The Genius of Amazon Owning The Washington Post

Did you know that? Obviously, you know Amazon owns Washington Post. Yes. Okay.

No, Jeff Bezos owns Washington.

Okay. But like you know, Jeff Bezos and Amazon are kind of you know together a little bit, right?

You would agree with that? Not as much. I actually think he really has stepped away.

But he still owns a good chunk of Amazon. You would agree?

Yes.

So he has a vested interest. Of course. So okay. This was this is this was on Twitter. From Navalism. So it says, Bezos owning the Washington Post is the cheapest subtle political insurance that Amazon can buy. $250 million insures $700 billion against antitrust action. And it's like, if you think about it that way, it's like, oh wait, go back. I'm gonna reread it again.

What?

Bezos owning the Washington Post is the cheapest subtle political insurance that Amazon can buy. $250 million for the acquisition of WaPo insures against $700 billion against antitrust action.

Why 700 billion?

Because that's what I think at the time. That's what Amazon was worth.

Oh, got it.

Yeah, get it. Like they're a trillion plus dollar company at the time. Yeah. Yeah. So like 250 is a drop in the bucket on 700 billion or over a trillion. You know what I mean? And they haven't really changed Wapo. Like I've read a couple things there. They haven't really changed it. They just kind of do their thing. But I think they kind of in the background, like they're just making sure, you know, there aren't any like crazy attacks on Amazon. Or if there are, maybe there's some defense. You know what I mean? But like, it just goes to show you, like, okay, who owns CNBC? Who owns NBC? Who owns Fox? It's all like the owners at the end of the day are dictating their political views, um, to, you know, these, these media platforms.

Did you know MSNBC was a partnership between Microsoft and NBC?

I didn't know that. Oh yeah, MSNBC. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's because it's Microsoft. Yeah. What about it?

Yeah, no, I was just saying like these big corporations have been getting into media for a while. Yep.

'Cause they know the influence is there and they can't become irrelevant, right? It's, you, you go to where the attention is going.

But it can hurt you as well. Like I look at Elon and the X acquisition politically, I think it's hurt him more than helped him.

You see what he said last week about, um, so he said something crazy about Harris. Yeah. Yeah. And then he, he deleted it. Yeah. But I'm just like, dude, that is like, I don't care who you are. Like, I gotta take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Aliyan, he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need, and the group responds. Great experienced members. Getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members. Getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric. Getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside. But speaking of Elon, I think what's going to work out well for United Airlines, which is every Asian person's favorite airline, you know, remember the doctor getting dragged out during COVID So—

Just, just to clarify, it's a joke. Yeah. Eric's being sarcastic.

I'm being facetious. I fly United. I fly everything. Um, but I think what's going to work out well for United, by the way, is United Airlines, all the passengers get free Starlink. Have you used Starlink on a plane before?

I have not.

Oh my God, it's great. You can watch movies, you can do everything. You're just basically working at home. You're, you're working with super strong Wi-Fi. And like, my— I, I flew with my mom from back from Vegas once doing just JSX, right? And then my mom's just swiping on like YouTube Shorts and the whole thing's smooth the whole time. And so, I think that's one. Um, when United, like, this partnership went live, that got millions and millions of impressions, 'cause Elon retweeted it, right? So they got millions of impressions, and I think more and more people are gonna talk about this. And if other airlines don't adapt quickly, which I think they will, they probably will, but right now, it's gonna be a boon for United, 'cause everyone's like, oh my God, the Wi-Fi's so fast on United! It's a marketing play.

It is a marketing play, and I think the other airlines will catch up.

Yep.

Because right now, Eric and I travel quite a bit, But if you go on an airline, a lot of the airlines offer different internet packages, including higher speed for streaming. If you ever buy them and you try to stream, it sucks.

It doesn't work. Yeah.

So I'm like, so you're trying to charge me more for streaming and it barely loads a website up in decent speed. And it's just like, the internet just sucks. I don't understand why it's so archaic.

Yep. But this is a good example of like when the product's just really good. This is just product marketing and it's just purely word of mouth. And even the way I just talked about it right now, it kind of makes you want to, Use Wi-Fi on the plane, right? I think what's what like Wi-Fi like that level, but what we're gonna lose is the ability sometimes when you don't have Wi-Fi, it's such a great moment where you can just spend time and think. I don't know what you do during the downtime. I just spend time. I think I read a lot, right? You're probably just watching movies. Yeah, I was like, you're smiling.

I watch movies all day when I'm flying.

Yeah, you was like if you had Starlink, you'd just be working the whole time.

But like, I think it's no no no. Even when the airplane has fast enough internet for me to work. I use an iPad like you, but you also use a laptop.

I know, I just use the iPad on the plane.

No, no, I use the iPad for everything.

Okay, yeah.

So what I do is when you watch movies on your iPad, I download them in advance, I make them in a box in a corner, I browse the internet and do my job, like emails and all that kind of stuff.

And then the movie's just on?

On the corner. But the trick is you play the movie before you turn on the internet because some of the platforms will be like, oh, you're not in the United States, you can't watch.

