My Podcast Recommendations For Marketing & Growth Leaders
Here are my most recommended podcasts for Marketing leaders, as you will see the majority aren’t marketing-specific podcasts, they are importantly more business-related, with that said they will help with honing your skills and improve how you communicate to business leaders and consider how you approach Marketing and pitching across the business.
Decoder
Good for company breakdowns, deep questions and CEO profiles
Rapid Response
Good for business responses and how they’ve reacted
Work Life
Good for exploring interesting topics and deeper conversation
Marketing Against The Grain
Good for marketing chatter. I am not always a big fan of all of their recommendations (as for very specific types of early-stage companies) but good for food for thought and opportunities to see if the ideas would fit for your business
Business Untitled
Good for understanding the people behind the business and great for ideas
Definitely check out the genius behind MSCHF and the art of going viral podcast
Masters Of Scale
Good breaking down companies or themes and considering how to apply to your own situation.
Land Of The Giants
Good for the inside look of companies and breaking down business and business leaders.
Marketing Freaks
Good for getting under the skin of the companies, the how and why behind campaigns and channels. As a past guest I can tell you how much effort they put into sourcing their guests and setting up their vodcast and podcasts.
Here is my cheatsheet from my appearance on Marketing Freaks
Or watch the short version ↓
The Uncensored CMO
Good for understanding the varying worlds of CMOs, their day to day and their journey to the leadership team
Discover Daily
If you are a brand lead and want to understand how you can create a highly-produced daily podcast Perplexity is a great example of how to do it and bring the brand to the front of the project.
Why Love Hate Anger LOL & Vanity Are The Key To Shareable Content
For years smart people have reverse-engineered how and why things are shared on the internet.
A handful of years ago people even got it to a point they could make something go viral…
In recent years with the shift away from a monoculture to many algorithmically driven subcultures, we have seen the way we share go from public by default to semi-private (in chat app groups) to one-to-one sharing.
From my background in crowdfunding and fundraising, there were always 4 main reasons why people share, it was simple,
Love 💜 - for the love of something or someone
Hate 🤛 - for the hate of something
Anger 😡 - something that causes anger
Vanity 💅 - something that made you look great aka vanity.
The one element we missed was LOL (😂), we have always shared laughable moments, whether that is by storytelling together, sharing a joke on email (yes this used to be a thing as did chain emails), share a clip of your favourite comedian before they were all close to being cancelled to someone banging their head or slipping over.
We have gone from sharing moments we saw → to moments others captured and then — sharing on group chats.
All of these parts of the formula are driven by you, your points of connection (nodes) and the connection and emotion it triggers. If it were a movie it would be inside out.
Love - I love this, you will love this, I love you (made me think of you), ‘this is love’ always works as it drives a deep feeling and connection.
Hate - I hate this, you will hate this, this will make you hate me, this is hatred always works as it drives a negative feeling and connects you both around something (for good and for bad)
Anger - this makes me angry, this will make you angry, look at this angry mob etc picks on what we can be driven by or are looking for
LOL - this is funny, this will make you laugh, this is funny do you remember this - all are centre points based on laughing together or sparking a memory
Vanity - look at what I did, look at what this person said about me, look at your post doing well - all is about making you or your friend/colleague feel good.
If you are building a Product or looking to build out product features, definitely consider how you leverage these 5 emotions to help make your product sticky and truly build features that gain shares with these 5 emotions front of your mind and the users mind.
I’ll leave you with the Pixar storytelling video that will help you understand storytelling and how to apply these to your work.
The Business Of Duolingo
Duolingo is that app that is given as case studies, its seen as the leading light in Growth, app growth and AB testing.
Duolingo did incredibly well on TikTok and is often the go-to example of how to leverage brand in the Marketing landscape.
They were deliberately random and arguably smart, however, don’t expect it this to be your copy-paste winning formula for your brand.
Many do not realise the business model and the economics behind the language app, with over 80% of users not or never paying for any features of the app and an ad model that only contributes to -10% of its revenues.
Here is a quick video with the Duolingo team talking about their app, their smart approach to push notifications (think mum guilt), its economics and how AI is going to be powering many tests and many more to come.
