INBOUND 2013 - Big Ideas - Dan Lyons "Tell Me A Story: When Media and Marketing Become One"

Please welcome Dan Lyons. Hi. I've been at HubSpot for four months after a career in journalism. And everything I know about marketing is just whatever I've managed to pick up in four months at HubSpot. So that's my way of apologizing in advance for the next 45 minutes of your life that you will never get back. So as a journalist, I worked at Newsweek. I was a tech editor there. I worked at Forbes. I also created this blog called the Secret Diary of Steve Jobs, where I pretended to be Steve Jobs writing about tech. And I was often asked, probably the question I got more than any other as a reporter was how do I get the press to write about me? How do I, how do I get press? And then how do we get good press? Right? And the answer always is that you just have to have a good story. It begins with a good story. And I was always kind of stunned that people didn't understand that. They just thought they had a good company and should write about it. Figuring out what your story is is kind of important at an individual level. Like, who am I? Why am I here? Why am I on this planet? What is the story of my life? What is the arc that my, my life story is going to take? It's even more important at a company level. And the question there is, you know, why do we have this company? What are we in business to do? And if the answer is just to make money, then that's the wrong answer because you can make money doing anything. You know, you could buy a dry cleaning company and make money. So why are you doing what you do and what do you do? I think a lot of companies actually have a hard time defining what actually they do. Right? So these exercises in storytelling are things that you need to do if you're going to pitch the media. They're also important because a lot of companies increasingly are trying to build their own media operations. HubSpot is one. HubSpot has a very thriving media operation, but we're expanding. They're also important. Even if you intend to never tell the story to anyone, the storytelling is also a journey of self discovery. And stories are incredibly powerful things. And I'll give you an example. Apple, a company that I pay a lot of attention to, became the most valuable company in the world last year. The biggest market cap in the world, bigger than ExxonMobil, on the basis of a story. And the story was mobile devices are taking over the world. Apple is the leader in mobile devices, therefore Apple is taking over the world. The Stock ran up again on another story which turned out not really to be true. It was a story that Apple is making a TV and Apple is going to revolutionize the TV industry the way they revolutionized the smartphone industry. This is a big multi billion dollar market and Apple's going to own it. When people started to realize that that wasn't true, that there wasn't any Apple tv, at least not anything imminent, the stock started to go down and it went from a high of $700 to a low of 400. And that drop of $300 a share represented $300 billion in market value. On a story. I'll tell you another story. Last fall I was working as the editor in chief of a technology site in San Francisco called Read Write. And from a business perspective, we were struggling. We're trying to sell ads and we had a great ad sales department. Our parent company was a an ad broker and we were struggling. And one day I had lunch with two people from HubSpot and they told me a story. And the story is this. There's a guy somewhere in the Boston area who has an appliance store, right? Maybe a chain of stores. He used to spend $800,000 a year buying ads from the Boston Globe to find customers. Now he pays $1,000 a month for HubSpot. And he hasn't cut all of his ad spending, but he's cut a lot of it. And right there at that lunch, that moment, I realized my business is toast, right? It's not just that my website is struggling and everybody else is doing well. It's not that this is some kind of temporary lull and we're all going to come out of it. The business of creating content and putting ads next to it, that's done right, and it's done because HubSpot and companies like it have just cut the legs out from under what we did. So I did what any sort of person would do and I started trying to get a job at HubSpot. And the story is that that story changed my life. It changed the course of my career. It's the moment when I decided to sort of leave the ad supported media business and find a new way to make a living. So I want to talk about a few things today. Some basic tactics of how to deal with the press, sort of how the sausage gets made, tales out of school kind of stuff, some storytelling stuff. And then I have this idea that media and marketing are kind of colliding and becoming one in the same. So I'll start with Tactical, Right. The biggest mistake companies make is they do what we call, like, you know, spray and pray. You know, you get that press release. You. You pay someone to make it, you write it, and you send it out to a thousand or a billion people. And you hope someone's going to write a story about you. Right? It never works. And I'll tell you a story again. When I was at Newsweek, I had a Newsweek mail account. But I had been in the business long enough by then that people who knew me, and I knew a lot of people, they all knew my Gmail account. So the only people who ever wrote to me at Newsweek were people who didn't