Unveiling the Advertising Industry's Best Kept Secrets with Wayne Blodwell, Founder & CEO of TPA Digital

(Intro Narrator at 00:00:00) Today, we're talking to Wayne from TPA Digital about the best practices for running ads and Ryan Reynolds. You're listening to Joel Beasley, Modern CTO.

(Joel Beasley at 00:00:15) But you've got the knowledge that I don't have in marketing. So your podcast is about advertising and marketing. You talk to different people. What's going on in your world? The premise here is we've got a lot of founders, a lot of technical people who like to understand different parts of the business because they're growing in their career. So I like to bring on different perspectives, like you being in advertising, to hear about what's going on over there.

(Wayne at 00:00:38) Yeah. I think so much and so little in a way. I think just in general, given what's happened with economies around the world, advertising spend has to work harder than ever before. So those glory days of run one big TV ad and you're done for the year has really changed. It's become much more ROI focused. And obviously, with consumers using digital more and more, which I think for savvy people we sort of take for granted, but some brands are still figuring out how do they approach digital advertising versus TV and outdoor. So you've got, it has to work harder. Digital is growing because consumer eyeballs are there. And then within digital itself, the likes of Google and Facebook obviously got to this huge size that they are. Other companies now are chipping away at that, which is interesting. You also got things like regulation is becoming more prevalent, particularly in Europe around how user data is used. And then the rise of new media channels. So your TV back in the day was this huge box you could barely lift up. And now it's connected to the Internet, and you've got apps and content being streamed all the time. And the advertising experience there is different. So yeah, there's just tons to keep you busy if you work in the ad industry. That's for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:02:09) For founders that are trying to get their company growing, small, under ten people, what should they be thinking about in regards to advertising?

(Wayne at 00:02:18) Yeah. I think it depends on the type of company that it is, but you basically want to follow the cliche right place, right time type message. And so you've got to understand where do you think your prospective audience is. So if you're the CTO at a sneaker brand, Instagram is probably a good place for people to be interested in sneakers. But if you're the CTO at, let's say, fintech, then maybe it's news publishers like FT, The Economist. You really gotta think about where is the audience. And that's an art in itself. And then once you understand that, what do you want to tell them that's gonna make them interested in what you do? And so trying to align with that based on the company that you are and the audience you want to win over for your product, that's sort of the art and science of advertising, really.

(Joel Beasley at 00:03:15) And then the professionals are going through this process of testing the audience, validating assumptions, testing messages, things like that. It's just this recurring, it's not just this one thing. We buy an ad. We put it on the TV. We're done for the year. It's this never ending process of testing?

(Wayne at 00:03:34) Yeah. Definitely. I mean, there's lots of marketing theorists who might disagree with what I'm about to say. But in general, you have two strands of advertising. You have what you'd call brand advertising, and that is just you want people to remember you. So that's where the likes of Coca-Cola, Colgate, Pampers, the advertising they do is mainly recall based, and that's because you buy their products in store. And then the second strand of advertising is more response driven. So that's where the advertising has more of a call to action. And typically, online has definitely more been led by response because you can click on the ad or you can go to a search engine and type in what you just saw, or go find them directly. And in the response driven world, it's way more iterative. So as you say, it really is test and learn. The best brands in the world are testing and learning hundreds of variables, so it's on a week to week to month basis. On the brand advertising side, it still follows quite a classic process. As in, you spend time planning your campaign around a big product launch at Christmas or something, and then you go and work with your media partners. So that maybe Snapchat or Instagram, like, what cool things can you do with them? And then you run the campaign and get results later. So there's these two strands, but in general, the more iterative way of optimizing and learning and testing, machine learning is becoming a really big theme within our industry. That's becoming a bit more dominant these days. And that's mainly because the ad spend is being tasked to work much harder than ever before.

(Joel Beasley at 00:05:20) What does that actually look like in everyday running ads, the machine learning?

