It's no joke to get your show on Apple TV, but its the best way to get an Amazon ranking, here is...

Okay, and welcome to this episode of Speak PR. This is the podcast for business owners who want to use public relations to get noticed, to build their businesses. And I am really delighted and honored to have Maury Morgan. And Maury Morgan is sitting in Beijing right now, and he and I have met each other in different cities around the world over the last 20 years. Maury, welcome to the show.

Good afternoon and good morning as well.

Zao shao hao. So, Maury, you are now branding yourself on LinkedIn as the Wisecracking Entrepreneur. Tell me, you've solved a number of business problems for people, and I first of all met you as Clark Morgan on the training business. So can we just talk about What have you learned over the last sort of 15 to 20 years of how you create a brand around your own personal skill sets?

Good question. My personal skill set started as a microbiologist. I went to university, studied microbiology, was in the territorials— that's the Australians call them the reservists in the army, the Australian Army— as a member of the medical corps, also as a microbiologist in that capacity. So there was no way that I thought that my skill set would be training and China and stand-up comedy and entrepreneurship. So look, I think at the end of the day, I'll use a microbiologist to describe what I've learned, and that is chance favors the prepared mind. Louis Pasteur, the French microbiologist, coined this— well, not in this century. And he is absolutely right. The more inputs you give yourself through life experiences, whether they're intentional or not— occasionally they're not— the more ready you are when an opportunity presents itself. And as an entrepreneur, which is why I call myself an entrepreneur— wise cracking, because I like to consider myself relatively intelligent but with a sense of humor. I've seen opportunities where others have not.

And I think the great thing about being in China and being an entrepreneur is there are so many of them. Now, what are you doing now? You've got a show called Now Is This On, which is a web series. And what you've managed to do is to create value which is sustained beyond you in the room, right? You're great in a room. I've seen you work. But can you just tell us then, what are you doing Doing now, Maury, and how are you making money doing that?

Yeah, well, the Is This Thing On? as a question mark, is this thing on? Is the standard. Anyone who grabs hold of a microphone, particularly in comedy, is what they say into the microphone if they're a bit unsure of themselves. Is This Thing On? is a web series, although only the first 2 episodes will be on YouTube and the entire 6 episodes will go to Apple TV. And I will tell you why we've chosen that a little bit later, is this whole thing is actually a marketing and PR exercise. Hence why we're talking about it on this podcast.

Yeah, absolutely.

And what is it, PR? And what is the purpose of this PR and marketing? It is for the stand-up comedy school, which I founded after my Clark Morgan business called the School of Hard Knock Knocks.

You built a business which is the School of Hard Knocks. And of course, if you do one, you could call it Opportunity Knocks, but I think that's also been taken. Tell us then, this idea of making a series about a business, how did you do that? Was it expensive? I'd love to hear how you do 2 on YouTube and then transition onto the Apple TV.

Apple TV, yeah, sure. Well, I'll just correct you, it's School of Hard Knock Knocks. So how did we go from producing a show? Look, it's It's another motto that I've developed and a motto that I developed in China, in Shanghai, prior to meeting you in Beijing and then Shanghai again. Go big or go home. That's when you're in China, everything's difficult, nothing's impossible. And that's what I thought with the School of Hard Knock Knocks. We have a very small competitor, a very small number of competitors. And in order to differentiate myself from the market and create a barrier to entry for anyone else thinking about it, we'll create a TV show. And that's what we did.

And from a practical point of view, did you film that yourself or did you get a crew in? And how long did that take and how much did that cost to do? Because that's possibly a very big undertaking.

Absolutely. So again, that chance favors the prepared mind. I had helped a friend out, an Australian friend in He was filming a project for his own business, doing his own PR and marketing. And I was helping out. I had a couple of days free and I didn't mind flying up with him. And I met on that time a director by the name of Stig Weems. And Stig was filming the production and I befriended him and we got on really well. And I found out that Stig was an ex-comedian, ex-stand-up comedian and a comedian. was even in a TV show. Well, when the idea came to me to make a show myself, he was the first person, the first name that came to mind. He happened to also live about 2 kilometers from where I was living at the time. So it was serendipitous almost, you could say.

