[00:00:00] Speaker A: There's a longer list of things you did wrong, but those are the lessons that you learn really well. Here's this amazing person who's just going to solve all these problems in this department or this one thing. If you get too comfortable with that and you step too far away too early on, problems occur. Advertising should feel more like entertainment in order for brands to survive and thrive.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Welcome to the Entrepreneur's Lockbook podcast. I'm your host, Zach Bernard. You can find me on Social at its Zachby. In each episode, I bring on experts from various industries to learn about their strategies and insights driving extra business growth. The Entrepreneurs Logbook podcast is sponsored by wegpr where we're dedicated to helping entrepreneurs build their thought, leadership and business by getting them on podcasts and launching their own podcasts. Today we're joined by Trevor Judek, founder of Lemonade, a full service advertising agency that specializes in creating entertainment driven marketing campaign for gaming, entertainment, web3 and blockchain brands. Trevor founded Limiting in 2018 with a bold philosophy that in today's media landscape, advertising should look more like entertainment. Under his leadership, they work with major brands like Disney, Meta, TikTok and Dior, driving over a billion downloads and 10 billion video views for their clients. Trevor, it's great to have you on the show. Welcome aboard.
[00:01:19] Speaker A: Pleasure to be here. Thanks for having me.
[00:01:22] Speaker B: Cool. One of the things I always love to ask with anyone that comes on the podcast, because this is a business, this is an entrepreneurship podcast, is, I mean, you've been on the space for a little bit here and even had your company acquired, which we can talk about that a little bit later in this episode. But one of the things I love to hear from you is if you had to restart your company from scratch, knowing everything that you know today, what's like the one thing that you would do differently that you feel a lot of entrepreneurs, business owners get like totally wrong.
[00:01:55] Speaker A: That's a good question.
You know, I definitely think there's a few things that we did right. You know, it's always fun to look back, right, and like, okay, what are the things we did right? And we can talk about those, but there's a longer list of things you did wrong.
But those are the lessons that you learn really well.
I think there's a number of things, and this is not in any particular order, but something I talk to people about a lot is sort of hiring people to solve a myriad of problems and sort of thinking that they're going to be that unicorn. So I'll give an example sure.
When building out a sales team and kind of trying to replace myself as the founder salesperson at multiple stages of the company, which was always a challenge.
There was always these times where we'd bring someone in. We'd, in hindsight now have the idea that, okay, this person can come in, they can have not only a Rolodex, um, they can have a network. Right. But they can also have a process that we don't have for sales. They can have the ability to implement that process.
And also, by the way, they can also have time to do all the sales and all the follow up and all the outbound and all the outreach and somehow, you know, do all those jobs at the same time. Well, and ramp up in the time that we expect them to ramp up. Right.
And you know, in hindsight you realize that not all of those things are possible.
And you push through a lot of those things as a founder because you just kind of make shit happen.
And you know, it was just one of those things that I don't know that we ever like a hundred percent successfully built the right flywheel for.
But I saw myself make those mistakes multiple times where it was like, oh, here, here's this amazing person who's just going to solve all these problems in this department or this one thing.
But if you, if you get too comfortable with that and you step too far away too early on, problems occur. And I've, I've made that mistake with finance, I've made that mistake with sales. I've made that mistake multiple places.
So I know that's a bit more of like a general answer kind of around hiring and almost trying to find like a unicorn in multiple places. But it can be an Achilles heel for sure. Oh yeah.
[00:04:38] Speaker B: I mean, I think that's so true. And I've seen like so many people that they're starting to, they're starting to build their company. They've been doing sales for like the entire time. Like, okay, like I want to be able to scale this, delegate, do, do the stuff that's more like needle moving. They're like, okay, I mean, let's hire a closer. Like, I'll, I'll just be able to focus more on growing the business and everything like that. And then they realized that they were maybe closing at 30% because they're the founder. And then they get a sales rep, they're closing like 15% and then they're wondering like, why are they not doing better than I am doing? And that's where you have to be very careful when you're hiring people, you also need to have a good process in place in order to obviously get people that will crush for you and that will obviously adapt your process and make it better. Maybe. But yes, like, you have to be careful when you're hiring and not do it too fast. Sometimes some people will go into that. So, like, oh, let's just delegate everything out.