The Disney Dilemma Podcast - Land of the Giants
Its rare that I recommend more than one business podcast from one podcaster or network, with many being hit and miss or often they turn into case studies repackaged.
However, Land Of The Giants is one of the series of podcasts that is always worth listening to.
If you are a leader of a business, into the ops sides of companies or enjoy listening to how businesses have to balance cycles of hardship The Disney Dilemma is a brilliant listen.
It highlights why generational brands are important to us, passed down from parents and grandparents, recommended by our friends and why our kids and future generations love and will continue to love Disney. But behind the scenes it’s never easy, especially for the brand managers and highlighting why do the internal business leads have to tread so carefully and nurture the brand and not overly police it in today’s world.
I also highly recommend Ride of a lifetime by Bob Iger as a must read/listen for business leads.
Enjoy!
If you enjoyed this article, enjoy the following ↓
The Importance Of Audio In Your Marketing Mix
MSCHF CEO On How To Go Viral Podcast
Instagram Views Metrics
Social media metrics change, constantly, it can be the most hotly contested subject by creators, influencers and brands.
Instagram updated “creators” yesterday that they were shifting to views as their primary aka most important metric (the video below explains this).
Adam Mossari the Head of Instagram shared - ““Views” the primary metric for Reels, Stories, photos and carousels.”
He also clearly references the top new important metrics
Views (Adam Mossari rightly points out there can be multiple views per piece of content, so keep this top of mind)
Sends per reach (how many people are sending your content via DM)
Reach
Core Takeaways To Consider As A Creator, Influencer Or Brand:
Views as standardised metrics are smart for Instagram but may be a little misleading for creators, it will be moving creators and brands to create more compelling (most likely video) content that is built less for public engagement but created for “sends”
Views (count) are a critical metric on Threads too - highly engaged views will likely come next, and high-value views will also be considered by Instagram in the near future (who viewed, from where, how long or how many times)
Engagement will always be important, however, engagement is lowering across the board, reactions have dropped because we live in a constant flow of content (which is too much for most of us) - engagement in public and private via sends will be critical in working out away from watch time what is
Finsta’s (private friend accounts) and sinsta’s (meme-created accounts) have sent content via DM for a long time, this will likely see many more of these accounts created - a core internal Instagram metric
Instagram have openly talked about its creation problem, but many aren’t creating (pareto law aka the 80/20 law is likely at play here - 80% viewers, 20% creators) this is a way to see curation and potentially create playlists
Brands and creators - When creating content what you are creating, why you are creating this piece of content, who will be consuming and how it will prompt a share (in DM) - this will lead to smaller accounts with more influence and reach
Follower counts will likely drop, many don’t need to follow creators and brands anymore and rely on other signals to power your FYP. Inbox shares and any comments connected to shares will enable Instagram to add more juice into certain videos, creators and the content they create
Context of the share will be important, understanding why the content was shared, how it was viewed, the reaction and interaction around that content will be critical for Instagram to improve their product and beat out competitors like TikTok.
With an unique ability to improve Threads and potentially improve WhatsApp products from this learning.
My long-term view is Instagram is pushing users to create private groups (as this was naturally happening by users, even before the purchase of WhatsApp and Instagram - these are core reasons why Meta invested so heavily) and networks of sends.
Private becomes the default and the culture of these apps, an important however here is - Instagram can build their new private graph (working out who and how people are connected) to change content consumption habits away from one feed into an inbox of content curated by friends, family and creators (sorry brands it will be highly unlikely you are included in this).
Could 100 Gigs Be The Future For Artists?
Drake dropped 100 gigs late on Tuesday, dropping 100gb of content including three unreleased tracks and tens of videos and pictures.
Many artists are becoming disillusioned with the algorithmic filtering from social networks and a shift to entertainment-based feeds (thanks to TikTok’s re-engineering of the web).
This approach does not engage the causal followers and unless you are constantly following or have alerts switched on fans will miss any update from their artist of choice.
From an artist's POV: Why amass millions of followers and be restricted by the platform?
