New Rules (for CMOs) of B2B Marketing + PR

Drew: Hello, Renegade Marketers! If this is your first time listening, welcome, and if you’re a regular listener, welcome back. Before I present this episode, I’m thrilled to announce the first-ever in-person CMO Super Huddle that we’re hosting in Palo Alto on November 8, 2024. The theme is “Daring Greatness in 2025” and we’re rocking a full slate of inspiring speakers with ample time for networking. Early Bird tickets are on sale now, so grab yours at cmohuddles.com. It’s gonna be flocking amazing!

You’re about to listen to a Career Huddle where our B2B CMO community, CMO Huddles, gets exclusive access to the authors of some of the world’s best-selling business books. The author at this particular huddle was David Meerman Scott, the author behind nine editions of “The New Rules of Marketing and PR.” We dive into the new rules as of 2024 and David shares amazing real-world examples from Do-It-Yourself wooden surfboards to the Grateful Dead to the Savannah Bananas, where brands are inviting clients in, serving them in helpful ways, and standing out by having fun. If you like what you hear, please subscribe to the podcast and leave a review. You’ll be supporting our quest to be the number one B2B marketing podcast. Alright, let’s dive in.

Narrator: Welcome to Renegade Marketers Unite, possibly the best weekly podcast for CMOs and everyone else looking for innovative ways to transform their brand, drive demand, and just plain cut through. Proving that B2B does not mean boring to business. Here’s your host and Chief Marketing Renegade, Drew Neisser.

Drew: Hello, Huddlers and other listeners. I’m excited to introduce you to David Meerman Scott, author of “The New Rules of PR and Marketing,” which first came out in 2007 when it instantly became a must-read for all students of marketing. I mean, I remember vividly when this book came out. It’s like, you got to read it. I remember people buying 10 copies and giving it to their staff. Anyway, since then, because it’s been 17 years, David has written several other books and updated “The New Rules” eight times, with the ninth edition coming out this year. Now, given all the changes that we’ve seen in the last year, not to mention the last 17, I’m really excited to learn what’s on David’s radar for 2025 and beyond. And we will, while David’s book does cover both B2B and B2C, we will get to B2B. So anyway, welcome David Meerman Scott, how are you and where are you this fine day?

David: Hey, great to be here. I’m outside of Boston, where it’s a beautiful day, and looking forward to going hiking next week and to the beach the following week. The summers here in the Boston area are fleeting, and I try to take advantage when I can.

Drew: Exactly. I know it well. Now I want to talk about the stuff behind you. But before we do that, one of the things that the folks at Smart Brevity keep reminding me is get to value early. To deliver something right away that folks can take away just in case they’re leaving early. Maybe you could provide three new rules or new opportunities for B2B marketers that you’re talking about in your book.

David: One thing that’s super interesting to me is that the ideas I talked about in 2007 still are valid. And that is, if you understand your audience really well, and you create content in some form or many forms to reach them, you will get noticed, and that has not changed in 17 years since I wrote the first edition. Well, you could say in 20 years, because I started writing the first edition a few years before it actually came out. We’ve got AI, and I’m sure we can probably dig into this more over the next couple of minutes that we’re together here, but artificial intelligence burst onto the scene in the last couple of years, especially since ChatGPT jumped out and really rattled the marketing world, and especially the B2B world. And yes, super important stuff to get right, but there’s a lot of people getting it wrong, so we will talk about that, I’m sure. And I’m seeing that social networking is still important, although it is a quagmire of bad information. It’s so hard to break through, in some ways, conspiracy theories, and I think what’s to blame is the algorithms, especially the horrible algorithms that are coming out from Meta and its properties, as well as Alphabet and its properties, and we can talk about that as well.

Drew: Well, and those are three good things, obviously. And I love the timelessness of yes, you have to know your audience, and that is a fundamental of marketing. And the output is content that’s helpful. Two, AI is changing a lot. And three, social networks. So great. Now, going backwards a second, you’ve got a surfboard behind you and you’ve got a Grateful Dead. Let’s start with the surfboard, because I know there’s a great story behind it.

