Todd Merrill:

Hi, welcome to Tales from the SkyLounge, it’s a podcast about business, consulting, and venture investing. We get out there in the world, we talk to people who are making it happen, and we get their stories. And if you could like and subscribe, it makes our producer, James, super happy. And he asked me to mention our Speedrun sister episodes, which Mike Martin, our guest today, is an early participant in, so we have a link in the bio down below, some short vignettes on Practical AI. So, today’s guest in the SkyLounge, Mike Martin. Hey, Mike.

Mike Martin:

Hey, Todd. How are you?

Todd Merrill:

Hey, welcome to SkyLounge.

Mike Martin:

I mean, I’m a glutton for punch, but I come back for round two of this.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. It’s always fun. Well, Mike, who are you and what are you working on?

Mike Martin:

Oh, that is a profound question. So, I am a fractional CMO. I work for an organization that you’re familiar with, called TechCXO, here in Atlanta, as we’re colleagues. And I work with a variety of different kinds of clients right now. I’ve got an emphasis on hospitality. It wasn’t something I was necessarily trying to focus on, but I’ve worked with a number of restaurant groups, I’ve worked with some hospitality tech, and I also do a fair amount of e-commerce and manufacturing clients. So, I’m having a lot of fun working on a variety of different brands, different challenges.

Todd Merrill:

Wow! Yeah. And I don’t know if you knew, but I grew up in a Dairy Queen family. So, definitely got the hospitality.

Mike Martin:

Really?

Todd Merrill:

I am ServSafe certified. So, I know how to wash my hands and cook meat.

Mike Martin:

Man, I remember growing up at a Dairy Queen.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Mike Martin:

The blizzards are the best.

Todd Merrill:

Heck yeah. Yeah, yeah. Well, so you are from Atlanta, right? Does your birth certificate say Hotlanta on it?

Mike Martin:

It does not. It does not. Yeah. I’m from a suburb of Atlanta and very close to downtown. It’s called Decatur.

Todd Merrill:

Wow!

Mike Martin:

Yeah. It is a really cool town. It’s one that I still take my kids to go to events, have some great meals, great little food town. But it’s only about a 15-minute drive from downtown proper. But it’s just a great, very, very liberally minded little oasis in Atlanta.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. And it’s kind of near Emory, right?

Mike Martin:

Yes

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. So that’s kind of a neat part of Atlanta. I’m definitely out in the suburbs, not in the little borough, inner city by any stretch. So yeah.

Mike Martin:

Well, I am too now. I mean, I live just a little bit outside the perimeter here in Atlanta. OTP.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, wow! Are you scared about that? Are you allowed to cross that border?

Mike Martin:

It’s so funny that there’s such an identity marker for so many Atlantans, whether you’re ITP or OTP. And I’m literally kind of right on the border of 285. So, I find it funny. I spend so much time ITP (Inside the Perimeter), but I’m definitely put in that box of OTP based on the community I live in.

Todd Merrill:

So, your title placard says CMO, but I know you really have a lot of roots in creative. And that’s kind of a differentiator.

Mike Martin:

It is.

Todd Merrill:

And that’s something we talked about on the Speedrun episode previously. How did you grow up in Decatur and that kind of neat, creative environment? How did you find creative or how did you figure out that was a thing that you wanted to pursue professionally?

Mike Martin:

Yeah, I did it in a very kind of backwards way, to be honest with you. Decatur is a very artistic community. My parents, neither one of them, I would call artistic, but I was certainly surrounded by it. And I actually went to school to be a landscape architect.

Todd Merrill:

No way.

Mike Martin:

Yeah. I worked for one in high school and just absolutely loved it. Initially was going to go to Tennessee State, and switched my plan and ended up going to UGA. And it’s a really respected program there, a five-year program. But they throw you right into major classes, and I was a classic freshman who was very interested in the social aspect of college.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. I can only imagine.

Mike Martin:

Yeah. So, yeah, where I shifted gears is just by happenstance. My older sister had a friend who was doing an internship at a pretty well-known ad agency here in Atlanta. And I worked in a traffic department, and traffic morphed into project management, but I didn’t realize it at the time. But I was so lucky to be in traffic because I literally ran paperwork from department to department to department. And there’s a little like clear cellophane pouches when you start a new job, you have to run paperwork around. So, the great thing for me was that I got exposed to every different department and role within the agency. And I started feeling this sense of camaraderie with the creative team. And this art director took me under his wing. And I started asking a lot of questions about what he was doing. He showed it to me. And all of a sudden, just something clicked. And I said, “Oh my gosh, this is for me.” So, I followed that path and became an art director, which also required two more years of school after my undergrad.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Mike Martin:

Yeah. But that’s how I got into the agency world.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. So my, I guess, almost stepson, Beth’s son, is up at UGA right now. He’s 22, and he encountered, I think it was accounting or one of those death classes, and quickly went from business to advertising in the liberal arts, you know, so he may be following you in your footsteps up there at UGA, but he loves it.

Mike Martin:

I’ll tell you a really funny, quick story about UGA and how our brains work. You know, if we have a particular strength in one area, typically it has to give someplace else, right? There are other areas. I took an economics class. I think it was microeconomics, and I showed up for class every day. I studied, you know, I went in for the first test. I was like the first one done, like pencils down, looked around, like, boom, crushed this, right? I was in Athens at that time, they would print it up on that paper. Remember the paper with the little holes in the side of it, and it went from like green to white, green to white?

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Mike Martin:

So, you’d go check what your score was. So, you had the last four of your social, which they would never do today either. And it would have like your rank and then your score. And so I went up and found mine, and it said one. I was like, boom, crushed it, top 1%. I knew it.

Todd Merrill:

Number one

Mike Martin:

I was the bottom one. I failed this test so miserably and went to the professor and said, “What should I do?” And he said, “You should drop this class immediately because you’ll never recover from that grade.”

Todd Merrill:

Oh, crap. That’s harsh. And you never looked back?

Mike Martin:

No. And I was like, well, this is not what I’m suited to do.

Todd Merrill:

It’s kind of divine intervention. Like, you need to go somewhere else.

Mike Martin:

Right. And it wasn’t even subtle. It was like a boot in the butt, don’t do this. Yeah.

Todd Merrill:

Dang

Mike Martin:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

Well, it’s funny how you find your path in life, but eventually you get where you’re supposed to be going.

