Poker actually translates to marketing pretty well!
How can poker skills translate over to marketing? Find out today when we talk to Ryan Green!
About Ryan:
Ryan brings over 15 years of experience in marketing and analytics. In 2014, Ryan became the first employee of Coegi, launching the day-to-day operations of the company. He later assumed the role of Operations Director, overseeing the implementation of Coegi’s tech stack on The Trade Desk, DV360, White Ops, 4C, and Abode. After three years as the Senior Vice President of Marketing & Innovation, Ryan has recently launched The Last Splash, a media consultancy which aims to help brands navigate the complex world of the modern media ecosystem.
Contact Ryan: https://www.linkedin.com/in/ryangreen83?utm_source=share&utm_campaign=share_via&utm_content=profile&utm_medium=android_app
Ryan’s plugs: https://amasaintlouis.org/ https://bestmarketingconference.com/
The Marketing Gateway is a weekly podcast hosted by Sean in St. Louis (Sean J. Jordan, President of https://www.researchplan.com/) and featuring guests from the St. Louis area and beyond.
Every week, Sean shares insights about the world of marketing and speaks to people who are working in various marketing roles – creative agencies, brand managers, MarCom professionals, PR pros, business owners, academics, entrepreneurs, researchers and more!
The goal of The Marketing Gateway is simple – we want to build a connection between all of our marketing mentors in the Midwest and learn from one another! And the best way to learn is to listen.
And the next best way is to share!
For more episodes: https://www.youtube.com/@TheMarketingGateway
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
TRANSCRIPT:
Sean Jordan (00:08)
Hey everyone, it is Sean and St. Louis and welcome to the Marketing Gateway. you know, sometimes I worry a little bit as we’re doing these episodes that maybe we’re getting a little too comfortable talking about marketing topics that we like and that we enjoy. And we don’t really stop to say, what is marketing and how do we really make sure we’re doing it right? And here’s the thing, this episode today, we’re going to address those questions. We’re going to talk about
the meat of what marketing is. And we’re gonna talk about how St. Louis should have a better role in it. And I cannot think of anybody to have a better discussion with about this than Ryan Green from Last Splash. Now, I’ve known Ryan through our local marketing community. He is a really, really sharp guy. You’re gonna love hearing from him. And he’s been doing this for over 15 years. was actually the first employee at Koigi, which…
He was involved in the day-to-day operations of the company. ⁓ He worked a lot of major brands. He’s done a lot of things that he’s going to tell you about, including a really surprising one ⁓ right at the beginning that you’re going to love. right now, what he’s doing is he’s trying to help brands with media consultancy. And he wants to help them navigate the modern media ecosystem. And as he’s going to talk about in the interview, what he thought he was going to be doing when he started that
arm of consultancy is not what he’s actually doing today. A lot of what he’s doing today is more problem solving than anything else. And I like to think that that’s a big part of what marketing really is today. We’re not just thinking about problems from a point of view of how much money can we spend or how do we boost sales or how do we make metrics go up, but how do we strategize? How do we take all of these different activities that we can do and really benefit a brand or company? And I promise you, at the end of this interview, you’re going to have a new perspective on some of this stuff.
So without further ado, here’s Ryan Green.
Sean Jordan (02:09)
Well, hey, it’s Sean and St. Louis and welcome back to the Marketing Gateway. And I have with me today Ryan Green. And Ryan is somebody who I know from our local chapter of the AMA and he’s somebody who always has really wise and smart things to say. So, so glad to have you on today, Ryan. Thanks for joining us.
Ryan Green (02:25)
Thank you, Sean. Appreciate the opportunity and ⁓ all the work you do with AMA and certainly always invited to 314 Digital. I know our organizations work pretty closely with each other. So appreciate everything that you do for the marketing community in St. Louis.
Sean Jordan (02:44)
Right back at ya. ⁓ you know, Ryan, I always like to start these shows off by just asking if you can tell me something surprising that I don’t know. could be anything that you’d like to share, so go ahead, hit me with something surprising.
Ryan Green (02:56)
I’m not sure if we talked about my first career or not in previous conversations, but I’m a college dropout, professional poker player. I spent six and a half years in the mid-auts or mid-2000, whatever you call those years, playing internet poker for a living. well, I didn’t.
ever graduate from the University of Missouri, I had to get a degree in life in a lot of ways doing that. you know, there’s so many MBA programs now that kind of teach poker as kind of a backbone skill. And I still, you know, 20 years after doing that, reference lessons from my poker career, both in how I think about marketing, how I think about
human behavior and even how I help coach other executives. It’s a good framework for thinking about game theory or thinking about motivation and a lot of different things. So it’s actually been an interesting corollary and it’s something that tends to come up that surprises people.
Sean Jordan (04:11)
You know, ⁓ traditionally, like executives play golf, right? So you’re saying they can learn a lot more about their current day jobs by playing poker. I love that.
