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Hey, what is up?
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Welcome to this episode of the Wantrepreneur to Entrepreneur podcast.
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As always, I'm your host, Brian LoFermento, and I will give you a little bit of behind the scenes information here to kick off today's episode.
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This is a guest.
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I've been so excited to have him here on the show.
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He has been on our radar for a long time.
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He's exchanged emails with our staff Him and I have exchanged emails and today we're finally making this episode happen, and I love this guy's energy, I love his passion for business, I love his passion for marketing and I really love his mission.
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One of the things that you'll find in the way he talks about marketing is that he helps the Davids of the world compete with the Goliaths, and I think that he has such an interesting perspective when it comes to that, because this is someone who comes from the world of big broadcast media.
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Let me introduce you to today's guest.
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His name is Mike Guerrero.
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Mike is president and CMO of Vanbrie Media, which is based in the Miami and Fort Lauderdale area, just on the other side of the state from me.
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Mike came up in broadcast television, where he worked for over 25 years in creative services and programming, mostly for NBC stations.
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He worked in markets including Hartford, Detroit, Jacksonville, Houston, Miami all over the country.
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He spent the last 17 years of his television career in executive management, overseeing all aspects of creative and marketing for his respective stations.
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He also served this is someone I'm telling you.
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Mike not only is brilliant, but he is incredibly accomplished.
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He also served five years as the chairman of NBC Station Marketing Council, which is a position charged with ensuring strategic marketing priorities are being aligned between the network and more than 230 local stations across the country.
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He's a seven-time regional Emmy winner as a writer, producer and director.
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And what I love is I don't know why he decided to do it on New Year's Day, but on January 1st 2020, he decided it was time for a new adventure and he launched his agency Today.
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Vanbree Media is a full-service marketing agency serving both B2B and B2C clients from coast to coast.
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Like I said, his mission is on helping the Davids of the world compete with the Goliaths, but, as Mike is going to tell us in today's conversation, it can be a tricky task, but he's going to help us make progress there.
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So I'm excited about this one.
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I'm not going to say anything else.
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Let's dive straight into my interview with Mike Guerrero.
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All right, Mike, I am so very excited that you're here with us today.
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First things first, welcome to the show.
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Thanks, Brian, Glad to be here.
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Heck yeah, First things first, welcome to the show.
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Thanks, Brian, Glad to be here.
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Heck yeah, You've got a lot to live up to, Mike, so I'm going to kick it over to you to get the party started.
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Take us beyond the bio.
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Who's Mike?
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How'd you start doing all these cool things?
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Yeah, man, thanks for the intro.
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I just worked recently with WWE World Wrestling Entertainment.
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I feel like your intro is like I feel like there should be smoke and cannons when you set people up to get going.
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It's great stuff, so I appreciate it.
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Yeah, like you said, I started out in broadcast television, went to UConn Go Huskies, started with an internship in Hartford, connecticut, and then traveled 20 years around the country with Graham Media, which is a great outlet, and then came to Miami to work for NBC and you know I've always kind of believed in that.
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You know, wayne Gretzky quote, ofky quote of don't skate to where the puck is, skate to where the puck is going.
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I kind of saw some things shifting.
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My whole career was spent working at the top of the marketing funnel.
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Then I realized that as data evolved and became more prevalent in marketing that I needed to get better at the middle and lower parts of the funnel.
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January 1st I launched my own agency.
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The goal was to start working with cosmetic surgeons but you know, 10 weeks later, bam pandemic.
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So everything shut down and I figured I had to pivot.
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So you know, right now I treat my client roster kind of like a stock portfolio, right when some industries are up, others are down and vice versa.
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So I just think it's important to diversify like that.
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So now we work with everybody from, you know, Microsoft solutions partners, to cosmetic surgeons, to nonprofits and everything in between, and I love it.
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Yeah, I love that overview, Mike, especially because, using that Wayne Gretzky quote, actually I'll give listeners a little bit of behind the scenes before you and I hit record.
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We kind of joked about the fact that everybody talks about marketing and we know what marketing conversations usually look like.
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Everyone wants to talk about social media, paid advertising.
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Of course branding plays a lot into marketing and sales, so those conversations everybody's heard before, but we're not going where the puck is, or was we're going where the puck is going.
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So, Mike, my super broad question to you to kick things off today is where is marketing?
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What should we be talking about?
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Everybody's focused on those little tactical things, but obviously you have a very strategic and visionary mind.
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What should we be talking about in the scope of marketing?
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Yeah, that's a great question.
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I think it's a full funnel approach and it's a long-term approach.
