Swell AI Transcript: Guest Spotlight Nathan Yeung

00:00 Tim Rowe Nathan, when we initially connected, what excited me most was the opportunity to really bring a well-rounded, modern, omnichannel marketing conversation to what is a global, passionate, out-of-home audience, and really to talk about the challenges facing CMOs, marketing leaders, and have an insightful dialogue from that perspective. Within minutes of us initially connecting, you were talking about wrapping buses and stuffing it full of executives and prospects, and how you had police escorts on the way through Dallas to a Red Hot Chili Peppers concert, and you've hung billboards upside down. I realized this conversation is going to be so much more than that. So Nathan, thank you so much for being here. I'm really excited to have this conversation. I'm super excited too, Tim. I've got some fun stories. You sure do. I think you even talked about the poor man's brand lift study and how to use Google Search Console for that with out-of-home. That's something that we're going to talk about, and we'll get there. But by day, you're a fractional CMO, and you have a finance and management consulting background, specifically cutting your teeth in management consulting. How did you go from finance and a consulting career to helping companies grow in scale as
01:21 Nathan Yeung a sales and marketing leader? I actually went to school for marketing. I graduated in a program that was specific for marketing with actually a specialty in entrepreneurship. It just so happened I fell into finance, and it was a very senior role. I was a VP of finance at the age of 21. It was wild. I was totally unqualified. I wore fake glasses because people didn't think I was old enough for the job. Realistically, that just propelled me into a very senior position very, very early in my life. Because of that, I was afforded this kind of opportunity to really work with angel investors in some of their companies and really be a management consultant and kind of be their eyes on the ground. Sometimes in private equity, these are the people that are like board observers, but I'm a little bit more hands-on. I'm like an operational consultant. Meanwhile, while I'm doing all this, I was always a marketer. I always had these kind of side businesses where I was doing things and really building products. I really enjoyed marketing. I always was fascinated with marketing ever since I was younger, and that's why I went to school for it. It was certainly a passion of mine. I think when I really got into marketing was actually when I started doing super affiliate marketing, media arbitrage, which was a thing where I was buying a lot of media and I was arbitraging basically the cost
02:47 Tim Rowe and the revenues I was earning from offers. You're fronting the ad spend essentially in exchange for a little piece of the take. That's like the wild west of advertising is really that.
02:58 Nathan Yeung It is the wild west, man, because you can make, and listeners, this is a gamble. Just when I say these numbers, don't think it's going to get rich quick scheme. You'll lose all your money too. Previous results do not guarantee future outcomes. This is the disclaimer here. You could easily generate 30 to 50% of your money a month return. But there's no revenue certainty. Just because there's a conversion doesn't mean that vendor is going to pay you. You have to deal with that risk every single time. That's why I stopped that business because it was just like excruciatingly stressful just because on paper I was making money. Didn't mean I was
03:44 Tim Rowe actually going to have cashflow. It was not a fun business. So you ended up in the collections business probably. Yeah. You get into and you get really stressed because we're not talking about 20 grand on a credit card. We're talking like 200 grand on the credit card. You burned the money. It's gone. It's spent. And we're hoping that the people pay us for the things we helped them sell.
04:05 Nathan Yeung 100%. So anyways, sorry, not to sidetrack. I was seeing these marketing side gigs and I loved them. I really, really did. And what I started realizing when I was in these businesses and I was looking at these businesses and working with these businesses, I just really didn't find the marketing talent great. And if I was doing this on my side job as a hobby, a very serious hobby, I was like, why are people paying for really subpar talent? And then I saw massive gaps between the advisory work and the actual implementation. And then I was starting to talk to my friends who are all very successful business owners and they were all burned from marketing people. And so it was just very frustrating. So I ended up becoming a COO for an ad technology company, which really was great because I really learned the ins and outs of ad technology, how inventories bought, how much fraud there is. And when I left that company, a bunch of the members essentially joined me to create Finder Audience. And that was the basis. So just like many small businesses, we really started with mom and pops, small retainers, I call it 1500 to maybe three grand a month. And now we've graduated to middle market, to enterprise where I'm going to say our retainers are five figures. I'm not going to get into the specifics of that. But we're certainly well past the seven figure agency and we've graduated into that. But it's also because I'm incredibly passionate about the work. I'm incredibly passionate about finding white space, finding opportunities, repositioning companies, and also having the team to execute on that. So that's why I'm a part of executive groups. I'm one of the very few fractional advisors that actually has a full team to execute. Now that means for, again, listeners, just because I'm a fractional with a team doesn't mean I'm doing better. It's just because I want to scale.