We're going to scale. And then you find out that you have so many things of the puzzle that are like, totally missing that are going to stop you from scaling the first place. And to your point, I mean, you learn from those mistakes. I mean, that's how you get better, you improve. And then for your next hire, you can be like, yeah, maybe not right now. Maybe we might look for another person. And it sounds like you've learned from those lessons here.
[00:05:51] Speaker A: Yeah. And to your point, you know, the process part of that's important. So one of the more important pieces that we did eventually bring in, and it was a hire, but it was something where we kind of baby stepped into it. So actually at one point brought in a consultant for operations.
And so they started in a consultant basis. And then eventually they were so helpful that we made that person our coo.
And it was something where they were able to point out a lot of the blind spots, operationally implement processes, develop processes in a collaborative, kind of cooperative way. Right. And then say, okay, we don't just hire our friends. Right. We don't just hire the person in our network. Right. We develop a job description. Right. I mean, this sounds basic, right? But we. When you're first starting out, you just sort of go for what's closest to you and what's familiar, and those are easy mistakes that trip you up. And then when you have someone come in who actually has a process and says, no, this is something we need to own as a company, that's going to be our process that defines how we do this. And then within that process, we can bob and weave a little bit and say, oh, okay, this person or this thing might be better for that particular role. Then all of a sudden you have a decision framework that you can operate within.
It's like, wow, you know, the game has changed.
So that was, you know, a real game changer.
And then I would also say just. Just being able to kind of understand different points of.
Of leverage. So we were really good at growing the business from a paid media perspective, from a marketing perspective.
But I would say something we didn't quite nail for a while was services and like productized Services or repeatable service.
And some other agencies have done that really well.
And I've seen with our parent company, like our acquired company that's acquired us now how they've done that. And so I've learned a lot recently about that.
Not that everything has to be that way. You can still have a mix of custom and productized services, but the ability to have something repeatable where you know how to execute it, you know what that cost margin is versus saying yes to everything and just doing all custom work is, which is a mistake a lot of us make early on was definitely something that, you know, we fell into for a while and it can get you to a certain stage, but at a certain point it becomes very exhausting.
[00:08:39] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean it's a learning experience from all of us. I mean you're going to learn things as you go, you're going to fail. And I mean, I wouldn't call them like failing, I would call them more like learning lessons that you can improve upon. So it's always a good thing here.
Switching gears a little bit here.
One of your core expertise is obviously you mentioned it yourself, like advertising. And it's interesting because we were talking like just before and I was like, you're in la, right? And like LA is basically, I would call it like the, the City of entertainment. And you found like a pretty interesting niche where you're basically shifting from like the usual advertising to more entertainment driven marketing. And I love to understand like how you guys actually go about helping brands make that shift from like the usual advertising they're doing to more intro entertainment driven marketing. So like when a brand comes to you, what does that kind of process look like to understand what kind of content will resonate with their audience and all. All that jazz there?
[00:09:33] Speaker A: Absolutely. It's the thing I'm sort of most passionate about. I mean, it's something we've been doing for years now and I think it's kind of finally having its day in the sun. We're seeing a lot of conversation emerge. We're seeing a lot of brands shift into this now and create studios and really take a step into entertainment. And we can talk more about what that actually looks like. But really the sort of philosophy behind it started with a background that my business partner and I have coming up in entertainment. So producing entertainment, from movies and television and documentaries to my business partner kind of came up through the acting sort of funnel myself more as a producer, him a little bit more as a director. Eventually we worked kind of as a team in that Way running a production company. That's how we met before we started Lemonade. And so as content producers and storytellers, you know, that piece of the puzzle was always really valuable to us. But as we built out a full service agency and we saw what really worked well on engagement, on sort of risk reward, with people wanting to sort of give up their time, you know, for like the content that they're viewing in return for being sold something, right? That shift that's continued to, as attention gets more and more fractured, has only increasingly become more important that the value you're delivering is a very high bar of more premium or valuable entertainment. Doesn't have to be premium, but it has to be valuable as far as entertainment. And if we think about sort of the last bastion of what's really working still to capture attention, movies, games, film, tv, documentaries, all of that is still working very, very well.
