Make Content People Want vs. Ads They Skip
With Guest Steve Pratt
Your audience doesn't have short attention spans. Just high standards.
The How to Sell More Podcast
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February 4, 2025
So many of today’s marketing strategies involve interrupting people and dropping ads and promotions that demand attention. But as marketing costs increase and results shrink, throwing more money at competitive advertising channels may not be the answer. It may be time to shift your approach and earn your audience’s attention with the type of quality content they actually want to read, watch, or listen to.
In this episode of How to Sell More, we face the uncomfortable truths about paid advertising with Steve Pratt, author of Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers. Steve believes that customers are more empowered than ever to skip or ignore things they didn’t ask for, and this includes advertising. Instead, he believes the way to earn your prospects’ and customers’ time and attention is by giving them a gift, the gift of trust-building content.
Consider Slack. In addition to running traditional ads, they launched an insightful podcast about the future of work. Their content resonated, and as a result, their listeners associated Slack with innovation, productivity, and smart conversations.
Dell took a similar approach when facing a branding challenge after the merger with EMC and VMware. Dell needed to shift prospects’ perception from a hardware company to a leader in digital transformation. What did they do? They launched Trailblazers, a podcast hosted by Walter Isaacson. It wasn’t a sales pitch disguised as content; it was a real, professional show that built credibility and trust.
“You're not just competing with other marketers. You're also competing with YouTube, Spotify, TikTok, Instagram, television, radio, emails, Slack...” - Steve Pratt
Is Steve Pratt anti-advertising? No. But he emphasizes that we have to work harder than ever to earn our customer’s time and attention. The “Earn It” approach champions old-school, long-term relationship building, at scale in the digital age.
His expertise comes from years of producing world-class content—the type people actually want. Steve ran a content innovation lab at CBC and then co-founded Pacific Content, one of the world's first branded podcast agencies. Pacific Content served clients like Ford, Audible, BMW, the New York Times, Slack, and more. In 2019, it was sold to Rogers Sports & Media.
Today, through The Creativity Business, Steve helps companies develop differentiated content and marketing strategies that earn, rather than interrupt, attention.
Ready to see real results from your marketing efforts? This episode will inspire you to rethink your approach and create content people want to spend time with.
Connect with Steve Pratt
More About Today's Guest, Steve Pratt
Steve Pratt is the author of Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers and the founder of The Creativity Business, which offers speaking, workshops, and consulting to help companies develop differentiated content, marketing, and messaging that earns attention.
Steve is also the co-founder of the world’s first branded podcast agency, Pacific Content, named one of Entrepreneur’s 100 Brilliant Companies. Pacific Content worked predominantly with US-based brands, including Ford Motor Company, Audible, BMW, the New York Times, Dell Technologies, Face- book, Rocket Mortgage, Slack, Shopify, Zendesk, Morgan Stanley, Charles Schwab, Prudential, Adobe, and Atlassian.
Prior to embarking on his entrepreneurship journey, Steve was the director of digital audio at the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation (CBC), where he ran a content innovation lab, launched one of the world’s first legal music podcasts in 2005, and grew a highly engaged online community at CBC Radio 3.
Steve originally learned how to earn attention by producing television, working in genres ranging from music to children’s programming and entertainment journalism to local news.
Steve lives in Vancouver, Canada, with his wife, Debbie, and three kids, Cedar, Dawson, and Charlotte.
Mark Drager: Steve, if we had to apply the core principles from Earn It, specifically to help us sell more, where would you suggest we start?
Steve Pratt: I think it's through thinking through the lens of attention first. In some ways, I think when we think about selling, that's kind of like the last piece, right? Like, that's the win. You're done—well, you've sold. I mean, I know there's more after that with lifetime value and returning sales and all that sort of stuff, but we kind of jump to the thing that we want first as the outcome. To be able to even get to the point of having a sales conversation, you have to earn your way into somebody's time and attention.
It's really, really hard to get in there these days. I don't think it's ever been harder to get inside somebody's permission zone of time and attention. So the book, for me, is the starting point of saying you actually have to make something that people actually want to spend time with. After they've spent time with it, they have to be like, "That was time well spent. If I had to go back in time and travel back in a time machine, should I spend time with this?" You would say, "Yes, that was a great decision. I would do it again."
Because sales are not made in single interactions for the most part. If you want to build trust, build a relationship, and have somebody become a customer, trust comes from proving yourself and creating value over and over again. Thinking about this idea of attention first and creating value for the person you're trying to reach and connect with is not only unusual but almost imperative for people to think about.
