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.

Transcript

So marketing has basically been a profession where we lie chronically and pathologically for a living. The reason we lie is very simple because most of the time we’re dealing with crap. We’re dealing with deficient products. We’re dealing with products that have weaknesses. During most of my advertising career I’ve worked brands and companies that have huge, huge issues. And instead of addressing those issues and dealing with them, we cloud them and we try in a way to use misdirection and as I said hyperbole and exaggeration, and lies to mask the deficiencies. One of the things that we’re trying to do with Crayon, and listen I don’t want, you know too much bravado here because quite frankly we’re a startup and we’ll take it… we’ll take the business any way we can get it but we’d like to be a company that refuses business of or from companies that we do not believe in. OR, if we accept that business we want to be able to tinker with and fix the product and fix what is wrong with it. Instead of lying about it, we want to be able to tell the truth. So do I think marketing is part of this opportunity? Damn straight!

Here’s the other problem Jason is that companies like Pay Per Click, etc…word of mouth which is the most…we all know it…It is the most organic, natural, credible, influential form of ultimately influencing a potential purchase and conversion.

So what we have done now is we’ve tried to formalize it. We’ve tried to go ahead and productize it. We’ve tried to scale it and in doing so we are bastardizing it and manipulating it as well. So you got word of mouth, you’ve got buzz, you’ve got conversation, companies like Pay Per Post, for example, they’re just businesses and businessmen and women that are out there saying how do we create processes and technology that scales it and automates it and takes out the human element? So - and I’m not defending it at all - I’m saying that at the end of the day for marketing to exist and have a place, and it does have a place, we cant forget with authenticity comes humanity as well and humanity doesn’t just mean humans involved, it means life, it means being in touch ultimately and really just connecting with what is real and not believing our own shit and not believing our own lies.

Joseph: I just want to say one thing: I’ll give you a good example, Dove’s campaign for real beauty is an example of marketing that has a place and a purpose.

Yeah, well basically the whole Dove campaign for real beauty and it is deep and is attached to charities and there is a conversational element when people can submit stories. But at the end of the day what did they do? What did Dove do? It created billboards and print ads yes very traditional advertising with women that were flawed. In other words: real. Women that weren’t exactly supermodels…

Joseph: Yeah as in flawed. As in as in supermodels like Jason and myself!

In a way, you know, people that didn’t have the best skin. People that maybe weren’t, you know supermodels – they were a little bit overweight, they were maybe were shorter or taller than the rest. They were a little bit older. They hadn’t been retouched and now they’ve come out with an unbelievable piece of video called ‘Evolution’ that actually shows you how much manipulation is taking place with someone who is very average looking is literally made, comes out… it’s almost bizarre, comes out like beyond supermodel. And it just shows you all that is wrong not just about that industry, the health and beauty industry, but about marketing as well. So they’ve actually come out -and I don’t think whether they knew it or not and whether they intended to or not - They have become not just part of the conversation but they’ve actually seeded the conversation. They’ve actually demonstrated how a brand can stand for something that is real and authentic and I will be very curious to see whether they…

It’s like eating from the tree of knowledge in the Garden of Eden. You know whether you like it or not you ain’t gong back to running around frolicking naked anymore! You know - it’s time to leave. It’s time to grow up.

Jason: It’s really interesting you know when you bring up that Dove campaign. It’s almost like that they really - either stumbled upon, like you said, or maybe somebody’s really brilliant – but, they really brought authenticity to beauty and they stripped down what beauty is and said “OK, let’s look at exactly what we’re saying as a society what beauty is?” OK it’s making all these people up to a point of uncertainty. And let’s look at real beauty and hey that looks pretty beautiful too. It’s almost like, you know I told people the analogy of… you know you have someone like Britney Spears or something like that or really processed music and then somebody comes out with just a guitar on stage and , you know like Dylan pops out on stage and plays and you know ok yeah his voice isn’t perfect and he misses a couple of chords and he changes the lyrics but…that’s sort of what’s endearing about it …a sort of authenticity that I look at this movement as sort of the acoustic movement of marketing.

JJ: Sort of unplugged marketing

Jason: It’s unplugged marketing! Yeah like let’s just let’s strip away all the makeup, the… I’m buying that domain name before I publish. ‘Marketing unplugged?”

JJ: By the time you get to registering somebody has already registered---

Jason: Would anybody…If anybody wants me to write a book right now here’s the deal. Somebody give me a hundred thousand dollars for my scholarship fund and that will help put two kids in school. I will write a book! OK? All proceeds go to this.

JJ: Give me fifty thousand and I’ll…

Jason: Right! And you’ll send your kids to school.

Jason: But the other thing is…you mentioned Pay Per Post again and you talked about Buzz Marketing. And I always hated this whole genre of buzz marketing and I always took sort of exception to it because like you said…add something organic and natural and beautiful when buzz spreads. And to try to make it happen through strategy in an inauthentic and manipulated way, I sort of look at it as between the difference between true love - you know when you really fall in love with somebody or something, a vacation spot or a restaurant or a beautiful woman or a beautiful man as the case may be - and then you try to make them fall in love in a sort of serum or manipulative way it actually becomes prostitution. And I look at Pay Per Post and it’s almost like they took love and the Buzz people they took love and they made it into this prostitution.

