From Bose to Bills: Recent Media Moves

Speakers: Katie Flynn, Bob Burch

not an office friend?

I’ve never seen it. I’ve seen clips, obviously. Like everyone knows the famous stuff. The chili.

But yeah, but we just have random– I love that the chili thing is our 404 page on our website.

I think Evan did that.

Yeah. No, it’s perfect.

We are rolling. OK.

All right.

Mr. Bob Birch, Chief Media Officer here at Flynn. Welcome back to the podcast. Thank you. Also one of our most dedicated listeners. So now you get to listen to yourself.

I know. I hate that part though.

Yeah, it’s weird. Yeah. When I watch back the episode, I put it on like 1 and 1.5. So it goes– Same

thing with the clips. Like the clips get shared and I’m like, should I share this? And I’m like, that’s weird.

No, it’s fun.

We’re just having fun. No, I like when other people share.

Yeah. Speaking of fun, we’re going to keep it light today. We’re going to talk some current events, some marketing current events, and some current events here around Flynn. But we got a couple of stories picked out. So I think we’ll just dive in now. Yeah. Let’s go. Let’s hit it. All right. First story.

What are they called? The guys who are doing the funny 60-second reviews.

The breaking and entering.

60 seconds of advertising news. Two 27-year-old men have turned TikTok energy into must-watch daily updates for the ad world.

They do it from a tiny Manhattan office, dropping quick, irreverent takes on ad headlines with flips, jokes, and no shortage of personality. And they actually were invited to Cannes. They were doing like a daily terrorist talk.

They did like terrorist talks. Yeah, they were invited.

They get sponsors for their programs to–

And mostly agencies, correct?

Yes. And what’s great about the sponsors, too, is people are paying money, certainly the eyeballs on it. But the sponsorship is nothing more than a printed piece of paper with a logo– Just talking about. That’s just taped behind it above the whiteboard.

Yeah. Yes. Yeah. That’s what makes it so fun.

That’s what’s fun about the whole thing, is that it’s just very underproduced, but intentionally underproduced. And it’s just about quick hit content. And I think they mentioned the morning brew being their inspiration.

And it’s just such a quick watch.

But I love how snackable it is, because you’re probably like me. I get no less than 20 newsletters a day. And I try to skim the headlines for the best of the best. But it’s like you don’t always know.

And I’m curious about their process. I’m like, are they at the end of the day looking at the news cycle? Or are they coming in super early? Because they drop it in the morning, I believe.

But yeah, you get a kick out of it, for sure.

It’s quick. And their energy is crazy. And they’re kicking and jumping around and just– Throwing like, poster board. Yeah. So yeah, end of the day, I certainly wouldn’t have the energy that they do.

Yeah, no point.

But yeah.

They’re doing something right, though. Very interesting. I think it’s a really smart approach. And we’ve talked about this before with like, on Instagram there’s agencyprobs. Really relatable content. But like,

however many it is, between 60 and 100,000 agencies, I think, in the US. So that means there’s a lot of people working there. It’s probably a little bit of an untapped audience.

Right. And again, it’s such a good way to get the information, too. Because even certainly, we all get newsletters every day. So just too many of them– adage, adweek, media post. We get all of them. You can’t read them all. Half of them are gatekeeping. And you need subscriptions anyway.

So it’s also nice– I hate that little preview.

Yeah. You get your free articles every month. But it’s also just nice getting that quick news and the quick hits and stuff like that that maybe isn’t just on your radar every day. And so they’re really good at curating the stories that are interesting.

They’re really entertaining. And it’s 60 seconds. Yeah.

I mean– Who doesn’t have that?

Yeah, exactly. So it’s good. It kind of reminds me, too.

It reminds me– it’s kind of going back to the pandemic, the some good news that John Krasinski did.

Yeah, I loved that.

Similar idea. It’s just quick. It’s quick. It’s positive. It’s upbeat.

What ever happened to that?

I don’t know. But like with anything– I thought it

got sold to a network or something. And they were going to be doing something with it.

That’s what I mean.

That’s obviously– I would love these guys to continue to be successful. But the reality is, right, somebody’s going to come in and buy it and probably ruin it. And I hope they don’t, because it’s great right now. And that was the same thing with some good news. People were worried that it was not going to go over as well. And it was also– again, it’s OK for things to have just a moment in time. And that was such a necessary thing. And it worked just where we were as a country and everything we were dealing with.

Right. Authenticity came through, both on that and on these 60-second videos. So yeah.

