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You're listening to the Radcast. If it's radical, we cover it. Here's your host, Ryan Alford. Hey guys, what's up? Welcome to the latest edition of the Rad, Radcast. The key principles of marketing though really have not changed, right? And so some of the tactics, some of the technologies, that's changed, but the reality of how you design categories is still the same.

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The reality of how you create demand and capture demand is still the same. The reality around how you build legendary breakthrough products is still the same. And some of the approaches of how we get there are very different, but at a principal level, a lot of the stuff's the same. And then in certain cases, you know, new technologies have opened up, if you will, new principles, and that's cool, too. But.

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Yes, shit has changed a lot in the last 30 years or so. I used to call what we do a company factory, likewise, old fashioned, so we are now a venture collective. So if you want to think about it, what we do is combine several elements that are discrete in most of the world. And those elements are the ideas, the entrepreneurs, the executional know-how, and the capital. And we put that all together.

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And we believe that by putting that all together, you are much more efficient and seamless and that the opportunity for success is greater. And so we're always trying to think about like, you know, at the end of the day, if we're going to market a product, it has to solve a need of the customer. And there are probably product features and benefits that make those, that actually solve those problems. So those need to be communicated. But the way you communicate them can be.

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really, really irreverent. And the more irreverent we've made things, the more it tends to stand out from 99.9% of other advertisers out there that are pitching their products in boring, generic ways. We had to figure out what the root cause of a bad commute was. And it's not just because there are tons of cars on the road, but it's why are there tons of cars on the road? And so we found it in economic development and urban planning, actually. And we kind of understand the problem a little bit more. We look at what their needs are, what the needs of their tenants are.

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And we kind of work around that and get clients that way, I guess. Even taking one step further, why do you assume that I am coming here for a mission based shop? Like, why is the search bar the first thing I see? What if you changed it completely? What if you started off with I'm just looking and you go from there?

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You know what's interesting about that thought is, you know, we actually have been thinking about that a lot with Forth Ave and the fact that we have over 7,000 items and the shopper that's coming is more often than not somebody who's trying to figure out what's the right product that I use for my hair or skin anyway. So before I go, I'm not coming in saying I want this particular product. Sure. Maybe about 40% do, but still about 60% are trying to discover.

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And so we're trying to do a better job of how do you lead that discovery? How do you make that experience something that's exciting, something they want to come back to something that's enjoyable because that's what you get when you go into the store. Actually, that's the alternative. What a lot of these consumers say they don't get in the store is a good quality shopping experience. So they go online, but they're just shopping online, but they don't know what's out there. You have to think about if I were to be picking up a product in store and looking at it, those are.

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pretty much the same exact angles I would need when I'm on a website. It's not just front and back, but you... Think about all the things that happen in that one moment when you hold a product. You're understanding not just the basic dimensions, but weight. How big is it? Where will it, how will it fit? Does this actually fit in my, if it's shampoo, will it fit in my bathroom? Is it gonna be too big?

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All these things are questions that are getting answered very implicitly in the shopping journey. Now you have to think about how you're going to do that online. You can literally see the Instagram has a guy in your head. It's nightmarishly boring. And so I decided to just do something totally crazy and different in the space. And I incorporated three weeks after I got laid off because I was so taken with the business model. And then I discovered Eucalyptus Lyle cell as an incredibly sustainable

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luxury material in the space that was not heavily adopted yet. And now we've kind of become the de facto eucalyptus sheet brand in the United States. A lot to unpack there. I think the biggest, but no, no, it wasn't even that long as much as there was a lot of insight there for anyone in any stage of their brand or development. And it's so many people get so emotionally tied to

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you know, a product and you know, to hear that you had no emotional tie to a eucalyptic sheets, it warms my heart that you actually did this from a smart perspective. The point of the matter is that once you're pushed up against the wall, you really figure things out. Either you figure things out, you just crumbled, but we opt to, you know, figure things out and help other small businesses figure things out as well, especially the small ones. Yeah. And that's a big topic. You know, we're a digital agency and we work with

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Small to medium, getting more into medium sized brands just from a scale perspective for us and what works for us. But having worked with being a small business, having owned small businesses and working with them, it's a really underserved category because they typically do not have the budgets, the sophistication or the ability to kind of leverage what has become a democratized internet. But.

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They don't have all of the assets, or all of it put together. So I love anything that's getting and working towards that, which really seems like what Hello Wolfie's doing. One strong point of view I had around the product was that it needed to be able to be good enough such that a famous person, a professional athlete, someone who wanted to improve, would wear Whoop, and we weren't gonna pay them.

