The One with B. Jeffrey Madoff - I Love Marketing With Joe Polish And Dean Jackson - Episode #94

Hi, this is Joe Polish with the Genius Network and I'm here at my dear friend Jeff Madoff's studio, Madoff Productions in New York City where it's. You can hear sirens outside and all kinds of crazy stuff. And I've known Jeff for over 15 years. He was first introduced to me by our good friend, mutual friend, Ken Glickman. And I came down and met him at one of his other studios and we just hit it off and I interviewed Jeff many, many years ago in the late 90s, and it was one of the highest rated interviews I'd ever done. At the time, Victoria Secret just did a giant online launch with Jeff, pretty much oversaw the whole thing. And he's done commercials for Victoria's Secret for many, many years and Ralph Lauren's documentary Liza Minnelli. He's worked at many billion dollar brands. He teaches. He's just a really smart guy, very interesting guy. And so we're going to talk about all kinds of stuff from life product perspectives on entrepreneurship, building a business, creativity and a variety of whatever the heck we decide to talk about here. And so Jeff, who is Jeff Madoff?

My degree was in philosophy from the University of Wisconsin and I was on the wrestling team in college.

Really?

So yeah, so those, the combination of philosophy and wrestling was great preparation for being in the business world.

I can see that. I can see how that makes sense.

It does. And what I'm doing in terms of my work is all actually self taught. It's my second career. My first career was I was a designer. I started a company and When I was 22, I had 110 employees, two factories, and was chosen one of the top 10 young designers in the United States. But there were only eight of us. I don't think there were 10 to fill out the top 10. And then I made the transition into film and then video production after that because I discovered that designing isn't what I wanted to do. But I learned a great deal that applied to what I'm doing from that.

So where do you teach?

I teach at Parsons School for Design, which is the top design school in the country. And I teach a course called Creativity Making a Living with youh Ideas. And it's a course that I bring in designers, actors, writers, entrepreneurs, different people from different fields who talk to the students about what they do, how they did it. And it's kind of in a way demystifying the whole process of being an entrepreneur and starting a business. And whether you're an actor or a designer or doing direct marketing for that matter, all of the protocols of business that you have to go through in your startup are the same thing. And it's really interesting to see the students reaction to that as it becomes, in a sense, less complicated when they realize what it actually takes and how. Basically, a knowledge of business, I always say to my students, is like a martial art. How do you protect yourself and strike the most efficient blow so that you can continue to do what you want to do?

Do you consider yourself more of an artist, an entrepreneur, or what? I mean, how do you think of yourself?

I don't think of myself as an artist or an entrepreneur. I think of myself as a father and a husband and somebody who, you know, I own a business. Whether or not I'm an artist is a judgment that someone else can assess. Am I an entrepreneur? Yes, because I've started two businesses and built up those businesses and employ people and do things. So I'm an entrepreneur. But I don't really think about defining myself. I'm just more interested in the activities I'm involved with that kind of define me.

Okay, so is creativity something that can be learned? Is it something that some people are born with and other people don't, or some people just idea people and other people are not?

Well, I think about it a lot because I also do a lot of reading about cognitive neuroscience, how our brain works, and all of that. But tied into that is also psychology, which was my second degree. My degree was philosophy, as I mentioned, and psychology. I believe that on a certain level, first of all, you have to define creativity. What is that? And with my students, that's the first question I ask them is how many of you consider yourselves creative? And they all raised their hand. I said, okay, what is creativity? Nobody says anything. I said, you just defined yourself as being creative, yet you can't define what creativity is. You need to be able to do that. And I don't care if it's dogs on fire jumping out of airplanes. You got to give a definition as to what creativity is. Because how can you say you're creative if you don't even know what creativity is? To me, creativity is the ability to see relationships between ideas and create something new or do an iteration on something that's already been done in a new way. There's that phrase, we all stand on the shoulders of giants. And I think that's true creativity because it's building on ideas and having associations and seeing things a bit differently. But the key is being able to execute.

