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SUMMARY:
Drew Holmgreen, CEO, PPAI, discussed experiential marketing, strategic campaign execution, and brand consistency on the latest episode of How I Made It In Marketing. |
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It’s a noisy world out there.
So anytime you have that most valuable of things – a small window into your ideal customer’s attention span – are you clear and memorable with your value proposition?
Of course, that is all the more complicated by the fact that the small window of attention isn’t only when they see your big TV campaign or whatnot, it can come from so many places – it’s also when they step into your store, add something to the cart on your website, reach out to customer service, and on and on.
Which is why this lesson from a podcast guest application stood out to me – “Even bad brands can be good, when they’re consistent.”
To hear the story behind that lesson, I talked to Drew Holmgreen, CEO, PPAI.
PPAI is the Promotional Products Association International, the largest trade association in the world for the $27 billion promotional products industry – a community of 15,000 members.
Holmgreen manages a team of 50 and a budget of $25 million.
Hear the full episode using this embedded player or by clicking through to your preferred audio streaming service using the links below it.
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In 2009, Holmgreen was working with TM Advertising on developing a digital ecommerce campaign for their client, Sport Chalet (now defunct). The campaign was intended to launch on Black Friday with significant retail deals all tied to new ski and snowboard products. They conceived a campaign that featured some of the sport’s best-known talent through an interactive 3D “mountain.”
As the user engaged with the mountain, shards would pop out, revealing videos of a particular athlete – talking about the product, their career, etc. At the time, it was among the most advanced interactive promotions that the industry had seen and involved an incredible amount of coordination.
And then…the rug was yanked from underneath them. Days before launch, Sport Chalet was forced to terminate their e-commerce agreement, which meant the online purchasing function was no longer an option. They had a $500,000 investment in the website and supporting advertising campaign. They pivoted fast…as in…put down the turkey leg on Thanksgiving Day and made this happen.
The team developed an in-store strategy whereby consumers would access the website, engage with the athletes as intended and then go in-store to make their purchase through use of “secret” codes that were available within. What could have turned out catastrophic was re-imagined and relaunched in a matter of hours. Coordinated across three agencies (AOR, media and digital) on a holiday and at breakneck speed.
Holmgreen credited an incredible product and an incredible team…facing seemingly insurmountable challenges. And it worked…!
The state of Texas has historically brought mixed perceptions – those who experience it as a vacation destination, have very positive perceptions; those who don’t see it as “hot, dry and dusty.” One particular “state brand” survey saw it rank near the bottom in appeal. The reality is completely different – seven ecological regions, a vast variety of cultural influences and incredible people.
No better marketing exists than to sample and experience a product, but how can you sample a state?
Enter “Texas on Tour,” an experiential marketing road show that targeted specific high-opportunity markets with a true sample experience – multi-sense dome theater, VR kayak rides, live concerts (for example, The Old 97’s, and Holmgreen jokes that Rhett Miller wrote their song ‘A State of Texas’ just for him, and in all seriousness said that Miller and the band were great brand ambassadors), green screen engagement, trivia and…of course, incredible branded merch.
The results were extraordinary – lift was seen in every single market that Texas on Tour visited and revenue popped! This breakthrough campaign ran for nearly 15 years after its inception, coordinated across multiple agencies and supported by literally the entire state of Texas.
After 17 years in the agency space, Holmgreen started at MPI as their Senior Director of Marketing and Communications. Immediately after he came on board, Holmgreen recognized that the brand was fractured – internally (marketing and departments), organizationally (chapters and members) and externally (partners). While the vision and mission were in a good place, the positioning wasn’t formalized.
There was a tagline that everyone understood, but its expression was very inconsistent. In that first year, they partnered with an agency (Belmont Icehouse, his former shop) and formalized the positioning – tone, personas and expression. From there, they pulled together visual guidelines and launched a Brand Book.
In his seven years at MPI, those teams – internal, organizational and external – bought into that positioning; the Brand Book became the law and Marketing staff became the deputies! MPI now runs exceptionally well in how that positioning is voiced and visibly present. And when some of those teams may step out of line, that Brand Book (the law) is immediately dropped into place to bring them back.
Consistency is a beautiful thing…more on that in a bit…
via Wade Alger
As his Creative Director at TM Advertising, Alger taught him one of the most important lessons Holmgreen has ever received. When working on a client assignment, Holmgreen came to him with feedback and said, “Wade, I think we need to XYZ (Holmgreen cannot remember what it was).”
Alger had a great, and very “agency” response, “Drew, I don’t give a f**k what you think. I’m not making that change.” Holmgreen asked him why, to which Alger told him, “I don’t care what you think. I want to know what you know. Why does this need to be changed? And don’t tell me you ‘think’.” Indeed! Holmgreen knew based on the existing client strategy that whatever they were talking about required adjusting.
Holmgreen talked him through that strategy, gave him the background and details. Alger’s response, “Cool…I’ll put the team in action.”
Holmgreen considered himself fortunate to work with Alger, along with Tom Demetriou and Andy Mahr at TM Advertising, joking “I guess they needed three creative directors to tackle me at TM. All brilliant, brilliant guys.”
via Tim Hudson
As the founder and GM of Belmont Icehouse, a creative boutique agency where Holmgreen spent seven years, Hudson, who he also worked alongside for three years at McCann-Erickson, is among the most talented visual brand creators that Holmgreen has ever met. Over his career, Holmgreen helped collaborate on development of some great brands, both their positioning and their visual expression.
Among his first lessons working with Hudson at Belmont, Hudson shared this anecdote, “A great brand should always look good on a cap.” When you unfurl that comment, you understand the genius of it. Great branding is simple and direct. More complexities create target confusion. Whether visually or in its voice. The other great lesson Hudson taught, “Even bad brands can be good, when they’re consistent.”
Indeed! How many bad campaigns have you seen, but damned if you don’t know what they stand for…you may not agree with how they went about it, but brutal consistency will drive the point home.
via Paul VanDeventer
As the CEO at MPI, VanDeventer has become and continues to be one of Holmgreen’s greatest mentors. VanDeventer had so many incredible lessons for Holmgreen when he was transitioning out of a client space and into a nonprofit:
via unnamed
This lesson Holmgreen needs to be anonymous with, because it’s a positive brought from a negative. And he doesn’t want this individual to be revealed.
Some years back, Holmgreen was erroneously copied on an email by his supervisor. It was his review. And it stated that his niche was less-complex clients; those that really don’t require heavy strategy, because he wasn’t a strategic thinker.
He saw it…and was pretty pissed. The head of the agency immediately reached out. Told Holmgreen he wasn’t intended to see that, and it wasn’t true. But you know what? Holmgreen held on to that chip and he tells those who he mentors to find a chip that motivates them.
Maybe it’s the competitor in him, but he always finds the need for something to drive him and that comment was one that really stuck with him – made him work harder and think deeper.
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Not ready for a listen yet? Interested in searching the conversation? No problem. Below is a rough transcript of our discussion.
