Audience Over Customer

Tom Nixon (00:02.315)
Yacht rock there. I got it out of the way. We could move on with the rest of the episode. I don’t have to work it in conveniently and casually. We’re done. Curtis. really? How?

Curtis Hays (00:10.232)
would have worked it in for you. Yeah. Well, I was on a plane the other day and I messaged you, was like, there was a Yacht Rock documentary on the plane ride, I guess aired on HBO. I was like, why is Tom not interviewed in this documentary?

Tom Nixon (00:27.907)
Well, it’s what’s funny about that. I think I messaged you back. We actually interviewed the director for my other podcast, the Yacht Rock podcast that we keep talking about. And as a matter of fact, he used our podcast as research for that documentary.

Curtis Hays (00:41.526)
That’s good. But then he should have put you in it. mean, just one question, just.

Tom Nixon (00:46.179)
There is actually he reached out to somebody in the community and said, hey, what is this do be bounce that I keep hearing about that person reached out to us and said, hey, can you explain to me what the do be bounces and we explained it gave him examples. Well, his name appears in the credits in ours does not. yep. Yeah, that’s okay. That’s true. And maybe someday I’ll have another podcast. But for now, we should probably focus on this one because we’re going to talk about things more germane.

Curtis Hays (01:01.038)
that’s rough. Well, maybe someday you’ll have your own documentary.

Tom Nixon (01:13.279)
our audience and we have a guest that I’d like to bring on if you don’t mind. She’s got a great last name, which you may recognize. She’s got a great model. She’s got a great message. So please welcome or join me in welcoming Danny Dufresne, executive producer and founder of the Ox Company. Danny, great last name.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (01:20.838)
you

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (01:33.958)
Thank you. I feel like I grew up with no one being able to pronounce it. And then I married a man with a one syllable last name and then refused to change my…

Tom Nixon (01:42.479)
Well, the best thing that ever happened to you then was Shoshank Redemption because

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (01:47.106)
Exactly. There’s Shawshank. There’s also an Old Mitch Heppard joke that is do-fraying that a lot of people get. But my husband has also shockingly never seen Shawshank Redemption. So who knows?

Tom Nixon (01:57.583)
shame on him.

Well, we’re glad that we met you because I think you’ve got a model very near and dear to our own hearts that we’ve talked about. We framed it as the Team Lance model, but your bio says that you are the champion of the new agency model. So explain what that is and explain a little bit about the Ox Company before we dive in.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (02:16.614)
So yeah, so after 20 years in the industry on every side, so whether at post companies, in-house at film companies, at production companies, in-house at agencies for the better part of the last decade, you’re seeing so much change. And I was seeing all of this, a lot of disconnect in the way people communicate and really more of a grasp for like everyone to bring things in-house and we have to do this, it has to be in our P &L. But from my experience running creative and video departments at agencies,

Those are not the best people to do your best work, right? If you have the exact same group of people doing every single creative project, it’s going to look the same as everything else. So taking my experience from executive producing every kind of thing, events, video games, VFX, broadcast, all the things, I started this agency. Or really, it’s more of like a boutique fractional agency.

We work with smaller agencies that are coming up. Maybe it’s two people that just left Ogilvy and they want to start their own shop and they have amazing big ideas and they have no idea how to get anything done. Or maybe it’s a great strategy team and they have a few great creatives. But again, they don’t have that sort of production operations or creative operations background, which they really don’t need. And they almost don’t need that overhead all the time.