Yeah. So, yeah, I think from an entrepreneurial standpoint, you know, I mean the definition of an entrepreneur, the original definition is in 1804 by a French guy, John Baptiste. Say that said, an entrepreneur is an individual that takes resources from a lower level of productivity to a higher level. And that's when entrepreneurism is done in a value creating sort of way, making something better. And I think the distinction between many creative people that don't ever build businesses and ones that do is there's something to do with risk and responsibility. People come to you and they ask you to take their companies, their ideas and put together commercials and video representations of their products and present them in a way to where the world is going to want to buy that stuff and associate with them and go to their stores and go to their websites. And you do this not only on television, but also the web and you're very skilled at it and it's a big business and you're involved with multi, you know, in some cases billion dollar brands. So I want to talk to you about that.

Let me just interrupt for one moment because I think as you were talking about what is an entrepreneur, I think that a more interesting question in a way is why are you an entrepreneur? Why did you choose to take the risk as you spoke about risk, to do something where instead of having a job that maybe was safer and that you could have an income from the get go? And I think that's interesting because it goes to the core of what being an entrepreneur means. I mean, I'm an entrepreneur because I'm unemployable.

I would agree with that, thank you very much.

It takes one to know one.

I'm the same way. I'm totally the same way. Yeah, I mean, I know why I'm an entrepreneur. I don't want to live in the time and effort economy. I want to live in the results economy. At the end of the day, you know, I don't know if you ever read Man's Search for Meaning by Viktor Frankl. Have you ever read that book? Yes. You know, I mean, just the stuff that he talks about with meaning, about the purpose of life and the meaning behind it. I tend to think that real entrepreneurs, I mean, people that will risk their ass and put just everything into trying to make a venture work goes so far beyond someone that just wants to make money. I mean, I think there's a deep meaning for people that really attempt to achieve, to do the things they want to do and sometimes it just doesn't work out. I mean, actually, as a matter of fact, in most cases Dreams are not fulfilled for many entrepreneurs. I mean, simply from an income level. I mean, that's already been proven by studies from the Kauffman foundation that vast majority of entrepreneurs, business owners, never make more than $50,000 their entire career. So there's a lot of people that try to win that game that don't. I think the reason that we play it, though, is because we want some meaning behind it. We want to make a mark in the world. We want to take our creativity and turn it into something other than just a thought in our heads, turn it into reality.

And there's another thing I would say, too, because not everyone is. Is cut out to be an entrepreneur.

Not at all.

And that's neither good nor bad. That's just a statement. And I think that one of the key things for me in making my work life pleasurable, and since I spend most of my waking hours working, that's key, is finding the right people who can compliment your talents, enhance your talents, enable you to express your talents, and that you're sort of on this journey together. And I think that that's a big deal. You know, there's a lot of people that consider themselves entrepreneurs, as if that's an end in itself.

Right, Right.

And it isn't.

Right. It's like saying, I'm a tennis player, so.

Yeah. Or I'm. Exactly. I mean, it's. It's a. Except in a tennis player, you know what the racket is? Pun intended. And when you say you're an entrepreneur, there are so many that I've spoken to. Well, what do you mean you're an entrepreneur? What are you doing? Well, I'm working on some applications in the financial space. Okay. I still don't know what you do. What is it you do?

What you just said is really interesting because I was doing an event recently in Arizona for our clients, you know, one of our I love marketing sort of events, and a guy came up to me, and I have a personal assistant that at the time we're doing this recording, she's been my assistant for 17 years. Her name is Eunice Miller. Unbelievable. And he came up to me, he's like, you know, how does Eunice hang out with you all these years and hear you teach all this stuff about how to go out and make money as an entrepreneur and running a business? And why does she still work for you? I mean, why hasn't she gone off and done this on herself? And I said, why don't you ask her? And she was literally, like, maybe 20ft away. And I said, eunice, come here for a minute. I go, he wants to know, after listening to me all these years teaching entrepreneurs how to build their companies, why do you still work for me? And she said. She goes, I mean, she didn't need pause or anything. She goes, because I don't want to take on the risk of what Joe does. I don't want to be the front stage person. I like supporting him backstage. I love what I do. What he does is not what I do. That's not how I'm made up. I mean, it was, like, perfect. It was almost as if someone staged this. Her answer was so perfect. You know, I think again, to quote stats, which I don't know exactly, I think these come from Kauffman Foundation. Dan Sullivan told it to me was like, 1 out of 20 people in the US have the psychological makeup of an entrepreneur. And out of those, one out of 400 actually ever make it over $100,000 a year mark as a business owner. So it's not the vast majority of people. I mean, most people work for other companies. And it's not good or bad. It's just how you're, you know, how you're made. The cool thing is, the vast majority of people in my world that are watching and listening to this interview are those people. They want to know, how do I make my business work? How do I turn my ideas into money? How do I take it to the next level of success? And if you ask most of why are you doing it? They'll give you the canned answer. But who the hell knows? They're driven to. I mean, you've hung around some very wealthy, very successful people from your mind, what are the characteristics, things that differentiate those people at the top of their game? Highest earners.