Drew Holmgreen: So one of the things I took from the CEO was, bad headspace. So when that when that review was written, that individual wasn't in a good place. So I took that into consideration. I mean, I was pissed, and our CEO really calmed me down. I mean, this was your this was your lay on the couch and let me talk to you for a second kind of moment.
He was I was a psychology major for a year. He was turning that right back around. So I cooled down and, understood and empathize with where that director was. He knew that I was copied into it. I calmly went in and said, hey, I saw this. And he said, yeah, you weren't supposed to.
I said, well, it. I don't agree with it. And he said, you know, he can. I copied it, and he said, okay, I get it. I get it. And it's something maybe we can work on.
Intro: Welcome to how I made it in marketing. From marketing Sherpa, we scour pitches from hundreds of creative leaders and uncover specific examples, not just trending ideas or buzzword laden schmaltz. Real world examples to help you transform yourself as a marketer. Now here's your host, the senior director of Content and Marketing at Marketing Sherpa, Daniel Bernstein, to tell you about today's guest.
Daniel Burstein: It's a noisy world out there. So any time you have that most valuable of things a small window and ideal customers attention span. Are you clear and memorable with your value proposition? Of course, as all the more complicated by the fact that the small window of attention isn't only when they see your big TV campaign or whatnot. It can come from so many places.
It's also when you step into when they step in to your store, add something to the car on your website, reach out to customer service, and on and on. Which is why this lesson from a podcast application guest application stood out to me. Even bad brands can be good when they're consistent. Here to share the story behind that lesson, along with many more lesson filled stories, is Drew Holmgren, the CEO of PPI.
Thanks for joining me, drew.
Drew Holmgreen: Absolutely, Daniel, thank you so much for having me.
Daniel Burstein: All right. Just looking at a quick, cherry picking of Drew's background from LinkedIn here. He's been an account executive at McCann chief experience officer at Meeting Professionals International for the past five months. He's been at PPI. PPI is the Promotional Products Association International, the largest trade association for the $27 billion promotional products industry in the world. It's a community of 15,000 members at PPI who manages a team of 50 and a budget of $25 million.
So give us a sense. What is your day like as CEO?
Drew Holmgreen: Yeah, so I mean, being five months and a lot of it is, is a ton of learning. I'm I'm at that proverbial fire hose right now, just really trying to, get as much information as I can about the industry. And a lot of that involves my meeting with, a bunch of our key stakeholders, going up and out on the road quite a bit, touching base with some of our key members.
I spent a lot of time in conversations, getting constructive feedback from a lot of our key members. But then, you know, being being somewhat new in this position, I probably spend the majority of my time really thinking about how to strategically push this industry forward in a way that pairs with our vision, mission, and core value.
So I spend a lot of time thinking about that validating decisions, seeking out what information I don't have. And that information can come from the amazing staff that are here at the board that's here to support me. And again, those those members, so I do a lot of reading research reports. A lot of catching up on, on, industry articles that exist out there, many of which we compose.
So, yeah, it's it's that firehose and really helping me understand this industry and where it needs to go.
Daniel Burstein: I mean, that is a great way to start a role. A lot of listening, thinking, researching. I know I've made the mistake before of just kind of rolling in, shoot from the hip, wanting to change everything right away. So kudos to you. Well, let's take a look at some of the key lessons from your career. I know I've said this before, but I've never worked in any other industry.
I've never been a podiatrist or an actuary, but I feel like we get to make things. That's something really cool about marketing. We make things and not everyone gets to make things. So let's see some lessons from some of the things you made. You said it rallied together to overcome Murphy's Law. So how did you learn this lesson?
Drew Holmgreen: Yeah. I think as as any marketer is going to find out, the, the worst case scenario is always something that can potentially play out and, you know, Murphy's Law is something that you, you've got to be prepared for. Specifically, when you're preparing for contingencies, you need to rely on a really strong team to get there.
And this particular case, I had a client, back in, you know, call it 2009, I think, called sports Chalet. Sports chalet, if you've lived on the West Coast, you know Sports Chalet really well. They had a sporting goods store had about, I want to say 55, stores spread throughout California, Nevada, Arizona, New Mexico.
And really, their core focus was around, winter sports and, skateboarding. Really, really, really cool experience, very much an experiential shop. So when you went in there, they were known as the experts. So everybody who works there was, was an expert in what they did. So if you were going there to look at some skateboarding stuff, dude, in the back there was a skateboarder and he knew how to talk to you about trucks and everything else.
If you needed a new snowboard. Dude working in the snow shop was a snowboarder. So everybody there was was truly an expert. So when they came to us at, this was when I was at TM advertising, they had a whole campaign that they wanted to launch around, Black Friday that was going to be focused on there, all of these new styles that they were getting for their winter sports.
So snowboards, all that gear skis, all that gear, all that stuff. So the campaign that we pitched to them was you're the experts. So let's bring in the experts to be pitchman for you. And we went out and contracted with some incredible talent. Not not necessarily Shaun White, because we didn't have that kind of budget, but think like, you know, the step down from the Shaun White's of the world, the people who were so well known on the, the winter sports circuit, all of these pros, just amazing athletes, you know, amazing women athletes, male athletes, all of them extremely charismatic.
And so we did this huge shoot over the course of, like, a week out in LA, brought all of these athletes in, you know, decked out in the gear, had them showing off all of the, the, the, the skis and the snowboards and the boots and everything else. I remember I can't remember all their names, but there was this one athlete who was really well known for her relationship with her dog, and her dog was like, and all her social media, her dog would show up in, in every ad that she did.
And so we had this really cool video of her interacting with the dog. And then the entered the dog interacting with snowboard. And so like, all this stuff was really cool. We developed, which at the time it kind of look like this is my geek coming up, but it kind of look like, Superman's Fortress of Solitude type, mountain.
Okay, with all these crystal shards on the side of it. And each time that the user would, would mouse over one of those shards, that shard would pull out 3D, come towards you on your screen, and then fold out to a video of that athlete talking about the product. And within that, when you click through, you could go buy the product.
Okay. So I think we had call it a dozen, maybe 15 different athletes in there. And golly, I mean, the videos we had from them, they were engaging with the merch. But then also, they were telling stories. So they were telling stories about why that particular product was great. They were telling personal stories about how they got into snow sports and winter sports.
So it was just it was an unbelievable experience. We got a ton of awards for it. I mean, worked just night and day to get this thing put together. And even if you if you took this experience and transplanted it from 2009 to 2025, it's still would hold like it was such a cool experience. So we create all of this.
We invest a ton of money into it for leading up to Black Friday. The whole campaign is, we've got a pretty heavy, localized digital media campaign pushing people to the mountain, which is what it's called. We have real creative things that we do in our industry, but then we just called it The Mountain. But anyway, so so we're getting everything set up there.
And about a week out, our client calls us and says, hey, so here's the deal. We had to pull the plug with our e-commerce engine, and we, you know, we're we're sitting there on this call. We're like, okay, so who's the new one? We can repoint all the links and everything. Yeah, there is no new one. So we're like, we've got a half $1 million media campaign.
