Episode Transcript
[00:00:25] Speaker A: Today, I want to get straight to one of the biggest mistakes I see in marketing. Trying to reach everyone and ending up connecting with no one.
Real growth comes from knowing exactly who you're speaking to, what they value, what moves them, and why they should trust you. My guest today, Scott Schufer, founder and president of Frontgate Media, an award winning marketing agency and media group known for reaching the faith and family audience. With more than 25 years of experience in over 7,500 campaigns for publishers, nonprofits, movie studios and major brands, Scott knows what it takes to turn an audience insight into real marketing results. Scott, welcome to Street Level Marketing.
[00:01:08] Speaker B: Hey, thank you for having me.
[00:01:11] Speaker A: Yeah, great to see you. As we start, I want everyone watching to think about, you know, their own marketing.
Are you simply trying to get in front of more people or are you mentioning reaching the people most likely to believe, engage, buy, share, or come back?
I'm starting the conversation with Scott by looking at audience strategy from the ground level. How brands identify the right people, speak their language, and build campaigns that feel relevant instead of random. This segment should establish why audience precision matters. Scott can help us understand the faith and family market, why it represents serious consumer influence, and what brands often miss when they treat value based audiences as a category instead of a community.
Scott, when you're looking at brands trying to reach the faith or family audience, what do they most misunderstand about the market?
[00:02:07] Speaker B: Well, a lot of folks will look at the market and kind of assume it's exactly the same as what they're already doing, which is never the case when you look at any kind of a niche market, for example, ethnic markets. Right. If you look at the African American market or the Hispanic market, or if you look into the faith based markets, there's a reason those are defined differently. And every one of those audiences has nuances and, and alternatives that you need to understand in order to communicate with them. And if you miss that, then you're not going to make a stronger connection.
So it's definitely something you have to plan ahead for in understanding how strong someone's faith is or their family biases, if you will.
That's a huge emotional selling proposition that when you tap into it, can really make a big difference for your brand.
[00:03:11] Speaker A: What makes the audience so valuable from both a cultural and consumer behavior standpoint?
[00:03:18] Speaker B: Well, I mean, one of the values is that emotional connection. You know, if you can tie to someone's faith, you know, it can be doubly effective.
You know, for example, we all know kids are very important to parents, so when you tie into something to do with kids and parenting, that's a really strong connection for parents, especially mothers.
So how about if you layer on top of that a faith connection? Well, now you've got two massive emotional connections for a lot of people.
And so layering those together really increases the impact that your brand is able to make.
When someone's trying to evaluate why should they choose you instead of someone else.
[00:04:10] Speaker A: How do you move a client from broad marketing assumptions into real audience insight?
[00:04:17] Speaker B: Well, we like to do a lot of testing. We're a big believer in testing. We don't just launch into campaigns typically so that we can gather metrics and help the client to understand what's connecting and what's not.
So if they have some underlying assumptions that maybe don't fit very well, that will kind of come out in the testing phase and we can help them
[00:04:41] Speaker A: to see
[00:04:44] Speaker B: what actually is working versus what they think will work.
Which, you know, for all of us, that's not always the same thing. You know, as a marketer, I make assumptions and sometimes what I think isn't going to work either.
But, you know, testing is very, very important in that, and we love to do testing.
We also have for larger clients.
Our kingdom analytics products and services allow us to go into a client's existing audience base and pull out all the key mosaic groups and the targeting on how those Personas like to be communicated with. So for, you know, for larger clients, we're able to really profile their existing audience, help them understand how that existing audience wants to communicate with, with the brand, and then step up the marketing program so that it accomplishes those goals and reaches people in the way they want to be reached, basically making it much more effective.
[00:05:59] Speaker A: So, so when you say there are audiences, are you talking about, like, companies can come to you, they have a list of, say, 100,000 former customers or lists maybe they bought, and you can segment those lists.
[00:06:17] Speaker B: Yes, we do a deep dive.
