The Similarities & Differences in Digital Marketing Between 1999 & Now With Adam Brown

Hey guys, we're here for episode five of the e-commerce opportunity. I've got Adam on. Adam, what's up, brother? What's up, man? Thanks for having me. Yeah, how are you? I am great. Thanks for asking. It's almost the end of the day here. You're on the West Coast, right? Yep. So for me, it's about 1 p.m. For you, it's almost end of day. That's right. End of the day, end of the week. Awesome. Well, I'm pumped for you to be here. I know we actually got connected. I think you've been on my email list for a bit and you reached out. I did some research on you and I'm actually fascinated by your background. Do you mind sharing a little bit about what you're working on right now? Yes. So I'm a little bit of a fanboy of yours. You saw my post on LinkedIn today and I think my team has just followed your company and you and I just heard about you for a while. So that's why I reached out to you and I'm glad in very short order. As most winners I have found, you answered quickly. Next thing you know, here we are. And I think that's a sign that you're a player as I expected, which is great. Right now, I'm working on building Circle Media. Our original thesis was outsourced social media management. Most brands need a social media manager. It's impossible to do it internally on your own. It's a lot of different disciplines, very hard to figure that out. So we provided an outsourced solution, very closely priced to an internal solution and heavy, heavy, heavy CPG beverage and spirits. We don't really do any other categories now and I'm just head down building this thing. I really think 2020, despite the carnage in the world, was a really good year for us and really gave a big stamp of approval for what we're working on. So now I just want to like double, triple down on it and scale it. Amazing. And we'll talk about this in a little bit, but just to clarify. So when you say social, you're talking about primarily like organic social kind of owning a brand's content versus paid social. Is that correct? Yeah, yes and no. So yes, period. No, in the sense that the way we look at it is like every brand needs a rock star social media manager. That social media manager needs to be dangerous in content, photos, videos, and graphics. So we create content for all of our clients, copy, planning, community management. So all the things you would typically think is like outgoing messaging and comms. And we also think influencers, brand collaboration. So growth, potential for reach and awareness. Paid social. We manage some paid social for every one of our brands. We have like 38 clients on retainer. So we're managing boosted posts, targeted posts, a lot of retail velocity support, and a little bit of e-commerce. Once a brand starts to like into maybe like 10k or more in monthly spend on paid social, we'll usually bring in a partner. We have a bunch of partners that we like in the space that we think are better suited to be like true paid social assassins. Because I think it's like you're going from need of social media manager, which we think is mission critical. And now almost like a secondary role, which is like e-commerce lead or like paid acquisition specialist. And once you get to that place, we like to bring somebody else to fill that second hire, so to speak. Does that make sense? Absolutely. Yeah. Appreciate that context. So by the way, I know I'm telling you before, I couldn't believe your age. You look much younger. So for those watching, you'll see, you wouldn't guess that Adam has as much experience as he has. He's actually been in the space since about the late 90s, kind of early 2000s. And for those listening, you'll just hear his voice so you won't know otherwise. Can we talk about like what's changed since you got in around like 1999? What did digital marketing look like back then? What are some of the similarities between then and now? And what are some of the biggest differences? We could talk about that one for a while. Yes, I graduated college in 99 and that was the dot-com boom. So if you didn't live it, you wouldn't know it. But it was a crazy time. I live in New York. I graduated school, came to New York, and there was a zillion companies. They were all worth a gazillion dollars. There were people getting jobs everywhere. Everyone was spending money. So it was a really fun time as a young person graduating from school. I was working in sales and we represented our 24-7 media. We basically sold the advertising for 5,000 websites. So websites would come to us and instead of like having a sales team, we would sell the ad placements, which was like banner ads and like widgets and like little things on their website, which, believe it or not, killed it. Like they actually worked. Like people would go and like 30% would click on this banner and like go over to your website. It was amazing. It was also very early email. We would sell highly targeted 90% open rate email lists where you would like send something out and people still weren't sold. They were like, yeah, I don't know, email. I don't know the person. It feels weird to me. But it's like 90% of the people open your email. It's crazy. So I did that for a little while. I did it for literally one year. And one of the websites I sold for was goto.com. It was the first pay-per-click search engine that like predates Google. Right. And they were like you under because it was basically like I called like Dell computers. And I'm like, when somebody searches for a laptop computer, don't you want to be the first one? And were you willing to pay? They're like, yes. And then I like hung up and I was like, hey, compact computers, don't you want to be the first? And so I was like basically like moving a market on my own like a