DTC POD #348 - Storytelling Across Screens: The New Rules of Brand Building
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What is going on DTC pod today we're joined by John Saponya, who is the CEO and co founder of wondersauce, a modern advertising agency that specializes in brand storytelling, paid media, e comm and digital experiences. John, I'll let you kick us off. You guys have been around for a while now. You've worked with some of the biggest brands in consumer and commerce. Commerce. Why don't we just get started with where. Where'd you get your start? How'd you kind of find your way into into the landscape and how'd you start building wonders?
John Sampogna 00:01:51 - 00:02:32
Yeah, I mean back God it was like 20 years ago. It's crazy. I'm getting older but I went to school for music. I didn't necessarily know what I wanted to do but I had this like made up dream that I would be hanging out in like the East Village and finding the next Strokes and when I realized that wasn't really a thing. A bunch of my friends were creatives for developers and they were like you'd be pretty good in an agency setting, you should check it out. And I ended up getting a job at the Time was a digital agency, about 400 people. I did a bunch of different jobs there, but I kind of fell in love with the business. I love that you could learn so much about different industries.
John Sampogna 00:02:32 - 00:03:28
And after bouncing around for like three or four years to two different agencies, I met, I met my business partner and we started Wondersoft when we were like 27, I think. And we wanted to create an agency that was inspired by the way we grew up in the sense that we never saw the Internet as like, things you needed to learn to make money in life. We saw it as like, wow, that's cool. Like you can talk to someone on Instant messenger and wow, like, we're downloading music on a Friday night when we're in eighth grade. This is really fun. And then, you know, everything in like college where I remember like three social networking and post social networking. And then my 20s with like the advent of the iPhone and the app economy and everything we've seen in the last 10 years, it's always been this hyper acceleration of just like, cool stuff that makes your life better. And I wanted to create an agency that was inspired by that, where our only constant will be change.
John Sampogna 00:03:28 - 00:03:54
And we want to like, truly live the customer journey. So that's why our service offering is, you know, we build things like apps and websites and e commerce experiences. We create content that can drive earned media that could be a super polished campaign that could live for years. And then we also do a lot of like, media buying and paid acquisition. And we just see that as like, the components you need to survive as a brand today.
John Sampogna 00:03:54 - 00:04:13
Yeah, and why don't you walk us through a little bit of that? Because there's so many different functionalities when you're, when you're talking about an agency model that covers all those different, like, core functionalities. So, you know, who are the typical brands that you work with? Like, who are they in terms of size and what do they come to you for? Like, what are they looking to collaborate with you guys on?
John Sampogna 00:04:13 - 00:05:06
Yeah, it's a real mix. I mean, historically, it's always been a pretty equal split between really established, like Fortune 1000 businesses and direct to consumer startups. So, you know, speaking about direct to consumer, we, we got our start back in 2011. It was really like, at the time when like, Harry's and Dollar Shave and all the Generation 1 D2C brands were hitting the market. So we got to work with those brands that like, happened to follow soon after. And we were doing all like, the branding, the audience development. We're creating the website, the content, the go to market strategy, where we got really, really good at basically building businesses out of nothing and putting them in market and then working with them for a year or two and letting them kind of foster and grow. So that's always been like a core focus and it's been incredibly fun partnering with so many different types of entrepreneurs.
John Sampogna 00:05:06 - 00:05:59
And then the other side of the coin is when you're working with a more structured corporate brand. And we're doing kind of similar stuff, campaign development. Sometimes it's building digital products and other times it's buying media. But I'd say like about half our clients work with us for a specific thing like, hey, Wonder Sauce, we need you to like just create this campaign or manage, you know, $5 billion worth of media. And then we have other clients where they're just basically like 2025 is all about, you know, increasing our sales from offline to online. That is the one goal. So you guys are managing that one goal and you're handling the creative, the media and the tech go. And we're managing like one business goal and we're really kind of like their agency of record and truly a partner to the business and we love that stuff.
John Sampogna 00:05:59 - 00:06:05
So it's kind of a split between project work and, and retained kind of AOR model stuff.
