Stacy Jones from Hollywood Branded Uses Content Marketing and Kim Kardashian To Acquire Clients

Alright guys, welcome back to another episode of Growing Your Agency. I'm your host Ryan Shank. Today, super excited, we're joined by Stacy Jones of Hollywood Branded. Stacy, thank you so much for being with us.

Ryan, thanks for having me.

Of course. So Stacy, tell us a little bit about Hollywood Branded, how you got into it, and why.

Sure. So what Hollywood Branded is, is an agency that matches pop culture to brand activities. So we look for ways that we can leverage Hollywood from TV shows to feature films, to music, to red carpet events, to celebrities, or even influencers in a way to work with the brand and get higher engagement from those who are going to be targeted as far as the consumer. So go ahead.

No, I was going to ask, and I maybe give us an example. So is that like, you know, pay-to-play kind of when they do these like, you know, Instagram brand deals, or is it more like engage, you know, like the product is actually like placed into something that looks like organic?

Yeah. So we do quite a bit. So we do product placement in movie, TV shows, and music videos. Some of that is paid for, some of that is not paid for. In fact, the majority is not paid for. You can tell usually when you're watching a movie or TV show and you see a brand that's just part of a scene, Usually that brand has been loaned to the production. It's helping the production offset costs. They're not having to purchase it. They're not having to get clearance for it. And maybe that brand is also helping promote that film or that TV show. If you're looking at something where there's verbal messaging and a storyline and really heightened exposure for a brand, then that turns into something called brand integration. And that's usually where dollars are being paid and the brand is getting more of a guarantee of their exposure. On the flip side of that, we do celebrity endorsements, working with celebrities to become the face of brands or to have the celebrity, um, actually become part of the retail or on pack with the brand. And then we also do social influencers. So as you mentioned on Instagram, most of those things are now paid. People wish that they weren't paid for anymore, but you have any following of any kind, most influencers are getting some sort of dollars and we work with them in order to best capitalize, best showcase the brand within their content.

That's awesome. One example, I'm assuming this is a pay-to-play, but I always notice Postmates. One, I think they're everywhere with celebrities and influencers, but they came out with this study, and I'm sure it's, maybe it's real, but it's basically like, here's how much Post Malone spends on Postmates per year or something like that. But it's interesting and kind of relatable, 'cause you're like, oh man, I probably spend like, you know, 20K a year on Postmates or whatever it is. But things like that where they're like taking the brand and kind of like showing that like it's used by someone else, I always think is like, it's pretty cool.

Yeah. And so with Post Malone, that is a very— it started off I think as a very organic partnership, but that is definitely a celebrity endorsement where there are different campaigns that he does with them. Our agency's actually been involved with both of those entities in bringing in a third-party brand as well. So it's a lot of fun.

That's awesome, that's awesome. So tell me, when you first, you know, you've been doing this seems like a little while, how do you get into this? Like how did you, 'cause I'm sure it evolved like a lot over the years as social media has picked up. Like how do you get into it in the beginning?

Sure, so I've been doing this for 24 years, so that is quite a long time. It's longer than some of our staff has been alive on our team. So that's a nice reflective moment for business owners out there when that happens to you. But so I got into it, I answered an ad in The Hollywood Reporter. At the time, The Hollywood Reporter was very much so focused obviously on TV and film. It had a product placement coordinator position listed. I applied for it. No one knew what it was. My mother in fact said, "Oh, you're gonna be working at a grocery store moving cans towards people on shelves." I'm like, "I don't think so. This is a movie and TV show magazine." And I ended up running an agency for over a decade, hit that proverbial glass ceiling. Feeling, left and started something a little bit new with Hollywood Branded back in 2007.

2007. And when you left the agency, you decided to start your own company. How did you get that first client? You know, I think that's always something people are interested in. It's like, and by the way, and like, you know, how did you get the first client? And then also like what got you over like that fear factor of like taking the leap into your, you know, creating your own company?

Yeah, it took me years to actually take the leap. I think my friends and family were very ready, much so before I was, because they were tired of listening to me bitching moan about different pain points that I was experiencing and refusing to leave because for all of us, the pain we know is much less scary than the pain of the unknown.

The fear of the unknown.