We just spent a quarter of $1 million on a digital experience. And then there's our fees. So you're in this about a million bucks. What, do you want us to do this? Yeah. We need you to figure that out. So we're like, okay. Cool. So we're also in a contract year at this point. So we're like, we really do need to figure this out.
So it's the week before Thanksgiving. We we pull the entire, you know, our, our, our account planning team, our creative team, our media team, even brought in our digital outsource vendor based out of New York that that built the mountain. And we said, guys, we got to figure this out. What are we going to do? And we pulled together this very last minute idea of creating these codes that lived within each of the charts, so still operated the same way.
So you go to the website, you click on the Fortress of Solitude mountain crystal, it opens up. Athlete comes on there. It says, purchase this item, here's your code for 10% off and store. So we changed it for being an e-commerce experience to an in-store experience. Ended up driving a lot of good traction to the store. It ended up working, but so Daniel, I'm telling you, it was Thanksgiving morning around 11 a.m..
I'm at my parents house in Austin, and I'm sitting there just you know, we're in a chat, just just trying to get this all figured out because this campaign is launching. My mom comes in and says, honey, we are sitting down to Thanksgiving lunch. Would you like to join us? And I looked around and said, I would love to join you.
I'll be there in about 45 minutes. Bottom line is we got it out there. Campaign was a success. It worked out well, but the whole team just bought it just just rallied behind this cause of we have got this outstanding product. We know that it's going to do well by the client. Our knees kind of got chopped out from underneath us.
So let's figure out the best way forward. And we just rallied together. Got it done.
Daniel Burstein: Well it is a great example of a very good idea to a very good concept that it can work on different levels. Right. It wasn't really tied to one thing. There was overall value to the customer that was separating from a back end and you change up the back end. So that was great. But it gets me thinking now that as you've moved on in your career, like what element of contingency planning do you do?
Or is you're just like, you can just never do it right, and you have to have an agile team. Because when you talk about Murphy's Law, I don't know if everyone listening knows the term, but it means that which can go wrong will go wrong.
Drew Holmgreen: Absolutely.
Daniel Burstein: And anyone who's worked in marketing long enough, you know. Yeah, that's so true. You know, it's even more when it's like, you know, live things go like God. So, you know, now that you move up into kind of more C-level roles or strategic roles, how do you balance is is there specific like contingency planning you do for certain things?
Yeah. So take us through always.
Drew Holmgreen: Yeah, yeah. So always whenever we're setting up a tactic that's going to deliver on a particular strategy. The strategy should strategy shouldn't necessarily carry a contingency plan because that's the a high level agreed upon, you know, need that you need to get to an address and how you're getting there, the tactics that drive up to it, you have to expect something to go wrong.
You know, any any smart marketing strategy will have multiple touchpoints and elements to it. Whether it's a creative that's just not responding, you need to have a contingency plan for it. Whether it's an event that's part of your marketing strategy and, you know, God forbid. And this has happened to me in my past, a hurricane hits, and now your event cannot happen.
Because of that, you need to have a contingency plan behind it. In that case, we had an event taking place in Houston, hurricanes going through Houston. We had a media plan supporting it. Well, now we had to pivot that media plan and move it out of market and into another market quickly because we didn't want people driving. We didn't want to drive people to an event that wasn't going to take place.
So, you just you just have to be prepared. So if something happens and you get that last minute call from from your client saying, hey, this has happened, what are we going to do? You don't just kind of sit there with your mouth agape, like, I don't know, you got to have an idea of, you know, what's understand what this what the what the goal of the strategy was and how.
And you should have a kind of backup plan of how you can still get there if this fails.
Daniel Burstein: Yeah. You mentioned about that's especially true for live events. So many things can go wrong with live events. We've had the hurricane thing happen before. Here's another lesson you mentioned. When you can't send a sample, send the entire state. So how on earth did you do this?
Drew Holmgreen: Yeah. So I spent, about a decade of my career working on Texas tourism. If you're not familiar with what that means, each state and most big cities have a tourism, budget that they have out there to try and drive leisure and business tourism. Most cities rely very, very heavily on tourism income. States rely on it, very heavily.
A lot of the funds that come in to, that come into, state, state taxes come through tourism funds. So the example I give you, Texas operates on what's called a, a hotel occupancy tax. So when you come and stay in Texas, if you go look through your bill, you'll see a hotel occupancy tax. The state of Texas gets, I think it's half of 1% of that tax.
And that funds their tourism budget upwards of. I think when I finally rolled off the account, it was about, $40 million a year funding that tourism campaign. So, I did that for about ten years. And we were doing some strategic planning to try and figure out how we could, really make a mark on people who had poor perceptions of Texas as a tourism destination.
This was based on some a research study that we had seen called the State Brand Index. So the state brand essentially looked at states as a the state's brand as a tourism destination. Texas ranked, I want to say 47th. So we were right near the bottom, I think new Jersey ranked last. But it just befuddled me because I grew up in Texas.
I've been all over this state, and so I'm going to brag about the state a little bit. Texas. I'm going to sell it to people who haven't been here yet. Texas has seven different ecological regions. The only state that has more than that is California. Texas has everything from 8000ft mountain peaks to actual white sand beaches. I know, I sound like I'm like I'm lying.
I'm not lying. It's South Padre Island has white sand beaches. Texas has bogs that are similar to, bogs and, swamps that are similar to Louisiana rolling prairies. Just, just, you know, we get the Panhandle, gets a ton of snow each year. Can't quite ski there, but they do get a ton of snow. But there's just Texas is such a beautiful state.
And, you know, our brand was. It's like a whole other country. Well, it's anybody who's never been here. Another bit of research we found is that once you visit Texas, you were. And again, this was, you know, 15 years ago, but once you visit Texas, you were like ten times more likely to recommend and to visit again. I want to say it was like 75% of people who visited Texas said, yes, I'm coming back.
Whereas those who hadn't visited Texas said they were only like 30% likely to visit. So there's just these massive gaps. And in marketing, when somebody consumes your product, if they have a favorable experience, what are they going to do? They're going to consume it again, and or they're going to recommend it to their friends and family. Texas is not necessarily like tide.
You can't send a sample of Texas to somebody in the mail. If you did, I don't know what that would look like. But over time it might not smell real good. So the idea and the strategy here was, how can we bring Texas to people? So what we did is we, developed out a strategy called an experience marketing campaign.
We earmarked a sizable amount of budget, rationalize it with the business case. Got some partners on board to help fund it as well. Some sponsors, and then started pushing forward. This experiential campaign had multiple components to it. So we worked with a company called Red Peg marketing. It's based out of Alexandria, still still great partners.
And I speak to them every now and again. To create this, large footprint that could stand on its own, but for the most part visited 15 different targeted state fairs a year. So it had multiple pieces to it. And if the audience wants to go, I think you can still just search up Texas on tour and you'll, you'll, you'll get a video that kind of shows your highlight reel.
Daniel Burstein: Reminded me of it. So like traveling carnival or state fair when you see it. That's what it looked like.
