The Truth About Audience Building in Marketing with Marc Sirkin, Growth Consultant and Former CEO of Third Door Media| Ep. 393

Summary

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The Marketing Millennials: Ep. 393

Guest: Marc Sirkin (Growth Consultant, ex-CEO at Third Door Media)
Host: Daniel Murray
Topic: The Truth About Audience Building in Marketing
Date: February 18, 2026

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Episode Overview

In this episode, Daniel Murray sits down with Marc Sirkin—former CEO of Third Door Media, growth consultant, and long-time digital and marketing operator—to talk candidly about the myths and realities behind audience building in marketing. The conversation dives into why growing an audience doesn't automatically result in business growth, how marketers get caught up in vanity metrics, why product-market fit is the backbone of any successful marketing strategy, and the hard decisions behind monetizing audiences in today’s fragmented landscape.

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Key Discussion Points & Insights

Marc’s Marketing Journey

[01:45]

• Started out as a graphic designer, shifted to project management and product marketing.
• Sold a small digital agency in the dot-com boom; built an early version of what became like Squarespace.
• Spent a decade in nonprofit digital fundraising, then stints at PwC and Third Door Media.
• Rose from running digital product to CEO, eventually leading to the Semrush acquisition.

“I’ve worn all the marketing hats...it’s interesting to see where it’s evolved with the modern go-to-market stuff.”
– Marc Sirkin [03:45]

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The Audience-Outcome Disconnect

[04:30 – 08:55]

• Building large audiences (ex: Facebook group from 300K to 800K) didn’t directly lead to increases in fundraising.
• Similar disconnects after March of Dimes appeared on Oprah: massive traffic spike, no donations.

“Just because you can acquire eyeballs doesn’t mean necessarily growth follows.”
– Marc Sirkin [05:52]

• The importance of tying audience growth to context and meaningful calls to action.

“The audience exploded and fundraising did not follow… There’s an interesting relationship between eyeballs and growth that’s worth talking about.”
– Marc Sirkin [06:14]

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Lessons from Direct Marketing

[07:28 – 10:27]

• Old-school direct marketers understood context: message and medium must align.
• The shift from brand marketing to performance culture (audit, measure, iterate), and how that’s narrowing again with SEO unpredictability and LLMs (large language models).

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Why Marketers Chase Audience—and Why They Shouldn’t

[11:00 – 14:21]

• Product-market fit and ideal customer profile (ICP) must come before audience scale.
• Modern marketing channels are more expensive and less predictable than ever.
• A smaller, tightly-targeted audience often delivers more value.

“You could have an audience of 8,000 plumbers and hit your goals easier than having 100,000 not-plumbers.”
– Daniel Murray [14:11]

• The value of discipline: avoid being lured into every new revenue opportunity before your core offering is dialed in.

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Revenue “Spine” and Revenue Streams

[14:21 – 16:56]

• Don’t stretch for new revenue streams (e.g., certifications, job boards) before the core is solid.
• Adding new products/revenue streams can distract and dilute organizational focus.

"It’s very distracting…if you haven’t dialed the main one in.”
– Marc Sirkin [15:54]

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Events, Advertising, and Monetization Tactics

[17:42 – 24:31]

• At Third Door Media, advertising was the most leveraged motion—simple mechanics, high margin—but susceptible to macroeconomic shifts.
• Lead gen linked to events worked well: “Huge margins on selling webinars with targeted ICP.”
• In-person events: expensive, long-term payoff, high risk if fast profitability is expected.
• Know whether your plays are profit, audience, or marketing/branding moves—and plan accordingly.

“For Third Door [events] were designed to make profit…very tough to run a B2B event without losing money.”
– Marc Sirkin [19:13]

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Strategy: Begin with the Right Motion

[23:13 – 24:31]

• Decide upfront and invest in the motion where you have internal strength.
• “World class at execution” in one area beats scattered, mediocre attempts across many.

“You need to be…world class at this part of execution, because we need to be, because the market demands it.”
– Marc Sirkin [23:18]

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Commoditization, Brand as Moat, and the Role of Advertising

[24:31 – 27:05]

• B2B is more consumer-like due to commoditization and choice overload; brand and attention are the new moats.
• Advertising cuts through “choice paradox,” helping guide consumer decisions in crowded categories.
• Examples: Dunkin’ using Ben Affleck, Nike’s storytelling ads.

“Brand choice…the cognitive load on making a choice in a crowded market’s hard…Advertising as one tactic, there’s a reason why storytelling, narrative-driven advertising lasts.”
– Marc Sirkin [25:47]

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Content, Clips, and Distribution

[27:05 – 31:33]

• Super Bowl ads are now creative assets repurposed for social, CTV, multiple channels before and after the event.
• The playbook: create for the main channel, atomize for others, let clips extend the impact everywhere.

“It’s become all about the clips. Because the clips are where you can get mass distribution to drive the brand awareness.”
– Marc Sirkin [30:42]

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Knowing When to Slow a Channel

[31:33 – 34:13]

• Importance of experimentation: at Third Door, paused/sunset LinkedIn paid because returns lagged.
• Sometimes the problem isn’t the channel, but budget, targeting, or patience with algorithms.

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Attention ≠ Traction

[35:16 – 40:10]

• Distinction between impressions (potential) and attention/engagement (actual).
• Funnels aren’t linear; buying journeys are messy and conversion windows vary.
• Example: proper timing and sequence of emails greatly improved conference ticket sales.

“A lot of times, it’s hard to decipher. And I think all of us are sort of like Sherlock Holmes-ing these algorithms…”
– Marc Sirkin [37:28]

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On Email Saturation

[40:10 – 41:04]

• Frequency is fine if content truly aligns and delivers value; sales-only blasts are the issue.
• “If [content’s] aligned and good enough, you can send as much email as you want.”

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The Quarterly Leadership Check-in

[41:04 – 42:57]

• Leadership teams should quarterly review their “revenue spine.”
• Check for message drift, audience clarity, consistency in value delivery.

“Open up all the emails you sent…did we lose our discipline…brand repetition, it just really matters.”
– Marc Sirkin [42:29]

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If Starting Over: What Not to Build

[43:35 – 45:32]

• Don’t add courses/certifications too early.
• Begin with what best builds audience and leverage (newsletter, podcast, some form of publishing); delay ads and education until the engine is running.

