Transcription:

We know what you want. You want to reach more customers and grow your business.

But the marketing and PR landscape is murky and confusing.

Now, you can gain clarity with Straight Talk on the latest marketing and fundraising trends in technology from two agency pros.

Bryan Earnest and Mark Mathis, from Amperage Marketing and Fundraising.

Now, amp up your marketing with the Amp Up Podcast.

Mark Mathis: Welcome to the Amp Up Podcast. I'm Mark Mathis, Chief Creative and Strategy Officer with Amperage. And I'm joined by Bryan Earnest, President and CEO of Amperage Marketing and Fundraising. Bryan and I have been partners in the agency for 25 years. Whoa! That's a long time

Bryan Earnest: Hard to believe.

Mark Mathis: For that reason alone, well, we felt it was high time to bring our many discussions, debates, arguments to the medium of podcasting and have a little conversation with you about marketing. Usually, we do this over drinks. But today, we're going to do it over a little coffee. So I've got my cup ready. So why don't we get started with episode number one, year number one of the Amp Up Podcast.

So Bryan, we've walked the halls. We've been in myriad offices of businesses, nonprofits, hospitals. We've talked with marketing directors, CEOs, presidents, doctors, executive directors. And one of the questions we do hear regularly is "Why should I hire you guys?" Or "Why should I hire an ad agency?"

So, Bryan, let's start with that as our first question of the day. Why should you hire an advertising agency?

Bryan Earnest: Well, good morning, Mark. And I'm really glad I got my coffee in me for this question. I think certainly over the last 25 years, just the whole definition of an advertising agency has changed over the years. But, you know, in general, I think we've seen a change in the fact that organizations look to an organization like ours and others in the industry, I think, first and foremost to expand their resources, build some capacity, expand their thinking. I think so often the marketing staff of an organization are just so close to it when they get the opportunity to bring in some fresh perspectives and fresh thinking.

And I'll throw one more thing out there, Mark. I really do believe that bringing in an outside organization can help another organization save money, save resources. I know that not only our organization, but others in the industry like ours, we are being held our feet to the fire every day to bring return on investment, to bring measurable results as our tagline and mission statement say, you know, you have to move the needle. And organizations are looking for that more than ever. So I'll throw it back at you, Mark. I guess after all these years, are we an advertising agency?

Mark Mathis: I'll just piggyback on what you said about saving money. Because we have hundreds of clients, it makes sense for us to invest in specialists. So for example, OTT, which is over-the-top television, you may not even know what that is. So you're probably not going to invest in that in your own organization. We will, because we need to have a specialist because we're placing thousands and sometimes millions of dollars in that OTT space. So we've got to have a specialist who can negotiate, analyze and recommend an OTT option. So that would save a company money too, investing in an agency rather than trying to get a specialist for each particular area.

Maybe crisis PR doesn't make sense for you to have someone ready in that. We do. Again, we need it because we have so many clients. We have to have that specialty. But as an individual marketing department, I don't think you could afford to ever invest in just one person with that kind of critical skill.

That kind of leads me to, are we in advertising agency? I don't know. Some people wanted to call us a consultancy. We have fundraising. We help with strategy for people. We have been psychologists at times. We're problem solvers. When people are in trouble, they call us. When people have new businesses, new products, new departments, maybe some of their old products aren't doing as well, and they need of that fresh thinking you were talking about, I think that’s really a key. I don't know.

We call ourselves an ad agency because that's what people know us as, but I think today we're changing pretty rapidly and we're becoming something else. We'll have to hire an agency to come up with a new name for what we are.

Bryan Earnest: Exactly. You know, I was just thinking, does really an advertising agency truly exists today? I think you and I are both big fans of like Mad Men and, you know, we've read all the old Ogilvy books and all that kind of stuff. I just think advertising agencies as they once were, probably not. The agency of record model has gone away. I think there's still some organizations trying to hang on to certain types of retainers. It's so much broader.

To really help an organization today, you have to come at it. I love what you said about being specialists. That's what they need. Sometimes on the front end, it's marketing research, it's actual just broadening out their production capabilities. They need that consultancy, that storytelling.

