Hello, I am Paige Albanak, editorial director of Promax, and this is the Daily Brief podcast. Today I am so happy and excited to be speaking with Rick Luchik. He was formerly senior vice president, creative marketing, and brand standards for CNN, and he is also a former Promax board member. And Rick, hello, thank you so much for being here.
Nice to talk to you. So, let's start at the very beginning. How did you find your way into the business of entertainment marketing? The old-fashioned way.
I started at a college with a small television station up in Canada, and I was a, you know, did everything camera everybody did in those days. And we had a promotions manager at the small television station, and he wasn't very good at what he did. And I just loved television. I always loved television.
So, I used to stay late, and I started editing promos together and kept pitching, and the promotion manager didn't like him, but the station manager did. And so, they started using them at that television station. And then a job came open, actually, for a promotion manager at a different station in a different city. And I got that job in 1982.
And so, I've been working in promotion marketing, whatever we've evolved this job into since 1982, nonstop. So, what drew you to cutting promos? Like, why was that the area that you stayed late to do? It was just, I honestly loved television.
I loved everything about TV. It just excited me. I was in a television program in high school. That's what I went to college for.
I was just a television nerd, you know, just excited about everything television had to offer. And this is from somebody who grew up with one television station. You know, I didn't, I didn't get a second television station until I was 12 years old. But I just, for whatever reason, I loved TV.
Oh, he said, where did you, where did you grow up in Canada? And why was your first TV job? I grew up in a place called North Battleford Saskatchewan. So, everyone can Google that and figure out where the heck that is.
And I went to the first television station I worked at was, it was called Two and Seven in Lethbridge, Alberta. And the best thing that came out of that job other than starting my career is where I met my wife and we're still together today after over 40 years. Oh, wow, that's amazing. Okay, so that got you into the business of Promo.
What brought you to CNN, which probably might be a long journey, actually. Yeah, so, you know, from the television station that I, where I started working in promotions was back in my home province of Saskatchewan. And that eventually grew to running promotions for six stations in Saskatchewan. And then the company that owned this brought me East to Toronto to run promotions for that whole company.
And then that company about the CTV network. And so I took over running promotions for the CTV network and the company continued to grow. I eventually became in charge of the CTV Creative Agency. And we did marketing and promotion for two broadcast networks in Canada and 32 cable channels.
And so it was a pretty big portfolio. It was all going swimmingly and good. And as things happen, new owners came in. I didn't quite see my eye with their company.
They can run it the way they want to. So I made the decision that I was going to leave after 32 years with that company. I had a non-compete clause in my contract, which meant I couldn't work in television in Canada for at least a year. So that meant I had to look elsewhere.
A very good friend of mine, Lisa Gregorian, was the first person I turned to for advice. And so I phoned Lisa and I said, look, I haven't told anybody other than my wife this, but I'm going to leave and I'm going to need to get a job in the UK or the US most likely. I haven't done this for a long time, point me in the right direction. And Lisa said, give me a week.
I said, okay, I'll trust you. I'll give you a week. Within a couple of days, she came back and she said, there's this really good job I think you should look at within our company at CNN. And I'd like you to talk to the people there.
And so I talked to the recruiter from CNN and we talked, I talked numerous times with the person who was doing the hiring. I just got more and more excited about it. CNN is such a great brand. And I have to remind people, I actually started working on television before CNN was even formed.
But I'd watched CNN grow through the years. And the brand was still strong, but it was struggling a little bit at that time. So the idea of being able to go and work with a brand that has had as much potential as CNN did and had such a story past as CNN did was too big of opportunity. And so we took that leap.
And my wife, she always does, is the only participant. And we packed up and I say we most kids leave home. We left our kids and left them in Toronto. And we moved down to Atlanta and it was a little over 10 years ago.
You were like, and we're so much warmer. No. Are you in Toronto now? No, I haven't been in Toronto.
I was in the Toronto airport last week. But no, I haven't been back to Toronto really for quite a while. Okay. All right.
