Expert Strategies and Tips to take your Business to the Next Level

Glad to be here. Thank you, you had a long trip.

Hopefully, we’ll see. We’ll see that in 30 minutes.

Sure. I am Jason Turner, co-founder of ID Lab. ID Lab is a traditional and digital full-service marketing agency. We provide the best possible service that we can to all of our clients. We are charging at full speed in addition to our traditional and digital spaces. The new web3 and metaverse, which to some is new and to others it’s been around for five-plus years now. And we are very much focused on ensuring our clients are well aligned and messaged to the market, which is one of the things that, candidly, I think marketers sometimes will gloss over. We get all excited about the tactics and jumping in, you know, what’s the latest and greatest way to get our clients to market? But some is the core message. So, we very much focus on what it is we’re really seeing in the market that’s special and relevant and of value. As Simon Sinek says, I don’t know if you’ve watched his “Start with why” we’re very focused on the “why” because it just makes sense.

Wow. It’s really simple, actually. I should pause before I answer your question. Do you want me to give you more background on me?

Let me come back because I did answer your previous question. I apologize. My fault. My background is in marketing, marketing, marketing, and marketing. I have been doing marketing now for 30 years, I guess. And I have been very fortunate in my career, working with some amazing brands and so many amazing people, not just clients but also people inside my agency and the people I bring to a family, meaning my agency. And, you know, I cut my teeth is probably one of the hardest industries to survive in marketing, which is fast-moving goods, FMG, which is all consumables. The reason is it’s a 1% margin business. So, if you mess up your marketing, or you mess up your product or your distribution, or any of the four P, i.e., Product, Price, Place Promotion. Going back to college, college training, and marketing, you might say those are not profitable, and you can lose your profit for the year. Anyway, I moved into digital, and this was in around 1994 because I saw what was coming with digital, much like what I see is coming with Web3 in the metaverse. So, I moved into digital. I ended up building Levi’s first E com instance and we did this revolutionary thing at the time, which was correlated to the catalog, which was their biggest sales driver, with the digital, with their website. That had never been done, and all of this was a code in the catalog that you could put into the website. But that garnered all kinds of media, and it was exciting. That was in Canada because I’m originally from Canada. And then Levi’s U.S. brought us down, and we showed them how to do this. Then I ended up meeting a beautiful woman who is my wife today and ended up moving down here and working with an agency called Studio Architects that was acquired by Sapient. I moved into Sapient, and at Sapient, I did Nissan Worldwide. I led the rebuilding of walmart.com and vitamin shops, Audi, and the list goes on and on and on. All centered around strategy, branding, marketing, and core business model evolution because this was the digital revolution. I was doing all this, and then I built a division inside Sapient that was focused on marketing strategy, branding, etc., and grew that to about 200 million. I left there, and it went on. It’s now sapient razorfish, don’t know what its market cap is anymore, but I should know that. Then I moved on and started a prescription eyewear company. I built that, saw that, and moved back into marketing for Warner Music, where I got to work with some crazy fine artists like the Sinatra family, working with Nancy, Tina, Queensryche, Rihanna, Mel from Spice Girls, Led Zeppelin, and The Monkees and all these amazing artists. It was great, they were such good human beings, and there’s so interesting. Then I left that and started my own agency, and that’s where we are today, ten-plus years later.

Well, you did your homework. I am impressed. Yes, co-founder and business partner of Three Wells. Three Wells is focused on cannabis, CBD, etc. Basically, wellness for 50 plus. The reason we started our company is pretty simple. I had some severe back issues as I was hit by a drunk driver and crushed a couple of vertebrae, and my co-founder had similar back issues.

So, we were inflicted with incredible amounts of pain for years and what we discovered was that cannabis could help take the edge off. Cannabis does not take away the pain. It helps take the edge off, calm you down and let your muscles relax a bit if you take it properly. If you want to go get stoned, go ahead. That’s not how we introduced the plant. And when we were trying to figure out for ourselves how to best use it, there was no information anywhere. And so, we built a company around giving people safe, well-thought-out information and direction from professionals. So, we have an on-staff nurse. We have doctors that are involved. We have plant specialists in horticulture and some botanists and chemists, etc. That business is all focused on just bringing joy to people’s lives and helping them live their best life at 50 plus. Why 50 plus? Because your body fundamentally changes when you are about 43-45, and then you start paying the price for all those crazy things you did when you were in your teens. And it’s 50 when you really start to feel it. So, that’s why.