And I’m sure they’ll parlay it into their next thing. This will have a shelf life. But even just you’ve started to see them diversify their posts a little bit more too, where they’re on the street looking at different ad campaigns.

But that’s them for them. They’re 27. How cool. They’re going to have– there’s a lot of good stuff on the horizon.

Well, and like you said, there’s thousands of agencies.

There’s, unfortunately, thousands of– there’s a lot of people struggling to find new opportunities and things like that too. So you have to find ways to stand out. And that was, I think, one of the things that led them to doing that is, hey, we’re going to do something. And yeah, now they’re getting agency executives and executive creative directors and people who watch it every day.

Good for them. Well, speaking of other industry news, I know you sent me an article earlier this week about how Bose is coming back on their paid media spend. They are doing a bit of an experiment. I think to see if they can get an AI model together. What do we know?

So the biggest thing that they came out to talk about was paid search. So specifically, they’re pulling back on branded paid search. And they’re doing so and really doing some incrementality testing, which honestly, in paid search, is something that you’re seeing and hearing more and more about anyway is the incrementality of it. And it makes sense. It’s so bottom funnel. And with something like branded search, I think the CMO mentioned it specifically. But it’s, are you basically taking credit for people who are already in line to buy your product? And there is something to be said about that.

If they’re already searching for Bose headphones or a specific model of headphones, they have likely done their research. They’ve explored other things. And they’re ready to buy.

So for someone like them who also has this tremendous brand presence, they’ve got partnerships with sports leagues. They’ve got these big ad campaigns that are running all the time.

For them– It’s a very familiar brand.

Yeah.

They can probably stand to pull back on that.

We have conversations a lot about branded search with clients.

Yeah, I feel like we just talked about this yesterday.

We just talked about it yesterday. And there’s a couple of reasons to bid on it sometimes, which was the issue we were dealing with yesterday with a client is a competitor was aggressively bidding on their brand name. And so we were talking about protection strategies and how can we force them out of that. And so certainly to protect the brand, that’s one reason people do it.

For someone like Bose, I think what’s interesting there is they will probably make up for it in organic. They’ll get organic search filling some of that gap. But I think it also depends on, as a business, do you care where they’re making the purchase? Because for someone like Bose, if their margins aren’t any better if you’re coming and buying directly from them– Versus like Target or something. Target, Amazon, Best Buy, they’re going to fill that gap with the paid thing. And they’re going to take the sale. But you’re still selling the product. But certainly some D2C businesses, especially in the e-commerce space, sometimes the margins are better when they sell it through their website versus going through a retailer. So they have to balance that piece of it too.

But I do think that it does make sense that they want to push more of their search investment into more generic type search terms.

Win out the people who haven’t already decided that they want those.

And I think sometimes search is held to such a strict performance targets that it’s not considered as an awareness channel. And there are very, very upper funnel keywords that you can get where it’s in the category. Or even think about adjacent categories where maybe you have a solution for the problem, but it’s not the exact solution they’re looking for yet. You’re not going to get good conversion rates there. But you’re going to get traffic from it. And they’re going to get to the site.

And then–

And they might start considering it.

Yes. Yeah. So sometimes people don’t think about that mid and upper funnel type search with those broader keywords.

Well, I think it’s hard. We want the click and the buy same day, right? But maybe that takes a month or whatever to see it. Or somebody waits for a big birthday or whatever that might be. That stuff is just, from an attribution perspective, a little harder to take credit for.

And they’re going to jump in. And they’re going to then buy it on their own time. And a lot of times, Google is the starting point there where that’s just going to get them to the retailer.

Well, yeah. I guess we’ll keep our eye on it. Because if they’re being this open about it, maybe they’ll let people know how it goes in the end. I don’t quite know that I have an understanding of the AI component of what they’re trying to do.

Yeah. I wasn’t really following that one. It was– I would say most of the discussion that was going in the industry was just other people who are running paid search just debating the merits of brand, which is a pretty common topic. And again, it depends on who the brand is. It depends on what else they’re doing. And then they can decide whether it makes sense to bid on their own branding or not.

Yeah. All right. We’ll keep our eye on it.

Story number three.

Story three.

Josh Allen, local hero to the Rochester community.

The reigning MVP.

Yeah. And the Buffalo Bills fans run rampant in this area. So lots of love there. New commercials for– Natrol. Natrol. I was going to call it a neutral fall. That’s all right.

Sleep aid.

Interesting commercial. High production value. Him in some different scenarios. I actually thought he did a pretty nice job.

He did. He did.