What’s great about these agencies as they’ve been pushing the industry or really dragging it a little bit forward is that as we have all these other agencies merging, their overhead is getting bigger and yet their capabilities are getting smaller. And these smaller agencies can compete because they can pitch these big, exciting ideas without 40, 50 % overhead, without all of the red tape in process. And so really what we do is take any creative idea, any brief

even just the concept of an idea and work with them during the pitch and during creative development to let them, like, how much is something gonna cost? What are our options here? How can we make something more 360? Are we thinking about the media and where it’s gonna go? Are we thinking about how it’s gonna translate into everything else and not just this one piece of content you’re making? And we really execute it for them by embedding fractional teams that they’re really only paying for what they need when they need it.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (04:40.41)
how they need it. And by embedding those teams with agencies and brands, they’re able to really ingrain in how that agency works. And they’re also able to protect the agency in the brand vision, where I feel like even being on the production company side for a long time, production companies have their own style. Everyone is that that’s what they do is their niche, and they should stay there, I think. And

You want to have the ability to find up and coming talent to approach projects in a different way, not just the way that like one company would do it. And I think that broader out of the box thinking is what’s really like leading the change right now in the industry. So it’s been exciting. We’ve been around almost 10 years now and working with, again, small agencies and direct brands.

Curtis Hays (05:27.758)
So, we’ll…

Tom Nixon (05:28.055)
Yeah. Curtis, that sounds familiar. mean, that was the model that you sort of found yourself in. What did 10 years ago? Yeah.

Curtis Hays (05:33.731)
Yep, very similar. I think most people know our story, but yeah, started very similar. Working on projects, wanted to bring other team members in, didn’t want to bring in the overhead, didn’t have off space at the time and all those things, but just wanted to solve problems for clients. And you get the right creative or the right analyst or whoever and say, hey, I want to bring this person in on this project.

But we created Kaleidoscope so that there was one building place, essentially. One place for the customer to build through, but then we worry about the team that’s going to be assembled for that specific project. So we kind of…

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (06:11.834)
Because you should really be able to start every project with a blank slate. And I in-house at agencies and even at brands, but especially at agencies, they are so tapped, you know, and they have so much going on, they don’t have time to go back to like a brand new well of, you know, talent every single time. They’re booking the exact same directors or the exact same production companies every single time. And it gets formulaic and the work gets old and stale. you also…

Curtis Hays (06:15.608)
Mm-hmm.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (06:38.544)
There’s no incentive if they know you’re going to keep hiring them for them to do big amazing work. And I think the biggest change is that now that agencies and brands are really having to do so much more of the production prep and creative development than it used to be, it used to be you hired a director and they like brought all the vision. But now like you’re really having to stay a lot closer to it and you’re never just making one thing. Everything has to be 20 different things. And there’s a lot of different resources needed for that.

I think it was more of a getting burnt out in-house at agencies and knowing that I didn’t want to be a production company. So I started the company first and foremost, knowing what I didn’t want to be and really just knowing that I was the fixer everyone called when they had something that they just couldn’t know how to get it done or they had a problem or somebody else, some other producer had messed something up. And I didn’t know how to monetize that because I knew I didn’t want to just be me as a freelancer.

I wanted to build that team and be able to bring in amazing artists and illustrators or whoever I was seeing out there doing great work. And I’ve really built that more of a creative community. think what we’re known the most for is the partners, the creative, the creatives we bring in, the up and coming people that you’ve never heard of, the directors we give opportunities, the approaches that we take to stuff that save money and time.

Tom Nixon (08:04.269)
Yeah, cool. Well, another area where we converge, Danny, I think is we found this article that you wrote why your brand needs an audience, not just customers. And you say most brands have customers, but the great ones have an audience. So explain where you’re coming from, and then we’ll talk through how do you build an audience and not just have a roster of transactional customers.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (08:25.414)
Yeah, I think this isn’t by any means a new concept. I think the oldest brands that have been around for a long time, that’s why they’ve been around for a very long time. I think what’s happened, especially over the last 10 years with social media and all of these different places that brands think they have to divide their marketing budgets and that they have to do everything just because you can have a banner in a place doesn’t mean you have to have it. If it’s not improving your brand messaging, if it’s just filling a space.

Curtis Hays (08:27.087)
Thanks for listening.

