Mike Griffin: 0:29

Hi, welcome to Marketing Qualified. I'm Mike Griffin and I'm Chris Newman, and we're so excited to kick off our first ever Marketing Qualified podcast, where we're really just here to talk about all the absurdities that come inherent to modern day marketing talk about all the absurdities that come inherent to modern day marketing.

Chris Newton: 0:45

And yeah, we'll give a quick background of ourselves and then we'll be off to the races. So, mike, do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself first?

Mike Griffin: 0:51

Yeah, yeah, I'm proud in some way and just shocked in others to say that I have more than 10 years of B2B marketing experience. Now, journey started off at a high-tech B2B PR firm and currently is at a publicly traded enterprise fraud risk mitigation platform. It's been a hell of a journey, but I say that to say I've seen a lot of shit along the way here and I'm excited to have a platform, venue and audience to air out with you and honestly, just to keep with you every week. Man, this is going to be awesome.

Chris Newton: 1:26

Yeah, it's going to be great. And yeah, we pretty much just needed an outlet for all of our frustrations and anger. So that's why this podcast is for him. And yeah, similar to Mike, I've been working in various marketing capacities for the past 10 plus years or so Variety of different startups, everything from email and SMS tech startups to currently I work at a workplace management platform startup based out of the Boston area and, yeah, you know, truly looking forward to this podcast, I think that there may be occasional nuggets of wisdom sprinkled in between all the other nonsense that we talk about during the week. And, yeah, and yeah, it should be a, should be a good um, a good outlet for us. That's right.

Mike Griffin: 2:08

Come for the borderline therapeutic ranting and ravings of borderline Madman and stay for the occasional nugget of wisdom.

Chris Newton: 2:17

Yeah, so, uh, each, each, uh, each week, we'll we'll be doing a variety of different segments. Um, occasionally have guests in a listener mail. Once we start actually getting listeners, that ever happens. And um, yeah, I honestly, I think the most difficult part about this is going to be editing these episodes, cause I fucking hate the sound of my own voice. But uh, I was told once that I had a good, uh, I had a good face for radio. So here I am doing a podcast.

Mike Griffin: 2:44

Yes, don't let your dream stay. Dreams, go after it, exactly, oh man. Hey, speaking of editing this file, this first, this episode numero uno here. I know that you had something to get off your chest that was tech-related, that you experienced quite recently. As a matter of fact, oh yeah, isn't that right?

Chris Newton: 3:04

Yeah, quite experienced, quite recently, as a matter of fact. Oh, yeah, right, yeah, quite quite recently, literally about half an hour ago, ceo asked me to join a seo podcast that was going to talk about ai and generative ai and how you can leverage that to improve your seo and whatnot. So they're hosting the podcast, they or, sorry, the webinar. They start um, you know having some technical difficulties. One of the women is like, let me start. You know having some technical difficulties.

Chris Newton: 3:26

One of the women is like let me just, you know, adjust this setting or whatever, and webinar completely comes to an end 47 seconds in sends out the 47 second video to everybody who registered. And, yeah, they couldn't figure it out. The webinar that was supposed to be an hour long with a ton of listeners on, ended it after 47 seconds. That being said, it is a little bit humbling because just getting this podcast up and running has been, let's say, a little bit of a struggle for Mike and myself. You want to give a quick recap of what, what issues we've had, and we should also preface it by saying that we're we're both remote. Mike lives in New York city, I live just outside of Boston and, yeah, I'll let you kind of talk about some of our struggles of our own.

Mike Griffin: 4:08

I would love to share some of our struggles. Before I do that, I have to ask you what did you do with all the time you got back in your day? 47 seconds, when I mean. What else is there to do, right, so you?

Chris Newton: 4:20

know I had a nice bowl of soup went downstairs pet my dog she was happy about that. She tried to eat some of the soup. Yeah, and now we decide to record a podcast.

