Why Storytelling Still Matters for B2B Marketing ft. Zontee Hou

Zontee Hou:

Yeah, [crosstalk 00:00:02] anything that teaches you to think on your feet is probably a good thing. And for most people, public speaking at some point in their life is going to be necessary. So I’m definitely a fan of the improv. I mean, I was a bit of a queer kid when I was growing up and as a professional speaker, that’s actually something that is pretty common is that we’ll bring in improv folks or coaches. So I’m all for it. I think that makes a lot of sense.

Mark Richardson:

Yeah. Buddy of mine I worked with, he had a group… worked in Amsterdam for a while, a group called Boom Chicago. It was weird because it’s based out of Chicago, but it’s in Amsterdam. And so he was really successful in growing their kind of corporate partnerships and public speaking enablement discipline there and ended up making them more money I think, than the actual theater.

Adam Kerpelman:

Isn’t that where the whole Ted Lasso crew hooked up?

Mark Richardson:

Yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

Hey, everybody. It’s the Data-Driven Marketer sponsored by NetWise. I’m Adam.

Mark Richardson:

I’m Mark.

Zontee Hou:

And I’m Zontee.

Adam Kerpelman:

Welcome back for another hang in the data basement. Thanks for joining us and special thanks to our guest this week Zontee Hou, who is a professor, speaker and president of Media Volery which is a marketing agency. Yeah. I’ll throw to you Zontee at this point for kind of the rest of your intro back before I start asking you about professor positions and stuff, I want to be a professor.

Zontee Hou:

Sure. So I like to tell people that I like to tell people what to do. So that means that as a consultant, I work with large brands across the country and the world to develop their digital marketing strategies. It means that in a classroom I’m working with graduate students at Columbia and at the city college of New York so that they can develop their digital marketing skills. And it means that as a speaker, I’m talking to organizations again across the US and I’m actually going to be doing an event this week in Greece, but virtually since we’re in COVID land. And I love working with people on developing the skills, the frameworks, the abilities that they really need to tell compelling story using digital marketing channels.

Mark Richardson:

Awesome.

Adam Kerpelman:

I love the umbrella way of saying that of… I mean, I guess it speaks to exactly what you’re talking about the storytelling skill, but ultimately the idea of telling people what to do.

Mark Richardson:

Yeah. Yes. I wrote that down too.

Adam Kerpelman:

In a way that sums up all of those positions with different sort of shades of meeting, right? Professors, it’s all education, but then as a marketer, it’s kind of like, hey, buy my stuff or whatever.

Zontee Hou:

Exactly.

Adam Kerpelman:

But yeah. So when we were talking beforehand, you were talking a bit about data and storytelling, which of course it’s The Data-Driven Marketer here, right? So that’s something that resonated for us. Do you want to kind of jump into that bit a little and kind of… I think it’s a really interesting space because it lives right at the spot that we talk about on here a lot that I think the interesting idea of being data driven in marketing is that you’re trying to tell these human stories. And you have to take that data and turn it into these human ideas and languages and concepts and ultimately telling people what to do without it just being like, look at the data it speaks for itself. That doesn’t really work. You’ve got to take it somewhere, right?

Zontee Hou:

Yeah, absolutely.

Mark Richardson:

You need to know how to be data driven, right?

Adam Kerpelman:

Right.

Zontee Hou:

Yeah. I think the interpretation of data is really important. So one of the things that I teach in a classroom is really using behavioral psychology to think about marketing, right? And in behavioral psychology, one of the things that we know is true is that we use aoristics, so shortcuts for making decisions. And data is a great example of something that our mind is really able to anchor onto and connect with and hold onto as a piece of information. So one of the reasons that you’ve probably had one of those conversations with somebody where they go, I don’t remember where I heard this, but 75% of people, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Right. They don’t remember where they heard it, but they remember the fact and they remember what it was about. And quite frankly, half the time, I think that they get it wrong. However, the important thing is that the data itself becomes this mental anchor.

