A History of Marketing / Episode 42
This week, I’m sharing my excellent conversation with Geoffrey Colon, a creative strategist and author of Disruptive Marketing. Geoffrey is a self-described “hybrid” marketer with a career spanning the full spectrum of the industry, from running street teams for Red Bull to leading brand strategy at Microsoft, with stints at Ogilvy, Dentsu and his own agencies in between. He’s won Cannes Lions, Webby’s, and bylined articles in Fast Company and Advertising Age.
In our conversation, Geoffrey draws a direct line between the first radio ads of the 1920s and the creator economy of today. He argues that the most successful marketers aren’t the ones try to invent something new, but those who embrace the art of the “remix” copying, transforming, and combining ideas from the past.
Here is what you’ll learn in this episode:
The First Radio Ad: The story of station WEAF in 1922, and how a real estate promotion for apartments in the Bronx created the blueprint for interruptive advertising methods still in use today.
The Art of the Remix: Why Geoffrey believes we overvalue “originality” and undervalue the power of borrowing ideas from adjacent industries to create something new.
Guerrilla Tactics: A look back at the era of Red Bull street teams, and why physical, guerrilla marketing is making a comeback in a digital-first world.
The Power of Unlearning: Why the age of AI isn’t just learning new tools, but being willing to “unlearn” old ways without falling victim to sunk costs.
Be sure to check out Geoffrey’s newsletter at Creative Studies and his popular TikTok.
Listen to the podcast: Spotify / Apple Podcasts
Thank you to Xiaoying Feng, a Marketing Ph.D. Candidate at Syracuse, who volunteers to review and edit transcripts for accuracy and clarity.
The First Radio Ad: WEAF and the Birth of Broadcast Marketing
Andrew Mitrak: Geoffrey Colon, welcome to A History of Marketing.
Geoffrey Colon: Thanks for having me.
Andrew Mitrak: You wrote a book called Disruptive Marketing, which we’ll talk a lot about. The very start of the book talks about the first radio ad on WEAF back in 1922. Can you talk about this story and how did you kind of come across this?
Geoffrey Colon: So WEAF was a station in New York City. At the time, radio was music and people talking on it. They would do things no different than today. They would maybe talk about what was happening in the world. That’s where most people were getting news, probably similar to how a lot of people get news on a news feed now on a social media app. You would turn the radio on and listen, I think as a group, to sort of figure out, “Oh, what’s going on?” and you would be entertained that way.
And at the time, they had to figure out how to monetize radio. It was expensive. The technology to run it was expensive. And I think the station said, “Well, how are we going to make this work? Because we have to figure out how to pay for all of this equipment.” And one of the people there got the idea of, “Well, why don’t we talk about things that need to be promoted?” And they came up with an idea of, “Let’s promote this local housing that was basically available in the Bronx where families could go live.” And that was really the first radio ad as we knew it.
And that, I guess, was the beginning of the end, if you want to look at it that way, Andrew, in the sense that all media always has advertising that invades it. So you have radio, you have television, you have the internet, you have social media, you have whatever comes next. But advertising always figures out how to invade these spaces where people pay attention to something.
Andrew Mitrak: It’s a great story. I’m wondering, reading your book, it was published in 2016. It’s all here and now, future-looking work. And by the way, a lot of the future sort of, the things that you say in 2016 will happen in the future, happened in the future. So it’s very prescient in a lot of ways. But you start the book with this case study from 1922. What was your thinking? Why was that? Why did you feel the desire to start with this particular case study? What lessons did you want readers to draw from it?
Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, there’s a tendency of us in marketing and many fields, we don’t really look back on really older history. We have a tendency of looking at things that have happened in the last two, maybe five-year cycle. And what I wanted to do is note like, hey, wait a minute. Here is a case of something that is 80-some years old and it basically explains how almost everything, what happens in every media space.
So like when people say, “Oh, the world is about attention and capturing attention,” it’s like, well, that was the case back in 1922 when this radio station decided, “Oh, let’s use attention, people’s attention to promote an opportunity to live somewhere.” I mean, we’ve always been in an attention economy. I don’t think that’s new at all. And that’s what I was really trying to show. And I’ve always been a believer of like everything is a remix. If we go back and study history, it doesn’t necessarily, you know, what’s the phrase? It doesn’t repeat, but it rhymes. And that I think we’re not good as an industry of looking at how a lot of things are remixed and recycled from older eras that we just figure out like, “Oh, how do we make that fit the new era?” This concept of copy, transform, and combine.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, no, it’s totally true. It’s a theme that we’ve covered a lot on the show of that there’s these things that feel like contemporary debates within marketing or advertising. Is it creativity or is it measurement? Is it storytelling or is it salesmanship? And these debates, they’ve been happening for like 150 years. It’s like a lot of the things, it’s like, “Oh yeah, you could just trace it back.” And it’s not new. And it’s like, gosh, wouldn’t you think like we would just acknowledge that or at least start like, “Yeah, these are debates that have happened. Let’s kind of move forward from there.”
