Marketing Superpowers: Build A Brand So Good That Getting Customers Feels Like Magic | Jon Davids

I think some people are fooled by the term fake it till you make it. You could fake it for a very long time and never make it. If you have something to offer that's truly valuable, you can put it out there actually in pretty crummy form and people will jump together. This is right about now with Ryan Alford, a Radcast Network production. We are the number one business show on the planet with over 1 million downloads a month. Taking the BS out of business for over six years and over 400 episodes. You ready to start snapping next and cash and checks? Well, it starts right about now. Yo, what's up guys? Ryan Alford, I'm your host. Welcome to Rad about now. Hey, what we said we're always getting right. It's always about what works now. And I think that's really sort of the mantra for today. So we got John Davidson, the CEO of Influicity and he is the writer and the author of marketing, superpowers. What's up, John? Ryan, it's awesome to be here, brother. Looking forward to this. Excited to talk to you. Yeah, anyone that has superpowers or is writing about them is kind of a, I don't know, Superman, Batman, growing up. You know, I was pretty pumped and I think, you know, the biggest thing is you know how to grab attention and that's the key today is, you know, grabbing attention but you got a lot of substance behind it. So I really respect a lot of what I see that you're doing and excited to kind of get behind all of it. I appreciate that, man. Yeah, learning how to hijack attention is something I figured out pretty young but really figuring out how to monetize it and turn it into money and sales and dollars and sustainably do that. That took a bit longer. So yeah, but you got to start with step one. You got to get attention if you want to get anywhere. Yeah, well, I've been asking, you know, it wasn't like when we came up with the show title, it was sort of, it was intentional, you know, like, there's a lot of stuff that the sacred cows of the past and too forward looking, you know, the, the metaverse, you know, like, so it's like right about now it's sort of meant to be like, okay, let's talk about now and what's working, you know, let me ask you this question though, would you rather be right? Or would you rather be now? Because let me get, let me give you a little more context why you digest that. So yeah, I mean, a lot of people like to future cast but they're not always right. And then some people like to be exactly precise. They're going to talk about something, they want to make sure it's definitively known which camp do you fall in? You know, I think people romanticize the past and the future. The reality is what's happening now is the least sexy but probably the most useful. So if I had to pick, I would say just stick with now because you're going to be right more often than not. The problem also, and we all see this in the startup world is that people are right, they're just way too early. And then they die of premature death. And if they say, oh, if I just waited three years, I would have been bang on the money. Yeah, there you go. Talked like a true analyst. You got to see the data, baby, right? Got to see data and you got to live it because if you're early, like I've been in the past, man, it can be painful. Yeah, I have no kidding. I've got a few of those cars myself, few less zeros on the bank account. But John, let's, let's set the table, you know, give a little bit of your brief background and who the hell you are. Yeah, man, I'm a kid that couldn't do too much but figured out how to get attention on the internet in college and was able to turn that into a $300,000 business. Sure version is figured out Buzzfeed before Buzzfeed came along, figured out how to get people to read content on the internet. This is pre-Facebook, pre-YouTube, pre-all that. And I learned in the early 2000s, the big sites on the internet were MSN, AOL, and Yahoo. And I essentially made some content, did some deals so that I could provide them with their content and in return, they gave me links, hyperlinks, back to my site. And just doing that, a whole lot of hustling grind, I was able to build a business with a whole lot of advertising revenue, pulling in about 300,000 a year, paid for college, and then some. And that was kind of my start of my entrepreneurial journey. Yeah, I love it. What the hell does Influicity mean? I got to ask, you know, like for the audience, like, I know it sounds like a cool word. You know, I think I know, there's influence in there. And, you know, there's action. So what does it mean? I still remember coming up with Influicity, I was struggling so hard to come up with. And you know how hard it is to come up with names, man. Like you want to get something that encapsulates everything. But yeah, it was a bit of influence. It was sort of like its own world. I kind of came up with city. And I think I actually sat down in the end and just wrote down a whole bunch of words, you know, left side of the page, right side of the page. But, you know, our start was influence to marketing. So that was the inception of it. And that's