David: Yeah, Grain Surfboards. So I’m a surfer. I’m also very focused on the environment. I’m on the board as well as a big donor to the Mamoní Valley Preserve, which is in Panama. We own 12,000 acres in a very, very important part of the world. It’s the narrowest point between North and South America and the narrowest point between the Atlantic and Pacific Oceans, very important for animals, birds, insects, amphibians, all kinds of different creatures. And so I was reading one of my surfing magazines a couple of years ago, and I ran across an article about wooden surfboards like, whoa, that’s hitting my hot buttons. I love surfing. I love taking care of and stewarding the environment, and surfboards are not great for the environment for a variety of reasons. So I went to Google and I typed in wooden surfboards, number one hit on Google at the time, Grain Surfboards. Wow, cool company they’re creating these wonderful surfboards. Oh, and they’re located only an hour away from me. Oh, they’ve got a build-your-own-surfboard class that’s conducted over four days. My wife was just about to travel to Japan. I was like, I’ve got four days free. I signed up then and there. I pulled out my credit card and spent, I think it was like $1,500 on the very first visit to their website, because they were dialed into me as a surfer, as someone who likes beautiful wooden surfboards, as somebody who is protective of the environment, they had dialed my number up perfectly. I went up there and actually made this surfboard, and I love it so much that it has never seen the waves. It sits here in my studio, although I went back about a year later to make another surfboard, which I do surf on on a very regular basis, and I can’t wait to do that in a couple weeks. And so it’s really interesting to me, how I call it buyer personas. There’s many different ways of thinking about your target market. And yes, this is a B2C example, but it absolutely works with B2B. How when you understand your buyers and you are creating the content for them. You are creating something that will attract them, and maybe, in the case of me, pull out a credit card and spend $1,500 within 10 minutes of visiting your website.

Drew: There’s so many things of interest that I think is worth again, it is B2C, but there’s something so wonderfully counterintuitive about a surfboard company offering you the opportunity to build your own.

David: I love this idea. And by the way, this is very much applicable to B2B. And here’s what’s interesting about it, most companies slap on all kinds of copyrights and patents and trademarks and all kinds of legal protections. The first place they go is the lawyers and say, here’s our new product. Let’s get all kinds of controls on it. Grain Surfboards did the opposite. They said, Alright, we invented the technique to make this surfboard. It’s a boat building technique the founder used to build boats for a living, and it’s got ribs in it, and then the wood is over the top of the ribs, and then at the bottom, there’s a plug that’s made out of Gore-Tex material, so that air can get in, but water can’t, so that when the board and the air are in a different temperature or different humidity, it doesn’t cause the laminate to delaminate. They very much have a proprietary technique for building these surfboards. It’s very much something they could have patented. That’s very much something that they could have slapped controls around and made secretive, but they didn’t. They said, you want to buy the plans to build this surfboard? We’re happy to sell them to you. You want to come up to our factory and work with our artisans to make your own and we’ll show you everything you need to know to make this surfboard? Come on up. We would love to have you. I think that’s just amazing. And so many companies do the exact opposite, they don’t want to share the details of what they’re doing. 

I’ll give you another little example of this, which I talk about a lot, because I think it’s fascinating. It became part of “The New Rules of Marketing and PR” book about third or fourth edition. I think I invented this concept: newsjacking. Newsjacking is the art and science of injecting your ideas into a breaking news story used by tons of B2B companies. So every company has some area of expertise you or your people, and when a story breaks that you can comment on, put out something right away on your blog, on social media, do a video about it, whatever, and get your ideas out there. Maybe the media will find it and put you in their stories. Or maybe somebody will that will interest them enough that they’ll buy your product or service. So I invented this idea. I put it out there. I did not trademark the idea of newsjacking. I bought the URL and I made it completely free. Anyone who wants to use this idea, go ahead and today, it’s about a decade later. There’s dozens of PR agencies and marketing agencies that teach newsjacking or consult doing newsjacking, or have services with newsjacking. It’s in the Oxford English Dictionary, and my name is attached to it. Last time I checked, there was over 200,000 hits on Google to the phrase the word newsjacking, and I have the number one hit because I have newsjacking.com. So that is counterintuitive to most B2B marketers, because the first thing they do when they invent a concept is they say, put a trademark on it, put some legal protection on it, don’t allow other people to use it. And I suggest maybe, just maybe, from the marketing perspective, the right answer is to do the exact opposite, and make it freely available.

Drew: There’s something else interesting that struck me. It’s so important, particularly, let’s say, a software company. Oftentimes, there’s a lot of components of the software, and folks only use today 20% of the software. But by bringing the folks in there, you’ve created an experience. They fully buy in and they’ve actually built the product so they know it inside and out. So you created an incredible experience. You’ve brought them together to also build community around the brand in a highly memorable way. Because every time you look at that board, you’ll remember that building experience. And then so, I mean, you’re sort of part owner. I mean, you made it. So there’s just something wonderful about bringing customers into your offices to do something that will create this memorable experience.

