The link to the podcast can be accessed at the top of the page. A full transcript of the podcast can be accessed below. Thank you for listening, and happy marketing!
Jeromy Sonne:
Welcome to the Agency Founder Podcast by Moonshine Marketing. Every single week, we interview successful founders of marketing agencies at different points in their journey to pass on their victories, defeats, challenges and lessons learned to help you take your agency to new heights. This week, we’re speaking with Tom Davenport of Digital Marketing Specialist, a worldwide funnel focused agency that works with major Hollywood studios, major recording artists and e-commerce stores. Tom, thanks so much for being on the show.
Tom Davenport:
Thank you for inviting me.
Jeromy Sonne:
You were actually mentioning that you had a background like you were an audio engineer at one point, is that right?
Tom Davenport:
Yeah, I was. I did music production at university because that’s what people who are everything shy of dropping out do at college. I was quite academic, but I really, really wanted to run a studio. And I did this for a couple of years after. There is a good story. I won’t go into too much detail because it’s of more interest to engineers than agency owners, but I learned a bit about how money works and how to gain funding. And if people want to see this, if you Google, how to start a community studio, I think the top result is this thing I did for a site called Startacus, which is this whole motivational thing about how you can start a community studio and I even have one today, for example, still 10 years later after doing the thing, get emails from people asking for advice on how to do that. I was an audio engineer, but I threw the whole lot and to try and sustain an actual career and income because I had kids quite young. I basically abandoned music and even after trying not to work with it, it came around in an even bigger way, like ended up working at a level in it that I would have dreamed of and it only happens by trying to really hone the craft elsewhere. That felt like fortune. Still love audio, the science, but here I am, running ads.
Jeromy Sonne:
A little bit like the eureka thing that Thomas Edison said when he’d run into a problem, he’d just go and work on something else and then the solution to the first thing would end up popping up later on. It was almost like destiny.
Tom Davenport:
I’m a big fan of that. That sounds amazing. And in fact, it’s something I try and actually emphasize to my team is that sometimes you could get real good at a specific craft and so will lots of other people. The thing that will make you different is the thing from left field that means you’re bringing new inspiration and new ideas into the same system and that’s where you start to differentiate. And I think that that’s something that could be an underlying theme actually that keeps coming up today because people like, we want a lot of music and entertainment work because we weren’t from that world because we had the grounding in, we’ve done work in FinTech and in more commercial industries and they wanted that. Actually, having that left field experience or your outside experience is really important. And as I say, what brought me into the music business at a higher level was exiting it and then getting good skills and then reconvening. I always have to remind myself to be conscious of that because it’s really valuable.
Jeromy Sonne:
Absolutely. Let’s take a step back real quick, though, and tell me about Digital Marketing Specialist. What do you all do and what does the day to day look like and all of that? Give me the high level pitch on Digital Marketing Specialist.
Tom Davenport:
We’re a small team that started by focusing purely on digital marketing. At the time, we’re about to hit our seventh birthday in about two weeks. I cleverly started the business the same week I got married, so that was real busy. I saw the competition at the time as other web agencies who they were doing digital marketing as an afterthought, hugely SEO. And I wanted to just exclusively specialize in digital marketing. So the name, as generic as it sounds, it made sense then. And I was solo at the time and the domain was free, unbelievably.
Jeromy Sonne:
There’s a lot of naming decisions that come down to the name was free, like the dot com.
Tom Davenport:
A combination of that and having some time pressure to actually submit something to Companies House, which is the UK company registry, but it let’s me get it right. This is what we’ll call it. You have this very generic name, but it was to differentiate from web agencies at the time. We started there. My background was I’ve been an audio engineer and also been, in the meanwhile, was a journalist for things like Wired and Gizmodo and a bunch of tech things and had this SEO ground and because I came from that content background. I was really all about the technical end of SEO, which is very trendy now. But back in 2014-15, it was relatively niche even though it’s very impactful, especially on sites with a bigger index.
Tom Davenport:
And so I went through the motions with regular businesses and marketing, and I think that’s a great grounding. Within a couple of years, some old contacts from my past in music and contacts I’ve built on Twitter because as I said, I was an audio engineer and this was for a community studio for local government that did free recording for young people. Actually on Twitter, a lot of people back around 2010 time, 2009 to 11 maybe, they were very supportive of that kind of initiative. It wasn’t all arguments [inaudible 00:00:06:06]. And it was like, oh, [inaudible 00:06:08] interesting, like early adopter type people and we can really get behind and support each other. In a while, look at all the connections we’re making and it’s that kind of era.