all we did for the first five years. I mean, it was a long time before we added any other services. So it's kind of influence. Yeah, I love it. I mean, influence or marketing is an interesting, you know, world, right? I mean, you've lived in Breedla like you said the first five years. I love for your perspective because a lot of, you know, it's been around longer than you think, but it's evolved. And there's more people. I would stop sort of calling it crowded. I don't think it's crowded because it's still effective. That I think crowded like starts to erode like perception of effectiveness, which is not what I'm trying to do. But it's definitely changed. I mean, what's your view just on influence or marketing and the evolution of it? Yeah, I would say it's not crowded. It's splintered. And the more influencers that come along, the more space they carve out and they do take share away from others, but it's share that is better used on exactly what they're doing. So what I would say, you know, at a high level, influencers and influence in our culture is incredibly niche. It's incredibly fragmented. We all live in our own brand bubbles. We all swipe the feed on TikTok and Instagram and see something and think everyone else is seeing it. Well, here's a news flash. No one else is seeing it. You turn to the person to your right and your left. They're seeing something totally different. So we're all in our own cultures and our own bubbles. And I think influence plays a big part of that because everybody can grab a mic in the camera. Most people aren't as good as they think they are. We can't all be Ryan. But if we can build something that people can watch all of a sudden, we can carve out our own 10,000 fans. And now again, we've splintered it again. So that's how I think about it. Yeah. And I don't know. It's become really interesting because I had this conversation this morning. So it was really relevant, John. And with TV declining, like linear TV, social media, doing what it's done, it's been rising a long time, podcasting, rising, all these mediums. Like it's almost becoming like individual influencers or people are almost like the TV stations of today. You know, like it's fascinating because, you know, it's almost like reality TV meets social media, meets authority, meets, I don't know, celebrity. It's this combination of things that makes it the content entertainment that people want to watch or even education. I mean, because even TV was used for education and entertainment. And now it's sort of like influencers or the new CBS ABC NBC. I don't know if you've ever thought about it like that. Oh, man, you're reading my mind. I mean, do you remember back when Ozzy Osborne had a reality show? Yeah, of course. And it was Ozzy Osborne and it was the OC and the Hills on MTV. And it was really a lot of MTV. And then it was, you know, Laguna Beach. And I'm trying to like Jersey Shore. And when this happened, and then a years later, it was the Kardashians, but that was kind of the start in my mind of the modern influencer era where you really build networks around individuals. They become their own micro brands and then they start building products and services and all kinds of stuff around themselves. And then it went from linear TV and cable to Instagram. And that I would say probably the first big piece of that was the Kardashians, you know, Kim Kardashian, 300, that million plus followers on Instagram. So it's been a slow burn, but it actually happened pretty quickly just a couple decades. Yeah, it is. And Heidi Montag, it's Spencer Pratt, our friends from the Hills. Oh, yeah. And had both of them on our show over the years. It talked a lot about that. Heidi maintains that she was more popular at one time than Kim Kardashian. But the internet, but the social media had, that they were, you know, like two years behind it with social media had been like two more years advanced. You know, their fame and fortune would have been multiplied. And I don't know that she's wrong. I don't know if, if, and I love both of them, they're actually pretty good people and fun to be around and, you know, have their own skills and talents. I think that the Kardashians might be a little will naturally entrepreneurial than maybe them. But the attention that they're describing that they might have had was probably on par. You're bang on, man. If you think about it back to the conversation about, you got to be now, because they were a bit early. If you think about them and even the Osborns, like the Kardashians, yeah, they had the momager that was pushing them and probably doing a better job than others. But also it was the timing. Paris Hilton, Heidi Montag, Spencer, he was the villain on the show if I remember from a couple decades ago. Yeah, we all hated Spencer. But if they had just come around three, four years later, yeah, they would have been in the position to capture Instagram and Snapchat and all the rest. Yeah, exactly. What's been your experience now, like, you know, having the agency and working with, you know, more of the, I don't know, self-made influencers, I imagine, and the ones that do it, is it, it seems like in a way, you know, like you