know me. Right? So I used that email account basically as a filter. And I would go in every morning, there'd be about 50 emails in there. They're almost all just blind pitches. I would make sure there wasn't a note from my boss or, you know, something I had to look at, and they would just zap that whole inbox, Right? And I'm pretty sure that every other reporter does the exact same thing. So I could never understand why these companies are spending all this money. But, you know, I didn't want to ruin it for them. And my friends work in PR and they're getting paid to do this, but it's totally useless, right? Not only that, there's no upside in doing that kind of outbound pr, or very little. There's huge downside. And the downside is that by doing some of these things, especially if you do them wrong, you can alienate people, you can annoy people. You can actually be paying a PR agency to make reporters hate you. Right? So I'll show you some examples of things that can go wrong. These are just some of my favorites. The one that begins, dear Media Representative. Right, Totally done. Like, fuck you. I'm out of here. Right. Okay. Right. Dear Dave. My name is Dan, but Dave is close. I get it. It's fine. No, right, then this one. As the tech writer at Time, would you be interested in this? I work at Newsweek. Thank you. The guy at Time is a friend of mine. I can forward your email to him. Right. When I was at Forbes, it was Fortune, right? They always get Forbes and Fortune mixed up. And it's not like I have a big ego about, well, you know, whatever. I'm probably an obnoxious prick, but. But it wasn't that. It was just like, clearly, you. You created this pitch for someone else. They said no, and now you're sending it to me, right? I know. I'M getting someone's shop worn goods. I would actually get pitches that they had changed my name. They had my name, right? But then when they got in the body they had forgotten to change, so it was still addressed to Fortune or the time. Anyway. And the last one is I'm following up on an email pitch. That's a phone call, right? Reporters get a lot of that. Now I personally don't really care. It doesn't take that long to answer the phone and say, yes, I saw your email. No, I don't care. Thank you, have a nice day. Right? But this is the one that reporters bitch about. If you sat around a table of reporters having drinks and you listen to them really bitch for some reason, this drives them batshit crazy, right? So don't do that. So those are the don'ts, the more interesting are the do's, right? And the main thing to know is that working with the press is just like working with, you know, prospects. It's about relationships, about figuring out who these people are and getting to know them. Getting to know their kid or who their kids are, what they like, what stories they like. Getting to know about their asshole boss. Because every editor is a frickin asshole, right? So. And don't expect to close on the first meeting, right? You know, you're not gonna get a story right away. And the other thing you can do that's really, really useful and tactical is you can dish, right? Reporters live for information, bloggers live for information. If you can talk on background or off the record in a way that you don't get any press for you, but you're feeding them information about other stories, you can buy lots of goodwill and lots of protection. There are two people I'll tell you about without mentioning their names. One is a PR person in New York and the other is a really well known venture capitalist in California. Both of them are amazing gossips and they're incredibly wired in and they know everybody. So this PR person, nobody ever crosses her because she's a source for all of us, right? We all need to be able to call her and find out what's going on, so and so, right? Right. Because of that, all of her startups get good press. She herself has had a big profile in the New York Times about what a wonderful PR person she is. All because she'll dish and because she has a network, right? The other guy is the same deal. You can look around, think of the venture capitalist in California who's had the most amazing press all the time. A constant stream of good press for him and his portfolio companies. And it's because two things, he owns most of the blogs, he literally has invested in a lot of tech blogs, and B, he gives them information all the time, right? That stuff really works. We're supposed to say that it doesn't, that we're all above the fray, but actually it works. The thing I would tell you too is be careful what you wish for, right? There's no such thing as a puff piece. People always want a story. Write a story about us. Write a story about us, right? Every reporter is going to take a pound of flesh, right? It's the cost of getting the story done, right? If only because of self respect. We use what we call the dreaded to be sure graph, right? It literally begins to be sure, and it's usually 2/3 of the way down. If you see a really positive book review, there'll be a to be sure graph where they throw all the bad stuff about the book in one paragraph. It's the paragraph where you put all the stuff that runs counter to the main premise of your story. Even if the reporter doesn't want to put in the to be sure graph, her editor will. Because the editors are these evil little gnomes who sit in New York in offices, right? And they never have to deal with you, they never have to deal with the sources. They