Mike Martin:

That’s exactly right.

Todd Merrill:

So, you got some really cool stories to talk about. I’d love to get a couple of them out. So, you worked in the Big Tobacco area. You want to talk about that?

Mike Martin:

Yeah. So, for those who remember this history, there was a lawsuit against Big Tobacco, and it created the Master Settlement Agreement. And from that, an entity was created called American Legacy Foundation. And the tobacco industry funded the campaign to counter all the horrible things that the industry did. And it was an amazing moment because we created the Truth Campaign. And I was working for an agency in Boston at the time called Arnold. And we collaborated with an agency in Miami called Crispin Porter + Bogusky. But what was so much fun about kind of the psychology of it is the moment you tell a teenager not to do something, they’re going to want to do it even more.  So, we had to figure out how to go about messaging all the danger and what we realized about teenagers, still universal today, is if you are what they consider two-faced, right? If you are manipulating a teenager, that’s unforgivable. And that’s exactly what was happening. And we literally had access to the boxes of all of the files from Big Tobacco and all the horrific things they did and how they marketed to kids and all the flavor combinations and the scientific manipulation to get to get kids and adults addicted.

So, the work we did was still today considered one of the most effective campaigns ever made, but it required so much creativity. And the client, to the credit, gave us so much leeway. Now, we also had a team of lawyers we had to go through, but we were so innovative. We were creating merchandise. We were creating websites that we would intentionally just blow up three months later and completely rebuild it and just do something totally different just to keep it fresh. We were doing a lot of event marketing, and we had this really cool truck that we drove around to events. And we trained grassroots marketers on how to engage in conversations that was more about informative and let them arrive at the right conclusions and not preach to them. So, it was one of the coolest campaigns I’ve ever worked on. A lot of people remember the body bags ad, where we filled the streets of New York with body bags. And we just did a lot of, like, guerrilla stunt marketing that we became very well known for.

Todd Merrill:

Wow! You’re kind of ahead of your time. So I was, I don’t know, YouTube takes you down weird rabbit holes sometimes. But I think one of the interesting ideas I came across recently was there’s this kind of, like, interesting shift in so if you have a lot of money, you go do a lot of research, and then you have a lot of creative, and then you can kind of force people to have opinions. You know, that was kind of like the playbook, right? If you spend enough money, you can form opinions.

Mike Martin:

It’s repetition.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. And then now it’s kind of like with social media, it’s almost on its head right? And I’d love to kind of run this by your brain, but you know, some people are now turning it all upside down and saying, hey, lead with organic social, do all these kinds of stunts, and just throw stuff out there for almost free. It’s almost the heyday of creative. You lead with the creative first and let them go nuts, and then try a billion, million things. And then only after you get a bunch of virality or some kind of impulse, like, hey, people like watching this for whatever reason in whatever demographic, only then do you pour money on top of it and then turn that into an ad. You think that’s a valid strategy, or how do you think about that?

Mike Martin:

So, the way I would interpret that and some of the advice I give my clients is you have to create cultures of rapid experimentation. You have to be trying stuff constantly. And the other part of it is you have to go talk to your audience, and it’s such a, you know, it seems like a no-brainer in marketing, but I would say the majority of brands don’t bother to factor in the voice of the customer really solving their pain point, or are we just pushing our agenda, you know? So, in regards to creating really disruptive content, which we for sure did at the time, and I would say we were kind of part of an early wave of what became the viral videos, clients would say, “Oh, that’s great. Make me one of those. Make me a viral video.” Right? And we would say, “Look, if we could control culture like that we’d be billionaires, but we can’t do that.” Like, you can’t predict what’s going to happen, but what you can do is just constantly iterate on new types of content and try it and experiment on a small scale and then apply it more broadly.

I think what’s happened today is we have so much more capability than we’ve ever had before to distribute content. I might have talked to you before about this, but the democratization of marketing tools. It used to be the big P&G brands were the only ones that had access to primary research and expensive tools, and expensive production, and now even a small business has AI and production tools on the laptop and smartphones in their hand, which you can create content. So, the playing field has been leveled. But the byproduct of that is the vast amount of content that we’re served up now is so massive and overwhelming that, to me, a brand can’t afford to go in with vanilla content that people are just going to swipe right past. But there seems to be little appetite for really embracing creativity and trying things that are out of the norm. You can still engineer your message inside of that, but you just package it in a way that is really interesting.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. I’m just thinking like Mentos, the Freshmaker, and we all kind of laughed at how stupid that was, but we all remember Mentos, right?

Mike Martin:

But you can’t just have a bland catchphrase anymore and just kind of ride on that. You have to, like, put your product in ever increasingly interesting places and experiment.

Mike Martin:

That’s right. And I think what you were saying earlier is the mentality is let’s just beat people into submission with content marketing, and you create this formula to say, hey we know that if we hit them 27 times across these seven channels, eventually they’ll give in. Right? And that’s not the way I would want to win over customers. And I always argue with, hey, or maybe it only takes six to eight touchpoints with really good content that’s thoughtful and useful and memorable and sticky, you know? So, I’m not a fan of the old school way of just, hey, it’s all about reaching repetition. It can be a terrible tagline, a stupid campaign. But hey, after they see it a thousand times, they’re going to see it and it will. It does work. That’s why it continues to be done.

Todd Merrill:

So that’s like the classic beer commercial at the Super Bowl, right? You spend a bazillion dollars, and then it’s just it’s kind of like the logo. You never show the product, and then it’s the horses or whatever, you know.

Mike Martin:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

Or patriotic stuff.

Mike Martin:

And all those brands are doing the Super Bowl spots. And by the way, I’ve written and produced two Super Bowl spots myself.

Todd Merrill:

Cool

Mike Martin:

One of which was for the Truth Campaign, but so many brands are so afraid of taking a chance that they’ll go and they’ll focus group test it to death and ask viewers to watch it in such an artificial and engineered way, ask them to dissect a 30-second ad in a way that they never would sitting there watching it with their friends watching the Super Bowl. Right? And they’re just terrified of taking a chance.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Mike Martin:

You know?

Todd Merrill:

Well, I remember you’d watch the Super Bowl and then everybody kind of would just wait for the ads, and then you didn’t want to get up and get pretzels, you know? 

