Episode Transcript
Rob Broadfoot 0:20
All right, Rob, we’re back with episode 69.
Episode 69.
Oh, it’s an exciting number.
No jokes?
Don Mock 0:26
No, we’re gonna play it straight.
Rob Broadfoot 0:27
Episode 69.
Don Mock 0:28
Yeah.
Rob Broadfoot 0:28
What’s before 70?
Don Mock 0:30
So you came up with a really interesting idea for us chat about today. Why don’t you lead us in here on what the topic might be for today.
Rob Broadfoot 0:36
So I was thinking about when it comes time to talk. You’re talking with a client about a project or a new new client or whatever it is. You get to that question. What’s the budget?
Don Mock 0:49
Yeah. Money. What does this cost?
Rob Broadfoot 0:51
What does This cost? What’s the budget? Oftentimes, you get the number and you go, “Oh, that’s a really low number.”
Don Mock 1:00
Well, I always say $1 million.
Rob Broadfoot 1:02
1 million dollars.
Don Mock 1:03
Which you always get a good chuckle out of that in the meeting. Then we even had a client earlier this week throw the binky out. The old Austin Powers.
Rob Broadfoot 1:11
Austin Powers. Yeah, exactly. So when you first get news of a low budget, you might go, “Ohh.”
Don Mock 1:19
Groan.
Rob Broadfoot 1:20
Not This guy. No.
Don Mock 1:22
You’re psyched.
Rob Broadfoot 1:22
What has two thumbs and says, “That’s great news.” This guy?
Don Mock 1:26
Yeah, absolutely.
Rob Broadfoot 1:26
Why? Because really, what low budgets do- or smaller budgets do- is force you to be more creative. I think.
Don Mock 1:35
I actually totally agree with that.
Rob Broadfoot 1:36
So it actually is an opportunity to do something cool and crazy and fun. It forces you to think a little bit differently, I guess, or more aggressively.
Don Mock 1:47
I think it also helps clients, maybe, accept ideas. I don’t know- feel free to disagree with me on this- but maybe accept ideas that wouldn’t traditionally be accepted with a higher budget because “hey, you only have the sandbox you have, to play sandcastles in.” It’s like, here’s what can be done with that budget at play. Some of those ideas might be a little bit pushing the boundaries a little bit. Because you have to maximize creativity.
Rob Broadfoot 2:11
Have to. So we’ll start with an anecdote.
Don Mock 2:15
Okay. I love it.
Rob Broadfoot 2:17
When I was a young man.
Don Mock 2:18
Okay, how young?
Rob Broadfoot 2:19
I guess I was probably in eighth grade.
Don Mock 2:22
Okay. All right.
Rob Broadfoot 2:23
When do you start mowing lawns? Eighth grade?
Don Mock 2:28
I don’t know. That’s a great question. I mean, I don’t feel like I was mowing lawns in elementary school.
I think it was about eighth grade. So we’ll say 8th grade.
Before we- what kind of mower we’re using, though? Gas?
Rob Broadfoot 2:41
I mean, it was an eighth grade. Not to date myself, but I don’t think they had electric mowers all the way back then.
Don Mock 2:45
No, but I only had the push mower.
You had the push mower? Oh, no, gas, baby.
Growing up, good old Ted Mock made me use the push mower with that little contraption-
Rob Broadfoot 2:56
My thought was supreme.
Don Mock 2:57
It had a contraption on the back that caught the clippings, some type of horrible basket, and it had like the bullet- like the twisted rotational blades. Oh, it was awful.
Rob Broadfoot 3:06
No, no, no, I had a full crank start.
Don Mock 3:09
You had to pull the rope thing, that whole deal, right?
Rob Broadfoot 3:12
Yeah. So, I decided I was going to landscape over the summer. I knew I wanted to mow lawns. I didn’t have much of a marketing budget. So I just wrote down a piece of paper- that was my very first tagline.
Don Mock 3:27
Wow.
Rob Broadfoot 3:28
Which was, I went by Robbie, It was Robbie, your neighbor for labor.
Don Mock 3:32
Whoa.
Rob Broadfoot 3:33
How about that?
Don Mock 3:33
I love it.
Rob Broadfoot 3:34
So that was my first little- and I made up this cool little card and I walked around and put it in everybody’s mailboxes and got business.
Don Mock 3:42
This is the old school, The only way to contact you was by phone. Right? I mean, you had to give out the phone number.
Rob Broadfoot 3:47
You put your phone number on there. People would call you and I mowed the lawns. So not a great creative example, but the idea that there was no marketing budget, so you get out there, you pound the pavement, you beat the street and you hit the mailboxes. Then it was funny, because later on in life-
Don Mock 4:01
I think I know where you’re going with this.
