Latest / Beyond Fulfillment Podcast / Building Fandom and Personal Brand with Marketing Pioneer David Meerman Scott

Transcript

Building Fandom and Personal Brand with Marketing Pioneer David Meerman Scott · Beyond Fulfillment Podcast

• 0:00
  Imagine you've just been handed your pink slip.
• 0:03
  Your career is suddenly derailed and the future feels uncertain.
• 0:07
  What would you do?
• 0:09
  How do you turn a moment of crisis into a lifetime of opportunity and fulfillment?
• 0:15
  Well, today we're diving deep with the legendary David Meerman Scott, a beacon for those wanting to make their mark through innovative marketing and authentic engagement.
• 0:26
  He's someone who has turned getting fired into a launchpad for an extraordinary advising companies like HubSpot and penning best selling books that have redefined marketing and pr.
• 0:40
  In this episode, you're about to learn not only why having a unique brand identity is crucial, but also how to leverage your passions to create unforgettable connections with your audience.
• 0:52
  We'll explore David's journey from his pivotal shift from a career in finance to to becoming a pioneering force in content marketing to the strategies that have helped him build equity in over 25 companies.
• 1:06
  He'll also detail how to turn challenges into adventures.
• 1:10
  Combine human passion with cutting edge AI and engage your audience just like the biggest fandoms in the world.
• 1:18
  As always, if you found value from this content, please like and subscribe.
• 1:23
  Hello everyone and welcome to another episode of the Beyond Fulfillment podcast.
• 1:28
  I'm your host, Dave Goulis, and this week my guest is professional speaker, best selling author, coach and advisor, David Meerman Scott.
• 1:39
  Welcome, David.
• 1:40
  Hey, Dave.
• 1:40
  So good to be here.
• 1:41
  Thanks for having me on.
• 1:43
  Yeah, thank you so much for taking the time to be here.
• 1:45
  Of course.
• 1:47
  So, David, you've done so much in your entrepreneurial career and we'll get into all that.
• 1:52
  Can you tell us a little bit about your backstory and how you got started?
• 1:56
  Yeah, sure.
• 1:57
  I thought I wanted to be a bond trader when I was in school.
• 2:00
  So I started working on the bond desk at Dean Witter Reynolds.
• 2:04
  It was a municipal bond desk.
• 2:06
  I hated it.
• 2:07
  It was awful.
• 2:08
  It was not for me, but I loved the information behind what the bond traders were using.
• 2:14
  Real time news, real time data.
• 2:16
  And so I drifted into the real time information business, worked in companies like Dow Jones and Reuters.
• 2:24
  I was in Asia for 10 years doing.
• 2:28
  And then I came back to the United States, worked for a piece of Thompson, one of the divisions of Thompson, and I was fired in 2002.
• 2:38
  It was a terrible time to find a job because it was only a couple of months after 9 11.
• 2:43
  And that basically forced me into becoming an entrepreneur.
• 2:47
  I started by advising clients, then I wrote a couple of books.
• 2:51
  One of them became a massive success.
• 2:53
  The New Rules of Marketing and pr, which has sold a half million Copies so far in 29 languages and is now in a ninth edition.
• 3:04
  And then that propelled my speaking career.
• 3:07
  I've spoken on probably 500 paid speaking gigs in 46 countries so far.
• 3:13
  And then I advise clients.
• 3:15
  And it's interesting that you ask how my journey got where I got today.
• 3:21
  And it's because I got fired.
• 3:23
  So one of the best things that ever happened in my career was getting fired.
• 3:27
  Wow, that's incredible.
• 3:29
  Okay, so like you said, you thought you wanted to be a bond trader.
• 3:33
  You get into the real time information business, you're with some large corporate companies.
• 3:38
  Yeah.
• 3:38
  You're over in Asia, you come back, you get fired and forced to be an entrepreneur.
• 3:44
  So how did you make the transition into to marketing from that previous background?
• 3:50
  So I was a mar.
• 3:51
  I was a marketing person at financial information companies, marketing and sales, but mostly marketing.
• 3:58
  And that gave me a perfect opportunity to essentially have a head start in what has become our whole online world.
