← Marketing Beyond with Alan B. Hart
Marketing Beyond with Alan B. Hart
452: What can Formula 1 and Podcasting Teach Us about Bold Marketing Moves? with Melton Littlepage, CMO at 1Password
00:39:07
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- [00:00]
Alan Hart
This podcast is brought to you by eHarmony, the dating app to find someone you can be yourself with. Why doesn't eharmony allow copy and paste in first messages? Because you are unique and your conversations should reflect that. EHarmony wants you to find someone who will get you. How are you going to know who gets you if people send you the same generic conversation starters they message everyone else. Conversations that actually help you get to know each other. Imagine that. Get who gets you on eharmony? Sign up today. Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. At Mint Mobile, we like to do the opposite of what big wireless does. They charge you a lot, we charge you a little. So naturally, when they announced they'd be raising their prices due to inflation, we decided to deflate our prices due to not hating you. That's right. We're cutting the price of mint unlimited from $30 a month to just $15 a month. Give it a try@mintmobile.com Switch for $45.
- [00:54]
Melton Littlepage
Upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month. New customers on first three month plan.
- [00:58]
Alan Hart
Only taxes and fees, extra Speed slower above 40 gigabytes.
- [01:00]
Melton Littlepage
Details for all of us, it's about predicting where the consumer is going and getting half of it right.
- [01:13]
Alan Hart
One of the things we want to do is create ads that don't suck.
- [01:18]
Melton Littlepage
Embracing change creates great possibility.
- [01:22]
Alan Hart
I'm Alan Hart and this is Marketing Today on the show today I've got Melton little page. He's 1Password's chief marketing officer, has a long history of leading innovation and marketing at various organizations such as Outreach, Tenable, New Relic, Schoology, and also at Concur. On the show today we talk about 1Password, the cybersecurity space that it occupies, how he's thinking about differentiating his brand and what this big push into a Golf sponsorship means and how he actually got that sold into the organization. That and much more with Melton littlepage. Well, Melton, welcome to the show.
- [02:16]
Melton Littlepage
Thanks, Alan. It's great to be here today.
- [02:18]
Alan Hart
Yeah, I'm excited about this conversation. I know we're going to talk a lot about security and cybersecurity and obviously passwords, but before we get there, a little birdie told me that if I was with you in person, I need to make sure you stay away from railings and balconies and I really need to know what that's about.
- [02:38]
Melton Littlepage
Yeah, that's no joke. I've recently discovered that I have a fear of heights. But it's not that I'm afraid of falling. It's not like being at the top of a ladder and falling off. But I found recently that when I'm someplace where I can look over a rail, like a mall that has five stories down into a food court, actually where it happened was a hotel where the inside of the hotel was open and I could look over in the atrium, like down 10 stories that I had like this crazy urge momentarily to jump. And then I had this inner battle in my head of don't jump. Obviously I wouldn't want to do, but. And so I was very worried about that, if I can be honest. I was like, what is going on in my brain? So I, I looked it up and it's a thing. It's not a very common thing. The medical term for it is high place phenomenon, or more commonly called like the call of the void. Which sounds super crazy, but I'm just like, I'm a fairly normal guy, live a fairly normal life, normal outlook. But obviously I have a crosswire upstairs and it makes me wonder if I have one crisscross wire. What else is going on up there? Who knows? But maybe that explains how I ended up.
- [03:50]
Alan Hart
Yes, yes, I could relate to marketing as the call of the void. Maybe that's the semblance, but I had never heard of that before. I'm glad you're talking about it because if there's other people listening to this, they'll know now, right?
- [04:06]
Melton Littlepage
Yeah, for sure. If you also suffer from the call of the void, hit me up on LinkedIn. I would love to know that I'm not alone out there.
- [04:12]
Alan Hart
Yeah, yeah, it does sound like it's like a fight or flight response mechanism, right? It just gets converted differently for you. My wife is deathly afraid of heights, but it's more of she clings to the walls versus wanting to go to the other end. So I, and I probably should divulge this. I wanted to become a clinical psychologist when I started out my career and did the psychology route, did some internships and different settings with patients. I hadn't heard of this, but the notion of that the response is either cling to the wall or jump does not surprise me at all. That it's that little difference in translation. So interesting. Thank you for sharing and definitely listeners it melting up if you. If you've had the same urge in your head. But. Well, we'll talk about the other call of the void marketing and where did you get your start in your career and kind of what has been some of the stops along the way because you are now the chief marketing officer.
