Ideas can be the driver to business. If they’re not interested in your product or they don’t have the funds, I always believe they’ll find the funds if your ideas is creative enough.

Welcome to the Shootsta Unscripted podcast. Today, I’m thrilled to have a special guest, a sales and market marketing veteran, with experience in building successful operations all around the world across Australia, Brazil, Canada, USA, Japan, and a lifetime’s worth of experience in the realm of advertising and media.

Bill Pezzimenti’s journey has given him endless stories that all seem to come back to understanding the importance of what makes humans tick, especially if you wanna be successful in any sort of industry that requires creative input. So without further ado, Bill, welcome.

Oh, thank you. It’s great.

It’s good to be here.

It’s great to see you.

It is. It’s been really, really busy. Yes.

Yeah. Yeah. Great.

I wanted to get you on the show specifically because you’ve got such a wealth of experience over such a great time span that you’ve seen the world change in in a lot of ways, particularly in this space. And, maybe you could start off by telling us how you sort of got into media and your your journey from the beginning. Media. Yeah.

I was about twenty six years old when I when I started in radio.

I always had a desire to to be in that area. I love music. I love I love the industry. Didn’t know much about it, but I it was a very creative industry, and that’s and that’s what attracted me to it more than anything else.

Because before that, I was working out of jobs. I worked at I was building Mustangs at at at, at Ford Stamping plant. I was working in factories.

And and while I was doing that, I was writing.

And before that, I was nine years old, and I was shining shoes that, I would go to the black bars in the city, not understanding the difference between color and race. It was just a great opportunity to go in there with my shoeshine kit and make a few make a few, you know, coins to get potato chips and Coca Cola. And that was my first effort actually in sales and and being brave in the whole concept of, you know, getting out of my comfort. I wasn’t riding my Schwinn bike.

I was actually out there. I asked my mom, can you get me a shoeshine kit? And she didn’t understand why. And on weekends, I would go out to the city, walk to the city, go into the bars, and ask anybody anybody wants to shine?

So I’d be on the floor. So I’d be the little white kid in the black bar shining their shoes, and they thought it was pretty odd to see, you know, a white kid coming in with a shoeshike hat. But that was that was the foundation without realizing it of where I was heading as I got on with my ears. And I felt that as I grew to a certain age, and I said I gotta find something here.

I didn’t have a university background. I said, you know, this this sounds like an interesting job. So I persisted. I got in the industry.

I found I worked in progressive radio, which was a great place to start. They were cool. They were hip, and they were the latest thing in radio playing long form music as opposed to two to three minute songs. So that’s where, you know, Pink Floyd and all of them started.

And I built my career on on on, you know, on marketing and sales and, hustle for money. I was in Upstate New York at the time. Buffalo, was a city in decline.

People were leaving it because there were no jobs, no opportunities, so I learned my skills of fighting in the streets for money to compete against higher rated radio stations as opposed to our stations where which was really really really niche.

And this was a time when radio was the golden media.

Right? Was it it’s the best time to be in media. It was highly creative.

It wasn’t, as formula as it is today even at the radio stations. I can tell you stories of artists like Peter Gabriel, Genesis, Frank Zappa, all of them would come into the station almost on a daily basis to be interviewed.

And they come and you’d be talking to them. I mean, you we’ve seen the the what what would you call the kings of and queens of music.

Yeah. Yeah.

And today, it’s all contests, competitions, trying to keep an audience. You’re trying to keep people because, you know, I understand there’s a lot of competition out there. Social media, digital is all competing for what they used to do, and they work very, very comfortable doing.

But it it was an accountant’s game in media and still is in radio, where creativity was always in the back burner. Well, it’s something that was completely loose. We’ll use it when we need it, but if we don’t need it, we won’t bother with it. So we train people to be more accountants than creative artists that can actually work smarter. It’s and find that space that makes things work better for clients. Because radio, media, TV, it’s a it’s a creative industry. Podcasting, same thing.

Yeah. So do you think you you said they were more so accountants. Were they and they were trained to be accountants, but was creativity taking a back seat then?

Oh, yeah.

Yes. You would have to convince them that this idea can make money.

They they’re they’re risk averse. They won’t they won’t bother with an idea no matter how creative it is. If you go in there and you say to them, hey. I’ve got this great idea. It’s it it sounds good. It it looks good.

They won’t necessarily well, let me give you an example. I when I got into TV, TV is a very conservative industry.

Everything has to look good.

I mean, it’s very visual, and it’s very vanity, situated where you gotta really, really look good.

All you have to do is watch the TV presenters, and you’ll see what I’m talking about. So creativity, in TV is not something that they that they cling to. They they like the old established ways of doing business, which we know in media.

You write a proposal, you do a business plan, you go out there, you see a client, you convince them that your numbers are good, because everything’s about numbers. Remember that.

Not about ideas.

