The One With Andy “Video Boss” Jenkins - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #20

I'm dean jackson, he's joe polish, and this is the I love marketing podcast. Hey, everybody, it's Dean Jackson and Joe.

Polish, but Joe Polish with a cold right now. So I'm going to sound a little weird today, but hey, deal with it because we've got the eloquence of Dean Jackson and our very special guest, a guy by the name of Andy Jenkins. So, Andy, you're on a cell phone, which is really unbelievable that you would show up on the I Love Marketing show on a cell phone. But you're a very special guy and you know a ton of stuff that's going to help our listeners make a boatload of money and give them some good strategies. So we're going to for just this one. So how are you?

So I'm great. And, you know, just let me apologize right up front. Not only am I on a cell phone, I'm on an AT&T powered iPhone. So there's a good chance that we'll drop this call 37 times, but I swear I know exactly how to pick off. Pick up exactly where we left off. So it's going to be great. It'll be like a little staccato, kind of like a really bad piano recital piece. But I'm here for you guys and thank you. Thank you, honestly, for allowing me to show up with this inferior technology and not having a landline. It's not 1980.

But what's kind of funny about that is you are known as one of the best and most sophisticated in video marketing guys out there, but you also have a really extensive background in video and in the film industry. I just want to ask you to kind of give us a thumbnail sketch of who is Andy Jenkins? Where did you start with? And where are you now? So our listeners have a good idea.

Of who you are and why they should not listen after the next 37 seconds of explanation. Well, thank you for giving me this forum to talk about myself in the most uplifting possible. I will give you guys the short version. So when I was seven years old, When I was seven years old, my father took me to see Star wars and I was the second person in line on opening day of Star wars in Brighton, Michigan. Beautiful Brighton, Michigan. And at the conclusion of watching that movie, I had pretty much defined what it is my life was all about. And it was trying to figure out whether the force was real and at some point, building a lightsaber. And if that didn't work out, which it didn't, I was going to go and work in the feature film business. And that essentially was like, the genesis of what drove me in every bit of education that I did. Every time I ever got arrested, it was because I was in pursuit of that. And ultimately what happened is that it managed to infuse its way into two careers. So I'll just give you again, the short word. We'll jump ahead. So from 7 to about, let's just say, oh, no, I'm getting out of college. So I went to NYU film, right? Which is very cool. I've learned a lot of Whole Foods and Birkenstocks and, you know, liberal media. It was awesome. Really enjoyed it. And at conclusion of nyu, I went. I got out of NYU and I started working at the Guiding Light, which is a soap opera. And so that was very congruent with my personality. And it was a great time. And as my career evolved, I decided that I really liked editing. I really liked putting all of this stuff together. So that's the direction that I headed. I learned how to be an editor. And it was really interesting time because, you know, I got out of school in 92. And about that time, the whole concept of digital editing, where you could, you know, digitize something that was shot on film or tape and then work with it in what's called a nonlinear fashion, where you could jump about and put stuff over here, from over here, you never had to cut anything or glue anything together. It was really a revolution. And I got to work on the very first one called An Edit Droid at nyu. And so, you know, as this career of mine progresses, I finally start to realize my dream. And I get into the feature film making business. And look, I was starting to at the bottom, you know, entry level. And I sort of worked my way up until I got to a point where I could actually edit a film. And I was working on this slasher film, and it was just, you know, it was awesome. It had Corbin Bernstein and Dee Wallace Stone, who was the mom in ET And a bunch of scantily clad teenagers who essentially ran around and, you know, had sex and then get killed. This is really high art cinema during one scene, which unfortunately got cut out of the film because. Because, you know, the guy just wasn't able to pull it off. We found him. He was a 711 AD model. So, you know, just, again, we're maintaining this high standard of art for B movie smashers. And the production designer, who's the guy who's in charge of the look and feel of the film, he's holding this Big giant sword, which is how this kid was going to die. He was going to get his head chopped off. And I walked into that, and all of a sudden I was assailed by this nostalgic Dungeons and Dragons memories. Because, you know, I used to play that wholeheartedly as a kid. And I said, norm, that is just. That's cool, man. That's a great sword. Now, the thing you have to understand about low budget films is everybody sort of pulls a bunch of different weight and wears a bunch of different hats. So I was the lucky guy that got to do what's called Props Returns, where I drove this sword back to the prop house. So, you know, I get to the prop house and hand over all the props and I hand over the sword