Gordon Borrell is the Founder of Borrell Associates Inc. and is considered the local media industry’s leading analyst. He is ranked in the top 2% among Gerson Lehrman Group’s 150,000 consultants worldwide and is quoted frequently in advertising and media trade publications, as well as The Wall Street Journal, The New York Times, Ad Age, Forbes, and other publications. In this episode, Gordon discusses advertising’s evolution into marketing. Marketers young and old need to realize the unique advantages they each have and work together to fill in gaps. Just as emerging platforms like TikTok are skyrocketing brands- radio, print, and television still have their place. We’ve experienced 2 prior waves, being; search and social media. Gordon goes into detail about the 3rd wave of marketing which is video. Brands that can adopt this way of communicating will be leading the marketing atmosphere in 2022 and the next several years. Your audience can find you- they are aware that you exist- now they want to get to know you! Allow them to see you in motion, be personable and watch the trust matrix amplify tenfold. We all have video cameras on our phones, take them out and hit record. That’s what to expect this week on the Conquer Local Podcast.

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Introduction

George: This is the Conquer Local Podcast, a show about billion dollar sales leaders, marketers leading local economic growth and entrepreneurs that have created their dream organizations. They wanna share their secrets, giving you the distilled version of their extraordinary feats. Our hope is with the tangible takeaways from each episode, you can rewire, rework and reimagine your business. I’m George Leith. On this episode, we welcome back Mr. Gordon Borrell. He is the founder of Burrell Associates, considered the local media industry’s leading analyst. He’s ranked in the top up 2% on Gerson Lehrman Group’s 150,000 consultants world wide and is quoted frequently in advertising and media trade publications like the Wall Street Journal, New York Times, Ad Age, Forbes and others. Gordon has appeared on CNN and other TV and radio programs, discussing trends and forecasts for local media. And prior to starting Burrell Associates, he was vice president for New Media of Landmark communications, Where he worked for 22 years. He’s the past chairman of the local media association, current chair of the Local Media Foundation. He’s got five children and he’s been active in youth sports in local schools. He lives with his wife in beautiful Virginia Beach. Get ready conquerors, Gordon Borrell coming up now next on this week’s episode of the Conquer Local podcast. Welcome to the Conquer Local podcast, a gentleman who needs no introduction to this audience because we’ve had Gordon on the show a couple times over the last, can you believe it? Five seasons because Gordon, you were on season one and we always, the tradition is we bring Gordon on right around the Burrell event, which was in New York at the beautiful Grand Hyatt and then you moved it. And I don’t even know why you would move a conference to Miami. Like, it just sounds awful when you go New York to, like, what the hell?

Gordon: Yeah, there was just one thing behind a it, and it was a four letter word called snow. We held it in New York for 10 years. It was very, very successful at the Grand Hyatt. You know, one of the most expensive venues and it was packed. It was pretty much sold out every year. And I just got freaking tired of every single year, there wasn’t a break, for all those 10 years, we always would look at the forecast and oh my God, it’s gonna snow next week. You know, just before the conference came and often it did. And I just got tired of that, but the real reason that prompted us to do it, ’cause change is hard, right? You like doing the same thing you’re comfortable with is the Hyatt got converted to condos. So they shut it down and went well, where should we go? And so we said, let’s go to Miami. I said that what the hell? We went to Miami and it was an even bigger success.

George: So a couple of my colleagues were at your first event in Miami and it happened to be the very last conference before everything got shut down on COVID. So we saw each other again here a few weeks back in Miami and Burrell, 2022 was on board. Congratulations sold out, absolutely sold out, the place was jammed, some great conversations. I loved Ezra’s conversation around DraftKings and what they’re doing in the gambling. See, I could always count on you to have an amazing lineup of speakers. In fact, we’ve had Rishad Tobaccowala on the show and I was introduced to him at your event in New York a couple years back. But you know, I gotta tell you, Gordon, one of the highlights of that event is your keynote and the information you bring forward every year, this year you’re diving into that Nostradamus like Gordon Borrell and whatever it is that you look into to see the future and looking at 2032 with a ton of data behind that. And I’d love to understand from your lens, what does the future look like?