Go back straight to the fans…especially the superfans…
The Superfan Flywheel ↑ How the superfans increase reach and sales for their favourite influencers, celebrities and creators
What Drake (& his team) have done is smart, by offering a glimpse beyond the Instagram feed, releasing songs directly for free downloads is removing the friction of these platforms enabling to see where fans are based, what songs are downloaded and streamed, which videos and images are downloaded (for free) and what platforms are driving traffic and engagement with fans.
Although the popular platforms (Spotify, Instagram etc) offer a limited number of these features, it disconnects them from the fans and limits their chances to connect.
In the near future I suspect many artists with large teams will take an approach to this, likely pushing for mobile numbers to send important updates to (like a 1-2-1 service) and looking to sign up superfans with emails (to send newsletters, exclusives and website updates to).
Is this the future not exactly industry-wide but it does offer an opportunity for artists to move away from social platforms and reward their fans with great behind the scenes view and bonus tracks that could be working harder for them.
This is how the superfan ecosystem works and how smart artists like Drake can leverage this new model to make money and connect with their fans at a much deeper level
Update 10/08/2024: The delayed release of the tracks onto Soundcloud and other streaming sites also shows how smart they have been looking at the data and then releasing to make money via streaming. Well played Drake and the OVO team.
Hype File, Swipe File, Hire File
You might have heard of different files, most commonly the swipe file, something you’re inspired by and will use as inspiration in work or play. Think of a private board for things to use in the future.
Something I recommend most is a hype file:
Save screenshots where people have given you compliments
Sent you nice feedback on work,
orWhen friends have just said thanks, something nice or say you have gone over and above etc.
My hype file is pinned in my Apple notes and is great when you’re having a crappy day or need a kickstart when having a low point. I split mine out into work hype, into home hype and friends hype.
A spin on the hype file is called a brag document when you have had great feedback, when they’ve got great coverage (for you, your work etc) about them or your product etc.
Hire File
When I was in-house and developing my department (think of org design with connected profiles) I would create a Hire file.
It is a notes file of the areas we were not as strong in and is not just a list of roles but a file full of examples of very strong profiles from LinkedIn that would be great additions to my department. Hire files are more than just skills but are a well-rounded profile that would be a great hire for these roles or roles to craft in the near future.
I would look at my hire file and see profiles of people on LinkedIn and craft job specs around their style of profile and on a couple of occasions they actually applied for the role and were standout candidates.
In your hire file don’t be afraid to save LinkedIn profiles or export to PDF and save in your hire file and reach out to these profiles, speak to them and say what you are looking to do and the timeline, often they will get back in touch closer to the time of hiring or you can keep them as warm leads.
These are all recommendations I make to my coaching clients, especially for CEOs, CPOs and CMOs.
If you enjoyed this article, enjoy the following ↓
Looking for something specific? Search below
Must Reads Drop 0724
This wee I brought back my must reads newsletter from a seven month sabbatical. I now call the newsletter a drop, it will likely be monthly, a little more like a mixtape was than a weekly newsletter.
Why The Sabbatical? We are in the biggest content tsunami we have ever been, constantly bombarded by content, whether thats video, audio, web or app based content and to be honest it is hard to cut through, especially in an email newsletter.
The Backstory: For nearly ten years every week without fail I sent out Must Reads, firstly as an internal newsletter and then once a handful of people asked me I opened it up and broaden it out further.
Why Bring Back Now: I have been writing daily on this blog, I wanted to get back into the flow of content creation and curation and then see how it felt to write it. I actually have 3 drafts that I never sent as it didn’t quite feel right or land well enough when I sent to myself.
So rather than copying and pasting it, here are the 5 most popular stories and my Netflix deepdive:
Most popular top down
BNPL to attempt to replace credit cards (what could go wrong)
Netflix 80 games release (to leverage IP and become gaming relevant)
Charli XCX summer of brat taking over (if you’re in Marketing or Growth dive deep into this music and cultural push)
Netflix Deeper Dive
Netflix Expansion Issue: Gaming is Netflix’s newest approach to capturing and owning your time and attention, the issue for Netflix it’s costing the consumer more money (away from ad tiers) and their bet isn’t paying off for now. Research is showing it’s only one game that is remotely popular. The same happened with other brands, but will this large investment be worth the added pain and expense for the consumer I highly doubt it in the short to mid-term.