I've often thought about, you know, people who I know who were tremendously successful, who have accumulated literally billions, who are on achieve, that very rarefied air of success at that level. They're obsessed. Yeah, it's beyond drive. I have drive. I've survived some very tough business climates. And I am, you know, live in New York City, which is an expensive place. My kids are going to college. You know, I'm fine with that because I get to do what I want to do every day. And that's the primary goal to me is how can I live my life the way I want to? And the measure of success isn't how much money I have, it's how happy am I. And I often have wondered, what is that separation? And that separation between the people who have achieved extraordinary success, and this is without exception that I know of, is that their pursuit has become an obsession. So I think that that's the key difference that I see in people that have achieved that kind of extraordinary success is they're extraordinarily obsessed with their success, and that is what has propelled them to those places. Have you seen the same thing, or would you say it's different from what you've seen?

No, I think you're absolutely right. I think there's different reasons why people are driven and different reasons why people are obsessed. I learned marketing from a very brilliant but sort of crazy guy by the name of Gary Halbert. He was a marketing genius, but just a very colorful personality. And guy either loved him or he hated him. And he used to make this statement, said this to me. The world advances on the backs of its neurotics. And I find that to be very accurate in a lot of ways. And it's not an easy question to answer. That's why I asked the question if there was just one. Oh, these are the three elements. These are the three characteristics. I like hearing other people's perspectives because I think it gives you a glimpse not only into the makeup of success, whatever you want to call success or achievement or fame, and that doesn't necessarily mean that's a good thing. It also, I think, gives us a glimpse into ourselves. And I want people that watch my stuff to hear different perspectives, not because I per se, want them to do what Jeff Madoff says to do when we're going to get start talking about branding or building or creativity. I just want them to think differently. And I think when you start listening to other people's perspectives, it allows you to get a paradigm shift. My friend Dean Jackson, we have a podcast, ilovemarketing.com and we did an episode about ideas versus execution. And most people would say ideas are useless without execution, which in a lot of ways is true. You can have the greatest idea in the world, but if you don't do anything with it, then you got a really great idea that you did nothing with. And then there's a lot of people that would be like, well, execution is everything. And, you know, Dean, we did this episode, and he talked about the only thing that will make flawless execution better is a better idea, because if you add a better idea to already existing flawless execution, you can blow it out of the water. So I place a heavy emphasis on ideas. I think ideas are critical, and I think they're important, and they're most Important when you actually give those ideas to someone that can do something with it.

I agree. I mean, the execution is big. How many times have I heard and even said myself I could have done that? Yeah, but the response to that that I always have is, yeah, but you did, right?

Exactly, Exactly. Yeah. People like, oh, you know, it's almost like they get pissed when they see something that they could have done happening. It's like, well, you know, whose fault is that? You know, let me get off your ass and do something.

Right.

Instead of getting pissed about it, maybe get pissed and use it as a motivator to actually say, well, you know, life is not a dress rehearsal. Everybody's heard that thing before. All right, so let's switch gears. Let's talk about advertising and marketing and brand building. And since you work with a lot of big brands, and I am pretty much a hardcore direct response guy, I want to talk to you about that subject because you're an expert in it. And I'd like to first start with asking you to define what is a brand.