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Like essentially we didn't need to sponsor everyone who wore the product. And I said that if the product delivered on its value proposition, which was that it could measure recovery, it could tell you how hard to work out, it could tell you when to go to bed, it could make you a better athlete, person, you name it, then people should pay us for that. And by the way, if it didn't deliver on those things, there was no amount of money we could pay someone to wear something 24-7.

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that they weren't getting value out of. I mean, ask yourself, how many things in your life do you wear 24 seven? Absolutely. Look at the best of anybody in your space. What plumbing? I don't care if you own a boating company. I don't care if you've got a painting. I don't care if it's pizza. There is a peak and there are people who are at that peak. They are managing their social media. Well, they are investing in it.

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They're spending time on it. They're making it clean, clear, and under control. They're building it up. So, my first step is always to get you to 100,000 followers. For the local businesses, you go, can be 10, 20, 30, you know what I mean? But really, the main identity here is how can we get a lot of people buzzing about this business? How do we do that? Lot of people, lot of people. I want every view I can get.

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And then we start to look for, okay, credibility. It comes back down to fame engineering. How do you position your brand to the point where people wanna come to you? And eventually, where you're so big, sometimes my clients, they're so big after a while of just working with me that it's just like, they don't need, why do they need me? You don't need me to get introduced to big guys anymore. You're a big guy. People are trying. I've had that, where clients, we're paying for,

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podcast placements were paying for TV slots. They're paying for Forbes and entrepreneur. And we've done the fame engineering. We built their content infrastructure and I helped them with the brand, the U media and I, and I don't know how scalable it is. I don't even know if I want to scale it. You know, I like the fact that it's super boutique and that everybody I work with gets best friend customer service. That's huge on the agency scale. It's like, you could text your best friend.

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at 11 p.m. on Sunday, a brand new idea or something. We'll work it out. We're going to work it out together. You know, I'm your best friend. You know what I mean? I got your back. It's like that. So. If that that door open when I'm working with a client is like best friend customer service, you could talk to me at any time. We're going to consult. I am rocking with you on this. I took all the different commonalities from the times that I pitched, whether it's email or cold call. And at this point, it's thousands of them.

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And I started to notice patterns of when an editor would actually respond and when it kind of just went into the trash. And so after years of doing this, I mean, now I've gained over one billion organic views for like all of my clients, most of them whom are super early stage. Some of them don't even have a website. I noticed that there were some key elements to a pitch that usually gets noticed. And so that is how I came up with my CPR method. That is kind of the...

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tangible part of it. But I think a bigger part of it is the mindset part. And I think, you know, in a saturated market, we know that traffic alone is not enough, right? So if I see an ad, like whatever, but if I'm debating between, let's say, you know, two companies and I see that you've lent your expertise to a podcast or to an entrepreneur, I'm probably going to go with you, even if it's more expensive and marketing just doesn't get you there, right? You know that because you're in branding. So PR is the only way to both get authority and traffic.

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So that's kind of what I'm talking about here is that earned media. And so how do you have a conversation with a journalist who you've never met and you probably never will and get them to feel like your pitch is value driven enough that they want to share it with their audience? I have viewed successes as over the last few years is like really like four basic temples. And I ran through them a little bit earlier, but happiness, health growth and purpose. Um, and when, you know, you, you can be in really good shape on, on the counter side of that, but

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still be depressed. And so it's it's there's an alignment with the things that that you and the same token somebody can can you know give if if what your passion in life like surfing and all you want to do all day is surf and you don't care you know that you live in like an efficiency apartment and and all it takes to afford that lifestyle is to give like

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two hours of surfing lessons a day, and then you can surf for the rest of the day. If that's success for you, then it's for nobody else to define it for you. That's all that you need, and that's all that matters. And so, I think as I've gotten older and matured, and been around a lot of people who define success for themselves, it really is, you're up to us individually to determine what we're after. But then I knew that I wanted to scale fast.

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I have a business partner, JR. JR helps me in time on the kitchen side of things. I do another side, the gross side of things. And then it became, let's scale this thing. Let's make it to where other people can open their own. We became the first meal prep franchise to teach people how to open up their own commissary kitchen, if you will, and distribute to their satellite stores. And it took off me. I mean, granted, I'm totally fast forwarding past all the shit you go through and whatever, but it took off. And so now...

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Fast forwarding a lot, here we are with 50 locations sold, 27 currently open, and everywhere from Greenville, South Carolina, all the way to Spokane, Washington. This morning I was talking with all of your associates, five of them, and I was explaining to them about like marketing strategy and about how so many of these influencers have no concept of how ridiculous they sound when they come up to.