David: 100%. I’ve been doing some work recently for a company called Design Ergonomics. They design dental offices, pure B2B. If you’re a dentist and you need a new dental office, they’re one of several companies that you can use to design your dental office. Dave Ahern, who’s the founder of the company, is also a dentist, and he still has several dental offices. He invented some proprietary techniques for doing dentistry that are very ergonomically sound, and if you use those techniques, you’re not only doing dentistry faster, so you can literally see one more patient in a given day than if you’re not using that technique, but it’s also more friendly to your body. So what he does is he invites people into his dental practice and says, “Here’s how I do this dentistry.” You don’t have to buy anything from him, even though he’ll help you to set up an office just like his. That’s the business they’re in, the B2B business that they’re in. But he just wants to help dentists. And his belief, and it’s absolutely true in the B2B world, is that the more dentists who understand his techniques for doing dentistry, the better, because anybody who does that technique is most likely to need to get the products and services that he offers at Design Ergonomics. I’ve helped him to create a website and his social media presence and his focus on buyer personas that allows him to reach those people who are ready to build a new office and want to do it in an ergonomically sound way. And again, it’s counterintuitive. Why in the world would one dentist invite other dentists to their offices to watch their technique, which is more efficient than other dentists, because are they going to copy it? Well, yeah, he wants you to copy it. And I think that B2B companies generally try to avoid that kind of thing. So I think that’s actually a mistake.

Drew: Yeah, you know, if we go back to your original point about content, if you understand the audience, in this case, dentists, dentists need information on how they can be more efficient. It’s a highly competitive business, so you have an understanding of it. You certainly know that one dentist talking to another, they know that it’s going to be relevant, and then the content is interesting and unique. It’s “come to my office and see how it works.” So that ties back.

David: What’s fascinating is you don’t have to buy anything from him to learn the technique. It’s called an “over the shoulder” event. In other words, you look over his shoulder as he and his associates perform dentistry to learn the techniques. He provides that for free. You don’t have to buy anything from him, and if you want to go to that event, learn the technique and buy product from someone else, that’s cool, because he’s getting his ideas out there. But he knows that the vast majority of people who see the technique and want to implement it will want to have him and his people do the training in the office, and they want him to design the dental practice, and they want to use some of the products that he’s patented to do it. And so it works great for him, but he’s going out there in a way that most B2B companies don’t. Most would say, “Yeah, you can come, we’ll show you what to do, but you got to buy something first.” Or, “Yeah, you can come, we’ll show you what to do, but you got to pay us as a consultant to show you how to do it.”

Drew: And the way I’m thinking about this is because we have a lot of conversation in CMO Huddles about events, and events are working again, whether it’s small groups or even large groups, because people are hungry to get together. But these are both cases of the surfboard and the dental. These are unique experiences. They’re highly personal, they’re highly relevant, and they’re unique and memorable. And I feel like if folks in the audience started to think about that in the context of what they could do to create something like that, they’d probably find a competitive edge. I mean, yeah, it could be expensive to get it started, but only people that will show up are highly interested, right? We had a conversation about this in a Huddle yesterday where it was, “Hey, I got a lot of people at the top of the funnel that kind of knocked on a website, but they’re not really ready or interested in getting this to the other place.” There’s this massive gap, whereas all of a sudden it’s like, “Hey, come see how we’re getting one extra patient a day and making it easier for you to do your job.” Okay, I’ll do that.

David: That’s exactly right. And I’ve got other examples of the same thing. But it goes down to it actually is a technique using neuroscience. So my daughter, Reiko, she and I wrote a book called “Fanocracy.” It came out in 2020, and it’s about how to build fans of a business, including B2B businesses. And Reiko is now an emergency doctor, and when we were writing it, she was in med school. Her undergraduate degree at Columbia was neuroscience. And so we decided to take a look at the neuroscience aspects of how and why someone becomes fans of a company or a product or a service or an idea, and one of the strongest reasons why someone becomes a fan is related to physical proximity, how close you are to another human being. And from the neuroscience perspective, that has to do with the idea going back tens of thousands of generations of humans, where, when we are part of our tribe of people, you know, imagine 20,000 years ago on the plains of Africa, if you’re with your tribe of a dozen people, you’re safe and comfortable and secure. But if you run across a tribe of rivals, you feel as though there’s some danger there, and that still is active in our brains today. If you go into a room with people you know, say a cocktail party or something, you feel safe and secure. If you go into a crowded elevator where you don’t know people, you can feel uncomfortable, but here’s something interesting. Think about a B2B conference. You walk into a crowded elevator, people have a badge. They’re from the same conference. You feel comfortable because they’re part of the tribe that you’re part of for that weekend or that moment. And so what we learned as we were doing the research on the neuroscience aspects of building fans, that the more you can bring people in physical proximity with you and one another, the stronger the bonds will be, and the more likely they are to become fans, which is why Grain Surfboards works, because I was with their artisans for four full days, or why HubSpot’s conference, for example, which I’ve spoken at every single one since 2008 or 2009, I think their first one was, they bring these people together. You don’t have to be a HubSpot client to go to the HubSpot conference. All you have to do is buy a ticket. Anyone can go and you get in physical proximity with other salespeople, marketing people at companies, you all have the same badge. So you go into a crowded elevator, no one has a badge on. You’re uncomfortable. You go in a crowded elevator, everyone’s from the HubSpot Inbound conference. They have their badge on. You feel much more comfortable because they’re part of the same tribe. So the more as you have a B2B business, the more you can bring your existing and potential customers together with you and your employees and your teammates in physical proximity, whether that’s at an event or a dinner or bring them to your office or show them around your factory or whatever it is that makes sense, the more likely they are to become and remain fans.