Zontee Hou:

And so one of the things that I talk to people about is why is it important for us to weave data, statistics, numbers into the way we present our information? It’s because it A, makes us more trustworthy. B, it makes the information more memorable. And C, it becomes that shortcut for somebody to access that information later on. So the more we can use data in our storytelling, the more we’re actually creating these signposts within our story that people come can come back to. And that can be really powerful. The other thing that I always encourage companies to think about is how can we find information that we have, whether it’s our internal information about our audience or the surveys that we’re conducting to learn about our audience, are there things that we know that we can actually share back out to our community that they can benefit from?

Zontee Hou:

And most of the time the answer is yes. So I’m a little bit like you guys. I was actually a first wave podcaster. I started my first podcast in 2007. So I’ve been in this space a really long time. And of course, one of the big companies that host podcasts is called Libsyn, Liberated Syndication. And they have a podcast called The Feed and on The Feed, what they do on a regular is that they actually take their aggregated podcast data and they share it back out to the community of here’s what’s actually happening in download numbers and behavior numbers and listens so that other people can learn from that and get a benefit from it. That sharing of that data is valuable because not only do they become a resource, but then they actually become a press resource as well.

Zontee Hou:

So they’re not only a resource for their community, but then they are actually quoted and thought of as expert within the space because they’re sharing that data. And that’s a huge opportunity for a lot of organizations. So that’s something else that I talk about a lot when it comes to data and storytelling is could you be doing more with the information that you have on hand so that people come to you for the stories that you have to tell?

Adam Kerpelman:

Which I think is also great, or the way I would say it is it’s a strategy that’s good for storytelling and always has been because it anchors it. But increasingly it matters in the space of content marketing because as search engines started to emerge and we ended up where we are now, now you have that recursive thing of, well, now people cite your research and it ends up, like you said, turning you into a thought leader in the space. If you’re the one doing substantive of research in a space like podcasts, like you mentioned.

Zontee Hou:

That’s exactly right.

Adam Kerpelman:

What’s a little interesting though is that I still, like you said, been at it since 2007, we’ve been doing this for a while. And I still find when I talk to other marketers in the space that there’s still a lot of resistance around the extent to which you have to give away some of what you might think of as the good stuff internally, sometimes that’s statistics, sometimes it’s knowledge that you think, oh, well, we hired you for your knowledge, don’t just go give it all away. And the point is, well, yeah, but you go and you give it away and then that causes people to feel closer to your brand and closer to the product or closer to whatever and then they stick around. They don’t just go cool, I learned everything and then leave. And that’s sort of a shift that I think is sometimes hard to pitch internally. And so when you go and say, we should publish this report, a lot of times somebody above you in the chain might go, no, I’d rather our competitors don’t know those numbers or whatever.

Zontee Hou:

Yeah, absolutely. I hear that all the time from client. The truth is that most of us have numbers that are not actually competitively important, but can be really valuable to the community that we serve, right? I think of a client of ours like Cisco, where they have a whole partner marketing portal where they’re educating their partners, because they know that when their partners are successful at marketing, then they sell more Cisco Systems and products. And so they’re really seeing this as the life cycle of how can we be more successful as a business? It’s not just our own marketing that has to be improved, right? It’s also making sure that the folks that we actually work with have the tools that they need in order to be successful.

Zontee Hou:

And again, I think that all of us can think about that. Whether you’re a B2B marketer or a B2C marketer, there are probably things that your audience would benefit from understanding that would help them to just make better decisions or quite frankly, even experiment with your products. I mean, I think about an area that’s completely unrelated to B2B. Let’s say like beauty products, right? And if you’re a beauty brand, you have the opportunity to be telling people what are the top 10 nail Polish colors of the season. Sure, that could benefit your competitor in the sense that I guess they could run out and start making those colors. But by the time you’ve actually reported on it, is it actually beneficial to them? Haven’t you already gotten the benefit out of that information and moved on.