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The Core: Focus, Improve, Then Diversify

[45:32 – 46:59]

• Build one motion/engine well before expanding.
• Diversification comes after efficiency and stability in the original motion.

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On Founder Boredom and “Bright Shiny Object” Syndrome

[46:59 – 47:40]

• Adding new revenue streams often distracts founders; listen to your audience, not your ego.

“Boredom and ego can play all sorts of head games with you, but if you’re laser focused…the audience will tell you where they want to go next.”
– Marc Sirkin [47:29]

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The Marketing Hill to Die On: BRAND

[47:40 – 49:39]

• In a world where everything can (and will) be commoditized, enduring brand (values, promise, consistency) is the only real moat.

“I would die on the brand hill…in our AI powered world, brand is the only moat left.”
– Marc Sirkin [47:52]

• Brand isn’t logos/colors, but the accumulated trust and reinforced values the audience expects.

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Notable Quotes & Memorable Moments

• “It’s dangerous to assume big audience, big results.”
  – Marc Sirkin [08:55]

• “Advertising as one tactic...there’s a reason why storytelling, narrative driven advertising lasts.”
  – Marc Sirkin [25:47]

• “You can vibe-code a website, no problem. Let’s start another revenue stream. It’s very distracting…”
  – Marc Sirkin [15:48]

• “Most people get the clips and they go, oh that’s interesting. If it’s interesting enough, maybe I’ll go watch some of the episode...it’s become all about the clips.”
  – Marc Sirkin [30:42]

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Where to Find Marc Sirkin

• LinkedIn: Marc Sirkin
• Substack: Marc Sirkin’s Newsletter
• Podcast: Playbook Broken (Season 2 ramping soon)
• Website: sirkin.com

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Timestamps for Key Segments

• 01:45 – Marc’s career journey
• 04:30 – When audience didn’t translate to business growth
• 11:00 – Why audience size is a misleading metric
• 14:21 – Building the right revenue “spine”
• 19:13 – The economics of events vs. advertising
• 24:31 – Brand as the true moat in commoditized markets
• 27:05 – Content repurposing and the importance of clips
• 31:33 – When to pause or slow channels
• 36:46 – Attention, traction, and non-linear funnels
• 41:04 – The quarterly leadership message check
• 43:35 – What not to build at launch
• 47:40 – The marketing hill to die on: Brand

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Tone & Style

The episode is direct, jargon-free, and laced with dry humor. Both Marc and Daniel share candid “from the trenches” stories and tactical lessons. The vibe is no-nonsense, skeptical of marketing “hacks,” and firmly rooted in discipline, clarity, and respect for the basics.

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A must-listen for marketers wrestling with audience growth, channel strategy, and the ever-changing media landscape.

Transcript

[A]

Are you tired of marketing events where nobody's actually done the work? Unpacked is different. February 18th through 19th. It's virtual. It's free. Real life cycle marketers sharing tactics you can steal today. Register@CUST IO TMM. Welcome to the Marketing Millennials, the no BS Marketing podc. I'm Daniel Murray and join me for unfiltered conversations with the brains behind marketing's coolest companies. The one request I tell our guests stories or it didn't happen. Get ready to turn the off. We are back with another episode of the Marketing Millennials podcast today. I have Mark Sorkin on the podcast. Me and Mark kind of have a beef right now. I'm kidding about Marking Land, but we'll talk about that more later. I can't wait. But he's a CEO of Third Door Media and if you have been in marketing for a while, you will probably know martech.org he made the biggest mistake not using marketland.com, but that's also something we could talk about too. And he is great at building audiences. And it was sold to Semrush and now Semrush is sold to Adobe. And this is just the spiral effect of how things are going. But I want to let you intro yourself. And how did you get into marketing?

[B]

Thanks for having me on the show. It's been a while we've been talking about it, so I'm excited to see you again. I think we last saw each other at Inbound back in September, whatever that was. Yeah. Just to clarify, I left Semrush in October to start my own consulting firm. So I spent a year as CEO of Third Row Media inside Semrush and left. And we can talk about that too. And we definitely can talk about Marketing Land because that is an interesting and fun conversation to have. So, yeah, to answer the question kind of briefly, I started as a graphic designer back in the early 90s. I'm very old and it was just having coffee with somebody, so I'll tell the story for the second time today. So my boss said to me, hey, Mark, you're a good designer. I was like, okay, thanks. And he's like, but you're not great. It's like, oh shit. A backhanded compliment. But what he saw in me was kind of an operational rigor and a strategy mind. And he kind of pulled me into project management, operations, product development, product marketing. And that kind of set the career on fire in many ways. That was the first time I was with a company. I was only young though, 24 or whatever. But we sold our small digital agency. We were like 11 people. We sold it to a company called IXL that became one of the big.com agencies at the time. That company grew from 30 people to 3,500 people in 18 months. It was absolutely insane. Inside that company I kind of cut my chops on project management, product marketing, built a product and we end up getting funding for that product. We got 18 million bucks. Actually back then they were giving money away. It was falling off trees. Intel funded us with a couple of other founders and we started a company based out of San Diego that was basically Squarespace in 1998 effectively. And so it was a really interesting experience and it kind of really, kind of lit me up in many ways. I ended up taking a job at the March of Dimes running digital fundraising and marketing for them. And that lit up, gosh, a 10 year nonprofit career. So I spent 10 years in kind of like large health charities running digital fundraising, community strategy. Ended up at PwC doing some consulting work and then finally landed through a weird set of circumstances at Third Door Media. Love Third Door Media. Incredible search engine land. Martech, as you mentioned, marketing land at the time. And I kind of grew into the president position and ultimately CEO position as we sold the company to Semrush. And so I've kind of played all the, I've worn all the marketing hats. Like whether it's the rise of social, the rise of e commerce, the early days with content management systems as graphic designer. Obviously back then info kind of web architect was like the hot role back then. So I've been around for a long time. I've done all the different marketing roles. It's interesting to see where it's evolved to with the sort of modern day go to market stuff. But that's the nickel tour from my career.

[A]

And I know, I mean a lot of the businesses you've run had massive reach. So when did you realize that growing the audience wasn't automatically growing the business?

