#52: How To Build A Brand with Bill Macaitis (former Slack CMO & Zendesk CMO)

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Hey.

This episode is from G2's Reach virtual event that we did a couple weeks ago. I got the opportunity to interview Bill Macitas, who's former CMO of Slack, former CMO at Zendesk, former CMO at Salesforce, somebody that I've had on the podcast a couple times over the last few years. But I always learned something talking to Bill. G2 asked us to do a conversation all about how to build a brand. And I said, sure, I'll do it, but can I run the audio on my podcast? Because I know people would love it. And we got a great 30 minute conversation with Bill. Talk to him all about building a brand, what it means, how to measure it, how to think about it in.

20, 22, 23 and beyond.

I think you'll enjoy this conversation. So here it is, me and Bill. Not really so much me. I got to interview Bill on this one, which is a lot of fun.

So here it is.

Hey, Bill. So this is my friend Bill Macitas. We were just hanging out backstage. I just told Bill that I lit a candle for this session. So wherever you are, where are you? Actually, Bill, are you in the California, California area?

I am San Francisco, Marin County. So okay, I love it here.

All right, great. I'm in Vermont, which is usually a wild card for most people. So we're across each coast right now. Kristen says, what fragrance this is? Santa Fe. I don't know if you've ever had that one before. Just happened to be what's on my desk. All right, anyway, we have this. This session is going to go by really fast. We got 30 minutes. I'm honored to get to interview Bill. I've had him on my podcast a bunch, gotten to know him a little bit over the year and just am always look up to him as somebody in this space who has done amazing things through his time at Slack and Zendesk and Salesforce, and excited to jam on my favorite topic, which is brand. But Bill, before we get into me grilling you about brand for 30 minutes, why don't you just set the stage and give people maybe the abbreviated version of your background, who you are, what you've done and what you do now, just to set the stage for People, Yeah.

Always been an online marketing nerd, starting Wall Street Journal, Fortune, Forbes at a very early age. And I just geek out on the stuff. So 10 years in the consumer side, couple exits, startups there. 10 years on the B2B side, like you said, Salesforce, Zendesk, Slack, and now I do advisory stuff for other startups, either serving as their board advisor or formally as an independent board member. So I'm super excited.

All right, so they have us here to talk about brand. And without leading you in a certain direction, when you hear that term in this context, what does that mean to you?

You know, for me, it's. I love talking brand, but I will say it's a very volatile topic. Right. You know, there's a lot of different viewpoints on it. You've got this massive spectrum of people that 100 believe in it, no matter what other people that are like, you know, it's a scam or, you know, marketers don't know what the hell they're doing. So I think it's a fun topic to discuss because I don't think it gets discussed enough. And especially in the B2B landscape, I think B2C, if you're in that, you're a marketer, of course, you're obsessed with it. But B2B, a lot of times it seems to get pushed to the side for the. The almighty lead drives many a team.

Yeah. And I think if you just boil down in the B2B world, we do obsess over. And I know you have a philosophy around measurement and how you think about, you know, knowing what's working or not. But I think it is easy to kind of just have this bias towards. We like the direct response things. Right. We like to know that when we send an email, we get this response. When we do this thing, we get this. And I think that there's just a lot of that stuff has now become table stakes in the digital marketing realm, where a lot of people have access to the same tools and the same toolkit. And I think of you see the modern approach to B2B marketing today is companies have kind of two motions. They have brand and demand. Can you just take us into the. Whether it's the companies that you're advising now or just your history as CMO at those companies that you mentioned, actual marketing function. Where does brand fit into the mix of, I'm at this company, I'm trying to grow revenue. Where does brand fit in? That it's not just, hey, throw up a billboard on the 101, and that is your brand strategy. Like, where does this fit into the actual marketing strategy?

Yeah, so I'm a big fan of having brand be an overall marketing goal that everyone on the marketing team can contribute towards, that can be measured. And I'm not a fan of marketing teams getting super siloed out. Right. So where you have a separate brand team versus a separate demand gen team, or maybe brand's not even in marketing, it's in design or, you know, some other place. I think ultimately, because if you think about it, brand is just the sum of every single interaction someone has with your company. And that extends on the website, that extends in support chats, that extends in the product itself. Right. So all marketers can play a part in that. And even from a channel perspective, right? Like if you have the demand gen team and they're managing all your, you know, your Facebook ads, your LinkedIn ads, well, you could run a brand campaign. You're going to need them, right. For running the actual channels itself. So I am a big fan of having it be more setting each year. Marketing has its own top goals and everyone in marketing works towards those goals versus, I think, what's more, a little more common, which is like you have very siloed marketing teams that each have their own metrics, often competing.