stockbroker. And I was like moving these like computer companies against each other. So anyway, we represented to go to and then go to stole me away. They're like, this kid's great. Let's get him. And I became the director of Northeast sales at 23. And I knew nothing. So that's like my journey specifically to your question. It was Wild West. Like people were just spending money like crazy. It really changed in like April 2000. So it was like pretty quick. It was like all of a sudden the world got weird. And from that until September 11, 2001, 2001, it was like a weird time, people were pulling back, people were like, not sure what was going on in the world. And then obviously, when September 11th happened, things got really weird, people pulled all their dollars away. So it was a very like, bumpy, crazy 24 to 36 months. When I graduated from college, a lot of highs and a lot of lows. What I've learned is that most small businesses have no idea what's going on. And so as a result, they end up getting screwed, sometimes maliciously, and sometimes just by circumstance. And so the reason why I started circle was, I want to help empower the SMB with a no BS approach to help them like cut through it and almost be like they're like, they're like Shaolin warrior, like rabbi, whatever you want to call it that like guides them through the coals, so that they're able to effectively market in the market that they're in. And that's, that's sort of why I started circle. And that's how that's how we approach things now. And as, as it stands today, it's a little bit reminiscent, right? Like there's been Facebook, Instagram, Amazon, and Google are like the places to market, like early stage, there were like a handful of websites that were really killer, like 98 99. And the rest was a bunch of crap. And I look at that a little bit like today, there's like, kind of those, and then like other stuff, none of my clients are doing like programmatic and like all that kind of stuff. Now, they're like focused on these things. And understanding how to navigate those is very tough. You know, you work with a lot of brands, and internally, they don't usually have the firepower to be able to manage those things. So I just think what was true then is still true. Now, having somebody that can help you guide and be act on your behalf, and be sort of beholden to you and not to their employer, and actually help you effectuate change and convert users and grow a community is very, very important. And it will continue to always be important. That's why guys like you and me have jobs. Yeah, man, I think you answered part of this kind of in the ending of that. But I don't normally ask this question. But where do you think digital marketing is heading? Right? There's obviously not similar to like what you did in 1999 to 2000. And that kind of interesting journey that you told us about, but in a different way, like the past year through the pandemic and whatnot, obviously, changed a lot of things that accelerated things towards ecommerce. Where, in your opinion, is digital marketing heading this year in the coming years? I'm definitely not a predictor. Like, I don't know. But like, it seems like Instacart, every client I speak to is like Instacart ads, Instacart ads. I heard that's the ground. What do you think? And I'm like, yeah, of course, it's that makes a lot of sense. Buying from Walmart directly. Obviously, Amazon just continuing to crush and grow and dominate. I live in like a co-op, like a non sexy co-op in New York City that is not super hip. But Avvo just like signed a partnership with my building where your first order, they gave you a $30 credit and you fill it out on the app and they have groceries delivered. And I did that and it was done. So advertising across platforms like that. And there'll be a ton of those. We're not going back to like our traditional where everyone just goes to the grocery store and everybody just walks around and buys. So I think, you know, digital marketing in that mindset is definitely changing. And then I'm just a big fan of voice. So obviously Clubhouse is all anyone wants to talk about. We're not going to go deep into that. Like, you know, depending on my mood, I'll tell you whether or not I think it has value. But I like the idea of live audio and I like the idea of voice and audio in general. So I think people really need to figure out how to get their mind around how does audio fit into what they're doing in their ad creative, in email, in any kind of communication, because I think that's going to be important in the next 12 to 18 months. Love that. You nailed that. So thank you for entertaining that question. Talking about like what you're working on today, like I just scrolled, I think you're your guys's company Instagram account. And some of the brands and the logos are really cool, really impressive brands. Are you able to share any like current or previous clients, you know, how you land some of these clients? What does engagement look like? Are they ongoing retainers? Are they projects? I think at the beginning you mentioned 38 clients. Can we talk a little bit about like what you do and who you work with and maybe even how you brand yourself like within this vertical of CPG? Man, you come with those heavy questions. I'm definitely going to go over time. So because I'm long-winded too. So let me try to keep it succinct. So primarily what we do is outsource social media manager. It just makes a lot of sense. And that's like the 38 clients that we're working with. A lot of other clients maybe have a social media manager or some of the bigger brands like Yasso and Popchips and One. These are brands that we've been working with for years. They just use us for content creation. So they have like, so basically we're saying you hire Circle Media