Marketing Magic: Business Lessons from the Muppets and Goat-2-Meeting with Andrew Davis

PodcastMarketing

Sep 2

Episode 879: Show Notes

Today on the Podcast, we have Andrew Davis, a Best-Selling Author and Internationally Acclaimed Keynote Speaker. He has appeared in the New York Times, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and on NBC and BBC. Andrew has crafted documentary films and award-winning content for tiny startups and Fortune 500 brands.

In this episode, we’re talking about marketing lessons we can learn from The Muppets, what the pandemic did for a goat farm, and if your digital doppelganger should be your own property or owned by the company you work for. This convo is going to spark your creativity and get you thinking in new ways. You’ll walk away excited about how you can leverage AI in your own business.

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The Wild Ride of Andrew’s Career

In the late 90s, Andrew worked on the Muppets and Sesame Street, Bear in the Big Blue House, Elmo in Grouchland, and more. It’s also where he met his wife. Starting by managing budgets, he learned a very valuable lesson: if you can create great content that inspires people to buy things they didn’t know they needed, you can sell anything. Working in the puppet-building department, he was advised that if he allowed the artists to do their best work to create the most lovable characters; that’s the magic that would allow him to sell merchandise to the public.

To be successful, you’ve got to create something that people fall in love with. If you create content that builds a relationship with an audience, they’ll buy anything you can sell them. Even though Sesame Street was a non-profit, they were selling millions and millions of dollars worth of Elmo merch every day. That’s what built the company and afforded them the chance to build great content. He learned that content builds relationships, which builds trust, and in turn, drives sales. If you can do that really efficiently in any business, you can do that at any scale!

A Path to Public Speaking and the Power of Partnerships

In 2008, Andrew was asked at the last minute to fill in for a speaker at an event. Afterward, he was approached by three people who wanted to hire him. For the next four years, this was the primary lead gen tool for the agency he ran with a friend. In 2012, Andrew wrote a book called Brandscaping, simultaneously falling in love with the art of speaking and sharing ideas with lots of people. Today, he speaks 55 times a year. If you’ve been thinking it’s all black and white, and there’s only one way to succeed, look at Andrew’s unconventional path to success!

Andrew’s first book is all about using partnerships to build your brand. Anytime you can leverage another person’s audience in a mutually beneficial way, it’s a really fun and successful collaboration that is within almost anyone’s reach. The most unique and interesting stories he finds are in long-term partnerships. He has seen referral-based businesses that don’t accept clients without a referral and brands that raised their prices for those who refused the original quote and came back later. People buy experiences, and the better your experience, the more they’ll pay and the more referrals you will get.

Thinking Big and Starting Small: a Four-Step Process to Embracing Constraints

Embracing the constraints of being a small business owner has been pivotal for Andrew. Creating a podcast is a great example; you can spend nine months getting all the equipment, meanwhile you haven’t produced a thing! He believes that if you really want to do something, you have to eliminate the unnecessary, and that’s why he developed the Cube Theory; four things you can do to embrace constraints. First, you find the easy thing to stop doing, like a newsletter, and then stop doing the hard thing, like TikTok posts that aren’t generating sales. Next, you need a simple and clear objective that you can measure.

Then, you add unreasonable constraints, like reaching your outcome in a specific time that might seem impossible to reach. Add a creative constraint, like recording a podcast with only an iPhone. Most importantly, you need to be clear about what is at stake. Either a reward, like a few days off, or something you’re not looking forward to, like giving up the podcast. If you do these things, you’ll stop wasting energy on what’s not affecting your business, and focus on a clear outcome. You’ve embraced the constraints that you used to see as things that were holding you back.

Goat-2-Meeting and More

Andrew believes that applying the constraints and finding a way to create something new is the way that you can create an impact. He shares a great example of this, based on the story of a non-profit organization called Sweet Farm in Northern California. In March 2020, they were fully booked for their in-person retreats where guests could plan team-building events, plant trees, and interact with the many rescue animals. But then the pandemic hit, and they saw 40% of their revenue evaporate.

