Million moustache march was just one campaign by the Elastic Agency and we discuss why they say "...

Welcome to this episode of the Unnoticed Podcast. I've got Aaron Perlett, who's joining me all the way from Denver, and he runs a company called Elasticity. Aaron, thank you so much for joining us.

Hi, Jim. Thank you so much for having me on today.

Now tell us about Elasticity and the, and the problems that you're solving for business owners.

Sure. Elasticity was founded about 12 years ago. We were all working for Fleischman Hillard, which anyone who works in our industry, Jim, is familiar with. And the challenges we're really trying to address is simply that. And when people come to us, they have a business problem or they wouldn't be coming to us at all. They're trying to drive sales. They're trying to— usually it's related to their fiduciary responsibilities of whether it's revenues or whether it's a nonprofit that's simply trying to build its cash, or it's someone in crisis who's trying to protect their revenue. Someone is upset with their brand or an individual that represents their brand. Typically, that is the problem we're always trying to solve. And the way that we view the world at Elasticity is that every problem begins with data. We try to use and infuse data with everything we do, try to understand an audience, try to develop creative, try to reach an audience. It's always using data. Today, if you look at reputation management, public relations, advertising, whatever you want to call it, if you look at marketing communications today, there are 2 primary tenets. There's content and there's distribution. And what we try to do is create really compelling and disruptive content and then deliver that. And we remain agnostic to how it's delivered, but typically that delivery needs to be in 360 degrees because getting people to pay attention to one channel today is very challenging.

Yeah.

thanks to what technology hath wrought upon us over the past 15 years or so.

Aaron, you've mentioned a few things there that are a bit different to your background. You're at Fleischman Hillard, the PR firm. So what brought together this, this idea of communications and data from a PR background?

Yeah, you're right. My, my background is really steeped in media relations. I began my career working in television as a producer. And so I have always, at the heart of what I'm passionate about and what I'm interested in, it's been content creation. I love creating interesting content, but I spent most of my career in media relations. And I think what we found was that— what I found at least, and I don't know if this is everyone's issue— is that because of the vast changes in media, because revenue streams from most media has been sapped and what you have seen is this revolving door of reporters and also many media outlets have unfortunately gone under. You've had to think about more importantly, what's the most effective channel to reach someone? Forget about what your competency is, but let's think about what really makes an impact. My previous role at Fleischman Hillard, I started to see what I was doing have less and less impact. Yes, I was able to get a 4 or 5-page story in Fortune, but who was really reading Fortune magazine? Everything was moving online. The only magazines were sitting in doctors' offices at that moment. My partner, my now partners at Elasticity, and I had a vision for starting with data, creating a content-rich approach, and then integrating that through traditional media relations, through social media, through advertising. And we built a team that was integrated and worked together because, to get back to the data function, if I'm a media relations practitioner, I don't want to be going to 300 different media outlets to pitch my story. What I want to go to is the most effective ones. The person who's got the information for that is actually our media buyers. Because our media buyers, they use data that they wouldn't be spending a client's money to place advertising unless they knew the audience was the most effective for whatever that task is. So the data sharing between our paid media and our earned media makes for a far more effective media relations practice. And then I also find that, again, getting back to content being one of those fundamental pieces, If I'm able to send a compelling piece of content to a reporter that outlines what I'm trying to get at, they're far more likely to pay attention. In the same way that if I've got a short, compelling video on Facebook, you're far more likely to pay attention than to some static post. And so that content and the delivery of it is really the 2 essential stools, or I guess pillars of the stool.

Can you just tell us which tools are you using to Do that kind of data targeting and analysis? Because that's where it starts from the sounds of things. Is it Google AdWords or what are you using as attribution software?

So we could be using— we use a number of things, some of them proprietary, some of them are simply just paid subscriptions, everything from Nielsen data to Facebook data, which is free for anyone. Because Facebook, they don't care about charging you for the data because they want to, they want to charge you for paying to advertise and reach. I don't mean boosting because boosting actually, All it does is help reach the audience you've already built. But if you don't use Facebook advertising, you just simply drop a piece of content on there, only about 3% of your audience is gonna see it. So let's say you're a breakfast cereal brand and you have a million followers. 3%, if you just drop a piece of content on Facebook, only 3% of your followers are gonna see it at most. If you put some spend behind it, that number broadens dramatically. It doesn't have to be a huge spend, but then you're also not just reaching your own audience, you're reaching new audiences and you can segment the targeting data you use to reach them. And when Facebook did that, everyone followed suit. LinkedIn followed suit, Twitter followed suit. And what you found was that the platforms are, they're tremendous tools to deliver the right message to the right people. But, but they're also really great at making themselves money. So if you, if you're not willing to spend a little money, your message is gonna fall on deaf ears.