[B]

Oh, that's a great question. I think the first time I ever reckoned with that, I think it was at Autism Speaks. Actually. It was the first time I reckoned that we had like everybody back then. Organic social was like the thing, it was the hot tactic. And Facebook had just become kind of public, open to everybody. We had several board members who were impacted by autism at different levels, kids on the spectrum, that kind of thing. And we had somebody at all the big companies, Twitter, Facebook, and they all came to us in those early Days saying, let us help you build your audience, and it will drive tons of fundraising. And the one that's in my mind now that kind of illustrates that point is that we were at, let's say, 300,000 followers on Facebook at the time or friends or whatever it was back then. And Facebook lit up their. And I'm blanking on the name, but at the time, there was like a special program for, you know, basically groups and businesses on Facebook. And we went from 300,000 to like 800,000, like, over. It was like on a Tuesday. I went in and checked the dashboard. I was like, wait, how did we get to 800,000 people? And it was because Facebook had launched this program and we were in it. We were like one of two or three charities in the program. The audience exploded and fundraising did not follow. And it was just like, to your question, it was like, oh, wait, like, just because you can acquire eyeballs doesn't mean necessarily growth follows. Now, we figured out how to drive growth out of that audience ultimately. But it wasn't like, turn on the faucet and all of a sudden money comes. And I've seen that multiple times in my career. In fact, I'm just remembering now, the March of Dimes was highlighted on Oprah Winfrey's show back in the day, which was the biggest thing on the planet. And we saw traffic jump that day by 10,000%, but no donations. There's an interesting relationship. Think about the super bowl this weekend. There's an interesting relationship between eyeballs and growth that is worth talking about.

[A]

Yeah, I wonder for that follow growth and just the mention on a big show. What do you think the perceived gap was that? Because for some businesses, they get a mass spike and they do have a good landing page and the offer is there. It can explode your business. But also if you get mentioned and there's not a good call to action of. Okay, Oprah doesn't say, I don't know what. But Oprah didn't say, hey, everybody, go. I'm putting money into March or Diamond. You should too. What was the perceived gap basically on Facebook and mentions, what do you see? What would have tied in that gap to help more?

[B]

I think it's context. Right? I think, sure, you're absolutely right. Like, you know, the direct mail and the direct marketing worlds understand that the right audience, you know, it's interesting. Again, I'm kind of like, I wasn't really thinking about this until you just said that. But like, pre Internet, when we were in a world of. And we were in a world of non social media, non performance marketing, direct marketing and direct media, like they figured out pretty quickly, hey, if we advertise, you know, I don't know, the Tony Robbins program at 3am when people are up and they shouldn't be up and they're feeling bad about themselves and we put something motivational, there's context for that. So I think there's something similar here. I don't think the principles have changed. I think in the case of Autism Speaks, all of a sudden we're in front of a whole bunch of people who are on Facebook exploring the platform, who don't necessarily have a direct connection to that world. Okay, let's see what this is all about. But I don't think we were sophisticated enough at the time to understand how to try to convert some of that, let's call it anonymized or non contextual audiences into donors, volunteers, whatever we might have wanted to do with that. So I think like getting that alignment, as you said, is critical. So, you know, yeah, sure, the pieces are like the landing page and the offer, but the channel and the medium also matter. Right. Like, it's like, yeah, it could have.

[A]

Been like, yeah, people didn't care on like an Oprah's audience about March.

[B]

Exactly, exactly.

[A]

Yeah.

[B]

So I think it's dangerous to assume big audience, big results. Doesn't mean it doesn't work. It can work. I'm sure we're going to hear about several advertisers that put Super Bowls out that had great response and others that didn't. The question is how you align that to the audiences. Because obviously super bowl is a different thing. You're talking about a mass, mass audience.

[A]

Yeah. With those type of things, it's like creative is the targeting. Are you not targeting? It's like whatever creative you put out as there is targeting. If you're business owner and like Squarespace is trying to get domains.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

You're trying to target people to come.

[B]

And I think what's interesting about the world we live in today is that we've all grown up, let's say the last 15, 20 years in a very performance marketing culture. Right. We all kind of understand the equation, like put money in over here, get people here, get results over here. Well, prior to performance marketing again, 15, 20 years ago, brand marketing and sort of more general marketing was not measured that way. It was measured in terms of brand lift and aided unaided. These are things that big brands still do. But the typical performance Internet marketer isn't doing those kinds of things. They're expensive, they're time consuming, you don't get a fast feedback loop. So there's something happening. And we could talk about what's happening with GEO or LLM visibility, because there's some interesting parallels to how do you measure visibility in LLM to the way we used to measure brand versus, you know, clicks, money, clicks, results. And so it's, it's shifting a little bit, I think, in an interesting subtle ways.

[A]

I also think, I mean, I want to get your take on this because you, you hearing now a lot of people that like some of their primary goal is like, we need to grow our audience, we need to grow our audience. Like, how do we need to grow our audience? But they, and that could even come at the expense of like, they're not thinking about like business outcomes and stuff like that. So like, how do you, what do you tell marketers about that audience grows P. To be careful of and then also like, how to do it the correct way?

[B]

Yeah, I mean, I've thought this for a while, but I've just started to really articulate it in my own head sort of as a consultant, like, what's the story? I'm trying to tell people. And I think that at its core, the product market fit and the sort of ICP of that product is the most important thing. There's trite sayings. You can say, oh, there's riches and niches, okay, fair enough. But different products have different audiences and some products appeal to mass audiences and some don't. Some appeal to niche audiences. But at the end of the day, what strikes me as interesting is that we're in a world now where SEO isn't working the way it used to work. It's not as predictable. We don't fully understand how discoverability is working on LLMs, nor do we believe that the kind of clicks that the click volume you're going to get from LLMs is way less than it was from, from traditional SEO. We know that the email game is shifting very quickly. It's hard to get in people's inboxes and get people to click. So we know marketing channel marketing is getting harder, costs are rising. And so I think if you have a product that doesn't have a really well defined ICP and a really great product market fit, it can be hard to figure out, well, what is the message here? And so the size of the audience is important. You need a big enough audience. You need a big enough. A big enough TAM to make a difference. To your business goals. But I think if you just think in terms of just gross numbers, in terms of the audience, it's like, who are we talking to here? Do we understand how they're receiving it? Again, I think about the Oprah example. Great. We got in front of millions and millions of people, but it didn't move the needle. So what the heck does that mean? So there's kind of a weird trade off that I think is becoming more acute in today's marketing landscape, which is like, you better have your product market fit dialed and you better have that ICP dialed because people are expecting more personalized content, they're expecting a better buyer journey. These are things that they're tough to do at the mass market. And look, God bless you. If you're a B2C marketer and you're selling, I don't know, tires or something, that's not my world. But if you're selling B2B stuff, you're talking about a specific audience. I do think that the pressure is on to get those pieces right before you accelerate channel marketing. I think if you just say we're just going to spend money on LinkedIn because we know the audience is there, I just haven't seen a lot of assigns the success of that.