So depending on what level of work we're doing, we'll do a full demographic psychographic analysis of that existing database.
In some cases, we'll do a deeper dive to evaluate the brand based on vendors, on other stakeholders, customers, employees, kind of the whole stakeholder map to get a feel for how the brand is perceived across the different engagement groups that the business or the nonprofit is working with. So, yeah, basically, yes, you have it exactly right. We would take their existing database and we're able to go in and analyze that audience and give a really solid report on what those profiles are, who you know, they've been called psychographics, they've been called Personas, they've been called target audiences, they're mosaics. It's all the same thing. It's all wrapped up into one solution.
[00:07:26] Speaker A: Yeah. What are the signs that a campaign is connecting with people instead of just being placed in front of them?
[00:07:34] Speaker B: Well, action. Right. If we're always trying to drive someone to take action.
While I do believe in brand based advertising just to keep the brand top of mind, most of what we do is driven to somebody to take, driving somebody to take an action.
So whatever that action is, whether it's a click through to something or a sign up or a purchase opportunity, you know, that action is the measurable.
And with advertising, you know, we try to stay focused on take getting someone to take one action at a time. So if we're going to try to create five different outcomes, we're going to run five different types of ads to do those things.
And from that we'll be able to really see a direct response measurement of how that message is connecting or if it's not.
[00:08:32] Speaker A: Right.
Why is specifically often more powerful than trying to appeal to everyone?
[00:08:41] Speaker B: Well, I mean, you know, appealing to everyone is just an overspend basically. You know, as much as possible you want to get to the right people with the right message. So when you're throwing spaghetti against the wall, you're just reaching a lot of the wrong people, right?
[00:09:00] Speaker A: Yeah, that's, it's just really as simple as that.
What kind of audience data matters most when you're building a campaign for a faith or family market?
[00:09:12] Speaker B: Well, that's a really good question.
When we're building a campaign, we want to know as much about the product or service or cause as we can and then who they think their target audience is. And we're going to match that up with who we think their target audience is, which isn't always the same.
And we want to know their priorities. Who do they know it's worked for and who do they want to try to make it work for out of that audience? We're going to kind of combine all that together and then the testing will reveal what we need to know. So it's hard to answer that question on the front end. It's a lot easier to answer it on the, you know, on the completion side of a testing campaign.
[00:09:57] Speaker A: Correct? Yeah. Right.
How do you balance demographic targeting with deeper signals like beliefs, lifestyle intent and community influence?
[00:10:08] Speaker B: So for us being in a niche, we don't have some of the, the depth I would say of some of the really big tools that are out there. Right. Like as much as Google is a gigantic, enormous pain in everybody's arse, they provide you with a lot of data.
So, you know, you do get deeper metrics and you can go even deeper than just what they provide. But when you're advertising to a niche audience, even a really large niche like the faith and family audience, then, you know, you rely a little bit more on the brand relationship of the media outlets we, whether that's social influencers or streaming television people that are subscribing to Christian channels like Goodview or Faith Channel, or maybe to the Christmas channel. You rely a little bit more on third party validation and a little bit, I wouldn't say less. But you don't have as much available to you in the analytics side as you might for a larger entity.
You know, it would be like pairing the Christmas channel against espn. Well, ESPN has a lot more data, but you rely on fans of Christmas to show up at the Christmas channel.
[00:11:26] Speaker A: That makes a lot of sense. What I hear in this first part of the conversation is that smart marketing does not begin with a platform, a budget or even a campaign. It begins with knowing who the audience is and respecting what they value.
When I take a short break, I'm going to come back and we'll talk about authenticity, trust and why audiences can feel the difference between real world connection and forced messaging. After a word from these sponsors.
Welcome back to Street Level Marketing. Stay connected to this show and every NOW Media TV favorite live or on demand anytime you like.