They’re already coming, even though we’re not targeting them. And they’re coming for a couple of reasons. So, I’ll come back to that and answer the first question first. Put on your marketing hat. Need versus want. What is the greatest motivation for consistent, predictable, almost annualized in a way, or recurring revenue is where you can find and tap into a market? It’s a need. They have to have this. When you’re younger, it’s a want. I want to get stoned and have a little fun. Oh, I want to take some CBD to help my body balance. I just want to feel a certain way. What if I have to do without it? I can. So, when you’re under 40, that’s the scenario in the relationship you had with cannabis when you had mid-forties, and all of a sudden, it turns into a need. I have knee pain, back pain, insomnia, whatever, you know, eating disorders, depression. That becomes a need. You need to help supplement your body to rebalance it, and cannabis does that. So, when you tap into a human need, your business model becomes much easier. Because as long as you provide reliable, trusted on time, etc. l love to shuffle things up, and I’m shifting back to ID lab for a second, but keeping our marketing hats on. We talk to clients about brilliant basics and magic moments, right? Have you heard the term Brilliant Basic?

They’re self-evident, but brilliant basics are simply that if you’re offering tires, make sure your tires are around they are gripped. For example, if they’re snow tires, they perform in the snow, they’ve got the number of miles. All those things are sort of Brilliant Basics. Make sure you’re nailing those, and then there are Magic Moments, the magic moments, and those unexpected things that customers really surprised about. When they get them, then they’re memorable. And they’re memorable in a positive way. So, when you go in, buy your tires, maybe, you offer them some snacks, or you bring them into the garage, and you show them how the tires go on, and you show the construction and why they’re going to be safe riding on those tires. And then two days later, you call them and say, hey, I know we put the tires on two days ago. How are they doing now? How are you feeling when you are using the tires? Because if there are any problems, come back and we’ll take care of you. That’s a magic moment. That’s when you make yourself memorable. So, similar to three words. There are brilliant basics that we did, which is good information, and then we did the magic moments. Now you might ask how does that relate to what was asked about young versus old? So, going back to the need versus want, they just want brilliant basics, right? But we offer the magic moments to those that are older because it has a massive impact on the joy, the comfort of their lives, and what’s happening. Now get right back to your question, young versus old. All younger people come on the website because they’re looking for information for their parents and grandparents. And then they’re discovering the plant for themselves. So, we don’t need to target. Sure, it’s a bigger audience, but it’s not akin to an annuity revenue like an older audience. They’re coming anyway. So, why spend the marketing on it when it’s not our core target. If we did that, our differentiator would be gone. That’s a big thing, your differentiator, because we’ll probably get into this. I’ll sort of steal the thunder by saying I often hear people talking about unique selling propositions and USPs. An agency, for example, forgets agency owners watch it. You know what your selling proposition is. Oh, we have the best creative in the country. You know, everybody says that so, because everybody says that even if you did, now you don’t because a customer’s not going to take the time to serve. Well, how am I going to measure your creativity versus someone else’s creativity? So, my point is that a unique selling proposition has to be audible and defensible. Those are the two things by which you measure a USP. Can you own it and protect it either through legal methods or irrefutable claims? And so that’s the ownership, and then the defense ties into it as well. Anyway, I’m jumping ahead in your agency discussion.

It matters less and less, and I think it will continue to matter less. There are advantages and disadvantages to starting an agency in California. One of the advantages is even though capital investment is spreading across the world now, I was just reading Africa has two and a half times its venture capital investments. I’m using that as sort of an extreme example. So, there’s money starting to flow globally. But the thing with California is that you still have some of the biggest entities around innovation and around technology here. We’ve had this exodus, and everybody has to embrace it as it’s real to Texas. And there’s a lot of people that have moved to Texas with that. The thing with California is it’s always going to be seen as a very setting place to be. It’s always going to be a technological hub for the world. From an innovation POV and look, I take nothing away from India, Canada, and the UK. I’m not saying it’s the one and only, but it started as a base. I mean, you had HP, Hewlett-Packard started their thing literally in their garage, and that’s where it started. So, it’s embedded in the culture here, which is something to consider. But California’s really expensive. Not only from an overhead perspective but also having to remove labor from, I say, overhead. But the labor is expensive here too because taxation is high, the cost-of-living side, etc. So, those are things to consider. If I were starting an agency today, I wouldn’t be as married to being in California as I was when I started ID lab.