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a business. It's like, imagine friends. It's like, take yourself out of a business. Imagine I just met you and was like, Hey, listen, we can be friends for like a thousand dollars. I can give you an unquantifiable result that I have really no idea what it is. But if you do this and pay me, then I can do this. And then you do that to a business and say that to this, Hey, listen, you know, I know you don't know me from Adam, but for a thousand dollars, because I have these numbers, I can give you another unquantifiable, you know, thing. That's a great ROI.

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You, you, you're never going to establish a foundation with that company. They're going to look at you being like, what's going on? Will some companies pay? Yeah. Thousands of companies pay tons and tons, but they're pulling back away from that. And I, I, it's, I got news for people. Not a lot of people talking about this, but like influencers and all that stuff, that money is going to be starting to get drawn back. Cause you got people like me, got people like you, people like the constellation union that we'll get to the see you later. Um, I like that the see you later. Um, but.

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I'm understanding that you can get so much substantially ROI better with real deal people. It's like, why do you want to pay somebody that clearly is not invested in your company to be able to get an incredible result that you can't tell me the result? As a reporter and as a host as well, I do a lot more hosting now. Yeah, especially, well, Marty and McGee, I mean, you guys are sharing thoughts there. That's an opinionated platform. Yeah.

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I'm going to tell you straight up, brother, when it comes to something that we are passionate about, you're going to get every ounce of our real. And that's what's expected of us from our employer. And that's a standard that we hold ourselves to as journalists and men. But so much of what we get to do on that platform is fun.

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Yeah. And it's a, I hate the word brand, but it's a, I'm sure it's a word that gets used often on your platform and in your ad ad agency there. Um, I would the brand that we've built is one that is fun, but it's very honest and people enjoy spending time with us in an open interview platform, not because our questions are easy,

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but because our questions are fair and open-ended. This is the first Super Bowl where a lot of people can't get together like they used to, right? Back in the day when we were consulting on Super Bowl ads, it was all about like, look, you gotta tell a visual story. You gotta tell something that doesn't require audio because 90% of the time people are going to be at a party, probably drinking and probably...

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you know, just with a bunch of friends and you're, you're, you're going to be drowned out. This is the first time that attention was very important. And I think the Superbowl advertising in this context actually failed at taking advantage of that opportunity to have people's attention because you can actually like take a message and run with it. I think the best, the best version of that was like some of the social stuff that happened on the side.

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and and i think that was the coolest part of the super bowl that i want to talk about as well as the social networking that the twitter ads that were released like during during this time that people were retweeting and talking about because people had more time to go on twitter you know but more time to go on social and those were the things that were trending on twitter last night was the things that were social based things that people were served

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during the Super Bowl itself. I think I've gotten to see uniquely both sides. The pre-influencer side of it and then the post. And I kind of walked the line in the middle and saw it from both ends. It is a big business now. There's a lot of money gets poured into it. I think probably rightfully so. Social media is a very engaged audience. You get a lot of people following people for reasons.

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But I think it's a really scary proposition too, to some of these contestants that come on the show and they go from zero to hero overnight and they don't know like immediate fame is, can be like suffocating, paralyzing, confusing. You can wake up one morning and have a million followers and lose yourself in the process because it goes from you just highlighting your life and sharing it with family and friends.

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to now asking yourself the question, how do I stay more relevant and how do I engage with my followers? And so your lifestyle starts to turn into that. You start to become a caricature. And I think that's scary. I think it gets really, really hard for a lot of these people in all aspects. TikTok, the next YouTube or always somewhat niche? Oh no.

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Not niche, whether it's the next YouTuber, it's a monster. Yeah. And the funny part is, it's not like TikTok was a leader by leaps and bounds over other platforms. When we looked, we've looked at Instagram, we've looked at Pinterest, we've looked at all the different social media sites. When you combine all those scores together, TikTok wasn't different. It wasn't the best.

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But what was different about TikTok was the speed at which it was doing it. So if an average curve was, you know, every couple or three or four minutes, you're getting a high from a platform, a subconscious high, TikTok was doing it almost four times faster. And when it's doing it that quick, you just spend more time to your point of the vortex, that's basically it. So what you're saying is TikTok is the cocaine.

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of social media. Is that what we're saying? TikTok is the Gatorade that allows you to keep playing the game. The reason I am so passionate about this idea of an online presence is because if you don't control your online narrative in today's digital first world, something or someone else will. And you know where to find us at the dot rad dot cast on Instagram. I'm at Ryan Alfred on Instagram and everywhere across the web and.

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please find us the new and improved, theradcast.com, where you can search for any of the topics we cover and find all of the content, all the highlights, all of the badassery that is. You'll know where to find us and we'll see you next time.