Category: Podcast

Announcer (00:02)

And now, you’re listening to the Live Analog Marketers Podcast. For marketers who lived through the transition to digital and the newcomers who inherited the results. Using the past as a lens to understand the present and navigate the future with intention. With your hosts, Aaron Peterson and Jamie Jones.

Jamie Jones (00:30)

Again, welcome to the Last Analog Marketers Podcast. I’m Jamie Jones.

Aaron Peterson (00:35)

And I’m Aaron Peterson. Today we want to start to cover the current state of marketing. We’re not doing any time traveling. We’re just talking about what’s happening right now. We’re not gonna get into nostalgia hour, we’re not gonna get into futurism forecasts. We’re gonna save that content for another day. Very close coming up behind this because we do wanna get into how we got to where we are and where we think we’re heading. But for right now, we’re gonna start with where we’re at right now in the marketing industry.

Jamie Jones (01:06)

Exactly. We have some perspective on what marketing is doing in 2026. I don’t know if we have all the answers, but we’re definitely very familiar with the clicks, the chaos, and the coffee-fueled spreadsheets, which has fully been my life the last few years. Let’s dive into the themes that we want to cover today. I think we have three present themes that we’ve kind of bucketed stuff into. I’m sure we’re gonna miss some stuff, but I’m really excited to talk about these three things because they’re really near and dear to both of our hearts and the experiences that we’ve had in the last couple of years. Mine is the last couple of years of my career at Kantar, which is data-driven marketing. Marketing today is insanely data-driven. And I will tell you, at first I was super excited about that because there was a point in time where we would create something and ask the sales team or the client management team to send it on our behalf. And we would just assume it eventually got somewhere and we were eventually reaching the end user in B2B marketing. But today, all of our creative, all of our different channel marketing that we do is scored. We have view rates, we have heat maps, we have scroll depth, we have cohort LTV – everything comes with a measurement. And I think 10 years ago I would have been excited about that. And now sometimes it feels really overwhelming.

Aaron Peterson (02:33)

I mean it also feels really restrictive. As someone who has planned and bought media, I feel like we’re also professional analysts now. Which, again, not to say that I don’t love data. I do. And I do think data is important in driving decisions largely, but it does feel like the Creative Brief now basically starts with “What’s the SQL query?” instead of, “What’s the big idea?” And it just feels…disjointed.

Jamie Jones (03:01)

When was the last time you heard someone just say, “Let’s have a big idea and make it work?” It’s always, “What are we gonna get out of this? What’s the ROI?” It’s all about attribution models and multi-touch and increment incrementality tests. It’s a mouthful, truthfully, because I think it makes marketing less creative. It makes us just analysts, as you were talking about. I can’t remember a campaign I’ve launched in the last few years that didn’t come with a fully built-out spreadsheet of a tracking plan. The tracking plan was the most important piece, not the creative part of it.

Aaron Peterson (03:39)

Weabsolutely. And on the ad buying side, it just means constant experiments. A/B tests, holdouts, geographic lift tests, brand lift tests. I mean, the creative that really looked great in a brainstorm session gets lost, it dies in the data because it can look like a really great idea and even it could be that kind of idea that has a great risk to it, but the data says, “Not worth it.” And so it gets lost.

Jamie Jones (04:11)

And being from market research where both you and I spent a lot of time, it only feeds that even further, right? Because segmentation becomes micro segmentation. And we’re thinking about different messages or different platforms across zip codes or looking at people who have previously disliked our animated gifts. There was so much analysis paralysis that you really lost the creative totally in the process.

Aaron Peterson (04:39)

Yeah, I think that you struck it right there, which is the data gives you confidence, but it’s also paralysis. You know, it feels like clients and internal stakeholders that you work with, they want statistical significance yesterday related to the campaign that you’re planning today that hasn’t even launched yet. And so it does. It just feels like a lot of those marketing things that we could get excited about have been contained or held back in a lot of ways.

Jamie Jones (05:10)

And the interesting thing about being part of the marketing team in a B2B environment is that you are seeing what your clients, your oftentimes B2C clients are doing and also kind of understanding that B2B is a different beast. But the people who are managing those B2B B2C clients kind of want you to do the same thing internally, even though you recognize it doesn’t always work. And so I feel like there was data-driven storytelling that we would tell our clients to do. And then we would try to replicate it as a B2B company. And it just didn’t really quite work. But overall, I think the common theme that we saw, whether it was for our clients or for our own internal campaigns, was just this real hesitance that started to emerge over the last five or 10 years to try things unless you had the data to prove the success. 

And it felt really constricting. We talked on our last episode about how being creative is one of the things that brought us to this profession. And the analytics behind data-driven marketing sort of put you in handcuffs around that a little bit. Sometimes it really does feel like we have the cart before the horse, as they say. Things are going a little bit backwards, and I’m not sure how to get out of that. But I know that I really miss when we could just be creative and we could just be fun. And our leaders trusted us. I think that was the big switch I’ve really seen as data has become such a part of marketing, is that our leaders told us to fail fast. But then when we did, they were really pissed about it. And there really wasn’t a lot of tolerance for failure. 

So I think that, especially in the last couple of years when I was super-focused on commercial marketing and trying to tie attribution at the B2B level, there’d be so many touchpoints and so many parts of an organization would talk to a prospect or a customer. And how could you really say if a webinar or a face-to-face event or an email or something was the piece that really brought that person to the table? And instead of being happy that the revenue was there or the client was happy, there were a lot of people wanting credit or people wanting to take it upon themselves to say, “I’m the reason that this happened.” And so that kind of fighting with your sales team or fighting with your client management team is a really challenging part of marketing. If you’re in marketing, I think you kind of know that. And I used to always go into meetings saying, “Hey, this is, it’s a little bit of an art and a science. I have data, I’m going to show you some things. I’m really excited about the attribution that we can connect, but at the end of the day, this is qualitative plus quantitative.” And unless you have an organization that really believes in that, I think marketing’s kind of set up for failure.

Aaron Peterson (08:08)

I agree, and I think also to add on to that, part of the challenge is that marketing teams are focused on creating those opportunities for sales, for client service relationships. But what’s interesting is that, to your point, where we are not often given credit. We have to fight for credit with these teams, it’s especially hard in those B2B environments because a lot of what you’re trying to do is prove some sort of marketing impact or attribution related to existing clients, right? It’s not something you often have, especially in those certain types of businesses, service oriented businesses – most of your existing business and your growth comes from your existing clients base and then you add on small amounts of prospects over time. And in those environments, marketing is especially challenged, right? Because if you’re in an environment where you’re just getting in prospects all the time, it is a lot easier to show that marketing attribution.

Jamie Jones (09:10)

Totally.

Aaron Peterson (09:11)

But outside of that, it does get way more challenging. And I like to think of myself as a very data-driven person, in general. And I wouldn’t argue necessarily with the idea that a large portion of the decision making that needs to happen should be driven by data within those groups. But I think that that being said, it does create paralysis because, instead of, to your point, looking at overall success, coming together to say, “What are all the various ways in which sales, client service, product, marketing, IT tech support, all those different elements, how can we all come together and do what we do in our function to support the overall growth of the client? And how do we all contribute to that?” Instead it has really largely become, like you said, these siloed little areas because we’re so focused on all of that data. And what that ultimately does is it also hinders us from taking any sort of risks.