last. My man. This is so cool. Do you guys, like, have any more of these? You know, I'm thinking maybe I can, like, you know, I don't know, rent one and play with it or I don't do something. I don't know what I was thinking. But he goes, he looks at me with a sidelong glance and he takes me back into this room that is reminiscent of the end shot of Raiders of the Lost Ark, where they're pushing the Ark of the Covenant in that shipping box into this giant warehouse. It's like, warehouse. And lo and behold, there are several stories and racks of Roman armor. And I later learned that this was called Lorica Segmentata, and they had Roman armor and helmets and shields and swords and all this cool stuff. And he's like, yeah, see what we got here? I'm like, why do you have this? And it turns out they just got done propping a Discovery Channel series miniseries about the rise and fall of Rome. And I'm like, what are you gonna do with this? He goes, you know, eventually we're gonna have to get rid of it. I' would you allow me to sell this stuff? And you know, on a consignment basis. He goes, yeah, dude, we'll even ship it to your customers. I'm like, all right. So I went on to ebay and that lasted about two days. I just hated it. And I started an E commerce store. And once I started this E commerce store with like a little $50 a month Yahoo store, I proceeded to do hundreds of thousands of dollars in sales and essentially sold out the prop house. And then what did I do? I went to another prop house and sold them out their remnant replica weaponry, essentially kind of went through the country selling out these prop houses of stuff that they wanted to get Rid of and was, you know, kind of getting nervous and eventually found a company that imported replica weaponry from India and where was going to let me drop ship it. Meaning that I would send them the name and address of the customer and the order and they would send it to the customer and I would just pay wholesale and charge the customer receipt retail. And so this is about in, you know, 98, 99, when I've been in my, my movie and TV film career for about eight years, seven years somewhere around there. And I was getting burned out. You know, I worked for NFL films. I worked on a couple shows that won Emmys for editing and was getting a great day rate. But I was just getting burned out. And so I said, you know what I want to do? I really want to try to rediscover this creative thing that makes that really make made the whole dream of when I went to see Star wars as a kid. Because what had happened is it turned into a job. So I started Internet marketing. I started selling swords and armor, replica swords and armor online. When Lord of the rings hit, I started selling Lord of the rings swords. You know, we were ranked. My store was ranked number one in Google for Lord of the rings swords. Back in the day, opened up a tapestry store that sold wall hanging tapestries. You know, we had tapestries that 40 bucks and tapestries over $1,000. A sports collectible store. And just was having a great time until I actually became involved with this company as a partner and a producer. And the company's name is Hackson Films. Nobody's ever heard of hacks and films. But back in 1999, hacks and films did a small independent feature film called the Blair Witch Project. And I think you understand how that was a sea change in priorities for me and so began to sort of say, all right, well look, you know, literally my stores had made seven figures in that year of build up and they were consistent. And frankly the only time we never made a sale was on 911 in 2001. And I said, you know what? I think things are consistent. We got them set up. I'm going to try to see if I can't get back into the film business. And so I came back into the film business with the guys and I discovered something supremely awesome about coming back into the film business the way that I did. I was no longer a laborer. I came back in as the best employee title ever, investor. So now I was associate producer, executive producer, post production supervisor, editor, whatever I wanted to be. But I was also investor which said I didn't have to do anything. And I really started to enjoy that side of things. And then in about 2005, YouTube came out, and I looked at that sidelong and I said, you know, I bet you that there's something to this, and I want to make sure that I'm going to be the guy, or at least one of the guys that is an enabler in terms of education for people that recognize that when the transition of video, let's just call it video, you can call it a lot of different things. You talk, multimedia, whatever. But when a transition of video makes it into the mainstream online, I want to be there when that happens. And so I did. And that's what I do mostly now, although right now I straddle both worlds. I just finished creating a feature film again with my partners at Haxon, and we are just on development of feature film. And in the meantime, over in the Internet marketing space, you know, I've done distance learning and doing distance learning. I'm actually getting set to present an education called the Video Boss on what I've learned as a feature filmmaker and an Internet marketer, selling real products and information products to other people and show people sort of the things that I do as a feature filmmaker in order to do that. So that is. That is in a nutshell. Gosh, I'm probably. What do we got, like, six minutes left now? Sorry, guys.

