Unleashing Brand Love at Gusto

 

Drew: Hey, it’s Drew. I’m excited that you’re here to listen to another episode of Renegade Marketers Unite. And if this is your first time listening, then welcome. This show is brought to you by CMO Huddles, the only community of consistently curious B2B marketers, and that has a logo featuring penguins. Wait. What? Yeah. Well, a group of these curious, adaptable and problem-solving birds is called a huddle. And the leaders of CMO Huddles are all that and more, huddling together to heat up the coldest job in the C-suite. Get it? If you’re a B2B marketing leader who wants to outswim your competition, please check out cmohuddles.com. Okay, now on to today’s show.

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: At our CMO Super Huddle last November in Palo Alto, the first panel by design was called “Brilliant B2B Marketing,” and it featured four B2B marketing leaders who orchestrated highly effective brand-building campaigns that also ended up helping the business grow. Now, among that illustrious group was Jason Ng, the CMO of Gusto. Jason’s story is fascinating, which is why I’m so excited to have a one-on-one with him today, right now. And by the way, before joining Gusto in 2022, Jason had long stints at Amazon and Microsoft after getting his foundational marketing experience at Procter & Gamble, and I know that’s going to come up. So with that, welcome Jason. How are you and where are you this fine day?

Jason: Thanks, Drew. Excited to be here. I am in sunny, for a rare change, Seattle today.

Drew: Two words that you never put together: sunny, Seattle. All right. Well, perfect, because these days we often don’t get to put the words brand and B2B together. So perfect setting on a sunny day. We’re going to talk about that anyway. Just in case our audience has to leave early, or we need to convince them to stay, can you provide three things every CMO needs to know before embarking on a brand-building marketing campaign?

Jason: You know, I’ve had a chance to do this several times, most recently at Gusto and AWS. And what I can tell you is my experience there in terms of the appetite to do brand marketing and a big brand campaign is the same. And so the first thing that I think is really important is just business readiness. And I think what’s important there is a brand campaign, an effective one at that, is really there to amplify what’s already true about your product or a company. So you need to make sure that you have strong product-market fit and a very compelling value proposition.

Otherwise, you know, you could be amplifying something that’s not great and end up wasting a lot of money, and then people will think, “Oh, well, brand marketing didn’t work because we tried it that one time.” And I think related to that is you do want to have effective performance marketing programs, because essentially, what you’re doing with a brand marketing campaign is you’re creating awareness and demand for a product, but you have to be able to capture that demand effectively. And so if you don’t have strong content marketing, SEO, search people things to drive people down that funnel, you may not see the results you want from a brand marketing campaign.

The second piece, I think, is really important, is just having readiness around your team. And a lot of times CEOs or boards, they will be confident in investing in brand if they know the team can execute effectively around that. And so having strong creative and having a team that can deliver compelling creative is critical, because creative is a highly leveraged activity, and if you’re putting something out there that people don’t like, or you haven’t demonstrated the ability to get that right, again, you’re throwing money out the door. And I think it’s really important that you nail all the things that lead up to great creative like your positioning, your briefs, your messaging, all of that to drive to something that is worthy of amplification in a brand marketing campaign.

Drew: So the first one is so interesting, which is basically, if you put money behind your business, and it’s not a good product or service, and there isn’t a good product fit, it’s probably going to only accelerate the decline of the business. And I’ve talked about that on this show, so it makes sense. So you really got to be confident in your product, on the fit and the value prop. Okay, so I’m with you. There’s no discussion needed. You said point is you’ve got to have effective performance marketing. You know, I hate the term performance marketing. It’s a piccadillo, because it implies that other marketing isn’t performance – we’ve got the performance marketing and then we got everything else. But I know what you mean, which is the ability to take this potential demand and capture it and convert it into business. Talk a little about what that looks like, because we’re creating this broader umbrella of interest, if you spend a lot of money, could be a big, if you will, a fire hose of interest. So what are we talking about when we say performance marketing that’s effective?