Drew Holmgreen: Very much, very much a good comparison. So we had a 30ft enclosed double dome theater. We had really a first of its kind VR kayak experience. We had a green screen theater. We had a live music stage. And then we had like a lot of just kind of experiential stuff going on. SeaWorld is one of our sponsors.
So they showed up on a couple days in a couple of destinations and brought animals, porcupines and penguins and all kinds of stuff. Porcupines, by the way, are really soft when you pet them, which was kind of a surprise to me. So, it was a it was an 18 Wheeler truck that, like, a transformer just folded out into these experiences.
So as we got people then we had and this kind of leads me to where I am today, but we had a really big branded merch campaign, so we gave away t shirts, caps, everybody loved these really cool branded bandanas that we had. And we played games on site and people could engage with our brand ambassadors on site, educated all of these brand ambassadors, so they become they became Texas enthusiasts and really knowledgeable about the state, even though they might be they might live in Des Moines.
They would travel with us from destination to destination. So we almost kind of had our little cult following of brand ambassadors that were employed by Red Peg.
Daniel Burstein: It was the course of the campaign.
Drew Holmgreen: It was. And so we so we did this for during my tenure. It lasted, I want to say 4 or 5 years until I left the agency. It continued on for another 6 or 7 years. So it made it a full decade. But we went from destination to destination, had live concerts, some of them sponsored a lot of times they were sponsored by the city of Austin, which is live music capital of the world.
So they would bring their artists to play. We could then if you sign up for our newsletter, we would send you, downloadable mp3's of the artists who performed all of that, sponsored by Austin. But at the end of the day, what what we also did from a partnership perspective is we partnered with, Orbitz and Hotels.com to then go back and track.
So when we went to Los Angeles, we went to Chicago to Des Moines, to Kansas City, to New York City, to, Boston. We went to all of these different cities. We targeted these cities because they had enough lift direct flights back to Texas. And they already we on our website, we saw them as opportunity markets and that we had a relatively high level of visitation.
What we saw in each of those markets, leaning into Hotels.com and Orbitz, is that all of those cities after we visited saw immediate lift, all of them saw more searches for Texas. We started getting increased bookings from each of those cities to Texas. From those markets. So the the impact of it was, was astronomical. And, you know, and then we, we actually we did, surveys of some of the attendees as well, ask them what their perceptions of Texas were before they got there, what they were after.
They went through the experience, and all of them would see a big flip. They all would, you know, call it hot, dry and dusty. And then they would walk out saying, I really gotta check it out. It seems like it's a whole lot more light than that. Oh, it's like a whole other country. So I mean, it just it works really well.
It was a great way to, to kind of flip the perspective of Texas on its head by allowing people to experience it in their own backyard.
Daniel Burstein: I mean, that's a great example of experiential. I think sometimes we we shift have shifted so far to digital marketing. Sometimes we think that's the only tactic. Getting people out there and actually trying it can be very powerful. One of the things you mentioned was the band's live music, and you mentioned you have like the old 97, right.
A specific song for this, I wonder. We talk now about influencer partnerships, creator partnerships and all this. Is there anything you learned about that from partnering with the old 90s to to write that song?
Drew Holmgreen: Oh for sure, for sure. So we, the last year that I was on the campaign, 20, 2010, I think, we did three we actually did three standalone events. We did one, Navy Pier. Not in it. We did one that I can't remember the name of the pier in New York. We did one at Navy Pier in Chicago, and then another one at, pier 49.
I think something like that in San Francisco. And each one of those, we had, old 97 to do a live concert. And Rhett Miller and the gang at old 97 were amazing to work with. You mentioned it a second ago. There's a song that they produced called Texas, which, was written before they went on tour with us.
So I'm going to go ahead and take credit for that and say that they wrote the song for, for our tour. I'm going to make another leap and just say that Rhett wrote it for me, but that's cool too. I'll I'll make that assumption. But they they were completely on board and working with us to the point to where we had, kind of a, traveling brand ambassador tour go through each of those cities with this big inflatable, ad that they would toe throughout the city, and they handed out concert tickets, while the concert tickets were really just little promo pieces leading people back to the spot where Texas on
tour is located, with details about the concert and that sort of thing. And we would get, you know, a thousand people show up for these concerts. My, it was the best last day anybody could ever have on a job was my last day at TM in San Francisco, where I got to go hang out with old 97 before the performance and their greenroom, then went up on stage and introduced them.
And then literally after the show was over, I handed my laptop to my to my and I said, okay, I'm done. And then we went out and had a good time. But yeah, having them as influencers, I mean, immediately when you're handing out these tickets to to a live free concert, from old 97. So, I mean, it was just immediate borrowed equity.
So. Yeah.
Daniel Burstein: Oh yeah. I when if anyone who knows that band and rockabilly band, you just feel the Texas item. They had a song. Yeah. Before you did this West Texas teardrops. Oh, straight maybe. Want to go to West Texas? All right, so it's very interesting. You talk about our first example was a very you took like an in-person, experiential type of, process in that store that you talked about and you brought it digitally.
Your second example was actually trying to take a state tourism and make it experiential out to people. And I think this brings up what I was talking about at the top a brand. There's so many different touchpoints that a brand can have online and offline. So you mentioned one thing you learned was formalized a brand and consistency will come.
So with all these different touchpoints a brand can have, how did you formalize the brand.
Drew Holmgreen: So this was after I left the agency space and went to a trade association called Meeting Professionals International. I was recruited over there. I was, you know, ready to transition out of the agency world. Had some interest in getting into the tourism hospitality space after my experience with Texas and, and a few hotel brands and a few other tourism brands.
And so MPI Meeting Professionals International is the business side of the hospitality market. So, really, their, their, their thing is working with, event professionals. And so I wanted to learn that space of it because the business leisure side of it is a huge part of, of travel and tourism. So when I went there, I went there as their marketing lead, their senior director of marketing communications.
And what I found is that they had a very strong brand. Their tagline is, when we meet, we change the world. So really, you know, you feel some some good energy behind that. There was no real, formal positioning behind it. So they had a good tagline. They they seemed to be able to talk internally about what the brand meant, but it hadn't been formalized, and that positioning was inconsistent at best.
At the time, MPI had 17,000 members, 70 some odd chapters, one chapters to to the next. The the the experience was completely different. From a brand standpoint, logos looked different. There was just it was just fluid within consistency. So I ended up, engaging with Beaumont Icehouse, which was the agency that I had left to go to MPI and brought them on board as our brand agency to really redo the brand positioning and redo creative brand positioning for MPI.
There's a lot of kind of, pieces to that brand that had to get out there because, you know, this, this particular trade association and PPA is the same part of our value to our membership is in-person engagement through events. So even at our events at MPI, the MPI brand didn't we didn't seem to own it very well.
You would come to our event, and it seemed like a great event, but MPI wasn't necessarily present there because we didn't have a brand activation at our own event. So what we started to do is really stitch together consistency with that positioning, selling it internally before we sold it externally. So getting the staff on board with, hey, this is what we mean when we say when we meet, we change the world.