What is a brand is an interesting question because I agree with you. Most people don't know what it is and they mistake it for something else. Brands started literally, it comes from the word brandure, which was a term for burning an insignia to show ownership on cattle and other livestock. And that's literally where modern brands, the brand came from. So 400 years ago, brands were about livestock, and then they were set out by certain guilds to protect the purity of the product that that guild was trying to sell, like silver, like gold, and so on. Brands as a phenomenon in business, it's really been in the last probably 15 or 20 years that that's become a topic of conversation. And it's really heated up in the last 10 or so. And there are iconic brands that we look to like Disney, what a brand is. And I'll go back to Disney and Apple, which are both interesting examples. A brand is a story well told. That's what a brand is. And that story has to be about what the core value and core product is that you're trying to sell. Where the mistake is made a lot is in not drawing a distinction between a brand and branding. Branding is how you get the message out there through advertising, through marketing, through public relations. That's branding. But you have to start with a core message about the values of that company that resonate with their consumer base. And of course, you have to have the product behind it to deliver on that promise, because a brand is a promise. So for Example, Disney, the brand is family entertainment. They deliver on that promise through their amusement parks and through their movies and that kind of thing. It's family entertainment. And they've delivered on that promise very well. They're held up as one of the prime American brands. But when Disney was building the company, he didn't think about it as branding. He just wanted control over his business and over the image of his business. And there's an interesting footnote there. In terms of what Walt would do when evaluating the various opportunities that came his way or when he was thinking about initiating new ideas, what he would say is, what would Mickey do? Mickey was Mickey Mouse, but he used Mickey Mouse as his barometer for what he would do or not do. Would Mickey do this? I don't think so. It's not a good idea. And so those things that Mickey would do became brand extensions, those things that Mickey wouldn't do. And it was literally like that. That was literally the question posed in the meetings when Mickey did this. Jump out to Ralph Lauren. Ralph Lauren, his brand is associated with status and good taste. That's what his brand is about.

Can we refer to him as Ralph Lauren?

Because I would prefer that, considering he hires me. I'll pronounce it correctly, don't have to worry about it. But you know, Ralph Lauren's brand proposition is status and good taste. Yeah, instead of the mouse ears, he's got the polo pony, but he's got his iconic brand symbol. And the most valuable thing that any business has, this is true of Disney, this is true of Ralph Lauren, it's true of Apple. It's true of all the major brands, is their brand equity. And that means what their brand means to a consumer public. So when Ralph was experiencing very difficult business times in the 90s, before he went public, it wasn't the factories full of his clothes or the stores full of the finished fashion or the bolts of fabric. That's not what made his company have such a high valuation. It was the brand equity he had built on a global scale that made that valuable and made that important. And creating that brand is a process that takes consistency in terms of establishing your brand signature, like family entertainment. That means if you're Disney, you don't do an X rated movie. You know, if you're Ralph Lauren, you don't do something that's cheap or not well done because that doesn't fall under the umbrella of status and good taste. And you take a brand to its pinnacle. For instance, if I go like that, what brand is that?

Nike.

I Mean, now think how amazing that is that I go like that and you at my students, at Parsons and so on, immediately know that that's Nike. Do you know how many hundreds of millions of dollars they spent on advertising and marketing, everything to embed that in our minds? The brand equity of Nike is astounding. What they've done similarly with Apple. You know, Apple stands for hip innovation, you know, and they do that through their design, through the incredibly effective marketing they do so that they announce things and people are anticipating the next tablet, the next iPhone, the next whatever, whether they even need it, which most people don't. They want it because of how effectively they have built their brand equity.

Okay, well, let's take the Nike example, because if someone wants to just go out there and create a swoosh that in and of itself will never make a company grow. I mean, you take a company like Harley Davidson, where I think has some pretty serious brand loyalty, when you have your own clientele tattooing your logo and your name on their bodies, physically, I mean, that's taken it to a whole other level. And in order to get to something like that, there's all of this stuff that needs to occur. And so I think when people try to model all of these companies that you talked about that are small business owners, they're going to have a pretty rude awakening if they don't have some pretty effective what's in it for me? Sort of messaging for people to first start buying, using, consuming, wearing, whatever before consumption starts. Brand in and of itself does not create sales. It may be one piece of it, but there's a whole infrastructure that goes along with it, a whole strategy. And that's what I'd like to kind of get some of your thoughts on.