Jason: Yeah, and you can use interchangeable terms like direct response marketing or just the things that are highly, highly measurable. So right? The first thing you see when you run a big brand campaign, and I see this even from a timestamp point of view, like I run an ad, I see a lot of traffic to my website, especially for people who don’t or who have never heard of us. And so making sure that your website is performant in that like it has been optimized to clearly message what your product is. You know customers you serve, what you stand for. So in many ways, it is a manifestation of your brand, but it has to be performant in getting people to that next step, whatever that may be for your business, and so getting that right, and then going, like one, like reverse engineering, like, what’s the step that happens before that? Like so landing pages, or sometimes people might come through search right, and so making sure that you have the right SEO programs in place to show up on the keywords that people might type in when they see or respond to your brand marketing and paid search on top of that, so getting sort of those bottom of funnel activities there and present so that your ad just isn’t viewed, and then it goes away and people forget about it. But if someone has some level of interest, you show up in a way that captures that person while they’re thinking about your product or your company based on what they were exposed to in your brand campaign.

Drew: Okay, so it makes sense because we’re again, we’re throwing in theory, if you run a brand campaign and spend money on advertising, chances are your site traffic will go up. One thing I’ve noticed is that companies that are really good at optimizing their website for, if you will, often you’ll have this brand campaign, and then you land to the company page, and it doesn’t include the brand campaign visuals, story and so forth. And the story that I often hear is, “Well, we optimized, we tested it. It’s on some of the landing pages, but it’s not on the homepage.” Is that a good practice?

Jason: I’ve done it both ways, where I’ll create an ad, I’ll put a URL at the end, and it goes to a campaign landing page. But I think sometimes we overestimate how much people recall when they see that ad. Often, you’re making an impression. Just getting them to your website is a big win. I think we overthink the need to have continuity from a brand impression. Some companies have done this well – I’ve seen Google Cloud has this campaign where that through-line from that campaign is in every touchpoint for the customer. But you really have to be all in on that for it to work effectively. When I have tested sending people to a campaign landing page that has more of that continuity, oftentimes the brand campaign works hard insofar as it lets you know what the company is and maybe what it does, but people aren’t going to recall all that information if you put too much in that ad – it becomes an infomercial. When they go to your landing page, I think we just overthink or overestimate how much transference happens from what they saw in that campaign to where they go when they land on your homepage. By the time they take that action, they’re more interested in, “Okay, what is this company?” In my example, we sell payroll, so I want to know more about what their payroll offering is, and so we don’t try to force the campaign through the homepage or into a campaign landing page anymore.

Drew: It’s so funny because we had Sahil Patel, who’s of Spiralized, on a bonus huddle, and he often talks about website landing pages and giving customers exactly what they need at that moment. He really strips out the creative, and I found it – because we had him revise the same one – it hurt me as a person who builds a complete brand and thinks about it, but there was a point to it. I think you’re right in that seeing an ad is very different than going to a website, and you have to acknowledge that. I will acknowledge that at this point because what you’re doing is finding the shortest distance to the answer they were looking for. How can you get them to the next step, which is either the pricing page or the demo page or some other thing? It’s a pull-through. I love consistency, I love the through-line, but I get why we have to acknowledge that the website serves a different function, and if they got to the website, that’s a win. Now make sure you convert them.

Jason: That being said, when we shot our ads, we took a lot of stills from it. We actually reuse a lot of that photography across our marketing collateral, including some of our pages on our website. It’s just not front and center because it doesn’t need to be. But I do believe in both what he said and what you just said, where consistency is important.

Drew: The last thing you mentioned in your three things is the readiness from a creative standpoint. You can’t bore anybody to buy your product, and if we’re trying to get their attention, we have to get their attention. So in your specific case, how did this campaign develop? Maybe let’s go back now to the beginning, even when you landed at Gusto in April 2022 – what was your mandate?

Jason: My mandate was to uplevel our marketing organization and our capabilities and to deliver marketing that lives into the vision of the company and also does justice to a product that, quite frankly, had kind of grown organically on its own through word of mouth. In many ways, my marketing vision was to really steward the brand in a way that was true to the company and played off the goodwill and the love and passion that people who use Gusto have when they experience paying their people for the first time through Gusto and other use cases that we offer. It was really to develop a best-in-class marketing program across brand demand gen, comms, product marketing, all of those different functions, so that we can confidently say that our marketing lives up to the quality of our product and reflects the love that our customers have for us.