Mike Martin:

Right

Todd Merrill:

And then it was like, oh, well, we kind of know what the ads are going to be. And then the third quarter, you got to see this one ad for this new thing. And now it’s like, what? I don’t want to watch the Super Bowl except on fast forward. And then I’m going to go on the Internet and watch all the ads. And then now it’s like, well, who cares about the ads? Let’s talk about the social media leading up to the Super Bowl. Like, who’s doing and saying something like nuts?

Mike Martin:

That’s it. And everybody pre-releases their ads in advance. And so, it’s not even a surprise. And now it’s filled with movie studio promos and pharmaceutical ads. It used to be the man getting the money together for one Super Bowl spot was a really ambitious buy, and now you’ve got companies buying multiple ones.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. So, what’s it like working in that kind of environment with a Super Bowl ad? Is that like high pressure? You know, is there any equivalent to that now? Is that environment kind of shifted to somewhere else now or is?

Mike Martin:

Yeah, that’s a great question. So, incredibly competitive. So, within the walls of the agency, if you were given that assignment, I mean, you really were given a golden opportunity. But it was always by design, a highly competitive fight for the winning idea. And so, I mean, there would be hundreds of scripts presented round and round and round. And there is also a time when the client expected a heavy investment in conceptual time to get to the good stuff. You kind of have to get the easy answers out to start digging into more novel ideas. But there’s no time anymore. Clients don’t want to pay you to think the way they once did. So, I mean, we might start on a Super Bowl spot six months in advance of the Super Bowl. We might ideate for two, three months to get to a winner and then start the production process. You know? I did a spot for Monster.com. They were launching a new service for hourly employees. And my idea eventually made it to the final round and was chosen by the client. And we went to LA And it was like one of these just massive productions. I mean, we had 18 wheelers with us, the premier stunt driver of 18 wheelers. We had demolition teams that blew stuff up. I mean, we had all these stunts. We had the A-list director shooting this. And I think we spent 1.3 million dollars on the production of a 60 and a 30 Super Bowl spot. And here’s the real irony. That spot ran one time.

Todd Merrill:

No kidding. Wow!

Mike Martin:

Because the concept showed this 18-wheeler that was driving without a driver. And the voiceover was talking about somewhere there’s a truck that has no driver, and then cutting sides of a coffee shop, and there’s a driver sitting there and says, and somewhere there’s a driver that doesn’t have a job. So, it’s about marrying those two together.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Okay.

Mike Martin:

So, there was fun with this truck driving out of control. So, the Trucker’s Union went ballistic and said we’re so safe and you’re portraying us like we’re, like, you did notice there was no driver behind the wheel, right? There was no union driver. And the client freaked and made us pull it. So, 1.3 million dollars. 

Todd Merrill: 

No way.

Mike Martin:

Ran one time.

Todd Merrill:

Wow! You know, I wonder if that’s on YouTube somewhere, and then it would be interesting to see if the long tail, like people, more people have seen it because of the controversy after then that…

Mike Martin:

… probably

Todd Merrill:

One day, on the Super Bowl or whatever it was.

Mike Martin:

I knew it was so funny as I have a cousin and he is in trucking. His family has a trucking company and the union immediately started reaching out to try to gain support in protest of monster.com. And I called him and I said, “Hey, did you see the spot last night?” And he goes, “Oh yeah, it’s hilarious.” And I said, “Did you find that in any way offensive?” He’s like, “Nah, of course not.” You know? “I got it.” Like, no, it’s not offensive. And I said, “Have you heard from the union?” He goes, “Oh yeah, they’re trying to get us all riled up.”

Todd Merrill:

Hey, I think there’s a LinkedIn article or something here, like from monster.com to monster beverages, like how advertising has changed. Anyway, you should write that. That would be fun.

Mike Martin:

Well, speaking of Monster, and I would even categorize Red Bull. I mean, Red Bull has masterfully taken their brand and attached it to extreme sports. I mean, sending a guy up in a balloon in a spacesuit and jumping off. I mean, all the extreme stuff that they do. I mean, that is the core of kind of viral video creation, right? It’s just extreme, all extreme sports. It’s brilliant. It’s worked so well.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Anything, anybody doing anything kind of crazy. You’re like, oh, that’s probably a Red Bull commercial. It’s almost synonymous now with, oh, that’s awesome, you know? And that’s hard. That’s hard to do. And it takes a while and a big investment. Is that an example of like, it’s really hard to build a brand, but it’s a sustained effort over years, right? And it only takes a couple of things to kind of derail that.

Mike Martin:

Right, and you know?  It takes courage. It takes tenacity to commit to a direction and stick to it, and not flip-flop every two, three months and change your strategy. But the other big difference is in this day and age, everyone has a platform. Everyone has a voice. There’s a million ways that you can push a negative review out for a brand, and if a brand thinks they’re ever going to create breakthrough creative, that’s going to really drive revenue, but they’re not going to get any kind of pushback from somebody, that is impossible. That’s never going to happen. If I had a company, I would much rather create content that drives conversation and dialogue, even if half of it is opposition. I mean, I’m not looking to proactively offend people, but there are millions of brands every day whose content is swiped past. If you create content that people are talking about, even if it’s debating it passionately, that is a huge win, but a lot of brands don’t think so. You get one negative comment. It’s like, well, we have 10,000 loves and this one person who’s got a strong opinion, oh, pull it, pull it down. You know?

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Yeah. You have the ultimate, you know, we have access to the ultimate focus group now, which is everybody…

Mike Martin:

… everybody

Todd Merrill:

Everybody is on social media anyway. Right?

Mike Martin:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

And then, why wouldn’t you take advantage of that and then pour more money on top of that? That’s kind of interesting. So it’s generative AI is the kind of the new thing, that’s got to be a boom, but it’s also kind of dangerous, right? It’s cool cause you can ideate more rapidly. It’s also dangerous cause you shouldn’t just go with number one, two, and three and call it good. Right? You still have to go through that filter of, okay, let’s build this out a little bit and see… has that been good for the creative or is it kind of been weird or is it kind of just another tool that we’ll see where it goes?