Curtis Hays (08:51.018)
Thank

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (08:54.884)
it’s not building any resonance with your audience. I think that the brands that are taking the time to sort of slowly build their story, new brands that are coming on, let your audience in on what you’re doing behind the scenes. Let your audience know how things are made. Also connecting with the stories of the real people. think where we’re, the reason we’re seeing it sort of scale back to this method is

Curtis Hays (09:12.25)
you

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (09:23.96)
influencers and just feeling like they’re being oversold by people that they have nothing in common with. And everyone is getting very sick of just being stuck on their phones. think you’re seeing engage, social engagement is just down a lot this year. I don’t think that’s new information. And the way that people want to interact with their brands is changing. You’re seeing a lot of people going more towards these groups, you know, a lot of more community building with brands that you’re seeing, I think.

There’s a ton of opportunity there because it’s not only more affordable, but I think the playing field is more level, no matter if you’re a big brand or a small new brand, to reach out to your community in the way where you’re connecting with the lifestyle that your brand represents. So that’s where I see the biggest step forward is, whether it’s an athletic company doing

sporting events with local community clubs or an outdoor company, instead of taking a bunch of influencers on a trip, take real customers, take valued customers or new customers. Let them experience it. Or smaller up and coming brands that want to be able to partner with their local communities. People want to get out of the house and off of our phones. And I think the brands that embrace that and use that as part of their storytelling are going to really connect.

Tom Nixon (10:50.393)
storytelling that also sounds like you, Curtis, recently, but it reminds me of some of the things that you’ve bristled at the past season or two on this podcast is when people come to you just strictly with this objective that I want leads. Give me leads. And that’s the short term ROI of like almost like a heroin fix, right? Just give me the lead to pump it in there and you’re trying to get them to think beyond that lead into what this

big picture.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (11:20.218)
Connection. think there’s a difference between we’ve all seen the billboard, right? That’s like do billboards really work. Well, it just did Well, I don’t not for me it’s not if it’s not the eyeballs are the wrong ones and not what you not the community that you see if if brands embrace the the new and the flashy and the trendy all they’re gonna get is is consumers that move on from them to the next thing that appears flashy and trendy and new

Curtis Hays (11:26.723)
Thank

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (11:48.804)
And it’s just, it’s not, I think there’s a slow build that you’re actually able to, you end up being able to charge more, prove the quality of your product, prove that like you have this ingrained, you know, community that’s going to go out there and influence others that isn’t just, you know, it’s free marketing to a certain extent. I think we’ve all been there where it’s like, you know, we want leads, we want, what’s the ROI on this? And

Curtis Hays (12:14.192)
What?

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (12:16.698)
What’s hilarious to me when I’m working with talking to brands or trying to convince them not to ruin a creative idea is I think you have a lot of fear where they are looking at data. They’re looking at data and saying, well, I can point to this piece of data that when we say this, they click this. Or when they do this, it gets us this. Not very often is actually leading to long-term sales or showing them anything in that matter.

But it’s also, think you have to question who’s giving you the data. These media companies are giving them data just to sell them more media that is telling them they need to dilute their brand messaging even more and show up in a bunch of different places. I think that it’s no different than like having, you know, I bought a desk recently and I Googled standing desk once and long after I purchased the desk, my Hulu is still showing me these desk commercials that don’t, it’s a waste.

Curtis Hays (12:58.618)
replacing the big day to a big day.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (13:13.894)
And I think that there’s better use of the money. think taking a marketing budget and investing in more quality production, more thoughtful strategy in how you’re showing up and how you’re building that community. It doesn’t have to be video. It doesn’t have to be, you know, it can be podcast. It can be playlists that inspire your audience. It can be, you know, we’ve made beautiful coffee table books for brands. There’s so many different things that I think

Curtis Hays (13:43.94)
they predate

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (13:43.974)
create more of an embedded culture of quality and care. I think that sales comes after that. Sales comes naturally, but I think that too often the decisions that are made out of fear just end up falling flat, or they are really good until the very end, and then they’re like, OK, well, swap the logo and put it up here and do all this stuff that we know we’ve been told makes it more sticky for the audience. And it actually just now,

makes them change the channel or swipe or ignore whatever it is that you’re trying to sell them.