Zontee Hou:

And quite frankly, if that’s the information that’s keeping you in business, then maybe it’s not the thing that you want to share, right? Maybe it’s more like, again, I don’t really know anything about nail products, but maybe it’s like, what are the popular nail stickers that people are doing out in the world? And you are focusing on the colors, but you’re talking about stickers. Sure, that’s fine. I mean, you can share whatever information you want, but if it’s beneficial to your audience and it engages them in consuming more of your product then that’s still valuable.

Adam Kerpelman:

Or if it turns them into possible consumers when they might not have been, which is a thing that we think about a lot here is we try to educate people about marketing techniques and stuff. The reality is, yeah, this podcast is sponsored by a company that has a marketing tool. And if we create more marketers, then it rises… what is it? A rising tide floats all boats.

Mark Richardson:

A rising tide floats all the boats, yeah.

Adam Kerpelman:

Raises whatever.

Zontee Hou:

Yeah, sure.

Adam Kerpelman:

But you know what I’m saying. I’m curious sort of how you end up talking to clients about just very mechanically, how they use the data by which or maybe semantically would be the way to say it. I had somebody early in my career say, don’t say 70%, say seven out of 10, which I always thought was one of those interesting sort of anchor points around helping people understand. There’s using data to guide the storytelling, then there’s also literally using data in your storytelling. And there are ways to do that poorly as well.

Zontee Hou:

Yeah, absolutely. I will say that I definitely don’t line edit my client’s work, but we do talk a lot about how do people tell good stories in general. And again, I think that comes back to this behavioral psychology piece. There are some really fantastic books out there. One that I like is Hidden Persuasion that really talks to this idea of what kind of language really resonates in the ad copy. And certainly I think that, that can be an opportunity for folks, right? To think through in what situations is what data helpful? So something like seven in 10, that’s really great in certain situations where you’re trying to ground it in this human element. But in other cases, you actually want to lean into the more specific numbers because they sound more credible. So in other situations you’re better off saying something like 43.2% of blah, blah, blah. And that’s because the 0.2 actually gives that higher level of credibility to people because it sounds more precise. So it really depends on the situation and how you actually want to be using of your language.

Mark Richardson:

Yeah. I think the key is like what you said is, is it trustworthy, memorable and does it provide a shortcut to… a means to an end, right? And I think we get overwhelmed with possibilities in how to kind of position certain findings. So I’m really curious as we’ve kind of sit at an intersection of B2B and B2C strategies is because ultimately we are a B2B company. But this is ultimately a human interaction at the end of the day. And those humans are consumers. So there is what I’m noticing is a great deal of consistency, as well as some differences between the way that brands are marketing. You kind of have to have a blend of both, right? How would you speak to sort of a B2B to C lens on storytelling?

Zontee Hou:

Yeah. I mean, I think that oftentimes in B2B we are looking for a level of authority and precision that is perhaps not as important in B2C, right? In B2C oftentimes we’re trying to give people a sense of scale, right? If you think about buying a set of speakers, right? They’ll say it’s as loud as standing 10 feet away from a rock concert, and that is giving you a sense of scale. What you don’t need to know is like 73% of people say that this is as loud as a rock concert. That probably doesn’t make a huge difference to you in that context. But for a B2B brand, the idea of sharing those numbers and that precision is really to say that we know what we’re talking about. So again, I think about the usage of numbers, really, as a shortcut for understanding what is the point of the story that you’re trying to tell people, what do you need to get across? And why are you communicating to them? What’s that information for?

Adam Kerpelman:

What’s interesting there, ultimately in terms of what you’re… not so much what you said, but how you were saying it about the B2B audience is, it comes down to a thing that we talk about with marketing a lot, ultimately the feeling, right? Sort of the idea of scale versus authority and precision, stuff like that. It’s ultimately B2B marketing is still talking to other people about… It’s just business products and often you’re talking to them via the same mediums where they consume the same. These days, I mean, I guess it’s always been the same with TV and stuff too but you increasingly-

Mark Richardson:

Go with addressable media.