So does that fundamentally change the nature of PR? Because it used to be earned media, paid media. It sounds as though all that owned media really is paid for in terms of distribution. It changes the nature of what PR used to be, which was content that had integrity, that was chosen by an editor. Do you think that's just all gone away?

It hasn't all gone away, but it's dramatically diminished. Even the outlets that we think about as still being bastions of earned media, there's still a number of pay-for-play opportunities in them. Forbes has what they call councils. They have the Public Relations Council and they have the Advertising Council. You can pay $1,200 a year and you can publish on Forbes. So from a thought leadership perspective, that's a very heady thing, but it's a pay-for-play opportunity. It's an advertising opportunity. If you look at native content on say CNN.com or MSNBC or what have you, oftentimes some of the editorial content we're reading is actually paid for. There's really been a blurring of the lines. Now that doesn't mean there are not still credible news opportunities. If you have credible news. And there— but oftentimes what media outlets are paying attention to is the Goliaths of industry, the true industry changers, or unfortunately, the worst things that are happening in the world. If you look at our news streams, traditional media is covering calamities. It's from, from the BBC in the UK to— or globally, rather— to NPR. It's a very depressing thing to listen to.

One of the journalists in Beijing, when I was talking with him, he said that, you know, good news is not news, bad news is good news. And that unfortunately was the tenor of it. You've also said something though, Aaron, about this need for disruptive content. And just tell us what you mean by disruptive content.

Yeah, I think when people hear the word disruption, I think there's immediately a negative connotation to it. That means that it's Sacha Baron Cohen, it's buffoonery, It's something like that. And that's not necessarily the case. Being disruptive is doing something different. And maybe it's not only different for you as a company, but it also could be different for your industry. I'll give you an example of something we've done for 2 of our— one client actually on 2 different occasions. We worked with H&R Block, which in the US is a huge tax processing concern here. And we worked with them for 2 different tax seasons. And you can go and here's the typical pitch. It's, hey, it's tax season and there's nothing better than H&R Block. They process more tax returns than anyone else in the US. Okay, if I'm a reporter and I see that, I'm like, that's not interesting to me. I wanna see what TaxSlayer is doing, what TurboTax is doing.

Yeah, yeah.

They're disrupting the industry. They're making sure you can do it on video. That's disruptive, doing it on video. Our first campaign for H&R Block was called the Million Mustache March. And we created a— we had a tax policy professor write a white paper that basically made an argument that people with mustaches should be due a $250 tax return because they were improving good looks in America and they were erasing the stigma of the ugly American. And so we had a tax— we had a true tax policy professor write this document. It was based on Pass case study law for teachers in the US. And we held a physical Million Mustache March. We launched this in early February until Tax Day on the 15th of April. The way you could support this was by putting a branded mustache on your photo on Facebook. And every time a consumer did that, H&R Block would make a donation to a charity called Millions from One, which creates water access in third world countries. But it was this disruptive notion of this ridiculous argument about taxes related to H&R Block and mustaches and a charitable endeavor. And it ended up getting covered globally, not just in the US. The BBC actually covered it globally. And it was an actual, to turn a phrase, a drop in the bucket from a From an investment standpoint, an H&R Block standpoint, because at the same time they were running their traditional advertising on major media. This was purely a digital and an earned media campaign. We got amazing coverage for it, but then we also got great interaction online because it was disruptive, because it was different. Nobody took it really seriously. They realized it was all in good fun, but H&R Block's name and brand equity was attached to it at every stage. of the journey. You can also do disruptive though, and tug at the heartstrings. You can do disruptive by something that is purely movement-oriented, that's trying to drive change to help improve humanity. It's finding a way to, to just step out of the norm.

That is a really fantastic way of looking at it. I see you've also worked with GoDaddy, which traditionally has been almost a commodity Internet registration. Can you share another example?

Sure. We were with GoDaddy at a really interesting time in their evolution as a company because they had become known as a brand by doing very racy advertising.

Yeah, exactly. So the small t-shirts and fairly robust girls.