Rob Broadfoot 4:02
Yeah, we did a great mailer that was for a landscape service. Again, not much of a budget, we could print a postcard but the idea was we took a leaf, and we stapled it to the postcard, and the postcard said, “We found this in your yard. If you’d like for us to come back for the 562,000 more, give us a call. Which was a great… left it in people’s mailboxes, and super, super effective.
Don Mock 4:32
Yeah. Yeah. I love that. I love that campaign. Because all you have to do is… I mean, how much does it cost to print a postcard? I don’t even know. Not a lot, keep them in the truck. They’re obviously on their way to their destination to do whatever services, but they’re gonna get a-
Rob Broadfoot 4:46
You have to take a stapler.
Don Mock 4:47
Yeah, but they’re gonna get more maximum, I hate to say ROI, by not just having one house on the block, get the whole block or get people around. So that they save on time, they save on labor, from not driving around all the all over the place, save on gas, all that good stuff. I thought that was an awesome idea.
Rob Broadfoot 5:08
So in that same vein, you and I worked on a project. It was for a mailer for a company that does industrial coding and marking. They wanted to do something impactful. They wanted to do a direct piece.
Don Mock 5:23
Now hold on a second, explain what industrial coding and marking is. Just in case people don’t know what it is.
Rob Broadfoot 5:28
This piece specifically was for the lumber industry. So they have the big machines that, you go into the lumber yard, and they have to mark the actual number on the lumber for supply chain management. So that’s all about supply chain. So they do the coding and marking. They do it for wood. They do it for PVC, plastic, they do it for metals, they do it for everything.
Don Mock 5:50
Yeah, I think they even did the printer that prints the “born on” dates on bottles.
Rob Broadfoot 5:54
oOn your beer bottles, or whatever it is.
Don Mock 5:56
Yeah. So it’s printing and all these weird three-dimensional avenues and areas, to your point, for supply chain management.
Rob Broadfoot 6:03
So this was an initiative specifically for the lumber industry, and they wanted to do something impactful. So we came up with the idea of that. So the old way of doing this, is literally stamping You stamp things. Sometimes you can read it. Sometimes you can’t. I mean, the benefits of doing it with a digital printer are obvious, I guess. It’s nice and clear. We wanted to talk about this idea of, hey, we have a new and better and improved way of doing it. So the idea that we came up with, was a box and because this company that we worked with, worked in this industry, obviously access to lumber was super easy. So we literally took two by fours and sawed them into little chunks. Zero cost. Then in our office, we had a stamp made. It said “the old way.” Then we had a nice one made that said “the new way.”
Don Mock 7:02
They printed with their printers on the wood.
Rob Broadfoot 7:04
Yeah they printed on the on the actual blocks of wood the new way. So you had one side of the block. We sat in the office, and we literally hand stamped, I don’t remember how many of these, 500 maybe?
Don Mock 7:15
I mean, there weren’t 10s of 1000s of these things, because there’s only so many sawmills and wood whatevers.
Rob Broadfoot 7:20
It was a regional play.
Don Mock 7:22
In the United States.
Rob Broadfoot 7:23
I think there were 500. Let’s just say 500, something like that. We literally sat here in the office and hand stamped every single block to say “the old way. The idea was great, because you didn’t have to perfectly stamp it.
Don Mock 7:36
No, it’s a crappy ass stamp.
Rob Broadfoot 7:38
All you had to do was be able to make out the letters and read the idea. Then we package that in a box, so that when you opened it, you saw the old way on this block of wood. Then when you picked it up and took it out and flipped it over, you saw “the new way.” Then there was a nice little brochure that explained what we do and introduced the services. I always thought that it was a really cool idea. It was a really efficient use of money, very cost effective, because you’re literally taking wood and then your hand doing it.
Plus, it’s a good reminder that in this digital age of “all we do is Google AdWords” and this and that, it’s like do an old-fashioned mailer. That’s a touchy feely thing.
People like tactile things.
Don Mock 8:20
If you get a box in the mail-
Rob Broadfoot 8:22
You’re going to open it.
Don Mock 8:24
Think about that versus email like, “oh, mail came” and somebody put a box on your desk. You’re going to open the box, you’re not going to not pay attention to the box.
Rob Broadfoot 8:32
100% chance you’re gonna open the box. What’s in the box?
Don Mock 8:39
That’s a story for another podcast. But versus just the sea of emails. I’m not knocking email. I’m just saying, hey, mix it up. I mean, if you do have a limited budget, maybe there is an old fashioned, old-school way of doing things to get attention.