Mike Martin:

So, I’ll argue both sides of this. Right? And it also kind of depends on what your role is in the industry, how threatened you are. As far as access to data and being able to process vast amounts of data or tapping AI to just generate a larger volume of directions for consideration. It is undeniable. It can be a really powerful tool. What I think is important is I fully embrace AI tools on behalf of my clients, but with the caveat of you still need human oversight, right? You still need to build tools, feed ideas, and then have people who understand the brand voice. The other aspect of it that I think a lot of brands don’t get because they just want to experiment is if you’re truly going to utilize AI tools, you have to be willing to invest in the training of those tools, and it’s not a quick process. It takes time to learn the voice. And the other part of that is if you don’t have a very thoughtful, well-crafted brand strategy, if you don’t understand that you’re positioning in the marketplace, if you don’t understand your customer, if you don’t have a brand voice, then how is an AI tool going to operate on behalf of the brand? But I would also argue that if you hire a new employee and can’t handle all those things either, how do you expect them to operate? So yes, we need, back to the beginning of the conversation, rapid experimentation, but there also has to be some foundational elements of a brand that are in place that provide those guardrails and provide brand consistency, and you teach people and you teach tools before you can fully utilize it.

Todd Merrill:

I always felt like machine learning and AI from a purely mathematical background is great at recognizing things that’s already been seen before and maybe some variations. Right? So you’re never going to get from that lens truly creative out of this generative, you’re just going to get like, “Hey, let’s show me three, four blues progressions on a piano. Okay. I can do that.” You know? And it shows you 10.

Mike Martin:

Totally

Todd Merrill:

And you’re like, okay, I like that one. But like, well, is there something else we should be talking about in a whole different thing nobody’s ever seen before? You know, only humans are going to get you to that kind of level.

Mike Martin:

You know, you’re correct, but what I would say to that though is well before AI, you know, very rarely would an idea be so uniquely novel and different and never before seen. I mean, the truth is we all pick up aspects of culture and trends and things happening and whether we recognize, or not that our brains are still processing that. And then what a lot of creative people do is you start to connect dots into something. Is it a hundred percent original? No, we’ve all been influenced by other things. I had a boss that used to talk about socks and sandals. And what he meant was… we had an office in downtown Atlanta. It wasn’t necessarily the coolest part of town, and a lot of people wanted to move to the more creative areas of the city. And he would also say socks and sandals. Like, go outside, go walk around. These are all the people who are in town for a trade show or something, and they’re walking around in socks and sandals, right?

Todd Merrill:

Socks with sandals.

Mike Martin:

Right

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Mike Martin:

Yeah. And he said that is the world, right? Like agency people, creative people often live in a bubble and don’t even realize it, right? The conversations you’re having, what you consume, the movies, the music, everything is not broadly adopted, right? You tend to be kind of more at the front of the bell curve. And so, if you only live in that world and you’re only talking to people like yourself, that’s not your client’s customer. Go immerse yourself in their world and their brand and observe their customer and figure out how to talk to them in a unique way. Don’t just build an echo chamber for yourself.

Todd Merrill:

You know, I was just thinking about how everybody tries to get hold of the young generation. So, Gen Z is kind of the hot one right now. It’s coming into money. You’ve got to market to them. They hate brands. They’ve got their own language. A new word is emerging in an interesting way every day, like, what does that word mean? And it refers to something that they all watched like last week on TikTok or Insta or Snapchat or something where I’m not, right? And I have no, like, unless you’re in it all day, every day. So, it’s kind of this weird kind of, you know, it’s kind of like, yes, they have their own culture and you have to be in it and speak their language, but they all want to be heard or they want to be understood.

Mike Martin:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

And then, so a lot of times it’s like, as older marketers, we don’t understand, like there’s a different way to communicate to that generation.

Mike Martin:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

And it kind of goes back to Gen Z, if you market a Gen Z, you’re not marketing to boomers or Gen X or whatever, or millennials.

Mike Martin:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

So you need to market to… you need to have lots of different threads and lots of different people during lots of different ideas rather than one commercial on the Super Bowl for one hour, one minute.

Mike Martin:

Well, you know, what I would say to that too, though, is it goes back to the importance of understanding your customer, go talk to them. Don’t make presumptions about them, like, do research. And the other side of that though is make sure your organization reflects a broad range of generations, right? You don’t have to have 30 years of experience in the industry to have your voice heard anymore. I think it’s really important to bring people in to speak about their own experiences, and agencies and in-house marketing teams and brands, learning about these different generations. Also, I am always reminded that when the pendulum swings too far one way, it’s coming back, right? And all of the hyper consumption of generations of big houses, nice cars, second homes, all these things that culture and society told us that was a definition of success, this generation is saying, I don’t want that stuff. I don’t care if I have a house. I don’t want a house.

Todd Merrill:

Can’t buy it anyway.

Mike Martin:

Right. My currency is experiences, right? And so, they’ll live very simply, and they’ll spend their money on the most elaborate travel, right? Because they want the experiences. And so they’re their parents look at them and go, well, wait a minute. You know, a home is the best investment. Is it? Is it? Right? They’re questioning everything. Plus, I also think the other place we’re going is as we accelerate with AI and other technologies so fast, there is a growing demand for experiences where you slow down, right? You know, there are adult summer camps now. Now, the cell companies are offering you the version that’s not a smartphone. It’s just a phone.

Todd Merrill:

Flip phone, yeah.

Mike Martin:

Right. It doesn’t have apps. And there’s a growing number of young folks who don’t have the same interest in social media and are smart enough and they’ve seen. It’s almost like coming back to cigarettes, right? All the dangers, you can’t say you don’t know now, right? If anyone who smokes a cigarette now says, “Oh, I didn’t know they’re bad for my health,” is like, really?

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, you did.

Mike Martin:

Right. Right. I mean, I doubt there are many 13-year-olds right now that haven’t been exposed to some kind of message about the dangers of social media, so they’re swinging back the other way. And you know, if I were going to start a business tomorrow, I’d probably do something where I take people trout fishing and camping and just be free of devices.

Todd Merrill:

I thought about that. I thought about how my boys did Boy Scouts. Now they’re older so we’re not doing it anymore.

Mike Martin:

Same

Todd Merrill:

But like that whole experience of unplugging for just a couple of days, you know, cooking your own food, everything kind of slows down, and you get a lot of perspective in a hurry.

Mike Martin:

Totally

Todd Merrill:

Maybe that’s like an executive team-building thing or something.

