Introducing Jay Acunzo, the creative force behind Creator Kitchen! With an undying love for content creation, Jay is transforming the digital media landscape with his refreshing approach. He’s not your run-of-the-mill marketer – Jay thrives on challenging conventions and inspiring content creators to think outside the box.
As a speaker and storyteller, Jay effortlessly captivates audiences with his fresh perspectives and thought-provoking ideas. His mission is simple: to empower fellow creators to stay true to themselves and craft content that truly resonates with their audience.
But that’s not all – Jay’s talent extends beyond speaking. He’s a gifted writer and host of the captivating podcast “Unthinkable,” where he delves into the remarkable stories of unconventional content creators who dared to defy norms.
At Creator Kitchen, Jay Acunzo is on a mission to revolutionize content creation and empower creators like you to unleash your full potential. With an authentic passion for innovation and creativity, Jay is leading the charge in shaping the future of digital storytelling. Brace yourself for a journey beyond the ordinary and embrace Jay’s movement of exceptional content creation!
Jay can be reached on Twitter @jayacunzo or via LinkedIn.
Recent Shows with Jay Acunzo
EP 339: Are You A Showrunner? with Jay AcunzopodcastThe marketers who will win in today’s environment are those who understand it’s all about providing a great experience. It’s no longer about GRABBING attention, it’s about HOLDING attention. Although a surprising number of professional marketers aren’t as good as you’d think they would be at marketing themselves to get more clients. That leaves a big question, how do professional marketers who need clients market themselves?
This week’s featured guest, Jay Acunzo, Founder of Marketing Showrunners, has been helping marketers do exactly that through podcasts and video series. Learn more about how he does that successfully on episode 339 of EDGE of the Web!
Some key topics discussed during this show include:
Following the best practices
Components of running a show
Holding attention, not just grabbing it [...]
January 24, 2020- EP 339 Transcript | Are You A Showrunner? with Jay AcunzoTranscripts
Announcer: 00:01 On this episode of EDGE of the Web…
Jay Acunzo: 00:04 Our mandate has changed and we just do not address it. Our mandate as marketers, whether it was right or wrong used to be grab attention and now it’s hold attention. And so I don’t think great marketing is about who arrives, great marketing is about who stays, and if you just focus on that, everything gets better.
Announcer: 00:22 Your weekly digital marketing trends with industry trend setting guests. You’re listening and watching, EDGE of the Web. Winners of Best Podcast from the Content Marketing Institute for 2017. Here at CR at edgeofthewebradio.com. Now, here’s your host, Erin Sparks.
Erin Sparks: 00:43 All right. Hey, this is episode 339 of EDGE of the Web radio. Welcome back. I’m your host Erin Sparks. Every week, we bring you amazing guests to chat with and digital marketing trends on a regular basis, and we unpack key marketing topics for our digital marketing audience. So if you’re new to the show, we certainly implore you to go over the edgeofthewebradio.com where you can learn a lot more about what we do and how we do things.
Erin Sparks: 01:10 If you’re new to the show, we want to show you the ropes. We’re doing a live broadcast on YouTube each and every Monday as close as we can get, but today is Tuesday live at noon because we can be agile that way. We also roll out a podcast soon thereafter. Two podcasts actually. Our news as well as our interview.
Erin Sparks: 01:28 We also transcribe and be able to create some great blog content regarding the interviews that we have and roll out social as well. So you can get all that information right over edgeofthewebradio.com and you can also find us on all the podcast platforms, iTunes, Google Play, Stitcher, Spreaker, iHeartRadio, Player FM, Spotify, TuneIn, and a sundry of others. And if we’re not where you listen to your podcasts, let us know. We’ll certainly get our feed over there.
Erin Sparks: 01:56 Again, all the information over at edgeofthewebradio.com news, show, and much more. So the show is actually brought to you by Site Strategics. We talk about this plenty of times. Site Strategics is our parent company focused on agile, digital marketing. If you’re interested in what that means and what that means to your bottom line, give us a shout. We’ll be happy to discuss some action items that we see that you can take advantage of right then and there, and perhaps we might have a good relationship and who knows what we can do for you longterm.
Erin Sparks: 02:24 So give us a call over at 877-SEO-4-WEB or 877-736-4932. All right. I’m going to introduce our producers at large. You’ve got Jacob Mann in the production booth along with Allie Coons.
Jacob Mann: 02:36 Hey.
Erin Sparks: 02:36 How you doing? She’s never going to speak.
Jacob Mann: 02:39 No, she’s not. So…
Jacob Mann: 02:42 See, I’ve got my own title here, but I don’t know. We’ll have to make one for Allie. Say hi.
Allie Coons: 02:48 Hello.
Erin Sparks: 02:50 Hello. How are you guys doing?
Jacob Mann: 02:51 We’re good. I was going to say, I know you’re saying it right, but every time you say Spreaker, I feel like you’re getting it wrong.
Erin Sparks: 02:57 No, it’s Spreaker.
Jacob Mann: 02:58 And then I was like, “Oh, wait. No, that’s really how it’s spelled.”
Erin Sparks: 03:00 You think I’m saying some sort of foul language here?
Jacob Mann: 03:03 Maybe. I don’t know. Something.
Erin Sparks: 03:05 I got arrested for spreaking.
Jacob Mann: 03:06 You got to be careful, man.
Erin Sparks: 03:08 I got to be careful. All right, some show notes. Just want to keep you updated on the housekeeping here. I just want let you know who’s going to be coming up on the show here next week. We’re going to have Dawn Anderson and the following week we’re going to have Kim Scott. By the way, we’re also going to be a media partner over at SMX West in February in San Jose. We’re going to be out there to talk to speakers as well as you, our digital marketing audience.
Erin Sparks: 03:34 So happy to be partnered up with Third Door Media. So if you’re out there, grab us and let us know what you think about our show. Hey, we may even be conducting some interviews out there on the fly if you’re interested in being part of the show on a regular basis… Not on a regular basis, but if you want to jump in on the show, give us a shout over an info@edgeofthewebradio.com or if you want to suggest somebody that we should be talking to, let us know and we certainly will reach out to them.
Erin Sparks: 03:59 Set your reminders on YouTube, make sure you smash that bell so you can be notified about when we are going live, because our live audience is really interesting. We want you to jump in and ask questions of our audience. So speaking of SMX, I just want to let you know, this is February 18th and 19th. The show out there is a great conference with a lot of great speakers and our relationship with Third Door Media gives you a nice sizable discount to that purchase.
Erin Sparks: 04:28 So if you actually register for the entire time up to the event, we’re actually providing 15% off the actual price of the ticket. If you use the code Edge 15, That’s E-D-G-E 15 when purchasing the tickets. Simply search for SMX West and you can go over there and proceed to checkout. You got some great speakers. Dawn Anderson, who’s coming up next week, Brad Geddes, Tim Jensen, all friends of the show. Elizabeth Marsten, Joe Martinez, Ginny Marvin, Lily Ray is going to be out there. Barry Schwartz is going to be out there. Aleyda Solis, Bruce Clay and Kirk Williams and many, many more.
Erin Sparks: 05:05 So if you want to jump over there, it’s a great conference to attend. We highly recommend it and hey, use EDGE 15 and knock off some costs that go up. That’s all the housekeeping information. So we’re going to jump into our deep dive with this week’s featured guest.
Announcer: 05:22 Now, it’s time for EDGE of the Web featured interview with Jay Acunzo, founder of Marketing Showrunners.
Erin Sparks: 05:26 We want to make sure that we reach out and let you know about our show sponsors. We’re very happy to have a continued sponsor of the show. Ahrefs is a fantastic program. You can go visit them ahrefs.com, R-E-F-S. And what they do is they give you the keys to be able to do competitive analysis and jump in and see exactly where your competitors are getting their traffic and why. So can see the pages that they’re getting traffic to the content that sends the most traffic to them and the exact words they’re ranking for. So you can deconstruct their SEO strategies and use it to the better of all mankind. Or at least gets yourself on the lane to be able to capitalize on what they’re doing.
Erin Sparks: 06:14 So it’s a great analysis tool. They link and intersect tools. It’s fantastic to be able to see where your competitors are getting links collectively and you’re not. So you can have a nice roadmap of outreach. So go over to ahrefs.com and you can start a free trial today. You’ll swim in great data just like we do over at Site Strategics. So with that, let’s meet this week’s industry expert. Okay, Jay. This is not our first rodeo, Jay. You’ve been here literally twice before. One time kind of irked me because you went full Marvel and went into Iron Man versus Batman and that was a nice conversation. You might want to harken back to that listeners, and I won’t rehash it now, of course. Although, have you noticed the new Batman that’s been recruited? I mean, one…
Jay Acunzo: 07:02 It’s like debating Google versus Bing. It’s not worth it. Let’s just move on.