Rob Broadfoot 8:54
That piece, that was pretty easily trackable. There was a direct ROI, huge bump in sales, for that piece. I don’t remember what the multiple was on the return, but it was massive for them. So that was kind of a cool one.
Don Mock 9:12
I love that one. That’s a great example of limited budget, but maximizing creativity specific to that industry. And using that target audience appropriately, and speaking specific to that target audience. I love that one.
Rob Broadfoot 9:25
There was another one. You want to talk about the Med Shape?
Don Mock 9:28
Yeah, we worked with a company named Med Shape they if we can name drop them because they’ve since been acquired, actually.
Rob Broadfoot 9:33
I believe so
Don Mock 9:34
We worked with those guys really from the outset. They are a orthopedic medical device company, or were, at the time. Now they’re just a division of a larger firm or whatever. They had developed an alternative method to- I’m going to try to break down the science very simply here but- reattaching torn ligaments to your bone. The traditional method do that has been done for years and years is, I tore my rotator cuff. I tore my something, some type of ligament hanging off. You got personal experience.
Rob Broadfoot 10:08
I literally did tear my rotator cuff.
Don Mock 10:09
Yeah, so you tear it off. Well, those things are attached to your bone. The only way that we we used to do it in the past is we would drill a little- and again, I’m painting with a broad brush here- we will drill a little pilot hole into your bone, take the end of the ligament, which is attached to your muscle, wrap that around a screw, a Phillips head lookin kind of screw, and then screw that sucker back into your bone. There’s a lot of reasons why that’s a bad thing. But there’s no other… you can’t glue it down, you have to permanently fix it. Then over time, of course, and through rehab and therapy and whatnot, the ligament basically, sort of attaches itself to the bone. So they developed a product called EXO shape, which was a different way to reattach the ligaments to your bone. So instead of wrapping the ligament around a screw, and screwing it in, which slowly destroys the structural integrity of what little ligament you have left. And also, you’re rotating it and putting it back in, you kind of have to guess where you know, the end of that ligament is going to be on the on the screw, in terms of how your arm moves, and things like that. They developed kind of this plug method, where they drill a hole in your bone, and they put this little convex plug in there. Then they put your ligament into that little hole, little well, if you will. Then they shoot this little conical device, and it’s a plug that holds your ligament where it’s supposed to be. So it’s a non-rotational way of reattaching you’re ligament. I know, I’m being super scientific here. But they wanted to launch this at a trade show, and medical startup device company, not a lot of money, not a lot of budget to get going. We’re like, hey, let’s just do fun T-shirts. Have everybody in the booth wear T-shirts, print up 50 shirts. I don’t know if you recall this, Rob, but we really had to fight for this one.
Rob Broadfoot 12:02
Yeah.
Don Mock 12:04
Marketing guy loved it. The rest of the guys were terrified.
Rob Broadfoot 12:06
Terrified.
Don Mock 12:07
Terrified. So I think he went rogue and actually printed 25 or 50 of these things on the side hatch. “We’re doing it anyway.” But the idea- It’s taking a long way for me to get here- but the idea was, we printed the shirts that on the front of it said “Don’t screw yourself.” That was the line on the front of the shirt.
Rob Broadfoot 12:26
Nice and big yourself.
Don Mock 12:27
“Don’t screw yourself.” Then on the back, it was hey, EXOshape, the non-rotational fixation, you know, blah, blah, blah, or whatever the case may be. Gangbusters. I mean, I think they went through all the shirts in like five minutes.
Rob Broadfoot 12:39
Yeah, big bold statement.
Don Mock 12:39
Yeah. And humor for that very specific audience, but also ties right back into a direct benefit to their product. So to your earlier point, creativity on a limited budget, but has resonance there, right, and really, really worked. It’s a great example of strategic creative messaging deployed for that specific audience.
Rob Broadfoot 12:40
It’s always great when clients let you do that type of thing. It scares them. But they like being scared. I’s a good thing.
Don Mock 13:14
Absolutely. Well, we know it’s going to work that. And maybe the marketing guy knows it’s gonna work, or marketing gal. But then you got to get buy in from everybody else.
Rob Broadfoot 13:23
Shareholders get scared.
Don Mock 13:24
Yeah, well, for them, it was a fun exercise, because they were startup. There’s so many people there. It wasn’t like we’re working with Johnson and Johnson, you know what I mean? You be a little bit more aggressive, depending on where you are in the marketplace, against your competitor.
Rob Broadfoot 13:39
So another example is a campaign that I worked on years ago, for the now, I don’t want to say defunct, because it’s not really defunct. They merged with KSU. But Southern Polytechnic State University.
