Wednesday Thoughts: Invest in People

Happy Wednesday everyone.

I hope you’ve been having a good week.

Today’s newsletter is sponsored by Rick Beispel.

Rick is SVP of Sales and Strategy over at Cadent, which offers data-driven solutions for buying and selling TV advertising.

He’s also a stand-up fellow who, since reaching out to me on LinkedIn, has been really warm and thoughtful in his newsletter feedback. I really appreciate Rick’s thoughts, and hope you reach out to him to network, connect, etc.

Onto to today’s thought. We’re going to try to weave 3 different stories together and deliver a throughline.

Let’s go!

Wednesday Thought

3 different things happened over the last few weeks.

And while it may not appear so, I think they’re all connected.

First, Josh McDaniels was fired as Head Coach of the Las Vegas Raiders.

McDaniels was a wunderkind who served for many years as Bill Belichick's, the esteemed (but also as a Jets fan, reviled) hall-of-fame coach of the New England Patriots, right hand man.

McDaniels promised to bring the “Patriot Way” to Las Vegas - a type of football that was sound, disciplined, and ultimately successful, mirroring the Patriots years of dominance.

But he failed. Miserably. McDaniels was fired last week, after a vicious team meeting where his players and coaches ripped into him.

The team disliked him so much that, after they won in their first game after he was fired, they smoked cigars in the locker room to celebrate the new regime.

What’s interesting though is that this was McDaniels’ second stint as a head coach. His first gig was equally as bad with the Denver Broncos.

In fact, coaches that serve under Belichick and promise to bring the “Patriot Way” is one of the biggest fallacies in all of sports.

Belichick has had a long line of former assistants - from Romeo Crennel, to Charlie Weiss, to Matt Patricia, to Bill O’Brien, to Josh McDaniels - who have promised to bring his brand of football elsewhere, only to flame out, miserably.

The next story is about Joe Biden.

Without getting too much into politics here, there were a string of polls released last weekend that showed Donald Trump up way ahead in key swing states in 2024.

Yet, last night, the Democratic party did fairly well - Andy Beshear won reelection in Kentucky, and other Democratic initiatives and candidates around the country seemingly outperformed the public’s perception of Biden.

Finally, the last story: FaZe Clan’s demise.

Digiday has done some excellent reporting on this, but essentially, FaZe Clan is (was?) an eSports organization that has top creator talent in the gaming world.

They went public at a $725 million valuation last year.

They were sold earlier this year for $16 million.

What went wrong? It seems a litany of things, but one was quality control - they couldn’t ensure the creators in their organization followed through on their promises to brands.

As such, partnerships were signed, but rarely set up to deliver success.

OK!

So what do all 3 of these stories have in common?

We have moved to an era of people over party.

It doesn’t matter about the brand or institution you work for.

It matters who you are, what you do, what you believe, and how you execute.

You can work for the best boss in the world. That doesn’t make you a superstar.

You can work for a party whose president is disliked. You can still get elected.

You can have an emerging eSports company. But if it relies on its people for success, and its people are unreliable, it won’t emerge - it will nosedive.

A common thought in modern marketing is to invest in “networks.”

That way, you sign up for a string of brands or people, and get more efficiencies, bang for buck, or synergies (e.g. ads across multiple shows that align with different contexts, and can dimensionalize different aspects of your brand to the same people).

For example, you invest in a podcast network like NPR or The Ringer, because it has many shows of the same quality.

Or you’ll invest in a portfolio of sites owned by the same company, in order to reach foodies, culture enthusiasts, techies, news connoisseurs, etc. and grab some CPM efficiencies in the process.

But it’s increasingly important to be more intentional with the partners you select.

You can’t just partner with a person or a site because they live under a strong brand umbrella.

They themselves need to be influential, because people no longer value these umbrella networks or brands in the same they used to (Brian Morrissey just wrote a great piece on this subject).

Instead, people connect with people, not brands.

And as marketers, we need to value the actual people and personalities we work with, and make sure they are up to snuff, vs. just investing in a network or brand and hoping they will have enough influence to reach and convince our audience.

We live in the creator economy after all.

So invest in Bill Simmons, vs. The Ringer.

Invest in Big Cat, vs. Barstool.

Invest in Guy Raz, vs. Wondery.

Finally, it is increasingly clear that its harder than ever for brands to preserve quality control.

Just because someone is part of an organization, does not make them reliable or influential.

And I think the same goes for quality control among advertisers.

A brand is only as good as the quality control of the communications being put out to the world.

And increasingly, there are shortcuts being taken.

In digital, there are obvious shortcuts being taken with AI - platforms like Meta and Google, where if you upload a few pieces of creative, spit out “exactly” the right formula for the ads that will work “the best” to the “right people.”

But what you actually see in your feed isn’t pristine and perfect creative, whose hold over you is so influential it forces you to buy on the spot.

It’s mis-matched copy and images, sloppily put together in the name of efficiency.

But there are other shortcuts too, and quality control being looked.

Like the Hulu outdoor ad I saw downtown the other day with graffiti on it.

Like the double spotted TV ads, or the CTV ads that buffer out.

After all, one of FaZe Clan’s downfalls was that they couldn’t control the influencers in their organization.

One of them sent screenshots as proof of their posts with doctored dates.

That’s what advertisers are paying for if the people managing the brand are asleep at the wheel.

Too much, we focus on impressions, delivery, innovative targeting, or being culturally relevant.

But not enough on pristine execution, and how the customer is actually experiencing the ads we put out into the world.

So let’s play less attention to umbrella brands with less influence.

And more to the people we actually want to invest in.

As well as the quality control they’re using, or abusing.

Otherwise, you get a Josh McDaniels instead of a Bill Belichick.

The Patriot Way worked for one person.

But there’s no guarantee it’ll work for others.

Stay thinkin,

Danny