Well, Nike, for instance, started as, you know, a unique athletic shoe that they first made the soles of the shoes on a waffle iron. Right. You know, so they had a unique product that was used by the Oregon track team, and it had a authenticity to its origin. So that swoosh stands for aspirational athletic achievement. That, you know, their phrase, which was brilliant and simple, just do it, you know, became part of the vernacular. But all of the underpinning of that was an authentic product that delivered on the promise. Same with Disney, Same with Apple. Same with Ralph Lauren. So if you think that you can throw all the money in the world at an ad campaign, you can maybe fool people once, but you can't build a brand because a brand requires repeat business and adding other members to the tribe. So to Speak. But all of that is built on the foundation of an actual product that has to in some way enhance the value of the lives of people that buy it, whether it makes them just feel better or they feel they can run better, or they can enjoy their families at a vacation spot better, whatever it is. But you're right, there has to be that authenticity. And a lot of people just think if they promote the hell out of something, they can sell it. And they think that doing that makes them a brand, which it doesn't.

My favorite definition of branding came from David Ogilvy or Brand, where he said, you know, a brand is the personality of your product or service. And I think that's his just a great definition. And so I'd like to talk about, you know, obviously, a company that you've spent a lot of time with, Victoria's Secret, and what is their strategy? How does it all work? I mean, is it the attractive models?

Is it.

What is it? I mean, what is the what. What does their brand represent? What are they communicating? And when you put together a commercial for them, what are you wanting to convey?

Well, let me ask you. I'll flip it a bit. What does Victoria's Secret represent to you?

Seriously, what does it represent? Probably the best underwear, panties, undergarments, bras, etc. That a woman could buy that is sexy, that is hot, that allows any woman to have the association with beauty and sexiness and that sort of stuff.

And you're right. Just like Nike is about the aspiration of athletic achievement, Victoria's Secret is about the aspiration of being sexy and beautiful.

That's it. It's aspirational wear.

That's right. Yeah. So what they have done as a company and what is the brilliant strategy that they've employed is that they have worked with developing the idea of Victoria's Secret as that sexy, aspirational brand, yet tasteful, but also that they have created the personality of their brand through the models they've used over the years. So they've got.

Which is obviously a smart strategy.

I mean, part of what I've done with them in the video content that I create for them online is also allowing the personalities of the models to come through. So they aren't just beautiful women that are somehow objectified. You see, when you see Adriana Lima, you see somebody who is very funny and has just a great personality, and she's a lot of fun. You see Dowdson, who has another kind of a personality. She was authentically an athlete, and she's now one of the faces of the vsx, which is their sport apparel. She was a competitive speed skater before she was ever a model. So she's like authentic. When you see the workout tapes we've done with her, she does that stuff. I mean, it's pretty impressive on a certain level. They become, if you will, accessible movie stars. People see them in the catalogs, they see them in the commercials, they see them online, in the videos. Then they can go to the store and get a signed picture or even have their picture taken with them. So they have created an aspirational brand through employing very selective choices of these, what they call supermodels that represent the brand. You know, that's an ever changing stable.

What is really being accomplished then when you put together, I mean, what, what is the. How do you know when it's working? How do you know when it's not?

Well, that's, you know, the multimillion dollar question, depending on how large your brand is.

Well, yeah, because I mean, I guess a brand could like, you know, a direct response guy would say have a call to action, drive them to a website, you know, have a trackable mechanism, make a specific offer. When you're doing that, without all of that, how do you structure success?

Well, I think your question is how do you measure success? Yeah, right.

And so, and how do, when I say structure, I mean how do you create it so it is successful? That's what I meant by structured success.

How do you measure it? There is a strategy to getting the name out there. However, there's no one strategy. And as the marketplace, the way to reach consumers has gotten more and more splintered, you have to do more innovative things to get in front of the consumers. I believe the most precious commodity out there now is people's attention. And to get their attention, to hold their attention, and hopefully to be able to sustain it over time, which is what it takes to build a brand is a tough gap because oftentimes results are not immediate. And to sort of plant your flag in a particular marketplace. I mean, nobody can think of women's lingerie without first thinking of Victoria's Secret. One of the reasons is they outspend everybody, but in their outspending everybody to capture that attention. They also make more money than any other lingerie company. Ralph Lauren spends probably more than any apparel company, yet they make more money on a global scale than any apparel company. The strategies are again, as you said, and it can't be repeated enough. First of all, having the product that is going to be attractive to a consumer Having an authentic base from which to build your brand is critical. But even the smallest company, the smallest startup has got to start asking itself, what are the brand values that we're trying to imitate? What are the core values of our product? What is it we can say about our product? What does it do? Why does it make your life better? Why should anybody want it? You know, and that's key. Before you worry about how you get the message out there. You know, first of all, you got to have a message to convey and a message that people don't hear and think, well, that's bullshit. I've seen it. It's crap. So it's got to be the first question you ask when you start a business. Is there a market for this, whatever it is, whether it's a service or whether it's a product, Is there a market for it? Why is there a market for it? Who's my market? How do I reach that market? What websites do they go to or what TV shows do they watch or how do I capture their attention? And then after that, how do I go on the attention I've gotten so that not only will they come back in the ideal sense, and this happens very much with Apple, is that your consumers become evangelists for your brand, which.