Mike Griffin: 4:32

And here we are. We did decide to record. Yeah, man, just to empathize with those folks. To be fair, I think we probably could have managed a little bit better than they fared. I'm going to give us a little bit of credit, but everything from figuring out that the Google Meet that we were using at first doesn't actually allow recordings, to the sound editing software had all kinds of issues, even allowing me to call in, to getting my fucking microphone set up properly and not having the echo of my own voice coming into the headphones.

Mike Griffin: 5:01

Yeah, I mean, there's just a lot of stuff that goes into, especially, like you said, given the fact that we're both remote and talk to each other from two different cities. It's just like inherently harder than if we were sitting there face to face having a normal conversation into a microphone. Uh, I guess I, I guess I feel for a lot of the producers, a lot of the editors and what have you uh, none of which we have, by the way, buddy, it's you and me that are going to have to go in and figure out how to make this thing happen. So, yeah, it was a bit of a journey. It was a lot of like can you hear me now? What about now? Where's that feedback coming from? What if I share you on this thing? Does it work? And we're actually. I think we deserve some credit for getting to this point, but it was a long and winding road with, I'm sure, some more unforeseen potholes in our near future.

Chris Newton: 5:48

Yeah Well, I mean, I don't want to give ourselves too much credit, because it sounds like you're making a pretty big case for return to office and we are not. We both are very against that. I'm personally a hybrid. Right now I love it. I get a couple of days to go into Boston and the rest of the time I can, you know, derp around at my house.

Mike Griffin: 6:06

It's a fair point. It's a very fair point. Yeah, I'm on a similar kind of situation right. So two days in three days, uh, remote it. If you look at the map of New York city it's not a particularly far like mile, wise journey to get from where I live to the actual office. But if you know anything about the subway system then you know that it can, depending on it, can be literally man like a 30 minute commute to like an hour 15, depending on train delays and all that kind of fun stuff. So we're turning to office. Yeah, I get it here for it a little bit. Don't want to lose my remote work privilege. That is, that's like a big thing for me. Audio difficulty is included. We'll deal with it Right, yeah.

Chris Newton: 6:47

So managers out there listening, don't bring your people back full-time into the office PSA. They don't like it?

Mike Griffin: 6:55

Yeah, I mean, let's talk about that for a second. Are you more productive on the train into work or listening to your favorite non-marketing qualified podcast, sitting in traffic each morning, or being able to roll out of bed, pull yourself together quickly and just jump right into being a productive employee? I'm going to say that you're probably better in the latter. Challenge me there.

Chris Newton: 7:18

I definitely look way better going into the office than right now going into the office than right now. When you were talking to me this morning about what we were gonna do for the podcast, if we were gonna record audio and video and everything, you asked me what I was wearing. I said I may or may not be wearing a white tee with pit stains and I'm happy to say this is a clean white tee. It's not one of the dirty ones. Yeah, it's. You know I would never wear this into the office, obviously. And you know I honestly don't really mind the commuter rail. Like you know, there's been horror stories about the commuter rail going to Boston. I've taken it several times and I haven't been late once, which is nice. But now that I say that there's probably going to be delays pretty much for the rest of my life.

Mike Griffin: 8:00

Yeah, you're fucked. Now You've done it, man, jesus. Yeah, for for what it's worth. I was concerned because at the time I think I texted you this right I was rocking the same hoodie and cap that I'm rocking at the moment and you know what? I think I would be comfortable with this in the office. I think it's that kind of place we should say, by the way. So Chris and I met each other when we were riding the Orange Rocket ship at HubSpot back in the day and quickly bonded over appreciation for the absurd, which is again what a lot of the focus on this podcast is going to be about. And you know it was. It was casual, almost to a point of being uncomfortable at times. Right Like there. There were some, there were some really questionable outfits that went on there and, uh, I, sometimes I miss it and sometimes I'm like you know what. No, I'm glad that I need to like take an iron to some of my attire from time to time before, before venturing in.

Chris Newton: 8:57

You know, when you were talking about the orange rocket ship for a second I thought you were going to say that we met on the orange line, like right before I caught fire on the bridge. Which time did you? Uh, I was going to say I don't know if you were living in Boston when that happened, mike, but uh, still fresh on my mind seeing people basically jump off the bridge to get away from the orange line in boston.