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You know, I think one thing that's kind of interesting that's going on is we referenced data earlier and I don't know if you've ever heard of the CSI effect, but if you haven't, it's this interesting study that was done in Oxford University and the principle of that was that juries, prosecutors, were having a harder job because juries were so trained to think from these TV shows that, you know, every fingerprint was perfect and DNA match.
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And why can't we solve this in an hour?
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And it's not that easy to do.
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And you know, I would say that is very prevalent in marketing right now.
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I don't know if we have a name for it, but you know, data is great but working in it, I feel better about my data.
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It's more protected than I thought it would be and it's not the best point it's ever been, and I'll get into that, you know, a little bit later for reasons.
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But it's really, you know, making sure that you're connecting with your customer, that you have the right message, that it fits who you are being true to yourself.
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But then also, okay, great, you develop the lead.
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You've developed this interest, this awareness?
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How do you really you've developed this interest, this awareness?
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How do you really pull them through the middle of that funnel to consideration and then down to make the purchase and then, in a perfect world, they become brand champions for you and they lobby and they refer you to other people.
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So that's really where we're working on it right now, and whenever we start working with a client, we make sure that they're really thinking ahead and really committed to doing it.
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The other thing I would say is we do something called like a mindset marketing map, where we kind of draw an access where you know, do you view marketing?
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Do you view it as an expense or an investment?
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And then do you care about leads or your brand?
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And you know, if you're a company that only cares about leads and sees it as an expense, you know you're in a tough spot.
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It's a long-term game.
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You have to pay some attention to your brand, you have to see it as an investment.
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You have to be willing, you have to have the fortitude to do it well, and the most successful companies do that.
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So we kind of take that holistic approach.
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Yeah, I'm going to pick on that a little bit, because I think that I've been an entrepreneur for 16 or 17 years now, which sounds crazy to say in my mid-30s but I started really young, when I was 19 years old, and from there, mike, I'm fortunate in that when I started my business, I was in college.
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Quite frankly, I didn't really care about the results, because for the next three years, my only task was to waste time sitting in a college classroom and amassing student loan debt, and so I was less concerned about the results that I was getting with my business and more just concerned on.
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I want to build something really cool.
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I had that luxury of time and, I would argue, a luxury of not as many life obligations, but obviously for most entrepreneurs as adults, we do have that time horizon.
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We do have an impatience for results and I would imagine, mike, in the marketing that you do with your clients, a lot of them obviously want results right away.
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Talk to us about that delicate balance between faith, between discipline, between saying no I'm going to stick with this for a certain amount of time, because obviously this plays into the mindset stuff that you like to talk about with regards to marketing versus the magic pill that I think everybody expects.
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Yeah, no, you're absolutely right, and you know we've all been there.
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As an entrepreneur, I was in the same boat.
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You know I was an entrepreneur and then I dipped back into the working pool for a little bit and came back out.
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You know, because, let's face it, it's things like you know you can relate to this in your real life Like you need benefits are expensive, you need insurance.
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You know I mean how many great businesses never took off just because people couldn't stay in the game long enough to get their idea to take off.
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So you know it's really about setting expectations for the client and realizing, you know, there is no magic bullet, there is no magic wand.
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You know setting a realistic expectation with ROI.
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You know there's a lot of clients that you know want, you know, six, eight, 10x ROI right off the bat and it's just not the way it works a lot of times.
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And I would say, you know I look at it, you know, again, like a stock portfolio, if somebody told me, hey, you give me $100,000, you know, tomorrow, by the end of the year, it will be 200,000.
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I take that investment all day.
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Right, that's a two to one ROI.
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So it's about, you know, like what Warren Buffett said no-transcript.
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You know what kind of investment and what kind of timeline it might take to get to where you want to go.
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And then you know.
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The good news is is I realized over time like I'm not a good cold caller.
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I'm pretty good at presenting, I'm pretty good at soft closing and I stink at hard closing Right.
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So the downside of that is there's probably some business I haven't gotten over the years because of that.
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But the good news is I build trust with the clients over time so we have that relationship before we ever get started.
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You know if you twist somebody's arm into doing business with you, you know right off the bat it can be kind of an adversarial relationship.
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So you just want to know that you know.
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You know you're aligned completely with the goals, the timelines, the creative everything to have the most successful partnership you can have.
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Yeah, really well said.
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I love the stock portfolio analogy, so I'm going to roll with that for a little bit, because when you talk about having a stock portfolio go from 100K to 200K, what's beautiful about it being a portfolio and not just one stock is that there will be winners and losers, and obviously the analogy here for marketing is that not everything we do is going to hit, and I think that most business owners I would chalk it up, and it sounds like you have a similar attitude is that either one, they don't do it for long enough to they don't try enough things, and three, they don't learn from all the experiments that come along the way.