And I think that’s especially a big challenge for B2B marketing, because in B2B marketing, in more cases of B2B marketing than B2C marketing, you’re typically advertising or marketing to multiple stakeholders in B2B, right? You’re not, if you’re selling a software product or service, for instance, you’re not just selling to that end user who needs to use the tool, but you’re selling to the head of IT. To someone in finance, maybe somebody on the executive team. And so you’re really marketing to a plethora of stakeholders across a variety of channels because you need to be able to hit each of those stakeholders at every stage of the funnel that they’re in. So you, in that scenario, end up with this large grid of activities and content and programs that you need to do. And with the focus on data, it really kind of puts you in this box, right, as a marketer, where you really feel like, “Okay, there’s only these things I can do, and they have to have this result to them, or else I’m failing.” And so I do think that there’s…I do wish that we would get back to a little bit of less focus on the data, as much as it is really important. But I do think that we need to find and strike a balance between data and risk and data and opportunity and saying, “How do we have the courage to maybe take a risk where the data might have told us not to do it?” I think especially when you think about creative, if you run a creative idea through testing, you could run it through there and it could get killed in that testing.

Jamie Jones (11:44)

No, I completely agree, and it’s funny, we hadn’t chatted about this analogy, but I thought about it as you were as you were talking that – Sales is kind of like the striker on the soccer team, right? They get the goal and everyone celebrates them. But, getting that ball up to the opportunity to actually score comes through many different facets of the team. And truly, the best teams are the ones who really all contribute and play as a team together. And I think in B2B, we’ve really lost that. 

I had that conversation so many times with the sales team where I’d say, “I don’t get credit for this sale. I’m not taking anything from your compensation. I’m just merely trying to prove that the activities that we’re putting on that take a lot of time, take a lot of creative energy, are part of my day to day, are valuable. And please let me recognize that within the technology system so that we can continue to prove to senior leadership that these are things we should have.”

And it always felt like we were trying to take something away from them instead of working with them. And I think you were talking about selling into this team environment, right? That in B2B, that there’s procurement, there’s the individual buyer, their senior leader, all these different stakeholders. And it kind of is a team you have to convince.

But we approach it as an individual instead of like bringing a team against a team. We sort of don’t do that. And we fight against each other internally. So I think there’s definitely some things to be fixed. I hope we’ll get a guest eventually on who can tell us that they’re doing it really well and we can try to learn some things from that because I’m certainly bringing stories of what not to do. But I gotta imagine that people are doing it right. So we’ll try to find one of those people.

Aaron Peterson (13:30)

Yeah, I agree. I agree. Although that is a good segue into point two, so…

Jamie Jones (13:34)

Yeah. Very good segue. So point two of where marketing is today in 2026 is going to be no surprise to anyone because it is everybody’s existence, whether you’re in marketing or not, and that is attention. How do we create attention? How do we buy attention? And how do we hold attention?

Aaron Peterson (13:55)

Yeah, attention is THE hot commodity, right? I mean, not only has it been a buzzword for a while now, but it feels like anytime there’s an industry event lately and there’s the recap, you know the couple of things you’re gonna hear about. Obviously one of them’s gonna be AI and one of them’s gonna be attention. They’re definitely gonna be in that recap somewhere. There’s more content than ever, and less uninterrupted attention. So that’s kind of marketing’s reality now. We’re in this very weird state.

Jamie Jones (14:29)

Part of why you and I are here today and part of the goals we set on our last first initial podcast was talking about infotainment, right? There’s so much, but how do you create something that’s valuable? And I think we’re really pushing brands in all capacities to be experienced designers. It’s not enough anymore to just interrupt someone’s time, you need to be able to reward the time that they spend with you, even if it’s for a short little bit or for a really long time. People want to feel like it was worth their time to pay attention to something.

Aaron Peterson (15:03)

Yeah, absolutely. I mean, we’re seeing a lot more of the short-form hooks and reels, modular creative, across those different layered campaigns, and they reward that deeper engagement. And so it’s thinking about it like a quick snack for a scroll, but a longer snack for the subscribers. And so you can kind of hit both worlds. and you can also lure people from one side into the other, right? Go from being a snacking scroller to being a subscriber if your content and how you put it out there is, like you said, engaging and rewarding in a way that makes it that they want to follow and be further engaged.

Jamie Jones (15:42)

Exactly. And I think it’s kind of a test. Going back to that “fail fast,” right? We know that sometimes people really are engaged with a brand in one context, in one channel, and then totally behave differently somewhere else. How I behave in my search bar or in my AI chat app or with a podcast or with a streaming app. I know personally, a focus group of one over here, I do different things and times that by millions of different people. So brands are certainly challenged to figure out the right way to create and keep attention. And one creative isn’t going to do the trick. They’re gonna have to try a lot of things and figure out what hits and what doesn’t. And I think that really goes back to the idea of failing and trying and marketing needing to be able to be a mechanism where something can fall flat and it’s okay. There can’t be this deep fear that, if it doesn’t work, then somehow our jobs are on the line or we’re not going to be successful. I think one success and a bunch of failures actually produces some really great brand content and really great brand feelings from people. And that’s really gotten lost as we’re just searching for attention constantly and then trying to measure that attention constantly.

Aaron Peterson (17:10)

No, I totally agree. And I think for me, what I think about is, and again, we all have our own behaviors and quirks – which is part of why you and I both also find marketing and market research very fascinating because it’s really interesting to understand people and their behaviors – but, I think about from my personal, again, study of one, but I look at the activities that I do on my devices based off of what the activity is. For instance, if I’m shopping on Amazon or another retailer like that, I’m gonna do that from my mobile phone. I might scroll on the couch or wherever I’m at. But if I’m going to go make a big purchase, like I need to purchase a new fridge, I’m not, for whatever reason in my brain, I cannot get over the idea of making that purchase of a fridge from my mobile phone. I have to go to my laptop or computer to do something like that because it feels like, well I need, I don’t know, something more about it. But it just goes to show you that as marketers, we need to think about that and calibrate the bids and the creative and all of that by context, right? Because people and audiences have all of those really different behaviors. High intent channels cost a lot more, but the conversion quality is often higher. So it’s almost do you do that or do you go to the low intent channels that need that smarter creative and where you’re gonna do retargeting to work with them? It’s a balance and some marketers focus on one or the other, some of them do a mix of it. But I think that that’s probably one of the things we really need to focus on going forward and right now, is just really making sure that we’re managing that element of context behind how we’re reaching those audiences that we’re trying to get attention from.

