Lean from a $4 Billion Dollar Direct Marketer Ron Lynch who put GoPro on the Map!
Episode 10 of Chatbots and Digital Marketing we are joined by Ron Lynch of Big Baby Agency. Ron has quite the background in the short and long form direct sales and marketing space.
Ron Lynch is a unique creative force in the marketing industry. A background in retail operations, filmmaking, and product design made him naturally take to making infomercials in the early 2000s. He worked early on with brands like SpaceBag, American Tourister and Orange Glo to develop direct response short-form spots that sold millions.
In the long form space, Ron’s first infomercials were The Ultimate Chopper (80MM), The FlavorWave Deluxe Oven (100+MM), The Total Trolley Ladder (80MM), SmartWare (80MM) and Light Relief (Over 100MM). That would be pretty good for an entire career. These were actually his first five long-form infomercials in order. As of 2014 he has written, directed and executive produced over 90 long form commercials and 300 traditional short form television ads. He has won numerous Telly’s and ERA awards including “Best Infomercial of the Year” and “Best Hardware Infomercial of the Year” for Total Trolley.
In the past 7 years, his strategic outlines have helped guide product launches for Rug Doctor, Eagle One, AeroGarden, Silk’n Beauty, Tanda Me, Robin McGraw Revelation, BackJoy and everybody’s favorite GoPro. His work has included new individual product launches for corporations like The Hunter Fan Co., Valvoline, Johnson & Johnson and The S.C.Johnson Family of products. He has helped entrepreneurs and Fortune 500 companies alike build brands through direct sales via television and the web.
Ron currently consults for a variety of consumer companies, does success coaching for elite marketers and frequently speaks at Universities as an expert in the Direct Response field. Additionally, he is an accomplished author and screenwriter.
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Karl Schuckert: 00:00 What is up chatbots and digital marketing podcast listeners. This is Karl Schuckert with another fantastic interview on our podcast. And guess what? I’ve got a good friend and monster marketer literally a genius at what he does, bringing companies to fruition with the products that solve massive problems and have mass appeal for most people. In fact, some of the products that he’s brought on, I’m sure you actually own some of them. I know I do, and I’m pretty, I’m going to bet that most of you, 80% of our listeners actually own some of these products. So I actually got the, uh, the opportunity to meet Ron Lynch a few years ago, a couple of years ago, because I was hosting an event in Austin, Texas called Zero2Scale LIVE a great event. It was an e-commerce slash online marketing event. In fact, even a lot of our people that were in the room were actually just crushing it.
Karl Schuckert: 00:56 Everybody there was crushing. It was a great event. And Ron, who was, he was great. He talked about how he could, he brought GoPro a to life. And also he’s saying a Jon Bon Jovi Song at the end of his speech, which was awesome. He was like, you know what, before I go! Shot through the heart and your two leg baby, you give love a bad name. Anyway, he’s saying it way better than I did. Uh, so I want to bring Ron on here live and actually before I do because I pre-recorded this just like you probably should when you’re doing podcasts. Uh, for some odd reason, part of the first part didn’t get recorded. Uh, so I actually, I’m going to improvise and I’m going to Redo my introduction for him. That way you guys know exactly who Ron is before I bring them out. And then I’m also going to let you know kind of what the little piece that you missed.
Karl Schuckert: 01:48 It’s, not bad cause there’s only just a couple. It was like less than a half a minute. Okay. So let me tell you a little bit about Ron. Ron is the creative director and strategist for Big Baby Agency and Ron Lynch is a unique creative force in the marketing industry and it has a background in retail operations, filmmaking, product design made him not a naturally take to making infomercials in the early two thousand. He worked early on, uh, on with brands like space bag, American Tourist and orange glow to develop direct response, short-form spots that sold millions of dollars in the long form space. Ron’s first infomercials were the ultimate chopper, $80 million, the flavor wave deluxe oven over a hundred million dollars plus the total trolley ladder over 80 million in sales. The smart wave 80 million in sales. The light reef did over a hundred million dollars in sales, uh, and that would be pretty good for an entire career.