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I want to hear your perspective on that, because the one positive thing I brought from the classroom is that phrase the marketing mix.
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Obviously, it is kind of that portfolio of marketing, but I'd love to hear your perspective on those winners and losers and experiments and finding the winners along the way.
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Yeah, you know, through my TV career you know it was interesting we came to realize that humans are actually terrible predictors of other humans' behavior.
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You know, and we would do that with you know, some stories we would produce, ones that we thought were going to be major hits, you know didn't take off for whatever the reason, and then others that we didn't give a lot of thought to, you know, suddenly popped.
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So that's the beauty of trying a number of things, having an open mindset, and it's also being able to look inside and say you know, a lot of people, a lot of companies will think the reasons why people will value their business are not the same as why they actually do.
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You know, and that's a hard conversation to have, you know, sometimes with clients.
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You know, I'll give you an example we had a cosmetic surgeon who invented a robot 30 years ago that helped revolutionize, you know, the procedure that they do and that was kind of their selling point when we started working together and I said you know, I'd worked with TV stations where we tried to promote, you know, together, and I said, you know, I'd worked with TV stations where we tried to promote you know, hey, we were the first in color and we were the first in HD and that's all cool, but that is not going to influence what I watched tonight at, you know, 8 PM and you know it's the same thing with these businesses it's hard to rest on your laurels on something that you did 30 years ago.
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Um, because people just want to know can I get a great result for a fair price with a great customer experience right now and you know a lot of small business owners, you know kind of need that tough love to say we have to focus on what the consumer really wants and not that what we internally think is important to ourselves.
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Yeah, hearing you talk about these things, mike, we've got to talk about your TV background on the air here together, because I would imagine that you learned so many things through being in the broadcasting business for so long, and I'm a big believer that everything is a microcosm of life and therefore we can apply those microcosms and those lessons to anything else that we experience in life, of course, including business, and so, looking at your career, and especially within the NBC network, I think about the fact that within NBC alone, there's so much programming content that's all vying for people's attention.
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But even beyond that, nbc is not the only player in town.
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I can turn to 500 other channels at this point in time.
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What are some of those lessons you picked up from the broadcasting industry that you realize, holy cow, this actually did directly set me up for success as an entrepreneur, as someone who helps others with marketing.
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Oh man, that's a great question.
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Where do you go with that?
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I think it really helped me learn that we're competing in the attention economy, you know, is a thing right now.
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People have so many choices and I'm going to butcher the statistics on this, but I read something not too long ago about, like in the 70s, people used to see something like 400 marketing messages a day, and now that number is up over, you know, like 10,000.
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We are constantly bombarded by messages in the video we watch and the internet that we search and the social media we scroll on our phone, and so, you know, it's really realizing, frankly, that we're not the main character in our customers' lives or our viewers' lives.
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Right, they are, and they've got a lot of things going on and what's a big deal to us.
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We just have to, you know, really step back and realize that.
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You know we have to provide tremendous value.
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We have to be able to describe what we're going to do for them succinctly.
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Describe what we're going to do for them succinctly.
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We have to understand, meet them where they are, you know, in terms of their point in the day, what device they're on and whatnot.
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Like that, and, if you don't, the companies that do that best are the ones that really thrive, and the ones that aren't thinking in that mindset, you know, have more of an uphill battle.
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Yeah, hearing you say that of meeting people where they are, I guess you triggered one thing in my mind from two things.
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You said meeting people where they are and that they are the characters in their own lives.
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That's what they're interested in.
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My mind immediately goes to my favorite show of all time, which is Seinfeld.
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And so what is so captivating about Seinfeld?
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Well, it's a super relatable show.
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Here we are decades later.
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I do wish that they made it in the modern time, but even decades later they didn't have cell phones back then.
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It's still so relatable to the human emotions that we all experience, and you can watch any single episode of Seinfeld and be like, oh my gosh, I've experienced that.
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Mike, how do we bring that to our marketing?
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How do we bring it to our own brands, our own businesses and the communication that we have with our audiences or potential clients in a way that's that relatable, because TV writers obviously understand that.
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How can we master that in business?
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I mean, it's a lot of listening, it's a lot of empathy, you know.
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I mean, you know, that's one of the things that I think I do pretty well is I'm kind of a master empath in the sense that you know I can see how anybody got to the decision they made.
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You know whether it's how they voted or their stance on remote work, or you know things they enjoy watching, even if I'm diametrically opposed to the viewpoint.