And so you produced this show and are there— how long is the show? Is this a 15-minute format? And then you're hosting that in On a sort of live sequence, or is it you're sort of posting it as a series of X number of shows?

Yeah, no. So, so there's 2 ways of looking at it. So if you're a small business and you're thinking, oh, this is beyond me, I'll give you some numbers. $50,000 Australian dollars, which I don't know, is probably £2.40 or something with the exchange rate. But I think that's in US dollars, something like $32,000 US dollars. So If you can calculate that as well. Yeah, so look, and that amount of money was spread out over and is spread over about 2 years. So it's not like a huge chunk of change in one go. So what is the show? The show is actually— it went through a different, a couple of different ideas, but eventually we settled on it is a factual show versus a scripted show. So factual means that we We're a fly on the wall. We follow— we had 10 wannabe stand-up comedians from different backgrounds. We had a couple of people in their 50s, a couple of young people in their 20s, and then sort of 30s, 40s. We had 50/50 women to male. We had some from Sydney, some from Adelaide, some from Melbourne, a good mix of personality types and backgrounds. And we Put them in a room for 5 days and we— the activity was that you were learning stand-up comedy, but then we had a guest comedian and a relatively famous guest comedian. So in terms of PR and marketing, I have always been a big fan of KOLs, key opinion leaders. So we embedded these KOLs, these names like Greg Fleet and Glyn Nicholas, a great Welsh-born Aussie comedian and performer. And they basically took a day for each of the 5 nights and we filmed them. And what we filmed them doing was quite unusual. For example, on one of the nights, Mayumi Nabetzu, a Japanese-born Australian comedian, took them to do life drawing. And when I say life drawing, that's nude painting to But then she told them everyone has to get naked as well. So she forced the group of 10 strangers to strip off except for an apron so you wouldn't get paint on you. And that was episode 2. And so we get to see them learn stand-up comedy, but we also get them— we also get to see them go through these emotional challenges and the roller coasters. There's crying. We have a— I'm sorry, I'm sorry. a behavioral analyst as well. And the behavioral analyst does hypnosis on one of the people called Steve Mackey and makes him forget his name. So it's a bit more organized than just walking into the factory floor and pressing the record button.

So you've done that. So then we notice that you've got this video. You are going to tell us a little bit about Apple and the revenue model. And then let's also talk about— so let's just talk about and move on fairly quickly around this idea of the Apple TV and how difficult is that to get onto Apple TV?

Yeah, well, the reason we're on Apple TV was purely by accident. Initially, I thought we will be able to get onto the ABC, the Australian Broadcasting Corporation, the BBC of Australia. And unfortunately, wrong timing. They were going through turmoil, new CEO, no one wanted to make a chance on an Australian unknown. So we looked at alternatives and I reached out to Netflix, Apple TV, even Google Premium— sorry, YouTube Premium. And I found out through Apple TV that almost anyone can get their own show onto Apple TV. You just have to go through an augmented A company that augments everything, brings everything together. They, they ensure that the quality of the video is great, that any captions are included, that the format itself is the right format for Apple to stream. And in Australia, I think there's 5 such companies. So I spoke to them. They said, look, this is what we can do for you. There's a cost. And we said, you know what, at the end of the day, in terms of PR, if we give this to the ABC, They'll pay us a chunk of change and then they'll stick it in a warehouse or underground for who knows forever. And we'll lose that PR and opportunity. So let's put it on YouTube, episodes 1, 2, and a teaser like a trailer. And let's run that continuously. And we've got over 5,000 views on those. In fact, the trailer on Facebook has got over 13,000 views. And then build up that sort of subscription of people who on YouTube are watching us, and then we'll put all episodes onto Apple TV. Now the big reason for Apple TV is that it then gets ranked and put on to IMDb, which is the Internet Movie Database, the IMDb, and IMDb.com is owned by Amazon. So Amazon has one of the highest authorities in SEO. IMDb has one of the highest authorities in SEO. So by adding Is This Thing On to IMDb, produced by the School of Hard Knock Knocks, and that this show is a comedy, we're immediately attaching the brand of the School of Hard Knock Knocks to the word comedy at a massive level in terms of SEO. And that's the goal, isn't it, of PR? And then that also allows us to put it on YouTube. So we're able to get YouTube views, which is good for PR, and we can link that to Facebook ads. And I'm getting 8 cents the view at the moment on Facebook, which again is unheard of.

