Welcome to Sacking Growth. Welcome to Sacking Growth, Call to Action, a show for the trailblazers, change makers, and paradigm shifters. Each week, a different marketing hero who is called to make a change in their field will join us to walk through each step of their journey. They'll cover the highs, the lows, and what's coming next.
Together, we'll help you find the changes you need for your own business to win. I'm Steph Pranola here with Evan Hughes, and today we're so excited to welcome Refine Labs Demand Generation Manager, Libby Shell. Libby reinforces Refine Labs' commitment to making creative that causes a reaction by appealing to humanity and empathy in ads. Libby, thank you so much for coming on today.
For sure, I am thrilled to be here. We are thrilled to have you. Can you tell us a little bit about your path into marketing and your experience with traditional digital advertising? Sure thing.
I never intended to end up in advertising. I feel like that's a pretty common thing for people who ended up in B2B SaaS, but I got my degree in strategic communications. I started working immediately after graduation at a call center for a templated website company, and Lib is boring. So I taught myself SEO, PPC, and used some of those deep-seated HTML5 skills from my MySpace theme editing days to really make it a bit more interesting and not just answering calls and waiting for the queue to clear.
So I kind of parlayed that into where I'm at now and spent the past 10 years learning on the job and just learning absolutely everything that I could about digital marketing and advertising. And then on the advertising side, I've always kind of been in that creative realm. So I was a very much an arts and crafts person growing up as a theater kid. I love creating things.
And I feel like I see the world through a very unique lens. I very much have an artist's brain. I don't necessarily have the talent to execute on that, but I have a very detail oriented. I appreciate a subtle sense of humor and good design.
And I feel like all of those fit really well into advertising. So I think that's what brought me to just pay attention to ads all around me and just what people are saying in more detail. You talking about the path to advertising, I think it's going to resonate with so many people because I think most of us that are here having these conversations or listening to conversations, it was some sort of kicking the pants or slapping the face that you didn't realize and suddenly you wake up and you're like, oh, I'm in. Well, there's D to C, B to B, B to C.
And here I have been for years. And so the unconventional way to get here, I think, is so important for us all just to recognize us as normal and that path to and having been fortunate to work with you live a long time. I definitely can see kind of the artistic approach to how you think about advertising, how you really think about messaging and strategy. And I think you're probably some of your time at the call center, right?
There's some empathy being developed in that conversation too because you're learning how to just resonate with different individuals, different personalities, just the frequency and volume that does have a natural segue and almost is thinking about our messaging and creative too. So I think like kind of making a little bit of a pivot there and connecting those two as you think about that moment you've seen some sort of creative element that just you knew it needed to be blown out, that you needed to reset some expectations. Was it just a scenario in B2B where you're seeing consistently ads that are absolutely awful? What was it that really ignited that where you started to challenge yourself and also recognize it came naturally to you to really start to recognize what creative is poor or not or to find, I guess, subjective.
But here we are. Yeah, for sure. Yeah, I honestly, like I said, I did not end up in marketing or advertising on purpose. And I think I ended up in B2B even less on purpose.
I ended up being the entire marketing team for an IT managed service provider. That is incredibly dry space. Very boring. And I wanted to make my mark.
I was really like a bright-eyed early career kind of unjaded professional. And I wanted to make a huge impact. I had told myself I'm going to be on the executive team by the time I'm 25. I was 23.
And I was very ambitious. So all I saw around me on our competitors, on our advertising was just dull, boring, tech speak. And while you're talking to a technical audience, it's all going to blend together if it's the same. And when I was really thinking about it, I kept coming back to the idea that every single business that is functioning successfully has to have a unique value proposition.
There needs to be something special about what you do and why you do it that will make someone purchase from you. So I really wanted to lean into that for this very, very dry space. I got a lot of pushback for it. And part of that was just being very young, being very green in the space and wanting to push those boundaries in a more conservative industry.