Download the free Now Media TV app on Roku or iOS and unlock non stop bilingual programming in both English and Spanish on the move. Catch the podcast version at www.nowmedia.tv. from business and news to lifestyle culture and beyond, Now Media TV is streaming around the clock. Ready wherever you are.
I'm continuing with Scott Schufer, founder and president of Frontgate Media. And now I want to get into one of the hardest things for brands to fake authenticity.
When you're marketing to a value driven audience, the message cannot just sound right, it has to feel true. People can tell when a brand understands them and they can also tell when a brand is simply borrowing that language to make a sale. In this segment, we'll explore how brands build the trust before the conversation, how value based messaging can be done with integrity, and why authenticity is not soft marketing. It is serious performance advantage.
Scott, when does a campaign begin to feel authentic instead of simple, simply promotional?
[00:13:50] Speaker B: Well, it starts with the creative. You know who did you cast for your video, you know who wrote the copy, who picked the imagery. Right. If, if they are not in the space, you're gonna have some challenges you just aren't aware of. Right. If you don't, if I don't, I don't need to design a campaign for the Hispanic audience.
What am I going to do wrong? Right. You're going to come up with the, the. I'm going to come up with the Chevy Nova if you know the marketing story of the Chevy Nova where Chevy introduced the car, the Nova to great success in the States and around the world, but in Latin America, nothing. And they couldn't figure out why until someone explained to them that the Nova being a car translates in Spanish to no va, which means doesn't go.
So why would you sell a lot of cars in Latin America that called. Does not go problem.
So that, that's a, that's how you can tell when the, you know you're authentic or not. Right there.
[00:15:02] Speaker A: Yeah, that's a good point. I, I actually I did a lot of marketing for, I was a firefighter for many years, Captain and I did a lot of marketing for healthcare agencies that wanted to start programs for first responders, you know, to treat PTSD and things like that. And that's what I did for many years.
And that's, that's another audience that when you're marketing to that demographic or those type of people, they know when you're speaking their language and, and whether you're just trying to move in on them or you know, there's a culture.
So that just made me think of that and the point being there.
What mistakes cause brands to lose trust, culture, engaged or value driven audiences.
[00:15:51] Speaker B: Well, you know, that, that ins. In, excuse me, insensitivity is really what will tank you faster than anything else.
So I'm trying to think of an example. Well, I'll give you an example from way back and it's not my example, but it was relayed to me from one of our outlets. We work with the number one publication for church worship leaders and tech teams and that's called Worship Musician. And when it first debuted, it was called Christian Musician. And the publisher, Bruce Adolph, you know, was kind of a pioneer and still is a pioneer in bringing the church market so space into the national association of Music Merchandisers, the NAM association, and when he first went to the big gear companies, these are guitar companies, soundboard companies, lights, everything that, you know, you can imagine that is needed inside of a church to do a Sunday service or five Sunday Services or to broadcast.
You know, the NAMM industry companies had not recognized that the church was a viable audience for them yet.
So when he first debuted the magazine and was bringing ads, selling ads to that inside of the world, they turned in the same ads. They were turning into Guitar Player magazine or you know, fill in the blank, whatever, Bass Player magazine.
And so they would turn in ads that had women holding martinis in low cut dresses because that's what they're advertising, you know, with the guitar player that was holding their guitar. Right.
Well that maybe isn't going to be a hit with church pastors at Presbyterian churches. Right. It's not.
You're going to immediately tank your credibility. So he had to go back and kind of educate those early adopters to say, hey, you know what? This is a unique audience. You can't run a picture of a sexy woman holding an alcoholic drink and expect Catholic priests and Episcopal pastors to want to carry your product in their, in their worship team.
[00:18:16] Speaker A: Wow.
How do you help clients speak to audience values without sounding forced or opportunistic?