That’s when the Founder and CEO embraced the constraints, stopping any focus that wasn’t on keeping the farm alive. Instead, he concentrated solely on recouping the lost 40% of their revenue, encouraging his team to come up with ideas in just one day. He explained that lay-offs were what was at stake. And overnight, they came up with a strategy to host in-person animal interactions called Goat-2-Meetings. You could have an animal join your Zoom call and give you some fun facts. By the end of the year, they had generated over $1,000,000 and done 8000 Goat-2-Meetings. And, GoTo Meeting loved the idea so much that they donated a huge check to the cause. Similarly, a Chicago company launched virtual closet consulting. The key finding? You can leverage constraints to make your business stronger.

Understanding the True Superpower of AI

A lot of people only use AI to ask research questions. But that’s not entirely new! If you want to really leverage AI, you have to embrace its true superpower. For Andrew, that is mimicry and imitation. That’s why he created his virtual twin, Drewdini, to be a creative collaborator. He thinks and writes like Andrew. This has been super effective, and Drewdini is already spitting out subject lines that Andrew would have written himself. Every time he needs a new one, he opens the same thread on ChatGPT or Claude, and the bot leverages all that he has already learned to create a new one.

Right now, ChatGPT4’s neural network is roughly the size of a squirrel’s brain. And ChatGPT2 was about the size of a bee train. You have to keep in mind that if you are going to train one thread in ChatGPT or Claude, or CoPilot, you have to realize that it loses focus and attention very quickly. So, you have to create squirrel-sized tasks. You can create an outline in one thread and generate ideas in another, but AI can’t write the email, brainstorm a bunch of ideas, put a subject line together, and give you the summary for LinkedIn in a single thread. As the large language models evolve, you need to keep the scope in mind as you are training or teaching your AI to think like you.

An Insider’s Perspective on the Future of AI in Marketing

Andrew issues a warning on what he has seen happening in tools and technology that he’s not that keen on. A lot of tools, especially marketing tools, are implementing AI as a shortcut for creating more content faster. But, they’re using the same principles as everyone else. That means, at the end of the day, the content you are creating is not unique, and we’re going to end up with a whole lot of mediocre content created by the same engines. That’s why we need to embrace the idea of owning our own digital doppelgangers.

We need to know where our jobs start and end, and where the digital doppelgangers start and end. If we are free to give up the way that we do things, the way we think, the way we’ve trained our AI, it’s a fast path to nowhere. In the future, Andrew sees employees and agencies being hired not only for what they can provide but the AI they’ve trained to do things their way. That’s why it should be your asset, and not the company’s. The time has come to distinguish between the company’s digital intellectual property, and your own.

Quote This

“We, as people, need to embrace the idea that we should own our own digital doppelgangers.”

—Andrew Davis

Highlights

The Wild Ride of Andrew’s Career and Learning from the Best in the Business [0:01:54]
A Path to Public Speaking and the Power of Partnerships [0:07:19]
Thinking Big and Starting Small: a Four-Step Process to Embracing Constraints [0:13:57]
How Goat-2-Meeting Leveraged Limitations [0:20:20]
Understanding the True Superpower of AI [0:27:08]
An Insider’s Perspective on the Future of AI in Marketing [0:34:41]

OUR GUEST:

Andrew Davis

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Andrew Davis is a bestselling author and internationally acclaimed keynote speaker. Before building and selling a thriving digital marketing agency, Andrew produced for NBC’s Today Show, worked for The Muppets in New York and wrote for Charles Kuralt. He's appeared in the New York Times, Forbes, the Wall Street Journal, and on NBC and the BBC. Davis has crafted documentary films and award-winning content for tiny start-ups and Fortune 500 brands. Recognized as one of the industry's "Jaw-Dropping Marketing Speakers," Andrew is a mainstay on global marketing influencer lists. Wherever he goes, Andrew Davis puts his infectious enthusiasm and magnetic speaking style to good use teaching business leaders how to grow their businesses, transform their cities, and leave their legacy.