Jamie Jones (19:01)

Yeah. And I think as we talk about our personal experience, right? I obviously have a lot of engagement with ads and social media, especially Instagram. And do find that either I’m purchasing or on the brink of purchasing something because it is so easy and right there and feels like something I need. And I’ve been retargeted by that ad or retargeted something from it so many times. On the flip side, in the B2B capacity, I would have LinkedIn try to come and say, “Look how successful your ads are, look how successful your promoted content is, because these brands are engaging with it and these brands spend money.” And I kind of would dig under the hood a little bit with the people who were running those campaigns. And I’m like, okay, well, tell me how you know this. And really, when you kind of dug under, what you saw was that the people who spent a lot of money with the company tended to engage with the content. But it was the same challenge we had as an internal marketing team, right? Did they spend money because they saw those ads or that promoted content, or were they already doing stuff and so therefore just showed interest in the things that were of a brand that they were familiar with? So it was really hard to kind of understand whether that investment was valuable or not valuable. And everybody is being challenged to kind of show that economics and it was really hard to do.

Aaron Peterson (20:28)

Yeah, I think that it also made marketers struggle because we were put in a place where our hands were tied. We needed to be able to deliver, but we also were not being necessarily put in a in a position to to be successful for that.

Jamie Jones (20:50)

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, success nutriments were probably the nightmares that kept me up at night, right? Because it does, it just sort of felt like there was such a lack of control of knowing what was gonna lead to dwell time or conversion flows or click throughs or impressions. And there was so much pressure put on success, and high depth cost-per-dollar, cost-per-click. And it was just really difficult to actually showcase that. So yeah, it definitely kept me up many nights.

Aaron Peterson (21:29)

Well, and I think a lot of marketers need to just have that more practical move, right? Which, it’s not sexy, but they need to prioritize the channels by their attention yield. They need to design layered funnels and invest in those creatives that really earn time rather than demand it from the audience. Because like we’ve seen, it’s just not working the other way. You have to be able to show the value, show the reward in order to get the attention.

And I think that’s especially important in B2B marketing because there are often a number of those stakeholders involved, like we were talking about earlier. So you really can’t have that one size fits all approach with these campaigns or with the way that you try to message to these to these people because what you say to a CFO is obviously not necessarily gonna resonate with a CIO or CTO or your stakeholder if that stakeholder is a client in a brand space or a business itself.

Jamie Jones (22:28)

And especially when you have a product line that’s multifaceted, right? This is not just, “Does one product hit a certain audience in a certain channel?” and we do or do or don’t do that again. It’s 12 products at the same time, and all those different channels, and all those different stakeholders. And so the matrix and the web just would get bigger and bigger and bigger. And it often just felt like putting fingers in a leaky bucket, right? You’re like, “Well, this one’s not doing good. We’re gonna move it over here.“And you never could quite find success because there was always something kind of red. The red light was going off on something, even when there were a couple of green lights going on. 

So we don’t have the answers. We know that attention, for B2B and B2C, is a real challenge in 2026. I have seen a lot of reports of very big brands, B to CPG brands moving a lot of money into influencers, which to think that that’s the place we live in today, I’m certainly not the expert, but probably we should have a whole episode about influencer marketing because I think that would be really, really interesting. But attention is hard to get and it’s hard to keep, but it is probably the biggest buzzword of our industry today. 

So we’ll put a pin in that and maybe come back with some thoughts on how to do it better on another episode, but we’ll move on at this point to the third point. And it actually has to kind of do, I think it has to do with internal structure, and kind of tying the first two points together in a really practical way.

Aaron Peterson (24:03)

Yeah, I agree. And so our last point here is that marketing today really can’t be siloed. And what we mean by that is brand, content and creative, comms, digital, demand gen, media, research analytics, all the elements that go into it, they all have to operate like one team. Otherwise that measurement and the attention wins that we’ve put together, they vanish, right? Like, they just go away because it only works when we work together as a functional team. And what you are seeing a lot more often is, especially within bigger companies, which you and I have both been a part of, these type of marketing organizations where things really do get siloed and you get in a position where it’s like, okay, here’s a growth marketing team that has like demand gen and events, and then you’ve got brand and comms over here doing stuff completely separate, and they don’t necessarily meet with each other. So it can be a big problem.

Jamie Jones (24:57)

Yeah, no. And they all have different goals and sometimes have different bosses and sometimes have different revenue lines. So it can be even worse than just not talking to each other. But the funny part is that they’ll have all these different technologies, have all these different campaigns, have all these different vendors, and they’ll just call it “omnichannel.” We’re doing omnichannel, like that it’s, okay. That it’s a disarray and it’s totally disorganized and no one has the same goals. But in reality, you and I both know personally that that creates an immense amount of friction and KPIs that don’t match each other and in general a lot of creative inconsistency.

Aaron Peterson (25:41)

Well, yeah. For example, if we had research that told us that audience A prefers a problem first messaging, but then the media buy shows the best placement is in mid-funnel. And then the creative team is doing their way, but way their work, but they decide to make product focus spots because that’s what their research told them or where they were focused. And none of that got coordinated across those different developments. So of course the campaign and the performance of everything that the team is doing tanks.

Jamie Jones (26:12)

Yeah. And I think it kind of goes back to what we were talking about earlier in the conversation, approaching it as a team, right? You’re selling into an organization that is protecting their budget as a team, if nothing else, right? They’re all in agreement that we can’t spend until we all agree. But we don’t approach them with a real team effort and a lot of operational rigor, briefs are not shared. There really is an essential data point. There are never weekly sinks. It’s sort of like, “We have this problem and come back to us once you’ve solved it.” And I have seen very little usage of shared metrics. It’s really not glamorous stuff. It’s certainly not the creative part of marketing, but I do think the times when I would call them like “tiger teams,” the times when it was multiple people from different parts of the organization coming together for one goal…that’s when things seem to work the best and be the most functional.

Aaron Peterson (27:11)

Yeah, and I think to add on to that, though, but part of what creates even additional chaos is the governance around those metrics, like who owns it and who signs off on the approval of the creative test and who agrees on the brand lift. I mean, because what we end up seeing is that that ambiguity means that nobody optimizes what they’re doing and nobody takes responsibility for optimizing the collective.

Jamie Jones (27:37)

Well, and the funny thing was, is…we built a bunch of really expensive – built or bought a bunch of really expensive – technology on top of a system that was already misaligned and broken. So let’s just throw a million dollars at Salesforce because certainly that will solve our problems. But the tech stack was only as good as the processes that were already in place and the people that were put in charge of the governance of it, as you said. And I think what it really ended up being was just a lot of expensive chaos. We had cheap chaos, and then we had expensive chaos. And in general, too many cooks in the kitchen. I mean, I remember feeling like I was looking for a CIO to come in and say that somebody needs to be doing a better job of managing the funnel. And I seem to be the only person at a VP level –  which is high, but not that high, right? – I seem to be the only one screaming from the rooftops, “Hey, we are not using this technology properly. We are all not on the same page.” 

And why is the marketing person saying this? But we were laughing before the call. It kind of comes down to marketing to be that person sometimes. And so, I really appreciated the times when we worked on projects where it was, as I said, a “tiger team” brought together. There was a pipeline that was very aligned. There was like this collective unit, and no one was out for themselves. Everyone was trying to build it and move it together in the right direction, but that was definitely the exception, not the rule.

