How does the shoe feel on the other foot, Sean?
We have a very special interview today! Our lovely host Sean has decided to be in the hot seat himself!
About Sean: Watch the video and find out!
Contact Sean: https://www.linkedin.com/in/seanjjordan/
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.themarketinggateway.com
Copyright 2025, The Research & Planning Group, Inc.
Transcript:
Holly Wooten (00:08)
Hey everybody, I know this is a little bit of a change of pace. You’re used to seeing Sean here, ⁓ but to kind of celebrate a hundred episodes of the podcast and to kind of allow everybody to get to know Sean more as a person, we decided to interview him for a few episodes. So today’s episode and tomorrow’s episode will be me talking to Sean and asking him some questions kind of.
about his background and what we do now ⁓ outside of the podcast and whatnot. So today is part one. Look forward to part two tomorrow. So we’ll just go ahead and get into it.
Sean Jordan (00:52)
Hey guys, this is Holly from the production team here. Today to kind of celebrate surpassing 100 episodes, we’re gonna do something a little bit different here and I’m actually gonna interview Sean just as, like I said, a celebration of 100 episodes but also so you guys can get to know him a little bit better. Holly, you are a glutton for punishment because more than anybody in the world except for maybe my kids and my wife, you get to listen to me all the time.
because you’re editing these episodes. ⁓ you’ve learned that sometimes I can use some salty language when I’m off camera. Check out the blooper reel. Delighted to be here. Go for it. What questions do you have for me? OK, so we’ll just kind of start how we do with everybody and ⁓ tell me something surprising that I don’t know. OK, so I’ve shared so many of these when we’ve been talking with guests.
But one thing I don’t think I’ve ever shared is that one time my friend and I got this bright idea to go to Long John Silver’s dressed up as pirates. This is a college thing, just one of those crazy ideas that I had. we went for it. We went and got pirate costumes with eye patches and bucking your swords and everything. And we were having a great time. We’re walking in, you know, going, yeah, we’re on pirates right here to order chicken planks, you know. And that was all good. Everybody was, you know, the people at the store were laughing. It was a good time. But then
A guy with a real eye patch walked in right behind us with his family. okay, I worked in fast food for many years. I never expected anyone with an eye patch to walk into Long John Silver’s of any place because I never seen anybody at a fast food restaurant with an eye patch, right? So he’s right behind us. And we immediately were embarrassed and mortified because it’s like, you know, we’re there with the fake eye patches on just, you know, playing it up. And the guy did not look like he was very amused by any of it. So we’re sitting there eating our food. ⁓
trying to keep the pirate thing going, but also feeling kind of like heels and ultimately left. So that was a fun experience. Okay. Interesting. I’ve never heard that one before. So that was surprising. And then for our series of the Marketing Gateway, we are obviously focused on the St. Louis area. So tell me how you came to live in the St. Louis area. Well, I want to begin by saying that I never intended to stay in St.
Because we moved here when I was 10. My dad was in the Air Force We moved to Scott Air Force Base and it’s really hard to live on base so we wound up living in the local community because there’s like a long waiting list and ⁓ I grew up in O’Fallon, Illinois and O’Fallon, Illinois was for me a town I did not want to reside in in fact I swear I would never move back and now I live 15 minutes away in Swansea So go figure but I actually wanted to get out of Illinois. I wanted to move anywhere else
And I’ve traveled a lot and seen the world and I was like, I’d love to live maybe California or maybe the Pacific Northwest somewhere, just somewhere different. And my wife has never lived outside of Illinois. She’s from the central part of the state and she’s never gotten to live anywhere fun either. So what drew us back here was I got a job at EB Games, which is a ⁓ video game store that got acquired by GameStop at some point. And I came back because I knew that if we opened that store in inches away from my old house practically,
that it would do really well because I knew the area and I wanted to be the manager and I was right. We were a top ranked store for many years, but ⁓ then I kind of got stuck here after buying a house and having kids and everything and that’s why I’m here. But you know what? As much as I say, I don’t like to live in St. Louis. I actually really love it here. It’s a very affordable place. There’s lots to do. It’s really easy to get to anywhere I want to go. mean, it’s, you know, just four or five hours to a lot of major cities and they’re really easy to go and spend a weekend in and
There’s a lot of good here. The people here are great too. And one of the things that I’ve really embraced, especially when it doing the marketing gateway is how much thought leadership and expertise we have in St. Louis that just doesn’t get hurt a lot. you know, I’d like to count myself in that group, but some of the people we’ve talked to are so much brighter than I am. So we have people that are just amazingly intelligent and sharp that have done some tremendous things. And I’m just honored to be a part of that community.