Ryan Green (04:14)
Yeah.
They should still keep playing golf or whatever keeps them active and moving, certainly. But when you start thinking about negotiation or you start thinking about hidden incentives and thinking about the difference between what people say and how they behave, I think that really comes out in a game like poker.
Sean Jordan (04:44)
Absolutely, and a little bit of probability too, where you have to make sure you’re not trying to bet on something that isn’t really going to happen, right?
Ryan Green (04:47)
Yeah.
Well, you can take long shot bets and should in poker when you have the right return, right? So if you, for example, if you have a flush draw on the flop, that happens about one out of every three times. But if you’re only putting in 20 % of the money into the pot, you actually have a big overlay and you should be usually raising or inducing everybody else to put in, even though.
you’ll lose two thirds of the time, your expected value calculation ends up being pretty good then, ⁓ depending on the proclivities of your opponents, obviously. But ⁓ so many lessons that you can kind of learn or apply to poker. In fact, one of my friends ⁓ that I do some business with, ⁓ had a
complicated situation and I just brought up a poker table and put the faces of each of the people and what their size of their effective chip stacks were as a way of kind of describing a situation that you know just would happen at a board meeting or something.
Sean Jordan (06:01)
I love it. It’s a great analogy and I can see all kinds of applicability just from what you shared there. So when you get your book written, you don’t have one already, make sure, let us know. I’d love to read it.
Ryan Green (06:12)
Maybe I can write a book for me one day, but I will let you know.
Sean Jordan (06:20)
Fantastic. Well, you know, on this series in the Marketing Gateway, we are really focused on the St. Louis area. So tell me a little bit about how you came to live and work in the St. Louis area.
Ryan Green (06:29)
So I’ve lived in St. Louis since I was 10. Moved here from central Illinois in third grade. Lived in Columbia, Missouri for a while. As I said, I was a college dropout there, but I did live in Columbia during the poker years. And then afterwards at my first job as well. In Columbia, Missouri, two hours away still kind of feels adjacent to St. Louis in a lot of ⁓ ways.
I ended up moving to Minneapolis for two years right before the pandemic. We opened an office of my previous agency that I worked at there. And then I moved back to St. Louis where my family ⁓ is, ⁓ you still is, right before the pandemic. ⁓ So I always felt like even though I wasn’t always centered in St. Louis, that I was always part of the community here. And in fact, you know, when 314 Digital
started. I went to all of those events even though I lived in Columbia and I would bring a lot of the people from my agency here as well. St. Louis has a lot of unique untapped talent and I think it’s a unique place for starting a business, for thinking about tackling a lot of different marketing challenges that are probably overlooked a lot of the time.
Sean Jordan (07:54)
Very true, very true. And ⁓ one thing I appreciate about St. Louis over Minneapolis, and I love going up to Minneapolis, but I have driven on the sidewalk there before because I couldn’t find the road because there was so much snow everywhere.
Ryan Green (08:06)
Yeah, the
weather is a little more ⁓ sensible here, but Minneapolis is a fantastic Midwestern city too. They know how to handle the snow well and it is a wonderful place in the summer. ⁓ Street festivals every weekend, ⁓ a lot of great concerts ⁓ and music that comes through Minneapolis as well. Sometimes I’m still a little jealous about living walking distance from First Avenue. ⁓
when I lived in Minneapolis and kind of wished that ⁓ we would have something similar in St. Louis. So anybody here who wants to start a concert hall, First Avenue’s a great model.
Sean Jordan (08:51)
Fantastic. hopefully somebody hears your call and we can get that going here. what is something about St. Louis that you wish other people knew?
Ryan Green (09:01)
You know, I wish people knew how attractive it is to start a business here. We have, ⁓ you know, a very affordable cost of living. have a very educated, talented workforce. There’s some very balanced workforce here, too. We’re not a
one trick pony type of metro. We have a lot of different industries that thrive here. ⁓ And it’s well balanced ⁓ as far as world class education, ⁓ great healthcare systems, ⁓ and really galvanizing force of different influences and backgrounds that I think you can really have at your fingertips here.
20 minutes away from urban, rural, and suburban America all in one place. You talk about being able to bring a focus group together. We have all of that right here in spades. And we have that Midwestern work ethos that I think would be attractive to so many types of businesses. And given how easy it is to…
⁓ communicate now with and to work on Google Sheets or in cloud systems. The bones of ⁓ affordability that we have here has made it, I think, an incredibly attractive place to build a 21st century business.
Sean Jordan (10:38)
Totally agree. you know, mean, I have to drive all the time. I four hours to Kansas City, four hours to Chicago, or maybe four and a half hours to Chicago. ⁓ Not hard to get up to Iowa or down to Memphis or Nashville or, you know, many other places that I can do it a day trip if I really want to. And I have. So I think that the central proximity of where we are is great. And, you know, of course, ⁓ there’s a lot of people here too, that have a lot of sharp knowledge, great training, you know, good experience.