don't have to go back and look at you next week, right? The reporter does so, and they're kind of twisted little freaks who sit in these offices and they have nothing better to do than to ruin people's lives, right? So they're gonna insist, they're gonna make you put in a to be sure graph, right? So then from your point of view as a startup, as a marketing person, it's a transaction, right? You need to weigh, what am I gonna get out of this, right? And then what is it gonna cost me? What's the worst it can cost me? Remember that sexual harassment suit last year? They're gonna talk to your customers, they're gonna talk to customers who left, they're going to talk to customers who went to your competitors, they're going to talk to your competitors and probably quote them. Can you withstand that? Can you take that hit in order to get whatever it is you hope to get out of that big article? Are you going to sell more stuff and if you're not, don't do the story, right? And finally, the last thing I would say is that what you really have to do is try to think like a journalist. And for most of us, that requires having a few drinks and lowering your IQ by about 20 points and then getting to that zone of being a journalist. And when you make a sales call, you don't go out and sell stuff by saying to people, I need you to buy this stuff because I need the money. Right? That's not how you sell stuff, right? So same with a journalist. What is it about this story? That telling that story is going to get her a promotion or advance her career as a journalist. Right? That's what you need to be able to think through. And journalists are driven by one thing and one thing only, and it's stories, right? Great stories. And that can be a scoop, meaning a story that no one else has, or it can just be a really, really good story. And that's, you know, it's what journalists talk about when we sit around in the newsroom or at a story meeting, we dish. We just talk stories the way Dharmesh talks about code, the way Wall street guys talk about money. We just talk about stories, right? We're not really looking for good companies. We're looking for good stories. And there's a big difference. A good company does. Does not necessarily equal a good story. And a bad company can be a great story. I'll give you one example. Emc, which is a terrific company here in the Boston area, I mean, a great company, they crush it. They do fantastic stuff, but they're kind of boring. They make storage equipment. They had a good story. They had a turnaround story a while ago, and they would come to me, and I was friends with the PR guys, and they'd say, why don't you write about us? And say, because you're boring, you're great, and you make lots of money. It's a terrific company, but I just can't find a story that I can sink my teeth into. So then the exercise you go through is, what is your story? And, you know, preferably it's a good story. It doesn't mean it makes you look good or entirely good. It's a good story, right? And the thing about this is when you start, sit down to think about what is a story, what's a good story? People freeze up. I used to teach creative writing at University of Michigan, and kids would come in, register for the class and come in and then sit down and go, like, I don't know what to write about. They'd be like, well, dude, you know, you should have thought of that before you signed up for a creative writing class. But, you know, here we are you're kind of fucked. Let's work on this, right? So the thing is, you can kind of reverse engineer a story. You can actually look at stories and study them and see how they work and then try to fit your facts to that architecture, right? So stories have a couple of big things. A story has a hero, a main character. Every story has a hero and it has conflict, right? The dog's going to die, right? This comes from the old National Lampoon cover. Buy this magazine or we shoot this dog, right? Suddenly there's suspense. It's kind of cheesy. So drama springs from conflict, right? Without conflict, there is no drama. There is no story. You have a hero who wants to get something, has desire, wants to get there. And to get there, they have to get over obstacles, overcome them, and then using cunning or force or both, they get to their goal. Okay, so we figure out first who's my hero, right? The hero isn't always the CEO. People often think that. That. Okay, well, it'd be the CEO, right? And to be honest, reporters love to write about CEOs because they're generally sociopaths, but they're also generally narcissists, which is this amazing combination. So they're narcissists. They love themselves so much that they don't know that they're sociopaths. And if you get them talking, they're amazing, right? They're this rare combination of mental dysfunction. But it doesn't have to be the CEO. And I'll tell you a great story about a guy that was. Has nothing to do with the CEO. There's a guy at IBM named Bernie Myerson, Bernard Myerson, and he's this kind of schlubby guy. He has a PhD in physics from City College of New York. And he was working away in IBM research on particle physics and how to make semiconductors. And after seven years of work, his team had this amazing breakthrough. And they figured out a way to mix silicon and germanium to make a chip that was 10 times faster than a silicon chip. Really amazing thing, took years of work. And they figured it out, and it goes to the mainframe guys. So this