Karl Schuckert: 02:57 These were actually his first five long infomercials in that exact order. And as of 2014 he has written, directed, and as an executive produced over nine long-form commercials and 300 traditional short term television ads. He has won numerous Telly and ERA awards including best infomercial of the year. And best hardware infomercial of the year for the total trolley. And in the past seven years, his strategic outlines have helped guide product launches for the rug. Doctor Eagle one Arrow, Arrow Garden silken beauty, tandem me, Robin McGraw, revelation BackJoy, and everybody’s favorite GoPro. His work has included new individual products, launches for corporations like the Hunter Fan Company, Valvoline, Johnson and Johnson and the SC Johnson family of products. He has helped entrepreneurs and fortune 500 companies alike build brands through direct sales, via television and the web. Ron currently consults with a variety of consumer companies, does successful coaching for elite marketers and frequently speaks at universities as an expert in the direct response filled.
Karl Schuckert: 04:19 Additionally, he is an accomplished author and screenwriter. All right guys. So what, I’m going to go ahead and do. I’m going to bring Ron on right now. There was a little part that, uh, actually didn’t get picked up on the recording, so I’m just going to kind of improvise and fill you in. The question that I asked Ron here was, you know, you had a lot of success in the beginning. He had five literally knocked out of the park successes and I asked him was it always like that? And I asked him that, you know, like a lot of people usually struggle when they start. What were some of the things that got him in the position to where he could be successful? Uh, one of the things that he talked about was that he came from the retail space and for 10 years he was literally the infomercial guy. He was the guy that was doing product demonstrations. He would, he learned really well how to demonstrate and sell products, kind of like live face to face with people. And because of that, it gave him a lot of insight. Anyway, without further ado, I’m going to go ahead and hand it back over to Ron and then at that point you guys will be able to just see where we’re at the inside of this podcast. So let’s hop on over there. Now,
Ron Lynch: 05:32 there wasn’t no aggressive, maybe 10% of our orders came from the Internet. People weren’t comfortable putting their credit card online. People weren’t comfortable really navigating the Internet like they are now. And I know that sounds like forever ago. You don’t, you know, it was I guess, but so my first couple of infomercials, you know, I think you rattled off six there that was like out of the park, out of the park, out of the park, out of the park. And then I had a streak where I had four or where nothing works as nothing worked and these are not cheap shows to make. And you have this expectation like, oh, this is the guy who hits it out of the park and then suddenly you’re bunting and getting first base hits and things aren’t working and you kind of really reevaluate. Am I really? Was I just lucky or am I good at this or, and so I, I certainly had my moments of doubt along the way. And I think one of the things that I learned from that was quit making it about my sign up for really good products. That’s the easiest way to win in business is to sign up for really good products that really help customers that they don’t know anything about. And you’re just the person that tells them about it and that that’s the simple formula to success.
Karl Schuckert: 06:47 That’s a very simple formula for sure. And there’s definitely a good story there. So I mean it sounds like for a good 10 years you’ve got your sort of your field manual of like presenting people as you learn by trial and error there. Like how to present a product where it’s, you lie, it’s like a live show, live play that you have to present every day demonstrating the product, its benefits, and features and having people to use it. And it’s very live and interactive, which gives you a lot of insight about how people think and react to things when you when you speak it. So that’s a really good key is getting the experience of that is as a salesperson or a marketer. The second thing that I really caught on there was, um, uh, you know, you had some home runs pretty quick and those were massive success, but then you probably got caught up in like, I’m so great, I’m so this, and you know, the head kind of blows up sometimes and then you had some failures that kind of knocked you on your butt and made you realize, you know what, there’s this gotta be a simpler way.
Karl Schuckert: 07:46 And maybe the way that you fixed it was find products that people actually need. They actually have a massive solution because you know, that have, that, you know, a large audience could resonate to find those type of products and then push those type of products. So really, um,
Ron Lynch: 08:04 in our industry it’s, I guess it maybe it is for some people it’s easy to get a big head. It’s actually kind of difficult because when you, it’s kind of like the movie business because as you’re making it, writing it and making it, you’re very excited about it. And then it goes to edit. And then sometimes you may not know that your show works till six months after you made it. And so you’re kind of in the middle of the next one. So I don’t think I ever really got a sense of I’m awesome. I kind of kind of a sense of how did that happen? Point out later that they did in those days, you found out later, it wasn’t like the online environment where you know, like right away. So you had followed a little bit later, Huh. And I’d feel good about it. I feel like I could talk to the consumer, but I just really had not considered that the first six products that fell in my lap. We’re awesome products. And so I thought, oh, this is just, this is a formula and I know the formula, but the, the key element was it starts with a good product because I, I don’t want to bring up anybody’s failed products, but we said yes to some stuff we probably should not have said yes to.
