Pod Insights MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth Fueling Fandom & Creating Better Advertising Experiences About this episode Chief Marketing Officer, Scott Donaton from Versus, an innovative entertainment and technology company specializing in transforming audience engagement using proprietary AI. Scott delves into the realm of competitive intelligence and marketing strategies, emphasizing the importance of understanding competitors to enhance your marketing business. Discover how engaging with perceived competitors can help identify your brand differentiators and elevate your marketing approach. Fueling fandom & creating better advertising experiences is the focus of today's discussion with Scott Donaton. Show NotesConnect With: Scott Donation: Website // LinkedInThe MarTech Podcast: Email // LinkedIn // TwitterBenjamin Shapiro: Website // LinkedIn // TwitterSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
Transcript 0:00 Speaker 00 The Martech Podcast is a proud member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. Looking to launch or scale your podcast? I Hear Everything delivers podcast production, growth, and monetization solutions that transform your words into profit. Ready to give your brand a voice? Then visit iheareverything.com.
0:25 Speaker 01 From advertising to software as a service to data, across all of our programs and clients, we've seen a 55% to 65% open rate.
0:36 Speaker 02 Getting brands authentically integrated into content performs better than TV advertising.
0:42 Speaker 03 Typical lifespan of an article is about 24 to 36 hours.
0:46 Speaker 01 If we're reaching out to the right person with the right message and a clear call to action, then it's just a matter of timing.
0:53 Speaker 00 Welcome to the Martech Podcast, a member of the I Hear Everything Podcast Network. In this podcast, you'll hear the stories of world-class marketers that use technology to drive business results and achieve career success. Here's the host of the Martech Podcast, Benjamin Shapiro.
1:15 Speaker 04 Welcome to the Martech Podcast. I'm your host, Benjamin Shapiro, and today we're going to discuss transforming audience engagement and the evolution of your customers. Joining us is Scott Donatton, who is the Chief Marketing Officer at Versus, which enhances entertainment experiences by leveraging proprietary artificial intelligence to gamify content across various platforms, transforming passive engagement into interactive fandom. And today, Scott and I are going to discuss fueling fandom and creating better advertising experiences. All right, here's the first part of my conversation with Scott Donatton, the Chief Marketing Officer at Versus. Scott, welcome to the Martech Podcast. Thank you, Benjamin. Great to meet you.
1:55 Speaker 05 Be here. Thanks for having me.
1:56 Speaker 04 Excited to have you here. Excited to talk about something that I actually have been working on all morning. We're making the migration. We're getting ready to go from being just a podcast to more of a media brand. We're creating video, spitting out other types of content and even potentially going live. Trying to think about better ways to build our fandom and create better experiences, something that you do on the advertising side. Tell me a little bit about your work and a little bit about versus as we get started.
2:24 Speaker 05 Sure. Yeah. And I love the context of what you're doing because I've always believed that no brand in the media space should define itself by a platform. First and foremost, there's an idea at the heart of everything you do and any way that you can deliver on that idea and serve that audience allows you to pivot. As you know, into any technology or changing consumer behavior. And that's what I've spent a lot of my career doing. And what I love about versus, and the reason I joined the company a few months back is that there's this real focus. We're B to B to C, but obviously any B to B to C company has to start with the consumer, the end user. And at the end of the day, what we are about is how do we make a more interactive, fun and rewarding experience for people's fans?
3:04 Speaker 05 And then that translates on the business side into them spending more time, coming back more often to those ecosystems and driving revenue, retention, loyalty. But what's really great about it and what I mostly love is in a way, it's not brain science what we do, but it was actually born of brain science, which is like a lot of great companies. I think we're all about taking existing human behaviors and giving people a way to express their feelings, their thoughts. And in the case of fandom, there really is proven research that when people love something, they want to be closer to it. They want to feel more connected. They want to feel more engaged. And that's kind of the itch that we scratched with versus, which is when you're watching a show and you think this is who did it.