[00:18:28] Speaker B: Well, we try to stay very on focus with, you know, with what's going on in our community as a whole. Because really the, the faith based community is not one community, even though it gets lumped in together any more than the Hispanic community as one Hispanic community. You know, there's, there's big differences between the Mexican Hispanic world and Latin American Hispanic world. And you know, it's just not all one group, but they get lumped in together the same way that in the Christian world all the Christian subgroups get lumped in together. So we try to stay current, we try to stay relevant with the copy and the content that we're creating, whether that's social posts or ads, you know, for streaming television or you know, direct email ads, whatever that content is. We start, we just try to stay very current so that it's not sounding stale and it's not looking old.
[00:19:34] Speaker A: Yeah, makes a lot of sense.
What role does consistency play in building long term credibility?
[00:19:50] Speaker B: I went to San Jose State up in Northern California and there was a concept that was taught at that time that was called minimum effective frequency. How many times does your ad have to be seen or absorbed before anybody actually connects with the message?
Just a hint. It's not one, it's more than once now.
In that period we had print, tv, radio. No, digital.
In the digital age, the concept of minimum effective frequency has kind of disappeared because now we're on information overload. We have way too much.
So consistency is Critical because if you're not consistently showing up, you're forgotten immediately. I mean, you know, when you get off your phone and come back 10 minutes later, you don't remember what you saw. It's already over.
So consistency becomes hypercritical in the digital age. And that's why you have follow Me campaigns, right, where we're doing retargeting and all of the things where ads are following you around because there's no way to achieve a minimum effect or frequency anymore. You really have to just maximize your exposure with whatever budget you can afford.
[00:21:18] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, we have that here in the auto space. I'm always, you know, playing with that when we're running streaming ads and stuff.
That fine line between is it, you know, sometimes even a little bit, you might as well not even run an ad because it's just, it's like throwing, you know, a penny in the ocean.
How should marketers measure trust when the outcome is not always immediate?
[00:21:50] Speaker B: Well, that's. Yeah, I mean, that's. You just have to wait. That's the uncomfortable answer.
If you have a long adoption cycle, there's nothing else you can do but wait.
So you kind of have to work through that testing phase. And in that type of situation, it's going to be longer than other, you know, other similar situations.
And the only way you can mitigate that is to try shorter conversion opportunities. So for example, you might want to take your messaging to email and if see if you could get the point across and you know, in a few email tests and generate an immediate response because you'll know within 4, 48 hours or less how your email does.
So it depends. You know, you could try to shorten that a little bit through some faster testing if it's possible.
And then again, if you know your mosaics, you can tailor the communication and that kind of stacks your, the odds in your favor.
If you're communicating with people in the way they want to be communicated with or they expect, then that can also help shorten the turnaround time. But yeah, if you have a long conversion cycle, a long sales cycle, it's difficult. You gotta become patient.
[00:23:19] Speaker A: How important is the messenger or media partner when the campaign is built around trust and credibility?
[00:23:27] Speaker B: Well, I think that's something that's very undervalued in the digital age, where we're just throwing money at Google or Meta and there's really no trust factor. Like Google's just Google. They're just throwing ads at people. Right. So you have targeting, which is important, but nobody, quote, trusts Google. They know they're just getting an ad. And I would say the same is true for Facebook, at least within the traditional ad system for Facebook and Instagram.
So I think because marketers have been trained in the current media age to just use these targeting systems, we've, they've kind of lost the fact that third party validation plays a major role. And so I think especially in a niche, you know, third party validation, the importance only increases when you're inside of a niche.
[00:24:26] Speaker A: Yeah, it makes a lot of sense. What becomes clear is that authenticity is not a slogan, you know, it's an alignment. It is what happens when a message, the brand, the offer and the audience all make sense together. We'll take a short break. When we return, we'll move from message to execution and look at what separates a campaign people notice from a campaign people actually act on when we come back.
Sam.
I'm here with Scott Schufer and now I want to talk about campaign execution, the part where strategy has to become movement.