So you were at CNN for about a decade. Correct. Okay. So you kind of were there past decade and ended up getting kind of tumultuous.
But we'll talk about that. I mean, for all of us, but we'll talk about that coming up. And then at CTV, were you in news promo or were you in promo across the company? The whole company, news promotion in, you know, we had Discovery MTV, you know, sports channels.
I did promotion for the 2010 Olympics in Vancouver. The whole gamut. I got to try everything. Also, I want to highlight that you actually just dropped a really great piece of advice.
I think not knowing that you were doing it, but you know, you were saying after 32 years, you were like, huh, I've looked for a job for a while. So you did a really smart thing, which was reached out to a very well-connected smart person and just said, hey, I don't even know where to start. What should I do? I think that's just like, the job is actually doesn't have to be more complicated than that.
But I think people forget, you know, sometimes it's calling your friends. That's, you know, that really is true. And I wasn't calling on Lisa for a job. I was calling her for advice and that just turned into what it did.
Yeah. I think that, I mean, I'm digressing for a moment, but I think that's a hindrance. You know, like for me, if I'm, because I'm in contact with freelance, so if I'm looking for extra work, I go like, well, I don't want to call them and make them so obligated. But if you're just calling like, hey, I'm looking around to stuff like, I think people like to help you.
Yeah, absolutely. And sometimes, you know, you kind of step in the right place at the right time. Yeah, definitely. This is a very broad question and it'll require you to pick among many, many children.
But what has been some of your favorite work while you've been at CNN? And not to top my own head, I can think of several things, but what things that you've loved. You know, one that probably doesn't spring to mind for most people automatically. But campaign, we did called Go There.
And there was lots of fun in the backstory of how Jeff Lucas approved that and everything else, but that's for a different day. But it was, it was just really good. And there was one really strong piece we did that involved Wolf Blitzer and Emma El-Bagre. And it was a concept piece and we really didn't know how it was going to turn out.
But it involved a shoot in a refugee camp in Greece and, you know, Whit Fries and Dan Brown got on a plane, met the crew there and shot. And it was real shooting in the camp that turned the promo. And it was just a really strong piece. And while it was a really strong piece for the viewers, what it also did is it also gave a focus for the CNN family, for the journalists, to really focus on that this is what CNN, great reporting and listening to people and telling the world about what's happening in the world really brought into focus for the CNN family what we do.
So it was special in that it was a really good piece of creative that came out of an idea and great execution on that idea. But it also delivered on talking internally to CNN as well. And that's sometimes what we forget in marketing. It's not just about the viewers.
The viewers are really important, but there's other audiences that we need to think about when we're doing marketing because we're speaking about the whole company. And you need to think about what's the message you're delivering to the people who work at your company as well. And they need to be proud of the promotion. And one of the great things that I always enjoyed was people at CNN coming up to me and people who worked there for decades saying thanking me because CNN had never looked better than it did during my time there because of what we did to showcase CNN until the story of CNN.
So two things on that one. I feel pretty strongly that we ran this back go their campaign. So I will try to take it up and along with this because I really remember the footage of the reporter in the camp. Yeah.
And I know it's a different organization. One of those enemies behind me, we won for that spot as well. And we won a lot of pro max awards for that one. Yeah.
Well, that's my other point is that you've won a lot of pro max awards in general. And I was also going to say, I think that just to expand on what you were saying about promoting the brand internally, but I think also a spot like that did a good job of establishing and reminding people what is CNN's brand mission. And it wasn't like hit us over the head with it. But it was clearly like, this is what we're here to do.
This is what here. This is how we're here to serve our audience is what we're here to do. And but did it in a way that was simple, but visually arresting and very clear. So I think that is that it's kind of like hits everything you want out of a spot.
You don't have too much time to do it. All right. So that was go there. I mean, some campaigns I have loved from CNN, I love the history of comedy spots and also a history of late night spots.