These are the core values of MPI. These are the pillars of our strategy, our mission, our vision. This is what we are doing for our membership and and our community. And then after we got that set inside, then we started going out to our 70 plus chapters, same kind of toolkit and providing them with monthly creative toolkits so that they paired with what MPI was doing.
So now you've got 70 chapters communicating the same as the global brand, in essence. And I've got some I've done some franchise work in my past. We were creating a franchise model. I worked on 7-Eleven back in the day briefly. And, you know, we created these massive kits for 7000 convenience stores around the world. Well, this just translated over to that.
So now we're creating these these marketing toolkits for all these chapters, just really pushing forward that consistency. And what you started to see as you started to see our members, really, I use the word rally earlier about Sports Chalet. They started to rally behind when we meet. We changed the world. They started to rally behind the branding and when, when I transitioned out of MPI, we started doing a lot of our own merch for the members.
And, I mean, they would go crazy over it. Just simple things like a Yeti cup with not not the MPI logo on it, but the tagline on it, no logo on it at all, just the tagline. And people just loved it. It allowed that kind of consistency. A lot of, really good associations almost developed a little bit of a cult like feeling.
I certainly has that MPI, really. It had it when I came into it. And boy, that just blew up over time there because people really started getting behind what the brand meant internally and externally. And that consistency, I mean, it's it's a beautiful thing. That's where it really kind of just started everything gelling well.
Daniel Burstein: And part of that is their experience with the brand. You correct at MPI, you rose to chief experience officer. And I wonder in rising that role, you're talking about getting to details here. When you started to rise up, at what level did you keep your kind of fingers in the pot and get very detail oriented? And what level did you stay strategic and execute through others?
And I ask because when I interviewed Jim Kruger, the executive vice president and chief marketing officer of Informatica, one of his lessons, he told me, was, the higher you get in the organization, the more details you need to know, which seems counterintuitive for you. On the one hand, sea level, right. Another hand experience to me seems so detail oriented, not to mention experience with people who are meeting professionals and this is their job.
So what level as you kind of see, you told us where you came in as you grew into that chief experience. Officer, what level did you stay in the details? At what level did you get more strategic and execute the others?
Drew Holmgreen: Yeah. So, it's interesting, I if, as you're in the process of kind of rising through the ranks, I got some good advice back in the day to use an executive coach to help me learn and get past any barriers that might, I might know, might not know. Are there, one of the, one of the great things that the executive coach told me, she we went through an exercise of what are you really good at?
You know, what's gotten you here? And then, you know, if there were five things that I'd said, it got me there. She took four of those and said, you need to forget all of those. Those are things that are going to hold you back as you start to get next level. One of them was, I was always known, especially in my agency days, as go true, go to true.
You needed something to get done. Just go to true. It'll take care of it as you start to rise through the ranks. You cannot do that anymore. You can't be. Go to Daniel like you can't. There's. There's too much. It has to be done. A and B, you need to empower the people who work for you to get their jobs done, to support the strategy that you are driving down.
That said, I also am a big believer in leaders have to know how. So the example I'll give you and you mentioned details. At the end of the day, if we have a workflow management platform, I need to know how to do that. You don't want me in there, but I need to be able to speak that language and understand those details.
Getting, you know, a little bit down more into the tactics of marketing plans. I always want to be be present when the marketing plan is being finalized so that I can at least ensure that what is being output by the team is pairing with overall strategy. Those are the kind of details and the depth that I, I was, I continue to be in, as a chief experience officer and I continue to be and as a, as a CEO.
Now, I will tell you that at the sea level, if you find yourself getting too deep into the weeds, you might lose scope of what's happening up top and you just you'll get bogged down into it. I think one of the greatest lessons that I have learned is that empowerment. Because when you don't empower the people who need to be a level or to down to do their jobs, they feel like they can't do their jobs and they feel like it's always got to be go to true.
That gets it done for me, and I'm just never going to rise up the ranks here myself. So, I get it. Like I think we as as sea level leaders, we all need to know those details. It's the way in which you dive into those details and engage with those who are leading them. That's. I think that's the key difference.
Daniel Burstein: When we talked about some of the things that drew made in his career, that's a great thing we get to do is make things. We get to make them with other people as well. So soon we'll talk about some of the people that empowered you in his career and that he learned from. But first, I should mention that the How I Made It and marketing podcast is underwritten by Nick labs, I the parent company of marketing Sherpa.
You can get conversion focused training from the lab that helped pioneer the conversion industry in our AI guild, along with a community to collaborate with. Grab your free three month scholarship to the AI Guild at Join Dot Net Globs ai.com. That's a joint MSE labs ai.com. All right. Do let's talk about some of these people that empowered you, or at least that you learn from.
You specifically mentioned Wade anger. You said you learn from Wade. Tell me what he told you. You tell me what you know. Definitively, not what you think. So why did he.
Drew Holmgreen: Tell you that? Absolutely. Yeah. So, Wade is is one of my, one of my favorite people that I've ever worked with. I really hope he doesn't listen to this, because I don't want him to hear me saying all these great things about him, but, very brilliant creative. You know, he's he's worked at, TM I worked with him at TM.
He's worked at, Martin Agency. He's had a number of incredible campaigns that he's put together. I was fortunate enough to work with he and, Tom Demetrio and Andy Mars. My, my kind of creative director team. I guess they needed three creative directors to tackle me at TM. All brilliant, brilliant guys. So when when I was at TM, I'd gotten hired on as the account supervisor on the Texas tourism business.
And, you know, understandably, Texas. It's a government account. It's a show account for an agency. So when you when you get an account like that, it's not one that you expect to make money on. Although we tried really hard to it's not it's not going to be profitable, but it's one that gains other business for you because typically those type of accounts, you get some leverage to do some really good work.
And they gave us at the Texas Tourism Client, wonderful, wonderful people. I never want that job to work within a government agency like that because it seems fraught with a lot of issues. But, I mean, we really got to do some cool stuff, like Texas on tour. So after I was hired at TM as a county supervisor in the Austin office, I mean, you know, we're cranking out a lot of ads, and I'd only been there for, like, I call it, six weeks, something like that.
So there's, there's an ad that comes through and, strategically, the the headline wasn't, wasn't right for what it needed to communicate. So I, you know, kind of put my thoughts on it, sent it back to the team, and I suggested a headline, suggested a headline. Okay. And so then I get, a message back from from Wade, saying, you know, why?
Why did you change this? And I said, well, I'm I'm not changing. I'm giving you a suggestion. He said, why are you giving me a suggestion? I said, well, I think and I can't remember exactly what I said, but I said, you know, I think based on, you know, based on the target size is probably is it going to work?
And he said very bluntly to me, I don't give an f what you think. I need to know what you know. I said, oh, okay. So a lot of me thought like, you know, all of a sudden I get kind of red faced. And fortunately this is before zoom and teams, so he can't see that I'm sweating right now.
I'm like, okay, give me more guidance here. And he said, look, you are the definitive expert on this client. We hired you to be the expert on this client. You need to know what the client knows. So you need to strategically know why we are doing things. He said, I don't want to hear the words. I think, I don't care what you think.