I love that. I'm come back to that in a second because I think what you said maybe and I see this chat from this question from Vera in the chat, do you consider community under the brand umbrella? I do see a lot of companies today and you can see like job titles on LinkedIn and you see people posting stuff. It does feel like marketing teams kind of call it brand. And what it means is like brand on a marketing team is the people who do design or do community marketing or run the podcast. And it is a very common trap to get into. And I've seen it at a bunch of companies where you're kind of doing all this brand stuff, but it's all happening in a silo. There's like, yeah, well, we have a community manager and she runs the community and we have a podcast and we do the podcast. But the only way that stuff really works is to your point is if it's all consolidated into one thing. So can you share a little bit more light on this? Like, I'm heading into 2023. Like, how do I go and set a brand goal? How would you measure that? I do think that that's a mistake that I've made in the past. And it's something that If I was going into a new year, I would want to articulate like this is our brand goal for the year. It's not just this collection of non demand gen channels, which is what we usually do.

Yeah, totally. So the way I've approached in the past is there's a whole host of good brand metrics. Some of the more common ones are things like aided recall, unaided recall sentiment, which measures, you know, the positivity or negativity towards your brand. You know, share voice, share conversations. When people are using social channels, how often are they mentioning your company's name in relation to whatever, you know, category definition, words that you have? There's a bunch of them out there, right? And so like for instance, when we were at Slack, we said, hey, we start. First thing I did when I got there, like let's start measuring our aided and unaided recall. And at the time I thought everybody in San Francisco knew about Slack, but when you actually measured it outside of there, no one knew it, right? And especially when you get more like traditional industries and we were like at like 2% or something. But you know, we tracked it and we tracked it every month and we could kind of see organically how much we were growing. And then we would say hey, like maybe we want to run a campaign, right? And how much could we increase that inflection point, right? And you know, eventually we got it down to like, hey, we knew exactly how much if we were going via paid routes, how much a point of awareness would cost us. And there's lots of different ways you can get those metrics. A really simple one we use was we use SurveyMonkey. They had an audience measurement tool and you would just survey like hey, prospects, you know, and go, you know, when you think of team communication software, which companies come to your head that's unaided, right? And aided actually lists all the different, you know, competitors that you might have. So I like to go into the year and kind of think about like, hey, what are the most important metrics for marketing? You know, brand is usually one of them. And then we think how everyone can contribute to that, how content can contribute to the brand, how the SEM team, the display media team, the nurturing team, certainly design, if that's in marketing, how do we get brand into our product? I mean, I think that's a really overlooked area, especially in B2B software. I've gone into so many God awful B2B software that just feels like I'm in a hospital. It's like so sterile. It's White background, black text, everything is next except cancel. Like put some color in there, put some a unique tone and voice in there, right? That's how people feel about you and that's part of a brand, right? Like improve the sentiment. When I was at Slack, like, everyone knew about Gmail and Outlook. We consider those one of our competitors, right? Like super high awareness, 90%. But the sentiment towards those tools were much, much lower. I'm a big believer that especially in SaaS, if you can make a simple and fun tool to use, you're going to get so much more word of mouth. And that can be measured, you know, via awareness, via sentiment. So those are a couple ways that I tried to look at it.

I like what you said. It's how people feel about you. So could that be one way that we could define this brand thing? I do get sometimes people caught up on, well, brand is the design. Like our creative director, like she runs brand. But it's so much more than that because you see community podcasting events, right? Like even in an event like this, right? Should the goal of an event like this be direct sales pipeline for G2? I'm sure it's one thing that they're going to look at, but that can't be the reason. This is not. No one's here telling you and go buy G2. Right? But does an activity like this impact what you just said? Does this impact how we, how somebody feels about G2?