Adam Kerpelman:

… lives are meshed, right. So you’re talking about-

Mark Richardson:

[ Crosstalk 00:15:57] trackers and everything we’re able to tailor that content. We should be able to tailor the story pretty much in a kind of bespoke manner to the receiver, to that audience. And we’ve talked on past episodes about how it’s almost offensive if you’re not specifically micro targeted with display ads or video ads across the internet now.

Zontee Hou:

That’s right.

Mark Richardson:

I give the example, it’s like, I want to be hit with sports gear or speakers, not red women’s shoes, I don’t shop for those currently.

Adam Kerpelman:

But also you would like to be hit with things that will make you better at your job, right?

Mark Richardson:

I’d like to be hit with-

Adam Kerpelman:

So now you’re getting targeted by the B2B set. And so I think where I was going with that is the idea of I’m curious what you Zontee, what you see or sort of what you deal with, with your clients at that context and sort of the difference between the B2B audience sort of narratives or the storytelling or that kind of thing because I think-

Zontee Hou:

Yeah, for sure.

Adam Kerpelman:

… for sure people have preconceptions. And generally I feel like I end up saying they’re wrong.

Zontee Hou:

Well, I think that you’re exactly right, that you are consuming B2B and B2C content in the same places. And the truth is that the person who is your B2B customer is shaped by everything that they see in their B2C lives, right? So if Nike is serving them these incredible micro targeted ads that are flashy and beautiful and highly relevant, then when they are experiencing your ad and it’s clunky and it’s sad and it doesn’t feel particularly relevant, then they’re judging you in the context of every other ad that they’ve experienced, right? One of the books that I teach in my classroom is by Marshall McLuhan. Who’s very famously said the medium is the message. And his point is that the medium is culturally the message. When you use a particular medium it’s in of everything else that somebody’s experienced. So to your point about TV, you’re not just watching a TV ad and thinking like, wow, this is a brand new thing that I’m experiencing.

Zontee Hou:

You’ve experienced a million TV ads before. So you know if this is a good or bad ad, you know if it’s interesting or not, you know if it’s relevant or not. So that really impacts you, right? So even now, I was watching Hulu yesterday with my husband and we got a contextual ad that’s interactive, right? And sure, that’s a new format that I am only now starting to see more of because Hulu can give you a highly precision targeted ad and it’s interactive, right? But have I seen a TV ad before? Absolutely. Have I seen an ad where I get to pick an option? Absolutely. At this point, we’ve all experienced those things, so it’s not new information. So in that context, I think that everybody has to continue to up their game as they experience more new things, to think that you can be a B2B marketer and not have to deal with what true in the B2C space is naive.

Adam Kerpelman:

Right. And the idea that your target audience is somehow less sophisticated because we’re talking about a business context, it’s really just everybody lives in that media ecosystem now. And I think the other reality of the modern media landscape is that it’s also silly to even try to chase it by demographics, the way that I think a lot of marketers are trained too, right? I mean, you look at what the age demo might be on TikTok, well, then a pandemic hits and it completely shifts by 20 years in the other direction within three weeks.

Zontee Hou:

Completely.

Adam Kerpelman:

Things get adopted so fast that, six months ago it was a little sillier when I would pitch TikToks for our B2B campaigns. And now everyone’s completely on board because they realize how much that’s just sort of where the attention economy is right now. And who knows where it’ll be in two years, but to say, well, it’s white paper, we do white papers. Like yeah, okay, do white papers too, but also make TikToks telling people to go to the white papers if you’re in B2B.

Zontee Hou:

For sure. I tell people that one of the most compelling uses that I’ve seen of TikTok for brand is a Microsoft product manager who is on there doing these just quick hit demos of how to use the products in some advanced ways. I mean, why not use this medium to teach people skills that really help them to get more out of your products? And that’s pretty B2B.

Mark Richardson:

Yeah. It’s actually in our pipeline. That’s current you’re-

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. This is me pitching TikTok-

Mark Richardson:

… you’re x-ray visioning our content pipeline.

Adam Kerpelman:

… to our teams.

Zontee Hou:

Love it.