A Data-Driven Analysis of Marketing in 2032; Gordon’s Perspective

Gordon: Yeah, well, Nostradamus be damned. My crystal ball, it’s like a little dented marble, glass marble in my drawer. And when I look through it, everything is not only blurry, but also upside down. So there, the Genesis of that presentation occurred about this time last year, I was reading an article in Harvard Business Review and it was entitled something like, why great strategies fail. It’s fairly long article and just reading it during lunch and got halfway through it. And there was a quotation from a newspaper consultant who said in the year 2000, she was working with a bunch of newspapers and she was struck by the fact that their long term planning was three or four years out. So, you know, 2002, three, four, something like that. And she said yet they had all of the data to understand where things would have been headed in 2010 because they had been on the internet for five or six years, had established these very formidable presences by the year 2000 and actually had experience back in the 1980s with a thing called Utron, which was online bulletin board. So that was the Genesis. That’s why I did the 2032 presentation, looking 10 years out.

George: So, you know, I remember a very compelling image that you showed with Prince Charles wearing a cutting edge piece of technology called Google Glass. Now that really caught on ’cause I’m actually wearing my Google glasses right now.

Gordon: Hey, well, the reason for that was, to benefit those who weren’t there at the event was I went into talking about TikTok and I talked a little bit incessantly and excitedly about it on purpose, ’cause I know people go, what the hell is he talking about TikTok? That is the most ridiculous thing. And then I walked through, if you recall, I said, if I were standing in front of you 10 years ago, I would be talking about MySpace and about Facebook, Facebook wasn’t even a public company. And I went through all of the things that had occurred in 2010. So let me take you back to that period. And if you wanted to be cool, the coolest thing you could do was wear Google glass. And there was the picture of, you know, probably the most uncool guy in the world wearing Google Glass. So my point was, what seemed cool back then really wasn’t and what seemed stupid back then, Facebook, really wasn’t stupid. So fast forward to today, you look at some of these platforms like Instagram Reels and TikTok and you go, well, that’s ridiculous. And then through a series of data we had from 2010, we said, look, here are the things that look ridiculous and look what happened to them.

George: So I love the contrast where you’re saying, 10 years ago, here’s all the crazy stuff. And here’s the things that came true, that now we look at it and it’s just things that we do on a daily basis. So now when we look forward, I see what you’re doing here, but the one thing I wanna tell our audience that is not familiar with the name Gordon Borrell and your organization, there is a ton of research that has done and every year with a local advertiser survey and is it 11 years, 12 years, 14, you’ve been doing this for a long time. And that’s the piece where people are on the edge of their seat in that room, all the top media executives in the US, taking pictures of the screen, hoping that you won’t send the deck out, but you always send the deck out, but yet we still take pictures. Because we’re like that right there. I need to understand that.

Gordon: Yeah, well, the reason I got into the business, George back in 2001 was I knew from my experience with another media company back in the 1990s, understanding disruptive innovation, was that people would feel challenged and really, really skeptical of what the future would hold. So people making predictions would be shouted down unless they had research. And I thought, I’m gonna get that research. I’m going to have a data based company and I’m gonna be dying to get up on stage to say something and have somebody challenge me because I got the data, so we run this survey. It’s the largest survey of local advertisers. We’re about to launch it for 2022. We’re actually doing two now, we’ll do one in the spring, one in the fall. But from that comes an incredible amount of insights that, it’s not the standard stuff, we ask them what they’re spending and you know, where they’re spending it and what’s changing and things like that. But we get into a couple of the deeper questions to figure out what the hell is going on. And it just, you know, we’re able to pull out some really remarkable insights. There’s a really interesting thing that happened during the pandemic. And we kind of saw it occur in the year 2000. So we quick pushed in a survey question there and then we followed up in 2021 and sure enough, there it is, you know, great drama that’s happening with media company or with advertisers as a result of the pandemic.