Yeah, totally, right? I think how you feel about it is a great litmus test. And I know like at Slack, for instance, when we'd run events, we would do like a post event CSAT survey or one time we even, I think we even had like the little are you happy? Like you know, smiley face on the happy face. Like when you would leave, you know, and just kind of give a feel for it. Because I do think, right, like, yeah, I'm sure some people are going to look at this and go, how many leads did we get? Or this or that. But a lot of us, like, did people have a good interaction with. They have a good experience because they're more likely to talk about it. I think there's a question on sentiment, like how do we measure it? I think there's a lot of ways, right? Like so you can use CSAT type stuff, customer satisfaction. So like I said, after this, like after this session finished, we could just like, you know, you could put up a little survey. Thumbs up, thumbs down. Hey, did you enjoy this session? Right? You know, did you have a fun time at it or maybe in your onboarding experience, right? Like after someone finishes signing up and completing their first task, like, hey, was that enjoyable or did it suck? Right. Like, was it a painful experience? There's lots of ways that I think you can measure the sentiment, but I think it's really important. Right. And it impacts your brand. Because, you know, I think in this day and age we're all thinking about like, what is the most capital efficient go to market model. But if you can get like word of mouth in people that just love you and talk about you and recommend you, like that is always going to be the most efficient go to market driver. But to do that, you have to think about these experiences, right? Like how many times in B2B do we just gate everything? Like, oh, I'm going to gate every single piece of my content because I know I'm going to get lots of leads that way. How frustrating is that? If you're just a prospect that maybe wants to learn about you but doesn't want to get called right away, you know, we really pollute the experience a lot. In my experience, it makes a lot.

Of sense when we're able to just talk about this like, oh yeah, like we buy. And primarily I would say even, especially in B2B where it's a considered purchase, there's a lot at stake. You know, implementing a piece of software or something internally, there's 10 to 12 to 15 people involved in the buying process. It's going to take 3, 6 months to buy it. But like I know in my life, and I'm sure the same for you, Bill, as a cmo, like when it came to implementing new tools or new tech at your companies, most often the way that we buy is from word of mouth. Oh, I'm friends with Bill. He ran, he was, yeah, I'm gonna text him, be like, hey, Bill, what do you, what do you use for website posting?

Right?

And what you tell me is gonna be so influential there? I just, I think that is the secret to like becoming a breakthrough success from a B2B marketing standpoint. It's like, yes, you have your playbook of all the things, all the always on campaigns you have to do. But it's, I really like this idea of like, let's get back to thinking about word of mouth and how can we get more people to talk about the things that we're doing and get on their radar because everybody loves to talk about this. There's, you know, 15,000 martech tools or whatever industry you're selling and there's, there's so much noise to cut through. If you were a CMO right now planning for next year, like are you setting specific goals? Like there was a question about marketing strategy. Can you talk a little bit through how does a word of mouth go? What does that look like and where does that fit into the overall three or four kind of okrs for the.

Team for the year?

Yeah. So I think there's a lot of ways you can get word of mouth. Right. Some of this dives into the thorny topic of multi touch attribution analysis. And in my experience, I think marketing teams tend to overestimate how much all their campaigns generated because they tend to steal a lot of that word of mouth traffic. Especially if you have multiple touch points. Right. Which most B2B especially if you're dealing with mid market or enterprise, you're going to have longer deal cycles there. I found a really easy way is just hey, have like a sign up survey and just go, hey, where'd you hear about us? Right? Friend or colleague? Did you hear about us on this radio? Did you see us on this, you know, display ad, whatever it was, Right. Is that perfect? No, it's a recency bias. Yes. But it's going to give you like a directional signal. As far as how many people heard about you via word of mouth, you could always use direct searches to direct brand. I think there's some different ones out there. But I think the thing is you can measure this. I'm a big believer that I don't know why but B2B for the longest time all we do is we put on our little funnel blinders and we measure funnel metrics like oh, here's visitors and leads and MQLs and SALs and pipeline and all the way through. But we tend to, I don't know for whatever reason, but we tend to ignore or just not really track like experience metrics like we talked about sentiment, you know, net promoter score, CSAT or even like brand metrics, right. Like aided recall, unaided recall, et cetera. So I think like when you're coming at marketing, you're setting your 2023 goals. It really helps if you can start tracking those because if you don't, you are just going to be a slave to sales, a slave to every other team that just looks at you as oh, you are purely creating leads, right. And then it creates kind of weird behavior term behaviors where you do things like you know, gate everything or just do whatever you can to get the form complete even though it's a horrible experience. But if you have a little more well rounded, I think you can look for both long term and short term and have a much more diversified approach.