Tom Davenport:
And so people who were in the music world were supportive of me back then, even if it was just in passing, you’re acquainted. You might not be friends, but you get to know people’s user names and so on. And so years later, when I was running up advertising and starting to show these amazing results on Facebook that was easy to get, particularly 2015, 16, 17 year. It was absolutely a honeymoon period for the whole thing. And it was like they would start inquiring with me about, hey, can you have a look at this for us then because they wanted the outside influence, I suppose. And I had that commercial grounding in regular business, B to C marketing mostly, but I had that grounding. And so it felt like the opportunities were wide open.
Tom Davenport:
Well, your question was what’s the agency about? It’s this whole team of us. We have a great extended network of freelancers, but there’s a core team of us in rural England. But despite that, we are running some really cool substantial campaigns in the entertainment business and it’s because we focused on dealing with the biggest audiences we can. But because I’m very interested in dealing with psychology at scale and I love the example that when you’re dealing with a lot of people, some underlying truths about your psychology, really, they become quite predictable. In the same way that if you blow up a balloon, the air pressure is consistent, even though all the molecules inside that balloon are going crazy and independently, it’s like that scale, that, right. And that’s something I find really interesting.
Tom Davenport:
And I feel like what I’m trying to do as well as run a business and have an income and everything, it’s about having an environment where I’m learning how to handle with the biggest markets I can manage because that’s a valuable skill in any sector with any message you’d ever want to put out that. You could have positive influence and if you leave it to the bad guys or your Cambridge Analytica types… That’s an interesting story I could get into as well. But if you leave it to them, then they can run wild. And so it feels like dealing with big audiences would be valuable. And that interest and some fortuitous meetings has led us to doing lots of cool stuff with quite big entertainment audiences, but we also love e-commerce. So we still do a lot of that because I still love good funnel marketing. That’s what we’re about. I know it’s not succinct, but that’s what we’re focusing on at the minute. And we’re also getting into book publishing at the minute, but that feels like part of the entertainment side of thing.
Jeromy Sonne:
That is interesting. And it’s cool how, basically, you were able to take and start from this beginning, which is like this community radio, this community recording and get some other experience and mash those together into running a successful marketing agency and you’ve worked with some pretty big artists. And doing a lot of this promotion of media, in a way, whether it’s films or artists or books, like you mentioned, or what have you. That’s really, really interesting. Having experience at both, would you say that that’s working in that world is a lot different than working with an e-commerce store? Do you have to approach it in a different way because that’s a little bit unique. Most of the people that I’ve had on the show are e-commerce or local lead gen or whatever and there’s nothing wrong with that. It’s I think how most agencies pay the bills and they specialize, but this is a unique approach and I wanted to get your thoughts on that.
Tom Davenport:
I get what you’re saying and I think it’s worth pointing out and this might be obvious, but I often say, by learning how to get leads for plumbers in Swindon, which is the town where in UK, that’s what makes you a good marketer. The reason it was easy to walk into entertainment world and out compete was because of the sheer… And there are some very talented teams within it, I’m not trying to say it’s us versus all of them and they’re all bad, that’s not it. But I think for years, no one finds it hard to market Coldplay. It’s like you almost can’t go wrong. People got away with good enough results because of the brands. I think the biggest thing in any marketing actually is like the brand and the product market fit. That’s so much bigger than the tactics on the platform.
Tom Davenport:
But to answer your question, do we treat them differently? Well, yes, because tactically, if I’ve got a book where a lot of the purchases are going to happen on Amazon, I can’t retarget checkout abandonment. It’s on Amazon. They do have a discreet DSP platform that you have to spend 10,000 pounds before you can use and even then you can’t even necessarily use it. The point is, I don’t get the same signals off that kind of campaign. If I’m sending stuff and I’m trying to drive streams or an album launch, but we might have a merch store, but ultimately, I’m sending people… You can’t have 10 links in album launch ads like to Spotify, Apple, Amazon, blah, blah, blah. You have these like landing page link aggregators. And so the signals that you have to work with are different.