Yeah, I think trying to do everything in-house now is not the way to go. I think you need to keep your core as to what you want to be great at or think you’re great at and what types of services are in greatest demand by your target client? Keep those things in-house. Keep your creative direction in-house, your strategy, and your program management. The leads of those need to be in-house because especially program management, and I hate to say this, but some people think that program management isn’t sexy. Well, when it takes your margin from 10% to 30%, program management all of a sudden becomes very sexy. And that’s the reality, right? Sure. You’re pointing the spear. Your salespeople must sell the deals correctly and not undercut your margin right out of the game. But assuming they do that. Well, the next big thing is, is your program management solid enough to keep your margins up? So, it’s a long way to say keep your core functions internal. Don’t be shy about outsourcing. Outsourcing is actually really a good way to go in many aspects. And generally, really, to keep a ratio in the range of no higher than 50% of our active workforce is outsourced. Well, it’s been around 30, but we won’t let it go higher than 50%.

I mostly agree with you. The unfortunate position that any founder or leader in the agency is in is that you have to be good at multiple things simultaneously. Your sales engine has to always be firing and always be phenomenal because your core client usually is CMO or senior executive. They have a shelf life stamped on their foreheads as long as they enter a new job, and it’s 18 months. That’s the CMO average duration in the company now in the United States. So, you know, your clients in churn probably in an 18-month window in most cases, not all cases. So, anyone who’s going to get up there and say, no, I’m done with my client for three years, that’s great. It happens. All I’m saying is if you have to look at things, generally count on 18 months, which means you have to keep your pipeline full to your point. If what you deliver is terrible or it isn’t a good experience for the client, your reputation will go down, and everything depends on your reputation in the space, and you’re not going to grow the account. So, you actually have to do those two fundamental things well all the time. You can’t give up on either one.

Yeah, I just got a call from a CMO yesterday, he left, disappeared for a couple of months, and then he came and said, hey, Manager, I said, okay, is this competitive or how long? common? Let’s go. We got to do this. So yes, case in point.

Yeah, that’s changed a lot. I have seen that in the last four or five years because when I was building agencies, there was a time when clients did not want to hear that you were outsourcing. They were very nervous about that. To your point, though, now they don’t care. And we’re very transparent with them, saying, look, here’s the in-house team. They are your everyday contact points, usually limited to one or two just for simplicity for the client. But I will these five guys or these five women or whatever, they are contractors. We are responsible for them. We still maintain the quality of the product that we deliver to you. It’s of our expectation is completely transparent, invisible to you. But we operate ID lab, and we operate with full disclosure and transparency because even if it was an associate analyst, which is a very, very junior position, and we didn’t tell the client that this associate analyst was a contractor and the client finds out. They’re not angry, but they’re like, why aren’t you comfortable with me? Why aren’t you disclosing everything to me? I start to wonder, and you see, at that moment, you planted a seed, and that seed can grow or not grow, but let’s say it has something else happens. Well, now it’s starting to stack up, and you can easily undermine your relationship. So, that’s why we operate in full transparency with their clients on everything, including our profit. Suppose they are seeds, fine. Yet here’s what we’re making on. I love it because I find when I do that, they trust us more.

Yeah. As a founder, stick with your core strengths. Core strengths aren’t necessarily what’s your best skill, which sounds counterintuitive so let me explain it. It’s different for an agency owner and founders than it is for the staff when it comes to this question because good agencies are passion-driven. You don’t get into that because this game is not for the faint of heart. It is an emotional, financial, legal, and everything imaginable roller coaster to build and properly operate an agency. So, from a founder’s perspective, you have to be passionate about what it is that you’re focusing your agency on doing. If you’re just highly skilled at it, but you’re kind of laissez-faire about your level of passion for whatever it is, then you’re not in the agency very well. Your team will feel a lack of passion, and then they will not get motivated and inspired, and that’s a big portion of your job. So, focus on what you’re passionate about and skilled at. For passion, slightly ahead of skill, you can learn the skills, but you can’t gain the passion because it’s more of just something that happens inside of you. Tactically, I think it’s the other place you’re going. Being the jack of all trades and offering every marketing service to anybody that comes in the front door is not the way to go. You could have done away with that years ago, but what I’m finding now is that the best place to start is vertically focused. Because when you’re talking to a client and using their vernacular and a little nuance of information that only the people in the vertical industry would know. They immediately trust you much more because you understand the business. They don’t have to teach you that. At the same time, the distribution system in this vertical doesn’t work this way. It’s slightly different, and here’s why. So, you have to be vertically focused at first. Then you can run your version.