Drew: “Unleashing brand love.” I love it. So talk about what was the process that got you to your creative strategy?

Jason: It wasn’t the first time that Gusto had ever created a brand spot, but prior work that we had done kind of came in fits and starts. We were good about explaining what we do and what we care about, but they were very much manifesto-driven campaigns, which have their role. I wanted marketing or brand marketing that could also perform and really help provide air cover for a full-funnel marketing approach. One of the things I do whenever I embark on a brand campaign is stay very close to customers. I’m looking at what the customer insight is, what their point of view in the world is, what struggles and pains they go through, and what role my company and product serve in really helping them solve a pain point or deliver against something aspirational that they hope to achieve. One of the great things about the customers we serve is small businesses – I mean, who? There’s no one you root harder for than the small business. These are people who are sometimes part of an immigrant story, or sometimes someone onto their second career. But there’s a real profound life-changing impact that small business has on society, on communities, and the people who run them. So just really getting to understand their point of view of the world, and what it’s like starting a business, what it’s like paying their people, what it’s like managing a team – all things that we provide – was really the genesis for developing insights into how I could craft a campaign around this.

Drew: So are we talking about quantitative? Are we talking about qualitative? How did you know when you had talked to – because what’s so interesting having worked with clients who have targeted small businesses – I mean, you could look at the world and half these small businesses are very happy with the size that they are. They don’t necessarily want to be the next – that’s part one. Part two: there’s a new generation of business starters who were 35 and under, and their way of thinking about business is very different than previous generations. So you’ve got a very dynamic target and a very diverse one. How did you sort of go about getting this information and then narrowing it down to the key insight that you ended up building the campaign from?

Jason: Yeah, so you know, you talk to as many customers as you can. I start my research journey usually with qualitative first. I mean, I’ll look at whatever quantitative study we have, but I like to develop theses around what customers think before I do any kind of survey-type research. And so it was a lot of just talking to small business owners organically, like getting on calls, or sometimes I’d go into a coffee shop and I’d ask them all, you know, “How did you start your business?” And before I get into, like, who do you use type of thing, but just really understanding their story, and everyone’s got a different story, and it’s a very broad pool – a startup is very different than someone who runs a coffee shop. But one of the things that you learn is you see the differences between the types of businesses or where they’re at in their life stage, but then you see what’s common. And so when you start to look at what are the commonalities, it’s true whether you’re a YouTube influencer or someone who is running a bakery shop. And one of the things we learned was, starting a business is really hard. It takes a lot of courage, and when it comes down to some of the first things you have to do, like you have to incorporate your business, or you have to get a business number, get it set up as a business entity, like paying your people and running payroll, even if it’s just yourself running that business, is often something that people don’t like to do, and the solutions in that space, even to this day, aren’t the best. You know, it’s a lot of enterprise companies or bigger companies that serve multiple segments well, but a small business owner needs something that is very simple, very intuitive, something that they feel gets them. And, you know, I don’t want to disparage my competitors on this show, but I mean, the reality is, why not? It’s not so easy using some of these bigger players. And there’s a general dislike for it – it’s a necessary evil, like, “I gotta use so and so, but I don’t love it, but it gets the job done” when we talk to our own customers. So I talk to customers and non-customers, I realized that, like, “Oh, since we’ve used Gusto, it’s changed our world” or “You guys are so much better than what’s out there because you understand small business.” You’re right. We’re running a business at the end of the day, but we don’t come across as like we’re here to nickel and dime you. We’re not here to please shareholders or things like that. Like we are very much mission-led in our approach. And so that is what got us down this line that if we could somehow take this pain that people feel and balance it against the tension of the joy that people often feel when they’re using our product for the first time, or the satisfaction that they have, then we could create a really interesting story around that. And so that’s what led to this creative angle where our ads compare these painful tasks like watching grass grow or waiting for paint to dry, or sitting in a dentist chair and getting your root canal, to managing payroll and other jobs to be done within our space, which you would think, “Oh, you know, it’s a hard decision, like, yeah, I don’t know if I’d rather get a root canal or run my payroll,” but with Gusto, the answer is obvious. You would use us for these reasons. And so it was a really clever play off of taking these everyday situations that people would compare to these jobs to be done with us, which is totally different where you actually – it’s a no-brainer. Of course, you would rather run your payroll through Gusto than sit in a chair getting your root canal. So that’s the genesis of the idea. And what was cool about it was we could repeat it in different forms, in different scenarios, and use it also to highlight different products and offerings we have beyond just our payroll solution.