And then one that one that I haven't already told you, I was going to ask you about one that won a lot of awards was the Donkey and Elephant campaign, which was a very beautiful and simply illustrative campaign and like it looked like it was done in like pencil or pen drawings. And then the mission or the I just think they were very effective. And actually, then I also want to talk to you about the Apple Orange campaign, which I didn't down, but we talked about because that won a lot of awards too. But let's start off with Donkey and Elephant, which came out I believe in 2020.
It covered a lot of things that were going on at the time, COVID, political divisiveness, etc. It was right out of the election. What sort of what was the origin of that campaign? How did you guys conceive it and how did it ultimately evolve?
Typically, when we go into a campaign, what we did what we would do is we would do somewhere between eight and 10 different kind of concepts of what we were doing. And so, you know, this was part of the campaign for the 2020 election. We would take these different concepts and we'd go to different creative partners quite often if it was something as big as the 2020 election, and we would invite a couple of different creative agencies to come up with ideas. And then, you know, we would start from probably 30 to 50 different ideas and we would kind of call it down to our, you know, eight favorites.
And then we would take it to Jeff Zucker and Ellis and Gollist, and we would pitch those ideas. And for something like the election, you don't just have one campaign. That's a year long thing. You need a bunch of different ideas.
And the idea for Donkey Elephant, which was a clay nation spot, actually, came from Fig, the agency that also did Apple and Banana for us. And they're not, or weren't at the time we started working with them, a traditional broadcast kind of agency. But we'd known about them and we liked their work. So we really liked Donkey Elephant.
We decided to pitch it as part of it. And you know, either something clicks in the pitch or it does it. And Jeff really liked it. Obviously, you can't sell the whole election.
But what it really did was it set up, set up humor, which is always good. And people never thought of using humor in news marketing, but we always liked humor. It kind of poked fun at both sides in the election. And we didn't take a stand with it.
It was just kind of there. It was one of those spots that people just warmed up to. We didn't buy any external advertising for Donkey and Elephant. Everything we got for it, either ran on CNN or it was earned media.
And that was a kind of spot that was just shared all. A lot of earned media. I got a lot of earned media. And, you know, what's good creative?
Hard to tell. But, you know, we see it. We saw that and it was one of those things. Oh, let's hope that Jeff and Allison loved this one because we would love to do it.
And to their credit, they went for it. Okay, so it's so funny that I remember it as like pinning. So I'll also go through and post that one again, although we made out of Donkey and Elephant spots. Yeah, it did happen like a pinning because it was actually based kind of on, you know, the really old century old kind of political cartoons.
But we just put it into 3D with the clinician. But I think the thing about those spots that resonated with me is that you're right, they were humorous, but they were very gentle. And so, and it was like, if these two people on the other, on the far side of the aisle could like sit on this park bench, sort of just have a reasonable conversation, wouldn't it be a lovely world? And it was sort of something I didn't get the time that we were all longing for a little bit.
And it was also nice to be like, oh, I don't feel bludgeoned by that. I feel like calm and, you know, and that the discourse is in control. I don't know, I just think I felt like it was a very soothing spot at a time where nothing felt very soothing, or campaign not really a spot. Okay, and then I called it apples and oranges, but it was apples and bananas.
So that was the same year. So tell me about that. And that was also from Fig, and then I want to talk about Figgles. That was the first time we worked on a project that big with Figg.
And so this was kind of at the height of the discourse. And you know, we'll shift in how we handled it as a news organization, because it was uncharted territory being under attack by the White House. Again, we had to look at how we put ourselves out there. And, you know, we go there was still a fresh campaign, but go there didn't work in this new environment.
And we needed to do something different and what that was. And so we did what we called a range of creative concepts. The range went from, you know, a real traditional kind of spot with it, a news footage that talked to Rakesy and Edward, blah, blah, blah. And then, you know, range of spots all the way to the wacky, which was Apple and banana, like who talks originally just Apple.