Adam Kerpelman:

No, but it’s kind of always been this way with media. My argument has always been, there’s no use fighting wherever the popular attention is. And I think the example I often bring up is just sort of people are very protective of their music taste. I have always, when people… Oh, that’s not punk, that’s not whatever, they’re selling out. Some stuff is not for me, but if it’s got a 100 million streams, there’s something going on there that I don’t understand. And so it’s a media platform and it’s the same with TikTok, when it first started happening I was going, I’m not sure I understand it yet. Now I do maybe too much for my mental health. But when you look at that kind of volume of attention, you go, okay, well, it’s just the new media platform. So let’s just think of it like all the rest of the channels and figure out a fun way to have a presence there.

Mark Richardson:

I’m a little curious and we can kind of use TikTok to segue into one of these current events that I love to chat about on here. Obviously Mark Zuckerberg, rebranded Facebook recently as Meta to sort of push into this AI, VR, AR metaverse as they’re trying to coin it. And I kind of look at this as an inflection point and you spoke very eloquently about Marshall McCluhan, with this idea of the media as the message. The last decade or 15 years, really marketers, content creators, advertisers have kind of been trudging behind or racing to keep up with Google, YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Twitter which has Vine, we had Vine briefly, which I think TikTok was inspired by.

Mark Richardson:

And so at this particular inflection point with all of the understood concerns around privacy and people’s issues with their data being used and knowing that Facebook has been kind of nefarious and had to come back and try to re-earn the trust of their users. Do you see this as a place where marketer, creators, agencies should continue following along and trying to pump a lot of money, a lot of content into those ad platforms? Or do you see this as a point where we are almost taking control back from those large corporations? Do you see maybe over the next five to 10 years, where do you see media creative storytelling given the nature of where the oligarchs want to push the tech space?

Zontee Hou:

I think there’s a lot of different directions we can take this. So in terms of taking power back, I certainly think that one of the things that you’re seeing with these congressional hearings, with the whistleblowers, with the public dialogue is that there is going to be some kind of a reckoning. Even today, I read that Facebook has decided to delete their entire database of facial recognition scans because they’ve realized that that is a step too far and people don’t like it. And they want to, I think, make a show of Goodwill in terms of the public’s needs and desires. Certainly I think that we, as a public, as a society need to continue to push back on these organizations if we are seeing that they are doing things that we don’t agree with. And I think that we do need to legislate. There’s no way around it.

Zontee Hou:

We’ve been in this space of this kind of pre for all wild west of the internet for a really long time. And quite frankly now as all of these different places mature and they become part of our just normal lives, which quite frankly has been true for 10 years, but we haven’t treated it that way, right? We’ve really treated it as if it’s novel this entire time, but quite frankly, for this new generation that’s growing up now, it’s not novel, right? It’s the only reality they’ve ever been aware of, like you guys and I, we remember the time before the internet, but we’re past that. So now our opportunity is to say, we have to do something about that. And then in terms of looking at what is going to be true for marketers, I think that you guys mentioned earlier this idea that we’re always going to have to adapt to you the new next frontier.

Zontee Hou:

And I think that that is true and marketing will always follow where the attention is because where people spend their time and energy is where we want to be putting messages, right? And whether that’s in the metaverse or in TikTok or in some other unknown platform that is yet to be invented, I think that marketers have to be where the attention is. And it only makes sense to invest in a space if people are spending time there. So you may, and I don’t know if any of your guests have covered this, but you may have been part of that first Clubhouse boom of folks who got on Clubhouse. But quite frankly, once people started to leave Clubhouse, did it make sense for brands to continue to be in that space?

Zontee Hou:

If there are other platforms that are more valuable for folks to be, then my suggestion to brands would be go to those places, right? So I think that there’s something to be said for Twitter spaces, because on that platform, you already have a builtin audience and there are quite frankly a more measurable audience that you can tap into. So even if you’re going to be creating content to me makes more sense depending on your brand to be in a place where you have an audience base rather than to try to create it from scratch from a smaller community, unless you have a real toehold in that particular community or a real value proposition.