So, I’ll assume that their brand articulation strategy, however you want to put it, is in place. I can tell you that 70, 80% of the time, they say, oh yeah, we’ve got the brand all figured out, and then we go in, and we look at it, and it’s not. So, even though we’ve been brought in to focus on messaging, we often have to tighten up the brand. Non-marketers tend not to make very generic statements. We’re going to be the best in the world at making tires. Cooper, Michelin Falcon, I think, is another one. So anyway, back to your question. In developing the message, the first thing that we understand is what is the job to be done and for what job are you being hired to do, as that brand? Now, are you familiar with Clay Christensen at all? If you are not, let me tell you he is. Clay Christensen was a brilliant marketer. I think he passed away a few years ago, unfortunately. He was a TED talk speaker. But if you Google play Christiansen milkshake, they did this whole analysis on McDonald’s milkshakes, and you can imagine an entity like McDonald’s, the amount of research they put into a milkshake, the viscosity, the flavor profile, the color, the size, the temperature, all of that. I mean, they got that dialed in, and they said to Clay, and I’ll bring this back to your point of sale, it’s around messaging. Hey, what are we missing that we should know, and how do we sell more milkshakes than we are? We’ve analyzed everything, and milkshake sales were bad, but they were flattening, and they want to grow. So, Clay went out and did some research. But he took a different approach. Usually, in those situations, the research would be about the product or how we should position it, or all these typical things which we still value. Don’t get me wrong, but what he did was he went in to find out why they were buying milkshakes, sort of the essence of it. And he found that I’m sure I shouldn’t believe this, but it’s true because I would not be this person. But people were buying milkshakes while commuting to work in the morning. That was the highest volume sales period. And they were doing that because they needed to be entertained, sloshed, and distracted on the way to work. They were hungry. They didn’t want to eat something that would be hard to eat or consume in the car. And they also didn’t want to eat something that would be done before they got to work. They also wanted something that would stay in their stomach for a few hours.

Yeah, exactly. And they wanted something to stay in their stomach for a couple of hours after they went to work because they didn’t want to be in a car, and they needed to get the messenger back to the office. So, for the job to be done with, it was simply that, you know, entertain me, distract me and make me feel full on my way to work, not give me a sweet treat, which is what we all sort of quake and milkshake. So, bringing all that, it was a long way to get to the answer to your question. You start with what the job is to be done. Because then we understand the cognitive and emotional state of the audience. So, then we can look for the triggers, like what are those emotional triggers? What things do they need to hear? And then, we can start to shape the words around them. And we used professional writers, like one of my writers. Actually, he still does write Marvel Comics. And so, these are real writers, and great writers are really hard to find. But a great writer can find a word or sequence of words that others can’t.

So, we hit that emotional trigger, and that’s where your messaging starts. It’s the emotional trigger. Where too many marketers go is feeds, features, and functions. You have to start with the why and the emotion, and then we start to build the message around that. Then we limit our clients to only three. And they have to be in sequence. You get three message points and you have to tell and there’s a whole exercise that we go through. We have workshops depending on the scale we offer workshops around messaging, or we do very small ways, but we come forward with, okay, here’s what we think are the top three, and here’s the primary, secondary attrition in that order. Then we work with the client to ensure they’re on board with it. And then, we move through the messaging. We create a whole message platform for them, and we make them stick to that message. So, when they put on their homepage 50 different messages, we immediately admonish them and say, no, you have to take the first, and then you can support the next two on that page. But the next big thing that a lot of agencies don’t do is actually sell the messaging platform internally to the client. What ends up happening often is the message is given to the marketing, maybe for communications, maybe the product leaders, and then that’s it. Then you have your executive team out in the marketplace with something completely different. So, we get the executive team and all of the leads with customer service reps. Anyone who has to communicate with the customer at any one point gets brought into that whole messaging, development, and execution because that message has to be supported and broadcast every day, at every moment, for it to sink in. And that’s a feature positioning, and that’s a feature you need in selling propositions.