George: So when we look past COVID, hopefully it is in our rearview mirror, it’s over, we’re moving on. What are you seeing in some of the trends if we were to pick out some of those top trends?

Major Post-pandemic Marketing Trends; websites, social, video, hiring

Gordon: Well, I think the biggest one that we all have to pay attention to is the one I alluded to and that was do during the pandemic, we’d been through it before, not the pandemic, but a downturn, an economic downturn, advertisers always act a certain way. So they acted that way when we had started the business, which is the.com Bubble Burst, brief recession, and then during the great recession. So when the pandemic came, we get, oh, wow, we know what they’re gonna do. Let’s start testing all that and what happens. And then you can see what changes because trends move along very slowly, almost suddenly. And then when economic trigger occurs, boom, they accelerate, things accelerate down and things accelerate up. So the key trend that we saw in 2020 was that people retrenched, they always do, with their advertising dollars, except a few, the smart ones continue spending and they get market share. So they steal market share from everybody else who gets paralyzed when they go, well, we can’t advertise ’cause we can’t even open. And I don’t even know if we’ll be able to deliver, you know? And so everybody’s just frozen. And then what they did, George, was they plowed a lot of money into their websites, when they figured out what to do. They said, well, we need to put the hours of operation and what we’re doing to protect people on our websites. And we need to put e-commerce. We don’t even have an e-commerce, people can’t buy gift certificates. And so they spent all that time doing that. And then they realized social media was kind of an advertising thing, so they needed to do some of that. And then they became like media companies, they had content, they needed to write headlines. They needed to shoot videos and they needed to feed that news animal every day. So it was, they’re a mountain, they have a bike shop and they have a new mountain bike. And so, they get somebody riding around the parking lot on it and talking about it, they post it on their Facebook page or, and then, two or three days later, they go, wow, that was great, people came in, now what? So they just have to keep feeding it. So the trend that occurred was all of a sudden in 2021, these businesses started hiring massive amounts, like two people, each of them, but add them all up, you know, 20 million businesses started hiring marketing people. And this has never happened before. It was always the owner who made the marketing decision. The radio guy would come in, or the TV guy or the yellow pages guy. Oh yeah, I’ll buy that or gimme a better price. Now it’s a marketing team, and guess what? They’re very, very young. And guess what young people do the most? They get on their smartphones. So all of their marketing is around social media and smartphones and things like that. So that will have a significant effect on the future of marketing for companies. That’s the big change during the pandemic, this army of young marketers, very, very influenced by the power of social media and search.

George: So I remembered one of the slides I took a picture of, knowing that you would send them out afterwards, but I still took a picture where it says that in 2022 there’s 862,000 marketing jobs, which is greater than the 729,000 advertising jobs. Now I remember back a few years ago where you told us that marketing spend was larger than advertising spend. I think it was right, 2016, correct? Where those past.

Gordon: Yeah, right around then, yeah.

George: And now we have this phenomenon that you’re describing. So trusted local expert, you know, we’ve got lots of those around the planet, on our platform. My favorite part of my job is four-legged call, where I get to go out with the sales rep and talk to their client. And we started hearing about that time, 2016 or 14 probably in between there, I got a guy, I got a gal. Yep, and now you’re telling me they don’t have one. They got two, three and four.

Gordon: Yeah, the deer have the guns, they got their own marketing people internally and their novices, George, a definition of a novice is someone who spent less than 3000 hours in the particular task. When they get to 10,000 hours, you know, which is roughly four years at 40 hours of a week, they’re masters, so by definition, they’re younger people who haven’t been in the workforce more than four years and I’m generalizing here, but they tend to look like younger people to us. We’re doing more testing on that. And those younger people, they’re gen Zers, the youngest of them. And they’re gen Ys, they have very different ideas about how to market good or bad, but they’re different. And so if you’re with an agency or a media company, you damn well better sync up with these people. They need education, it’s not like they know everything, you know, and they know they don’t know everything. And so the more interesting thing is, okay, this army, these young people scare me the death. I’m 64 years old, oh my God, they’re just gonna wanna advertise on TikTok, you know, I can’t, even to them, they don’t know my language. I’m a boomer, right. They actually want to talk to you, they need your help. They go, well, okay, I don’t really watch TV and I don’t read the newspaper and I don’t listen to radio. And I’m not that sure about billboards or cable TV. Can you help me with that, how does this all fit together? You know, should we spend some money there because you know, I really know the owner, the craggy old owner of my HVAC company says, we ought to be buying some radio. What is radio again? So what I’m saying is there’s a great, great opportunity for agencies and media companies to step up to the plate and say, we’ll be your partner, we’ll help you. We’re not just trying to sell you stuff. We wanna partner with you and help you make things work.