Ryan Green (10:56)
Yeah.
Sean Jordan (11:08)
And that’s actually something I wanted to bring up because I know when you and I were talking recently, you had made this really, really good point about how St. Louis has all this marketing experience in our community. But we often get passed by when people are looking for those kind of representative voices on, you know, what marketers think. They usually go to the people in the big cities. They don’t usually come to us. So let’s talk about this for a little bit. I thought it was really interesting when we discussed it before.
Why isn’t St. Louis a bigger part of the marketing discussion and how do we get ourselves there?
Ryan Green (11:38)
Well, it definitely is starting to be right. As you look at the history of St. Louis has been built on a lot of marketing, right? If you look at the Darcy and the Budweiser Frogs and, you know, a lot of the great agencies that were here in the 60s and 70s and 80s, you know, we do have a, I think, a very unique understanding of what makes the middle class tick.
and what, ⁓ in ways to communicate across a diverse ⁓ group of audiences. now that, in particular, as you got into the 2000s and 2010s with some deregulation, a lot of the emphasis of CEOs and businesses going to the coasts, lot of the marketing followed there too, but the customers didn’t, right? ⁓ So,
I think Rashad Tabakawala, who’s an industry luminary, ⁓ a formative person at Publicis up in Chicago, in one of his books, he said that over 90 % of agencies, people at least, are in four cities in the United States. Let’s start to sprout a little bit, I think, ⁓ with more decentralized workforce and the cloud computing stuff that we’re talking about here too.
But there’s still a lot of decisions that are made in, you know, Midtown Manhattan on Madison Avenue that aren’t thinking about the swath of America that we live in, that still think about ⁓ the Midwest and the South as flyover country, that, you know, maybe they have an office in Denver and that represents the Mountain West, right? But…
rural America, urban America is different in the Midwest than it is on those coasts. And I think that you start to see a ⁓ narrowing of ideas that are brought forth. I mean, think about during the pandemic, how many commercials looked and felt the exact same coming out of the pandemic, the slow piano and the gray matted
books and then suddenly the hope that came after in that, mean, every commercial had almost the same playbook. if we, St. Louis has a chance, if we can galvanize together to say, hey, like, there are some really creative ideas that we can bring forth that do bring ⁓ audiences together in a different way.
And you see that coming out of the agencies here. I know your affiliation with American Marketing Association, some of the stuff that we see from 3 and 4 Digital is just incredibly creative. We’ve always had a little bit of a PR problem, though. And we need both within our walls here in our four walls of St. Louis, but also
St. Louis and the two have left too. We need to trumpet our city in a little bit of a better light to bring forth and to make sure that our great creative ideas really are showcased in a different way than they are right now.
Sean Jordan (15:12)
100 % agree. you know, just being someone that’s been in this community, I never intended to stay in St. Louis. Like when I moved back here as an adult, I thought, I’ll just be here for a few years and I’m going somewhere else. And now that I have a family and we’re kind of rooted here, you know, my wife and I talk about this all the time, like, we really are pretty happy here. And there’s a lot of opportunity here. And there’s a lot of great people here. ⁓ It just doesn’t it isn’t a city that you move to for the vanity of it. It’s a city you move to because it’s a comfortable place to be with.
Ryan Green (15:23)
Yeah.
Sean Jordan (15:42)
you know, a lot to offer. And I feel like, you know, some of the so many of the people that I’ve met through the marketing community, ⁓ many of them had big jobs at some point in their career, and they’re they’re happy to be here not to settle, but just because there is a groove that they can find here that they couldn’t find in some of those bigger jobs. And it really is interesting, too, because we have a lot of people like yourself like myself that are really unconventional. So you know, I’m also originally a college dropout, although I did go back and finish eventually.
Ryan Green (16:06)
you
Sean Jordan (16:11)
I dropped out to manage a McDonald’s though, not to play poker. So my parents weren’t quite so proud of me at the time, but ⁓ the experience. That’s probably true. The experiences that I got from working at McDonald’s though and other retail, and I did a lot of other things too. I worked in the comic book world and things like that. ⁓ They taught me a lot so that when I did go back to school that I had some application for everything that I was learning. And I think marketing classes in particular, I saw things.
Ryan Green (16:19)
We’re not at the time either, Sean.
Sean Jordan (16:40)
very differently than what we were being taught because I had done it. I had been out in the world and lived it. And so we have all these people around town who ⁓ have taken unconventional paths, who are really different in terms of the backgrounds they have. How did these things help us as marketers? And how do we encourage more diversity of thought in the field of marketing?