John Sampogna 00:06:05 - 00:06:45
Yeah. And I think what's really fascinating is like you're saying you started this business 13 years ago and you've grown it to, you know, over a hundred people, to being able to pull off such a broad range of different things. But why don't you talk taking it back to the early days, like when you, you're saying, I just started an agency. What were some of the first projects that you like took on and what did you do? Because like there was a time where you started where you didn't have a, you know, 100 plus person team that could pull off anything from D2C to Fortune 1000 sort of, you know, macro initiative. So what did that look like and what did the steps look like to like start to grow your breath of expertise and services that you guys could offer?
John Sampogna 00:06:45 - 00:07:30
Yeah, I mean, starting an agency is really easy. I mean, anyone can do it, like in five minutes from now you can just say, I'm going to start an agency called Spindrift Collective and we're an agency. File an LLC in Delaware and boom, like that's it. But I always say there's, there's like, there's so many levels to agencies. You could be a five person team that Just does one thing. You could be a thousand person company or anything in between. But there's so many levels of scale and also like capability in terms of what you're able to deliver. So back in the early days, we, we were largely like our bread and butter, was building websites and e commerce experiences and like social content because we grew up doing that.
John Sampogna 00:07:31 - 00:08:28
So those were the things we did day in and day out because we were truly experts in it. I remember we had this list of like friends, friends of friends and friends of friends of friends where if we quit our jobs and we had eight hours a day to just like take meetings and talk about our business, who would we talk to? And we basically started doing that while we were still working at other agencies. And we would take drinks, coffees, lunches, and we did it for, I think like a day or two. And we had an RFP where people were like, we got, I got a, I got a call and someone's like, hey, I got this lead. It's a prototype. It's a beer prototype. We want you to like develop kind of like this, this cool thing that will help people profile how they go about like selecting craft beer. And I was like, cool, is this for like, what is this for? He's like, it's for that wonder sauce thing you were talking about.
John Sampogna 00:08:28 - 00:09:00
I'm like, oh, like, wow, that's legit. And I remember like, we stayed up all night, we cranked a proposal, we did like spec creative with UX work and it was like this fully baked thing that was beautiful. And I remember like, I got the response. We sent it the next morning. I got the response like a few hours later and it was just like, cool, when can you start? And I was like, we totally like overshot this. And it was like a $20,000 nothing project. And we treated it like it was like a multimillion dollar thing. So that was like our first project.
John Sampogna 00:09:00 - 00:09:41
It got us going. It allowed us to basically like live for two months on, on the money coming in. And I remember like soon after that, we signed a couple like smaller websites. We took on some digital content work and it just starts going. We never had any like, fear that we would make it because we were so confident in our abilities to do good work that we knew like, if we had time to actually produce work, our clients would vouch for us and get us more of it. And I think like, we didn't do any real marketing at wondersoft for the first five, six years of the business. It was all word of mouth. We Started we were two people, no funding and we were know a hundred people in five years.
John Sampogna 00:09:41 - 00:09:43
So like we grew really fast and it was all organic.
I, I love that. And, and it's, it's, it's really cool to see especially like in the beginning. I think that's something whether you're on the agency side or you're an entrepreneur, you know, getting that first client and getting the business sort of going, it's super, super exciting. So, you know, just moving on from, from that, I'd love to kind of talk about, you know, some of the principles that you guys operate on and have seen because you've seen all sorts of businesses, you've seen what works, you see what doesn't work. But I love to chat a little bit about brand and storytelling. Right, that's something that you guys talk about and you guys, you know, really key in, key in on. So what, you know, what is brand storytelling and what do brands need to know to get it right?
John Sampogna 00:10:24 - 00:11:21
When brand storytelling is a catch all, it could be anything from your actual branding and your positioning and your essence, what you stand for, your value proposition, your product benefits. It could be all that stuff. It could be a campaign that's driving towards a big moment or a product launch or a holiday. It could be like organic evergreen social content you're putting out all day every day, influencer stuff. It could be literally anything. So I think it's really just like it's content that tells your story. And not to be like a corny marketing bro, but it's like there's top of funnel, mid funnel and lower funnel. And I think top of funnel is like I always say it's, you get to be a little bit more long winded, you get to romanticize a little bit and you get to almost like work towards building this complete picture of what your brand is ultimately going to be one day.