Yeah, exactly.

Yeah. I mean, just listening to you tell that, there's so many. There's so many lessons in that, as I was listening to it, and one of the things that we always like to talk about are kind of the, you know, the inflection point, the times where you made a decision and it changed the direction or a lesson that you learned or an aha that you had. And I think that, you know, when you were in the prop house for that first time and you had the foresight to ask the guy, could I sell these for you? Is like, that opened up a whole nother direction for you, didn't it? Oh, and it absolutely did. And look, I always thought. I always think that life is just a bizarre twisting of gears and strange happenings. And if you think about how absolutely unprepared but supremely prepared I was for that to happen, it really makes it special. I was unprepared for that to happen because I'd never sold anything in my life. Never. Do you think even. What made you think to even ask? Because I loved Dungeons and Dragons when I was a kid, and Dungeons and Dragons was the thing that inspired my imagination. And so when I would get suspended for truancy from school, it's not because I was out, you know, hiding behind the dumpster, drinking a 40. It was because I had borrowed a video camera from a buddy and I got my other buddies to cut school with me and we would go out and make the most ridiculous films that we possibly could. And so, you know, at the end of the day, I had, you know, Dungeons and Dragons and wow, that's so cool. And I, you know, it's kind of like this, I don't want to call it like the same male testosterone drawing power that makes people buy Ferraris when they turn 40 years old. But it was, you know, it was a 27 year old kid going, man, that's the coolest thing. I really think that's cool. Look at what they have, all of this. And there was just something that came out of my mouth that said, let me sell all this stuff for you. And here's thinking back on it, I think what I wanted to do is actually own it all for myself. But I couldn't see any way to afford that. Look, you know, back in, let's call it 98, you know, I was pretty well paid as an editor. I was just, you know, just at like six figures a year as an editor. And that was good money. But still it wasn't enough for me to go buy a piece of Roman armor indiscriminately, which cost like $395. So at some point I, you know, I had this just vision of someday walking into a house that was just stuffed with cool medieval armor stuff. Because, you know, man, I just, I loved it. I loved it. It was a very, it was a passionate thing for me. And as a result that. I love that you call it an inflection. Because an inflection generally means that you're hitting something at an oblique, ricocheting off it in a different direction, even if it's only slightly different. Well, this turned out to be an extraordinarily different inflection for me. It was really a deflection. Go ahead.