• 4:09
  Because when I was in the financial information business, it was last century and it was pre web, and I was able to understand how real time information worked, how news worked, how data worked, how people made decisions based
• 4:27
  on information.
• 4:28
  And then when I went out on my own, I had had all of this unfair advantage, this unfair head start, which allowed me to create essentially a new kind of marketing, which is now obvious.
• 4:44
  But at the time, it wasn't the kind of marketing about creating information.
• 4:49
  Great websites, with the arrival of things like blogging and podcasting can do that.
• 4:56
  Of course, we're doing a podcast right now.
• 4:59
  Social really burst onto the scene around 2007.
• 5:04
  So I guess I was lucky in that the ideas that I learned from those corporate jobs were perfectly positioned for me to realize among the very first people in the world to realize, or at least the first people,
• 5:21
  the first person I was the first person to write about the idea that marketing is about content, marketing is about creating great websites.
• 5:29
  Marketing is about creating free information that will attract people.
• 5:36
  And that's how I got started with the entrepreneurial journey was the idea of, number one, getting fired, but then having that fabulous experience leading into getting fired, which allowed me to understand the tremendous transformation at that time.
• 5:52
  This is 20, whatever three years ago, 24 years ago, that marketing was going through.
• 5:57
  Okay, so you're, you're starting to, you get fired, you're forced to be an entrepreneur, you're starting to consult for other companies.
• 6:05
  Like you said, it was writing that first book that really launched your, your career as we know it, with the speaking and everything else.
• 6:13
  So when you Going back then, when you're in that process, did you.
• 6:17
  Like, what was that like?
• 6:18
  Did you know right there?
• 6:19
  Like, I.
• 6:19
  I have all these ideas, and this is where marketing's going.
• 6:22
  And was it some sort of, like, an epiphany that led you to write that book?
• 6:26
  It was.
• 6:28
  I had a profound understanding.
• 6:33
  Sorry, A profound experience that I was seeing the world of marketing in a new way.
• 6:42
  I absolutely was convinced, 100% in my mind that marketing was undergoing a radical transformation.
• 6:53
  And I felt like I was the only person who was seeing it at that time.
• 7:00
  And I was seeing patterns in the universe.
• 7:05
  That's the way I like to think of it.
• 7:07
  I was seeing patterns in the universe that other people.
• 7:11
  Maybe other people were seeing it, but nobody else was talking about it.
• 7:15
  And this was back around 2001, 2002.
• 7:19
  It was actually even earlier than that.
• 7:21
  But the entrepreneurial journey started in 2002.
• 7:26
  So, yes, I knew I had something.
• 7:29
  And at first it involved helping companies to implement those ideas, but then it became writing.
• 7:34
  In 2004, I started my blog, still going 20 years later.
• 7:40
  And then I started.
• 7:43
  My first book came out 2005.
• 7:45
  It was ahead of its.
• 7:47
  It was called Cashing in with Content.
• 7:49
  But it was the new rules of marketing and PR that came out.
• 7:52
  It came out the first time in June 2007, the exact same month that the first iPhone came out.
• 8:00
  IPhone One.
• 8:02
  Around the same time that Twitter launched, around the same time that Facebook opened up for others other than students.
• 8:10
  So it was a remarkable time, the summer of 2007.
• 8:15
  And I was lucky that my book came out exactly then.
• 8:18
  And everyone wanted to know what the hell's going on here.
• 8:21
  The iPhone and Twitter and Facebook and what's happening here.
• 8:25
  And my book described all of those things.
• 8:28
  Wow.
• 8:29
  Yeah.
• 8:29
  So talk about a perfect storm.
• 8:32
  And, you know, like you said, social media, complete game changer for how marketing and companies sell and whatnot.
• 8:41
  And you basically wrote this in 2005, before the iPhone, before social media came out.
• 8:47
  And you're talking about content marketing.
• 8:49
  And I don't remember the conversations back then, but I can't imagine anyone was talking about content marketing at that time.
• 8:58
  My first book about content marketing came out in 2005.
• 9:02
  I was writing it starting in 2003.
• 9:06
  Nobody was talking about it.
• 9:08
  Not a single person.