06:02 Tim Rowe  It's your business model. That was a strategic decision for you.  Yes. I wanted to scale. Some fractional advisors just want work-life balance, which is like you earn 10 grand, you work five hours a month. Great. Good for you. Awesome. Right. But yeah, two dogs and it's great.
06:18 Nathan Yeung  Yeah. But you're not executing. And so I don't like that. I don't like how I'm giving people advice. And I have no control over the outcome. For me, it doesn't make me feel good. It really just doesn't. It doesn't feel right. It feels like here's a good example. It would be like if you paid me to give you the IKEA instruction manual, but then I didn't give you any tools.
06:44 Tim Rowe So you'd be like, here's how to put it together. You just got to source your own Alan keys and
06:50 Nathan Yeung  Yeah. It's like, sorry, man. Like I got those like you're buying like this bookshelf for me. It's like, Hey man, here's all the materials. Here's like your little like playbook. But sorry, dude, like no screws, no Alan keys. Like you gotta like just figure that out yourself.
07:05 Tim Rowe  It's going to end up in the closet or outside of the curb on trash day. I'm
07:09 Nathan Yeung not going to use it.  And that's exactly what happens, right? That's exactly what happens because a lot of times like business owners hire these advisors and they actually forget that they really have to invest some time into executing. And often these playbooks, these suggestions, these recommendations, they sit on their desk for four years sometimes, right? And I just don't think you're providing value then, right? And I don't feel good selling that.
07:34 Tim Rowe  Okay, so let's let's double click into this and maybe we can unlock an early takeaway for some of the listening audience who are largely selling advertising. It's a lot of business development. We've got a large sales audience representing the media, offline media community. How can they, they've got all these great ideas and they bring them to brands and present them. How can we help brands to take some of that maybe heavy lifting off of their plate and facilitate some of these ideas coming to fruition because there is such a disconnect between ideation and execution? Is there something that maybe the listeners of this audience can implement in their process to add more value to folks like yourself?
08:22 Nathan Yeung  I think when it comes to out of home and people who are selling out of home, you're predominantly selling to people who are marketers and maybe even creative shops. And so the biggest thing that I think every business owner, even our enterprise side, they're very data driven. And so hopefully, if you're an out of home person, and you have been approached by maybe a data vendor where it's like, hey, I'm going to put these things on your out of home spots, and it's going to help you capture data, I'm going to say you should do that. You should partner with that because every single person under the sun that runs a large organization, the first thing you're going to say is, oh, I'm going to do an out of home ad. How am I going to measure that? And they always have, most people who are not marketers have a massive gap between an out of home advertisement and how are they going to measure it? Right?
09:14 Tim Rowe Mad Fientist The thing itself, like the actual billboard.  Yes. Mad Fientist I get that as a concept, but then getting to, how am I going to measure this? Or how is this going to come out in the wash for me? That's a chasm.