I need to know what you know. And so I say, cool. Okay, so what I know is that the target audience is, you know, vacationers in Oklahoma City and we're trying to get them down for winter vacation. I'm making up stuff here, but, real simply a way to reply back to me, call up the team in action.
And that was it. And you know, when I talk, multiple times a year, we keep up quite a bit. I ran into one of his really good colleagues just a few months ago. We were talking smack about him, but, I've he's heard me say this a few times that, you know, there's there's bits of advice that I've gotten in my career, but I don't care what you think.
I want to know what you know is such a good lie. Just, you know, tell always when you. When you're giving, when you're giving direction. Talk in strategy. Talk definitively. Don't talk about opinion.
Daniel Burstein: Yeah. Well, when I hear that line, the other thing I think of is that sometimes we're not that customer. And I wonder if you've done anything with a client where you're not the customer to figure out how to get in their mind. Because something I hear definitely I've heard from Mark directors and others over the years is like, I would never read that.
I would never read that ad. It's so long, I would never read it. And I was be like, you know, who's going to read it? Like, if you were refrigerator broke that morning, then you're going to read. Then you might want to read a page about a refrigerator and you might be interested, or a landing page or whatever it is.
And I think sometimes in marketing and advertising, we take this, we look at it through our lens. What I would do, I would do this, I would do that where it's so different when we're actually on the customer journey and potentially buying. So I wonder, like to kind of extend on that lesson from Wade, which I think is probably one thing he was saying in a sense, is what have you done to put yourself in the shoes of a customer when you were not that customer?
Drew Holmgreen: Oh, I got a really good one for that. So, for the you know, this is a podcast, so you can't see what what I'm wearing right now. But I went to University of Texas at Austin and I'm a huge grad. We're playing, we're in the process of hopefully winning a national championship in softball. And, one of my clients for five years, we were the agency of record for Texas A&M University, which if you follow, you know, collegiate sports, you know that A&M hates Texas and Texas.
I mean, to be honest, we could kind of care less about A&M. No. I'm kidding, I'm kidding. So I worked on Texas A&M as their lead strategist for five years. I did with a great team. We did so many cool campaigns for them. We were responsible for at the time, running a recruitment campaign that resulted in the largest freshman class in the history of the university.
So we did a lot of really cool stuff. Again, like Texas tourism, they allowed us to do some great creative, some great strategies, wonderful people that work there. I will tell you right now, that's a product I would not consume. I, I grew up in Austin. I grew up, you know, I'm third generation to university of Texas grad.
I have multiple friends who called me to sell out for working on that client. I said, you know what? They pay well in their checks, cash, so I don't. I sleep well at night knowing that our agency is taken care of. But the reality is, look, that is a product that I personally would not consume. But I understand the target audience.
That would a good example of that. My son has said he's interested in being an engineer. By all means, go to Texas A&M. I was an advertising grad. There's no reason for me to I'm going to go to Texas over Texas A&M just for that regard. But their target audience is very specific. At Texas A&M, they're an agricultural and engineering and manufacturing school.
That's your target audience. That's not me. So learn like, you know, I'm learning about this industry now. I think what you find about really good marketers, I'm not necessarily saying I'm one is that, good marketers are quick learners. They can learn products really, really fast. So I had to learn about the Texas A&M culture again, not necessarily a culture that I would have wanted to be a part of, but I can totally understand the people that do and I can empathize with them, understand them, understand their wants and needs behind A&M as a, as a, as a university, as a fan base, and so worked with that knowledge to put my
own perspective completely out of mind and look through the eyes of their consumer.
Daniel Burstein: Yeah. And then step one is knowing that you're not always a customer. And I think not to get too deep. That's something that this country struggles with right now. And so the marketers in the world that do really well at that, right. Yeah.
Drew Holmgreen: Yeah. And and I would just just one other quip on that. And I hope that I'm not the CEO that's like this or the boss that's like this, but it's very difficult. And I've been in that circle before, in previous jobs where the CEO was saying, I just don't like that. And it's so hard to go to that CEO and say, I dig it.
I know you don't like it. You're not the target audience. That's a really hard conversation. And sometimes it does not go well. But if you're the marketer, you have got to have that conversation. You have to just say, I get it, you don't like it. I kind of don't care that you don't because you're not the target.
Daniel Burstein: Yeah, a long time ago, we did this fun viral video. We're trying to. You think we called it Fight the Squirrel? It's the CEO that loved squirrels and wanted all these squirrels on his nose. And so they were trying. And the idea is that the county executive and the marketing team were trying all these ideas to convince the CEO.
And he's like, you're just squirrel haters, what's your problem? But at the end, they came with data and that was a difference. Yeah. That's it. We're losing X amount of money every day. We have the squirrels on the hub. He's like, kill the squirrels. Who wants the squirrels? I don't want that squirrel. Right.
Drew Holmgreen: So so legacy that goes back to my point. Tell them what you know definitively. I'll take emotion out of it. Take their emotion out of it.
Daniel Burstein: And opinion.
Drew Holmgreen: You know definitively.
Daniel Burstein: That's right. All right. You said that Tim Hudson taught you that even bad brands can be good when they're consistent. So how did you learn this from Tim?
Drew Holmgreen: Yeah. Tim. Another and I actually wouldn't mind if he hears this and hears me bragging about him. His ego and weights are very, very different. Tim is, is one of the best brand. Designers in terms of brand of visualization that I've ever known. And so when, when I worked at Belmont Icehouse for seven years, I came on as their lead account guy and and finished as their, their VP of account service.
And, Tim always had just it kind of goes back to, what were we put into play at MPI and that's consistency. I mean, how many horrible campaigns have you seen that you remember? Because they were brutally consistent? How many bad jingles have you heard in your life? But you remember them because they were brutally consistent.
So sometimes, you know, I'm not advocating for bad, bad branding. I'm not advocating for bad strategy, but even bad strategy and bad can or, bad creative output if it's done consistently and it actually can make sense to the target in some way, shape or form, that can be good strategy. So we, you know, no agency strives for, strives for a bad brand.
But every agency should strive for credible consistency across the board. And so we used to talk about that all the time. That even even bad branding can be good when it's, when it's consistent.
Daniel Burstein: So where is that balance? And when you keep a heritage and keep things going versus when you know you need to pivot and change or something else. And I bring this up because I know we talked about promotional products also. It's kind of becoming more known as branded merch. And I think that's probably a decision. And I don't want you to have to give anything away yet.
But the probably, probably some of the things that you have to think about right now. So how do you balance that consistency if we all, you know, agree with, Santa Claus drinking Coca Cola 200 years ago or whatever, versus, you know, markets move, things change.
Drew Holmgreen: Yeah. Yeah. Well, so I think it's, it's the tenants of the brand that always need to be in place. So if it's bad branding, but it's working and it's consistent, then there's something that led there. There's, there's those core pillars and you're the core pillars to your brand should never change. I mean, with Nike, you know, it stands for victory.
That's that's never going to change that. You know, I don't see them ever walking away from a just do it but just do it aligns with victory. They put out some bad ads. They have. I mean, I'm a huge Nike aficionado, but they do some bad work at times. It's so damn consistent. It almost. I hate to say it, but it almost doesn't matter.
