Transcript
Brian Erickson:
Thanks for joining the Cardwell Beach Marketing Podcast. My name is Brian Erickson, Chief Strategy Officer, and partner at Cardwell Beach. In this series, we’re interviewing senior marketers and business leaders across industries to develop a perspective of what marketing will look like in a post-COVID-19 world, which is hopefully on the horizon here, now that we’re rolling out vaccines. Today’s guest is Paul Josephsen, the Chief Strategy Officer for UPROXX, a media brand that covers entertainment, music, and lifestyle news. Paul is also an advisory board member for the Rutgers University Design Thinking Certificate Program. Paul, thanks so much for joining us today.
Paul Josephsen:
Thank you for having me.
Brian Erickson:
Let’s talk about weathering the storm. I think it’s been different for everyone, but there’s no question that things have shifted rapidly on multiple fronts, and throughout the COVID-19 pandemic, consumers have increasingly spent more time online, consuming media, entertainment, and news. I would just be curious to hear how this has changed your approach to the UPROXX brand and business strategy to meet the moment.
Paul Josephsen:
It’s been really interesting, because as an organization, as a media brand, we’re constantly evolving with audiences. We look at audiences in a couple of different ways, and so, of course, our other audiences, right, our brand advertisers and our partners who spend their time and energy with us and transact with us, but also looking at ourselves too and saying, “The way we all do our jobs has changed, and the way we consume content has changed.” We’ve tended to see that the typical time periods of media consumption have changed. Instead of having heavy beats of consumption during drive time or commute time, people started to consume content throughout their day. The formats of content changed. We saw a drastic increase of video and video consumption across our landscape, and we have been for a few years. Social has remained very steady and very high. We saw a drastic increase around podcasting and podcast consumption.
What we found is that engagement changed by platform, but engagement changed with how consumers were now kind of taking in their content. We saw that as an opportunity to not play by the same old rules anymore, and instead create for where the people are, create for where our audiences are, and give them the opportunity to decide when and how they were going to consume that content. I would say those are some of the bigger opportunities we saw come out of the COVID landscape.
From the other side of it, with our advertising partners, we had to change how we communicated. It was no longer being able to go to the office and see people and spend face-time with them. We had to think about, on the other end, what they’re dealing with at home. Customer relations, I would say, drastically changed. I would say in a really positive way because at the end of all of this, we’re inherently human, right? When you bring it back to that, and you say, “Well, if we take an approach where we’re there for each other, we show empathy for the world around us and what’s actually happening in our individual lives, we can be there with our audience.” We can be there, in that case, with our advertising partners. We can communicate with them in a way that works for how life is happening now.
We’re very sensitive to the fact that in the middle of a pitch presentation, somebody’s children might be right there, or they might’ve just been in between calls or had to help with homework. When you realize that’s happening for everybody and nobody’s alone in it, it’s really powerful. I would say that those are some of the big opportunities we saw. We certainly changed, as I mentioned, we changed the way we communicated with our audiences in terms of how content was released and where it was released, and we changed with our advertising partners in that we adapted to the world around them to ensure the way we were communicating was actually effective in their personal life.
Brian Erickson:
Yeah, definitely. Everybody has to be a little bit more nimble and understanding of personal situations these days. I guess you’ve seen content consumption change from just before and after work to during work. Does that mean that people are slacking off at home? Is that what your insight is there?
Paul Josephsen:
No, I think what it means, and by the way, it’s like, “Great, totally” is the answer to that. No, I’m kidding. But the most truthful answer I can give to that is that I think it’s very real to say that there is no such thing as separation of work and personal anymore. I think that’s a very real and almost powerful thing to say in that I haven’t met a friend, a colleague in any industry that has conventional work hours anymore. Sure, they’re times of the day they’re in meetings. But work doesn’t leave you. Clients don’t leave you, and they shouldn’t. It’s not how the world is anymore.
What I’m really saying with the content and times changing, is that your phone is your phone, and your phone is where you’re watching Netflix at night, and it’s also where you’re answering your most important email of the day. It’s also where you’re QAing your most important ad units that you’re selling, and how you’re reviewing creative, and how you’re even editing a presentation for tomorrow’s big meeting. That device is everything to you. It’s your entertainment, it’s your personal, and it’s your work. I think what we’ve seen is that those worlds have completely collided during the pandemic. I think they were colliding well before the pandemic, I think they just really came together now. You’re seeing that websites and the content produced by websites, like UPROXX, are being consumed at all hours instead of peak traditional content times.