Karl Schuckert: 09:10 Yeah. That’s the other thing too, right? Maybe the money that it takes to produce something, it’s kind of easy to say, yeah, I’ll take that project. Even if you’re not feeling it, you know, maybe at some point I’ve, I’ve seen that happen. Um, good. Good to know too. The other thing I was going to kind of came to mind was about the project. It was working really, really well. Like Billy Mays and all these like grates that could really do good on it. We’re crushing it. Do you feel like the Internet ruined it? I mean, whenever the timing that this happened, there’s been such a massive conversion of like TV shows versus like online streaming and stuff like that. Do you think that some of that had to play with some of these failed attempts or fell projects?
Ron Lynch: 09:56 No, I did not at that point. Cause I mean, we’ve had plenty of successes since then. So we, we’ve had, um, you know, great, great products through the television life cycle. I would say what, what, um, the, the major change that has occurred is back in the early two thousand because of the devotion to television from both the audience and the advertiser. You could, you had to have something and it was not cheap. You had to pick products that 80% of people could buy because you had to have that kind of success on TV. You really had to have a large audience to, to make it work. Thanks to the fragmentation of the Internet. I can now say yes to products that I would have said no to them that have a very defined audience. It’s now a matter of can I find that audience in media, whether that media beyond line or beyond TV.
Ron Lynch: 10:52 Um, and GoPro kind of happened at the convergence of those two things. As television stations exploded in about oh seven and eight, oh eight and Facebook came into existence and youtube came into existence. GoPro came out that at that same time, so there isn’t that same two to three-year window and we could, instead of having a GoPro half-hour infomercial, which is what we originally designed, we ended up having 13 or 14 spots that we’re all on very specific networks reflective of the viewer. So there were kayaking spots on the outside TV network. There was car racing on speed or on velocity there were skiing on ESPN so that we could now pair content to a consumer. And that’s exactly what we do now online. And for a lot of our brands and our clients and ourselves are PR because we own a few products. We reverse engineer that. Now we go online and find those verticals and trying to blow the company up that way. And then to television as a second or third tier approach as you’re going into mass. Right?
Karl Schuckert: 11:58 Yeah. You definitely can test so much faster today with, with the, uh, with Facebook and Google ads. Um, and yeah, really good points about like your demographics. We’re kind of, I mean you have good back then you still have really good demographics, but you could only serve to those demographics all at TV versus now there’s sub, there’s so many sub and super demographics. I would say nowadays that you can serve,
Ron Lynch: 12:24 you could really succeed with an OxyClean. It’d be very difficult. Does it succeed with an oxy clean today because of the change in media? Hmm. Interesting. Where would you put your OxyClean? What cheese? What channel would you pick? Well, we only had 30 samples to pick from, so it wasn’t too difficult. But if you have 400 to pick from, where do you put those valuable media dollars to get that kind of success? It would be a hard choice.
Karl Schuckert: 12:50 So what has happened to the infomercial industry? I mean it’s still there or is it still stronger?
Ron Lynch: 12:55 It’s huge. It’s, it’s still, but it’s still in the areas where it was always strong. So housewares, it’s strong. There’s lots of cooking infomercials, skincare, still hugely strong. Um, personal care development. So real estate, a get rich quick schemes, all that stuff still there. And you’re seeing more things like nutraceuticals and vitamins because those shows you very inexpensive to produce. You see a lot of Larry King style shows with two people looking out over each other’s shoulders, reading the prompter, trying to look like they’re supposed to be on TV, like the infomercial that costs $30,000 to produce. There are lots of those.
Karl Schuckert: 13:35 Okay, fair enough. So, um, come and get, could we kind of get off point a little? There were actually two, like since I have you here, I could have you explain the GoPro story as well. I think that’d be a cool story to share as well, like how that started and where it, you know, how, how you produced a Super Bowl commercial. And I think that’d be a great story to share.