Drew: Love it. Okay, one last thing. You mentioned Panama at the very beginning, and what I can’t remember, and maybe you know or don’t know, are there penguins in Panama?

David: No penguins in Panama.

Drew: Okay, we can move on.

David: Definitely penguins in Antarctica, but no penguins in Panama.

Drew: Well, you know, a group of penguins is a Huddle, which is why I had to ask. Okay, now let’s go to the Grateful Dead and the book you wrote on that, and since it’s there, we have to talk about that. And Bill Walton, so let’s do that.

David: “Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead” came out in, I believe it was 2010. I wrote it with Brian Halligan. Brian is the CEO and co-founder of HubSpot, and also Bill Walton, NBA basketball hall of famer. Bill, sadly, several months ago, passed on. He was a buddy, super awesome guy. Loved Bill, and Bill was the biggest Deadhead, not only because he was seven feet tall, but also because he’s seen the Grateful Dead or the offshoots of the Grateful Dead over 1000 times. I’m at 108 times I’ve seen the Grateful Dead or the offshoots. My buddy Brian, my co-author, probably about 150 times. And that’s fandom. That’s fandom for sure. So we wrote this book “Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead” to talk about the idea of how this crazy band from San Francisco that started in 1965, the offshoots are still going with original members all the way into whatever the heck year this is, 2024, and they recently finished up a run at the Sphere in Las Vegas. I went six times. How crazy is that? Because I’m a fan, and when you’re a fan of something, you keep doing it, you keep spending money.

Drew: Yeah, that’s the kind of bond that I think every brand would love to have. Let’s go back, because I know there’s some lessons in there, some intersections between some of the lessons from the Grateful Dead in your latest edition of the new rules. And I want to make sure we cover some more of the new rules. I mean, we’ve talked about understanding your audience, and let’s, I guess, let’s move into AI for now. Why it’s hard to have a conversation on marketing right now without—it’s funny, I saw a post on LinkedIn earlier in the day. It said, like 90% of what you hear about AI is hype, but there’s 10% that’s really good stuff. So what are you seeing? What are you excited about, in terms of new rules?

David: So with AI, what’s interesting to me is I worked really hard to kind of boil it down in my own mind. What is AI? Because a lot of people think they know, or maybe they know, but it’s really in some cases hard to articulate. So I’m going to share with you something that you can mention in a dinner party to all your friends who don’t understand technology, and they’ll think you’re super smart. Artificial Intelligence is simply data and math, it’s all it is. And so when you think about AI, always be thinking, whose data is it number one, and whose math is it number two? And so that will help to guide how you’re thinking about artificial intelligence.

So if you’re using ChatGPT, which is probably one of the most famous forms of AI that marketers have been using, think about in its basic form. When you go to the website of OpenAI for ChatGPT, it’s OpenAI’s large language model, so it’s their math and the data that it draws from. If you’re using just the regular public ChatGPT, it’s basically public data. It’s books, including three of mine. And that’s another discussion of how I think about my content being used without my permission. By the way, here’s the answer: I’m happy to have all of my content that’s freely available used without my permission, because that’s why I put it out there. Scrape my website. Take all 20 years of my blog posts. Take all the videos I’ve ever done. Take all of the videos of me speaking that the conference organizers have put up on the internet. I’m fine with everything that’s freely available being taken. I’m not so comfortable, however, with these large language models taking the content from Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead, from Fanocracy, from The New Rules of Marketing and PR and using it without my permission, nor without any compensation. That’s another topic, but thought I would throw that out there.

So data, plus math. If you’re thinking about OpenAI, it’s OpenAI’s math and public data. And so yeah, you can go in there and you could say, “Please create a blog post for me,” but you’re creating a blog post with someone else’s data. I am a huge fan of using artificial intelligence on your own data, and there’s many ways that that’s possible, many ways to do that. I’m a huge fan of taking one form of content and applying AI to it, to use it in multiple forms.