And those industries are bigger than really most others combined. Gaming, for example, is bigger than film and TV combined. Right. We work in those spaces. And so we kind of see what some of these mechanisms are. And so as we've worked with gaming and entertainment companies and kind of reverse engineered what they do, we've seen that entertainment is really the vehicle.
And so it comes back to this simple theory, which is advertising should feel more like entertainment in order for brands to survive and thrive.
So instead of making an ad, you think through a framework of making a piece of entertainment. It is still technically a goal of promoting your brand or engaging your customers on a topic or a cause.
And sometimes that brand is more forward and is more topical in that piece of content or that series. Other times it's taking a bit of a backseat. And that's a bit more of the sort of subtlety that comes in working with the right creatives to make these things happen.
But if you think about the biggest form of this is something like an Apple making an F1 movie. It's a giant advertisement, but at the end of the day, it doesn't feel like it because it feels like this amazing piece of advertisement or this meeting piece of entertainment rather, that is subsidized by brands.
And I think that people are okay with that exchange if they're getting something really valuable, right? And it's the brands that bring you entertainment you love will win the brownie points, right? Brands that just try to shove product down your throat and sell you something and don't reward you with something for your time will not be rewarded. Right?
[00:13:31] Speaker B: And one of the things that I think is interesting, so if you Think about more like a B2B advertising context. Like when you're creating like some creatives, you're gonna have like a hook and like the start of it, like catch attention, like have a, have a bit of entertainment so someone is like reeled into it. But it looks like when you're looking at more like entertainment based advertising, like the entire content, the creative is like the entire hook. Like you're hooking someone in, you're entertaining them throughout the entire time. So people are going to be much more engaged during that entire time versus just looking a normal ad being like sold a product or anything like that. Obviously the end goal with advertising, even if entertainment based, is to like sell you something. But if the brands do it correctly, from what I'm hearing, it can be much more effective than like the traditional advertising.
[00:14:16] Speaker A: Yeah. Example would be, so let's say you're, you're facing the idea of hey, we're launching a product. Do we want to make a 30 second commercial that's going to go on Facebook or do we want to create a social series, which is a more popular format now that's emerging to sort of storytell and use the episodic format that we've all become accustomed to, you know, from Netflix and more episodic viewing. Right. Our binge viewing habits where we're, we're used to sort of tuning in for the next episode of something in a short form, you know, or shorts on YouTube or any of those. Right.
And if you use that format that people recognize and you say, hey, instead of doing this 30 second commercial that is just sort of going to be forgotten because one, you have to touch someone's, you know, memory and sort of attention 7 to 10 to 15 times before they're really going to remember anything about you.
That 30 second spot isn't going to do a whole lot for you. No.
2, you want to build a long term relationship with them so that you have ltv. Right? Meaning like you want to have a long term value within that customer. You want them to not only purchase something from you, but you would rather have them purchase something a little later in your funnel that is worth more or stick with you for a longer subscription or a longer period of time with your brand, then just get that quick sale. If you really think about investing in the long term of most brands and the way most products and sales work.
So if you start to really put yourself in that mindset, say, oh, well, Instead of that 30 second spot, I could make a three or six episode social series of one to two minute episodes with some influencers who are sort of talking about something topical or culturally relevant that my audience cares about and my brand is in the background or sort of used to facilitate that story in a way that doesn't feel forced, which is again kind of the artful piece of that that we would help someone with.
Then suddenly someone feels as though, you know, they're part of something, they're part of a story, they're relating to something, they're seeing this product in their life in a way they relate to and saying, oh, wow, that's interesting how that can weave into, you know, the fabric of something. And then it becomes a much easier sell, a much easier integration.
And sure, someone may still decide they don't want it, but at least you've made a much stronger recommendation. Emotional connection, right?