• 9:09
  Well, there might have been a few, but nobody that bubbled up and became popular.
• 9:15
  And my first book was, I think, ahead of its time.
• 9:18
  2005 was a book about content marketing, but it was the hit book, New Rules of marketing.
• 9:24
  And PR was 2007.
• 9:28
  And yes, it came out the same month as iPhone and it came out right around the time that Twitter had already launched but was surging in popularity.
• 9:41
  So I immediately had to do a new edition of the book, which came out a couple of about a year later and have updated it every two years since.
• 9:52
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• 10:36
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• 10:43
  All right, so you, you launched this book which changed the trajectory of your career, right?
• 10:49
  And social media starts to take off.
• 10:51
  IPhone is out, et cetera.
• 10:52
  And then what happened next?
• 10:54
  So then the book comes out and it's selling like crazy.
• 10:58
  My publisher has to go back to the printing press multiple times.
• 11:03
  It sells hundreds of thousands of copies the first year.
• 11:07
  And then speaking gigs come my way, just people find my name, which I use my middle name on purpose because I'm the only David Meerman Scott in the world.
• 11:19
  There are many David Scotts.
• 11:20
  There's a David Scott who walked on the moon.
• 11:22
  There's a David Scott who's a member of Congress from Georgia.
• 11:26
  There's a David Scott who was an Ironman triathlon champion.
• 11:30
  So I became David Merriman Scott so people could find me.
• 11:33
  And by the way, that's an entrepreneurial.
• 11:35
  Something very important for all entrepreneurs is as you're thinking of a name of a company, the name of a product, name of a book, even your own name.
• 11:44
  Try to be unique on the web so people can find you.
• 11:46
  But anyway, they would find me.
• 11:48
  Oh, who is this David Mehren Scott guy?
• 11:49
  This book's pretty good.
• 11:50
  I should have him speak event.
• 11:52
  And I started around that time.
• 11:55
  I was getting an average of one inquiry a day for my speaking.
• 12:02
  And so I continually raised my fees to try to balance out supply and demand.
• 12:08
  And I was doing 30 or 40 speaking gigs a year for more than 15 years.
• 12:16
  And and so as an entrepreneur, my business completely transformed from being a consulting based business to being primarily speaking fee based as well as book royalties.
• 12:33
  And then from there I transformed to also include advising companies different than my consulting practice because this was more of coaching advisory work.
• 12:48
  And I did it initially with emerging companies for equity.
• 12:54
  And my first advisory client was HubSpot.
• 12:58
  I joined them as their very first advisor.
• 13:01
  I'm still an advisor 18 years later.
• 13:04
  And at the time I joined HubSpot they had $250,000 in revenue.
• 13:09
  They had eight employees today, 2.5 billion billion in revenue and something like 8,000 employees.
• 13:16
  And I've managed to be a part of their organization for 18 years, helping them in many, many different ways.
• 13:27
  So the book really was the driver of my personal brand.
• 13:33
  And then that led to the speaking engagements and then that led to my advisory work.
• 13:39
  Although I do cash advisory work here and there, it's mainly for equity.
• 13:44
  Okay, do you mind if I ask, how many companies do you have equity in currently through that advisory work?
• 13:52
  Well, interestingly in the case of HubSpot, it's going on 18 years.
• 13:56
  The average engagement is probably about two years.
• 14:00
  Sometimes people want me to help them with some work for a couple of months to get off the ground or to help build a marketing plan or whatever it might be.
• 14:12
  And some companies want me on a retainer based arrangement for a number of months or a number of years.
• 14:19
  I figure I'm just going to guess probably 25 or 30 companies so far.
• 14:25
  Okay.
• 14:26
  Wow.
• 14:27
  And HubSpot, you know, like you mentioned, mammoth company.
• 14:30
  And to get in there, what was that like too, seeing a company like that, the way they've grown and being like you said, the first, the first advisor that they, they ever hired.
• 14:41
  I mean, what, what's that experience been like?
• 14:43
  It was an amazing experience.
• 14:45
  It's still an amazing experience because every time I have an opportunity to meet with someone from HubSpot or hear about what they're doing or, or attend their conference, their first hub.