Tom Davenport:
At a very practical level, it’s different, but what is constant, it’s the psychology of attention and it’s how acquiring attention is exactly the same. The underlying cold, warm and hot strategy is exactly the same. It’s like do the best targeting you can, but how can you double qualify them, where you can run creative that’s only of interest to the right people? And if they engage with that, then great, they’ve stuck their hand out and said, yes, I’m in your market. And then, the goal of cold is collect and shepherd a really valuable warm audience that’s really carefully curated and then really work at retaining and sustaining that. And that’s exactly the same with the e-commerce where we’re trying to maintain, build a valuable warm audience that will convert and get great lifetime value from.
Tom Davenport:
And it’s also really valuable, albeit at a bigger scale, with say a music act, where there might be a lot of downtime between album releases and you need to retain that warm audience because the warm audience or the engagement audiences is actually more valuable than say the page fans because people might have liked the page seven years ago and not really cared anymore or they might have liked and they just haven’t engaged. They’re technically in the cold. And I can come back to that and I know I’m going beyond your question, but there are some really interesting dynamics, especially when you’re dealing with where a warm audience is bigger than a lot of cold audiences that other advertisers might use. It reveals some really interesting structural differences. That’s where there are differences, but the underlying psychology of getting attention, retaining it and converting, is actually the same strategy in a lot of ways. It just gets different at the delivery level, if that makes sense.
Jeromy Sonne:
Yeah, it does. It does make a lot of sense and that’s some interesting insights. I’m curious from like a business perspective, do you find substantive differences working with like Hollywood studios or record labels or what have you versus like your typical e-commerce store? From the business relationship side, is that a different dynamic because that’s like a whole world unto itself? There’s a whole ethos around that and I think a lot of people have perceptions of it from the outside that may or may not be true. I’m curious, what are your thoughts are like working in that entertainment world and how you feel like that may be different or more of the same as like working with like a plumber in Swindon, like you said.
Tom Davenport:
I’ll give some sense of the main patterns, but it can vary even within the industry in the same way that you might have handful of e-commerce clients who are great and, who are trickier for other reasons. I’d say we’re very lucky that we, in some ways, like in music in particular, it is like some of the biggest acts of all time that we’re working with and their teams are inherently easy to work with. They’re just the best in their game and they’re really organized and they get it and they’re intelligent and so in some ways that’s really good and easy, but I’ve also worked in entertainment where it’s chaotic. There’s certainly been some projects where it’s been so chaotic that it’s been difficult, but I’ve had e-commerce clients where actually like, they’re just so busy running the business so they it can be tricky to pin them down for getting what you need.
Tom Davenport:
I think one of the one really common difference is in entertainment creative is really well covered. They’re actually very used to procuring what they need design wise and getting the video clips and they’ve got their freelancers or internal resources for that. And they also importantly, what they have completely cracked and have always had cracked is their taste and eye for style and the design aesthetics. And so we don’t have to go creative at all apart from guiding arm, placement, format and sometimes giving some pointers about what we need from a cold versus a more direct, like [inaudible 00:15:58] call to action. Whereas on e-commerce world because we’re very technical, we have creative resources and freelancers, but internally, we’re very much about the technical and delivery and shepherding the audience and get the. And when a client in e-commerce world doesn’t have the creative resources then sometimes it falls through the cracks and we have to live with for longer than I’d like, have to live with the product on white background. I’d say on creative, it’s the biggest difference because in music world, they generally got that dealt with better than I could and that’s why we’re quite a good fit with them, I’d say.
Jeromy Sonne:
Interesting. You’re able to take your skills, those marketing skills, like you said, the really technical stuff, the really deep understanding of these platforms and bring it to these really creative geniuses in some ways and some of them less so, I’m sure, most of them, incredibly talented creative people and say, let’s just get you in front of the right people in the right way and think about it strategically, but also like just execute relentlessly tactically versus something else where you maybe have to do all of that. That’s incredibly interesting. Keeping that in mind, how do you build a team and what’s your philosophy on team building when it comes to working in entertainment, but also working in these other sectors as well? How do you find the right people that are good fits and can handle the job well? And what do you look for regarding not just team member skills, but like culture as well and things like that? And how are you thinking about that as you grow?
Tom Davenport:
That’s a great question. I think that’s the thing I’ve struggled with most because as much as a stereotype it is, I am that technician who started a business, and I know a lot of us and maybe the kind of people listening to this are probably in that position, too, but I’ve had to really learn how to run the team and how to let go. And that’s a constant process for me, which I’m getting better at, but I also have a lot left to work on.