(Wayne at 00:05:25) Yeah. There's a multitude of ways, but lots of buying platforms, so Facebook, for example, Google Search, they have inbuilt machine learning. So if you think about on Facebook, how many people on Facebook these days, probably a billion. And there's multiple different ways you can target those users. That is too much for one human to really break down all those variables and understand which ad to serve and when, and also what price to buy it. So you have platforms like Facebook, which will have that within them. You also have, which has been my area of specialty since about my career, something called programmatic. And that's the data technology that sits behind advertising. And it's almost a sort of new industry of third party machine learning companies, and we call them custom algorithms. And similarly, every single ad, well, not every, but if you went to, say, ESPN and you saw a banner ad, that ad has 200 plus variables attached to it. So the time of day, the device you're on, the operating system, how many ads have you seen before from the advertiser, the list goes on and on. To value that impression in one person's brain is absolutely impossible. And so with machine learning, you basically can crunch all that data and start to work out where patterns are occurring, where the number of variables line up that work for campaigns. And so there's a bunch of companies. As I say, it's inbuilt into some platforms. There's also third party who specialize in this. And I think it's definitely the way the world is going because if I'm running a campaign, I have to sleep. I have a bad mood sometimes. I can't make the best decisions. But if you can train machine learning in a specific way, it can definitely be more performant for advertisers.

(Joel Beasley at 00:07:29) So programmatic advertising, the way you define it, it's basically just using this iterative approach and buying ads when I go run ads on Facebook. We market our clips, right? So we'll take clips from the episode. We'll target people that are CTOs that like marketing, and then your clip will show up to them. And we do that and then we do some stuff on LinkedIn and Instagram and it's different. We edit the video differently for different purposes. Like for YouTube, we edit it differently to be more fun and interesting than the one we put on LinkedIn, which is a slightly more professional version of it. So just the act of buying these ads for the specific call to actions, for ours is listen to the episode, subscribe to the show, that's all considered programmatic advertising.

(Wayne at 00:08:17) Yeah. I was, you would say it. Yeah. I only say that just because the term is so contentious. It is really boring. Someone wants to call it something, someone wants to call it something else. But yeah, I always say that data and technology applied to do advertising, that's essentially programmatic. And then what you've been doing is programmatic. It's just not always termed that way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:08:39) And that's the main type of advertising your company runs for its clients?

(Wayne at 00:08:44) Yeah. So we don't actually run campaigns for clients. We advise on them. So one of the things, when we set out six and a half years ago, a lot of the advice that has been provided to advertisers was attached to spending money. And you just sort of think, well, that's a somewhat of a conflict of interest. Like, how can you trust the advice you're being given if it's like, oh, spend more money with Facebook or with Google, whatever it might be? And so we're a pure consultancy. We don't attach the way that we make money to ad spend. We give advice. Ultimately, like anything, you have to, hopefully the advice you give returns for them in some way. But we really trade off being impartial and the value behind that.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:27) I agree with that. I get emails every day from Google or Facebook saying, hey, our ad specialist will jump on a call and tell you how you can make money with this. And I was like, I bet you they can.

(Wayne at 00:09:38) I kinda feel bad because sometimes I'm sure it works.

(Joel Beasley at 00:09:42) I'm sure it does. Yeah.

(Wayne at 00:09:43) But you're like, well, if I was getting someone to advise me on buying a house, I'd probably look for somebody who's not, who's gonna try and save me money, not spend as much as I can. So yeah. I think impartiality is important if you're making some pretty high stake decisions.

(Joel Beasley at 00:10:02) We do a little bit of that. So we build, we have our podcast, and that has advertisers. And then we make fifteen other shows for other companies. They'll pay us to make them shows. And so we have a whole production team for each show. Some of those shows want us to run sponsored clips like we run for ours. And so when they started asking for that so that they can get more subscribers and grow their show, they said, hey, we follow Modern CTO. We see you guys running ads, but you don't offer that as a service to us. And so I said, okay. Well, we started offering it last year, and the first thing that we found is that, to your point, we have a very clear separation. We say, okay, this dollar amount is how much you're paying us for our time to do revisions, campaigns, test them, all of that is in this dollar amount. And then this dollar amount is your ad spend, and we spend it directly through your ad account. So you see every dollar. You don't pay it to us. And then as your ad spend goes up, your fee stays the same. We haven't had anybody push it past $25,000. So we just see it as the amount of time and effort it is to test a different creative and exchange the ads. Obviously, if they went over $25,000 a month type deal, we would wanna do more tests and more things. So we tell people, yeah, from $1,000 to $25,000, that price is not gonna change for us to run your ads. Because we found out, when we first started selling it, people were, all they were asking us in the sales process, you know, prove that you spend this. And we just learned really quick that they just need to be completely separate. So I find it fascinating that you've made your entire business on keeping it separate.