I made a comment the other day, talking with a friend, that primetime, the traditional primetime of TV, is gone. Primetime is whenever I decide now, as a person. Primetime for me is 11:00 PM to 1:00 AM. If you want to reach Paul Josephsen on a device, that’s when you’re getting him. That’s when I’m watching my shows. That’s when I’m binging, that’s when I’m catching up on The Mandalorian or whatever else it is that I’m watching. That’s my primetime.
Brian Erickson:
Yep. I would have to say I’m in that night owl bucket myself. But it’s interesting. I kind of set you up to see what your feeling was on the work from home trend being more productive, or less. I saw a study at the University of Chicago that people took all the extra commute time and largely devoted that to working more. I’m a huge proponent of remote work, not just as a business owner, it gets more productivity out of your people, but I think you have that ability to … Not all time is created equal, right?
are certain moments in your personal life that are more valuable by nature of what’s going on at that moment, whether that’s in the middle of the day or in the middle of the workweek, or whatever it is. I think it’s important to be able to work around life rather than work through your life. a little bit of a tangent there.
Paul Josephsen:
Oh no, look, I think it’s an important one, and frankly, I don’t think it gets talked about enough. I can speak for a few people in my network that have told me that 5:00 AM to 8:00 AM on a Sunday morning is their time. It’s not about flooding your colleagues’ inboxes and creating work for others at that time, it’s actually about getting your head right and preparing for what’s going to have the most impact. I think we’re becoming a “shoot for impact” economy. Instead of hours for the sake of hours, or punching in and punching out, I think everything’s becoming about impact, with impact meaning top-line revenue, impact meaning bottom line in margin, impact meaning innovation, but it’s spending the time on the things that are genuinely going to move the needle, cut out the clutter. That, to me, is how work-life balance is created, too.
Brian Erickson:
That’s pretty awesome. Create the maximum amount of leverage with the minimum amount of, not necessarily effort, but time.
That’s pretty great. How do you strategically take that insight and approach a media brand? Not to throw you a hardball on the spot, but any thoughts that pop into your head on that front?
Paul Josephsen:
I think pulling the same thread through. It’s different by discipline. I think there’s a lot of truth in that. At the end of the day, creators have to create. That’s not necessarily based on hours or input. That’s based on maximizing creative time and value, putting enough things out there to see what sticks, and then doubling down on the things that are really moving the needle in terms of engagement and interaction. That doesn’t know just a max amount of time you could put in. That’s ideation, production, distribution, a learning mechanism in there, and then applying what you’ve learned and scaling it.
In terms of what we do for advertisers, it’s thinking about the things that are going to matter most to them. What are the timeframes that you know they’re going to be putting dollars into market, and what are the things that you know they care about? What’s your special flavor of that thing? If you know the Super Bowl is going to be transacted in high, high, high volumes, as an example, why should they buy Super Bowl coverage with you? What is your twist on it? What is your approach to it? By the way, why does your approach matter? That, to me, is where the art and science really come together. It’s easy for any publication or any content creator to say we’re an expert in this, but what determines your expertise? Is it the number of page views you’ve received? Is it the number of video views you received? Or is it something a little bit more tangible? Is it your ability to actually change the way people think and feel about a subject and prove that you can do that?
I think that’s where, when you talk about shooting for impact, to bring it back to what we started at, shooting for impact means moving the needle for brands, in my world. It means being able to tangibly tell a brand, “You came to us to change the way people think and feel about your particular product. Here’s how we matter-of-factly did that,” with an objective third party measuring it. If you’re able to do that, that to me is the most important thing you can show, regardless of topics. We kind of started around shooting for impact, and went into coverage points and what makes you an expert. If you can show that your expertise moves the needle for a brand, you’ve gone from a”nice-to- have” to a “must=have.” I think that’s where shooting for an impact matters for brands.