Erin Sparks: 07:06 Oh, God. Well, I mean, yeah, absolutely. I mean, Batman’s Google, Iron Man’s going to be Bing, right? That’s the pair up that you’re trying to put.
Jay Acunzo: 07:15 Let’s move it along.
Erin Sparks: 07:16 I’m just embarrassed about Affleck and then this new kid, this new sparkling Twilight vampire who’s going to be the bat. It just makes me sad. I was just teeing it up for a softball to you. All right.
Jay Acunzo: 07:28 First of all, can we just shout out Jacob? Jacob is the… This is a deep cut. This is a deep cut for podcast listeners. Jacob is the Matt Gourley of this show. This is amazing. Jacob is doing such a good job behind the scenes.
Erin Sparks: 07:40 Oh, wow. Look at that.
Jay Acunzo: 07:40 There you go. Matt Gourley is the producer for Conan O’Brien. So this…
Erin Sparks: 07:44 Fantastic. So I’m getting from this that there’s going to be three times as much focus on a full screen on Jay now just because of an ego stroke, right?
Jacob Mann: 07:54 Yeah, I think so.
Jay Acunzo: 07:54 Listen, you got to know who’s doing the feeding here.
Erin Sparks: 07:57 All right. So for our listeners who don’t know, Jay, shame on you. Go back and check out some of our shows before. It’s been a pleasure to be able to talk to him. He and his organization help marketers create their audiences favorite show, so they can be a favorite brand for that audience. As founder, he helps cover and advance the movement of marketers making podcasts and videos. And this is kind of an interesting inception is I’m going to be interviewing you about how you help others do their own shows. So I’m going to kind of pull that out of you and it’s going to be kind of a podcast inception. How about that?
Jay Acunzo: 08:32 I love it. Everything I do is meta. Marketing to marketers talking about doing shows about shows for people who make shows.
Erin Sparks: 08:38 Could we go like a fourth here? Could we do a meta about this show?
Jacob Mann: 08:42 I’m just waiting for the classical music in the kick.
Erin Sparks: 08:46 All right. So, Jay, you have a number of different podcasts, but the deal is you just rolled out with a brand new one. That’s really cool. And that’s 3 Clips. Tell us about 3 Clips.
Jay Acunzo: 08:59 Sure. So Marketing Showrunners is trying to help marketers find and share their voice and distribute that voice with the right audience to make a difference, make an impact, and shift the culture for the better. And I think the best vehicle to do that is a show. And there’s a myriad reasons we get into for why showrunning is having a moment in marketing, and we can certainly dig into that, but for 3 Clips, it was a podcast about back to our meta point, podcasts.
Jay Acunzo: 09:24 So what we’re trying to do is essentially understand great shows, a few little pieces at a time. And so we take shows ranging from brands you’ve heard of, REI, Trader Joe’s, HubSpot, Drift to companies you’ve never heard of. Two legendary shows out in the media world, from Gimlet Media to my all time favorite podcast, Radiolab. And we play back multiple clips and deconstruct them. And we’re kind of advancing this new show and learning as we go. So you’re going to see a lot of updates to how we deconstruct them. But for now we’re taking 3 Clips at a time and go in deep to understand why it works or in some cases why it doesn’t work, so we can all get back to making great shows for our brands.
Erin Sparks: 10:03 Now, very, very cool. And the other two podcasts that we won’t fail to mention is I Made It and Unthinkable. Unthinkable literally has, I think… You got 170 plus shows right now, right?
Jay Acunzo: 10:17 Yeah. That’s my longest standing podcast. So it’s not the first one I launched, but Unthinkable was this foray to the side of the day job back when I had what looked like a day job because at cocktail parties and someone asks, what do I do? It takes a little while to explain now. But Unthinkable was my first attempt to make a narrative style show and just learn this craft, and it led me to start making shows for brands. So I made it as an example of one of those clients shows with a brand called Podia. We have world-class creators deconstruct the making of one single project, which is a really interesting lens over these people you’ve heard say the same platitudes on every other show.
Jay Acunzo: 10:51 We go deeper in terms of their craft, which I love and it’s getting good response so far. I’ll make a couple shows a year, audio and documentary video for clients. And that dovetailed into me launching Marketing Showrunners, which we just use a shorthand MSR because we’re getting tired of saying Marketing Showrunners over and over again. But that’s the education and media company that we decided to launch after doing so many client shows and learning that there’s, there’s far greater impact to be had if we publish educational content and build community than just a serve an individual client here and there
Erin Sparks: 11:25 For our audience, our listeners who haven’t come across your content before, Jay has a very stylistic way of delivering content. It’s very narrative. It’s very conceptual as well as the mixing and the editing that goes on. It takes a long time. This is not only professional, this is quite entertaining and it’s also insightful into how the clips actually all organized together to be able to tell the story. So there’s lot of podcasts that are in these rungs of just full board conversation. Let’s go through the entire interview. Very similar to this one, right? But there’s also others that are starting to crop up that are much more deliberate in telling a story and unpacking the passion of the target, right?
Erin Sparks: 12:13 So you’re finding yourself in this new next level space of storytelling regardless of what the medium is. And obviously you’re in the audio lane predominantly, but you’re truly defining this next level of creativity as well as focus on, “Don’t rush through it, tell the story, really understand the story and deep dive.” And that’s where you’re not going to get the short snackable audio content on your way on your commute or as you were working at the gym. The audience that’s actually going to consume this is as dedicated as you are telling the story. Yes?
Jay Acunzo: 12:54 So a couple of things. The way we’re publishing our content and how that helps us go really deep with the people we serve and also make sure we’re not hinting at the fact that we’ll serve this kind of marketer. There’s friction that we’re trying to create. And then there’s the reason shows matter. To your point, this is very meta, right? So everything we’re doing, other marketers are doing too, and we’re trying to teach it. So let me address both quickly.
Erin Sparks: 13:16 Sure.
Jay Acunzo: 13:16 So there’s a lot of marketing lessons to be learned here. So the reason we’re publishing content, and the reason I led by saying not, let’s all create great podcasts or let’s all create great shows. I said we want to help marketers find and share their voice, make a difference, and shift the culture for the better. And we just happen to believe a show is the best way to do that is because we want to find and serve deeply a subset of marketers who believe that creating better content is better marketing, right? Who believe in serving the audience. And that’s why they exist, not to sell more stuff. And oh, by the way, when you serve the audience better, you end up selling more stuff.
Jay Acunzo: 13:49 So we want to serve this subset within a subset, within a subset, right? We’re niching down. So when we create 3 Clips, we uphold that belief. We say those words over and over again. We want to let people know what we stand for and what we don’t stand for. We’re not going to talk about what microphone should you use and way should you distribute, and what growth hack can you use to grow an audience. We’re going to talk about, did you hear how this guy opened his show? Let’s go deep with that.
Jay Acunzo: 14:14 Did you listen to really what happened in that clip that you just loved listening to? Nothing really interesting happened and yet it was interesting audio. How can we do that too, right? Because we are resource constraint. So that’s what we’re doing. And there is an implied friction, which is if you just want a blueprint, we’re not the audience for you. We’re not the media company rather for you. You’re not the audience for us. So that’s what’s happening in our world, and really quickly in the world of marketing at large, that makes this stuff so compelling and necessary and timely, our mandate has changed and we just do not address it.
Jay Acunzo: 14:46 Our mandate as marketers, whether it was right or wrong, used to be grab attention and now it’s hold attention. And so I don’t think great marketing is about who arrives, great marketing is about who stays. And if you just focus on that, everything gets better. And really there’s just two pithy things you can sum it up as. The lifetime value of your audience gets higher, people stay, they trust you, they take actions with you, they race down the funnel, all this good stuff. Lifetime value goes up and cost of customer acquisition goes down because you have this hoard of passionate fans that can’t get enough of you telling other people and making it easier to bring people inbound and also for your team to go outbound with confidence. So those are the benefits. It’s not brand awareness, it’s brand affinity. And so that’s the moment we’re living in.
Erin Sparks: 15:29 And also it couples with brand advocacy as well. You’re going to be-
Jay Acunzo: 15:31 A hundred percent.