any of those amazing smart people would like to be on the show, we’re more than happy to host you. And then what is something about the St. Louis area that you wish other people knew? There are so many things that don’t show up on the normal like touristy kind of radar that are really, really cool. for example, ⁓ there are some really amazing hiking areas around here that just are there. They’re usually within an hour of
the St. Louis area, but they’re really great to go to and just kind of get out in nature. They have to be careful during tick season. Lone Elk Park in particular, which is a great place to go, ⁓ has really, really bad ticks in the spring. But Lone Elk Park is right next to the World Bird Sanctuary and also the Wolf Sanctuary, which are two amazing places to go that nobody ever really talks about. And yet they’re really awesome. ⁓ Another thing that I don’t think a lot of people know about St. Louis is that there are some museums here that
are not that well known, which are really neat. There’s some art museums that are ⁓ on either the college campuses or like there’s the Modern Art Museum. ⁓ There is a Black History Museum. There was a Blues Museum, unfortunately it just closed. ⁓ And there’s also a Museum of Transportation. There’s a Museum of American Kennel Club, all kinds of things like that that you might not be familiar with. So if you’re coming here and looking to get off the beaten path, I mean, sure, you got to go to the City Museum. That place is incredible. ⁓ But once you’ve done that,
Like take a look around because there are a lot of other things that are off the beaten path, but they’re still worth your time. We also have the chess museum. that’s I think it’s the world’s largest chess piece or something like that. So all those chess lovers out there. My son’s gone to chess club camp, in fact. So, yeah, I know Kyle loves to play chess. So I’m trying to take him there one day. So, OK, well, let’s just kind of get into the meat and potatoes of the interview then.
⁓ So before you worked in marketing research, I know you’ve not only talked to me about it, but you’ve also discussed it on the podcast as well. You’ve had an interesting career where you’ve worked in comics, video games. You literally just talked about EB games, ⁓ game journalism, ⁓ and retail. ⁓ These aren’t really things that you would necessarily associate with St. Louis, so kind of.
go into a little bit about that. My first job actually involved at Arch, actually two Arches because it was McDonald’s. you know, I, yeah, great joke, right? I really am glad I started at McDonald’s. I did not want to start at McDonald’s. I wanted to have a more impressive job when I was 16, but McDonald’s was hiring. I went in and in my application and that night was having an interview and getting hired, you know? So it was easy to get into and I learned a lot. And one of the things I learned from McDonald’s was
how to take a process and break it down into many pieces and have multiple people working together as a team. Now, I will say at McDonald’s, it doesn’t always work out very well. It depends on who’s running the floor. Eventually, I did get the chance to be a McDonald’s manager, and I was really impressed by the system that they had. And I think one of the things that really taught me was when you have a system and you make sure it’s operating correctly, you actually don’t have to work that hard. As a manager, if my store was running well, I could just walk out in the lobby and I could refill people’s drinks or I could talk with them.
I could clean up things that need to be cleaned up, all the things that make a restaurant a nice place to be. that, by the way, you’re supposed to do if you’re managing the place properly. So ⁓ the problem was that we often had managers who were not doing their job correctly or who were making people miserable and they were causing the place to not run. The same was true when I was at EB Games. Video game stores, really fun places to work, but everybody’s really underpaid. they’re there because they love to talk about video games. And I was no exception.