Frontgate Media has led thousands of campaigns across entertainment, nonprofit, publishing, brand and faith based sectors that kind of experience a practical view of what works, what gets ignored, and what actually motivates people to respond.
This segment should focus on the mechanics of high impact campaigns. Clear positioning, audience timing, media placement, partnerships, creative execution and measurable outcomes. The goal is to give viewers street level tactics that can apply immediately.
Scott after leading more than 7,500 campaigns, what separates a campaign people notice from one people actually act on?
[00:26:20] Speaker B: Well, it's, it's really dialing in to that target audience member, you know, creating the right combination of variables to really create a massive impact with someone versus just something that's happening in passing. So, you know, when we can go deep in a connection standpoint, from a connection standpoint, then I love that kind of campaign more than a typical, say, direct email campaign where we're just blasting out emails.
That doesn't give us a lot of chance to really go deep with that target audience member.
So for example, we were part of an agency team that helped market a big self help platform from aarp.
And with that campaign we were able to not to, to sponsor the Women of Faith conferences which were taking place all over the country in stadium size venues.
And for that we were able to incorporate massive reach and multiple touch points. So not only did we do digital advertising and we were in the event program, but we sponsored a speaker, we had video, we drove traffic on site at every stadium for these women to pick up a bracelet, we had them complete a very simple survey on an iPad.
We were modular in our booth structure all over the site at each stadium.
So at the end of the day with that we actually, if the stadium had 10,000 women, we were able to harvest 8,000 of them them. So we were getting 80% conversion rate, which is unheard of. Like that's a unicorn right there. I, I bet I never get to do that again. But, but when we did it, you know, we had aligned exactly every possible touch point correctly. From the premium giveaway to the survey, to the in endorsement from the brand itself, or I should say the implied endorsement with the speaker.
Every piece of that campaign hit exactly in the way we hoped it would.
[00:28:48] Speaker A: Where do campaigns usually break down? Is it the message, the audience targeting the offer, or the execution?
[00:28:58] Speaker B: Well, with, within our world, I would say the budget is where it breaks down.
Many, many marketers don't come to the table with enough budget to achieve what they're trying to achieve.
A lot of times the marketing campaign is kind of like the redheaded stepchild to the product creation or whatever. If it's a cause, they're already strapped. They're a nonprofit. Right.
If it's a product, they'll make a million dollar movie and then come in the door with $100,000 marketing budget.
That doesn't make any sense. Right.
So a lot of times the budget is where things break down is that there's just not enough budget factored in to really achieve the results of what they want to achieve.
And so we have to get very creative and do the best we can do for them. But budget is certainly one of those areas and probably the number one area where, you know, that ends up affecting the final outcome.
You know, our budget for the ARP example, we had a very healthy budget for that, you know, so we were able to go deep and really, you know, help AARP benefit by harvesting 80% of the people at 40 plus stadiums across the country. So, you know, that's a big effect.
Had that budget been half, we wouldn't have been able to do everything we did.
[00:30:28] Speaker A: Yeah, I fail with that problem every time. Even, you know, a lot of times the budget, the marketing budget's not looked at as the fixed cost. You know, it's, you get the scraps of what's left over after everything else. And you got to try to make do what, what they give you.
And it, you know, usually never rare, very rarely is enough.
[00:30:53] Speaker B: I have all the budget I hope for. I've never met any marketing better than I. In fact, I have more budget than I hoped. So this is going to be great. So we all work under those constraints. But you know, at the end of the day, there's, there's kind of a pass fail on the budget side and that's where that plays in.
[00:31:11] Speaker A: Yeah.
How do you identify the emotional or practical trigger that moves someone from awareness to action?