Erin Sparks: 15:32 You’re going to be advocating and evangelize at a micro level. Much deeper and much more persuasive. I want to go back up to a particular level though because you have been banging this drum for a good period of time. You had a book here just recently, Break the Wheel, which also follows in the same vein. You talk a lot about following best practices and this herd mentality. There’s a discipline for this type of content that you’re talking about, but there’s also kind of a lack of discipline or a safety protocol of just doing the exact same thing that everybody else does. And if it fails, you can blame it on the trend or the group. You talk about breaking the herd. There’s a risk implied there, and there’s such a unknown when it comes down to, okay, what I’m not going to do the same thing that we’re told is tried and true, and it should be our way of rolling out this type of content. There’s such an unknown. That by its very nature separates the marketers that are willing to take a risk, right?
Jay Acunzo: 16:40 It’s simple to understand. It’s really hard to execute. And that’s why I wanted to spend two and a half years of my life trying to investigate it and write a book, and speeches, and just lik embed myself in this to see can I make it a little bit easier for people to execute? The simple thing to understand is that finding best practices is not the goal, finding the best approach for you is. So how do we do that? And I think when I was doing the research, you uncover some real science-based rooted in real brain science issues that cause us to retreat to the best practice. But I think the easy way to sum it up is we’re taught from a young age and whether that is your first job out of school or grammar school, middle school, high school and college, there’s a right and a wrong answer.
Jay Acunzo: 17:21 And we now live in a world where people have infinite right answers for almost every single subset of a decision, subset of a project that we have to tackle. I did this hilarious little bit in a speech. Well, not hilarious in my mind, but the audience found it funny. I found it horrifying. But I was like, here’s like a subset of the decisions you need to make to do a podcast. Why don’t we look at the length of an episode? How long should a podcast be? And we found endless answers. And I tweeted how long a podcast be. I got 69 different people saying 69 different things. Like this is the era we live in where the tiniest of choices is overwhelming because we have infinite possibilities available instantly.
Jay Acunzo: 18:00 So I think that the best skill we can develop in a world of infinite possibilities is knowing how to vet them, not vet them to find the best practice and what works in general or what works on average, but the best practice for us in particular, and to do that, we first have to understand the us. And so there’s all these variables in your firsthand context that best practices don’t take into account. So we’re making poor decisions or decisions that are close enough. And so the work is average, the work is close enough and we need to break that cycle and start getting better at investigating our context first and then using that to make choices. So that was the whole thrust of Break the Wheel is how do we do that because the result is more innovative, more exceptional work.
Erin Sparks: 18:43 It’s a powerful book and we certainly recommend reading it. I want to use an example of this. In your most recent podcasts, you talked about envision design as an incredible envision tool, an incredible design tool and prototyping tool and utilized by designers and artists and they focused on a customer first approach. Again, to the point, they rolled out not a show, but actually a full length movie showcasing designers and the design industry, and on top of it, they didn’t stream it, they didn’t make it for the masses, they actually rolled this out in private screenings, 1,500 different screenings, 60,000 different audience members participating to the design community. Now, you talk about an entire circuitous route to deliver content to who their customers are. This is the definition of what you’re talking about, right?
Jay Acunzo: 19:44 Yeah. And they were included in the book, and that story started on my podcast. And by the way, for those with podcasts, this is why we need to re-promote the best of episodes from our backlogs because here’s Erin asking me about this episode that came out in 2017 and last week, I published it as a best of. So we have this giant asset, this beautiful asset of a show, and we don’t really use it that well. And only recently did I start doing these best of’s and people seem to like them. So there’s a little marketing lesson I learned recently.
Erin Sparks: 20:08 Absolutely.
Jay Acunzo: 20:09 The story goes this way, and I’ll sum it up quick. InVision was doing what a lot of software companies do in B2B. They were interviewing customers for case studies and they would ask the same kind of boring, redundant question because shrug, that’s the best practice. It’s like, “Why do you use our product? What were you struggling with before? What got easier afterwards? What would you say to those who are considering buying us?”
Jay Acunzo: 20:29 And then a woman by the name of Clair Byrd who was on these video shoots and on the marketing team at the time asked a very simple question to end and that led them down this very interesting decision-making pathway, let’s say towards a feature film. She said, “Why is this work meaningful to you?” And people started going really off the reservation with how angry they would get at the rest of the business world. They don’t understand product design. We’re designing some of the most important apps in the world. There was just like passion there. And so she’s like, “We should go deeper there.” And so they dug in deeper and they found that what these people wanted in reality weren’t how to’s, they weren’t tools. They wanted a sense of community. They want it to feel they belonged and had a seat at the table.
Jay Acunzo: 21:15 So if that’s your first principle insight, it’s not go teach design and do a lot of how to’s with your blog, it’s, “We’ll make these people stars, elevate them, give them a platform, tell the stories of their jobs. We need to do more than just these case studies. We should roll together our video assets and make a 60-minute documentary film about this stuff.” And then because people want community, we’re not going to just publish it everywhere, we’re going to go for resonance, not reach. Let’s do all these offline debuts at companies and community groups and bring together these people in the room and show them you’re not alone and show them that you have a kinship with these others, and together we can give this entire community a sense of purpose, a sense of identity and a seat at the table.
Jay Acunzo: 21:56 So it looks crazy to say, “Don’t do case studies. Do a 60-minute documentary film.” Until you go down the decision-making path that they did in their unique context. And none of that would be possible unless Clair and her team became investigators into that context, and ignored the best practice.
Erin Sparks: 22:13 And that’s why I wanted to circle back around because as you were talking about, it’s not about the best practice, it’s about what’s what’s best for you and your understanding of your customers, but there’s a linkage there. You have to understand your customers first. You have to understand their why, right? So there’s a discipline internal to be able to get to that point before you can ever decide on what the medium is or what the tactics are to be able to reach them. Yes?
Jay Acunzo: 22:39 A hundred percent. Now, that I’m teaching people how to make shows, there’s a lot of questions, “How do you measure a show? The data is not great. It’s downloads and drop off rates from Apple podcasts, et cetera.” And I’m like, “Well, we as marketers have to get creative again.” Just as the pendulum is swinging from everything, being programmatic to a lot more creatively led brand first, audience centric marketing, let’s do that when it comes to measurement. And so one way to do that is think about what InVision did. They got an insight by talking to their customers and it transformed not just one project, but their sales team drove more leads. They got to do these workshops at giant prospects that they could never reach without the film.
Jay Acunzo: 23:15 That one insight that they only got by talking to customers, transform their marketing and sales. That’s ROI. Well, you have a show, you should be surveying that audience. Having a one to one video calls with that audience like the firsthand research and knowledge you get is ROI for the team. It’s just not a pixel you placed on your show in some magical sense to generate a chart. There’s this nice connection between the two and a half years I spent with Break the Wheel and the way I’m seeing people build their shows and I’m trying to sort of bring those lessons to this craft.
Erin Sparks: 23:46 I see that clearly. And it’s not for the timid of heart or the meek. I mean, I was going to ask a question, should every brand consider a show? And I’m not because we’ve already answered that question, is that you’re literally separating the wheat from the chaff just by deciding to jump into this space of creativity and focused consumer content. But you also have to have the discipline and the self-awareness of how your customers actually consider your service because it’s not all going to be roses. You’re going to actually understand a lot more about some of the problems that your brand may have. But when it gets down to the show, let’s go ahead and jump into, you’ve already made a decision to create a show and you’ve got the concepts, you’ve done the discipline to be able to find out what your consumers are truly interested in.
Erin Sparks: 24:41 Clearly, there’s some need for talent inside the organization to be able to build interesting content. I’m talking about attention holding content yet, but interesting content, how do you guide a company or a marketing department to be able to help hone in on maybe the jewels inside of their organization to be able to deliver this message?
Jay Acunzo: 25:03 It really does start as a brand exercise, as a story exercise. You put aside the medium and you start with do you have something meaningful to say? And so often we talk about the container in marketing. It’s a blog, it’s a podcast, it’s newsletter, it’s SEO, it’s whatever. We need to talk about the stuff inside because that’s really what moves the needle and that’s what the audience is after. And so that’s where we start. We do have a consulting arm to MSR that helps fund the media content we’re creating and down the road we hope to create some educational products. But when we consult, it’s do you have something meaningful to say? There’s some decisions to make here. Is this a show where you’re trying to go on a journey of understanding with your audience, which by the way, is what a show is.