No, I wanted to ask you, Andy, because you obviously picked up on the fact that in spite of this desire to do art, be it video, be it whatever sort of creative thing is going on in your brain, you also combined it with marketing and with entrepreneurism. The whole term starving artist comes from the fact that they don't know how to generate money with that which they want to do with creativity. But you've actually learned how to take your creativity and to use the buzzword monetize, you've learned how to monetize it. You started that off early on because you have the ability to see the opportunity. And I think that's one of the characteristics of just great entrepreneurs and great marketers is they see where the money's at.

Yeah, I think that's absolutely true. I think for an artist though, and I think at some level all entrepreneurs are really guide in the wool artists that are just want to be able to create. And whether it's content, you know, let's use that really tired lexicon. Whether it's content or service or commentary or opinion, they definitely want to be somebody that creates something as part of their milieu of things that they do. As an entrepreneur. Yeah, that was a good one. Right, but you didn't hear that one. That word has appeared on I love marketing. So we're gonna. For all our historians paying attention, that's the first appearance of the word Melmieu. Oh, yes. Let the shenanigans begin. So at the end of the day, all I'm saying is that as a entrepreneur, we are creative people. And I think ultimately for me, I was just as attracted to. To be able to create something in the process of this marketing as it was. And here is, here's the thing that always meant the most for me. Here's the thing when I, when I would have fears or doubts, would wake me up with a reoccurring dream, it was the liberation. It was the liberation of not having to. And boy, this is really going in a human potentials direction. But let's go with it. Not having to conform to how culture says that you have to earn a living. And so what that means is that, look, part of my job is to give myself mental white space just to walk away from the things that are administrative or the things that are commoditized stuff that I have to do in order to keep the business of the business afloat. I walk away from that and I enter this white space and that allows my brain to. To just function. And that's really where the creative stuff comes from. And so I think it's very difficult to get that when you are working in an environment that I think we all typically refer to as corporate America. Which is why the value proposition of the ROI per person is so low. I mean, you get one person and they give you 100% ROI. They give you 100% of that value, and you get two people and all of a sudden, you know, only A little bit more is done. So each person is now giving you 60%. And I just think that, you know, as an entrepreneur, if you allow for yourself to have that creative white space, you just get better at your job, which means that your business grows. Indy. Did you have any e commerce experience when you offered to sell these props? None. So there's the thing. I mean, I think that the thing that I got out of that is that you used the momentum of something that you were really excited about. I mean, you were passionate about this prop stuff and you had to use that to then figure out the stuff that you needed to figure out to sell anything online. It doesn't matter what you were selling, you still had to go through the moves of how to set up your Yahoo. Store or how to sell something on ebay. And that was very valuable because you were able to parlay that into selling other things. Well, let me tell you the good and the bad of that. And for people that are entrepreneurs, the two or three people that are listening to this call, besides you guys, I think that there was a great deal of upside and a great deal of downside that today is all upside down. And so the downside was back in 1999, you know, there was no such thing really as Google. So if I wanted to find a shopping cart, I mean, I had to use the Yahoo. Search engine, which was just chock full of goodness even back then. And now I'm probably, you know, going off the reservation here when I'm talking about search engine quality. I actually ended up being somebody that taught search engine optimization in the later years of my Internet marketing career. But you know, at that time, if you were to go and try to find an e commerce shopping cart, you know, the starting rate was at $5,000 for a custom installation. If you go and search in Google today for shopping cart or e commerce software, you know, you can throw a dart, you can start for free if you want to, and it's essentially about as easy as operating your microwave oven. So the bad side was I had to spend a lot of time waiting for innovation to occur so that I could deploy this thing, do this thing. The upside for me was I spent so much time in this pioneering area. Not that I was a pioneer, but really the Internet as a whole was beginning to pioneer what it was going to become at that time, that I got to see things develop that people who are getting online today, last year, five years ago, didn't get to see. That was an upside that eventually allowed me to teach this stuff Because I understand its origin story. You know, why nowadays the E commerce engines, the shopping cart, search engine optimization, video marketing, YouTube, why all those things are critical, important components to slam together to get critical mass on success in marketing. The downside was I did have to figure that out. Now here's the advantage for people today and you know, again, not to make this a soapbox rah rah call, but none of that, none of that is a problem anymore. In fact, there was no information even back in the day for someone to tell me I couldn't find a search Engine Optimization eBook ClickBank. What? There was no such thing as ClickBank, which is the largest repository of ebook information. Now like I said, Wikipedia, no such thing as Wikipedia. So nowadays you want to learn something, you're literally a search phrase entry and a couple of pages of research away from understanding how to start. And then when it comes to wanting to get good at it, you're a product away. You're a $37 ebook or $100 multimedia series or a $2,000 coaching program where people lead you by the hand through it. It is really, at this point you don't have to think about that anymore, which is really a boon for the entrepreneur and the artist inside the entrepreneur to decide that. All right, well look, look, the standard of entry, the barrier of technology anymore is non existent. I get to concentrate and focus on doing what I do in order to market my products. And I think that's why even, you know, depending on the day and who you talk to, people will say that the gold rush of online marketing is over. I have never been in a position in the last 11 years of doing this to not say I can't wait for the next evolution because it's just going to broadly and expand horizons. The people that I know in this market that are successful and do not think that the sky is falling every single time, you know, the feds regulate something or something changes and becomes mainstream or you know, the networks or the big retailers get involved every single year. Their business grows because they understand that. I think at this point, since we're talking about the democratization of communication and commerce, which the Internet really is, the industry and the people that control it are the same people that use it. And so they get to shift, they get to shift it towards their own evil shenanigans, desires and their schemery, which is essentially how it has worked in the past. But now the barrier of entry is just so low that everybody can play. I mean, look, you know, you guys probably Understand this in 2011, more content was created than all of recorded history before that combined. Right. So, I mean, you think about it, not all the content is good. I wouldn't necessarily suggest that, you know, Twitter needs to be cataloged for the ages so that when the aliens come to discover our species, that's the first thing that they see. But at the end of the day, between Twitter and Facebook and now these portals that let people engage on their own terms, and blogging and news and the proliferation of people starting businesses online and YouTube, more content has been created just in a year than all of human history. And that has a net effect of that. Content creation in itself guides how people want to interact when it comes time to make a sale. So I guess it's a roundabout way of saying for me me the old ways of just, you know, creating offers and sales and all of the other things that we associate with on the, you know, brick and mortar retail level where you walk in and somebody is there to greet you and there is some sort of incentive. That stuff is really becoming the dinosaur nowadays. That's not the incentive for people to take action when it comes for them to decide to purchase a product. I think it's about distinction marketing. I think it's about personality marketing. I think it's about connecting with your audience and your potential clients and customers in a way that you couldn't do literally five years ago without spending a fortune. Now I could turn on my iPhone and it would probably crash the call, but I could turn it on and I could make a video of myself speaking, a message walking through my house talking to people. I could have that up on YouTube and I could have that all done five minutes from now and reach a potential audience of millions. Where else can you do that? And frankly, the fact that I can now be in that person's home talking to them directly or speaking to them while I have some sort of slide up, I think it's just a profound opportunity. Well, the fact that India, literally I could get my iPhone and push FaceTime and be talking with you face to face on your iPhone in La Jolla, it's just like you couldn't even imagine that in Star Wars. Didn't even imagine.