[00:31:21] Speaker B: Well, it's, it's, yeah, it's in, it's in establishing the motivator. Where is that emotional connection? If we can, you know, hit the emotional button, that's the connector and sometimes that's not possible and sometimes it's maybe not as strong as others, but
[00:31:39] Speaker A: you
[00:31:39] Speaker B: know, if we can hit the, hit the right emotional, you know, button to, to fit. And we obviously we want to be authentic in that. Like we talked about in an earlier segment, it's got to be an authentic connection. We don't want to just hit an emotional cord for no reason, but if we can find that spot, then that's going to motivate the action for sure. People react and respond more than often and faster than they decide.
[00:32:11] Speaker A: What role do the partnerships and media relationships play in building campaign momentum?
[00:32:17] Speaker B: Oh, it's tremendous. You know, we're in the process of just getting started to launch a new social platform called Axe Social.
And part of our campaign for that is to lay the foundation with the media outlets in our space and with the influences in our space so that we can help them understand what the platform is about and then try to work on enabling a deeper connection with those outlets and those influencers and other people that we hope will become stakeholders in the overall interest of what Ax Social is doing.
So, yeah, absolutely. I mean, the deeper the connection with the outlet, the better.
And I always favor outlets that will get on board with us for campaigns and provide added value beyond the buy. Right. I mean, we can buy radio spots all over the country, but we look for stations and station groups that want to go deeper because they really are saying they believe in the client.
And when they do that, we want to go deeper with them too. So I always tilt budgets toward the more flexible, more partner oriented media outlets and individuals and less toward the. Yeah, here's our package.
Take it or leave it.
[00:33:45] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, makes a lot of sense.
What should business owners track if they want to know whether a campaign is truly working?
[00:33:55] Speaker B: Well, there's a short term answer to that and a long term answer. So, you know, the immediacy of it is the click, you know, or the scan or the email collector, you know, whatever the, whatever the short answer. Is you can measure that very quickly. But ultimately most people need to be, look, most businesses need to be looking at lifetime value of the client they're obtaining.
And a lot of marketing directors will go, you know, they're just running fast, they're trying to get to the next campaign.
So you know, however many products they launch. We do a lot of work with book publishers. So you know, they're not going to have only one book. They're working, they're working 50 books at a time, right? So, so they're ready to get on to the next one once they do their plan.
And there's not going to be a lot of conversation at that time about the lifetime value of that book reader that just picked up a first time author.
But you know, there's really, that's the bookend of the process.
The first side of the bookend is the immediate response metric and then the back of that is the, is the lifetime value. Has that customer been converted more than once? And really that's where your value comes in. Because if you're just advertising one, you know, one for one action, one time, it's very difficult to recoup unless you have a really high ticket item.
You know, you're not gonna, you're not gonna recoup a book marketing campaign. If your book is, you know, 10, $20 a book and you're spending advertising money for one book, that's it, you're not going to write another book.
That's your lifetime value. Is that one sale. You know, then yeah, that's a situation where I would say to somebody, save your money or understand that what you're doing in our case would be a ministry opportunity. You're getting your book in the hands of people that need it. And it's not really a business proposition at that point, it's more of a charity proposition or at least impact proposition.
[00:36:14] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah.
My owner here at the dealership, you know, his, his answer response to a lot of the, the vendors or you know, marketing companies is, you know, how many more cars am I going to sell? You know, that's really all I care about at the end of the day is, you know, are we going to sell more cars? You know, and it sounds so simple but you know, really you got to look at what you're offering and you know, break it down that way.
What makes an offer strong enough to move someone from interest to response?
[00:36:50] Speaker B: Well, if you've answered the question, what's in it for me? Me being the recipient of your ad, then that, that's what governs it. So you're right out of the gate.
One of the mistakes that advertisers or marketers make is they are way too busy informing about what they want someone to know instead of making benefit statements about what's in it for the person that you're trying to convert in the target audience.
So it's critical that everybody is tuned into WIFM radio. What's in it for me?
So if you're not answering that question, you're not converting. You can inform all day long and maybe at some point that person will be interested enough to convert. But if you're informing instead of appealing, then yeah, you're really less than your impact.
Yeah.
[00:37:52] Speaker A: Wow.