Jay Acunzo: 25:44 Are you trying to go on that journey of understanding into the entire domain that you operate in? Like if you’re a MarTech company, you’re trying to understand modern marketing. Okay, well we need to find an angle and a hook that makes it instantly different when you speak it out loud than every other show doing the same generic exploration, right?
Erin Sparks: 26:01 Absolutely.
Jay Acunzo: 26:02 Or do you want to own one theme? Is there something specific you want to go deep in that if you do, you can actually really move the market and help create a world that you can sell into. The world that believes what you believe, right? And you can bring together your true believers that way. So you have all these non-show related decisions to make, and then very neatly you can create what’s called a show bible, which is what we teach our clients where it’s a documented strategy and the show bible or take this giant thing, break it into component pieces and there’s small pieces and I won’t get into, but the big three are the concept of the show and that’s what helps people self-select.
Jay Acunzo: 26:38 I’d like to go on that journey with you. I can sense how it’s different than everyone else’s. It’s brand IP that could exist beyond any one channel or show, right? I say it has to pass the t-shirt test. Would somebody put the logo or the phrase or the continual running jokes on your t-shirt? Because it’s this angle you’re taking, this mission you have. It’s this lens you’re putting on the world, your concept. That is your format. It’s how do you break down an episode to get people to the end of the episode.
Erin Sparks: 27:04 Oh, wow.
Jay Acunzo: 27:04 That’s the one job we all have, get them to the end. Right?
Erin Sparks: 27:07 Yeah.
Jay Acunzo: 27:08 So whether you interview and everything you’re doing structurally happens on the fly or you’re doing post-production or somewhere in between, you need a plan. And so that’s the format, and then talent. And we’ll look at like, “Okay, who’s hosting and why? What are the benefits of different types of hosts? How do we ensure the host is resonating? And how do you then go deeper with all these three things over time to both build community and reinvent all three all the time because if it’s serialized, people get bored and it stagnates really quick. So you’ve got to reinvent.” So that’s the giant angle with which we look at the creation of a show.
Erin Sparks: 27:40 Right. But it’s interesting that you put talent on a third tier. Now is that the level of prioritization?
Jay Acunzo: 27:48 I like to say that it’s sort of like if you’re building a car, you could probably get down the road without a few key parts and then it will all break down, but there’s certain things you need just to start it, right? So let’s start… They’re all important in other words.
Erin Sparks: 28:03 Sure.
Jay Acunzo: 28:04 But order of operation is how we address it. But you cannot decouple them. So we start with the concept and we go to the format because the format is so often inspired by and informed by the concepts. Let me give you a quick example.
Erin Sparks: 28:18 Sure.
Jay Acunzo: 28:18 With Unthinkable, my first show, I was like, “Okay, I’m going to explore examples of work that seems counter the convention, seems crazy until you hear them explain it.” Then you’re like, “Oh, it’s from their context. That’s where they got this information. It makes sense for them, maybe not me.” What is the logical flow of experiencing that story, such that you want to keep listening and you kind of get it at the end? Well, it’s like the first thing I need is a cold open to tease you and convey why you should keep listening.
Jay Acunzo: 28:44 Then I need to introduce the concept. Then I need to introduce you to the protagonist of the show. And maybe the way I do that, given the nature of this concept is, “Okay, I need to say, here is the common thing that Erin was doing all the time. And here are all the best practices that he faced.” So you have this logical format that can unfold from the concept. So that’s why we start with those two things. And the last thing we do is we take the talent and say, you’re now going to fit into this apparatus. And I think last time I said, “You’re building an Iron Man suit. You’re Tony Stark and you’re not stepping into your Iron Man suit where you become a superhero who is better than Batman.”
Erin Sparks: 29:24 Wow. See how he snuck that one in there?
Jay Acunzo: 29:27 I’m a pop-culture… I’m a novice. I don’t get that stuff.
Erin Sparks: 29:31 Let’s go Mandalorian instead. Let’s just go Baby Yoda.
Jay Acunzo: 29:34 Hashtag Baby Yoda, you’re now viral. But what I’m saying is you build the apparatus first and you understand how that works and you tinker on it over time and then you find talent who can fit into and improve that apparatus and use it in ways that you never anticipated.
Erin Sparks: 29:48 Well, what you’re doing is structuring but you’re also finding the talent because if you start with talent first then they’re all over the bloody map and then you have that ego centric framework that ultimately burns out way too quickly. It’s not thought through and then you’re trying to actually structure around that and be able to do it. Inversely, it just doesn’t make sense because you need to be able to put the plan together that’s insightful and research oriented as opposed to somebody that’s got… They’re on fire for a particular passion project and they’re going to get burnt out.
Jay Acunzo: 30:23 Right. You’re picking off assumptions. You’re trying to get rid of the ones that are the most egregious assumptions first. So it’s like people want to show. What’s the show about? Okay, well people listen to that show. Okay. People will listen to the show. Great. Well, what’s our plan in the episode to make sure they stick around? The golden rule of this stuff is get them to the end. Do we have a plan for that? And another assumption is the host. And if you start with the host, like you said, they’re going to assume, “I’m an executive. I can just rant on a microphone. Or I can talk to the most-“
Erin Sparks: 30:48 All the high D’s. Yeah, exactly
Jay Acunzo: 30:50 Right. So you need all three: Concept, format, talent. Those are the foundations of a show.
Erin Sparks: 30:55 I get it. All right. So the foundation building aside, and I’m not marginalizing it. I mean literally getting into the root of the matter here is that you’re putting together the framework, you’re putting together the content, you’ve followed your best practices to get to a particular unique tease, a particular unique sound, a particular unique way of storytelling. But at the end of the day, you have to hold that audience’s attention. And this never gets a focus. And that’s why you’re doing 3 Clips to be able to unpack certain podcasts that are doing it well. So holding that audience’s attention in the society that we’re in, I mean, it goes back to how long is your podcast. I mean already, you’re going to be pushing a good deal of people away just because you’re not fitting their time mold or their time framework. But when you get down to it, we have such an ADD mindset of society. You’re fighting an endless battle to try to get them over those next three minutes or so. Give us some ideas of what the recipe is for holding attention?
Jay Acunzo: 32:08 Well, there’s certainly no recipe, but I do want to encourage people to think a little bit differently about how they approach it. It’s a little counterintuitive. But I like what you just said in this sort of ADD world we live in. I forget who said this. It might’ve been, I think Seth Godin who says that attention has been strip mined. Every which way somebody can try and sneak a few more seconds of your time, people are doing that. And so what we think has to happen now is we steer into that. We say, “Well, because people don’t pay attention to stuff, we need to do all our CTAs and housekeeping upfront because that justifies the marketing expense and that’s the sponsor, and that’s our message.” So front load it.
Jay Acunzo: 32:47 But actually what we’re doing precisely because people don’t have attention is we should flip that. And the most intriguing and tantalizing and delightful content needs to go first, because if they hit play, yes, there’s a couple of other controls like fast forward and jump back and forth, but it’s not like a book. It’s not like a blog post. You’re not really in control of the consumption as much as a podcast or a video series goes compared to text. So when they hit play, you have one job, which is make sure they don’t hit stop.
Jay Acunzo: 33:17 And there’s subtle things we can do. Like for example, the cadence that I just gave you that line in, I use a little bit of pausing. So this is me kind of like stepping to the side to analyze what I just did. Like I learned that first from some great mentors who correctly pointed out that I speak too quickly and they said, “Don’t try to slow down, just build in pauses.” Because if you have that pause, people snap back to attention. Sometimes they’re proactive because it’s like, “Oh this is important. And I like this is dramatic.” Sometimes it’s actually just reactive.
Erin Sparks: 33:49 Subconscious, yeah.
Jay Acunzo: 33:50 It’s like, “I’m washing the dishes. I’m washing the dishes and Erin paused. Wait a second, I thought I was listening to Erin. What happened? Oh, he’s building up to something.” So through no extra money and very little extra time, we can build in these things like how you speak, like what you open with, like the angle you take on a very familiar topic that makes it different and refreshing. No extra budget. And so the punchline here is we need to start viewing creativity as resourcefulness, not resources. So if you have five hours and 500 bucks to spend on your podcast this month, it’s how you spend that time and money that determines if it’s creative or not, not how much of it you have to spend.
Erin Sparks: 34:30 Well, you just sound like my dad there.