• 14:55
  I, I was a keynote speaker at the first HubSpot conference.
• 14:58
  There were like 300 people in a hotel ballroom.
• 15:02
  And you know, now they're, they're regularly getting more than 10,000 people in person person and more than 100,000 people virtually.
• 15:10
  So it's amazing.
• 15:12
  And what I love about working not only with HubSpot but with other companies is my ideas for strategy continue to work.
• 15:24
  Yes, the tools of marketing are changing.
• 15:28
  Now we've got AI, things like TikTok have come along different ways of, of doing content, different ways of communicating.
• 15:39
  Artificial intelligence in all of its forms are super new and super interesting.
• 15:43
  But the strategy remains the same.
• 15:45
  It's understand your buyers deeply.
• 15:48
  Then it's create the sort of content and information and other aspects that can attract them and educate them and inform them.
• 15:57
  And it's understanding technology and how you can apply technology to, to generating attention from those buyers.
• 16:04
  That hasn't changed in the 30 years that I've been doing marketing.
• 16:10
  Sure, the tools change, but the strategy doesn't change.
• 16:13
  So seeing HubSpot apply that kind of strategy and changing it, ever changing it over the 18 years I've been involved, it's been a true honor to be a part of that.
• 16:28
  Wow.
• 16:30
  All right, so.
• 16:30
  And you've written, is it 12 books at this point?
• 16:33
  Yeah, 12 books.
• 16:35
  12 books.
• 16:35
  Okay, let's get into some of the other, the work you've done.
• 16:39
  I see you've got that Grateful Dead sign behind you, and one of your books was Marketing Lessons from the Grateful Dead.
• 16:46
  Is that right?
• 16:47
  Yeah, that's right.
• 16:48
  And I wrote that book together with Brian Halligan.
• 16:51
  He's the co founder, former CEO, now chairman of HubSpot, and Bill Walton, the NBA Basketball hall of Famer, who we sadly lost this year to cancer.
• 17:03
  And the three of us, I put that book together.
• 17:06
  It was super fun.
• 17:08
  It's a fun way to look at marketing from the perspective of how this rock band from San Francisco that formed in 1965 became the most popular touring act in history.
• 17:19
  And interestingly, one of the most important lessons from is they did so because they actually were doing content marketing before anyone talked about it.
• 17:30
  And they created a social network before Mark Zuckerberg was even born.
• 17:35
  What they did was they allowed fans to record their concerts.
• 17:40
  And they were the only band that did that.
• 17:42
  Every other band said, no, you can't bring recording equipment into the concerts.
• 17:46
  And the Grateful Dead said, sure.
• 17:49
  And so in the early days it was cassette tapes and later on MP3 files.
• 17:54
  But people could record the concerts and then trade or give away the tapes.
• 17:59
  They didn't allow you to sell them, but you could trade them, you could give them away.
• 18:02
  And that's how people learned about the Grateful Dead was through these concert recordings.
• 18:06
  That's how I learned about them.
• 18:08
  And I've been to 111 concerts since then.
• 18:11
  My buddy Brian, who was my co author, has been to probably 150 or so.
• 18:16
  Bill Walton saw 850 Grateful Dead concerts in his life.
• 18:21
  So we all learned about the band in a Similar way, we heard the music on a free cassette tape that someone in a dorm room or someone in a car stereo had popped on.
• 18:32
  And then if you like it, you want more, and eventually you buy a concert ticket, or eventually you buy an album, or eventually you dig in deep like I do, and you buy everything.
• 18:42
  Another book I wrote is called Marketing the Moon.
• 18:46
  That's about the marketing aspects of the Apollo lunar program.
• 18:50
  And that's super interesting right now, actually, because Marketing the Moon was written and it published about 10 years ago.
• 19:00
  But in this year, as we're recording this 2024, Scarlett Johansson produced and starred in a film called Fly Me to the Moon that was partly based on the ideas in my book, Marketing the Moon.
• 19:14
  And Fly Me to the Moon came out in theaters over the summer and in late 2024 came out in streaming.
• 19:21
  It stars not only Scarlett Johansson, but Channing Tatum and Woody Harrelson.