And we need to get back to ideas in order to to gain advantage. And I always believe that I had the advantage because I came up with ideas.

Right or wrong, it allowed me to have so much freedom because they would, you know, they would work. Not all of them. And that’s the thing. You gotta throw things out there.

You do you can’t expect everything to work, but you gotta try. And that’s part of bravery in business, and I use that a lot because we’re not brave normally as people. We we aren’t risk takers. We follow a pattern.

We follow a way of life that everybody else does.

And we Yeah. That’s interesting.

So being creative takes a little bit of risk to put the idea out there, and you’ve got these the people that are essentially buying the media are risk averse, So you have to really crack something to to break through to them and get their attention. Right? Was there was there an example of an advertising campaign maybe in the past or something that you remember, maybe pre Internet days, that still stands out today as being, like, really creative.

Yeah. But, I’ll give you one. It was called, I know the term rooting means different in Australia than it does in America, but it was a campaign that I, I had the mayor’s office contact me.

And they had, they were trying to raise funds to plant trees because a lot of the elm trees in Buffalo were dying. So they just came to us for a small, you know, donation, whatever. And I sat with them, and I said, you know, why don’t we do a major campaign for television on television and try to get the public involved with raising funds for what we need to do? We called it rooting for Buffalo.

Okay?

So so trust me. It was a plea a tree planting, campaign.

And we were able to take a small idea from the mayor’s office and turn it into a big television event for approximately eight or nine months.

So we got corporate sponsors like American Express, for example, Pepsi, you name it. They became corporate sponsors.

We read vignettes, stories about trees and what they do for the, you know, community, what they do for the city, and how they help out the oxygen levels and all of that. And it was fantastic where the end result was we ended up planting thousands of trees.

We covered it in the news almost every day. We would do a story about this tree planting, and it was such a positive thing to see us do something as creative as this and get it across and make money at the same time. And, you know, plant a whole bunch of trees all over, you know, all all over the city.

Yeah. So you remember pitching the idea and how that would be?

I do do. Yeah. Yeah. We came up with I worked with a producer and, you know, a small team of people that they gave me access to.

We even pitched it. I said, look. I’m trying to get some corporate sponsors. I talked to the mayor’s office.

The mayor of the city let me use his office to bring clients in to talk about the the program. That’s right. Now you can’t get any better than that. He’s even wearing the little rooting for Buffalo badge.

It’s I mean, it’s it it was perfect, but we all had an interest. You see, everybody had a stake in this. The city did.

We did.

The, the politics of the optics did everything. Everybody was in the right place at the right moment. And the and we made money too because we got maybe ten or twelve major sponsors.

Yeah. Wow. And so do you think maybe that’s, maybe that’s a way that you can link creative to campaigns and pitches so people get on board is understanding what who has a stake in everything and and what kind of creative appeals to those individuals?

Yeah. But it doesn’t always work because, there was another concept.

When I was watching the news in the states, I’d always watch young black kids in handcuffs.

Okay. So this is what, white America would see on TV all the time. So it created fear, a negative impression of young you know, they would they would be afraid of young people, black kids, or whatever. I said, we you know, let’s do something about this.

So I went to my general manager at the TV station. I said, look. We got the power of media. We could actually change the way people think or feel about it.

Now in Buffalo, there’s there’s ghettos. So you had the black the black ghetto, which is called the fruit belt, only because they had a lot of fruit belt fruit trees.

Very dangerous neighborhood, by the way. But if you drive down there, it’s like Beirut. I mean, the, you know, houses are empty, abandoned, neglected, whatever.

So the concept I had was, why don’t we do a program where we build we we get young black kids that are unemployed to renovate these homes one house at a time.

And what we’ll get I’ll talk to the unions of, like, electricians, plumbers, retired electricians, plumbers, you know, construction workers that are kinda bored to come and work with them as mentors.

And then I went to the bank to say, we’ll do a major campaign. We’ll watch we’ll watch that whole block change to be transformed. Every day, we’ll film it. We’ll go down there every single day, and we’ll put it in the six o’clock news. And we’ll we’ll have a big banner saying, you know, building the building the streets. And you’ll see all these wonderful black kids working with retired guys that have or gals that have lost their purpose in life.

The bank refused it.

They didn’t like the idea.

It’s not that they didn’t like the idea. They didn’t wanna present themselves. They they still had and this is what I believe. It was still a bit of racism there that they didn’t really believe in showing their product against a neglected neighborhood.

Right. So then creative although you do have to take into account the stakeholders that are involved, there’s still sometimes maybe an agenda?

There’s a there’s an agenda.

Another example with another bank. So I had to put that one aside, and I was disappointed.

So I went I didn’t wanna give up on the banking industry because I I I knew there was value there. So I, there was a bank in the eastern part of the United States called KeyBank, and they wanted to refurbish their Easter, what do you call it, stores or buildings or whatever.

