and the shortcut-seeking that we feel either because we feel stressed or because we don’t care about the audience, for some, which, again, is a shame. But I just felt there wasn’t a home base that I had in the industry, and so I wanted to create it, create something I wanted to exist and send up a flare and see if others would come running towards it and say, “Oh, I want that to exist too.”

Matt Byrom:
That’s really interesting about the video calls. So you’ll actually hold a video call with how many people?

Jay Acunzo:
So I send out an invite list. I got away from it the last couple of months because I started my book, but I really, every month I’d send out an invite list for, I don’t know, maybe six calls throughout the month, maybe a little bit more. They’d be one-on-one calls, so it’s one person signing up for a spot. I used the first half to ask questions of the individual, and the second half we talk about whatever they want to talk about.

Matt Byrom:
That’s a really interesting marketing strategy, really, that you’re holding effectively, focus sessions, really one-on-one focus sessions with your listeners to actually understand deeply what they like, and what they don’t like, and what they think about your podcast, but then actually using that for only half the time of the call so they get the value on the other half of the call by asking you questions and understanding learning things from you, really, so it’s a win-win really.

Jay Acunzo:
Oh, 100%. And Matt, I never wanted to be just a pull from you to me, “Hey, I want that value. I want that information.” I like it to be give and take. And so I think a podcast is a great medium, but I think all content really is this where it is a give and take even though unlike a video call one on one you might not see the audience. It’s a give and take in that while I’m speaking right now, you’re making judgments about my voice, the speed at which I’m talking, the nuance of what I’m saying, how right or wrong I am as it applies to you. It’s a give and take whether you want it or not, and, again, I think at a macro level, brands don’t care about that, they don’t recognize that. It’s the fire they’re scared of, and they just want it to be a push model. I’m going to push my thing to you, and I’m going to pull out the value in dollars. That’s not the way of the world anymore. The way of the world is these little moments of give and take that, again, if you zigzag a little bit but ultimately head roughly in the right direction, that’s where you get an audience that cares and all the results that follow. And so that’s how I structure my show or my video calls.

Matt Byrom:
And it’s not like a highly scalable tactic, but it’s deeply personal, which comes back to the whole undertone of what we’ve been speaking here today about.

Jay Acunzo:
Well, I question that idea of what’s scalable. So what isn’t scalable about the video calls? I’m curious because I have … I think I know what you mean, but what about me doing those video calls doesn’t scale? Because then I have an idea that I want to share after this. But I’m curious to learn more about that comment. What doesn’t scale?

Matt Byrom:
I guess from my point of view, I’m thinking that a video call is fairly time consuming, minimum probably an hour with a bit of prep involved on both sides so that you can get most value from what you’re doing. And then I guess you’ll have to understand or write up a document of what you’ve learnt so that then you can iterate on that moving forward. So it’s not necessarily a one-minute, two-minute thing. You could only do a limited amount of those per day.

Jay Acunzo:
Right. Exactly. So it’s the construct. It’s the channel or the container doesn’t scale, right? It’s a video call that lasts an hour. Or I think I actually do half an hour, and it’s five to six people. It’s the mechanics of setting it up, scheduling it, writing the notes, reflecting on the notes. That is the kind of container; it’s the construct of the mechanics of these calls. That does not scale. It’s like a rigid piece of, I don’t know, Tupperware that’s like you can’t just move the walls to the left and the right. It does not scale. Correct.

Matt Byrom:
Yeah. That makes total sense as well. You’ll never find out what those scalable things are unless you’re doing the things that won’t scale in the first place.

Jay Acunzo:
Right. You’re like preparing to be awesome before you’re okay, right? It’s like, “Well, I don’t know if this is a big enough room for my home gym. It’s not going to be able to fit 12 different workout machines.” It’s like, you’re not even exercising at all right now. Can you just fit one exercise machine and do like one day a week for a little while? Yeah, it’s funny, you don’t ever skip to the end, but it’s funny how much we want to skip to the end in marketing, so much so that it affects like our storytelling.

Matt Byrom:
And then out of the podcast, you’re now helping people throughout … You’re about the launch Unthinkable Media to help people with their podcast and their business as well. Please tell us a little bit more about that.