Ron Lynch: 13:56 Okay. Well, I’ll tell you how that has generally happened. Um, we’ve found Nick Woodman at the, in fact, our new business development guy did at the, uh, outdoorsman show in Salt Lake City, Utah. And he came back to Seattle and he had met nick and I didn’t hit, kind of shown us the camera first came, was not that great. The next year I went back to the show and I met nick personally. The camera had improved, the mounts were terrific. We said, okay, we got to go to TV with this, and he was ready. So he came back to Seattle, to our office. Our Seattle office was in Seattle at the time and we sat down and crafted a half hour infomercial. Um, I wrote a creative brief and strategic brief or all of those media planning and how we were going to present the product and how we were going to have two angles and every commercial.
Ron Lynch: 14:41 And um, the essence of the camera is, in fact I got here is when you turn this camera on, the first thing you do is you’re looking at it and you go beep or all the commercial start that way with the face of the user as an Avatar with goggles or a helmet on. So this psychology is, your face goes here, this is you. So no longer do you have to tell people you’re an awesome surfer skater skier camera. Does it work? And that was when social media exploded. So we knew people, we, you know, it’s the ultimate sports selfie camera. It became a wearable thing, right? It was like more of a wearable. It is wearable. And in fact, in my office, I have a box that’s got like 400 different kinds of mounts for it. But you can mount this thing. The mounts were actually at the beginning were better than the camera.
Ron Lynch: 15:31 This isn’t a hero three, they hear a woman is like a little pinhole camera. It was really not great. Um, until I got the batteries in the lenses figured out, man, there, they’re good cameras now. But it was this idea of Hook it on your helmet, on your chest, on your skis, on the poll, on your SurfBoard, on the front of your car. Like all suction cups, you know, all these different kinds of mounts that allowed you to make cinematic movies about yourself. Um, so the first year instead of doing a long-form infomercial, we took that 30 page script and we just pulled it apart and every page was a different scene of a different sport and we didn’t shoot any commercials. We just sent the word out to consumers and people submitted their video to us. And so, and a lot of them were good sportsmen like they were legit.
Ron Lynch: 16:25 Um, Neil Amundsen, there’s one that I set the credit thing. Yeah, Neil, he’s the guy. Just the wingsuit jumps off the cliffs in Norway and wings. It’s so this guy, his dad was actually the accountant for the company. And then, you know, son was this extreme athlete. And so we had got all this great footage of guys jumping in wingsuits off of cliffs in Norway and places and we, so we put those on TV and those became our first ads. And to get traction, we ran a contest which ran until about two years ago. So it ran for a decade. And the contest was every day we give a complete suite of GoPro products and mounts away to one person. So people would go online and they would, there was this interrupt and you’d go to GoPro.com they would interrupt, they’d enter their data interrupted, go away, and they get to the site and they’d be like, oh my God, this is used for everything.
Ron Lynch: 17:17 There’s no way in hell I’m ever going to win this. So they buy it and that, that those purchases or what drove the company for the first year before we got retail distribution. Um, so then we got retail distribution and we were in best buy and you know, electronic shops and ski and surf shops around the country and a couple of years have gone by. We could board then we could afford Shaun White, we could afford a Kelly Slater. And so we’ve got some kind of more extreme athletes, um, in kind of every sport. And then the Super Bowl, the first Super Bowl time came around and go pro because of their audience and x Games type athletes became affiliated with Red Bull. So those two companies appeared at all of the same types of events and Red Bull was sponsoring, um, Felix guy that jumped out of the hot air balloon in space.
Ron Lynch: 18:19 Yeah, I know you’re talking about, but I don’t know. GoPro provided the cameras and so that was shot and the guy jumped out of the balloon in a spacesuit and Kim came to earth. That became, and we would never tell anybody what our Super Bowl creatives worth. That became the first Super Bowl ad was this guy and the countdown in jumping out of space. And it was the first closeups because people had seen footage of it but they’d never seen like the extreme close-ups of his experience. So it was a pretty killer APP. And I think our separate, your ad was a baby.