And they, they pulled all their advertising, and they were big advertisers just for the year. No more advertising.

No spot no spots on on air because they needed all that money to to do a huge, huge refurbishment.

So I thought, how am I gonna get them on?

So I called up KeyBank, and I said, I’ve got an idea. I’d like to come to see you and talk to you if if you don’t no. I worked in television, so I had more accessibility to businesses than, say, a radio sales rep or somebody who’s selling matchbooks.

You know?

So I said, yeah.

I didn’t have an idea.

I just wanted that door open. Now I had to think of something that would make sense for them. So I sometimes do that. I’ll say I have an idea. Let me just get me in the door first, and then and then I’ll come up with the concept. And the concept was was, I was looking at the feminine feminist lens.

At that time, women were well, let me put it this way. Women were discouraged to borrow money from banks for themselves. It’s like, if you were a single woman and you wanna borrow money for a loan to buy a house back in then, it’d it’d be unlikely they should get it.

And they looked at women as being, not as sophisticated with money or ideas or everything. So the program that I pushed was, to do a half hour special on women, offer some ten second vignettes on stories for teaching women, and changing the perception that that women are not reliable when it comes to money.

And they liked it. As it turned out, the whole marketing team were all women. So they said, okay. They found within a month, they found the money.

They gave it to me. We did this great show for a year. I had a calendar for a whole year of what we were gonna do.

And it was a it was a good program because it was it was genuine. It wasn’t It was something that was necessary to our society to think differently about how to have your perception change and, and give women, an equal voice Yeah. At at at the same time. So that was a creative idea that made money. And, of course, the other networks started calling KeyBank and saying, can can we have some of that? And he said, no.

Come up with an idea, maybe we’ll talk about it. So that’s what I’m saying. Ideas can be the driver to business. It isn’t always about your numbers, about your ratings, about your you know, because then you become sort of like a a victim. If they’re not interested in your product or they don’t have the funds, I always believe they’ll find the funds if your ideas is creative enough. So creativity is is hugely important.

Do you think that holds true now? I mean, we’re living in the most interesting times ever for the advertising world, generally speaking, with social media and the Internet and the attention spans of people shrinking. It is. Very much so.

I think at no point in in human history has it made people ponder what it means to be human, given the advent of all these technologies that are out.

Do you think do you think machines or AI will ever be able to compete with human creativity?

I I think AI will be useful.

Yeah.

I think it’ll be fast, expedient. It’ll it’ll answer some of the I mean, AI are people. Yeah. Because everything we input is what they take. They’re just quicker than we are now.

AI isn’t I don’t think is going to be, at this point, a creative generator.

I mean, just for fun, I asked them to write a poem, and they couldn’t do it. It was it was pretty awful. Yeah. Okay.

So you gotta have the human experience first. You’ve talked about being human. Yeah. And being human is understanding who you are first and foremost.

You’re not a title.

You’re not an influencer. Everybody’s everybody is an influencer, by the way. Whoever you talk to during the day is an influence. You influence somebody.

Being human is, being compassionate and understanding, the heart and how that works. And once you give them the heart, if you can give AI the heart, then then we’re in trouble. Yeah. Or the soul, which goes a little bit deeper than than just mimicking or parodying what you’re saying.

And they’re able to rearrange words beautifully. They’re don’t you know, don’t get me wrong. So I think it’s a tool like all the other tools we got like that, you know Yeah. Computer, like the microphone, everything is a is a tool.

I’m not afraid of it. I I don’t believe in hysteria where you think that it’s gonna take over the world.

Our demise is gonna be because of us.

Yeah. Because of a nuclear war.

That’s a whole lot of more or even a bigger threat.

Not a bigger threat, but climate change. Yeah.

These are the real threats.

So you just I think that it it will remove some jobs. There’s no doubt about it.

Yeah.

But technology always does. That hasn’t changed.

So using it as a as a tool is one thing. Our producer, Katie, asked you earlier, you know, how you write poetry and where does it come from, and you said you don’t know. No. Is that is that something, you can’t quantify that for an AI, right?

No. I just started writing and, it just comes out, the metaphor, the the imagery, you know, it doesn’t always, when it’s working, it’s working great. And when it’s not working, I don’t wanna struggle with it.

So I don’t sit there and painstakingly go through editing, finding a rhyme, the word rhymes with word. Is this or or or or or or, you know, and then try to find it because I don’t that’s not how how it comes. And I don’t think anybody who’s in the real creative world doesn’t really know. I mean, there are disciplines that you have. The more you write, the better you get in it. Sure.

And as I said to you before, I’m I’m studying, for a master’s program, and I’m learning how to think academically. My first paper that I submitted was a challenge because I had to change what I thought was a metaphorically beautiful phrase into a fact.

Yeah. Yeah.

