Episode Transcript
Elise 00:00:05 Hello, and welcome to the loop marketing podcast. I'm your host Elise Stieferman, director of marketing at Coegi. Today we're joined by Coegi’s president, Sean Cotton and vice president of marketing Ryan Green. Let's get started.
Elise 00:00:18 Welcome, Sean and Ryan. Glad to have you back again today. We're talking about building a rockstar marketing team. So it's no secret that we're in the middle of the great resignation- employees are demanding more of their jobs, wanting more work life balance. That's especially true. I feel like in the marketing world and in particular, the agency world. So then thinking about building up a really strong digital team, Sean, you recently stated that managers and recruiters shouldn't be looking necessarily for rock stars. Could you talk a little bit more about that and how it's worked well for Coegi?
Sean 00:00:57 Sure. Well, Elise, what I meant by that is that a lot of times when companies are in that situation that you're talking about, they're looking for a quick solution. If I can just find this one person that knows everything about digital and they're a rockstar, all my problems will be solved. That's a temporary solution at best, and it's also lacking in a lot of ways. What my approach has always been is to build the framework that allows for the development and the training of multiple individuals from different backgrounds and with different skill sets that can become a rockstar team. And when you do that, that actually attracts other rock stars, if you will. They wanna work in that type of environment where they can add to the team and their skills can be enhanced versus being viewed as that savior, right, that's jumping into a situation. So that's what I mean by stop looking for rock stars.
Ryan 00:02:07 That's an interesting point of view because I think when people say that they want to find a rockstar, a lot of times they're saying they wanna find a generalist, they wanna find somebody that can be competent at five or six different things. And generalists are obviously very important to an organization, but for digital marketing, how splintered things have gotten, you need to have a lot of specialists. You need to have people who have a lot of depth and understand analytics and understand automated buying and understand social and influencer and understand how to organize projects and to talk to clients and hold those relationships. That's impossible to find in one person you wanna find a whole rock band, not just a rock star, right? Cuz the best musicians come when there's five people playing together with different competencies that that flow together a lot better. So it's more about finding that team, or the full band than one individual it's going to make that happen, just to kind of continue on that analogy.
Sean 00:03:16 Yeah, absolutely. And the facts are that those generalists and even those specialists that have expertise in a certain area. There's fewer of them than there are opportunities. And so if we don't build a system and an environment where we can create individuals that fill those roles as well, we're always going to be behind the eight ball. So certainly whenever in my company I can attract a very talented individual to our organization, I'm gonna do everything I can, but again, I find that it's far more successful to create a company that is always pushing each other to be better. And those talented individuals that, you know, we're always looking for recognize that and say, I wanna be a part of that. I think I can add to that company or that environment.
Ryan 00:04:18 A lot of times we talk about our organization a lot, you know, using a team and we talk about like how important the farm team is as well, bringing on and having an opportunity to grow talent and to lay the seeds for people to have those opportunities, to learn the dynamic things that are needed to be a good marketer because marketing has a sweet spot between a qualitative and a quantitative discipline, that can understand the spreadsheets and the boardroom. That's really what those rockstars are, but you really gotta start with one or the other and develop those skills that are transferable across different challenges and disciplines. So it's much more like a baseball team. I think maybe a better way to look at it.
Ryan 00:05:19 Investing in your farm system, investing in veterans as well. The rockstar that people are looking for a lot of times are somebody that are in their thirties and forties. You may also want to look at people that are older than that, that bring a lot of wisdom from a variety of different backgrounds that can also be valuable to a marketing team as well. It's not just the kids out of college, It's not the people in that seven to 10 year experience, but bringing people from a lot of different disciplines that may have not necessarily been marketers their whole life, but maybe that can still be really good problem solvers and can help us discover new challenges.
Elise 00:06:03 I would also add that the word talented is so subjective. It's, you know, that means a lot of things to different people and something that I know Cogi personally cares a lot about is the attitude of the person and the cultural fit. Could you elaborate on that and being able to look at someone and you know, of course consider their resume, but more talk about how they exhibit the Cogi way, which really encompasses a lot about our culture.
Sean 00:06:33 Absolutely. I mean, that is the most important thing as you know and the Cogi way is made up of our attitude, the service that we provide, how we contribute to the culture, and how we approach things. And so, in a nutshell, the attitude is enthusiastic determination, enjoying being a problem solver. Our approach is being detail oriented and accurate. Our service is going above and beyond, making digital heroes. And our culture is one of being positive and showing respect if an individual exhibits those qualities in the interview process, or we know of individuals that exhibit those qualities and they have some of the foundational skills around marketing around data and so forth. They're going to excel in our organization because we can train all of the specific skill sets. And within the organization today, we have a wide variety of people.