Yes. Yes. So it was a big leap. And when I started out, I did not start the company with, you know, a client in hand by any means. I was able to open doors to some relationships I had fostered over the years and had BlackBerry come on board based off of an agency I had previously worked with. Their other division had a client, they knew who I was, and so they made that introduction to me. So that started off a 12-plus-year relationship where I've never been fired by a client so many times, 4 times in fact, because every time they had massive layoffs, we got laid off and then we'd be brought back on because the work we did was phenomenal, and then there would be a buyout of the company, and so every agency would be laid off, And then they'd bring us back on again. So it was just this constant turmoil of doing this. And we just recently stopped working with them again on their reinvention of that product line. But you never know what's going to be out there. And so you really just have to have some faith. And if you were doing something before and you knew how to do it, you probably are going to be able to bring that to your new business. You're just going to need to teach yourself some extra skills, maybe in financing, maybe in HR, whatever you were not doing beforehand. Make sure that you have a solid plan in place.

That's incredible. How did you get BlackBerry back then when, you know, essentially you had no clients, no brand reputation, maybe a personal reputation? How do you get them to say, yes, we're going to choose you as our, you know, agency that we're going to work with?

I had a very solid reputation. I was very well known within my industry, and I had to do the same thing that everyone else did. I had to do a presentation. I had to fly out. I had to meet with them. I had to explain what my thought process was, and we were against many other agencies for the business. And whatever it was, they liked it and they went with us. And so they started off working with us, and I feel a lot of loyalty for them over the years, despite coming back and forth Hire, non-hire. It's been an interesting ride.

Hey, it's everything's— life is a roller coaster. So that seems like it's just part of the ride. So now, so back then, that's, that's how you got clients. How do you acquire clients today?

Really? Sure. Really, most of our client acquisition is through inbound marketing. So back in 2012, I started writing blogs and I had no idea where that would go. But this today, we now as an agency, it's not just me writing. In fact, I write the least number of blogs than anyone else. But we put out a minimum of 4 to 5 blogs every week. And this is established— I'm sorry?

On your own website is where you publish?

We do, yep. So we use HubSpot in order to keep it a little bit more streamlined and organized, and we have it built into our website. We have over 25,000 reads, unique reads, visitors on a monthly basis for our agency. Could be a lot higher. I'm aiming for that 100,000. We'll get there. But back in 2012, I don't think at the end of 2012 I even had 100 reads, honestly. And you know, that was something that just shows where content marketing can take you. Um, we repurpose all of our content. We do blogs. The blogs became my original podcast for marketing mistakes and how to avoid them. I gave over 100 podcasts of me teaching people in short form, 15 to 20 minute chunks of how they could do what I do across social influencers, product placement, or celebrity endorsements. And then I grew that into doing podcast interviews. And that's all part of our content because all of that becomes blogs again. And then that becomes ebooks and that becomes infographics. And that actually becomes— now I'm writing my third book. So there's all ways that you can take content and repurpose it. And it's not like doing Google AdWords where you spend the money and it's gone. You're spending money because you're spending time of either yourself or your employees But it's something that keeps on returning and returning and returning to you. Yeah.

So do you ever, so one, I love that. And I also was not expecting you to say inbound marketing is how you're driving new customer acquisition today, which is actually amazing. I thought you were going to say it's all relationship-based, which is like not scalable for people listening or watching. And it's like hard to get into. So that's amazing. So it just sounds like it's just that day in, day out grind, putting it out consistently, not giving up and just, continuing to do that. Do you ever go into Google Analytics and look at what are our most trafficked, or look at some old blog posts that are high trafficked and then try to add another call to action or change them up in any way? I was listening to something the other day and someone was saying that as a tactic. I actually did it recently and I thought it had pretty good results. But curious if you ever check out high-performing posts and try to optimize them now.

Yeah. I will say our highest performing posts tend to include the name Kardashian in them. It's awesome. You know, I never thought that that would be the driver to getting traffic to our agency. It's all about the Jenners and Kardashians. But, uh, yes. So, uh, Google best practices are to go into your blogs and to continuously update them, add video, add photos, change the verbiage to it, change the CTA. And the other thing that we do is if a blog is high performing, we'll look at some of the keywords that are driving that and we'll try to write similar blogs off of that if it makes sense. And we don't go in with a strategy that I think people say that you should have where you know exactly what you're writing about. We really look at what's cool today and what's a good story or where's the client pain point where we're going to be able to share more and give them advice through our blog.

Awesome. Um, kind of switching gears a little bit into, uh, into like, you know, so now you have the clients, you're acquiring them. What is, what is the deliverable to them, you know, like, and how do you report that back to your clients and the cadence of that reporting?

Yeah, so it really depends on what service that we're providing to them, but in the terms of product placement, we're looking at, you know, what would it cost to advertise on that show, how long was the brand in it, how focus, in focus was the brand logo, was it front and center of the screen, was it something that character interacted with. All these have different grading scales. And so we're able to give an overall ROI on what that value of that exposure is. Based on CPM?

Based on number of views?

