CalacanisCast Beta #10 & Across the Sound #69

Jason: Ok Everybody. Welcome to a very special first video episode of Calacanis Cast Beta. Yes we’re still in beta. This is a joint podcast with of course, Mr. Joseph Jaffe sitting next to me. As you know, The “Jaffe Juice” is the author of such amazing books such as The 30 Second Spot and Guns, Germs, and Steel. He also did Jurassic Park and Purple Cow, Built to Last... many, many books! Ahh... and ahh of course he is the host of his own podcast Across the Sound which this is going to also be played on so this is a joint podcast the way podcasters do efficient stuff…Lazy podcasters doing two podcasts at once.

So I’m going to hand it over to Joseph. He’s going to do the introduction to his show so you get to have two introductions and two sets of commercials. Everybody knows that the CalacanisCast Beta is sponsored by Podtech.net, Podtech.net, I love you podtech.net for sponsoring my show. Of course everybody knows that their sponsorship goes to the Bay Ridge Preparatory Opportunity Fund. And that’s a donation that they made of fifty thousand dollars for the year for me to do fifty shows and that’s gonna help some kids go to um…private school who were formally in public school real disadvantaged kids. So, it’s a really great thing. Also GoDaddy, GoDaddy; everybody loves GoDaddy! That’s the registrar I use and when you use GoDaddy they’re also making a donation to the Bay Ridge Prep Opportunity Fund and you go there right now, because you’re a pal of Jason’s. We’re going to give you a special code. You give your special code when you checkout and you buy your domain name you type in ‘Jason1’ J-A-S-O-N 1 and they’re going to give you ten percent off your purchase or something like that. It’s a really good deal. You need to buy domain names anyway, Joseph Jaffe loves GoDaddy.com correct?

Joseph Jaffe: Bob Parsons is brilliant. As far as their commercials are concerned we can talk about that later. So, I also share the same vision which is the ability to send kids to beautiful private schools in, but I guess my difference is or my different association is that I’d like to send my kids to private schools. So, right now Across The Sound is looking for a sponsor so if Podtech and GoDaddy would like to sponsor Across The Sound please help send my kids to college…and the best of colleges because, and the best of colleges Ivy League! Ivy League because you know at the end of the day one buck and seven cents for one copy of Live After will…you know what? It’s taking too long! I don’t want these kids to be 35 years old and still wondering whether or not they’re going to get into Wharton or Harvard or Princeton or something like that.

Well, welcome to a very special episode – a video podcast episode of Across the Sound. The new marking podcast, this is episode 69 Beta as well, I like the idea of Beta. And Jason knows I’m sure that he will never----

Jason: My podcast will be in beta forever!

Joseph: Yes, well that’s what I was going to say you’ll never ... you’re taking the Google route you’ll never get out of beta.

Umm…I am thrilled to be here with of course none other than Jason Calacanis who is himself a presenter of the Calacani…cala... cala… CalacanisCast. I can’t quite get it right! And we’re gonna have a little bit of fun. I’ve never done a video podcast before so as you can see over here - I don’t know if you can zoom in or something like that - but this is a red beard. And for those of you wondering where the hell the growth is coming from this is what I call dieting-by-community! I’ve told my wife that I’m not going to shave this beard until I lose 24 pounds. So I’m going to do a little bit of a test here which is you can see me in my glorious fat state and now it’s, you know, let it all hang out because until I lose the weight this beard ain't gonna be shaven and if I don’t lose the weight I’m going to look like a giant dick, as well, by coming out to you guys and saying I’m gonna do this. So…that’s my little sponsored kind of link. Oh, by the way, one other thing….Across the Sound is being brought to you by Sequoia Capital... (laughing)

No - I’m joking.

Jason: Yeah…we’re now investors. (laughing)

You’re basically going to look like Gandalf by the time this is through. Losing 24 pounds is gonna take six months. Yeah exactly, exactly. This is the shaming yourself to lose weight concept!

So, I guess we should use the format since we have one microphone. We each ask each other a question or something like that. So, I guess the question for you is… My question for you is you’re launching a new agency called Crayon… and it in Second Life and you’re doing all these sort of cutting edge marketing ideas but how much of this is really different than what ad agencies are doing? Because some ad agencies are doing stuff for YouTube now and other stuff, so what is the premise… what is the reason that you’re starting a new marketing agency?