And I think that really started me off on the path of, you know what, it may not be what other people like. But there is something to be said for, you know, tapping into the humanity and the why behind what are we doing? Because if you think about it, okay, marketing or advertising, cool. Our job is literally to sell things and to enable sales.
Well, that doesn't feel all that fulfilling for me. I want to make sure that I'm also doing something positive or using that creative side of my brain. So the way that I think about it is more of how do we, how do we achieve these goals while still kind of reaching people and seeing them as people instead of dollar signs? Well, people are dollar signs.
That's what B2B is all about, right? Right. No, no, no, I totally resonate so much with me too, because I feel like we get kind of stuck in this vortex of just execution and we lose sight of what we actually are trying to convey to the market and being, you know, there's situations where we're going to have an audience that's super dry at your point or that's maybe a little bit more enthusiastic and just playing into those different elements, require different skill sets and approaches. And I think that that's where, you know, having a solid foundation of marketing and understanding like the importance of empathy towards approaching an audience is key.
But you have to really recognize like, what are the trigger points for each audience, depending on how you're going to reach them? What are some of the tools or skill sets you've developed or they can naturally over time that helped you apply that kind of empathy approach to various audiences that you might have targeted across some of your different marketing journeys? Yeah, I think a lot of it has come in lately. I find myself to be a very deeply empathetic person and throughout my life, I've kind of the constant theme in the back of my head is why.
And I want to know more. I want to understand whether that is why people do what they do or what motivates those decisions or why things are the way that they are and why we accept them. So I very much come from that place of challenging convention, asking people questions, raising my hand and sometimes annoying the teacher saying, but can you explain that deeper? Or do you know why you think that way?
I was obviously a hit in discussions in college. People loved it. I was a classic sender. But in terms of just understanding where people are coming from, I go through kind of the psychology.
I put myself in their shoes. When I take on a new client, I write down and understand what is the ICP? Who are they? What do they care about?
What are they thinking about? And really kind of try to embody that as a character, kind of targeting back to my theater days of who is this person? What are they motivated by? What do they care about?
And then thinking about them as a person outside of work, what else is going on in their life? It's not just work. Like, yes, this is what we do from eight to five on Decorified 8, maybe more, depending on the persona. But who are they besides that?
Because who you are deep down, that matters a lot more than, okay, what do you do? What kind of like a tiny thing are you selling or software or service are you selling? All of those things are not as consequential as those different perks that make you do. So I really think about it.
I love to get in the weeds of, okay, well, for example, I worked at a logistics freight company. And I had to learn all about how things get where they're going all across the world. I will never ever look at a freight truck the same again. I'm like, okay, I wonder if that's a refrigerated truck.
I wonder if they're on their way to snare. If they're on their way to delivery, if they're, if they're, if they're, there's a bill of lighting, like all of these things that I've never thought about before. But it makes me think about, at least for them, the anxiety of understanding. I am on so many deadlines.
I am entire, people are depending on what I'm delivering, whether that is toilet paper or vaccines or, you know, a new shipment of bananas to a trader Joe's like, they're running out because they price them really low. So what is that human element that's driving people? Is it Greek? Is it anxiety?
Is it just trying to get through the day because this is the backbone of society? So I really think that that's one of the biggest things that I use to try to think about empathy and how I'm getting inside the mind of someone else. I also love to do research and just find out where do these people get their news? Where do they go to learn from their peers?
Are they receptive to outside ideas? Are they not? Is it a closed system? Is it a very insular community where people only take recommendations from their peers?
For example, like in the finance world or in hedge funds, it is a very closed system. It is, who knows who and you are asking your broker or the folks in your direct community? What software are you using? What solution are you using?
And it's not someone typing into Google, I'm looking for a software for both management. That's not happening here. So it's a completely different play. And it really just depends on who you're speaking to and who you're trying to target.
Perfect summary to just kind of close that out. I think the different industries that you spoke to as well help illustrate kind of how different the sense of urgency could be and or the place that that person is in within their thinking. Right. So also what you can apply to similar thought level to like a CFO, right?