George: Well, that was one thing that I found to be very like a proof point was where you had the four things that you learned that, you know, why are those advertisers clients, why are they buying from a trusted local expert? And it seems that the reasons haven’t really changed.

Gordon: Yeah, they haven’t, you know, the remarkable thing about it, you can say, well, here are the four things that advertisers want the most, 80% or more say it’s buried to extremely important when I’m making a decision, to hire an agency or a media company that they have great marketing expertise. They have, you know, a partnership rather than a vendor attitude. You could say all those things and they go, oh yeah, that’s kinda interesting, it’s even more interesting if you contrast it four years ago, four years ago, there were two things at the top of the list when we asked advertisers, what causes you to hire an agency or a media company? Two things were at the top of the list. They’re not there anymore, and it’s just amazing. They are, you wanna know what they are? I should tell you. They were, and it’s just so boring. When I saw Corey Elliott, our head of local market intelligence do this on stage. I thought, oh, that’s just so boring. That’s a stupidest damn thing. He said, here it is, the number one thing, the reason that these companies choose a partner to work with is the type of media that they’re selling. So think about it, the owner says, well, I wanna buy some radio advertising, that’s what I need. So what’s most important? Well that they have radio advertising to sell, the number two thing was that the person selling it is an expert in radio advertising, or, you know TV, or could be direct mail or whatever. Those two things indicated that the advertiser knew what they wanted to buy, gone, four years later, gone. They don’t know what they need to buy. What they need is somebody that advise them. I mean, that is just such a great opportunity. A ball of clay.

Local Trusted Experts and the Nuances Between Advertising and Marketing

George: Well, for those of us listening to what you just said, I get excited with that because you know, in my tickle trunk, I’ve got everything. What do you need? You need connectivity. I got that, you need Microsoft 365. I got that, you need Google workspace. I got that because the toolkit is getting larger. And I remember when you and I first met years ago, we were preaching this gospel to organizations saying, you need to get a team that can present more than just boxes on paper and spots and remotes. Like they need to be able to offer more because of the demand that was coming from the street. How do you think we’re making out on that Gordon, you work with lots of media companies, you have them as your customers. Do you think that we have true, trusted local experts that understand all the nuances of a holistic digital marketing strategy?

Gordon: Well, not across the board, but I’m really encouraged. And I think a lot of companies finally get it. There was resistance to this just a few years ago. And rightly so, if the data that I just told you about is true, and that is advertiser said, oh, to hell with that guy, I just wanna buy radio. So that’s that. Sales people are smart, they can’t make commission. They can’t put food on the table unless they sell. And if the advertisers say, gimme some marketing advice, they’re adopting. Not all of them, the older set, it it’s harder to change, you know, if you’re older and you see a set way of doing things, if you’re younger, maybe it’s more are flexible. The average age of the people in our audience at the conference was 52, right? So that indicates, this is a really older set that’s out there trying to respond. However, I think the demand is such that the salespeople, like I said, are really smart. You know, they’re gonna figure it out and they’re gonna go, wow, I really need this. And if I don’t have the answer, I’m gonna get it for you. So what I tell people, George, this is helpful, sales reps. Is that look, pick the cragiest, most honorary bully, you know, advertiser that you deal with. You have to deal with, that big auto dealer who knows everything, and reeks of cologne, and has his hair slick back. You know, everybody’s got one, right. That they have to deal with that SOB, you know, but he spends a million dollars with us. So I guess I have to listen to his arrogance, okay. You got him in mind? So here is the litmus test for you to know whether you have passed or made the grade. Imagine that guy sitting at his desk going, ah, I’ve just read in, let’s say he is a plumber. I just read in Plumbers Monthly about one plumber here in Oshkosh who just tripled his business by doing something on TikTok. What the hell is that all about? Maybe I should do that. I know I will call, you, what would make him pick up the phone to call you? That guy who’s got a huge ego. Doesn’t wanna ask anybody anything. What would cause him to say, that’s my expert. That’s my go-to person that saleswoman, that sales guy. So that’s what you have to morph yourself into, to be the person who is safe to talk to and has, most of the answers, you know, I don’t all that much about TikTok, but I think you’re right, it’s getting big. Let me get you an answer. I’ll call you back within the hour, you know, or two hours. So you get somebody on your staff and hey, help me, TikTok. I didn’t know what the hell it is. So that that’s a great illustration I think of what the sales rep needs to morph into if they want to be relevant today.