Yeah. PCSU.
So they have one of the top robotics programs in the country, which is awesome. and at the time, I don’t remember the year. But at the time, they were hosting the, I think it was the southeastern regionals for robotics, so they wanted to campaign around that. Just to sort of drive awareness for SPSU. So the idea that we came up with, was that SPSUs had created this robot. Obviously, we named the robot Polly. So they’d created Polly the robot. But the robot was so adept that it escaped campus. So robot rogue. Robot leaves campus, oh my gosh, we’ve lost our robot from the campus point of view and the school’s point of view. But from the robots point of view, it was, “well, I gotta get a job out in the world. Now I need to be a gainfully employed robot. I gotta make ends meet.” So we came up with this campaign that was that narrative. So it had two halves to it. One was from the perspective of the school, and that was missingrobot.com. That was user engagement. Tell us where you found. We did wild postings all over, missing robot, help us find the robot and all this stuff. Then we did robotforhire.com, which was Polly’s resume and everything else and I need to go get a job.
Don Mock 15:14
Yeah, well, it’s hey, I went through this university, I’ve got all these amazing skills hire me.
Rob Broadfoot 15:18
So we had we have a little bit of a budget. Not a lot, but what we ended up doing was was hiring a local puppeteer, actually, to create the actual robot costume. It was more of a 50-style looking robot. It wasn’t like a super contemporary robot. So it’s sort of throwback kind of… almost a Buck Rogers. What was the robot, Maximilian? Did I just nail that?
Don Mock 15:47
I think you did nail it. I don’t know.
Rob Broadfoot 15:48
Fact check me people. Fact check me. So we create, we build the actual costume. Then we just went around, sort of guerilla style and filmed these quick little videos of Polly at the coffee shop, behind the counter, pouring coffee as a barista. And in various other small jobs to post on the sites and post online on YouTube and all over the places. Then the funniest thing was, we were like, Okay, well, Dragon Con was in town, which for those who don’t know, that’s the ginormous- What do you mean call it? It’s a giant convention.
Don Mock 16:24
It’s a big sci-fi, comic book, movie-
Rob Broadfoot 16:27
-Movie. Cosplay.
Don Mock 16:29
But gaming.
Rob Broadfoot 16:30
It’s got all the things.
Don Mock 16:31
It’s a big one down here. It’s like multiple hotels, downtown Atlanta. It’s always- is it Labor Day? It’s always close to school starting, I think.
Rob Broadfoot 16:41
It’s huge, it’s a ginormous convention. So we had come up with the we’re like, oh, well, let’s buy a ticket. Let’s infiltrate the floor. We’ll take Polly down there. A buddy of mine was going to help me out and was going to dress up in the costume and walk around. Of course, the day before he gets sick. So who ends up in the robot costume? Yours truly. Put on this costume and went to Dragon Con.
Don Mock 17:05
It’s awesome.
Rob Broadfoot 17:05
Walked around the whole floor spent the day down there just kind of walking around. It was awesome. It’s awesome because you’re in costume and you can walk around and do whatever and meet and greet.
Don Mock 17:05
Greet and wave at everybody.
Rob Broadfoot 17:06
I felt like I was at Disney World.
Don Mock 17:11
Yeah, inside the goofy costume.
Rob Broadfoot 17:20
Inside the goofy costume. It totally worked. It was great. We got all kinds of coverage out of it. We also had Polly, of course, just walking down the street, talking to people and interacting. People took pictures and posted them and all that stuff. Then the campaign culminated at the actual southeastern robotics event at SPSU where, of course, Polly showed up, and made it back to campus. All is well in the world.
What a fun idea, and what a fun campaign.
It was a cool campaign and we didn’t have a lot of money and we just kind of bootstrapped it. Again, it was a super creative idea, I think, that did did really well. It drew a lot of attention.
Don Mock 18:00
Yeah, well I love the wild posting aspect to it, too. I mean the whole missing robot, it just-
Rob Broadfoot 18:05
“Have you seen our robot?”
Don Mock 18:06
Yeah. It’s pretty awesome.
Rob Broadfoot 18:09
That was a good one.
But there was a little bit of budget there, because, obviously you made the costume. Right. We’ve got a couple different websites.
Don Mock 18:18
And the microsites andthings.
Yeah. But it’s but it’s taking that almighty dollar and stretching it as far as humanly possible within the confines that you’ve got.
Rob Broadfoot 18:29
The last one, and because I know we’re jamming.
Don Mock 18:31
No this is awesome. We’ve got tons of these.