He’s obviously in that commercial. He’s been in other commercials. Some of them have been– some good, some not so good.

It’s not always on him as the actor, right? It’s also on us as the content creators and the creative folks coming up with good ideas.

But it was a really well executed spot.

Yeah.

Very seamless. And a good message and one that also was just authentic to him, too. There’s been some follow up articles about it, too, where he’s talked about his story of he took this before a long flight and he slept some of the best he had.

And he’s also– I think one of the things he’s known for in the NFL

and why he is so good is he really hones in on the details of every little advantage he can get to get better and better. And one of the things he said was sleep. Oh my gosh, yeah. He’s busy. He’s got it. He has a very famous now wife.

I was hoping I was going to see her at the end of the commercial. I’m not going to lie. When he stepped on the red carpet, I was like, where’s Haley?

Yeah. So he has a busy life. He does celebrity golf tournaments. He does appearances on things. He’s obviously traveling around with her. And then you have the rigors of a 17 game season and deep runs into the playoffs that unfortunately haven’t ended the way any of us have wanted it to yet.

And I say that is not even– I’m a Bears fan.

Well, I’m a Patriots fan, but I think the backup is always the bill. Well, I shouldn’t say it like that, the backup, but you know.

The home team. Yes.

Living in Rochester, New York and in Western New York, it’s really hard not to root for them.

Yeah, of course.

Because just the collective community lives and dies whether they win or lose.

I drive by that house in Bloomfield almost every weekend that is painted blue with red shutters and a– now they have a carved Buffalo bill out of a stump in the front yard. I was just like, every time I pass them, I could never be their neighbor. Like, it’s just– and the cars, they’re fully committed. And they were in a spot for the Buffalo Bills either last year or the summer before then.

Because the house next door is a Jets house, so I think they duel a little bit.

Yeah, but I mean, Josh Allen, he’s an entertaining person.

The Buffalo Bills social media team uses him a lot. He’s willing to be in those things. And he does funny things. They did a video around the NFL schedule release where they made a joke of– he said, we need an idea for a schedule release. And he said, well, you should use AI. And AI meant Allen Iverson. And they had Allen Iverson in there not knowing why he was there and why Brandon Bean was calling him. That was really entertaining. They did another one, too, where they’re building a new stadium. And they basically ripped off Parks and Recreation with the pit. And they had Josh Allen living in the pit,

which him and Chris Pratt– just very similar in terms of personality and things like that. So it was good. But he’s a good sport with all of those things. And I think that goes a long way with talent. When they believe in the product, when they’re happy to be there and they’re a good sport,

I’m sure– And don’t take themselves too seriously and don’t have that embarrassment factor. You just have to get over it and

rip the bandic out. Because he’s using the product, he can talk about it in interview settings of, this is why I started using it and why it’s important.

It goes back to the authenticity piece, for sure. Speak for the love, which, though, I got to say,

I totally agree with him. Sleep might be the thing that gives you the cutting edge. I think it was Monday.

So that’s someone with a one-year-old.

Well, right. I have a one-year-old who’s been pretty good, sleeping seven to six. But every few weeks, he’ll have a regression of waking up at five every day. That just doesn’t work for me. And so I said to Nick, I’m like, I’m at 10%. I need some help. So he did the last three early mornings.

I might be a whole different person. I don’t know. I feel like I could conquer the world.

It makes a difference. And he talks about how important that is. So it’s that little extra edge. We’re always better when we’re not tired. And we can bring our full energy into everything. So it’s important.

Well, I’m interested to see where the sales go, like if that’ll be public information. Yeah. It’s a big name.

I’m sure it’s already taken. Yeah. And I mean, at a minimum, it will sell really well in Western New York. Everything that you put– Josh Elinon does well. We’ve got Josh’s Jax.

I don’t know if you knew this. He actually owns a pistachio farm. His family owns a pistachio farm.

No, I hadn’t a clue.

And I am amazed that they are not selling like Josh Allen’s nuts in Buffalo, because I feel like they would just make so much money off that. But yeah, he owns a pistachio farm.

Maybe soon. Maybe soon.

Yeah.

I love it. Well, OK, our last thing. Speaking of current events, we are preparing today for a retirement party here. Colleen Bogart, it’s her 30th anniversary today. And we’re having the retirement party. So one, I just want to take a moment to acknowledge how awesome Colleen has been over the years. I know she was your first supervisor. Yes.

Wonderful, wonderful person. Clients love her. She does excellent work. She’s super smart. She’s a master negotiator. So she will be sorely, sorely missed. It’s not goodbye by any stretch. I know she’ll still be around. But excited to celebrate her today and thought maybe you could share some words too.