Sean 00:07:31 Ryan, who's sitting here to my left, as many people may know, if they Google him started as a professional poker player, but his understanding of both the qualitative and the quantitative aspects of people as he mentioned earlier translated very well into digital marketing. And I'm sitting here with you (Elise), you know, you have a theater background, but you also went got your MBA in analytics and started with us part-time and you came up through the organization that way. Our SVP has 20 years of holding company or holding group experience. So it's the collection of all these diverse sets of personalities and skill sets, but they have one thing in common and it’s that we all buy into the Coegi way of how we're going to treat each other every day, how we're gonna treat our clients, and the expectation of always trying to be the best at what we do.
Ryan 00:08:29 You know, I was fortunate early in my career to get to spend some time with Brett Wilson, who was the founder of TubeMogul, as a pioneer in ad tech, and the one thing he kind of pulled me aside and said was, your culture is special, and that's something that you have to fight for as you grow and as there's more offices and there is more diversity that comes in. Keeping that culture tight,and keeping it still with the ethos of who you are as a company is so important. And I think having foundational documents like the Coegi way, having a standard that we hold ourselves to and being accountable in performance reviews to make sure that everybody in the organization knows that this isn't a fluff piece. It's not something that's on our “about us” page that we sweep under the rug and pull out once a year when it's convenient, but it's something that we live and breathe. That does allow us to bring a number of different diverse backgrounds to the table, and have everybody know that we're going to hold to that standard. It's really significant, I think, it’s probably the most important one reason I can think of, why we've been successful as an agency, if I could point to one thing, at least
Sean 00:09:52 Absolutely. And, you know, we hold each other to that standard of not only operating according to the Coegi way, but as I mentioned earlier, being the best at what we do, always pushing ourselves to be better. And, you know, I heard it expressed during a recent company training. One of our employees says, I know that if I go to one of my teammates, they're going to have the answer for me because I know they've put in the work and they've educated themselves and vice versa- we know that we can count on each other. And so that's just the opposite of that rockstar mentality to where you have this siloed information. This is the only person that knows SEO, or this is the only person that knows Amazon, right? And they hoard that to increase their own value. It's just the opposite within our company. We want to spread that knowledge. We want everybody to continue to raise their level of expertise so we can rely on one another and it makes our job easier when we do so
Ryan 00:11:01 That rockstar can become a diva pretty quickly, and when they do become the one person that holds information, that's a big threat to a company, right? That's a big threat to our agency. So we really value cross training and really the dissemination of information. That's why we write so much, that's why we are so particular with our process, because for us to be able to scale our clients' businesses, we have to be able to scale our knowledge across our organization.
Sean 00:11:37 And it takes an investment of time. It takes an investment of, of money, to create and maintain that type of environment. Yeah. But I would argue that it takes less time and less money than scouring all of the career websites and searching for these individuals that meet these very specific criteria and then maybe losing them nine or 10 months later, because it wasn't a culture fit or because they weren't motivated or they weren't fulfilled. So actually the return on investment of creating this rockstar marketing team environment is much, much higher, than looking for those specific individuals to fill gaps.
Ryan 00:12:27 And when you hire for competency, which everybody does, but ignore integrity. I think Warren Buffet said that's the worst combination, if you have somebody that's integral to your organization, that lacks integrity, that's a dangerous place to be in. And that's when you put too much emphasis on one individual and not the team and the process and the organization as a whole. That can get people, can get businesses in a lot of trouble.
Elise 00:12:56 So then in thinking about the people who are more generalist versus those who are specialists and kind of siloing information, part of me wonders if that's simply occurring, sometimes for those who want to maintain greater value, of course, but sometimes it's related to how fast paced the environment is of the marketing world and in particular, the agency world. So then how would you both approach creating more time within an organization to innovate, to share information to train, when you feel like you might be constantly in the rat race of trying to get things done?