[A]

Yeah, I, I think that's why a lot of people say hire product marketers. Your first marketer.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

A lot of problems when you go into business is, is they, they lost track of like that their roots of like product marketing and discovering their core message and going to re you to redo that exercise to figure it out. Because usually the reason they're not performing is like the messaging isn't clear. It's not. Their audience isn't clear. Like there might be a mismatch on messaging. An audience. Just like you always have to go back to like fundamentals usually with these, with marketing. So I think that's a crucial point you're making on that going back to, you have to go back to your core a lot. And that's usually like where people mess up is they start, oh, I want to build an audience of a million people. But why? I mean, you could have an audience of 8,000 plumbers and hit your goals easier than having 100,000 and our plumbers and like 5,000.

[B]

I think that's right.

[A]

Yeah, yeah.

[B]

And the thing is, once you have that audience, you have a revenue spine. Because once you understand the product market fit and once you understand the ICP and the audience, you can build a spine that drives the kind of Revenue you need to drive through that business. I think where a lot of businesses get in trouble is and we struggle with this at Third Row Media. I've been thinking about this a lot lately. We had an event business that drove sponsorship dollars. We had an advertising business that monetized the eyeballs on sites like Search Engine Land. And we had a lead gen business that helped us work with sponsors to drive targeted ICP fit. Lead gen, right. We debated for years like, should we create a job board and charge for listings, should we create certifications, training programs? And it was always very sexy. It's like, oh yeah, let's create a. And I spent probably six months really digging into certificate during COVID We're like Third Row Media. Boy, it would be great to have a search certification from Search Engine Land. Sounds sexy. Probably could sell a few of those. There was a huge organizational commitment and what we realized was the certification business is different than the advertising, event, sponsorship business. So we're actually deciding to go into a different business. Do we think organizationally we can support that business or is it going to distract us? In our case, we decided it's going to distract us. But I would argue and maybe the audience will feel me on this is like there's a lot of businesses that make the decision. Like, it seems like an easy lift today. We can vibe code a website, no problem. Let's start another revenue stream. It's very distracting for an organization to have multiple revenue streams if you haven't dialed the main. The main one in. And so it's like again, the audience might be receptive to more products, but are you hitting your goals? Are you driving the revenue you need to drive through? Have you earned the right to sort of expand beyond that? And I think that's a disciplined conversation. I mean, it's easy to get distracted and think we could do that too, no problem.

[A]

And it's also different. A lot of it's a different motion too and a different skill set and sometimes a different audience. If you're trying to go after a different audience, you just, you redo messaging. You have to go back and do all the. You got to redo, you got to have a. Probably a different person thinking about it than thinking about the main audience. And a lot of people put it on one marketer to be like you to do messaging for this. And then, oh, we have this other product that does this and you have to do messaging for that and then messaging with that. And that's right. Then you end up what we talked about at the Beginning is you try put out this broad messaging and see who comes in. And then it doesn't work as well as targeted core messaging to your icp.

[B]

That's right. And it takes real discipline. And that discipline isn't just a marketing function. Right. It's pressure from sales saying, we want more products, we need more products to sell. Fair enough. But are you selling the current products well enough or do we agree that we've got the right motion for that first set of products before we go launch new products? There's a financial component to it. How's this going to affect profitability? Ebitda, all the rest of the stuff. There's an ego aspect to it. Hey, we're good marketers. We can pull this off. Don't worry, I'll just work a couple extra hours. There's a bunch of other factors in when you make this decision. They're all dangerous. And I'm not saying it can't work out, but I am saying it's dangerous. And you should be mindful about adding pressure to an ICP and a product. Market fit is tricky.

[A]

Which I know with like third door media, which like Motion did you like figure out had like the most leverage when it came.

[B]

The motion with the most leverage, to be honest, was advertising. The problem with that, because it's so high, it's so high margin, it's easy to implement an ad platform, take orders and deliver the ads. The problem is demand. Demand was very macroeconomic in my experience. Maybe, maybe we were wrong about this, but our experience was advertising. And I'm talking about display on the sites. House ads on our sites went from sub 10% total revenue to 30% during COVID and right back down after Covid. So there are macroeconomic reasons for that. But highly, highly leveraged lead gen is very high leverage. Huge margins on selling webinars with lead gen components to it. Especially if it's a targeted ICP where once you get them hooked on, hey, this is a really good fit. We're getting quality leads that's real easy to resell, so you get a real good retention number on it. In the event business, virtual events are great high leverage because it doesn't cost a lot to do virtual events. But other than our friend Jay, I don't know who's figured out virtual events very well. Maybe marketing land has, but like virtual events are getting harder and harder to sell post Covid and now the drive back to in person events has the downside of in person events are expensive to run at scale, so they're not.

[A]

Fully leveraged so hard. It's like one of the. They're needed. But it's not like a profit play. It's not a profit, it's an audience play.

[B]

Correct. And that's tough in this environment. Right. Because for third door and I'm not sure how you run marketing land but for third door those were for profit events. Those events were designed to make profit for third door media, period. Now we leveraged sponsors to pay for some stuff but if you're a B2B marketer and your boss is your CMO, your CEOs like we got to get in front of people. It's very, very tough to run a B2B event without losing money and saying hey, we're going to lose some money here but we're going to make it up in pipeline. That's a tough one.

[A]

I think in person is a long game thing. I think eventually it becomes a profit center. But if you need revenue now, it's like a hard, it's a hard trade off. Eventually if it becomes a thing, it's going to be a very good profit center for you. But agree you're one year, two, year three even, maybe year four it might make break even or slightly profit. So it's like that's a hard.

[B]

Dude, let me tell you something. Yeah. I'll leave the, I'll leave names out of this just to protect the innocent but I know that There are several B2B events that lose somewhere between 800 to $1 million a year to. I've heard one that loses $20 million a year and they're fine with it. They're huge company, they invest a huge amount of money. It's both a, it's a marketing but.