said, not everybody's, and I don't know that I'm good either, but not everyone's good necessarily in front of the camera and the mic. But what's the balance between what's necessary to be an influencer? Like you've got micro influencers, you've got big influencers, all that. Like it's hard for me to sort of divide the line because people always go like, well, should I just be an influencer? And like, you know, it depends. Do you, do you, does this enter into your foray much? You've got to have something to offer. And, you know, in the book, so one thing I talk about a lot is the idea of choosing your content format wisely. And so you could do visual content, video, you could do photo content, you can do written content, and there are influencers throughout every one of those genres, you know, you could have a famous author who's an influencer, you could have someone who's on YouTube as an influencer, you could have a writer, someone on Twitter. So there's definitely different levels, but this whole idea of should I be an influencer is the wrong way to approach it. First of all, most influencers, and I know a lot of them, they make no money. They're poor and they don't have any money, and there's no way of making money. So just because someone's got 100,000 followers and they're getting a bunch of likes, they're dead broke. So don't be fooled by that. That private jet is a set in Santa Monica. I've been there. The second piece, the second piece is, the best way to go about it is to have a business idea in mind or something that you could possibly sell and build a community around that. The reason I talk so much about community and building customer communities is because that really is where you can connect content and commerce. So you can say, you know, down the line maybe I want to start a brand for moms. I want to do a clothing brand for moms. I'm a young woman. That's my thing. The thing I would do on day one is start making content to serve that audience, and then you'll monetize down the line. But just making content for the sake of it because I want to be an influencer, most of the time that's a loser's game. Yeah, and I think that's the evolution right there, right? It used to, I think it's gotten a little better with people recognizing that, you know, like, just the sports cars and, you know, beach photos and all the sort of aspirational content versus the meaningful, you know, like you said, truly building a community. And I think that's where you see the divide of the, ironically, the halves of the have not. It's like, show me like what seemingly a well-made, thoughtful, yet under-produced video. And I'll show you who's probably making six figures versus the opposite of, you know, the beach photos and everything else who's probably living the reverse lifestyle, right? I think there's a lot of what you're describing. 100% you know, and it's the idea. I think some people are fooled by the term fake it till you make it. You could fake it for a very long time and never make it. If you have something to offer that's truly valuable, you can put it out there actually in pretty crummy form and people will jump to get it. I'll give you an example. There's a guy I know on Wall Street. He has a hedge fund and he is an influencer. He can put content out on Twitter X. He can put content out on LinkedIn. And he will have people clamoring to see his content. And I'll tell you why. Because what he's putting out is insanely valuable data, analytics, spreadsheets, formulas, financial models that are super valuable to his audience. And so he doesn't have to get pretty and do his hair and turn on the camera like I do. Because he's got something way more valuable to offer, which is a financial model that's super valuable to this audience. So you got to think about connecting again, content to commerce and think about how you get there logically. It takes more than just beach photos. Talking with John David's author of marketing superpowers that's coming out soon. Is that right? Can we hold the book up for everyone, John? June 18th, man, prior to right now, marketingsuperpowersbook.com. There you go. Talk to me. Let's talk about the book. Like what are the marketing superpowers? And we've been talking about individual influencers. Are we talking about is the book more geared towards that business versus corporate business and larger brands and things like that? Yeah, the book is pretty universal. And you'd be surprised, like I said, we did nothing but influencer marketing for the first five years. And we do a lot more than that now at Influicity. But even in those first five years, our clients were maybe not who you'd think they are. Yes, we had the Toyota's and JP Morgan's of the world. But we also had like construction companies, accounting firms, influence lives in every business, every sector. It doesn't matter who you are, a 70 year old man or a 13 year old girl, we're all influenced. The book itself is actually a spin on influence. And the reason I say that is because it really focuses on customer community. So it doesn't matter what business you're in, you need to build a community of people that are obsessed with your product. And