I feel like you can always tell when a company doesn't have a clearly articulated marketing strategy because you're just kind of doing a bunch of tactics where it's like, if you have a philosophy on, you have to be able to say, like, here's our point of view on how we're going to do marketing this year, and then here's the goals we're going to set against them. And then you're communicating that out to the team, to the rest of the company. You can't just staple on any of these tactics and do them and expect it to work. You have to have a strong point of view. When I was at company called Drift, David, who's a CEO, there was like, from the beginning, before we even started, I joined the company early, before we even started marketing. He was like, here's my philosophy on how I want us to do marketing here, and it includes X, Y and Z. And that was so beneficial for us to figure out, like, well, what the heck should we do? Like, why should we have a podcast? Why should we have a community? I think you can't make those decisions in a vacuum. They have to be able to fit in your marketing strategy somehow. Okay, I got some questions in the chat for you. This one is from Sharad. How do you feel about B2B CEOs becoming social media influencers to drive traffic to their business?

Bill, B2B CEOs social media. I feel like it's been happening a long time. CEOs Barnum Bailey, you know, everyone that's gone out, must it kind of create a buzz and attention? A lot of times I'll advise companies, and one of the first things I'll do is just kind of like, suss out the CEO and go like, hey, is this a extrovert with a great personality that's tweeting all the time and loves interact, in which case that could be a huge asset to your company. Right? And lean into that. That's great. I was super fortunate. I got to work with Marc Benioff, right? Like, he's just this amazing figure and person and philanthropist, but just, you know, like, hey, let's use that, right? You know, and I've. I've talked to other ones and there's nothing wrong with this, but they're like, they came from a dev background and they kind of shy away and they're introverted and sometimes they'll ask me, well, should we have this massive PR budget? And I'm like, well, you know, I might actually move that somewhere else. Right? Because I don't think you're gonna be able to leverage the CEO that much. It's really crowded. So I think like, hey, whatever, company works, everyone's different. The playbook shouldn't always be the same. Right? You always have to adapt to the strengths of your, of your team.

If I can tack anything onto your answer there, I will say that just in the way that that question is, is framed. Like I don't think there is marketing and social media. I think those things have now converged. That is like how people find information about products and companies online today. And so I think like, do you have to be there? No. Can it give you an advantage if you are? And typically like the CEO or the founder of the company started that company for some reason, right. Like in the case of Marc Benioff, right. Like famously was, was at Oracle, had this great relationship there and had this history there and had some deep thoughts about like CRM and on premise like that stuff is all gold from a marketing standpoint where like you should be sharing that because that's a unique perspective. And so typically it's not. The CEO didn't start this company to just magically get rich. They have a unique perspective. And so if you can use that to your advantage and share it. And I also think you don't have to be this super controversial or polarizing figure or in video interviews. Just sharing your thoughts in a tech on a text based platform like LinkedIn can be, can be very beneficial. This question is from Jonathan. What is the best approach for getting budget for brand building in a downturn like this as opposed to just lead gen? Oh, isn't this great? Economy goes in the tank and so we just all, we just do. Lead gen is going to be the solution to get us out of it. It's like the chicken and the egg thing. How do you answer this question, Bill?

So one thing I would say is a lot of times these don't have to be mutually exclusive. So when we ran some larger brand campaigns at Slack, one of the things we found out was that it generated pipeline. And I think again you have to kind of come into this with a little bit more of a data measurement mindset. But what we would do, for instance, we'd run a campaign in say Austin, Denver and Seattle and then we would have control cities that didn't get it or just the rest of the US that didn't get it and go, okay, well how much did our aided recall sentiment, et cetera go up? But also how much did pipeline go up in these markets? How much did leads go up in these markets?