Ryan Green (17:02)
It helps so much. mean, I think one, you know, the coasts attract, this is a broad statement, but kind of attract the MBAs, right? They attract people that want to go to Fortune 100 companies and immediately, you know, take big swings and an ego, I suppose, that, you know, those cities represent
And that’s all fine and good, but the people who buy products are the managers of McDonald’s. They are ⁓ nurses. are, ⁓ you know, stay-at-home moms that have multiple jobs. They’re farmers, right? ⁓ And it’s hard to have that perspective when you’re staring at spreadsheets. It’s easier to have that perspective when
you can go back to those experiences and understand a lot of the small, medium, and large lessons from that. I still to this day, I think my most challenging job that I ever had was the drive-through guy at Taco Bell in the late 90s when I, it was a two minute, 30 second clock and I had to exchange the money and get the sodas out and had…
the screen for who’s in the window and the screen for who’s ordering and getting the right food out with the sauces, right? Like, I mean, you need to do eight things at once there. I learned more on how to actually get shit done at that job than I was going to staring at a spreadsheet in an MBA class, right?
The practicality of those lessons is incredibly important to being able to understand your consumer, but also to be able to actually ship out work, not just be thinking of ideas and putting PowerPoint slides together. ⁓ I think one of the big differences in agencies in St. Louis and brands that are here too.
startups to, you know, the parinas of the world is that we take those ideas and put them into action and get that and get the work done in an efficient, non-egotistical way ⁓ that takes multiple view, you know, viewpoints ⁓ that are not just purely financially driven. And if we can tell that story better as St. Louisans, as St. Louis marketing community,
I think we have an opportunity to attract larger opportunities. Some of those that kind of went away in the 80s with Reaganomics and deregulation and a lot of you know, several of the companies leaving St. Louis, which is, you know, pretty well, ⁓ well understood by St. Louisans at this point. But we can bring that back, right? Like we, having that spirit is,
something that I think is very unique to at least St. Louis and a number of Midwestern companies. And you actually are starting to see more articles written about that. I think I shared with you a Wall Street Journal article that said, hey, as the holding company agencies continue to merge and to lay off staff, the independents are doing a lot better. Independent agencies and…
Sean Jordan (20:33)
You’re welcome.
Ryan Green (20:47)
The middle of Wyoming, right? Being highlighted by Wall Street Journal journalists. There’s opportunities for middle America right now, probably more opportunities than there have been in last 30 years.
Sean Jordan (21:02)
I agree. agree. you know, I mean, my firm, we’ve been around for 43 years and probably the first 20 years, we pretty much just worked in St. Louis. But, you know, now I have clients all over the country, all over the world, really. And ⁓ you can do that because, you know, the Internet, of course, allows you to operate a different scale than it was possible to do before. also ⁓ because there’s more of a expertise market now than there was before. Before it was you really had to have the right address or the right affiliations or
Ryan Green (21:14)
Yeah.
Sean Jordan (21:32)
the right connections, but now if you have the right expertise, it doesn’t matter where you’re located, people will come to you and look for you. And I know it’s something that many of us in marketing, I work in course research, ⁓ many of us in this field, we have to find a way to share that expertise. But once we do, the world will come knocking once we establish ourselves.
Ryan Green (21:52)
especially if you’re somebody who has been cultivating relationships across ⁓ different disciplines and different geographies in different areas, right? ⁓ I see the small little benefits of, know, that workers like you and I, right? ⁓ Being able to tap into, ⁓ as,
consulting and anybody can open an LLC now. The band of free agents, I call them, that’s out there grows every day. I had a connection with a writer at AdAge that just left and is a journalist on his own now.
Somebody that now is in our free agent network, right? I have an ongoing relationship with the former CMO of Best Buy who’s a free agent ⁓ that I do business with. have ⁓ somebody who’s became a ⁓ mentor and a friend of mine who has an agency in Nigeria.
So there’s so many…
If you’re open-minded and you’re somebody who wants to, you’re curious and somebody who wants to get to know people and somebody who wants to challenge, challenge the status quo, it’s easier to do than it has been at any other period of time in my life.
Sean Jordan (23:29)
Totally agree. And, you know, I think it might be a good idea for us to back up a little bit, because you, again, you have a lot of experience doing, you know, big product stuff. You have experience working all over the world with ⁓ brands you’ve worked with or with partners that you’ve worked with. But let’s talk a little bit about what marketing even is this year in 2026, because I know listeners on this show have probably heard us have a guest on that every single time it is someone who’s doing a completely different thing than everybody else has been on. You know, we’ve had people that that are
doing internal marketing, external marketing, that are doing digital marketing, that are focused just on creative stuff. mean, know, everything, PR. And it’s such a big umbrella that even when you look at like the American Marketing Association’s definition of what marketing is, like they have to refine it every couple of years because it doesn’t, like what they were telling me when I was in school 20 years ago doesn’t even apply today because it’s so different. So how do you really see marketing today? What is it really about?
Ryan Green (24:14)
Yeah.