Geoffrey Colon: Yeah. Performance versus brand. I mean, a lot of people could say, wait a minute, that, you know, David Ogilvy was talking about that because he was always like, “If advertising doesn’t sell, then it’s not really doing what it’s supposed to do.” We have those debates now in this current era where it’s like, “Well, does it help sell?” It’s like, all right, we’ve been talking about this for 50, 60 years.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, totally. So one of the things that I like about this WEAF radio case study story is that one of the things is that this idea of radio ads didn’t come from radio people. That it came from like telephone people at AT&T. And that it’s like there was an innovative thing at the time, right? It was radio and it was ads and it was selling stuff and that was a way to monetize it. So there was innovation there, even though it was also interruptive. But it was people borrowing ideas from an adjacent industry and applying them in a novel way. And it seems like that’s a theme throughout your work is that that’s an angle for creativity and for the eye. Can you speak to that idea of borrowing from adjacent industries and applying them?
Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, I mean, I’ve always been a generalist, not to use that term, but you know, how do you look at the world that, you know, in a wide manner? And then say, “They’re doing this over there. How do we apply that in our area?” But again, remix it so it fits our area. I sort of cringe when people will sort of say, “We need to go out and get an expert to do this particular job.” And then the job isn’t really creative or the output from that job isn’t really creative. And then people will sometimes be frustrated and say, “Well, it’s not as creative as I thought it would be.” And it’s like, well, yeah, because you’re basically having people who are not really wide, they’re just deep. And they’re doing exactly what you expect them to do.
I mean, there’s plenty of areas in marketing where I see this. Like if you market healthcare or insurance, you are probably doing a lot of the same things there. It wasn’t until a couple of years ago when you had organizations like GEICO and Progressive and State Farm said, “Wait a minute, let’s throw that old playbook out because they actually hired people who came from different industries to figure out what their marketing and advertising was going to look like.” So I think, you know, we should take more risk in terms of who can we get that is unique to basically apply their learnings to our field.
We’ve seen this in lots of different areas. Even if people say like, “Well, you wouldn’t hire someone outside medicine to work on medicine.” The thing is doctors and scientists are still inspired by lots of areas outside of medicine that they then apply. This is why, you know, you have a lot of medical scientists now saying things like, “Hey, one of the best things you could do is actually fitness.” And fitness doesn’t necessarily fall into like medical science, Andrew. It falls into like, well, wait a minute, that deals with like VO2 max and basically walking and doing things that should really, you know, come natural to people. But, you know, the more you apply things from other areas, the more that actually can lead to some interesting outcomes for, you know, how we basically navigate life.
Andrew Mitrak: Totally. You know, this is like another area that even within the guests that I’ve spoken with, I’ve spoken with real like, you know, marketing PhDs, experts, and folks who like are very, very deep into marketing as a discipline. And then I just had an interview that I just recently published with a historian at Nike. And basically the gist of the story was that, you know, their first head of marketing was their lawyer. Phil Knight was an accountant. Carolyn Davidson, who designed the Nike logo, was a student. And all these people who aren’t trained marketers, didn’t learn about the 4 Ps, you know, and didn’t get an MBA, but they just had good instincts, they had a passion, and they made many of the best marketing decisions of all time.
And it’s just kind of a thing to square. Like what is it? Is it worthwhile to read a bunch of marketing books and really learn it? Or what does that say when so many like folks who seem like amateurs or are not experts but can make a lot of the same, the right decisions on it? So like, yeah, what’s your reaction to that?
Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, I mean, I’m in the middle there. I’ve always been more of like a hybrid where it’s like, I think it’s bad if you’re a person who’s like, “Well, you shouldn’t study anything on marketing. You should just go do it and wing it.” I mean, like there’s a lot to learn from the science of marketing. I think like it’s important to study those things. That being said, I also think it’s good to not be mired in, “Oh, well, that’s the way to do it and that’s the only way to do it.” Because you don’t make up any ground that way, Andrew, when you sort of get stuck with the, “Well, this is how things have worked the last 60 years. That’s what we’re going to continue to do.” Because ultimately that’s what leads to fatigue from most audiences where they’re just like, “I know I’m looking at advertising or I know I’m being marketed to.” And then it becomes less effective.
So I think it’s somewhere in the middle. I always tell students who are marketing majors, “Oh, I’m glad you’re doing that. But go build a business too. Go learn how to actually build a business, even if it’s like selling t-shirts online. Just go learn how to do something so you’re not a person that I call the professional managerial class, people who have advanced degrees, but when you say, ’Have you ever built anything?’ they’re like, ’Well, no, I’ve only managed things.’ I’m like, ah, I don’t know if you really, you know, I don’t know if that’s all that you need to do to make things really happen in life.”
Andrew Mitrak: Or go sell something as well. Like building something and selling something, it’s like your empathy for a salesperson as a marketer changes so much if you’ve had to like sell and close a deal yourself or things like that where it’s like, yeah, you have to have like life experience to apply it as well.