Mike Martin:

Without a doubt. And my son is almost about to be 15. We were in Scouts, too. We still do a lot of camping, hiking, fishing, stuff like that together. And it’s like his favorite thing. You know, I don’t have to twist his arm to go camping. We’re going to Cumberland Island, where there are wild horses in September, and he’s so excited. Now, yes, this kid loves YouTube. You know, he loves Instagram, he loves a lot of video games and stuff, but if you ask him what’s your favorite thing to do? He’d say camping and fishing.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Get unplugged. So, for a while, it was snap streaks. Like, you had to check in with buddies, and then you didn’t want to go camping. You could not unplug. It’s all the same terminology of addiction, right?

Mike Martin:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

You know, maybe the pendulum is finally swinging back the other way, where we’re recognizing it as a drug or as an addictive behavior.

Mike Martin:

Social media. Yeah. Social media is like a cigarette. It is engineered to be addictive.

Yeah. I talked to my 21-year-old, and he said, “Yeah, like that whole generation grew up with a tablet in their hands at dinner or something.” Right? And he said, “That’s the worst thing.” Like, we all hate that. That, you know, yes, we grew up with it, and now we’re like rebelling. My kids will never have technology. It’s like, okay, we’ll see how it is, you know.

Mike Martin:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, it’s kind of funny to see how that reaction goes.

Mike Martin:

Yeah. Yeah.

Todd Merrill:

Hey, you had a cool story about an ice cream truck that you want to talk about. Do you want to tell that story?

Mike Martin:

Yeah. So, this is back to the truth campaign. So, one of the things, these facts, not created, not manufactured, that the tobacco industry did was they did a lot of research around different ice cream flavors that they could enhance cigarettes with in order to get kids to smoke at a very young age. And so in that kind of classic gorilla style of marketing, we cast two young actors to dress up in an ice cream vendor’s outfit. And we got an ice cream truck with the old bell, and they had the PA system. And while the spot was scripted out, they were driving down the road. We were really doing this in LA and there was just natural passerby, but they were delivering the script via the PA system, the intentionally crappy crackling speaker on top of the ice cream truck with that terrible music playing, but they talked about, hey, did you know that the tobacco industry actually used, you know, explored ice cream flavors in order to get kids addicted. And what happened is when you’re doing a production in LA, you permit a certain area, and you have police officers there that the production hires. But one of the reasons they are there is to make sure you stay within the footprint of where you’re permitted to shoot. So, we were doing a dry run with the talent, and they were driving. One was driving, one was doing the talking, and they drove down and they passed the point where we were permitted for, and they hung a left turn to go turn around and come back and do the whole thing again. When they turned, there was an elementary school right there.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, no!

Mike Martin:

There were kids out on the playground. These were elementary school kids. And the talent had a microphone in their ear, and we were in video village and we could give them direction. And I could see from the cameras we had on the ice cream truck what was happening, the natural reaction. And I said, start running the dialogue, do it. Just start talking to the kids.

Todd Merrill:

Ha ha ha, yeah.

Mike Martin:

And they did. And the kids all immediately responded and started just running down the fence listening to this message, and we couldn’t have manufactured a more perfect and organic reaction to this message. Now, as I said, we were out of compliance with production, so as soon as we cut, the production company said, “Hey, you can’t use any of that because we don’t have permission from the school, parents, kids, we’re out of our footprint,” whatever. And so we shot it as scripted. However, we said, wait a minute. What if we went to the school and said, all right administration, what if we offered to buy you guys 10 new state-of-the-art computers in return for the school and the parents allowing students, and by the way, this is a message that’s really beneficial to you, and the class said, “I don’t know, I don’t know.” Like, let’s try. So sure enough, they agreed to it and we got signed off and we ran it. And that was one of the most effective spots, but it was never, it was never meant to be produced that way. But again, it’s those happy accidents or those just moments of just go with it, try it.

Todd Merrill:

Go get it, yeah.

Mike Martin:

You can’t plan it.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Wow!

Mike Martin:

It was fun.

Todd Merrill:

Wow! And was that Super Bowl thing or just like a national spot?

Mike Martin:

Yeah, that wasn’t a Super Bowl spot, but it was definitely one of their best performers. We won a bunch of marketing awards for that campaign in that spot. And of course, the client loved it once we figured out all that.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah, that’s awesome.

Mike Martin:

Yeah. Once we could legally run it and get signed off, then it was fun.

Todd Merrill:

Ice cream man, ice cream man. Wait, tobacco, what?

Mike Martin:

Yeah. Right. Right.

Todd Merrill:

So, one of the things I was asking you in the show prep was the biggest challenge in your career, lowest low, highest high, and then it turns out that’s kind of the same story, right? So, you want to talk about your maniacal boss story?

Mike Martin:

Yeah. Yeah. I’ve worked for some really, really interesting people in my career. And if somebody asked me, it’s almost like that matrix moment of, hey, swallow the blue pill and you’ll never remember working for him, you know, swallow the red pill, whatever. If you gave me that option of saying, hey, if you could go back and not have those experiences and not work for that type of person, would you take it, and I never would, not a million years. I developed the thickest skin of just the harshest, most critical feedback of people cussing you out, throwing your storyboards down the hallway, acting like they’re pissing all over your ideas, slamming their big Texan boots on the table. It was the wild west truly of behavior that would never be tolerated today. But I learned how to defend my ideas. I learned how to be resilient with incredibly harsh feedback, and I also learned how to understand the importance of selling ideas internally before they even went externally. But that was the first crazy boss. The second crazy boss I worked for was just the most abusive leader. I mean, just every moment he could take to just destroy someone’s confidence and just tear people down in group perspectives. I mean, it seems like that would never happen today, but at the time, it did. And I made a decision that I just wasn’t going to tolerate that anymore, and I didn’t create confrontation just for the sake of confrontation. I did it because my team and people who had worked incredibly hard deserve better, and so I started standing up to him, and as most bullies do, they can’t stand that. He would literally turn beet red, slam his hands down, and look at me like, if he could have ripped my head off and killed me in that conference room and gotten away with it, he would have. And people started … they hated coming to meetings because every time he did it, I’d call him out respectfully, and I knew that my time was very limited there because of it, and sure enough, he fired me probably two months after that, but it also was the motivation I needed to go start my first company. I had an agency. But I never regretted being fired for the right reasons, and I never regretted standing up for people who deserved it.

Todd Merrill:

Maybe that was like the hand of God kind of sliding you over to where you need to be again, right?