Oh yeah, yeah, yeah, that's smart, that's smart. See, I see Neil does this thing where he like watches TV and works at the same time. I can't do it. So it's just different strokes for different folks, but I think it's a good move for United. I'm just surprised that nobody else got the jump on it. You know what I mean?

Yeah.

The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is, Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, we have inflation. That also means wage inflation right now. And it means that when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple of years because it's just become too cost prohibitive. And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing. They've been a great asset for us, and I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketingschool.io/hire. Again, it's marketingschool.io/hire to learn more. You can fill out the form there and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires That we can help you find. Um, this guy tweeted, so co-founder of Chubbies, he started tweeting, Preston Rutherford, and he talks about— this is kind of the, the, the new— like, he tweets like these CEO-CMO interactions. I'm gonna read off this interaction and see if we can, uh, get a key takeaway here. So he says, CEO, I can't improve— I can't approve quote-unquote brand marketing spend if I can't measure the return, even if it's needed to get out of stage 3. New CMO, I agree, I think brand marketing is BS.

What?

When CFOs and CEOs hear brand marketing, they think unaccountable, expensive, and money-wasting. The vocab's gotta change. You're not wrong. And then CMO, it's a classic story. Team gets approval to do a brand campaign, they go off, find an agency, create an expensive ad, and run it on TV. Then they wait. Ultimately, everyone ends up asking, so what happened? And so, I'm not gonna read the whole thing here, but I think what he's basically saying here, just reading this. Okay, so I'm scrolling down a little bit. So then then the conversation moves on a little bit. CEO says, "Great. The main goal for 2024 is sustainable profitability." CMO, so let's drill down on the three business results that best accomplish that goal. First, do you agree that being able to discount less and not lose customers helps us get more profitable? CEO, obviously. CMO, second, since you know how much higher the revenue per session of branded organic search traffic is, would you agree we want to increase it as much as we can? Low-key getting integration interrogation vibes, but yes. And third, we want to be able to expand into wholesale and show up the way we want, right? Just spoke with another founder. It's their most profitable channel. Finally, do you think the product discount offer and urgency-driven creative we use accomplishes these goals? You sly dog. I see what you did there. No, definitely not. CMO, now that we're on the same page, let's talk execution. CEO interrupting, it's finally clicking. Let me freestyle on the mic for a sec. Right? So I think I need to read this part. So CMO starts beatboxing and then CEO says, like every goal we've accomplished as a brand, the tactics were never immediately obvious. We committed to a feedback loop and tried things to reach that goal. Our approach is simple. Do more of what works. For a quote unquote brand, we were never clear on the specific financial results we aimed to drive. So we didn't have a feedback loop. Our attempts fell flat and were viewed as a failure. While specific tactics aren't immediately obvious here either, we're used to that. We'll apply the same process we applied throughout our history. CMO, happy tears. That was beautiful. Didn't rhyme and you didn't rap at all, but you got a Grammy in my heart.

Oh, that's cool.

What's your reaction to this?

I think it's spot on. But a lot of businesses in today's world are leveraging marketing strategies and tactics that are actually trackable. For example, if you're running TV, you can do CTV, and a lot of it is trackable, and you can get the ROI. For example, if you're running ads on Tatari, Tatari will tell you which one of those IP addresses from someone who watched that ad went to your website and then ended up converting into a customer. A lot of marketing is much more trackable than it was a few years ago or 5 years ago, and whether it's a brand campaign or it's a performance marketing campaign, You can put a lot of ROI to channels that you don't think that you really could have in the past.

My takeaway from this is you need to have a methodology for branding. It seems like before, and people just say, okay, let's just throw spaghetti against the wall and see what sticks for brand.

Right.

And then like, did it work? Not really sure if it worked, but they're just saying, hey, like, you know, there needs to be, what is our, what is our financial target here? Okay. What are the goals exactly? It's almost like how you'd run a performance marketing campaign. Right. And then to your point, You should track what you can track, but it's also okay if you can't track everything. But you shouldn't, you shouldn't start with, oh, it's okay, we don't need to track everything. Because I think a lot of marketers are kind of going towards that now. It's like, no, no, no, no, you still need to track what you can track, but it doesn't need to be hardcore, like everything.

No, it doesn't need to be hardcore. But anytime you're doing a marketing campaign, you should have KPIs in mind. What are you trying to achieve from this campaign? Because then you can present it. The biggest problem executives have and corporations have about marketing is, A lot of campaigns are run with no objectives in mind. So at the end, they just look at a lot of things as failures when they could be successes. And they look at a lot of campaigns as successes when it got a lot of coolness or notoriety or awards, but it didn't really do anything from, from the bottom line.

Yep. Anyway, that is it for today, everyone. This is live from us at Inbound 2024. This is how seriously we take it, guys. Neil had to speak at a couple things. I have 4 things to speak at today. This is the third one. I have one more, but please don't forget to rate, review, and subscribe. It helps us grow. Go to marketing school dot io slash agency to apply for the Agency Owners Association. You can have a call with our guy Austin, and we will see you tomorrow.