Mark Drager: And so one of my go-to moves, of course, having been in marketing and advertising the last 20 years, is to think, "Okay, we need to get more attention. We can make stuff and hope people find it." It's a bit like walking through a forest, posting a printed poster, packing it onto a tree, hoping people just kind of come across the poster and say, "Oh, this is perfect for me." Of course, we know that doesn't work. So the go-to moves for most people are, "We're just going to buy the attention." Like, "We're going to put ad spend behind it. We're going to target our audience. We're going to buy media placement—Facebook ads, YouTube ads, programmatic ads. We're going to buy billboards. We're going to sponsor an event. We're going to wine and dine people." We're going to put spend behind it because that's the best way to make sure that our message is dropped in front of the right type of people at the right time. That's my playbook. That's many, many people's playbook. That is not what you suggest in the book. So why is the thought of taking out ads—here's a quote: "Ads do not deserve attention by default." Why is that?
Steve Pratt: I think because ads are not what people are asking for. It doesn't mean that all ads are bad. I should say that out of the gate, I'm not anti-advertising. I think, by its very nature, if you think about the way ads work, we're choosing to consume something. It could be a YouTube video, it could be a podcast, it could be listening to the radio, whatever you decide. I've chosen the thing that I want to consume, and then I'm interrupted with something that I did not ask for, with a message that is not something that I'm necessarily interested in. It's not something that is for me. It is something that is from a company trying to convince me to do something. It's a transactional piece that's put in there. If I look at all the things that we have built up as kind of defence mechanisms to avoid the things that we don't want, consumers have never been more empowered to bypass all these things. We have ad blockers. We have all sorts of privacy settings. We have skip buttons. We're paying for subscription services where you can't even reach people with an ad anymore. We're very smart about avoiding things that we don't want.
And so if you actually want to get the time and attention that you're seeking from people, you have to be exceptionally interesting and valuable. I think that would be the lesson for ads. If I were going to do—and I'd be like, "Make something that people appreciate spending time with." This is the part I find, again, I know this is really obvious and maybe biased, but when you take a really big zoom out and you think about a company spending money on an ad, I find it interesting to say, "Okay, you're paying money to interrupt people in the middle of something they like, and you're paying to put something that they don't like in front of them in the hopes that they're gonna like you more and become a customer." That used to be the default—the cultural norm that we had to accept that if we wanted free TV shows or free music on the radio, that's the deal we bought into.
But because we're not in that era anymore with the internet, it just doesn't seem to be the best strategy for me anymore. It's like sub-1% success rates on all these paid media campaigns in the digital space. Why not be the thing that people actually like spending time with, I know that sounds so obvious, but you could just make things that people like spending lots and lots of time with, and where they're really happy to hear from you and they welcome you into their lives and give you lots and lots of time and attention. It sounds really obvious, but that's not the way that we operate because it's incredibly hard. It takes an incredible amount of time, thoughtfulness, skill, and it's expensive and challenging. Truthfully, right? It requires patience, and we also don't have that. There's a lot of desire for short-term, urgent results, to just get that sale in before the end of the quarter. Drive short-term ROI immediately. There's a lot of incentives to do things that people don't like. But if you think about human nature and how you are as a consumer—patience, trust, creating value first—those are all the things that actually work in the real world that I think we can embrace a little bit more of.
Mark Drager: Well, I'd like to spend a little time talking about work because you do point out something—you have a thought that's really interesting. So if we take a step back and we look at all of the studies, advertising does work. You know the old saying, "How many times do you have to have a touch point with a client before they're aware of you? How many reach-outs do you have to do before they'll take the call?" We know that repetition, and it's been studied, repetition does work. It makes you more memorable. It helps create a stronger brand recognition in terms of colours or naming, and it will help with brand recall. It may even help with consideration. And so they've done studies where they've had people come into a classroom. I'm going from memory here, from Jonah Berger's book—one of his books, but you referenced it in your book, and listeners we had on the podcast as well. So you can go back and listen to Jonah Berger's episode, but in one of his books, he references a study where they had people come into a classroom and then sit down, and then many, many later, people would be asked to look at photos and try to recognize someone. And just on a single interaction, they recognize someone. But if someone came in multiple times—a stranger came in multiple times—there was a stronger recognition there. So we know repetition works, but as you point out, repetition working and having people know you doesn't mean they're actually gonna like you. It doesn't mean they're actually gonna trust you or even want to buy from you. You may just be actually annoying.
