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Mark Mathis: This is the Amped Up podcast from Amperage Marketing and Fundraising. I'm Mark Mathis and I'm with Bryan Ernest. And our topic today is all about words. So Bryan, I remember this quote about words, "words are free. It's how you use them that may cost you later." I think that sums up our topic today. We drop a lot of words at Amperage in our blogs, podcasts, our speeches, our client work groups, in email. But I wonder if all those words truly communicate. Or have they all become just jargon to people. We thought today, let's just drop a few words and see if we can define them so they don't lose their jargonistic state and become much more effective communication concepts. So, I'll drop one here, Bryan, to get us started.

We talk about this word all the time, when we discuss creative and that word is authentic. What do you think about the word authentic?

Bryan Earnest: Well, you are certainly right, Mark, our industry has plenty of jargon. The vocabulary seems to be exploding, over the last, certainly several years as our field has exploded itself. And so, yeah, that's when we hear a lot, authentic. So, what does authentic mean in the world of marketing? I go to Ted Lasso when I'm thinking of what am I going to say in one of these podcasts. And I was just watching an episode over the weekend and good old Leslie Higgins from the Soccer Club told Ted Lasso, I think he said it best. "Well, I suppose the best brand is being yourself." And I really think what it's all about.

Customers today can really, sense when and perceive to what extent a brand is true to itself. If a brand doesn't act like itself, your customers are going to call you out on it. And we see that all the time. I think for our clients and brands overall, the ones that have really figured out their core to understand really who they are, from the inside out, really seemed to be much more genuine. It helps them connect even better with their customers, with vendors, suppliers, and and even their employees. Studies has shown that millennials and gen Z, which is now like nearly 140 million people, are definitely concerned more about the authenticity of brands.

They want to see real people in the ads, real people that they can relate to, people like themselves. That may mean that the days of the actors in some of the ads and in some of the concepts may be maybe behind us. Dove soap came out a couple of years ago, did some ads, they called it their Real Beauty Campaign. It really did extremely well. It tested well, it sold well. Connected customers in a much more authentic ways. Other brands like Nike, Patagonia, some of those have been applauded for their authenticity while others have been kind of slapped on the hand, like Victoria Secret has been criticized for their, I guess I would say inauthenticity, if that's a word.

So, yeah, certainly being authentic is a big part of our vernacular these days. I got one for you, Mark. We talk about a lot in our business. So, what about being humanized or humanizing?

Mark Mathis: You know, how human of you to ask me about humanized Bryan. That word started as just kind of a way for people to make something unpleasant, more suitable for everyone else. I think about how people might say they taken steps to make a jail more humanized, make it something easier for the people to partake in, but in advertising and marketing, I think it means to stop barking at people and start having a candid conversation with people. And in that vein, I'd say you need to be more empathetic in your approach and know that all marketing is talking to just one person at a time. One human at a time. So, with all that said, I believe too many marketers and marketing materials are just becoming a glorified spec sheets.

And the problem is that the goal of marketing is not simply to educate, but it really is to motive. And to do that, I think you have to really appeal to the human benefits of any product or service. So, humanizing the advertising, which also rhymes and makes a great literation, makes the connection and builds a relationship with a customer. And to do this, you have to endow your product or your service with human characteristics. So, thinking of your product or service as a real person also helps to humanize when you go to talk about it. To humanize, you have to respect your customer or your donor, a patient or a stakeholder. You have to make eye contact in your marketing whenever possible.

You have to use humor, not slapstick jokes. I think we remember how funny an ad was, and then you go, what was that product? And everybody goes, nah, I don't know. But maybe the humor is just not taking yourself so seriously and being able to maybe be very honest with people, being real. Building a relationship with your viewers, not talking to people like they're just an inanimate object or group of objects. You've got to empathize with the person on the other end of the marketing. That will make you more human. If you really think about that person, that's going to be receiving this marketing and how they're going to be here and applying it to their lives. I think that's what really makes something human. So, humanizing your advertising, connects in a personal way. It unites people. You're no longer marketing to consumers, but creating a connection in really that humanized way. I know that's been a lot of words and a lot trying to define this, but I think it's critically important because in order for marketing to work today, I think it kind of goes back to authentic. If it's not authentic and humanized, it's just not going to work in this new world. And that's my next word for you.