Aaron Peterson (29:09)

Yeah, exactly. But in that scenario, success looks like reduced friction in the handoffs, having faster test cycles, having marketing decisions, and also broader decisions in the organization, right? All align to that one source of truth. And so the KPIs that we’d look at – time to decision, campaign cycle time, lift in cross channel conversion – all of those things get impacted and improved. If we’re able to be better connected and better aligned across not only the marketing team but the broader organization as well.

Jamie Jones (29:48)

Yeah, I think it’s not a sexy thing to talk about, but integration and collaboration as in internal functions, I mean, really is the place that we feel marketing is in 2026 and one of the points of either success or failure, depending on how your organization is attacking it. 

So I think those cover our three topics for today. 2026 ss an intense time for marketing. We are under the gun for trying to improve KPIs and measurement at every turn. I think there’s a lot of opportunity to bring the creative aspect back into the fold, but we’ll see if that happens or not. Obviously, all organizations, including the marketing function within them, are vying for attention. That is incredibly difficult to gain and even harder to keep. But there are infinite amounts of channels available to use to try to gather, garner and gather those. and I think that there will continue to be a lot of test-and-fail and trying to figure out where people are sticking with brands. And last but not least, just bringing together that operational glue and working more as a team, more as a “tiger team” within the organization, I think will allow marketing to be stronger. Too often marketing is left to fail, succeed and fail all alone. And I think when brought into the fold within other parts of the group and collective, there’s a lot more opportunity, you know, for success.

Aaron Peterson (31:31)

I totally agree. And I think it is a tough landscape out there right now for sure. There’s just like we said, there’s so much going on, there’s so much attention to be needed and had. There’s so many products and services out there to put in front of people. But I think if we as marketers stay positive and we focus on those three areas – measuring smart, designing for attention and getting people to actually talk to each other within their own marketing teams, within their broader organizations – rather than burning and wasting money on things that don’t work. When they can get out better quality content, products, marketing campaigns that actually have impact on driving the needle in whatever way they’re trying to do.

Jamie Jones (32:15)

Yeah, I have been sidetracked by someone’s shiny new idea, maybe more times than I’d like to admit. So I agree. Lots of opportunity and reasons to be hopeful. All right, Aaron, that’s the last of the content we prepared for today. As we mentioned earlier, a lot more to come. But as we wrap up this episode of The Last Analog Marketers, do you wanna lead us out with our One Last Thing?

Aaron Peterson (32:43)

Sure. And I mean I think you kind of talked or at least touched on it briefly earlier, which is one of the things that you and I have noticed is this sort of shift in the dynamic of how marketing fits within the organization. And one of the things that we often do feel like is that we have to play the role of the adult within the business organization, right? And what I mean by that is that, and to your point, when things go successfully, everyone in the organization wants to say they were involved in it. The sales people are like, “Yeah, I activated that campaign.” The client service people, “Yeah, I got my client to give a quote.” Everybody wants to be involved. When it goes poorly, they’re nowhere to be found. And instead there’s a lot of finger pointing. There’s a lot of no and again, nobody wants to get in trouble, as it were. And so rather than address the problem head on, you end up in these scenarios where people are somewhat in their silos, their fiefdoms. They try to be protective. They point the finger in other directions. Nobody wants to take the blame. And marketing often we default to being the ones that just take the blame

And we will shrug it off and then we will not only do that, but we will then on top of that be in a position where we will have to come up with the solution, right? We’ll have to come back and say, okay, look, this thing didn’t work. Let’s come back and let’s figure out a way to make it work. And so we really do, it does feel like we often have to be the adult in the room that comes in and says, “Okay, let’s not point fingers. Let’s not focus on what went wrong and who did what. Let’s just focus on what do we do now and how do we move forward to be successful.” And so it’s an interesting place for us to be in. In a way, it’s great. We do get to have some guidance and impact on how to handle situations. But on the other side, it also does put us in a very precarious position, right? Because especially in an age right now where roles are very scrutinized and success metrics are so important as we talked about in this call, if you are not successful in marketing nowadays it really is a risk of whether or not you’re going to keep your job and whether or not you may potentially be let go.

Jamie Jones (35:06)

Yeah, I think it goes back to what we talked about on the first episode.Marketing seemed like a fun and safe place within the organization to be. And I’m not sure it is anymore either. But I liked the idea of whenever the house gets burned down, marketing’s the first one who kind of gets the shovels and the concrete ready and we start rebuilding. And I think that was fun and exciting and empowering.

But maybe for people who’ve been in the business a really long time, we feel exhausted by that. We’re kind of sick of always having to rebuild the house once it gets burned down and we’re looking for a more collaborative business environment where things don’t get burned down and the fire only goes one level and we kind of stop it there and keep…

Aaron Peterson (35:51)

…with hurricane hurricane proof windows and things like that. And so we don’t have to keep rebuilding the foundation and all of those elements, right? And that comes back to that collaboration we were talking about at the end of this, right? If the teams actually work together and collaborate more efficiently, we’re gonna have less of those failures. We’re gonna have less of the house getting knocked down.

Jamie Jones (36:13)

Yeah, absolutely. Well, that’s all the time we have for today. As Aaron mentioned earlier, we will have a two-part series coming up next looking at the History of Marketing, going all the way back to some Mad Men references. So make sure that you subscribe and don’t miss out and check us out. Re-watch our first episode if you missed it. And we’re just really happy to be here and thanks for your time.

Aaron Peterson (36:39)

Thanks everyone. See you soon. Bye.

Jamie Jones (36:40)

Bye.

Announcer (00:02)

And now you’re listening to the last analog marketers podcast. For marketers who live in the middle and the new marketers who inherit, using the past as the present and navigate the future with intention. With your hosts, Aaron Peterson and Jamie Jones.

Aaron Peterson

Hello and welcome to The Last Analog Marketers, the podcast with analog roots and digital reach. We’re very excited to be here and have you join us for our first of what will hopefully be many episodes. we’re your host, I’m Aaron Peterson.

Jamie Jones (00:42)

And I’m Jamie Jones. We grew up before the internet and we learned marketing in the 2000s, which I think gives us a unique perspective on the entire landscape of the transformation that is happening today, because we both come with 20 plus years of practice in marketing. Aaron and I have talked a lot about putting this show together. We’re finally here doing it.

But we have noticed a lot as individuals about what’s going on today and what we’ve missed as a collective group of marketers and what we think we have to gain in the future. So we’re just here to talk about it and we’d love to have a great audience pulled together to hear more about it.

Aaron Peterson (01:26)

Exactly. And you know, of course we have our experience. We have a lot to talk about. And you and I can talk for hours. We often do. but we’re also hoping to feature, you know, episodes where we have seasoned experts that we’ve met with or connected through those years because we want to help them, you know, let them impart some of their wisdom and guidance.

And we also want to create opportunities to have conversations with the next generation of marketers too, because we both have also been in situations where, you know, we’ve had to work with folks in generations younger than ours. And, you know, we’ve had enough I I guess wisdom to understand that there’s things that we can still learn from those people too, right? Like and we were in their boat at one point as well. And so I I think this is a great opportunity for us to sort of

look at some of the opportunities ahead and sort of explore some of the latest ideas and innovations with that group of people.

