An Interview with the Founder and CEO of Marketing Architects

Well, Shane, happy to be here today. I’m excited to talk to you. I grew up in Minnesota. If you look on the map, if you go straight north from us, you’ll run into the North Pole. So we’re pretty far north, and we’re a hardworking group of people, because that’s what we do all winter, and I’m still here today, so something’s kept me here, even though a lot of people complain about it. But that’s my home base.

I think we get labeled as Minnesota. Nice is the term used, and it’s a good group of people that live here. Although in the winter when travel happens again, I’ll be excited to do a lot of traveling. We’re smart enough here that we visit all our clients in the southern states, in the western states, in January, February, and March when it gets pretty cold here.

We don’t have mountains in Minnesota, even though we have a lot of snow. So that’s one of the places we go to ski. It’s, it’s great to get West, where you can get some elevation and enjoy the slopes.

I was the first child of three, so there’s five of us.

Well, the one that’s work related is that we actually have a phenomenal advertising environment in Minnesota. If you think back a hundred and some years, the first mass-marketed products were made in Minnesota—paper and tree products and General Mills with Cheerios. Minneapolis is one of the places where advertising was really established. We’ve got a great arts community here and a pretty dynamic environment for folks who do the kind of things you and I do. It’s a great place to be based and involved in advertising.

I am, yep, as many chances to leave and have, uh, ended up staying here. Yeah, it’s a good place to raise a family.

Yeah, I, I was a runner in high school, and I got recruited to run in college, and I ended up in right in St Paul at a school called the University of St Thomas, and was a great choice. I joined a phenomenal team there that really changed my life. So I ended up staying here. I looked at a lot of different places, but it ended up being my backyard.

I have. Needed a morph out of that. Just a lot of miles on the legs from all of that, and more more the biker and different pace at my age, but so that that that part of me is behind me.

Yeah, I had a marketing major and an economics major, so I had the creative side and the analytics side back in the day. It turned out to be a good combo for the industry I’m in now.

No, I credit that to my freshman roommate, because I thought I would go down the marketing route. He said, ‘Chuck, I think you’d be really good in business if you had a stronger technical background.’ He was an economics major and said, ‘Take one econ class.’ So I did, and in the first class, we learned to forecast the sale of beer and pizza. I thought, ‘Wow, what could be better than talking about that all day long in college?’ I ended up adding that as my second major, and I really credit my roommate Mike for pushing me in that direction, because that’s the skill I probably use more today than even the marketing side. Everything’s so data-driven that I’m glad I had that background.

I think, I think the professor knew his audience, so I think that’s how he got you involved in that class, right?

Got really lucky there. I ended up working for a big marketing firm. I actually interviewed, tried to get into commercial banking and a couple of other routes, the old on campus interview routine. And I had an interview with a marketing firm that wasn’t even on my radar, and they wanted to hire a marketing statistician. I just fell in love with the discussion I had with the hiring manager where I’m like, ‘Wow, I get to use these technical business skills, but in a very creative environment.’ So I said yes to that, and it was the best thing I did. I think it was really fortunate, and I just really got off to a great start in the profession of marketing at that company, but it was really by chance.

Right. Yeah, I think, I think what’s helpful with anyone that can have some time studying stats is it helps you make decisions in marketing that are based on probabilities. Today, it’s hard to have. One number that you can optimize a campaign to you might be having brand as a component, or multiple metrics you’re looking at. And so using probabilities is something you spend a lot of time in stats. And the other part is you spend time with the data, and there’s not as much differentiation between them on the model development side, it’s who’s got the best data. And as soon as you’ve worked with a lot of that. You know, anyone can learn that skill, the old garbage in, garbage out, really applies to statistics, that the best data is going to win almost all the time. And good marketers don’t have to be good at the science side, but they should be really good at the data side. And I think that would be a couple things I took away from that, and those are the skills I probably use more today than the actual hands on model building skills.

Yeah. Well, for me, I had a really nice run. I got lucky. My second job was with an agency that grew from zero to almost 200 million in revenue, and it was in the process of being sold to Omnicom, one of the big holding companies. In the division I ran, I was able to leave and decide, ‘What am I going to do next?’ So I wrote four or five business plans, and they just were all falling flat. The people I ran them by thought maybe it wasn’t the right next thing for me. And my wife was nine months pregnant with child number two—due date was in a week or so—and I was trying to figure out what to do next. She sat down next to me and said, ‘Well, what are you going to do next?’ I said, ‘I don’t really know. I’m somewhat stuck.’ And she said, ‘Why don’t you do what you know?’ I replied, ‘Well, what is it that you think I know?’ She said, ‘You’re really good at working with clients to solve marketing challenges.’ I said, ‘Yes, but the agency I left—I have a non-competition provision—so I can’t really do that.’ She said, ‘Are you sure? Does it cover every channel?’ I thought, ‘Maybe let me look at that again.’ And I realized it didn’t. That agency did a lot of things, but it didn’t do advertising. So I called a few people, and no one was doing direct response radio at the time. And I thought to myself, ‘Well, this is either the dumbest thing I’m going to pursue or it’s the greatest thing in the world, because it’s an open marketplace, or no one is there for a reason.’ So it was really my wife’s idea, and we incorporated. I launched in honor of her on Valentine’s Day that very next year. This was in December when we had this conversation and found traction. I credit all of that to her.