Adam Kerpelman:

Yeah. From the beginning, I was saying that Clubhouse is a feature, not a product.

Zontee Hou:

And that’s a great way of putting it.

Adam Kerpelman:

And it seems to be shaken out that way, everybody’s just kind of building Clubhouse into their preexisting social products. Yeah. I mean, strategically, I think if I can restate sort of what you’re saying or we’ve all been saying here, I think strategically the move is ultimately to diversify. And that’s the channels that you target in terms of output, but as long as you fall back to storytelling and ultimately realizing that the idea is, yeah, every… It’s sort of, I guess it comes back to the McLuhan quote, which is actually maybe in the modern ecosystem worth explaining a little. I think the context of that quote, when they say the medium is the message or the media is the message, they don’t mean what we… he didn’t mean what we mean when we say media now, mass media, it’s more like media, like videotape is a type of media onto which things are recorded. So is films, so is papers, so is whatever.

Adam Kerpelman:

I bring that up because it’s sort of like, if you can get the storytelling down, if you can back up and understand the story of your product, the story of your value prop, the story of the pain points that you solve, then the part where you have to adapt to the different channels and things like that is just a matter of taking that story and fitting it into the media slot that you’re talking about, right? How do we cut this up so it fits on TikTok? And maybe it takes vast creativity, but then you never, as a marketer really have to worry about like, oh, I’m a TikTok guy. And then, well, if TikTok goes away now, what?

Adam Kerpelman:

So the thing is exist a step further back and understand that the fundamentals come down to storytelling and like we were talking about earlier, how do you use data to guide the storytelling and things like that? But keeping that human element means it’s just a little shift to go from YouTube to TikTok, to Clubhouse, to Twitter spaces to Instagram.

Zontee Hou:

Absolutely. And I think beyond just storytelling, really think about what has value for your audience, right? Maybe the value is entertainment, but it’s still value, right? If there is not something that your audience gets out of the content that you are producing, then they are not going to stick around. So you can create a whole bunch TikToks but if it’s not something that your audience wants to engage with, wants to watch, wants to share with other folks then it’s not going to be successful.

Mark Richardson:

Yeah. I think that goes right to some of the best podcasts that I listen to. It’s like, there are really smart people delivering incredible information that I can go out and make buying decisions, voting decisions, X, Y, Z decisions off of. But the reason that I’m coming back in, day after day, week after week is because they’re entertaining. Like you said, that’s, I think the humor and fun and entertainment can never be overstated in its importance to marketing, it’s importance to delivering information or delivering content, whether you’re reading from an encyclopedia, you’ve got to figure out a way to make that information transfer engaging, right?

Mark Richardson:

So when I think of Pod Save America, these Obama’s speech writers who are actually really funny. They’re delivering news and perspectives and interviews and all that’s great, but it wouldn’t be what it is if they didn’t have that kind of smarmy snarky wit about them. And now that’s why they’re able to sell t-shirts and stickers everywhere.

Adam Kerpelman:

It sort of goes to our warmup conversation about improv and things like that, right? Like just practicing that part of it is really valuable for a marketer in the space to… I’m not saying everybody has to be a star and has to bring charisma, right? But if you can practice at that sort of baseline level of storytelling and just compelling turn of phrase than the medium part is less important. I mean, it matters on your budget sheet, ultimately, where’s your spend going to go?

Adam Kerpelman:

So one thing I want to make sure we hit before we run out of time, you’ve done a lot of work with NGOs and sort of I think nonprofits in the space, these big organizations. I think Mark mentioned IMF, stuff like that. I’m curious sort of the different challenges you run into in that space versus I think a lot of what we’ve talked about so far is sort of B2B, we’re trying to sell a product to some people, or we’re trying to sell shoes to consumers. It’s a very different thing if you’re the IMF talking about monetary policy or… What’s the one? UNICEF, talking about malaria vaccines or something like that.

Mark Richardson:

Yeah. How does storytelling… Yeah, how do you differentiate your kind of funnel approach or your segmentation approach when working with a client like that?