A CFO at a more senior enterprise company could have very different mentality to how they approach. It could be more secure, structured sophistication versus you know, the CFO at a startup that's younger in their career, they're on rapid growth mode. They're excited about taking risks. So I think it's all just understanding not only just the audience but the individual, also circumstantially what they're surrounded by.
So you're, I think at the foundation of any solid marketer and I've always kind of echoed this as this innate curiosity is key. If you have the curiosity to continue to explore, you can identify these moments of empathy. You can identify these audiences that you want to hit. I just think that we sometimes lose sight of that because we create boxes around what we're trying to do.
So we think and we go back to like a creative element and we're designing an ad based off of potentially our competitors or have a look and feel that we want to be here because we're in our mind we're artificially creating success in there because they are competitor bars versus actually how do we apply demographics? How do we understand different components of that individual and like they're even keel outside of work but that person to person component and it's easier said than done, right? It takes a lot of time and energy. You're missed to say like you just have to figure it out.
Like it's not there's no playbook to do that. You don't know what tools you have. You don't know what CRM is available. You don't know what research that you can find.
Sometimes it comes with fucking up. You have to fail if you don't fail, then you don't know. And I think having that like path to be okay with failure too is such a strong tool to have in your tool belt. So to your point about remaining curious, asking questions continuously digging in is absolutely key to success for any marketer that's looking to really challenge the norm.
Yeah, for sure. I think that your point about being willing to make mistakes and mess up is huge. I think that's the biggest opportunities of learning that I've had in my career were when I swung for the fences and it exploded at my base. Whether that was speaking up in a meeting or speaking out of turn when I probably should have just kept my mouth shut.
But it taught me, oh, okay, in the future when I'm feeling like I don't know what's going on or I feel like I don't feel comfortable in the situation that I'm in. Maybe it would be better to take a beat, take a pause and not just say whatever I'm thinking off the top of my head in a business situation. That is also something just thinking about the willingness to make mistakes with advertising and the speed of just the media machine right now. It's so easy to test things and mess up and then the world forgets about it.
Unless it's horrible, you can probably get past it. You can pivot, you can shift and you can reinvent yourself. There's something to be said for kind of that rapid speed of reinvention. Sometimes it's kind of suffocating because you feel like you just have to constantly be on, but it also gives a lot of potential for just testing new things, trying new things and elevating an art form, which is really what advertising is.
Yeah, I think being okay with failure moves us really easily into our next section. Before that, I just want to call out how much I love hearing the why. Not just from questioning the way that things have always been done or the way that these industries traditionally market to others, but it helps you answer the questions that your customers are going to have when they're reading your ads. If you are constantly questioning things, constantly questioning the why behind the way that you're building ads, you have a more like well-rounded perspective on what your customers are going to want from an ad because if you're thinking why, then you know that they're also thinking why.
So being able to answer that question efficiently in a quick still image is a really powerful tool to develop, answering questions before they even have to ask. Exactly. Yeah, it's doing some of that thinking for them because you already know your as inside their head as you possibly can be. So we want it to feel like they are reading my mind.
Some people hate that about advertising, but I think that just from an innate kind of understanding of your target audience perspective, it can be really helpful because at least from a consumer perspective. I see a brand that just hits the nail in the head. They absolutely nail the messaging. They get it.
They get what I'm going through. They have seen and are showing me that this is a solution to my problem and that will inform a purchase decision. It makes me feel like, hey, they understand who I am as a person. They understand my challenges and, okay, I can give this a try.
Now that's on a more consumer scale. So it's a little bit different when you're spending a lot more money making data buying decisions, but at the same time, it is still based in feelings and feeling like you're seen and heard. Maybe a couple examples of how you might take an ad and rework it to include more empathy and make these people feel seen and heard. Yeah.