Yeah. We use AI tools to help initially get where they are, whether they’re talking about, and then we sort of we experiment quickly, we just drill down from there. Search is probably one of the best, easiest examples, and we just went through this with a client where they assumed that they needed to be in conferences and send out all these brochures and their sales pitch. And because this is their business, and we said, look, you got a brand with low awareness, no equity except with your current customer base. So, you’ve got to find a way to get your brand message out before we start talking about what makes you special. They don’t even know what to call you. They don’t know you exist. So, in that scenario, we said, look, we have to write, we have to draft on other brands that are known better. So, the easiest natural thing to do is a complex campaign in search. So, we put a big, complex campaign together, which worked incredibly well. Then we could start building from there. Now, that doesn’t answer your question, and I can’t answer your question because the brand situation is the thing that we really need, and on top of that, where they want to go with the business and then where they’re at with the business. Because the one thing I haven’t said that’s really important is, at the beginning of anything, branding, messaging, and tactical planning around execution. We do an exercise with the client that tricks the market, and I mean that figuratively and literally. Meaning what often happens with clients is their drinks are on Kool-Aid, and that’s normal, and they should. They should be drinking their own Kool-Aid because they have to be passionate about what they do. But we don’t have to when we step in. What we have to do is play the market.

You may think you’re the best producer of blue paint on the planet. But actually, everyone thinks Sherwin-Williams and Kelly Moore are ahead of you. So, let’s face the realities because when we face the realities, we know the emotional and cognitive state of the customer. And then, we can talk internally about how to get you to a point where you are perceived to be the best complete paint in the market. But we must remove all of the and reduce the Kool-Aid effects on our clients. Then we can get into the honest positions to where we are and then the honest tactics that we have to go through to get to where we want to be. Like the Converse campaign, they thought they were well known. They thought that everybody loved them, and we proved to them that wasn’t the case, and they had to embrace that. When they embrace it now, we can all move forward in the right tactical and strategic ways.

They need to do the same thing they did in 1995, believe it or not. And I’m so glad you brought this up because it’s now the core focus of ID lab and a personal interest of mine because I love these situations where our lives will fundamentally change. And that’s the reality of working through. So, what companies need to do is not yet enamored and enchanted by the shiny object, which is the metaverse in web3, and correlate that back to 1995 because there’s one thing that companies have to do now that’s related to 1995 and one thing they better not do, it’s also related to 95. So, the thing that they should be doing now is they should be doing the fundamentals. The fundamentals are, should we be doing this, yes or no? No. If the answer is no, what are the implications? If the answer is yes, all right, why? Why should we go do this? How are we going to measure the success? What are our expectations of web3 in the metaverse? What is our competition? And all the fundamentals after be answered first. At ID lab, we’ve shaped an entire workshop that can be 4 hours to 4 days, where we get at the answers to these questions. Then when you have that, when you figured out all of those fundamentals, then you can decide because it will help you answer. Do we need to be in the metaverse? Do we need to shift to a blockchain? If we’re going to do either one of those things, how do we do that? Those are the answers you need because it is such a fundamental shift. This isn’t like putting up a show on the web. This has much deeper implications for your business, relationships with your customers, and the pressure and capital-intensive needs that it will put on the business. So, you got to start there, and when I say that, I’m sure people in the audience think, Yeah, that’s just the fundamentals. You’ll be shocked how many companies and even agencies don’t start there. They start with, how do we get a 3D model and avatar? That is the wrong place to start. Did I answer your question?

All right.

So, I have to ask you questions?

All right, you start.

Yeah.

Pure comedy.

Absolutely a morning person. I’m up at five in the morning.

Milk Tea. I’ve never had a cup of coffee in my life.

No, I have tasted it. tasted okay. I love the smell, but don’t like to drink.

Oh, my favorite superhero, I think, Superman.

No, man. That’s all for the show, and that’s my way. No, I do not read. I know the answer to your questions, which is a rapid round, but.

You can explain as well. One of the big things as a founder of anything doesn’t matter if it’s an agency. You have to understand yourself and know your strengths and weaknesses. And I’m thankfully aware of all of that. You also have to understand how you learn because if I don’t learn by reading, they help me fall asleep, I learn tactically, I learn visually, and then third to that, I learned through sound, audibly. So, that’s why I don’t read, because I don’t retain. But if you put a video or an object in front of me, I’ll retain everything.

I am constantly watching videos.

Because aura in web3, because we’re so focused on web3 in the metaverse. Aura is this new luxury brand consortium to validate the digital authenticity of NFTs and other digital properties that the luxury brands are creating, which I thought was brilliant. I heard about it, but I didn’t know the details, so I searched it.

Thank you. I appreciate you coming.