Drew: You find this insight that payroll equals pain for a lot of businesses, for non-customers, but doesn’t equal pain for your current customers. And there’s some brand love because you sort of made this what should be painful easier, which is a great insight. And it goes back to what you said earlier about Product Market Fit and your value prop. How did you sort of articulate the strategy before you did the creative, and at what point in time did you go to the executive committee, the team, you know, your boss, or whatever? Did you go, “Here’s the strategy that we’re thinking about”? Or, you know, when did you have to get buy-in for that? Was there any resistance? Can’t we just talk about the speeds and feeds and features of the problem?

Jason: There’s always a back and forth because everyone’s got an opinion on creative. And I dealt with this a lot at Amazon too, so I’ve kind of been through the ringer already on how to align creative strategy to customer insight but also business vision. And you know, when you’re in a smaller company or a founder-led company like mine, it’s really important to have the support of not just the board but more of the founders. And in my case, you know my CEO, Josh, who’s great, and in many ways, a company’s brand when you’re starting out, it’s really derivative of that company vision. And so to be effective, like, if you have a disconnect between your brand strategy or your campaign strategy with the company vision, then you know you’re DOA, right? It’s not gonna happen. And I think what’s really important for me was to spend a lot of time with the CEO, founder CEO, to understand, like, “Walk me through what led to you starting Gusto, what was your vision? What were some of the things that really kind of pushed this company through its growth but also through difficult times?” And one of the things he constantly came back to was just, it’s painful doing these things – this is a hard task for small businesses, and so really trying to marry, in some ways, what I was hearing from customer insights with what he was thinking of the business. Fortunately, he’s very dialed into customers, so it wasn’t far of a disconnect, but using a lot of his words, or using and showing that I understood the company vision and how my creative strategy took that vision and built off it, didn’t conflict with it, didn’t contradict, didn’t replace it in any ways. I think that led to him feeling like, “Okay, I understand the logic of how you’re thinking about this and where you’re going with it.” And you know, you can end up also in a spiral where you go back and forth too long. And he recognized that like we could talk about this endlessly, but we just gotta go. And so I think you have to know how to work with the people who are most influential, or who could say no to you, who could gate-keep some of the work you’re doing in order to just bring them along and even make their ideas your ideas seem like their own in some ways. And so I think it was as much having to navigate through his thinking and where he was coming from and making sure there was good alignment there.

Drew: That’s really important. I can’t emphasize it enough, and the fact that you had a founder who could articulate it, and you could just pull right, draw the through line, that totally makes sense. What I’m wondering is, in this, in today’s you-can-test-everything world, you have this insight that is very soft but real, right? It’s very emotional idea – payroll is hard, starting a business is hard. If we can make payroll easier, that’s good. It’s really a very simple proposition. But did you do any kind of testing of the concept? I know we’re going to talk a little bit about the testing of the execution that you did in terms of this approach, and I think that’s really important that we cover it. But did you do any concept testing at all?