Bryan Earnest: Yeah. Before you go there though, thinking about these two words, that kind of build off of each other and I've heard you say quite often, you know, another aspect of humanizing is actually companies want to get so wrapped up in their features and benefits and their logo and their big fancy tagline or campaign line, but just forgetting the human element, whether that's as social post or, you know, a digital ad that you see, or of even a TV spot and you kind of lose that human element. People connect with people, don't they? I mean, if I see a person in an ad or someone's eyes, it's going to connect with me in a much more human way. So, the actual creative itself can be much more human, can it not?

Mark Mathis: Absolutely. I just think that people tend to write ads thinking they're talking to a big audience. It's hard to describe this, but it's not like a personal conversation and in a personal conversation, you're exactly right, you'd want eye contact. You'd want to reach out and touch the person's hand or something while you're talking to them or you'd want to smile a little while you're telling your story to them. So, yeah, I think all of that helps humanize and makes the message more authentic.

Bryan Earnest: Yeah, it makes me think about a product like Progressive right, insurance. They've humanized it where you you feel something about Flo, right. And all of her friends, they've had this personal humanized conversation about insurance. It's a little funny, it's a little off the wall, but I wouldn't know anything about Progressive, unless there was this human element.

They've even humanized a gecko, right. And created this humanized character to make something as boring and, basically the category of who cares around insurance to be something that now suddenly you're drawn into in a much more human way.

Mark Mathis: Oh, it's much more interesting, but I like how Flo has got characteristics that you may not think are the greatest characteristics of all. They've got an ad right now where she's kind of just rambling on about some boring things and people are daydreaming in a world, around it. But so they pick on themselves about the topic, which I think is great. And I think that goes to that being funny, being willing to not take yourself so seriously, but not being you know, slap your leg, funny where you get so lost in the joke, but not in the product or service they're trying to sell. So, it seems like this kind of all leads to it. Well, that's a great for the message, but everything is going digital these days and we throw that word all the time. Digital, digital, digital everything's digital. Taking something that's humanized and authentic, and now it becomes digital. It seems almost the opposite. So, why don't you kind of explore the word digital for people?

Bryan Earnest: Wow. How long do we have, I know we try to try and keep these things to 20 minutes. I feel like you could do a doctoral dissertation on what digital is today. Don't Google it or look it up on Wikipedia. It would be longer than this podcast so I guess Mark, I'll throw it back at you.

What isn't digital these days? TV's digital. Everything online is digital. Everything in our hand is digital. Our cars are now digital. Everything is, so, this could be really a trip down memory lane too, you know, in the world of marketing. The first idea of digital is really when marketing and communications moved to computers and then the internet, and eventually to all the other platforms and really shortening this up, you know, over the past decade or so; digital marketing has referred to advertising being delivered through digital channels, such as search engines and websites, social media, email, mobile apps. And it just keeps growing and growing and growing, right. The platforms just keep coming.

And now we really have to look at digital more holistically. We often refer to it as that digital ecosystem of a business, your website, any other marketing technology around it, E-commerce, mobile, user experience, all of it coming together to create a seamless access to your business. And that's really what the digital ecosystem is really all about. Is creating that Amazon effect that total digital immersion of your customer with you and your business, anticipating what that customer's going to need, how you follow up afterwards, how you make that experience seamless all the way through. It's all aspects. Even your phone is a digital experience. And all of that coming together is really where digital is today. And of course we can't feed all of these digital platforms unless we have the C word, content. So, Mark that word gets thrown a lot around a lot today. From your perspective, what's content?

Mark Mathis: I'm not a fan of this word. I'm really not, because we used to call content, creative and I thought that gave it a better feel like we're, this is creative. This is something that's new or it's exciting, or it's interesting. And now we've labeled everything content. This all came together when I was once introduced as a content creator at a conference, evidently they had lost my title and any of my bio and they were introducing me and they were just going off and they were just, all of a sudden, I hear this, he's a content creator and it just gave me pause.

Bryan Earnest: Maybe they didn't like the old title you had of Director of Cool.

Mark Mathis: Right, another C word. GIve it to me.

Bryan Earnest: Come on anything.

Mark Mathis: I've been called a lot of things. Never a content creator. But now we call everything content, newsletters, websites, stories, copy, podcasts, everything seems to be content today, but I'm even a little confused because are you a content writer or are you a copywriter? Are those different things? Are they the same? I think they're the same, but sometimes when we think about content, we're referring a lot of times to digital content. And it seems like it started with the idea of the table of contents in a book. I mean, that's really where I think we all used that word, implying that it's a bunch of stuff inside of something else.