the core of the book comes down to one simple formula. And I'll give you the formula right now. It's called the movement formula. And every brand needs to have this. A unifying belief multiplied by faith equals action. And your unifying belief is what is something that everybody should believe. Everybody that you're selling to should believe. Number two is faith. What are all the things that you do every day to build faith? Things like testimonials and case studies and books and studies. And then the third thing is action. How can they, if they believe you, how can they actually buy into it? And the answer usually is buy my product. Yeah, I love it. And I always talk about a formula. It's not that exact thing, but it's like, what do we want people to think? How do we want them to feel? What do we want them to do? Love that, love that man. And so when I'm building a creative brief for a brand, it sort of starts with that. Like, you know, what do we want them to think? How do we want them to feel? Because people think with their head and they buy with their heart, yeah, old but like. But they do motion and logic. Emotion and logic is the combination. And I think that's what I love with, with your formula, like the faith, it wasn't what I thought at first. I'm like, oh no, John Davis is going to tell me that hope and faith is a strategy. Uh, no, no, it is not. You're talking about the faith of what, what builds the faith, the social proof, the, uh, the sort of the what ladders back up to proving, uh, ultimately your unifying belief, right? Did I get that right? You just nailed it. It's the social proof, it's the case studies, it's the thought leaders that echo what you're saying. And it goes beyond brand. One of the reasons I love thinking about it and I named it the movement formula is because I talk about things like the ketogenic diet. I talk about things like crypto. I talk about things like, uh, strategies that people use for investing. The biggest one of all is religion. Everything follows the exact same formula of belief, faith, action. And, uh, and yeah, it's not about hope and a prayer and me wishing someone's going to buy my product. It's me working hard to prove to them that this is the way to go. You know, uh, and I'm a God believing man, but I'm just going to say this because I'm also a marketer and like, uh, you know, like educate. I go to like, I've been to a few like the super churches. Man, you talk about knowing the formula. They got it, maybe like, they like, they, they, they, they, they're like, if you want to study marketing, go, go to like one of these mega churches and see the content and see it all. And I mean, like extracting the message out of it because I'm not trying to be blasphemous for anyone listening. I'm just more like impressed with the, the overall organization and their understanding of the tennis that you just talked about. 100% man, it's funny. There are so many things in our culture that you got to be careful about talking about. So two of the most powerful, uh, movements in our society are politics and religion. And those are two things you got to be very careful because I don't want to offend anybody. Like you said, we're taking lessons. We're not trying to be blasphemous. But I talk about those two things in the book as examples. And if you look at the US presidential campaign, uh, and I don't mean this one, I mean any one of them for the last 50 years. And if you look at religions, again, not one, but all of them, they all follow the same pattern. And if you can extract the lessons, you can say, okay, I can sort of do this and this in my business. And it has the same effect. That's right. Do you think like with most people or brands, you know, in trying to build the movement and trying to get that universe, you know, like, where does the pitfalls come? You know, like what's, what are, you know, maybe some of the things that holding people back or what's their biggest problem kind of getting to that stage? The biggest thing I see Ryan constantly is there's two things you got to talk about. There's the how and the why and people get them reversed. You see, the why is why somebody needs to solve this problem? If you want to go to the gym and lose weight and get a six pack, your why is, because I want to get a six pack. That's where I'm going to the gym. But if I'm the person who owns the gym who's trying to sell you a membership and all I'm talking about is, hey, I have a gym by a membership. Here are my hours, check out the equipment. All you're talking about is the how. And again, you as the business owner or maybe as the marketing person think, oh, but that's what I'm trying to sell. It's a gym and no, no, no, you're not. You're trying to sell the why. The why is because you desperately want to lose weight. So you can play with your kids. So you can run up the stairs. So you can live to be 85 years old and be healthy and happy. So figuring out what is the why? That's the customer's why and what is the how? And that's my product. But always start with the why and go on with it for as long as you can. You'll notice, man, one thing, for example, in my content, I talk about a lot of stuff on