Latest / The Marketing Brief / Joe and Brian Recount the Studio Advertising Days and Pontificate About Building Community (S1 E21)
Transcript
- Brian Aucoin: Hello and welcome back to the marketing brief. I am your host Brian Aquan and this is the podcast where we briefly touch on aspects across the marketing landscape. always, we are joined with a marketing expert and today we are very excited to welcome in Joe Epstein. How you doing, Joe? Joe Epstein: Hey, how are you? Happy to be here and it's good to see you. Brian Aucoin: Yeah, it's great to have you, an old friend. you like to introduce yourself to the pod? Joe Epstein: Sure, absolutely to the pod. ⁓ Hello pod, my name is Joe. I'm not related to that other guy. Just gonna put that out there, slide that across the table before we begin. ⁓ From a marketing perspective, I know Brian actually from my days at Sony Pictures, where I got to launch a hundred odd campaigns, including two Spider-Mans, two Bond movies, three Resident Evil movies. Brian Aucoin: Mm-hmm. It's a good thing to get out there, yeah. Yeah. Joe Epstein: Eight Adam Sandler movies, which is not enough. District Nine, what did we, and Brian was on my media team, what else, what ⁓ did work on together? Anything pop out? Brian Aucoin: Dude, I talk about District 9, that campaign, like, to date, like, sometimes in interviews, like, I'll bring up District 9, because that was so fun. Yeah. Joe Epstein: It was an awesome campaign and ⁓ made more awesome by kind of, I think, sort of the fluidity of what we sought to do. If you think about that campaign, and I think about that campaign a lot, I talk about it in interviews as well, as I should, is this idea of not necessarily being adherent to a tactic or a set of tactics. Brian Aucoin: Mm-hmm. Yeah, as you should. Joe Epstein: but a narrative North star and using the tools available to us at the time to be able to tell that story in a really organic, authentic, really fluid way. Some of which you saw like the billboards and the bus sides, right? Some of which, like at some point we just did ⁓ mock man the street interviews that you see today that, you know, talking about the non-human sort of narrative. Brian Aucoin: Yeah. Joe Epstein: And it was so, it so sort of, again, organic that it wound up allowing users, allowing audiences to really get inside this very sort of intricate, dynamic, ⁓ invasive drama. So. ⁓ Brian Aucoin: And ⁓ wasn't there a mobile number you could call? Yeah. Joe Epstein: Yeah, yeah, we actually stole that idea from another campaign that we worked on called When a Stranger Calls, which won ⁓ Week's campaign of the year or something like that. But we got like a quarter of a million ⁓ people and sort of fake reporting non-human sightings like the parking lot of 7-Eleven or like the back of Denny's. Brian Aucoin: Nice. That's awesome. Yeah. Joe Epstein: what we wound up doing is taking like, I don't know, a thousand of them and putting together, literally almost on the fly, nationwide map of where these calls came from. So you'd be able to like go around the nation and like find your neighborhood ⁓ like, you know, Rockford, Illinois, right? Quad City, shout out to the Quad Cities. And find ⁓ like ⁓ like, Brian Aucoin: Mm-hmm. That's yes. Joe Epstein: calling in sightings for non-humans. So, anywho, that's how Brian and I know each other. I spent many years at Sony, I ran digital at Fox, did some subscriber acquisition at Hulu, I helped launch Apple TV Plus, I ran marketing for Machinima and ran their kind of agency, doing gaming and influencers. I became, I was TikTok subject matter expert. Brian Aucoin: Yeah, I mean, talk about building. Mm-hmm. Joe Epstein: in media entertainment. kind of covering changing attitudes, perceptions and behaviors of audiences and TikTok's role within those changes across broadcasts and streaming and theatrical and sports a little bit of music. ⁓ Most recently I ran an innovation team for Razorfish out of publicist for Samsung until a few weeks ago, which I was late. Brian Aucoin: Yeah. Oh man, yep, comes for us all. Gosh, community, you get the cone. The community, you know, I was thinking about when you were talking about District 9, like how building a community in such a short amount of time with such adrenaline fueled kind of exercise. that was, I mean, what did we do? We did 20, 25 releases a year, right? So you're building community like every month. Joe Epstein: Every marketer gets the cone, I suspect. Brian Aucoin: sometimes two to three weeks before the movie opens and trying to really get people all pumped up. I mean, movie marketing is really fun. Yeah. Joe Epstein: It's super fun, ⁓ and it's really different than, I like I said, I just got off a spin selling phones. And the interesting thing about movie marketing is there's no tangible attribute to any of the product that you're selling. There's no trunk space, there's no miles per gallon, there's