Steve Pratt: Yeah, if you show up all the time and every single time, you may annoy people, and that's what they're gonna think of. They will remember you, but just not for the right reasons, right? But when you make things that people really enjoy spending time with, when you actually think about creating value for the people you're trying to reach proactively, you can do the exact same thing, but just much, much more effectively. So I used to have a podcast company. It was like the first podcast company that worked exclusively with making shows with brands to try and help brands think and act more like media companies. And we got just incredibly lucky. Our first customer ever was Slack in the early days, and their CMO was this brilliant guy named Bill Macaitis and just immediately, I just learned so much from working with him on the Slack podcast, and he talked about these brand touchpoints and how important it was.
They knew how many brand touchpoints it would take for somebody to become a Slack paying customer or to sign up for a team, and it was probably somewhere between like 10 and 20 or something like that. And having a content strategy, you could put those people on a schedule of having phenomenal brand touchpoints like you put out a podcast every two weeks, there's a new episode, and the goal was to blow people's minds with something that was amazing, and surprisingly, not about Slack—something that came from Slack, that showed you who they were in their voice and their tone, but it was not trying to sell you on anti-email, pro-messaging, anything like that. They made a show about the future of work, and it was just a super interesting show that sounded the way it felt like to use Slack. And to me, that was like, the brilliant thing is, like all the points you make about repetition—bang on. But if you had a choice of saying, "Would we like to repeatedly annoy people, or would we like to repeatedly blow people's minds with an amazing, surprising experience?" Or, like, "Wow, that was amazing. I mean, I should tell other people the show, it's so good and I can't believe they didn't, you know, pull a bait and switch and turn it into an infomercial at the end," that stuff's sitting on a platter. It's very easy, if you can actually get the creative courage to be able to be that generous, people will welcome you into their time and attention on an ongoing basis.
Mark Drager: Just to hit the point home, here's a little bit. You know, if you're in the Toronto area, there's a jeweller that is, I think, a privately held company.and this is my opinion, but I don't know if you know Spence Diamonds. Spence Diamonds has been running television or radio commercials for maybe 20 years now, 25 years, and they are the most overplayed, most incredibly annoying, in my opinion, and the opinion of my wife and the opinion of most people. I know that when the radio—when these commercials come on, we change the station. And they have so much coverage on the radio that often, if you change the station, you will change to another station. And they will also be playing a Spence Diamonds commercial. And they have frustrated me and annoyed me for so long that even the voices of the people drive me crazy, and I will refuse to ever shop at that place because for the last 20 years of my life, they've been driving me absolutely crazy. I don't know if anyone else about it, but I like deep in my bones, I don't like it so much.
Steve Pratt: I love it. So you're like, "This is literally like, you're the case study right now for me, for all the things that we don't like about advertising," right? Like, just listen to the annoyance in your voice. For 20 years, you've been doing this, "I will never shop with you." And you know, I have a question I like to ask all the time: when you're making things and you're putting these things out there, asking yourself the question, "Would I tell other people about this if I didn't work here?" Like, "Is it so good and so interesting that I would talk to other people and recommend it or talk about it because it was interesting if I didn't work here?" 99% of marketing does not pass that test, right? But that's what we actually all want. We all want people to tell other people about it. You know, the Jonah Berger stuff again, like word of mouth is the best way to get new customers to buy things because coming from a trusted person in your life that's telling you rather than you talking about your own company. I think being different and being interesting and being generous—things like that. So I love it. I just love it. I love hearing the emotion in your voice.
Mark Drager: I'm reading the book. And I literally wrote down Spence Diamonds, and I was like, "Maybe I'm gonna get sued for this." But again, this is all in my personal opinion, and other people must love them because they've been in business for a very long time. And I'm sure for a certain type of person, they just love it. But, but not for me.
Steve Pratt: You know, the thing is, I guess for me, like, I think the opportunity—and I don't know them—but if you think about a diamond company or something like that, or a jewelry company, I always just think of, like, what's the show that you could make on your own terms? That would be something that people would actually want to spend time with? Like, why would they not make a show about what great relationships look like, you know, or something that I'd be like, "Oh, that's surprising." I know why they're making it, but it's not about them. It's a show for me that I'm super interested in, if I care about relationships—how to have a great marriage, or, I don't know, whatever it is—you might change your opinion about them if they actually made a really good show, instead of peppering you with things that you can't stand over and over again, right? Wouldn't it be interesting if they—if there's no branding on it, and you didn't know who it's from, and then turns out it was them, you're like, "Oh, what?"