is in the days when IBM's chip division's only customers were the mainframe guys. The mainframe guy said, nah, we don't want that. Shut down your group. Disband everything. Seven years of work. I know, sorry. We don't want it. So Bernie goes rogue. And this is not the kind of guy who goes rogue. This is a PhD, right? This is like a PhD scientist guy. But he goes rogue. And he starts sneaking into the chip plant in Fishkill at night and making little batches of these chips, right? Then he goes even more rogue. He starts calling on customers, other companies in tech that compete with IBM, like Qualcomm, saying, I get this amazing technology. You really should license it from us, right? He could lose his job, but he keeps doing it because he's just so enraged, right? Well, at the time, IBM's got into trouble, they were about to go out of business. They brought in a new CEO, Lou Gerstner, and Gerstner says, this is stupid. We're going to start selling to everybody. He starts scouring the labs like we're in danger of going out of business. Let's find anything we can sell and sell it. And he finds Bernie and he loves Bernie, and suddenly Bernie's a hero. Suddenly, Bernie now is selling a billion dollars worth of his technology a year. He's bringing in a billion dollars to IBM with this idea that nobody wanted, right? The next thing you know, Bernie is promoted to run. He's the chief technologist. Then he's running the entire semiconductor division. And now he's the VP of innovation. Now that is a great story, right? The guy who took a risk, who wanted something so badly, he overcame all these obstacles. That was a great story. It wasn't the CEO. It didn't matter. It was also how we told the story of the chips. Because who wants to read about chips? Nobody gives a shit about chips, right? What you want to read about is the guy who made the chips, right? And the personal drama and struggle of getting them there. The other slide is the hero doesn't have to win, right? People always think every movie has a happy ending. Newspaper stories don't have to end at the end. You can end in media race, what Hemingway called in the middle of the thing, right? So my best example here is Elon Musk, who I love, right? He's the CEO of Tesla and of SpaceX. Right now he's building two things that are really hard to build. Electric cars where he's trying to compete against the big car makers and space rockets that'll carry, you know, payloads up to the space station, right? He hasn't succeeded really in either. I mean, there have been successful steps along the way, but they haven't finished either of those companies. But he is a great story and a great hero because he's struggling against such immense odds, right? So, okay, so you pick your hero. Next thing is you have to send the hero on a journey Some of you probably know about this idea of the hero's journey, but for those of you who don't, I'll rip through it quickly. There was a scholar named Joseph Campbell who studied all these myths from around the world, came up with this idea that he started seeing the same story kind of pop up over and over and over again in all these different myths. And he wrote this book called the Hero of the Thousand Faces, about this set of common elements. It's the same hero in different names, right? And the myth goes like this, so the elements go like this. There's a call to adventure, right? The hero is called by destiny or fate. He has a task, he has something to accomplish. He doesn't want to do it at first, he refuses the call, but then he does go, right? To accomplish his task, he has to physically leave home and go on a journey and travel someplace. At one point, he goes into the underworld. He either literally dies and is reborn, or he metaphorically travels into the underworld, returns, he achieves enlightenment, he completes his task, he returns home. The end, right? So an example of that is the Odyssey, right? Which is the book none of us read in high school. We were supposed to. But the Odyssey is the story of Odysseus's ten year journey home from the Trojan War, right? He didn't want to go to the war in the first place. He did. It's over. And now he wants to get home. But the there's all this stuff in his way to getting home. And meanwhile, while he's away, his wife Penelope is at home, still believes he's alive. These guys, these suitors who think he's dead have taken over his palace. They're spending his wealth, they're eating his food, and they kind of want to kill his son Telemachus because he's the heir. They want to marry Penelope, kill Telemachus. Odysseus finally gets home and this is the shot of him basically the bloodbath. There's this Tarantinoesque ending where he just lays to waste all the suitors in one big, big scene, destroys everybody, gets his wife and kids back, right? The end. At one point in the Odyssey, he actually does sort of metaphorically travel into the underworld, right? A more recent example that you probably know better is Star wars. And this is a true story. George Lucas was a huge fan of Joseph Campbell. He had written two drafts of Star wars, the original Star wars, before he had heard of the Hero With a Thousand Faces. And he read this book and it like hit him like a thunderbolt. So he rewrote Star Wars. And if you go read Joseph Campbell and then go back and watch that first Star wars movie again, it will blow your mind, because it is note for note, like paint by numbers, right? The hero's journey. This is Luke's