LinkedIn, on Instagram. I'm always talking about the why. I'm always talking about what's of interest to you as the reader. I don't talk about myself at all. Or if I do, it's like in the PS of what I'm writing. So focusing on the why and then getting to the how only when they're ready to take out their wallet. Ah, love it. Yet now you're in the pulpit, but now I'm preaching like a true preacher. Yeah, you got me fired up, man. Yes, I love it. Is, yeah, it's fascinating to me. A good, one of my, I don't know, good friends is Christopher Lockehead, category king developer. And he says he who evangelizes and owns the customer product will rule the category. And that's what you described in a lot of ways is not your speeds and feeds and features or your brand colors. But owning IE messaging, IE showing that you understand that pain point, that problem. And because when you own the problem, your brand or your service tends to be the solution, right? Because you're, it's the payoff. It's the payoff and people will beat a path to your door if you have something of value and the thing of value is not what you have. It's what they want. And so that's where again, people get confused. I get messages all the time on social media because I preach about the power of building a customer community and marketing and make money in this sort of entrepreneurship marketing stuff. And people will message me and ask me for things that I don't even sell. Like they want consulting services or they want the people were asking me for my book long before I ever wrote a book. You know, people, do you have a book I can buy? It's like, no, I don't, I didn't even write a book. And so if you have a solution or if you have a message, I should say that resonates, people will beat a path to your door. Bingo. How do John, you know, when you're building, I had this same discussion recently. You know, it's not you build it and they come, unfortunately. So, I mean, unless it's TikTok, but still has some organic power, you know, you've got to amplify these things, you know, like you get your unifying message. You get your social proof. You have all the content. You're doing these things, but is one way or another is it pay to play or can these things really happen organically? Oh, they can happen organically, man. And I'll give you my, my diet tribe on that. Do you know the story of liquid death at all? Yeah, I do. I know it well enough to know the, the, the cliffs notes. But let's talk about it for the audience sake. Yeah. So liquid death, it's tall boy cans of water looks like it was designed in a tattoo bar. Or I say it's the Sony meets Post Malone. That's kind of what it looks like. But the reason I bring it up is because what you just said, build it and they will come, build it, they will come. That does not work. But if you talk about it and promote it without actually ever building it, they actually might come to and I'll give you the liquid death example. So before that brand ever started, before that product was ever built, there was no canned water at the time. What the founder did was he just put out a video and then ads, I think he spent like three or four hundred bucks ads on Facebook driving to this video with this really cool new rock punk star water brand. And then when you actually clicked and got to the landing page, it was just a email field. Hey, this product doesn't exist yet. Put your email in and we'll let you know when we have it. And he was able to get, I think it was some crazy number like 50 or 100,000 email addresses of people who were just desperate for this water because they bought into the message, they bought into the brand and he was able to then build it. So it wasn't built it and they will come. It was promoted and then they will come and then you can build it. So I just like showing that example because it's for me, it's like, that's like the minimum viable concept, forget about minimum viable product. It's the minimum viable concept of just showing the message to people and seeing if it resonates. You down with MVC? Yeah. You know me. The minimum viable concept. You don't have to make it product. John David, everybody's going to love this man. It's going to be like, I don't even have to make the product and just give me a, I can always prefer to promote some concepts. If the concept makes sense and yeah, on the side of like building organically, again, I talked to so many brands that are playing what I call the messy marketing math game, which is how do I spend a dollar to make five dollars? How do I make a, spend a dollar to make seven dollars on Facebook? It's like, get off the Zuckerberg train for a second and if you open your eyes, you'll see there are brands that are spending a dollar to make a hundred dollars, you know, make a thousand dollars because they have brands that resonate so magnetically when you see a line outside the door because this new sneaker brand just launched and there are people lining up at six in the morning, believe me, they're not running Facebook ads and doing the math. They're just putting their product out there because they've already built that community. Yeah. I love it. And it's, it's playing from