I love what you said about crisis communication too. I think about in our days back years ago, when we both worked in PR, a lot of organizations have a PR person, but when that is really at the height of a crisis, you need a specialist, you need somebody from the outside, who's going to come in and can really help while your internal team may be handling internal communications, somebody that can handle that. It's threatening to the brand, right? It's something that puts the organization at risk. And so there's definitely that need.

And, you know, just trying to keep up, I was just going to say, trying to keep up these days. You know, if you're an internal team and you're trying to keep up, keeping up with Google and Facebook and Instagram and all of the rules and all of the new platforms, Snapchat and everything else, if you're a person who's a Jack of many trades, I was once that person, working for a healthcare system years ago, it's hard to keep up with it all. And so your example of OTT or I think about people on our team that are just Google specialists, they're reading, learning, watching videos, doing trainings every day, every week.

Mark Mathis: Absolutely. Let me piggyback off something you just said, agency of record. I think that's one of those phrases that gets thrown around a lot in our business. But I've heard you say a phrase that I have stolen and used and I haven't given you any attribution on it, but you've always said we're an agency of collaboration rather than an agency of record. And I love that phrase. Why don't you explain what that means? One, so I know what it means and I can steal it better, but also so other people get what does that mean.

Bryan Earnest: Yeah, agency of collaboration, I have felt that for some time and I think probably some of that for me just came from, I think, my personality is one of being a bridge builder, yours too. And I think recognizing too that there's just a huge volume of work out there. It's not a finite amount of work. It isn't. There is many organizations that need help.

I've always encouraged our team to play well in the sandbox. And what I've recognized is with some of the biggest clients we've worked with, they have assembled a team of great specialists that can help them in a variety of areas. And while I think there are certainly areas that we are very good at, we've been partnered up with organizations, other-- I'll use the term air quotes here-- agencies or digital firms or consultancies or whatever else that maybe just not only good, but great in that area.

And so, for a client, it becomes greater than the sum of the parts. And quite honestly, recognizing that we can't do it all. And if we get spread too thin, then we're not doing an effective job for our clients.

I could think of a great example, you know, we're probably one of 200 different firms that do work for John Deere. And yet they recognize some of the work that we do for John Deere and say, " Amperages, those are our guys. We need their help with this. They'll do a great job. They've proven it." We come in, we're like a special tool in the toolbox that they can pull out and say, "That will help us in this situation."

And, Mark, over the years, I've encouraged our team to be that agency of collaboration. We just may learn something from others. And I think we have many times over. We may have borrowed great ideas from other organizations. We may see how they tackle a problem, how they develop a campaign, how they present it, a lot of different things. What's the old saying? I'll probably screw this up royally, but, you know, "Iron sharpening iron. Steel sharpening steel," it's that kind of just working with others in the business, you become better yourself.

Mark Mathis: Yeah. I know sometimes when we walk into a room, there's a feeling of competitiveness at first, not only with other agencies and other providers of research or those kinds of things, but also in-house personnel. That's what we have to quickly quell and get to a point of where we're just all trying to move forward together. We don't do well if we compete in that kind of situation, because either feelings you're going to get hurt or you're not going to be honest about a situation or about an idea. It'll tend to be you just push your own agenda each time.

So I think this collaborative nature has really paid off. The clients where we're actively collaborating with large in-house teams or with other agencies seem to do very, very well when all the players finally put down the swords and pick up pencils and go, "Let's just figure this thing out together."

So when I think about the sandbox I was just thinking about, sometimes we do have to play nice in the sandbox. And other times we're having to push back pretty hard because thinking of the digital media world, where you have television stations selling digital media, you have yellow page distributors selling digital media. Walmart just announced they're going to start selling digital ads on their platforms separately.

It's good to have those people in the room, but if everyone's selling something, they're going to push it pretty hard. So you need someone to step up in the sandbox and say, "All right, folks. We're going to do the analysis. We're going to make the recommendations. And we're going to do it from a very objective point of view." And I think that's one of those points where we do stand up and say, especially around media buys, "That it's really time for professionals to do this, not for each person that's pulling out a media bag to sell."