John Sampogna 00:11:21 - 00:12:10
And the expectation is that you're not immediately going to get money. It's. You got to have patience in a mid funnel is more on that consideration where it might be more product driven marketing. It might be, you know, going a little deeper into aspects because we have more information about the user. And then like lower funnel is just like, you know, direct response performance stuff where you're, you're getting someone to buy. And we're in a really interesting spot right now where I feel like a lot of brands have completely abandoned top of funnel and the traditional marketing that is super important and they've shifted completely to lower funnel performance tactics. And there's a Ton of value in lower funnel. We run it for all of our clients like Meta and Google and all that stuff.
John Sampogna 00:12:10 - 00:13:23
But that's not a marketing plan and it's not a way to run a sustainable business. And I think that brands are starting to realize now that the lack of building a proper foundation as a brand has left them susceptible to competition, rising costs of media and a return on ad spend that is non existent. So we're trying to encourage the brands we work with to move away from that model, to diversify their media spend away from that into different areas where they're able to stand out from their competition. And ultimately like this general idea that a lot of these businesses going to market, they're just like completely obsessed with like attribution models and return on investment and return on ad spend and Roas, I get it, trust me. But if your entire business model is built on paying for customers all the time, it's a pretty bad business model. You need, there needs to be a give and take there. So we're trying to kind of like bring things a little bit more centered and a more like moderate marketing approach that balances paid and earned and like immediacy with like a little bit of time.
Yeah. And what I, I really want to kind of dig in there because I think what you said is, is spot on, especially for a lot of newer brands. Right. People see, you know, the first thing they'll do is they'll go to something like Meta or TikTok shop. They'll be looking for the attribution and it's very clear. But like you're saying a lot of that in order to get it to perform your targeting. You're inherently targeting bottom of the funnel because you're looking for a conversion. So what does it look like? What is, what does a strategy look like to kind of embrace, you know, some of the brand marketing, some of the campaign, like when you guys are working with clients, like what does that conversation look like and how do you set up a campaign for success? Are you looking over a longer time horizon? Is it, you know, multiple different initiatives that are all working in tandem? What does it look like if you're trying to say, hey, let's you know, think about building this an entire marketing funnel as opposed to just, you know, one converting ad.
John Sampogna 00:14:17 - 00:14:50
Yeah. And it's going to be different for every business. So just that's the precursor here. Because I can say it's one thing that's like, I can say connected TV or linear TV is top of funnel, but it could Be lower funnel. It's like, it depends, but just using generalities, I think, like time and market is the biggest advantage for a new business. So one thing I like to stress early on, you know, specifically in the direct to consumer space is we're probably in like stage three or stage four of direct to consumer. You know, the early days of direct to consumer, the innovation was direct to consumer. It was the supply chain.
John Sampogna 00:14:51 - 00:15:21
It was the idea of like high quality, cutting out layers of fat going to you. That's the innovation, right? Those. The second step in that process was, you know, the brands that came out soon after the first batch. And it was like, we're going to ignore the traditional way of marketing and we're going to use social to tell our story. And now. And that was really big. And then where we're at now is like, I don't even think D2C exists. It's just there's E commerce, there's retail, and there's traditional brands that do both.
John Sampogna 00:15:21 - 00:16:18
There's D2C brands that do both. It's mixed. So the first thing I like to talk about is like, you need a media budget. Regardless of how good you are at earned media, whatever your media budget is. Two, you need to understand that, like, there's always going to be people in your category spending more than you and more, and there's going to be people spending less than you. So I always like to say, like, whenever people are asking, what's the number that's right for me? I'm like, I don't know. Like, if you say I have a million dollars for a year and I'm like, how does that feel? Does that feel like you're going to be up like every single night and your investors are going to be barking down your throat like after three weeks because you're not getting sales? Or does that feel like comfortable to you? And if the answer is like, no, it feels comfortable, I'm like, okay, look, we're on the right track. Because what I'm looking for is like, I want people to commit to a number that they're not going to panic and stray from the strategy if things aren't going according to plan after six weeks.
John Sampogna 00:16:18 - 00:16:54
Because usually when you turn the switch and you go live, things might be going to plan, but it feels way more real when you're not getting that, like, shopify sound every hour, every 20 minutes, every 10 minutes. And the then customer growth is slow. And I'm like, trust me, it's part of the process. You got to just trust Me. But then like, you know, stress takes over. What outside voices come in and they say, you know, you're doing this and this wrong. Why you have to increase your frequency on meta and blah, blah, blah. And all of a sudden like the plan's fucked and everything's going in the wrong direction and things are bad.