09:26 Nathan Yeung  It's a huge chasm. It's a massive chasm. It's the great canyon. Honestly, for some people, they literally cannot put two and two together. The only thing they know is, oh, they immediately equate it to something that they're familiar to. And you know what? All executives are familiar to the 32 highway billboards that they blast by every single time. Mad Fientist They can tell you who's on them and they've never really given them any attention.  Exactly. And so you're really fighting that uphill battle of that chasm. You have to be extremely mindful about that. And then the second thing is, you hopefully are selling something that is relevant to the market, whether by proximity or whether by industry. And a great example of that is, we've done billboard campaigns around manufacturing facilities, like industrial facilities. And so it's very easy for, if you were selling this, to go to a SaaS company that is only selling enterprise software to industrial companies to be like, you are putting a billboard beside their office. Mad Fientist Right. Like that logically makes sense.  That logically makes sense. And so you do have to do a little bit more homework on making sure that your out of home ads and those locations are very relevant to that market. And explaining that, like the media kits where you go eyeballs and traffic, that goes right over the executive side. Like no one cares about that. The marketing manager might appreciate it in the sense of like trying to drive overall impression strategy. But the executive who ultimately buys it, like the CEO who ultimately comes down hard on the marketing manager is going to look at that and just be like, this is a stupid spec. Go do digital. I like it because you can measure it. You're going to go buy an ad outside and we're going to have to pay for print. You're going to have to install it and we're going to, we got to think of all of these things. It doesn't make sense to me. So you got to be very, very hyper relevant to whoever you're selling. And then the third thing is you don't want to compete against the creative shops. You don't obviously want to tell the marketing manager what to do, but you should be steadfast in saying, don't do an ad that everyone else is doing. Right. You have to stand out. You are just as much as a impression as you are on a digital swipe. So that means if you aren't doing a good hook, if you aren't doing something creative, if you aren't doing something even bizarre, you're not going to get something memorable. So as an account manager, you should in the best
12:08 Tim Rowe interest of your clients, really push back when you go, your ad sucks. It just sucks. Just don't. It's almost a responsibility. You have a responsibility. Ideally. And if you adopt that as a mindset, I have a responsibility to you as the client, to the format, to the public seeing this thing that I am going to deliver value, I agree to hold you accountable as the advertiser and challenge you in that way.
12:40 Nathan Yeung Yeah. And so, you know, I've done ads where the bus stop is right outside the door and it's actually a map to the door. What do you mean? It's literally, so it's a bus stop station. And it's a portrait side. And literally it's like, this is the store name. This is the picture of the door. Oh, so like you literally know which door to walk in. Yes. As you're walking, you're not even looking at the retail front. You're being forced to see the ad. And then if the ad catches it, you immediately go look at the door. And it's completely unconventional. In fact, I think someone on a blog actually picked it up and actually posted it and said it was a genius idea. I thought it was relatively just logical. But people liked it because it was just very, very contextually relevant, but it was also a little bit bizarre because no one does that. Right. And so it forces you to go look at the door and it forces you to actually think about the brand. And as you mentioned just at the beginning, I have intentionally put a billboard
13:47 Tim Rowe up, upside down. Right. You put a billboard upside down and like- The creative was upside down. Right. But that was on purpose. And you did that- That was on purpose. When and why did you do that? So it was for a restaurant. And we put it up upside down because when you do that, you get all of these people on social media go, look at these idiots. These clowns screwed it up. They put it on upside down. But the reality is the amount of impressions and shares I got is more than that billboard itself. You could have bought a billboard on a side road that only saw a hundred cars a day, but you got that one person who's going to stop and take a picture and troll you
14:28 Nathan Yeung to blow up the whole campaign. And you know what? People go, you're crazy, but if you go buy any $500, $700, $1,000 course on social media, they make intentional mistakes all the time. It's literally a common practice to do intentional mistakes in your reels or in your videos or in your captions to force engagement and to force people to actually go, hey, did you even notice that? To actually make a person spend energy on you. And it's something very common in digital. So if you feel like it's a bad idea, if it's so common to actually purposely do mistakes in digital, and trust me, I'm not the only expert that has put this into a course or somewhere,
15:14 Tim Rowe then it probably works out of home too. Wow. Because we put such a high bar on the creative and the romance of beautiful creative. And I think that so often we associate perfection with that. And Specsavers, I don't know if you saw, there was a great campaign out of the UK a few months ago, Specsavers, they do eyeglasses and they did a whole series of out of home placements where it was upside down or sideways or the ladder looked like it got stuck underneath the vinyl for the billboard and somebody made a mistake. And it was this kind of delightful play on, hey, we're an eye vision store and all of these placements have a quirk about them. It's playing on those two factors to create that memorable brand experience.