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There's a part of me that can go okay, I can see how they got there and that's so important, not just in business and marketing and communications, but like even in the workplace.
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If you have a nine to five job and you're working in an office of 50 people, you're going to have people who think differently than you do, vote differently than you do.
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That is really.
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Empathy is a currency these days, so you need to be very in tune to that.
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And then you also have to factor in things like AI is a big thing in media right now.
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Ben Affleck and Ashton Kutcher I'd heard them on panels speak recently.
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You know just about how AI can impact the industry and a lot of people in the industry got really up in arms or, like you know, those guys said, hey, we have to embrace this, we have to use it.
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And people said, you know, you're a turncoat, you're a trainer, and I'm just like the train is coming down the tracks, whether we like it or not, whatever business, you're in, right.
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And so you know, I don't know any cobblers in my life, I don't know if you do, but at one point that was, that was a craft, right it was was making shoes.
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There was an artistry to it.
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And then I got mass produced and people were like, yeah, I'm okay with that.
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You know, same thing telephone operators.
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Should we not have cell phones today?
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Because once upon a time people had to, you know, connect those calls, and now we don't.
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So it's just like you have to apply that stuff, you have to embrace that stuff.
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We're at a very small window in time, you know.
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I mean there's going to come a point in time where we don't have to launch a stuntman out of a helicopter to create that stunt.
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And the point I'm trying to make is that the consumer dictates that.
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So you know, the artistry only has as much value as the person who's consuming it does.
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And there's hundreds of millions of people who watch movies and hundreds of thousands who make them, the hundreds of millions are always going to win.
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So whatever industry you're in, you just have to really have that perspective that you know the future is what it is and those who figure out how to work with it and stay ahead of it are going to do much better than you know.
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Those who, you know, kind of crossed our arms and say I don't like this, I don't want this.
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Yeah, mike, first things first.
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I had totally forgot that cell phone operator was a job and something that we all used to use.
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So interesting to think about that.
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But secondly, I'm going to say this I've never gone here on the air because it's dangerous territory, but I'm trusting and I'm going to go here with you, here today, because I do think it's such an important topic.
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And when you talk about things like, there's going to be people on other sides of the political aisle, we're going to have to listen to viewpoints that maybe don't reflect our own.
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And, mike, as an extreme empath, it's so clear that that's something that you enjoy.
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You love hearing, you love listening, you love understanding, I would argue and I've always very much felt this way and I'm sure that you join me in this and that when I hear people say your marketing must be polarizing, you have to be polarizing, I thought to myself that's not how I want to be like in general.
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I love people.
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I don't love being repelling to anybody.
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Quite frankly, it naturally happens, just because we're all humans and that's an inevitability.
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But I don't believe in being polarizing for polarizing sake.
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Now, you and I promised to go places in marketing that most people typically don't in this conversation.
00:18:08.259 --> 00:18:09.694
What's your take on that?
00:18:09.694 --> 00:18:11.738
Because we've all heard that advice out there.
00:18:11.738 --> 00:18:17.996
But it just seems to me, like you personally, the way that you do business you're very inviting, the exact opposite of polarizing.
00:18:17.996 --> 00:18:18.998
How do you navigate that?
00:18:19.758 --> 00:18:21.519
Yeah, no, that's an excellent question.
00:18:21.519 --> 00:18:25.904
Well, you know, in TV, and people have probably heard this, there's two sayings.
00:18:25.904 --> 00:18:29.410
One is the riches are in the niches and the other is you know.
00:18:29.410 --> 00:18:33.877
The opposite statement to say the same thing is you know, when you try to appeal to everyone, you appeal to no one.
00:18:33.877 --> 00:18:35.981
And I get that right.
00:18:35.981 --> 00:18:37.203
I mean it's it's, it's.
00:18:37.203 --> 00:18:38.913
People have their viewpoints.
00:18:38.913 --> 00:18:45.961
And if you want real brand loyalty, I mean you look like you know Apple versus you know IBM or Microsoft back in the day, I mean they had those great campaigns.
00:18:47.069 --> 00:18:49.951
It's important to do it, but you can do it with kindness, you know.
00:18:49.951 --> 00:18:52.532
I mean I think that's why you know cable news.
00:18:52.532 --> 00:18:59.196
You know, I was lecturing at a class at UCF not too long ago and I said you know, I'm Gen X.
00:18:59.196 --> 00:19:03.359
When I was growing up, if you told me who your favorite anchor was, I didn't know which way you voted.
00:19:03.359 --> 00:19:05.820
Now you tell me what you know cable news network you watch.