call to adventure, right? He's being called to adventure. Ben Kenobi, the wacky neighbor, is telling him he's got to go do this thing. He doesn't want to do it. Remember, Luke doesn't want to go at first. He wants to stay. Here's this scene, the trash compactor scene, which you probably remember. This is the belly of the beast, the dive into the underworld. Jonah and the whale, right? And I know it sounds like I'm a crazy person. I'm making this up, but you can look this up elsewhere. It's true. George Lucas talks about Joseph Campbell all the time. And then you say, okay, fine, but what does this have to do with media and marketing? Right? Well, there was a guy at the Wall Street Journal named James B. Stewart who wrote a lot of really big, important business books, but he also wrote a book called the Art of Storytelling. He was hugely fascinated with Campbell. His book, the Art of Storytelling, was given out to an entire generation of reporters and editors at the Wall Street Journal, who then went out and spread that formula all over the industry. During my career, I've intersected with so many people who all speak the same language about story that it's like a lingua franca for our business. And it works like this. It's very simple. When you write a story, first you decide who's your protagonist, who's your hero, and then you put him in danger. The first thing you do, okay, is it Larry Page at Google? Let's put him in danger. How is Larry Page at Google in danger? What's the threat to Larry Page? Right. They call it the tick, tick, tick. You know, it's a scene in MacGyver where the bomb's gonna go off in 10 seconds unless MacGyver can figure out which wire to cut. Right. You need urgency. If there's no urgency, there's nothing to pull the reader forward. There's even a formula for how you tell a story, and these are the elements of it. And the misspellings are intentional. Reporters, journalists use these wacky. It's like a cockney rhyming slang for journalists. We have these wacky misspellings. So the lead is your first sentence. That's your anecdote that sets up the character, sets up your hero, usually depicts him In a scene. So we have a visual image of the hero doing something. The nut graph is where you state the premise of the story. It's like your thesis for the story. This is what I'm going to argue in the story, the main point of the story, and you're going to unpack it through the course of the story. Then there's another element called the deep breath. You take a step back. It all began when this formula is so pervasive that once you see it, you'll start seeing it in every business story you've seen. I recently saw a story in the New Yorker, new yorker.com blog about BlackBerry that was this formula to a T. Third graph was. It's 1984. Two engineers in Canada came up with the idea to make a pager. They called their company RIM, that went on to become BlackBerry. Everybody was addicted to them. They were so great. You move forward chronologically to the present tense, where now BlackBerry is for sale, right? You have the kicker and the lead, the kicker and the out. And the kicker is basically you tie back to the lead, you tie back to whatever point you made at the top, and then you're out. Okay. You say, okay, but how do I put someone in danger? I think every story has three big elements. Every business story has three elements. And you can again find this in every business story. The tiger, the tree and the treasure. And basically, if you think of it as a fable, it goes like this. There's this huge tree that grows all the way to the sky. You can't see the top, but up top there's this treasure. To get it, all you have to do is climb the tree. So you start climbing halfway up, you look down and there's a freaking tiger coming up after you to kill you, right? And then the quest, the urgency becomes, am I going to get to the top, get the treasure, buy a rifle, shoot the tiger before the tiger eats me? Right? You can complicate it. You know, you can put a giant up top guarding the treasure. That's Jack and the Beanstalk. You can put a dragon up top. They have to kill. That's the hobbit, right? In BlackBerry's case, the tiger is Apple. In Apple's case, the tiger is Samsung. Right? You have to have the tiger in the story. If you don't. If you don't have those three things, you don't have any urgency. You just have a guy climbing a tree to get some treasure. Or there's no tree, that's just treasure lying around on the ground. There's no tiger, you know, it's boring. So these are the elements of a story. And I wanted to look at the best storyteller, I think, of all time, the corporate storyteller of all time was Steve Jobs. And to me, I think for Steve, it was totally instinctual. Right? He just knew instinctively how to tell a story and how to make everything a story. And he did everything with archetypes. So the ones we all use are betrayal. Right. Journalists love betrayal stories. Human beings love betrayal stories. Right. Samsung was Apple's biggest supplier. They made their chips, they made their screens, and then they turned around and they stabbed Apple in the back and they made their own phone trying to kill Apple. Right. The same with Google. Right. The other one is the underdog story. You know, David and Goliath. You see that a lot if you're a startup. It's actually a good story and it works. It's kind of shopworn, but that story actually really works. The revenge story we love, Steve gets thrown