Being sprayed down with water after Super Bowls or during Super Bowls. It was funny because when we signed up with GoDaddy, people said, oh, that's great. You guys are crazy. They're crazy. What a great marriage. They hired us actually to help soften their brand. They wanted to appeal to what they call the doers. And that is people like us that are entrepreneurs that need services like web services and different digital services and tools. And so what we really did was we dramatically softened their image and we tried to appeal to entrepreneurs, not just men sitting at home in their basement, and tried to use different colors and different scenarios and bring to life different stories about largely oftentimes female entrepreneurs to really soften, again, soften the image, And appeal directly to people who were gobbling up these different services and using different tools and creating their own websites and things like that.

And so in terms of the problems that people come to you to solve, it sounds like it's also quite elastic in terms of the kind of clients that you're getting. Do you have some kind of process that people can follow if they're listening to the show? Do you have an elasticity? Way, for example, that they can use?

Yeah, it's called listening. It's a lot of— see, I think that we're so jaded by our own preconceived notions that— and I've seen this in C-suites as well— that we go into a situation where we think we know what a customer wants, we think we know the answer to something, and instead of stepping back, getting rid of our preconceived notions, and actually looking at what research tells us and then trying to derive insights from that, from the research about your audience, because it's not that terribly difficult or expensive to go get research about what people think of your brand. And even if you don't have those types of means, if you're a small business owner, to look at maybe how your competition is being effective, what's really moving the needle for them, even if it doesn't appeal to your own personal sensibilities, If you're trying to build a business, what you care about is serving an audience and you're trying to bring whatever your dream is to fruition, but you're trying to serve a specific demographic. And it's, I think, throwing out those preconceived notions is where it begins, looking at true data and understanding what your audience really wants. I think that to me is the key. And then I think the other thing is, this might sound odd. Paying attention to pop culture. As guys like you and I get older, it's harder and harder. When you hear a name, Camila Cabello, who's that? She's a really popular singer that my kids love. Oh, I don't care about her. Yeah, but if you're trying to reach 17-year-old girls to sell your products to, yeah, they care. So it's paying attention to pop culture oftentimes is really important because then to get back to the mustache campaign you and I talked about earlier. At the time, mustaches were becoming a thing. They were— there was this kitschy nature to mustaches, and young people everywhere were really getting into mustaches. It was an important part of how culture was evolving. And today, if you look at it, there's a lot more people with facial hair today than there was 20 years ago in the workplace.

Yeah.

That was the beginning of that. And so, we were looking to identify What are trends that we can jump on top of that we can really make work for this brand? So I think it's looking at data, looking at research, throwing your preconceptions out the door and trying to be realistic and agnostic about what your customers want and desire. And then thinking about how that ties in possibly to pop culture, to what's happening around you, to technology. What are the tools that people are using? Not every company like Zoom stumbles into a global pandemic and becomes An overnight sensation. We'd been using Zoom for 6 years, but there are people that had never heard the word Zoom before last February. So it's— yeah, to me, that's the key. It's listening, actually. Listening to everything around you and not getting so tied into your own preconceived notions.

And if people want to listen to you more, Aaron, how can they find you?

I'd recommend they don't listen to me at all and they run screaming. The easiest way to find me is to come to our website. It's goelastic.com is, is that's our company website. Or you can go to Amazon and Google me and find my terrible book, which is, which is horrifying. But actually, that does get back to an important point that you and I touched on earlier that I should probably mention. Search today. I think that traditionally public relations practitioners have not paid enough attention to the power of search.

Absolutely agree.

And search algorithms change constantly. So today, to me, search is the ultimate arbiter of everything. It helps people find things. It helps people determine whether they want to work for you, whether they want to live somewhere, whether they want to move somewhere, whether they want to purchase a product. And I think that search is probably throughout my career has been the most underappreciated aspect of reputation management, of brand marketing. Everything relies upon search, whether it's Google, YouTube, which is the second largest search engine in the world, Bing, whatever you want. Even Amazon has search technology. Facebook has search technology. Search couldn't be more important.

I agree. And people are going to search for you. They're going to look for your website, Aaron, and they're also going to look for that Elastic book that you've got. Thank you so much for joining me, Aaron Perlett from The Elastic Business in Denver, Colorado. Thanks so much.

It's been an honor, Jim. Thank you so much.

You've been listening to Aaron all the way over in Denver, Colorado. And thank you for listening to this episode of Speak PR. We've been talking about the need for being disruptive but not negative, and about the need to listen, and also about taking into account the power of search. Thank you for listening to this episode, and we wish you the best of health, a profitable or at least sustainable business, and that if you're going to be going out and doing some marketing, do think about the 360 reputation and all the touchpoints that anyone's got with your brand. Thank you so much for listening to this episode of Speak PR.

You have to look very, very carefully to be able to decipher that.