Mike Griffin: 9:15

this is the craziest thing how that can just how that can just happen. Right, I was not living in boston at the time. I did see a lot of the coverage on it, right, and I mean, it's just like something. Something somewhat similar happened on the one train in new york recently. There wasn't a fire, thankfully, but it did like derail and there were a bunch of folks that were injured and what have you is really really a really, really terrible situation.

Mike Griffin: 9:40

Speaking of which I wanted to tell you about my recent webinar experience. Speaking of terrible experiences, I got to tell you I will hand raise here I think that I should have stepped in and been a little bit more involved in the process from the onset, so I could have asked, asked the right questions. With that as a disclosure, here's the situation. There were, I think, north of 300 attendees that registered for this panelist type of discussion that we did recently. I got excited by that number at first, and then I realized we had directed internal people to the very same landing page and form that needed to be filled out, as we had all of our prospects, all of our existing customers, and so that number in terms of, like, actual interested people was super inflated. Our conversion rate is pretty fucked now because we're including people that are at my own organization and it just makes it difficult to get the actual story that we want to tell to our CMO, to the ELT team and what have you.

Mike Griffin: 10:49

And then so you fast forward to the day of the oh. I should give this context. So the webinar that you were signing up for, unbeknownst to you, the actual end user, you were signing up for 40 minutes of a pre-recorded webinar and then another 15 or so of like live Q and a. So I don't know how you feel about that. Maybe you should talk about the value of pre-recorded versus not, but that's what you were getting when you signed up for this form.

Mike Griffin: 11:16

So then I ask the people internally that are running it right Where's the link that I should use as just an internal attendee versus a prospect that's actually going to be signing off for this? And they're like oh, here's the link. And the link was to the landing page. So they were telling me, the director of global performance marketing, to go and fill out a form that I know damn well I shouldn't, in order to obtain we're using fucking Zoom. Dude. It was a Zoom webinar link. So naturally I don't I creep the calendar of one of my colleagues who has filled out the fucking landing page form to get the actual link Log in, preserve one erroneous form submission and I like to think that I did my part there and we'll do my part as a more in a more proactive way the next time around to to to make sure that a similar situation doesn't take place. But webinars man.

Chris Newton: 12:07

So basically, what you're saying is you're an honest marketer and you don't pad your numbers. That's what I'm trying to say. Yeah, I don't. I don't believe in the padding that makes one of us. You know how many times I've signed up for our product since I started a month ago. They're like, wow, signups are way up this month. I'm like I know it's crazy. I just started.

Mike Griffin: 12:25

You're running out of email address combinations for your name.

Chris Newton: 12:29

Oh yeah, Fun fact I told you that there'd be occasional nuggets of wisdom in here. Fun fact if you have a Gmail account or like a G Suite or something, if you do whatever your email is and then like a plus sign and then something else, so like chrisnewinplus1atdomaincom or something, google sees that as, or like most web apps will see that as, a unique email address. But when they send the confirmation email to your email it'll still go to your gmail. So anytime I sign up for a new product or something, I'll do like a plus and then some other combination of something.

Chris Newton: 13:07

It's also a good way to find out who's sending you spam or not, because if I sign up for like fidelity, fidelity or some shit, and I do chrisnewton plus fidelity at you know whatever at gmailcom or whatever, and then I start getting a bunch of spam to that email address and I know who's doing it Damn, what a hack. It's also good when you're signing up, you know, a bunch of times to your company's web app to pad your numbers and you know you don't want to keep using the same email address every time because hubspot won't count it as an additional one. It's just uh, you know, it'll just update your contact record, so you need to use a new one right.

Mike Griffin: 13:45

oh man, I wish I had known about this. When, back in the day, back at hubspot, another chris it wasn't you signed me up, wilson, it wasn't wilson either. I'll give him a pass on this one. They signed me up for the Nickelback fan club letter and every month this fucking thing hit my inbox. I was like I know what wouldn't obviously I. Did I unsubscribe? No, did I click through occasionally? Yes, did I browse tickets? It doesn't matter. Okay, the point is that I was signed up for this newsletter against my will and that, uh, that still hurts yeah, I mean you.