16:05 Nathan Yeung Yeah. And so you can do it the pure creative route or you can just do it the bizarre route. And I think what ends up happening is it is that perfectionist kind of view. And in one of my first guest podcasts, I said, we often get so stuck on this idea that everything we put out has essentially, we think of it almost in spotlight syndrome. We all have inflated egos. Sure. And people who run companies have inflated egos on how much reach that they have on an organization. And a great example of this are people who refuse to do a new website, even though they get maybe like 20 visitors a month. So rather than just launching an incrementally better website, they want the perfect website. So then they go through 30 iterations and they never get the website up. But the reality is they've only got like a measly 20 to 50 people coming to the website. So why does it matter? They're really talking about like incrementality. Yeah. And it doesn't matter. So you can spend a year trying to do the perfect creative, but guess what? You're really not going to know whether or not that creative is great until you put it into action anyways. So is it better not to do an 80% product and actually see if that's even worth it? It's the whole reason why people do polling and surveying, right? It's like, the whole point is, is not to look for perfection. The point is, is let's drive some sort of results so that we can garner an observation that will drive further recommendations. And if you have no results, then you have no recommendations. And then now you're just time-wise, you're a year older. Right. And so a lot of times I feel like billboards too, people are like, oh my God, we got a spelling mistake, a period's missing. Oh, everyone's going to think we're stupid.
18:04 Tim Rowe Panic button. Yeah. And it's just like- We've got to reprint everything and emergency, it's a fire. Yeah. And guess what?
18:11 Nathan Yeung You can leave it up and capitalize, lean into it. Yeah. And even on my first podcast, that one, he was saying that he knew someone who wrote the same newsletter and he's like sent it out like 300 times. And this one time he changed the title because he's always had the same title. He had like three times the response rate, but it was by mistake. Right? So this idea, so I think it comes to this whole inflated ego, spotlight syndrome perspective where it's just like, you want perfection and you think you need perfection, but the reality is, is like, you don't, you really don't. How many times has Apple,
18:52 Tim Rowe Tesla produced an imperfect product? And guess what? People still buy it. People still use it. Right. Apple didn't have a decent camera until like what, three years ago and
19:02 Nathan Yeung still the number one phone in the world. Yeah. And Tesla is falling apart. It's still doing great. Right? Like you could pull the rubber or the plastic pieces off the back. I think there's a video online where if you drive your Tesla three too fast and you go into water, it'll like bust out your bumper because it'll catch like a cavity in your bumper, essentially like punch it out from the back. And so, wow, you got all these, like the reality is, is that you don't need perfection. What you need is scale. Right. And, and, and, and, and that, that hinders like productivity and it hinders like progress. So I think like out of home ads are like perfect example of that. Sometimes people spend too much. You can do something as simple as what I just did
19:47 Tim Rowe flip it upside down. And guess what? Just because you look stupid. It doesn't matter because people are going to remember your address and people are going to remember your brand. Forever, probably forever for that restaurant. They'll forever be known as the restaurant with the upside
20:02 Nathan Yeung down billboard. And so that's something you can't buy. We also, I, I, this is, this is simple. We also did this for posters. What do you mean? In-store posters. Like, like in a, in a store window in the store window on the retail front, we instructed all franchisees to put the poster upside down because people walk, because people walk by and they go, look at this idiot. And then they look in, they look in, they stop. And so hard, right? It's the same as getting someone to stop scrolling on social. How do you get them to stop and give you three seconds of their attention? Exactly. And, and the number one driver for most people in re for like brand new restaurants is literally having people look at people eating in the front of your restaurant. So for the brand, brand, brand, brand new restaurants, we do simple strategies like this. And then we, we tell the owners to get people to sit right at the front.
21:01 Tim Rowe Push them to sit at these tables where they're visible to passersby. And really I think is the mantra that we've, I think had at the top of the page since we first connected about sustainability and practicality. We talked a lot there about, about scaling and principally for you, it's sustainability and practicality, something that you can repeatedly do over and over and over. What does that mean? Like what, what, when you apply sustainability and practicality, like those are two kinds of buzzwordy things for other reasons, but when you apply them to marketing, it's really, really impactful. What does it mean?