To kind of wrap a bow on the WEAF radio case study, it’s like on the one hand, this is a hundred years ago now and there are still radio ads and there’s still interruptive things. But then part of the lesson is like, can’t we evolve past that? Can’t we get past interruption? But then interruption still exists. And does that just mean that it’s been around for a hundred years, it’ll be around for a hundred more years and there’s that Lindy effect where it’s like it’s just existed forever and it’ll continue? There’s some reason to that? Or is the lesson like, no, we need to really think of how to break away from it? Do both of those things exist at the same time? Or what’s your thought about that?
Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, I mean, I think if you didn’t have interruptions, you would just sort of have what we have with streaming nowadays. When I mean streaming, like when a streamer goes on YouTube and is on there for four hours or they’re on Twitch and you’re like, “Wow, like you’re not taking a break at all.” You just, ultimately the audience fades as well from scenarios like that. I’m not saying that everything has to have advertising breaks, but I think advertising when you do interrupt, you can decide what, you know, whether you want to take a break and not pay attention or you may happen to pay attention.
I don’t know what the answer is there because I think if you integrate more advertising or more sponsorship into media, people start to get upset about that as well because they’re listening to you talk like you and I are talking and then all of a sudden they’re like, “Wait a minute, they’re talking about something and I think they’re trying to promote it.” And I don’t like that either. So it’s, you know, it’s, we’re in a weird world where we’re always trying to figure out the best way to sell or give awareness to something. And I don’t know what the right answer is.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, sort of, I guess that’s part of the fun. It’s like an evergreen challenge and we continue to experiment.
Guerrilla Marketing: From Ancient Rome to West Philadelphia
Andrew Mitrak: And so, okay, shifting from that example, I also want to talk about some of the kind of historical moments of your own career because a topic that I haven’t covered at all in the show is guerrilla marketing. And can you just share when did you first start doing guerrilla marketing?
Geoffrey Colon: You know, I was really, I got really into like graffiti and street art having grown up not far away from Philadelphia where graffiti actually, the modern graffiti I should say, was invented. If we look at, you know, where graffiti really originated from, there’s cases of it going back to ancient Rome and ancient Greece. But the modern version of it came from Philadelphia and then it was really...
Andrew Mitrak: Like the opening of The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air [Laughs]
Geoffrey Colon: Correct. Correct. No, that’s actually a good example. And then New York City took it and put it on another level. So I’ve always really been interested in guerrilla marketing because you are doing something out of context, out of the norm. You might be, you may see a blank wall somewhere and you’re like, “Okay, how are we going to take that over and paint it in a way that draws attention to what our product is that we’re doing?” It might be what we’ve seen recently with people setting up real-life versions of people in storefronts and getting people’s attention because they’re like, “Whoa, what is going on in there?” There was a recent case of a B2B product called Ramp that recently did this in New York City.
So it’s, you know, guerrilla marketing does exist still. There’s just less cases of it because you can’t track it. You can’t really see what the effectiveness of it is. But it makes for good PR and it can be exciting because you can do stuff that’s just sort of out of the norm that we have usually been doing, I would say the last, you know, 20 years where we sort of stick to the playbook.
Andrew Mitrak: It’s funny because you mentioned how you don’t see as much of it anymore. And it is one where as I became aware of marketing, I would hear a lot about guerrilla marketing, right? And I think that in the early 2000s-ish to maybe the late, early 2010s, I feel like I just heard guerrilla marketing as sort of a buzzword a bit. And then I don’t hear as much about it anymore. Is it because it’s been absorbed into normal marketing? Is it just like a PR stunt, I guess? Or is it that there’s actually less of it happening as the world becomes so much more digital? Or it’s not really a digital guerrilla marketing per se and that’s, and it’s not trackable and therefore so much marketing is digital that it’s just less guerrilla is part of it? Is that sort of, like why is it disappearing, I guess is my long-winded way of asking a question.
Geoffrey Colon: I think we’ve, I think you hit the nail right on the head. I think we have over-indexed on digital. And so we don’t really put an emphasis on guerrilla marketing because that’s in the physical world, it’s in an analog world. The reason I think it’s starting to creep up again is because people are doing a lot more things in real life. But also a lot of that scales. Canadians actually were really big on guerrilla marketing. They, in Vancouver, they called it culture jamming. That, I mean, like Canada really sort of led the way. I think Kalle Lasn who wrote the book on guerrilla marketing is Canadian. So I don’t know what it is north of the border that made Canadians do that, but I think they saw something that said, “Wait a minute, let’s take advantage of the physical space and then figure out ways to draw attention to ourselves.” And then that’s just, that has spread across the world, you know, pretty much to every territory, every country now does some form of guerrilla marketing for brands.
Andrew Mitrak: And as you were early in your career, you were doing some guerrilla marketing yourself. And I think, did you work with the Red Bull street team?
Geoffrey Colon: I did. Yeah. That was pretty wild.
Andrew Mitrak: What was that story?
Geoffrey Colon: I was running sort of my own, this is early 2000s, my own influencer business out of my apartment in Brooklyn. And Red Bull approached me because I used to do a lot of street teams for music releases. Anytime there was something big coming out in the music world, street teams were the most effective way to call attention to that because you still had physical record stores. So you wanted to make sure people knew when something was coming out. And they said, “Hey, we want to hire you to figure out how to do this to get our product out to more people.”