And that, to me, bothered me because I don’t I don’t write like that.

I don’t think machines can write like that either yet.

No. No. And, I mean, they can analyze Yeah.

Because that’s what we put into the system.

They can’t edit. They can’t edit it.

Yeah. But the machines are us. Yeah. We are the machines.

In a way.

Because we created it. It’s just how far do you wanna go and how far we can take this technology.

That’s I think we’ll try and take it all the way.

Just Yeah.

I mean, when you look at the industry, the the industry alone, I mean, when you look at the advertising industry, it hasn’t changed in decades.

Even with the Internet?

Even with the Internet. I mean, all it’s done is block people from being human, from having meetings, face to face meetings, which are important to get your message across.

So in a sense, we’re already robotic in the way we think because we think within a certain box that we’ve been taught. So everything we’ve been taught is the way we think. So we don’t go outside of it. So I like going outside.

Yeah.

I I I actually like going if you’re going north, I’m gonna go south.

I wanna see you know, if I when I was single and I was young, people go out on Friday and Saturday nights. No. I go out on Tuesday and Thursday night. There’s there’s less competition than when you go out on answers.

So I’m always looking at, you know, it may take me a little bit longer, but not that much.

But I see things differently.

Yeah.

And that’s the way media needs to change that way too, and they haven’t. They’re they’re still constructing.

You know? If and I don’t think the commercials are any more creative than they’ve ever been because they’re kinda goofy. Sometimes we don’t even know what the product is.

They’re trying to sell us, you know, alas, you know?

They’re trying to go viral. It’s what everyone wants to do. Right?

Yeah. And it is what everybody wants to do. And nobody understands what they’re doing. Yeah. As long as they get their likes and their, you know, a few comments, they succeeded.

Yeah. For what?

Where do we go from from there? It isn’t being human. It’s being annoying is what it is.

Yeah. That’s the new advertising.

It’s Because everybody’s you know, gaslighting is a word.

I don’t really understand it anymore. It used to be an opinion. Now it’s a gaslight.

Another word that that’s been hammered to death is bully.

So now, you know, when I was in school when I was a young kid playing in the playground, I got I guess I was bullied. You know, I got beat up a lot for saying the wrong things about somebody’s mother. So I, don’t understand how we became so temperamental about every word that comes out of our mouth, and we are temperamental.

Yeah. We’re temperamental beings. Yeah. So I guess the media has changed. We’re, you know, we’re now on social media. We’ve got shorter attention spans, and the creative has had to adapt accordingly.

What about people around the world? You’ve done business all around the world. Yes. Different cultures.

Aren’t humans essentially the same regardless of culture when you’re trying to appeal to them in a creative sense?

Yes.

They have different cultures, isn’t it? It’s like when I was in I spent a lot of time in Brazil.

And, one thing I learned, I I I, you know, I was lazy. I didn’t speak Portuguese. I understood it. I had a translator, and that helped me, you know, communicate with whoever I needed to communicate.

But I learned it’s it’s not the language so much. It’s understanding who they are as people that got me, into meetings and into, places where I never thought I’d I’d I’d never dream I’d get into in a in a foreign country where you don’t speak the language. Many times, the Brazilian says, you are Brazilian, Bill. You just don’t speak Portuguese.

But I would drink their cachaca. I would I would party with them. I wasn’t afraid of a lot of, foreigners go to cities like Sao Paulo, and they’re, frightened by it. It’s it’s an imposing city.

Think New York twice the size. You know? And so and, there’s a lot of crime.

But, generally, the people are the same. We all have the same emotions.

We all have hate, love, pain, cry. We do all the things, all these emotions, but it’s in that language. But the the emotional language is the same.

So whenever I was training, I tried to understand first who they were as people, what their values were, what they were learned, what they were taught. Their values are different.

They lose a job. They’re in the street. There’s no safety net like Australia has safety net and that America does to a certain degree.

There’s no safety net. You lose your job.

You could be out in the streets and you walk down Avenue Polista, which is like Broadway in New York.

You’ll see the poverty and and you’ll see the excesses of the human condition.

And it was education was important to them.

So if I gave them a certificate at the end of my training program, and I did, that they’ve accomplished something. They were so proud. That certificate was like getting a degree at Harvard. They were so proud. Not that that not because they’re naive or they’re simple.

It’s because they understand the purpose of achievement and work, and they were there to learn. And they would they would take everything you say and try it, at least try it, to make themselves better and to survive in a very harsh environment.

But it’s a beautiful country, and I mean the people are amazing.

So the fact that they have the willingness to try, I mean, you don’t see that in all cultures, especially when people have safety nets and they’re comfortable and they just sort of plot along. Is that is that an emotion or is that something that’s cultural?

It’s ego.

It becomes ego. When you become an expert on anything, all of a sudden you know everything.