00:19:05.820 --> 00:19:07.781
I will tell you where you voted.
00:19:07.781 --> 00:19:10.864
And you know those companies have made a lot of money doing that.
00:19:10.864 --> 00:19:17.448
So you know, I see the value in it, but I also it's just not my personality style.
00:19:17.448 --> 00:19:21.678
It's not the clients I choose to work with, who want to inflame people to.
00:19:21.678 --> 00:19:26.058
You know sell their product or service, so you need to know who your audience is, what they do.
00:19:26.058 --> 00:19:28.916
Niches are important but you know you can.
00:19:28.916 --> 00:19:29.920
You can do it with kindness.
00:19:29.920 --> 00:19:34.540
You don't have to, you know, trash people or companies along the way to do it, at least in my view.
00:19:35.163 --> 00:19:36.987
Yeah, people or companies along the way to do it, at least in my view.
00:19:36.987 --> 00:19:40.332
Yeah, so well said.
00:19:40.332 --> 00:19:40.954
That is an important takeaway.
00:19:40.954 --> 00:19:44.330
Listeners, if you've ever felt like myself or Mike in your travels and you've thought I don't want to be polarizing, how am I supposed to be polarizing?
00:19:44.330 --> 00:19:48.830
Mike is such a great example and we're obviously going to drop his links at the end of this episode.
00:19:48.830 --> 00:19:50.012
You can also find it down below.
00:19:50.012 --> 00:19:57.845
But the way that he does business, you could tell even I'll tell you as someone who's emailed with Mike back and forth for so long now that he shows up with kindness.
00:19:57.845 --> 00:20:00.336
He took such an interest in our show from the second.
00:20:00.336 --> 00:20:03.123
Our team reached out to him and I feel his support.
00:20:03.123 --> 00:20:05.657
So it's really a joy having you here on the air with us today.
00:20:05.719 --> 00:20:11.873
Mike, I want to go a little bit deeper, because you brought up Ben Affleck and I think you said it was Ben Affleck and Ashton Kutcher.
00:20:11.873 --> 00:20:17.019
When they talk about AI, obviously that's the big elephant in the room in most conversations these days.
00:20:17.019 --> 00:20:20.262
With regards to business, I'm a big proponent for technology.
00:20:20.262 --> 00:20:22.185
I love technology, making my life better.
00:20:22.185 --> 00:20:30.151
What's your take on where we are?
00:20:30.250 --> 00:20:31.673
how we should and could be using AI and is it making marketing?
00:20:31.692 --> 00:20:31.913
better or?
00:20:31.932 --> 00:20:32.713
is it making it worse?
00:20:32.713 --> 00:20:38.441
Yeah, I mean, you know I came up as a creative writer, that was my background, but I'll still use it to get a, to get a running headstart on on AI.
00:20:38.441 --> 00:20:42.306
You know there's certain things, like you know, I'll give a great example.
00:20:42.306 --> 00:21:11.039
I had a client who is based in Manhattan and when Taylor Swift released her new album, we wanted to do kind of a of a fun thing where we had, um, you know, everybody looking at a sheet of paper through this microscopic glasses that they had, you know, looking for clues on who she was talking about in her songs, and I was able to type into an AI generator the exact kind of shot I wanted to see and send it to them and say, hey, can you shoot a shot just like this?
00:21:11.039 --> 00:21:11.987
And they did it.
00:21:11.987 --> 00:21:15.455
It came back, it was perfect, it didn't take phone calls and a bunch of text exchange.
00:21:15.455 --> 00:21:16.076
I was like, do this.
00:21:16.076 --> 00:21:22.673
So I think you know things like storyboarding, um, are going to be so easy to do right now.
00:21:22.673 --> 00:21:28.869
Um, you know I don't make movies for a living, but you know I've heard you know like, okay, they have to do pickups, right, where they have to bring the whole cast and crew back to shoot pickups.
00:21:28.869 --> 00:21:30.211
You know, I think the future is not.
00:21:30.211 --> 00:21:42.172
Who did I hear say this Maybe Adam Grant, somebody like that that the future isn't having all the answers.
00:21:42.212 --> 00:21:46.051
The future is being able to ask the right questions Right, and I truly believe that.
00:21:46.051 --> 00:21:50.068
Even as a visual video creator, you know Photoshop is so different.
00:21:50.068 --> 00:21:55.289
It used to be a real art to you know, if you wanted to change the shirt somebody was wearing, it took a lot of effort.
00:21:55.289 --> 00:21:58.557
Now you can do that, basically just typing in a different shirt.
