What Is Spectacle Marketing?

So I want to talk about spectacle marketing. When you look at MrBeast, his videos, they're all spectacles, right? It's like, oh, here's a $1 date versus a $500,000 date, or here's a $1 boat versus a billion-dollar boat or something like that, right? Now, you saw Cluey, right? That company, you heard of them?

That was the one where they raised quite a bit of money.

They raised from Andreessen Horowitz, right? So I watched an interview with this guy and he's a kid, literally, he's 21 years old.

The guy who like tried to do something during the Y Combinator party or something like that?

Yeah, yeah, yeah. So he threw like a Y Combinator, He threw a party, like a legit party, right? Where it's like 50/50 ratio, invite only. And then he was getting interviewed by this guy, Brett Malinowski. And so I should talk to Brett about this at some point, but basically he's like, okay, YC, everyone throws these networking events. He's like, that's freaking boring, right? I want to do a party where it's a legit like 50/50 ratio guy-girl, and it wants to be, it has to be invite only because it's going to be exclusive, right? But when they first released Clue.ly, he had a video that was super high production where he was like on a date with a girl and then you could see him wearing glasses and then it was telling him what to say, right? And that's how Cluey works. It tells you what to say or tells you what to do on like a sales call, for example, like that person saying this, okay, you should know this about this person, right? It's like a heads-up display basically.

Hardware?

No, it's not even hardware. That video seemed like it's hardware. It's actually just software right now. And then he was getting asked, are you going to get into hardware? He's like, oh, maybe, right? Who knows what's going to happen? But His whole thing is he always tries to do outlandish stuff. And so they made a launch video on how they're hiring 50 interns or how they're paying, like they want an army of these creator interns that they'll pay $50 an hour. And then if they hit a million views on a video, they'll bonus them $1,000, right? And then he'll hire these engineering interns and pay $200 an hour or whatever. But his whole thing is like, you have to like stand out. And I do think that's a nice way to get press in the beginning. I think that's a big reason why Andreessen backed them. I do think though, if you keep doing this for the long term, you're going to burn out and you're going to it's actually not going to compound in a positive way for you in the long term.

Yeah.

Now, don't get me wrong. Who else does a good job of spectacle marketing? Trump does a good job with spectacle marketing. Elon does a good job too, right? But there's a price to pay with that is my point. There's always trade-offs to this. So I think you can grow a big audience certainly, but there's trade-offs to it versus like Gary Vee. He's always been consistent about positivity. So it's really hard to like burn him or try to go after him for something. So trade-offs.

No matter what kind of content you create, people still do go after you. If you look at Gary Vee, a lot of people go after him. I wouldn't say as many as—

Not as many though.

Yes, as the ones who do spectacle marketing. And you just have to get good at ignoring the haters because like, generally speaking, if you watch Gary's content, someone could try to hate, but there really isn't anything to hate.

There's nothing to hate.

Yeah. And when people hate on him, it's of silly things. But if you actually look at what Gary's done as a career, he's done extremely well in multiple industries, multiple exits. He's a great entrepreneur. But I think a lot of people just hate because of jealousy more than anything else.

Yeah, it's usually an internal thing. It has nothing to do with them. And so, but I do think when you do spectacle things, you do increase a surface area of people that are watching you. And like, by the way, you know, it's not like, I mean, you've tested in the past, right? In certain situations. And so like, you've seen what the trade-offs are.

And I think you can do spectacle marketing in many different ways. You can do like the MrBeast, Running with different amounts of money in a backpack and not saying anything because that helps you get more reach globally, at least on some of the platforms. You can do stuff like Alex Becker. I think he used to do a lot of Lamborghini stuff. I could be wrong on the car type.

Yeah, he does a lot of make money online stuff. Yeah.

You can do stuff like Alex Hormozi where I would say he does it, he has content without his shirt on, at least in some of his videos or showing that he's buff or jacked. There's different ways of it. But what I found is, Nothing beats just creating a really good product. Like look at Lovable, you know, Lovable's getting a ton of press. What kind of marketing is Lovable really doing?

Not much.

It's a great product. And I think they're at, in 6 months or something like that—

$70 million?

I think it was $60 million in ARR.

Yeah.

In like 6 months or $50 million in ARR. It was one of those figures, but it was fast growth, a lot of revenue in a low period of time. And when you look at the publicly traded stocks, The biggest companies don't do any form of this kind of marketing, spectacle marketing. They just have a really good product or service and a big TAM.

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So I showed you before we started recording, uh, the new version of AnswerThePublic, right? It's quite a bit different than the existing one. It has more features. Guess how long— and the existing one's built on Ruby on Rails.

Uh, I haven't heard that in a while.

Yeah. So they're getting rid of all of that existing technology and rebuilding it. Guess how long it's taking them to launch A whole new version of a product with more features.

A month?

I wish. 2 months.

2 months. That's still pretty fast.

We have existing users, so you gotta port, right? So there's some extra work, but 2 months is pretty good.

That would've taken you like a multiple of 3 to 4x before, maybe longer.

Dude, the existing person who was running that company was just like, yeah, it'll take a year. And I was like, huh, how do we end up fixing and changing all this stuff?

1/12 the time. Oh no, no, no, 1/6.

1/6. 1/6, yeah.

1/6, yeah.

The existing person was—

I kept thinking a month.

The existing person was really good. We just wanted to go a different direction with the product and I was like, all right, let's just run this lean. AI is here. We're going to adapt our products. Everyone is used to traditional search. We're going to revamp it all for AI. We're going to revamp it eventually. Like I was even talking to the team. I was like, when you look at marketing products, You know, and you even have Care for ABM.

Yeah.

But what I was telling people, I'm like, we're thinking about products wrong. And they're like, why? And I actually had a call with them this morning, today being July 4th.

They're not celebrating July 4th, are they?

These team members were in Brazil, so for them they're working.

Yeah.

And I wouldn't force anyone to work during a big holiday. But when you look at the app, Forget just our app, when you look at most marketing apps, they tend to all give you tons of data. Would you agree with this?

Yeah.

And I was like, this is wrong. And they're like, why? I'm like, we're moving in a world where people aren't really paying for the data. Even before, they weren't really paying for the data. They were using the data to get a specific outcome and, or they were hoping to get a specific outcome from it. Like, oh, you gimme keywords, I'm going to use this data to go create content, get more traffic. The traffic generates more sales or leads and I generate more revenue.

Yep.

And I was like, Why don't we just tie in the whole funnel or workflow and just do it for people?

Yep.

So it's like you do the research. Okay, you got the research. Ask them where they want to create content, what, for what platforms, recommend the type of format of the content. They can select which versions they prefer, create it, have them sync to their platforms, post it, collect the data, and then figure out what's working and what's not.

And continue.

And then continue.

Yeah.

And then revise what you recommend and saying, These are the topics recommended. Here are other popular ones, but these ones have not done well on your platform, so we recommend these.

Yep.

Can you please approve us to go create content for you automatically? Yes. Here are the outlines. Looks good. Cool. We will create it. Can we post it on these times? Yes. Approved. Automatically done. Once it starts going, then you start asking, hey, can we just create the content without sending you the outlines and without your approval? And you start eliminating steps. They may say, no, we want you to— we still want to see the outlines. Or they say, We don't need to see the outlines, but we want to see the final product before it's posted. So then you start going through this and like, cool, you can start automating a lot of marketing for corporations. It's not going to be perfect. I don't think it would be as good as having a team combined with AI, but for SMBs that barely have money, they would gladly pay $100, $200 a month for something like that instead of hiring people because they can't afford the people.

All right, that's it for today, guys. We will see you tomorrow. Bye.