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And what we found out was it wasn't just say if you run a brand campaign, only brand increases and nothing else happens. A lot of times if it's a good campaign, people are gonna, oh, I wrote this company, what's going on? Or maybe at the same time the salesperson's reaching out to them so they're much more likely to become a lead or they're going to have a larger deal size going through. So I think it's really important to measure it. And the most important thing with measurement, I would say like have a control group, you know, have something that doesn't get it, you know, and not only that, but do it in a way that you have enough frequency reps. So some of the companies I advise too, they'll, they'll initially want to run a campaign, but they'll do it really, really shallow, right? So every person only maybe gets two or three impressions and I'm like, no, no, just like, like consolidate it down to one city, get those impressions up to like 30 times. So they'll achieve active recall and so you can actually see the needle being moved. I think like if you can advocate and if you can put in the right framework, you can say, hey, we are going to help generate business now while also building that long term brand equity.

Brand does not mean don't measure it, don't want. Like when you have a stronger brand, go back to what Bill said earlier. You're going to change how people feel about you. You're going to increase word of mouth and when you increase those two things, more people are going to start showing up on your website and bec interested in your thing. And I think that it doesn't mean go try to make the case to spend X dollars on a bunch of billboards right now, right? Like community could be one, events like this could be another, a podcast. Like there are many lower budget brand building activities that the goal is go back to what Bill said earlier. Such a good framework for this. Like how can we change how people feel about us? How can we improve and increase what word of mouth. It doesn't just mean go spend a bunch of money. Brand is not just like light a bunch of money on fire, go get everybody branded slack frisbees. Like, you know, that's not what this Is this question is less specific to brand, but I think it'll be very relevant for all the people in here. This question is from David. How do you effectively manage all of the different marketing goals? How have you created that synergy, knowing there's multiple functions, teams? Bill, if you could just kind of quickly give us your philosophy on just goal setting as a team.

Yeah, I think the most important thing, and you mentioned it, Dave, with drift and David, having the CEO come in and either articulate what are the top company goals or even have a philosophy behind it. Right. So one of the things I really enjoyed when I was a salesforce is Mark. Every year he would come out and say, hey, this is the vision for the company for the year. And he would also go like, here's like the top 10 things we're going to do in stack ranked order. And I always took that with me. So whenever I make a goal list, I also stack rank them. It's hard sometimes. It's like you're choosing your favorite children. Right. But it's so much better than an unstructured list. Right. Because it gives the team much, much more focus as far as, like, hey, you know, what is the top priorities here? Is it experience? Is it brand? Is it legion? Is it whatever? Fill in the blank. Right. I also think too, like, it's really easy, like the inherent momentum or inertia for marketing teams is to be siloed. We tend to be specialists, which means we hire, you know, someone that does pr, someone that does content, someone that does ops, someone that does pmm. And if you don't say anything to the teams, they will all do siloed little projects that they only control. They'll all have their own metrics. And so I am much more of a fan of saying, like, hey, articulate, what's our philosophy in marketing? What are the top three goals? How are we going to measure them and think about, like, how all these teams can work together towards each of those goals? I found that way that increases collaboration much more than kind of letting it just drift into the siloed route. Yeah.

And to a point that you mentioned earlier, you have a lot of data to work with in marketing. You have attribution, but that doesn't give you a roadmap of here's what we need to go do. You're not going to get a paint by numbers approach to this. And so I think your job as the marketing leader is to be able to like, take all these inputs and then have a philosophy on, like, okay, well, what Are we going to go and do next year? We think we have three or four key levers in marketing and that's what we're going to focus on. And the example that I mentioned was driven from David, the CEO. Do you have any advice for those out there who maybe are at a company where the CEO is not as excited about marketing as David was, where I, as the marketing leader, I have to drive this. Give me some advice for like, for managing up and for making this happen myself.

So I think it's always good, like if your CEO doesn't have a set of goals and priorities for the overall company, I think you should nudge them, like, hey, help me out here. But if, you know, sometimes the marketing philosophy is going to be a little different. If they don't have one, create one yourself. I mean it's usually like for the advisory role. A lot of times I'll interview potential CMOs for those companies and usually my first question is always like, tell me your philosophy on marketing. Right. Like I want to hear how you think about it. Like what guides you? Not just like all the tactics. Because there's a gazillion tactics in marketing. Right. We could all do a hundred different things. And you have to figure out like, I think when you get paid, the big bucks is like pick the two or three that are really going to move the needle and that align with your philosophy, that align with what the company's trying to accomplish that year.