Mark Drager: That wouldn't cause me pause. They could win me back. And, you know, it's funny, I was talking with another company yesterday, and they are struggling with the idea of whether they should go through a full rebrand because of some negative reputation, some of the fact that they haven't really—they have multiple products, and they're deciding to go all in on one, but it's kind of different from where they started. And they're thinking like, "Oh, do we rebrand? Do we launch something new? You know, how do we go about this?" And I said, "Listen, you have a few choices." And I don't know if, Steve, you've been following along with the Jaguar stuff that's been happening, but you know, Jaguar had a legacy brand, and it had fans, but those fans didn't want to buy the vehicles. Well, why didn't they want to buy the vehicles? If we go back six or seven years, they decided to move away from performance, move away from specialty, move away from luxury, become mass markets, start doing SUVs. They diluted their tire brand promise, so the hardcore people didn't want to buy that.
Then they looked at the sales that were falling off and went, "Oh, well, sales are falling off. People must love or get a new fund. Exactly. Better, better, better. Change everything." So what do they do? They go all in on electric. Well, I mean, I will give them some benefit of the doubt. The car industry, you have to plan five to seven years ahead. People were making decisions a few years ago where it looked like electric's going to take off. It's clearly not—they're going to go electric. Let's come up with a brand new brand. So out of the three options, right? Like, "Hey, let's hold on to our brand, but actually create something people want." That's option one: "Let's actually make something that Jaguar lovers want to buy." Well, no, let's not do that. Option two: "Hey, let's come up with a brand new car, a brand new strategy, and a brand new thing, and just simply put that under a brand new brand, and then, you know, push it back to let Jaguar become a licensing thing, like put it on keychains, and just stop making cars." But they chose the middle path, which is to annoy and destroy everyone who loved them and create something brand new that the brand doesn't carry over to.
And so I'm left scratching my head, but where I'm going with this is, "Hey, you know, maybe, maybe if this diamond company or whatever actually created something that people wanted, we would be more open to that. Like, let's actually just create stuff that people want and that people like, rather than going, 'Hey, how do we scratch everything, throw everything away, and start something new?'" I believe that you can have your audience come on that journey with you. I think that's the thing you can actually do.
Steve Pratt: I think there are good examples of companies that have evolved and had to change their brand perception and done it really, really well. Like, we were working with Dell Technologies when, like, when Dell merged with EMC and VMware and a bunch of other companies a number of years ago, it was a new entity, right? Like Dell was kind of associated with laptops and servers and desktops and things like that, but this combined group of companies wanted to be known for digital transformation expertise, and they really understood disruption and how to help companies avoid their company or industry being Ubered in whatever their industry was. So they had a brand refresh on this, and one of the pieces was a content strategy.
They knew their audience were these C-suite executives who were going to make big decisions around like hiring Dell to work in a digital transformation strategy. And they knew that this group of executives did not want like listicles and tips and tricks and shallow stuff. They wanted meaty stories from people who had been in their shoes—other C-suite executives who had faced the tough challenges that they were all facing in their industries. And it was almost like a content strategy on a plate. Like, "Okay, well, let's go tell those stories. Let's go find the stories of all the different changes that have happened in a particular industry."
And we talked to all the people who were there and talked about how they made decisions at these forks in the road with their industries. So we made this show called Trailblazers, and every episode was a different industry, like the airline industry or the streaming industry or the photography industry or whatever—here's your episode. So every episode of it, new people keep coming in because their episode exists, right? And there are two really interesting choices they made. One was, who's going to be the host of the show? It could have been Michael Dell. Emil, probably a very obvious choice. He's the founder, the CEO, very well known. Could have had anybody do it right in the garage, right? Yeah, right, where you started, right, in the garage. It would have been an amazing story. And this team was really, really brave.
