INBOUND 2013 - Big Ideas - Dan Lyons "Tell Me A Story: When Media and Marketing Become One"

Key Takeaways

please welcome Dan [Music] Lions hi um I've I've been at HubSpot for four months after a career in journalism uh and everything I know about marketing is just whatever I've managed to pick up in four months at HubSpot so it's my way of apologizing in advance for the next 45 minutes of your life that you will never get back um so as a journalist I worked at Newsweek I was a tech editor there I worked at Forbes um I also created this blog called The Secret dire of Steve Jobs where I pretended to be Steve Jobs writing about tech and um I was often asked probably the question I got more than any other as a reporter was how do I get the press to write about me how do I how do I get press and um and then how do we get good press right but um and the answer always is that you just have to have a good story right it begins with a good story and and I was always kind of stunned that people didn't understand that they just thought they had a good company and should write about it um figuring out what your story is is kind of important at an individual level like you know who am I why am I here why am I on this planet what is the story of my life what is the arc that my life story is going to take uh it's even more important at a company level and the question there is you know why do we have this company what what are we in business to do and if the answer is just to make money then um that's the wrong answer because you can make money doing anything you know you could buy a dry cleaning company and make money so why are you doing what you do and what do you do I think a lot of companies actually have a hard time defining what actually they do right um so these exercises in storytelling are things that you need to do if you're going to pitch the media they're also important because a lot of increasingly are trying to build their own media operations HubSpot is one HubSpot has a very thriving media operation but we're expanding um they're also important even if you intend to never tell the story to anyone because storytelling is also a journey of of self-discovery and stories are incredibly powerful things and I'll give you an example Apple a company that I pay a lot of attention to became the most valuable company in the world last year the big market cap in the world bigger than Exon Mobile on the basis of a story and the story was mobile devices are taking over the world apple is a leader in mobile devices therefore apple is taking over the world the stock ran up again on another story which turned out not really to be true it was a story that apple is making a TV and apple is going to revolutionize the TV industry the way they revolutionized the smartphone industry this is a big multi-billion dollar market and Apple's going to own it when people started to realize that that wasn't true that there wasn't any Apple TV at least not anything imminent the stock started to go down and it went from a high of $700 to a low of 400 and that drop of $300 a share represented $300 billion in market value on a story I'll tell you another story last fall I was working as the editor-in-chief of a technology site in San Francisco called Reed write and from a business perspective we were struggling we're trying to sell ads and we had a great ad sales department our parent company was a an ad broker and we were struggling and one day I had lunch with two people from HubSpot and they told me a story and the story is this there's a guy somewhere in the Boston area who has an appliance store right maybe a chain of stores he used to spend $800,000 a year buying ads from the Boston Globe to find customers now he pays $1,000 a month for HubSpot and he hasn't cut all of his ads spending but he's cut a lot of it and right there at that lunch that moment I realized my business is toast right it's not just that my website is struggling and everybody else is doing well it's not that this is some kind of temporary lull and we're all going to come out of it the business of creating content and putting ads next to it that's done right and it's done because HubSpot and companies like it have just cut the legs out from under what we did so I did what any sane person would do and I started trying to get a job at Hobson um and and the the story is that that story changed my life it changed the course of my career it's the moment when I decided to sort of leave the ad supported media business and find a new way to make a living so I want to talk about a few things today some basic tactics of how to deal with the Press sort of how the sausage gets made uh Tales out of school kind of stuff uh some storytelling stuff and then I have this idea that media and marketing are kind of colliding and becoming one and the same so I'll start with tactical right the biggest mistake companies make is they do what we call like you know spray and pray you know you you get that press release you you pay someone to make it you write it and you send it out to a thousand or a billion people and you hope someone's going to write a story about you right it never works and I I'll tell you a story again when I was at Newsweek I had a Newsweek mail account but I had been in the business long enough by then that people who knew me and I knew a lot of people they all knew my Gmail account so the only people who ever wrote to me at Newsweek were people who didn't know me right so I used that email account basically as a filter and I would go in every morning there'd be about 50 emails in there they're almost all just blind pitches I would make sure there wasn't a note from my boss or you know something I had to look at and they would just zap that whole inbox right and I'm pretty sure that every other reporter does the exact same thing so I could never understand why these companies are spending all this money but you know I didn't want to ruin it for them and my friends working PR and they're getting paid to to do this but it's totally useless right not only that there's no upside in doing that kind of