Chris Newton: 14:20

You say it's against your will, but I bet somebody at your desk like we hub spot was an open office, just for anybody who doesn't know it. I bet somebody walked by his desk one day and they're like why are you on nickelback's website?

Mike Griffin: 14:30

and you're like oh, it wasn't my fault man this.

Chris Newton: 14:32

This guy named named Chris. He can't even tell me the last name. Sign me up for this newsletter. Just be honest, Just own it. If you like Nickelback, just own it.

Mike Griffin: 14:41

I think the time is right. They were not the meme that they are now when they first came out. Think about everything that's coming back around 90s fitting clothing, fucking Pokemon has already come back and it is back. What else we missing from? I mean, the point is yes, uh, own it. If you're gonna own it, have no shame and just just do you.

Chris Newton: 15:07

Just do you, yeah I mean, I think that's a big uh. A big thing is authenticity and marketing. You know we can see right through inauthentic marketing right away and uh, yeah, I mean, speaking of that, do you want to give a quick background about what? What gave you the idea for the podcast? Like you know where it came from, why you wanted to do it, aside from just, you know, getting a bunch of like, uh, frustration now on the general public?

Mike Griffin: 15:33

Yes, yeah, so the general public definitely is going to be. Uh, I mean that that was definitely impetus number one, uh, but no, seriously, there's a lot of really good, high, highly informative podcasts that are out there for marketers and what have you, but they're all very like and many of them are like corporate sponsored as well. You know you're doing this on behalf of, like your marketing tech oriented type of company, so by default, you're focusing on driving EV for your organization or just trying to establish yourself as an SME for I don't know personal branding or like influence reach Right, honest and raw take on marketing. Because, like listen, man, some of the stuff that you get, these insights from the experts on these other podcasts are really buttoned up and sometimes it's just really fucking dumb right. They don't make any sense and you're doing it for the sake of doing it and you don't get like the in the trenches kind of account at, like all the heavy lifting that went into, the technical hurdles that had to be overcome, and you don't get like an honest take about and I was working with this fucking guy at this vendor and it just made it impossible to to get the level of like analytics that I needed or whatever.

Mike Griffin: 16:44

So just just a place to have like a nice honest conversation and and laugh at how absurd some of the stuff that we as marketers need to go through is. And you've always been an empathetic ear. You always have similar type of stories and it's like, well, what do you hear about this? Which is why I decided to reach out to you and have, uh, have the conversation and hopefully that resonates with folks that are in a similar type of type of predicament. If you will and have have a place that you can, you can reach out to and just not have to worry about the professional. Should we call them like bumpers that need to be on some of the other marketing podcasts that you hear?

Chris Newton: 17:18

Yeah, yeah, I like that. I think that I think bumpers is a good way to put it. I mean, I personally know a couple of bald fucking influencers on on LinkedIn that pretty much just talk out of their ass pretty much the whole time and you know, I see a lot of people take it for gospel and I'm just like that would never work in reality. And, like you know, they're not doing it for you, like if they had all this infinite wisdom, like they're not doing it for you, they're doing it for that, they're doing it for the likes, they're doing it for the shares and they're monetizing your. Attention, basically, is what it comes down to, and 100%.

Chris Newton: 17:50

Yeah, speaking of speaking of that, we're going to go to a sponsor now. This episode is brought to you by duncan. No, I'm joking, we don't. We don't have duncan as a sponsor yet working on it.

Mike Griffin: 18:03

That's right, duncan, if you're listening, we're here we're here and just the heads up.

Chris Newton: 18:09

We got about 10 minutes left. We'll edit this part out or maybe we'll just leave it in. Well, this is, you know, speaking about authenticity. Mike and I are recording this on the free version of Zoom, so I just got the notification that we have 10 minutes left. Oh, also, should we talk a little bit about how we're kind of like getting this podcast set up? Like pretty much everything here is brought to you by AI.