(Wayne at 00:11:42) Yeah. Yeah. I mean, we definitely get asked from time to time if we can run campaigns for clients, but we just don't. We just decided not to. And it's amazing to hear, by the way, that the other shows or small businesses see advertising as a way to grow followers. One of the big things the advertising industry has tried to nail in the past three to five years is advertising for growth. I think, historically, a lot of companies thought advertising was just a cost. You just kind of have to do it because everyone's doing it. But actually, if you've got a good understanding of data, you get an understanding on is it working, then you can actually prove that spending this much money is gonna return X. So why don't you do it? And I think with digital, that's just kind of democratized that for everyone. My grandma, she knits dolls in her spare time. She could, if she could afford it, set up a Facebook ad account and start to market them and link out to eBay, wherever it might be. That's pretty incredible. For small businesses, they have an opportunity to grow through advertising. It's not just the Procter & Gambles or the Nikes or the Coca-Colas of the world. The ad industry kind of is for everybody.

(Joel Beasley at 00:12:59) If you give your grandma arthritis, getting too many orders, shame on you.

(Wayne at 00:13:05) I imagine she'd be great at ad copy testing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:13:11) She just knits the ad right onto the thing. So when people are setting up advertising budgets at their company for the first time, how do they do that? A percentage of gross revenue? What do they look at?

(Wayne at 00:13:25) Yeah. The rule of thumb that large companies use is 10% of revenue goes back into advertising. Very broad rule of thumb that's been established over years. If you are a challenger into a new category, that might be more 30 to 40%. So we saw that specifically in, for example, delivery food based apps. They spent a lot of money in advertising to acquire users. Same with the taxi services. Same with the deliver to home mattress industry. They spent almost 50% of their revenues back into advertising. But if you're a smaller business and you're kind of just treading the water, I really take the test and learn mindset. As a small business owner myself, I know that the value of money on cash flow, you don't necessarily have the opportunity just to sink it all into advertising and fingers crossed that's gonna return for you. So you can take steps. Things like Google, Facebook, YouTube, programmatic to some extent, you don't have to have minimum budgets. You don't have to commit a certain amount to a deal. You can test and learn. So yeah, there's three schools of thought. One is as much as you can to grow aggressively as you can. The second is 10% is a sort of standard concept. And then test and learn, see how you go. It's a bit dependent on the appetite and objectives for growth, really.

(Joel Beasley at 00:14:53) That's interesting. We're at the point we have about twenty people at the company, and we're at the point where we're expanding and getting a little bit more bold about our spend. We found a ton of traction on LinkedIn and through cold email. And so ramping those up has been something that, well, we're currently in the process of it. It was, we have our current version of it. Can we double that? And then from there, do we triple that? So breaking it into managed pieces has allowed us to figure out each stage and do it slowly. But these tools aren't cheap too. And I'm imagining the way I'm thinking about this too is, the cold email tools, the LinkedIn tools, all of those, those are all under our advertising budget. Is that normal for you?

(Wayne at 00:15:42) Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Because it's ad spend. And one of the ways you see big brands plan their budgets is looking at the size of the target customer. And so you're always gonna have a low hanging fruit of customer who is very high propensity to want to use you. That comes at a certain cost. And then actually start to extend that out. It's probably gonna cost a bit more to get those audiences because they're less likely to be aware of you, consider you, or want to use your product. And so that 10% rule kind of considers how big the market size is, what share of that market you need to have to be competitive. So yeah, that's, for us, one of the things that we find, when we first started, our target audience for our offering was advertisers. Kind of realized that's a very broad category. And then we started to do some audience work last year, and we decided that we actually have a specific profile of customer who would work with us. And we call them a global brave change maker. So their remit tends to be a global advertiser.

(Wayne at 00:16:57) They think brands, and then the personality within the brand is somebody who actually wants to elicit change. They can go internally and create change. You find with some companies and some people at companies, they just don't fit that profile. So by doing that audience exercise to work out what does our target customer look like, it really helped us to focus on our outreach.

(Wayne at 00:17:25) So some cold email, we create specific content on things that we think that audience would care about. And then just make your time more efficient as opposed to before it was anyone who'd want to listen. And the reality of that is, as much as I think our service is relevant to everyone in the world who should be working with us, the reality is there's probably more of a curated subsegment of those who should.