George: Well, I get excited because this is the gospel we’ve been preaching for quite some time. You have to be the trusted local expert. Doesn’t mean you need to have all the answers at the moment, but you need to be the one that they would reach out to that has that open mind and maybe that open organization that we’re trying to figure this stuff out. And I also like to tell customers, it’s tough to figure it out because it changes every frigging minute. So you can’t be very definitive on things because the algorithm might change or the features might change by the way, Google my business, not Google my business anymore. It’s called Google Business Profile. They haven’t changed the logo. They haven’t changed the text messaging on their site, but they’ve changed, you know? And so the ground is moving underneath our feet. Now, for those of you who are just meeting Gordon for the first time, and you haven’t done the Google search to figure out his organization, you work with some of the biggest media companies in north America. And you’re meeting with those sales leaders, those CEOs that come to you to ask for advice, and you kind of help them to put together this plan of moving forward into this space. So without naming names, are you feeling that these CEOs and these leaders are truly getting what the opportunity is today compared to maybe five years ago?

Gordon: They’re getting there, what I’ve found is the big public companies are operated a bit different. They’re looking at debt load. You know, they’re looking it profitability and things like that. And it’s not like there’s not a strategic bone in their body, but they’re really focused on maintaining shareholder value. So the shareholders are not wanting in a lot of cases for you to spend their money, their dividend that they might get on acquiring another company. So it’s really tricky with the bigger companies, you know, to make big dynamic things happen, though it is indeed happening. So I just, before the doing this podcast, sent out an email to a guy, a COO at a public company. And I said, oh, look, we just redid our table on the percentage of total advertising revenue that comes from digital. And we do it every year, people really want it. I don’t know why, but it is kind of a measure of how someone’s company is progressing toward becoming all digital. And by the way, here’s the dramatic statement. The thought grenade, everything is going to be digital in about 10 years. So yeah, there might be magazines just the way there are still ice trucks, you know, and horses, okay. But it’s all going digital. So if you wanna measure your transition to digital, maybe you apply this measure to say, what percent of our total ad revenue is coming from digital? So the email that I sent out was, oh, look, this one company just surpassed you. They now have something like 75%, happened to be a broadcasting company, 75% of their total revenue, highly unusual by the way, coming from digital marketing advertising, the way they did it, George, was they bought it. They had several acquisitions over the past couple of years. That’s a lot easier than organically trying to grow it with your existing staff to just go out and go oh, hell, we’ll bring this in and this in. And then we’ll have this company, you look at a company like town square, they more or less grew it organically with town square interactive, that huge unit that they have, and they have about 300 radio stations. And half of the revenue comes from digital. And the average for radio is I think, 15 or six. So there are some CEOs that I think see the future, but you can’t really stand in front of shareholders and say, yes, you’ve invested in my big television company with 35, 40% coming from TV, which is where all the money and reran fees from the cable companies, which is half of their revenue and say, the future’s gonna be digital because wait a minute, what the hell does that mean? For all this operation over here, that’s bringing in all the cash flow for the company. So it’s a really, really tricky thing.