outbound PR or very little there's huge downside and the downside is that by doing some of these things especially if you do them wrong you can alienate people you can annoy people you can actually be paying a PR agency to make reporters hate you right so I'll show you some examples of things that can go wrong these are just some of my favorites the one that begins dear media representative right totally done like you I'm out of here right okay right dear Dave my name is Dan but Dave is close I get it it's fine no right this one as the tech writer at time would you be interested in this so I work at Newsweek thank you the guy at time is a friend of mine I can forward your email to him right when I was at Forbes it was Fortune right they always get Forbes and Fortune mixed up and it's not like I have a big ego about well you know whatever I'm probably an obnoxious prick but um but it wasn't that it was just like clearly you you created this pitch for someone else they said no and now you're sending it to me right I know I'm getting someone's shopworn Goods I would actually get pictures that they had changed my name they had my name right but then when they got in the body they had forgotten to change so it was still addressed to fortune or to time anyway um and the last one is I'm following up on an email pitch that's a phone call right reporters get a lot of that now I personally don't really care it doesn't take that long to answer the phone and say yes I saw your email no I don't I don't care thank you have a nice day right but this is the one that reporters about if you sat around a table of reporters having drinks and you listen to them really for some reason this drives them bat crazy right so don't do that so those are the don'ts the more interesting thing are the Dos right and the main thing to know is that working with the Press is just like working with uh you know prospects it's about relationships it's about figuring out who these people are and getting to know them getting to know their kid who their kids are what they like what stories they like getting to know about their boss because every editor is a freaking right so and don't expect to close on the first meeting right you know you're not going to get a story right away and the other thing you can do that's really really use and tactical is you can dish right reporters live for information bloggers live for information if you can talk on background or off the Record in a way that you don't get any press for you but you're feeding them information about other stories you can buy lots of Goodwill and lots of protection there are two people I'll tell you about without mentioning their names one is a PR person in New York and the other is a really well-known venture capitalist in California both of them are amazing gossips and they're incredibly wired in and they know everybody so this PR person nobody ever crosses her because she's a source for all of us right we all need to be able to call her and find out what's going on so and so right because of that all of her startups get good press she herself has had a big profile in the New York Times about what a wonderful PR person she is all because she'll dish and because she has a network right the other guy is the same deal you can look around think of the venture capitalist in California who's had the most amazing press all the time a constant stream of good press for him and his portfolio companies and it's because two things he owns most of the blogs he literally has invested in a lot of tech blogs and he gives them information all the time right that stuff really works we're supposed to say that it doesn't that we're all Above The Fray but actually it works the thing I would tell you too is be careful what you wish for right there's no such thing as a puff piece people always want a story write a story about us write a story about us right every reporter is going to take a pound of Flesh right it's the cost of getting the story done right if only because of self-respect we use what we call the dreaded to be sure graph right it literally begins to be sure and it's usually two thirds of the way down if you see a really positive book review there'll be a 2B Shore graph where they throw all the bad stuff about the book in one paragraph It's the paragraph where you put all the stuff that runs counter to the main premise of your story even if the reporter doesn't want to put in the 2B Shore graph her editor will because the editors are these evil little gnomes who sit in New York in offices right and they never have to deal with you they never have to deal with the sources they don't have to go back and look at you next week right they reported us so the and they're kind of Twisted little freaks who sit in these offices and they have nothing better to do than to ruin people's lives right so they're going to insist they're going to make you put in a 2B sure graph right so then from your point of view as a startup as a marketing person it's a transaction right you need to weigh what am I going to get out of this right and then what is it going to cost me what's the worst it can cost me oh that sexual harassment suit last year they're going to talk to your customers they're going to talk to customers who left they're going to talk to customers who went to your competitors they're going to talk to your competitors and probably quote them can you withstand that can you take that hit in order to get what whatever it is you hope to get out of that big article are you going to sell more stuff and if you're not don't do the story right and finally the last thing I would say is that what you really have to do is try to think like a journalist and for most of us that requires having a few drinks and lowering your IQ by about 20 points and then getting to that that the zone of being a journalist and and when you make a sales call you don't go out and sell stuff by saying to people I need you to buy this stuff cuz I need the money right that's not how you sell stuff so the same with a journalist what is it about this story that telling that story is