So you go to a job and I’ve done this, you know. What what is a resume? A resume is just your mother’s note to the teachers telling you how great you are. You know what I mean? I have never seen you know, I don’t deal in resumes. When when I interview people, you know that.

You hide me over a coffee.

That’s right. Yeah. I’m I’m interested in what you have to say, not not, you know, this or that. I mean, I I’m interested in character.

I can train at the other stuff, but it it is ego. So when you have that kind of an ego, you you become limited. You stop learning because you present yourself as the authority. I’m just here.

Oh, I gotta listen to his bullshit or whatever it may be. You know? So, it has nothing ever to do with, being scholarly or studious or at Seagull. You gotta I’m always learning.

I mean, I I love to learn, and I still feel I don’t know anything.

And I do. And I do. So I can learn from a lot of different people. I can learn from the twelve year olds.

But I, you know, of I build teams, and I build teams all over the world.

And that’s the one thing I’ve found. There you’re either involved with yourself or you’re involved with wanting to be a better self.

Yeah. So, how does how does ego get in the way of pitching creative? Or being creative?

Well, you can be stubborn with your ego too. I mean, ego works in a lot of positive ways, don’t get me wrong. But it also works in very many negative ways and you’ve gotta control it and contain it. It’s like a it’s like having a pit ball that’s untrained, you know. You got she wants to bark and bite at everybody that walks by and that’s what ego does when it’s not controlled.

So I think you need to to, find a place where you gotta let yourself wide open for information.

And then you can well well well look at I’ll say try this, Steve. Give this a try. You may go home and say I’m not gonna try it because it’s a stupid idea. I don’t like it. It doesn’t fit into my into my way of thinking, but stupid ideas sometimes work.

You know, I remember your training sessions we used to do. Was it was it Monday mornings or Wednesday mornings? We used to have these training role play sessions.

Right.

And they were literally designed to break everybody’s ego. You had the sales hotshots, the best guys, the money makers in there, and you would just break them.

Yeah.

Yeah. Because ego gets in the way of of, productivity.

We have to stop talking to ourselves and believing because, you know, everything that we do with our ego, we give ourselves like a thousand likes.

And that and that’s what it is. And then we share it with everybody else. Look at how great I am.

Look at how, Nobody loved those training sessions by the way.

No. No. And that that you don’t then they wouldn’t. No. I mean, I did this same training sessions in Canada and Brazil, and, in the UK.

Japan was different.

Well, that’s an interesting one. Because the Japanese have a very specific culture. How did they deal with the concept of ego?

Well, I, when I was getting a I was talking to this to our sales director in in in, Japan. He happened to speak really well in English and I said look at you gotta think.

See I always push that idea of thinking. Most of us just react.

We don’t think it through. You gotta think. You gotta think about business. You gotta think about this.

And I’ll go all the way to the top, managing directors and CEOs. They don’t do a whole lot of thinking. They’re they respond to a, an environment of, confidence. If they hear or see somebody that’s confident, they wanna buy into it.

Because a lot of this stuff is cowardly stuff. So when I went to this Japanese sales director, his name was Tom.

I said Tom again I think.

And he said Bill, in Japan, we’re not taught to think. We’re taught to do.

And then it collected and said, okay.

Well, then here’s what you gotta do.

Forget the thinking then. Okay. I’ll I’ll I’ll put that But it was an interesting way of He he was he was honest and he was genuine. He said, look it, we’re not taught to think so. Your approach is wrong. It’s not gonna it’s not gonna help us.

Just tell us what we need to do and we’ll do it.

And that’s how they saw success, just following the blueprint?

Oh, they were they were team oriented.

They worked as a group. The individual was a small I.

The individual was always there. Mind you, because cause even in groups and communities, there’s always the individual. You don’t you don’t take that away from them. You don’t wanna destroy the individual or the person.

But they worked as a, you know, as a complete whole with five, six, seven, eight or nine people. And it’s wonderful to watch, actually.

That’s why the Japanese have done some interesting things in in the field of management and and ideas and concepts, even though he said that they don’t think I’d I’d disagree with him. Yeah. I believe there’s a lot of thinking going on over there.

It’s a different kind, Mitch.

Just as if this is what we’re used to because we’re in we’re individuals, Australia, America, Canada, you know, we we like to think of ourselves as the wild west, the cowboys. We kinda do what we wanna do, and, it doesn’t matter what the others do or what you’re told to do. Nobody likes to be told what to do.

No, that is true. Yeah.

Let’s talk about the future, because you’ve got a huge experience in the past. You’ve seen a lot of change in the history of the media space, generally speaking.

Where’s it going? Like, where where does this end? How does it how does it culminate?

Media is, it’s a big it it’s a big term. Okay? It encompasses a lot now. Now you’ve got drones. You’ve got in the sky media.

I I think radio’s gonna start waning. I mean, you got podcasts. This is pretty much like a show, a radio show, really. And you got access to more people than a radio station could has.