Mike Martin:

Right, right. And there were so many people at that organization who were just like they’ve been so beaten down, you could just see them coming into work every day, just so deflated. They hated their job. They hated the work. I mean, we certainly weren’t going to be providing great service to our clients with employees in that state of mind, you know? So, that was both a low and a high when I got fired. It certainly forced me to make some tough decisions with my wife. But also soon thereafter, I was like, I am more motivated than ever to do my own thing and to never treat people that way.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, yeah. I do think that these difficult personalities are always going to exist in the workplace.

Mike Martin:

Of course.

Todd Merrill:

They might not be able to throw things and damage property anymore. But I think that’s always going to be something that you have to deal with in the workplace.

Mike Martin:

Well, if I can connect this to parenthood too, is it’s a hard lesson too, for parents that you have such a protective mindset. My wife would call it the mama bear mindset where if somebody treats your child wrong, you want to step in and solve it for them. You want to be their protector. And the truth is, you’re really not doing them a favor by not letting them learn to navigate conflict and talking to them or don’t return a bad deed with a bad deed, right? Just because they treat you bad doesn’t mean that the way to counter balance that is also to turn around and treat that person bad or other people bad. It’s hard to do that.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. I think there’s conflict resolution, is the normal, you know, everybody has to have that skill. Nobody is good at that at birth, right? That’s something that you get reps in and you get stronger.

Mike Martin:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

I think there’s a whole nother gear. It sounds like you ran into one of these really maniacal people that it’s like no matter conflict resolution is going to be, you know, no matter diplomacy is going to figure this out, there is, I’m right, you’re wrong go, go away, and then I think that’s another skill that is hard to learn to where at some point you either go with it or you got to leave. Right? And just sometimes conflict resolution is not possible.

Mike Martin:

You know, the other lesson to me is around culture, right? So many companies write this well-crafted flowery language on their website, but they don’t embody the values that they put up. And I tell clients all the time, and this is a very scary notion for them, is you don’t own your brand. You can influence your brand. You don’t own it. Who owns your brand is your customer, right? The perception they have of the company and their minds is the brand. You can help shape that, but that collective belief in the brand, that is the brand, they own it, not you. It’s the same with companies and culture, right? Just because you put words on a page, you can frame hollow language and put it on your employees’ desks. But if the leadership doesn’t embody that and act on it and show humility, then that culture is all a farce. And culture is in the minds of your employees and the way they perceive the company and brand. 

Todd Merrill:

It’s a sum of the parts in a lot of ways.

Mike Martin:

Yep

Todd Merrill:

You know, I was at an investor event last night. We got to talking about this, this a little bit of a sidetrack. I talk about turpentine media. It’s kind of this new phenomenon. It’s a network of podcasts that Andreessen Horowitz put a bunch of money down. It’s kind of a spin in, is kind of a good way to think about it, but a couple of folks, Totenberg is one of the guys. He used to work in a couple of portcos said, hey, this is a, you know, creating public is an ethic. I mean, we talk about that, and then organic social, you know, somebody wants to see a personality on the screen that we can relate to personally. So that was the idea, right? So I think that’s a super powerful thing. Let me put a pin in that. I’ll get your perspective on what that means. And now Andreessen Horowitz is bringing that in as a function, much like we used to have advertising and sales and marketing now, we have creative social, it’s got to be a brand, and B2B influencer kind of thing. But then I got to talking, and we’ll come back to that, but I got talking about Coca-Cola, right? Okay. So, we’re in Atlanta. Coca-Cola man you used to love in elementary school, and the Coca-Cola man would come in his little pickup truck with ice-cold, little bitty bottles, and you got your pencils with Coca-Cola on them. And don’t do not say the P word. We don’t know what that is. Right. The blue P drink. Like, we don’t say that anywhere near Atlanta.

Mike Martin:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

And then going from that kind of brand loyalty, anybody that was in Atlanta pre-Y2K, super loyal, can’t imagine like even calling it anything, but you know, it’s not soda pop, it’s Coke. You want a Coke generic.

Mike Martin:

Right

Todd Merrill:

Somewhere along the way, they lost it. Like, who was the guy that ran Coca-Cola during that era? Goizueta, right? So Goizueta School of Business. You know, everybody knows Goizueta. And then something happened, and then like, I don’t know, or even frankly care who’s running Coca-Cola now, like that’s bad. Right? And going from that kind of loyalty to I’m not real sure what’s going on, and I kind of don’t care. And then I kind of drink water now anyway, like what, what happened? Right.? And then like it became impersonal, and then they started outsourcing everything. And then they kind of had some weird PR stuff and they quit creating in public.

Mike Martin:

Yep

Todd Merrill:

That is the ultimate global brand for… generational global wealth brand that kind of, you know, they kind of lost it. Right? And but that’s an example of culture is you know?

Mike Martin:

Totally, totally. And I’d worked on many of their brands over the years. And it’s funny, I feel like our conversation keeps always going back to cigarettes, but there is a connection here. And that is why soda did not receive the same level of scrutiny that cigarettes did. Right? You know, I mean whether it’s the red can, the blue can, or any can, you know, high fructose corn syrup, and all this stuff in classic soda is horrific, and it’s a huge contributor to diabetes and other weight issues. And it’s why they smartly just diversify their portfolio. I mean, there’s hundreds of brands now, including tons of waters, flavored waters, energy drinks, and green teas. Like, there’s tons of stuff. Why did that happen? Was that accidental? No, of course not. They knew what was coming, that they saw the future. So, I think that there was no way not to kind of fracture the brand a little bit because it was always classic Coke. That was what they were known for. But now the real future value of the company is this massive portfolio of a brand. And so it’s harder to be that company they once were.

Todd Merrill:

Well, and then what is culture? It’s fractured, right? And then it’s kind of, it’s almost an umbrella company now with lots of little bitty brands. I don’t know who owns Red Bull, but Red Bull is probably owned by somebody, but that brand, that sub-brand is like really well done. Right? But why is the thing right next to it is not exposed as well? Well, I don’t know.

Mike Martin:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

That’s what we all got to figure out, I guess, in the creative world.

Mike Martin:

Yeah. Yep.

Todd Merrill:

Just kind of steer it back to create our organic social, do you feel like that’s a thing that everybody needs to be focusing on? Is that a core, you know, create public, you feel like there’s got to be, to drive brand awareness now, is it a personal thing now where you need a personality on staff or a founder or a something?