They were like, "You know what our job is? To get people to listen to the show, not to have it be something where they think it might be kind of like a Trojan horse, where it looks like a show, but it's actually an infomercial for Dell." And so they're like, "Who could we get that is not a Dell employee to host this show?" That would signal, "This is a real show with real value for these C-suite executives." And like, "Oh, how about Walter Isaacson, the guy who wrote the Steve Jobs biography and the Elon Musk biography and, you know, Da Vinci and all these other things? Just an amazing, amazing, incredible journalist and biographer." And we reached out to him, and he said, "Yes." He's like, "Okay, so Walter Isaacson's hosting the show." It's like, unbelievable. It's a great show. And then the last piece—if you go and look at the podcast art for the show Trailblazers with Walter Isaacson, there's like a really important thing that is not on the podcast art. There's no Dell logo. It's just a real show, and it's in the metadata. They're not hiding it like they're the publisher from Dell Technologies, but it signals, "This is a real show that is worth your time and attention. We're acting like a media company, and we're not putting a bunch of interruptions in saying we stand for digital transformation. We stand for digital transformation in a single listen." So they had it, they did research on it with like a split group of a control and exposure group. This one— the exposure group listened to a single episode of the show, and then they asked the two groups the same questions, and the group that listened to one episode knew it was Dell, liked Dell more, and associated Dell with expertise and disruption and innovation and digital transformation, and wanted to hear more episodes. It's just like, Matt, like it just sounds really obvious: if you make something people like and they get value out of spending time with you, they're gonna like you more. Like, this is not rocket science. They're gonna want to spend more time with you if you do something that's worth spending time with. And they did a really, really good job with that brand pivot. You know—
Mark Drager: I love that case study because, as we're talking about all these things, I know because I think these questions all the time in my head, I'm thinking, "How is doing this gonna even help Dell? How is this even gonna work?" Right? It's such a soft KPI. It's such a soft outcome. I mean, I want leads, I want sales, I want revenue, I want short-term gains. I want all of these things. But the reason I love that story is, as a Brand Builder, I always encourage my clients to think about increased consideration, and I use those words very carefully because how much is it fair to ask of a given tactic or a given strategy or a given campaign? What do we want? Like? Ideally, we pick an audience, we show them an ad. They immediately love the ad. I mean, they click on it, they go to the landing page, they go to your sales page, they look at the phone number, they fill out a form, and they let me give you my credit card—I am ready to buy right now. But we know that the idea of dropping the ad, getting them to a page, getting them to take action in a single step, is not something that has been very possible. Maybe at one point it was possible, but not really. I mean, it just takes so many touch points.
It takes so much time, so much consideration, to be able to encourage people to move forward, especially in B2B, especially in complex situations, or anything that's consultative-based. And so we know it takes time. So if we can have our prospects or our referral sources or our past clients increase consideration for whatever we're doing next to me, that is a win that is like a very tangible, real thing. I'm not going to sell you on this touch point or once or twice, but I'm going to at least plant the seed and have you start to consider our products or our services more. And then we can allow the lead generation channels, the sales channels. We can allow all of the other professionals and all of the other systems that we built into our entire sales process or funnel. We can allow them to do the work. But when it comes to retargeting or keeping in touch with people over a six-month, nine-month, 12-month period, having people who only purchase from you once every year or two years—having that, having you stay top of mind—to me, is not a sales process. It's what you're describing, which is continually staying in front of people with really high value or really great content.
Steve Pratt: Now it's like, you know, when you think about all these other pieces you're paying to reach other people's audiences, you're renting somebody's audiences for very short periods of time. If you make something that's really valuable that you own, you're building an audience that you own, and over time, that means getting bigger and bigger. And those people have opted in and said, "I'm welcoming you in. I look forward to hearing from you more." Where I don't have to pay to reach people and start at zero every single time I want to do it by paying for somebody else's, you know, time and attention. And the neat thing about—when you talk about increasing consideration, the thing I think is an underused metric is time.
If we think about particularly different forms of rich media, you can get a lot of people's time and attention if you do something well. And I think when you think about consideration, it's like, how much time did they spend with us, and how much time are they spending with us on an ongoing basis. And what does that mean for consideration? If I spend tiny chunks, like three seconds of a 30-second commercial before I skip because I don't like it, or in a podcasting universe, honestly, if you make a good show, you can get 85 to 95% completion rates on a half-hour episode over and over and over again, where, if you're putting out a six, eight, or 10-episode season or something like that, you're getting hours of people's time with your brand in their ears in a very intimate setting. That changes consideration in a really big way. And I don't think people give that the volume of time spent enough credibility or importance.
