What I Continuously Learn About Marketing and People
I’m big on timelines, and not just because they help me keep track of my circuitous journey between startups and Google, but because I learn by looking back.
My second time at Google ended almost 3 years ago, when I left YouTube’s BrandLab and moved back to Boulder, Colorado to work on a video startup. And ten years ago this month, the first Google product I worked on was sunset (pour one out for Google Audio, programmatic radio before anyone ever used the P word), so I soon left Google to join another startup.
Things I’ve learned about myself are probably only interesting to me, but if you’re curious, one of them is “Yes, I still love both Google and startup life.”
So instead, here are a few things I continuously learn that I think are more universal.
Everything Old is New Again
As a marketer, if no one’s looking for what you’re offering, you’ve got to go find customers. That was true for auctioning radio ads in 2006, and it’s true for what you’re working on today. I met with a startup this week, whose chief admitted, “It’s awesome when you launch something the market needs and growth is automatic for a while. Now the real work begins.”
Everything Old is also true, in my experience, about team and hiring. I’ve studied organizational behavior in school, been a part of culture-building at any company I’ve worked with starting with Emergent Biosolutions, and helped build teams both the Google way, and the startup way. I haven’t seen anything new, from a culture and team standpoint, that can’t also be described as hiring great people who care about each other and the company.
What goes around comes around in media, too. Podcasts were invented in 2009. A decade later, they are surging and some company called “Spotify” just acquired 2 major podcast companies.
Newsletters are surging, too. Email is old and newsletters are old and delivering newsletters by email is so old that it seems new. Even longtime bloggers like Seth Godin and VC Fred Wilson have re-optimized their content as a newsletter. Wilson wrote recently about the “technical debt” in maintaining his blog comments and community when most readers consume his daily posts as an email. I published a humble local soccer email newsletter…in 2004. Today I get most of my news from carefully chosen newsletters like Axios, the Colorado Sun, SmartBrief, MediaBistro, Poynter and Soccer America.
Learn by Watching Startups to Predict the World
Everything I learned about marketing came with a startup mentality. I watched them carefully, even if I was at Google- where I’ve been lucky to work on teams with a startup structure. And I’ve always found that it’s justified to keep an eye fixed on emerging competitors in the market.
At Google Audio, I watched Pandora and later Spotify capture share of listeners- not immediately, but over time. Later, YouTube went from the only video platform to surrounded by other video audience machines- like when Meerkat burst onto the live video scene, only to be immediately squashed by Periscope. And at Nest, some of our best smart home device partners were only a few years old.
Working with startups from an early age, I moved through biotech, adtech, video and IoT. Since I started my career as a journalist, the collision of startups and media has always captured my attention. Another Fred Wilson post laments the WaPo paywall. But subscriptions are for real; Medium is slowly adopting a paywall, andI gladly pay for The Athletic and Soccer America; one is a couple years old, and the other is 48. All have great journalism behind a paywall. Jeff Jarvis seemed to respond to Wilson with a nuanced yet equally gloomy take; his post’s “entrepreneurialjournalism” tag seems to be the way to look at all of journalism. Writing, “Paywalls will not work for more than a few…Consumer willingness to pay for content is a scarcity and we’ve already likely hit its limits,” Jarvis argues that the future of journalism is entrepreneurial and community-centered (local).
It’s 2019, and we still don’t know how we feel about paywalls, what the right price is for streaming video, or many other media things. But I will learn what’s ahead by watching startups figure it out.
The Humanity Part I: Customers Over Funnels
I haven’t always loved our terminology in marketing, from all the man-made layers of AdTech to the maligned “growth hacking,” which is still how startups predominantly think about marketing. That’s fair; if you can’t find profitable ways to “acquire” customers (another yuck), then survival will be tough. But marketing is much more than advertising. I often find myself referencing a 2011 exchange between Brad Feld and Chris Moody, now both Foundry Group partners here in Boulder, about what marketing can be for startups. In a word: thought leadership.
The word “funnel” is nothing new, and in BrandLab I learned to embrace any marketer’s definition of it, but focusing on an upside down cone leads to some bad behavior.
So I love what I’ve heard over the last few years: much more talk about the Customer Journey. This has been true in my close work with many startups, and in my biggest project of last year too, the launch of Nest’s co-branded Nest x Yale Lock. (Does this project count as a third tour of Google? Even if it does, I doubt that’s a record.) Nest has been phenomenal at customer obsession, from what you see externally- industrial design, creative content- to their workflow and deep knowledge of their customer personas.
The funnel should give way to the customer journey. This is hard for most companies. Marketing teams are often organized so that we inevitably focus on our own functions — especially when growth, acquisition, SEM/SEO, performance ads and analytics are entirely separate from CRM and brand marketing in many companies. We have to go out of our way to understand the journey — the unique and ever-changing path that segments of customers take. Less funnel. More journey!
Startups and Humanity Part II: Video Edition
I also believe startups will solve the quality and clutter we have in digital video — sometimes by adding humanity to video. To date, we’ve seen a lot of startups that offer templates and other impersonal approaches to video; sometimes the massive scale of digital video seems to lead to problems that would be best solved by people.
What there isn’t: A quality filter, a simple revenue or ROI formula, or a strong correlation between who should be making video and who has the fearlessness to actually do it.
One thing I learned through experimenting: great video has to have compelling people. Engaging can bring a story or a product to life with low-cost, sustainable video. Obvious? Maybe. But while Zappos has been doing that for years (since 2006!) but it’s parent Amazon, and many other ecommerce brands, have been slow to incorporate video with people showcasing products. One ecommerce leader told me late last year: “Amazon is amazing at nearly everything, except having a human element tied to anything. They are a machine. Video (is) the opposite, which is why so many people are attracted to it from the marketing side and consumer side.”
But startups are crushing video, from Cheddar to many ecommerce brands. And sure enough, Amazon is starting to do a lot of live content with established personalities and bundles of products. So like everything else, startups lead the way in humanizing video.
PS: Stay Open
Everything Old is New Again can be restated as What Goes Around, Comes Around. I think that goes for us who’ve worked at Google or other huge companies, too.
Be receptive, and stay open, to the outside world.
When startups, sellers, candidates, causes or anyone else who is up against the odds comes asking you for something, it’s easy to delete or ignore. Don’t! Muster a reply. Not just because you could be doing outreach for an underdog some day (and maybe should?) But because trust me, it’s fun. Also, simply because it humanizes your employer. And you!
Written for the Xoogler.co blog by Jeff Rozic