You know, I have big shoes to fill, like you said, especially the client relationships. I mean, we have a lot of clients who have been with us for 10, 20 years even and have worked so closely with her. And she is just the epitome of somebody who goes above and beyond for everything. Totally. And she’s just so good at listening to them and knowing what is important to them and just always putting them first. And that was such a good thing to learn coming up as a very selfish 20-something. 20-something.

We’ve all been there, Bob. Maybe we need to think about others and what’s important, or even just simple things of–

I remember when we were trying to make recommendations, I think one of the hardest things when I was first starting to push digital marketing, for example, was, well, why didn’t they take my recommendation? And she was always very good at just, well, you need to think about it from their perspective. And maybe there’s something that they’re not telling you. Maybe there’s something– they often have a reason. Even when it seems so obvious to you that they should be doing this, sometimes you’re not getting the full story. And as clients, we like them to be candid and be transparent with us, but sometimes they do keep some things. And they have the reasons, and sometimes they’re not the best at communicating that. But that’s OK.

So she was always also just a good person to, like, that’s fine. Be angry and hear in my office about this.

And then– The amount of things I’ve run past her over the years, just standing there, taking candy from Colleen’s Candy Corner while I complained. She’s an excellent support person.

She has an amazing memory. She remembers everything about–

Or she’s written it down.

She’s written it down. Or she’s kept it. I brought some props.

I brought some props. Yes, I would like to see the fun stuff.

So what’s interesting– and we’ll show the camera here– Colleen keeps everything. And she is very much a believer in paper versions of everything. And so as she has been cleaning out her office, there have just been miscellaneous relics Treasures, really. Dropped on my desk saying, I can’t believe I kept this, but I thought you would find it interesting. And so this is the online advertising media capabilities, which the first slide in it is why digital, which, again, is crazy. There was once a point where we had to explain, the internet’s not going somewhere.

Which shows how long we’ve been around.

And that’s from 2007. She left this vacation folder, which anytime I took a vacation because I was handling the digital– Hold it up to one of these. Because I was handling all the digital stuff, I needed to give her a crash course on what’s going on. What does she need to be aware of? Because at that point, I was really a one man– You were a digital native. Yeah, and I was a one man band until we started building out that capability more. And there’s a myspace.com media kit here.

I love that.

Which is great. Their CPM was $3 to $5 for banner ads on myspace.com in 2000, whatever. So it’s fun.

It is really fun. I’ve been getting really good ones, like press clippings of Flynn or Martina Flynn through the years. Good memory stuff. And stuff we did from a marketing perspective. Really fun concept driven campaign stuff that we did dimensional mailers or onboarding kits. Just some really cool stuff. It’s been a fun journey.

She’s also– she obviously knows media. She knows the advertising side of media. But she’s a consumer of media. And she’s very aware while she’s doing it. I think we have grown up in a very distracted multitasking type watching. But I mean, she picks up. When there’s a new campaign from a competitor, she picks it up and immediately is bringing it to the attention of the client. Did you see this? Did you see that? There’s this new billboard here. There’s a new TV spot here. We’re running new stuff. She’s– we’re getting spot times.

I have a drawer in my office of Life Insurance Direct Mail because we were doing so much of that work. And Colleen would get a lot of it. And I’ve kept it because they’re good direct mail kits.

Absolutely.

They’re interesting to refer back to.

So yeah. And she’s always been a good keeper of that. And that’s why our clients love her so much. And that’s why we’ve loved having her for 30 years.

Well, speaking of, I’m going to go blow up some balloons.

All right.

And then we’re going to get to partying.

Get some drinks. There’s huge thank you to Colleen. She is– she loves a whiskey sour. So we’ve got a special custom made one.

With the egg white. Very important.

And we got some other drinks and some food.

A French 75, I think. We’re going to have a great time.

Yeah. I think just about– and this shows you Colleen’s kind of impact on everybody. I think every media team member that has been here in the last 30 years is coming today. It’s coming. I love it. Which is going to be such a fun reunion. And there’s a lot of others from around the agency. So she really had such an impact on everybody. That’s going to be a happy time. I’m sure it’s going to be a little sad. I know. We’re going to try to keep it happy. I know we had our final one-on-one meeting. And she said, I want this to be happy. I want this to be happy. But yeah, I’m sure there will be some tears. But again, tears of joy. And she’s excited and excited for the next chapter. And we’ll just