Sean, I don’t know what marketing is today. And I want to sugarcoat that. I asked Claude a year or two ago when I was starting my own consultancy, build me a marketing agency that can do anything. Spell out to me every single potential marketing function and role. And it spit out 300 things.
Sean Jordan (24:29)
Ha ha ha ha ha.
Ha
Ryan Green (24:52)
And it did it in like 17 different categories, right? So like if you take out all the, I’m sure somewhat overlapping functions, is marketing analytics, is marketing public relations, is marketing ⁓ content, is marketing media? What is media, right? Is marketing personal branding? Is it ghost writing? Is it…
What is creative now? What is a campaign? ⁓ I don’t know anymore. I don’t think that it’s, I think it’s very tough to pigeonhole a one sentence definition for sure. ⁓ Marketing is almost like breathing for a company.
It’s every interaction, it’s every sentence that’s said by their executives to their social media team, to what their customers say about them. ⁓ It’s everything, right? Which makes it almost, and I think that’s part of the problem with why marketing doesn’t always get the attention or the budgets or the C-suite positions and authority, because it’s very hard.
to even say what it is, much less what the return on this mass of communication is as well. Finance is very easy in a lot of ways to say what it is. Legal is incredibly easy to point to. ⁓ But marketing has, by necessity, kind of this all-encompassing everything.
I gotta be honest, when I started my, off and started my one man shop, I thought I would be doing media buying stuff, or media strategy. I haven’t done that once. Not once. I put one media plan together that was not fulfilled. But they paid me to do it, which was nice. I…
I mean, it’s problem solving. A lot of it’s almost coaching, right? I ⁓ don’t know where the, and this is probably not a great answer for your audience, but I don’t know where it starts and ends. And that is a challenge and an opportunity. If you’re somebody who needs rigid guidelines, marketing is going be very tough, very tough. And…
will be increasingly tough even if you wanna be a specialist and just do one thing. You wanna be an SEO specialist today? Well, you’re have to also probably understand at least paid search if not, know, what generative optimization looks like. And that could go haywire very quickly, right? Or you get replaced. ⁓
It is marketing technology. I mean, you certainly are gonna have to be a technologist to be an effective marketer today. Even if you just want to be writing long form articles and doing some kind of 10 year horizon brand plays, you’re still gonna need to be a technologist, right?
So yeah, there’s so many different directions I could go with this, but I do not know how to define marketing today. It’s probably, you know it when you see it, maybe. How would you define it?
Sean Jordan (28:42)
Well, that’s the thing is that I think ⁓ we’ve gotten away from the transactional kind of thinking to more the type of we’re creating some kind of awareness and value ⁓ in what we’re doing because even the things we try to quantify in marketing a lot of times are not necessarily about exchanging money anymore. That’s what it used to be back in the 50s and 60s. now it could be about just making people aware or getting people to click or.
you know, getting people to refer, give word of mouth. mean, those are all very common marketing problems. then internal marketing is a whole big thing now, you know? Yeah. Like how do we get everybody aligned that we’re all following, not just a mission statement that somebody wrote, but really our hearts and souls are all in it together. And, you know, it’s interesting. I was at the Lego store this weekend. Anybody that knows me knows I love Legos and ⁓ the one over in West County mall.
Ryan Green (29:15)
Yeah.
Yeah, I didn’t even mention internal marketing, right?
And which Lego store?
Yeah, I’m familiar with that one. ⁓
Sean Jordan (29:38)
⁓ Yeah, and they
had just they they just had an event so they were packed but they brought the Pokemon Legos out and of course my kids are big Pokemon fans so wound up with a Pokemon set on our way out but I was just looking around at Lego store and like when you walk in there you’re not just thinking what are the values Lego or what does the brand mean or anything like that you’re you’re walking in there understanding that Lego is about fun it’s about building it’s about discovery it’s about ⁓ you know
all ages having a good time with these multi-purpose bricks. And they’ve done a really good job over their 50-some years of being in existence of refining and clarifying and understanding that message. And I did an episode on them where I talked about how they almost went out of business in 2000 because they didn’t quite have that same clarity that they have today. But the reality is you don’t have to be told what LEGO’s brand stands for. It’s apparent because they…
Ryan Green (30:25)
Yeah.
Sean Jordan (30:32)
live it, they embody it, they make it part of what happens when you walk in that store or when you buy products from them. And that kind of clarity is really rare in brands and marketing. I’ve worked with many clients that even their own internal audience can’t agree on what the purpose of the brand is or what it means to people. And certainly when they hear consumer feedback, they’re really stupefied a lot of times because the consumers tell them something completely different. So
Ryan Green (30:49)
Never.
Sean Jordan (30:58)
I think that’s probably one of the trickiest things about defining marketing in general is we all know what it looks like in the end. We all know what a well-marketed organization is, but it’s kind of like a brand. It’s like a cloud where you can see it from far away and you can understand it, but when you get close up inside it, it’s like, what am I looking at here?