Jason: Yeah, so we have used this tool called Winter with a Y. This is not a plug for them in any way. We do things where we will put different options or different—I mean, I’m getting a little executional—but different flavors of that breed, the wording within that brief, to see and collect any kind of anecdotal feedback on how people respond to it. People can vote; you could put three different options, and people can vote on the ones that they like the most, and they don’t see each other’s votes so there’s no bias there. And we can triangulate people’s responses to it. But a lot of it, too, is a judgment-based exercise, and maybe I’m a dying breed because I still rely a lot on judgment. I’ve been trained in this for over almost 25 years, and my creative director came from Chiat Day, and so he’s also of that ilk, too. But I think you can collect feedback to inform your point of view, to disconfirm beliefs that you might have about something, but ultimately, we’re talking to humans at the end of the day. And to be a marketer who really understands not just buying psychology, but people’s needs, Maslow’s hierarchy of needs, or just how people think and feel—I think we were able to, we felt like we were able to hone in on the right angle through a combination of that and some of that testing.

Drew: Well, and the key thing is, you know that you had alignment with your CEO and presumably the board. In order to move forward, you had the things seem to line up. All right, we’re going to take a quick break, and then when we come back, we’ll go deeper into the execution of this campaign, how you actually created the ads, and how you sort of did some media testing. So stay with us. We’ll be right back. Launched in 2020, CMO Huddles is the only community of consistently curious, aka flocking awesome B2B marketing leaders, and that has a logo featuring penguins. Wait, what? Well, a group of these curious, adaptable, and problem-solving birds is called a huddle. And the leaders in CMO Huddles are all that and more, huddling together to heat up the coldest job in the C-suite. If you’re a B2B marketer who wants to build a stronger peer network, gain recognition as a thought leader, and outswim your competition, please check out cmohuddles.com. Okay, we’re back with Jason Ing, CMO of Gusto. Let’s talk. All right, so how did the ad go from strategy to idea? In-house team?

Jason: In-house team. You know, we have folks who have worked at big agencies on my team, and my creative director has relationships with all the production companies, and so when we bid this out, we didn’t go through an agency—we went straight to the production companies. And so we picked Hungry Man; I have a lot of experience working with them on big campaigns, as my creative director did as well. They pitched. And then we did a director search for who could produce our ads, and then based on their body of work, we went with someone, and we moved pretty quickly here because we’re more of a startup than we are a big company. But it was done on a much more accelerated timeline than I’m used to, but we got to a good place with who we selected and who’s making our ads.

Drew: And when we say accelerated timetable, how long did it take from “okay, we’ve got the idea, let’s go find a production company and a director?” How long was that?

Jason: It took about six weeks. Now, we did script out the work ourselves, and we did bring in a freelancer to take the brief. And I like to look at different options—we don’t just take a brief and okay, here’s the ad based on a brief. I will often look at like five or, you know, five to ten different options, or pick the best one. Let’s look at different territories, let’s look at different tones, tonality, and things like that. And then I try to make it as structured—like we have our scorecards, we know what our criteria is. But again, there is some fuzziness in terms of what we often pick, and our CEO gets involved in that as well, and so that’s part of making him feel brought into the process. And oftentimes, you know, he’ll have his favorites or we’ll have a recommendation that we push forward. But there is certainly an art to how you get from a brief to different concepts down to the ones you choose.

Drew: Well, and one of the interesting things—so it’s interesting to me that you had your CEO involved, because I remember I came up, I worked at Chiat Day for a couple years, and J. Walter Thompson and big agencies. And one of the things that I realized pretty early on is that there are people in the business who were really good at looking at a storyboard or a script and saying, “This is going to be great on video.” And then there are other people who are just looking at the words and reacting to that. They can’t quite get the value, and there’s an art to that. You know, I worked with one of the best, James Patterson, who, you know, the famous writer now, was creative director at J. Walter Thompson.

Jason: Oh, I just watched his show “Cross” on Prime Video.

Drew: There you go. So, yeah, and his genius was he could look at four storyboards and he could say, “That’s the winner.” Okay, it was just really, really unbelievable at it. He wasn’t the guy at the time who was coming up with the ideas at all. He was the guy who could bring in five different creative directors with five different campaigns and say “that one,” and it was just an art form. So I’m always—when you share it with someone who is not used to doing this, like a CEO of a startup, it’s kind of a scary thing.