[00:17:12] Speaker B: Yeah. And with like the brands that are investing the, like the entertainment aspect of things, I mean they are investing more efforts and more of like in depth strategy to be able to capture the attention of those people versus people that just run up like 50 different creatives and hope that one hits. So with the entertainment, you're putting more efforts but you're investing more into like the, the long term, like the LTV of a potential customer, like making sure that, okay, you're not just getting that quick sale, you're making sure that you get them in like the long run. Even if it's a couple months from now, it's end up being worth it. And I feel that a lot of brands will start, I mean, it's already been pretty popular doing entertainment based advertising, but I can definitely tell that in the upcoming years it's going to become even more popular, that people are just going to invest much more heavily in that. And one of the things that I love to touch on is you've created something that you call the story 360 and I'd love to hear you break down what that kind of looks like in practice. I'm curious how you go about uncovering these different narratives for brands that they might not think of when they actually have an interesting story to tell in the first place.
[00:18:17] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely.
I mean really, it's this sort of amalgam of what we've been working on for years with this approach of saying, hey, how can we make advertising feel more like entertainment?
And then eventually giving it a name. Eventually. In the beginning it didn't have a name.
Sort of these things start one way and then eventually you come up with some fancy name for it. You know, that's the Truth.
But the idea is it's a process, it's a proven system now that we've actually developed over time. We've driven billions of views, millions of dollars in revenue from this actual approach.
And the thing that we have really been able to harness is experience in gaming and entertainment and in technology, where we're able to understand what are the mechanisms from gamifying, from creating entertainment, from developing great storytelling that are both culturally relevant, relevant to you as an industry, or particularly something that you could latch onto even if it's not obvious to you as a brand, Hone in on that as sort of a brainstorm, conceptual opportunity, mix that with again, what those sort of cultural opportunities might be of the moment. Right. Because you're searching for relevance as a brand in any given moment in time.
You know, could be pop culture, it could be something trending.
And then how do we mix that with our formula and our formats that are proven, whether that be an episodic series, whether that be a bigger step of investing in a documentary or a film, or whether that just be, you know, downstream, how this is going to fuel your paid ads or your influencer strategies to have that entertainment centric approach. Because this is all essentially infrastructure for the rest of your advertising if you do it right.
So the kind of story360 model we have is taking this entertainment centric approach and thinking, injecting it into each of those facets of your marketing and then coming back to the client and saying, okay, here's how we can model in a short term campaign basis, if you just want to get your feet wet or on a long term, sort of multi year annual basis to say this is a concerted effort that we're going to take with you because we see the direction that they're going and that's what we're doing with a number of brands. And you know, some people want to kind of start out small, some people want to take a bigger step, but either way, you know, we feel like it's the future. So we've developed a process around it. Yeah.
[00:21:13] Speaker B: And I feel like whenever you're working with any brand, any company, it's about finding that like one thing that makes a brand unique and then being able to correlate it back to any trends, cultures, anything going on. That's where you get like the advantage of like the relevance when you correlate like your, your core differentiator here. And that sounds like something that you guys have mastered, like figuring out exactly what will resonate when it comes to like promoting the advertising in an entertainment fashion, while still, like leveraging that unique, like differentiator, perhaps, that. That that client or brand has.
[00:21:45] Speaker A: Well, exactly. And I think to give you, like a bit more tangible examples. Yeah. Say like entertainment frameworks. If you think about the way, like a movie is made, we apply that thinking to how we build campaign. So, for example, when you're building a commercial, you would hire an actor, but you think about the character in a story you're going to tell, whether you're B2B or B2C.
We then think about filling that character role in a unique way. Maybe that character should be an actor, but maybe that character should actually be an influencer. And maybe that should be an influencer who is particularly relevant in your space or with the topics that are going to resonate with your audience.
And that particular influencer. Influencers should be kind of cast in a set piece, you know, or an environment, you know, that is going to really emulate something your audience aspires to. And we should shoot that over multiple episodes.
And think about this the way you would assemble a piece of entertainment property and again, get people to tune into it. Almost like you would something on Netflix or you would. Yeah, something on tv. Right. Because it's familiar. Right. We all know these formats.
I'm just using that as an example because again, it's familiar. And if you start thinking in those ways, then you start thinking about that every time you have a product launch or a new idea. And then we get our clients to think that way too, and they go, oh, hey, we have this new release coming up. How could we apply that entertainment thinking to it? How could we gamify it? How could we develop some mechanisms around this that are going to excite and delight our audience?