So this part of the conversation reminds us that a campaign is not just content pushed into work, into the world. It's a sequence of decisions designed to create action when the audience is clear, the message is aligned, and the execution is disciplined. Marketing becomes more than visibility, it becomes momentum.
We'll take a short break. When we come back, we'll close with the bigger picture. What 26 years of marketing evolution can teach business owners about what they should what still works today. When we come back, Stay connected to street level marketing and every NOW Media TV favorite live or on demand, anytime you like. Download the free Now Media TV app on Roku or iOS and unlock non stop bilingual programming in English and Spanish on the move. Catch the podcast version at www.nowmedia.tv. from business and news to lifestyle, culture and beyond, Now Media TV is streaming around the clock. Ready whenever you are. I'm closing this conversation with Scott Shuford, founder and president of Frontgate Media. And I want to step back from the campaign or one audience and look at the bigger picture.
Marketing has changed dramatically. Platforms, data targeting AI, consumer behavior, media habits and customer expectations are all moving fast. But some fundamentals have not changed. People still respond to trust. They still need clarity. They still want to feel understood, and they still make decisions based on value, relevance and belief.
The final segment will give viewers a practical takeaway from Scott's 25 years in the field.
What to stop chasing and what to start measuring and how to build marketing that creates long term credibility instead of short term noise.
Scott, after more than 25 years of marketing, what has changed the most and what has stayed exactly the same?
[00:40:29] Speaker B: Well, what has changed the most is obviously the digital age. I mean, we've, we've, we've gone from having three major ways to hear about things, not including events and billboards and outdoor stuff. But you know, it used to be print did print, television and radio were the primaries.
And you know, then came the Internet and then came email, and then came social media, you know, and then came the cell phone. And now we got, you know, a million ways that we get hit and hammered with messages all day long everywhere we go. We carry that with us now, whereas we didn't used to have that, that opportunity. So digital has, it has completely changed the landscape. And of course none of the other opportunities went away. There's still television, there's still print, it's less into some degree and television is now kind of did, but.
And we still have radio and radio is also digital as well. So nothing seems to go away.
And the marketing budgets don't get any bigger. So marketers are constantly faced with hard decisions about what to, what to choose and where to go.
So the digital age has really been the biggest change and the need to continue to develop your core messaging, your core content, and then slice and dice it up to be delivered through all these different mediums, whether it's YouTube and TikTok shorts or social media memes or streaming television spots. I mean, there's just so many different ways to slice it up now. So that would be, I would say, the biggest change.
And then right now we're in the middle of a whole nother change, which is the AI world.
So it's changing everything right now. It's not over. But yeah, we're gonna see the day that, that all searches are answered by AI and there's no more link grids. You're not going to go through, you know, two or three pages of Google links anymore. You're going to get an answer from Gemini.
And that's already happening. It's happening right now. It's just a matter of time before that goes away.
Things like Wikipedia are going to become irrelevant.
[00:42:57] Speaker A: What marketing trends do you think business owners are overvaluing right now?
[00:43:07] Speaker B: Overvaluing?
I don't think there's anything that's being overvalued.
I guess it depends on how much weight you're putting into AI right now.
So I'm super excited about AI, but I haven't changed my own spending in the AI realm.
I'm looking forward to changing my spending. We, we have gone to a very purposeful direction to be training the, the AI engines so that we're showing up as a company ourselves in, in the engines as they answer things.
But we haven't started, you know, AI advertising yet.
[00:43:52] Speaker A: We will.
[00:43:53] Speaker B: I'm excited to do it, but we're still Using Google, still using Meta.
Really for me the big thing is we continue to build our own audience so we don't have to go or be as reliant on external media as we once were.
So to me it's important that everybody should own their own audience.
I want to have email addresses and text numbers for our people. I don't want to rely on renting them from Facebook or Instagram or LinkedIn or any other third party platform where they keep the people and I just have, you know, built a digital home there.