21:44 Nathan Yeung So a great example of that is TikTok's great. TikTok's amazing right now, right? If you have the talent to produce TikTok videos, do it. And the question is, is can you do it consistently? So, so, so let's put this into a bit more of a, of a realistic perspective and walk this step by step. Say you've hired an intern and he or she, or they are call it 21 fresh out of school. Doesn't really know what they're doing is an intern. So great. You have an intern and they, and they know TikTok. So they're going to create some videos with you. So for three months, you're going to be sustainably able to produce good TikTok videos, which is practical because you have a 21 year old who's technically experienced to do this for you, but it's an intern. So now you have to ask yourself, is that sustainable? Now you have to ask yourself on a budget perspective, can you actually sustain a person who's 60% of their day is just going to produce TikTok videos? And is that sustainable for you? Is that, is that a sustainable action? And then practical, is it, is it something that they can do well? And is that something that you can continue to enable them to do well? So meaning can they actually produce, you know, really great, amazing content. So you have to be in a operational environment where you can sustainably do something for a long period of time without it disrupting your business. And two, you need to be able to do it well, and you need to be able to operationally do it well and, and afford them the environment for them to do well. And if you can't do either of those, then don't do it. So I'll put this into a more simple perspective. Maybe TikTok's not great. Let's just say I live in a city of a thousand people. And let's just say my marketing tactic is local associations. Got it. The BNI, chamber of commerce, whatever. So, and, and, and, and let's also put it, I am anti-social. I am an introvert. All right. This is neither a sustainable or a practical tactic, right? Because one, I'm not going to do it well because I'm an introvert. Two, I've got one BNI group to go to because I live in a city of thousand people. Right. And there's only seven people in that BNI group and there's no more business to exchange. Exactly. So, so the, the, the, the fact of the matter is I always preach, you got to be able to do something that's going to be easy for you to do across a long period of time. A great, another good example of that is a podcast. It's just audio versus a podcast. It's video. If you're a person that travels a lot, how are you going to do a podcast or video? That means you're going to constantly have new backgrounds and your, that means you're going to travel with a full setup. And that's your choice. Sure. You got to ask yourself, is that a sustainable thing for you? Right. And then, and then again, you know, maybe you don't have a great stage voice or maybe you're just really good, really bad at just speaking. And so therefore is it practical? It could be practical if you invested some energy towards it. So then it always comes down to, is it sustainable? Is it practical? And then more importantly, where does this fit on your priority chart of tactics? Because I can guarantee you there are other sustainable and practical activities that you can do. So you should probably do those.
25:06 Tim Rowe How do you identify, and this is probably an episode or a three-day conference in itself, but is there, is there maybe an easy way to kind of shortlist what a few of those things might be?
25:19 Nathan Yeung There is. And what, so I call this, this is also kind of my, my poor man's marketing discovery process. So what I call it, it's called the zero, is the journey from zero to a hundred. And what I want to do for any of you listeners, you can do this at home. You don't have to be a scientist to do this. Okay. You need to just, just draw a line on, just draw, draw, draw a basic, like line chart kind of on a piece of paper and just honest, be honest with yourself and say, if I was a customer, one, how do I first start or learn about this industry? And then what do I think ultimately influences them along the journey? So that could be a forum post, that could be a friend referral, that could be looking up on Google, that could be looking at the company's case study, that could be talking to a salesperson. And you draw this out in, in, in a little bit of a, in a, in a kind of a line chart in what you think is a reasonable sequence of events. Sure. And then what you do is you apply values to them. You go, what do you really think just based on your anecdotal experience influences them to a hundred. And, and, and this can also be negative. So you should also be honest and say, well, what would push them away from me? Right. What could they land? So if you're a Google, if you're, if you're a dentist, okay, great example of this. A lot of people look up dentists and then they're, you know, who are they going to go to the dentist with 4,000 reviews or the dentist with three. Right. So, so you should put on the chart, okay, well, well, I'm only at three reviews. So I'm probably going to get some negative points here when they look at me on Google, Google maps, because I know they're going to look at me on Google maps. Sure. And then, then you look at all