I think says everything about the substance of what you're selling, because I don't know of many long sustaining brands that were just pure crap that had any real competition come along. You know, I mean, there's certainly brands that are cheap and there's certainly things like that, but they still in their own worlds, if there's going to be long, I mean, we're talking decades of sustainability. There has to be substance. And I think all of those things you discuss discussed that are needed with a brand strategy. What's your purpose? All of that requires sophistication. It requires execution. So when someone just looks at a brand and says, oh, I've got this really cool web application, I'm going to be the next Facebook, it's like, well, there's a little more to it than that.

I think there's an illusion out there that it's easy to win the lottery.

Yeah.

So you see whether it's Facebook, which, you know, interestingly, since it's gone public, has performed horribly.

Right.

You know, and there's Google and there's those companies that are, you know, in the span of the business time line, quite new.

Yeah, yeah, very new. I mean, they're an emphasis agent time worth recording this.

Right. Who have, you know, they'll built a perceived equity that's very great. And, you know, one of the things that's changed from when I was in my 20s is that as opposed to embarking on a career or something, I know so many people because I'm in contact with them every day as you are, who devote their time and energy to starting a business. And if it doesn't go public or pop big, they're onto something else.

Right.

And everybody's looking to grab that gold ring. But most of them just end up going in circles because the number of companies that turn into Facebook, that turn into those companies that blossom into huge businesses like that are very small. Most startups fail and a lot of them just incinerate money along the way.

Yes, totally.

It's really interesting because I don't think that the basic principles of business have changed. You know, you've got to have a desirable product or service that people are willing to pay for, and they have to be willing to pay enough for it so that your business can grow.

Yeah. You've got to be able to price accordingly, position it properly, market it effectively, or it's going to go nowhere. Because there's plenty of amazing, awesome products and never see the light of day because they have the whole strategy screwed up. I'm going to make a couple other points, but I want to ask you first about story, because you are a great storyteller. Even throughout the entire time that I've known you, you've sent me books here and there about stories, telling stories. And it's critical in order to get your message out to the world. You got to tell your story. You got to tell a pretty damn incredible, better story than the next person if you want what you were talking about earlier, which is attention, because that's the economy that we live in. The attention economy.

Yeah. I think that what's really interesting is storytelling is going back to our most primitive tribal selves when we sat around the campfire and told stories. And oftentimes the shaman or medicine man was the one that told the best stories because he created the illusion or perception that he could control the rain and the thunder and the crops coming up and whatever. Storytelling goes back to probably when there was more than one person in a room. And storytelling is a really nice term. It relates to sales. You have to tell the story of your product, the story of your brand. Salespeople are storytellers. Everybody is, to some degree or another, a storyteller. If they're talking about something and they're hoping to capture your attention and then get some result. Whether it's persuasion, sales, forming some kind of alliance or whatever, it's all about the stories we tell. That's how we bond as human beings is through our stories. All of these things. I mean, storytelling is huge. So it's huge in terms of communicating what's important or what we want people to believe is important in things. So you go back to our most primitive selves, and then you apply that idea of storytelling to the most cutting edge technology. And if you don't have storytelling as a part of that technology, then it's like a car without a spark plug. That ingredient will keep the whole mechanism from moving forward.

Okay, so how does someone tell a good story? I mean, how do you do it?