John Sampogna 00:16:54 - 00:17:53
So I like to have like really practical, honest conversations to start. And then it's all about like the audience, who are you going after and where are they and how cheaply can we get their attention in a format that we think will make the most sense. So in the last year, like, we like, we just want to won an award, an integrated campaign award with the Dairy Farmers of America, a totally different type of brand. And we had this idea around connected tv. We thought that most people that are watching their streaming shows, they're laying on their couch watching a show, they could be binging it, but they're watching a show and they're also on their phone when an ad break comes up. They're not paying attention to the screen. So we had this whole idea around just like playing with sound audio and basically we wanted to start with like five seconds of silence to get the user to think that the TV froze. And then we, they're going to look up and then we hit them with some ASMR sound design.
John Sampogna 00:17:53 - 00:18:31
So it's like crazy craveability. And the, I think the completion rate was like 98%. It was wild. We drove an increase in sales in store. Super, super successful. So I'd consider that like super contextual marketing where the creative and the media buy are truly married. And that's the sweet spot right now. So if you're going to do top of funnel, big brand awareness play, whether it's like an anthemic spot or maybe an event or something like that, truly marrying, you know, the media with the creative and then figuring out a way to get it in front of the right eyeballs.
John Sampogna 00:18:31 - 00:18:41
So we're thinking about the media plan, like highly strategically and almost like a creative exercise and vice versa. I'll stop. I'm talking quite a bit.
No, no, I like that. And how do you think about all the different channels? Because like you said, it's really important to match the creative to the format. But like when you're thinking about all the different types of media that you could buy, all the different placements, all the different creative, like what are some, you know, what are some things that you're liking right now? Where do you see things headed? Do you see a lot, you know, Move. Like I've seen a lot of D2C brands, you know, starting to move back towards TV for some of their top of funnel stuff. I've seen, you know, all sorts of stuff. So what are you guys seeing? Just from a, from the creative side.
John Sampogna 00:19:13 - 00:20:12
Again, I look for opportunity and it's funny like a lot of the stuff that I look for, like I don't have data to back up whether or not it's the right move other than it feels right. So I'm a big right now proponent of connected tv. I think it's incredibly undervalued and you're going to get targeted ads that have the same impact as linear tv. And you compare it to, if you compare it to the exact show, you compare it to like which streamer has the best programming this winter. I want exposure there. So like for me I'm looking at what's going on not even as a marketer, just as a, as a consumer in the space, in the streaming space, right? You've got, you've got Netflix and Apple and Hulu, Paramount, Peacock, blah, blah. There's a ton, a ton of them, right? And I'd say like priority one for those businesses is subscriber growth. They're trying to get people to pay a monthly fee.
John Sampogna 00:20:12 - 00:20:43
The second thing is they need to build their libraries up so they're trying to license, license content so they can tell people like we have, we have Seinfeld come to us. And then they're also then producing original program. Those are three things they're focused on. That takes a lot of effort and it's really gnarly. You're seeing them rebrand, they're trying to like merge a lot of noise in that space. Guess what? They're not probably spending a ton of time and money doing optimizing their ad platform. It's probably on the list. They're working on it, but it's not top priority to me.
John Sampogna 00:20:43 - 00:21:31
Like when I'm watching a program and I see like the same ad six times, instead of getting frustrated, I'm like, I take a note. That seems like a big opportunity. So right now I see like, I see an opportunity to like put a decent investment there and be okay. Like with a brand being like featured with the next ad, being like an injury attorney, like it is what it is but you're getting like undervalued media in a high impact way that allows you to tell a 15 to 30 second story. So like to me connected TV is an opportunity that I think is undervalued. And you know, there's a million easy ways to shut it down. Like, oh, like what's, how are we going to gauge whether or not it's working? And blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But we know it works because it's working for our clients.
