Let’s be honest: marketing technology, and marketing and sales, and mobile engagement, and mobile user acquisitions — they’re all deadly dull subjects that have been known to kill a podcast, and its listeners, dead — and not in the sexy French la petit mort kind of way.
But with their new VB Engage podcast, Stewart Rogers, and Travis Wright aren’t interested in producing a limp and lifeless show. They’re raring to go with some of the most famous people in the mobile marketing arena, all dealing straight talk about what they know best, plus a firehose of snarky reality checks when it comes to accepted marketing wisdom.
And that’s what the industry is begging for, Rogers, the director of marketing technology at VB Insight, says. “People have stopped being brutally honest about marketing,” he notes. “There’s a lot of fluffy content out there about marketing, and a raft of social media gurus — and they only call themselves a ‘guru’ because they can’t spell ‘charlatan.’”
The marketing world has to wake up into the 21st century. It’s not just about mobile acquisition and engagement, anymore. It’s about how you sell and market products to people in the brand new world where mobile is king. Whether it’s a product or service, people now use their smartphones to research it, to understand it, to ultimately buy it. That’s where your customers are now.
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“User acquisition is part of it, sure. Engagement is part of it — of course it is. But the podcast is about that entire story,” Rogers says. “How we, as entrepreneurs, small businesses, medium-size businesses, corporations in both B2B and B2C environments, get to those people who want to buy something to solve a problem.”
How do we react in a world where you could launch a product and make money from it worldwide in less than 2 minutes? How do we get found in a marketplace with unprecedented competition?
“All of these new issues — we really want to get into it, and understand it, and blow it open, and make sure people are taking away the weekly news and understanding that from a more honest perspective,” Rogers says.
VB Engage will be serious in the amount of biblical-level knowledge they drop, they promise, but it’s going to be delivered in a way that makes it more interesting and enjoyable for everyone. “Instead of a go-to-the-library-and-trawl-through-the-books experience,” Rogers says, “this is going to be much more akin to turning up at a music festival and letting the knowledge hit you in the face.”
They’re going to ramp up the honesty and pump some of the top marketers, social media influencers, marketing technologists, customer experience pros, and mobile payment specialists for in-depth, backstage-pass kind of knowledge that makes for great conversations.
“Elon Musk doesn’t realize it yet, but he’s going to be a guest,” says Wright, a marketing technology expert, consultant, columnist, keynote speaker, entrepreneur, startup growth-hacker, and sometime stand-up comedian. “We’ll probably have Obama,” he quips.
Rogers adds quickly: “I can guarantee that the only person we won’t be having on is Donald Trump. I’m afraid his hands are just too small for this podcast.”
“A lot of these shows take themselves a little too seriously,” adds Wright, “There’s a term that I’ve coined: snarketing. It’s not just a marketing podcast — it’s a snarketing podcast too.”
But in the end, Wright continues, it’s really about the quality of the guests, the content and the questions they’ll be bringing to the table.
“We’ll be delivering consistently great content with consistently brilliant people,” he says.
The first batch of 20-minute episodes will air May 17, airing weekly after that. Expert guests include:
- Gary Vaynerchuk — schooling us on the modern customer
- Joel Comm — on live video, Snapchat, and how to win
- Bryan Kramer — dropping customer experience knowledge bombs
- Amy Vernon — breaking down community, content, and product
- Andrew Grill — chatting about social media and influence
- Mayur Gupta — covering omnichannel and the digital marketplace
- Brian Solis — examining where business meets design
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