I think that you can certainly look to Hollywood for telling good stories. You know, getting your attention, holding your attention. And of course, the best movies are kind of timeless stories. So I think that storytelling means that in your traditional sense, there's a beginning, middle of an end and end. You know, when you think of childhood stories, it's once upon a time. You know, you get something going with engaging your listeners from the beginning, but you have to make them somehow feel a part of it. Either that they can benefit from that story that you're telling them, they will be entertained. I mean, just like education, which I consider an act of seduction. In other words, my students need to want to know what I've got to say. That's also the same thing for sales. That's also the same thing for an actor on stage. You know, it's all of those things, you know, when I've seen you, and, you know, I hate to say it, but you're brilliant in terms of on stage, your storytelling, whether you're telling the stories about your guests that you're bringing up to speak or what people can accomplish. That's storytelling. And I think that it's storytelling, I think, is both a skill in understanding how to do it and an art form in terms of how you do so. There's the ingredients and construct of the story, which is the skill part, and then there's the art of it, which is being able to tell a compelling story and hold people's attention.

Right, right. Well, you know, let's tell the story about. Let's go back to. I think it was the late 90s when you did the largest Victoria at the time, Victoria's Secret launch online. And it was like it was probably the biggest thing that ever happened on the Internet.

Victoria's Secret online launch, when we did Their first show that was live streamed on the Internet was an interesting study because it wasn't that long ago. It was like 1998 or so. Victoria's Secret partnered with Yahoo and AOL, which were the two largest distributors of online content at that point.

That was before Google.

Huh? That was before Google. That's right. It's amazing how quickly things become historic now as you look through the rear view mirror of technology. It's quite amazing. So it was interesting because we had a meeting at Limited Brands at the corporate ownership of Victoria's Secret, a publicly traded company. And There were probably 14, 16 of us in this meeting. And I was, other than the people from Yahoo and aol, probably the most savvy about the Internet in that room at that time. And the reason I mentioned that is because they talked about they being aol and Yahoo talked about how the largest online live event up to that point had been John Glenn's relaunch into space. And I said, and how many people tuned into that? And they said, you know, about 250 to 300,000. And I said, okay, so if we get a viewership of a million and we'll probably get at least that, what's going to happen to your servers? And they were silent. I said, tell them what's going to happen. And they were silent, said, okay, I'm going to tell you. Their servers are going to crash. You're going to crash the Internet. And the people from Victoria, oh my God, that's horrible. And, and is he right? And they nodded. Yeah, they just didn't have the capacity at that time to handle that. This is awful. What are you going to say? No, no, it's great. What do you mean it's great? I said, the concert sold out. Nobody can get in. Victoria's Secret crashes the Internet, man, that's headlines, that's great pr and that's how you go with that kind of thing, which is in fact what they did. And so it was pretty amazing because I knew it would crash the Internet because I knew there wasn't that capacity at that time. And then you turn that into a positive, right, rather than a negative. And I said, also we can archive the show online so people could see it afterwards. Now the funny part about it is it looked like crap. You know, the window, video window was like that big. And it looked like if you poked yourself in the eye then put gauze up in front of your eyes, that's what the image looked like. So in that short time, I mean, that was only 14 years ago.

The.

Capacity for online streaming has so geometrically increased that now, you know, it used to be thought, I used to be told, you know, the online stuff, you do the online content because we do lots of online content creation. And people would say, oh, it's got to be short. You know, you can't do anything more. People don't have an attention Spanish more than a minute, minute and a half. And, you know, they were looking at things that way because people would click off and so on. I was maintaining and have since been vindicated. I was maintaining. You don't know what you're talking about. You're looking at the wrong thing. You're looking at the frustration that people have with slow download times because remember then people are still using their telephone modems to download videos before broadband. And I said, so you're looking at the frustration with the limits of that technology. It has nothing to do with the content. You know, you can see movies that are two hours that seem to go by like that in a blink. And then there are short things that happen that seem to be eternally long because they're so boring. So it's about the content, and you're talking about the limitations of the technology. When that technology improves, all of those perceptions are going out the window. Of course, now you can download movies, you watch your TV shows and everything else. My kids are going off to college. They don't have TVs in their dorm anymore. They use their notebook computers or their iPads to watch television. So, you know, it's all changed. And it wasn't. It's an interesting point to me because it wasn't about people won't view content that's longer than that because they don't have the attention span anymore. No, it's about the technology wasn't up to the task and they would get frustrated with the buffering and so they would click off.