It goes where it goes beyond anything I’ve ever seen.

It’s gonna be probably, splinted in many ways. You won’t you won’t, you won’t see control the way we’ve seen control in the past. You’d had a few networks, few radio stations.

Now social media has really become, more enlightened in many, many ways, even though there’s a lot of crap out there. And we have to we have to go through all that, and it’s time wasting. It is. But we find the place that we feel comfortable with.

So media as we know it is hasn’t really adjusted to the new way of work. Yes. Radio stations do podcasts now. They’ve adopted that.

But they’re still falling I mean, you you take a look at, AM radio, when he got here, two GB or whatever it is, and you listen to their shows and it’s it’s it’s light news. It’s not heavy news. It’s light news. It’s local news and it’s all getting people to sign up.

Yeah.

If you have trust in in your, information and the things that you’re presenting to anybody, you don’t need a competition.

Sign up now and and that’s what they’re doing. They’re trying to keep the audience.

So that’s getting harder and harder to do. Young people especially, they don’t rely on just one form of media. They’re skilled in going all across different types of media. I hear stories about people I’ve never even heard of.

And it’s, you know, thank God I got my my my son and daughter there. You know, they turned me on to Kendrick Lamar, for example. And and and what’s the other one? Childish Gambino.

No. I wouldn’t have known any of these things, but I do listen to it. It.

Yeah.

Because, I’m gonna stray a little bit because rap is is is poetry, it’s writing, it’s it’s ideas, it’s it’s it’s interesting.

But is media definitive? No. It’s not gonna be the moneymaker that it was before. They’re losing ground.

Would I wanna own a media company? Probably not.

I probably wouldn’t because it’s it’s harder these days to get, the kind of revenue that you need to make it work in a proper way to get that kind of exposure. Look at CNN. Got the worst worst ratings.

MNBC’s got terrible small group of ratings. So you got all these little capsules of media stick that’s drawing people with particular, opinion about their politics and what they like and what they don’t like. And then you got the Internet playing with them. Yeah.

Putting up these memes and and and you know fake commercials. You don’t know what’s real and what’s not real. And that reminds me of something when I was in working in progressive radio, because I write satire too. I I wrote a comedy show for six years.

And I put on the air fake commercials back in nineteen seventy eight, seventy nine.

Yeah.

To blend in with the other commercials.

Just to see what kind of reaction we would get because that’s the kind of station we were we were totally irreverent. But, you know, today it’s common. Today it’s like, you know, it’s like everybody’s doing it. That’s it.

He said we believed it back then.

Right?

We’re all propping ourselves up for something we don’t even understand.

Yeah.

I mean, it’s the whole concept. I mean, if it’s still going on speed dating or whatever it is, I mean, I I don’t understand why everything has to be so fast.

What’s the hurry?

Yeah. So we’ve got super fragmented audiences because we’ve got Totally fragmented. Yeah. We’ve got shorter attention spans, and we’ve got we don’t know what’s real and what’s not anymore. Yeah.

It’s pretty bad.

So it’s it’s kind of unknown where we’re heading. Right?

Well, there’s nothing that we feel that has foundation trustworthiness anymore. I mean, at one time, we used to think religion was, the family was. All of those things are are being, broken down to a certain degree, and to a large degree, actually.

And the leaders of the world aren’t aren’t aren’t any better than any of us.

That’s very true. So if I’ve let’s say I’ve got a enterprise business. I’m the CEO of an enterprise company. In this world with this climate and the way things are heading specifically in media, what what do I do to adapt to this evolving market? How do I release a campaign that’s going to have an impact to the broadest audience possible?

Well, that’s what being different is all about, and that’s where creativity comes in. You really there was a company, that didn’t have a big budget. Right? They had a small budget.

So they worked with an agency, an advertising agency, and they said, this is our budget. Make this work. I don’t have a lot of money. And they did.

They bought a billboard in a busy highway, north and south, and it was all their money. And they put this creative concept on the billboard, and it was just the right amount of irreverence to get people talking about it and to get the newspapers actually writing about it. When we started a radio station, a long time called woo woo, w w we had no money.

We had no money for promotions. We had no money for anything, but it was a, it’s going to be a cool station. Cause we’re going to play, you know, jazz, blues, you know, so you name it. So what we did was we, went to, we found this parody of of talking heads, psycho chick psycho killer.

It was called psycho chicken.

And it was great. It was a great parody. So we put on a reel to reel tape. We let it run for forty eight hours.

For two days, when we went on air, we just played cycle chicken over and over and over again.

The team we’re all a bunch of young crazy guys called up and girls. We all called up KFC, McDonald’s, because there are a lot of young people that work in these places. Hey, listen to this station on, you know, ninety eight point five on your desk. Listen, they’re they’re they’re doing some crazy things. So they turned it on, and they heard psycho chicken.