Rob Broadfoot 18:33
A recent one that was good was, if anybody remembers that… I think this was within the last like, six months or so. There was a horror movie that came out called Smile.
Okay. You’re the horror guy. I’m not a horror guy.
I love horror films, love them. I don’t know how to describe the movie. I don’t want to give anything away. But once you were infected, dare I say, by the entity…
Don Mock 19:01
It’s been six months. I mean, spoiler alert, everbody.
Rob Broadfoot 19:04
There was this spirit, that took people over. When it took you over, you, obviously, did very bad things. You weren’t in control. But you always knew that it was triggered when the person smiled, and they would smile in this really creepy, cryptic weird way. I mean, it’s the great idea of turning a happy face into the scariest thing in the world.
Don Mock 19:04
Yeah. Right. Absolutely.
Rob Broadfoot 19:04
So what they did was, they bought tickets, right behind home plate, or baseball games and whatever else. So I guess it would have been a year ago. So they bought seats right behind home plate and various other sporting events.
Don Mock 19:45
So they’re always on camera.
Rob Broadfoot 19:47
They’re always on camera. They put people in the smile shirts. So they hired the actors. They put them in the smile shirts. Nice big bold smile, so you could read it on camera. The people, the actors just sat there still as could be for the entire game and smiled.
Don Mock 20:02
Oh my God, that’s creepy.
Rob Broadfoot 20:03
Yeah. I mean, of course, there’s a little bit of budget there. You got to buy the good seats, right? You got to pay the actors. I/t garnered huge attention. I mean, you’re talking about free airtime. You’re talking about all the PR that came out of that. All the wild postings, all the crazy stuff. I thought that was a really good stunt. Really smart way to smart way to do something on a budget.
Don Mock 20:29
Because it’s a nontraditional avenue for entertainment, for movies and whatnot. I mean, obviously, we’re used to billboards, we’re used to all sorts of commercials, you’re used to trailers. You’re not used to seeing that. It’s a shock to the system, because you’re not used to seeing that at a sporting event. You know what I mean? Like what’s going on? And it ties in really well to the theme of the movie.
Rob Broadfoot 20:51
And it was so unique that there’s no… on the shirts, it just said “Smile with the people.” I mean, there’s no URL, there’s no call to action. There’s no nothing. It was so odd that anyone who saw it would have been like, “what in the world?” All you had to do was Google “smile people at baseball game.” And boom, you’re gonna you’re gonna figure it out.
Don Mock 21:13
Yeah. That’s awesome.
Rob Broadfoot 21:14
That was a cool one.
Don Mock 21:14
I love that one.
Rob Broadfoot 21:15
I thought that was pretty neat. So yeah, those are a few examples of creativity on limited budgets.
Don Mock 21:24
I think that’s a fun topic. We love big budgets, too.
Rob Broadfoot 21:27
Yeah, we don’t want to scare off our big budget friends, because we certainly love those, too.
Don Mock 21:32
Well, I think those are cool. I think that really ran the gamut of a lot of different examples.
Rob Broadfoot 21:38
And a lot of different tactics.
Don Mock 21:39
Yeah. I was gonna say just from a t-shirt to all sorts of different things.
Rob Broadfoot 21:43
Direct to T-shirts to everything else- and print and everything else.
Don Mock 21:48
All sorts of good stuff. All right, I think that’ll wrap it up for today.
Rob Broadfoot 21:52
I’m gonna go watch a horror movie.
Don Mock 21:53
Do it. While you’re watching a horror movie, where can the people find us?
Rob Broadfoot 21:58
Yeah. On the interwebs, of course. If you go to wherever you find your favorite websites, and you type in www.mocktheagency.com and hit return on your keyboard, that will then take you to our website, where you can see a bunch of samples of our work. On the social networks- that’s where people gather online to interact with one another these days-
Don Mock 22:23
Do they interact or do they just argue these days?
Rob Broadfoot 22:27
Yes, it’s a lot of arguing. Somebody should really clean that up and moderate that space. But anyway, we’re there, of course, @mocktheagency. We’d love to hear feedback and thoughts and ideas and other cool ideas. If you guys have cool, creative ideas that you’ve explored, we’d love to hear him. So thanks for tuning in, and we will talk loud at you next time for episode 70.
Don Mock 22:49
All right, thanks everybody.
Rob Broadfoot 22:50
You keep trying to cut me off but I’m gonna keep wrapping up. So that’s it.
Don Mock 22:53
No, we’re good.
Rob Broadfoot 22:53
Here we are. Alright, bye everybody.
Don Mock 23:10
All right, see ya.
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