Yeah, I can certainly do that. It's very easy for copy to come across as sterile. It can be easy to fall into a habit of insert business jargon here, drive results, insert cliche business phrase. And I always like to take a step back when I'm looking at copy or a landing page or something like that and say, okay, was this written by a marketer?
Or was this written by a human? Did you have your marketing hat on or did you have your human hat on? Or did you have your technical hat on? So when you're in really, really dry industries, okay, did a technical writer write this?
Do I understand it? Reading this as someone not in this industry? If the answer is no, okay, cool. This is a technical writer.
I may be over my head. But if there are areas where it feels like cool, insert, fluffy marketing speak, optimize, optimize performance, deliver better returns, like, but what does that do for people? I think it's going back to that why. It's really easy to say or speak to the objective that you want to help people achieve, but telling them why or what that will do for them, that's where it really sinks in and becomes more human.
I think it's really just a matter of does this feel authentic or does this feel like I'm trying to sell you something? Like, yes, we understand that the objective of a commercial society is yes, we're going to be sold to. We're going to be like things are going to be sold to us constantly. It's we're constantly inundated by things that are being sold to us or that people want to sell to us, even in the privacy of our own homes.
We just have to accept that, but it feels very cliche and beige when it's just like, okay, cool, you're telling me that your solution is oriented. Cool. So everyone else, that doesn't tell me anything. I want to know how this is going to impact me.
And I think that society is very individualized now. And people do want to know probably in a bit of a narcissistic play of like, what is it actually going to do for me? And that there is a solution. And it's not just, cool.
There's this massive existential black hole of a problem. I don't know how to fix it. My boss wants me to fix it. Am I going to fail or figure out a solution?
And I think that when we're thinking about being a be sass, that's what we're doing with advertising. We're saying these problems and these kind of challenges that you've been tasked to solve, sometimes yeah, they are impossible. It is 20 years ago, 30 years ago, we never would have thought to even try to do what you're doing right now. But now that we are in our reality, have to figure it out.
And that just means that we have to leverage more tools to do that. And I think we all have to work together now that everything is kind of insane and recognize that, okay, everybody needs to take a breath. I would love to just take 10 or 20 off. You can breathe.
The world's not going to have yours. Yeah, right? 10 or 20 years. That would be great.
Can I just go back and be like, every team can? That would be nice. And that journey, right? To like all of this.
Yeah. So it just complements itself as we think about how do we continuously evolve our career, the ways of thinking our successes and failures, even within our careers or the questions that we're asking or sometimes for me, it was the question that I wasn't asking that actually the reason I failed because I wasn't showing up with ideas that I had or presenting myself with like innate curiosity because of that fear of like, how am I going to be criticized or judge or that imposter syndrome? And I think that ties too, as we think about like putting our creative together or creative strategy, you are going to swing and miss. That's fine.
You know, it resonates with you, Libby. When you see this ad and you're like, oh, I want to buy this. There's a hundred thousand other people that it didn't resonate with, but they're still within that buying audience. So it's also you're not going to always have a hundred percent.
I think we all know that, but sometimes you just get, we get so fixated on the numbers and the success that we lose sight of like the reality of what's going to take place. So I think like it all those journeys kind of play hand in hand as we think about evolution of how we think about advertising, evolution, how your careers evolve to the tools that you're using. So it's really fun to kind of unpack this a bit more. Yeah, for sure.
I think that the biggest thing just bundling it all together is we can't constantly get stuck in the numbers. I think as a data-driven marketer now that everything's super data-driven, it's very easy to just look at a spreadsheet and say, okay, objectively, this one is the top performer. But there's so much more nuance to that, especially when you're thinking about something on a creative side. I find that creative analysis is one of the most challenging and rewarding things that I get to do in my job because yes, I could stick with the numbers and just say, objectively, this is the one that generated the most clicks with this audience and it drove conversions and blah, blah, blah.
But what is that actually telling me about my audience? What is it telling me that we could use for future rounds? Or, you know, is this resonating more because we use more action words or we painted a picture, we told a story and that story seems to be resonating versus, you know, cool, we put a lot of stats on here or it's a case study. Great.