The banana wasn't even there to begin with. In this case, it was so important at the time. We didn't pitch it just just to Jeff and Allison, but Jeff wanted me to pitch it to his whole executive team, because he wanted everyone to have buy-in. And so we pitched it and the room was almost divided.
You know, there are people who got Apple and banana and people who thought we should really be very news and button down and how we presented ourselves. We went around and around it and Jeff was really, really good at listening to people's opinion. The meeting kind of broke up and people left the room. It ended up just being Jeff and I sitting there and we just chatted about it really briefly.
He just kind of turned to me, let out an expletive and said, go for it. That's the beauty of being the boss. Yeah. And so, you know, I walked out and gave Whittahive 5, Apple and Banana started.
And here again, that was probably the most successful spot from an earned media standpoint. I've never done it. We've got millions and millions and millions again. We never bought a single piece of external advertising.
It ended up on you're thinking of the orange because that was later. I mean, no, we never used the orange. It was actually Alan DeGeneres, who used the orange out and said, let this represent the president. And that's funny.
And it became so kind of ingrained in people at that time. And the one place that I really smiled was there was a time Kellyanne Conway was on the White House Law and being interviewed, I think by Jake Tapper, they were in a little bit of back and forth on it. And Kellyanne Conway said to Jake Tapper, now be an Apple, don't be a banana. And with that Apple, I just kind of went, okay, we've broken through.
Yeah, we're done. Our work here is done. Yeah, it's another campaign that I felt like it kind of, it spoke to the moment and it transcended CNN. But it's not like you lost, like people knew that that campaign was from CNN.
But it was like, go there to me was clearly CNN and about the CNN mission, whereas Apple and Banana was about the environment at large and how are we as a news organization and really as a country and as a society trying to have these conversations, how are we navigating it? So I felt like it was almost like a public service announcement. So people like calm down and also speak, try to speak in reality. Exactly.
And those are the kind of things you don't have a lot of those campaigns that come along in your career, but boy, they're memorable when they happen. Yeah, two and one, two and almost three and a short space. Yeah, it was a short space of time. We had to do a lot of work, a lot really strong.
And at the same time, like I mentioned, we were launching shows, the history of comedy and all of that. And what we loved about those programs was that the Anderson Cooper's and John Lemons played along and fun spots with them. And it intertwined the original series with our newspeople and people had trust in what we were doing with our marketing. And they would play around and they would do things with them.
You know, the stuff we did for New Year's Eve, particularly with Anderson and Andy, and we did a spot for New Year's Eve in for New Year's Eve 2020, that was Anderson and Andy singing a musical called 2021 Might Not Suck. Yes, I remember the spot. Yeah. To be able to get Anderson to go and do a song and dance, which is not his comfort zone for us, showed a lot of trust.
Let's talk a little bit about Big and then how you ended up working with Big on the two campaigns we just discussed. And then I just want to talk to you in general about how you determine what agencies you're going to work with and why. But let's start with Big. Fig came from a relationship that Whit Freeze had.
Fig had not done. I'm not sure they'd done any work in the broadcast. They'd done a lot of advocacy, marketing, promotion, but they were just somebody different who hadn't done anything in this theater. And so it started out of, you know, the campaign that became Apple and Banana.
We had a bunch of agencies, people we worked with a lot and we tried some new people. And Whit said, let's try this group, you know, let's see if they've got a different approach to how they think about things. I was very open to that. One of the reasons that I hired Whit in the first place was he had no background in television news, zero, and hadn't worked in broadcast marketing to a great degree.
So I'm a big advocate for trying things that aren't traditional. What did we have to lose by trying something new? It turned out to be a beautiful relationship for us. I think that makes sense too because that's why Apple and Banana and Donkey and Elephant looked so different than most things you'd be in news company.
I don't think I've ever seen campaign but really look like that in news campaign. And that's nothing against all the other great partners we work with. It was just the right people at the right time to do something interesting. But for all the agency listeners out there, what are some of the things you look for when you're looking to partner with an agent?