Jay Acunzo: 34:32 First time you interviewed me, I didn’t have the salt and pepper Dr. Strange side buttons going on here, and I am now a father. That wasn’t… So I fit the mold.
Erin Sparks: 34:43 Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Do you realize that you just actually broke that fourth meta?
Jay Acunzo: 34:48 Did I?
Erin Sparks: 34:49 You are actually deconstructing what you were saying on this show that’s actually deconstructing other shows. There it is.
Jay Acunzo: 34:58 All of this is a plea for me. I need a hobby.
Erin Sparks: 35:05 Yeah, we’re going to keep on doing this. We can do this all day long. Now, you’re absolutely right. What I meant by that is my father always told me it’s not about what you have, it’s how you spend it. If you’re going to buy a tool at Sears, right? You’re going to buy a craftsman because it’s going to be the best. Invest a little bit more money, but you’re going to get that longevity of that tool. Same thing applies to what you’re focusing on. If you have that fixed budget of time and money, you’ve got to not just follow the trend, not just get into those best practices and throw it to the wind because with those limited resources, you’re just not going to ever come to even a proximity of striking gold.
Erin Sparks: 35:47 So how do you break through the best practice mindset of a show practitioner, especially if they’ve been doing it a while because that’s a whole another hill of beans? Inceptualizing a brand new piece of content is going to be a heck of a lot easier on a ramp than somebody who’s been doing it for years and they think they’ve got it down.
Jay Acunzo: 36:08 Yeah. There’s some foundational lenses through which you can view this. And as you can tell, it’s one of my favorite words is lens. It’s like the way you think, the way you approach it, that goes a long way to any of the tactics you approach. But we get caught up in tactics first, which is an issue. So rather than talk about tactics on MSR for example, our educational philosophy is change the person, change the world, right? Like address the fact that this is chess, not checkers. There’s not three simple moves you can make to win. There’s infinite types of moves and ways to play, and there’s really no such thing as a definitive win necessarily in this in particular. So that’s the lens through which we view this. Let’s address the person in the way we teach. But then when you think about, like you said, if you have a show, if you are creating content, even if you don’t have a show, you just have a brand and a lot of rules and a lot of guidelines all that stuff.
Erin Sparks: 36:56 Absolutely.
Jay Acunzo: 36:57 Right now it’s about the kind of component pieces of it and breaking it down to be knowable and attainable. So when you make a decision based on your context. Your context is just three variables you need to explore first before you bring in any external impulse like an idea or a best practice. There’s you, the person or people doing the work, there’s the customer or the audience, but the person or people work is for sure. And then there’s your specific resources, which is your means to make that work happen, and looking at those three things first and combining those variables with some kind of best practice or a new idea that you might have, that makes it a lot easier to make good decisions faster. And so that’s like what my book is all about. And so I don’t want to belabor that stuff.
Erin Sparks: 37:42 Sure.
Jay Acunzo: 37:42 But with the show now we can look at, okay, you have a show, it’s EDGE of the Web. It’s a great show. 339 episodes. I mean, congratulations. That’s amazing.
Erin Sparks: 37:53 Thank you very much.
Jay Acunzo: 37:54 But how do you now make small and refreshing changes all the time?
Erin Sparks: 37:59 Absolutely.
Jay Acunzo: 38:00 Don’t pull big stunts, but what are the little things you tweak? And a show forces you to think about that because it’s the time. It’s the runtime, it’s the episodes, it’s the seasons, but there’s only finite things you can do. You can do things like remix something which is just combined new elements. You can refine something which is whittle it down or get rid of it. So we go through this system of these, like we call them the 5Rs, which are five small and refreshing changes you can make. And all you do is you take a trait of the show kind of think, “Okay, people latch onto this.” What is one of the five changes we can make to this like remixing it or like refining it. Repurposing it is another one. You move from hosting a show and audio to video, but there’s all these tiny changes we can make and the goal isn’t to make one, the goal is to make a lot of them all the time that are small so you keep exceeding expectations over time.
Erin Sparks: 38:51 There you go. That’s awesome man. It’s much more palatable, it’s much more easy to digest those as opposed to extreme changes. I’m sure you come across that every once in awhile. To another degree people can actually be, if they’re doing show production, they can actually get too creative. They can go over their skis and think they are that next Seth Godin for example. It’s like you need to tone it back a little bit because you’re not there yet. Those are probably some major conversations or at least some frank conversations that you need to have. Yeah?
Jay Acunzo: 39:28 Yes. I want marketers to be more ambitious about what they aspire to create. Now, when you aspire to create it, you have that vision of down the road, right?
Erin Sparks: 39:38 Right.
Jay Acunzo: 39:38 And I like to say that a showrunner has two things that they need to use daily, that they also need to let others in on, which is vision and process. So the vision to say something that matters, to shift the culture, to do something that resonates and process to make it happen. So in very practical terms, it’s like aspire to something akin to your heroes or that your mind’s eye is telling you, “We should make it. Wouldn’t it be great if?”
Erin Sparks: 40:02 Right.
Jay Acunzo: 40:03 And then move forward little bits of the way every day. It’s this weird decoupling of the two that gets us into trouble because now we’re like, “I want to be Seth Godin. I want to be Ira Glass. I want to be Jad Abumrad.” So now I’m a cheap artifice and people hate it because I think I’m ready or we can only move forward bit by bit. We could never create something like that. And it’s like, yes, today, right? So don’t let the bigness paralyze you, just like you don’t let the bias to act dilute what you do, aspire to something great but make little bits of progress all the time towards that.
Erin Sparks: 40:37 And that’s how they got where they are. So they didn’t execute huge leaps and bounds. You actually use a euphemism regularly, aspirational anchor in the book, and these are what we’re talking about right here, and those aspirational anchors can be small points that you actually start building content, building different changes towards. And once you get those continually, that’s a discipline. It’s not one and done. It’s you always have to anchor yourself. Just like you’re climbing a mountain. You’re setting that piton each and every way you’re going up there, and you’re accomplishing it. So don’t get eclipsed by the brands that you see out there and the incredible content that’s out there. Make those small steps to be able to increase your content as frequently as you can. Yes?
Jay Acunzo: 41:29 Right. A hundred percent. When you think about goals, you think about mile marker or kilometer marker for our non-US friends down the road. You’re like it’s what we need to do or where we need to get to. Unfortunately, the goals we articulate incentivize us to do the safe thing because we’re scared of not reaching them. So the goals sound like increase listeners 50% month over month for our podcast. A far better aspirational anchor would sound like, let’s show the world how fun and relevant we can be through our show. How will we measure that? Well, we might be measuring the size of the audience, but also the passionate qualitative responses. There’s different ways to measure a goal, right?
Erin Sparks: 42:10 Yup.
Jay Acunzo: 42:10 And so when you say it that way, let’s show the world how fun and relevant we really are. What you’re focused on isn’t some point in a distance. You’re focused on what behavior changes do we need to make now such that we do better work and see better results? Well, if we’re trying to show the world how fun and relevant we are, why are we putting all the boring housekeeping first. Let’s start stronger. Or hey, “Bill, you’re hosting our podcast, your salary, you’re hosting the show. You’re kind of not yourself. You’re trying to fit the mold of somebody who sounds bored or are too stuffy.” You’re fun. You’re funny. Be that. So when we focus on the behavior change we need, which often stems from some kind of dissatisfaction we have today, now our goals are better reached, and I call the statement of that behavior change, the aspirational anchor, let’s show the world how fun and relevant we need to be as one example.
Erin Sparks: 43:01 Very good. You’re sounding much more like a lifestyle coach. You realize that? So just plug in-
Jay Acunzo: 43:07 Change the person, change the world, right? Change the work. Brands are constructs. Companies are constructs. We’re talking about here is the behavior of people and everything else stems from that.
Erin Sparks: 43:20 Excellent. All right. Well there’s a couple of other questions I do want to ask you as we kind of go through this submarine or in the cars of this train. I asked you about possibly getting over your skis and creative talent. Well, how much… Maybe a softball for you. How much time can you spend on the details of a show before it starts turning into diminishing returns? Because we were talking about climbing up, making small tweaks continually. Well, I mean, I’m sure you have the answer, but when do you go too far that?
Jay Acunzo: 43:57 This is where one of the most important skills we aren’t talking about enough comes in. We’ve heard the word empathy before and I think there’s great books out there on empathy, both in marketing and outside of marketing, but one of the exercises of an empathetic person I think is, especially with a podcast or a video show, consume your own work. Not to just pat yourself on the back, but kudos because you made a thing and that’s remarkable. But also because it’s like an athlete’s version of game tape. It’s your ability to understand, “I’m getting bored of this or ooh, I really didn’t ask that question.”