Bryan Earnest: The sandbox analogy just works so well. If you're the kid who's throwing sand, not playing well with others, you're the first kid yanked out of that. And so being that collaborative nature is critical.

And I like what you said about, especially media, for many organizations, their media investment, whether that's online, offline, whatever it may be, that is probably the largest part of their overall advertising marketing budget. And so if those dollars aren't invested well, that can really be detrimental to an organization overall.

And so it gets to a certain point where having that outside expertise that can really make some bold recommendations to say, "This is where your dollars are invested". A person who goes to invest their own portfolio.

I have a couple of sons in college right now who are investing with Robinhood, which I find it ridiculous since they barely have any money to put two nickels together. But yet somehow with their buddies, they put $10 every month to start investing in some stocks. And, you know, that's fine when your total portfolio in their case is probably a couple hundred bucks, maybe. When your portfolio starts to get bigger, you might graduate to an E-Trade. But if it gets big enough, you're going to call a stockbroker or some kind of investment firm and say, 'Help me do this and help me not lose my money."

I kind of think of it the same way as an organization is investing sizeable amount of their marketing dollars, that's a perfect time to get some help and making sure you're getting a true return on your investment.

Mark Mathis: What I like too is that Robinhood was one of the Superbowl advertisers. So they went with a traditional media to roll out their biggest message of the year and spent five and a half millions to promote.

Bryan Earnest: So have you tried Otley yet?

Mark Mathis: No. I don't think I'm going to either. I do like oats..

Bryan Earnest: Yeah. Oat-Milk?

Mark Mathis: I'm not ready for that. I'm more coffee.

Bryan Earnest: Yeah. They don't manufacture that in Cedar Rapids, right? It's just your grits that you eat.

Mark Mathis: Grits milk. Delicious!

Bryan Earnest: Yeah. There you go, grits milk. I think it has potential

Mark Mathis: So when we're thinking about what kinds of agencies out there? I've noted that there's a resurgence of in-house marketing departments and they're growing rapidly. And we can see it with some of our clients where they sometimes have 20 people in an office or 25 people in an office. It made me kind of think, "Well, what is the real difference between an agency like ours, a larger agency where we've got 40 to 50 people? How do we fit? How do we compare with an in-house department?"

Really, I'll just start with one. I'm going to go back to that problem-solving idea. We tend to provide kind of a new perspective. I'd call us maybe the drones of marketing. We give people that new perspective and some fresh thinking to the table. I believe that really helps in that agency or that day of collaboration, where if we can bring in new ideas to an old problem that maybe they're having, that that's really the difference. They're working in it day to day, maybe tasks are just overwhelming them, where we're much more results-driven because that's how we get measured.

So we might bring that new perspective to the table that they've been missing because they've just been trying to get a laundry list of things done. And every fire that happens in their organization probably falls into their department, so they're just constantly being inundated with ideas. We can help. It's not that someone is smarter than another or more creative. I know that some people say that, "Well, the agencies are really creative." I just think we're bringing that fresh perspective and maybe more strategy and research because we have the time to focus on it and really provide that to people.

Bryan Earnest: I think with in-house departments, they're so close to the organization. And so I think your point about bringing outside fresh perspective, those organizations are looking for that. So much of their days are eaten up-- this is from my experience-- are eaten up by just internal tasks, quite often. Meetings and internal initiatives, a lot of times it's internal communication. I think about all the hospitals that we work with. Not only just those internal tasks, but all of the content platforms that they have to feed on a daily basis. So it may be an internal newsletter. It may be their website. It might be emails that are going out. It might be CRM. Not only is it one social media platform, but now it's, you know, three, four, five, six different platforms that they're trying to feed. And just trying to feed the content beast right now is really challenging.

I also feel for some organizations that with the pandemic of the last year, they've probably in some cases have had their staff reduced in some way. Quite often marketing is one of those areas that was able to be cut. Many of them are still working remotely or working in a much more virtual fashion than what they have. And they need resources. It's just hard to spread the peanut butter all the way to the edge of the bread.