Karl Schuckert: 18:56 It’s like those video games too. Like when you watch those ads, cause it’s like the first person video game where it’s like you feel like you’re in the person.
Ron Lynch: 19:05 Yeah.
Karl Schuckert: 19:05 That’s what’s so cool about GoPro and the wearables and the ads. I know the one ad that I remember you telling me about the one with the
Ron Lynch: 19:13 babies. You wrote that one right? It’s actually, it was a baby in the companies. It was one of the employees took the footage. Yeah. So that it was essentially we’re, we’re, that was a Super Bowl commercial and the intent was there are as many women as men watching the Super Bowl and we were, women tend to buy more consumer goods than men. So how do we pull them in and include them and how would you pick a sport in a sports camera thing. So we’re like, okay let’s not pick a sport. It’s Christmas time-ish. People have let, okay, so we have this baby and then the video was very simply a dad throwing his baby up in the air and the kitchen. But behind the kid, there was a ceiling fan. It’s kind of like I’ve got a ceiling fan here. So that’s in the background spinning and the kid kind of jumps up in the frame into the kind of the ceiling fan in the background in this kind of scared like, Oh, does dad know what he’s doing? That was the, and that was the first year, I think we did had slow motion in the camera too. Nice. But I think the thing that was that actually out of that whole experience of Super Bowl ads, it’s the most interesting is how we bought the media. Because what does a Super Bowl ad costs time.
Karl Schuckert: 20:36 Yeah. Well a million, they say like $1 million. 2 million now I think right
Ron Lynch: 20:40 it per 30 seconds. It’s now up to $6 million a minute. Wow. So we will. So we were looking at 30-sec spots at that time, they were about two or $3 million and we bought them for about three or $400,000. But the way that we did it was we didn’t buy the Super Bowl time from CBS, ESPN, we went to all of the affiliates who also by FCC law get time every hour that you’re doing advertising.
Ron Lynch: 21:11 So they got, they had time. So we bought, we bought like the time instead of the local Ford dealership who wouldn’t pay $70,000 for a 30 sec Super Bowl ad because they’d never sell enough trucks to make that worthwhile. And so we went to Chicago, New York, Miami to Dallas, and we picked all these cities and we cherry-picked this media and bought all the affiliate time. Well, they run their affiliate commercials whenever the heck they want to. So we asked for more because they weren’t selling it. And so we ended up negotiating with several of them to get two or three runs pregame during the game, fourth quarter post game. So we’ve got this jumble, but we ran the exact same commercial. And every single slot.
Ron Lynch: 21:56 So Monday morning when all of everybody’s reporting on the Super Bowl commercials, they’re like, holy smokes, GoPro about like three spots. Can you believe that? And nobody’s really counting or understands where or how that was bought. But they’re thinking this company must be blowing it up. They just spent like $12 million on the Super Bowl and we’d spent, you know, 10 15% of what everybody else was spending. Okay.
Karl Schuckert: 22:21 Wow. That’s phenomenal. That’s like, uh, did you can get away with that today? Absolutely. Again. Nice. Nice. So you kind of hack the system there. Yeah. Take some really good markets. Low, you know, US-based markets for the most part. Right?
Ron Lynch: 22:36 They were, they were, you know, we bought La, New York, we bought where people were buying, watching the Super Bowl. Nobody was any wiser.
Karl Schuckert: 22:42 Nice. How did the um, a lot of publicity free, that’s all free obviously? Um, how, how did that affect the company after that that happened?
Ron Lynch: 22:51 Well the company is, yours were, when we met him, they were doing $600 k. Then the first strategy of just going up there, making commercials in short form that matched creatives got him to sticks the next year. The same thing we just repeated that got him to 60 million and then the next year was the start of the Super Bowl and that got them to 600 million. Those are yours. They’re still running on TV throughout the year and them, they don’t run on TV a lot anymore. They run pretty sickly around the holidays.
Karl Schuckert: 23:24 Right. Well they kind of like own the market too, you know, in, you know, you go to, you go to buy extreme gear, skateboards, surfboards, snowboards,
Ron Lynch: 23:34 hardware’s the store. They’re there every, they’re at the airport. They are everywhere. They’re everywhere.