But one of the things that I figured out really quickly was that the way I looked at my customers and the way that other people looked at their customers were completely different. And we did an episode where I talked about that, how I realized that if I looked at my customers as people that were there to rip me off or to steal things from me or to waste my time, that I wasn’t going to be very good at serving them. And what I did instead was I encouraged people to come in the store and waste my time because then they would come back and buy things. And I think one of my most famous stories from that, I probably told you this one before, is
I had this guy come in and he got really mad at us, rightly so. We did something that really ticked him off. And he ⁓ returned a bunch of stuff he had just bought and told us that he was never gonna shop with us again. And then he came back a few hours later with this sheepish look on his face. And he said, I went home and I told my kids that I was never going back in there. And they said, you can’t do that. Sean’s been so cool to us. You have to go back there and buy those things back and tell them you’re sorry. And he did.
And not only that, but then like when Christmas rolled around, he came back and bought even more stuff for his kids. Now, we apologize. We were wrong. We did something that wasn’t cool. But it was because we took such good care of our customers that we could make an error like that and people would come back. And that was one of those really big moments for me because I realized like you never see the effects a lot of times of all this work you put in to take care of people and to make them feel welcome. But when it happens ⁓ that
they really pay you back in that way. It’s very rewarding. And that’s part of why, you know, in the field we’re in now, I’m always talking about how important it is to really celebrate those victories a lot more than those problems that you hear about in feedback a lot, because it’s really demoralizing when you hear somebody thinks you’re terrible, but sometimes it’s well-earned. Yeah, I’ve definitely had my fair share of, you know, learning those same kind of lessons in my experience in retail as well.
And you’ve kind of already touched on it a little bit, but what are some lessons that you learned from not even just McDonald’s and EB Games, but also your journalism background and all that stuff? What did you bring from those jobs forward with you? So I got my first job as a paid professional writer when I was 16, which is great. I used to sit and read video game magazines and say, I want to do that one day. And I did get to do that.
I didn’t get to get published in a magazine initially. I got published on websites because those were still kind of a new thing. I was an editor of a site for a while and had thousands of readers a day. That was pretty cool. I got free games sent to me in the mail that I got to review. ⁓ I got to review some good ones too, games that people have actually heard of like Half-Life or Starcraft or You Don’t Know Jack or games like that. ⁓ It was really exciting. I got into college and I realized that that wasn’t what I wanted to do for the rest of my life, which is funny because I keep
every now and then going back and doing video game writing as a hobby. that was the thing. I enjoyed it as a hobby. I did not enjoy it as a job. And the people I knew that were doing it that were older than me depressed me because they were really narrow and they were so focused on this one thing. They didn’t have anything else in their life. And a lot of them aren’t doing it anymore because they got burned out, too. So I learned that lesson pretty quickly. Like you want to do what you love, but you also want to keep some of the things you love to do in your spare time.
because if they’re your day job, you will get tired of them really quickly. And I never want to get tired of writing because writing is something that I love to do. It doesn’t matter what I’m writing about. So another lesson I learned ⁓ when I was working in ⁓ the comic book world was the value of marketing. I got pulled in because I had to market my websites and everything in the gaming space. And I got pulled in to be a marketer for a comic book called The Hedge Knight, which is written by guy named George R. R. Martin, who’s a lot more famous now than he was then.
And in fact, I’d never heard of him when I started working on this. And The Hedge Knight actually just got made into an HBO series called The Night at Seven Kingdoms. So, you know, it’s a pretty big deal now. But back then it was kind of like, oh, it’s like a knight’s tale, but more realistic, you know? So I got pulled into work on this. I wanted to be the writer on the comic, but unfortunately I got passed over for that. So I might have been the guy that wrote the press releases and the marketing copy instead. And actually that was a better place for me to be because we turned that book into a bestseller and
We actually went through multiple print runs, which in the comic book industry is a sign of huge success. Normally what happens in comic books is you print four or 5,000 copies of a comic in the floppy edition where it’s about 26 to 32 pages. You sell those to comic book shops. It’s non-returnable, which is really unusual for the publishing industry. Usually products are returnable. And they’re stuck with it.