out of Apple. And what does he do? He goes off and starts Next Inc. A rival computer company. He's going to kill Apple. He's going to show those guys that they shouldn't have fired him. Right? Right. Freud and Oedipus doesn't really have anything to do with Jobs. But you know the Oedipal story that Freud interpreted to mean that all men want to kill their fathers and sleep with their mothers? You're like, ew, right? But. But I think of that as everybody who ever worked at Oracle and went off to start a company. So Marc Benioff@salesforce.com is the Oedipus story. Right? He wants to kill Larry. He loves Larry. Larry's his dad. Larry gave him his start in life, but secretly he wants to kill Larry. Right. That's what he really wants to do. And the last one is the resurrection story. And the resurrection story, obviously is very central to our culture for obvious reasons. It turns out it shows up in all cultures, right? These stories of people who die and are reborn. Right. And it shows up in business, and we call it the turnaround story. And the best turnaround story ever was Apple. Apple in 1996 was as close to dead as you can be. Apple was almost out of money when Jobs came back. Right. By 2011, 2012, they're the biggest company in the world. It's the most amazing turnaround ever. What gave it extra resonance, though, is that Jobs himself had a resurrection story. Jobs got thrown out, wandered in the underground of Next and Pixar for 10 years and then came back. He was resurrected, right? Steve was sort of this messiah figure and he knew how to work that and how to play it, right? What he also knew is that every protagonist needs an antagonist, right? You have a protagonist, who's your hero. You always have to have an enemy. And the one thing Apple doesn't do now, you'll notice since Steve is gone and Tim Cook is in charge, they don't really have an enemy. When Steve was alive, they always, always had an enemy. And it wasn't about selling computers. Steve made the story bigger than what it was. You know, when Steve told the story was, they're bad, we're good, right? A lot of us are kind of afraid to do this, you know, in the corporate world. We want everybody to be happy. We want everyone to like us, right? Everybody's a potential customer, right? The end result is that we stand for nothing. We become mush, right? We have no message, right? Steve didn't really worry about that. He didn't worry about offending people. He was kind of a sociopath, right? So here's the famous 1984 ad, which you probably have seen. What you may not have seen is the way Steve introduced this ad at a macro conference. He got up and he gave a speech to set up the video. Before he rolled the video, he gave this talk about IBM and he said, you know, IBM wants it all. Apple is perceived to be the only hope, the only force that can assure freedom, right? It's aiming its guns on its last obstacle. I mean, this is really over the top, right? But this wasn't about buying a computer. This is about joining Steve in his crusade to save the world, right? More recently, Apple's enemy was Eric Schmidt of Google, right? Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board. He sat there, he took notes, he knew all about the iPhone, and then he went around the back door and Google started Android, right? And this is what Jobs have. Make no mistake, they want to kill the iPhone, we won't let them. This don't be evil mantra is bullshit. I know the guys who make Android. I don't think they had any intention to kill anything or anyone, right? But this is a much better story than saying, well, Google is entering our market. Think about how Most of our CEOs would tell us, well, we think Google's great. It's good to have competition. They're entering our market with a lower cost profit. They're competing for market share. Like, no, they want to fucking kill us. They want to burn our fucking Houses down, they're going to kill our kids, right? Like, this is, you know, this is war, right? Right. I should point out that, you know, the other thing about storytelling is that storytelling involves exaggeration. But, like, Steve was great at making it. High stakes, high drama, right? And finally, before I get on to this talk about marketing, I want to talk about failure. Because this is one thing that used to drive me crazy as a journalist, right? I'll ask it to you this way. Have you ever gone to a movie, right? And the hero is some guy, an action hero or superhero, and the guy's perfect. His childhood was perfect. He has no neuroses, no flaws, never makes a bad decision or a wrong choice. Nothing ever goes wrong for him. Internally, externally, he lives a long, happy life. He never screws up. Everything's great. The end. No, you've never seen that movie because it's fucking stupid, right? Like, that's a stupid movie, right? If you saw that movie, you would want your money back. You'd be like, no, no, right? But every day as a journalist, I got that pitch. I get this pitch. This company is really great. You should write about them. Like, why? Because they're really awesome. Okay, what's the story? They're really awesome. I raised some money. I'm like, that's not a fucking story. You know what I mean? So the thing is, Michael Jordan got cut from his high school basketball team, right? Tom Brady of the Patriots was benched when he was at Michigan, right? And those are great stories, right? Ron Johnson, who was the guy who ran Apple's retail business, the genius behind