So owning your audience is really critical and that, that would be something that I would encourage everybody to be focused on.
[00:44:45] Speaker A: Yeah, the, the OpenAI ads, we had an opportunity here to be a part of the pilot to get in to being, you know, advertising and chat GPT, you know, the new sponsored posts. But it was like $50,000 to get in and you had to spend at least 50,000 in ad budget that month.
And the, the geo targeting was only about 50 accurate. So somebody in Michigan could see our ad, you know and so we didn't, we didn't go through with it. It's just not there yet
[00:45:21] Speaker B: by the first year of anything. I don't like the first year of a new car.
You know, I don't want to be the first guy into a new technology, but I'm happy to be the second.
[00:45:34] Speaker A: How should brands think about AI, digital tools and automation without losing the human connection?
[00:45:42] Speaker B: Well, that's the key.
You know, it's become very evident as AI continues to permeate. Everything that everyone is doing is that you gotta, you gotta have a human sandwich around that AI. So AI is phenomenal and it's taking over routine work, it's helping with process, it's streamlining things.
But at the end of the day you gotta be able to start it in the right place and when it spits out the other end, you've gotta be able to make sure that what it gave you is accurate and fits because it's not always true. So you know the, it's gotten much better over time with the hallucinogens or hallucinations.
Yeah, I've had lot of much, much smaller subset of hallucination answers coming from, from chat cbt, which is my primary, that's what I use the most.
But you know, you've got to have a human on the front end of the back end or it's not gonna, it's not gonna work. It's gonna spin out of control and mess up your brand if you don't have A human who understands how to get it started correctly and then how to evaluate and approve what you get on the other side.
[00:47:08] Speaker A: Yeah.
What should business owners stop chasing if they want marketing that produces durable growth?
[00:47:23] Speaker B: I would say this kind of be a weird answer. Maybe, but for a lot of business owners, especially smaller business owners, it'd be vanity. Don't chase your vanity.
Try things, see what works.
Don't assume that you're putting an ad in media outlet X because everybody does it or because you want to be in it for some reason.
Let testing dictate what works and do more of that. And don't be afraid to try new things like we just talked about with the AI ad opportunities.
It's a little early, so maybe a little too. Don't be the first guy to put his foot in the, you know, in the ocean and find out there's a shark there.
But when things have matured a little bit in a category, don't be afraid to test it. And be sure you're embracing your learning curve. You know, you, when you were born, you didn't stand up and walk away. It's going to take some trial and error before you're gonna, you know, walk in a good stride. So when you do your marketing, don't want and done. I, I cringe when someone says, oh, I did that and it didn't work for me. And then they blame the outlet or the tactic rather than themselves for not being an expert at what it is.
So, you know, as soon as someone says to me, I tried that, it didn't work, I know where the problem is and it's not the outlet.
[00:48:53] Speaker A: Well, you know, we're coming out of time. But Scott, if the audience would like more information about you and Frontline Media, where can they find you and connect with you?
[00:49:04] Speaker B: Yeah. So our website is probably the best starting point. It's frontgate media.com that's the easiest way to get us. And then we're on, you know, all the standard socials, Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, Twitter, you name it. Not even Twitter X. I betrayed my age.
So we're on all the standard social platforms as well. But our website is this wealth of information and has a, an entire blog of marketing tips and hints and case studies to help people understand how to market to this Christian and family friendly audience.
[00:49:49] Speaker A: Thanks for coming on the show.
I want to thank Scott for joining us and sharing real insights, you know, on audience strategy, faith and family marketing, authentic connection, campaign execution and long term trust.
What this conversation reminds us on street level marketing is that great. Marketing is not about chasing attention. It's about earning attention from the right people with the right message at the right moment.
And to everyone watching, we invite you to keep refining your message, keep studying your audience, and keep building marketing that moves people. And clarity and purpose. Stay connected. For more on NOW Media TV.