George: Well, and I appreciate you bringing up the Town Square, you know, analogy because Bill Wilson, CEO of Town Square was one of your presenters. He gave a very great presentation. I remember when Tim Peroni created that thing in Charlotte years ago, we were working with him at that time. It’s amazing what they’ve done there now actually. And I think it was 84 million in revenue. He put it up on the screen, so I’m not telling stories to school. And now they’re gonna double down on that in Phoenix with another operation and then maybe acquire some more radio stations, ’cause that’s the footprint and like, it’s a hell of a story. I don’t wanna steal a thunder ’cause I’m trying to work on getting Bill on the show so he can tell it himself. But the other thing that I wanted to talk about was what I felt sitting there. So we’ve got your friend Ezra who did the great presentation on DraftKings. We’ve got bill Wilson talking about radio and Town Square Interactive, but there was, what I’m calling the rise of OTT and connected TV, because it seemed like that was what everybody was talking about, even radio, even newspaper. And of course television’s talking about it because they built platforms. So can we talk about that video phenomenon, that you know, or was I just, did I have too many drinks at the patio bar, was I just kind of dreaming it?

The 3rd Wave of the Internet: Video

Gordon: No, that’s it. The interesting thing about video, if you recall, was I showed the internet in three waves and each wave was a decade long. So we’re now just entering this third wave. The first wave was from 2000 to 2010, the second from 2010 to 2020, the first wave was search. And what I showed in there, George was revenue. So we’re looking at revenue, and so you saw this blue line, which designated search revenue, growing and growing and growing in that first decade. And that was everybody going, oh wow, the internet. Okay, where is everything, what’s out there? And so search became huge, cuz everybody was going to google.com, typing and stuff, and then seeing ads, right? And then the next decade was social, starting in about 2010 when Google or Facebook went public. And that was everybody going, okay. We know where everything is now, where is everybody? And so they connected there and you could see that line for social media advertising growing really fast. So you look at the third decade, starting in 2020, and then was this orange line, and it not only rose, but it just went skyrocketing, for the remainder of this decade, and that is video. And so we are in that wave right now. It’s basically everybody going, show me everybody. Okay, I’m on the internet, I’ve found where everything is. I’ve connected with everybody, I see pictures. And I see pictures of, you know, painted toes by the pool of people’s food and crap like that. Okay, come on, show me video. I get to see people. I know I can do that now because of the pandemic and Zoom. So here comes video and it’s in the form of Instagram Reels and YouTube and OTT programming, which is technically streaming video and streaming video advertising. And so what that opens up and what makes it so interesting is that what one company do you associate with search and where do advertisers buy their search advertising from, that one company? What will and company do you associate with social and where do advertisers buy that advertising from? What one company do you associate with video? And when advertisers wanna buy that video, who do they call do, who do they go online and buy what, where it’s local. 65% of local businesses buy OTT that they’re buying OTT and streaming video advertising. 65% are buying it from a local media company. You won’t find that with social, 65 percent aren’t buying from a local media company, buying from Facebook and search. So this is the new local wave for all these media companies and agencies. And the other thing about it, I’ll just shut up after this George, I’m just so excited about this. The other thing about it is video is a true disruptor, which means it’s opening up a completely new marketplace. Something like 80% of the businesses that are buying video advertising have never, ever, ever, and never will buy television or cable advertising. So they’re completely new to video. So it’s opening up this tremendously new marketplace.

George: Well, I find that when I talk to, your now friend Jamie Cohen, who I know you work with, Jamie’s an alumni of the Conquer Local podcast as well. And he tells me when he was brought into Salem and Jamie was in the newspaper business when we all met him first, he arrives at Salem to build digital. And he said, what the reps. And I met all those reps, trained all those reps. What the reps were saying is digital be came an opportunity to have a conversation with people that they weren’t having conversations around buying traditional radio. So it’s kicking, this is an opportunity to kick open new doors is what I hear you saying.