Brian Erickson:
That’s pretty awesome. Looking to the future, obviously, we’ve forever changed as a society, and both on a personal and professional level, and also on a brand level. For marketers and strategists in your industry, folks that are dealing with entertainment and lifestyle and a lot of the things that really make us who we are culturally, do you anticipate some aspects of what we’re seeing now? Will it allow your business, and not necessarily just the work from home aspects of it, but will it allow you to return to the way that you approached things pre-COVID, or is the language of impact and measurement and results really kind of the new normal that we’re going to be moving forward into? I guess, how do we deal with that, if that’s the case?
Paul Josephsen:
Yeah. I think that has to be the norm, and frankly, I think that needed to be the norm before COVID. I just don’t think it necessarily was, but I think it needed to be. I’m really excited about that piece of it. I think in terms of things going back to normal, yeah, look, I think they will. Humans are, by the sheer nature of it, who we are, are attracted to groups and we’re attracted to being with one another. It’s just the makeup of a human being. I think when we can get back to lunch-and-learns hanging out with each other. I think that’s going to be very real and will come back.
I think how we entertain clients, and hosting major events, and doing big things in group settings where we can come together and share moments together, will be very real. I think that goes, you know, if you look at the industries right now that we’re missing in terms of personally we’re missing, we all miss concerts, right? We all miss those. Even on a smaller basis, we all miss group dinners, and clinking glasses. I think those are inherent to all businesses. I think those will come back, and I think they’re going to come back with a vengeance, frankly. I think they’re going to come back hard and fast, and I’m excited when they do.
I think there’s elements of it that will be here. I think companies have learned that people can be trusted. I think companies have learned that people inherently want to do good, and therefore are personally motivated to excel in their jobs because they want to be good at what they do., They want to be considered good, if not great, at what they do. I think companies have realized, oh my gosh, it’s not about sitting at a desk. It’s about being impactful for the business.
I think the other thing that’s happened is – I think autonomy has taken over. People have realized that others can do their jobs without somebody breathing down their neck. Managers have learned to adapt to trust their people, to focus on the job getting done instead of the traditional hours at a desk. I’ve come up in my career at an interesting time, almost at an inflection point of those two worlds colliding. I’m certainly of the new school, and I always have been. That doesn’t jive with everybody. Not everybody’s wired that way. I’ve found a way to be wildly successful in my team management and with my peer group, with the focus on the business output versus anything else.
I personally believe, and this is a personal belief, that managing to the business output yields the greatest results and actually focuses people on the most important thing, which is what we’re all here for, which is the business objective, instead of the other things, hours at a desk, time spent staring at a computer screen, things of that nature. When you focus on that, the business benefits, people also benefit. They thrive in their own personal situations and they feel empowered to handle the situations that they need to handle to create their own dynamic of work-life balance and get things done. By the way, I say that it’s not easy, it’s hard. Sometimes it conflicts, two schedules don’t jive together. not particularly easy, but it is achievable, I think, with open communication.
Brian Erickson:
Yep, for sure. I guess just back to content consumption patterns, user behavior, and things that have been a result of some of this change in behavior, are there any types of content that UPROXX publishes that may have been less popular before the pandemic and kind of unexpectedly were a sleeper that woke up and it came to the forefront?
Paul Josephsen:
I wouldn’t necessarily say types of content, but I would say we saw an increase in performance of content that we had already planned to make, but certainly benefited from the content consumption behaviors of audiences during the pandemic. We saw our podcasting audience drastically increase. I wouldn’t say that’s only because of the pandemic. I would actually say a lot of that has to do with the power of the topics, the societal and cultural conversations happening. The podcast I’m referring to is People’s Party with Talib Kweli, which was an incredibly informative dialogue between Talib, who’s a massive cultural force, not just in hip hop, but in culture more broadly, with celebrity counterparts and others that are challenging us to think differently. When you marry the topic at hand and the cultural relevance of the topics at hand with the platforms they’re being distributed on, it makes a perfect recipe for why that would succeed today.
That, to us, wasn’t about changing a format. It was about doubling down on what we knew had to happen anyway. We knew podcasting was critical. We knew video versions of podcasts were critical on various platforms. We knew the topics we were covering were more important now than they had been over time, just because of what was happening in society. That created a bit of a perfect equation to drive content consumption. We didn’t necessarily change how we were distributing things, but we doubled down in various areas. We evolved our distribution to maybe say, you know what, instead of podcasts second, it became podcasts first, right?