[A]

A media company can do it. But it's a marketing play for like a SaaS company to do it.

[B]

Correct? Yeah, but think about it. If you're CMO of a mid sized B2B software company as an example and you're like, look, we're going to do this event and it's going to have marketing benefit down the road, but we're going to lose 300,400, $500,000 this year. That's a tough sell. You really got to be sold that there's something down the road for you and it takes a real vision. The event team and the leadership team need the vision to go do that. I'm not saying it's a bad idea, but you're right. In a media context it was unacceptable to lose money running events they were for profit events.

[A]

I think when you come down for the meaty example you gave, I think when you're deciding on advertising versus people paying, you're deciding versus am I trying to create opportunities that everybody can have versus making it only for a select group of people. Because advertising basically, like with this OpenAI talking about it like doing ads, it's trying to make it not like the only the people with money can afford. ChatGPT is trying to say it's a library where anybody who wants to be educated could do that and advertising is the medium to do it. That's why people are still advertising.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

All around is because it's a way to offset cost so people can have it for free.

[B]

That's right, Yeah. I mean, look, I mean you're in business to make money, so there's different schemes by which to make that money. A free event that draws lots of audience that you can monetize later, that's a fine strategy. I don't think it's about good or bad strategy. It's about being deliberate about that strategy and being specific about it. Right. As opposed to being sloppy and saying we'll just try everything and like whatever works, works. It's tough.

[A]

Yeah. I think, I mean that's so like the audience play is hard like we talked about before, because it's like, it's also like picking the right stream to go first is like, do I. Am I becoming an event company? Because all these, when you were coming down, these robes, like they're different motions, as we said, is like event motion. So different than a newsletter motion versus a community motion versus a. And you have to decide, do we have the people on the team to execute this in motion? Is it going to be a profit center or is it going to be a loss center or is it going to break even? Is it an audience play, is it a marketing play or is it a profit play? You have to make these decisions ahead of time before saying I'm just going to run event or I'm just going to run a newsletter.

[B]

That's right. Yeah, that's right. That's exactly why I said earlier the revenue spine, that's my frame of reference, is what's the spine of this company and are we world class at this part of execution? Because we need to be, because the market demands it. And once we've built a solid foundation, okay, great. We've built a big audience and we've monetized it through, let's just say advertising as an example. We Used to say this at Third Door all the time. The reason SMX works, the reason Martech works, is we've earned the right to ask people to pay to show up for an event in person with us. We earn it every single day by publishing great content. They trust us. And then when we say, hey, we're going to run an event, would you like to come? It's 1,500 bucks. Enough of them say, yes, we would like to come to the event. Right. But there are different models. You can get at this in different ways. You can start an event company that doesn't have an editorial brand. But for Third Door, the DNA was the editorial brand first. Build the audience and then earn the right to monetize it through the other ways that we monetize it. So getting that strategy right and understanding what that revenue spine is, is step one. I mean, I think it's interesting. It's really easy to get sucked down the clay, go to market, engineer, AI powered, whatever. It's easy to get enthralled by how cool it is of the things you can do today. But without a good spine, I'm not sure any of that stuff works. Great. We got a ton of leads. They're the wrong leads, nothing converted. Okay, good luck.

[A]

Yeah. I also think that we're becoming in a time where, like, things are commoditized. Like B2B is becoming more like A, and I hate it is more like a consumer play than it was ever before. Because before there was like one or two or three options in your space. And you can run certain plays like demos and win because you can hide pricing, you can save fluffy things. You could work. But now, like, truly marketing is the mode and the person who owns attention is the mode, and the person who owns trust is the moat. Where before it was less of that because the competition wasn't there, but now that everything is kind of becoming a commodity. Even in B2B, there's 10 different options for everything. I mean, why advertising works is because it does. I say, for me, it lowers the choice paradox, basically.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

Like, it helps you, like, make a decision. Advertising in this world where there's 20 options at least. Like an ads educating you, getting you closer to that purchasing decision that you didn't have before. So that's why ads need to exist in this world.

[B]

Yeah, I agree completely. I mean, there's a reason why. Why Duncan keeps hiring Ben Affleck to do his Duncan commercials. Right. Like, it's very on brand. Duncan's a Boston brand, a Northeast brand. Ben is a guy who you sort of relate to in a bunch of different ways. And they make that calculation the same way that any brand utilizes celebrity or brand messaging or brand positioning. There's an art to it that it's like, again, we've all been trained over the last 15 years on this performance, this relationship to spend and results. But the reality is that brand choice, and you're absolutely right, the cognitive, the cognitive load on making a choice in a crowded market's hard. Like, how do you make a choice? Like, okay, I'll just go ask ChatGPT. Well, I don't know if ChatGPT is right, so how do I start to winnow that down? And the truth is that advertising as one tactic, there's a reason why storytelling, narrative driven advertising kind of lasts. Like the kind of advertising that Nike does at that level sticks with you. Now, you may hate it, fair enough, but you remember it. And that does reduce that choice paradox. I think that's a good way to frame that. So advertising, look, I mean, we could debate whether or not, you know, the Budweiser ad was a good ad or a bad ad. That's not the issue. The issue is like, did it hit the, did it hit the audience the way that they hoped it did and did it get them the results in terms of their brand lift that they wanted?

[A]

And you're seeing more and more of those brands, like it's not the super bowl is just one of the moments where that, that campaign, now they're learning that that campaign needs to be. That's right, Social, the ctv, I mean, like a different channels. Like they're making use of that creative. Yeah, like and, and they took multiple takes and yeah, it's become like just because they have that one super. Well, they're trying to make it work for multiple different channels and multiple.

[B]

Yeah, I mean it's interesting because like it used to be the super bowl was the moment that you saw those ads for the first time, but now you see them all in advance. Right? We saw all the ads in advance. We saw the cl. The Claude ad was shown like a week before the Super Bowl. It's all over YouTube. So yes, you're right. The leverage of that advertising unit becomes deatomized or atomized in multiple different ways so that they're getting pre moment experiences and post moment follow up. It's brilliant. But it's all part of what that buyer journey has become. Right. Because the thing that's different between now and 50 years ago is the media landscape has completely exploded. There's a million channels, there's unlimited channels that you can go to, whether they're digital or analog or whatever. And so you're not going to get coverage on all of them. And that's where, you know, kind of like, understand again, going back to product market fit and icp, like, well, where are your people hanging out? Let's go there. It's hard.