Jamie Jones (02:18)

He’s not calling us old, but he’s sort of calling us old a little bit. Okay. So now that you have the lay of the land and some of the goals for why we’re here, it’s probably a good idea to introduce ourselves. Not everybody knows us. I think some people listening will know us. Aaron, why don’t you give us a little bit of background on how you got into marketing?

Aaron Peterson (02:40)

Of course. So my name is Aaron Peterson and I’ve been working in marketing since 2005. I spent the first decade of my career on the agency side. I was managing multi million dollar budget media accounts, and eventually I was also serving as a research and planning director for a mid sized media buying agency. but then in the last decade plus I moved over to the client side where I’ve led major marketing efforts for Kantar, SurveyMonkey, and several other businesses in the space.

Jamie Jones (03:11)

And why marketing, right? Like we could have done other things. Like how did you sort of land in that facet of business?

Aaron Peterson (03:19)

For me, I accidentally stumbled into my calling as a marketer. I was the editor of my high school’s newspaper. and I always really loved creating content that resonated with my peers. That was always a really fun thing that I did. And so, you know, I went to college thinking, like, hey, I’m gonna probably go into marketing or advertising. and even in those early years when I was in high school, you know, I was already starting to be a part of that transition from analog to digital. I mean I can remember starting out laying out the newspapers on light tables that were, you know, glass top tables with lights underneath them and we literally were putting the pages out and laying out the newspaper pages on them and bringing in PageMaker as like this, you know, revolutionary way for us to lay out the pages online. And so all of that sort of stemmed me into this exciting excitement of like, I’m gonna go into journalism. But I got into college and in my first semester, ended up having a journalism class with a professor who was an editor for a newspaper in the region. and the way he talked about the career of a journalist and the way he talked about his own life, which could have been, his own experience, but it just imparted to me at a very impressionable time. And so I kind of got nervous about that. I was like, “I don’t know if that’s the life that I really want to be living.”

And at the same time, you know, I’d always been really involved in student government and paying attention to the news and things that were going on in the world. I was in student government in high school. I was in the student government in college, and so I ended up transitioning my major to political science. And through that I took tons of courses that were related that ended up being related to marketing. So, you know, statistics, sociology, psychology, all those sorts of things that you end up taking. And I thought I was gonna leave and either be a campaign manager for people running for office, or I was going to go work in an embassy because I was also minoring in French. And so I really thought it was one of those two career paths.

But again, it was one of those things where as I was at the end of college having conversations with my grandparents who were trying to give me life advice, they said, think about what it’s like to be a campaign manager. You’re gonna have to find a person and you could have to go from time to time and that could mess things up. And so you just really never know. And so when I got out of college, I decided I was gonna start just looking for a job. I wasn’t sure exactly what I was going to do. But it turned out I was going to Massachusetts. I was staying with my grandparents and my grandmother was playing Mahjong, with a group of friends of hers. She mentioned that I was in…

Jamie Jones (06:16)

She’s before her day playing mahjong. Popular now.

Aaron Peterson (06:19)

Right? That’s so popular now. And so she said to me, she said to this, you know, group, Hey, my my grandson’s in town, he’s looking for, you know, somewhere to, you know, to work. This is like his experience. And one of the women who was on the team,  in the Mahjong group said, you know, my son owns an ad agency. He’s actually looking for \an account coordinator, someone just to help with accounts. And so I got a job as an account coordinator there. And it kind of just has become this wild ride since then, like I said – ending up working at Kantor and SurveyMonkey and doing some of these really big things with big brands.

Jamie Jones (06:55)

Yeah, I mean wild ride is kind of the best way to describe it because I feel like no one sort of ends up here purposefully. It’s a little bit accidental. A little bit of your skills plus just like fate where it takes you, right? You know, for me, I was really, really creative. And honestly I think if my parents had been more supportive, I would have gone into fine arts because I just loved art classes. Like, that’s all I did. This is a painting that I painted behind me. I was always creative enough. Honestly, no one was even talking about being a graphic designer at the time, but that’s probably what I should have done. But my mom really pushed me into business. And so I thought, well, if I’m gonna be in business school, I might as well be a marketer because that feels like the most creative part of being in business. 

And I think it’s worked out pretty well for me, though sometimes I really do miss being like the creative, the creative piece of it. And I actually had one of my first internships where I got to be the project manager in charge of the creative team. So I would make sure that they checked off all of their different ads. Like it was for a cable company. And so as you can imagine, they had a million spots and a million different advertisements. And so my job was like literally to make sure that they hit all the different spots in the sizes and in the types of formats they needed to be in. And I thrived in that because I’m super analytical and very detail oriented. But you also have to be looking at creative all day. 

So, anyway, that’s sort of how I got into my first internships and then my first job, which happened totally by accident. I was trying to get a job with a different company. And this alumni who didn’t know me at all, I just sent a random email. He wrote me back saying, I hate this company. You definitely don’t want to work for this company. I’ve been trying to work for Blackboard. You should go try to work for Blackboard. And hey, here’s a link to an actual entry-level marketing position that they’re hiring for and their head of HR went to Penn State. And I’m like, okay, that sounds like a good opportunity for me. So I got really lucky. I don’t think people get jobs like that anymore. I think we’ve been chatting about how difficult the job market is today, but 20 years ago that’s what it was like. So I cut my teeth in those early days in product marketing. It was an education software technology company, which again at the time was so innovative and different and just the idea of learning completely online was still kind of revolutionary. I know today it seems like nothing, but that’s how long we’ve been in this business. From there I landed with a part of WPP, which was their long tail media buying arm. It had a couple of different names. And then I sort of headed over to Kantar, which is where we met. 

And I was there for 14 years and I really got to do like jack of all trades marketing, which some people say with a little bit of, I don’t know, disgust, but I think it was good. I got to do everything. I can do everything. And I feel like you and me, we approach all of our projects with that experience of feeling like we can kind of take anything on because we’ll figure it out. So, website management, event ownership, PR content. I mean, you know the drill.

Aaron Peterson (10:24)

And I mean I think also on just to add on to that too, I think that it’s useful to be able to be in that position because even when we are put into into roles where we aren’t that, where we do need to focus on a specific part of marketing, we’re so much more effective, in my opinion, at doing those roles because we understand the other elements of it that other people are doing or or should be doing on around us, right? To make it all work effectively. Which I do think makes a big difference, right? It’s like anything else. When you can walk a mile in the other person’s shoes, you can obviously understand them, work with them a lot better. And because we have done all of those roles before, we can be like, “Yes, I understand the stress you’re going through trying to plan that event.” You know what I mean? Or, “Yes, I can understand how frustrating that CRM program is getting those automation set up.”

Jamie Jones (11:19)

Been there, done that. Yeah, I think both you and I have had challenges where we people do come to us for our experience, strength, and hope, as they say, but we also don’t want to take over because we’re no longer in those positions of having to do all the work. So I think that’s an interesting balance. And I also think, I’ve I have thought about, why did I go into marketing? I should have done maybe some other facet of business. 