So a lot of people have started just like you said, digital marketing. People are starting to say content marketing. Someone said that phrase was first used in 1996, the year we started our business by the American Society of Newspaper Editors. And I'm a little skeptical of that. Talking about an industry that really hasn't kept pace with all the hip words and things, why they would have gone to content marketing.

But what I do know, is that to me, content marketing, is different from other marketing cause it involves the active sharing. That sharing word is critical of like an article or a video or a podcast or any other media to engage a particular audience. And to me it seems like it's really proof for performance marketing. Instead of telling people you're the best, you would create content and stories that prove you are the best. And that's really what content is now. It's storytelling. It's publishing, it's video, it's art. It can be just communications and it's intended to move somebody or move the end user. So, content is really when you think of that definition, yeah, a lot is content, but if you don't have the sharing. So, just creating a brochure, isn't content, creating a brochure that is and how it's to be shared would be content marketing, how to take it and make it useful. And it's all about the end user. And that's my next word, I'd like you to explore Bryan is, this one. I'm also kind of, not a fan of, because we talk about user experience. We use UX to talk about it, or we talk about customer experience and we talk about CX. What do you think about those words?

Bryan Earnest: Yeah. You know, that's a great one, Mark. And those are emerging terms in our industry. And certainly growing with stickiness, people are kind of throwing those around like they maybe did brand 15 years ago where everything was about brand and now it's UX and CX and there's lots of schools of thought on it. And I think in a, from a general sense, the user experience, UX has really come from digital platforms of looking at how a user experiences a website or a mobile app, or for instance, my brother-in-law is a UX designer and he is working for a major bank.

And he is designing one page, over and over and testing it of how people do financial transfers. That was one page that he's working on. So, is it easy to find how to do a transfer, how to pull in your bank information, how to, what is it, where does the eye flow, where does the, when I'm making that interaction and I'm making these transactions on a website, is that user experience a positive one that makes it easy?

Is there a high success rate? Is there, are there errors that happen? Are people leaving the page cause they're frustrated? Does it take too long to complete a task? I mean, user experience could even go not only a website, but it could be like, for instance, I have a friend that does UX that works with military contracts of looking at like the dashboard of a tank and says, when I'm in the middle of battle, if I look directly down, am I seeing the gauge that I need to see? Is the gauge to my left what I need to see? Is the gauge to my right? Are they the right color so they jump out at me right away? Whatever it might be, those are the right functions happening for that user to make that user experience as fluid and as quick and easy as possible. Good digital UX, so to speak, it gives that user or customer the ability to find information quickly.

Specifically, we talk about a lot in our industry around websites, websites, and mobile apps, to really see, can I get to the desired task with ease? Can I search with ease? Can I get to what I need? Many people think UX kind of fits into the larger CX, which is customer experience. And by contrast it encompasses maybe all the interactions that a person has with one's brand.

So, it might be measured in overall experience, likelihood to continue working or to use that product or, engage with that brand. It could be everything from their website to social media to, is it easy to order, you know, is it as easy as Amazon to order from your company? Is it easy if I call a phone number?

How many times have we been on one of those service calls and at the end they say, would you like to hang on for 10 seconds and answer questions about this experience? It's really a broader, customer experience overall. Was it pleasant, professional? Was it easy to access? Did you treat me like a customer, not like this is the first time I've ever engaged with your company. How refreshing is it when you call a company and they say, hi, Bryan, and it's even an automated voice, or we'll get you a person right away. Even if it is automated, they still know something about you. Believe it or not, I called into Media Comm a week or two ago, Mark. And they were saying, oh, thank you for being a loyal customer. Wow, you actually know that I've been a customer for 20 some years. Right. And the fact that, they already knew my information. They already knew my address. It's a little scary on one hand, but giving up a little bit of that privacy, so to speak, also makes for the broader, better overall customer experience. And we had a podcast I know, not too long ago where we talked about how important it is to measure customer experience with your clients, with your customers, with your patients, with your students to really get a handle on, not just that one-on-one experience, but on aggregate, how are your, customers and your clients, your stakeholders, what do they think of you? What do they feel? It's the only thing that can really improve that overall UX and CX.

Mark Mathis: Don't you think that's also being very intentional about every touch point? Yeah, I'm just thinking about a catalog I tried to open the other night. It had, they had put those little sticky things on all, the sides, which I think you're required by the postal service. And you ended up ripping the entire catalog apart, trying to get it open. And I'm thinking this is bad customer experience, because by the time I got done, I was ready to just to throw it away rather than to try to struggle through this ripped apart piece.