instead of having nine people on your social media manager payroll. And most brands are like, yeah, I can't afford that. So they don't. And we're a great solution. Once you're doing a hundred million in revenue, like you can have a big marketing team. So our thesis starts to make less sense, but every brand needs elevated content. So we provide content as an outsource art department, multi-discipline, right? So you can get photos, videos, graphics of any kind through one resource at a really reasonable rate. And what's really helpful and why we choose to choose, why we chose this category, these categories is that we can help brands start on third base. We don't have to like learn about CPG retail velocity as a creator that doesn't know what you're talking about. Like we know what you're talking about. So we can like, you know, fill in the blanks really quickly and help brands move faster. So a lot of brands are really, that's probably grown like 200% in the last like nine months of like just content offering as an outsourced partner. And then we're working with sometimes their ad company. Like we work opposite Lunar Solar Group a lot because, you know, they could use more content groups like IMM or Mute6 or some of these agencies that are out there that are like, yeah, if the brand we were working with had doper content for us, we'd be stoked, but they don't. And we, some of them don't do it at all. Some of them do it, but it's expensive and they don't really want to do it. So we're a really good solution to be able to do that for them. So a lot of our brands and if you look at our Instagram right now, I'm sure it's just like a gallery of some of my favorite stuff that we've made. Probably a mixed bag of content only brands and social media management routine or brands that we're working with. And honestly, a lot, I don't have a sales team. Most companies, I don't know what you do, but like most companies you start, you prove out your thesis and then you hire like a 22 year old to go out and sell for you. My secret sauce, my superpower in this world is sales. So I'm probably never going to outsource that until I retire. So as such, I need to out, I give all of my defense, everything, a typical agency owner would deal with the headaches, the drama, the client services to my team so that I'm entirely focused on business development and sales. And most of my business comes from referrals. I think over nine years in the space, you end up getting a lot of referrals. A lot of CMOs jump around. They take you with them to the different companies, which is amazing. And to be honest with you, a lot of business in the last 12 months has come from LinkedIn. Just one call sales. People are like, I hear you on LinkedIn for a year. I get what you're about. Let's go. And that's the best type of business to get. Amazing. And what does the team size look like? So about 38 clients give or take on one of the services. How big is the team to be able to fulfill something like that? Yeah. So we have 29 full-time employees. I'm in my brand new office that we moved into last March, right before the pandemic hit. So congrats. It's nice and good, but also pretty negative because I have a seven-year Manhattan lease and I'm stuck in this place. But it's beautiful. And most of our people are here in New York. But really, in the last six months, we've started hiring remotely. So we have some people in Washington, Hawaii, Texas. And that's how we're expanding our footprint. Nice. That's awesome. I'm sure the hiring process may be determined by the role that you're hiring for. But what's really important to you when you think about hiring someone? When you're considering hiring someone, is it culture fit? Is it talent? Is it a hybrid? Is it something else? What's used the most important thing? Definitely the persona, culture fit, and do they have a superpower or do they have the DNA of a forward-thinking, growth mindset type of human? Because that's just the kind of person that's going to do well with me as their Jedi master. If you're somebody who's very like, I want to punch the clock, and I don't really want to care about work after work, and that's your style. That's great. That's for you. But you wouldn't really work well here. So I look for that. I feel like all the other skills are sort of fungible. I can teach a great receptacle that's built that way from their DNA how to do what we do. I know a lot of other people go the opposite. They're looking for somebody who's got X amount of years of experience of social media management. I almost don't want them to have bad habits that they learned elsewhere. So I look more for that. And probably a third of our staff is through the farm system, meaning people that went through our intern process, then maybe became a part-timer, and maybe became a full-timer. And some of them have been here five, six, seven years now, having grown in that farm system. So it's a little bit of outside talent raw, and a little bit of farm system development. Awesome. That's super helpful. I want to shift gears now to kind of some investing and advising. I know when we talked actually on email before this, you wanted to preface it like what you're saying is not investment advice, and you're not this financial advisor investor. So I appreciate you being transparent about that. And I actually told you, I think I prefer the way that you're investing, right? A couple of deals, some smaller checks with people that you believe in, not spending hundreds of hours vetting these deals. But if we talk about now that we've kind of got that part of the way, at what stage do you typically get involved with brands that you're investing, advising? How much time do you spend on the advising side on a monthly, quarterly, yearly basis? And what are some of your insights