And I was telling you in preparing for this episode that my first boss asked me, how about sales? Like you’re doing product marketing, why don’t you jump into sales, wouldn’t that be good? And I sort of scoffed at the idea. I mean, gosh, over 20 years ago, why would I want to be in sales? I’m already in marketing. Isn’t this the job to have? And I think that’s one of the questions we’re gonna explore on these episodes, because twenty years ago it really did feel like I had fit into a place within the business that was a good fit for my personality, was a really good fit of being part of all the different things that happen within the business, a creative part of the business and maybe like in some ways a safe part of the business. I don’t necessarily think that that’s true today, but it definitely was 20 years ago. 

And I think the brand strategy, the execution, kind of just passion, creative. And even more recently, the stuff that I’ve focused on with data and analysis – like marketing’s been really fun, but I have a lot of questions about where it’s going. And those are kind of the things we’re going to start exploring in these episodes.

Aaron Peterson (12:48)

Yes, I’m very excited for all of our talks because as we’ve been exploring over the weeks with preparing for this, we could go into some of these topics for hours and hours and days and really what we have to do is focus ourselves so that we get through these episodes and don’t bore anyone. 

Okay. But brand strategy is actually a great transition into us talking about our time together at Kantar, right?

Jamie Jones (13:09)

Well, let me ask you because I think it’s interesting. And I always had this conversation because I’d meet people – you’d meet them online, because of course you’re working remotely. So half the time you never even met the people, but you’d meet and you’d say, “How’d you ‘grow up’ at Kantor?” Because everybody kind of has a different route towards the big conglomerate that Kantar became. And it usually started with a different brand. So tell me how you grew up at Kantar?

Aaron Peterson (13:36)

Yeah, I mean that’s one of the craziest parts about Kantar in the years there, right? It’s like how it transitioned through the years was an incredible journey to be a part of, which we’re gonna go into talking about all of that and the consolidation and the brand stuff. We’ll get all into those experiences as we talk through some of these other things. But yeah, so I had been working, as I said earlier, at a media buying agency. I was the head of research and planning there. And so I was using a lot of market research tools. And a number of the different tools I was using were Kantar-owned products. Which at the time, like you said, they all had very different branding. So they weren’t necessarily even known in the market as a Kantar product, in some cases, unless you were really, really paying close attention to industry buys and acquisitions. 

But I ended up wanting to leave the agency world. I wanted to move back to Boston because I was living in central Pennsylvania at the time. My husband and I had first met there and we kind of wanted to be back in the city. And so I started looking around and I saw that Compete, which was a Kantar company, was hiring not for a marketing person at the time, but for a client service lead. Now Compete was an interesting product and brand. They owned, at the time, the largest behavioral data set in the US. And so basically what that meant was like every millisecond that you were online on your device, if you were in the panel, we were at Compete getting a data point for what was happening on that device and what you were doing. So it really allowed us to do a lot of competitive Intel stuff. 

I did the client service work there for a year and a half or so. I was managing some big clients. I had Sony Pictures, Sprint. I did work for Verizon and ATT because I was sitting in the tech and telecom team. So it was largely working in that sort of space and just advising them on what to do with their marketing strategies and their digital and web strategies based off of this behavioral data and how people were behaving online on their devices. 

But I also at one point saw that there was this opening on the marketing team. And I was like, “There’s my chance. I’ve got to move over into marketing.” Not that I didn’t enjoy the client service stuff; it was really great and it was really interesting. And I got to fly out to their offices. So, going up to the top floor of Sony Pictures Tower in Hollywood is like a crazy thing to do when you’re 31 years old and to be like, “My god, I’m going up and presenting to all the suits at the top of the tower.” 

But I knew I didn’t really want to do that forever. I really wanted to be into marketing, which is where I thought I’d have a lot more success and a lot more satisfaction. I was able to get that role. But not long after that, Kantar started doing a series of consolidations of their brands. So, first Compete was merged with a company called Dynamic Logic that did media effectiveness work, that was combined to create a company called Millward Brown Digital. Then that was combined with the legacy Millward Brown as they started to put Kantar in front of all of the names and that became Kantor Millward Brown. And then they decided okay…

Jamie Jones (16:40)

Really long logos.

Aaron Peterson (16:42)

Yeah. My God, those logos were so hard to work with. I feel bad for the graphic designers during that era because it must have just been so frustrating for them.

And then Kantar did eventually make it to what was the end goal, right? Which was a single brand, single consolidation, single website, just Kantar, dropped all the other separate brands. Everything got reorganized internally as these sort of subsections. And you and I got to work on and through all those massive changes, and it was a lot of work that went into that. A lot of really interesting work. 

In the moment, it didn’t always necessarily seem like it was the most fun. But the outcome and being able to look back at that and say, “Hey, you know, we were able to take fifteen or so brands and effectively do all that work and consolidate them down,” like, that was a really cool thing to get to be a part of that, you know. And so eventually as all that happened, I was doing content and thought leadership, the PR, hosted events, and a lot of the digital marketing, managing the websites and stuff for Kantar in North America. And of course, through that process, that’s kind of how I got to meet and interact with you. 

So why don’t you tell a little bit about your side, then, and how you ended up getting into the single Kantar world?

Jamie Jones (18:00)

Well, I hope you all appreciate our jokingness because I don’t think anyone survives corporate America without having like the scars to go along with it. And I think the joking is probably the best coping mechanism for the good, bad and the ugly. So

Aaron Peterson (18:18)

That or you go into alcohol, which is not as good of a coping mechanism. 

Jamie Jones (18:22)

Maybe we’ll have an episode where we have some drinks, but not today, not the first one. But anyway, we laughed through it because it was super fun. And I’m glad, Aaron, you had the opportunity to appreciate some of those experiences, like Sony in the moment. Cause I think sometimes that’s part of our career is you don’t even recognize when it’s good until it’s over. And then you look back and think, I kind of miss how that was. 

So I also came up through Milward Brown, but mine’s a little different than Aaron’s. I came up through the brand tracking business, kind of the traditional Milward Brown business. And I was joking that the calf was fat. Their business was doing really, really well. I didn’t know that at the time. Only in retrospect did I realize how good it was and how far, far it fell. 

But my role was definitely a little bit of a stretch for my experience, but I’m so glad that I was, given the opportunity. And those first years at 11 Madison [Ave., New York, NY] were so interesting. The floor was color-coded by which part of Kantar you worked for. So I only knew the people in the green section because that was the Millward Brown section. And there were a whole bunch of other sections that you just didn’t know those people. Like, that’s the yellow section. That’s the pink section. We don’t talk to those people. So it was funny working for a small company within a big company. But it was all one company, but it sort of wasn’t. And as Aaron said, eventually they really did try to consolidate things together.

Aaron Peterson (19:54)

Well, not only that, it’s just funny how different that is from the general corporate office culture now, right? Everybody’s about being open, connecting, like, “Sit where you want, sit across departments,” all that sort of thing. Now, in practice, that doesn’t usually happen because people end up sitting still in their groups and their teams. But, just the way that the business culture also has changed is really a lot.