Jason: It is a scary thing. I mean, you have to lead the witness a little bit. It’s all like, if you just—if I just said, “Hey, I put my scripts in Google Docs” and just ask for feedback, that would not go well. You have to kind of prime them a little bit, explain the idea, and then have the script. I usually—I don’t do full-on storyboards at that stage, but I have the script with a few key visuals colored in and all that you could see how it would look, and that gives enough information to get a reaction.

Drew: Okay, so you shoot now—did you, because I know I’ve seen the ads, I think there were six or seven in the series, and did you when you first test marketed this, if you will, did you shoot all of those, or how many did you shoot to get into test market?

Jason: We shot four, and we held the rest, and then we went and did a match market test with those four.

Drew: And what’s a match market test?

Jason: A match market test is a fancy word for A/B tests using cities. So we selected a handful of cities to run our ads in, and then we had a set of control cities. Actually, technically weren’t control cities in the sense that they were actual cities, but we did something called a synthetic control city, where you can get very sophisticated now and look at like, okay, if I have these four cities I’m running an ad in, let me create a grouping of cities that, based on a certain weighting of it, these control cities will behave exactly the same as those test cities. And so that gives you an ability to—at least a better ability to—look at what the incrementality is when you compare your test city versus your synthetic control.

Drew: And what kind of difference were you looking for, and what were the KPIs involved in the test?

Jason: Yeah, so we were looking, you know, we look for what’s the differences in differences. So you’re looking at what’s happening prior to the campaign, during the campaign, and after the campaign. And so when you see the differences of differences, it’s like, what did the pre versus post look like in your test cities versus your control cities? And what we were looking for – like, I try to capture every type of signal, because I don’t… I could be surprised where I see it, but generally, like the higher up you are in the funnel, so if you’re looking at traffic search volume, you will see clear separation in those metrics. But I looked at it all the way down to leads and like, how far down the funnel, like the different stages of the funnel did they get during the campaign and after the campaign. And what I was surprised to see, and maybe in hindsight, it’s not a surprise, but small businesses are very consumer-like in their behavior. They don’t… there’s not this like one-year-long enterprise sales cycle that I had experienced in my prior job. It was like, you know, they’re making that decision in a month. And so we could track the cohorts and their behaviors on some of the more metrics that were closer to revenue, and even track it down to the revenue level to see like, did ad exposure create lift or not? And we saw evidence of that within a 90% confidence interval band. And so that gave us confidence that like, oh yeah, when you pair brand with, you know, direct response marketing, you are going to see an impact. And I think the SMB space within B2B is kind of a good guinea pig or testing ground because of the closeness to consumer behavior that you see.

Drew: Right. I mean, it’s more… I mean, it really is B2B to C because it’s such a broad group. There are so many small businesses, and they do behave like that, and there’s plenty of companies that have been able to build it. And so it makes sense. This is much harder to do on an enterprise sale. The one thing I did want to ask you is, there’s a famous case study years ago where it’s like Travelocity was spending all their dollars on search, but they couldn’t spend another dollar effectively, like because the cost per acquisition was… so they took 70% of their search dollars, put it into television. Now this was years ago, and they saw two big things happen. One, they saw a massive increase in site traffic, but two, their cost per clicks went down because people were aware. Did you see that? Okay, good. You’re way ahead of me. Talk to me.

Jason: We did. So, like, what I described before is more of what we call a causal lift analysis – like, cause and effect. What did it do? What did it do in terms of lift? But then you can look at it down to the user ID level and down to the conversion of your existing programs. And so like when we ran on YouTube or on Google properties, you know, we were running a lot of our brand ads on YouTube TV as well, as well as a lot of mid-funnel on YouTube. And what we saw was our cost per leads went down when we were investing in brand. Actually, it made us better than whole when you look at like the total cost, and so we allocate… we went from a mix of like, you know, close to 100% on bottom of funnel to more like 30-70. And now we’re more balanced than even now on brand versus bottom of funnel. And so you definitely see the efficacy and the efficiency improvements when you look at, you know, those brand ads are doing a lot of the hard work, and it’s making it much easier for those search ads to perform more efficiently.