(Joel Beasley at 00:17:52) This would be a good time to give you a free shout out here. What's your website?

(Wayne at 00:17:57) If you go to tpa-digital.com, you can find everything about our stuff.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:03) And what does TPA stand for?

(Wayne at 00:18:06) That's a good question. It doesn't actually stand for anything now. We used to. So there's a bit of a brand story to this.

(Wayne at 00:18:13) We actually started life as The Programmatic Advisory. Now the company name did what you think it would do, and we started to realize that, actually, our services were spanning beyond programmatic. So into things like data strategy, analytics, search engine marketing, and we realized that programmatic was kind of holding us back in a way. So we didn't want to lose the heritage of what we always stood for, like the impartiality I spoke about earlier. So we changed to TPA, which is just three letters that are organized that way, and digital because we're focused on digital marketing.

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:53) When I saw it, it's the airport code for where I'm from, Tampa.

(Wayne at 00:18:56) Is it really?

(Joel Beasley at 00:18:57) Yeah. Yeah. So that's the—you take TPA. It's like the airport you'd fly out of. So I was wondering, I was like, are you from Tampa?

(Wayne at 00:19:04) It's actually annoying that we were trying to buy tpa.com, and it's a company called The Property Angels, and they were not returning my emails. It was so frustrating. So we had to go the hyphen digital route here.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:17) So for advertising, right now, you know, I'm talking to you. Some people would call you an influencer, and there's a lot of influencer marketing out there. I'm personally starting to get the contracts. When I interface with a company, they'll send you an influencer contract. I'm not a fan of the word because I'm Joel, and as a software developer, I started a podcast.

(Joel Beasley at 00:19:40) And I don't see it as influence necessarily, but I am curious, have you seen this happening in people that are purchasing programmatic advertising? Are they working with influencers? How are they doing that?

(Wayne at 00:19:56) In this sort of business-to-business sense, it's a little bit gray. So there are definitely some people who I know are paid by other companies to write certain content and promote them, and it's not really disclosed. So for example, there'll be some senior people within the industry who are on the boards of other companies—it's not known they're on the board—but they're writing about them, talking about them at events. That is influencer marketing, whichever way you want to dress it up. And I think often when we talk about influencer marketing, we think about the reality TV show stars on Instagram, you know, with this huge number of followers who promote any product for any price. I think that the world of influencer marketing is changing and that the quality is starting to improve. So if you look at what Instagram have done and Twitter are doing, really sort of authenticating the follower counts, making sure that the followers are who they say they are. And I think now you're seeing this other micro section of influencer marketing, which is professional-based. And I'm seeing actually some interesting companies who started to specialize in that because, you know, I sometimes get approached to promote or endorse a specific company.

(Wayne at 00:21:13) And I know personally, I don't know why I'd do that, and I likely wouldn't unless I really believed it. But others might not know how to deal with that. And so there are some companies who I know who are creating almost like an advertising agency for professional influencers. But I think it comes down to—it's kind of secondary. I think you have to maintain your sort of professional integrity and make sure that you're not like Cristiano Ronaldo where he will promote anything on his Instagram.

(Wayne at 00:21:46) And he's got such a big following, no one cares. If you're a professional and you promote the wrong company and you haven't done your due diligence on that company, I think it'll come back to haunt you in a bigger way.

(Joel Beasley at 00:21:57) Yeah. What's your favorite tools in your marketing stack? What do you like to use?

(Wayne at 00:22:02) I am obsessed by something called demand-side platform, and that's like the buying platform for programmatic, primarily because it's one of the earliest ones that I used. So my background prior to getting to advertising was computing. I had a BTEC. I didn't do A-levels at school. I did a BTEC, which is a dedicated course to computing. I went to university and focused on Internet computing.

(Wayne at 00:22:28) And I got into advertising, just sort of stumbled in. And then when I first got access to the software, I was like, this is what it's about. This is like—I love software and the Internet, and it connects all advertising from publishers to buyers. And so for me, over the years, I've learned how powerful those tools can be. And, you know, the likes of Google have a demand-side platform. Companies like Microsoft—

(Joel Beasley at 00:22:53) What is this? I don't understand this. This is news to me.

(Wayne at 00:22:56) A demand-side platform is a piece of software, and it essentially connects advertising on websites and apps with advertisers. And so you literally go in, you put in your campaign criteria, and you buy. It's quite similar to Facebook, but rather than buying on Facebook or buying on Instagram, you buy from The Guardian, ESPN, CNN, CNBC. And there's—

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:26) It's like a marketplace for people to have traffic. Right?