Curtis Hays (14:20.046)
Yep. Yeah. So Tom, I mean, what, what, what I’ve come to the realization is that branding, and I mentioned this before, branding comes before marketing. So there’s this, this thought process that a lot of customers have and that I had previously that marketing sat at the top and branding was a function of marketing. It’s like, you have to start with brand first. You can’t do any marketing activities and let you know who’s your ideal customer. Who is your audience?

What value do you provide to them? How do you message and communicate that value to them? And why ultimately, why do they buy from you? So you really have to start there. Do you have the ability to communicate that and communicate that? It sounds like what you’re saying, Danny, is long-term. If you’re going to build an audience, it will be loyal, engaged customers that you’ve got to build trust. You’ve got to build reputation.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (15:18.288)
There’s a better way to get those leads that you’re talking about than just like throwing a bunch of stuff at people and hoping they click it just to get it to go away.

Curtis Hays (15:18.775)
and

Curtis Hays (15:27.5)
Right.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (15:29.242)
And they’re qualified leads. Like if you’re doing a partnership with a local company or you’re doing something where you’re bringing people out and they’re interacting with your brand or your product in some capacity, and then you have the information for all of those people, isn’t that a more qualified lead than just like someone who clicked something once on accident? It’s like, fill it.

Think of it, it’s always like quantity and quality, right? And I think that that’s where you’re looking for the quality of leads that are gonna stick with you. It doesn’t matter if someone buys something once or pays for one month of your subscription service. You wanna keep it, you wanna keep that going and have them feel like they’re a part of it.

Tom Nixon (16:14.511)
Yeah. Did you have another thought Curtis? No, okay. So I’ve used this term myself before the magnetism of brands. All right. I want it. I was just thinking about this the other day, even before knowing that we were talking today, doing yard work or something. And I thought if I could get inside an organization and they would actually get a list to me, what’s the best thing I could do to build my brand? They would expect to hear things like, you know, digital marketing or SEO or who knows some tactic.

The first thing I would start with, would tell that brand, go be awesome. Go be awesome. First of all, so that you’re going to have fans. You’re an audience that naturally gravitates to you and it’s going to go out there and do your marketing for you in a lot of ways, but it can’t start with just, well, let me manufacture something inauthentic and hope that I can trick people into clicking a link. For example. So how do you.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (17:08.559)
Exactly.

Tom Nixon (17:12.044)
work with companies to develop that magnetism because it’s not just a single asset, right? It’s not just I produce a video and I put it somewhere in there. They go.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (17:17.338)
No. And I think that too often, especially at all of these agencies that are just grasping to get anything they can from brands, what is the point of doing one one-off video if it’s not a holistic campaign that is connecting back to a ton of other things? Similar to your example of what would you do in-house at a brand, when I’m working with brands or when I’m working with agency creatives early enough on in the process,

Curtis Hays (17:30.075)
going.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (17:47.174)
Biggest thing that I like to do is think about who the consumer is. I feel like we went from having like, you would map out exactly who your customers were, right? Like you would have mood boards and images and know who they were and how they thought. And we’ve diluted that into data, which does not tell us a picture of them. And we have diluted that. I think we’ve taken the easiest way out in, well, we’re just going to

Take all their data and that basically tells us who they were and then we’ll show up where they you know where they are online That is not the same as being a part of someone’s life of knowing who they are I think you map out who your you know who your real audience is and then you you create an entire holistic program Around that that’s built in a ton of different ways. You can still have you know, that’s small catchy little tick-tock stuff That’s going out for that same person, but it all has to sort of have the same

mission overall and how you’re reaching that and how you’re telling that story. I like to think of it like if I’m bomba shoes and I’m a person that like, our audience is people that care about the world and care about society as well as cute socks and cute clothes, then go show up in society and invite those people out to do that with you. I think that is a, and tell those kinds of stories across the board.