- [05:18]
Melton Littlepage
At 1Password yeah, I'm really a late in in my career entrant into marketing. I started really like I'd say my first substantive run in my career was in sales and that was because I asked everybody as I was coming out of college what's the fastest path to making a lot of money? Almost didn't matter what the outcome was. I was really early into building software for websites in a B2B setting. Wasn't a great developer, wasn't also a great developer. Project manager, wasn't perfect at documenting requirements, but I could relate with the buyers. We were doing custom software development in the late 90s. That beats me as a Gen Xer and I learned that going out and really spending time with the buyers and understanding the problems and the objectives and the mission of their organization and being able to translate that back into the websites and the web systems we were building that really fed me as a person and it really fed my wallet. Earning a commission on sales was a pretty marvelous thing and so I built my career around that and I thought I was going to be in sales forever. And I ended up in a general manager role in a software product business that was one of the first multi tenant SaaS companies. We didn't have that language then. We called it a business service provider. Initially we called it on demand as IBM was leaning into that. On demand demand and then only SaaS towards the end. But being a GM, I had sales and then everything that was associated with the professional services, post sale, marketing, pre sales and, and then I became responsible for the product in this division of the company because I, I just needed to, in order to deliver what the market needed, what the buyers wanted to buy and, and that got the attention of the president and I was promoted to chief product officer from that role. And she was an amazing woman. I had a conversation with her, I was like, you don't want to do this. I don't know the first thing about product or product strategy. But she's yeah you do. Starting from the customer and working your way back to the architecture is the way to go. And I learned a lot from that experience and thinking differently about how to simplify a product that was understandable by the buyer and delivered at scale through this SaaS architecture. We just happened to be fortunate. We were at the right place at the right time and we were acquired by Concur, the expense reporting giant. We were a little expense reporting competitor. They just happened to have figured out some things that they wanted to get their hands on and I came on board and one of the first things I was asked to do was to help concur build a multi tenant free trial to buy version of their product. The product up until then was an enterprise grade product that was originally an on prem license and maintenance product that had just entered the cloud, but it entered the cloud for enterprises single tenant, still highly customized, basically taking a highly customized on prem solution and putting it in a container. And so building something that had limited, like zero customization, limited flexibility in terms of configuration that could be delivered at the scale of thousands was a new challenge. And I was really privileged to be a part of the team that designed and built and brought that product to market. But I did it from the product side. I was a leader in the product management organization and then brought this product out and it was actually a pretty remarkable failure initially. At the end of the first six months we had something like $20,000 of monthly recurring revenue which was just an absolute drop in concur. At the time it was a publicly traded company that was growing wild and a lot of us did a lot of soul searching. And I just was very vocal about needing to drive more awareness, needing to drive engagement with the product out in the wild, needing more digital advertising, needing campaigns that reached our buyers in non traditional ways. And in the spirit of you broke it, you bought it. The leadership team at Concur gave me an opportunity to step across the boundaries from product into marketing and take on the challenge of generating demand, which is a term we use now for just figuring out the problem for this free trial to buy product. And so when I had my first marketing role, it was after selling for a decade and after leading product in a SaaS business. And so I brought that, that, that product and selling background to marketing and just treated it like a hard system to decode and, and figure out the journey to get in front of the buyers with a compelling story and then take some risks getting there. And that worked. It turned out to be my true calling. Like marketing just absolutely perfectly fits all my interests and passions. And it felt like I'd been training for that day my entire career. And through a huge amount of good luck in a few smart campaigns, we just blew the top off of Concur. So if you've used Concur in the last decade, you probably experienced elements of the product that we built back then and it took off explosively. And not only did the free trial to buy Motion generate a lot of business in the S and P segment, we actually became a demand net. It captured a huge amount of interest in the mid market and enterprise and became one of the top lead gen tools for the entire business. So it was a true win.
- [11:04]
Alan Hart
That's amazing. That's amazing. What brought you to 1Password?