Zontee Hou:

Yeah, absolutely. So I’ve worked with clients like the IMF, the UN FAO food and agricultural organization, ARP, Gassnova, which is the gas and carbon capture enterprise of Norway. In all of these cases, we’re not focused on selling a product, right? What we’re really focused on is educating a public about topics that are really important to the missions of these organizations. And we’re really focused on still engaging them through digital marketing and social media channels, but around why should you care about these topics? What does it actually do in your day to day life? And what can you do about it as a public citizen? And I think that in those situations, storytelling, and also the use of data is important because you have to express to folks that in some ways their lives or at least their lives as they know it, depend on them caring about these particular issues, right?

Zontee Hou:

So whether it is the issues of Americans over 50, or it is for the IMF, like you said, monetary policy, it’s really focused on how do we take these big picture issues, translate it into smaller nuggets that are impactful in your day to day life? And again, give you some kind of a hook so that it’s memorable to you. And it’s become something that you want to talk to your family about, to your friends about, to your senators about, because what they really want you to do is to become an advocate around those issues. One of my favorite examples is from the UN FAO and they do some incredible education campaigns around the importance of soil. They do a huge campaign around the importance of soil quality for agriculture because all of us rely on food to be grown out in the world for us to eat.

Zontee Hou:

But most of us have never thought about how important soil is as a part of this ecosystem. And they do a lot of education around what are the things that we can do day to day, but also why should we care about the policies that actually make a difference to the agricultural sector, to farmers, not only in the US, but small farmers who are subsistence farming in Africa? All of that is really important. And so they have to make it matter to you on a really personal level. And I would definitely encourage anybody listening to check out the social media of the UN FAO because they do an excellent job of translating all these big picture issues.

Zontee Hou:

Of course, they’ve done a huge campaign around bees as well, and we all know why bees are very important. And all of these topics can be difficult for you to understand, right? The truth is and we know this again from behavioral psychology, behavioral science, that it is very difficult for humans to picture the future. We’re very poor judges of what is actually going to come down the pike and impact us. We’re also really poor judges of things that impact the big picture of society. But when you can break down all that information and explain to people how it impacts them on a day to day level, that’s where it becomes memorable. That’s where it becomes something that they actually care about and want to talk about.

Mark Richardson:

Kind of goes to that, all politics is local adage when I think of that.

Adam Kerpelman:

Well, and it strikes me as a very interesting challenge because it’s easy with a pair of sneakers to just sort of get out there and say, oh, they’re the best, they’re sort of pow boom. When you’re talking about the step, there’s a very careful line between over dramatic or melodramatic if you’re talking about NGO sort of topics and educational and sort of that thing. Or sometimes I know I’ve run into some ads over the years that have sort of made me… It’s sort of like, okay, I get the point you’re trying to make, but I feel so bad right now, I just want to turn it off instead of engaging with the content and actually learning about the topic. And so-

Zontee Hou:

Absolutely.

Adam Kerpelman:

… again just starting to-

Mark Richardson:

But this is me on current event watch so I think this is slightly applicable. There’s NGO, PIDA came out with a recommendation for major league baseball around the world series. They’re great at using big events to kind of get their name out there. And they suggested changing the bullpen to the arm barn, which got a lot of trolls, a lot of laughs. The arm barn, yes, that is a real recommendation.

Adam Kerpelman:

I love it.

Mark Richardson:

But it’s like, yeah. It got a lot of snark, a lot of hate on Twitter.

Adam Kerpelman:

It’s silly.

Mark Richardson:

But a lot of players really embraced it. And I’m like, that’s the way that they’re shoehorning their values. And if you’ve been bought in with PETA, you’re probably on their side, but there’s probably thousands of new people who this is their first brush. So it’s kind of-

Adam Kerpelman:

That strikes me as much better than a lot of PIDA’s previous sort of efforts at the trend a little too much towards sort of extremist. But going after the thing like that, I think makes a point in a way that I do hope the MLB gets behind that one, because it’s such a silly change and who cares? But you get to make the point and everybody’s happy and it’s a fun joke.