So that your messaging is always the same, but there’s lots of different high level and low level ways to do that. But I think it’s hard when we’re competing with media companies that are selling data because it’s the easier thing to do and they just get more more money out of it. And I think that you got to go out on a limb at this point and not be afraid to stand out from the crowd and do different stuff. think that’s what’s really going to be impactful in the long run.

Curtis Hays (19:22.705)
with.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (19:45.306)
You’re not looking for like a flash in the pan TikTok brand, right? That like, everyone’s using this one product this week and then they’re gone next week. That’s not the goal.

Curtis Hays (19:46.193)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (19:55.238)
that sort of sounds like when we do some brand research, we’re building messaging and your messaging framework and the client says, well, here’s our list of our clients and here’s who we want to go after. Can you just go do the research and then tell us what our messaging should be? And you say, well, actually, we need to actually talk to your customer. So can you give us a list of customers to talk to? And quite frequently they push back on that, don’t they? It’s like, almost like they’re afraid of you talking to their customers, but it’s the real emotional.

Tom Nixon (20:17.859)
They do.

Curtis Hays (20:24.114)
components to why they buy and why they stick with you and those types of things that are at the heart of the strategy, right? Talk about that, Tom.

Tom Nixon (20:30.255)
Yeah, exactly right. In a lot of companies do bristle or the reluctant or ask why would you need to talk to the customers? Which goes back to if you go be awesome, you’re going to want me to talk to your customers because you’re going to want me to figure out why they think you’re so awesome so that I can tell other people why they’re so awesome, right? So

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (20:48.481)
Or define why you’re awesome. What makes you awesome? Why does your audience love you? What about it? Why are I’m like Arc’teryx. Why are my customers willing to pay $600 for a jacket? There’s so many stories and there’s interesting stuff there that can be told in a multitude of ways. And I think so often, I’ll work with a branding agency specifically. And then the moment all of this amazing brand messaging that’s been customized and all of the stuff that the brand wants to use,

Curtis Hays (20:53.977)
It’s what you

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (21:17.604)
gets handed over to the next agency or in-house, the execution of that messaging whittles away. It becomes more the targeting or throw in some of these buzzwords, but it’s not actually built into the stories that they’re telling and how they’re showing up in the world.

Curtis Hays (21:36.164)
Right. Yeah, it’s way more impactful if your customer says why you’re awesome versus you saying you’re awesome.

Tom Nixon (21:42.583)
Right. Sometimes you honestly, sometimes the company, the brand doesn’t really know the answer. They really don’t. They think they do. But then when I talk to their customers, I hear something completely different. And I think that data is extremely valuable. Going back to data, Curtis, I wanted to tee something up to you though, because I agree with Danny’s basic point about chasing data is probably the wrong path. But my view on it is it.

Is that people are chasing the wrong data based on the path of trying to follow. So data has become too much pass failed. Did we get a conversion or did we not get a conversion? And we’re throwing our money into things that are conversion, but there’s all these other data points that live upstream on the models. And we’re to do a whole episode on the models that we use for messaging for measurement. And it’s all mapped to the customer journey and that, you know, traditional sales funnel, but we’re trying to get people, aren’t you trying to get people to say there’s different metrics?

here, maybe outside the funnel, Curtis, that there are, you know, at the bottom of the funnel.

Curtis Hays (22:43.462)
Yeah.