Mike Griffin: 18:34

I don't even know if this is my own voice. This might be like an AI generated version of my voice. By the time that you hear this, it's gone through. Man, yeah, it's a good point, right, Like AI is almost like one of those roll eyes and sigh buzzwords right now. But, like listen, for all the difficulties that we had to climb through to get this free zoom, as you correctly point out, spun up. Like it was helpful in terms of logo generation, in terms of of song intro, song right, which I think is dope. You guys let us know in listener mail if you think it's a, you think it's on brand here. But yeah, it helped out a lot and I don't think we're at a point where it's totally replacing everything human, but like it's a good, I don't know. It's basically like in Mario cart, right, you can do that little, that little trick where you get a boost off the start line. That's what comes to mind for me.

Chris Newton: 19:23

What do you think about it? Yeah, so basically, you're cheating. That's. That's exactly what it comes to. Yeah, I, I'm a big fan of cheating, especially for if it's things that I don't really care about. You know it's we look at it as a time saver. It's like you know, neither of us are designers. We got this logo. That's good enough. Is it great? No, is it good enough to get this up and running before we get some big sponsors like Duncan in the door? Like absolutely Duncan, if you're listening, I tried the. I tried the new dunking iced coffee. It's the sweetest fucking thing I've ever had in my life. And I don't mean sweet, isn't awesome, I mean like it's undrinkably sweet. That's why I work in marketing. It's like, why didn't they use that as a tagline? Like dunking, dunking iced coffee, brought to you by ben affleck. It's undrinkably sweet, it's on tree.

Mike Griffin: 20:10

Yeah, exactly because like, listen man, you're gonna listen to that, you're gonna hear, you're to read the advertisement for it. You're going to think to yourself but like, why is it actually? You're going to want to test it out and guess what?

Chris Newton: 20:19

You're going to get a bunch of sales out of the gate for the I mean the, the AI stuff. Like we, we use some um AI generator for the music which you know made a pretty cool beat and like literally five seconds. It's a 30 second long beat. Um, I personally don't know how to make like any audio or anything like that. Um, you know, I could probably spend a couple hours doing it myself, or I could just tell Loudly to throw down some dank beats and like, and here it is. So, yeah, shout out to. I think the name of the tool that we use is Loudly L-O-U-D-L-Y. They're not a sponsor yet, but hopefully they'll hear this and they will be eventually. But yeah, I think I also asked chat gpt like give me a bunch of ideas for like a podcast. So like, a lot of the segment ideas came from, uh, chat gpt. So like some segment ideas that we're going to be doing over time. Or like, um, we mentioned listener, listener mail. We'll do like stories.

Chris Newton: 21:31

Uh, for marketing, um, marketing fact of the day. I've got a fact I'll share in just a couple minutes here Sales fails, my personal favorite, where we talk about fails that sales has had in relation to marketing. Bad marketing advice of the week this is my second favorite probably Something that we either read on LinkedIn or in a news article or something, or here on a podcast and just outright bad marketing advice. Um, everyone's a marketer. That that should be a good segment. Um, that'll be funny stories about times that random people tell marketing that we should be doing x instead of Y because everyone has those. And yeah, we have a whole. We have a whole bunch of other ones that I'm excited to do.

Mike Griffin: 22:18

I'm pumped man. I was going to say, like, listen, the point of sharing these and being honest and cracking some jokes about it is not to like dunk on anybody, right, but it is kind of just to speak power to. You know, let's just be honest about how some of like the stuff that we deal with on a day-to-day basis, some of the pressures and some of these folks that we'll poke fun at, are super real, right. Like you have to have a sense of humor about this kind of thing, otherwise your stress is just going to go through the roof and hopefully, yeah, this place can be a home for those that are of like minds.

Chris Newton: 22:47

Yeah, absolutely yeah. I guess, before we move on to the marketing fact of the day, do you have a favorite segment that you're excited most about?