Right. And it's still funny how people always make the short, you know, people's attention span. So it has to be short sort of thing where any direct response person knows that it can never be too long. It can only be too boring.

Right.

You know, and it's got to be in a place where they can actually consume it because. Yeah, I mean, I mean, your whole thing about download, that's exactly it. No matter how great the food is, if you're trying to eat it through Pexiglass, I mean, it's just not going to. It doesn't matter.

That's right. And it brings up another, I think, important distinction and that is that there is content, what people like me and many others create, and then there's distribution, be it on television or be it in print or be it on the web through your computer or tablet or phone. And the distinction, by the way, in terms of those consumers, whether they have Apple or Android, I don't care. You know, all I care about is here's another pipeline and I can put my content through those pipelines to reach the consumers. So with Victoria Segart, who's very smart about this kind of stuff, we create content on the web. Some of that same content we do in repurpose and you'll see it on Entertainment Tonight and Access Hollywood, the E Channel. And then we drive viewership to their yearly holiday TV special through all of the content we create for the web. Last year, and now we're doing it for the second year in a row. This year in December, we did a live streaming show which we produce as a full up talk show, like a network talk show with guests and video roll ins and everything else. All these things serve to do two important jobs for Victoria's Secret. One is to drive viewership to the TV special. And when we did the live streaming, it upped the viewership substantially and they were able to track that from the Internet and from cbs.com to the air. And the other thing is that we took over the homepage of victoriasecret.com and we did that for the first time three years ago. I've been pitching that for about six years. And they had the highest sales days ever online.

Wow.

So the content was directly relatable to increased online sales.

To wrap up the world of where we're going is pretty amazing. I mean, you know, again, we just did a conference with my friend Peter Diamandis, an Abundance 25K group meeting in New York. And it was, you know, the technologies that are coming online are off the charts. Earlier this year, you know, Peter Diamandis set up a meeting with me and my friend Brendan and the CEO of YouTube. And we spent an hour or so just talking with him about YouTube and what their future is and what they're going to do with video and how they're going to embed things into where people can click right off watching a YouTube video and buy something and stuff that I can't talk about here until they release it, but just it's amazing. And your ability to convey to the world visually is absolutely incredible. And you're a guy that can put together some pretty awesome stuff. You do incredible work and So I want to. I want you to talk a little bit about your company, Madoff Productions.

Well, as you had said earlier, we're based in New York City. It's Madoff Productions. Our website is madoffproductions.com there's a Madoff Productions YouTube channel. And you just type in Madoff Productions channel. Our Twitter is Adolph Prod P R O D and our Facebook is Madoff Productions. The reason I'm giving all of those things is that people can go and see our work and see what we do. We work with companies from concept all the way through to execute and distribution. And we work on a huge range of projects. So it can be Victoria's Secret, we can be doing a network commercial, or it might be with the Harvard School for Public Health where we do a documentary. We create lots and lots of web content that's distributed by our clients. Most of the moving content you see on the Victoria's Secret channel or on their VS All Access website is, is done by us. And the way that we work with people is really trying to understand what their needs are. And after all this time, I know how to ask the right questions to sort of elicit the information. Because a lot of people don't know a lot of times, of course, they're too close to their own business to understand it. And we own our own production and we own our own post production. So everything's very hands on here. The thing that I love about my work is, is that it brings me into contact constantly with new ideas, new people, and it's always part of my creative challenge to figure out how to best tell their story, to help them build their business or expose their ideas. Because we also do things that aren't product driven. We just did a series of PSAs for bladder cancer and we did that because it's touched my life with someone I know actually who brought me into the job who died of bladder cancer. But I also do stuff just because I'm ultimately seduced by ideas. And being seduced by ideas makes me a patsy for things that I think are really cool and exciting. And so it's all of that, certainly in terms of any of your viewers. Viewers or your club members or any of that. I'd be happy to discuss with them what any of their needs might be if they want to actually get out there in a different way through things that we do. And they can look at my work and see if it's the kind of thing that fits with what their vision is of who they are.

Awesome.

So thanks for that opportunity to plug the hell out of myself.

You are welcome. Yes. That was it. So, as usual, Jeff, it's always fun chatting with you. It's been 10 years since our last interview, so I'm glad we finally were able to do one here. So thank you, dude.

Thank you.

Appreciate it.

Great.

Thank you.