They can just throw the swoosh on their entire ad. Could just be a swoosh for 30s. It's still going to get its point across. That's not good branding, but that's consistency. So sometimes, you know, the there's, there's certain factors that may come in certain impacts, that that might hit your business that you need to pivot and address.
But as long as you stay consistent with those core tenets of your brand, then you're going to be in good shape, because then if you need to put it back, people are still going to get it.
Daniel Burstein: So we talked about some great marketing lessons in general, but I always like to touch on the industry or the focus that the guest has. In your case, you are in non-profits and associations and nonprofit. You said one of the key lessons you learned was volunteers are your best resource and you learn this from Paul, then Deventer, how did you learn this from Paul?
Drew Holmgreen: So when I, when I got to MPI, I was coming directly from the agency space. I had had nonprofits as clients. I'd worked with some trade associations as clients, but I clearly I knew nothing about the association space as a, as an employee. And I again, you know, was drinking from a firehose to try and learn it.
So at one point, Paul is the CEO at MPI, and I, I've been really fortunate to work with some wonderful people, and Paul is one of them, great mentor. And, he said, this is kind of the can do, drew. He said, hey, you're saying yes to everything. And I said, well, I think we can do all this stuff.
He said, you can't. And I said, well, I, I think we can. He said, well, here's how you can said volunteers. And I said, I don't know what that means. And he said, you know, each of these good trade associations have a great volunteer network. And the reason they have a great volunteer network is that trade associations are heavily focused on ensuring that, the the mission of the organization is pushed forward.
In my case, the mission was all about event professionals, professional development and, advancing advancing the events industry. In this case, it's around promotional products. Right? So within these associations, the members all want to be involved in that mission. They want to have a hand in it. And the way to do that is through volunteerism.
Most trade associations will have, you know, a professional development, committee and, a DB committee and an international committee and a strategic foresight committee, Volunteers and governance committee. So any slew of committees that you can get involved in, and these are all great opportunities to to lead, and to really in some instance, give, give back to the, the community in the industry that you that you love.
So in having this conversation with Paul, he said you can get some of these done. You need to use your volunteers. I said, okay, I don't think I quite understand that. And he said, look, you've got all of you've got a media volunteer or a media committee, you've got a marketing committee. You don't have a big enough staff to get some of this done.
So start to work with those committees to try and get some of the work done. Also, you can work with these committees to validate what you're doing. One of the good examples I'll give you so at MPI, right after I had moved into, chief brand officer role, I took on the chapters team and we were going through a pretty significant overhaul of the chapter structure.
So again, MPI had about 70 chapters of the 15,000 members. I mean, 13,000 of them are organized into these local chapters. There's a DFW chapter, there's a Texas Hill Country chapter. There's the Chicago area chapter. So there's a, Netherlands chapter just all over the place. So as we're looking at this chapter, restructuring, frankly, it had gone through the board once under a different leader and failed.
The board said, no, this is a no go. This isn't a good structure. This this is a planned out well enough. And, so I then tack it on and I said, okay, how can I get this done? Right? And I started thinking about what Paul had told me years back and said, you know what I'm going to create?
I'm going to create a network of validators, and I'm going to start I'm going to start with the, community asset, the community committee, the Cmac chapter member Advisory Council started with them, brought in our Dei committee, and then brought in 3 or 4 different board members as another subcommittee started to put the structure together, then started validating it with each of them, started to get feedback from them okay, went back, retooled it a little bit, and kept going through that process and refining it and refining it, refining it and then actually use some of those board members to be presenters.
So when it was taken to the board to represent, I presented some of it, but now some of their colleague board members were presenting it as well. So it was a matter of using the volunteers to not only refine this process, to inform this process, but also to advocate for it. So at the end of the day, when it was finally pitched out to our membership, hey, we are changing your entire chapter structure and bear in mind the MPI membership.
You'll hear Texans say this a lot. I'm a Texan first and an American second. I don't say that, but some Texans do. A lot of the MPI members would say, I'm a member of the DFW chapter. Oh, and I'm a member of MPI as well. So now I've got all of these all of these chapter leaders and these community leaders who are pitching it back to membership.
And I'm just kind of standing back and watching. So now it's their product. It's not mine. And it got I mean got passed by the board easily implemented, had great community leader, within the staff at MPI and it's gosh, I think it's in its third year now and just absolutely saw. So it's that's your volunteers become that source of information, that source of validity, that source of credibility.
And if you're, you know, if you've got all associations typically have that, but on the corporate side as well, or just get those key stakeholders involved, those can be your volunteers.
Daniel Burstein: So we are talking about as an organizational structure, but is that what it also takes to get marketing campaigns messages approved? Because earlier we were talking about earlier talking about Texas, me like, hey, this is a a dream campaign for an agency to have. And on the one side I can see there's the upside. There's the brand, there's the network.
Oh my gosh, of every I'm sure, tourist company in Texas. But when you're talking about a CVB, when you talk about nonprofit and talk about association, they don't have this streamlined structure that a private business can do. I mean, in even private businesses. I was interviewing at key, I think yesterday we published, a podcast with a key marketing leader at McKinsey who was talking about stakeholders in software company she worked at in McKinsey, where there's partners.
Every organization has stakeholders. But my gosh, do nonprofits and association and CVS have a lot of stakeholders. And marketing is the thing everyone thinks they know because it's that outbound message. I mean, is, is that the same approach that you take when it comes to selling a marketing campaign?
Drew Holmgreen: Totally. Right. Totally right. I mean, lean into the stakeholders when you it's a little bit of that that I was a psychology major for a year. So, manipulating minds is something that marketing does. Hey, make people think that this is partially their idea. Once you get your stakeholders with some ownership that. Oh, well, what if you did this?
Oh, yeah, we could do that. Well, now this just became part of their idea. So now they're not only going to be on board for it, they're going to advocate and push. I always say that when you're when you're pitching it, whether it's a campaign, a strategy, etc., you got to put that bulletproof shield in front of you so you're prepared for every single answer.
Part of that bulletproof shield is those stakeholders helping you defend. Because when when you have somebody that's not you, that's one of them defending your effort and rationalizing it for them because they are them. That's it's the credibility. You know, it's it's the third party validation at home. I can tell my wife that we need to go do something.
She'll say no. But then her friend comes in and says the same thing and she'll say, oh, yeah, sure, it's the same. It's the same concept. It's my wife is a stakeholder. This person is a stakeholder. There you go. That's it. It's getting the stakeholders on board.
Daniel Burstein: Bring them along on the journey, too. It sounds like. That's right, that's right. All right, let's get, to a final personal lesson. This is very personal cuts. Very deep. So deep you wouldn't even name these people. And this this is a totally anonymous. If you want, we could kind of cloak your voice and face all that stuff.
I could do.
Drew Holmgreen: I could do some cloaking myself. No, I'm not doing that. Yeah, now.
Daniel Burstein: You got to. You should always have a chip to help push you forward. So how did you learn to have that lesson?