Drew: And it makes sense. If you’re not understanding what we’re talking about here, it’s as simple as top-of-mind awareness translates into action. Period. And it’s really that simple. And if you’re not top of mind, and you see a search ad, or you’re Googling for something, and you know, a couple of brands come up, you’re not instantly gonna click on it if you’re not… who is that? I don’t know. Do I like them? Do I have a positive feeling about them? And so it is why, you know, that even in massive Super Bowl ads, I mean, the key step number one is, are you ready for search?

Jason: Yeah, exactly. And you know, I learned this from, you know, the early days of my career, when it was actually pre-digital marketing at Procter & Gamble. You know, we looked at our media plans and we looked at the GRPs and the TRPs, so that’s gross rating points, total rating points. And so, like, you have to have multiple touches before you can get someone to choose you, even in a fast-moving category like toothpaste, right? And so it’s really… but where it’s more sophisticated here is like, you gotta tailor your message based on where that person is in their purchase cycle and make sure that you’re touching them multiple times before they get to the bottom funnel when they’re ready to make a decision.

Drew: So the test goes, obviously, you did this for markets in this synthetic thing, and the test goes really well. You see the results. It looks like it’s going to pay for itself, or certainly help the business grow faster, which is the goal of this when you expand it. And I know you and I talked about this off the record, I’m just curious, can you give us a sense of where you were from a spend in the test to where you ended up when you ended up taking this national? Is this far off the record, or this is on the record? So tell me what you can tell, what we can talk about, whatever you are comfortable.

Jason: Yeah. Well, I will say, you know, we started out relatively small but enough to make sure there was enough signal we could capture from the test, right? And so, like, we basically simulated what it would look like running in like X number of cities, what that would mean nationally. I even probably waited a little bit more just because I didn’t want to under-market. And then from that, when we looked at the results, we were like, “Oh, these are really good results,” or like, “This stuff is working.” And when you’re in a high-growth company like I’m in, it’s like, okay, when you find something that works, you double down and you double down fast and hard. And so we went from like a 10x spend in brand, from that initial investment. A lot of the… or I should say, in media, like, you know, the right costs are hard costs, but yeah, we significantly scaled, and we’ve never looked back. And so this is now part of our plan and part of our playbook. And I think as long as you know, we have a good story to tell out there and we see the performance like new people are coming into our category constantly. And so it’s become an evergreen program for us.

Drew: Right. I mean, it’s something… couple million new businesses every year. I mean, it’s not insignificant. And once they hire the first employee, it’s like payroll time. So from a media standpoint, again, this is tricky because you are B2B to C. You do have a broad target. It’s very dynamic. There’s a, you know, usually there’s an owner of a small business, and then there might be an accountant somewhere. What were some of the things that you learned from a media standpoint in terms of things that worked for you, or combinations of media in terms of where these ads ran?