Jay Acunzo:
Yeah. Thank you for asking. A funny thing happened when I started the show. It didn’t grow a big audience, but it grew a resonant one, one that was passionate and engaged. And so I started digging into the mechanics of how you create those experiences. Instead of pumping out a lot of episodes to rank higher on Apple Podcast, how do you create episodes that people want to reach out to you afterwards or they want to subscribe to stick around.

Matt Byrom:
That’s phenomenal. I love the elephant concept there, and can people actually contact you and apply to be on these programs with you?

Jay Acunzo:
We don’t take inbound guest requests, but I am obviously looking for partners all the time, both co-marketing partners, distributions partners, and clients, and so the way I work with these clients is I’ve created what I call the small comedy club for branded podcasts. So back to the comedian example, you go to small clubs and work on that material and work on your performance. Then you make the big stink about the big special on Netflix.

Matt Byrom:
And where can people find out more about this?

Jay Acunzo:
We launched the website at the end of February. It’ll be unthinkablemedia.com. In the meantime you can just shoot me an email. It’s just jay@unthinkablemedia.com. Or you could follow along. I’m actually doing a behind-the-scenes diary of building the business in my podcast Unthinkable.

Matt Byrom:
Okay. So I’m going to jump into our last five questions here, five quickfire questions. Number one: What’s your best piece of marketing advice?

Jay Acunzo:
Focus on resonance not reach.

Matt Byrom:
Number two: Can you recommend a book to our listeners?

Jay Acunzo:
Any collection of Calvin and Hobbs comics.

Matt Byrom:
Number three: Which software tool couldn’t you live without?

Jay Acunzo:
Evernote.

Matt Byrom:
Perfect. Number four: What’s your favorite example of a marketing campaign?

Jay Acunzo:
I’m going to go with Death Wish Coffee’s Super Bowl campaign. It was the peak, the success story after years of struggling of a company that chose to do something differently and build and create the world’s strongest coffee. So Death Wish Coffee, the entire story would take me too long to explain, but you can go to my show. You can go to Unthinkable and you can listen to a podcast called Best Practices. It’s way back in the archives. But Death Wish is one of my favorite brands, and their Super Bowl ad was something to behold.

Matt Byrom:
Cool. I’ll definitely check that out. And lastly, which other podcasts do you listen to?

Jay Acunzo:
I love, it’s mostly nonbusiness business shows that I love, but one I’m really fascinated by and I’d love to imitate at some point to try my hand at it is a show called The Way I Heard It with Mike Rowe, who is a former TV host. So the show is what he calls “the only podcast for the curious mind with a short attention span.” It’s maybe six-minute stories where he tells the backstory of something we’ve all heard of, but you haven’t heard it told this way. And at the end, he reveals what it was. So it’s a little bit of a guessing game. He’s an amazing storyteller. It’s just him scripting it and reading it. But he’s got a way with words. So it’s The Way I Heard It. You will not regret it. It’s really short, and it’s delicious.

Matt Byrom:
Excellent. I’ll definitely check that out as well. Thank you very much, Jay. It’s been an absolute pleasure, and I feel like I could care on talking to you for quite a long time [crosstalk 00:59:54]. But really nice to have you on the show today. And everyone check out Unthinkable. Check out Unthinkable Media when the website launches in a few weeks. And also look out in the next few months for a book that Jay’s launching off the back of the podcast as well. Does that have the same name, Unthinkable?

Jay Acunzo:
The book is called Break the Wheel, and it’s about getting out of this endless cycle of best practices, conventional wisdom, and trendy tactics. So Break the Wheel, that’ll be this fall.

Matt Byrom:
Awesome. Thanks very much, Jay. Pleasure to have you on today.

Jay Acunzo:
So much fun, and if you listened all the way to the end, thank you, thank you, thank you for listening. Thank you guys.

MSP Episode 7: Interview with Jay Acunzo from Unthinkable

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Marketing Strategies Podcast

Podcast Episodes

Episode 26: Interview with Matt Lerner Founder of Startup Core Strengths

Episode 25: Interview with Tim Soulo CMO at ahrefs

Episode 24: Interview with Sancar Sahin VP Marketing at Typeform

Episode 23: Interview with Ben Aronsten CMO at Seedrs

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