when they buy it, they’re stuck with it. So they’re very conservative about what they order. They’ll order what they have pre-orders for and then maybe a couple extra copies and that’s it. And for the Hedge Knight, we were selling out where we had to go to reprints and our final reprint, I think was about 40,000 copies of the third edition. ⁓ We eventually wound up publishing it through Marvel in fact, which was pretty cool, although we learned some tough lessons from that. I’ll talk about it another time. But the value of marketing was important because how did we get to that level? It wasn’t…
just the name of the author. I mean, he was a rising star as fantasy authors went, but he still wasn’t a huge name. And it certainly wasn’t the property because it wasn’t his main property. It was like a side story. So what we did was we went and we engaged the community online and we got people excited about the idea that, if you buy this, we might be able to adapt the main series. And the main series is being adapted into an HBO show. So we’ll have our own version of it that you’ll get to read before that. And that got the community excited and made them want to buy things. And they also love the art.
So when they started seeing the art and it was depicting these characters in a way that they really got excited about, they wanted to own this. It wasn’t that much, it was like four bucks a comic. So ⁓ marketing made that product really, really successful. And we did it again a few years later. My wife actually wound up working on this. ⁓ It was a graphic novel called Anita Blake Vampire Hunters written by Laurel K. Hamilton who actually is an author that lives here in St. Louis. ⁓ And these books.
Later on in the series, we would never have been able to adapt them into comics because they are notoriously full of sex. But the earlier ones we could and they were still pretty sexy, but they didn’t, you they weren’t they weren’t things that we couldn’t produce. And ⁓ we got a lot of women interested. So we went to Romantic Times and some of the other sources for ⁓ romance and paranormal ⁓ type books and things like that and got people really excited. And these comic book shop owners were calling us up and thanking us.
that women were coming into the comic book stores. And my wife got to go do a signing. She was the person that did the adaptation. And ⁓ she got to sit there with Laurel K. Hamilton one time. She got to go to comic book shops and have people come in and want her signature on things. She got a newspaper article written about her. I never got any of that in any of the comics I worked on. But again, the power of marketing was really important because we tapped a community that needed to be served, that wanted products like these and nobody was offering. And unfortunately, ⁓
comic books is just not a very sustainable world. It’s a lot of people fighting over very, very thin pieces of a very small pie, unfortunately. And it’s interesting too, because everything my kids read is comics, but it’s not the kind of comics that I was working in. It’s graphic novels that are made for kids now. So you could see that things were kind of transitioning that way even then. But even so, it was a really interesting thing to do in my 20s. I’m glad I got out of it. Okay. Well, what was it? I mean, you kind of…
You did kind of talk about it in that, but what was it about marketing specifically that kind of drew your attention and made you go, okay, yeah, like this is the career change that I want to make? Yeah, so when I was working for EB Games, I was in touch with my customers. Every day I was talking to them, figuring out what they wanted, figuring out what they needed, and we were very successful. Like I said, we were the top store in the entire Midwest for years.
And when I left, were number two, and that was because the district manager store, or the regional manager store, excuse me, had decided they wanted to try to compete with us, and they kind of had an inside track. So I’ll take that, you know. But ⁓ we were very, very in touch with what the customers wanted, and the customers hated a lot of what we had to do in the store because it was inconvenient. I get these planograms. Planograms in retail, by the way, are these sheets you get that tell you how to set up your store. They tell you where to put your fixtures and where to hang things and…
where everything’s supposed to go. And the idea is that everybody’s supposed to kind of standardize, but when you’re a store that’s in strip malls and malls, ⁓ every store is shaped differently. So the planograms don’t really make a lot of sense and you have to adapt them. And they’re done that. Yeah, yeah. And the marketing department would be very insistent that we do things in a certain way. And I would just sit there and go, why are these people telling me what to do? They don’t seem to know anything about how we’re doing things. And they certainly don’t know how to serve the customers correctly because they’re not.
in the day to day. And I wanted to know, and I really sincerely wanted to know, how did they get to be in a position where they got to tell me what was right and wrong when they’re not doing what I’m doing every day? And so I thought, well, I’ll go and ask them if I can maybe get a job in the corporate marketing department. And they told me I needed a college degree. Well, I was a college dropout at that point. I had dropped out of my journalism program to go do these other things. And so I realized I need to go back to school and finish this off. And I’m to go and get a business degree this time in marketing. And then maybe people will take me seriously.