3:45 Speaker 05 The butler did it. I think this person's going to break a record. I think, you know, talking about last night, the American league is going to win the All-Star game. And we give people an outlet to take what they know, to take things in trivia, to take their predictions, their thoughts, their opinions about the things they love. And we give them a way to express that fandom directly in the environments where they're consuming content.
4:06 Speaker 04 I had an epiphany yesterday that the television is dying as we know it. And hopefully that means that your home television, your big screen doesn't actually get pulled out of the wall. But the epiphany was whenever we have a babysitter, I've got two young children, four and seven years old, and they go to bed about eight o'clock and God forbid, my wife and I stay out past eight o'clock if we're going to dinner on a date night. So what are we doing? We're paying $25 an hour for a 20 year old to sit there and look at their iPhone and watch YouTube. We always say, hey, you're welcome to watch the television after the kids are asleep. They're like, no, thanks. I have my phone. Where's the charger? And their media consumption habits have changed so much. Where you mentioned things like the All-Star game and the Grammys or this show that you're watching.
4:51 Speaker 04 All of our media consumption is changing, not in terms of the device that we're using, but also the platforms we're going on. How do you think about building fandom and creating better advertising experiences as the younger generation seems to be moving away from not just traditional linear television, but even moving away from OTT and getting into more social media and user generated content as their primary source of entertainment?
5:20 Speaker 05 For us, we can work on any platform. Most of the consumption of versus games through our partners happens on mobile. That is the primary screen in most people's lives these days. And we can work with anything from, it could be print based content from a publisher site. It could be streaming content. It could be social search. We work with Microsoft Bing to gamify search results even. So we could just as easily work with Hulu or Netflix as we can with TikTok or YouTube. And in fact, by the way, what's happening now is YouTube is seeing more and more of those young audiences are starting to watch YouTube on their television sets and consume content that way. So I actually don't think the TV set experience is necessarily going to go away.
6:03 Speaker 05 I do know, and I spent four years at Hulu before I joined Versus, that everybody watches TV if they watch TV with a mobile phone in their hands right now, or they're just have the mobile, as you said. And they don't have the TV on at all. And we're agnostic to that. It doesn't matter where you're consuming the content or in what form, we basically reflect and mirror the content that you're consuming it in the environment you're consuming it. Now, to the other part of your question, which I think is a really important one, is that we've seen all of this incredible innovation in the last, whatever period you want to label it as. And in particular, if you think about Hulu is 15 years old at this point. Netflix is around the same as a streamer.
6:44 Speaker 05 And we've changed everything about how people consume content, except for the advertising experience. The advertising experience remains, for the most part, an interruptive, intrusive experience where a brand basically interrupts the content you're trying to consume and want to consume, waves its hands in front of your face and talks about itself. And we know that audiences don't love that. We've known that forever. Whether it's jokes from 40 years ago about people going to the bathroom or making a sandwich during air breaks, or as we started to have technologies such as TiVo and others that gave people the ability to bypass advertising, or now, obviously, all of the premium options for those who can afford them to delete advertising from their media experiences.
7:26 Speaker 05 Essentially, audiences have said over and over again that while they're okay with the fact that advertising subsidizes their media experience, they don't like the interruptive, intrusive nature of advertising. And I think that's where, not just us, but the entire industry has an opportunity, and maybe even an obligation, to try to redefine what that experience can be, so that you're still connecting brands to audiences, but you're not doing it in an interruptive and intrusive way, but a way that is seamless, a way that maybe even enhances the experience and adds value to it. And that can take a lot of different forms, whether it's seamless advertising built into the interactive content that we create,
8:06 Speaker 05 or whether it's more and more streamers and others working with brands to develop branded content where brands are actually telling stories people choose to spend time with versus running away for harm.