I learned really on, I look for an agency that will listen to us. Back in my days at CTV, just when we've taken over the network, and we had to do a rebrand for CTV because the brand was in horrible shape, we hired a company which has birthed a lot of the great people in the industry today called Pitterid Sullivan. And Pitterid Sullivan were the giants in the industry at that time. And I remember clearly, you know, before we'd hired them, Billy Pitterid came up to Toronto and he sat in our boardroom and we'd had a bunch of agencies and all these agencies had come in and the first thing they did, they had storyboards, they were pitching stuff and everything else.
And Billy Pitterid opened up an empty notebook and started asking us questions and getting us talking. He didn't come in there and tell us what we needed to do. He came in and listened to what we had to say and then went away. So he didn't come in with preconceived ideas and I think that's really important for agency people to do.
Don't think you have to come in with a hot pitch right away. Take your time, listen to what the client needs. Like really listen. Don't think you know things until you listen.
If you do that, I think you'll learn a little bit as well and maybe come up with some better ideas than what you would do if you just came in blind with a pitch. You think with agencies, like how important is it to you that A, you sort of are familiar with their previous work? B, that you have a pre-existing relationship with them? I mean, is it really more about what are the ideas that you're bringing to the table?
Or do you sort of want to know? Like one thing I hear a lot is that agents say sometimes we get clients because they're looking for a specific style and that's a style that we provide and then they sometimes be like, oh, we get pigeonholed into that. So for you, how much do you consider that previous work? What are some of the things you look for before you even get to the listening stage?
Just in inviting them into the room? It's a lot about, you know, people you know who is working for the agency. It's not always the person leading the agency, but who do they have? What editors do they work with?
You know, who are their producers? Have those people been with them for a while or are they always having to bring in in new talent? And you can kind of tell a lot about what you're probably going to get out of an agency. Yeah, look at the reels, but the reels aren't important to me because anyone can put together a reel and who really worked on that reel.
I could put a reel together for you and the truth is that I had very little to do with the actual creative of most of those reels, most of it with me approving the creative. I take reels with the grain of sand. Let's talk about that for a second, which is you're in a position for a long time of creative leadership, which means you aren't producing the creative yourself, but you certainly have to be very in touch with what it is you're seeking creatively, what you want to see, what you want to get. How do you feel?
What are the qualities of being a good leader of creatives and also being a good creative leader? If you're leading creatives, you need some background in being a creative, whatever it is, you know, with background is in design, minds and shooting and editing and writing. I probably consider myself a writer first and foremost, even though I write very little. Now, so you need some backgrounds, you know what you're talking about, but you're not just who came out of school with a degree that tells you how to manage people.
And then it's higher, the best people you can. Don't be afraid to hire people who are better at you at things than you are. You know, every one of my designers I had was a better designer than me. I wasn't afraid of that.
I'm not afraid of having people who are better writers working for me. I want the best people because I learned from them as well. You know, the things I've learned in the last 10 years has been phenomenal. It's been excellent.
And then keep an open mind. I always tell people there's 10 different ways to do a promo for anything, at least 10 different ways to do a promo for anything. And they can all work. So we're just going to, you know, settle on one of them, but don't get locked in that there's only one way to do this.
There's got to be different ways to to do it. My former staff will tell you I can be a bit of a hard-ass, but nobody's ever afraid that, you know, I yell at situations. I don't yell at people. And we have hard discussions on stuff, but it's always in a safe environment.
Okay, Nadia, are you actually yelling? Oh, yeah. Oh, no. I, part of the problem is just the tenor of my voice can sound like I'm yelling sometimes.
I'm really not. I'm just talking, but I get passionate when I talk. And so, you know, I passionate conversations about stuff. And I like discussions.
And I like people pushing back when I have to tell somebody for the fourth time that I want to voice over at the end of the spot and just don't put up a title card and expect that people are going to read the day date and time. Yeah, get a little cranky when I've had to say the third promo in a row. How important do you feel that it is to, as a leader, to build trust with your team since you're asking them, you know, to display some vulnerabilities when they come, you know, when they're trying to bring ideas to the table? Absolutely critical.
