How Do You Take a Swing at Fun and Creative Things in Marketing?  The Chief Barketing Officer of Cyberdogz Shares the Secret

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Welcome to today's episode.

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Our guest today is Mike.

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He is the Chief Marketing Officer at CyberDogs.

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Welcome to the show.

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Hey Eric, Thank you for having me on.

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I appreciate it so let's start with talking about your title and your company's name.

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What is the inspiration for that?

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Yeah, you know it's funny.

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I get asked that a lot and the idea of chief marketing officer is, honestly, just to have some fun with the title, do something different.

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That kind of pops for people.

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We, as marketing professionals, we wear so many hats and do so many things.

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Sometimes it's hard to find a title that encompasses it all.

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So instead of trying to shoehorn something in there that didn't really make sense, we just wanted to have some fun with it.

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But the name Cyber Dogs itself.

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People ask me all the time what is a Cyber Dog?

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And it's.

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I don't really know specifically what that is, other than it's more of a belief system and a brand and a lifestyle and where it comes from.

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For us is that just years ago, when I was a solopreneur and doing side hustles and these different things, a buddy of mine, we were building websites, him and I, and building out brands, literally at times for beer and pizza, and we came up with the name Cyberdogs at that time just because it sounded cool, it sounded edgy and whatever, and that was just what we ran with for the longest time.

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So in 2015, when I started the business officially, I had generated a list of names like 70, some names of all your typicals right, like Ascendant Marketing and all these innovative names.

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That kind of sounded marketing cool, and I had thrown CyberDogs in the mix just as a kind of a sacrificial lamb in a way, sent that out to a bunch of people I knew in the mix, just as a kind of a sacrificial lamb in a way, sent that out to a bunch of people I knew in the industry and out of, I believe, 19, 7, 17, 18 people something like that that I sent it to and said, hey, can you walk through this list of name options for me and tell me which ones stand out to you out of all those people?

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Cyberdogs came back in the top three every time and I couldn't say that for any of the other names in there.

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So it became obvious at that point to just be like I think CyberDogs is the name and we'll build a brand and a mythos around that, so to speak, as to what that really means.

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But it just struck a nerve with people and I think it had something that resonated with our audience.

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It's a fun history and it was all built on literally beer and pizza.

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I love it and it's because I'm a dog person.

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I have a French bulldog and I think a lot of people are dog people.

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That might be part of the secret, but French bulldogs are the number one dog in America for the second year in a row and mainly while I podcast, my dog naps.

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But I think she's more on the sales side than the marketing side because she always just wants to meet new people.

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She needs a hug every hour, those sorts of things.

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But I think that she's going to be angling for promotion to chief marketing officer before too long for the podcast.

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Yeah we actually you mentioned the french bulldog we have two bostons which look very similar and same thing they're.

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They're in and around the business, laying on the couch, kind of the backbone of things from day to day, and just to throw it out there, like when we came up with the name and reverse engineered it.

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From there we really found a lot of engineered it.

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From there we really found a lot of traits, the tenacity and the energy and all these cool things that kind of came from not only just dogs but a bulldog breed, like our logo suggests.

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So we used a lot of that stuff in the brand and in the way we talk and the way we can narrate our voice for the brand.

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So it really it came together at the end of the day, but dogs honestly were a huge part of it.

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So tell us a little bit about who you are and what you do with your business.

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Yeah, long story short is, I started out my career doing a lot of graphic design, a lot of cartooning, illustration work, and went from a small ad agency to the printing industry, which I was in ad agency for a couple of years print industry for about nine years and then transitioned from graphic design to web design, then moving into more of a corporate role with online retail, doing everything from building out websites, design, leading basically teams of people, social media, and it just naturally progressed over the course of my career, which is I'm knocking on 30 years now, and when I started CyberDogs, for me it was really about how do I take the best aspects of that and try to create something that's unique and special and fun that I can really exercise.

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What got me into this whole gig in the first place, which was the creative side and having this fun with it as a creative, I think when it became routine for me and all of a sudden I was getting out the white shirt and the tie and the khakis and signing off on vacations tie and the khakis and signing off on vacations and it just became too vanilla for me to the point where I needed to inject some spice back into it and scratching that creative itch was how I fixed that problem for myself.

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So tell us a story about some of the most creative, the best marketing you've done that would inspire the marketers that are listening to want to do.

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I've been really fortunate because I've been lucky to have some ideas land and even when I was in my corporate world, retail world, getting to pitch ideas to Nike or Jordan or Under Armour, these places and have them be very receptive to this out of the box concept, it was energizing and it really fueled this confidence that these rules and ideas, they apply to anybody, big or small.

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So taking that kind of energy from the corporate world into basically startup mode when we started CyberDogs is it was huge.

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And since starting CyberDogs and being able to do that, we've had a lot of opportunities to do some very, I would even say, strange projects, because they're not, they're very non-typical and they're very like.

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How did you, how'd you, find yourself in that scenario?

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And it was.