8:16 Speaker 04 You just succinctly described my entire company's pitch, not specifically for the Martech Podcast, but our parent companies. I hear everything and we build media brands for industry influencers and organizational leaders. And the whole pitch is, nobody wants to be interrupted. You can't just interject yourself into somebody else's audience. Like, we've got sponsorship spots in the Martech Podcast, so I'm kind of talking out of both sides of my mouth here. But if you really want to make a long lasting, big impact, you have to create content that your audience wants to get them to know you, to understand you, and eventually your products and services will come as a tailwind of that. Everybody has heard the saying that every
8:58 Speaker 04 company is a media brand, but companies aren't focused on building their media brand assets. They're focused on promoting their products and services. So what's the right way to build that fandom, to create an advertising experience that isn't, let's say, advertorial?
9:15 Speaker 05 Yeah. I've spent the last 20 years of my career at this point, a lot of those last 20 years focused on this question and helping brands create content that's worthy of people's time. And sometimes that was longer form content, documentaries that I've executive produced for BMW and KitchenAid and L'Oreal, among others. And sometimes that's shorter form and social content. But it's a really interesting thing because so many brands still fall back on the model that has admittedly worked for over 100 years now, which is an interruptive, intrusive model, even though the earliest days of radio and TV were not. It was brands presenting sponsorship roles, much more than it was commercial breaks. But I think what's interesting now is, on the one hand, no one thing replaces, for example,
10:00 Speaker 05 the TV commercials. So even as the TV commercial continues to decline in effectiveness and efficiency and desirability, brands are afraid to let go of it because it still works for them. It may not work as well as it used to, but there's no one mass thing that replaces that. Instead, there's a hundred smaller things. But I think if every brand begins with, what is my story? What is my why? What purpose do I actually play in people's lives? How can I express that in a way that... People might want to spend time with. Any brand can do that, and I think every brand should. And even the ones that kind of run away from it or think that they're in a low interest category where it might be hard to do that. You can always get to, if you focus not on the product and service that you make, to your point, but to the role you play in people's lives.
10:45 Speaker 05 There's usually a story behind that that's worthy of someone's time. You mentioned the word fandom. And what amazes me is sometimes when I talk about fans versus audiences, people get a little bit like, why are you using the word fans? And I was like, who wouldn't want their audience to become fans? In what world is it not a great thing to, instead of thinking about people as consumers or audiences, think of them as fans? Think of them as people who love something, who want to be closer to it, who want to engage with it more, who want to interact, who have thoughts and opinions? Who care?
11:16 Speaker 04 Who show up even when you stink? That's what fans do, right?
11:20 Speaker 05 Yeah.
11:20 Speaker 04 You have a Yankees hat on, I'm a San Francisco Giants fan.
11:23 Speaker 05 Oof.
11:24 Speaker 04 I'm a fan. They stink. I still show up. It's like in my nature now. It's gone past the point of current performance to historical meaning in my life and in my family.
11:35 Speaker 05 Exactly. Oddly enough, given that they didn't play yesterday, but I usually wear my Yankees cap. And I've had, unfortunately, plenty of opportunities the last three weeks, but I mostly make sure that I wear my cap the day after they lose a game versus when they're winning.
11:48 Speaker 04 Yeah, they've been pretty bad lately.
11:50 Speaker 05 They have.
11:51 Speaker 04 So how do you cross the chasm there? We're all trying to build audiences, get people to pay attention to us. Often, brands are starting with advertising. Hopefully, they're wising up and realizing that they need to actually create stories and content and media brands. And you want to turn those consumers from prospects to part of your audience and eventually into your fans. What bridges the gap between, as a brand, someone being in your audience to actually having some sort of fandom associated with your brand?
12:25 Speaker 05 It does start with that finding the story of a brand. And for me, with all respect to Simon Sinek and his famous start with why. TED Talk, I've used that as the basis for how I talk to brands for 20 years, which is when you find your why, you've usually found your story. I'll tell you a funny story. I was working with Johnson & Johnson several years ago when I was on the agency side of the business and went out with a TV show creator, a very famous show creator, showrunner, and a client from Johnson & Johnson, a marketing executive. And this showrunner asked the marketing executive at one point, what's a Band-Aid? And she said, what do you mean? And he said, well, if I was a Martian, I just landed here and I asked you, what's a Band-Aid?