- [11:09]
Melton Littlepage
I'm a huge advocate of 1Password from being a user and someone who just really believes in taking ownership of your personal digital life. But what I loved about 1Password is 1Password is by far the category leader as a consumer password manager and it is also by far the category leader as a business password manager. Now there's on the consumer side, there are millions and millions of consumers that have personally chosen to use the product for themselves and their family. On the B2B side, there's more than a hundred thousand businesses that have chosen to protect the business and all their employees with One Password. And there's just not that many companies out there that are the category leader on both sides of the house. And it has a huge amount of potential. You think like Adobe with Illustrator and Photoshop. You could think Google with Gmail or Microsoft with the Office suite, maybe Apple with iPhones and MacBooks, but that is pretty much it after that, the roster of companies that have the faith of the consumer community and the strength of being chosen by rigorous business teams doing hardcore evaluations. So there's something here, there's something amazing about this company that is an enduring moat that is going to allow it, give it permission to innovate for years to come. With a lot of loyalty and passion and belief behind the brand.
- [12:39]
Alan Hart
It is a unique position to have in the marketplace of serving both the individual consumer and the enterprises. Tell me a little bit about the cybersecurity space that you've fit into and what's going on in the industry, if you will.
- [12:53]
Melton Littlepage
Yeah, the cybersecurity industry is. It's hard to describe. It's incredibly fast moving and it has been in constant motion really since the adaptation of the Cloud, the SaaS takeover of application space, and then with the sort of the general availability of ChatGPT and all of the AI tools that have followed, it just keeps morphing. It gets more and more complex every single month. I now know a whole lot of chief information security officers, CISOs, and my hat's off to them. Honestly, it's one of the hardest jobs on the planet. The security teams need to get the defense 100% right all of the time across this entirely vast attack surface of networks, applications, hardware, devices, people. And the attackers only need to get it right once, right? And they take down a business. I don't know I'm not sure how they sleep at night. And I love being in this industry. I love being in, in the battle with the CISOs and the security teams and, and I love to contribute. I'd love to put a dent in the security risk that businesses face and, and do our part to, to provide security to businesses and people at home for that matter. Just as like a sort of a personal ethos. I think it's entirely unfair that you should be in danger as a condition of going on the Internet. We all have a digital life. Almost everybody uses the Internet in some way, shape or form in their career. And the fact that usage by itself creates risk for the business or your family, it just seems inherently unfair. But it is definitely the condition that we're in. And so it is very satisfying to be in the security software industry. I can say that I feel good about my contributions, however meager they may be.
- [14:59]
Alan Hart
Awesome as you guys, 1Password thinks about differentiating, I guess before we even get there. When you think about how you're approaching cybersecurity, there's sounds like a lot of different types of solutions. How are you approaching just your spot, if you will, in the cybersecurity industry?
- [15:17]
Melton Littlepage
Yeah. So let me start with our roots. We're an 18 year old company. Our first product was a consumer password manager and we were just incredibly fortunate to have great product market fit right from the jump. Our founders, they were developers themselves, they actually built the password manager in developer secrets manager for themselves. They shared it into the community and they had their first customer in 24 hours and it just took off from there. And so the company has been following this enormous community of users that rapidly grew to be tens of thousands, then hundreds of thousands, then millions. And they listened really well. Like the origins of the company for the first, I'm going to say roughly a decade, was an organization of engineers and customer success and that was it. It was purely product led growth and as a part of listening to the customers, took 1Password to work with them and they then wanted business features for it. They needed an administration console and they needed to be able to implement policy, send data to their logging system, be able to off board an employee when the employee left. And so just following that feature request process, they built a business password manager that was released about six years ago. Again, just like the right tool at the right place at the right time, enjoyed excellent product market fit and grew to 10,000 customers almost overnight. 2500-0500-0010-0000. Today more than 150,000 businesses, just six years later, almost all of that has come in inbound through either our full self service product led growth model or in a sales assist model where we would have the lead come in and we can intercept some of them if they're in the in the mid market or enterprise and they're better served by working with a sales rep to help them fit the product in as a solution. We grab that and away we went. So today we are, we're more than 1200 employees, we're north of 250 million in ARR. All on the back of this like remarkable idea and a great go to market strategy.
- [17:35]
Alan Hart
Awesome. How do you think about differentiating yourself in the space that you're in now?