Tom Davenport:
I think I have struggled a bit because where we are, a lot of people move off to bigger cities like London or Bristol. And we’re in the middle of that. It’s like there’s not as many people in these kinds of fields or with these kinds of skills in the area. That’s something I’ve found tough. But I’ve just found recruitment quite difficult generally and partly why I have a small team, but I’ve also done a reasonably good job of keeping the good people via internal or freelance.
Tom Davenport:
And also I think because we have quite interesting clients and we have at it where we’re recruiting and you get some really obvious glory hunters in the interviews, who just clearly just want some act that they’re a fan of on their repertoire so they can jog on in six months and say they did it. But generally, the team we’ve got like appreciate it and we’re all really proud to work on the stuff we do and to have the reach and impact that we do. It doesn’t sound like a lot, but I think in 2019 we reached 6% of the global population just on Facebook, based on reach metrics across all accounts, which might not be perfect. It might be bots now, but it’s like, okay, it doesn’t sound like a lot, but damn, it feels like a good KPI for reaching a lot of people and that’s something we’re really proud of. But it is the trickiest area for me is like deciding what I want routine wise because when you’ve got a small team, I don’t want a huge team. If you had a huge team, it’d be easy. Oh, here’s the hundred skills I need and so going to do these five each. It’s like, yeah, I’m trying to have a small lean effective team, but it can be tricky when not everyone fits in exactly or you don’t define exactly what you are.
Jeromy Sonne:
Well, it seems like if you want a small team, people by nature need to be able to wear a few different hats and so I can imagine that it’s a little bit like you can’t just go hire the best media buyer in the world because you need them to think about things maybe in little bit like a planner and also like a strategist. And also maybe they’re not making the creative, but a touch like a creative director so that they can actually do… The best media buyer in the world might actually flounder in a team like that. You need cross disciplinary, which it was just something you brought up earlier, actually. You like having those folks that have these different experiences where they can bring something out of left field and utilize that. Can you expand on that a little bit more, how these seemingly unrelated skills can make them better marketers?
Tom Davenport:
I’ll use myself as an example and I realize actually, as I said, this is one of the problems that I’ve got is that because I am interested in a lot of these skills, and I do this less nowadays, I’ve done a much better job of letting go of this stuff, but for a long time, because I have that certain breadth of experience and I’m jumping in on everything, but that makes it hard for other people to grow. And also it’s hard to replace me because I’m like covering so many hats.
Tom Davenport:
Examples would be that I’m very interested in engineering. The recording engineer side of me, although it’s not classic engineering, it’s really systems thinking, and thinking in systems is really what funnel based marketing is about and when you really understand systems at an engineering level, that doesn’t mean it’s complicated. It’s actually understanding that the lightest weight elements, which I think a lot of the terminology for like the way actual real systems in the world work is lost on a lot of marketers. Discussing funnels is actually some basic roles in a system that get forgotten and actually understanding that and then putting some of those features in place is one of the things that I think helps our approach to funnels. And there’s times it doesn’t work, but I think our approach means that the audience can self-organize. And in fact, that’s the only way you can deal with like really, really, really big audiences where a warm audience is in the eight figures. And the only way you can handle that effectively is where the audience is self-organized. An engineering background and an interest in just systems and system design and thinking is one of the things that helps differentiate our day to day bread and butter like media buying, as one example.
Jeromy Sonne:
I think that what you’re hitting on is diversity of experience really helps you have like better perspective on different clients. Is that a fair point to pull from what you just said? Would that be like a fair characterization?
Tom Davenport:
Yeah, I think so. The entertainment world likes that I’ve not only done entertainment, regular businesses like that we must have some credibility to work with like a Metallica to Elvis. It’s like-
Jeromy Sonne:
You’ve done Elvis?
Tom Davenport:
Yes. Elvis’ estate. Sorry, obviously, Elvis is-
Jeromy Sonne:
Oh, no, that’s cool, though. That’s actually really cool. I didn’t know that.
Tom Davenport:
Although we’ve done a lot of these things, I think in the next month, I think we have something pretty much like some of the biggest stuff from everyone of the last seven decades, the biggest modern stuff would be like BTS, which is like a k-pop band, which I hadn’t personally heard of at the time, but they are this phenomenon.