And Red Bull at the time was really only popular, the first area in North America that it was really popular was Miami because they sort of figured out how to get the product into nightclubs there. And then they said to the bartenders, “We’ll give you this product for free, but can you push it based on these drinks that you can mix together?” And then more people were like, “What is that?” And it’s like, “Oh, that’s Red Bull.” And that drove word of mouth that then got the beverage to grow off-premise. So it actually started to show up in like delis and grocery stores.
But I ran, you know, street teams in New York for a while for Red Bull. And now we still see the cars out there with the can on the back that drive around. I mean, again, that’s a lot of guerrilla marketing as well. Like people will always ask me like, “What do you get from that?” But you get attention. You go to an event, people see things. Sampling was really big. So, you know, we would do a lot of things where we would actually get the can in people’s hands to try it. You know, I don’t see a lot of that anymore.
Andrew Mitrak: I don’t know if I hang out in the areas where that might occur anymore. But I know when I was in college, I think that was the very first time I had a Red Bull, I think, was somebody with a car and a can and handing it to me. And being a poor college student, I’m like, “All right, sure, I’ll get some free calories out of this.” And that, I don’t know, I didn’t convert me. I don’t drink many Red Bulls, but you know, it got me to try it and be aware of it a lot.
So how did you transition from having your own agency to working at Ogilvy?
Geoffrey Colon: I sort of went from having my own to working at a couple of other places. And then, you know, Ogilvy had an opportunity and I was working at a really large digital agency before I went to Ogilvy. And I just was like, “Wow, it would be interesting to be at a big traditional agency at a time when they were really yearning for people with social media and digital experience.” And so, you know, I had a great boss there. She totally got it, was really a good social media marketer herself. And we just were able to apply a really lot of interesting strategy to the clients that we had. But I was also able to learn a lot from like the traditional creative directors there and how things were put together, you know, for what I guess we would consider old media. But I think, you know, when you understand that entire mix of how to buy media, how to make creative, what does that creative look like, what do these stories look like, what’s a customer journey look like? I mean, it’s a good education, I think, to be in an organization like that.
David Ogilvy and the Hybrid Marketer: Balancing Creativity and Fundamentals
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, you were kind of talking about how you want to do both. You want to be a hybrid creative, but also you want to know the principles of marketing and you want to know the fundamentals. And it seems like that’s something you get out of a place like Ogilvy is some of the structure and discipline and kind of the big company thinking and almost understand which parts need to be disrupted in a way because you’ve kind of seen how a larger agency works firsthand.
Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, and I mean, David Ogilvy is interesting because he has tons of case studies of things that I would consider to be disruptive for their time and place. I mean, a lot of times people are like, “Oh, that’s an old stodgy, you know, advertising agency.” But when you look at the case studies again, going back to how we look at history, it’s like, wait, what, you know, they did then could be applied now. And that can be quite disruptive. Putting an eye patch on someone who is, you get people to pay attention to the fact, “Oh, why does that person have an eye patch? Oh, that’s an interesting shirt.” You know, that’s, those are interesting tactics.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. So how much, so you mentioned David Ogilvy and you worked at the agency Ogilvy and he had, he had probably retired in what, like the 80s and had passed away by the time you were at the company, right? But was his legacy still there? Like does his legacy a big part of the, you know, it still bears his name, so clearly it’s at some point it’s there. But do they still kind of like give everybody Confessions of an Advertising Man and have them like read Ogilvy on Advertising to sort of understand sort of some of the history of it?
Geoffrey Colon: Your first day there, I remember, here’s Ogilvy on Advertising. Everybody gets that book who joins the agency. Yeah. So his spirit is definitely embedded there. There are quotes all over the walls there. I don’t think that I don’t think they’ve tried to move away from their historical legacy like a lot of other larger agencies have.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, because a lot of other agencies, you know, the one of the names like Ogilvy just becomes an O, like an extra thing in like the big string of letters and it’s like it gets merged in and gets shortened and you kind of lose like who was that guy to begin with. So it’s cool that his legacy was still there. Like what, how was it sort of applied still? Like how does it go from like a wall or some quote to actually like showing up in materials?
Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, I mean, every brief there is still originated from what his briefs were. So that hasn’t gone away. And if people are like, “Well, why don’t they update that?” Because it works. Like why change that? It’s because it’s simplified, Andrew. It’s really simplistic. And I think the issue with briefs is we make them so complex that when you get them back, you’re like, “This is 25 pages,” whereas it’s one page with three things that you’re basically trying to do.
And I find in this day and age when everyone’s like, “Okay, let me do my hand talking here. Here’s the 70 things.” It’s like, no, no one’s going to remember that because people don’t have the time or attention to remember that. What’s the one thing you really want to get across? I think that’s important in terms of not just advertising, but like anything you’re trying to do in marketing. Whether it’s marketing a product, marketing someone who’s trying to run for office, or marketing anything, an idea. You really need to, you know, this is where the whole elevator pitch comes from. Nobody really wants to be in an elevator being pitched something that they’re like, “Yeah, I don’t understand what you’re saying.” They just want to know like, “Oh, by the way, I have an idea. It takes this and this.” And they’re, “Oh, yeah, let’s actually do that.” So communications skills, I think we’ve made them way too complex for the 21st century. And we can make them much more intelligent again.