Gordon: Yeah, it really is. You know, and I saw this back, I wanna say in about 2008 or nine, on a trip in South Carolina to a TV station that was selling video recruiting spots. And it was for a truck company, that they had made this sales call and I went with them. And so what they were doing was they were saying, okay, you’re trying to recruit truckers, it’s really hard. We have this online site that come to and put your listings on, and this is the package, and we are also going to do a video and it wasn’t online. The video was actually on the TV station. So it was a commercial that kind of came with it. And it was just this rock lot, trucking company, and this old craggy guy from South Carolina, and the sales rep was discussing, we were talking about the package and what they would get and how many listings they would get and what the typical response rate would get. And every time he stopped talking, the truck business owner would say, what should I wear when they come to do the video? And he said, well, you know wear what you normally wear, blah, blah, blah. So let me tell you more about the package, yada, yada, is that understandable? Yeah, should we shoot the video here, you know, or should we shoot it out there on the lot? So he was absolutely obsessed. And at that point, a light went on, that God, people love to see themselves on TV, but can’t afford it. If something ever came about where they could buy what looked like a TV spot, I don’t know YouTube, right. And for maybe 500 bucks or a thousand bucks, this is really going to explode. And that’s why we see the explosion in video. People love to see themselves, in video rather than, oh, that’s a nice little static ad there that you can click on. No, it’s a video of them sitting on the edge of their desk in their best red pants suit, and their hair all done up, talking about how they’re the greatest real agents of all time.

George: Well, and you know, that takes me back to the days when my friend T-bone here, who’s our sound engineer, and I worked in the radio business and we recorded a lot of radio ads with customers in the studio, ’cause they wanted to hear their own voice. And I loved those ads because there was a really good chance someone would say, I heard you on the radio and then they would invest even more. So it’s the same phenomenon, but it’s quite exciting to see it happening. Gordon, you know, always a pleasure having you on the show and pulling out some of those nuggets from your amazing event. Now I do spoiler alert, there’s gonna be one next year. And I’m pretty sure I know where it’s going to be because I think you and I had this conversation. One of the evenings, let’s tease it because if people are interested in blocking off the calendar now and starting to figure out the budget, when will Burrell 2023 happen and what’s the location?

How to Attend the Next Borrell Conference

Gordon: Could be in Miami, we don’t have the exact location because the Hilton is shutting down for renovations. And what we discovered is they really needed to. So we’re glad about that, but we’re looking right now, it will be in the vicinity. It might be a little closer to the bay, rather than in downtown, but it’s always the first week in March, it starts on a Sunday and usually runs Sunday, Monday and Tuesday. So block that out, but you’ll see something from us, sometimes we do early sales to people who’ve attended in the past. So you might be, if you’re on our list, just go to our website, look for our research alert list. You can sign up, you probably get a notification that way. But in October, September, October, we’ll start promoting it, we’ll pick the date, we’ll pick the speakers and then we’ll announce it. You do want to sign up really early because that price goes way up after a couple of months. So the earlier you sign up, the less expensive it is, and it is a great event. I think George, we had 98% of the people said that they would, who attended. We had over 350, said they would recommend it to a colleague and something like 92% said they would return. So there’s that. So that was good, we’re happy with those figures.

George: Well, and I will tell you that, you know, we make the investment on a regular basis and every year you look at those investments and see if the ROI was there. And definitely the return on investment is there from that event. Now, the other thing I talked about was the fact that I got all sorts of friends that you’re working with in the space. And you do these contracts with media organizations, with large agencies. If anyone listening to the show would be interested in learning more about Burrell Inc, how do they get a hold of you and your team?

Gordon: Sure, we’re not a consulting agency. Although we do talk to clients when they have issues, we sell data, licensed data for the markets, and that’s the biggest bulk of our business. So most of the large media companies across the country are clients. We’re the only advertising data on Bloomberg, the four A’s, the advertising association of America, licenses our data, we license data to people for their specific local markets. It’s holistic, it’s all the advertising in the market, trending analysis and everything else, just you shoot me an email, if you’d like to Gordon, GORDON@BurrellAssociates.com two Rs and two Ls, and I will get it to the right person. Or if you have a question, I’d be happy to answer if I possibly can, but we love to work with folks in local markets, ’cause we learn a lot working with them. And I think we also know a lot working with a lot of other companies. We see a lot of things fail, so we can sort of help people prevent that.