John Sampogna 00:21:32 - 00:22:17
Another thing I think is like static out of home in key markets. And key markets don't necessarily mean like sexy markets. It doesn't have to be LA or New York or Miami or anything like that. You could find like hyper localized out of home vendors that are small mom and pop shops. And you can get billboards in places that have the right audience that will remember and look at your business. And you compare that with like very local social advertising. So you're able to then like even with influencer work, you're even like super target that area with like things you're seeing in real life and the things they're seeing, you know, on screens. So I think that's undervalued.
John Sampogna 00:22:17 - 00:23:31
And then last but not least, I think podcasts are still like really, really, really great plays. Especially if you have the discipline to build your own lists of independent podcasts where they're not part of a big syndicated network quite yet and you're able to work directly with the hosts. It takes more time, but like if you spent, you know, a day or two finding 20 or 30 podcasts that, that feature, I don't know, on Skincare or, or CPG or whatever and you reached out to them, you could do some really interesting stuff and you'll get like really tapped in audience that it might not be thousands, but it'll be like a couple hundred of really good people listening. And then if you work with the networks, honestly man, like you do like you could do jingles, super, super underrated. And they work and they're hard to sell, not everyone will approve them, but you'll get a laugh and then all of a sudden people remember it and it'll ping pong their brain. So those are three tactics and channels that we really like.
John Sampogna 00:23:31 - 00:23:34
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John Sampogna 00:24:04 - 00:24:59
No, I love that. And the other thing before I forget that I really liked that you just mentioned is when working with clients is to come up with something that they feel comfortable with and they can actually stick to the strategy. One example that this brings to mind for me is, for example, we're working with an SEO agency and it's something that takes time to see results and it's working and they do a really good job of showing, hey, you guys are here along the curve. But it could be very easily something that, you know, three or four months in, we might be like, we're spending too much. This actually isn't working. Like, let's cut this cost because we're not seeing anything. But then you start to see the compounding effect which happens after a long time and you're like, whoa, like, this is really great. So I think even the way of, like, being able to set those expectations with client when you're working with something that isn't as directly attributable as something of like a conversion or a performance on, um, I think that's right on.
And then the other thing you're talking about, about, like just looking for, like, that's the story of smart marketing, right? Is like looking for underpriced attention wherever you can find it. I mean, just an example, we're already seeing like massive upticks in conversion, like ever since the election cycle ended on Meta for like everything, it was like things ended and boom, like, everything's taking off. So that just goes to show how, when like a market or, or an ad platform is actually truly saturated with whomever's ad dollars, whether it's an election cycle or other competitors. And if you can find something that's actually underpriced, like, you're going to be, you know, you, you've got an arbitrage. So I, I think that's a really, really great way to think about it. And then just for our listeners, could you just break down and explain the difference between connected TV and linear tv?
John Sampogna 00:25:48 - 00:26:02
Yeah, like, linear tv, I would say, is just, you know, traditional, you know, TV through broadcast cable and connected ott, you know, streamed sweet.
John Sampogna 00:26:02 - 00:26:20
And, and then, so when, when you think about developing the campaigns for either of those platforms, is there something that you have in mind to, like, what tools do, like, marketers or brands have to like, leverage each one of those as part of their strategy in terms.
John Sampogna 00:26:20 - 00:26:21
Of like, how, how to buy?
John Sampogna 00:26:21 - 00:26:34
Yeah, in terms of like, how to buy or like craft the campaign Is there anything like, can you, you know, in the connected market, using connected tv, do you have a different strategy versus, like a linear TV that just gets sent out to, like, all the networks?
John Sampogna 00:26:34 - 00:27:05
No. I mean, because even linear, you can be, you know, you place buys with specific networks or, or even a type of ad. Like, there's, There's a platform that allows you to buy linear tv, like remnant advertising, like really cheap ads that play at early morning, late night. And honestly, like, even that, it's like a good tactic, but. And it'll, it'll spread anywhere. But to me, it's like, it's gotta be the right brand. It has to. There has to be a, A purpose for like, telling the story.
John Sampogna 00:27:05 - 00:27:50
And if we think that it'll be like an effective channel for that, and then ultimately, like, we want to be more targeted with like, where we. We want to be. So like, we always like to check like, big sporting events and programming schedules. And you know, I remember like, over the, over the summer with the Olympics, I believe it was on. I believe it was like Peacock. You know, we. Even if we can't afford to buy like, Olympic ads, we. We were doing buys on the network because we just figured like, based on consumption habits and how people stream major sporting events like that, whether it's the World cup or the Olympics, they just leave their TV on for like eight hours and then.