going to get her a promotion or Advance her career as a journalist right that's what you need to be able to think through and journalists are driven by one thing and one thing only and it's stories right great stories and that can be a scoop meaning a story that no one else has or it can just be a really really good story and that's you know it's what journalists talk about when we sit around in The Newsroom or at at a story meeting we dish we just talk Stories the way dares talks about code the way Wall Street guys talk about money we just talk about stories right we're not really looking for good companies we're looking for good stories and there's a big difference a good company does not necessarily equal a good story and a Bad Company can be a great story I'll give you one example EMC which is a terrific company here in the Boston area I mean a great company they crush it they do fantastic stuff but they're kind of boring they make storage equipment they had a good story they had a turnaround story a while ago and they would come to me and I was friends with the pr guys and they'd say why did you write about us and they say because you're boring You're great and you make lots of money it's a terrific company but I just can't find a story that I can sink my teeth into so then the exercise you go through is what is your story and you know preferably it's a good story it doesn't mean it makes you look good or entirely good it's a good story right and the thing about this is when you start sit down to think about what is a story what's a good story people freeze up I used to teach creat writing at University of Michigan and kids would come in register for the class and come in and then sit down and go like I don't know what to write about they'd be like well dude you know you should have thought of that before you sign up for a creative writing class but you know here we are you're kind of so let's let's work on this right so the thing is you can kind of reverse engineer a story you can actually look at stories and study them and see how they work and then try to fit your facts to that architecture right so stories have a couple of big things a story has a hero a main character every story has a hero and it has conflict right the dog's going to die right this comes from the Old National Lampoon cover buy this magazine or we shoot this dog right suddenly there's suspense it's kind of cheesy um so drama Springs from conflict right without conflict there is no drama there is no story right you have a hero who wants to get something has desire wants to get there and to get there they have to get over obstacles overcome them and then using C cunning or force or both they get to their goal okay so we figure out first who's my hero right right the hero isn't always the CEO people often think that okay well it be the CEO right and to be honest reporters love to write about CEOs because uh they're generally sociopaths but they're also generally narcissists which is this amazing combination so they're narcissists they love themselves so much that they don't know that they're sociopaths and if you get them talking they're amazing right they're this rare combination of mental dysfunction but it doesn't have to be the CEO and I'll tell you a great story about a guy that was uh has nothing to do with CEO there's a guy at IBM named Bernie Myerson Bernard meerson and he's this kind of schlubby guy he has a PhD in physics from City College of New York and he was working away in in IBM research on particle physics and how to make semiconductors and after seven years of work his team had this amazing breakthrough and they figured out a way to mix silicon and geranium to make a chip that was 10 times faster than a silicon chip really amazing thing took years work and they figured it out and it goes to the Mainframe guys so this is in the days when IBM chip division's only customers were the Mainframe guys and the man guy said nah we don't want that shut down your group disband everything seven years of work I know sorry we don't want it so Bernie goes Rogue and this is not the kind of guy who goes Rogue this is a PhD right this is like a PhD scientist guy but he goes Rogue and he starts sneaking into the chip plant in Fishkill at night and making little batches of these chips right then he goes even more Rogue he starts calling on customers other companies in Tech that compete with IBM like Qualcomm saying I get this amazing technology you really should license it from us right he could lose his job but he keeps doing it because he's just so enraged right well at the time ibms got into trouble they were about to go out of business they brought in a new CEO Lou gersner and gersner says this is stupid we're going to start selling to Everybody Let's he starts scouring the labs like we're we're in danger of going out of business let's find anything we can sell and sell it and he finds Bernie and and he loves Bernie and suddenly Bernie is a hero suddenly Bernie now is selling a billion dollars worth of his technology a year he's bringing in a billion dollars to IBM with this idea that nobody wanted right the next thing you know Bernie is promoted to run he's the chief technologist then he's running the entire semiconductor Division and now he's the VP of innovation now that is a great story right the guy who took a risk who wanted something so badly he overcame all these obstacles that was a great story it wasn't the CEO it didn't matter it was also how we told the story of the chips because who wants to read about chips nobody gives a about chips right what you want to read about is the guy who made the chips right and the personal drama and struggle of getting them there the other slide is the hero doesn't have to win right people always think you know every movie has a happy ending you know newspaper stories don't have to end at the end you can end in Mator race what Hemingway called in the middle of the thing right so my best example here is Elon Musk who I love right he's the CEO of Tesla and of SpaceX right now he's building two things that are really hard to