We made the front page newspaper as a promotional gimmick to get people to listen.

Oh, he fired it before the internet.

So that was that was an idea that was nobody would do that. I mean, conservative media would never do that. So we did that. And then we played music for two months.

Nothing but music. We didn’t even try to sell advertising because we didn’t have an audience. We were building the audience. Then we added weather.

Then we added news. Then we added personality.

So it took about six months for it to expand. So instead of saying, here’s my station. Here are all my personalities. I’m gonna push them. It grew organically.

The music was numb we knew that the music was gonna be number one. So we had to treat it like it was sacred.

So we’ve kind of come full circle then in, say, let’s say the last fifty years. I mean, we’re back at be creative now, and it’s it’s the most saturated market ever, but it is. You have to be creative now.

It is. And you always have to be because we’re in a creative industry. Yeah. Now if I go to a bank to get a loan, I wanna make sure that they got really good accountants and or or you’ve got you don’t want some wild crazy crazy idea. But that is the place to go. Now a lot of companies don’t invest in creativity.

They don’t even invest in sales. They like the merchandise of their product so they’ll go with the operation side because it’s sexier.

Sales to them is just a commodity, but it’s not.

True sales people aren’t just going out there introducing themselves and hoping that somebody likes you.

Because you know as well as I do that that industry does that very well. Why do you think they go out for lunches? Why do you think they they It’s like, you know, oh they like me. They love me. They like they’re like a whole bunch of Sally Fields.

Yeah. You know. So, companies don’t invest enough in in in sales.

Because when people get into sales, a lot of them wanna get out because it’s very very difficult. Yeah. Or they want a management role. Yeah.

So they’re not accountable. Really, they’re not accountable. You can always blame the sales rep. It’s too hard because you gotta go in front of somebody.

You gotta meet them for the first time and it’s scary.

And you gotta have them just look at you and say, no. I’m not interested.

Come back, empty handed again. Then you gotta go back out again and again and again.

Are salespeople born salespeople or is it something you can learn?

Yeah. I don’t know. You know, I I used to think so, but I I think it’s something that you can learn, but you gotta have one ingredient that a lot of salespeople don’t seem to have, and that’s, to be fearless and drive. You gotta have a drive.

You gotta have an incredible drive that makes you wanna succeed. And then it comes. It actually falls into place. Then it becomes second nature.

You don’t worry about what people think about you.

Yeah. Because that will trip you up anywhere in business, like in business, when we started up the company, I don’t care what title I have. You can call me anything you want. It doesn’t mean anything.

Some of the find out what are the important things. The things that don’t matter, you you just put that aside. And we focus too much on the things that don’t matter. We’d say, oh, we gotta have an organizational structure has to be in place. We have to have a template of what the company look a mission statement. I had a lady when I was managing director of the Australian traffic network.

Lady came to me from university, she was doing a paper on businesses and they want she wanted to know what their mission statement was. We’re an advertising company. So she came, I invited her and we talked, she was nice.

And, she said, so what’s your mission statement?

And I said, to sell advertising.

And she looked at me like I was waiting for more. And what else?

I said, that’s it.

What about what about we’re gonna treat the customer fair? We’re gonna we’re gonna what about the values that you that you have as a company? Don’t you not I said, well, you better have those values.

I don’t need a piece of paper on a wall to tell me what my values are. I already know what they are.

That is my mission statement.

And everything, if you if you follow a a structure of some sort, a discipline like, and you really believe in your company, you will do the right things like Marcus Orley has said the you know who he is.

Yeah. His meditations.

It’s better to be straight than straightened.

And whenever I think or ever I’m I make a decision about anything I do, I always think about that.

Am I going to be straight, or do they have to straighten me out later?

And most of us, and a lot of us, maybe not even most of us, but a lot of us fall into the category of being straightened.

We twist the truth. In business, it’s common to twist the truth. It because it’s accepted.

You can always make the null business.

Everybody does. Everybody exaggerates. That’s the whole idea of of selling yourself. Why do you think you have a resume or a CV as they call it here?

Yeah.

So like I was in Kansas city and I was looking at a job and at a TV, Fox network.

And they asked me, where do you see yourself in five years? Now that I hate that comment. I really do. I don’t know. I could be hit by a truck or who knows.

So I simply said to them, I see myself never having to ask answer that question again.

I I didn’t get the job, but it was okay. But but but you understand how we’re Everything that we do is prep to being something that maybe is inauthentic. Yeah. And I think if you’re authentic in yourself, as you know I hire diverse people. I don’t have clones of that everybody has to have a you know, every man and woman has to have a blue outfit and, you know, white shirt and blouse and whatever, and we all have to look alike.

I I I actually believe in bringing all kinds of people that can contribute as opposed to one type of person that’s gonna keep you very narrow.