Ryan Green (31:17)
Yeah, flying through the cloud versus being able to see it from a distance, right? I think that’s a very good metaphor and why executives who are inside that cloud don’t always have a good perspective of what it actually looks like. So I’m doing something. They just went to rain. Yeah, exactly.
Sean Jordan (31:20)
total.
They just want it to rain. That’s all they care about. ⁓
So, you one of the double-edged swords of modern marketing is this obsession with using metrics to guide decision-making. And, know, of course, I’m in the metric business. I’m not against metrics, but I’ve seen them used badly. And I always try to caution people not to use them improperly. So what is wrong with the measurement framework that marketers commonly use? And I know you’ve probably seen this too in your career many times. What could be done better?
Ryan Green (32:02)
There’s so many ways I could go on this question. You know, I think early in my career coming from a poker playing background, I thought that there would be a metric or two or a combination that you could put a scorecard and point to and judge the success of a campaign. And you can, right? It’s been done for a long time.
Sean Jordan (32:04)
you
Ryan Green (32:31)
I listened to a podcast recently ⁓ called Plain English ⁓ by Derek Thompson, former writer from the Atlantic. And the podcast was called How Metrics Make Us Miserable. And he basically said that optimizing things to metrics are optimizing to short-term success, winning the battle, but not the war. If you look at baseball, baseball has been optimized.
to a point where it has became a boring game. Basketball has been optimized to a point where you’re just chucking up threes. Marketing has been optimized to a point where it has became a pretty terrible experience for most. It’s been optimized to increase click through rate because that was an easy metric to…
Optimized towards so optimizing a programmatic campaign from a point ⁓ four percent click through rates of point ⁓ eight percent click through rate was a double Doubled the amount of visits and cookies you could drop for retargeting or whatever But it ignored the ninety nine point nine two percent of people who got a terrible experience and now ten fifteen twenty years later people don’t
trust digital advertising at all. Influencer certainly has ⁓ taken a hit. ⁓ The proliferation of ad blocking technologies, VPNs that people use that don’t allow any ads to ever come through has shown that consumers have had a negative
effect on optimizing for short term games and ignoring kind of the long game. And that’s now put marketing in a very defensive position. And it’s challenging, I think, for brand marketers who maybe have been touting some of these stats for 10 years to say that they were wrong or for their agencies to try to put something forth.
so that they can be maybe a little bit more like Lego. And you just kind of walk in and sense without metric that this feels right. Using intuition in combination with data is something that marketers have to be able to do. Most of effective marketing is just passing the sniff test. Not necessarily what’s going to be on.
some ultra optimized campaign. And at least for my field of work so far in the last two years running a business on my own, I don’t think most organizations get it and they’re not ready for it. ⁓ They all have the clarion call of being data driven, but don’t know why or what that actually means.
and it’s making it tougher to define what marketing is. It makes it tougher to defend what we do and it’s eroding consumer trust in our field and in the brands that we represent.
Sean Jordan (36:13)
completely agree. again, as someone that writes surveys and constructs metrics and things like that, my point to any client that I work with is, if this isn’t serving a specific strategic goal that is going to really give you something, why are you doing it? Because a lot of times they want to have information so that they can look at monitors and they can tell a story about how they’re doing well in this or that, but there’s a strategy behind it. It’s just they need a metric that they can report to their board so they can say, yeah, we did something. We moved up a number somewhere.
And number goes up is not a good strategy. It is just number going up.
Ryan Green (36:48)
Well, and part of the challenge is the daisy chain, right? To be able to report to the board. And then the board has a CEO, the CEO has a C-suite, the C-suite has VPs, and then they have brand directors that have an agency that uses a programmatic desk that has a supply chain underneath. I mean, you’re 10 steps away when, and I say this to ad tech people, when they’re…
Why doesn’t anybody care about supply path optimization? That would make all the media 15 % cheaper and have fewer fuel middle then. I’m like, because it takes 12 steps to get it up to the top, right? So there is a gimmick telephone as part of this too. Part of this is just a corporate America challenge. ⁓ It’s too matrixed. It’s too hierarchical.
to really make a difference. And at the end of the day, somebody up there is like, what’s the ROAS? What’s the return? Because it’s usually finance people that, with all the shots that don’t understand that the best marketing doesn’t have a number or a metric attached to it. You going to the Lego store does not have metric attached to it.
Sean Jordan (37:46)
And you know what?
Ryan Green (38:10)
The fandom of Taylor Swift does not have a metric or number attached to it. You just see it and you feel it when you’re there. And people need to start to trust their intuition. ⁓ that’s informed by data, right? I’m a poker player. I’ve looked at, played 3 million hands of poker before I would be able to understand. I just think this guy is bullshitting me. I bluff. And it did not have any…
Number or math reason besides I feel it in my bones. And we need to feel in our bones more. And that’s a tough thing to be able to articulate. Just believe me, I’m right. And when you have to be able to articulate that intuition, then things get really messy. And if you’re wrong, then you’re out. ⁓ So it makes it very challenging. The opportunity then is for smaller businesses.
for people that don’t have that red tape. ⁓ And for brands that probably had marketers that come from it. You look at Liquid Death, Liquid Death just put out an urn in combination with Spotify that would all that where your dead remains, we’ll be able to listen to your Spotify playlist forever.