Well, while I was in that program, that was when I discovered marketing research, which is where you actually get to learn things. You get to know information and do research. And I found that I was actually really good at it with my journalistic skillset. So that’s what drew me both to marketing and then ultimately to marketing research. And then, of course, if you don’t already know, we actually work at a marketing research firm called RPG.
So you started here? 2008. OK. And you started as an intern, right? I started as an intern. So now you’re the president, of course. What was the timeline? How did that work out? So this is a story that I do not think it’s easy for anyone to repeat because I have a knack for, as with getting a job in the comic book world or as with getting that job at EV games, I have a knack for being in the right place at the right time.
And it’s always somebody gives me an opportunity and I do something with it. And in this case, what happened was I had to, as part of my program, they gave us an internship with a stipend and a tuition waiver. So was like getting paid to go to grad school. And I thought, okay, for an extra year and a half of my time to go get real experience before I start working in the industry would be really valuable. So I had interview at four different places. And three of them were,
corporate type places. And one of them was this little firm that only had a few employees. And I remember when I came in, ⁓ I met ⁓ the person who was ultimately going to be my supervisor, her name is Beth and she’s not here anymore. And then David Rich, who was the president. And I was just looking around and I said to them both, like, I want this to be the place that I work because this is my speed. I can do a lot for you guys. And ⁓ I think we would really enjoy working together.
There were three other people that were competing for that and they were ultimately, we were all going to ultimately get placed in one of those places. So the corporate ones, didn’t think I would fit in. In fact, I talked to one of the interns at one of the corporate offices and all they did was open envelopes and take out surveys and input them into a computer every single day. It didn’t sound like what I wanted to do. And another person, I just didn’t get along with the guy that was the hiring manager. We were not right for each other. So, you know, just that this was the place that I wanted to be. And as it turned out,
They were really looking for an intern who could do a lot more than a normal intern. They were small and they were scrappy and they needed someone that had skills. And I was a little bit older and more, more experienced than the other folks. So, um, I was the one that they wanted. So it worked out. But while I was here, the 2008 recession started and the 2008 recession went on for a couple of years in terms of its effects on, uh, agencies like us. And so we went from having multiple employees in the office. I was actually sharing an office with someone.
to me and David being the only ones that were left. And I had my own office, which none of the other interns did. But we also had empty office space because we didn’t have anybody to fill it. And so he asked me if I would stay on after I graduated in 2009 to help him rebuild the company. I planned to stay for a year. I really wanted to go get a big corporate job or something. And it just happened that I really started to like the work. And some of that was because we started working with the Oregon Procurement World, which we’ll talk about.
Some of it was because I just really liked the ability to be in control of my life and my schedule, which you can do at a small agency. You can’t do that at a large place. Well, I’m glad you stuck around because now I work here and I enjoy it too. So thanks. Thanks for sticking with We’re glad to have you. So we kind of touched on it already with lessons you learned from like your previous jobs. But if you had to like pinpoint
one lesson that you would think like, yes, this is probably the most valuable thing that I’ve taken with me, what would you say it would be? ⁓ There’s a lot of lessons that I’ve learned, some of them the hard way, some of them the easy way. But you know, one that I think I probably told you in the work we’ve done is you never know when you’re working with someone where they’re going to wind up and.
it’s always in your best interest to treat them as if they are the most important person that you’re ever dealing with. And here’s why. So a lot of times when you’re in an agency space, you’re working with people that are buying your services and they might be lower level people in a department or they might be like their, their department head might commission the research and then assign like a lower level person to manage it. And it’s really easy sometimes to look down on folks because they’re not big, they’re not important. They don’t have a title. They’re not part of the C-suite.