Isn’t it true Shane? Isn’t a true Shane that, you know, everyone’s team is really the driver of anyone’s business. You know, the leader’s job is to primarily assemble that team. So I can’t think of many times where I’m really the key driver of anything any longer. It’s, it’s the, you know, it’s the people that do come up with the great ideas and do the work. And that’s just, that’s been my whole career, just working with great people.

Well, I think if you just step back and think about what TV was before, it was very traditional media. It had been much the same for decades. The major players—the networks and the ratings companies—have stayed the same for decades. The players, the major cable companies, the distributors like Comcast, Mediacom, Warner—all of those folks have been relatively fixed. But maybe just a little longer than five years ago, it’s become an emerging market space where streaming, connected TV, over-the-top TV—all those terms we’re hearing now as marketers—are all happening to TV. New players are rushing in, and data is being used in television planning in new and different ways. The landscape of vendors that serve the industry has exploded from just a few to many hundreds. You hear about attribution and different ways to do that. So it really has fundamentally changed in the last five years. What’s different, though, now compared to when Facebook started—that was just a pure emerging space, and no one had ever really done social media at scale like that—is that TV is now having to transform itself. So that’s very different. How does an industry that has been very traditional adapt to something new? Sometimes it’s easier to start from scratch. While TV can’t do that, it has to. Disney has to figure out how to move ESPN from a linear platform we’re all used to consuming to digital platforms where it’s available on demand everywhere. So these are really interesting challenges to watch people try to solve in our industry.

Yeah, well, the one thing I think is really important when you consider TV is not to think too small. It is actually a bold growth move when you think about how a TV spot airs, reaches so many people, and communicates a longer form message that people sit through because they want to get to the rest of their content. There’s a lot more you can do with TV than people typically realize. We actually attended two different virtual trade conferences, had 21 conversations with people who had tried streaming TV and failed, and in every case, what we could decipher immediately was that they didn’t think about it holistically enough. They put some quick creative together, put the buy together, saw what happened, and quickly determined it wasn’t moving the needle in any way they could decipher.

So really, the key to TV is not to think of it in too small a fashion. It’s different than, for example, search, where everyone has a search budget, needs to optimize, and Google has millions of clients with the sophistication required to make it work. But TV is just to function your business—it’s optional. You don’t have to be there; it’s incremental to anything else you do. That’s the number one thing we try to encourage people to do: step back and develop a bigger picture approach. What that means is to think about what goals you’re trying to achieve. There’s a lot of debate between, ‘What’s a brand and how do I build that?’ versus ‘What’s performance and how do I drive that?’ That’s a generic discussion that happens a lot, but still not a lot of people know how to do both.

If you don’t try to win the long game in TV, you will lose. In other words, you’ll generate a response from TV, but you’ll start to see that change as the campaign ages. And if you don’t have some aspect of this that is building a baseline for your business, it’s the old top-of-mind awareness thing—where if people go to buy from a category, they’re most likely going to consider Nike or Reebok, the brands most familiar to them. So if you’re going to use TV, it’s important to keep all of that in mind. Don’t start too small. It’s not out of reach for most performance brands today; there are different ways to test incrementally to your budgets, not break the bank, and define success, but you do have to have a more holistic planning approach.

Yeah, that’s a great question. One thing I enjoy in marketing is when you look at someone’s campaign, trying to figure out why they may be doing that. We’re all in the cheap seats, evaluating, “Is this what I would do? Could I do it better?” That question is great because you can learn from major brands that use TV, like GEICO, where the story was they shifted their business model from paid insurance agents to doing it online. They used television to drive a shift in their business model—a bold growth move, shifting expense from agent commission to television advertising. They get the double whammy of an efficient way to transact with the consumer and a long-term brand that differentiates them from other forms of insurance. What a great example of a digitally native brand. They really built their business on television and have done a great job with that. They’ve had a couple of stumbles along the way with creative that got some consumer backlash, but they corrected that, and they stayed out there all the way down to upstart challenger brands that may have just $20,000 to spend. There’s a way to find success even with that kind of budget if you’re smart and targeted. It isn’t a channel with tens of thousands of people, though, which is actually good for brands because you’re not going to have as much competition in television as you would in the search ecosystem or other digital channels where the barrier isn’t as great. It is harder to make it work, but if you do, it gives you a competitive advantage.