Jeromy Sonne:
K-pop Twitter is real. Oh, that’s cool, though. No, I think that that makes a lot of sense. Shifting gears a little bit, thinking about your journey and how far you’ve come and stuff, is there anything that you would looking back say, oh God, I wish I wouldn’t have done that? And then alternatively, oh, I wish I would’ve done this way sooner. I didn’t take it as seriously as I should have early on and it would have made my life a lot easier if I’d just done this.
Tom Davenport:
You have four hours, right? I want to acknowledge something I recognize that I got right was I got humiliating mistakes out the way really early. Any anxiety around approaching certain kinds of people or handling certain things or trying to have certain kinds of negotiations, I got them out of the way really, really early, like before even this business. I’m more confident in front of a notable entertainment manager than, I don’t know, like trying to do something more day to day in regular life. I almost can’t get out the door with… Especially off the lockdown, I can’t even get out the door of the house without leaving my keyboard and track pad at home when I go to the office. The thing I can do is the things I threw myself into really early. That’s something I got right.
Tom Davenport:
But what I got wrong was moving when I saw opportunities. It was something I got really frustrated and depressed about. Like 10 years ago especially, when I was really focused and really attentive on the technology world, like when I was on Twitter a lot, when I was a tech journalist and a lot of the calls and things I was seeing or predicting, and I could have been biased of course, but it felt like, oh, I had that idea first. And then what I did learn was, okay, learn to just go and execute on that. And so the thing I regret is the fact that I’ve had the business seven years and a lot of the things that I saw and I’ve made some good calls, but a lot of the things that I thought, ah, that’s something we want to do or that’s something we’ll have a play at or that’s something I think will play out and happen.
Tom Davenport:
It’s like, well, the lesson is go and have that punt and make it happen. Don’t let, oh I’m busy, get in the way, because if you see those opportunities, you have to ride it. If you found the stock early, like it’s obviously of more value to buy that stock at the start rather than towards the peak. It’s a bit like, this is a topic for another day, but a lot of the training I had actually probably around the time I was running that studio was just making memes and learning to deal with a lot of traffic. And you would do that by not necessarily inventing the meme, but having your ear to the ground so you could recognize what was taking off before everyone else spotted it because then you could do your remix on that or even go and buy the domain and get the Twitter account and all that and own that brand in a way or create that brand or just be part of that pie and ride the wave and get a lot of that attention and traffic. And I was getting bigger traffic then than I would on some of the bigger artists we’ve ever dealt with now because you were buying the right stock.
Tom Davenport:
The mistake then that I have learned in good time sense was if you’re going to put effort into that sort of thing, make sure it’s paying you you’re going to get a mortgage, you’ve got kids, et cetera, et cetera. Really, all I’m doing now with this business is professionalizing attention seeking online, which is basically what I’ve always been interested in. I’ve professionalized that fine, but it’s like, okay, don’t let running the business get the way now. You still need to keep your ear to the ground and you still need to act on those ideas and insights that you’re having because you won’t get any credit for it if you don’t actually take action nice and early and you’ll only kick yourself.
Jeromy Sonne:
The thing that I struggle with is where does the balance between focus and that come up. How do you find opportunities and move on them early? But you can’t start a new initiative every week and execute on anything well. How do you find that balance?
Tom Davenport:
Although, I have this problem, I have the solution and it’s actually why this business started. It’s actually the specific turning point. The solution is to have some rule set that qualifies those ideas. It’s like, if you have an initiative list for clients, you might say, let’s rank by ease and impact or something, because if it’s easy and high-impact then yeah, that goes to the top of the list. And there’s a threshold at which things are not worth doing, ie it’s high effort and low impact. It’s like, okay, don’t do it, obviously. And I’m pretty sure what you’re saying is, okay, these aren’t like tactical things you’re identifying for client. There are like big swinging, oh, I’ve got this idea and ambition to do certain initiative big business project with my life. Do I do it or not?
Tom Davenport:
Well, here it is at a higher level or here’s the example. Picture this, it’s 2013 or 14. I’d hit my goals of writing for Wired and stuff like that. That was the goal at the time, being a journalist. And I was like, okay, what I need to do is I feel like I’ve hit the peak. What am I going do? I’ve actually hit that goal. I already hit the goal of running my own studio. And for some reason, things aren’t working out because I’m not making enough money or et cetera. What I did in that case was I did a simple two by two matrix. And this changed the course of my life for the better because it meant I was ticking more life satisfaction boxes.