around like, what's a good investment to like, what are the things that you consider? Yeah, so just on the advisory side, like that is what I do day to day, I'm either selling or biz deving, or because of my team, knock on wood, all being here being alive and healthy and being able to be kick ass, I don't have to deal with the headaches. So I'm almost like an advisor to a lot of my brands, like I'm on calls that are not your typical fires, but like advice, growth strategy, channel strategy. So whether I'm doing that, or advising a brand that maybe I'm doing sweat equity for a person from equity, or I'm doing, you know, an actual investment, it's all very familiar. It's not like, it's not like I have to wear like different hats. So it's very like, formulae for me, when I look at brands, you know, I don't have the I'm not in the place where I'm like, you know, being doing like later, bigger size checks, right. So it's going to be very early seed, maybe like a round, but like a, a light round, right? So it's like, a but hey, we carved out a spot, are you interested? And maybe between 25 to 100,000. And it's all about the jockey and the horse pairing, right? Doing what I do. And I would imagine you feel the same. I meet a lot of killer jockeys. And I'm like, man, this guy or girl is awesome. And then we talk about like their brand and their positioning and like their channel strategy. And I'm like, this is not going to work or the opposite. Like they're like, wow, like this is amazing. This product is amazing. But like the jockey is a terrible human, or they're just like, they don't have it together. And I'm like, that's not going to work. So if somebody is raising and it's early enough, and I can get in where it could have upside for me, and I'm like, that's a killer jockey and a killer horse, then I'm very interested. And then I don't do that much work. Like I want to see their financials, and I want to see their plan. But I'm taking a flyer hoping that it's going to play out and knowing that it might go to zero or it might go to hero, but it's worth the risk because I believe in the pairing. Awesome. That's that's super helpful. Thank you. In terms of tooling, everyone loves tools, like what kind of tools are you using, you know, at the agency, or even in your personal life to better time manage project manage to, you know, do social media, right? Like, what are some of the tools that you and your team use? So we don't use a lot of tools, we do a lot of things natively on the platforms, because we're sort of saying like, don't don't just outsource and then have us like do set it and forget it. Like, let us be like intimately in the platforms doing them day to day. We use Trello for content. It's the easiest platform for just like content planning and presentation with clients. A client put me on to it like four or five years ago. I'm like, this is genius. And so like, I wish I could invest in Trello. It's a great platform. So we use it, we put every client on to it. And almost every client that's ever left us, they stayed on it, this is like a home run for them. I'm a big buyer of Trello. We use Asana for a schedule for assigning out tasks internally for years, probably since the day I started. So I'm a big fan of that. Personally, I've used Evernote forever, but I've just been talking about getting away from it. Like I feel like it's gotten real glitchy. And so I need a better like overall note and like sort of management tools. So if you have any, I'd be a big buyer of it. I'm not super long on Evernote right now from a personal planning point of view. Yeah, I don't have anything either, unfortunately. So I apologize to let you down there. But no, that's no problem with those tools. Again, simple, minimal, gets the job done. Don't over engineer anything. I like it. Two or three more questions. And then I want to wrap up with one final question. For you personally, like what are things that you've been researching or thinking about? And either either personally or professionally, what are things that are on your mind, business or personal? I feel like is there anyone that's not talking about NFTs right now? And, you know, Bitcoin, things of that nature. I sort of stayed away from it. A friend of mine, though, is like in Costa Rica, trading NBA Top Shot and other things. And he's been doing really well with it. And he's actually been investing some money from like other friends of mine. They've all been doing really well. I mean, I think the market is down right now, a little bit down right now. But so it might be a chance for me or anyone else listening to maybe like dive in because the market has corrected a little bit, but it looks like it's going to go back up. So I'm pretty intrigued by that, like the idea of alternative investing. I don't love getting involved in something that I have no idea about. But this at least NBA Top Shot and through the person that I'm talking about, it's a friend of mine named Chris. Like, I feel like I have like a pretty calculated, smart person who's working in that space, certainly smarter than me that can maybe do the work for me and alongside with me. So that's actually just something that's like super top of mind, like literally in like the last 24 hours. And that's something that I'm thinking about. And I think other otherwise is like the idea of am I ever going to have a gym membership again? I've been at New York Sports Club forever. I did Equinox for like a year, but it was like so expensive and just like not worth it for me. And really, in the last like four or five months I've been doing Peloton. I don't have a tread or a bike. I just do Peloton workouts. And I love them and I'm addicted to it. I love the community. I love the trainers. I'm wondering if I just go with that from now on and I just never