Andrew Mitrak: As far as the complexity, one of the truisms from David Ogilvy, his principles is like, if you have a successful campaign, keep running it. It’s like you’re not presenting to a standing army, you’re presenting to a marching parade. And the idea that if you have something that works, you don’t need to just like change it up every season just because. And I feel like there is a thing where it’s like people, you know, have the new holiday ad just because and totally rewrite everything just because it’s like a new year. And there probably could be a little more of just repeating a good message, sticking with a good slogan, not rebranding and having a new jingle or whatever. Like, yeah, do you think about that or are there other sort of like lessons that folks should sort of embrace still from Ogilvy?
Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, I mean, that’s a big one. Like even modern thinkers like Mark Ritson talk about that. Like he will say, “Why are people running these new ads or why do they have a whole new campaign when they should run the this other one?” It’s one thing if you change a campaign because let’s say the company has new products or features of those products. But if you’re like, “Hey, let’s do a brand campaign.” It’s like, is your brand still based on what it is that you sort of laid the foundation for with this original campaign? Yes. Then keep running that because you’re, to your point, and I love the analogy, it is like a parade. There’s a lot of people who have not probably seen the messaging that you have to keep hitting and hitting and hitting until they realize like, “Oh, that’s interesting, that company.”
And I think we’ve seen that in a lot of different areas, people taking that to heart. I just also liked David Ogilvy’s approach to the fact that, you know, he said like, “Your customer isn’t a moron. It’s your wife.” I think I have that quote correct.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, it’s along those lines, yeah.
Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, it’s like we have a tendency of thinking that our audiences are different from who they really are. And I think we’re actually going back to an era where if you understand who the audience is because let’s say you’re marketing something that you yourself use. So you’re like, “Oh, I know who the audience is.” Like that’s way more impactful than people who may say, “Well, this is who we want the audience to be.” That’s very different and that sometimes is delusional, if I may say that word.
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah. No, exactly. It’s funny because when I recommend Ogilvy, I say, “He does use some gendered language at the time. Yada yada.” Like caveat, it was a different, I mean, I don’t know if it’s a good excuse, but it was a different time. But like there’s a lot of truth to that. And the intention behind it is actually, yeah, speak, don’t assume your customer is a moron. Like they’re actually intelligent. You don’t have to dumb things down that much.
He also was a proponent of like actually having a lot of detail in your ads. And I don’t know if that works totally today on social and of course it doesn’t apply to every format. But in general, like just assuming like sometimes there’s a thing like, “Oh, everything has to fit in, you know, a three-word slogan and you can’t have a, you know, but it’s like actually sometimes you want to read a paragraph of like good copy about why this product is so great or that, you know, that Rolls-Royce ad about how it’s at 60 miles an hour, the loudest thing in this is the electric clock or whatever it was. Like these little things that just like, “Oh yeah, that like totally catches your imagination.” And he’s willing to write longer, which I also also like.
Geoffrey Colon: Yeah. Yeah.
From Agency to Big Tech: The Microsoft Shift
Andrew Mitrak: So you shifted from Ogilvy to Microsoft, and which is like a pretty big transition. So at this point you’ve been a solo agency owner, you’ve worked at leading digital agencies, you’ve worked at larger ones like Ogilvy, and here you are at like among the top few largest companies in the world and you do a brand leadership role for you. Like what was that like going to Microsoft and what was like sort of the big shift from agency world to, you know, big tech world?
Geoffrey Colon: I mean, it’s a huge leap in terms of the learning curve because you’re going from outside a company and really being sort of an advisor because that’s really what agencies are, they’re advising their clients, to being in-house and having to learn everything about the brand. From like the history of the brand, every product at the brand, every failed product at the brand because that comes into play too in terms of understanding evolution. Every solution area that the company was involved in.
I mean, there’s a lot to learn there, especially for, you know, when I got there, I think the company was around 40 years old, but it feels like 100 years old because there’s so many things that a company like Microsoft does. So yeah, it was a big learning. And I liked that though. I think, you know, drinking out of a fire hose is good for everyone to do at least once in your life where you don’t feel intelligent, you constantly feel like, “Wow, I don’t know anything.” And you have really, really smart people in the room around you at all times because that’s how you get smarter. That’s how you get better. You don’t get smarter or better by being around people who aren’t really good at their craft. So I think that was a great challenge. I looked back at that era and it’s, it was almost like having an advanced degree on steroids, Andrew, because you’re just like learning how to scale multi-billion dollar businesses.
Disruptive Marketing and DisruptiveFM
Andrew Mitrak: And so you wrote Disruptive Marketing while you were employed at Microsoft, right?
Geoffrey Colon: Yes.
Andrew Mitrak: And you’re publishing this and hosting a podcast called Disruptive FM while you were at Microsoft. And did you feel like, were you partly speaking and preaching to Microsoft employees trying to like evangelize a shift in thinking? Or were you more like and also speaking to people outside of Microsoft? Or what was your approach to sort of communicating both within your company and outside your company?
Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, it was internal and external. I think what I identified is that regular people on the internet were going to have larger influence than what I guess you would call the mainstream media or journalists. At the same time, I also thought employees were going to have huge influence on how you sell products. And then you were also going to have a huge influence on the other people who work at the company in terms of inspiring them.
I think what I identified early on is what you call, you know, the creator economy. This was 2013, 14 where I was like, “Hey, video is everywhere. This is, you know, how things are going to work.” And I remember someone going like, “No, no one’s going to watch video with like regular people or people who like work at a company.” And then I was like, “Hey, I think podcasting is going to be big and I think it’s also going to convert into like audio video like we’re doing right now.” And I remember someone saying, “Nope, that’s not going to happen either.”
But the reason I look back on that and I realize why those people said that, these were people who were PR folks who were scared about change because if that changes, then their job, which was pitching people at the New York Times or Fortune or Wired, they don’t see that as relevant. And it’s like, no, no, no, no, you can adapt because you’re just going to be pitching to creators, these people who are all talking about different things on YouTube or TikTok. I just don’t think they could see that, Andrew, at the time. I think they see it now. But I think every company sees that now. So I don’t know. It’s sometimes lonely seeing some of these things, you know, ahead of the curve and at other times it’s pretty interesting. So...
Andrew Mitrak: That’s right. I mean, because you’re also, you’re being a little provocative too. You’re talking about disruption and there are probably people where, you know, you kind of criticize MBAs a little bit. You probably work with a lot of MBAs, right? And you’re talking about this old way of doing things and Microsoft is probably doing a lot of those old things. Did that lead to any uncomfortable meetings at all or anything like that? Or what was that like?
Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, I mean, I think that provocation, like if you look at how people provoke on the web now, a hot take gets people to, you know, “What? Why are you saying that?” You know, um, I think there were parts of the book that I, when I wrote it, I was like, “I’m going to say stuff that is controversial because otherwise no one’s going to pay attention.” And that’s sort of how the web operates for better or for worse. I don’t think it’s always a good thing that people do that.
I think now if I rewrote the book or wrote a second book, I would take a different tone of that’s much more uplifting and has more of a collective leadership style. But at the time, that’s what you did to provoke people out of like a stupor. And yeah, those, I mean, sometimes people would be like, “Nah, this is not, you know, this is not where things are headed. This is always going to be relevant.” You know, that’s not necessarily something I always wanted to get into debates with people about. But, you know, I saw like, hey, there’s a need for creative technologists at these companies. There’s a need for people who understand APIs just as much as saying, “Well, I got my MBA from Northwestern or Wharton.” I don’t downgrade MBAs. When I wrote the book, I didn’t have one at the time. I went back and got one since. But like I think there’s much more of a need of just human understanding from folks that you may not get from an advanced degree.
Andrew Mitrak: Totally. That’s right. And obviously the gist is the point of the book is not to like diminish MBAs or anything like that. But it’s to really advocating for this idea of creative hybrids and that there’s lateral thinking and having broad experience that’s not purely just MBA to management consulting to big tech and management with no experience actually building things and being hands-on and being able to draw inspiration from outside of a very specific worldview.
Geoffrey Colon: That’s right. I mean, some of my best employees I worked with had like philosophy degrees. Some of the best UX people could also, you know, code or maybe they failed out of being like an engineer and did business. But like we’re in a weird, like to your point, Andrew, we have weird hybrid roles now that you can’t just say, “Well, I’m going to go and major in this.” It’s like you have to have a lot of different subjects and do a lot of different things and have a lot of range to really apply that to the world that we’re currently in or and the world that we’re like moving into.
Podcast Marketing: From Niche to Mainstream
Andrew Mitrak: I want to ask more about Disruptive FM because you, I’m relatively new to podcasting myself. I was a long, I was a very, very early like podcast listener like back in like when the Ricky Gervais Show was out in like 2005-ish or something like that. That was the first one I got into. But I mean, I’m sure you even predate me on podcasting.
Geoffrey Colon: No, no, no, no. That’s about the time I got into things too. 2005-ish. Yeah.
Andrew Mitrak: Right around that, yeah, right around then. But you actually were producing like relatively like way early like as far as especially business-wise, there wasn’t nearly as much business-related podcasting stuff. A lot of it was like comedy shows or things like that. But so Disruptive FM, you’re producing that. What did you learn about podcasting as you were doing it in those early days? Like beyond technical stuff or things like that, what was you worked on it for a long time, you’re still podcasting. What is it that you got out of it and what did you learn from podcasting?
Geoffrey Colon: You know, the things that I thought people didn’t want to hear about when I would do episodes where I’d be like, “Oh, I’m going to, you know, interview this person who wrote a book.” I have a lot of authors that were on the show. You know, maybe the book wasn’t a bestseller or, you know, no one really knew who the author was. And I’m like, “All right, we’re going to do this. I doubt anyone’s going to really like this episode.” Those were the ones that always did really, really well. Like the niche topics. People loved hearing about that because they would always say the same thing to me, which is, “You know, hey Jeff, I wouldn’t know about that unless you told me about it.”