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The answer was we just took some swings, really, and that encompasses everything from building out websites and having relationships with DC and Marvel comic book artists.

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One of the most notable is and this, just this started off a whim of sending an email to a stranger named Dan Juergens at the time, who was the illustrator and writer for the death of Superman back in the nineties.

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He's done.

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If you Google him, he's done a million different things for DC and Marvel.

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He's a heavy hitter in the whole comic book industry.

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I sent a stranger an email that basically said here's who we are as a company.

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I'm really into what you do.

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How can I help?

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No strings attached.

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And it led to a couple of emails back and forth and by the time it was all said and done, we helped Dan calibrate his brand, build him a website, and we've had a relationship with Dan Juergens now for the last few years, which is super cool, because if I was to go back and tell my 10-year-old self that I would be able to talk and communicate with Dan Juergens when I get older, I'd be geeking out pretty hard.

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That's a pretty huge thing, and that again created another level of confidence.

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Then how do we take that further?

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So, like just in the last year, we did a three-way co-brand motorcycle build out with Janus Motorcycles and Milwaukee Tool, which, again from a business standpoint, why is CyberDogs co-branding on a motorcycle build?

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For no other reason?

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To just to have some fun and to do something cool.

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That's it.

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So we ended up doing something like that, where it's very unique and it's fun and it filled our cup to the point where we could then chase the next thing and all that to be said.

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Yeah, we do all the normal stuff too.

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We work with clients on their everything from websites to business cards, to social media maintenance and whatnot.

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But we like to inject these special kind of big swing type projects once in a while just to see if they'll land, but also because if they do land it puts a lot of fuel in our tank to keep going and to seek the next thing.

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I love this concept of just taking a swing and sending an email that's genuine, because you want to work with somebody, because for the first hundred guests for my podcast, I just reached out to people and said, hey, do you want to do this, including you and I'm very grateful that a lot of people are just like, yeah, I'll do it and a pretty high percentage of people actually and so it's just sometimes taking that swing in a very authentic way, like you were saying, can lead to some really great things.

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I also like the aspect of doing things that are fun and perhaps, like you said, using your words, strange is also interesting, because those are things that are stand out and that are memorable, yeah, and to be honest, most of these scenarios you can make them make sense after the fact, like if there's something you want to do that's cool and fun, and hey, wouldn't it be neat if we did this, pull that string, see where it leads you and build, build the logic around it, because those things are, they're a huge part of your body of work.

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And again, not that we don't, we're not, it's not that we're not proud of all the normal things that we do.

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But if you can sprinkle in a motorcycle, build with milwaukee tool and all of a sudden, a dc comic book artist website, and if you can sprinkle a few of those things in there, it makes for a pretty unique story.

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And it's a lot less boring, right?

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I think that's one of the number one rules of marketing, like you're saying, is don't be boring, whether it's B2C or B2B.

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No one likes things that are just boring and buzzwordy the names that you were talking about for your company.

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If you would have picked one of the most boring names on the list, like a generic name that just sounded buzzwordy, you might not have done some of these cool things, right.

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Yeah, and I actually I love the fact that people have to ask, because it opens up the door for the conversation.

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If it was, I don't know, exquisite marketing or if it was something that was semi-descriptive, and nobody's going to ask you that question.

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They're going to just go.

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Oh okay, that's your name, end of story.

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But when you have something eclectic, something unique, like CyberDogs, more times than not they will ask what's that about?

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Tell me the story as to how you got there.

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What is a cyber dog?

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And it's authentically fun for us to say well, it started with beer and pizza, and it's not true.

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That's literally how it started and at the time we could live on that.

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It was more than enough to get us started.

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So it's got a neat backstory.

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I did think about naming my podcast self-control and pizza for a while.

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And I think that's the charm, though, is yeah, if you can explain it and you can, I don't know come up with a reason as to why it's not wrong.

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I think sometimes in marketing, and even in business in general, I think we we tend to follow the safe route or we do a monkey see, monkey do type approach, where we look at what everybody else is doing and it's before you do that, look in the mirror and do a self-check and what do you want to do, or what would be something that would resonate with you first, because then maybe there's people out there that would resonate with that on a different level.

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But the creative side of marketing is the fun side.

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But the creative side of marketing is the fun side.

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I don't know if creating hundreds of landing pages and email campaigns is very glorious or fun, but the creative side of helping people with branding is definitely more fun.

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That's where the cool kids get to hang out, like you were saying.

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So I think you have a podcast that is along this topic as well.

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Right, tell us a little bit about that.

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Yeah, we started the Brand Retro Podcast.

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Gosh, we're going to hit our 100th episode here in the next week or so, but it's probably about a year and a half ago since we started it and the reason behind it was we just wanted an outlet to have these conversations and talk to different entrepreneurs, business owners and creatives about how they get there and how does that relate to how CyberDogs approach is and share some client stories and those kinds of things.

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And for us, what is Brand Retro?

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Brand Retro is this idea of finding this pure place in yourself where you were excited about your business and you were energized about what you do.