Mark Drager: I would totally agree. I mean, on the articles that we write on behalf of our clients, we look at time on page, time on site, of course. But you know, if we see that, we can average—I remember one client where we were averaging 12 to 13 minutes per user on an article. Now, people would go, if you're thinking about an article as like a blog post, ours tend to be 1,200, 1,500, 1,800 words, fairly in-depth, written in a way that's scannable, written in a way that people can choose what parts they want to dig into. But some clients we or prospects we would speak to—1,800 words like we write like 300-word things. No one has attention, no one wants to read. And we go, well, like for this one client, we tend to average six and a half minutes. This other client, we average 13 minutes. Like people are willing to consume. I mean, unless they're just opening the window and walking away for a coffee and confusing me, like confusing our data. But we see it time and time again. But even if you're listening to this and you have a team or you have an agency that's helping with advertising, these theories, these approaches, can be brought into your advertising. A year ago, if I can share this story, a year ago, we went through a full market research study on behalf of a client, and we broke out all of their different—this is for a professional association, a membership-based professional association.
We broke out all of their different members into close to 60 different segment types based on how they might consider themselves. So you might consider yourself based on your maturity or your age in the practice or the group. You might consider the type of practitioner you are, the type of specialty you have, whether you're practicing or non-practicing, whether you're in leadership or not, whether you're in a public setting or a private setting—there are all these different ways. We found 60 different combinations.
We went and interviewed 24 members and non-members who crossed off multiple pieces based on gender or age, based on sexual orientation, even just—we crossed everyone off. And then we asked them all of these hard questions, and they gave us all the answers. So in the following year's campaign, we sat all of the leadership down, all of the board members down. We brought in members, and we interviewed them in long-form documentaries, and we asked them to respond to all of these questions—people want to know this. "Tell us the answer to that." We created a five and a half-minute—it's technically an ad—a five and a half-minute video of real people answering the questions that people want to know, cut into, you know, we covered off all this stuff. And we put it into a YouTube campaign. And over the course of a four-day period, we had 120,000 views. We had a fairly strong retention rate. But the real story I'm going here with is on a five and a half-minute ad. I don't know, Steve, how many YouTube ad placements you run, but that's skippable in the first four seconds. We had a 20% completion rate.
Steve Pratt: It's insane. It's amazing.
Mark Drager: And so I'm going to my client, and we were showing them this, and we said, "Guys, here's what we did. We asked people what they want to know, we interviewed you, answered the questions, and we put it into a documentary-style video, and then we paid for placement." I mean, of course, it's targeted placement, but that means that—24, 25,000 of these views over a four-day period of this really targeted micro-campaign—they were willing to watch a five and a half-minute ad.
Steve Pratt: Yeah, it's funny, you know, like it reminds me. So there's two things, I think. One, a great example of this—I worked with Red Hat at this podcast company, and they had this brilliant strategy of doing audience research, or they would go to conferences, and they had this booth that they would set up called "Comics and Coffee." You'd get a coffee and someone would draw your caricature while they asked you questions. And it was the same thing: content strategy on a plate directly from the mouths of the people that you want to reach. Like, I love that you did that. I think it's super smart education. And like, answering questions that people don't know the answers to is brilliant. And then, on the depth of attention, this guy, Tom Webster, who's an amazing podcast researcher—he's a long-time media researcher, and he works at a podcast company called Sounds Profitable.
That's kind of like the trade association for podcasting. And as I interviewed him for my book, he talks about this, and I just thought the way he framed it was so lovely. He said that if you look at our attention spans, everybody says we have no attention spans, but we will binge an entire Netflix series in a night. It's not that we have short attention spans; we have high-quality filters. We don't suffer through crap. And if there's something that's good and that is worth our attention, there's lots of attention to be had. If you're doing stuff that isn't getting any time and attention, I would say you probably have a quality problem—that you're not actually providing something that people are interested in, or the thing that you're putting in there isn't very good or isn't very useful. There's a totally different mindset to actually get all the depth that you're seeking. And your example is just brilliant. I love it.
Mark Drager: You remind me of something I said many years ago. I probably haven't said this in the last decade, but there used to be a time in our agency where we produced—means we produced some pretty corporate stuff. I mean, like, you have a quote in your book here that I love, which is, like, "This is a side note: copying what's popular is boring. Being safe, generic, or corporate is boring. Talking about yourself, your company, or your products and services is boring, and boring earns zero attention. If you want to earn attention, embrace the philosophy of doing the opposite." And that pains me a little bit because if we go back about a decade, we did a lot of corporate boring stuff. I mean, there's no way around it because we did a lot of internal communications. We did a lot of CEO talking heads. We did a lot of that type of work. And I started our agency in 2006, so if you go back to that world, it was, you know, corporate video was—since 1982 ABC Corporation has been helping people with that type of stuff but—
Steve Pratt: The person like a suit perfectly lit at their executive office—
Mark Drager: Yeah, they would take three steps and then sit down on the edge of the desk, you know, like, and be like, you know, and we would have—we would make sure that right of camera had copy space so we could fly bullet points in. And that's—
Steve Pratt: Opening up a manila folder with a report in it. Oh, this is interesting.