That's where an outside organization really can fit alongside them and kind of fill in the gaps, help with those needs new initiatives that are kind of over the top. It's like, "Well, we have all of our normal work to do. And now you want to launch a new campaign or some new endeavor, an acquisition or maybe it's a new service line that's being launched or a new product." That's where you got to go get some outside help quite often.

Mark Mathis: I think too that when we work with hundreds of clients a year, that we do get to see, let's say even a media buy, if you're working on that in-house, you can probably buy it pretty well. The difference really is an agency like ours typically has bought that same piece of media 30 times. We know what the prices are. We know what the touch points are, the negotiation points are going to be. And I think that really adds to an in-house agency, is that ability to maybe see more departments than just their own and know what else is happening around the community. That's helpful and not only can it save you money, but I think it can save you a lot of time.

I'm going to switch it up here, Bryan, just as we're moving along because I want to be mindful of the time. We've talked about a few of them, but what are some of the clues that people need an agency or a strategic consultant? What are the things that just make it perfect to align with an agency?

Bryan Earnest: I think I'll go back to couple of the different things when strategically for an organization, maybe there's a new strategic direction overall for an organization, help to propel that forward, right? I think that's certainly a time. I think as the investment in marketing dollars pick up and you want to make sure as an organization you're investing those dollars wisely, that's certainly a time that that needs to be picked up.

Certainly when the volume of work picks up beyond your internal capacity, that's an excellent time to get some outside help. I could propagate going with a list, but those are a couple of the key ones.

Mark Mathis: Yeah, I think when you're in trouble, something happens at an executive level, you just need some outside perspective on that. I think when you're diving into areas that are much more complex or maybe complicated that you really weren't ready for like digital marketing or those kinds of things or even simplifying a message. If you've just struggled with getting a message that people resonate with, maybe you do need a moment to just step outside of your box and see if some fresh ideas can help sprinkle in on that.

Bryan Earnest: You know, I would make one plug, Mark, and I would say anybody, whether it's a friend of mine that owns a business or anybody that I've ever known in the marketing field, don't try to do rebranding yourself. That time when it's time to update, change the name of your organization, create a new logo or really a new brand positioning, quite frankly, you're just too close to it.

I cringe at the organizations that put it out there for a contest to come up with their new logo. There is art and science to it. A disciplined process will help an organization in the end. I would beg and plead with any organization, please, please, please get outside help to help with a rebranding of an organization. It's critical.

For many organizations, it is a truly a marketable asset of your organization and how fragile it can be. We've seen it even with some national brands that have kind of played with their brand a little bit and you can see what outcry there can be from your customers, about if you're not caring for that brand in an authentic way.

Mark Mathis: Yeah, I think for many people, habits are starting to change. Digital is making huge inroads right now. This is probably a good time to maybe reach out and have people ask some really tough questions and consultants can do that. We can get away with that. Ask the tough questions, get everyone to talk about it, get it more transparent. What are the issues and what do we really stand for? I think that's a great role for an agency to play or a consultant to play in an organization like that.

So we've been chatting quite a bit about this. I don't think we've gotten in any arguments, but we'll certainly do that in future episodes, I'm sure. But Bryan, when you think about all the stuff we've just said, would you like people to remember?

Bryan Earnest: I think first and foremost is that hiring an outside agency is non-threatening to your team. A really good agency fit compliments your internal team and only exponentially grows the opportunities for your organization. There is help out there. And it really should be something that internal team plus outside firm helps to create something greater than the sum of the parts.

Mark Mathis: Yeah, I think that's great. I think I would just add I'd really like people to remember that we are problem solvers. That's how we come into the room and that's why we usually bring a blank piece of paper and start asking questions that really need group think and honesty within the room.

And once we achieve that, then we we're able to simplify their message in a way that they might not even be able to see because they are so close to it sometimes. And with our branding line, Move The Needle, we have to make sure that the results, it's not just a task list, it's results at the end of the day.

So thank you very much for listening in on our conversation about marketing and fundraising. And if you want to engage with us in more detail, check us out at amperagemarketing.com. That's A-M-P-E-R-A-G-E marketing dot com. We'd also like to thank our engineer for today's episode, Bill Klaproth. Golf clap for making this episode possible. So take care and move the needle.