• 19:26
  So it's super cool to see the ideas I wrote about in one of my books up on the big screen with these famous actors playing roles, interacting with the kinds of things that I talked about in that book.
• 19:41
  So did they reach out to you prior to the movie being made?
• 19:45
  And, like, do you collaborate with them at all, or.
• 19:49
  No, no.
• 19:51
  And the reason is because my book is nonfiction.
• 19:55
  It's a history where I talk about the marketing aspects of the Apollo lunar program, and the film is a fictional depiction of Scarlett Johansson's character as a public relations executive hired by NASA.
• 20:12
  It's a comedy, romantic comedy.
• 20:15
  So they didn't have to legally buy the rights to the book because mine's nonfiction.
• 20:22
  They were doing a fictional story, but they were very kind in many interviews to mention the book, talk about how it was influential, and then putting the movie together to make sure that they got all the details right.
• 20:36
  Okay.
• 20:37
  And another very popular book you wrote.
• 20:40
  It was a Wall Street Journal bestseller was Fanocracy.
• 20:44
  Yes.
• 20:45
  Which the Grateful Dead story really reminds me of that.
• 20:48
  Can you talk more about that book and what it's about?
• 20:51
  Yeah, sure.
• 20:52
  So I wrote Fanocracy with my daughter Reiko.
• 20:55
  She is now an emergency room doctor, but when we were writing the book, she was in medical school, and we both were constantly talking over the dinner table or in car rides about how we're fans of various things.
• 21:10
  I'm fans of the Grateful Dead.
• 21:11
  I'm fans of the Apollo Program.
• 21:13
  I love to surf.
• 21:14
  My daughter Reiko is really into Korean pop music, K Pop.
• 21:18
  She's really into Harry Potter.
• 21:20
  And we were talking about this whole idea of Fandom.
• 21:23
  And she did an undergraduate degree at Columbia in neuroscience.
• 21:27
  So I was asking her about, is there a neuroscience aspect of fandom?
• 21:33
  We're comparing the differences between the fandom I have for the Grateful Dead, a band that started in 1965, and her fandom around K Pop, which is a much, much newer genre of music.
• 21:48
  And then we decided to write this book together and we dug into the neuroscience aspects of how and why we become a fan of something.
• 21:56
  And the basic idea is that all humans are hardwired to want to be part of a tribe of like minded people.
• 22:06
  And it goes back tens of thousands of generations, because when you're with your tribe, you are safe and comfortable.
• 22:13
  And so when we're with our tribe of like minded people, it could be at the HubSpot Inbound conference where everyone has a badge.
• 22:23
  You know, you're part of a tribe of people who either use or appreciate what HubSpot has put together.
• 22:31
  Or I go to a Grateful Dead concert and I can be next to anybody standing in a beer line, let's say, and be instantly able to start a conversation because we're a fan of the same thing.
• 22:45
  That's why people who cheer for a sporting event get all, you know, get excited because they're part of.
• 22:52
  They're with their tribe.
• 22:55
  And we learned that any organization can build fans in the same way the Grateful Dead did, in the same way that K Pop bands do, in the same way that a sports team does, in the same way that
• 23:07
  HubSpot does.
• 23:08
  And we wrote about the book, we wrote in the book how to do that, and fortunately, as you mentioned, it became a Wall Street Journal bestseller.
• 23:17
  Quite a few people really dug into this idea of how to be.
• 23:21
  How to create fandom in their businesses by, by checking out that book.
• 23:26
  Okay.
• 23:27
  Another thing too, that you, you talk about quite often, and it's, it's in your intro video on your website, is passion.
• 23:35
  And how much the passion you have for what you do translates through when you're, you're selling or marketing your business.
• 23:42
  Can you just expand on that a little more for the audience?
• 23:45
  Yeah.
• 23:46
  You know, that was actually the most surprising thing that we learned, my daughter and I, Reiko and I, when we, we were researching the ideas that ended up being included in the book fanocracy that we wrote.
• 24:00
  It was surprising because what we learned is that people become fans of people who have passion.
• 24:09
  And it can be anything that you're passionate about.
• 24:14
  And that was really, really interesting.
• 24:17
  And the lesson here is that when you're passionate about something, and you share that passion with the world.