But yeah, it really was when leadership finally decided to sort of consolidate the marketing functions, which was somewhat in line with the consolidation to a single Kantar. It wasn’t necessarily a hundred percent lined up with that, but it was somewhat similar in timing. And that was really I think where we really connected and came together, us, you and me, but also just like the whole team as a marketing team. I credit a lot of that to the person that was selected to be our lead, which was our former boss Melissa Wilson. You know, she came in, she had a lot of that sort of the right attitude about how to approach the business. She was really collaborative. She recognized that she had a team of experts under her and she didn’t come in and try to tell us what to do or take over our roles or anything like that. She really listened to us and just supported us being great at what we were doing. And she was like, “What do you need to be better at your job or be successful at your job?” And I think she also just enabled that sort of collaboration across us. 

So, you know, I was managing the big Kantar event, Breakthrough [Marketing Summit]. And it wasn’t until she really came along that it was kind of okay for me to extend the invitation out and have more of the marketing team be involved in it and have more of you guys come to the event and be a part of putting together the event. And I think that’s the years that it became really incredible and we had just like the best events and the best turnout and all that was because we all really did that. 

Jamie Jones (21:46)

The Compete CMO summit, right? It had a completely different name. So those are the types of things that marketing gets put in charge of, right? It’s not just the external branding and creating a new color scheme. It’s internally bringing together the entire organization for one marquee event. Like, those are the things that marketing doesn’t always get the credit for. Like, people see the branding, they don’t realize you’re actually bringing together an organization through putting on an event like that.

Aaron Peterson (22:17)

Well, yeah, and you’re hundred percent right. That’s a perfect example because at the time, one of the things that people, especially internally, maybe didn’t realize, and maybe some of them still don’t know that this is what happened, but the [Compete] Digital CMO summit, we were seeing declining attendance and we were starting to struggle to get people to come speak to it because when it started as a Compete event, it was a really exciting thing. It had big names, Martin Sorrell, you know, big names in the industry were coming to present to it, but it was trailing off a little bit.

And it was because the naming of it was turning it off. The digital part was a bit of a deterrent because by then we had moved past the sort of digital versus traditional. We were talking about integrated marketing in the industry. So that kind of took some people back. And then the CMO part also pushed people away because we’d have clients who were the VP or director of research for Facebook or Meta at the time who were doing lots of work with Kantar on research. And they were like, “Well, my title’s not CMO, so I don’t feel like I’m invited to this event.” So, not only did we change the event because we were trying to bring the thing together, but there were a lot of strategic reasons that went behind making that event into something different so that it worked for the broad Kantar as a whole group once it was that, right? Because it wasn’t going to work anymore for all of Kantar if it just stayed as the Digital CMO summit. It would have continued to fail. 

So, yeah, we really did make a big impact and we saw those impacts too. Like you said, one of the things is we were able to start to measure the influence of those things and look and see, like, “Hey, how many of our existing clients that we deeply integrated into these programs – like content programs, having them in thought leadership and in PR, and then having them speak on stage – how many of those clients either maintained or increased their budget with us year over year, when we maybe were seeing losses in other places?

And so there were a lot of ways in which that I think really brought us together and made the team just feel like we were a much more robust function within the organization and less like we were this sporadic set of specialists.

Jamie Jones (24:30)

Right. And I think event management really brings a marketing team together, right? And I think that’s probably how we became, you know, friends, not just colleagues, because it’s late nights, it’s early mornings, it’s “This person doesn’t have a name tag.” It’s, you know, “This thing isn’t going correctly. This person doesn’t have their specialized meal.” I mean, man, people are never more high maintenance than when they’re attending an event. And I have never been put in a position of catering to more different specialized needs of senior executives than I have in event management. But you do it and it’s fun. And it’s one of those things that I don’t think marketing necessarily gets credit for, but it is really important because those branding opportunities of talking about Kantar in front of our clients and prospects retain business and create new business in a way that is measurable and sometimes is challenging to measure. But I think the best companies I’ve worked for see the value in those types of opportunities and continue to invest money in them year over year.

Aaron Peterson (25:32)

Yeah, you’re a hundred percent right. I mean, I can think back to – as just another quick aside –  but I can think back to when we were doing one of the last Breakthrough events that we did right before the pandemic hit, and we were doing the site visit and testing the hotels to make sure they were the right fit. And I remember I’d gotten to the point where not only was I thinking about all the elements that go into producing an event and the the stage and all the dinners and entertainment and all the logistics and stuff. But I was getting to the point where I’d go into the hotel room and I would be testing the water pressure of the showers. I’d be laying on the bed and turning off all the lights to see if there were lights that flashed in the room because, are the lights gonna flash in the room all night and wake you up? And I was like, we need to make this pick the best experience and if there’s things we can do to make this experience better, that’s what’s gonna make people remember how this was so awesome. So it’s like, to your point, we don’t get credit for a lot of those little things in the back end that we think of as marketers, but that’s where our specialty really comes in. It’s really thinking beyond what’s just right in front of us.

Jamie Jones (26:40)

No, you’re totally right. We’re way more than just marketers. And in every role I’ve ever had, marketing is the default. If there’s not a standard department to take care of something, it’s marketing’s job. So we end up really collecting all kinds of challenges within an organization and figuring them out, which is what we talked about in the beginning. We’re people who figure things out.

Aaron Peterson (27:02)

Yeah, and I love that. I mean, that’s…I’m a puzzle solver. I love to do puzzles, I’m a problem solver. That’s what I was gonna say.

We really could go all in all day about Kantar stories, and obviously, audience, don’t worry. We have lots of tales to share from our experiences through the years, not just at Kantar, but in all of our different roles and different places. We’ll weave those in throughout this podcast as we continue to have episodes. 

But for right now, let’s transition and just talk a little bit about “Why did we want to start a conversation about marketing in 2026?” I mean, I feel like we grew up in an analog world. You know, we were still at the time where our parents would send us out at night in the summer and they would just yell, or we’d have to be back by a certain time, and it was fine. And

I don’t know if my parents have any idea of where I went to or where I rode my bike to in those days or anything like that. But since then, we have built our careers in an evolving digital one. And I think that puts us into a small group of marketers who sort of exist in that space between traditional and digital. Not only have we lived in both worlds, but we actually grew up with the digital world. So we’ve not only been growing alongside it, in ways we’ve also been growing with it, right? And having impact back and forth between it and the way that we interact with it. 

And as our former bosses and some of our mentors are starting to hit some of the later stages of their careers and or even some of them have started to retire, which is just crazy for me to think about. Again, I don’t mean to call us out as old, but I do think it’s important that we capture some of those stories and share some of the insights across generations that otherwise might be lost. I think there’s a lot of things that textbooks or even the articles that get written in the trade publications don’t necessarily see the level of detail or the background behind everything that happens in the marketplace. 

And so, just like we were sharing a few little small insights a few minutes ago. There’s so many things for us to hear and learn about from the people who have been here and been doing it, but also to learn from those new people, right? And those future marketers and how they’re approaching these challenges and seeing it, who aren’t from an analog world, who’ve grown up in a digital only world, and so their perspective is very different. And it’s not that it’s a bad perspective; which, sometimes there’s a tendency to wanna create animosity between generations, right? 