all those Apple stores, always wanted to be a CEO. So he left to run J.C. penney. And he was going to turn around, this J.C. penney. He was going to be the CEO. He's going to be a superstar. And he totally failed. He fell flat on his face. He totally bombed. And that's great, great story, right? If he dared to sit down and write about it or talk to a really good journalist about it and tell that story what he did wrong, what went wrong that he couldn't control, right? How did it happen? Just tell that story. It's a story that you wouldn't be able to not read. You know, not only would you learn from him, you would actually love him. You would love him more for telling you why he failed and what went wrong and what he learned. He would be human, right? So dare to be human. Talk about your mistakes. Say what you learn from them, you know, so others can learn from you. I really believe the best stories are the ones they don't necessarily have to be true. I love fiction, I've written fiction, I read fiction. But they have to speak to some larger truth. There to be some essence of truth to the story that makes it really good. Which leads me to this final point, and that is, what if marketing became more like journalism? Not. Not that we'd all go out of business the way journalists were going out of business. But I mean, what if we dared to tell the truth? What if we dared to be more like reporters, right? I've been a journalist for a long, long time, right? This year I made this leap to HubSpot. All around me, other journalists are doing the same thing. Sequoia Capital, a big VC firm, hired a journalist from the Wall Street Journal. Andreessen Horowitz hired a guy from Wired, right? And it's not just in Silicon Valley. GE is building a news operation. Maersk is building a news operation. Qualcomm, the chip maker, has a news operation, right? They're hiring real journalists from places like USA Today and Forbes to run these things. And so far everybody has focused on the story of like, why are journalists doing this? And it's very easy because our magazines and newspapers are going out of business. So we're all fleeing and going to corporate jobs, right? It's not exactly true because all the people who left are the ones who had jobs. But anyway, nobody asks, on the other hand, why are companies hiring journalists? Why the hell would you want a journalist inside your company, right? And I think the answer is that there's a sea change happening. I think marketing itself is changing, right? And the work like that I do at HubSpot or these guys are going to do at these VC firms, is it journalism or is it marketing? And I think the answer is yes, right? It's both, right? And I think that over the next 10 years, what we think of marketing or what we think of as marketing is increasingly going to look more and more like what we used to call the media business. And I think marketing is changing because his business is changing, right? The old way of doing business was transactional, right? It was Glengarry Glen Ross. Here's your leads. Always be closing, right? This was your vice president of sales, right? The guy you have to work for and he just wants leads. Some pushy asshole. And this is how he saw marketing in that world. This was the one man band. Give me some fucking leads, you idiots. Go out and dance monkey, you know, get me some leads. I don't care how you get Them, I don't care who they are. Just get me a list of leads. I don't give a shit. I want a list of names with email addresses, right? In our role, we were carnival barkers, right? Get people into the tent. I don't care how you do. You're going to get them into that funnel. We're going to cram them down that funnel, we're going to turn them into hot dog meat. I don't know what you do with them when you get them in the funnel, but I'm new here, so I haven't figured that out yet, but. And in this world of business, there were only two business models, right? There was the first one, which is, you know, the used car salesman business model, which is, you know, the sort of churn and burn. Here's your thing. Boom, you bought my thing. Fuck you. Get out of here. I never want to see you again, right? It was the one night stand, right? The other one was the one that IBM and Oracle have used and a lot of tech vendors have used, which we get you in. We hook you. We hook you with software so you can't ever leave. And then we just exploit you forever, right? We just screw you forever, which I call prison sex. But we basically, we just milk you. We make the cost of staying with us just below the cost of switching. So you stay, but you hate us, right? But you can't leave, right? I once saw the CEO of EMC in the old days give a talk to a bunch of Wall street guys saying, you know, the great thing about our business is our customers can't leave. And the Wall street guys of course, love this, but I'm like, you know, your customers are going to read this, you know? Anyway, the problem is neither of those models work very well anymore, right? And the picture of the cloud is not there by accident, right? Business is changing. The way people buy and sell things is basically changing. And think about HubSpot. We literally don't sell, really. We don't sell packaged software, right? We have subscribers, not customers, right? We literally sell subscriptions the way a newspaper sold subscriptions, right? Subscribers can leave at any time, right? Worse than that. In the cloud software model, you