Curtis Hays (22:48.368)
Yeah, what I care as the media buyer, as the agency are the clicks and the click through rates and the impressions and all those types of things. But my customers don’t care about that data. My customers care about revenue. So you make an investment in marketing, you want something to come out of the other end of that investment. So, well, the conversations we have with customers and where the data that I want them to focus on are the qualified leads, the actual sales, and to the best of our ability,

tracking where did those leads and sales actually come from. So if we put $100,000 into LinkedIn advertising, there was a million dollars in revenue that came out of that. If we put 50,000 into Google, there was 250,000 that came out in revenue. And now you can actually pull levers that you need to within your organization and how you’re spending your marketing of where you should spend your dollars. But you have to remember brand is difficult to measure.

when it comes to a lead or something like that. So now we move towards what we call marketing efficiency ratio, where we take a total spend of all of your marketing across all channels over a period of time, and we compare that to previous periods of time, and when you’re doing different types of marketing during those periods of times. So if you all of a sudden turn on a billboard for six months, and then you have a three month maybe sales lag,

Then you look at a six month period with the lag of how those billboards might’ve affected your efficiency with your overall marketing. We spent more on marketing because we got those billboards. Do we have the same ratio or better ratio increase in revenue? If we didn’t, maybe those billboards didn’t really work all that well. So you’ve got to use some more complex understanding and you got to be able to track everything all the way through the front of the funnel or you’re pretty much flying blind.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (24:39.878)
And I think you have to be able to be agile too. You need to be able to quickly react to things, to be able to hit like all the levels of messaging because consistency I think is key with that, right? Like it’s consistency and it’s allowing it to spread throughout all of your other messaging. It’s not gonna be the same thing, right? It’s gonna be a different way that you’re telling that story or communicating that thing, but you have to be able to get things done quickly.

in order to, you know, if it takes you six months or a year to get a single campaign out, the messaging may have changed. World events affect that stuff. And I think having the ability to have our, you your ethos messaging may not change, but maybe your day-to-day stuff does. Maybe you want to tweak it or push something to react to be able to tell a little bit better, you know, adjust those level levers as you’re talking about. think I know that like there’s a place for data. I’m not like a data hater. I think it’s more of

Tom Nixon (25:36.911)
Hater, hater.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (25:39.61)
I think it’s more actually what I think is really fascinating is not enough brands and agencies look at the data of how people are interacting with stuff. And a lot of times, like you do a beautiful campaign and you don’t even have the media buy until you’re delivering it. And you’re like, I wish I had known it was gonna be here. We would have done this and created this thing. And I have done a handful of campaigns where we were very strategic in how we used the out of home marketing and the digital marketing.

Curtis Hays (26:09.925)
any.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (26:10.126)
in that media, like having different assets for how people are reacting and how people are seeing something and engaged with it.

Curtis Hays (26:18.715)
Isn’t that the quantitative research side of it, Tom? And you have some familiarity with that, like doing focus groups or, you again, interviewing customers and those types of things that you can get some data and insights of how well was this brand message perceived?

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (26:29.284)
A lot of times, it’s not even that complicated sometimes. think it’s like, for example, we were doing some events in New York and we needed everyone to go to this particular store. So we were purchasing out of home marketing. So we made sure that all of the sidewalk streets, all the sidewalk billboards were basically timed to point you to the store. And as you were walking, you didn’t miss a second of the ad because they were timed so perfectly.

Or if we’re going to be doing full airport buyouts, we’re going to make sure that we’re going to tweak the creative to be for that audience that’s traveling through that airport. Or boats off the coast of Miami to tell a certain story for that type of audience. I think there’s ways to approach it that are not necessarily fully innovative with having to go back to the way of thinking. think it’s just actually stepping back from being so granular that you don’t need to be.

Tom Nixon (27:26.925)
Yeah, for sure. I’m working with a market research firm on this concept of a possible analysis. So that may be something that you referred to, Curtis. So in this methodology, they’re work, they are going out interviewing customer bases and they’re dividing them and figuring it into quadrants, loyalists, mercenaries, defectors and hostages. Right? So obviously we want more loyalists that we do defectors or, or just mercenaries.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (27:55.782)
Mm-hmm.