Tom Davenport:
What I did was, and this is I think a good exercise for anyone to do, you just do a cross on a piece of paper. Top to bottom, left to right. And along one axis you say, audience, and along the other axis, you say, money or how much they’re willing to pay. You’ve got high and low on each. And then what I did, and you can start on another piece of paper, just to list all your interests or things you’re into or things you’re good at or just whatever comes to mind. Do the brain dump and then put all of this on that grid. You could do this on a whiteboard or Post-its, you can move stuff around. And I had interest from like music and community studios and writing and certain blogger things and certain website domains I had and also SEO and advertising certain things.
Tom Davenport:
And so a few things ended up in the low audience as in, okay, there’s not a lot of demand for this. Call it demand, low demand, not high demand for this sort of thing and people are not willing to pay much for this versus they are willing to pay a lot. And the stuff that ends up in the low demands and people don’t pay much for it. It’s just the passion project. And that’s fine, like find time for that in your life, but don’t make that the central focus of your life, like every depressed artist you’ve ever met [crosstalk 00:29:54]. I’m just saying, they didn’t do this matrix.
Jeromy Sonne:
Fair.
Tom Davenport:
Now, here’s what ended up in… And by the way, you can have things that have a big audience, but they wouldn’t pay a lot for it. And it’s like, fine, that’s a mass market product maybe. Or there’s something to that, you can get money through volume, fine. Or it might be, there’s not a lot of market and they would pay a lot. And it’s like, okay, that’s a premium luxury product kind of category maybe. And I’m saying product, it doesn’t have to be products. It might just be generally things you’re interested in. And you can play with the resolution of the idea, whether it’s a whole industry or if it’s a specific idea within a field you like, whatever, just play with it, just try and rank it all and see what themes emerge.
Tom Davenport:
The valuable bit, though, was in the top segment, which there’s a lot of demand for it. And by the way, I predict there’s going to be more demand and they pay a lot for it, was basically the digital marketing services. So that’s why I said, right. It was like a sobering moment because I was like, oh my God, I’ve studied music. I’ve worked in it. Alongside the technology writing, I was running the news section on Ultimate Guitar, which is a guitar website, which did very well, got in the top 1000 in Alexa, the traffic with my SEO and writing, but I was like, oh my God, I might actually shutting the door on music. And I was like, well, look, I’ve got two kids at this point and fine, time to grow up.
Tom Davenport:
And in a way it was sad, but I was actually like really committed to fine, I’m going to go at it. And I did it based on that matrix and I committed to digital marketing, which I liked anyway, obviously, or it wouldn’t be on an interest sheet, but it turned out, it really ticked all the boxes for me and I got really excited and engaged and really, really deeply got into it. And it was making money and it was growing and it turned out that I looped back around to the other passions I had anyway, even though I wasn’t. That grid is a really good way of prioritizing things you might want to do. What I need to do is keep doing that because, as I say, these are the things that I feel like I want to do and I don’t want to not give them a chance because, actually, what’s the thing that will sustain me for another 10 years? And that’s the thing I probably need to do now. I have to think what else is going to be in this portfolio of things I engage in otherwise.
Jeromy Sonne:
No, I love that. That’s a really interesting way of thinking about it and a very, very logical way of thinking about it as well. But I think that one thing that I heard once was Steve Jobs said that you have to just do things and then look backwards and hope the dots will connect. And I think that there’s like an interesting way of doing that, you have to forward and trust that it’ll all work in a way, no matter how logical you are about it. But I like your approach to thinking about making the right moves in life or business or what have you.
Tom Davenport:
There’s more wisdom out there in the world. I’m definitely not the final word on that, but that worked for me. And I think it’s a way of addressing… The only things that go on the sheet are things that you’re into, but then it’s actually having an honest look at not being drawn to the shiny light, but actually saying, all right, well, let’s actually score this damn thing and actually decide which of these should bubble to the top? Because the sexy stuff looks best, but actually, the non-sexy stuff might tick more boxes for you if you just decide what you want.