Drew, I’m not sure what you do with the content that you create, that we’re making right now and that you’ve done with your other episodes, but what’s possible, you can make a transcript using AI of everything we’re saying right now. You can then cut that transcript using AI into the most important points that can become tweets or can become LinkedIn posts. You can use AI to take the video and cut that into short segments that can become videos on social networks. You can use AI to take this content that we’re creating right now and turn it into three or four or five or 10 blog posts. 

AI can be such an interesting tool to repurpose your own content and to take that one step further, I’m a big fan of taking a company’s data so your company, whatever company you work for, take its data and create a proprietary, private database of the data, and then use AI to interrogate that data in some way, to understand about what your customers are doing, to understand what marketing strategies might work the best.

And what I’ve done is I’ve taken 20 years of blog posts, plus the content from six of my books, and I’ve taken all of that content, dropped it into a proprietary database, where then I have an AI engine over the top of it, and I can ask the AI to create pieces of content, but it’s using my data. It’s not going to the public internet and saying, you know, create a blog post about B2B marketing using buyer personas. It’s going to my content and creating a blog post about how to use buyer personas to create great B2B marketing. And so I think that’s really fabulous.

So I’m a big believer that AI is very, very important to do good marketing. It saves time. It creates, in many cases, better content. In many ways, it makes our lives easier. And I believe that over time, marketers and executives at companies, especially B2B companies, are going to be at a disadvantage if they’re not using these tools. Just like 20 years ago, you were at a disadvantage if you didn’t jump onto social media as that was beginning to burst onto the scene, or just like 30 or 40 years ago, you were at a disadvantage if you said, “I don’t want to have a website, I don’t want to do email.” You know, you think back today, that sounds ridiculous. Why would you not have a website? Why would you not do email? But people 30 or 40 years ago were reluctant to deploy those tools as well.

Drew (AD Break): This show is brought to you by CMO Huddles, the only marketing community dedicated to B2B greatness, and that donates 1% of revenue to the Global Penguin Society. Why? Well, it turns out that B2B CMOs and penguins have a lot in common. Both are highly curious and remarkable problem solvers. Both prevail in harsh environments by working together with peers, and both are remarkably mediagenic. And just as a group of penguins is called a Huddle, our community of over 300 B2B marketing leaders huddle together to gain confidence, colleagues, and coverage. If you’re a B2B CMO, why not dive into CMO Huddles by registering for our free starter program on CMOhuddles.com? Hope to see you in a Huddle soon.

Drew: It’s funny because for our audio version of this as a podcast, we’ll use Descript, where we’ll both edit it, transcribe it, get rid of the ums and ahs, which I love, find the snippets, and so forth. All of the repurposing that you’re talking about, we’re doing actively, whether it’s creating a blog post, whether it’s creating show notes. Funny enough, we found recently that Claude does a lot better when you want show notes.

David: Yeah. I found that the same thing is true of the various models, whether it’s Google’s model or Claude or OpenAI, ChatGPT, whatever. I’m a big fan of Perplexity. I use that all the time, but the different models are good at different things. So depending on what you’re trying to do, you go to the different models, and you kind of learn which model is better at which task.

Drew: It’s funny, on the GPT, creating your own GPT, I did exactly what you’re talking about. Loaded up my books, loaded up hundreds and hundreds of conversations into the Drew GPT, which it doesn’t work as well as I would like, frankly. But what has worked really well is we also took four years worth of notes and recaps from CMO Huddles and turned it into Becca, who is a B2B CMO, who can answer your questions, and we’ll pull from our own database. The answers are so much better.

So I want to connect the dots a little bit, because, to me, the thing I’m most excited about is the ability of these tools to create experiences and things that used to take $100,000 and a bunch of programmers to create, you’ll now be able to do, that’s part one. And part two, I think we’re getting close to real, true personalization at scale if you have first-party data. In a non-creepy way, in a way that you could actually service someone on a very personalized basis. We know that David likes surfboards and surfing, and we know he likes the Grateful Dead. We gotta find a way in every time we communicate with him to bring something of relevance, to show that we get it, we understand.

David: That’s an interesting one. I’m not sure we’re there yet. You can definitely find lots and lots and lots of things about somebody like me and what I like to do, because I’m very public about it. You know, here we are creating this content right now, and I’ve done hundreds and hundreds of podcast guest appearances. I’m blogging all the time, I’m active on social media, but the truth is, the vast majority of people aren’t very public.

So you know, the part that gets into the creepiness factor is using the content that’s created based on what products you buy and what company’s websites you click on and things like that, and I think most people are a little bit wiggy about that, and I think you’re only really drawing on a certain percentage of somebody’s persona when you’re doing that. So I’m sure we’ll get there at some point. You want to have some personalization, but I’m not sure that my breadcrumbs that are out there are truly developing a unique picture of me such that any organization can identify who I am to market to me.