But I have found that if I give them great service, no matter what their title is, I just work hard for them, that it always benefits me. Because a lot of times those folks wind up getting promoted, or they go and they take other jobs, or maybe they go into the agency space and I wind up becoming colleague with them. But whatever the case may be, if I treat them right from the beginning, without regard for how important they are, what they can get me, it almost always does benefit me in the long run and benefits them too.
because we’re able to build a real working relationship and not just this kind of transactional type of relationship that I always want to avoid. And I’ll tell you, a number of our clients today ⁓ are people that were in those roles before. And I’ve even had people that were my students or who worked for us come back and hire us. And again, how we treated them then matters a lot in terms of their ability to give us work now because they trust us and they know what we stand for. So I think that’s probably one of the most important things I ever learned.
to this day, I if I ever make someone feel bad about the work that we’re doing or anything that I’m doing for them, I mean, I feel awful about it, first of all, but I wanna know so we can fix it because I value every single person that we work for or with. And then.
in your
bulky resume. You also have teaching on there. So you actually teach at SIUE. How exactly did you get into doing that? Because you teach marketing there, right? I teach marketing and marketing research. ⁓ talk about fun trajectories, because when I went back to SIUE in 2007, when I quit my job, so I quit EB Games and went to be a full-time student and my wife
was working to support me and by the way told me that I could not drop out this time. had to come home with straight A’s. So when I was there as a student, okay, first of all, I need to explain that growing up in the Metro East, SIUE was not a school anybody wanted to wind up at. It was kind of considered a, this is where you go if you can’t get in anywhere else. It’s a step above the community college, right? It is not that anymore. SIUE is a fine school and I will defend it because I love that place. But.
Back then, when I was growing up, I went to the University of Illinois, which is much more prestigious, right? So I thought, man, I’m going to SIUE. I’m not gonna take this place that seriously because nobody else does. Well, what I found was that attitude evaporated pretty quickly because there actually were some very good quality faculty there, some great quality students. ⁓ And as I went through the classes, and I very famously would stand up and challenge professors.
I got in a shouting match with one of them at one time, fact. Any of the students that were with me will remember that and probably be surprised that I then wound up getting a teaching job because the very class that I was asked to come teach is the one where I got a shouting match with a professor, which is qualitative research. He at the time also was a practitioner like me and they wanted to have a practitioner teaching that class because the students in our graduate program only get one chance to learn about qualitative research and it’s in that class and it’s like
At the time it was 10 weeks, now it’s seven weeks. ⁓ So you really need somebody that knows what they’re talking about. But I also got asked to teach the undergraduate marketing research class. And that was fun because ⁓ I was coming in as professional and teaching night class. the students, most of them, it was a required class. They had no interest in going into marketing research. And so they appreciated that I knew what I was talking about, but they really hated the class. Because it was a hard class and intensive. And it wasn’t by my design. That was the nature of the class.
⁓ I tried my best to make it fun and exciting, but you can only do so much. Even so, I did have at least one student come through and go to our graduate program for marketing research. So I had an effect on somebody. But yeah, I never expected that I could teach with a master’s degree. ⁓ I never saw it. They came to me because they knew about the quality of the work that I had done. I was very active in the AMA when I was a student. ⁓ I kept in touch with all the faculty and alumni stuff. ⁓
My wife works at SIUE now too. She’s an academic advisor in the School of Business. So she never planned to work there either. She got her MBA in 2017 and ⁓ never planned to become an employee there, but it’s just a place that’s had a gravity for us. And we do appreciate that it’s become such a big part of our lives. In fact, I was just there last night teaching ⁓ my current qualitative research class. Well, you mentioned AMA in that answer. So.
this will be a good segue to my next question. You are actively active in the local AMA chapter, the St. Louis chapter, and you do try to network with colleagues a lot. And it’s not something that’s easy for everyone. I know for me it would be, you know me, I’m not a very social person, so that would not be an easy task for me. Tell me why you
why you think it’s important and how you kind of get yourself in the mindset of being able to do that. Well, it was actually something that I had let go during the pandemic as a lot of people had because it was really hard to go to these virtual meetings and have any substantial conversations with people. And I used to go to AMA stuff before the pandemic, but honestly, I was just a blip on the radar there. I was a younger guy.
who was trying to sell research to people that were not really interested in buying it. And so I would just go and be frustrated hot. What happened was I met Lisa Richter. Now I knew Lisa Richter and she’s been one of our guests on the show. She’s another researcher here in town. She’s kind of nearing, she’s not ready to retire yet. I don’t know if Lisa will ever retire, but she’s kind of nearing that point where she needed to kind of work with other research agencies time to time. And one of the first things she said to me when we met was, Sean, you’re not networking.