Sean 00:13:36 Right. Well, we have to consciously create that space for the individuals in our organization. So there needs to be time dedicated to training within an organization. There needs to be processes and guidelines in place as to how we go about our day to day so that we can produce what we need to produce, but do so in an efficient manner, in a productive manner, recognizing what's important, what's urgent and allocate our time in a responsible way. And then the leaders in the organization need to support that and that, they need to empower everyone underneath their management that that's okay. Right. And to have boundaries in place. Typically I like to have anywhere from 10 to 20% of my time and everyone else's time in my organization, dedicated to innovation in some way. It doesn't mean that they're not working on a project, but the way that they're working on that project is maybe slowing down just a little bit and understanding, is there a better way to do this, or how could this campaign or perform better? And in that way, you know, they're getting the work done, but we're also innovating, and the person's also growing,
Ryan 00:15:09 You know, as somebody who manages our center of excellence for innovation, I can tell you, it works a lot better if it's not just like with the rockstar example that can't be siloed to one person or one team. Innovation has to be something that's living and breathing for everybody. Now, there does need to be some proactivity to encourage innovation. But what happens if it's siloed into one person or one team, is that a lot of times it's a glossy product that has a lot of marketing and a nice name and a good ring to it, but it doesn't get implemented. It doesn't really become actualized. So it has to get buy-in from all areas of our organization, and the great idea can come from anywhere. Some of our best ideas have come from our campaign assistants who are still in college, because they're looking at problems a lot differently. So innovation is one of those things that's in like, you know, in the non-urgent, but really important, especially for agencies, maybe one of the most important things that we do, or to continually innovate small, medium and large ways. Um, especially with the pace of change that you're talking about. The big upheavals in how we even work have necessitated that the organizations that have been able to quickly and thoughtfully innovate are the ones that are thriving now versus where they were two years ago. And I think it's one of the reasons that we're continuing to have growth and success on behalf of our clients.
Sean 00:16:59 And over the years, you know, Coegi’s been able to be first movers or early adopters in several emerging channels because of that approach. The innovation doesn't live just with me, or just with a few leaders within the organization. Through that open communication, the entire company knows that this particular area is something that we wanna lean into that we want to become experts in. And so, as a result, you know, we're running CTV campaigns in 2018 at scale digital out of home. So on and so forth now with the cookieless future, you know, putting into practice actual media plans that aren't utilizing cookies instead of waiting until the hammer drops and we're forced to, but that has to be a directive that everybody understands through the whole organization- that we each play a part in taking that from a concept to an actual execution in our media plans.
Ryan 00:18:08 And a lot of times that takes some time to get right. So yeah, the leadership of an organization has to allow for failure. It has to allow for us to fail forward and to learn from those mistakes. It's also easier when you don't have a quarterly earnings report that you give, you can give your teams more time to figure out challenges without always having to be looking at the bottom line and knowing that your quarterly earnings are coming up. So I think that independents have a lot more space to be able to intelligently fail, to be able to be nimble and quick to adapt. And ultimately the product is stronger because of that, those conditions in the environments of the independent agencies.
Elise 00:19:03 So to wrap up, I'm gonna throw a curve ball. If you were to describe what a rockstar marketing team looks like in 30 seconds, what would you say, Sean?
Sean 00:19:15 So I would say that a rockstar marketing team is always learning, is ambitious and always pushing for better, not resting on their laurels. They love data, you know, digging down into the details of things. What else would you add?
Ryan 00:19:42 I would say that everybody needs to be appropriately competitive, but not with each other. They're competitive together to find those challenges and that everybody is positive. It's positive without being fake, right? Compassionate and understanding and knowing where your place is to some degree too. Knowing where your strengths and weaknesses are, working on both simultaneously and helping everybody on your team to become better, and lifting people on other teams that you don't interact with and being giving of your time to understand that we're greater than the sum of our parts. The positivity is really significant, I think, in the locker room, so to speak, to ultimately be good leaders, for the next generation. One of the phrases I like to use is “producing producers”. You should judge yourself and your teams, not just on the people that you have direct influence on, but the people that they have direct influence on too, to create a lineage that really does truly allow you to scale.
Sean 00:21:04 Absolutely. I think that a rockstar marketing team produces just that, a multitude of individual rockstars within your organization. Even as they move on, you know, I've been doing this for quite a while and am fortunate enough to still be working with some of the people that, you know, came under my supervision years ago, but there's others, as life changes and as opportunities arise, they've gone on in different places around the country and to see them as VPs now and directors and brand managers, that's the result of having a strong team. When you see that happen over and over again, [it’s] because that environment put them in a position to grow.
Elise 00:21:57 Sean, Ryan, thanks so much for your time. We appreciate it.
Ryan 00:22:00 Thank you, Elise.
Elise 00:22:02 Thank you for listening. Coegi is an industry-leading performance marketing agency based in the Midwest. We've learned a lot since our founding in 2014 and started the Loop Marketing Podcast to share some of our hot takes on marketing trends we're following, best practices we've discovered, and actionable tips for improving your digital strategy. We'll see you next time.