- [17:41]
Melton Littlepage
We explained our first act was commercial. Our second act was a business password manager. We're actually in the middle of the start. I guess we're at the start of our third act which is again listening to our customers as they are grappling with the challenges of the modern distributed hybrid work environment where the tools that they've owned for years, so the 800 pound gorillas in the security space that were architected to protect businesses when everybody worked from the office and everybody worked on the office network and everybody worked on the machine given to them by the company, on the apps that were provided by the company, the tools that were great at that are, they're not the total solution anymore for the modern way we work, right? We work remotely. We could be in a hotel, we could be at a Starbucks, we could be in an Airbnb on a mountaintop. We were likely using our company provided machine at some point during the day. But we're also probably using an iPhone or Android phone or maybe our personal MacBook. And while we love the apps our companies give us, we might want to use Monday instead of Jira, or we might want to use Figma instead of Photoshop and Illustrator, we might want to use a Canva, we might want to use airtable. And so the employees bringing their preferred apps in from the edge using their preferred devices has really challenged the security situation inside of these businesses. And so A tool like 1Password can help, right? Because we have the faith of the consumer. So we're resident on that personal Mac and we're resident on that iPhone. And so we can help close a lot of the security exposure businesses have as their employees take some liberties or are permissive with their devices and applications. And so we're embarking on this third act of doing more than just securely storing and sharing passwords, but instead we're extending what access management systems do today to a larger landscape, a landscape of personal devices and personally preferred apps to really give companies a total security solution. That's how we're differentiating in our head to head competition with our legacy competitors. And it has opened the door for us to encounter a whole new set of competitors which has really spiced things up in our go to market for sure.
- [20:23]
Alan Hart
Hey, I'm Ryan Reynolds. Recently I asked Mint Mobile's legal team if big wireless companies are allowed to raise prices due to inflation. They said yes. And then when I asked if raising prices technically violates those onerous two year contracts, they said what the are you talking about? You insane Hollywood. So to recap, we're cutting the price of mint unlimited from $30 a month to just 15amonth. Give it a try@mint mintmobile.com Switch $45.
- [20:48]
Melton Littlepage
Upfront payment equivalent to $15 per month New customers on first three month plan only taxes and fees, extra speed slower above 40gb details. My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for career day and said he was a big roas man.
- [21:00]
Alan Hart
Then he told everyone how much he.
- [21:02]
Melton Littlepage
Loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laugh at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com results to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com results. Terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn, the place to be to be.
- [21:26]
Alan Hart
Awesome. Let's talk about go to market. Because I know you've got a new way you're getting to market through golf and the President's Cup. So tell me a little bit more about that and I'll ask you a second question. But I'm gonna tee you up now for it, which is like, what was the pitch to get that cemented? There's so many marketers listening to this, I'm sure wanna know. How did you pitch that?
- [21:52]
Melton Littlepage
Yeah. All right, so we sponsored the President's cup golf tournament this year and also created a player ambassador sponsorship with PGA Tour star Mackenzie Hughes. For us, this is a really calculated bet, right? And I differentiate bets and investments. Like I can invest in in CPC programs and I can invest in event sponsorships because I have a reasonably good idea what performance I'm going to get back out from those. But when you're doing a sports marketing sponsorship, I classify that as a bet. You put the money on the table, roll the dice, you could Lose it all or you could win big. And I think calculated big bets are really important part of marketing strategy. But it has to be a calculated bet. So for us, we started with the data. We hired a third party media research firm and we handed them our target Persona documents. I think like most marketers, we have a pretty well researched set of Persona and we know what they're doing when they're at work. That's the nature of the Persona. But we don't know how to reach them when they're not at work. And so if you trust that we're doing our job at work. And so our social advertising, our digital advertising, our event strategy, our community influence, if you believe all that is working and you still need to grow more. Right. Add layers of growth on top of that, then you need to reach the target Persona when they're not in the office, especially the Persona that are not in the market. In our case, probably 97% of potential buyers are not going to buy in a given year and 3% are. And almost all of our marketing is oriented around gathering up all the demand from