John Sampogna 00:27:50 - 00:28:08
And the Olympic. The World cup is long over. The Olympics coverage is long over. But there's a random show on now and there's our ad. So, like, there's other. We're like, we just think this network's going to get way more play this month. So, like, it could be a good place to invest some dollars. But there's even like, programmatic ways of buying ctv.
John Sampogna 00:28:08 - 00:28:32
You know, there's. There's Tatari and Mountain, where you basically are just going after. You're, You're. You're taking a sum of money and they've got deals with like, a bunch of different, you know, different companies, and you're getting exposure to a number of different streamers through their platform. And you're going after a specific audience and you're able to like, kind of configure it. Like you'd consider a. Configure a better campaign. So there's a.
John Sampogna 00:28:32 - 00:28:57
There's a few ways of going about it, but I like to, like, I like to go to the table with like, an idea of like, where the creative is going to live. And then we really challenge the creative team to come up with an idea that will live for this buy specifically. So it, it feels really contextual and thoughtful and has a better chance of driving engagement and everything like that.
Okay, John, my next question was going to be about, you know, I think we've covered kind of the evolution of the consumer space to direct to consumer space. We've talked about brand storytelling, all that sort of stuff. But you know, one thing I'm really curious about is how do brands win with storytelling today, right? I think like today it's crazy. You've got all sorts of content. You've got creators creating content, you've got, you know, ads that people are running, media. There's like almost so many different channels or so many different strategies. So like when you're working with a brand, like what do you see is like some of the winning strategies, like in today's like fast moving market when it comes to like brand storytelling, all that sort of stuff.
John Sampogna 00:29:40 - 00:30:52
I think it's the first step we always ask is, is this a brand story or a product story? And there's a difference there. Um, you know, I think like a product story is where the product is so unique and is either gonna define an industry or it's, it's, it's something that's truly special and different. Where product marketing is, you can lean on that and it's going to drive results for you because the product is that different and unique and good. Um, and then there's a brand story. And a lot of people will say, well, we're both, we're both, we have a brand and we have, our product's amazing. I'm like, I'm not saying your product isn't amazing, but are there products that are just like it, that it's going to be really hard for us to like, stand out by saying the valuable things about your product? If so, then we have to focus on the brand and we have to build something there that will resonate with an audience at the brand level. So first I like to kind of like try and segment the conversation. And that's not to say like, if you're, if you've decided that we need to create a brand story, it could be like 70% brand story, 30% product marketing.
John Sampogna 00:30:52 - 00:32:10
If it's a product story, it's, it could be the inverse of that. Right? So it's not saying like, you have to be all in on that approach, but I do think it helps focus. I think the next step in the equation is really, really, really understanding your audience and figuring out why they would, they would engage with you to begin with. And I think that, you know, I'm not saying you should lead with like, lead with challenges or try and take advantage of like common customer pain points, but like really knowing those are very valuable because you'll be able to like address your core messaging to it to basically speak to exactly those pain points, even if what you're saying is incredibly positive and like uplifting. So I think like really knowing the space and the consumer and like where there might be an opportunity that the competition is falling short. And then I think like challenging your messaging strategy to live in like three different tiers where, you know, it's basically like we used to say it was the 333 rule where it was like, you've got three seconds to say something. What do you say? You've got 30 seconds. You could, the next next step is you have 30 seconds.
John Sampogna 00:32:10 - 00:33:02
How do you romanticize it a little bit? Maybe it's like the idea of like digital window shopping where you notice the second time you looked at it, there's like really cool like finishing on the back of the case and you're like, that's beautiful. I didn't know that. Notice that the first time. And then the three minutes, the last step is like now like someone's leaning back, they're, they're excited. Whether it's a video or a longer form post or they're getting into like the tertiary pages of your website. What are the details? So try to break your communication into like 3 seconds, 30 seconds, 3 minutes. And get really good at like, what is your best three second sale, 30 second sale and three minute sale. And when you have that down, you could start mapping it to like hypothetical ad placements of like, well, this three seconds could be an out of home ad, it could be a Facebook ad, it could be something on TikTok.