go back to a gym. So I don't know if that's what you were looking for. But those are the things that are on my mind like right now. Perfect. Yeah, that was purposely open ended. So that's that's great. And then one final question out here and then I'll have one last question after that. That's kind of more forward thinking. What for you is like the most valuable skill that you think you've learned and how does that serve you now? I just think selling is the most important thing that people can learn. I think a lot of people think they're not good at it. I would highly recommend like just learning how to sell, taking a class on how to scale like literally like Skillshare. Read Never Split the Difference, I think from Chris Voss, I think is the is the writer. Great book about negotiation. I think if you're going to be a business owner, a leader, a brand founder, you're selling customers, you're selling your employees, you're selling investors, you're selling people around you, just a tremendous skill. And I think a lot of people look at it like a four letter word, like it's like a dirty sales is like icky. I look at it very differently. I think it's the number one skill set you can have to really effectuate change. And just like being a doctor or a lawyer, which a lot of us were raised like that's a safe career so that you could always fall back on it. I think if you're really confident in your skin and you're really good salesperson, that's something you can always fall back on and always land on your feet. Killer. I appreciate that. The last last question I have. So obviously the name of the show is like the opportunity in e-commerce. And I think you've talked a lot about it, but I kind of want to get your like final thoughts on someone is like a new agency or wants to start an agency or a freelancer. So on the kind of service provider side, like where is the opportunity? Do you think like, is there a lot of opportunity within social media management? Do you look at your other agency buddies or your, your own service and be like, man, I wish I sold more email or I wish I sold more SMS or, man, I wish we were better at paid social. Like for you right now, like knowing what you know, is there a direction that you would steer someone in? Like if you had to give someone advice of like, Hey, this area, it's really interesting for these reasons or, or whatnot. I mean, go on LinkedIn and tell me you don't see a thousand posts for growth marketers need a growth marketer looking for a growth marketer. It's a real white space. If somebody knows what they're talking about and can like take some of these certifications with Google and Facebook and Instagram and snap and Tik TOK, and like really learn your stuff. And then also just how it all comes together, you know, follow your stuff, follow Nick Sharma stuff. If you can just, if somebody just digest, if somebody went to school and just school their brain on all those things and documented it all out, a lot of people are putting like me, you, they're putting it out there for free. If they just took it and formulated it all and put it all in and they were a hard worker and constantly like thinking about growth, that's in a fantastic role for any outside agency or an, even an internal hire to be like a real client side minded growth marketer that thinks like the client. I think like Hawk media, when they started was very much like that, like this outsource CMO that like kicks ass and like, and like treats you like an employee. Right. And I'm not saying they're not like that now. I don't, I know less about them now, but as they've grown into this monster company, it's probably a little less so, or maybe they work with bigger brands now, but there's a lot of opportunity for small businesses that have all freaked out in the last 12 months because of what just happened. And they want e-commerce, they need e-commerce, but they can't even get started because they don't even have like enough money to sit at the blackjack table. So I think if you can really learn that skillset, there'd be a tremendous amount of opportunity for you to start an agency from scratch and build one client after another, produce results and build a nice little business for yourself. Yeah, that's killer. And some of my buddies run that platform called marketer hire, and they were telling me, and they even put out data on it. I think one third of their hires lately have been on the growth marketing side. So one third of the brands that go to them are actually looking for growth marketers. So there is a ton of demand there. And I don't think there's enough supply. And essentially I think the best way to sum up a growth marketer, and it's not necessarily the right phrase is like, it's almost a jack of all trades, but you're actually know actually are good at all of them, right? You know, how paid in kind of middle and bottle the funnel work together, right? You know, how to drive people to a landing page or whatever it might be a product page, know how to get them to enter their email into the pop-up, know what emails to send, know how to retarget them to really understanding the ecosystem, how a customer interacts with a brand or a service or a product and being able to drive conversion. So that was killer. I really appreciate you being here. What's the best way for someone to connect with you? Is it LinkedIn? LinkedIn is where I live. So definitely look me up, Adam Brown. You'll see me. It's an avatar photo of me. So don't be shocked, but that's me a little bit of gray hair that you probably can't see, but it's there. And I'm at circle media on all social platforms. That's circle with an S like social circle, circle media. Awesome, man. Appreciate you being here. I'll link those handles. I hope you have a great weekend. Thanks so much, man.