And I said, okay, that’s fair, I’m not. And she immediately recommended that I go and talk to the AMA. And when we did, they had me speak at their conference last spring. And they also had me do a presentation at one of their meetings, which I believe you were at, right? At Maggiano’s where we did the focus group. So I started looking at that and going, you know, COVID’s over. I really don’t know people anymore. I have lost a lot of my professional contacts in St. Louis. A lot of them retired or moved or…
whatever, and aside from my students who I keep in touch with, I really just didn’t know anybody. So I started challenging myself to get out there and just meet people and talk to them and to talk less about myself and to listen more to what they were dealing with and doing. And I’m so glad I did that because a couple of things. First of all, it’s really easy, especially after a year like last year, to sit around and go, poor me, because it was a hard year last year. I mean, it was very, very hard.
And I don’t know very many people that had a good year last year, but those that did, best wishes because ⁓ it’s probably gonna hit you this year if it didn’t hit you last year. But fortunately this year seems to be better. ⁓ Talking to other people who are going through similar things was helpful, not just from a support point of view, but also just from a perspective point of view. Like, hey, we are all trying to find a pathway through this very difficult environment that we’re now in and we have to rely on each other.
And I think that’s a really important lesson to take away. Another thing though is I was not aware how much marketing had changed until I started talking to people. ⁓ Marketing, what I learned in school ⁓ back in 2007, 2008 in my marketing course, ⁓ almost all of it has been upended and replaced. And in fact, what I’m teaching in the classrooms now is so different from what I learned because digital marketing has transformed everything. ⁓
AI is transforming everything. There’s just all these other things that are happening now that are changing the roles we play. And some of it is really terrifying, I’ll be honest with you. But some of it is also really cool. And so our marketing community in St. Louis has changed too. we, the AMA is a pretty small group now. used to have hundreds of people show up. Now it’s probably the same, like a few dozen core people plus some other people that’ll come to every events every now and then. But.
The Missouri Digital Marketing Conference, think is what it’s called, is coming up in April, and it’ll have hundreds of people there. ⁓ And they’re all digital marketers, and they come from all over the place. So the digital marketing community has really grown while the AMA has shrunk. So that’s been another thing to understand is that there’s a lot of specialists out there now, but there aren’t a lot of generalists that do what traditional agency work looked like. You can look at Mad Men. You watch Mad Men, and you see the Sterling Cooper Draper Price Agency doing
you know, these big ad campaigns, those don’t exist anymore. Most organizations, most of them do their work internally or they hire a creative agency to help them with part of it. And maybe it’s point of purchase displays, maybe it’s branding, maybe it’s, you know, a certain media campaign they want to do or whatever, but they’re not agencies of record anymore. And the same is true for research. Like we used to be like a big subcontractor to marketing agencies. And now we work directly for the clients and the clients.
call us up and they treat us with the same level of respect and deference that they do anybody else that they hire. So it’s different and we have to be aware of that. You only really learn that through networking.
And then one other thing that I know we’ve discussed before that you have emphasized is very important is having a mentor. Who is your mentor and how did that person help you get where you are today? Well, the obvious answer would be David Rich, who again was the president before me and he’s the person I purchased this firm from. David and I had a lot of stories out on the road together.