Tom Davenport:
You mentioned Steve Jobs. He actually had a big influence on this as well because when he died and I’ve actually just found there’s this blog post I did about the night he died, which sounds really weird, but I was basically tasked with writing his obituary for CNET because what you do, you write obituaries before their death. It’s sound morbid, but everyone knew he was ill. I probably had four months where I was like, hey, can you do this obit? I used to love doing obituaries, but I just didn’t get around to doing this. And I found out that like 1:00 AM or something while I was at a friend’s, at night by the way, that he had died. And I was like, oh my God. And I was a little worse for wear and I had to go back and finish this obituary over overnight.
Tom Davenport:
But when I was diving into his life, I basically one way or another ended up thinking, I would really like to be… In fact, here’s the paragraph on my blog, “I’ve decided my next challenge is to be amazing at sales, door to door, in conversation, over email or anything. Some deep rooted instinct tells me I should try to be great at it.” Which is actually cool looking back at because that was a pure aspiration and I don’t know why I wrote something so sentimental, but you kind of get in that mood when you’ve just done an obituary. And it’s funny that by actually thinking about him kind of has like influenced some of the stuff we’ve talked about today. And it’s cool looking back to go, oh cool. I had to bite the bullet. I had to give up what I thought was my passion. But here I am actually feeling quite qualified at being good at selling because I think in 2019 we made some, can’t quantify all of it, but it’s somewhere between $50 and $90 million was generated across all clients. And it’s like, okay, wow, okay, I met the goal, I can sell. But what next? That’s the thing that this conversation has just reminded me, which is cool. Thanks.
Jeromy Sonne:
No, no, yeah, it is interesting how all of these things come together, like you said, and it’s fascinating that you were able to have that insight by writing about basically Steve Jobs’ obituary and stuff. Well, this has been a fascinating conversation, Tom. I really appreciate your time today. As I mentioned, at the end of every episode, I let our guest do a quick pitch for anything that they want, whether that’s their agency or what have you. I just want to give you that time now to plug whatever it is that you’re thinking about and want to.
Tom Davenport:
I don’t know that they’re listening, but if anyone is in a creative industry and usually on the creator side, rather than the big label or publisher side, we can help you take charge of your own marketing and own your audience. I don’t know that they’re listening to this, but that’s something we have a really good track record for, for like modern stuff, like BTS and Coldplay to [inaudible 00:36:02] like Depeche Mode and Elvis and Pink Floyd and The Cure. But yes, it goes beyond music, lots of high culture stuff like a Les Miserables, Monte Python, Royal Shakespeare Company. Lots of cool, cultural art stuff.
Tom Davenport:
But to be honest, maybe who I should speak to is other marketers and we, as of COVID and going into lockdown, and also with some of the recruitment problems that I mentioned before, we are now fully hiring remote. If anyone listening is really interested in marketing at a technical and systems level and has that mindset and ambition to work on really, really big consumer audiences, then yeah, I would love to hear from you because we have great credits. We’ve grown just through referrals and that’s still the case, but I think one of the goals that I’ve had that comes to mind when you’re talking about what lessons have I learned, well, I actually want to act on some of the credits we’ve got because we could be growing at a better rate. And so we’re going to have a real push. We’re going to need more people on the team. If anyone, across any discipline, it doesn’t have to be advertising. It could be in other channels, like search, conversion rate optimization, I would love to hear from you because I’d love to expand to the network of talented people to work with who really get what we’re trying to do. Maybe that’s the pitch is let me know about you and I will put you on the roster if you really care about doing a good job of this stuff.
Jeromy Sonne:
Absolutely. Well, Tom, thank you so much again for being on the show. If you’re listening out there, Tom is a fantastic, fantastic leader and any marketer would be lucky to work for him. If you’re interested in that, definitely reach out. We’ll make sure to include his website and contact information when we post this episode if –
Tom Davenport:
I should probably say that I’m clearly not very well practiced at promo if I haven’t even said the name-
Jeromy Sonne:
Bad at marketing, aye?
Tom Davenport:
Oh, sorry, Digitalmarketingspecialist.com is our website. And there’s a contact form. There’s not very many case studies at all, but you’ve heard about credits here. Maybe you can come and help us finish our website.
Jeromy Sonne:
Perfect. Well, Tom, thank you so much again. For everybody out there listening, take these wonderful ideas and thoughts and perspectives that Tom’s given, put them into practice, think about what’s your secret coming out of left field advantage that you can utilize to help you stand apart from the competition. And thanks to everybody listening and happy marketing.