• 24:24
  People want to do business with you.
• 24:25
  People want to talk to you.
• 24:26
  People want to have you on their podcasts.
• 24:29
  So we met, for example, and it works with any industry.
• 24:32
  We met a dentist.
• 24:33
  His name is Dr.
• 24:34
  John Morassi.
• 24:35
  And Dr.
• 24:36
  Merashi, I met him at a Tony Robbins event that I was speaking at.
• 24:40
  I speak at all of Tony's Business Mastery events.
• 24:43
  And it was a couple years ago.
• 24:46
  And Dr.
• 24:47
  Marashi said, David, I'm a dentist.
• 24:49
  I don't have fans.
• 24:50
  What are you talking about?
• 24:51
  This is crazy.
• 24:52
  And I said, well, let's talk about that.
• 24:54
  Dr.
• 24:54
  Marashi, what do you love to do?
• 24:56
  And he says, I love to skateboard.
• 24:58
  So I said, well, cool.
• 24:59
  Why don't you bring skateboarding into your dental practice?
• 25:03
  Not literally as in standing on a skateboard when you're working on someone's teeth, but everything else.
• 25:08
  And he did, and he actually has skateboards on the wall in the dental practice.
• 25:15
  Sometimes he'll skateboard from one examination room to another.
• 25:19
  He doesn't stand on a skateboard when he practices dentistry, though.
• 25:23
  And then he's created an Instagram.
• 25:26
  I don't know how many followers he has now, but last time I checked, it was over 40,000 followers.
• 25:31
  40,000 followers.
• 25:32
  A dentist because he started to share photos and videos of him scratch skateboarding.
• 25:39
  There's also photos and videos of his dental work and the fact that he's a dentist, but tons of skateboarding stuff.
• 25:48
  And he puts photos of him skateboarding on his dental website.
• 25:53
  So all of these aspects of showing what he's passionate about is a great way to attract fans of his business.
• 26:03
  And then people want to share that.
• 26:06
  So.
• 26:06
  Oh, a new family moved into Southern California, which is where he practices, and they're interested in maybe starting up with a new dentist.
• 26:15
  Who should I talk to?
• 26:16
  Oh, talk to Dr.
• 26:17
  Marashi.
• 26:17
  He's cool.
• 26:18
  He's a skateboarder.
• 26:19
  And it's not because other people are skateboarders that they want to work with him.
• 26:24
  It's because they love his passion for skateboarding.
• 26:29
  And I have many other examples of this idea.
• 26:32
  But what it shows is that when you share what you're passionate about, even if somebody else doesn't share that passion as well, they can respect that passion and they appreciated it and they want to do business with you.
• 26:48
  And by the way, I have the numbers.
• 26:50
  Dr.
• 26:50
  Marashi told me that since he started doing that, in the first year, he saw a 23% increase in the number of new patients in his Practice that he can solely attribute because he asks them when they walk in
• 27:07
  around his skateboarding and his Instagram and the referrals that he gets.
• 27:16
  Wow.
• 27:17
  Okay.
• 27:18
  All right.
• 27:19
  And you mentioned speaking at all of Tony Robbins events.
• 27:23
  Clearly, your career and your speaking at.
• 27:26
  His Business Mastery events.
• 27:28
  Business Mastery.
• 27:29
  Okay, got it.
• 27:30
  I mean, clearly, right?
• 27:31
  You've been able to network with so many incredible people and so many paid speaking gigs around the world throughout this whole journey.
• 27:39
  Right.
• 27:40
  What do you think?
• 27:42
  What would you say has been the best part of it for you?
• 27:45
  I look at it as a massive adventure.
• 27:47
  I really do.
• 27:49
  I tend to choose projects and speaking engagements and companies to potentially work for and work with based on is it going to be fun, Is it going to be an adventure, Is it going to be an experience?
• 28:08
  And I will always choose fun and experience over strictly money.
• 28:13
  And I've done that basically my whole career.
• 28:16
  I briefly mentioned I lived in Asia for 10 years.
• 28:20
  There was a decision I made at one time, do I stay in New York City, probably make more money, or do I move to Asia?