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Put that in a bottle and try to carry that with you throughout your professional journey.

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Point is a lot of people.

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When we start our business, we're all pumped about it.

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We're excited about it.

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Day one, we come charging out of the gate and it's just a great feeling to be an entrepreneur.

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But then all of a sudden it's tax time and then you're hiring people and as you add these different hats, you start to just sink into the reality of man.

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This is a lot of work and this is way different than I thought it was, and over time you erode that energy of how you started that vigor right, and that's what the brand retro mindset's about is stay that way, stay energized, maintain that vigor and be able to carry that through in everything you do.

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And it's really about just remembering why, remembering why you got started.

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I always throw the analogy out there with people and sometimes they'll say they don't get it, but I know they do because we all have it is if you can think back to when you were a kid.

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Everybody has that one Christmas where you're like man when I was 12 and I got the GI Joe US flag for Christmas everybody's got that one Christmas that blew their mind and what that really felt like.

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You've probably not really felt that since.

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So at 30, 40, some years old.

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What if you could capture that feeling again?

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What if you could take that 12 year old's feeling at Christmas morning and fast forward it to where you're at now?

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How great would that be?

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And that's the idea you should be capturing with your business is how do I maintain that energy and not lose that wide-eyed optimism that got me in this whole game in the first place?

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I think that's amazing advice and I recall that Christmas for me.

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I got the GI Joe figures and I got a bunch of Star Wars figures and I'm using an eight millimeter camera.

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I made a home video movie that was called Crud and it was a battle between the Star Wars figures and the GI Joe figures.

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That was one of the best Christmases of my life, for sure, and if you can capture that sort of enthusiasm for what you have to do to get out of bed every day to make a living, I think it'll be very rewarding for people.

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What have you learned in doing your podcast?

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Has it been good for your business?

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Have you enjoyed doing it?

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Podcasting is a relatively new channel in marketing, right?

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Yeah, and it's very much, in some ways, the wild west, because, yeah, there are a lot of podcasts out there, but there's more podcasts dropping off on a daily basis, it seems like, than starting.

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So I think it's a very wide, open medium to get your message and whatnot out there.

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And to your question, what I've learned is just again, take that swing, get out there and do it Like anybody else.

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When I started my podcast, I hated the sound of my voice.

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What am I going to say?

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There's a lot that goes into kind of, how am I going to pull this off?

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And once you just concede to the idea of I'm just having some conversations, I just happen to have the camera on and I'm recording it.

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And don't overcomplicate it.

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Keep it simple and find people that you want to talk to.

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I won't name names or point them out, but yeah, there's some episodes where maybe the client or not the client, but the guest and I didn't connect on the same way that maybe you and I are now, so the energy isn't the same, but that doesn't make it wrong.

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So you get through that one and you go to the next one and again, try to keep filtering, keep improving and keep getting that message out there.

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I think it's been huge.

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I will add this I think it's huge for me and anybody who has a podcast is it gives the listener and the viewer a really kind of a peek behind the curtain as to who you are authentically, and not just trying to figure it out by reading your marketing copy on your website.

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So I feel like clients that have come to us either from the podcast or having heard the podcast.

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They're two thirds bought in on the CyberDogs vibe before we even have that first conversation.

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Absolutely.

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I think part of the magic of the podcast is you get to know the people better.

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There's something about the voice you can hear when I'm excited and when I'm joking and we're laughing about things.

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It's very hard to make that come out in the written word and doing that on the audio and the video versions, I think the emotion that can come through is a lot more powerful and resonates with people a lot more.

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So I think that's one of the magic of the podcasting channel and I think it's becoming more popular over the last couple of years.

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I think when people were shut in from COVID, it helped boost the popularity.

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But I think, just as a medium were shut in from COVID, it helped boost the popularity.

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But I think, just as a medium, some of the technologies and tools to bring it to life are making it easier for people to leverage as a channel too.

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Yeah, 100%.

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I don't think it's as daunting of a task as it was two or three years ago, because a lot of these platforms now that you can use for podcasting, they have built-in editing capabilities and the ability to export different snippets and teasers and all kinds of different things.

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Yeah, I think the fact that it's getting, from a technology standpoint, it's getting a lot more realistic that people can do this on their own yeah, I think it's huge.

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It's creative and it's fun, mike just like everything else you do and you meet so many cool people, that's the other thing.

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Everything else you do and you meet so many cool people, that's the other thing.

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Just organically you meet a lot of cool people and then, like you said, if you invite a few people, that kind of feel like a reach and they say, yes, it's okay.

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I just my network just leveled up.

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That's pretty cool absolutely, absolutely, mike.

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we appreciate you being with us today.

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I'm gonna link to your website and your podcast in the show notes so everyone can check them out.

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Thanks for being with us today and thank you for sharing your story and these insights.

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We really appreciate you being here.

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I always like to say marketing will never be easy, but it should always be fun.

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So thank you for helping us make it fun today.

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Absolutely Thanks for having me on.

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I appreciate it.