There's a lot to be learned there and just taking that step past, okay, here's what the data is telling us, but here's what my gut is telling me. Here's how I interpret this creative. Here are the differences that I see between them. So for example, I was working with a company that was very much in the hospitality space and one of their top performing ads had a barista just looking straight on at the camera, smiling and it just said, we get it.
And there was something, it was very, very powerful, but I'm finding is that none of the other ads we were running at the time had anyone making direct contact with the camera. And I think that when you're in a hospitality space or through a barista, you are actively working with people day to day. You are having those one on one interactions and it felt very personal. It felt like that personal touch that someone in a hospitality space would want to have.
And I think that even just selling the ones that said, like, where is the actor or the model looking in this stock photo, that can have an impact and it can help people feel something versus if it's our rent. Mm-hmm. Yeah, it all feels. I know you're talking about the ad feeling personal, but everything that you're creating has to feel personal if you are putting yourself on a limb to shift the way that these things have been created.
So how do you deal with that when it gets to be no after no, after no, either from leadership or from others on the creative team? I know you've talked a bit about experiments using emojis and then also results from it's too meme-ified and that doesn't work anymore. Things change so fast. How do you keep pushing through when it feels like the market is just changing too fast to keep up with?
Yeah, I think one of the things you have to think about is who is rejecting it? Is it the client or is it your internal stakeholder? So if you're working in-house, is it a lack of willingness to try new things, holding you back? If that is the case, but at least it was for me, that was an impetus to want to change roles and change jobs and get somewhere that was a little more accepting of trying new things and testing things out and not just sticking with, well, this is what's always worked or here's the template that we just, that we use for webinars for motion.
We just changed the background color. That just felt so stale and stuck. I think dealing with the rejection or things not working, it's something that comes with time. It's, I definitely take things hard when a concept that I love goes in market and then it just doesn't resonate.
Like, oh, I really thought I understood this audience. I really thought that this would work. I loved it. But the thing that I have to remember is design and advertising is so subjective.
And there's only so much that I can do in terms of research ahead of time to understand that person or that I have to admit that for most of the clients that I work with or the companies that I help develop advertising for, I'm not their target market. So I have to understand it through my lens, but my lens may be putting some bias on there. And that very well could have an impact on the effectiveness of the advertising. I think it's really just a matter of checking in with myself and being like, look, it's a job.
This is a job. As much as someone who very much cares about their career and developing and excelling and doing my best possible work, I have to constantly remind myself, you know, why not rocket scientists, we're not brain surgeons. No one's going to come into bodily harm because this ad isn't resonating. And it's really more of that reality check of, I'm going to be okay.
If this doesn't work and it also gives me another opportunity to pivot, try something new, test something new. Okay, that didn't work. Let's try something even more outlandish that, okay, so our, our, our aid didn't work. It shouldn't be.
And it just gets me excited to think, well, let's try something new and that makes working and advertising and we're getting marketing exciting because if I was doing the same thing every single day, I think I would put my mind, I can barely sit still for like 20 minutes at a time. I can't imagine just being a spreadsheet input monkey all the time. I feel that to Michael. I, my best idea is common.
I'm pacing around my little office here and I realize sometimes I can't have these conversations when my brain starts working, I'm walking around. So I totally feel that idea has come from such different places and we're not necessarily impacting the world with our subjective opinions of ads, right? So we just keep pushing forward and we keep recognizing that we have to evolve experiment and set boundaries within ourselves. So when it's within ourselves that are most important, I think that one thing that from what I hear and the journey kind of from where we're at now in terms of how I got into my interest into advertising and marketing, how I started to think about like, oh, I actually have a unique skill set of how I appreciate and change my way for certain creatives or this resonates with me a bit more and how can I apply that to my client learnings and stuff.