That’s interesting. So the the genuine being genuine is super useful and creative, super useful in sales.

Do the best salespeople make the best sales managers?

No. Not necessarily. No.

A lot of the time what happens is you get this this amazing salesperson who gets promoted as a sales manager. Now you’re running the team.

Because the, the best salespeople are lone wolves.

Yeah. And it’s hard to become a lone wolf, and then you have to be a leader and engage everybody because you could have a problem because you think your way is the only way. I had success. There you go again. You go back to that. I was a great sales rep. Being a great sales rep is a combination of luck, who you know, how long you’ve been in the industry, and, the product.

It doesn’t mean you’re a great sales rep from the start. You just have a lot of, you’ve been kind of dressed up like a studio that’s all dressed up ready to go. And then you just follow whatever you need to follow to get to where you need to go. And, but they also have other qualities.

They’re curious. You would need curiosity to succeed. You gotta be curious. You gotta ask questions all the time.

And, if you’re not curious, you’re not gonna succeed.

It’s interesting. There’s so many overlapping themes here with creativity, being genuine, being authentic, the key emotions that motivate people regardless of where they’re from in the world. There is a trend there. There is just not immediately, visible.

Well, the problem that we also have is that if you wanna have an introduction to meet somebody, let’s say you need to meet somebody at an agency. You wanna put you wanna present your product. You got something that’s real and and it’s and you feel that it could help them. And then they close you down because they don’t know you. They close you down because it’s not in in the forefront of their minds which is unfortunate because that that could be a missed opportunity.

They don’t get that. But they’re trained, they’re busy, they work like factory workers, they’re constantly busy so you have to find a way to get in. And once you get in, then you become a partner. Eventually you could develop a relationship that has significance and and value. But the initial stages of selling, as you know, has I I I work with hunters.

And the initial stages with with that is, getting on the streets, knocking on doors, being rejected, getting on the streets, knocking on doors and being rejected. It’s it’s a day daily thing until you find that that one person that kinda turns it around for you. And then it makes you feel good, and then you and then all of a sudden, you’re positive again.

It’s not it’s not the end of the world, but, you know, you need money to survive. And in sales, you could have salespeople that don’t sell. They’re just service people, and you can see that. And and you’re out there struggling, and you’re you’re actually selling, and you’re not making anywhere near their money.

It becomes disproportionate, and you have to find a way of making it value, geared towards the hunters to keep them going out there to bring in, new business and new clients.

Amazing. Well, Bill, we’re we’re wrapping up on time here.

Okay.

We’ve been kinda running out.

I think we’ve learned some things here. It’s it’s very cool. I hope the, the listeners have learned some things too. But just before we go, tell us about what you’ve got going on. I know you’re you’re writing an opera, you got a book, you got some poetry going on.

Yeah. And I’m I’m going for a master’s right now in international just to wrap everything up for me. I’m not going for a career purpose. In fact I’m the only one in the whole class who are saying, so for your career, write a and I’m saying well it’s not it’s for myself. Yeah. I’m doing this.

The the the important things are the the book, which is a business book. It’s called, Facing the Monkeys’ Grin.

And it’s how we it’s it’s a lot of things that that are true. These are real stories about real people and how you gotta be careful out there.

Going into business, learning all the tricks of the trade, getting your degree changes everything once you’re in business because there’s politics, there’s personalities as you know. Yeah.

And how do you manage that?

How do you how do you keep focused and at the same time keep yourself balanced away from all the other stuff that could happen for you? There’s jealousies because the human condition is always there.

So I give stories, and and I also give some advice on on how I think you can handle it. It’s not perfect, mind you, because life isn’t, never is. But there are ways of of of staying on top of it. So that these things I’m doing, the book, the opera, the poetry channel, going to my channel, are all kind of a place where I was and I brought it off together.

I’m looking at other things, but, we’ll see where that goes on on a professional level. Okay. But where I’m situated right now, I love because it’s it it is, to to me, the ultimate creative, environment.

And it’s it’s, it keeps you busy, but it’s a different kind of busy than you can imagine. I don’t report to an office or I don’t even if I talk to you know, I can clear a room when I start talking about poetry. Okay? I know how to clear a room. If I don’t want anybody around my house anymore, hey would you like to hear a poem that I just, you know. Or or anything that’s that’s, esoteric or or or especially opera.

Yeah.

And so, now if I was writing rap or or doing something with pop culture, that’d be different.

I’m still involved with, Brazil, South America, and we’re throwing some ideas around. So we’ll see where that goes.

But everything’s an exploration right now.

Yeah. Facing the monkey’s grin. That’s what it’s called?

The boch. Yeah.

Yeah. Awesome. We’ll try and link it in the in the bio or something like that. Okay. Awesome.

Okay. Thank you very much. Thanks. It was fun.

I love it. Yeah. Every time. Okay.

Thank you.

Thank you.