Yeah. And people love to ask about channels like should we be on TikTok, should we be on YouTube, should we be doing events? And I think the answer to all those things is like maybe because I'm sure you've seen, I've seen companies be successful in every one of those areas. And so it is. You can't do them all. And I think the worst thing you can do is take this like half assed peanut butter approach and just kind of do an average thing across all these many different channels. I think that the power of focus, you know how many times in even at companies like that you were at with scale like Slack and Zendesk, Right. I would still bet that the majority of your revenue and pipeline is probably going to come from two or three core bets and core places that you're focused on. You have to be able to narrow in on those, right?

Definitely. Definitely it's Slack. We had a person that was Anna. She was fantastic at editorial tone and voice and had such a unique tone and we just like tried to leverage her everywhere. Right. Like in the Product and the signup process on the website in our ads.

As a writer, they're great.

Yeah, as a writer, right. You know, and codify the tone and voice, teach everybody in the company how to use it. It was like a super strength we had. And at Zendesk we had an awesome in house video team. I don't have that right. But like let's do a lot of video because we have a great video team. I worked with a company that they were awesome at events. They were so good and I'm like, do more of them. Right. And another company's terrible events, like stop doing, you know, but you're really good at this. It's like, you know, just you got to figure out what you're strong at and what your team's strong at and try to adapt your go to market towards it.

I love that. To me, that is the fun thing. Like I've had the perspective to see it at different companies. I think the fun challenge in marketing to me is like there isn't just one channel. It's like, okay, Bill's the CEO, he hires me as marketing person. It's like you're the chef and like you don't always have the same budget for ingredients but you have to deliver this amazing dish. And so it's like, oh well, what ingredients do I have here? And like to go back to the drift example, we had a founder who kind of already had a big social media following. He had done a bunch of a couple companies in the space and he was well known. We were like, all right, right, let's tap into that and use that to help us grow. Or hey, this founder is a tremendous writer. Like let's start a newsletter for her and we're going to publish that twice a month. And she's a super thoughtful writer. Like let's leverage those things. And so I think it's a game of like finding the gaps and finding the opportunities and assessing what you have. And I think maybe you got to do that now for 2023. Here is a question from Palmer. I guess he works at G2 or something like that. He said, what changes and trends in B2B SaaS marketing is Bill most excited about now versus when he first started at Salesforce 15 years ago?

Oh, great question. I'll do this in 45 seconds. Product like growth. I'm huge into PLG now. And I will say this too. Your go to market is always going to be changing and evolving every time in marketing. Oh man, it's hard to compete with that. Every time in marketing, you know, there's always new innovations coming out. So I always say that, you know, the best piece of career advice I ever got was, you know, don't focus if you're employed, focus if you're employable. You know, always be on top of the most current skill sets. I think product led growth is a huge driver now. And by the way, I don't think product led growth means marketing has no role in that. I think they have a huge role in that. And I think it's absolutely key to growing long term.

All right, we got five seconds left. Four, three, two, one. Bill. So great to connect with you, reconnect with you. Thank you everybody for joining us. Thanks for G2 for having us. We'll see you out another time. I'm Dave. That's Bill. We'll see you later.

Bye, Bill. Such a pleasure, guys. Thanks.

Hey, thanks for listening to this episode of the Exit 5 podcast. If you're in B2B marketing and you want to grow your career, you should also go and check out everything that we have over@exit5.com we've got articles, we've got videos, we've got templates, plus we have a community. A community of over 4000 B2B marketing pros. Whether you're deep in your career and want to connect with your peers or just starting up and you want a place to go where you can see what people are talking about, get smarter about B2B marketing in your own time to grow your career and help grow your company. Go and check it out. It's exit5.com you can get on the email list there. You can join the community. There's 4,000 marketers in the community. We have a job board. We're always adding new stuff. It's really becoming the number one place you can go if you want to grow your career and learn more about B2B marketing outside of what you're doing inside of your company every day. So check it out. Exit5.com and I also want to make sure I give a shout out to my friends at Hatch. That's Hatch fm. They produce this podcast. It sounds amazing because of the work that they do. And they work with B2B companies just like yours. They offer unlimited podcast editing and strategy for businesses. You can get unlimited podcast setting and on demand strategy for a low monthly costs. All you got to do is just upload your episode and they take care of the rest. Go and check them out. It's Hatch fm.

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