And then suddenly it just becomes a very immersive experience that doesn't feel like, you know, here is the brand, here's the transaction. Right. It feels more like what we call world building. Right. And that's the term that is becoming more popular now. But we've been using that for years because our gaming clients use that term all the time because they build these amazing worlds that you play games in. Our job, we feel, is to build these worlds across social media, across paid, across influencer channels, across all of these other marketing apparatus that we don't want to feel like they traditionally do.
[00:24:37] Speaker B: Interesting strategy. Yeah. So like a lot of people, I mean, you're used like the gaming example as one. They're going to be used like just playing the little world that a company created or anything like that. But you're taking that same approach to bringing that world and applying it to like different channels that still feel like in a way they're in that world and. But you're including like the other product services or anything like that that the brand has to offer while still keeping the entertainment side of things within that. That's interesting. I've never heard of that concept before, so I appreciate sharing that. And for like any like brand out, brands out there, they're like, hey, like, I think we want to do something different for our marketing. Like let's, let's try to do something like entertainment base. Is there like any maybe two, three bullet points that you would give to anyone that's like, hey, let's look at entertainment as far as like how they should be implementing that strategy. Things to think about before doing so. Because I imagine you obviously can't just jump into the entertainment world and hope that it magically works out, if I'm not mistaken.
[00:25:42] Speaker A: Yeah, absolutely. A few things. So I would say one, a lot of it just starts with what I really call like entertainment thinking.
So if you, if you imagine how we were just kind of talking about movies and television and just as a consumer, what you know about them, you know, they have script, they have actors, they have sets, you don't need to know or be an expert about how movies are made, but you probably know those things, right? Yeah. So if you start to kind of flip the way that you plan a campaign or you plan a concept and you start to think about the elements of it in those ways, not only does it become more fun, you know, to brainstorm, but it allows you to start thinking about it in a way that is going to put more emphasis on how you're actually entertaining your audience.
And while you're doing that, you will find ways to integrate your product to make sure, you know, you're checking the boxes that your boss leads you to to sell your product. Right. That will all find its way. And you know, of course, like, that's, that's what we do. Like, we're experts at that. But like, if you're on your own and you don't have an us, you can do these things too. Just start kind of thinking that way. Number two would be start to think about your partners. Whether that's agency partners, influencer partners, media channels as channels, as programming. Right. Think of yourself as a media company, as an entertainment company.
And again, that's kind of like a reframing. It's also a bit of a re Think approach.
But if you start planning that way and you go, well, you know, when I go home and I kick back, I have Netflix, I have Hulu, I have a game I could play, I have my phone, all these things, your audience has those same things too. And you're competing for all of that attention.
So what can you do to compete for that attention?
Do you want to just show them a pretty flat lay of your product, you know, just nicely laid out on some, you know, taupe background?
You know, that that might be a necessary piece of the puzzle, but probably not going to get the most attention, right?
So if you start retraining your brain a little there, then you go like, oh, I probably should have, like an entertainment channel. I should probably have an education channel. Should probably have something that's, you know, maybe funny.
And then you can even do different social channels for that. Or you could just do different content buckets, right?
There's no really big rhyme or reason to say you have to reinvent the wheel with how you do your stuff. But again, just programming.
Third would be take, take a step, you know, like, experiment. And it could be on your next campaign. It could be on a little project, it could just be on a partnership you have and say, how can we kind of tweak our approach here to make it a bit more entertainment centric?
Because I do wholeheartedly believe that the brands that are gonna survive and thrive as media continues to be disrupted, just like everything else, are gonna be the ones that really harness this and make it their own.
[00:29:24] Speaker B: I love that. Well, Trevor, really, thank you so much for coming on the show. I mean, that was a new one because I've spoken to a good amount of people in the marketing space. Typically more like B2B, but on the entertainment side of things, that's a newer concept to me. So I learned a lot from your conversation. So thank you so much for coming on and for anyone that wants to get in touch with you, because I know you have the website, you have LinkedIn anywhere. They should be looking out to find you here.
[00:29:49] Speaker A: So. Lemonadetheagency.com and then I'm Trevor Dudak on LinkedIn.
[00:29:55] Speaker B: Sounds good. We're going to put that in the show notes if anyone wants to check that out. And to our listeners, if you've enjoyed this episode, don't forget to subscribe to podcasts. You can also find more
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