Karl Schuckert: 23:42 So they don’t even need to do that. I mean they own their own market. All right, well cool. Let’s uh, let’s pivot off of that. So cause I don’t want to have, are usually, I don’t like having the podcast too, too long, but I want to definitely give value. I think a lot of people definitely got learned a lot of stuff already. Um, let’s talk a little bit about Big Baby Agency, which is your agency. And I want to potentially talk about this campaign you’re running, that you’re, I’ve used spending any money in ads on this, this video that’s kind of going viral.
Ron Lynch: 24:12 I mean we’re, we’re spending money but like 10 bucks a day. We’re not spending much of anything on it.
Karl Schuckert: 24:17 So literally like you’ve shared this, uh, February 19th, 19th, so like a couple of weeks ago you shared this video and just between, you know, a network of friends and, you know, maybe a small budget, 28,000 views, 44 comments, 121 shares. Um, and I, I if you, if you’re open to it, if you want to talk a little bit about how you’re kind of running that and I can actually share the screen here,
Ron Lynch: 24:45 I’ll give you a little bit more data on it that you can’t see from your side that I can see from my side. I think that we have, the kind of, the miraculous stat to me is I believe we have three or 4,000 complete views and it’s a 30 minute add.
Ron Lynch: 25:03 It is half an hour freaking long. And the shares that I got, I didn’t ask for, I didn’t call anybody in advance and say, Hey, I’m going to put this thing on. Would you help me out? I just put it out there and people who knew me clicked on it cause I normally don’t do social media advertising for myself and they saw it and it just, it kind of went from there. So yeah. And then we didn’t, we, we were at like 90 shares before I put any money behind it before I started boosting it. So, um, do you want to tell you what the content is real quick or have people watch it? Well, yeah. What
Karl Schuckert: 25:43 I would do first for the listeners, people that aren’t seeing the screen, um, I would go, I’ll go to Facebook and I’d go to Big Baby Agency. Um, just look it up. Based off that you’ll find that there’ll be a baby with like 3D glasses and you’ll know that that’s the one, there’s a video when you scroll down, there’s a picture of Ron and his is that your wife, I take it, it better be better be, but here’s the thing, you get to start it. And Ron’s in his kitchen and he’s giving his world’s famous pizza a recipe. So He’s, he’s got this like cross angle going on that and uh, it’s, it’s beautifully done and it’s, it’s, it’s simply done too. That’s what I love about. It’s very simple. It’s, you know, it’s palatable, it’s very simple. But then you also talk about more advanced marketing concepts that take a little bit more for people to kind of wrap their minds around. But you give people a call to action in here, uh, to, to basically pick that up. So yeah, if you want to kind of touch on that as well. Exactly. Kind of how that works. And you know what, it’s so far it’s just you just boost it. So we don’t really know what all the results are from this, but I can see that it’s already getting, it’s building a list and stuff like that.
Ron Lynch: 26:53 I can already generate a substantial amount of client inquiry and contracting for us too. And what’s weird is a lot of our competitors are watching the video and not saying they are, that we get word back like we, there’s been, I’m gonna say some of the larger people in our industry have had all of their employees watch it. And the reason why is, um, I, I do have a private training program. I only run it once or twice a year. I, it’s not a thing I do for a ton of money to think I do for them, the ethics of giving back and teaching people how to, how to advertise ethically because there’s a lot of unethical advertising out there. And there are people selling programs about how to do marketing, video marketing, and internet marketing. And from the Best, I could tell those folks didn’t have the type of experience that I have.
Ron Lynch: 27:46 They didn’t have the breadth of actual case study and knowledge. And so I was kind of a little bit irritated by that. And the Lambo video, you know, that, hey, there’s my yacht, here’s my Rolls Royce, here’s my Lamborghini, here’s me, here’s my dog. Um, that, that kind of marketing doesn’t appeal to me. And I thought, you know, what I’m gonna do is I’m just going to go in my kitchen, I’m going to make a pizza because I know how to make pizza and I know how to do advertising. And if I simply tell people how to do advertising while I’m making a pizza, they’ll get the impression and they have that. I must know what I’m talking about because if I can talk about this, so off the cuff, while I’m making a pizza and I have the case studies that I show, I probably know what I’m talking about.