Tom Nixon (27:57.143)
There’s a subgroup within the loyalist group that are the apostles. Think of the very close followers, right? In this case, you know, in the Bible, there was 12 real core apostles, but those people would go out and spread the word, right? And that’s what we’re trying to identify. So you can create cohorts of audiences and not just customers, but audience cohorts. It says these are the people who will run into a burning building to defend your brand. We need to figure out what makes them tech and go get more of them. So

In this audience first, I wanted to ask you, Danny. Audience first is a follower also of maybe I’m an apostle of Brian Clark, who is big on this audience first model. He was the guy that created essentially created content marketing and copy blogger audience first. He says all starts with audience, and I think people can recognize the companies that the brands that have done this very well. You mentioned Mamba’s and maybe Tom’s Dollar Shave Club, even Apple.

But I don’t think they understand what needs to happen at the first step one, two and three to get to where those brands ultimately ended up because it just seems I think in a lot of companies leadership’s mind. It’s like that seemed too aspirational. We’re just trying to sell a widget here. So how do people start on this audience first mentality?

Curtis Hays (29:01.78)
have to bring those things.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (29:10.042)
Mm-hmm.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (29:13.802)
It’s easier for larger brands that have millions of dollars to take big swings and to spend the money communicating to their audience that doesn’t have some roadmap of how exactly they’re converting everyone in a sales funnel. So for smaller brands, I’ve worked with a handful of small brands. Have you ever seen something in a grocery store and you’re like, love this brand. How is it that they’ve been around for like

Curtis Hays (29:14.868)
Okay.

Curtis Hays (29:32.852)
Okay.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (29:40.838)
20 years and they’re consistent. They’re not everywhere. They’re not trying to rule the world. They’re not trying to be Coca-Cola. They’re trying to be what they want to be and build slowly, build how their audience and how their consumers want them to. And I think, and listening, but also like not, I think having realistic goals and how you can build on those goals. Because again, I think taking the time,

is going to pay off in the long run. think that every brand was like, I want to launch and sell a million units. OK. But then that’s the stuff that’s cheap and easy and isn’t going to stick around forever, isn’t going to be there. And that’s not their goal. There’s lots of companies that have that goal. I think if you want to build a brand and not just sell a thing, then you’re building the brand and the lifestyle and the community of the people that have it. It can be anything. can be.

Curtis Hays (30:19.058)
and it’s huge and it’s-

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (30:35.14)
what some people might see as a boring office software, right? Why talk to your community in a way that is boring or dull? Why treat them like they’re idiots and they don’t know how to use your software? Let’s make fun of them, bring them in on the joke. Like there’s different things that you can do, but I think a lot of it is identifying those goals with the brand and being a little bit more realistic. Because yeah, often it’ll be a brand manager or someone that like is

Curtis Hays (30:41.042)
I want your attention to this right

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (31:03.354)
doing the brief and they’re like, our goal is this. We want to sell blank amount of this and we want to increase this. OK, well, how? There’s like two things you have to do before that. Can we like if that stuff’s not being done first, then no matter what we create for you, it’s not going to do what you want and you’re setting it up to fail. And I think that’s one of the great things I like about my job and because I get to work with so many different types of agencies and brands is that.

When I’m being brought in, I don’t have a problem being honest about my opinion as a consultant. I think that’s what we’re here for is we, you know, I’ve done millions of dollar campaigns that have fallen flat because the brand didn’t listen. And that’s not fun. Who wins in that situation? Like no one wants to, I don’t need to work that badly to do something that I don’t think is gonna, you know, thrive or really help the brand. So I try to fight those battles when I can.