Okay, hold on a minute here. Dean, you are cutting out like crazy. So you need to fix that, young man.

I'm cutting out?

How can that. Yes, your phone is skipping and cutting out and everything. And you know, I'm just here to hymn is here to serve our listeners.

With good phone quality. Let's see.

Yes. So go ahead you were saying, I mean, I like the path you're going down. You can be on FaceTime, you could be talking. There's all this access to technology, and it's unbelievable. I'm really enjoying just sitting back here with my cold today, not having to ask a lot of questions as Andy just goes off and just explains his philosophies and perspectives on this. But I totally agree. I always love that line. You can make excuses or you can make money, but you can't do both. Part of this, I think, is just coming at it. Are you playing not to lose? Are you playing to win? And taking that approach? It seems, Andy, that's kind of the perspective and the mindset that you operate from. Instead of seeing all of the obstacles, you just see a ton of opportunities that are available to everyone that never existed even just a few years ago, let alone, in some cases, two days ago.

What it is, it feels like, Andy, that now, it's that the technical friction has been removed from the creative people getting their message out. In the past, what you were saying, what you had to go through, is you were a creative person and you were curious and deaf and diligent enough that you had to figure out the technical stuff to get to express your creativity. And now in 2011, it's really. There's zero friction. No matter how advanced all the delivery devices get and the iPads and the iPhones and all of those things, it really comes down to digital literacy. All of that cool stuff really comes down to video and audio and text and pictures. Those are the only things that are in that recipe. And there's zero friction in getting those out. I mean, you can put a combination of all of those on a WordPress blog and not have to know anything technical to do that. You could have a television station. You can have a television which broadcasts, literally, if you wanted to, 24 hours a day from a $400 piece of software and a bunch of little flip cameras around your house. And let me just give you a little bit of perspective. And, you know, look, I want to absolutely give people some tactical advice as well. But my last employed job, where I was a staff member for somebody else, I worked on a piece of software hardware combination called a smoke. Okay? And a smoke was a digital finishing station where essentially the television commercials would come in. And, you know, my job was to do special effects and animation and cut them together and just, you know, make them look like they would eventually appear on the air. Now, keep in mind, this was all standard definition. This wasn't Even high definition. Well, that Smoke that was hosted on a Silicon Graphics, an SGI computer, which some people may recognize that name. That suite was a million dollars worth of hardware and software. In my $37 book bag, my backpack is a $2,000 Mac Pro, which can do essentially everything that that smoke suite did, and on a piece of software that costs about 600 bucks. Now, just think about the differentiation between the two there. And I get to say that because I was the guy that has worked, worked both sides of that. But if I didn't want to spend anything except the hardware that I already have, the laptop that I already have, I can edit now in high definition, which you couldn't do back in the day, you couldn't do in 2003. I can edit in high definition on Imovie or a piece of Pinnacle software from Sony for $99. You know, a nice night out or decent. I'm sorry, you wouldn't get out the door in la Jolla with 99 bucks. But, you know, somewhere in life, you know, Mississippi, you could probably do real well on that. No offense to anybody listening in Mississippi. But the bottom line is, you're right. There is no excuses anymore. And here's the thing that I realized early on, which I think is 100% responsible for me having any success at all, is that there are certain leverage points in all of our skill sets and our personalities that allow us to achieve some things that maybe our competitors or other people in the marketplace cannot. And we are all gifted with these great things. And my gift was I really love to tell stories. And so while, you know, you can put up a blog and write copy and you can send out email marketing, you can do direct response email, etc. Etc. The thing that I wanted to do the most was tell stories. And so you naturally gravitate towards the medium that you have the most comfortable with. And it just so happens that that medium now is the most powerful connection medium in the world. So, you know, I'm a big. Obviously you guys can tell. I'm a big advocate of being able to connect with your audience in a way that allows you to demonstrate you. I mean, we could talk about Apple and Apple success all day long, but the fact of the matter is there are very few people that don't associate Apple with Steve Jobs. And this is one of the reasons why they're the most valuable brand in the world right now, is because they not only have a recognizable brand, but they have a human that everybody can relate to. Love him or hate him, they have this great double crack, right? It's a two headed dragon, brand and person. And you know, whatever you want to say about Microsoft, guess what? Bill Gates was still a part of that brand recognition of that company. And for a long, long time they were the most valuable brand in the world. If you're into Internet market marketing like I am, you knew, you know, who the founders of Google are. You get that, you understand that. And that's because those guys made a cognizant decision very early on that customers like to do business with other people, not with the nameless, faceless, you know, try to call an airline and book a ticket and get stuck into, you know, automated voice response hell where basically at this point everybody's trained to just say operator, operator, operator as soon as they type, you know, because they usually do it on the phone and it's not easy to operate your touchpad. I don't, I haven't known what my, my, whether they call it a ticket number, the tracking number, or whatever the hell that number is they associate with your order. I have, I've never known what that is. So, you know, I want to reach a person and so do customers. And I think that, you know, whether you're really, really comfortable interacting with customers or not comfortable with interacting with customers, you have to make an effort to reach out to them on a one to one basis. And, you know, I get this all the time from clients who say, I never want to be in front of a video camera. And I hate it too. I hate it too. And so that's why I use like Microsoft's PowerPoint or Apple's keynote to make slide presentations so I can still communicate my message, not worry about how I look. You know, I talk into a microphone, I try to be emphatic, I rehearse my stuff, but the message still gets through to those folks. So at the end of the day, I think it's about creating the kind of connections that small businesses and entrepreneurs like us can, where the big companies can't do it because it's a scale problem, it's beyond scope. And then the smart people understand that you just need a hero. And frankly, for a lot of people, Steve Jobs, does that make sense? Yeah, absolutely.

I don't think any of that made any sense at all, actually.

I'll try to answer that. Yeah.

No, no, I'm kidding. That was great. You know, let me ask you, Andy, about people that are listening right now and they've heard all of what you just said and they want to make more Money, they want to sell their stuff, they want a package, they want to position it. There are certain things that you just delegate and hire and there's other things that you do not. One of my favorite sayings is there's two things you should never delegate in business until you actually understand them so well. If you ever do that, you truly can delegate them. The two things you should never delegate are marketing and the checkbook. Unless you absolutely have a handle on it. It. So in the case of making video, you're not just a guy that knows how to put this stuff together, but you also, you say storytelling, however, it's messaging. It is knowing what to communicate, how to communicate it in a compelling way, and who to communicate it to. You're very much a direct response guy. So everything that you do is designed to not only get your communication out there, but elicit a response. And so out of all the stuff that is available for people at a very low price that is totally accessible, much of it is like open source. We got a video coming out on I love marketing with Matt Mullenwig, the founder of WordPress, gigantic open source, tons of free software sort of company. What are the things that you think would be essential for the listeners, Our clients? Your clients. What should they absolutely learn and not attempt to delegate or abdicate or sweep under the rug and not pay attention to it because it's, you know, they don't think it's as important or they don't want to learn how to write, copy or speak in front of a camera or learn to PowerPoint. I mean, what are the essential things that someone really needs to know?