Mike Martin:

It depends on the platform you’re using. Influencer marketing is absolutely one of the most effective tools that so many brands can use. You know, if you’re talking about TikTok, I mean, TikTok creators, right? There are so many personalities associated with that content. Not all platforms require a clear personality, but you know, I would like it more to the brand voice even if other people are representing your brand, there is a voice that you hope, you know, influences them, even if it’s their own original content. To your question about organic social. Here’s what I tell clients. Organic social is engineered for you not to succeed.

Todd Merrill:

Huh, okay.

Mike Martin:

For a couple of reasons, number one, just a sheer mass volume of content, the algorithms themselves have to assign value to decide what goes up and what goes down. So, the one of the latest statistics I’ve seen is regardless of the size of your following your network, if you push organic content out, less than 1% of your network sees that content. Now, if that 1% engages with that content and is it likes that gives it higher value, very little, honestly. It saves, its shares, it’s comments. That’s true engagement. When the algorithm sees that, then it goes from 1% to maybe 2%. And then if it continues, it may be 5%.  So, it is a very slow roll, which is also why we’ve probably all seen this, those of us on LinkedIn. You post something, it does pretty well. It may go dark a little bit and then suddenly resurfaces like four weeks later with people commenting on it again. So, it’s also a pay-to-play platform, right? They don’t want you spending all your effort and time on organic. They want you to pay to be on the platform, to put the right eyeballs on it. So, I am a bigger proponent of paid social. But if you’re going to do organic, back to what I said before, you can’t put vanilla forgettable content on there because you won’t get engagement, and without engagement, you won’t get eyeballs. So many brands use organic social incorrectly, in my opinion. They don’t have enough courage. They don’t do enough experimenting. They don’t do enough A-B testing, to start to figure out and how to navigate, and through content marketing, and what their audience really wants to see and engages with. And sometimes what you guess is wrong.

Todd Merrill:

So, going back to your LinkedIn, right? So, it’s not keyword spam anymore. It’s not SEO, like it’s nobody cares, right? Write something that people are going to react to one way or the other.

Mike Martin:

That’s right.

Todd Merrill:

And then once you get like a little impulse, maybe spend some dollars to promote it. Is that kind of the strategy?

Mike Martin:

Yeah. And also, just back to having a personality, don’t be afraid to have an opinion, right? Don’t be afraid to say something provocative. Don’t be afraid to provide a counterargument to something that’s widely adopted, right? I mean, that’s what piques people’s interest is, well, this doesn’t sound like the same old stuff. I mean, there are so many people pushing just the most generic content out. When I talk to clients and they go, I don’t understand why we’re not getting higher conversion rates. And I say, have you looked at your own content? Like truly, have you gone and actually looked at your own content?

Todd Merrill:

No, it’s boring. I don’t…

Mike Martin:

… would I ever engage with that? Like, of course not.

Todd Merrill:

Right. Right.

Mike Martin:

Yeah

Todd Merrill:

That’s something to think about. So, is volume acceptable? No. I’d rather have one real good thing a week or a month.

Mike Martin:

That’s it.

Todd Merrill:

That is exciting that people wait for.

Mike Martin:

Quality over quantity. Now, can the quantity approach work? Absolutely. You better have massive budgets. You better have very patient leadership and investors and board members or whatever, because it’s going to take a while for that to work. And there doesn’t seem to be a lot of patience these days when it comes to ROI.

Todd Merrill:

Yep

Mike Martin:

I would argue it’s far riskier to create unmemorable work than it is to take a risk and do something provocative and create dialogue and have some awareness around your brand because you had the courage to take a chance.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. I like the VEO 3 with the Yeti and the bottom. The Sasquatch and Yeti adventures in the woods that was kind of fun for a minute, but nobody really did. There wasn’t really an act to that, right?

Mike Martin:

Yep

Todd Merrill:

It was great at promoting that one product, but then nobody replicated, even though they gave all the scripts on how to do it away.

Mike Martin:

Right. Well, Liquid Death came out with that recent ad that was a hundred percent AI. That was, I mean, come on, it was so well done. The dialogue between the two, you know, the two characters turned out to be father, son, but it’s undeniable that the production capabilities of AI are extraordinary. Are people losing their jobs because of it? Yes. I know it’s not a popular thing to talk about, but it is happening for sure.

Todd Merrill:

Right. Well, it’s the grindy parts of the job that are going away or becoming highly automated, right? So, you don’t have a guy with a clear plastic envelope traveling between departments anymore. It’s that kind of stuff. But you’re thinking about really creative things, which is a higher and better use of your brain than simply running stuff around.

Mike Martin:

I believe creativity drives profitability. You know, most organizations pull those things apart. And the notion of creativity is so scary because it’s hard to define. It’s hard to put a process around because they think creativity only happens when there’s a blank canvas and no rules, and that couldn’t be farther from the truth. The best creativity happens when there’s a clear set of goals and KPIs and guardrails to work within, because then as a creative person, it’s easier to nail the solution within the confines of a project versus saying, hey, just go do something. That’s the worst assignment ever. There are no rules.

Todd Merrill:

I want to ask you about your food network experience and the spinout. Can you tell us a story about that little company? And you started a little company.

Mike Martin:

Yeah. Absolutely.

Todd Merrill:

So, drama toward the end, it sounds like.

Mike Martin:

There was a period in my career when I was doing a lot of branded content. And I had a partner and we would work with networks like Discovery or Nat Geo, right? And what they would want to do is they would take a property. For example, there was a show called Rocket City Rednecks, and they would say, hey, we want to take these characters. We want to write some episodic content, and we want to connect the brand and the show, you know? And so we were writing and producing that. I had an ulterior motive in doing that work and that’s because I want to pitch show ideas. And so we were doing some work for scripts, and I came up with this concept called Pen Pals. And so like the old pen pals to spin on it, right? It’s the idea that food connects us in a way that few things really can, especially when we’re just so vastly different. Like, you could take a New York socialite with a passion for Cajun food, and her pen pal can be a mailman in Baton Rouge. And that shared passion for that type of cuisine can be all they need to have a friendship and become pen pals.

Todd Merrill:

Okay

Mike Martin:

The show progressed to the end, and then the attorneys got involved and they said, wait a minute, we don’t want outside co-IP ownership. They didn’t like that. That wasn’t their model. So, we’re at the one-yard line and it gets killed.

Todd Merrill:

Oh, no!