Erin Sparks: 44:31 Yep.
Jay Acunzo: 44:32 One of the transformative things for my interview skills was I like to ask, or I used to, I’m trying to get better at it, three or four sub-questions in a row instead of just the one piercing question, and I got-
Erin Sparks: 44:42 Got it. I resemble that remark. This is therapy, guys. I mean, honestly. All right, keep on going.
Jay Acunzo: 44:48 So what I realized is, wait a second, when you finish talking and I’m interviewing you on my show, Erin, I have three responses. I can disagree because that helps clarify your point and that’s good tape, and disagreement is good. Not being a jerk about it, but disagreeing and trying to clarify. I can build on top of what you said. Oh, that reminds me of this story or this point or data point or whatever. Or just asking the next question. Just move on. And if you listen to really great interviewers and famous interviewers, you’ll notice they have more moments than the average person where they don’t try to make it quite like a conversation.
Jay Acunzo: 45:27 It feels like it because they’re so natural, but really what they’re doing oftentimes is they just let you answer, then they ask a question on the backend, which seems kind of staccato and rough, but in the flow of an interview, you as the listener or viewer, you’re just on to the interestingness. So you don’t even notice that it’s a little bit of a weird person to person interaction. It’s better service to the audience. So I never would have picked up on that and also be able to teach it unless every single thing I’ve ever published, I’m like, “It’s game tape. I better consume it.” So that’s a way to see if something is growing stale.
Erin Sparks: 45:58 And from a self awareness standpoint, I mean it is holding a mirror up to yourself and would you actually enjoy this all the way through? And not only the small points is all right, let’s look at the entire framework. Again, what we’re doing sounds great as we’re doing it, but on reflection that’s also why you have to also come back around to your audience and ask your audience, not only yourself, because they, if they’re loyalists can give you some really true feedback on what you’re doing. Yeah?
Jay Acunzo: 46:26 Absolutely. There’s something… If it’s not an acronym for some reason we don’t take it seriously in marketing land. So I made up this acronym, let’s call it URR. It stands for unsolicited response rate. If you publish a given number, 45-minute episode of something and you talk to some visionary in your space and you felt like you killed it as an interviewer, you got such good material, they’ve never heard it before and you’re so excited, and you don’t actually hear any original comments, and nobody responds to it, and nobody is putting both time and reputation out on the line to say, I don’t know, on LinkedIn, “Hey, Erin is killing it with EDGE of the Web. I love listening every week.”
Jay Acunzo: 47:05 You’re putting your time and your reputation out there as a viewer. If no one is doing that, chances are you probably didn’t do as good a job as you thought. And so we can use these qualitative signal a lot better to go deeper with the audience, to craft a better show and also to supplement the kind of traditional metrics that some power that be might actually be asking for. So I call that URR. It’s like can you follow the qualitative feedback towards a deeper relationship and look at the friction it took them to do whatever that comment was like a retweet is far less valuable than a phone call with you. I mean there’s a degradation in between and you can just put a nice little point system on that and see am I developing actual deep relationships through the show? Because that’s what a show is for, right? So ask what a show is for. It’s for deep relationships, for depth, resonance, time spent, all these beautiful things that we don’t get enough as marketers. So you need to also measure that accordingly.
Erin Sparks: 48:01 Very good. URR. You’ve been using this for a while though, haven’t you?
Jay Acunzo: 48:06 I use it with my team. They probably can’t stand the fact that I brought it up externally. I’m sure I wrote one blog post a while ago about it and people were like, “Yeah, whatever. Crazy. We’re going to get back to our real metrics.”
Erin Sparks: 48:17 Oh, but I mean, honestly that is the litmus test. If you’re not being champion… And that’s a very, very insightful point. If they’re actually… If your audience is not getting past their own friction to be able to comment and communicate back to you, boy, there’s a challenge there and you have to do a little bit of introspective analysis to see, “All right. Are we really delivering the content that our consumers are looking to consume? All right. So last point I wanted to ask you… And I really appreciate your time today. We’ve dug into a lot of key things that you offer up show creators, and we really appreciate that. The fear of failure is still in content creation space will always be there.
Erin Sparks: 49:04 You bring forth first principle instinct, or insight I should say as you guide your own content, and it’s almost like this heart or this anchor point that you have. How do you help people realize that they’re actually failing in particular content or help them get past a particular fear, a fear of change, for example? So we’re talking about introspection, we’re talking about self-reflection, how do you get them past that to be able to use it constructively?
Jay Acunzo: 49:39 Okay. So part of this has to do with breaking down what creativity or innovation, however you want to term it, really is. We like to think it’s like creating something from nothing. But the problem with that interpretation is we’re never starting from the point of nothing. There’s always a preconceived notion, always a status quo. Even if the project itself didn’t exist before, you’re introducing it to a backdrop. So it’s not nothing. So now it’s okay, do something different than the status quo. But it can’t just be different. Because as you hinted at earlier, and I’ve said this on my show before, Erin, as a podcaster, I could just be quiet for five straight minutes, and I’m different, right?
Erin Sparks: 50:15 Absolutely.
Jay Acunzo: 50:15 But do you want that different?
Erin Sparks: 50:17 Right.
Jay Acunzo: 50:17 So it’s not just being different, it’s being different and good or different and welcome. I call that refreshing. And to do something that consistently exceeds expectations, you have to be refreshing consistently. You have to always make small changes to the status quo constantly. So I say that creativity is making refreshing changes on the status quo. And the way that happens is in the micro, it’s in the minutiae. It’s the day to day, my voice is not quite there. I feel bored. So tomorrow I’m going to show up and I’m going to improve upon the way I sound when I open my show. That’s it. Just open. That’s all. I want to sound more excited.
Erin Sparks: 50:50 Got it.
Jay Acunzo: 50:51 It’s doing a little segment here that you haven’t tried before and that you’ve never heard anyone try. I call these wrinkles. That’s what creativity really should be. It’s just focusing on little wrinkles all the time because everything we do is in some ways consistent. No good thing ever came from one random stunt. I call those random acts of creativity. That’s not what creativity is. It’s showing up all the time and getting better all the time. So the way we help people get over fear is to look that in the eye, is to redefine what it actually is to do this work, and it’s to say to them, you’re scared of not being great. Right? That’s the inverse. The way we’re saying it, failure is not being great. Okay. Guess what? You don’t get to decide if you’re great. That’s not a word that exists when you’re the creator of the work. The audience decides if you’re great.
Jay Acunzo: 51:35 And so since you can’t actually do anything about that, what can you actually control? Well, great doesn’t exist, but you know it does is better. So every day just focus on getting better. And the first version, no matter how good you start will be the worst version of the thing. So if all this is, is a constant betterment process, constant process of improvement, and all you can control is making small wrinkles all the time, you better just start right now because all you’re doing when you delay for fear of failure is you’re pushing out the inevitable, which is the improvement process. And if you have the reps that you delayed back, you’d be better in six weeks. So just start today.
Erin Sparks: 52:14 Again, you’re a life coach, not a podcast coach. Change the person, change the content. Fantastic. We really appreciate that insight because that actually blows away any hesitation, any type of reluctancy. It’s not about the fear of failure, you break it down to a granular aspect and it’s small steps. The analogy, the path of a thousand miles starts with one step or something like that. Anyway…
Jay Acunzo: 52:49 A hundred percent.
Erin Sparks: 52:49 Sure why not. All right. Well, Jay, we really appreciate the time today. This was very enlightening for us as well. And I catch myself even asking those types of questions on a regular basis and I appreciate any type of feedback that you can give us after the show as well.
Jay Acunzo: 53:06 Sure.
Erin Sparks: 53:06 Maybe a little bit of free therapy from Jay. So I do want to wrap up the show by asking you, because you do have a particularly unique space in content creation. What excites you about your industry right now?
Jay Acunzo: 53:21 Oh my goodness. I mean so much because when people clear away of the conventional wisdom, when they get back to those first principles, it’s like eyes are open and the possibilities return. And so I think we’re seeing the pendulum swing back towards favoring brand affinity instead of pure awareness, creative instead of programmatic. It’s always a portfolio approach. But look, I think the thing that excites me the most about this whole show running thing is when your job is to grab attention and that’s how you interpret marketing, it does reward a lot of bad actors, a lot of hucksters and tricksters and tactics that gets you in front of people for a few seconds.