• 28:28
  An opportunity came up to move with a company that I was working for and establish a Tokyo office, which I chose to do.
• 28:36
  So I chose the adventure.
• 28:39
  And when I choose whether I want to do a speaking engagement or whether I want to advise a company, it's like, is this going to be fun?
• 28:46
  Is this going to be easy, interesting?
• 28:48
  Is this going to be something where I'll learn something?
• 28:53
  And those are the ones I tend to say yes to.
• 28:56
  And over the years, I've enjoyed international travel.
• 29:00
  My wife does as well.
• 29:01
  She sometimes goes with me when I have an international speaking engagement.
• 29:05
  So, you know, I'm a sucker if somebody invites me to speak in a country I've never been to.
• 29:10
  Like, oh, yeah, how can we make this work?
• 29:15
  And so choosing that adventure has always, for me paid off because, you know, geez, we're working, what, a third of our life or some crazy amount like that.
• 29:26
  Why not make an adventure?
• 29:28
  Why not make it fun?
• 29:30
  And ironically, when I look back, I never made choices based purely on money.
• 29:37
  I made those choices based on fun and adventure.
• 29:40
  But ironically, I ended up probably making more money than if I had chosen the initial decisions based on money.
• 29:49
  So I think that idea for entrepreneurialism, at least for me, is really, really interesting.
• 29:57
  Choose the fun, choose the excitement, choose the adventure.
• 30:00
  Don't just choose the path you think will bring the most money.
• 30:06
  Quite an interesting paradox, right, where you.
• 30:09
  Always chose it is.
• 30:10
  It's really, really interesting because I can think back if I had stayed in New York and I'd been a sal gone up that track, I can see the track I would have been on.
• 30:21
  And I mean, of course we never know what path our career takes us.
• 30:26
  But working for companies in the New York City area, I'm not sure that ironically I would have made as much money as, yeah, let's do adventure.
• 30:35
  Let's go to Japan for seven years, let's go to Hong Kong for two years.
• 30:40
  Let's speak in countries where they can't afford my speaking fee.
• 30:44
  But I want to go anyway.
• 30:45
  You know, those, those decisions don't seem right for many people because it doesn't optimize the financial aspect.
• 30:53
  Right.
• 30:54
  All right.
• 30:55
  And David, with all you've done right, like you mentioned, we're wrapping up 2024 here.
• 31:00
  What are you most excited about in 2025?
• 31:05
  I'm super excited about artificial intelligence.
• 31:09
  But a smart application of AI to marketing, I think that it's transformational.
• 31:16
  I mean, everybody knows that AI is transformational.
• 31:19
  That's not a secret anymore.
• 31:22
  But I love the idea of artificial intelligence together with humanity.
• 31:27
  I think that the organizations that will win in 2025 are those who understand that even though you can apply these incredible tools to many, many different aspects of marketing, that humanity is still required.
• 31:44
  The idea of fanocracy, the idea of passion, the idea that we all want to be part of a tribe of like minded people, those things are still going to be super, super important.
• 31:57
  So the companies that will succeed, I think are the ones that can still have passion, that can still have a human approach to business, that can still build a tribe of like minded people.
• 32:08
  People.
• 32:09
  But do so using technologies that make that more efficient, that make that easier to do.
• 32:18
  All right, And David, if people want to get in touch with you, learn more about your speaking or anything else that you're working on, what's the best way that people can reach out to you?
• 32:28
  Well, like I said earlier, I'm the only David Meerman M E E R M A N Scott in the world.
• 32:34
  So Google me, you'll find me all over the place.
• 32:36
  Place on most of the social networks.
• 32:39
  I'm DMscott.
• 32:40
  That's DMscott.
• 32:42
  LinkedIn's always a good place.
• 32:43
  David Meerman Scott on LinkedIn.
• 32:46
  All right, and we'll link all that in the show.
• 32:47
  Notes for everyone.
• 32:49
  Great.
• 32:49
  All right, David, thank you so much for being here and sharing all this valuable wisdom from your journey.
• 32:54
  We greatly appreciate it.
• 32:56
  My pleasure, Dave, thanks for having me on.
• 32:58
  All right, and that's all the time we have for now.
• 33:00
  We will see you next.