Yeah, we can look at CPM or it's really just based off of media impressions as well, but it can dial down to the CPM basis.

Okay. So it's based on impressions and saying, hey, we got you this much exposure in this, you know, in this format, this placement.

And the value of it as well, because you can have a lot of impressions with really kind of crappy branding, right? And that doesn't matter so much, but you could have less impressions to a very niche audience with massive branding and storytelling and messaging that actually is going to result in sales from it. So that— there's different ways to measure and look at where there's value and quality.

Got it. And what tools are you using to measure those? And then how do you deliver that to the client? Is it on a monthly basis? Are you having calls with them to kind of go over things? Like, how does that work?

Sure. Well, we email with clients constantly. We have calls with some clients on a weekly basis or as needed, depends on what the campaign is. Other clients are on a monthly basis, others are on a quarterly. You know, we've worked with some clients for 10 years and they're quite frankly happy speaking to us on a quarterly basis because we have everything kind of just going and it works and we add things to it and it's a machine for them. And so they don't have to think about it so much. But with all of our reporting, we've developed a lot of proprietary software tools that we use in-house versus others. I'm really— it's more so subscription databases that I use where it comes to sales outreach, right? We work with like Winmo. We use HubSpot and that's because it controls our blog. It also allows us landing page templates and really ability to have anyone posting and utilizing the sources. And it also acts as a very good CRM for sales. We use, gosh, so many different like tools for production leads, knowing what productions are out there, influencer database software, letting us know what's going on, celebrity database software.

What are some celebrity and influencer software tools?

Sure. Celebrity Intelligence is one of the tools we use. Variety Insights is a tool. Production Leads is a tool we use. I mean, there's really a couple of handfuls of different services that we subscribe to.

Got it. Wow. I am thoroughly impressed with the level of sophistication in your sales process and a lot of the tools that you're using. What's your team look like?

Well, before I say that, the one tool I will say that everyone listening on this that's relevant despite if you're an agency or a business that you should potentially look at is a media monitoring tool. So even if you are a brand, you can have media monitoring tools to let you know how you're performing in the media and to help you craft a plan. So we use Critical Mention, and, and so that's our media monitoring service that we use. It does television, it does everything in regards to broadcast, it does digital and it allows you insight to social as well. So what we can do is go out and see what competitors are doing and give us some insight there. We can make plans against what we are planning on doing for our own clients, what and where value is as well.

Awesome. And, and do they have like alerts and like notifications? Yeah, Google Alerts, like whenever there's like mentions and stuff?

Yeah, right before I was getting on this podcast, I had an alert that we just got picked up for some more media that I was expecting, but it showed me not only the outlet that picked it up, but also all those others that are starting to pick it up and carry it. So that's a lot of fun.

That's awesome. Can you name any— are all of your clients and brands under confidentiality agreements?

No, not really. So we work with brands such as Bumble. We work with a company— and Bumble is a dating relationship app. So swipe right, swipe left, right? It's women.

I'm very familiar with Bumble.

Okay. Have you used it in your own life?

Yeah.

Okay.

Yeah.

And do you, I am assuming you use other platforms as well?

Yeah.

Because that's what people do. So with Bumble, we put them, the most recent partnership I think that came to life was with Riverdale. So two different integrations in Riverdale. There was a sweepstakes where you could enter if you went onto the Bumble app and you can actually go and visit Vancouver. Television swipe, right, on CW. It also went through Netflix. And with Bumble, we did a partnership with Ellen DeGeneres where she spoke about Bumble and remade 3 women in her audience's dating profiles, like the crazy cat lady, right? We also— yeah, a movie last summer that was awesome with Candice Bergen and Jane Fonda and Diane Keaton where Candice's character finds her new love through Bumble. So those are the types of things that we do often.

That's awesome. Name another client, 'cause that's really cool.

Sure, so totally different. FLIR is one of our clients. FLIR is a thermal camera company that primarily is for B2B sector, very much so government, very military, very home improvement. And they have some products that you can purchase also, like if you're in hunting and shooting world or fishing, you might have their, their technology and cameras on your boats or on your rifle scope or whatever it might be. But we work with movies to bring their technology in. So Rampage this last year is an example. We loaned the production a multi-million dollar plane that was loaded with camera gear. And so in the quarry scenes where you see all the monsters ravaging and they're coming and they're coming and coming, we had the plane there flying and and picking up all of the pretend military who are racing for the action scene. And then back in the headquarters, you see the general saying, "I need the FLIR on that image now!" And so that they could get the FLIR camera up so that they could see the crocodile coming at them. And so there's fun things like that. We do a lot of ghost shows and paranormal with them because you can see, you know, displacement.