David is twice by age. He is an elderly Jewish man. ⁓ Very, and I say that with a lot of affection because he’s very, very, his faith is very important to him. He’s an Orthodox Jewish, wears the yarmulke and ⁓ dresses in the way that you would expect. And I’d worked with other folks in the Jewish community and sometimes I felt a little bit like an outsider because I just didn’t really understand that world. David never made me feel like I was an outsider. He always made me feel welcome and asked me any questions and also in
you know, just participating in ⁓ his faith the way that he did without it being, I mean, you know, they’re not an evangelistic faith, Jews, you know, they are happy to ⁓ share what they do, but they’re not seeking to convert you. So ⁓ as it happened, I was on a path to being a vegetarian. So when David and I would travel, I would need to find vegetarian food. He would need to find kosher food. And that bonds you a little bit when you both realize that you have very limited options for dinner. Actually, one of my favorite times that we ever traveled was when we went to New York.
because there’s a ton of kosher restaurants there. And he was like kid in a candy store, just skipping down Fifth Avenue, looking for places to go and eat. It was great. Many other places we went, like Iowa or Minnesota or places like that, there might be one choice if there were any at all. So we learned, and hey, one of the things we learned too is a lot of kosher restaurants, they have interesting service, let’s just say, because a lot of times they’re run in service to a community, but they’re not really good at being restaurants.
So we learned some lessons from that too. But David and I, ⁓ I can’t say we always saw eye eye about every single thing because I often would bring a very young perspective and he would bring a very experienced perspective. But what we learned to do was we learned to talk out the issues that we had in terms of how we saw things and then try to find a common ground that really served our clients. And that’s valuable. Mentors should be good at not just telling you how to do things, but enabling you to push back on
and enabling you to share your ideas so that they can respond to them. that’s one thing that I would always say he’s really good at doing. I mean, when he started this business, he didn’t have a computer. And I talk about that all the time because I think it’s so funny. He didn’t get a computer until the 90s. And a lot of his work was traveling and just doing focus groups. He would do a focus group. He would type out his report on a typewriter or a computerized typewriter that had a word processor on it. And then he would turn it in. And then he’d go on to the next job. And we don’t do things that way anymore. ⁓
We had an intern, one of my first years, that recommended we move to Dropbox to store all of our files. Wonderful idea. We still use it to this day. ⁓ It was a ⁓ really, really great suggestion. If it had been suggested to David from that intern directly, he probably wouldn’t have even considered it. But because I had the youthful energy and the knowledge to say, yeah, this is a really good idea, and you’re really going to love this once we get on it, those things help. So a good mentor relationship does require the mentee to also contribute.
If you’re just a sponge and you just take whatever the person is giving you, but you don’t give back, you’re not going to get much out of it. But if it’s a two-way interaction where you’re really building and refining each other, it’s great. another mentor that we had mutually was a guy named Dean Cappell. And Dean was the president of Mid-America Transplant here in St. Louis, Oregon Procurement Organization. And Dean was really impressed with what we were doing. And he really wanted to help us. And when he retired, he came and consulted for us for a little while.
And honestly, one of the things that he helped us to do was to be less nervous because we get nervous when clients don’t return our calls or don’t answer our emails. We get nervous and he would call them up and ask him, what’s going on? And they would just usually say, we don’t want to tell Sean and David we’re not budgeted to work with them right now. That was it. It was just budget. It had nothing to do with us. They loved us. So that was a really fruitful thing to learning that we just need to trust ourselves and relax and believe in ourselves.
All those things you hear from Disney movies, right? But it really does mean something in this world. Okay. Well, I do have some more questions for you, but that will be more of a part two that we will post tomorrow of this episode being posted. So look out for that one. ⁓ I’m so excited you get to hear even more from Holly. Thanks for being on the podcast. And we were so happy to talk to you. And it was…
very interesting learning things about you that even I didn’t know in the two and a half years that we’ve known each other. All right, well, as I always say, we’ll see you next time. I had to do a little wave. just do it to have something.
Holly Wooten (37:53)
Well guys, that was part one. ⁓ Lots of interesting information about Sean, even some that I didn’t even know myself. And at this point I’ve known him for two and a half years, I think. So I hope you enjoyed it. Like I said at the top, that was part one. Part two will be going out tomorrow, so keep an eye out for that one.
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