no zero to 60 metric, there's no leg room, there's no third row seating. It's all, all, all, all. Brian Aucoin: Yes, doesn't exist, yes, physical. Joe Epstein: I'll use a gen-zillennial term. It's all vibe marketing. It's all vibe, right? But within that is this idea of I actually really want to participate in. Right? I don't have to be there forever, but I want to participate in a cultural moment. And ultimately, that's what we're, that's really what we're building. We're building cultural moments that are meaningful. Brian Aucoin: ⁓ please. Vibe marketing. Yeah. Yes. Joe Epstein: They don't you know in their best case Bond's spider-man Marvel. I did a couple x-men movies ⁓ at Fox right You know those things we do might want stay within as part of a larger fandom a perpetual community, but ⁓ Brian Aucoin: Yeah. Well, the franchise ones, people had preconceived notions. So you're building that. I mean, when it was an original IP, you know, you're telling that story for the first time. But like you said, you get them so excited. You build that culture and then opening day is something they're not going to miss. Right. They're going to go see an opening weekend because they have to be part of that community. If you want to you want to stay in our community, you got to see the movie. Yeah. Joe Epstein: Fingers crossed. Fingers crossed. But even so, you look at horror movies. And horror movies, as you know, are very big opening weekend sort of events. Yeah, well, it's spoiled. ultimately, are especially ones that are disassociated from long-term franchises. These are often impulse buys. And you go with your crew, and everyone has a good time. Brian Aucoin: Yeah, once it's spoiled after that, yeah. Yeah. Joe Epstein: There's a... Brian Aucoin: The theater is part of the experience. You have to see it in the theater. Yeah. Joe Epstein: Yeah. Yeah. So it's not like I'm, have like a community, a horror movie community card that I get punched. And when I get 10 movies, I get like free yogurt. It's more just like being part of that moment. That's what it means, I think, to be part of that community, right? Being part of a moment, having, you know, having a thing. I have to imagine you grew up in Boston. I have to imagine you remember going to movies and there you go, Boston Strong. Brian Aucoin: Yeah, that would be nice. Mm-hmm. Yes. Joe Epstein: going to movies like seventh and eighth grade without your folks with like your crew, right? The first couple of times and being like, this is epic awesome. Right? Yeah. Brian Aucoin: you Yes. Yeah, just being at the mall. Yeah, you get to get dropped off at the mall. was a great moment. So much freedom. Joe Epstein: I have to tell you, I remember, ⁓ and I'm gonna date myself here, I remember my entire, like half my eighth grade class into Breakfast Club. There were like 40 kids, and behind us was like the ninth grade class. ⁓ like that was a ⁓ moment, right? That was a really meaningful moment for us. ⁓ actually think. Brian Aucoin: Okay. Nice. you Yeah. Fort, sneak ins. Joe Epstein: I'm pretty sure it was PG, so I don't know if it was a sneak in. It might have been R. I mean, there's plenty of, you know, there's plenty for the MPA to sort of sink their teeth into that one. Brian Aucoin: Yeah. ⁓ my gosh, yes. I remember dealing with them too. right. Well, TikTok is an interesting place to go. ⁓ You know, I'd also, you know, I'd love to talk about what you think role, what role marketing plays. Now I feel like it's becoming ⁓ You know, I ⁓ I talked on this podcast with some people about a time when media did its thing. Creative did its thing. Everyone came together. Then it was launched. Joe Epstein: Mmm. Brian Aucoin: and now it's all underneath marketing, which is responsible for the strategy, the execution, the analysis, like all of the kind of building the whole machine now. How do you kind of look at that and make sense of that? Yeah, how do you orient that? ⁓ Joe Epstein: How do I orient that? Yeah. Let's take a look back take just a peek at media studies for a minute. There two things I think that occurred when you look back in our sort of our time Cue the goo goo dolls. What were you like in the 90s? ⁓ Back in the day, think about your formats ⁓ and your Brian Aucoin: Mm-hmm. Yours and mine. Yeah. Joe Epstein: platforms first. You had four channels, four broadcast channels and X number of cable channels. You had newspaper, you had radio, and you had outdoor. So you had these discrete platforms and the formats as a result were 30s, newspaper, outdoor, and then you had PR, right? And you could run a campaign with Brian Aucoin: Mm-hmm. Joe Epstein: in a kind of compartmentalized manner. format and the platforms allowed you to be able to scale in a compartmentalized way. Fast forward, we this incredibly ⁓ fluid with multiple screens in multiple, let's call them for lack of a better term, mind states. Brian Aucoin: Yes. Mm-hmm. Joe Epstein: There'll be moments when we have our parent hat on. There'll be moments when we'll have our, just Joe indulge me, my brain is mush moment. We'll have moments where we're sports fans, right? And go our laptops to our tablets, to our phones, to our TV screens, to our movie screens. And so from a brand perspective, what do I need to do? I need to be able to tell a cohesive, story to a highly fragmented number of audience segments. Let me get to that for a second. ⁓ Across a highly fragmented number of platforms that all have their own specific formats of choice. So TikTok is really interesting. we think about TikTok, first of all, TikTok's like big banner that they flew around. Brian Aucoin: Yeah, at the same time, yep. Yeah. And reason for existing. Yeah. From a consumer standpoint. Joe Epstein: in 2021 was in beginning of 22 was like don't make ads make tiktoks That's totally cool and i'm super down for that Except when you go see a theatrical client and like wait a minute What do you mean? Because I just spent a couple million dollars on fine tuning that trailer. It tastes it tests. Well, my producer and my filmmaker love it What the fuck you talking about? right, um, so Brian Aucoin: Yeah. Yeah. Joe Epstein: You know, as a result, you're getting to your question about role of marketing. Your role of marketing is to find the way in which to be able to tell a cohesive story to your fragmented audiences in a way that they'll accept it, that receive it. Sometimes that's in the form of TikTok dance challenge. Sometimes it's... Brian Aucoin: Yeah, that it's receptive. Mm-hmm. Hehehehe Joe Epstein: In outdoor right you look at kids properties and outdoor absolutely Because up until your kids about ten years old they're in the backseat looking out the window And when you have something that's funny in outdoor for kids properties, that's how you'll generate that nag factor All right on the other end of the spectrum. You have some talkie drama some period that has a word bait potential Brian Aucoin: Right? Mm-hmm. Joe Epstein: you're going to tell the story of the film as an artifact more so than what we're talking about in terms of District Nine where you're, know, conclave. You're really getting into the divisive political topography of the papal, the papal sea, right? Brian Aucoin: Yeah. And allowing consumers to self-select them their way into that, right? Like, hey, this is going to be some thick material. Joe Epstein: Yeah, right. But with something like that, you talk about talent and filmmaker and craft, and you treat it as a sort of a, for lack of a better term, artisanal choice, an auteur choice, as opposed to the same, how you might approach scream setting, which is all about visceral emotional reaction together. Brian Aucoin: Okay. Joe Epstein: and having fun with being frightened. Brian Aucoin: Yeah, and why it's better than sex. Joe Epstein: Yeah. Brian Aucoin: This is the seventh one. I that. know, ⁓ I try to quite simply talk about marketing this way is like ⁓ getting message to the consumer, right? There's so much that has to go into that. And I love the receptivity you brought up because if you don't understand your consumer, if you don't understand who they are, where they are, how they were, who were the messengers that they want to hear from, that's all baked into. How do I get the message to the consumer? But like, yeah. start to break that down. Joe Epstein: Now, what's interesting about that is let's take this out of entertainment. Let's go to cars. Let's go to phones. Let's go to, I don't know, vitamin supplements, whatever. There two avenues that I think, the two obvious avenues that you have. One is we have the best product out there and let us show you and I'll go through the entire feature spec list and show you. Brian Aucoin: Mm-hmm. Yeah, very product driven. Yeah. Joe Epstein: Very product driven. And depending on what kind of purchase decision that absolutely plays, and you have a pathway to tell that story. Other kinds of products are not, I always think of them as more about identity and less about utility. I take a phone, or in a lot of ways a car. Those are purchase decisions about identity, right, and less about utility. Brian Aucoin: Yeah. Joe Epstein: car's gonna get you where you need to go, right? Is it 30 miles to gallon or 28 miles a gallon? Is it zero to 60 in 4.6 or 4.9? Right? Yeah, exactly. But that then backs us into this idea of what role does brand play in the world? And by and large, you talk to anybody who comes out of business school and they'll say, oh, brand, you know. Brian Aucoin: How impressed is the valet guy when I pull up? The Los Angeles story. Joe Epstein: Brand is a promise of quality and this is not. Brand is, I mean it is, but it's far beyond that. A brand is quite frankly, right, exactly. But the power of a brand truly, I think today, I advocate, I patron a brand because it's how I see