I mean, I’ll just give you an example. Right now, I had a client meeting yesterday with a B2B company, and they’re considering starting a podcast. And so I reached out to a couple of people to find out if they’re using podcast production services, you know, third-party companies that help to produce podcasts, and if so, do they have names of companies? And so yeah, and right now, I’m in the market for a B2B company that does podcast production services. So if all of a sudden a company were to reach out to me and say, “Oh, we know you love the Grateful Dead, why don’t you buy some of our podcast production services,” I’d be like, “That’s interesting,” but I’m not sure that that would be very helpful.

This is the first time I’m publicly saying that I’m interested in a service like that. So now it’s out there. But my guess, I think, is I would put a 99.9% probability that unless someone happens to be watching this episode and reaches out privately to me and says, “Hey, I saw you on the episode, that’s a service that I provide,” and please do if you do, it’s unlikely that that little snippet among the millions of snippets that I put out there is going to produce the kind of data that somebody would want to be able to reach out to me privately and say, “Hey, we know you’re in the market for this.” So we got a long way to go. I think we’ll probably get there at some point, but I don’t think we’re there yet.

Drew: Yeah, interesting. And there is this weird, creepy thing. I’m very intrigued by things like personality assessment tools, right? Which could say, looked at your LinkedIn profile and perhaps do a personality assessment. That is a way of so if you’re an introvert or an extrovert, or a certain type of person that responds in a certain way, that could really enhance…

David: That becomes super interesting. And I have not experimented with that, but that is something that is intriguing to me. That’s more generic. That’s not saying, “I know you like the Grateful Dead.” That’s saying, “Oh, it looks like you’re somebody who has these attributes.” Therefore this would be the right way to market to me. That certainly becomes interesting.

Drew: So The New Rules of Marketing and PR. Let’s talk PR for a second. It’s funny, right when your book came out, you know, the firm that I ran at the time, Renegade, was very much on that cutting edge of social media, and we got excited about newsjacking, and we helped a few clients get into that. And what I found was, first of all, there’s the famous Dunk in the Dark, there’s a few others, and then it wasn’t a sustainable thing, like you could try to build a team, but it was very difficult. So I’m wondering if the way you approach PR in the new rules to have a consistent presence if you have thoughts on making sure that the PR that you’re getting, you know keeps going out there, and not just opportunistically.

David: When I first wrote The New Rules of Marketing and PR, so I began writing in about, I didn’t know that it was a book yet, but I began writing about these ideas around 2004, 20 years ago, and 20 years ago, Public Relations and Marketing were completely separate disciplines with a big fat brick wall down the middle of them. And they were very, very different things. And marketing was almost all advertising at the time, until I started to talk about the idea of content that you can create yourself as a form of marketing, most companies didn’t do a good job of it. Sure, they had a website, but they didn’t do a good job of creating great content. And social media didn’t exist at that point, Facebook and Twitter and all them started after I was in the process of writing the first edition of the book.

And then, on the other hand, public relations was almost exclusively how you can get members of the media, mainstream media, to write or broadcast about you. Now that brick wall has completely disappeared. There really isn’t any demarcation between public relations and marketing. And if you think about public relations… Public Relations, a paraphrased definition from the Public Relations Society of America, is that public relations is a discipline of reaching your public, okay, then no one said it has anything to do with the media. The media and media relations is a subset of public relations, but most PR people put their head in the sand 20 years ago and said, “Hey, public relations is only how we go to the mainstream media, how we go to magazines and newspapers and radio and television to get noticed.” So those have all broken down.

What I’m seeing today, you know, this is 20 years later. What I’m seeing today is that it’s all just about generating attention. One way to generate attention is to create the kind of content that people will find through search engines, through social, whatever. Another form of generating attention is that you create the kind of content that people will find and then write or broadcast about you, and sure, there’s still pockets of traditional public relations that are out there, you know, reaching out to members of the media with the hope that they’ll write about you. I don’t know if anyone even sees that anymore, because there’s so many different outlets now, and they’re not being consumed in the way they used to be.

But that being said, the idea of newsjacking is still viable. But the thing I always said about newsjacking, since the very beginning, since I invented it, is it’s kind of like a venture capital firm, or kind of like a movie studio. A venture capital firm invests in 25 companies with the expectation that most of them will go bankrupt. A few of them might be acquired for, you know, a bit of money, and then maybe, if you’re lucky, one will go public. A movie studio invests in 25 movies with the expectations that most won’t make back the investment. A few will do okay, and maybe one will be a blockbuster. And when you do newsjacking, maybe you do 25 different newsjacking opportunities where you think, “Wow, this is going to be great. I’m so excited about it. We’re going to get tons of attention.” Most of them will fall flat. A few of them will do okay, and if you’re lucky, one out of 25 maybe will get a bunch of attention, and that’s the way I think you look at newsjacking.