John Sampogna 00:33:02 - 00:33:44
It could be literally like the main thing we say to an influencer. Do whatever you want, but you need to say these, this one thing, like, that's it. So I think it gets, it gets you really good as a marketer of like knowing how to tell your story in like very disciplined ways. Three seconds, 30 seconds, three minutes. And then you're actually like backwards mapping that to like a channel strategy, which is your marketing plan. So we have like a couple tricks that we always use to get people talking and kind of like out of their own head. Because you'd be surprised, like most people already have the answers to all this stuff and it's just about like then finessing it and making it into like really polished creative and all that stuff.
I really like that because I think even, I think part of my question was kind of around how do you map it to this environment where like it's so dominated by like short form social. But then, you know, people as curious being. Once you get the attention, they still want to go down the rabbit hole and they want to learn more. So I think like, just for anyone who's thinking about their, you know, marketing in their creative and their messaging, I think that strategy is super helpful because the three is going to satisfy that. How do we get their attention then? You've got 30 seconds. Well, it's like, okay, what are we saying? If people are a little bit more on the hook and then you've got three minutes to go like all the way down the rabbit hole. So I think that's like, that's like right on the mark. John, I wanted to.
The last question that I had for you was kind of about, you know, working, onboarding clients and like working with them through different projects. So what is, what does that typically look like for you guys? Like what is, what is working with your agency look like? How do you guys figure out how to kind of pull out these sort of details? Like what? Just walk me through how you guys think about working with clients.
John Sampogna 00:34:51 - 00:35:46
Yeah, I mean, we build our process around our clients. We work with big companies, small companies and everything in between. So we always pride ourselves on the idea that the end result has to be great, but getting there has to be even better. And we want our partnerships to be like mutually beneficial and we want to learn from each other. Like, I will never be an expert in the products that our clients sell. I will learn, I will try. But I want to lean on them as the experts there and they're coming to me for an expertise on whether it's media or tech or creative or whatever. So I think like setting the foundation for a partnership and then also it's like we like to have conversations around like what are we trying to get to out of this partnership in the short term? Like, and being honest, you know, sometimes it's.
John Sampogna 00:35:46 - 00:36:29
We need highly strategic and creative deliverables and this is our highest priority work and it's, it's big for us. We need your best minds. And other times it's production. We need speed, agility and delivery. The work needs to be good, done fast and no errors and like the relationship is way more production oriented. So I think like being honest about that because we'll staff the team differently and we'll Also approach the partnership differently in terms of how we go about setting up the process and the tools we use. And you. And a lot of times like people like to sugarcoat that stuff and be like, but it's like it's, it's production.
John Sampogna 00:36:29 - 00:37:11
But like also we really are interested in your ideas. It's like if you're not, it's fine, just we don't need that stuff right now. Let's just build the most efficient production system that we can do. So you get as much out of us as you need in a short period of time and it helps your business. And then like where we're just kind of like, we're really good with onboarding. Like every single thing we do has an element of strategy baked into it. But we don't really charge for strategy nor do we have these like extensive six week research phases. We have learned how to build this business doing strategy at all aspects of brand development.
John Sampogna 00:37:11 - 00:37:44
And we do it, we can do it very quickly. We can test hypotheses and we could basically act on insights very fast. And our clients love that. And then we end up bubbling that up after like a few weeks after we're already working and turning out creative into like, by the way, here's a strategy deliverable and it's like a 30 page deck that kind of summarizes all that stuff. So we like to move quick and we like to make sure the work we're doing is really smart. But speed is the ultimate KPI these days. You need to be good and fast.
John Sampogna 00:37:44 - 00:37:53
I love that. And John, for anyone who's listening in that wants to connect with you, where do we find you when you shout out your socials of yourself and Wonder sauce?
John Sampogna 00:37:53 - 00:38:05
Yeah, both wonders.com and you can find Wonder Sauce and John Sampona on LinkedIn. And you can just hit me up directly@johnundersauce.com too.
John Sampogna 00:38:05 - 00:38:08
Sweet. Thanks so much for coming on the pod, John.
John Sampogna 00:38:08 - 00:38:10
Thanks man. Appreciate it.
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