these things and you go, what can I do really, really well? And you prioritize based on the high impact one. So, so you first look at the high impact one and be okay. Sales call. Okay. How do I influence more sales calls? Well, that means I could call call. Okay. And I'm not a great call caller. I don't know if I can do that. I can close meaning if they're a warm, I can, or they're coming to me with their hand up, I can probably close, but I don't know if I can invest too much in that. Okay. So let's go back to the Google, my business and the reviews. Okay. I have lots of customers, but I'm not ranking very well on Google, my business. Okay. I can work on this because I can just go back to my customers. I'm not scared to talk to those customers and ask them to give me a review and ask them to get my reviews. So, so you kind of go through this journey and you kind of just ask yourself, which ones can you actually really action on well? And you prioritize it based on the influence. So ideally you, you can do the ones with the most influence, but if you can't, that's fine. That's, that's life, right? You can't, can't have everything you can't have a pie to, um, and, and you, you go through this and then, and then sooner or later, when you've optimized everything you can do, and hopefully you're making more money, you can invest into fixing everything else. And that's kind of how I, I kind of reset people because I feel like everyone gets super lost, right? They're like, Oh my God, I got to do Instagram reels. Oh, Hey, you know, I got to, I got to do blog posts. Oh, I got to do SEO. Oh, I got to post on LinkedIn. Oh, I got to make cold calls. You know, Oh, I got to do a funnel. Oh, I got to do sequences. You know, everyone gets lost, but if you're lost, do this exercise reset and just go, what can you do sustainably and practically today and focus on that because your priorities, your priorities will change when you have more resources. When you have more resources, you can reshuffle your priorities. If you don't have resources, you do what is sustainable and practical. That is your, that
28:49 Tim Rowe is your North star. And as you were saying, I just wrote in big letters and circled it kind of comes back to this theme of being okay with everything, not being perfect. And that's, that's really the key is giving yourself permission to execute, iterate, optimize, move quickly, and to keep that feedback loop sustainably propelling itself. And that I think just has so many implications beyond marketing. That's, that's life stuff right there. Nathan, you're breaking, breaking it down in a way that's really practical. I think, uh, wow, that, that one's, that one's going to stick with me for a long time. Just being okay with it, not being perfect. Reed Hoffman, uh, has a, has a quote about product launch. And if you, if, if you're not embarrassed by your first product
29:44 Nathan Yeung launch, you waited too long to launch. It's a great measure. And honestly, I've learned this so much from my media arbitrage days. When we first started or when I first started, I was so picky on the aesthetics of the ads because I thought the aesthetics of the ads would do so much. But the reality is some poor aesthetics made, made great conversions. Ugly marketing, ugly marketing. Like some of our ads, some of the A, B split tests we had were literally like old school windows, 95 paint versions. And people click them. Sure. It's a little bit nascent. It's like the upside down poster in the window. It's not so perfect. So, so, so it's, it's really, it's really disrupting the frame. And, and if you can make it relevant enough, it still can garner convergence. Right. And it's, and it's still a little bit like, you know, and I can bring this, I can bridge this to so many other industries, but you look at social media influencers, some of them don't just talk about business content. They talk about business content, lifestyle content, all these things. And if you think about it, they're doing that just because they need more volume. But ideally you just want them for business. You want the people who are actually interested
30:57 Tim Rowe for business, but for some reason, they're doing lifestyle content. Right. I don't really need your lifestyle advice. That's not why I come to you. I come to you for specific insight on this
31:07 Nathan Yeung category or niche. Yeah. You just need scale and you need engagement. Right. And that, that, that, that is, that is, that is unanimous across every single industry. Right. And if you don't have scale, then, then guess what? You got to be hitting home runs. That's what you got to think about. Right. Right. If you don't have scale, you got to be hitting home runs. Right. You don't, you don't, you don't really have a chance to, to, to do poorly. So, so scale is far more important than
31:34 Tim Rowe trying to hit a home run every time. It's a real hard way to sustainably and practically over 162 game baseball season, win games by just hitting home runs. You're going to need to hit some singles and walk and get on with an error. You're going to need to play some small ball. Yeah. Tell us about the bus. Tell us about the bus, the red hot chili peppers. Like this, this, this is again, this could be a podcast in itself. Tell us this story.