Are you doing ideation and like strategy? Like, is all— like, do they come to you and say like, hey, directionally we want like this goal, and then you're kind of back solving it? And like, who's coming up with creative for all of that?

Yeah, so we will read a script and we're like, oh look, there's a quarry scene and there's some special effects, we should talk to the producer about bringing in FLIR. And then we sell them in on it. So we pitch it. Everything's a pitch. It's very much like coming up with your story and your angle.

Just love it.

And we go in, so there's not anything that— it's not like it's typically scripted of here, there is a can of water sitting here. Instead, it's going to be, okay, someone's sitting at their desk, podcast, and it would be natural for them to have a can of water next to them because they need to drink and stay hydrated. So we would go in and talk to them about doing that.

Wow, that's really cool. What's, um, So a couple, couple more questions tactically, like what, what are, what's your pricing model?

Sure. So we have two different ways that we work. Um, all of our pricing is exactly the same for all of our clients, um, for our agency initial fees for strategy and research. And it just depends on the service, whether we're doing celebrity endorsement or, uh, event activations or product placement or large-scale integration and ideation. So there's a flat base rate, and then depending on what that activation is, there is a fulfillment rate on the other side of that.

As a percentage? As a percentage of the deal?

It can be, with a minimum set in. So for us to do strategy, for us to come up with ideas, so if a brand said, "I want to do something in Hollywood," okay? And they wanted to—

Take me to Hollywood.

Take me to Hollywood. I want to use that power of pop culture.

I wanna see the stars.

Yeah, we have a program that starts at $2,500 a month and that allows us to go out and knock on doors 'cause we have to sell in the brand. As much education that we need to bring to the brand, we have to do a lot of pitching and education about the brand to the producers, the directors, the prop masters, the set decorators, transportation, stylists, all these different people who are on set and who are out there so that we can get them to understand who the brand is.

It's a full-blown sales pro. I mean, you're sourcing lists with lead names basically and then you're creating the script to actually pitch it all, you know.

So 100%, you're almost like creating a business every time. It's crazy. You know, we have very proactive, what we call product placement retainer programs, and those range from $3,000 to $15,000 on a monthly basis for unlimited product placement in movies and TV shows. We have social influencer programs that range from $5,000 a month all up to, you know, $20,000 beyond. It just depends because a lot of these things are budgeted and funded additionally because we're paying third parties for a lot of the work that we do. So we might have have a brand that says, I want to do Hollywood. Now that can mean very different things. Do you want to do network TV in Hollywood? Do you want to do an independent film in Hollywood? Do you want to do a blockbuster action movie? Do you want to work with an A-list celebrity? Do you want to work with a D-list celebrity? There's pricing that is all over the place.

Yeah, got it. Um, that is, that is awesome. So what one, uh, I'm gonna wrap, we're gonna wrap up here, but one final question that we ask everyone: what does your morning routine look like?

What's your morning routine like? Ah, it's not a good routine, and I have shame on this one. So I tend to stay up way too late and work way too long. I don't sleep a lot, but when I wake up, the worst thing I do, but it's how I actually manage my day and it's how I get my head around things, is I check my phone, I check my emails, I look for all the things that are going to possibly pop up and bite me, and I quickly deal with them so that I can then actually get on with getting ready and showering and brushing my teeth and doing all those fun things before going out and I have a fish pond so I am able to enjoy nature.

Koi?

A house on a canyon. Have not gotten the koi because you're supposed to have 1,000 gallons for that and this all started because I rescued a turtle and I got tired of cleaning a turtle tank inside our house so I built a pond outside of our house.

I bet the turtle was happy.

So happy and then we got a rescue Oscar because someone's other Oscar was eating a hole in it so then we had a turtle and an Oscar and then we got other fish and then they started eating some fish and some other fish like goldfish got really big so we have 12 you know, inch, 15-inch goldfish now. So we have a lot of nature in our ponds.

And where do you, where do you live?

I live in Palos Verdes, California. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

That's awesome. All right, Stacy Jones, Hollywood Branded, thank you so much for joining us on Growing Your Agency today. This was an amazing conversation. Where can everyone find you?

You can find me at hollywoodbranded.com. You can also learn more about us at learn.hollywoodbranded.com. We have online classes, so if anything I said interests you and you actually would be more so inclined to do it yourself, we got the tools. Or you could always visit our blog at blog.hollywoodbranded.com. Or my podcast is Marketing Mistakes and How to Avoid Them.

Awesome, awesome. Stacy, thank you so much for chatting today, and we'll catch you later.

Sounds great. Thanks so much, Ryan.

All right, see ya.