[A]

Okay. I may, may have seen like, maybe I wasn't on X at the time on YouTube or to see the anthropic. I could have been on.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

I could have been at the super bowl or during the Super Bowl. They could have been run. I could have been on Tick Tock and they're running an ad. To me, it's like, that's the new game is that people's attention are everywhere. And if you're not, you can't just be on that TV because during your ad, someone could be scrolling on their phone, missing your ad, and you're not running that moment on, on an ad or a TikTok or on social, a social post on Instagram and you're missing the moment of that one creator. That could have been everywhere.

[B]

That's right. The other thing that's interesting is just to stick on this, like this creative is interesting. I saw some data about the halftime show. The halftime show had. I don't remember, I don't want to misquote the numbers, but the halftime show had X million of views on YouTube at halftime and it doubled or tripled within 12 hours after the show. So people were going to watch it for the first time and going to rewatch it on YouTube multiple times. The engagement levels are kind of through the roof. So it's like, you're right. There's this interesting wheel of content. And we all, as content marketers, we all know this, right? You're trying to squeeze as much leverage out of every piece of content you can get. And certainly making an investment for X. A million dollars to run a Super bowl ad in today's environment is going to require a certain amount of digital savvy to leverage that creative. But that's true. Forget the Super Bowl. That's true if you're doing a podcast like yours, or that's true if you're doing a webinar. If you're doing a webinar for a client and you're not leveraging it on social with clips, you're missing opportunities to reach the audience where they are the goal.

[A]

I mean, now when you're thinking about ads Is you're thinking about, okay, can I have this in multiple places? But also you were thinking of like, is this ad gonna be clipped up by other people and put like, halftime show? I know it was basically a bad bunny ad and bad bunny sharing his message ad. But it was clipped up so much because there was such a message and such a storytelling to the halftime show that. But that's what you want. You want clips of clips and people making and talking about it and showing that they're watching it. And you don't only want your channels to be the ones that have to be promoting your content.

[B]

That's right. Like this podcast. I talked to somebody the other day about a podcast and this podcast as well. Right. I mean, the more I and I even on my own podcast, it's all about the clips. It's very hard. Like we're going to record. We've recorded for 30 minutes now. A handful of people will watch the whole 30 minutes. Hi to those people who are still watching, whatever. But the reality is that most people get the clips and they go, oh, that's interesting. And if it's interesting enough, maybe I'll go watch some of the episode. But like, it's become all about the clips. Because the clips are where you can get mass distribution to drive the brand awareness that reduces. Like, hey, what podcast is a good podcast? Oh, I don't know. Marketing Millennial sounds like a good one. I saw a clip, it was cool. I'll check it out. So that's coming at all angles, no matter whether you're talking about big time Coca Cola, Pepsi brand advertising or marketing land. And how do you. It's the same set of tactics, but it's just scaled for the size of the business and the audience that you're talking about.

[A]

I have a question. Did you ever have to intentionally slow or deprioritize a high visibility channel if it wasn't providing leverage to the business?

[B]

That's a good question. Yes, but only in experimental ways. So for example, at Third Door, we tested and actually at other clients I've had, we were testing. I'll talk about third door. At third door, we really thought, like everybody thought, well, LinkedIn is the right audience. Like we're selling tickets to events and we should probably be able to sell some tickets and some sponsorship. And we scaled up a number of kind of modern ICP driven, AI powered, like campaign tactics that just didn't show the return on the investment. And so we slowed or shut some of those down. We didn't spend a Huge amount of money. But we were spending enough that it was like, this is a little uncomfortable. And not seeing any signal through that noise was concerning in as much as did we get the targeting wrong? Do we have the wrong product market fit? Do we have the wrong landing page? Where do we start to think about how to address that to get this thing back on track? And so we really, we kind of came to the conclusion, which I don't know is totally true. We kind of came to the conclusion that paid media, the way we're doing it, doesn't work. We're either not spending enough money to get enough reps to find the answer or this audience just isn't going to buy a high priced paid ticket to an event through an ad, even as part of a funnel. And so yeah, kind of, I don't know if that's a great example, but kind of an example based on the question you asked.

[A]

Sometimes it's like we said before, sometimes it's like a, a offer problem. Sometimes it's like a, like you're, it's hard to say like you need a bigger budget to sell on that channel. Sometimes it's. Some people don't spend enough time like letting the, the ad run in the algorithm. So then they're not, it's not showing to the right because sometimes the algorithm needs to figure out okay, this ad. Yeah, serve for this person. And this happens on meta all the time time too. It's like people run out, they, they don't let the learning period happen and then, or they're not spending enough to even let them learning. Not spending a lot meaning like hundreds of thousands of hours just like they're not learning and they're like oh, it doesn't work for me. But they didn't let like the, the algorithm has to like figure out who you're serving to based on the messaging you're saying, based on your caption, based on who's engaging. It's a whole learning process to serve you out to the right person.

[B]

Yeah. And it's real true. I've been studying and trying to figure out YouTube and I've read a couple of books and watched some YouTube videos. But like it's clear to me that the algorithm like it's an interesting spin of spin to think about this way the algorithm and the business, YouTube's business and LinkedIn, they want you to succeed, but they can't allow you to succeed unless they have a signal of that connection. Right. So when you post a video on YouTube and this happens on TikTok too, right? It like it kind of tests the audience. It's like here's who's connected to you shows. It shows the video. If you get a high enough click through rate, high enough engagement rate, it will start to accelerate that out to larger and larger audiences. Once you understand that, you start reframing like oh like with like. I'm having real trouble with my YouTube channel because I like to talk about a lot of different things. It turns out bad, bad idea, stupid idea. I should be talking about one thing over and over again. Hammering the audience so that I finally find the audience and then it will accelerate my impression volume which will lead to view volume which will lead to subscriber growth. I didn't know that that's actually how it worked until somewhat recently. And I'm trying to refactor how I do my content in that channel.

[A]

One thing too, I think with paid media especially, I think people confuse an impression or as an actual attention and I think that's the problem. Attention is not always. Just because someone, your ad was shown to someone doesn't mean they paid attention to it. That's why I love like organic social because if nobody's paying attention it's not going to be served in the side works like that's a post is going to go to more and more people because they want people to stay on the platform. So what have you. What do you tell people when they the difference between attention versus traction. Here's what I hate about most marketing conferences. Consultants who haven't sent a campaign in five years telling you to optimize your funnel. Unpack kills the noise. It's February 18th through 19th, virtual and packed with practitioners who actually build this stuff. AI workflows, multi channel strategies, the stuff that actually moves Anita. No one on one content, no panels where everyone agrees. Just advanced tactics from people in the trenches. Last year over 3,500 lifecycle marketers showed up. Join them at cust IO TMM.