build electric cars where he's trying to compete against the big car makers and space Rockets it'll carry uh you know payloads up to the space station right he hasn't succeeded really in either I mean there have been successful steps along the way but they haven't finished either of those companies but he is a great story and a Great Hero because he's struggling against such immense odds right so okay so you pick your hero next thing is you have to send the hero on a journey some of you probably know about this idea of the hero's journey but for those of you who don't I'll rip through it quickly there was a scholar named Joseph Campbell who studied all these myths from around the world came up with this idea that he started seeing the same story kind of pop up over and over and over again in all these different myths and he wrote this book called the hero with a thousand faces about this set of common elements the same hero in different names right and the myth goes like this so the elements go like this there's a call to Adventure right the hero is called by Destiny or fate he has a task he has something to accomplish he doesn't want to do it at first he refuses to call but then he does go right to accomplish his task he has to physically leave home and go on a journey and travel someplace at one point he goes into the underworld he either literally dies and is reborn or he metaphorically travels into the underworld and returns he achieves Enlightenment he completes his task he returns home the end right so in example of that is the Odyssey right which is the book that none of us read in high school we were supposed to but the Odyssey is is the story of odys is's 10-year uh journey home from the Trojan War right he didn't want to go to the war in the first place he did it's over and now he wants to get home but there's all this stuff in his way to getting home and meanwhile while he's away his wife Penelope is at home still believes he's alive These Guys these suitors who think he's dead have taken over his Palace they're spending his wealth they're eating his food and they kind of want to kill his son telemus because he's the heir they want to marry Penelope kill tus odius finally gets home and this is the shot of him basically the blood bath there's this Tarantino esque ending where he just lays to waste all his suitors in one big big scene destroys everybody gets his wife and kids back right the end at one point in the odysse he actually does sort of metaphorically travel into the underworld right a more recent example that you probably know better is Star Wars and this is a true story George Lucas was a huge fan of Joseph Campbell he had written two drafts of Star Wars the original Star Wars before he had heard of the the hero with a thousand faces and he read this book and it like hit him like a thunderbolt so he rewrote Star Wars and if you go read Joseph Campbell and then go back and watch that first Star Wars movie again it will blow your mind because it is note for note like he paint by numbers right the hero's journey this is Luke's Call to Adventure right he's being called to Adventure Ben Kenobi the wacky neighbor is telling him he's got to go do this thing he doesn't want to do it remember Luke doesn't want to go at first he wants to stay here's this scene the trash compactor scene which you probably remember this is the belly of the Beast the dive into the underworld Jonah and the whale right and I know it sounds like I'm a crazy person I'm making this up but you can look this up elsewhere it's true George Lucas talks about Joseph Campbell all the time and then you say okay fine but what does this have to do with media and marketing right well there was a guy at the Wall Street Journal named James B Stewart who wrote a lot of really big important business books but he also wrote a book called The Art of Storytelling he was hugely fascinated with Campbell his book The Art of Storytelling was given out to an entire generation of reporters and editors at the Wall Street Journal who then went out and spread that formula all over the industry all during my career I've intersected with so many people who all speak the same language about story that it's like a lingua franka for our business and it works like this it's very simple when you write a story first you decide who's your protagonist who's your hero and then you put him in danger the first thing you do okay is it Larry Page at Google let's put him in danger how is Larry Page at Google in danger what's the threat to Larry Page right they call it the tick tick tick you know it's a scene in MacGyver where the bomb's going to go off in 10 seconds unless mcra can figure out which wire to cut right you need urgency if there's no urgency there's nothing to pull the reader forward right there's even a formula for how you tell a story and these are the elements of it and the the misspellings are intentional reporters journalists use these wacky it's like a cockney rhyming sing for journalists we have these wacky misspellings so the lead is your first sentence that's your anecdote that sets up the character sets up your hero usually depicts him in a scene so we have a visual image of the hero doing something the nut graph is you state the premise of the story it's like your thesis for the story this is what I'm going to argue in the story The main point of the story and you're going to unpack it through the course of the story then there's another element called you know the deep breath you take a step back it all began when right this formula is so pervasive that once you see it you'll start seeing it in every business story you seen I recently saw a story in the New Yorker new yorker.com blog about Blackberry that was this formula to a te third graph was it's 1984 two engineers in Canada came up with this idea to make a pager they called their company Rim that went on to become Blackberry everybody was addicted to them they were so great you move forward chronologically to the present tense we now Blackberry is for sale right you have the kicker in the lead which the kicker in the