(Wayne at 00:23:29) Right. Right. Very similar. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:23:31) There was one in my town back home where I'm from called Clickbooth. They were one of the larger ones, and I got to get to know them a little bit. But that's what they did. You would apply to be in their network, and you would have a certain minimum ad spend. And then you'd get access, and you could post your ads, and they'd get reviewed, and then they could go off into—is that what it's like?

(Wayne at 00:23:52) Yeah. Similar. Yeah. There's still the two sides really of advertising—the sell side and demand side. So publishers who have ads, they want them to reach as many buyers as possible.

(Wayne at 00:24:05) And as a buyer, you want to reach the right publishers as possible. And, you know, back in the day, you would pick up the phone and go, can I buy some ads from you for next month? And you can imagine how inefficient that is. Whereas now, the demand-side platform can connect into all these publishers and buy their ads and decide and optimize against all these variables in real time.

(Wayne at 00:24:29) And so my entire career has been following the progress of demand-side platforms. I would say that they definitely kind of lend themselves more to bigger budgets and bigger spends. There are definitely some demand-side platforms which have less kind of restrictions to use them. But there's companies like The Trade Desk, who have had phenomenal success over the past five years competing with Google in this space. And yeah, for me, that would be my number one answer to that. I love the demand-side platform, love what you can do with it, how you optimize campaigns.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:07) That is so cool. Can you buy from Facebook or Instagram through those platforms, or is it just the independents?

(Wayne at 00:25:14) It's primarily independents. I mean, when I first started, you could buy Facebook ads and you could buy YouTube ads. But then what Facebook have done over time is you can only buy them through their own buying platform, essentially. Some might think that might change. It could be seen as anti-competitive where the only way you can buy Facebook is through Facebook.

(Wayne at 00:25:37) Whereas if you want to buy—I keep saying ESPN because I was reading some news this morning about ESPN—but if you want to buy ESPN, you could buy that through a hundred-plus different companies. So yeah, for now, you can't buy Facebook through other demand-side platforms. And you used to be able to, but the jury is kind of still out on whether in the future you will be able to again.

(Joel Beasley at 00:25:59) So a lot of your work is focused on global brands who want to make a change, people who are bold. But for your business, for marketing to them, you're using cold email, those types of tools as well. Right? You don't use them for the clients or advise them for the clients, but because you're advising typically on branding strategies and spend. But for yourself to get new clients, what type of cold email tools do you like?

(Wayne at 00:26:23) Yeah. We tend to use Mailchimp to track some of our outreach. We don't do a ton. So because our product is so specific, and as I was saying, we've created this sort of curated audience now who is a much refined, most refined segment. We tend to use Mailchimp for outreach and newsletters.

(Wayne at 00:26:47) We've also started using DocSend. So we used to send content to people—PDFs and infographics—and we had no idea really if they were actually engaging with it or how long for. And we started using—and then we started to create custom content. So, uh, I'll make some example up. If we were outreaching to Walgreens, we would write something about Walgreens and then some content for them.

(Wayne at 00:27:13) Rather than that just going into some inbox, we can now track if they click it, engage it in DocSend, what they're interested in. And because we've got a very influential decision maker who's pretty time-poor, that kind of information for us really helps. If our target audience was much broader, I'm sure we'd use much bigger—I'm sure we'd use other tools which are a bit more funnel-based and optimizing landing pages and call to actions and trying to get people through to a conversion. But the primary goal for our advertising is people to be somewhat aware of us, but know that we know what we're doing.

(Wayne at 00:27:51) And that's basically what consultancy is about.

(Joel Beasley at 00:27:53) And so it's very bespoke and custom. You're not just blasting out to thousands of people?

(Wayne at 00:27:59) No. No. Not anymore.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:02) Not anymore.

(Wayne at 00:28:03) We did actually used to. We were using tools like LeadLeaper to find out contact addresses, using LinkedIn pretty aggressively. But for our purposes, because of what we sell is quite high-ticket and the sales cycle is very long, it just wasn't very effective. So now we tend to really target down into the audience that we really think should be buying our product and then sending them content that we think they should be interested in.