[B]

Well, I think you just demonstrated it with what you're saying about impressions versus engagement. I mean I think you know, attention is the first kind of gate to get through. Like is, is your, you know and impressions are a signal, right? Like, like a lot of impressions is a good thing. Assuming traction follows and traction again like the reality is it depends on what you're trying to do. You know, if, if it's a direct mail ask, you're trying to get somebody to sign up for your course. We know what that looks like, right? We know, we know what the benchmarks are. We know what the expected conversion rate is. It's within a. Within a thing. But I think if the goal is brand building, let's say, and attention, you're going to use attention as a measurement of, hey, did we, did we lock this and get the right audience? Again, it's all about defining the funnel and what you're trying to get out of that. Whether it's a spend or organic, it doesn't really matter. But we all experience this every day for some reason. This post I did on LinkedIn did really well and this post didn't. And I feel like that post was a lot better than the first one. But for whatever reason, it was Tuesday at 3pm it just worked better. A lot of times. It's hard to decipher. And I think all of us are sort of like Sherlock Holmesing these algorithms. Like, do we really understand how this works? I mean, this has been going on in the SEO space for forever. We all tried to decipher the Google thing, but the reality is that attention matters if it converts and conversion is in the eye of the holder. What do we mean by conversion? You've got to get real specific about that with your audience. And by the way, the traditional funnel, top of funnel, middle funnel, bottle funnel, whatever you want to call it, it's not that it's dead, but it was never really real. People don't buy in a linear fashion. So we're sort of coming to recognize like, oh, it's a messy buying process. People come in and out. I'll give you one good example. So we used to do event emails on Mondays and Thursdays, and we would send like, hey, this week's promo goes Monday. And then anybody who opened it on Monday will get this version on Thursday. Anybody who didn't open it would get this version on Thursday. Opens unopened. Real simple, right? And then we would see when people start to buy tickets, and it's really interesting. And we would sell very little tickets on Monday and Tuesday. High engagement rates, big open rates, lots of clicks. Okay. And no sales. That's weird. And then on Thursday, send the resend and you'd get a massive response from the opens and dead air from the unopenes. And so we started. I literally started calling people on the phone, be like, hey, can I talk to you in five minutes? I know it's creepy, but I see you open the email on Monday and you didn't buy a ticket until we send you the resend on Thursday. Oh, yeah, it had nothing to do with the Resend. I was just checking my calendar and I forgot. And the Thursday email reminded me that I hadn't bought the ticket. Like, oh, there's a B2C slash B2B thing happening here, right? It's like they got to go check with their husband or their wife. Like, hey, kid's not graduating high school on Thursday on June 2, are they? Because I want to go to this conference. So it's like once you understand the psychology of the buyer and how they think about buying, you can start to map the tactics in and so you can sort of go, hey, we're doing these emails on Monday for attention. So let's be a little wild. Let's kind of like do a little bit of what Jay does, a lot like kind of crazy subject lines. And on Thursday it's like, let's close the deal. Hey, you open on Monday, buy a ticket because prices are about to go up. Simple. That formula really worked. But it wasn't, it wasn't, it seems like I'm saying it now, it was like obvious. It was not obvious. It's not how we used to do ticket sales. We learned that as we kind of played with the audience and sort of like, okay, what's really happening here? So attention's good, conversion's better, but those things work in lockstep.

[A]

I still hear from people today that like we're sending too much emails.

[B]

Like, oh yeah. So I, I, I, I believe it. I, I, I know at Third Door Media, I know it, we sent too much email. But it was an email driven product.

[A]

I, I honestly think if, if my theory on sending too much email is like, if you're, if it's aligned and people like the content's good enough, you can like send as much email if it's rev relevant to that audience. There is a like a nuance to it. Like Don over send sales emails. Like, but you send me like newsletter and content and I see this and then throwing in like plugs here and there. I think it's, I think there's, there's a level you could send the question. Another question for you is like, what is one question that every leadership team should ask quarterly to make sure they're not like optimizing for like the wrong motion.

[B]

I think it comes back to what I said earlier about revenue spine. If you are very clear on, if you've got one to X number of revenue sources or streams and you're real clear on this is the one that matters and these matter but they don't matter as much but this is the one or two that are the spine of the business, the one that drives the most profitability. I think quarterly, it would be helpful. And AI could be a huge help here. Right? Like, are we drifting? Do we have content drift? Are we mixing messages and mixing audiences? Have we slid into getting quote, unquote lazy with our marketing messages? Or are we hammering home the key revenue things? Is it still delivering the side revenue things? Fine. But we know what butters the bread. And are we being really disciplined about treating that audience the way they deserve to be treated? I think quarterly, if you did a check kind of against your icp, against your product market fit, that would be smart. I venture to guess not that many people do that at that level. Just to make sure. And I'm talking about, open up all the emails you sent this month, go look at them, what they said, really read them, Read them out loud to each other. That kind of thing would be, I think, really, what are the ads? Did the headlines drift? Did we start using different images because we got bored? Did we lose our discipline on what we're doing? Because I think that brand repetition, it just really matters. We know that people take back in the day, we say eight impressions now it's probably 15 or 20 impressions. But to get somebody to take an action, it's multiple actions. And you need to reduce the cognitive load on people. You need to make it real easy for them to understand. Oh, it's those guys. That's why I think you see strategies where they'll lean into a bright color or a real specific brand icon and they'll just hammer it over and over and over again. It seems boring to you as the marketer, but the audience, they're getting reinforced. So I think that kind of reinforcement check internally based on this conversation, just in the context of this conversation, probably a pretty good one.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, I say that on social all the time. It's a repeated message thing. As you grow, someone hasn't seen your messaging. So, like, sometimes it's not. Not everybody's going to see your message, not everybody's going to remember your message. So it's a repetition of telling people what you believe in over and over and over until, like, they come down the funnel. If you were starting a B2B media company today or a SaaS company today, what would you deliberately not build? Even if everyone told you, not everybody told you to?