out and the kicker is basically you back to the lead you tie back to whatever point you made at the top and then you're out okay you say okay but how do I put someone in danger I think every story has three big elements every business story has three elements and you can again find this in every business story The Tiger the tree and the treasure and basically if you think of it as a fable that goes like this there's this huge tree that grows all the way to the sky you can't see the top but up top there's this treasure to get it all you have to do is climb the tree so you start climbing halfway up you look down and there's a freaking tiger coming up after you to kill you right and then the question mergency becomes am I going to get to the top get the treasure buy a rifle shoot the tiger before the tiger eats me right um You can complicate it you know you can put a giant up top guarding the treasure that's Jack and the beant stock you can put a dragon up top you have to kill That's The Hobbit right um um in blackberry's case the tiger is Apple in Apple's case the tiger is Samsung right you have to have the Tiger in the story right if you don't if you don't have those three things you don't have any urgency you just have a guy climbing a tree to get some treasure or there's no tree there's just treasure lying around on the ground there's no tiger you know it's boring so these are the elements of a story and I wanted to look at the best Storyteller I think of all time the corporate Storyteller of all time was Steve Jobs and to me I think for Steve it was totally instinctual right he just knew instinctively how to tell a story and how to make everything a story and he did everything with archetypes so the ones we all use are betrayal right we journalists love betrayal stories human beings love betrayal stories right Samsung was Apple's biggest supplier they made their chips they made their screens and then they turned around and they stabbed Apple in the back and they made their own phone trying to kill apple right the same with Google right the other one is the Underdog Story you know David and Goliath you see that a lot if you're a startup it's actually a good story and it works it's kind of shopworn but that story actually really works the Revenge story We Love Steve gets thrown out of apple and what does he do he goes off and starts next Inc a rival computer company he's going to kill Apple he's going to show those guys if they shouldn't have fired him right Freud and edus doesn't really have anything to do with John but you know the edal story that Freud interpreted to mean that all men want to kill their fathers and sleep with their mothers you're like e right but but um I think of that is everybody who ever worked at Oracle and went off to start a company so Mark Ben off at salesforce.com is the edus story right he wants to kill Larry he loves Larry Larry's his dad Larry gave him his start in life but secretly he wants to kill Larry right that's what he really wants to do and the last one is the resurrection story and the resurrection story obviously is very Central to our culture for obvious reasons it turns out it shows up in all cultures right these stories of people who die and are reborn right and it shows up in business and we call it the turnaround story and the best turnaround story ever was Apple Apple in 1996 was as close to dead as you can be apple was almost out of money when jobs came back right they by 2011 2012 they're the biggest company in the world it's the most amazing turnaround ever what gave it extra resonance though is that jobs himself had a resurrection story jobs got thrown out wandered in the underground of next in Pixar for 10 years and then came back he was resurrected right Steve was sort of this Messiah figure and he knew how to work that and how to play it right what he also knew is that every protagonist needs an antagonist right you have a protagonist who's your hero you always had to have an enemy and the one thing Apple doesn't do now you'll notice since Steve is gone and Tim Cook is in charge they don't really have an enemy when Steve was alive they always always had an enemy and it wasn't about selling computers Steve made the story bigger than what it was you know when Steve told the story it was they're bad we're good right a lot of us are kind of afraid to do this you know in the corporate world we want everybody to be happy we want everyone to like us right everybody's a potential customer right the end result is that we stand for nothing we become mush right we have no message right Steve didn't really worry about that he didn't worry about offending people he was kind of a sociopath right so here's the famous 1984 ad which you probably have seen what you may not have seen is the the way Steve introduced this ad at a macro conference he got up and he gave a speech to set up the video before he rolled the video he gave this talk about IBM and he said you know IBM wants it all apple is perceived to be the only hope the only force that can assure Freedom right it's aiming its guns on its last obstacle I mean this is really over the top right but this wasn't about buying a computer this is about joining Steve in his crusade to save the world right more recently Apple's enemy was Eric Schmidt Google right Eric Schmidt was on Apple's board he sat there he took notes he knew all about the iPhone and then he went around the back door and and and and Google started Android right and this is what job said make no mistake they want to kill the iPhone we won't let them this don't be evil Mantra is I know the guys who make Android I don't think they had any intention to kill anything or anyone right but this is a much better story than saying well Google is entering our Market think about how most of our CEOs would tell us St well we think Google's great it's good to have competition they're entering our Market with a lower cost product they're going to compete for Market like no they want to kill us they want to burn our houses down they're going to kill our kids right like this is you know this is war right