the 3%. And so we need to go out and we need to shake the tree really hard and get more of that 97% and get them into the game, off the sideline into the game. And so the media research firm came back and they stack ranked a set of entertainment integration and sports integration and then out of home opportunities. And PGA tour was just like very high on the list. It wasn't the number one, but it was the most achievable for us in terms of the fit of sponsorship marketing with our buyer Persona and the loyalty and the affinity that the Persona have. And so we started there and then we evaluated doing a event sponsorship like becoming the title sponsor of an event or sponsoring a player. And while we were doing that, we discovered the President's cup sponsorship opportunity and it was an instant fit for us. The president's cup is played every other year. It's the all star game in golf. It's a super unique format. It's unlike anything else that happens all year. This year it was being held in Canada. We're a Canadian business. We're one of the fastest growing and largest Canadian tech companies. And so that was a great fit. President's cup has three title sponsors. And so we joined Rolex and cognizant, who are the other two sponsors, which really elevated our brand to their level. Right. We needed that brand lift to be put toe to toe with Rolex and cognizant at President's Cup. But the other PGA Tour sponsors are companies like Accenture and BMW and AT&T and getting up on that title level and being there with Coca Cola. And that was really important for us because we want to be a household name as well. And then the event offered a massive branding opportunity. The logo was in the background of all of the T's and greens. It was interwoven into the digital scoreboards on screen and at the event. And then it came with television commercial spots. And so we filmed a commercial just for the event. But when the commercial ran, they ran it in a split pane view while the golf was on the left and the commercial was on the right. So it wasn't even something where people could avoid it and run away while the commercial was on and then come back for the golf. It was integral to the execution of the broadcast. And so we got great brand pickup. And then we were very fortunate that our brand ambassador, Mackenzie Hughes, was one of the all stars chosen to play for the international team. So we had perfect tie in with our player ambassador program and our event sponsorship. So it turned out to be a huge win for us. And the pitch for us going and answering your second question, the pitch was very much the can't miss nature of our business. As I talked about, the consumer for us is a really important audience, but so is the B2B buyer. And so our messaging and the orientation of our program was oriented at the B2B buyer. But we knew there'd be massive overspray. That overspray would hit buyers in other departments, it would hit consumers. But the reality is like almost every adult who uses the Internet is a potential consumer buyer of us. And so if our programs hit our B2B buyer, then that was a win. And then the overspray of every consumer around them, that was also a win. So we did the math and we could have justified the investment just on the B2B side of the business. We also could have justified the investment just on the consumer side of the business. And so having both at play really de risked the bet for us and gave us confidence to go.
- [27:25]
Alan Hart
That's amazing. That's amazing. I hadn't thought about the fact that thinking about you really focused on the B2B Persona and that's what led you here. But the fact that you've got this nice dual sided part of your business now, you could you basically get the upside of doing this on the consumer side as well as a double bonus or I don't even know what they would Call that in a. What is that an eagle in. In golf or something like that? I don't know.
- [27:49]
Melton Littlepage
I will call it an eagle.
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Alan Hart
That's amazing. It's amazing. Going from. And it, I have to believe, is this the first, it has to be the first sponsorship of this kind for this, for one password. Is that right?
- [28:01]
Melton Littlepage
And it was an all company moment for us too because we had a lot of hospitality in our home country. It was something where we could build great personal relationships with high value customers, some of our distribution and technology partners and prospects. And so our sales organization, our customer success organization was all in. Our partnerships organization was all in. And so it was creating a moment internally. We call this a lightning strike, but it created a moment in the company where everything was aligned. The message, the execution, the focus with our customers, everything was singularly focused and quite loud in a really good period of time for us. It was at the end of Q3 and it teed us up to get off to a really hot start in Q4 with a lot of great relationships to work with.
- [28:58]
Alan Hart
Awesome. Nice work on that. It shows that those bets can pay off when you've done the due diligence to make sure that they're the right bets to be making. So kudos on that. One of the things we love to do is get to know you even a little bit more. And there's a series of questions I love to ask. And my favorite is my first question. Has there been an experience of your past that defines or makes up you are today?