[B]

That's a really good question, and it's a hard one because I think the media landscape is shifting and the kind of traditional Tricks that worked maybe 10 or 15 years ago may not work as well. But what would I not I would avoid. I think email is still really, really powerful. So I would definitely have some kind of like publishing engineering that had some way to subscribe to it. Whether it's substack, beehive or just a straight email would definitely do something like that. I would definitely invest in something like this, a podcast where I can have honest conversations with people and then use those clips to sort of spread the brand awareness. I probably would hold on sort of straight advertising initially to make sure we've built the audience before we monetize it too soon. And I'm thinking about certifications. I think the certification courses thing is tricky. I probably wouldn't start there. I think again it would be aligned to the audience that I'm hoping to build and what they need. If I'm building an education media company, then courses are a great fit. If I'm building more of a traditional publishing engine, that would probably sway. The fit would probably be different. But what I would do is I would decide on what's the lead. Where do we think we can get the most leverage revenue wise at the most efficient way to build that revenue spine so that we have the capital to expand as we learn who the audience is. You know what I mean? Yeah.

[A]

I mean that, I mean that's how I like we built our media is like the goal is to have that one motion and then once you've got that motion how can we reduce the risk more and more and get the other motions like ad events to reduce the, like the load on that channel. Add whatever. To add the load. So what is that then next? But you have to have that one and it's still four years later. R1 is like 85% of like 80% of revenue. And we, I mean but it was 100%.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

So I mean probably 75 now. But it was like our, our full. And probably this year is going to end up being 70s or 65. So the goal is to reduce that risk, bring it down. But you need that one at first to you need it.

[B]

You need an engine that you can keep pouring gas into to get that consistency to run the business the way you need to run the business. Right. Because at the end of the day the stability of the business profitable or not. But whatever your funding model is or whatever is the key to build the engine. Because in today's environment you don't know what's going to happen. Right? We don't have any idea what's going to come around the corner. So having that relationship with that audience, having that community with the audience gives you a little bit of protection, a little bit of buffer. And then a lot of times the audience will tell you. Right. Once you've got a big audience, you could just ask them, like, hey, we're thinking about doing this. What do you think? Is this a good idea? Not a good idea. The benefit of building that core spine and that core audience is sort of unmeasurable in many ways. And so, yeah, whatever that.

[A]

I think also what you said too, is sometimes that core offering that you have, instead of thinking of another offering, it's like, how can I improve on it? So we can like increase.

[B]

Like that's right.

[A]

For some product, it's like AOV or revenue per user, or like whatever you're trying to trade, like, how to make that offering more valuable. So, yep, more and more. Instead of going, now we have to go find something else, like maybe go what you're good at and make it better before you go into the next thing.

[B]

Yeah. I had a conversation with somebody yesterday who does. He coaches founders. Really interesting guy. He's got 15 or 20 founder customers at any given time. And he told me the number one problem that founders have is they get bored and they convince themselves that they're really smart, which they are, and they go, hey, we can do this too. And they add, just like you're saying, well, we pull this off, we'll pull this off. Well, when you add a second revenue stream that's unconsidered, you're diluting your resources and your focus, it's really dangerous. Boredom and ego can play all sorts of head games with you, but if you're laser focused on that audience, that audience will tell you where they want to go next. And if you can listen to it, I think it's. It's a pretty cool way to run the business.

[A]

And lastly, I like to ask people on this podcast, what is a marketing hill you would die on?

[B]

What is a marketing hill I would die on? Hmm. I would die on the brand hill.

[A]

That's a good hill to die on. I always die on the brand hill.

[B]

Yeah, I think that's the only hill. It's the only moat. As far as I can tell, in our AI powered world, brand is like the only moat kind of left other than just pure technical execution, which, whatever. That's a. Even that'll get commoditized at some. At some level.

[A]

So, yeah, brand, I said to one of my friends who's in media today that like brand is like the ultimate risk mitigation tool.

[B]

Yeah.

[A]

You're, if you're trying to like, performance marketing is not going to de risk your, your business in a commodity world.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

It's how you're going to build the best brand and the best trust with your audience.

[B]

Yeah. I think the problem with, I think the problem with the word brand, which is why I pause, is that if you ask 10 people what brand is, you get, you will get 10 different answers. Right. And so when I say one person.

[A]

Is going to say colors and logos, the other person is going to say, yeah, yeah, yeah.

[B]

And by brand, I presume we're generally talking about the same thing. I'm talking about the, the promise of the brand that you built in relation to the audience remains. You know, whatever you've set it out to be, it's consistent. It's, it's whatever. Right. Whatever those brand values are, they don't change ever. They never change. Your audience gets to know who you are. You know, Nike is always about performance sports, period. Airbnb is always about like whatever. They're about like, you know, renting, whatever, like that those values can't change. The colors of the logo don't matter. Right. Like, like it's fine. It used to be, it used to be heresy to play around with brand colors and brand logos. That's changed. You know, you look at like, I remember the first time I saw a MasterCard ad where the logo turned into two baseballs. I was like, whoa, they're playing with, what are they doing? They're playing with their logo. That's not the issue. The logo is not the brand. And so you gotta be able to be a little bit careful. I think you need, you do need to.

[A]

Yeah. I mean, we're on the same line. I believe those values are important and reinforcing them consistently in a non selling way is what like brand is to me. Like we talked about earlier, Nike is doing these ads that are not like saying, go buy a shoe right now.

[B]

Right? That's right.

[A]

But they are brand. They do sell shoes. Yeah, because. And it sticks to what they're messaging.

[B]

That's right.

[A]

And where could people find you and what you're doing?

[B]

LinkedIn's a good place to find me. I got a substack. Mark Serkin substack. My podcast is called Playbook Broken. I'm ramping up season two. Got to figure out who's going to be on that. And serkan.com is my shilling website if you want to talk consulting or strategy or whatever. But yeah, those are. You can find me anywhere. I'm all over the place.

[A]

Thank you so much for joining. I appreciate it.

[B]

Thanks man. Thanks for having me. It's a fun conversation.

[A]

Thanks so much for listening. Keep tuning in to hear more great insights from the coolest marketers from around the world. If you haven't already, make sure to subscribe and follow the Marketing Millennials podcast on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, YouTube, or wherever you get your podcast. And if you like what you hear, I would greatly appreciate you giving us a five star rating. It helps bring more marketers into our community.