Drew Holmgreen: Yeah. So, I mean, if any of your listeners are in the in the agency biz, you've always got that the director who, seems to be out there trying to really help you, and then, boy, you kind of feel that. You feel that that knife just start to kind of you feel it kind of tickle your back a little bit.
This was the precursor to that, because this knife got shoved in me pretty hard later. So I had a director back in the day who, it was review time and review went around, and I got copied into a draft that I wasn't supposed to see. And within that, the director said, you know, great employee gets gets things done.
Probably best to keep his niche on, non, non complex, simple clients. I don't really see him as much of a, strategic thinker. Just don't think that this is, you know, we need to keep him on on simple stuff. But I read that, and, I mean, it was a it was it was. I don't know what's beyond a slap to the face, but, we'll call it a punch in the, in the, in the nether region.
And I was pissed. I mean, I was pissed, so I went to the CEO of the agency at the time, another great mentor. And, he could have stormed in and he said, what's up? And I said, you saw this. He said, yeah, you were copied on it. You were not supposed to be. And I said, it's bullshit.
He said, yeah, it's bullshit. I said, I don't know what to do with this. He said, look, man, I disagree with this. I don't think he's in a very good place right now. I think that was written in a in a bad headspace. It's not the case. You are a strategic thinker. I've seen it. I've worked with you on smart strategies.
Just take this and and own it and don't worry about it. And I said, okay. And it pissed me off. And I mean, this is gosh, this is 15 plus years ago, and I carry that chip. So I think what it's done over time is it's allowed me to. Almost think anybody is looking at me through that lens.
And is this guy really a strategic thinker? Is is he just, you know, flying by the by the, by the hip? So that and that goes back to being definitive, you know, talking about what I know definitively, not what I think. I'm doing the research, doing the background, drinking from the firehose, informing myself as best as I can.
Because that's how you build smart strategies. You look at all the angles. You know, we are doing a lot of advocacy at, at PPI right now around tariffs because tariffs are, really disturbing. The promotional merch community. There's a a lot of these small businesses that put a ton of investment in markets outside of the United States to bring products out.
So when we talk about smart strategies and smart thinking, we talk about how the terror strategy is one that is not strategic. It is one that is very just kind of throwing something out there to see how it lands. So I carry that chip with me, and I reinforce it with, with teammates and, ask the questions, before we act tactically, what's the end goal?
What's the objective? What's this going to accomplish? What's it mean for our target audience? Tell me what you know. Don't tell me what you think. So it kind of that chip is. I mean, it really, it's kind of driven me to where I am today, and it's it really drives a lot of my focus and and how I think.
Daniel Burstein: So I could after that ask you about how you became a long term strategic thinker. But I don't want to ask you about that because I know we can train and figure that out. I want to ask you really the harder question in in that role, how did you go about becoming a long term strategic thinker and having a chip but preserving that relationship on some level?
And let me tell you what I mean real quick. I interviewed this, always stuck with Mary, interviewed John Reid, who is a CMO of identified. And one of his key lessons was be easy to root for. And he told this great story. They were filming a campaign for Adidas one. They're filming these different up and coming celebrities. One was this rapper who is like really full of himself.
Thought it was a big favor for him to be there. Had this, you know, big crew coming with him and all this stuff. Never amount to anything. Someone else very early in his career, it was Michael B Jordan who came in, was a nice guy, very humble, very helpful. No crew, you know, and he became a big star.
And that was a great example of he was easy to root for. So going back to your story, you talk about a chip. I can imagine walking out of a CEO's office. It's going to be like an I'll show him. But he was still your supervisor. And part of it is not just like you said, you actually having the strategic chops.
It's the perception. It's having him on your side and rooting for you. So walking out of that CEO's office, take us like, what did you do next to not just become strategic, but also to be easy to root for?
Drew Holmgreen: Yeah. So one of the things I took from the CEO was, bad headspace. So when that, when that review was written, that individual wasn't in a good place. So I took that into consideration. I mean, I was pissed, and our CEO really, he calmed me down. I mean, this was your this was your lay on the couch.
Let me talk to you for a second kind of moment. He was I was a psychology major for a year. He was turning that right back around the, So I cooled down and, understood and empathize with where that director was. He knew that I was copied into it. I calmly went in and said, hey, I saw this.
And he said, yeah, you weren't supposed to. And I said, well, that's it. I don't agree with it. And he said, you know, he kind of copped it and he said, okay, I get it, I get it, and it's something maybe we can work on. And I frankly wanted to turn around and say, I don't think I need to work on it with you, but but I said, yeah, I think it's something we can work on.
I think we can continue to work on our relationship to. We did, and our relationship was fine until he firmly planted that knife in my back about five years later. But it goes into empathy. So, just under understand, you know, sometimes people react and have there in certain places and you need to this is a term that's overused, but it's still a good one.
You you got to meet people where they're at sometimes. I had a conversation with a member just the other day who sent a very vicious email, to me about something that clearly, they didn't have a good understanding around. So I had a good conversation with them. I understood their perspective, empathized with them, and, gave them some realities around what their perceptions were, walked away from it as a, you know, a good conversation that could have been inflammatory but ended up being good.
So, I think you ask, how do you get people to root for you, understand them, empathize with them. Listen to them, you know, and especially in the sales and marketing industry. And I'm definitely guilty of this. Boy, we like to talk sometimes. The best thing we can do is listen.
Daniel Burstein: Well, that's a great kind of endpoint to. This has been a pleasure listening to talk. And you've talked about so many different things, these stories from your career. If you had to break it down, what are the key qualities of an effective marketer?
Drew Holmgreen: Yeah. I mean, I think I've, I've, I've said it, pretty often here. First is, is never, always seek out validation. Don't just, don't just act on an impulse. Find find data to support a strategy and then build a plan and tactics around it. Get people to buy into it, don't make decisions.
And this is a I like to say this as a leader as well. Unilateral decision making will get you into a lot of trouble. And that's, that's, that goes in line with that stakeholder development and making sure that people are bought into, bought into concepts and, strategies and organizational plans and, and again, I, I am guilty of not doing a good job of communicating at times too.
So be a very good communicator. Don't assume that everybody can hear what's inside your head. When you are pulling together organizational strategies and structures and I've, I've learned this the hard way here to be very transparent and vulnerable. Don't don't assume that your staff know what strategies are just because you're presenting them in board meetings and on main stages.
Start internal first, get your team behind you, then move externally. You know, it's those those little ways just to be a good leader budget being a good marketer. Look at all the angles, look at all the angles and get your stakeholders involved.
Daniel Burstein: Well, thanks for sharing all these stories and lessons from your career and your. I learned a lot.
Drew Holmgreen: You bet. Thanks, Daniel. It's honor to be on part of this man.
Daniel Burstein: Thanks everyone for listening.
Outro: Thank you for joining us for how I made it in marketing with Daniel Burstein. Now that you've got an inspiration for transforming yourself as a marketer, get some ideas for your next marketing campaign. From Marketing Sherpas extensive library of free case studies at Marketing sherpa.com. That's marketing rpa.com and.
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