right I should point out that you know the other thing about storytelling is that storytelling involves exaggeration but like Steve was great at making it high stakes high drama right um and finally before we get on this talk about marketing I want to talk about failure because this is one thing that used to drive me crazy as a journalist right I'll ask it to you this have you ever gone to a movie right and the hero is some guy and an action hero or superhero and the guy is perfect his childhood was perfect he has no Neurosis no flaws never makes a bad decision or a wrong choice nothing ever goes wrong for him internally externally he lives a long happy life he never screws up everything's great the end no you've never seen that movie because it's stupid right like that's a stupid movie right if you saw that movie you'd want your money back you'd be like no I you know no right but every day as a journalist I got that pitch I get this pitch this company is really great you should write about them like why because they're really awesome okay what's the story I'm they're really awesome I raise some money like that's not a story you know I mean so so the thing is Michael Jordan got cut from his high school basketball team right Tom Brady of the Patriots was benched when he was at Michigan right and those are great stories right Ron Johnson who's the was the guy who ran Apple's retail uh business the genius behind all those Apple Stores always wanted to be a CEO so he left to run JC Penney and he was going to turn around this JC Penney he was going to be the CEO he's going to be a superstar and he totally failed he fell flat on his face he totally bombed and that's a great great story right if he dared to sit down and write about it or talk to a really good journalist about it and tell that story what he did wrong what went wrong that he couldn't control right right how did it happen just tell that story that's a story that you wouldn't be able to not read you know Not only would you learn from him you would actually love him you would love him more for telling you why he failed and what went wrong and what he learned he would be human right so dare to be human talk about your mistakes say what you learn from them you know so others can learn from you I really believe the best stories are the ones they don't necessarily have to be true I love fiction I've written fiction I read fiction but they have to speak to some larger truth there have to be some essence of Truth to the story that makes it really good which leads me to this final point and that is what if marketing became more like journalism not not that we'd all go out of business so way journalists are going out of business but I mean what if we Dar to tell the truth what if we Dar to be more like reporters right I've been a journalist for a long long time right this year I made this leap to HubSpot all around me other journalists are doing the same thing Sequoia capital a big VC firm hired a journalist from The Wall Street Journal andrion harwitz hired a guy from wired right and it's not just in Silicon Valley GE is building a news Operation marisk is building a news Operation Qualcomm the chipmaker has a news Operation right they're hiring real journalists from places like USA Today and Forbes to run these things and so far everybody has focused on the story of like why are journalists doing this and it's very easy because our magazines and newspapers are going out of business so we're all fleeing and going to corporate jobs right that's not exactly true because all the people who left are the ones who had jobs but anyway um nobody asked on the on the other hand why are companies hiring journalists why the hell would you want a journalist inside your company right and I think the answer is that there's a SE change happening I think marketing itself is changing right and the work like that I do at HubSpot or these guys are going to do at these V firms is it journalism or is it marketing and I think the answer is yes right it's both right and I think that over the next 10 years what we think of marketing what what we think of as marketing is increasingly going to look more and more like what we used to call the media business and I think marketing is is changing because because business is changing right the old way of doing business was transactional right it was Glen Gary Glenn Ross here's your leads always be closing right this was your Vice President of Sales right the guy you have to work for and um and he just wants lead some pushy and and this is how he saw Marketing in that world this is the one man band give me some lead you idiots go out and dance monkey you know get me some get me some leads I don't care how you get them I don't care who they are just get me a list of leads I don't give a I want a list names with email addresses right and our role we were Carnival barkers right get people into the tent I don't care how you do you're going to get them into that funnel we're going to cram them down that funnel we're going to turn him into hot dog meat I don't know what you do with them when you get them in the funnel but I'm I'm new here so I haven't figured that out yet but um and in this world of business there were only two business models right there was there was the first one which is you know the used car salesman business model which is you know the sort of churn and burn here's your thing boom you bought my thing you get out of here I never want to see you again right it was the one night stand right right the other one was the one that IBM and Oracle have used and a lot of tech fenders have used which you we get you in we hook you we hook you with software so you can't ever leave and then we just exploit you forever right we just screw you forever which I call prison sex but they they they um you know we basically you know we just milk you we make the cost of of of staying with us just below the cost of switching so you stay but you hate us right but you can't leave right I once saw the CEO of EMC in the old days give a talk to a bunch of Wall Street guys saying you know