32:04 Nathan Yeung So the, the number one thing that I believe in is you got like, especially when it comes to experiential things, you got to make an impact. Okay. Like if you don't make an impact, no one's going to come to you again. No one's going to remember you. And, and this is very obvious in like the conference circuit. When you go to conference circuits, especially with very institutionalized conferences, you know that the people that have been coming to conference are going to be like, Oh, I'm going to XYZ party. Right. Everyone has that XYZ party. There's like a standard party that everyone goes to. Why? Because they've created an experience, but they've probably created a level of reputation through time. So as a player that's new, that's coming to an absolutely massive conference that's been institutionalized for years and has had major leaders in the industry sponsoring every single year, we had to go to a conference and make. Beck. Okay. And were you the, were you the big dog or were you the little dog? We weren't the number one sponsor. Okay. No, we weren't right. But we spent money, you know, we spent money on other things. And so the, the, the idea was, okay, I was asked, okay, Nate, how, how would you make this different? And I was like, you know, I'll tell you one thing that I'll never forget. I was in a bus with a police escort. That's an experience I'm never going to forget. So you had personally experienced something like this. Okay. It is a thing. Every single person on that bus had their phones up. It's awesome. As everyone's looking at you. It's cool. It's cool, man. You're, you're in a freaking, you're in a, your giant bus, you're blazing through red lights. Like it's, it's, it's like, this is what it feels like. It's, this is cool. Like this is, this is really, really cool. And, and so I said, look, why don't we get a bus and why don't we do that? And why don't we transport whoever we need to go from point a to point B, but let's make sure the bus starts at the conference center. Great. And so, so now you think about it, we're doing this event, the conference is done. Everyone's going to that major event. And then like kind of this key select group of executives are now loading onto a bus that has been specially vinyl wrapped with the brand for this event. So, so there is some out of home on this, right? We did vinyl wrap. So every single person can see it. They can see the police escort outside. Sure. Okay. And now all of these executives are going onto this bus as people are leaving the venue. That in itself is a spectacle and a statement. It's a massive spectacle. And then of course, obviously you got the sirens as they're leaving, like everyone's going to be like, whoa, what the who's, where are they going? You're not going. Who's that? I want to be on that bus. And every single person is going to remember now. And so, so it's, it's, it's, it's, it's really, again, using a bunch of things to make sure that we create an experience that's going to be incredibly memorable. And so that's what we did. So we, we did, we did the vinyl bus, we vinyl the bus just for the event. And then we got a police escort and we, I believe the client had one or two booths at Red Hot Chili Peppers and they went and that was the
35:26 Tim Rowe experience. And every single person from that event is going to remember. Forever. And everyone who went to that big time party was wondering the whole time, where did they all just go? And I'm sure it was the talk of the conference. And I'm sure that there was a business outcome to this, but was this an overall success? Did they close deals? Like, was there a, was there a business objective
35:52 Nathan Yeung behind it as we always have to talk about measurement? So, so anecdotally, this was, this was actually the weird thing. Anecdotally, the, the client that I work with is in a very competitive space. There are new, there are new entrant, very new entrant. And the moment I kind of knew that our marketing was working was actually, so I'm very good friends with a managing director at one of the big four banks here in Canada at CIBC. And he messaged me because I posted about them on my LinkedIn. And he's like, what do you know about that company? I was like, oh, I work for them. I'm like their fractional marketing team. And he's like, oh, I've been watching them. I was like, I was like, why would you be watching this guy? He, my, my, my good friend, he only deals with like $50 million and above, like, okay. So they have to be big companies. So, so I was like shocked that he was like watching them. And, and, and so that was kind of like that anecdotal level of like, I was like, oh, wow. So like, people are really starting to notice this company. And, and, you know, I, I do know just from our client that they are doing much better. I'm trying not to name them because I don't, I don't, I feel like they would be happy the competitors knew who, who, who they're using to come up with ideas, but they are, they are doing well. They, they have, it is incredibly competitive space and, and they have, they have been able to at least put a foothold into that space. And that is not easy.
37:21 Tim Rowe 106 No. And really it's by having taken the, the contrarian path and going against the grain and maybe not doing some of the things that would have been traditionally expected and being willing to take a, take a major, major risk on, on an execution like that. And, but you've created an experience and now garnered the attention of folks that maybe wouldn't have otherwise been paying attention and all of the good things that come with that.
37:46 Nathan Yeung 118 We can put it as simple as what would you pay for a hundred executives that fit, that literally fit your qualifications of a 10, your total addressable market for them to remember you for a year? 119 What would you pay?
38:00 Tim Rowe 119 The question that I'm not even going to take a shot at answering because it should be left answered. 119 So that's kind of like the outcome of that. 119 It's a beautiful thing. Beautiful thing. Teach us something. Teach us about the poor man's brand lift study and how to do it on Google search console. You said this to me and I thought to myself, Oh my gosh, there's someone else out there in the world that's thinking about these things and they're not from the world of out of home. It's incredible. So I'd love to hear kind of how you think about really just measuring out of home in a very conventional, sustainable, practical way, such as Google.