The whole idea of public relations has utterly changed in the last 20 years, I think, so much so that I don’t really see any more demarcation between what’s PR and what’s marketing. Yet most organizations, especially bigger ones, still have different groups of people assigned to those different tasks. And what I see is often a huge disconnect, where the PR team is off doing some stuff, creating press releases and whatnot, which can be even in conflict with what the marketing teams are doing. It’s like they’re reporting up through different people and creating different types of stuff that sometimes aren’t even coordinated. So obviously, coordinate, if you have departments that are doing two different things like that.

Drew: So we’ve done surfboards. I think it’d be great to have one or two other interesting case histories that you talk about in the new book that sort of tell some of the dimensions of the new rules.

David: This is not in the book, but it’s something that I did a couple of months ago that was super exciting. Jesse Cole is the owner of the Savannah Bananas baseball team, and you have a smile on your face. You know the Savannah Bananas?

Drew: No, I saw your post on it recently.

David: You saw my post. So the Savannah Bananas, when he purchased the team back in 2016, it was just a bunch of college baseball players that would get together in the summer and play in this little, tiny, scruffy league in the American South. And his first couple of games, there were 200 fans in the stands. And he said, “You know what, I’m gonna…” and I’m not taking any credit, and I’m not saying that he like, used my book as his Bible, but he used the ideas that I talk about, and he said, “Let’s build fans, let’s create content, let’s do things that are interesting. Let’s have fun with this.” And so he started to have fun with his baseball team. They started to do cool and interesting things, like they danced on the field, and they did trick plays and they had the Savannah Banana Nanas, which are a group of grandmothers who became their cheerleading squad. They have the Dad Bod Cheer Squad, which are a bunch of guys with big bellies. They had a player on stilts. And, you know, no one could find in the rule book anything that said, you can’t have a player in stilts, and what’s the range for where the strike zone is? Well, it’s a little bit different if the guy has on stilts and he’s 10 feet tall. So all of these things were introduced into the game. And he started immediately selling out the Savannah baseball stadium. And then they started to play in bigger stadiums of sort of 10,000 seats. They’ve sold out every single game for the last, I think, something like six or seven years. They now have a waitlist of over 2 million people to get tickets. This year (2024) they played six major league ballparks. I went to see them at Fenway Park. They had more people in Fenway Park in 2024 than the Red Sox had for any single game at Fenway in 2024, just absolutely crushing it, the Savannah Bananas. I just love that example, because it shows that you can use these ideas for any kind of business. Who would have thought that a little tiny team from Savannah, Georgia would have more fans on TikTok than any major league team? And that’s what’s possible if you do content right, if you understand your buyer personas right, if you create content that’s right. It’s just, in every way, a perfect example of what I’m talking about.

Drew: Well, and I’m going to break it down a little bit more. I mean, first of all, they’ve adopted sort of the jester archetype, in all ways. They really went with it from a dad humor standpoint, they also essentially changed the product because, things like, there’s no bunts, they got rid of everything. There’s music all the time. The product is different. And so that was part when they changed the rules of the product.

David: What they realized is that playing under the current baseball rules wasn’t going to work. So they left the league. Created what’s essentially an exhibition league. Jesse now owns three teams, and they play each other, possibly going to four or more teams next season. And they created their own rules, which are called Banana Ball, and you just mentioned a couple of them, which makes the game more exciting and fun for fans.

Drew: Yes, I love the comment that bunts aren’t fun. Nobody likes bunts, which is hilarious. What’s so interesting here, in getting back to almost every conversation that we’ve had, is about creating a richer, more involving customer experience, and that when you do that, you also create all sorts of content opportunities and extensions, but you’re really getting to know your customer and building a fan base around you that can do a lot of the amplification work. And so this wasn’t just a couple of TikTok videos. This was a substantial change to the product, first of all, and that’s really important in all of this. It’s not just about the sizzle. There’s some steak that’s going on that was changed here. But there’s this other part of it, which is so ignored in B2B, which is, fun makes a difference, right? Being the likable, the most likable brand in your category is a huge opportunity for almost any business in B2B. It’s just funny because every time I talk to a CMO who’s getting their CEO or the board says, “I don’t know if we can go that far. We’re selling a serious product.” Well, you know, this is where the B2B and the B2C world can merge. I do think there’s a lot different, but in this particular case of not taking yourself seriously, it could make a big difference.