Mark Richardson:

But yeah, it’s one of those things with a lot of… I feel like with UN FAO and we’ll certainly link to them in the show notes here for folks to check out. But I think a lot of times with storytelling, we talk a lot about the bow tie, the marketing bow tie, there’s a funnel on the top. There’s a CRM or some kind of customer engine in the middle. And then there’s the retention ambassadorship even evangelist side. And it seems to me and correct me if I’m wrong, it seems like a lot of your work with NGO’s, IMF and UN FAO would be on increasing that other side of the bow tie. You’ve already got people bought in on the acquisition side. We know they’re bought in with their values, maybe they’ve donated or worked on a campaign before, but it’s really about taking those highly engaged people then and increasing their ambassadorship. Am I right?

Zontee Hou:

I think that that’s definitely a huge part of it. I certainly think that they’re still trying to bring people into the fold to care, but I agree with you that a lot of that activation is around spreading the word and really turning people into advocates.

Adam Kerpelman:

Okay. So we’re basically out of time at this point. I have one last one I want to hit before we get out of here. You mentioned before we started recording that like me, both of your lawyers are parents, or both of your lawyers are parents, well, that’s true. Both of your parents are lawyers. To what extent do you think that impacted your sort of trajectory in marketing, but also the extent to which data plays a part, right? Because in the context of marketing, data’s essentially the evidence that you’re using to back up, whatever you’re trying to say. Which to lawyers, I mean, I learned at an early age that if I wanted to convince my dad of something, I better come with some evidence, which ultimately is data about how my grades will improve if he buys me a laptop or something like that.

Zontee Hou:

I don’t think that I had put together those particular dots in terms of the evidence being the data. But I tell people all the time that when you grow up having to argue with two people who argue for a living, you become extremely verbal. You become extremely precise with your language and you also become really thoughtful about what will persuade somebody else. So certainly I think that it has taught me a lot of the skills that I use on a day to day level. I also tell people that it makes me relatively unflappable when it comes to things like Q&A. So whether I’m on a stage or in a classroom, it’s pretty hard to heckle me because I promise you, you have nothing on my mother, so I’m going to be fine.

Adam Kerpelman:

I was going to say, there’s also a process of early on, you’re not equipped so you lose all the arguments when you’re younger. And then I remember the age when I was sort of like, okay, I can hold my own now. And then I remember the transition into actually winning, which doesn’t necessarily feel like winning. It feels more like a stalemate and then someone leaves the room.

Zontee Hou:

[ Crosstalk 00:00:41:08] that’s all right.

Mark Richardson:

That’s kind of like parliamentary procedure, right? You need to know the rules to the game to figure… It’s like, okay, mom and dad are playing by these rules. If I just, by these rules, then I can beat them.

Adam Kerpelman:

Cool.

Zontee Hou:

Yeah, I remember when I was 16 or so, and my dad said to me, Zontee, you are a grade A bullshitter. And I was like, this is how I know that I have won this argument.

Adam Kerpelman:

Because all I’ve got left is sort of a backwards ad hominem attack.

Mark Richardson:

No, there’s no greater compliment than in a grade A bullshitter.

Zontee Hou:

That’s right.

Adam Kerpelman:

Cool. Well, so yeah, thank you for joining us. And where can people find you on the interwebs, if they want to chase you down?

Zontee Hou:

You can find me on Twitter, LinkedIn, Instagram, all at Zontee Hou. You can find my website zonteehou.com. If you are a small or medium business looking for a marketing agency, we are mediavolery.com. If you are a major brand looking for consulting help, you can find us @convinceandconvert.com.

Adam Kerpelman:

Ooh, I like that one. I didn’t get that in the intro. Awesome. And people can find us at Twitter, at Data Driven pod. Otherwise that’s a wrap. Thanks everybody for listening. This has been another Data Driven Marketer sponsored by NetWise. I’m Adam.

Mark Richardson:

I’m Mark.

Zontee Hou:

And I’m Zontee.|

Adam Kerpelman:

Take it easy, everybody.