- [29:26]
Melton Littlepage
Yeah. So one of my, one of my first major marketing leadership roles where I was responsible for a huge organization and a large budget. We were a very techy tech company selling a product to software developers to improve the performance of software. And our biggest program of the year was a sponsorship at the big AWS conference. Reinvention or unbelievably massive event, Huge check to write, put a big booth in the middle. And I'd been with the company maybe six months and I was doing all of the things I needed to do to build a great organization and great programs, get alignment with sales and product, but I didn't learn how to demo the product. I knew the pitch, but I didn't feel confident giving the pitch. And so I found myself in the middle of our booth and people would come up to me and they would just want to know, explain what the company does or walk me through the product. And I couldn't do it. And so I had to find somebody who was available and pass off the prospect which was not a great experience for the prospect, but for me it was a great reminder that as a marketing leader, you need to know the product inside and out. You need to master the demo, you need to win the pitch contest if there is one. And frankly, you need to be able to write the pitch and improve it. And you need to be sought after. Right? You need to be pulled into sales calls and be a part of the growth engine. It's not enough to administer a team. You have to get out front and lead. And so I'll never forget how I felt with that experience. And it's really shaped how I think about my role in where I sit organizationally and in what I expect of my marketing leadership team as they situate themselves as well.
- [31:15]
Alan Hart
That's a great lesson. What advice would you give your younger self if you were starting this journey all over again?
- [31:21]
Melton Littlepage
I think the biggest and best piece of advice I would have for myself is to stop pattern matching. What I want to say is resist the urge to fit current situations into templates that I know and I'm comfortable with from the past, but instead open my eyes, like really read the situation and think for myself about the best way to approach it. For the longest time I focused on like, better take something that I know and make it better. I didn't really think enough about being different, not being better, and having the courage to bring a novel idea or novel solution into a complex environment and take the risk of being completely wrong or losing credibility. But you can't break through with better, right? You can really only break through with a uniquely different point of view that is informed by what is right in front of you now. Also your past experience and your expertise in the market. But that's what I would tell myself is have confidence in yourself. Confidence, trust your heart and be bold. Not be comfortable in pattern matching.
- [32:40]
Alan Hart
Is there something either you think marketers need to be learning more about today, or maybe it's something you're trying to learn more about yourself?
- [32:49]
Melton Littlepage
I think the thing that I so I'm going to go out and say I've personally hired 50 marketers in the last 10 years and these would be director and above, roughly. And the thing that I've seen them struggle with the most is a Competent marketer with 10 years of experience or more is mapping a buyer's journey, getting a buyer from A to B and understanding the steps to get them there and the purposeful choreography of that journey from Stone Cold. Never heard of your product, don't know what you do to Someone who's delighted to sign the contract as soon as the docusign comes through. It's a journey, but it's not random. Right. And it's not just awareness. Throw your brand out. And it's not just top of the funnel demand capture with search marketing. It's not just slap up a website with product feeds and speeds. It is very deliberately orchestrated, especially if you have any element of product led growth or trial to buy. And I don't think marketers are very good in starting with their target Persona and saying, okay, how do I raise awareness? And then if, let's say I have their attention for 30 seconds, how do I earn two minutes of their time? What is that first. Aha. That first insight, the first spark. And then if I have them for two minutes, how do I educate them on their problem to a degree that they'll trust that I understand their problem, because that will unlock the next five minutes where they're interested in how I would solve their problem. And then that opens the door potentially to exploring a product video or maybe talking to a sales specialist. But decoding that and then making it scale to hundreds or thousands of leads a month, or tens of thousands of touch points, it's really hard. Most marketers aren't very good at it. And the marketers that I've seen that are exceptional and they go on to be entrepreneurs or onto CMOs, they. They have that figured out.
- [34:55]
Alan Hart
Yeah, no, it's a very good illustration of something that's super complex, but it takes all the pieces working together to achieve the end result that you're talking about, which is drive leads or drive scale of those leads. That's amazing. Are there any trends or subcultures that you're following you think other people should take notice of?
- [35:17]
Melton Littlepage
I'm fascinated by the subculture that has popped up in the US that are Formula one fans, but they're Formula one fans that are. They're driven, if you will. They're created by this Netflix series called Drive to Survive. And so this is a remarkable feat that I think could only happen in the 2020s. Drive to survive. If you haven't seen it, I highly recommend watch the first episode, the first season. It is. It's like the Real Housewives meet the most adrenaline fueled sport, but it's really about the drama and the personalities and the people and the characters. And so it has taken a sport that is, I don't know how old it is, 50 years old, maybe more, which has a niche audience of people that are like aerospace engineers, and really technical folks that just love the passion of the engineering. And it's dwarfed that in size by people that are just all about the personalities and the drama and the pageantry and the sophistication of this. Because it's a traveling circus that goes to 24 different places around the globe each year. And so it has exploded in popularity and it's so rare. I don't know if it's even precedented for a sport to become popular from a television series. But that's absolutely what is happening. There's something to be learned with the vulnerability of the drivers and the team leaders that are in this series where they open up their personal lives and the popularity of the sport explodes compared to other sports where it's really just about the performance of the athlete. And really only when you get around to the Olympics do you get to know people and their backstory. And so there's something here, right? And so I'm interested in this subculture, but I'm fascinated by marketing what is a multi billion dollar franchise from the one through personalities instead of technology or innovation or speed or adrenaline or whatever else.