You know, and it started from day one when I came to CNN and I was given the opportunity with a blank slate to have a blank slate. I could have wiped out the team that was there completely. Like I'd been given that much cart launch. I chose not to because they were all really good creative people in their own rights.
They just been working in the news media and they did news promos. And I just needed to get them to understand that there are other ways to promote news other than just doing news promo. They were willing to work with me and move in different directions. I was willing to work with them.
And you know, there's great people, you know, Sean Houston's an excellent creative director who was there when I got there with Sean's background. It all all been in news. By the time, you know, 10 years later, Sean was the one behind a lot of those great campaigns for original series, you know, like history of the sitcom and stuff. That was Sean's work.
And this was a guy when I came there who was only doing news promotion. So if you show the willingness to trust people and give them the environment to work in and help them, and you know, don't tell them their work is crap, but help them think about it in different ways than it works. And you know, we kind of had a rule in our group that I talked openly with everybody all the time right up until, you know, the very end that anyone could ask me anything. And I would answer them honestly.
I would tell them the truth when it was there. I would tell them when I knew something and I wasn't able to tell them. And I would tell them when I didn't know, as long as they felt that I was being honest with them, then they trusted in what I did. And having people who trust you leads to respect, demanding respect doesn't get you respect.
Yeah. And I think in those positions respect from both sides of them, not just respecting upwards, but them feeling like they're respected. I mean, certainly goes hand in hand. But I do think like, not like, I mean, I'm sure an all job is important to have respect and trust in both ways.
But I do think in the creative crafts, all the more so because you aren't putting yourself out there a little bit more. You know, we had honest conversations. And I used times of what was happening in society for us to have those discussions. So when the first kind of sense of the the Me Too movement was starting, I brought my group together.
And I just said, we're going to talk about respect of everybody here. I told them bluntly that I would not put up with anybody doing any of the kind of stuff, the misogyny and everything we're hearing about. And I had these open conversations with people. It opened up some wounds, but you know, I had two women come to me and talk to me afterwards about how they had had situations like that happening to them around them, not within our department, but around them and and help them through it.
And having those kind of really, really open conversations about what how we needed to respect each other was the only way we really did respect each other was to know that we didn't put up with anything, whether it was about sexual orientation, you know, clear your skin, male, female, it didn't matter. And that brought so much diversity in so many different ways that people were comfortable having those conversations and moving that forward. Yeah, that's a whole different layer than what I was talking about, which is really more about trust and respect on the work level. But if you don't have that respect on the human level, then your respect on the work level isn't going to be as deep.
You have to respect yourselves as human beings first and foremost. And that's sometimes, you know, it goes beyond just being respectful of work. It's being respectful of the person as a human. You feel like that knowing that and how to bring that into teams was something that developed after, you know, 30, 40 years in the business.
It doesn't seem, I mean, it seems like obviously when you talk about it, but I don't think it's something that a lot of people think about bringing into their leadership or into their work. You know, it honestly started really, really early for me. You know, I'm a baby boomer. I'm an old guy.
I was brought up in a different time. But my wife and I both worked for the same TV station where we met. I was hired almost exactly a year before my wife. We had the exact same job.
And when I was hired, I got paid $825 a month. My wife was hired the next year and she got paid $750 for the same job. The only difference was she was a woman and I was a guy. That stuck with me and stuck with me all the way along that there's people who look at you and decide what your value is, based on what they see about you.
And so that's that little lesson that early in my career has kind of driven my desire to make sure that people are treated equally. All right, I'm going to veer from that conversation into the future. So a big conversation happening right now in the world is about artificial intelligence and creative graphic art writing that's created by artificial intelligence AI. How do you think that when you look at a little bit, what kind of role do you think AI is going to play in entertainment marketing?