As we started the conversation earlier with the sort of evolving consumption behavior, we know it’s often going to be about stopping thumbs, engaging people, and capturing the hearts and minds of audiences in the here and now. are we creating the content for Instagram, for Facebook, for YouTube, for Twitter, et cetera, it’s going to do that in the most personal sense. Brian, is the thing that we put up capturing you? When I say capturing you, it’s in that fast scroll of your thumb, it’s getting you to hit your thumb again and stop it, and then hit the play button and listen. If we’re doing that, we’re doing a good job. I think as a publishing company, whether we’ve liked it or not, over the last decade we’ve been forced to evolve. Our entire industry has, regardless of what publisher you work at. this was no different than that. It was just another example of where we’ve had to pivot how we produce and the order of operations in which we follow.
Brian Erickson:
Very interesting. There is a science to stopping the scroll, for sure. I guess outside of just the content, kind of your publication, and it’s not even a publication anymore. It’s a brand and it’s a property, and it exists everywhere. Outside of content that you create directly for your audience, have there been any aspects of your marketing or your communication strategy to, let’s say, acquire new users, or to create awareness or to even speak to the advertisers that are buying placements from you, on just strictly like an outreach or branding perspective?
Paul Josephsen:
I’ll go back to the notion of shooting for impact, knowing what’s going to matter most to them. It certainly did. What it evolved to was us saying, “We know matter-of-factly they need this.” How can we bring that to them in an objective way that’s going to clearly show value and speak to their needs, and help them navigate a very messy world, a very muddy world?
Really simple examples. When the pandemic hit, and we had partners that had quite a few dollars associated with live experiences, right? We knew that they were going to be looking for a pivot. we put together packages associated with those same eyeballs, those same people that were going to be filling seats in various places. You’re not going to reach them there. Instead, you’re going to reach them online. Using really robust data sets, we created packages called “arena eyes” that allowed you to reach offline audiences, real-life audiences, in digital landscapes at the same scale that they would have been able to do had they been in a real-life setting. It forces innovation, which I get stoked on, personally, because a lot of it’s my job to do that, but also because challenging the way you think and the way you do things I think is really healthy. That’s certainly one example.
We took typical episodes of our podcast and we brought those episodes to Instagram and other platforms to reach more people. We created intimate performances with the talent across our family of Warner Music Group. We created these intimate performances for our brand partners while they were at home. people could log in and have their nightclub in, so to speak, with Talib spinning. We did that with a few different artists in a few different settings, acoustic, small scale performances, very intimate settings that helped remind people of our value proposition as an organization, but actually benefited them in a time of uncertainty and a time of scare, in a time of, you know, inside your four walls of your house general boredom. It gave them a release.
This is where I go back to, like, all of our marketing went human. That, to me, was the most important thing, because I think that scales beyond the pandemic. That stays with us. We remember that while we’re running businesses, in any business you’re in, those on the other side of it are human beings. When you cut through the clutter and you communicate with them as humans, it hits. They understand it. You cut through the BS of the lingo of your industry and you get to the heartstrings.
Brian Erickson:
That’s what it’s all about.
Paul Josephsen:
You do it in an authentic way, because you genuinely care.
Brian Erickson:
Yeah. I mean, you’re talking about impact. Every impact starts with something that moves you personally. you’re not going to move the needle and move the numbers without moving a person at the heart of it.
Paul Josephsen:
That’s right, and so well said, and that’s the most fundamental shift of everything, our content production, our content distribution, but also how we talk to our customers, who help us day in and day out fund our business and tell these stories and have the cultural impact that we have. Reaching them as human beings, doing things that stoke them as human beings, was that now the engagement with your brand becomes personal, and they have an aha moment where they’re like, “We get it. We see what you do with audiences. We see what you’ve done for people. We totally understand why our brand needs to be there with you.”
That’s the connection. I would say that’s become one of the most scalable things that we’ve done with our brand partners, in addition to bringing them packages and opportunities to transact, because the transaction doesn’t just happen because of human interaction. The transaction happens because of an inherent business value and proposition. Bring those two things together, and it’s very powerful.