Joseph: Well, you basically got one out of the three things right there 'cuz we’re not an agency, and we’re not about Second Life but our name is Crayon…

(laughing)

Joseph: You know what the thing is we… we’re playing around with stuff right now. I’ve called Crayon a mashup. I’ve called Crayon a shape-shifter. I’ve called Crayon a company just like some people just call not consumers or customers but human beings or citizens.

I believe that Crayon will be the best of five worlds…agency, consulting, advisory, thought leadership, and education. And ultimately Crayon exists for many reasons. One is to simply help marketers makes sense of the madness… the chaos which to us doesn’t look like chaos. To us it looks like a beautiful, beautiful, beautiful montage or collage of opportunities. Umm…I think that the Second Life thing by the way…First of all I love the fact that we have launched in Second Life because here it demonstrates just like using marketing to prove your marketing which is a little thing that I do to promote my book where I offered free books in exchange for reviews with no strings attached. I love that fact that we walk our talk! And I think maybe, Jason, that’s the difference. We walk our talk but we don’t even just walk our talk…you know, it’s not like new marketing can talk a big game. It’s not even that we walk our talk. We are a new marketing! You listening to this or watching us right now YOU are a new marketing. We are pioneers. We make this stuff up as we go along. Which is not to say that we don’t know what we are doing… we know exactly what we are doing. We’re going out there and we are by default pioneers just because there is no precedent. That’s one of the lessons that I want marketers to learn. If you want to be a leader and ever single one of you along with the beautiful oil painting or portrait of your founder from 2000 years ago your mission statement says that you are the leaders to be leaders in. Your brands are leaders. Leadership is not just market share. Leadership is a mentality... is a mindset. And if you want to be a leader well guess what? There is no one in front of you. That means there’s no research. There’s no data. There’s no precedent. You’ve got to follow your gut. You’ve got to follow your heart. You’ve got to follow and use your god-given common sense and brain and make the right decisions. So I think Crayon is a company that ultimately that exists… it says on my iPod ‘make a difference, change the world.” We want to make the world a better place. We don’t want marketing to be a swear word anymore. We don’t want advertising to be scorned or just you know, literally, we don’t want the stain anymore from media and advertising branding because they’ve become jokes in a sense.

So that’s what we’re kind of going out to do and we’re gonna make up, as I said, stuff as we’re going along and have a lot of fun as well

Jason: Ahh, so you brought up sort of like; marketing not being a bad word anymore. It seems like there’s umm… blogging and podcasting and what I’ll just put under the umbrella ‘authentic media’ ---people talking with real voices about you know, real products, real issues, their lives. It seems to have really sort of ankled marketing. Right? It seems to have been this like truth serum for marketing and now marketers are trying to figure out how do I live in this authentic world and a lot of them do really stupid things like create fake blogs and have ghostwriters doing it and they fall on their face or they try to game systems and they get caught like editing their Wikipedia page, editing their competitors Wikipedia page or you know, putting fake stuff on message boards or Amazon reviews. So it seems that traditional marketers have been making mistakes, you know, with regards to this stuff. And then, you know, you have people on top of that creating platforms to enable people to do evil stuff…like…people would do splogs or Pay Per Post or let’s try to do covert marketing.

There’s many examples of people trying to say ok let’s take this beautiful city that blogging is and like pissing in the well spoil it for everybody and capitalize on the authenticity that was built over years.

Is there really a place for marketing anymore because it just seems like you know marketing was so traditionally like Seth Godin says: “All marketers are liars”.

It seems like so much of marketing was based on type and spin and PR and was so unrealistic and PR people get paid to present their companies as incredible companies when in fact if you check the PR person at the bar later they’ll be like ‘yeah, their paying us ten thousand dollars a month to promote their company but it really is garbage and you know I would much rather represent somebody else’.

Is there a place for marketers in this new authentic world and what would your advice be to them? Or what is your advice to them when they show up?

Joseph: Look it’s a great point. And …let’s take a step back for a second.

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