Jay Acunzo: 53:58 But if you really understand marketing as holding attention, in other words, if you stop focusing on who arrives and you just serve who stays because that’s where the results come from, there’s only one, and I use giant air quotes here, tactic that works, and that’s to provide a genuinely good experience for the audience. You just can’t trick people into investing 20, 30, 60 minutes with you, let alone the repeat visiting of a show or a newsletter or anything really.
Jay Acunzo: 54:25 So I think we’re living through this era where now a lot of the bad actors are starting to wash away and who will be left are the people that really dug in underneath the fundamentals, the people that know that the better experience is going to drive better results. And so let’s get back to those basics and serving the audience more deeply instead of sprint around like crazy, and I don’t know, try to trick our way into people’s worlds. So a lot excites me.
Erin Sparks: 54:51 Less is more in dedicated space and focus is much better than trying to go a mile wide and an inch deep. Yeah?
Jay Acunzo: 55:00 I like to say that this is about resonance not reach, and if you’re searching for reach, look at what’s better served is having that foundation of resonance first, and on top of that. Sure. Maybe you grow. But let’s get back to the what this really is, which is it’s the people who stay that matter most.
Erin Sparks: 55:16 Absolutely. Well, we already answered at what bugs you about the industry. Obviously, it’s those attention grabbers that don’t have that depth and they’re trying to charlatanize everything, if that’s an actual word. So with that said, can you give us a final thought to those aspirational showrunners that want to jump in there and wanting to be able to create that content?
Jay Acunzo: 55:42 Yes, a couple things. So one is… There are three basic vectors of success you want to have. You want to have a show that’s able to continually reinvent itself. You want to have the measurement in place to measure depth, not breadth, and then you want to have the continuation of a relationship with your audience. And those are three things that seem so hairy and complex compared to, I don’t know, here’s six steps to go through. So the thing I would say, given the fact that the three most important things sound complicated is just acknowledged, this is chess, not checkers. So we need to start making chess accessible, but we need to also get away from the fact that is a silver bullet.
Jay Acunzo: 56:24 There is no magic solution. There is not one way of doing this. And so the onus goes back onto you, the individual watching to the marketer. And I think marketing is better when we feel like we’re on the hook instead of some guru or silver bullet that lets us off the hook. So just walk in eyes wide open to what this actually is. It’s hard but meaningful. Let’s try and figure out how to do more hard, but meaningful things.
Erin Sparks: 56:47 You’re going to find more more value in all these creations if you actually stopped trying to spin it and actually do the hard work. Fantastic. Fantastic concepts. Jay, we want to promote 3 Clips. We certainly want our audience to be able to subscribe to 3 Clips as well as the other two podcasts, I Made It as well as Unthinkable. Anything else that you want to promote on the show today?
Jay Acunzo: 57:14 Really keeping it simple. Marketing showrunners.com/podcast.
Erin Sparks: 57:17 There you go. Very good. All right. Well, we certainly want our listeners to go check out the news portion. The other podcasts, the bonus podcast of the show. We appreciate Jay’s insight into the news of the week as well. Jay, we thank you so much for your time today. We want to make sure that everybody follows you on Twitter. Jay Acunzo, LinkedIn, Jay Acunzo and Instagram Jay Acunzo as well as M ShowRunners. That’s the Instagram for Marketing Showrunner?
Jay Acunzo: 57:44 It’s Twitter.
Erin Sparks: 57:45 Twitter. Got it, got it, got it. Okay. Well, man, third time’s the charm. I think we had-
Jay Acunzo: 57:51 It’s great.
Erin Sparks: 57:51 I think we hit a goal, a hit the brass ring on this one. We certainly appreciate your time. Maybe we can get you back on a fourth down the road. How about that?
Jay Acunzo: 57:59 Count me in, Erin. You’re doing something incredible here as someone who love spending time with marketing and branded shows like this. 339 again, no small achievement. So hats off to you, my friend.
Erin Sparks: 58:08 I appreciate it, sir. Thank you so much. We want to make sure that you guys… Listen, our audience, do not run with a herd. Take Jay’s advice and think about what you’re doing and create that very, very insightful content. All right. Don’t forget to like and subscribe to our YouTube channel as well as our podcasts. If we’re not there on your podcast platform, let us know and we’ll certainly get the feed out there. And if you’re feeling up to it, especially this show, drop us over a few and let us know how we did on the show. We certainly appreciate your feedback and just like we’re talking about, this is our game tape that we want to hear from you. So let us know how we’re doing.
Erin Sparks: 58:46 Be sure to check out all the must see information over at edgeofthewebradio.com. There’s videos, audio, transcripts, and blog posts about this show that we’ve done over at edgeofthewebradio.com. We’ll talk to you real soon. We’re going to be talking to Dawn Anderson of Bertie on the 27th at noon. So we want to make sure that you pay attention to that. Anything else for the good of the show? I don’t think so. All right. Do not be a piece of cyber driftwood. We’ll talk to you next week and see you at SMX. Bye-bye. [...]
January 24, 2020
- Better Marketing Shows with Jay Acunzo of Marketing ShowrunnersInterviewIt’s all too easy in today’s fast-paced digital marketing environment to lose site of the distinction between marketing and advertising, to get wrapped up in the latest developments at Google, to focus on metrics and measures instead of the core goals they’re meant to quantify. Our special guest for episode 339 of the award-winning EDGE of the Web podcast was Jay Acunzo, Founder of Marketing Showrunners. Host Erin Sparks spoke with Jay about how to keep your eye on the real prize in marketing. Here’s what we learned:
00:40:37
The Need for Aspirational Anchors
Aspirational anchors are like goals but different. When you think about goals, you think about mile markers or kilometer markers down the road. They represent what you need to do or where you need to get to. Unfortunately, the goals articulated tend to incentivize you to do the safe thing because you’re scared of not reaching them. So the goals sound like increase listeners 50% month over month for your podcast. A far better aspirational anchor would sound like, “Let’s show the world how fun and relevant we can be through our show.” How will you measure that? Well, one way might be measuring the size of the audience, but maybe also the passionate qualitative responses.
When you have an aspirational anchor like that, what you’re focused on isn’t some point in the distance. You’re focused on what behavior changes do you need to make now such that you do better work and see better results? And in comes some of the resourceful creativity mentioned earlier. Aspirational anchors are about behavioral changes to improve the quality and effectiveness of the show.
00:43:20
Honing Your Content and Your Show
How do you know if your continuous improvement efforts on a show go too far? Another way of putting this is at what point do you recognize when your changes are showing diminishing returns? Jay’s take on this is about being empathetic, and to do that you really have to make sure you consume your own content! And you do this not to just pat yourself on the back for a job well done, but to use in the same way athletes what “game tape” to analyze their performance and spot areas for improvement.
For example, when doing interviews you have to really look at what you’re doing. When the guest finished speaking, what do you as the interviewer do? There are three basic responses: 1) You can disagree with the guest because it’s an opportunity to clarify a point, and disagreement makes for good tape as long as you’re not a jerk about it. 2) You can take a moment to build upon what the guest said, or 3) You can just ask the next question. The first two responses result in interviews that are more like conversations. But if you look at people who are really good at interviewing, the most often go for response #3 and generally minimize the conversational responses. The only way to make realizations like this is by consuming your own content.
Holding the mirror up to your own content can be a little painful sometimes, but it’s worth it. For example, what’s your URR – unsolicited response rate. If your content is really good, there ought to be people out there who are independently praising it and lifting it up. Is your content spurring people to promote it? If not, then you might not be doing as good a job as you think you’re doing, and there’s learning and improving to be done.
Focus on the reason for a marketer to do a show in the first place. The purpose is to develop deeper relationships with people. And if your show isn’t doing that, then it’s not as good as you think it is. It’s about depth, resonance, quality time spent, and so on, and you need to measuring those aspects of a show to get at its true effectiveness. If your audience can’t overcome the friction to make an unsolicited response to your content, then you’re missing the mark.
It also means gaining a deeper understanding of creativity and innovation. Some people think it’s just being different, but it’s more than that. You could be different by having five minutes of silence in the middle of your podcast, but people aren’t going to want that kind of difference. You want to be different and good or different and welcome. When you get different combined with the right elements, this is what Jay calls refreshing, and that’s what you should be aiming for. If you’re consistently refreshing then you’ll exceed people’s expectations and find success. It means constantly making small changes to the status quo to find what will work for you, and then change it up again before it goes stale. Constant small, incremental changes in the day-to-day minutiae is the way to get there. Jay calls these “wrinkles” and constantly creating these wrinkles is essential to creativity.