That’s a risky move. I don’t know. I could see that going being taken wrong by a lot of people. But the CEO is a, you know, was a from a creative agency. And they lean into their instinct. I don’t think that there was any stat or any ⁓ AI strategy that was going to promote, you know, promoting an earn as a good marketing ploy.
I remembered it because it was that, you know, ⁓ that difference though. So.
Sean Jordan (40:09)
I agree with you and I was going to make the point earlier that ⁓ I think when you’re talking about the money guys and finance guys being behind so much, they often, I find ⁓ they have a story that they want to tell that isn’t risky and which doesn’t really have much creativity to it. It might have a strategy behind it, but it’s a strategy that would persuade them, not a strategy that would persuade the ordinary people who might be using their company or brand.
Ryan Green (40:34)
Well,
and who is finance, who is their primary target audience? Who would you say it is?
Sean Jordan (40:45)
For financial people, I think a lot of times they’re thinking businesses or they’re thinking people that are looking for wealth management or things that are higher margin for them,
Ryan Green (40:53)
Well, I would say
it’s the shareholders and the shareholders can go to a quarterly earnings call. A lot of this comes down, honestly, the whole daisy chain, I believe that a lot of this comes down to the quarterly earnings call and needing to show a return every quarter. LEGO’s 10 year track from, you know, almost jumping the shark in the 2000s to today.
Sean Jordan (40:57)
Right.
Hmm.
Ryan Green (41:24)
what 20 years, Mercedes Benz says their life cycle is 20 years, you’re not gonna be able to find that return in 90 days. And you’re never gonna be able to prove that return in 90 days. And organizations that are, you know, the Jack Welchian making sure that you hit your numbers no matter what are gonna have a hard time ever justifying.
any marketing spender, any R &D that takes longer than 90 days. We’re going to run up to that with AI right now. So much investment is coming in AI at these organizations and they got Wall Street needs to see a return on that investment like yesterday and this stuff is going to take time. ⁓ So I got a feeling a lot of the innovation is going to come from private companies. Liquid death is not traded publicly, I don’t think.
Sean Jordan (41:59)
Mm-hmm.
Ryan Green (42:20)
Maybe I should ask AI real quick ⁓ to verify that, but ⁓ you’re going to get innovation from smaller groups. You’re get innovation from marketing innovation from businesses that can make faster long-term gut decisions that aren’t purely based on what’s the ROI, what’s the cack of this.
that I can show my investors at the end of the quarter.
Sean Jordan (42:54)
Very true. Well, one more question for you, and that is we really have this problem today where a lot of marketing is driven by strategy and we’ve touched on this in some of what we talked about already, but it’s not driven by creativity the way that like a brand like Liquid Death is. ⁓ And Liquid Death, I I remember, I think Brandon Toll brought that up when I interviewed him and I said, when I first saw that brand, I thought it was going to fail miserably because I just didn’t get it. I didn’t understand it. I’m happy to have been wrong because I just
Ryan Green (43:20)
Yeah. ⁓
Sean Jordan (43:23)
It didn’t make any sense to me at all, but they were willing to take a risk and plant their flag in that creative idea and they made it work, right? And people love it. So how can companies better utilize creativity to stand out?
Ryan Green (43:30)
Yeah.
They need to be more creative. They need to be bolder. need to…
Sean Jordan (43:39)
Okay, fair enough.
Ryan Green (43:46)
It’s challenging because they do need to, and it depends, everything depends on the company, who their core audience is and how broad that audience is. Coca-Cola, you know, can’t alienate 50 % of the population by planting a flag in one place, right? ⁓ But that’s why I think what I was saying earlier, the upstart,
new brands can and they can attack in a different way. I’d go back to Body Armor, which is a brand I was fortunate enough to work with in their formative years. And the creative agency that they had and the investment from Kobe Bryant, who was actually their creative director on some of their early commercials, thanks Gatorade, we’ll take it from here.
is pretty bold to say putting James Harden into 1776 garb on a horse riding into the night. ⁓ you were able to take those chances when you had 2 % market share. Now that they, you know, are in the 20s and 30s in market share, less chances can be taken, right? ⁓ So I think you’re going to true creative, bolder strategies.
not giving a fuck type of mentality out of the smaller upstart groups, you’re going to get, and that’s been true for a while. You got that with Dollar Shave Club, you had it with Body Armor. And I think that you’ll continue to see that from ⁓ insurgent places. It’s a tougher balance for existing brands, depending on the category too, but it’s probably imperative for them to be able to…
for any company to make some longer term decisions that aren’t just based on spreadsheets and on a narrow set of KPIs and to have the guts and gumption to ⁓ do it from intuition or do it from a place of justice, a place of, you know.
standing for something. I mean, look at what Anthropic and ChatGBT just had to go through, right? Like that. And those were some very quick decisions. I don’t think you were able to MBA out every scenario that was gonna happen there, right?