Is there anything else like if you kind of zoom back out and you're like, okay, this journey over the course of where I am at today, what have, like, what have you appreciated most about it? And this can be brought, you know, in terms of skills, qualities, learnings, what is some of the passions that you kind of walk away from and you're like excited to share with other folks and or it was a learning for you and how you correct that going forward. The things that stick with me the most are the things that were the hardest in the moment. So when ideas didn't work or when I would go up and pitch things to leadership and it would just get absolutely shut down and just realizing that I can continue on.
I think that that's really something that has just put a lot of tenacity into who I am as a professional. It's, yeah, I've been through some crap. I have dealt with some not great people and I would try to avoid that in the future if I possibly could, but it got me to where I am today. I would not be as confident in making mistakes as I am if I hadn't absolutely messed up.
I probably wouldn't, you know, if I could avoid those mistakes, I probably would because they hurt in real time. But at the same time, I'd have to be grateful for where they brought me because that's my reality. I can't just sit around and say, well, I'm not happy with what's going on right now. So I'm just going to be resentful of my past choices.
Like, no, future Libby is going to think back on this now and be like, okay, you know, we just got to accept it. Can't change the past and go from there. I think to kind of refocus on your question, one of the things that stands out to me is just really wanting and continuing to impact people and reach people with advertising or with marketing and think past kind of those big fronts of, oh, it's B2B or it's fitness. We have to put on this lens.
We have to use it to button up. We have to wear our suits and pantyhose and all of that stuff that no one does anymore. We need to think about people. That's all we really are.
But it's simple. Yeah, that is the perfect kind of close to this conversation advice to is just be authentic with yourself. And I think any conversation you have and any advice you can walk away with, like hearing you just speak openly and genuine is going to help so many other listeners to respect their boundaries and respect their growth trajectory and recognize that sometimes your best advice comes from some of those mistakes. And if you can still march forward, that's so, so important.
So I really appreciate the vulnerability and being open and transparent. I do always like to kind of close these conversations as we think about there's so much chatter right now. And I told myself I wouldn't say the word AI, but I have to. But if we think about the world of creative of reaching individuals of remaining authentic and personalized or having personal experiences, what's just you, anticipator coming?
What is coming up? What do you think? And this can be anything. But where do you see the roles in a year, two years, five years from now?
Yeah, there's, I think about the future of advertising a lot. And I also think about AI a lot because one, just from an art perspective, okay, we're using all of these ideas to generate these models that are just fitting out what they think we want in return. But I think right, at least right now, where we're at with AI creative art is that there still is a bit of an uncanny valley between what is truly human and what is kind of an attempt to be human and moving forward over the next few years. I think that people are really going to lean into those things that we know are authentically human.
Those are kind of the chaos and the acceptance of the human experience of being alive is hard. And in terms of just getting through life, that's something that every single human has in common with one another. We wake up every single day and get through the next day, to the next day, until we don't. And I think that is something that, and that sense of like that existential dread or that being part of one big symbiotic thing, that's something that AI really can't generate, whether that is the underlying anxiety of just being alive or the joy of being unpredictable and absolutely chaotic because that's what it means to be a human.
It's nuanced, it's multi-leveled, it's layered. And so I think that moving forward with advertising, we're going to see more of that mess, make its way into just what we're showing in mass media, or even just one-to-one advertising, because as we move into this next phase of how humans work with technology, I don't think it's going to get easier. I think being exposed to so many ideas and so many thoughts and so many likes and opinions all the time, that's not making it easier. It's just getting more difficult.
So I think that we're going to see people lean in and appreciate some of those more human, imperfect, messy qualities. Or at least that's what I hope, because that's what I would like to see. Amazing. Libby, we're so grateful for your time and insights and for sharing your journey with us.
We hope that everyone listening starts to find the excitement in pushing boundaries and never stops asking why. If you like hearing these journeys, make sure to subscribe and share this episode out to your network. And if you want to nominate a marketing hero to come on and chat with us, feel free to get in touch. Thank you all so much for listening.
We'll see you all next time.