Whether or not your show is great is not a judgement you can make as the show’s creator. That’s up to the audience to decide. What show creators can focus on is getting better through those constant wrinkles to the status quo. Fear of failure sometimes keeps people from engaging in the constant improvement process, which just guarantees failure. And when you focus on these small changes and wrinkles, they’re less daunting and shouldn’t generate that fear of failure.
Connect with Jay Acunzo and Marketing Showrunners (MSR)
Twitter: @jayacunzo (https://twitter.com/jayacunzo)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayacunzo
Instagram: @jacunzo (https://www.instagram.com/jacunzo)
MSR web: https://www.marketingshowrunners.com
MSR Twitter: @MShowrunners (https://twitter.com/mshowrunners)
MSR’s 3 Clips podcast: http://bit.ly/2NKwaPU
What’s Your Baseline Digital Marketing ROI?
If you want a baseline understanding of your digital marketing ROI, then find out with a Site Strategics report examining your SEO, content, social media, and PPC. Visit https://edgeofthewebradio.com/roi to get 30% off a comprehensive review of your digital assets!
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January 24, 2020
- Digital Marketing News Roundup with Jay AcunzoNewsKeeping up with the latest digital marketing headlines is a daunting task for anyone, which is why we include a news roundup segment in each episode of the EDGE. The latest features host Erin Sparks and Creative Studio Producer Jacob Mann along with special guest Jay Acunzo, Founder of Marketing Showrunners. Here’s the news roundup from Episode 339 of the award-winning EDGE of the Web podcast:
00:01:09
Google Kills the Cookie, Leaving Digital Media Companies Craving a New Way Forward
From Ronan Shields on AdWeek we learn that Google Kills the Cookie, Leaving Digital Media Companies Craving a New Way Forward. The industry is racing against a 2-year countdown to figure out new ways to target audiences online in Chrome.
Erin Sparks: People are kind of still reeling from this Google announcement about killing the cookie, and by that we mean third-party cookies, which is how digital marketers build retargeting audiences consisting of people who visit websites. What’s your reaction to this, Jay?
Jay Acunzo: My first job out of college was at Google Adwords, and I didn’t like that job at all. But as far as this news piece, a big part of the issue here is behavioral versus contextual marketing. I think we need to shift towards contextual marketing, not behavioral. The online retargeting tactics feel creepy and invasive. Can you imagine if something similar happened in the real world? You walk into a store and they already know what you want to buy, and then follow you around after you leave? It’s a form of advertising, and advertising is different from marketing. It’s a subset of marketing. Advertisers do things that aren’t good marketing. But to make a long story short, I am totally in favor of this move by Google.
Erin Sparks: But even a lot of good marketing outfits are very dependent on these tracking components, so they’re understandably upset about it.
Jacy Acunzo: Yes, but we’ve also built up this myth that these giant companies like Google and Facebook are something more noble than they are. They are companies out to make as much money as they can. So my advice to people interested in marketing (not advertising) is this: By all means use those platforms to make your brand discoverable, but always drive those people to a channel you own because those giant companies and their platforms aren’t about you, they’re about themselves. If you’re interested in real marketing, you should be thinking about building things on platforms you own.
00:07:23
The latest data on the January 2020 Google core update
According to Barry Schwartz on Search Engine Land, here is The latest data on the January 2020 Google core update. Now that the Google January 2020 core update is mostly rolled out, we have asked several data providers to send us what they found with this Google search update. All of the data providers agree that this core update was a big one and impacted a large number of web sites.
Erin Sparks: By all accounts this core update saw some explosive volatility in visibility for lots of different websites. Anyone involved in SEO really should be watching this data and expert opinions in order to understand the impacts on their work and clients.
Jay Acunzo: I literally spend 100% of my time on marketing, on creating great content and experiences. You just have to keep in mind that Google and these other big people are essentially frenemies, meaning sometimes they will do things that are good for you and other times they will do things that aren’t good for you, because they’re selfish t their core. People waste far too much time on the specifics of what one channel like Google is doing than focusing on their customers and being effective marketers. In short, if you pay more attention to your customers than to the industry, then your customers will pay more attention to you. The danger here is Goodhart’s Law, which states that when a measure becomes the goal, then it is no longer a good measure. When you start obsessing with metrics, then you’re losing sight of the goal. Growing search traffic by X percent or increasing your email list by Y percent is NOT the goal. Those are measures of the goal. The goal is to create an effective, engaging website, or create a newsletter that’s so good more and more people want to open it and read it on a regular basis. It’s very easy to get sidetracked by these things instead of focusing on what’s important and foundational. The people who are focused on the core work don’t panic around core updates and so on. And so for the people who do panic about them, you have to questions whether or not they’ve lost their focus on what’s truly important.
00:13:33
Spotify introduces game-changing ad technology for podcasts
On Impact, John Becker reports on how Spotify introduces game-changing ad technology for podcasts. This month, Spotify announced a new approach to its podcast marketing technology. The proprietary “streaming ad insertion” (SAI) allows Spotify’s sponsors to deliver targeted ads to podcast listeners through the use of real-time data analysis.
Erin Sparks: The podcast industry and its platforms have needed this for quite some time, so this is a great development.
Jay Acunzo: My initial impulse because of my focus on good content and marketing as opposed to advertising is to say that as these platforms embrace new technologies, I’d rather see podcasters focus more on sponsorship than flat-out advertising. Advertising rewards the transaction of the audience. If podcasters start focusing too much on what content will work for any given advertiser, it becomes a race to the bottom of the pyramid, to the lowest common denominator. Quality podcasting is about going deep to resonate with an audience, not just achieve reach. And as soon as you bring in something that rewards reach, you run the risk of watering down the content. If handled well, this new technology will hopefully allow the good actors to more effectively monetize their podcast content without sacrificing it quality. Advertising rewards extremism and sensationalism because it’s about what’s going to get the most eyeballs on something.
Connect with Jay Acunzo and Marketing Showrunners (MSR)
Twitter: @jayacunzo (https://twitter.com/jayacunzo)
LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jayacunzo
Instagram: @jacunzo (https://www.instagram.com/jacunzo)
MSR web: https://www.marketingshowrunners.com
MSR Twitter: @MShowrunners (https://twitter.com/mshowrunners)
MSR’s 3 Clips podcast: http://bit.ly/2NKwaPU
Read All About It in the EDGE Newsletter
You could be enjoying the latest digital marketing news delivered directly to your inbox! All you have to do is go to EDGEofthewebradio.com and you’ll see the subscribe box at the very top of the page. It’s free-of-charge, and we will never use your email for anything except sending you the newsletter. You can also sign up by texting the word “EDGETalk” to 22828, but not while you’re driving! Enjoy these digital nuggets of gold from the EDGE – your source for digital marketing news. [...]
January 24, 2020
- EP 289: Break the Wheel & Question Best Practices w/Jay AcunzopodcastThe marketing world is filled with advice and ideas from “thought leaders” but just because an “expert” says or writes something, that doesn’t mean we should do it.
Focusing on best practices from the experts could actually be harming your business and you don’t even know it.
Jay Acunzo, the founder of Unthinkable Media, says in his new book “Breaking the Wheel” says that what we should do instead is to act more like investigators and do what works best for our own companies.
This podcast will share some of the questions you should ask in any situation to make the best decision, regardless of what the “experts” say.
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Visit https://edgeofthewebradio.com/roi/ to get 30% off your comprehensive review of your digital assets!
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Download our show today or subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, or Stitcher! And now we’re on Spotify! [...]
October 31, 2018
- EP 246: Tips for Starting a Podcast w/Jay AcunzoInterview / podcastPodcasting is becoming the newest trend in content marketing and we wanted to talk to the host of one of our favorite podcasts, the Unthinkable podcast with Jay Acunzo.
Jay was a former digital media strategist at Google before joining HubSpot as the head of content and has now become an accomplished keynote speaker and award-winning podcast host.
We wanted to pick Jay’s brain to learn what tips he could give to someone who is starting a new podcast and find out how podcasters can take their show to the next level.
Join us this week for our fun conversation with Jay Acunzo!
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Download our show today or subscribe to our show on iTunes, Google Play, SoundCloud, TuneIn, iHeartRadio, or Stitcher! [...]
November 7, 2017