Well, I think you said it, and I don't want to necessarily punt on the question because I think I do have a good way to articulate this, but it's the creation of a message and the story is the most important thing that you can ever learn. Look, video making, the technical process is commoditized. We've arrived at this used to be a specialty. It used to be brain surgeon speciality. Like I said, you know that room that was full of a million dollars worth of equipment, it wasn't just a box with the software. It had all kinds of supporting mechanisms, materials and technicians hired specifically to maintain that stuff. So any more, Like I said, walk around with my laptop and a little flip camera and a headset microphone and I have a video production studio with me that I can make high definition videos with great sound and put those out there to the world via an Internet wireless connection in Starbucks. But one Thing that becomes all that's worthless if you don't know how to communicate to your market. So here's, let me just give you an example of how you can communicate difference between video and let's just say directly response marketing via text, right? So let's just say that I go and test drive a new car and it's a nice car, we'll call it a Ferrari. I come back to you guys and you say, so how was the test drive? And I go, oh man, that car is powered by a rocket. It's unbelievable. It corners aren't like it's on rails, drives like it's on a cloud and it's just got the stereo system which is just so amazing gangster. Now that's not necessarily the way that I talk, depending on how much I've had to drink. But ultimately it's not a far cry from a decision or the conversation that we've ever had with anybody about anything that we're excited about. Like food, right? How many, oh, that meal, that pizza, they've got the best. How many times have you ever heard that that was the best meal ever from a friend in a conversation? You know, a few, you know, so at the end of the day, how come we're willing to accept that message from our friend? But the minute that we see that on a piece of paper like a sales letter, we go, whatever, hype and we run from that thing, we delete, we block it in our browser. It's because of something called empathy. It's because people who are searching for like minded people or solutions to their problems have the same degree of passion about solving their problems as you do about doing something awesome and fun that you've always wanted to do. Now I'm not suggesting that you can turn on a video camera or your microphone and record the words awesome and all might and every other single hyperbole word that you could and have success. But the bottom line is it's one of the only mediums where you can be passionate about something. And that passion comes across on so many different levels with so many different senses that you can actually engage people. And it's also, I think, and I think that is dirty little secret of video. That's the upside, that's the advantage, is that all you need to do is be authentic about how you feel about something and people that will resonate with people. So you know, imagine people on this call who have their business. You started that business, the passion, it was a, it's a minor miracle that you did that. You didn't, you know, just stay in whatever job that you decided that. I mean, take the, think about the gumption and the decision and you know, you struggling with the anxiety of whether or not you can do this. And you finally decided to do it. And the thing that keeps you going is the passion about what you're doing because you believe in it. Now all of a sudden there's a medium where the technical side is commoditized, where all you have to do, literally all you have to do is talk about the reasons why you think it's important and people will get it. It doesn't require copy skills, doesn't require you to understand neuro linguistic programming, whatever the hell it's called, it doesn't require those things. It requires you to be genuine. And I think that if you're in business to help other people, which is really the only way to create any kind of success, at least in the long term, that you genuinely believe in and what it is that you do. And so we've been hiding, right? Until video became something that we could all access. We've been hiding and we've been trying to leverage other mediums like text or inbound sales calls, you know, a phone room, outside salespeople. We've been trying to fit our message, yellow page ads and television commercials which were prohibitively expensive. And we couldn't be ourselves there because it just wasn't cost effective. Now we can, you know, YouTube is free stuff is amazing plays on mobile devices. And you can turn on that flip camera, which you can get for 80 bucks. And in high definition, look at the camera like that's one of your most skeptical customers and give them the good news about why what it is that you do is going to help them solve pain or increase their pleasure. Seems to me like it's a lot easier than the 15 steps. And you guys are amazing copywriters. We both know that most people think there's between 14 and 16 steps that you have to include when you write a sales letter, right? Well, so in video there's three. There's the hook, which is why you should watch this video. Why should you watch this thing? It's not even why your product is good. You get to say, this is why I want you to watch this video. Because by the time you're done with it, I'm going to teach you how to correct that golf slice that you have. That's a pretty compelling hook for somebody that's looking how to correct their golf slide. There's the path, the path that they have to walk on to achieve that result, right? So we're going to walk down this path. And when it comes to the golf slice, for example, let's say that that's how we address the ball. The way that our hands grip the club, how far forward or backwards the ball is in our stance, the way that our ball are bound, body follows through when we take the swing. So that's the path of correction. And then the persuasion. And the persuasion is simply, if you want to know more, I have this thing that can do this even better. Here's what you do. Okay, so those are the three things, right? We're in the sales letter. We have. I mean, look, I could. I have to do what. I haven't written a sales letter in forever, but I still have, you know, this piece of software called Evernote, which keeps track of all my stuff. Stuff. I've got those 15, 16 components in my set in my Evernote somewhere where, you know, I guess at this point they're collecting digital dust. But, yeah, it's 3 versus 15. And, you know, here's the one thing that if you ever spoke at a seminar, been to a seminar or whatever, and you ask the attendees of that seminar, hey, do you really believe in what you're doing? Do you think that your business is great? Do you think that what you're offering customers is almost universally, everybody's hands goes up. That's great, because you've just qualified to be somebody that can be a video marketer. If you believe that. I love it.

You know, I mean, you go ahead, deet.

I was gonna say. So you think video is a good thing?

Yeah, yeah. I'm in the same boat. I'm a little unclear. So what I think I'm hearing from you here is that we should probably think about using video.

You know.