Which made me realize that even in our algorithmic discovery world, there’s still a need for human curators, people who find things and tell other people about them because not everyone’s going to know about every single thing out there. And then when you make them aware of it, they’re like, “Wow, that is like a fascinating topic. I got really, really into that.” So that was a big learning for me early on, you know, before people said, “Oh, there’s tons of people out there who talk about micro topics.” It’s like, yeah, and a lot of them write books. People are really fascinated about that just as much as they are about, you know, the big authors.
The Many Benefits of Podcasting
Andrew Mitrak: For sure. Yeah, and reading somebody’s book and then getting to interview that person is a magical feeling too because when you read a book, it’s like you’re so removed from the author in a way. And in podcasting, you’d have no reason to really talk to me per se or spend an hour with me. I’m some guy with a podcast and all of a sudden you will and it’s amazing when you just reach out to people and be like, “Hey, I have a podcast. Do you want to talk about your book and talk about other things?” It’s kind of just a wonderful shortcut to get to meet people and have conversations that you otherwise wouldn’t get to have. And I just personally, I enjoy this and I also, I’m sure did you kind of experience that at all as you were just reading books and getting to talk to cool authors on stuff?
Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, and in a lot of ways, I mean you bring up a really good point. It’s like exchanging business cards. I know that sounds wild, but when you’re like, “Hey, would you like to come on my podcast, we’re going to talk about this,” you then are connected to that person. It isn’t so much about the metrics as much as, “Hey, we talked, we got to learn some things from each other. This is really great. Now I know you and now I can actually talk to you in the future.” I mean, almost every person I had on, and I had a lot of guests on over the decade that I hosted that show, I mean I could reach out to almost all of them and say, “Could I ask you a question or could I run something by you?” And some of the people I had were nobodies at the time who are now huge. Scott Galloway, Steven Bartlett, Gary Vee, very early on when not many people knew these people. I had interesting CEOs on as well that most of them are retired but I think it’s interesting in terms of, I’m happy that people actually took a chance and said, “Sure, I’ll go on your podcast.” Some people I don’t even know if they knew what a podcast was when I would bring them on because it was audio at the time, audio only until later.
The Evolution of Podcasting Distribution
Andrew Mitrak: I didn’t think about that. At that time you were probably still having to explain what a podcast was like, “No, it’s not on the radio. No, it’s not a live webinar. It’s a recording.”
Geoffrey Colon: This is how it’s distributed, you know, this is how people listen to it. It was at a time when Apple sort of ruled that world. Spotify didn’t have any podcasts, iHeartRadio didn’t have podcasts, Amazon didn’t have podcasts. I mean, it was still the wild west in terms of listenership and people taking a chance on that, but, you know, look at the medium now.
Andrew Mitrak: Do you have any thoughts on how it’s evolved as a marketing channel itself? Like when you were starting, obviously beyond it just growing and there being more listeners and more podcasts in the world overall. Has it mechanically as a marketing channel or how brands or individuals think of it for marketing purposes? Has podcasting changed in your career working on it?
Video Podcasting and Gen Z Listening Habits
Geoffrey Colon: Yeah. It’s gotten, I mean, some of the early podcasts I remember were almost three hours, like they were long. And you would just talk about everything. It actually reminds me a lot of FM radio. It’s like, “Hey, let’s just experiment and talk.” And they were minimally edited. You did not edit a lot of it because it just was for people to listen to. Now I find if you’re not doing video, you probably are going to have a harder time being discovered. Now, that’s at this moment. I’m starting to hear a shift from Gen Z listeners saying, “I don’t want to watch video. I want to be in my headphones again.” Now this is a, I haven’t scientifically researched this, but I’m starting to hear from more of the younger generation, they want to just listen to some things, but it still has to be theater of the mind. Meaning there’s two people talking, maybe then there’s something they shift to something else, then they shift to something else. So it’s like you have to still keep the audience engaged. And I think the same is true with anything now is it’s not a matter of being short, it’s a matter of like, is it interesting? Do you have interesting people? Are you talking about interesting things? I mean, that’s the biggest learning I think nowadays.
The Shift to Fractional Marketing Roles
Andrew Mitrak: You’ve had your own small agency, you’ve worked at large agencies like Ogilvy, you’ve worked in-house at Microsoft, which is one of the biggest companies in the world and you have your own practice again. You have your own agency again now.
Geoffrey Colon: I do. Yeah.
Andrew Mitrak: And how is marketing different across those environments? Just broad question, but what is the same and then what’s different across them?