Netflix's Game Portfolio is Dominated by a Single Game
Netflix is using the classic dominant media company playbook, leverage your own IP and create more media and games around it, even suggesting 80 games based on their IP. They attempted this already with podcasts but maybe this is the way to win in gaming and owning more of your time on multiple devices. LinkedIn (yes LinkedIn), YouTube and Netflix are all competing to be your canonical media company whether that’s through native content, entertainment series or games.
Below is a quote from Netflix’s shareholder letter about the importance of advertising to Netflix moving forward, with the pricing packages going up to be more profitable; the quality of its programming and cultural relevance of programmes are going to be critical for their success and continuing to open our wallets each month.
“Ads fulfil two important strategic priorities for Netflix: first they enable us to offer lower prices to consumers; and second, they create an additional revenue and profit stream for the business.”
One More Question Podcast
This is my One More Question Podcast appearance, Ross and I broke down the modern-day Marketing world, what the business impact of Marketing is really and how the creator space is leading the way for brands to improve their products and the connection with their customers.
So Why Listen?
Why being a brand and standing out is an active business decision
Why Performance Marketing vs Brand Marketing isn’t versus it is and always has to be and - if it’s not you are building a brand ready to disappear
Grasp the importance of your utility level as a company and develop this out within your messaging and growth action plan
Understand that the delivery company you choose to deliver your customer orders is a reflection on your company and your brand, your first experience will be your last if your delivery is impacted
Why my coach+ product is popular and why coaching is critically important to Marketing and Growth team successes
Nostalgia is always going to be essential in Marketing but many overlook it or don’t see the power of the archive
Understand the power of generational brands
Why being a brand not a bland is critical in winning your customers
Learn why brands can go hyper-personalised to beat out competition (a handwritten thank you note will scale for you to win and stand out)
“Brand” is a tribe and tribal - it is critical to understand when to build a tribe or ask customers to join your tribe
Be bold to win - that has to be a business decision
Why community brands could be the next big
Or listen on your podcast player of choice ↓
Chat Apps New Fight Your Love & Attention
For the last couple of decades I have been working with brands to think about the customer and potential customers more than just transactions, I have pushed for brands to become community led businesses (I have embedded my recent keynote deck below).
WeChat (1.35 billion MAUs) and Telegram (+900m MAU’s) have led the way for chat apps (instant messengers) to create community and enable brands, KOLs and influencers to engage with their audience/community.
Discord, Slack and Teams have become professional alternatives to community with some boasting thousands of paid subscribers.
WhatsApp has slowly but surely become an option for brands to cut through the algorithmic filtering of social networks and email and engage with broadcast and polling options.
What has struck me is the reach off the channels within WhatsApp, here is an example from my team Arsenal (football club) official channel with over 5m subscribers.
What - Arsenal’s official channel with a poll
Why - Brand new kit launch with adidas
How - Offering a poll to then post an update with their favourite player
Arsenal then shared the most popular player Bukayo Saka as voted by fans.
With over 4700 reactions (as time of writing this) and counting it shows how engaged football fans and communities could be.
The bigger question for brands to answer is could WhatsApp be a way to stand out for free until they flip the monetisation switch and turn it into another pay to play platform?
My take: If I was in a growth or marketing leadership role (again) with a company today and our brand was consumed weekly and a loved brand I would be pushing my team to test the channel and offer audio, behind the scenes looks and push for engagement from my most loved customers and superfans.
Maybe worth the extra few minutes every few days for your social team to dive into…
HVE - High Value Employee(s)
Why High Value Employees (HVE) Need To Be Identified, Supported & Have Individual Plans Of Action
Imagine this ↓
Your best-performing member of the department comes to you and suggests they are unhappy and have been applying for external roles.
Your first thought was likely FFS, your second was to try and talk to them and hopefully listen to their points.
Your next action is likely to convince them to stay…
If this comes as a shock, there are likely three things that it could be or that are happening:
You are busy and missing the signs from this employee
The subculture or company culture has shifted and the employee doesn’t feel connected
orThe company is not moving in a direction that connects with said employees.