Mark Drager: Yeah. But so the thing that I used to say to clients, though, is like, "Listen, but they pull something out of thin air. You could be—you can be the association of steel producers or something, right?" Like, I'm making that up, but you could be that association, and we could produce an amazing project for you, an amazing video. But I used to say, "No one watching this is going to go, 'Wow, that is a really good promotion for a professional association,'" or, "Let's say that you are a medical practice or something, they're gonna go like, 'Wow, that is like the best promotional video that I've seen from any medical practice. You are the best medical practice out there.'" No, they're gonna compare you to television or Netflix or YouTube, like people compare your content to everything they watch and consume. And so the bar isn't, "Are we better than our competitors in content?" It's not whether we're better; you know we are. We happen to be the best medical professional association promotion, like, like, nobody is going to consume this stuff. Like nobody cares about it. And this applies to your blogs. This applies to your content. This applies to podcast or LinkedIn or what have you. It applies to everything we like to think as producers that people are going to carefully segment out. You know, you're going to go to a conference and the food is really shitty there, but you're going to be like, "Well, this is the best food I've had at a conference." No, you're going to like, it's just shitty food, right?
Steve Pratt: I think the piece that everybody you know—I think you've done a good job explaining it, but like the one additional point is people have finite attention. There's a finite amount of time every day that you're gonna be able to pay attention to things. And you are competing with everything else. You're not competing with other marketers. You are, but you're also competing with YouTube, Spotify, TikTok, Instagram, television, radio, emails, Slack, eating, time with your family, sleep. Like, when you realize that's what you're competing against, that's when you realize the bar is high, and you better make something really awesome, or you're gonna end up in the ignored zone. And again, when you're talking off the top about, like, the books about unconventional strategies, I feel like it also could have been called "unpopular strategies," because no one wants to hear that, just like no one wants to hear you have to do harder work to make better things and compete with every TikTok video and every Netflix series to get people's time and attention. Unpleasant but totally true, like that. Actually, the way things work, and the more you embrace it and being like, "Let's knock this thing out of the park and do something great," maybe that means we do fewer things, and that the things that we do are going to be really, really special, because making a bunch of mediocre, predictable, boring stuff at high volume is just going to get ignored. It'll be a waste of everybody's time and money.
Mark Drager: Okay, so I already know that the critics are going to say, "That might be great for Tesla or Coca-Cola or McDonald's or Nike or any of the big brands. We are not a big company. We're a small company. We're a medium company. We're owner-managed." And so people are going to say, "You know, this doesn't work. The unit economics—it's just too slow, it's too expensive. It's non-scalable. It doesn't actually lead to direct sales. It doesn't actually lead to business growth. It's hard to build attribution models to suggest that if I have to put half of my marketing budget into doing this type of thing, or going to a trade show, or actually meeting with clients where I can shake hands, why would I do this?" So what would you say to all of those very real things that I'm sure you've spent a career hearing?
Steve Pratt: Yeah, so great job. You've kind of listed like 8,000 reasons why the book is garbage, but—
Mark Drager: It's not from research; it's from being agency-side for 20 years.
Steve Pratt: Totally. So it's funny—I don't think this stuff has to be big budget. Like, you can be very creative and very brave at no cost. There’s this cereal company in the UK called Surreal. I’d never heard of them. Someone sent me something from the least creatively interesting place on Earth—LinkedIn. I got a post—word of mouth: "Check out this post." And I go in, and it’s a thing saying, like, "Attention, we are a cereal company. We are not a cat food company. Please stop assuming we’re a cat food company." And I was like, "Okay, you win. Why are you being confused with a cat food company?"
They had a LinkedIn carousel of 40 pages. It was like a PDF that they’d made in Canva or Microsoft Paint or something like that—it would cost $0.00. And it was just clever. It was basically saying, "We post a lot of cat and dog pictures because they perform better than advertising for cereal. And now people think that we’re a cat food company. We’re not. We are a high-protein, delicious cereal company."
I went through 40 pages of this thing gleefully, and now I know who they are. And here I am, on a podcast, talking about this cereal company to you because they did something different. Whereas if they had just hammered me and followed me around the internet with high-protein cereal ads, I would not be talking about them here. And I’ll just go back to the very start and just say, if you don’t have attention, you have nothing.