Joseph: Celebrities are the ultimate prostitutes. Aren’t they? They are the ultimate whores because they go and they pimp all these products that they don’t necessarily believe in just because the price is right. And on the flip side you’ve got brands I mean look at all the trouble that GAP is in right now. GAP is in trouble because they don’t stand for anything, they stand for absolute squat! That brand, they forgot, if the brand ever stood for something they forgot and so did consumers. All they did was basically help Joss Stone, and Jessica Parker and Lenny Kravitz, and, and who else? And Steven Tyler, and etc etc continue to sell records and …not that anyone buys those anymore either. But the fact is, you’ve got this …this almost this ….this recognition in a sense, or concession that we as marketers or brands have lost touch not just with our consumers but with reality as well. I won’t----

Jason: so, it’s not about the clothes anymore? Is that what you’re saying? They just basically made it about some pop stars and forgot about the clothes?

Joseph: Well, you know, celebrity endorsement is borrowed interest. Say you’ve got, you know Buick uses Tiger Woods or you know maybe TAG Heuer uses Tiger Woods…There’s some good examples and there’s some bad examples. Nike has done an unbelievable job in terms of how they have leveraged the Tiger Woods connection. Because if anyone has ever epitomized Just Doing It I think it’s Tiger Woods. He just…he just does it! I don’t know how but he does. But…but then you look at Buick. Just because Tiger Woods drives a car which he would never drive in a million years, do you think I’m gonna go and buy it? So the problem with celebrities is it is, it is complete borrowed interest but it also demonstrates an emptiness that the brand cannot stand on its own two feet. I want to say one other thing as well which is I think one of the biggest problems which is that marketers and agencies are making right now is they have lived in an ivory tower aloof and detached for too long. And what they’re doing now is they’re going from one extreme to the complete opposite extreme. They’ve given up all power all control which is completely not the answer either. The answer is equilibrium and balance and partnership. So even though we talk about organic and natural and, you know, authenticity…I think authenticity above all… transparency, there are ways to meet in the middle I guess. We can still be storytellers I guess. We can still go out and create beautiful pieces of art and cultural seeds in a way and allow people to buy into a dream without being liars.

I mean, ??? did this great campaign with the balls and etc rolling down the streets of San Francisco with the paint, etc . We can still buy into a promise as long as that promise is consistent, as long as that promise is full and not empty and not a fake or a promise or a lie. So, I still think the point is let’s meet in the middle and stop darting around from extreme to extreme because that’s where the clueless-ness and where just he complete idiocy occurs.

Jason: So it’s a conversation - So all things come back to the Clue Train Manifesto at the end of the day.

So let’s segue into podcasting and blogging and stuff like that. You, I guess were a blogger… You started you blog a couple of years ago, maybe two or three years ago, I’m trying to remember… and you started podcasting a year ago or so. What, what do you think the difference is between podcasting and blogging is? Which do you prefer? And what do you get a better reaction from?

Joseph: Alright then and I’ll ask you the same question then I guess as well. And it’s interesting I guess because we’re talking about it. Jason was just saying that he just launched a comment line or opened up a comment line where he got 17 calls in like the first day or first week or whatever the case may be. Now, I simply use my ??? interface before and now I’m healthy and he’s at the opposite end of the extreme where he’s got seventeen and trying to figure out how the hell am I gonna edit these and audit them and integrate them and it’s like be careful what you wish for.

But it’s interesting because Jason obviously he hit the ground running whereas I, in a way, both have the podcast from literally zero base. I guess, I love podcasting a lot more. I feel a lot more excitement about podcasting than I do about blogging which is not to diminish blogging. It’s just, you know, selfishly, I’m on the crest of the, in fact I’m not even on the crest of the podcasting wave. The wave hasn’t even peaked yet! It is still completely under utilized which is why I am trying to, not challenge, but call out to people like Adam Curry, and maybe you Jason, to start the Podcasting Advertising Bureau - the PAB. Because, right now, I mean right now we’ve got this nascent medium. I don’t even think it’s fair to call it a medium but it’s certainly nascent. And it’s not getting the respect and the treatment and the incredible follow through and investment that it deserves because it’s just this incredible, rich environment and it is truly conversational. Now…now I love blogging. I mean Jaffe Juice is terrific. I feel very, very close to it. It’s very special but… I prefer, you can tell, I prefer to talk. I prefer that you can hear my passion! You can hear my intonation, the tonality of my voice. Now, you’re actually seeing me in the flesh and I realize that you probably won’t eat for three days after seeing me in the flesh.

I’m telling you. If I took my shirt off trust me you would lose a lot of weight!

Jason: This is not the ??? show.

Joseph: Yeah, exactly, keep your shirt on. Exactly!

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