A bigger role than it should. It's a trend of I've noticed that's happening more and more. And I've said for years, there's creative people and there's marketing people. And there used to be this balance, this yin and yang, between marketing people and creative people.
And that balance has been sliding more and more and more to the marketing side. Obviously, coming from the creative side first and foremost, that concerns me. I think we have the people who are controlling our marketing promotion groups more and more so are people who need to have ROI. And ROI is a great acronym and I hate most of the acronyms in the marketing world.
But if you need to show return on investment before you start a campaign, you're destined to be mediocre. If you think that data is going to solve all of your marketing problems, you will be average, because everybody can access data. Data is a tool and it needs to be used as a tool. But AI doesn't have a human factor.
And the human factor is really important. Yeah, you can choose the most popular image. And I had this fight for years with people from the digital side of my business who wanted to use the feedback they were getting from data about which images we should use for promoting different things on digital. But all the data shows that Anderson Cooper is the most popular person on CNN.
And because of that, they wanted to use Anderson Cooper's image on everything they were doing on digital, which is great. But that doesn't help you in the really big picture. So if the data is telling you, you should only be using Anderson Cooper and you believe the data and you only use Anderson Cooper, what happens to your image as a network? If the only person you have out there is Anderson Cooper.
And that's a kind of problem that you have with following the data and following doing what AI does. And there's a program now that will do problems for you with no human input, but they're generic. They check all the boxes, but they're generic. And no AI program is ever going to do Apple and Banana for you.
It's never going to do Donkey and Elephant for you. And you will be, you will check all the boxes. You will be able to show that your, what your ROI is and how people are registering with it and you will be bland and you will be boring. And you will forget that this is show business.
You need the show and you need the business. And I worry about it. Sorry, long answer there. I worry about it.
But no, you bring up good points because I also think there's, I mean, just to drill down a little bit on what you just said, but I think, you know, with the advent of growth marketing and same thing with digital, because you can basically say, I want, you know, X number of impressions that requires me to buy X number of whatever, CPMs, or however you say it in the digital, but it's math, right? Like you're coming up with an equation and it says this is how many times we need to hit people to get what we want. And you're right, it takes that piece out of it, which is, let's go back to Donkey and Elephant, a piece of great creative where you can't predict where that's going to go. Like you don't know until it lands.
Correct. And you know, the math will tell you that people who watch CNN pick a show, you know, will watch this, this inane comedy and yeah, people don't just watch news, they watch different things. But what it doesn't tell, it'll tell you, you can find those people who watch news in this program, let's say jackass, for example, but it doesn't tell you, which intuitively, you know, this people aren't probably, aren't in the frame of mind about thinking about the war in Ukraine, while they're watching jackass. And so even though they may be news viewers, that's not the time to reach them because they're not in that mindset.
The algorithm will tell you, well, you can reach them there. So that's going to be a good place to reach them. No, it doesn't. Sometimes you need to use a little bit of human logic to figure out what's, what the data is telling you.
The other piece about that that I always wonder about is there's always a lot of conversation about doing the research and finding the audiences and where to find them etc. Like you just said, but what if you're, like, what if you're doing donkey and elephant and you strike somebody that hasn't occurred to them in 10 years to watch CNN. I just feel like if you're a little, if you're too targeted, you lose the ability, you lose the reach to some extent and the reach, you don't know who that's going to that. Absolutely.
You got to put some logical thinking into it that isn't a simple math equation. Where do you think, what do you think sort of the next trend, what do you think entertainment marketing is going? I think we're going into a real follow period right now. I think the industry as a whole is struggling and with it marketing will struggle as well.
I think it could be kind of boring for the next five years or so until the next spark comes along. The next thing that's that's going to change it. And one of the reasons I'm getting directly out of doing it right now is I think we had a really good kind of two decades for marketing for entertainment. But until streaming gets sorted out and we know how to make money off of streaming, I think we're going to be struggling in the marketing side of things, unfortunately.