That is funny. Okay, well, so, you know, look, that was truly fantastic. And I hope everyone listening on I love marketing is kind of getting it, and it really, you know, you are the video boss. So how do people. What do you recommend to shorten the learning curve? I mean, we've only got a few minutes left here, but you've spent years learning what it is, you know, you hang out with and have consulted on and been directly responsible for some of the biggest Internet marketing campaigns and launches in the IM history. And you kind of know how to figure this stuff out. So what advice would you give for. I love marketing listeners and anyone listening that wants to be a ninja and be super effective at this.

Well, I think one of the great pieces of news I have for you is that about 95% of what you need, if you've got a computer that's a year or newer, younger, you already have it, you know, whether it's Microsoft PowerPoint or Keynote. My first video I did with a USB headset microphone that I got from target for about 35 bucks. In fact, you had mentioned that I'd done some big Internet marketing product launches. The first launch that I ever did, did, which did eight figures of sales in 24 hours. I did that with a 30 day trial of PowerPoint. And this was Microsoft PowerPoint 2005. I did it with a 30 day trial of a piece of software for PC called Camtasia and that Target microphone. So here's the good thing. I mean, you know, software again is a commodity. You can, using trial software, figure out whether or not you're cut out for this without really risking anything other than the time it takes for you to sit down and say, what's my hook? What's my path? And how am I going to persuade them to take the next step where I can give them more value. One of the things that, and look, I don't, I'm not a pitcher. I like I said, I can't really sell anything to save my butt. But I am passionate about what I do and I'm doing, doing next. Evolution. I think videos come a long way and I think there's another evolution for video. And that video is called, that evolution is called Breaking the fourth wall. So, you know, I know that we're short on time. I'm going to keep you guys and Joe, if you need to pass out, go ahead. But I think it's important. This is important. Think about when you go to a movie theater, right? So on the front wall, which is wall number one, there's the screen. And on the side walls, walls number two and number three are the speakers, right? It's the part of the surround sound and in the. And also the people are next to you. On the back wall is the projector lifts. And so the projector is the origin of what you're seeing on the screen. And here's something that, you know, I've, I've not struggled with. I've struggled to help other people understand. And when they get it, it's the most liberating thing ever. No one expects you to. If you're not doing video, right? Let's just say that your career is not about video marketing or selling video products or video editing or creating video software. So that basically limit eliminates, you know, 1,1000 of a percent of all the other things people do in terms of their business. If you're not doing that, nobody expects you to be really unbelievably awesome at it. They don't expect Hollywood quality. They don't expect feature film quality from you. Take a look at YouTube. There are days that YouTube, which has a billion videos, gets more searches and visits than Google does, which is the top search engine. I mean, it's the Google vacillates between the number one and number two website in the world. How many professional videos are on there? Here's my point. All right? On that fourth wall, the fourth wall is where it gets made. That's where you create the sausage. And I think that, and I've experimented with, to great success that when you are making video and you decide to break that fourth wall with your customer and bring them into the actual video making process, you actually get better results. There's more authenticity. And they actually are willing to trust that what you're saying is worth a second listen to because you've just exposed them to your process. So when you take them around with the camera, when the person on camera says, hey, you know what, I'm just going to tell the camera to zoom in right here. So you can see this. When you say, oh, I'm sorry about that, I just smacked a microphone. When you actually, it's called in theater break character. You guys familiar with the term? You know, where the actor on stage decides that I just can't say this line anymore, I have to laugh or I forgot my line. If you break character in the context of a marketing video where you're trying to create a relationship, it works really well. So I actually just, I'm doing a vast and very risky experiment. It's the riskiest thing I ever have ever done online. And I'm not known for not being controversial, so that's not necessarily a weak statement. I've decided that I am going to to make fun of the Internet marketing industry. I'm going to tell the Internet marketing industry that they need to stop taking themselves seriously. Because I think that the business is at a point now where it's time for authenticity to rule the day, not slick sales and copywriting skills. So I have a product coming out called the Video Boss. Its actual name is the Video Boss, now even bossier. And I'm experimenting with creating a video where I break the fourth wall and bring the viewer along with me for a very bumpy ride. And what it's like, you know, to think about video in the terms of the way that I think about video. So if anybody wants to see it, it's free. On the back end of that, that video are three other videos that teach you exactly how to write a script, exactly what software to use, how to use the software, and actually how to put. Promote your videos, where to host them, how to get search engine backlinks so they can rank well in Google. And it's all free. And if you go to the videoboss.com you'll see what I'm talking about. So I invite anybody, everybody to come over and take a look. That's a really interesting concept when you start, when you talk about that, you know, letting almost really acknowledging that you don't have to be like a professional television show. And I think that that's probably one of the things that most small business owners would struggle with thinking, well, it's got to be perfect. But what would you say to a small local business owner who wants to use video and about that context of breaking the fourth wall? How would somebody in a, in a, you know, bricks and mortar, normal business kind of use that approach? Yeah, sure. So you guys have done one with the one with Gary Vaynerchuk, or have you only talked smack about him?

No, no, we interviewed him.