George: And we will put all of that information into the show notes when we produce this show and Gordon, always a pleasure having you on the broadcast and looking forward to next year’s event. And thanks for the insights you brought today.

Gordon: Great, thank you, George. I really enjoyed being on the show, it’s an honor.

Conclusion

George: Well, as always, Gordon bring us a lot for takeaways and we are going to link the presentation from the Burrell 2022 keynote that he delivered, which gives you a little bit more context to the things that we were touching on. But, it’s interesting, sync with the young marketers in your company. The season marketer is going to have to have very different ideas. And with those young recruiters coming right outta college, those two worlds are gonna come together, and it’s not that certain ideas are good or bad as you heard from Gordon, they’re just different. And I think you need them all. So when you sync them up, that entire team is going to get better. You know, the traditional media components are still useful, but what we’re finding is the buyers are looking for trust local experts in the tactics that they’re deploying. So if they’re thinking about video and you heard a lot about the video, will they think about you or if they’re thinking about social, will they think about your organization? And I wanna drive this point home in 2016, there was more money spent on marketing than there was on advertising. That’s when those two graphs crossed. Now it doesn’t mean there still isn’t billions of dollars spent and invested on advertising. It just means that there is more money spent on digital marketing, which we consider listings, reputation, websites, e-commerce, online booking, content creation, video. So it’s important to understand that. And whenever I work with a traditional advertising organization and how I can test this is I ask them, how do you describe your customer? And if they call them advertisers, then I know that they’re not thinking holistically about the entire marketing package. So Gordon taught us this back in 2016, this year, what he’s teaching us and you can find it inside his presentation, is that there are more people being hired to do marketing than there are people being hired to do advertising. That gap used to be 9%, now it’s 20% almost. So that tells us something, business owners at the SME level are getting smarter and they know they need to bring in experts to help them with this marketing thing. Now we also, and I love this graphic. We got the three waves, Gordon just talked about it. First wave is search, Larry and Serge build the page rank algorithm, Google is born. We’re like, whoa, it’s amazing. I search for something and I find it and oh, now there’s an ad there and I can just click and go. And now the advertiser’s like, oh, this is amazing. I’m getting all these people phoning and they’re coming to me, that’s the first wave. The second wave was social, Facebook finally figured out they wanted to be in the advertising business. And then they adopt a platform and you see a spike in the dollars that were spent in social. We kinda lump it all together. Although Facebook kind of kicked it off. Now the third wave that we’re seeing is video. And you can see in Gordon’s projection, that thing is a hockey stick, up into the right. The others were kind of a gradual curve. Although if you look at them back at the time, we were probably calling those bloody hockey sticks too, because we didn’t have the historical context of what was going to happen. But every presentation virtually that I went to at Burrell 2022, you had some of the smartest folks in the space talking about the rise of over the top connected TV and video. And part of that is we’re all carrying around a device in our pocket. Whether it be the Android device or the iOS device, that is just an unbelievable camera, that is able to capture video. We’re more comfortable with video than we were back, then COVID happened and we had to be more comfortable ’cause we’re all on Zoom. We’re into the third wave, which is video. So thanks to Gordon for sharing all of those insights that is gleaned from that survey that they do now twice a year through Burrell Associates. And if you like Gordon’s conversation discussing modern and influencer marketing, we’ll continue it by checking out episode 441. Less is more when it comes to your social media strategy, with Krista, and episode 364, the digital ad spend with Zach Johnson. And I’m not gonna give you the numbers, but if you go back, you could find other Gordon Borrell episodes in our history because he’s one of our favorite presenters and you could see why with all the great insights that he brought us this week. Please subscribe and leave us a review. Thanks for joining us this week on the Conquer Local podcast. My name is George Leith. I’ll see you when I see you.