Yeah. I mean, it has been a rough month. If you look at layoffs and consolidation and some earnings reports, and even more than a month, the end of this year has been not. I think fundamentally, as much as anything, I think COVID really changed our society in ways that we haven't figured out yet.
We're not back to where we were and things happened with streaming during COVID because people were staying home. There's a lot of unknowns that what the world went through with COVID still needs to sort out. I don't know where it's going to end up, but it's in disarray right now. Yeah, I agree with that.
And I think what's going to happen with theatrical in movies, what's going to happen with work. Are you people going to go to work and stay home? What's going to happen? Yeah.
And then even now, people are behaving as if there isn't COVID, but in so many instances when people get together, you hear about people coming away having gotten sick. So it's certainly not really over either. I agree. It's not and you know, what's fundamentally changed for me.
I don't get on an airplane or going to an airport that we're in a mask now. And I was just traveling last week and where I was traveling was not a COVID hotspot. But the flu was. And so now that I've got the object to put a mask on, I'm going to put that mask on.
Four years ago, I would have looked at anyone wearing a mask in an airplane as if they were crazy. Now it's going to be commonplace. We've just fundamentally changed so much in how we do things now. I haven't been to a movie theater since before COVID.
You have a movie theater so you don't need to go. Yeah, but still, you know, we just really do things really, really different than we used to. Yeah, I think it's a good point though. Like what will history say about this time period and how will we see that fundamentally changed things and we're in it?
Yeah, that's exactly right. We're in it right now. Like we're not on the other side of it. We're in it right now to see what's going to happen to society.
And it's a coin flip. The degree that you can say what's next for you? Look, I'm then working full time. Congratulations.
I've been working with a full time job or part time during college, but actually working since I was 15 years old. I'm 62 now. I haven't had a week between jobs or anything else. I've been working for that whole time.
That's enough. I need some breaks in between. But I love this business. And I think I've got a lot to offer.
So, you know, I'm going to look for projects to work on with people. I would really love to get back in working with local television, promotion people again. I watch a lot of local television news promotion. And a lot of it is just like 25 degrees off.
And I think a lot of people could just use a little bit of coaching in a non threatening way to help them kind of get on side a little bit. I would love to do that kind of work. It's not about the money. It's just about keeping active and doing that sort of thing.
So I'm hoping that will work out. But I don't have hard and fast plans at this point in time. Well, just a local television idea I think is so interesting. And at a time when local TV is an interesting place, right?
Because I think what is the media in the local space is so much less than it used to be. So local TV has so much opportunity. But they're also at a hard spot because they're being asked to sort of change drastically what they do and how they do it while still doing what they do every day all day long. So they have a really hard time pivoting in ways that maybe they need to.
So I think that they probably really benefit for some outside consulting. I think I could probably go into a local TV station in less than a month, just point out some really simple things I could do to change it, to be more effective in what they're in what they're doing just because they're so deep in the force. They're just not seeing what's going on. Well, even on the group level, you know, I mean, with now they're all giant groups, essentially next are Sinclair Gray could go, you know, they have a lot of impacts going on high level.
I mean, there's great work being done. But I do think with local TV stations, there's so much opportunity there. So how do you tap into it and especially with the resources? Yeah, a lot of them are doing some really good promotion work.
But look where they're scheduling the promos. I'm going, do you know the audience you're talking to where you're running this spot? And I'm not sure that that kind of next level thinking about what they do with the creative once they get creative is really happening as well as it could be. Okay, all right.
I'm going to leave it there. Rick, thank you so much for your time. I love this conversation. I thought like we got a little deep, which I appreciate.
Have a wonderful holiday. You too. Talk to you soon. Okay, bye, Rick.
That's it for this episode of The Daily Brief Podcast. If you don't already, please subscribe on Apple Podcast, Spotify, Google Play, or wherever you get your podcast. If you have comments, questions, or ideas for conversations, please feel free to reach out to us at DailyBrief at Promax.4. And as always, thanks for listening.