Brian Erickson:
I would kind of encapsulate everything that you’re talking about here on the human side and creating emotion and personal impact, I would really oversimplify marketing, a mentor that I had for many years would sum it up as attraction versus transaction. You’re very much toting the value of the attraction component of it, which I think is, you know, many instances understated and under leveraged for sure.
Brian Erickson:
On the advertiser side and on the brands that you work with, have you seen the mix shift more in one direction or the other, in terms of attraction versus transaction and the way that people are focused in the short term, kind of in a knee jerk fashion?
Paul Josephsen:
I don’t necessarily say I would say it in a knee jerk fashion, but what I’ve seen is I think collective businesses are shooting for impact. They are looking to actively work with partners that move the needle for their brand. while it might start with transaction, sort of where we ended that last question, where it started with attraction, it’s leading to what’s going to drive transactional value for my brand. brands come to us with the initial goal of, “We need to change the way people think and feel about this brand. We need to create a perception, an awareness, an affinity with our brand or product.”
Paul Josephsen:
after getting to know us, after getting to like us, after seeing the personal impact of our brand, they want to bring it back to, “What’s it going to do for my product?” That’s where we have to be able to tell the story. That’s where we focus. It’s a reason we’re significantly outperforming the rest of our industry and the rest of a competitive set in driving brand value for advertisers, is because of the relationship we have with audiences that when we tell a story, and therefore when we bring a product or a brand to life for them, they listen and it hits differently.
Paul Josephsen:
That, I would say, is attraction versus transaction. Maybe it starts with attraction, but being able to bring them something that will fundamentally move the needle and then prove that it moved the needle with objective third parties, like I mentioned earlier, and that we use every day, that’s where we win. That’s where the attraction and transaction meets. it may have started with an attraction. It led to a transaction, because they saw the business value. When those two boxes get checked, that’s where I think it becomes a repeat ongoing relationship.
Brian Erickson:
Totally, where there’s just a noticeable seamless flow between them, and there is no distinguishable line. I think that is the ultimate goal.
Paul Josephsen:
Right. You know what’s cool about it, is when the attraction becomes defendable.
Brian Erickson:
Yes.
Paul Josephsen:
It’s no longer, oh, I just like them. It’s actually, oh yeah, no, we really like them. We love what they stand for. We love the content they produce, and guys, there’s nobody else that can outperform them in terms of changing the way audiences think and feel about our brand or product. When we need to drive awareness or brand affinity, this is the group we have to do it with.
Brian Erickson:
That’s cool. That’s a great way to put it. I love that. could give one piece of advice to marketers and strategists at entertainment and lifestyle brands right now, going into 2021, what would you say is the number one most important thing to stay focused on?
Paul Josephsen:
Find your why and make sure your why certainly has human elements to it. Make sure when you’re talking to people, you’re talking to the people on the other end. Remember that businesses are run by people, and understand what matters to people today. Have your brand show empathy. Be there with them. When you’re focused on the transaction, make sure the value proposition for the transaction is bulletproof.
Brian Erickson:
That’s great. It’s funny, as you say that, saying it so deliberately, and I can sense that there is much meaning behind every single word that you chose to articulate there, and decades of experience and analysis go into that. Definitely don’t take those words lightly. That was my takeaway there.
Brian Erickson:
as we potentially continue into this track of unemployment that we’ve been seeing, and I know it’s gone up, it’s gone down, it’s gone sideways, but it’s not where we would want it to be. There are many folks in our sorts of roles, in marketing, digital strategy executives who happen to find themselves as free agents right now, how do you take that advice that you just gave on a brand level and translate that to what an individual should do for their own skill set and their own job search to better themselves and to land a position and be relevant in that position?
Paul Josephsen:
Yeah, it’s a really good question. I’ll try to take a complicated topic and boil it down t what I would do. In a world of confusion and a world of unknowns, I would try to bring specific ideas to light, because solution-oriented specifics will give colleagues, business partners, clients, something to chew on and something to react to. At the heart of that, really what I mean, it starts a dialogue, and that one idea might spark something that the entire group agrees to. Often that process isn’t given enough credit, but the final output is celebrated. It’s never that this one idea led to this final output, which got us there. I would tell people, be specific.