That's amazing. So in the end, actually, if you're getting 8 cents a view and you're moving up the rankings and maybe the show gets paid for, it'll be self-funding as a marketing exercise.

Well, I should add, we pay 8 cents, not the customer.

Oh, you pay 8 cents. Okay, I see.

Yes, but your listeners who are perhaps not au fait on Facebook advertising, you know, you're typically looking at anywhere between 40 cents to $1.60 minimum to get a view. Remember, this is an ad. It's essentially an ad. It's a show about my stand-up comedy school.

Great.

The great thing about Facebook is we can send those 8 cents just to people in Melbourne or just in Sydney or just in Adelaide.

Very nice. Yes, you can geo-target, can't you? And really, it's an infomercial, isn't it? Now I noticed then also on the School of Hard Knocks website, which is schoolofhardknockknocks.com, so forgive me for missing the pun earlier on, you use a tool called Proof Factor. Can you just tell us about that third-party platform? What is that and why are you using it?

Yeah, well, I actually heard of the type of platform that it is on a podcast, actually. I'm not sure, can't remember the name, and I started investigating and I'd already known that testimonials help. It is a free tool, Proof Factor, and it attaches to WordPress sites. I think if you go over a certain number of visitors, you start to pay. I recommend it.

Wonderful. And then also you're using the Google My Business because you've got 3 venues around Australia and you've got 5-star ratings, Mori, which is what one would expect. How did you get the customers to write a review? We've got about a minute left.

You just ask them. That's the reality. And you're probably in Depends on the relationship you already have, but 1 in 5 to 1 in 10 will say yes. You know, remind them again, put extra pressure. And if they're part of the community, which the School of Hard Knock Knocks is, then publicly tell everyone, hey, it was fantastic. Cheryl just wrote a great review. Thank you, Cheryl. And that just again reminds them. The important thing about my business is we don't actually have a location. We use the services of venues. So we're playing with the algorithm a little bit to be listed within an existing venue because we're a service.

So that's interesting. So because Google My Business wants to have an address in order to register it. So how do you get around that?

They send a postcard to that address.

I've had the postcard and I've registered that. So how did you get around that?

You have good relationships with the pubs. We bring, you know, every time we do a show there, we bring 100 to 120 people on a Thursday night and they love us. And of course, that's food and kitchen sales. And I just give them a call and say, look, do you mind if we list in your venue? And they're perfectly fine. So we have Adelaide, Melbourne, and Sydney venues listed for us. And our competitor started doing it as well, but they don't have 65 reviews. They're a bit behind us.

Morry, that's wonderful. So you're an accomplished trainer, an accomplished wisecracking entrepreneur. If people want to find out more about you and how you run businesses, where can they find out about you?

Probably LinkedIn would be the best. So Morry Morgan, M-O-R-R-Y Morgan, a great Welsh surname there. Just hit me up on LinkedIn and just mention that you heard this on Speak PR and I'll know exactly what we're talking about.

Ladies and gentlemen, Maury Morgan talking to us today from Beijing. So thank you for that, Maury.

Thanks very much, Jim.

And that's been this episode of the Speak PR Podcast. We hope that we shared some, you know, some useful insights, tools that you can use, including for me, the idea of making your own TV series, sort of a reality TV, which then becomes an infomercial. Very powerful. And Maury, Laura is the only person I know that's done that. So with that, I'd like to wish you all the best of health, a profitable business, and that you keep on laughing while you're communicating.