Sean Jordan (46:19)
Although
maybe chat GPT should have because they’re apparently having mass cancellations because of what they’ve done. Yeah.
Ryan Green (46:22)
Yeah, maybe, but maybe that’s a short-term loss for a long-term gain
for them too, right? Like, I’m not, I don’t know, I’ve been, yeah, yeah, and nobody does, right? Even your best predictive AI model, which I’m sure was tapped to help, you know, game play some of that. But ⁓ if anything, there’s probably gonna be…
Sean Jordan (46:29)
Sure. Yeah, we have no idea how it’ll play out, right?
Ryan Green (46:51)
more bold decisions I think being made the next couple years by insurgents more so than we’ve seen in a long time.
Sean Jordan (47:00)
I’d love to see it. I’m excited for creativity to come back in a way where marketing is exciting again. And ⁓ the Super Bowl is always where everybody’s looking for that to happen, but it seems like every year is less and less interesting. Yeah. Right.
Ryan Green (47:12)
Well, the ones that can afford that budget are not the insurgents.
I mean, the only real memorable one I can think of from the last couple of years is the Coinbase one a couple of years back, and that was crypto is a different beast, right? So yeah, it’s not going to happen at the Super Bowl. It’s going to happen on the fringes. It’s going to happen in some swell pockets, probably, maybe in some things that aren’t even targeted to you, right?
Because it is happening, I think, more than you would suspect in the barber shops that are showing the Red Bull TV and having some really creative sports that are being created, right? Like it’s happening in urban communities. It’s happening in Cuba, Missouri. And you just don’t know about it because it’s happening on a very small scale within
very specific communities isn’t necessarily breaking through nationally. ⁓ But it is happening right now.
Sean Jordan (48:18)
Well, I so appreciate you being on Ryan. I feel like this has been one those discussions that’s really mind expanding just in terms of we’re thinking about some big topics and ⁓ you have a great perspective. I really enjoy hearing from you. But one thing I always ask at the end of our show is if you want to plug something, so here’s your chance, what would you like to plug?
Ryan Green (48:27)
Yeah.
I have two presentations I’m working on. One will be at the AMA ⁓ St. Louis in early April. ⁓ I’m also having a panel at MDMC ⁓ in late April. ⁓ Both I think will be thought provoking and provocative. So I would love to… ⁓
Have anybody join for those? I’m sure I’ll be talking about them on social, which is basically just LinkedIn for me. Right now, come and follow along there. ⁓ you know, we’ll, I’m very excited to see how St. Louis responds to a interesting set of criteria that’s happening right now in the world and where St. Louis’ place is gonna be ⁓ as we move in to the
second fourth of the century too, right? ⁓ There’s a lot of important things happening and St. Louis is going to have a really unique voice.
Sean Jordan (49:46)
Well, we’ll have, of course, all of the information about what you have coming up and how to get in contact with you in the show notes. again, right, I just want to thank you so much for being on the Marketing Gateway. ⁓ We call everyone that comes on the show a marketing mentor, and you’ve definitely been that today. So thanks for being on.
Ryan Green (50:01)
Thank you so much, Sean. Thanks for having me and we’ll chat again soon.
Sean Jordan (50:06)
All right, long time listeners, you know what I’m going to say, right? What an incredible interview. I walked away from that. I told Ryan right after we got finished that like I honestly felt like my mind had expanded a little bit because we were talking about things that we just don’t talk about enough. We need to talk about more. And I am excited to hear him speak more at some of the opportunities that he has coming up and check the show notes for those. But in the meantime, ⁓ thank you, Ryan, for being one of our marketing mentors. We appreciate you.
We are so supportive of you and The Last Flash and the great work that you’re doing there, but also just your willingness to share. And I want to remind everyone, if you would like to be on the Marketing Gateway or if you know anybody that’d be really good, please put them in touch with us. You can go to themarketinggateway.com and sign up to be a guest there. We want to hear your expertise. We want to hear your knowledge. We want you to share your story. And if you are brave enough to do what we talked about in this episode, like with Liquid Death, where
You’re brave enough to take a stand and to say something and to tell your story in a way that the rest of us can hear. I promise you, it will make you a better marketer. So please come on the Marketing Gateway. We’d love to have you. But in the meantime, as always, I look forward to our next episode. We have many more great topics and guests coming up. I’m Sean in St. Louis. This has been the Marketing Gateway. See you next time.
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