probably do know this, but customers aren't worth anything until you hold onto them for a while. You actually lose money on a new customer until you've kept them for a year or more. There's some point where the lines cross and then they become profitable. So customer retention becomes hugely important. It's not just about attracting customers and conducting a Transaction. It's about holding onto them. Well, to me, that looks a lot like the media business, right? That's what we did. We rounded up subscribers. There was no lock in. We had to earn their loyalty every day. And we did two things to keep them on board. One was we told good stories. And two, we told the truth. We pandered sometimes. That's why they had comics, right? And trust me, you never want to mess with comics. I worked at the Herald a long, long time ago. If you ever fuck up one thing in a paper, if it's the comics, you will never hear the end of it. It's. It's unbelievable. But, you know, the other thing we did was we challenged people, right? We told people things they didn't necessarily want to hear. And I think maybe marketing is going to become that, and I think it might become that, because it has to. I don't know if you saw Jeff Rosenblum a couple days ago. He's a friend of mine. He made this movie, the Naked Brand, and he runs a digital agency in New York called Questus. So Jeff basically has this theory that says in the age of the Internet, in the age of social media, you just can't bullshit people anymore. This is a story we did on the HubSpot blog about him, right? You can't sell bad products and cover it up with great advertising. It just doesn't work. So in the end, it may be that we just have no choice but to sort of become like journalists, become like reporters and try to tell the truth about ourselves. Now, Patagonia, that gets mentioned everywhere, is the one doing this, right? I love this ad because it's don't buy this jacket. And it basically says, yes, we're green and we're environmentally friendly and we're crunchies and we love the outdoors. But the truth is, every time we make one of these jackets, we use poison chemicals and we hurt the earth. So seriously, don't buy this jacket. If you can use last year's jacket. If you can buy a used jacket, do that instead, right? Of course, the upshot of that is that they sold way more jackets, right? But. So it was super clever, right? But for a lot of companies to do what Patagonia is doing there, it isn't going to be like, we'll just walk out today and do it. It's a really wrenching transformation, right? A lot of us live in what I call the Happy, Happy awesome club. You know what I mean? We're awesome. You're awesome. That's awesome, right? Oh, my God. That email you sent last week about how awesome we are. That email was awesome. No, you're awesome. Fuck you. You're awesome. Right? You can't just say we're awesome. You actually have to be awesome. And the problem is, a lot of companies can't tell the truth because their products are shit. Right? They can't tell the truth, so they lie. But the fact is, if your products are crap in this day and age, you're basically screwed anyway because people are going to find out no amounts of lies and ads and. And awesome talk are going to overcome the fact that you suck at what you do. Right? There's an old New Yorker cartoon on the Internet. You know the one on the Internet, Nobody knows you're a dog. It's a dog sitting there on AOL or whatever. But the truth is on the Internet, everybody knows you're a dog. Right? It's the exact opposite of that. There's no place to hide. So I have this vision, and I think it's actually incredibly naive, but the vision is what we would happen. Really? What's the worst that would happen if we dared to tell the truth about our own companies or our clients that we represent, if we force them to tell the truth, Right? What if instead of being carnival barkers, right, we created a role for ourselves that involved telling the truth? Right? Pushing back on our companies and in effect would be forcing them to make better products. Right? What if that's what marketing was? Because that's where everything begins, with the product, not with the marketing. I know this is a marketing conference and we're all marketing people, but the reality is the product is the thing. People say Apple has great marketing, and they do. They have amazing marketing. But Apple doesn't win because of its marketing. Right? Apple wins because it's a great product and it has great customer service. The marketing just extends that. Patagonia has a really clever marketing campaign. Terrific. But Patagonia wins because the jackets are good. The product is good. If the jackets were crap, Patagonia, no amount of clever ads would cover that up. So it seems to me as these worlds of media and marketing collide and as storytelling becomes more and more central to what we do, that we have the opportunity to make marketing more than what it's been in the past. And we can actually push companies to make better products. We can tell great stories, true stories that actually change people's lives. And I'm sure tomorrow most of us will get up and just do the same thing we did yesterday. And the day before and last week and the week before. But some of us maybe will dare to go out and try to do something new, try to make the world a better place. I really believe that companies that dare to do this will be rewarded for their courage. And that's my talk. Thank you.