Mike Griffin: 22:55

I do like the bad marketing advice because there's so much of it and it's like you know. You see, some of these, some of these want to be influencer type of folks spewing stuff that was probably super relevant and groundbreaking in like 2010. We're still talking about it as if it's, you know, earth shattering and I just I don't know. That's not going to make their followers better, it's not going to make our listeners any better, but we can, hey.

Chris Newton: 23:21

Mike. Hey, mike, are you guys doing e-books? Yeah, yeah, yeah, you guys got to have a downloadable e-book where they give you your email and you give them the e-book.

Mike Griffin: 23:38

Hear me out have sales follow up immediately after the download. It's so outrageous. But yeah, it's gotta be that. For me, it's gotta be that.

Chris Newton: 23:45

Cool. Um, well, yeah, we have, uh, just four minutes left on our free zoom here, so, uh, I'll jump into the marketing fact of the week. Um, so I guess I'll start off by off by just asking you did you know where the concept of brand marketing came from?

Mike Griffin: 24:00

I honestly haven't a clue.

Chris Newton: 24:02

Where did it come from? So, apparently, I think this fact is also brought to you by chat GPT. So take it with a grain of salt. It may or may not be hallucinating, it may not be true or not. So apparently, branding came from the ancient practice of branding livestock to signify ownership of the animal with a symbol or a mark burned onto the animal's skin with a hot branding iron. This evolved over time for businesses to use unique names, logos and other designs to identify and differentiate their products from their competitors. This aspect of creating a strong, recognizable brand is now a fundamental part of marketing strategy, which helps companies to build a customer base and establish a significant presence in the marketplace. So yeah, apparently branding came from the actual aspect of like taking a hot iron and stamping it onto some unfortunate cow who's like gonna like scream and holler and be in immense pain for a while it's basically like a poorly run advertising campaign today.

Mike Griffin: 25:01

Right, you're gonna fucking force this uncomfortable thing on an unsuspecting fit and hope for the best exactly.

Chris Newton: 25:08

Yeah, you know, if you want to scare the shit out of your marketing team as a ceo, cmo or head of marketing or you know pretty much anybody at the company, mention how you want to go through a rebranding to like help increase, like, oh, sales are going down. You know what we need. We need to rebrand. Man, I tell you that's like we're gonna take this thing that was stamped on your ass and we're just gonna like stamp you again. Yeah it, it's going to burn, it's going to hurt, it probably isn't going to look good at the end but we're going to rebrand anyways.

Mike Griffin: 25:43

Oh my God, yeah, we're not going to bother to try to like let the the wounds that are still not fully recovered from the first time around actually come to like be fully healed. We're just going to go right into the next thing I healed. We're just going to go right into the next thing For the audio only format. You should know there was an actual shutter. That happened when Chris said the word rebrand. It's involuntary at this point, but there it is.

Chris Newton: 26:02

Your eye is going to be twitching the rest of the day.

Mike Griffin: 26:05

Christ, I'm a cracker Dude. This was fun.

Chris Newton: 26:09

Yeah, Hopefully some people will listen to it. Whether you like it or hate it, send us all your feedback. We'll delete all the hate mail and, you know, just show our significant others, our wives and children and whatnot all the fan mail. So, but yeah, we're going to try to get a cadence of you know, maybe like one a week. I think like 30 minutes is a good length, right, Like we only have 40 minutes max to zoom.

Mike Griffin: 26:35

but it feels right.

Chris Newton: 26:38

It feels right, yeah, and also, like there's so many long podcasts, like people don't have time for a long podcast, like I feel like 20, 30 minutes is kind of like the sweet spot.

Mike Griffin: 26:46

I totally agree, even some of my favorites. I'm like damn dude, I got like an hour and 10 minutes I got. I get you know, you've got to figure out a way to get that into my day somehow.

Chris Newton: 26:59

So, yeah, yeah, here you go. Awesome, well, uh, we're going to sign off, we're going to wrap up right now and uh, yeah, thanks for listening to episode numero uno. Much more to come Appreciate you, man, take it easy.

Mike Griffin: 27:05

Everyone, thank you.