Ron Lynch: 28:36 And that’s the essence of the video. And so I walk you through about seven or eight steps of how to properly utilize Facebook and integrate Amazon and integrate YouTube and what, what your ad should do. And I give an ad sequence and it’s an ad sequence we use, but you could swap some of the pieces if your marketing required it. Like it’s not like, oh this is a formula and you got to follow the formula. It lays it. And so I walked through the formulaic steps and I give hardcore real-world examples and so there are five or six commercials in the context of this half hour that I shot. I wrote direct produced and shot all of them and did the strategy for each one of them. So you get a sense of how I think and how this actually works in campaigns that work. So it really is a free education and that if I just give people that, it’s going to be one of two things. It’s going to attract people that want to do ethical advertising to kind of hang out. People like yourself. I get invited to conferences like the conference that you run, which I love. And then the other thing is it will attract clients because most people who do what we do don’t have the breadth of knowledge and clients will go, I’m going to talk to those people. And that’s exactly what’s happened in the space of two weeks. I’ve just about filled up my year.
Karl Schuckert: 29:55 Nice. Beautifully done. I highly, I mean I really commend what you’ve done there. It definitely grabbed my attention. I shared it with, you know, our group on my personal like fan page and uh, I really think people need to pay attention to how Ron is actually running this video, uh, without really spending much money. I mean, obviously Ron does, he is, he’s pretty connected in the industry, but for good reason, and you could do it though, these things are very duplicatable. I think the thing that at the end you give a little bit of a call to action for people to interact with your Messenger Bot, which is now powered by SegMate, which is pretty cool
Ron Lynch: 30:34 Thanks to you.
Karl Schuckert: 30:35 But in the back here, you basically, um, you’re basically going to be able to get a copy of some of his strategies and uh, and also kind of see what he does. And I would recommend that you guys when you get a chance, go there and check it out. I would definitely recommend it. Um, all right, so let’s go ahead and finish up with this part of the podcast. I kind of end it with this couple of quick questions. Really the last one is, is what was the best piece of advice you were ever given in life?
Ron Lynch: 31:06 Okay. Can I tell this story? Yeah, let’s do it. Okay. This is absolutely true. I was uh, 22 years old. I had flown from Seattle to Los Angeles to meet my best buddy for a weekend of fun. And the day, the evening that I arrived, I got off the plane and I probably had a few cocktails and we went to the Marriott hotel at lax and he worked for the Marriott and he’d rented us rooms and I probably had a few more cocktails and I might have been in my boxer shorts when I dove into the shallow end of the pool and split my head open, which might have hurt and it might not have, depending upon the number of cocktails that I had and I might’ve had a towel on top of my head and went back upstairs to our room to deal with that and got the wise idea that we were out of ice and we needed more ice.
Ron Lynch: 32:04 So it took the ice bucket, had the towel on my head in my dripping wet in my boxer shorts and went to the ice closet, which was, the machine was out of order, but I’m a genius so I knew that all the machines are in the exact same place on every floor. I walked out, got in the stairwell, went up to the ice machine right above me and opened the door and I hit somebody. There was somebody in the ice room, and this is a now one, 1:30 am in the morning. And when I hit the person, I heard this, oh, it sounded like an older person. And I was like, Oh, I’m really sorry. Ice Bucket, towel, blood. And I opened the door and in front -of me was Henry Kissinger,
Ron Lynch: 32:51 who else in the hotel? And there was actually three of him. So I talked to the one in the middle and I, as I said, I’m sorry, and then I felt bad. So I started scooping his bucket full of ice. And then Henry Kissinger in his underwear scooped my buckets full of ice. And I sat, I stood back and I kind of got my wits about me and I sobered up for a second and I sent my ice bucket down on the floor and I put my hands on both sides of the wall so he couldn’t get out. And they said, I’m sorry I’ve got to do this, but you are on my top three lists of people I would have dinner with if they would have dinner with me. And I’m pretty sure we’re not having dinner now. So I got to ask you, I’m like 21–22 years old. Can you give me a piece of advice that would be useful at my age? And Henry Kissinger looked me dead in the eye and he said, no. They said what? And he goes say no. If you say no, you can say yes later. But if you say yes, you can never say no later.