Paul Josephsen:
The next thing, I guess to add one or two more to that, tell people to come with sets of skills. I would recognize that the world around us is constantly changing, but we have more access to anything than we’ve ever had, technology, production capability, et cetera. Depending on the role, our industry is filled with so many different roles, if you’re a content creator, I would show the head of editorial what you would do differently. I would take the show they produced and edit it differently. I’d show them how it was going to live on Instagram or Tik Tok, right? I’d show them how I would change the intro logo and things of that nature. I would do it. I’d be specific, and then I’d give examples of it.
Paul Josephsen:
The last thing I would do, and maybe I should have led with this, is I’d be wildly adaptable, recognize that the entire world is changing, and that applies to the business, too. The way we’ve always done things isn’t going to be the way that we do things in the future necessarily. I’ve said this before, but when you open yourself up to that, you accept the fact that everything’s changing, you can own it, and when you can own it, now you’re empowered by it instead of scared of it.
Brian Erickson:
You have to have a framework for dealing with change, as crazy as that sounds. You have to have some structure in place, whether it’s just emotionally, mentally, business-wise, brand-wise, right? Humans need some sort of stability, and being adaptable, actually in my view, requires more stability than on an outward appearance level being rigid. You have to have a very strong foundation that you’re coming from to deal with whatever’s thrown at you and whatever sort of situation you’re going to be thrust into today, or whatever tactic emerges, or in marketing and in strategy, I would agree that nimbleness and adaptability are probably more paramount than anything else you can do.
Paul Josephsen:
Sometimes, frankly, it’s weird, right? People are like, “Why are you so comfortable with change?” In marketing, and in strategy, to your point, that’s been my career. My career has been change. I haven’t done the same thing all the time. I’ve had to be a change agent inside of organizations. I’ve had to rally the troops, so to speak, and drive new directions. That doesn’t always make you the most popular one. Challenging ideas and the way we’ve done things sometimes makes you friends, but sometimes it opens you up and it leads to challenge. It’s frankly, after pushing 20 years of doing this, it’s easy for me to say that out loud. It’s a lot harder for others that haven’t had to do that their entire career to do it.
Paul Josephsen:
I would also encourage those people to seek out others that have, to share ideas and to, look, it’s not always the cleanest process. It’s not always easy. I recognize that having the luxury to speak with you and say it here, it’s easy for me to say it, but I should be really clear that it’s not always super clean in the day-to-day. Even though it’s easy for me to say it…
Brian Erickson:
I think you have to go into, I think anything new where you’re actively driving change, I think you have to go in with the readiness to totally crash and burn, which, I mean, can be an emotional, gut-wrenching sort of experience, because I think on the other side of that, I think you have to fully immerse yourself and throw yourself into it and think that you can’t fail, which is a weird, conflicting way to look at it.
Paul Josephsen:
Well, be confident in what you know, and be confident in what you don’t know, which I think is almost more important sometimes. Know when to bring in a peer network. Those are the things that I take really seriously, and I’ve been lucky to have and to find, both in my current roles and previous roles, and with the network around me. Be open. This is where I would say, challenging the system doesn’t mean being intense or mean about it in any way. It means being wildly collaborative and being open to failure, not in the sense that something’s just not going to work out, because failure leads to decision making. Decision-making leads to change in one way or another. That’s where it’s healthy to have that set up in an organization, to test and learn and iterate while the rest of the organization has to run the day-to-day.:
Because on one hand, you’re ready to innovate. You’re ready to change. You’re ready to grow. On the other hand, you haven’t missed your benchmarks. You’ve performed the way the business needs to perform. It’s very healthy to have that dynamic working together.
Brian Erickson:
Just to kind of tie it all together. There’s nothing like quoting a children’s book by John Cena. “If you always do what you’re good at, you’ll never learn anything new.”
Paul Josephsen:
Yep.
Brian Erickson:
Great. Well, Paul, thank you so much for taking the time to talk with me today. I really appreciate it, as always. Some great insights here and some great perspectives. Thanks so much.
Paul Josephsen:
Thank you for having me. Stay happy, stay healthy. Best of luck to everybody listening, as well.
Brian Erickson:
Awesome. Well, this is Brian Erickson with Cardwell Beach. Thanks again for listening, and please make sure to check back for more senior marketers and strategists like Paul sharing their perspectives on what marketing will look like in a post-COVID-19 world.