Tom Nixon (31:58.027)
Awesome. Alright, Curtis, I’m gonna let you have the last word. internally there was a manifesto might be a strong word, but you issued some sort of edict that we will not be starting any program unless we’ve done brand first. So you’ve put this essentially it’s audience first because our process is going and finding out as much as we can about the audience that we’re trying to engage with. But brand first, it’s sort of a approach or departure from your past. Is it safe to say?

Curtis Hays (32:27.219)
Yeah, it just happened yesterday. I had a prospect. We had a conversation, CFO, CMO, three other marketing people on call. They’re in the new market segment. They want to do some advertising. And I said, who’s your customer? What value do you bring to them? Do we have all these pieces in place? At the end of the day, it was going to be a short-term campaign in one channel. And I said, I think you should just save your money and not do it unless you’re going to do a full on investment.

But first we’ve got to figure out these things. And at the end of the conversation, the CMO said, thank you. You gave us a lot of really good things to think about and we need to a lot of homework that we need to do internally first. And then we’ll call you back. cause again, yeah, I don’t want them to throw their money away and that’s what it’s going to be. You can’t do one campaign to an audience you fully haven’t defined yet and think that it’s going to stick. It’s just not. I you’re just going to throw money away.

And even if you did get the right eyeballs on it, you know, a handful of impressions, and I just keep going back to the 7-11-4 rule from Google, is seven hours of interaction with your brand across 11 different touch points. So you have to build a brand if you’re get seven hours of consumption. Starts with messaging and knowing who your audience is, and then building the content that aligns to the value that you provide to that target audience.

Tom Nixon (33:53.935)
Thanks.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (33:54.202)
And I think the content that they want to stick with within that seven hours is tends to be the stuff that feels like they’re being sold to the least. You know, I do a ton of work with Google and on YouTube for brands and I don’t even always agree with a lot of the Google, you know, standards and practices as far as like there needs to be a logo here and a brand message in the first 10 seconds. I feel like if, if YouTube owns TV at this point, because there’s more television there than Netflix, then create television like content.

for your audience, that they want to sit with that long. It doesn’t need to be 30 minute episodes, but it should feel like it’s talking to them in all of those different ways and hitting all of that. think too many brands don’t know anymore who their audience is, or it’s kind of like spaghetti on the wall and there’s like whoever, everyone, everyone’s the audience. And instead of like really honing in and then also holding all their agencies to that instead of like every individual.

brand or in the portfolio, like doing whatever they want.

Curtis Hays (34:52.405)
for you to report.

This is something I realized, Tom, for bullhorns of bullseyes. So we get a lot of views on our shorts, lots of views, but how long is a short? 30 seconds. So how many shorts is one person gonna need to watch to get to seven hours? A lot. Now, if we’ve got some diehards who listen to the entire podcast, right? All 35 minutes. A lot of times it’s audio, it’s not through YouTube, but it’s only a handful episode now and they’ve reached that point.

Tom Nixon (34:59.983)
Yeah.

Right.

Tom Nixon (35:08.439)
I’m no mathematician. I’m an English major.

Tom Nixon (35:14.019)
Yep. Yep.

Curtis Hays (35:23.201)
And, you know, so I think we’re seeing it. And so as a brand, you do have to figure out that appropriate medium and the content and what people desire to consume and what’s going to be helpful to them. you know, really kind of dial that part in. And that’s something, you know, I think we’re working towards as well.

Tom Nixon (35:42.351)
Excellent. Well, that’s a good place to leave off. So Danny Dufresne, which sounds really close to an anagram for Andy Dufresne. So free prize to the first person who comments on LinkedIn or YouTube. It explains who Andy Dufresne is. In a second free prize, we’ll go to the first person who comments on LinkedIn or YouTube and explains or even asks about the Doobie Bounce. And with that,

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (35:58.139)
haha

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (36:08.655)
haha

Tom Nixon (36:10.061)
We will leave you till the next episode of Bullhorns and Bullseyes.

Dani Dufresne Aux Co (36:13.776)
Thank you guys.