David: And I’ll give you an example of that from recently. And actually, it happened too recently for it to be a part of the new book, but you might remember a couple of months ago, Apple had a big fail when they did their crush video. And it’s on my blog, if you didn’t happen to see it, but they had a big Crusher. It looked like a kind of Crusher that would crush a car, and that big Crusher was crushing all of these analog tools of creative endeavor, paint, a beautiful wooden acoustic guitar, vintage stereo equipment, vintage photography equipment, and it completely crushed it down into being virtually nothing. And then, and this was all on a very slickly produced, high-quality kind of movie-level video. And then after it was crushed, the crusher opened up, and there was the new iPad there. And creatives like me were horrified. What in the world is Apple, which is one of the most admired companies in the world, what the heck is Apple doing? And Apple, of course, B2B and B2C, crushes creativity. Literally. What they were saying is, we are crushing creativity. That was the literal message. And then you can use our device to create fake creativity, was the way I took it. And it got tons and tons and tons of backlash. So the fun bit came a couple of days later, three or four days later, I don’t remember the exact timing. Samsung came out with their “uncrushed” video. It’s on my blog as well, if you haven’t seen that one, and that’s gotten millions and millions of views because they actually created a video where these, you know, they kind of recreated part of that Apple video, and then they used one of the, you know, guitars that was sort of partly crushed, and used that to a young woman was singing a song, and it’s a hashtag, uncrush. And so I can imagine the boardroom of Samsung saying, “Do we really want to stick it to Apple? Do we really want to do this? Is this something that’s part of our brand?” And I’m so glad they did, because they got tons of great attention for doing it. And it, you know, it kind of showed, hey, Apple’s not invincible. And hey, we do have a sense of humor here at Samsung. And hey, we can see that there are other ways to do this, this creativity thing. And hey, maybe if you’re the guy in charge of acquiring technology for all of your employees, you should consider Samsung phones rather than Apple phones, or Samsung computers or touchscreens rather than the Apple ones.

Drew: Two takeaways on that. One, no guts, no glory. Two, when your competitor screws up, make sure that everybody knows about it.

David: Yeah, and that’s, I mean, it’s a classic example of newsjacking too, really, really great.

Drew: Okay, I know we’re going to run out of time there. I want to make sure we wrap up with two do’s and one don’t for B2B CMOs in 2025.

David: Do have fun. Marketing can be fun. Please do remember that even though it’s 20 years later since I first started talking about it, it’s still about creating interesting content, understanding the people you’re trying to reach and then creating the content for them. And please don’t rely on AI to create content for you from data that has been scraped from the public Internet exclusively. Sure, use AI as a tool. I do too. I’m on the board of several AI companies. Love AI, but just be careful not to just create the kind of dreck that millions and millions and millions of people are putting out there by just pushing a button and generating content based on other people’s work.

Drew: I love it and so okay, we’re gonna have fun no matter what, damn it. We’re going to create interesting content, but we’re not going to use AI, which stands for average information. Just a reminder, it’s an average if you use it to create it from the beginning, I know Nicole Leffer will take me to task on that, but that’s not how she uses it, either. David Meerman Scott, how can people find you and engage you moving forward?

David: So one of the things I tell people, and many B2B companies screw this up, is you must always create a company name or a product name that’s easily findable on the web if you go to a search engine. My name is David Scott, and if you go to a search engine, and type in David Scott, you will see a whole bunch of people, which is what I discovered 20 years ago, when I was in the process of, maybe it’s 25 years ago, and I was in the process of creating my first website. So I am David Meerman Scott, using my middle name, the only one in the world with that name. See, if you Google me, you find me. David Meerman Scott, on most of the social networks, I am DMScott, the idea of building fans of a business website is Fanocracy. Maybe I’ll see someone on the waves. Maybe I’ll see you at a Grateful Dead show. Maybe I’ll see you at a B2B conference. But thanks very much, Drew, for having me on.

Drew: David, great to have you. And with that, we’ll say goodbye.

David: Take care everyone.

Drew: If you’re a B2B CMO and you want to hear more conversations like this one, find out if you qualify to join our community of sharing, caring, and daring CMOs at CMOhuddles.com.

Show Credits

Renegade Marketers Unite is written and directed by Drew Neisser. Hey, that’s me! This show is produced by Melissa Caffrey, Laura Parkyn, and Ishar Cuevas. The music is by the amazing Burns Twins and the intro Voice Over is Linda Cornelius. To find the transcripts of all episodes, suggest future guests, or learn more about B2B branding, CMO Huddles, or my CMO coaching service, check out renegade.com. I’m your host, Drew Neisser. And until next time, keep those Renegade thinking caps on and strong!