Mike Martin:

So, my contact at Scripps said, “Mike, this is such a beautiful idea. You got to do something with this.” So, I took that and turned it into a social network, essentially connecting foodies where you, pun intended, feed your pen pal and then feed the community with your content. And it did still have a show component. So, yeah, that was my first kind of tech startup and tried to get that off the ground for two years and learned some incredible lessons. Wasn’t successful. Got a couple of the wrong people involved. Had just an amazing partner. But you know, boy, if I could go do it again with what I know now.

Todd Merrill:

It’s hard. It’s hard to get the right combination of everything. Startups are difficult. It’s easy to get going. It’s hard to really get off the ground.

Mike Martin:

And get momentum.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Mike Martin:

Yep

Todd Merrill:

One last thing I want to ask you about. You mentioned you had a kind of a stint in government where you were in DC for a minute, and then, the dangers of outperforming in a government. You want to talk about that? That sounds like an interesting story.

Mike Martin:

Yeah. So, I worked on a presidential campaign earlier in my career. It was Mayor Bloomberg, who I have tremendous respect for. Ultimately, he decided not to run because this individual named Barack Obama that no one really knew about emerged and became quite a force of nature, right? But in the course of working on that campaign, I met some friends to this day in DC, and there’s a wonderful agency called Elevation, and they’re a multicultural agency. And so I partnered with the founder, and we did a lot of work for Homeland Security, US Customs, and Border Protection. We launched new travel campaigns for them, but this is a perfect example of you take a client that you never would imagine could buy creative ideas, and that would be Uncle Sam, right? The Federal Government. They would never buy creativity. We didn’t accept that as an answer. And so the campaigns we worked on, and the goals were enrollment numbers for the new travel campaign was called WHTI, the Western Hemisphere Travel Initiative. And we created a lot of really innovative content and sold the client very creative solutions, but it was also incredibly strategic. It delivered the message in a compelling and sticky way. So we had initially, I believe it was a five-year contract, and we exceeded the numbers so quickly that they defunded the whole program. And when we reported it, we were thrilled by the numbers. We thought they will equally be thrilled to see an adoption rate, you know. I don’t know what it was 30X of what the goal they set. And instead, the reward was, well, gosh, we don’t even need to, you know, we’ve done so well and exceeded all expectations. We don’t even need to continue this program.

Todd Merrill:

Ha ha ha!

Mike Martin:

And so they defunded the whole thing. And I asked one of my favorite clients, I said, “I’m sorry, I just have to ask if we had intentionally throttled back performance, like if we had done just the most incrementally successful work, we could have kept this for five years.” And they said, “Yep. Good lesson, right?”

Todd Merrill:

Ouch. Never again.

Mike Martin:

That’s right.

Mike Martin:

All right. So, it’s about travel and getting out in there in the world. I know you probably have a couple of DC-related travel stories. You got any great travel stories you want to talk about?

Mike Martin:

Well, I tell you one of the most memorable DC ones was I flew from Atlanta to Reagan Nationals so frequently. I was up there almost weekly, and as you can imagine during the winter like so many cold cities, you get stuck, but Snowmageddon for those who are in Atlanta, remember that horrific snowstorm. So, I was in DC trying to get home and couldn’t. And meanwhile, my poor wife, it took her six hours to go get one of our kids off of a school bus cause the school bus was stuck and the school bus wasn’t that far away, but the roads were so treacherous. And it took her six hours to go get this elementary school child off of the school bus. So meanwhile, I’m stuck in DC, thanks to the social media. I found a friend that was like also in DC. I didn’t even know it, you know, different industry, stuck. So, we were like going to bars, having a great dinner went and saw a movie. I talked to my wife who was just like, you know, she is truly scarred by that experience, you know?

Todd Merrill:

Oh, yeah.

Mike Martin:

And so I was living it up and she was in wintry hell, but there’s nothing I could do to help.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah. Just can’t get there. And then I think you went swimming with some pigs recently, right?

Mike Martin:

We did this summer. We took the kids to Exuma which is one of the islands in the Bahamas. And I think many people have seen footage of this island where these native pigs live and you pull up in a boat and your guide will hand you a bunch of carrots and they are swimming out and they’re much better swimmers than I would have anticipated. What I didn’t realize though is, and I should have, some of these pigs were like probably 400 pounds, no joke, enormous. And so, it’s like a car swimming at you and they’ve got these little legs, and while they’re a good swimmer, they can’t turn. So, the moment you put a carrot in their mouth when they’re swimming, you’ve got to shove them away from you because they’ll just crash into you. And you have an 85pound kid standing there, feeding a carrot to a 400-pound pig. They’re going to lose in a game of chicken.

Todd Merrill:

Freight train with no brakes.

Mike Martin:

Yeah, that’s right. That’s right. So, it was funny to have to shove them away from us. And then there were some stingrays, that huge stingrays that were also coming up, and they get fed too. But I’ve actually had an amazing experience with my son at the Atlanta Aquarium with stingrays, and people only think of them as the tails and the barbs and how dangerous, and I forgot what the guy’s name was killed, the outdoor show guy.

Todd Merrill:

Oh yeah, the Australian guy.

Mike Martin:

Yeah, the Australian guy. But the truth is that they are the most affectionate animals and they’re like dogs. They just want to be scratched. Now, you obviously have to be in front of them, but you know, our guide was like flipping their two kinds of side fins around. And if they could have smiled, they would have smiled. They loved it. You could just scratch them on the top and they just would swim up to you and just wanted nonstop affection. And it’s just not what you normally associate with a stingray.

Todd Merrill:

Wow! Water dogs, huh?

Mike Martin:

Yeah. They’re so cool.

Todd Merrill:

Very cool. Well, Mike, it’s been great having you here in the SkyLounge. We could go on and on. But how can people follow up with you if they want to talk to you after this on the internet?

Mike Martin:

Yeah. Well, I’m certainly the most active on LinkedIn, so they can find me there. And also, if they want to learn a little bit more about the work that I do, they can go to the company site TechCXO.com and then there’s a list of partners. And so, you will find me in there and people will also find you, Todd.

Todd Merrill:

Yeah

Mike Martin:

If they want to find that as well. So those are two places where you can find more information.

Todd Merrill:

All right. Well, thanks Mike.

Mike Martin:

Yeah. It’s been so much fun to talk to you, Todd. I appreciate it.

Todd Merrill:

Bye for now.

Mike Martin:

All right. See you, buddy.