Geoffrey Colon: You know, most companies that I advise now and consult with, they really want people who are immersed in understanding what their company does. So they’re not so interested anymore in let’s hire an agency and they’ll do X, Y, and Z and then they’ll go away. They probably have an in-house team. So the in-house team does a lot, but they still need people who are outside in to keep them honest because if you look at some of the worst work that’s been done over the last five years, it’s been from in-house agencies that don’t have outside advisors. Because an outside advisor isn’t drinking the Kool-Aid of that company, let’s just say. And you need that. CMOs actually want that. They’ll say like, “Hey, we’re going to have a couple outside consultants.” And you know, you’d always be in-house going, “Oh great, we’re going to have this person who doesn’t know what they’re talking about.” But those people actually would just keep you honest about, like you said, “Hey, I don’t know that’s a great idea. Here’s why.” Or like, “That’s a great idea. You’re not going far enough with it to make impact.” So that’s what I’m starting to realize is that fractional work is really changing what our relationship is with marketing. I noted this in the book as well that most of us would be, let’s say, fractional temporary gig workers when it comes to marketing. And that doesn’t mean that all full-time jobs are going away. It just means that there’s probably less of those on the staff. And then everything else is supplemented with other people who may come on board and do something for five months and then they’re done with that particular project. So it’s almost like the future of marketing is the future of work, which is a lot like putting a movie together. “Hey, you’re going to be working on this. It’s going to take us four months to put it together. After that you got to go find whatever your next gig might be.” And I’ve been working like this now for the past year and a half. And I’ll be honest with you, Andrew, it’s scary, but it’s also exciting at the same time because it’s disruptive to make that point.
The Power of Being a Generalist
Andrew Mitrak: It’s great. Everything you’ve talked about, I resonate a lot because I think of myself also as a very generalist type person. My background’s in video and in virtual reality production, things like that. And then startup marketing and I’m at big tech now but also do a podcast. And also have some creative outlet where I want to learn about other things. And my career is never like one thing at a time. It’s at least two things sort of. And you have more than two things. It seems like most of the time you have a lot of things going on, which is I think just good. It’s like a good way to have a rich experience in life and just embrace a lot of things and not like that you’re dilly-dallying and just sampling, but you’re doing a lot of things in a meaningful way, but also wearing hats which makes you better at the other thing. It’s like I do this thing here and that gives me an idea for this company over here. And that’s just I think a productive way to be a good creative and a good marketer, right?
Geoffrey Colon: Yeah. It almost is like this, I saw this thing recently where someone said Dr. Seuss actually niched up instead of niched down, which is he was a really good writer, but he knew that just writing words wasn’t going to be enough. So he figured out slowly how to do illustration even though it wasn’t the best. But he figured that out and he became world renowned. That is like I think the way that I look at things now. It’s like someone might say, “Are you an expert in this area?” No, and I probably never will be, but I’ll know enough to be dangerous to get by on that with the other things that you need to blend together to make something happen in our sort of creative era that we’re in. That’s really how creators operate. When you talk to a lot of creators, like people will say, “Oh, you’re amazing at this.” And they’ll be honest. They’ll be like, “I don’t really know how to use that. I just sort of figured it out.” And that mindset, we need more of that, especially to solve I think most of the problems in the 21st century because you can’t just be like, “Well, we don’t know what to do there. Let’s just give up.” It’s like, no, you got to figure that out.
Adapting to AI and Unlearning Skills
Andrew Mitrak: Yeah, no, totally. And also I think there’s, we’re at this moment of course with AI where a lot of things are like you have to unlearn and relearn things too. And if you have an experience at learning new things, it’s a little less intimidating to unlearn some things because you’re less attached to them. Because it’s only if your whole body of work has all been in one really specific area doing one thing in one specific way and then this new technology comes and changes that, it’s like, “Wow, I have all this sunk cost.” And I have a little bit of sunk cost across a lot of things, but I’m willing to kind of give it up a little more and change it. So I think it’s like overall a pretty healthy thing.
Where to Find Geoffrey Colon
Andrew Mitrak: Well, Geoffrey, I’ve really enjoyed this conversation. There are a lot of places where listeners can find you online. Where do you recommend people who have enjoyed this conversation find your work and follow you online?
Geoffrey Colon: Yeah, I have a website, geoffreycolon.net. I spell my name with a G just for those who are listening. I’m also pretty active on LinkedIn and I have a Substack like so many people called Creative Studies. I’ve also been a lot more active on TikTok. I know that sounds wild, Andrew, but I don’t know, like sometimes I just like to talk about interesting things because you’re like, “Well, I’m just going to bring the phone out and do it and it doesn’t have to be polished.” And people sort of, they like that. They just join in on the conversation. They ask questions. You know, I try to talk about the things in terms of like, “Hey, everything is a remix. Here’s where this may have originated from and we’re seeing it again.” And I think younger people really love that. And I like that too. I think that that’s important in our era where, I think as a person who’s more advanced in my career, I think it’s important to give back to people who are new in their career, whether it’s through time or advice or just listening.
Andrew Mitrak: That’s awesome. I love that, you know, you’ve inspired me. I should open up TikTok again. I’ve dabbled in it and I do get scared about it. But here I am, I’m telling everybody to unlearn and relearn. I’ve got to do it myself and get back on TikTok. So I’ll check out your work there and dabble as well. And it’s great. I know a lot of college students listen to this as well. So I’m glad that you’re there educating young people about your career. So yeah, Geoffrey Colon, thanks so much for joining me. I really enjoyed this conversation and it was just such a pleasure to read your book, to read your work, and I’ll keep following you online because it’s all great stuff you’re putting out.
Geoffrey Colon: Thank you, Andrew.