But that’s the opposite of what we want to do here, right? Like our purpose in this is the opposite. We’d instead want to make sure that we’re bridging the gap between the generations to say, “Hey, how can we make sure that we’re learning and understanding from each other?” Because there’s still people like me and you and some of our superior former bosses or whatever who are still in this industry who still have things to learn from those younger people. But obviously as that next generation comes forward there’s a place for, a role for us to play in helping to make sure that they can see and understand how we got to where we are right now and how that might help them make better decisions as they approach some of the problems that they’re presented in the future.

Jamie Jones (30:25)

Yeah, I mean, I think you hit the nail on the head. We’re talking about bridging the gap. And I think that’s what we, you and I, feel really strongly called for this project, this initiative, whatever we’re doing here. Because there are stories to tell from the past and also a lot of great thinking coming from the future. And we feel sort of in between both of those. 

And so we’re here to recognize how important the people who’ve come before us have been, how important the 20 years of our experience has been. And then also the people who are growing up through it now and what they can bring, the up-and-coming practitioners. They’re mastering new and emerging technologies. I like to think that I can always take any technology and be a master at it, but truthfully, the older I get, the more I’m like, “I don’t know if I want to learn that thing.” And it makes me realize that when we were in our early parts of our career and other people said that to us, that it is just a natural thing that happens in your life and your career where you start to get a little bit rooted in older ways. And so we’re trying to create opportunities not only for us to learn more about how we can be better marketers, but to bring that information out to like the larger audience of friends and colleagues and people we don’t even know.

Aaron Peterson (31:41)

Yeah, and I mean, I think overall we just found that there was sort of a space or a need, now more than ever, to sort of open up a conversation about where we are, how we got here, and where we’re going as marketers, as an industry, as a society. We certainly have ideas and opinions on that.

Jamie Jones (32:02)

Yeah, if you haven’t already keyed into this, Aaron and I are not quiet and we bring our personalities and our perspective and our voice to almost every conversation we’ve ever been a part of. We’ve been told that we dominate a conference table and a whiteboard session. So if you’re into that, keep tuning in. If you’re not, then nice knowing you. But that is definitely our personality.

Aaron Peterson (32:29)

Yes. Well our charming personalities and outspokenness aside, I do think that forty plus combined years of experience and expertise in a multitude of industries at least qualifies us for something, right? Most importantly, I think we’ve cultivated a number of great friendships and relationships with smart and really thoughtful colleagues who I think will enhance our conversations and bring additional perspectives. And so with that being said, Jamie I know that one thing that we wanted to make sure we did in this first episode was just to quickly outline what our three goals were for this project. So as sort of our last segment before we wrap up this episode, why don’t you walk us through what the three goals were that we have for the project?

Jamie Jones (33:18)

I hope that these are always the same, but they may change. But as of today, and in the what, four or five conversations we’ve already had in planning for kicking off this podcast, the goals that we talked about were first and foremost: Infotainment. like, I don’t know about you, but being in my head with my own thoughts isn’t always a safe place to be. So we really wanted to bring you something that’s fun and light, but also informational, quick hitting. A relevant distraction from your day-to-day, something you possibly could listen to at work or on a walk with your dog. and so hopefully as time goes on and more episodes are created, you’ll start to see that and look forward to it. Look forward to that episode drop every week because it’s 20 or 30 minutes that you get something really great to listen to.

The second goal, as we’ve talked about a couple of times, is part guide, part historian, part fellow hiker. You know, we’re in this boat with you. We’re seeing a lot of things in the industry. We’ve seen a lot of things in the industry. We definitely don’t know where this is going, but we’re curious about it. And so we’re here to bring that information to a talking audience and you know, hopefully get some other perspectives from, as Aaron mentioned, our friends and colleagues from along the way. 

And last but not least, we have a lot of creative energy. I told you alrI have had creative energy my whole life. So, since we walk in stores, listen to ads, listen to other podcasts, and stuff is constantly popping into our minds about how marketing and advertising and just overall branding works in the world, we just want to bring that to an audience and discuss it more and figure out what we think works, what doesn’t work. And get some perspectives from other people. So each week, we’ll try to do that for you guys and hopefully it’ll be entertaining for all.

Aaron Peterson (35:10)

My husband, I drive him crazy when we’re driving down the road because I critique every single billboard that we pass. And not just them like that’s bad or that’s great. But if it’s bad, I am gonna spend at least another fifteen minutes dissecting why it’s bad and what I would have done to fix it. And he doesn’t want to hear it. But maybe you guys do. 

Jamie Jones (35:31)

Bring that here. Yes, exactly. All right. Well, we have chatted for a good amount of time today. I think we probably could have gone twice as long, but we’ll save that for another session. We are gonna try to end every week with the same sort of ending, and we’re gonna call it The One Last Thing. So when we have guests, we’ll ask the guests to answer The One Last Thing. But since there’s no guest today, I’m gonna ask Aaron to end with The One Last Thing with something that he’s been seeing the last couple of weeks with the World Cup going on.

Aaron Peterson (36:05)

Yeah, so one of the things that I’ve seen recently that really stuck with me, The One Last Thing, is these clever approaches some of these major brands really took related to the World Cup and branding stadiums that weren’t sponsors of the games. I mean Levi’s did it in such a subtle way, they wrapped their logo, which has such a distinct shape to it, but they just wrapped it in white cloth or vinyl wrap of some kind. And they did it in such a tight way that the shape of their logo was still visible.

And then I also saw that Gillette did something similar where they covered their branding on the stadium in Foxboro, Massachusetts, with what appeared to be a large glob of, like, white shaving cream foam. And I was just really impressed and inspired. You know, it’s such a clever and classy way to handle something that’s somewhat of an awkward situation, right? I know from personal experience negotiating brand contracts with a large stadium that there’s a lot of ins and outs behind exactly what you get branded. And it’s like, is your logo going to appear above the concession stands or not? Is it going to be like in the VIP room or not? And all of those elements you build into it. And so I just thought that like those brands, that’s a master class, I think, in sticking to their brand principles. They didn’t have to step away from who they were for as a brand. They didn’t have to do anything that was sort of loud or obnoxious.

But they just, they stuck to their identity even in a situation that was awkward and maybe not the easiest. And so I just think that that’s something to really be celebrated in a time when I think, authentic authenticity really, really matters a lot.

Jamie Jones (37:43)

No, I totally agree. It’s been super fun to watch all of the brands interact with the World Cup. I’m gonna be so sad when it’s over because it’s been so fun to watch, but I love that example and I thought both of the stadiums did a really good job leaning into something that, as you said, could have been really awkward. Well, with that, it concludes our first ever episode of “The Last Analog Marketers.” Thanks for joining us.

Be sure to ‘like’ and ‘subscribe’ so you don’t miss out on anything that is to come – conversations and interviews, the analog history, the digital world, the future. We’re gonna cover it all –  brand, creative, media, research, the role of marketing, approaches like ABM, and so much more. So thank you for listening and have a good day.

Aaron Peterson (38:31)

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