Jason: Yeah, so online video has come a long way since the time I started at Cal. I was doing a lot of it in AWS, but it wasn’t very measurable. Today, you have connected TV, you have linear TV, you have connected programmatic, and then connected direct. This is where we had to involve the use of an agency or an ad serving company. They helped us look at our mix across the different types of connected TV channels. There’s TV, and when I say TV, it’s like putting ads in living rooms. Then there’s also the online video component, which is partially paid social – it’s mobile, it’s desktop, it’s YouTube, TikTok, and all the like. There are many ways you can serve up videos. One of the things we knew going into our shoot was that we were going to shoot and be able to slice in all of the different formats, whether it’s 16 by nine or one by one. We had the option, and what we did was focus. We filled our cup first with just making sure we were covering off the things that were measurable, where we could get signal. Then we layered on top connected TV, and then linear TV. As we went higher up the stack, one of the things I do when I allocate budget is I try to look at my mix by my spend mix, by how much of it is measurable versus how much of it feels right. One of the things that I do in any job is I will never commit more than 25 to 30% of my media spend on a feels-right spend, because I need to show restraint and also stewardship in terms of how I manage money. I learned that actually at Amazon, and it’s carried well. It’s a good lesson for any CMO to apply because the biggest fear a CFO has when you’re spending on brand is that you’re not going to be able to measure anything, or you’re just going to throw its money away. I built out the media components based on applying a mental model around spend and then looking at what was measurable, and then I did a lot of optimization and tweaking within that. We use market mix modeling to help us look at relative effectiveness of channels. Now, one could argue it’s an imperfect science, but it’s something. We have channel owners that are looking at everything from click-throughs to view-throughs of those ads, to downstream behaviors, to get us a sense of how these channels are performing on their own. When we have the ability to trace a user, if we know something about them, or if it’s being served through Google, for example, we can track different permutations of our marketing mix to see what the right one looks like. Again, it’s a little bit messy, and I’m probably making it seem more scientific than it really is. But in general, getting some signal through that and then having a sense of principles around how you want to allocate that mix gets you to a point where at least you feel 70 to 80% good about it. I’m a big fan of linear TV. I do believe that you’ll still get the biggest bang for your buck from a cost per impression basis on linear TV. I’m also a big believer in the Ehrenberg-Bass principles around marketing to people before they’re ready to buy your product. So I focus a lot on, or I’ve picked our spots on linear TV through big, iconic sports placements. We got on NFL football. We were on the World Series. We were on some of the more notable news shows, and shows that are more endemic to our category, like Shark Tank. I have smart media buyers who know how to buy, look for remnant inventory, or things like that, where we can get some good rates on some of the things that we ultimately run our ads through. I think there’s a lot of strategizing, but just brass tacks good old-fashioned media planning, looking for media arbitrage opportunities that we apply to really get our campaign out there and seen.

Drew: I love it. All right, so if I were to summarize what I’ve heard so far: don’t do this if you don’t have a product-market fit, because, as I said at the top of the hour, the fastest way to kill a brand is to spend more money behind it to get an insight from the customer if you don’t have that. What I loved about this was sort of the non-customer, customer comparison and the gap between them that you found there. Don’t go too far without buy-in from the executive, whether it’s the strategy or the execution that you’re going to approach of sort of fourth up testing. There was a lot of testing involved here, sophisticated testing that enabled you to have a high degree of confidence when you rolled this out and pulled the trigger and spent a lot of money that it was going to perform. Then the measurement – I love this principle that we’re going to make sure that 75% of what we’re doing is measurable somehow. We know that marketing mix modeling (MMM) is, as some people will call it, pretty good. There is no such thing as perfection, but it’s pretty good. But what I also like is that you are leaving 25% aside to just experiment and try other things, and maybe this will work. The challenge in all of this is it’s rarely one impression that moves the needle, right? And that’s why frequency matters. All right, so now it’s over to you for two do’s and one don’t for B2B CMOs who want to do a brand building campaign and get the money for it.

Jason: Know your customer, know your company inside and out. You don’t ever want to come across as tone-deaf on understanding neither. I think my example with knowing what the CEO’s vision was was really important in making sure that he was going to give an easier yes. Focus on creative excellence. When you’re running a brand campaign, you’re getting this in front of millions of people potentially, so making sure you understand the craft of creative – AI is becoming a big conversation starter in that realm, but I think knowing what great looks like creatively is really important to building your credibility, to give you permission to do those things. Don’t do – you know, it’s not a set-and-forget type of thing. It’s not one of those things you can go in and say, “Just trust me, I’ve done this before. I know what I’m doing. I’m going to spend a buttload of money, and we’ll see the results in the long term.” Like, walk people through, be honest about when you expect to see results, but know how to measure the things in between, how to capture signal to give you credibility along the way, because you can kill credibility with a poorly executed brand marketing campaign. You don’t want to make it harder for all other CMOs who are trying to pitch that in their companies. You really want to be meticulous and rigorous in how you roll it out.

Drew: Love it. All right, well, thank you, Jason Ing, and thank you listeners. If you found this episode of value, please thank Jason Ing on his LinkedIn profile and do me a favor, rate us on your favorite podcast app and maybe even leave a review. That’s all we’ve got now. I’m Drew Neisser. This is your Renegade Marketers Unite episode. Peace out.

 

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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!