the playbook, baby. And like, let me just say this, let me give you another great example, crumble cookies. Oh, yeah, that, that is a textbook example of this, you know, and look, yeah, they're selling, here's what companies I talk to, like I used them as a case study, like sometimes or like, is an example, well, they're selling desserts, you know, like they want to like not give them credit because they're selling desserts or, uh, well, they have nine hundred locations. You know, that's why they're, no, they were doing this when they had four stores. They knew how to evangelize the product. They knew how to make it that they, they, it was a branding masterclass combined with how to get garnered attention and interest in something that's, that's been around for years. How long have cookies been around, you know, like it's been around forever, but who has spent eight dollars on a cookie? Well, a lot of fucking people are, that's what they are. And because they knew how to create a story, they knew how to create a movement around delicious cookies because you see though how they're made high quality video content, showing them how they're made, describing the story, those pink brilliant boxes, you know, that get your attention. Everybody wants that pink box? Cravability, you know, meets attention, meets amplification. I love that story. It's so true, man. And I wrote, I wrote about crumble cookies, probably about two years ago, maybe a year and a half ago. And what, what's so cool about their brand is if you look at the others in the market, there's dirty dough, there's a whole bunch of others. Last crumb, I think is another high end one, but crumbles just nailed the social storytelling so well. And they made it about so much more than just the cookies. So again, going back to the movement formula, the unifying belief that cookies should be enjoyed with family. And really they extended that. It was about family, it was about happiness, connection, and that really resonated. And then you had all these faith builders, everything they're releasing a new cookie every week. They have a killer app, 900 locations, or 900, yeah, some, some huge number of locations. And they just nailed these pieces of the social culture so well. And yeah, they spun up a product with zero innovation, really, it's just a chocolate chip cookie with some fancy ingredients. And they were able to build this absolute power brand. Yeah, sorry, Hemsley is one of the founders, had him on right about now and messaged with him occasionally, he's brilliant. And I'll say this, they did everything that you said, and you mentioned it a little bit, but then they combined like the tried and true retail tactics, limited time offer, every fraud, every Sunday, so they've got the beautiful cookie make cookies being made videos and all that. But they have limited time offer, three new flavors each week to to stand that always there, chocolate cookie and some other one. And then three new ones to be excited, they're jazzed to come back. They don't know when they're favorites going to come then they created scarcity. They created FOMO, they created all that, all these things in one. And so that's part of what drives the movement too. And so even if you, and I think with brands and stuff, like that's a, that's a component tree that I think sometimes gets sold and look, I hate performance marketing. I hate the term. I hate that the salesmanship of what you said, like $4 has been going to all that stuff. And I don't, I don't hate the tactics. I just hate the perception of performance. Look, we all, all companies are in business to make sales, you know, of course we need some performance, but you can't have performance when you don't have a movement. You can't have sizzle without the steak, baby. You said it and it's got to be self-propelling and I'm with you that we love Google. We love Facebook. We run ads on those platforms. I'm not against that. But I'm against those people building businesses that are 100% reliant on those platforms. And there are so many case studies of businesses that have crashed and burned. There's a graveyard of e-commerce companies. I don't want to name them because I don't want to offend anybody. But there's all these e-commerce companies that thought they had figured out the Facebook algorithm, built their $50 million business on it and then realized when those numbers fluctuate a little bit, guess what, their cogs fall out of whack, their cat is off, you know, they're playing this cat, LTV, again the messy math game, all the acronym salad you got to deal with. So yes, it's great to rent demand sometimes. I call that rented demand, but at a certain point you've got to own the demand too and going back to your example, crumble cookies, urgency, scarcity, FOMO, limited time offers, rituals. Another big one is rituals. They build this habit of, we're going to drop cookies on this day, they're going to show up on TikTok this day, come into the store on this day, all those things are what makes for a brand that people are obsessed with. Talking about John David's author of marketing superpowers coming out here soon, John, you know, building equity and building