myself and how I want you to see me. Brian Aucoin: You Well, again, that's from the product's point of view, right? So then how does the consumer see the brand? Yeah. Mm hmm. Identity. Yeah. But something gets you there in the first place. mean. OK. ⁓ another shoe. Joe Epstein: identity So that means Wait, hold on. Hold on. Let me let me drop the other shoe. That is that is participating in culture There's a lot of shoes slippers really. I mean we're all indoor cats now The that becomes um What's it called? Participating in culture How do you win if you're Brian Aucoin: Yeah, the community around the brand, right? The brand as a platform that says like, I'm into this brand, these are all my people. Joe Epstein: Exactly. Right, which brings us back into film lessons from film marketing lessons in community building lessons in spinning narrative and turning narrative toward certain audience segments to shine up certain elements of how this brand participates within culture. Right. So yeah, so that's the, know, as we think about, again, moving out of entertainment, that's a sort of, I think a far more modern. Brian Aucoin: Yeah. ⁓ Very eloquently put. Joe Epstein: more sophisticated way in which to approach. And there plenty of brands that do it really, really, really well. So, well, I'm working. Brian Aucoin: Yeah, I agree. Well, I love to ask this question of all my guests. What's something you're looking forward to? It can be in your professional capacity, you mean your personal capacity, but what's something you're excited about right now? ⁓ I like that. ⁓ ⁓ We ran into each other at an industry event on a Friday morning, which was a really nice one. And I had a really good time like talk about community and finding your community. That was a good one. Joe Epstein: See you again. Truly. I tell you, I know. Yeah. Yeah, it's funny. I was really happy to see you. I was really happy to see Alex who I had lunch with on Tuesday. It was good to see Glenn. What was kind of funny about it though, yeah. I don't know how you are. I'm not so good in big groups. Brian Aucoin: Nice. Alex Brough for the listeners. Glenn Ginsburg for the listeners. No, since COVID, I'm worse. Yeah. Joe Epstein: Yeah, and so when I saw you guys I was like, oh sweet, I know somebody. But then it was like, you know what? I know these guys are ready. And when they were here, I'm not gonna meet anybody new, right? But yeah, yeah, exactly. And I was like, all right, dude, Joe, give it a moment. I think what I'm looking. Brian Aucoin: Right, I'm keeping the circle closed. Yeah, but you have the soft landing, you have the soft landing into it, right? And then you, I always say like, you I wanna live a couple steps outside my confidence bubble, right? So you're always kind of challenging yourself. So, but it's like, if you have that soft landing, I'm comfortable in here, I'm very confident, and now I can expand from there. Joe Epstein: Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yes. I think the thing I'm looking forward to as I think about what's next for me professionally reconnecting with people who I genuinely adore, you being one of them. ⁓ meeting new people. ⁓ think I've been one of those people that's been, you know, that's able tell you what I want to be when I grow up. ⁓ I have idea what I want to be when I Brian Aucoin: Yes, good. Awesome. We're doing that. Yeah. Yeah, even if I knew that, it's way past at this point. I ran past it a long time ago. Joe Epstein: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, so the question becomes more for me, what do I want to learn next? What do I want to experience next? And we are unfortunately going through some compression in our business on a lot of levels. And so that's going to require a bit more hustle and a lot of meeting people, because that's ultimately how you find roles, talking to as many people as you can. Brian Aucoin: Yeah. Mm-hmm. Joe Epstein: Comparing notes, seeing what they're seeing, letting them know. Whether that's consulting work, I need get some traction in, or full-time that's kind of fun too. And I think, hope, much of this is attitude. As introverted, yeah. But as as I am, Brian Aucoin: Timing is really big. Yeah, some of it's out of our control. Joe Epstein: I'm looking forward to just sort of reconnecting with old friends, comparing notes, some new people, seeing what they're seeing and what they're involved in, and seeing how I might be able to add and contribute. Brian Aucoin: Yeah, it's nice to have that control over your time. I always look at time as our most precious personal asset, right? Like how I choose to spend my time reflects on ⁓ I think is interesting and good for me. So I like that for you. So yeah, we'll definitely hang out, buddy. Joe Epstein: Yeah. Brian Aucoin: Thank you so much joining us, Joe Epstein. This has been a conversation on the Marketing Brief I am your host, Brian Aucoin. Stay curious.