38:39 Nathan Yeung 119 So, so as you know, and, and, and anyone listening, like there are other ways that you can measure this. You can, you know, if you are lucky enough and you have $150,000 to spare, you can go ahead and knock at Nielsen's door and they'll do a brand study for you. Or, you know, you can even go on to Google and spend like, I think it was like $50,000 to do a brand lift ad campaign, which is basically, you know, like for everyone that doesn't know what that is. You know how like every 34th video, you kind of get a video. That's a survey that says, yes, have you seen Sephora in your last thing? And that's a brand lift study that they're running. 119
39:17 Tim Rowe That's just a standalone campaign. 119
39:19 Nathan Yeung Standalone service that Google does. And so, so if you can't afford any of this, which I feel like a lot of people don't because you're spending all your money, media, which is a good thing. The sad part is, is that sometimes you do have to spend money on reporting. And so the poor man's brand lift case study is, or method is really using Google search console to measure brand lift. And so if you go into your Google search console, and if your client doesn't have Google search console, make sure they go ahead and get that installed and verified before you do your campaign. You can essentially look at brand lift based on obviously the time that you have your insertion order for. So if your insertion orders for three, three to six weeks or two months, whatever, ideally, they're not doing 32 other campaigns at the same time. You know, if they're, if they're tight on budget, they probably aren't. But what you can do is you can use that Google search console. And then what you can, what you do is in the filtering section, there is something called reg X. Reg X is something called regular expression, call it fancy coding word for filtering. It's like an, it's like an equation essentially. And so you can put in this kind of pseudo equation that will filter out all of the words that have the brand or filter, filter in all the words that have the brand name in various different formats. So if it's a brand name that has a space, it'll capture that. And you can just look at that. And so it's a great way for you to see brand keywords and search exactly that you're seeing more impressions. And if you're seeing more impressions, you know, generally speaking, I'm going to, I'm, you know, I'm going to take a whim here, but I'm going to say 70 to 80% of all people, first thing they do is Google the name. Sure. And so generally speaking, if you see an impression lift and you know, just through their media buying program that they're not spending too heavily anywhere else, but they are spending a majority of the budget on out of home, that's going to be a great indication that you're out of home locations and plan have generated some sort of media lift and brand lift and recognition and is staying top of mind and doing all those things that you're essentially selling your clients on. And then of course, like on a digital perspective, I don't really love, you know, tracking visits because it's, it's really hit or miss, but you know, obviously tracking that along with a brand lift on Google search console is going to be a great, you know, evidential perspective of like, Hey, you've done a good job and you're actually seeing an impact. So that's, that's the poor man's brand list process. And anyone can do this. Like you don't, you don't have to have any money to do this. And it's a great way for people to really see if whatever they're doing, both digital out of home really, or even print, you can, you can do this. So I really recommend if you're ever working with clients, make sure they have Google search console, educate them on, on monitoring their brand keywords and using that as a great way for you guys to say, Hey, this, this campaign's working. You can clearly see a lift. You can clearly see an increase in trend and impression and clicks.
42:33 Tim Rowe Nathan, you've given us so much. Thank you for doing that and just giving us an incredible conversation and ton of insight. What can we do for you? Where, where do we get in touch? Where's the Latin long? What do we need to know about all of the things that you're up to?
42:48 Nathan Yeung Awesome. Well, I have like a little fun IG channel called FYA.marketingbytes and that's with a Y. And that's kind of where I'm doing a whole bunch of educational content on theories and actual psychological research about like how mark, how like research actually applies towards marketing. And then of course you can just find me on my website, which is a www.findyouraudience.online. And if you want, you can just connect with me on LinkedIn. I don't think there's a ton of Nathan Young's and our marketers. So you can look up my name. My last name is spelled Y E U N G. And I'm sure Tim is going to be so kind to probably place this somewhere, somewhere in the podcast or
43:25 Tim Rowe in the description. So it'll be easy for you guys to find me. It'll all be right there in the show notes so that you don't have to do any additional digging. Nathan has done all the digging for us and presented us just with a treasure chest full of gold today. Nathan, thank you so much for being here. Awesome. Thanks, Tim. If you found this episode to be helpful, please share it with somebody who could benefit. As always, make sure to smash that subscribe button and wherever you're listening, leave the podcast to review. That's how you help us grow. Until next time, we'll see you.