community, it's not easy. It's not, there's a formula to it, but where do people go side? Like, you know, it's one thing to get started and to have that universal belief, you start to build proof and all that. Where, how do we, how do we grow nurture and keep that community engaged? It's a great point and I actually dedicated an entire section of the book. The last section of the book is called Hacking the Access. I've got this thing that I call the axis of influence, which basically explains how things, brands become influential in society. And then at the very end of the book, I talk about hacking the axis. How do you actually fast track, get in the speed lane and also change when things change around you? There's no question that as brands grow, they'll hit a ceiling and maybe they'll get to 100,000 followers or this much revenue or what have you. But then they hit a ceiling and they have to kind of break what they've built and rebuild again to get to that next plateau. I think where most people get stuck in the early phases, let's talk about like zero to one or one to two, is they keep doing the same wrong thing without actually improving. It's not good enough to just keep added for months and years at a time. You've got to do that, of course. But if your content format isn't working, if you're writing content and really your written content is not performing, try doing video content. If you're, if you have one person doing the content and people aren't connecting with that person, maybe they're not a fit for the brand or the community you're building, try swapping somebody else in there. So thinking about not only staying at it for a long time, but shifting around my approach, my content, my discussion, you know, I'll tell you my own personal story. I started making content, I mean, really like 10 years ago. But it wasn't until like 2021 that I finally started to hit because my storytelling got to the point where it was just way better because I had been working at it for so long, my copywriting got a lot better, got a lot better, my public speaking, and so it took a long time, but I was also improving in that time. And that's the thing that I think a lot of people miss. Yeah. When you're a good, good gold there, that'll be a highlight clip, that same right there, just for too if you're listening, you can rewind that a couple of times. So John, I kind of glossed over it I didn't want to because you spoke some of my other love language, the own versus Ritzed Land aspect, and it's a tough one. It's tough because, you know, we leverage social media, these rented lands, these walled gardens, you know, that we're renting them, you know, sometimes free and you don't know when they're going to change. And so it is super key to be migrating them to sort of those owned channels. But like when you're, I do always think though, like on the own side, some of the decisions have to be made with like keeping up with that community, delivering because email is certainly the channel you want that you want that first party data, you want to be able to have that direct communication. But how else, you know, I mean, are you a proponent of like building these sort of internal walled gardens, like how else are we kind of keeping that community intact beyond email? Yeah, there's different levels. So there's definitely the rented landscape, totally rented, which is I'm going to buy space on Google to get in front of your eyeballs. Then you have the next level down, which is the social media platforms, which are not owned by you, but at least you have organic access to them and you've got to still play by the algorithm. And then at the very bottom, you've got things like email, you've also got podcasts and SMS, I would say texting people's phone numbers. So you know, the way I think about it is, yes, ultimately you want to get as close to first party data as you possibly can. I want to have an unintermediated relationship with you, if you're my customer, that comes down to phone and email. But regardless, if you have touch points that are out there, and if you're doing as you scale, if you're doing a lot of stuff, so maybe you start with Instagram, then you expand a TikTok and YouTube and X and podcasts and video, if you have enough touch points, you can be present in people's lives and part of their daily habits. Even if they never subscribe or listen, you know, I do a podcast, you do a podcast, you do an amazing podcast, and I'm sure you have people come up to you on the street, Ryan, or maybe you know, email you and say, hey, I've been listening to you for, you know, six months, man, and you don't know this person's name. There's no indication that they're have any relationship, but they are tuning in. So just because you don't see them doesn't mean that people aren't there. Yeah. That's a big one. I'm in the grocery store, and I get, you know, we, we changed our, our name, and we, we have the radcast network now with right about now being on it, but we used to be just a radcast, and I'll get, you know, crossing the street or at a grocery store with my son, one of my sons, radcast, you know, like that's just what they, that's awesome. Sometimes