- [37:27]
Alan Hart
Yeah, I'm going to have to. I've heard about the series. I have not watched it, but I'm gonna later this evening I'm gonna watch the first episode. You've got my attention. And it is fascinating how you talk about it that other sports, maybe this is an unlock for other sports too. At least sports that may need more attention in the US in particular things like I could think of like women's soccer or something, right? Like huge fan base, could probably scale that reach with something akin to what you're talking about here. Anyway, that's an idea. I wanna spend more time thinking about that. Appreciate you putting that on my radar. Last question for you. What do you feel is the largest opportunity or threat facing marketers today?
- [38:14]
Melton Littlepage
Not trying to pander to the situation, but I think it was really obvious from observing the recent US election that long form conversational podcasts played a really important role, like a surprising role, a direct to consumer role, if you will. And it somewhat disintermediated the media. And it was more than a sound bite and it was more than a clip. And so I think those are fascinating. And so I think long form conversational podcasts are a really big opportunity for marketers today. You can really tell a story and again, much like with the Formula one, you can help people tell their stories. And hopefully in my case that would be chief information security officers that are combating the constantly changing threats out in the digital world. But you can humanize the story and you can humanize the solution and you can talk about the true impact that you can have in the lives of people, not just the companies that you serve. And so I think that's an undertapped opportunity. And obviously there's a lot of podcast content out there today, but the ability to get this right and really shape your market through sophisticated storytelling is right there for everybody.
- [39:44]
Alan Hart
Yeah, no podcasts. To your point. I don't think we've ever had an election that even uttered the words podcast before this one. And I don't know how much of an impact it had in the end result, but it was definitely a news source for a lot of people and I don't think people have really realized that yet. I can't say that I'm on par with some of those top ones that were getting all the ratings and all the interviews, but there is something to it. And I think in a world that we live in where everything is a 5 second, 15 second sound bite, there is a craving in some regards for Tell me the full story. Tell me the full story. So we'll see. We'll see. Hopefully it bodes well for me. Well, Melton, it's been fascinating to get to know your business and you even more personally. Just want to say thank you for coming on the show today. I appreciate it, Alan.
- [40:39]
Melton Littlepage
It's been a real pleasure and thank you so much for having me.
- [40:42]
Alan Hart
Hi, it's Alan again. Marketing Today was created and produced by me with post production support from Sam Robertson. If you're new to Marketing Today, please feel free to write us a review on itunes or your favorite listening platform. Don't forget to subscribe on marketingtodaypodcast.com and tell your friends and colleagues about the show. I love hearing from listeners. You can contact me@marketingtodaypodcast.com there. You'll also find complete show notes and links to what was discussed in the episode today and you can search our archives. I'm Alan Hart and this is Marketing Today.
- [41:19]
Melton Littlepage
My dad works in B2B marketing. He came by my school for Career day and said he was a big roas man.
- [41:26]
Alan Hart
Then he told everyone how much he.
- [41:28]
Melton Littlepage
Loved calculating his return on ad spend. My friends still laugh at me to this day. Not everyone gets B2B, but with LinkedIn you'll be able to reach people who do. Get $100 credit on your next ad campaign. Go to LinkedIn.com results to claim your credit. That's LinkedIn.com results terms and conditions apply. LinkedIn the place to Be To Be.
- [41:50]
Alan Hart
Did you know that two out of three listeners say podcasts are the best way to learn about the things they care about most? That makes podcasts the perfect place to introduce your brand, where ads are more relevant and trusted than any other media channel. Want to learn more? Download the Full podcast polls 202024 report now at podcast pulse2024acast.com and see how you can make your brand part of the conversation.