All the other objections people might have—it’s like, you’ve got to start with getting somebody’s time and attention. If you can’t do that, everything else is for naught because no one’s engaging. Zero seconds, zero email opens, zero referrals—like, nothing. Zero clicks to your website. It starts with attention, and then you get to move down the funnel. You can do it cheaply.
I do it myself as an individual, single person. I write a newsletter, and stuff shows up on my doorstep all the time because I’m just sharing my thinking about what’s going on. There are countless examples of just thinking about how you can be generous at every scale imaginable. How can you create value for the people you are trying to reach, proactively? It will come back to you. There’s a very nice reciprocity, values-based approach to doing this—of giving, you know, kind of a gift that only you can give to the people you’re trying to reach. That will benefit you by benefiting them first.
Mark Drager: And so, if you're listening to this, I want you to imagine what your business could look like in 6-12 months if you actually earned people's attention instead of trying to buy it. Imagine your ideal prospects actively seeking out your content, sharing it with their teams, and reaching out to you because they see you as a thought leader in your space. Think about your sales team having warm conversations with people who already know, like, and trust your company before the first call.For business owners, this could mean becoming the go-to authority in your industry. For marketing leaders, it means better ROI on your content investments and actually building a sustainable competitive advantage. And for sales teams, it means having prospects who are already pre-sold on your expertise before you even reach out.These aren't just nice-to-haves – they're real business drivers that directly impact revenue, market position, and growth. And they're exactly the type of results that Steve talks about achieving in Earn It.But to wrap up this point, we've skipped over something critical that you've mentioned a few times. This requires what you call creative bravery. Can you tell us more about that?"
Steve Pratt: Creative bravery is the term we came up with at the podcast company for, "Are you going to make a real show?" Are you going to make something that stands out, that is worth spending time with, that is going to surprise people because of how good it is?
The higher you get on the creative bravery scale, the more attention you earn. And it starts sliding down where it’s kind of like, "Let’s have our CEO host a show and talk to our own executives about how great we are." Or, "Let’s make a TikTok series about our own products and services," or, "Let’s do customer interviews about how amazing their experience has been, and that’s the primary top-of-funnel piece."
Not many people voluntarily want to spend time with that stuff—that’s lower down the funnel. Think about this challenge: If I made something and I didn’t work here, is it so good that I would tell other people about it?
That’s creative bravery. And it almost always means doing things differently than other people are doing—doing something that stands out and differentiates you based on your unique strengths and who you really are as a company. Everybody has this. It’s like, "Look deeply in the mirror and think about what makes you different and how bold you might be able to be in creating value for other people that you’re seeking to reach."
Mark Drager: So just to wrap up, I do actually want to talk about the book itself and the audiobook, because the audiobook is like the most amazing podcast experience. And I would expect nothing less from someone who’s run, grown, and then exited from a podcast production company.
But the book itself reminds me of when I heard Paul McCartney talk about the care and effort that went into Sgt. Pepper’s, that went into the packaging, that went into the design, that went into the experience. And even when The Beatles released The White Album, each original issue was numbered, and they had to fight with the record label to put that much budget into the packaging. Because to the record label, it was like, "The music is the product."
And to The Beatles and to Paul McCartney, it was like, "The packaging was the album. It was the experience." The experience totally—this book that I’m holding in my hand is unlike any book that I’ve read. So, did you have to fight with the publisher for this?
Steve Pratt: You know, can I just say, I love that you noticed this? It makes me so happy to hear you say this. Like, the audiobook and the print book—if you’re writing a book about unconventional strategies and it’s about earning attention, you have to do the stuff that you’re talking about in the book, right?
So, for the audiobook, I got these two amazing people I used to work with, Pedro Mendes and Gaetan Harris, to actually design the audiobook like a podcast—with music and sound effects, breaking the fourth wall. And we had so much fun doing it.
And the print book—my publisher was fully on board with it. There’s a designer there named Peter Cocking, and he and I went back and forth on all sorts of different iterations of this thing, and he just knocked it out of the park. It was almost like—honestly, for me, I can say it was an amazing creative experience. For him, I don’t want to put words in his mouth, but to have an author come in and say, "Go nuts, like, push it further"—I don’t know if that happens all the time. And he just nailed it. I could not be happier with it. So, it makes me happy that you noticed it too. So, thank you.