Yeah, we did. Cool. All right, so now, like, consider Gary. Does Gary remind you of Stone Phillips? Let me look at. He has this amazing personality, but, you know, it'd be really cool to go back into his archives and take a look at what his first show looked like. You know, I mean, I'm sure that it had all of the flaws, faults, and foibles that all of them have when, before they decide, wow, this could really work. And then all of a sudden, you'll notice if you go back into the archives of some people's online video evolution. You know, when you first see them, they're kind of greasy and flat and their shirts are rumpled. And then after they said, wow, this really works, the lighting gets better, the cameras get better. You know, they're ironed and pressed, they've showered, their combed. It's just really interesting that, you know, everybody thinks that when they see somebody that's very compelling online, that they have to immediately be this person. I'm telling you the same reasons that you have a favorite restaurant, a favorite automotive, you know, repair shop, a favorite dry cleaner, you know, a favorite coffee house. It's because of the people that you meet when you walk in through that front Door. And guess what? When you go and order a latte at Starbucks, they don't go, well, thank you so much for ordering our coffee. Do you understand how important this coffee is? It is loaded with antioxidants. They don't do that. They say, hey, hey, Dean, will it be the usual today? Yeah, because they know who you are. And so my advice to answer your question, Dean, is to just be what you be when a customer comes a calling, you know, make sure that they understand what's new and improved. Make sure they understand what it's going to be like to work with them. Something that I call the ownership experience. And I think the ownership experience is the most vital part of being. Putting somebody on the path to making the decision. The ownership experience is essentially, this is what it will be like for you to use the thing that I sell, right? And so it's. You know, some people might call it the assumptive close. But you're not selling, you're teaching, you're having. You're sharing an experience, right? The empathetic experience. So again, you know, I'll give you guys a funny little thing. Before I got any good at expressing what I wanted to express on video, I used to go and I went, I been through a dozen of these things because I'd get angry and. Or kick the desk and then follow over. Used to go to this store called Pier 1 Imports. And for the longest time, Pier 1 used to sell these glass heads. It's the only way I can describe it. I think you could turn them upside down and they were hollow, and you could use them as a bowl if you want, but they were glass head, about the size and shape of a human head, bald. And they were like 20 bucks. And I, because I would get so lost and I would start talking to my audience like I was talking to a million people. Instead of one person who is sitting at home on the other side of that screen, I would get this glass head and I would talk to it and I would pretend it was my best friend. That that was a huge inflection point for me, Dean, because I recognized that in order to be distinctive marketer standout today, we can't have a one size fits all message. We have to talk to a person and we have to talk to the person that is in the most pain and can benefit the most. We cannot be a friend to all. We cannot try to solve all of the world's problems collectively. As a culture, we will eventually do that if we get our shit together. But as a marketer your job is to identify the person that could most benefit from them and is in the most pain because they don't have what it is that you have. And if you talk to that person, person like your best friend, you make an impact. And I think that that should be very easy to do for anybody that runs like a, you know, a brick and mortar concern or a local business because they have made living and made their bones and grown their company by reputation anyway because it is a local thing. Does that make sense? That one again.

You know what, you know what's funny is I actually have five of those glass heads at my office. I really do. And now I'm going to go make videos in front of him and start talking to them all the time. And I have Burning man hats that I put because those of you who.

Don'T know what Burning man is, that's where he keeps his fancy hat collection. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Burning man is a total freak show out in the middle of the desert. All right, Dean, we're at time. Andy, this was fantastic, fantastic. Thank you. The website again for people to watch your videos.

Well, it's www.the videoboss.com. awesome. Thank you guys.

The last thing I'll say, I just was at an event and I saw Guy Kawasaki speak. He used to be like I think his marketing evangelist of Apple or whatever, chief marketing evangelist, whatever title he had when he, he was working with Steve Jobs and he was talking about video on YouTube and how they're uploading 35 hours of video on YouTube right now per minute. And how Justin Bieber the movie Never say never. He said, no matter what your opinion is of Justin Bieber, you will learn so much about marketing by watching how hard that kid works. And that in the last year 51% of all music sales were Justin Bieber. And that started on video. It started with YouTube and there are gigantic applications in this. If you just have a small business like I do with many of my carbon upholstery cleaners that use videos for testimonials and education based marketing to putting your face on it, to doing video sales letters. I just did a presentation at Dan Kennedy and Bill Glaser's event in front of 1200 people. And I played a video making my offer at the end. There was nothing any. I was not on the video. It was literally someone else's voice in total text. Just a voice. It was the highest close of the Glaser Kennedy history is what his team told me. 500 people got up and stood in line to get my stuff, and we had so many people standing in line that we literally lost a couple hundred people because they thought they would miss out on the offer. But the point is, I played a video, and video has so many applications, and you're the man. I hope everyone listening to this really takes what you shared today seriously. Andy, we really appreciate you sharing your knowledge, and we recommend that all of our I love marketing listeners go over and check out Andy's videos because you will learn a lot of stuff. Dean, I'll leave the last thing up to you guys to finish it off. And I'm sorry, I have a cold today because I know I sound like crap.

There we go. Well, I couldn't have said that better. That's the thing. Don't be afraid. Go ahead and try it. And Andy's gonna have some good. Some good advice for us. So, Andy, thank you so much. It was really my pleasure, guys. Thanks for letting me pontificate and set my soapbox on fire and go to town.

Absolutely. Thanks, man. Thanks, everyone. Give us your comments on ilovemarketing.com.