Ron Lynch: 33:56 And I have used that piece of advice in more negotiations and walked away from things and had people chase me down to give me the deal that I wanted more times than I can count. That single piece of advice has made me more money than anything else. Wow. That’s pretty phenomenal. Yeah, it’s pretty crazy. And uh, did you ever meet him later on in life after that? No. What’s weird is that he’s still alive. Cause you, I mean this was two years, I just did my twin, so this was 30 years ago and he seemed like an old man then. And he’s still alive. Yeah. You must be drinking baby’s blood cause that’s agency blood.
Karl Schuckert: 34:38 Um, what is, what is the, uh, what’s five years look like from now for you?
Ron Lynch: 34:44 Oh God, I don’t know what five weeks it looks like from now I don’t, I don’t tend to live that way. Okay. Yeah. I tend to live like really have worked really hard to live in the presence so I don’t, I’m capable so I’m never worried about the future. Um, I think that my, my wishes for five years down the road, I’m getting old enough now that it’s more about other people, about positive outcomes for my kids, positive outcomes for me, my coworkers, my friends eat the young, the young people that I mentor and that sort of thing. What, uh,
Karl Schuckert: 35:18 what big project are you working on now that you can talk about?
Ron Lynch: 35:26 Um, probably not a client based project. Um, I have a couple of skincare projects that we own, but I would say my book, I’m writing a book right now that I’m almost done with. Um, it’s an edit. I’m going back and forth editing with Tucker Max if you know Tucker over at scribe media, but normally they write the book. In this case, I’m writing the book and they’re critiquing it and it is a, it is a business fable about a young man who joins the circus in his teens and becomes the operator of a circus. And it encompasses, cause I didn’t want to write an autobiography about all this nonsense that I’ve done. It seemed better to write a fable around a circus and just instill all of the business lessons I’ve learned within the context of a narrative. So interesting. What’s the name of it? It’s a circus out there. It’s a circus out there. All right, cool.
Karl Schuckert: 36:18 Well, I’m going to go ahead and cut the, uh, the, um, podcast at this point. For those of you that watch, this was Ron Lynch. If you liked this episode, make sure you come back and share it with your friends. Go to our fan page, just make sure you check out Big Baby Agency and check out that video that we talked about. Other than that, I’m going to go ahead and let you guys go.
Karl Schuckert: 36:39 Okay. Chatbots and digital marketing podcast listeners. This is Karlos Sugar. I want to thank you for taking your time and listening to Ron Lynch, a little bit about his story and his background and kind of how we got started and just some of the creative genius that I talked about earlier, uh, that he literally has. I’m was, it was an exciting moment for me to have him on our call. Um, it was fun. Uh, I hope you guys got a lot out of this. I do want to remind you if you have enjoyed listening to our podcasts and you’re getting something out of this, please go to facebook.com/karlschuckert forward slash. Karl Schuckert. We are definitely working on a website and we may even change the name of our podcast because of the new site. Domain names are a little bit shorter than chatbots and digital marketing.
Karl Schuckert: 37:33 It’s like chatbots and marketing is what I’m, I might be changing this to just giving you a heads up when that happens. We will be at that domain, chatbots and uh, and digital marketing. It’ll actually be chatbots and marketing.com but that’s not up yet. So I’m just kind of giving you an insight that we might be changing that a little bit, but we’ll still be calling our podcast chatbots and digital marketing podcast. So without further ado, please go like the fan page. I’m going to continue to show these videos as a video there. You can also find us on medium and all you have to do is go to medium.com and search chatbots and digital marketing podcast. And you will find our dedicated show notes. And in the show notes, you’ll actually see and find an anything that we talked about. We talked about Ron Lynch’s agency.
Ron Lynch: 38:22 We also talked about his viral video, uh, that he has going on. And I want you guys to take a look at that because I think it’s going to help you guys with your marketing needs. There’s nothing for sale. I’m just giving you guys free content. I really hope you guys enjoyed this. I’m going to continue to knock these things out of the park, uh, as we continue to grow. This is episode 10. Thanks for listening. Take care and have a fantastic evening, day, morning or afternoon, wherever you’re at. Have a great one. Talk soon.
End Show Notes
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