(Wayne at 00:28:38) Sometimes they're not, obviously. You know, most of the time. But for us, that's been a much more effective strategy than trying to set up a phone call or a Zoom meeting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:28:48) So if it were ESPN—let's bring it down to reality—like, if it were ESPN, what content would you send them through DocSend?

(Wayne at 00:28:55) So we would try to research if ESPN has said anything publicly recently about the future of their business. So let's say, for example, they start talking about acquiring more sports rights. We would write some content around, we know your business is going through this. We know you need to acquire more customers who are sports-focused to make sure your sports content proposition is going to be more viable. Here's some ways that we think you could do that with digital marketing. Put that into a three- to four-page PDF, put it in DocSend, and then you try to identify the decision makers at the brands.

(Wayne at 00:29:34) And sometimes you end up with—you know, sometimes the decision maker hasn't actually seen what the CEO has said recently. For example, we just had this massive round of earnings from Q4, and all these big brands came out talking about a bunch of initiatives they're doing. And we try and ladder what we can offer in digital marketing consultancy back to those and write the content and send it. And yeah, for us, you know, our main goal is—our KPI, I guess, is a phone call. And we want to talk to you. And if you talk to us and we understand you better, we think that's where you'll be able to recognize our value.

(Wayne at 00:30:13) Or if not, you know, come back to us in six months to a year when you are ready.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:18) So you would call that an ABM strategy versus spray and pray?

(Wayne at 00:30:23) Yeah. Yeah. ABM is quite an interesting term because it's reasonably new. I mean, account-based marketing is not something that's been around for ages and ages, really. So yeah, that's what we now tailor our approach to.

(Joel Beasley at 00:30:37) I wanted to talk about—I'm watching the time here—but I wanted to talk about Ryan Reynolds. Yes. Because you wrote a whole article about what he is doing in the advertising space, and I was hoping you could share that.

(Wayne at 00:30:49) Yeah. He's flipping things on his head, really. So, you know, as we're just talking about the gin brand and how do they grow? How do you take a gin from, you know, an idea to an actual sizable check? It's marketing.

(Wayne at 00:31:10) I think Ryan Reynolds, you know, the reason why he set up his production company, the reason he's investing in all these brands, is that he thinks he can do better marketing than people in those categories. And that's pretty punchy. You know, some of these brands that he's competing with have been around for decades and decades. But he's got such a big platform of followers. He really understands his value as a brand himself, like the comedy elements of what he does.

(Wayne at 00:31:37) So, you know, you see he's invested in things like Mint, which is a sort of SIM card solution. He's got a football club. He's got a bunch of—funny enough, he's got a programmatic company called MNTN as well. They're like a demand-side platform for TV ads. So he's everywhere.

(Wayne at 00:31:55) And I think he's just worked out that if they could do better marketing than their competitors, they gain share. And I think he's proving that out every day through what he's doing with his products. And so, yeah, it's quite impressive. I think there's a lot that a lot of big established brands can really learn from how he's engaging with his audience and how he's doing marketing. It's a good trend to watch.

(Joel Beasley at 00:32:23) Yeah. And it's brilliant foot in the door. I mean, if he needs capital to buy any of these, people will take his meetings all day. Same with Ashton Kutcher, really prominent tech investor. Like, you wouldn't think. And then you start looking at his portfolio and his investments in tech, and it's almost like, it's great that you're an actor, but come on and talk about tech investments.

(Wayne at 00:32:42) Yeah. It's amazing. It's the same with—I know Serena Williams has started a fund for diverse-owned businesses. And yeah, it's incredible to see.

(Wayne at 00:32:52) But it's taking what they know about audiences and their platforms and marketing themselves and how they've got to be household names, et cetera, et cetera, and applying that into category-based products. And so, you know, the two worlds aren't that far apart. And I think there's a ton that these big established brands who've been advertising for decades can really learn. And they've been disrupted. And yeah, I am a massive fan of a challenger. For every challenger brand, I'm usually behind. I like the underdog.

(Wayne at 00:33:24) And so it's good to see big companies being kept on their toes.

(Joel Beasley at 00:33:28) What's your favorite ad that he's made or things that he's done for advertising?

(Wayne at 00:33:34) There was one where he did it with Johnny Knoxville, and he was advertising his pragmatic tech company called Mountain. And he said that he could explain it quicker than Johnny Knoxville was eating a really hot chili till he had some milk to uncover. And it was very funny, and he was on LinkedIn and Instagram and all his platforms, and he got tons of engagement. People loved it. And so it's just really balancing something funny but really simplifying what his product was doing.