Bryan Earnest: Yes. You know, I think about, we work a lot in healthcare as we've talked about, and I think about what hospitals are going through today, where for a long time it was, we just build this big building, if there was anything related to customer experience, it was, you know, we'll make a nice lobby for you. And we'll put some lines on the floor to direct you around the building, but parking became huge issues for people, access to appointments. Had to wait too long. They want to be able to get on their phone, make an appointment and do it all right there. They don't want to have to call a number, then get push seven to get transferred to someone else.

And then you have to talk to the insurance people and the billing people, that whole customer experience, how easy is it to search and find your Google place, to find your clinic, to know where to park, to know what insurance is accepted, to know where the phone number is, to be able to book an appointment online.

All of those things go into that overall customer experience. And especially with COVID today, where people are nervous about going to businesses. If it's not a good overall customer experience from ordering online to fulfillment, to how to return something to, it can be really problematic and dramatically affect profits and other key metrics for any business. So, Mark, I'm going to give you one more before we wrap up, this is one that -

Mark Mathis: Let's make it an easy one.

Bryan Earnest: Yeah, well, this isn't necessarily an easy one because it's not one we hear a lot, but it's something that we're kind of hearing a little more buzz, I think about. And that's the whole idea and it kind of wraps up everything we've been talking about, but when we use the term omni-channel what does that mean to you? Omni-channel.

Mark Mathis: Well, Omni is, Latin for all. So, it literally means all channels. The prefix Omni could be used in lots of different words and it is used with lots of different words. But in this case, I think it's really just talking about all the screens we're exposed to everyday. Like a desktop TV, laptop, phone, tablets, car, control panels. I was at a gas station the other night. There was a video playing on the gas station. There was another screen. We've got billboards now that are digital, that can actually, they could play video on them. If, they were allowed by the DOT. We've got video in lobbies. I mean, it just goes on and on and on all the places where you can see marketing. And each one of those is really a channel. You know, we used to think a channel is just maybe a couple dials on a TV now it's, 280 channels on cable, but it's really unlimited now. It is all channels. And I think you have to start thinking about it, just like how you were defining user experience.

We've got to think about the omni-channel is how are my marketing messages going to look in all these different channels and all these different ways people can interpret because you've got different sizes. You've got different widths, you've got materials like Facebook that's putting words at the bottom. Is it covering up things? I mean, there's lots of things to think of in terms of how that channel is used. For me, it's really becoming Omni mind blowing how many opportunities we now have to be an omni-channel world and how we place in all of those different screens.

Bryan Earnest: Mark, I was just going to say, you know, it, it ties back together so many of these concepts. So you think about an organization that takes any more omni-channel approach. Right? All of their owned media, which we talked a little bit when we had Laurie on with talk about PR, but you talk about all those owned media channels, where you've got your website. You've got email marketing that's going out, you've got social media platforms. You've got your advertising, you've got so many things, it ties back to the need for, I know you don't like the word, but how much content the entire table of contents, as you said, to feed all of those channels. You know, were it may mean you're taking the same concept but now you're writing and rewriting it and repurposing it. And while we had this in 30 seconds for TV, but we did this in two minutes to put on our website and we did this in 15 seconds to put this on our Facebook page or whatever it might be. I mean, the more the Omni, the more Omni and the more channels, the more content you need. And so it means more copy, more images, more creative as you said.

Mark Mathis: Well, I think and it's hard for people because in the past it was easier to just say, well, I like TV, so that's all I do, or I like newspapers. So, that's all I'm going to do. And then you had a little bit of integrated marketing, but now this takes integrated marketing to some astronomical, hyper level that can only be delivered when you're really thinking about each channel and how people watch each channel.

How authentic you are, how the content comes together and is humanized, no matter which channel you use. I mean, there's so much more to think about now than I think in the past that it's exciting from that perspective, but it also is a little mind blowing on the other side when you realize how much content you really do need in this omni-channel.

So I have another great quote I remember about words. It's "raise your words, not your voice." It is "rain that grows flowers, not thunder." So I hope we've raised the words today. And that is it for today's episode of the Amped Up podcast. If you liked any of the insights that you heard or you're interested in Amperage, please visit us at amperagemarketing.com.

And if you get a chance, would you please rate and review us? We would certainly appreciate any feedback you could offer. So for Bryan Ernest and me, Mark Mathis, content creator, Mark Mathis. Thank you for listening. And that's the last word for today.