it's scary. Oh, oh, what happened? And no, but yeah, to that very end, you never know where it's coming or at an airport. As it tends to be where it happens, a grocery store at an airport, I don't know what that is, at least for my callouts and asking me things. That's the DMs. The airports are the best for that because airports are where it doesn't matter who you are, where you're from, everyone congregates at airports. We, we all end up at an airport at a certain point. So yeah, you will see if people know you, if you get stopped at an airport. Yes. Yes. What, I mean, what do you make of, I haven't spent much time with this. You know, the whole TikTok thing, let's a debate about it. It's going away or not, but like it is such a behemoth now, it's hard to ignore. When you're talking with brands or people that you work with, where does TikTok fit in there? And is it just so big that no one should ignore it or is it still nice to you? It's definitely not niche. It's definitely big and I wouldn't ignore it. And you see businesses big and small, I mean, I open my TikTok and I see people talking about interest rates and mortgages and entrepreneurship because that's what I'm into. But then my wife opens it and she's looking at food videos and kid videos so everyone's in their own little feed bubble. I would say that the discussion around is TikTok and a come or go. It's not going anywhere. It might transfer ownership from a usage perspective. You might see a difference in the algorithm or you might see a difference in some of the fine print, but like you're not going to not have TikTok. And if I had to put money on it, I would say TikTok's not leaving. Yeah. Agreed. Yeah. Yeah. And that's a big debate, but I would say, you know, it's not going anywhere. But should you avoid it or should you try not to be on it? I would say people who avoid it today are probably going to be looking back in six months, a year, two years, three years, and they're probably going to join the bandwagon anyhow. But to be fair, Ryan, that's what happens with a lot of social media platforms. A lot of us didn't join Twitter in 2007 where we joined it in like 2015 and so a lot of us didn't do podcasts in 2005, we did it in 2018. So that's just the reality of how these platforms work. It's not going anywhere and I'd embrace it. That's at least what I've done. Yeah. Agreed. I led the witness a little bit, but too big to ignore, too big to fail. A little bit. A little bit. Exactly. John, as we're kind of wrapping up here, you know, any final counsel, any final tips, tricks, that you're seeing on your radar or things that you want to convey to our audience? Yeah. I would just say that people wherever they are in their business journey, whether you're in an entrepreneur, you're a professional marketing or a CMO, a CEO, you need to think about some of the stuff I talk about in marketing superpowers, not because it's a certain way to market or not because it's like, oh, if you're talking to this kind of customer, I need to build a community or I need to build a movement. This is the way the world is going 5, 10, 20 years from now. If you talk to people today, I talk to them all the time. I have young cousins, nieces, nephews who are 15, 16, 17, their media habits, their media diets, their consumption habits are a different world from what somebody in their 30s, 40s or 50s is living today or was as grown up with. And so you need to think about the principles I talk about in marketing superpowers because they will affect every single brand. And if you want to be around in 5, 10, 20 years and still be relevant, this is what you need to do today. 100% and I'll leave you with this and why I support marketing superpowers and the tennis that John's are talking about. Here's what people get lost in. If you only make one sale to a customer and you aren't building a relationship for lifetime value and for repeat sales and referrals and word of mouth, you can never outrun the new customer game. You will never get where you need to go. And that is the superpower. And that is why you need to check out John Davis new book. John, the pleasure of having you on, brother, talk to me about where I can keep up and buy the book. Absolutely man. The book is simple. Marketing superpowers book.com. You can go there, get a free sample, get the first few chapters free and of course pre-order and you can go Amazon, Barnes and Noble, wherever you want to get your books. And then I'm at johndavids.com. You can go there, follow me across social and I really appreciate you. You have me on today, man. This was awesome. Yeah, man. Hey, if you want your brand to fly, you got to get marketing superpowers. You know what to find us? Ryan is right. com. We have links to all this stuff today where you can find John, where you can buy the book and where you can learn more about everything we're doing every day. We appreciate you for making us number one. We'll see you next time on right about now. This has been right about now with Ryan Alford, a radcast network production. Visit Ryanisright.com for full audio and video versions of the show or to inquire about sponsorship opportunities. Thanks for listening.