(Wayne at 00:34:05) And yeah, that was definitely one of them for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:09) I gotta watch that. Josh, we gotta—oh, wait. He's got it. He's gonna show it here. Here we go.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:13) Is this it? I think—yeah. This is it.

(Wayne at 00:34:15) Oh, yeah. Steve-O. Yeah. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:16) Was this Steve-O? They're all the same. They're the guys that hurt themselves. That is great. Yeah.

(Joel Beasley at 00:34:28) That cost him, like, nothing because Steve-O is doing it for the publicity. It might have done a little something, but it works for everybody there.

(Wayne at 00:34:36) Yeah. Yeah. For sure. Yeah. And also, it's just, it's content you want to want to watch. Right? Like, one of the things that the ad industry always gets is that the advertising itself just isn't very interesting or engaging. Whereas content like that, you wouldn't even consider that advertising necessarily, but it is. And that's where I think advertising really works. That's where people really engage the brand. They go to the website. They find out more because the ad itself is interesting.

(Joel Beasley at 00:35:05) Yes. And that's what we call gummy vitamins. So my kids, right, they're not gonna eat vitamin pills, but they dress them up as these Disney characters, and they make little gummies out of them. And they put the vitamins in there, and they taste good. And it's—you're getting your vitamins. And so when we make ads or do things like that, we always try to figure out, like, what's the gummy vitamin version of this?

(Wayne at 00:35:27) Yeah. Yeah. I find it also—it's interesting within podcast advertising specifically, which, you know, is a growing field in itself. There's a balance between sort of host-read ads versus sort of third-party served-in ads. And I feel like the experience of podcast is so personal. It's literally in your ears. Like, you're listening to it a very different way. And so you feel like, you know, advertising relevancy is super important. You don't even know as a podcast creator, one bad ad you serve in there to a bunch of people is gonna really put them off the podcast. And so I think the ad experience itself with podcast is so important. And I think that's where digital kind of lost its way a bit where websites were really overcrowded with ads, too intrusive. And now it's working its way back. But podcast advertising—kind of take the learnings from that and don't do the bad practices that digital ads did. Do the good things well.

(Joel Beasley at 00:36:24) Yeah. The way we did it, we got laughed at when we started and they said we'd never make any money. Now we make over $1,000,000 a year, and we don't run any ads on our show. And people always ask me, like, how do you do that? And I said, well, we sell content. So we'll go to a brand and say, hey, we'll make you clips that are interesting, that, you know, have your call to action, and then we'll make all this digital content for you. And we'll do it through the act of having you on as an interview and asking you these questions and being on the show. And that way, the audience gets value, the brand gets value, and everybody is super happy. And I also don't let brands on the show that I don't actually like.

(Wayne at 00:37:03) Yeah. That's amazing. Yeah. That's really cool. Content marketing in general, like, you know, providing value to a consumer through content, which is what Ryan Reynolds is doing. Right? Like, a slightly different way. Yeah. It's a really good way to grow your brand and grow your audience at the same time.

(Joel Beasley at 00:37:20) Yeah. Man, this is great, Wayne. I feel good. What else do we need to get out there to the world? Go use TPA Digital.

(Wayne at 00:37:27) Definitely. If you just need some digital marketing advice, come to us. The contact form's really easy to find on the home page. What else? Well, it's interesting. I think just in general, it's a great time to be in advertising. You know, obviously, everyone suffered through pandemic and economic reasons. But the ad industry is cleaning itself up in digital and it's getting to a much better place where advertisers are gonna really work for consumers and really work for brands. And it's why you're seeing companies like Netflix now, not just doing a subscription model, but also introducing advertising in some countries. And so, yeah, it's a good time to be in advertising for sure.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:07) Well, I'm super glad that I met you. Now I will bother you randomly with my advertising and marketing questions. So I hope that's alright.

(Wayne at 00:38:14) No. I appreciate it.

(Joel Beasley at 00:38:16) Thank you so much for listening. And if you found this episode useful, please share it with a friend or colleague who you think would get value from it. And if you have topics that you'd like to hear discussed on the podcast, either add me on LinkedIn or send me an email [email protected]. Every time I get an email or LinkedIn message, it absolutely makes my day and inspires me to keep going.