the great thing about our business is our customers can't leave and the Wall Street guys of course love this but I'm like you know your customers are going to read this you know um anyway the problem is neither of those models work very well anymore right and the picture of the cloud is is not there by accident right business is changing the way people buy and sell things is basically changing and think about HubSpot we literally don't sell really we don't we don't sell package software right we have we have subscribers not customers right we literally sell subscriptions the way a newspaper SS subscriptions right subscribers can leave at any time right worse than that in the in the cloud software model I you probably do know this but you know customers aren't worth anything until you hold on to them for a while you actually lose money on a new customer until you've kept them for a year or more there some point where the lines cross and then they become profitable so customer retention becomes hugely important it's not just about attracting customers and conducting a transaction it's about holding on to them right well to me that looks a lot like the media business right that's what we did we rounded up subscribers there was no lock in we had to earn their loyalty every day and we did two things to keep them on board one was we told good stories and two we told the truth we pandered sometimes that's why they had Comics right but um and trust me you never want to mess with Comics I worked at the herald a long long time ago if you ever up one thing in a paper if it's the comics you will never hear the end of it it's unbelievable but but you know the other thing we did was we challenged people right we told people things they didn't necessarily want to hear and I think maybe marketing is going to become that and I think it might become that because it has to I don't know if you saw Jeff Rosen bloom a couple days ago he's a friend of mine he he made this movie The Naked brand and he runs a digital agency in New York called questus so Jeff basically has this theory that says in the age of the internet in the age of social media you just can't people anymore this is a story we did on the HubSpot blog about him right you can't sell bad products and cover it up with great advertising it just doesn't work so in the end it may be that we just have no choice but to sort of become like journalists become like reporters and try to tell the truth about ourselves now Patagonia that gets mentioned everywhere is the one doing this right I love this ad because it's don't buy this jacket and it basically says yes we're green and we're environmentally friendly and we're Crunchies and we love the outdoors but the truth is every time we make one of these jackets we use poison chemicals and we hurt the Earth so seriously don't buy this jacket if you can use last year's jacket if you can buy a used jacket do that instead right of course the upshot of that is they sold way more jackets right but so it was super clever right but for a lot of companies to do what Patagonia is doing there it isn't going to be like we'll just walk out today and do it it's a really wrenching transformation right a lot of us live in in what I call like the Happy Happy awesome club you know what I mean we're awesome you're awesome that's awesome right oh my God that email you sent last week about how awesome we are that email was awesome no you're awesome you you're awesome right like it's like you know you can't just say we're awesome you know you actually have to be awesome right and and the problem is a lot of companies can't tell the truth because their products are right they can't tell the truth right so they lie but the fact is if your products are crap in this day and age basically screwed anyway right because people are going to find out no amounts of lies and ads and awesome talk are going to overcome the fact that you suck at what you do right there's an old New Yorker cartoon on the internet you know the one on the internet nobody knows you're a dog it's a dog sitting there on AOL or whatever but the truth is on the internet everybody knows you're a dog right it's the exact opposite of that there's no place to hide so so I have this vision and I I think it's actually incredibly naive um but but the the vision is what would happen really what's the worst that would happen if we dared to tell the truth about our own companies or our clients that we represent if we forc them to tell the truth right what if instead of being Carnival barkers right we created a role for ourselves that involved telling the truth right pushing back on our companies and in effect we'd be forcing them to make better products right what if that's what marketing was right because that's where everything begins with the product not with the marketing I know this is a marketing conference and we're all marketing people but the reality is the product product is the thing people say apple has great marketing and they do they have amazing marketing but Apple doesn't win because of its marketing right Apple wins because it's a great product and it has great customer service the marketing just extends that Patagonia has a really clever marketing campaign terrific but Patagonia wins because the jackets are good the product is good if the jackets were crap pagonia no amount of clever ads would cover that up so it seems to me as these worlds of media and marketing Collide and as storytelling becomes more and more Central to what we do that we have the opportunity to make marketing more than what it's been in the past and we can actually push companies to make better products we can tell great stories true stories that actually change people's lives and I'm sure tomorrow most of us will get up and just do the same thing we did yesterday and the day before and last week and the week before but some of us maybe will dare to go out and try to do something new try to make the world a better place I really believe that companies that dare to do this will be rewarded for their courage and that's my talk thank you [Applause]