Most department leads do not identify who is your HVE (your high value employee(s)). They have an idea but do not actively treat the identified employee as such. They definitely do not have a plan of action for these individuals.
Yes, you can identify them and treat them well and they will look to progress their career elsewhere but many do not actively check-in, you miss their signals from their performance dropping, being continually frustrated in meetings and hearing what they are saying from their silence, you or they actively miss 1-2-1’s,
In some organisations, they train department leads and executive teams to identify and actively discuss key person risk - when someone is that important it creates a business risk for them to become unhappy and leave the business. If you were to take a step back, would your HVE be a key person to leave the business and create a risk to the business?
Do you have a handful of HVE’s or a high-value employee who you need to connect with and work through how they like to work, how you could support them further or know when to get out of their way?
A coachable moment for the week ahead is to review your team (try not to make it a 9-box exercise), identify your HVE and work out a plan of action for them or the HVE’s.
Remember: It is also great to support them in moving on, often high value employees need to leave and it’s ok as their line manager to support them in reshuffling your org and creating the most effective org design.
If you enjoyed this post why not read more of my blog posts here, if you are interested in more actionable coaching blog content read here
Growth Is: Always Be Auditing, Always Be Marketing
I have a motto, Its “always be auditing, always be Marketing”, it is simple, for me it is this what modern day growth is -
Auditing what is working, what isn’t working and what can be optimised (aka keep, kill, cure)
Marketing is an always-on strategic department, that needs to learn from its auditing and market accordingly.
These core components allow you to be smarter at Growth and roll out the best Growth work streams, in and outside of Product feature improvements, optimisations and tests.
It was my birthday recently and I received a great personalised card from my better half.
Moonpig has a smart way of using its packaging to market to the receiver to send a thank you card, you scan the QR code and it takes you to the thank you card section. Why is this smart Growth? It’s
Quick
Easy
Low cost
Trackable
Scaleable
One tweak I would have made (if possible would be) would be to match it to the sender and provide a chance to say thanks in one or two clicks.
QR Code taking you to the Thank You cards on site
I implemented QR codes (here’s my QR code case study) to track the impact of offline to online - it was personal to every user, it enabled us to track the impact of offline promos and every user sharing the code and provided a scalable way to grow our brand foorprint by our users.
My Favourite Growth Video How To Start A Movement
I have a Google slides deck I share with all of my clients, it’s a long playlist of videos on Growth, not just business growth but includes categories that are:
Life
Product
Marketing
The Future
The deck is to how frame growth differently, it’s how to see growth and business as many different parts, many different biases and many different disciplines coming together. To understand behaviour, we must open up, see how movements are made, appreciate different perspectives, and evolve.
The (below) video is from a classic TED talk called “How To Start A Movement”, in 5 minutes this video demonstrates how human behaviour and human (cognitive) biases can be made or broken in a few moments, it shows you how to stand out, be different, embrace change and go with the energy.
Next time you worry about doing something different or wanting to stand out, remember it takes one small step/dance to be a leader!
Is It Time To Dust Off RIP To The CMO Deck & Update For 2024?
Why Chief Growth Officers Are In Demand & Why The CMO Role Has Lost Some Of Its Influence
Recently there has been discussion around the CMO role and how the CGO role is what Marketing leaders do. This is inside the CMO community and at board and founder level.
Interestingly, this was not what I found back in 2019 when I keynoted a Marketing conference with RIP To The CMO and it is still very different to what most CMO roles are and what their outputs are.
Having held both the CMO CGO titles, coached both (And Product leaders) and advised company leaders and founders on what to hire for the roles are different, in the best CGOs - they understand Product, they blend the best of both worlds (Marketing & Product) and understand how to get the most out of the Product, improve the Product features (some even write the tickets) and get the most out of development teams and communicate this across the business.
The below deck is a quick breakdown of speaking to 20+ CMOs across 2019 and exploring how the role was and still is being disrupted, how the CMO will continue to be rebranded and what the future struggles might be if the CMO struggles to influence and own the traditional 4c’s and 4p’s.
The question now is 🤔 - Do I need to update for 2024? I think I might just have to