13:08 Speaker 05 And she said, well, it's an adhesive bandage for minor wounds. And he said, no, it's not. It's the courage to try again. And he goes on to tell a story about falling off his bicycle when he was young and cutting his knee and going in and his mother washing the cut and putting the Band-Aid on and sending him back out and him getting on the bicycle again. And I think I just watched her eyes kind of go wide as this conversation happened. But when brands really start to think about why they exist and the role they actually play in people's lives, there's always a more interesting story that's not about the product they make and how much it costs and why you should try it. And there's an emotional connection. We know that as humans, we make sense of the world through story. And so I think it's about brands finding their story. And then the other piece of it is just, it's a little simpler in some ways,
13:52 Speaker 05 especially technology's making it easier. It's personalization and relevance and contextual advertising. And within even what we do at Versus Game, we deliver advertising directly as part of the game experience. And we have extremely high click-through rates compared to industry averages, 2.1% and higher. And that's because, in a way, we're not breaking any editorial integrity, but we're not drawing a false line between the content and the advertising. And in fact, the advertising is usually contextual and relevant to the content you've just consumed in the game you've just played. You may have read an article on USA Today about Lionel Messi and then been asked to play a game about Messi and then get served up an ad that Messi is starring in, for example.
14:36 Speaker 05 And so when you make that advertising messaging contextual and relevant and personalized to the experience people are having, they respond better to it.
14:47 Speaker 04 I'm still stuck on the what's a Band-Aid story, which I think is a wonderful way to frame the difference between describing your products and describing your story. And I think that's emblematic of what marketers actually do. And the irony there is it's the storyteller telling the marketer, here's how marketing works. And you then, just to sort of paraphrase, went into, well, but there's not just the story, there's the delivery dynamics. And you're telling me that it's not just about what your story is, but integrating it into the existing ad vehicles to start to extend the story and being contextually relevant and understand who the person is consuming the media. So when you're coming up with these stories that describe the purpose of the brand
15:32 Speaker 04 and going into our Simon Sinek why, how does Versus think about delivering that message in a way that is engaging, personalized, and driving those click-through rates and that engagement that you mentioned?
15:45 Speaker 05 I think the beauty of what we do, and because we are B2B, we are all about the success of our partners, whether that's Microsoft, the NFL, Disney, USA Today, across the board, as we work with media and entertainment companies. Everything we do is driven by the content they're already creating. And the beauty of even how we use AI is we're not using AI to replace human content creation. We're using AI to take the content that people are creating and enhance it. But everything we do is automatically contextual as a result. So if you're watching a TV show, we will ask you a question about, what do you think's going to happen in the next episode? Who's going to get a rose in the next episode of The Bachelorette? If you're reading an article about Emmy nominations coming out this morning,
16:27 Speaker 05 Versus is going to serve up a game about the Emmy nominations and whether you think The Bear or Abbott Elementary will win Best Comedy, for example.
16:36 Speaker 04 Hang on, Abbott Elementary, is that worth watching?
16:39 Speaker 05 Absolutely. It's amazing how well that both of them have done in terms of commercial and critical success. In some ways, they couldn't be more different. They come from the same parent company that I used to work at, and they both are cultural phenomenons of a different sort.
16:53 Speaker 04 It's funny, because as we're using those, I'll use The Bear as an example. Example, I love The Bear. I think it's one of the top 10 shows for me of all time. And I didn't even like season three. I thought it was a little one note and a little manic. I don't want to have any spoilers for anybody that hasn't finished. But it's one of those things where it is such a cultural phenomenon. And I feel like everybody kind of knows The Bear. And even if they haven't seen it or heard it, they kind of understand, oh, today's modern cooking show drama. But those moments are fewer and farther between. And when everybody is different and we're all watching a million different shows and Netflix has its algorithm. And maybe we pop into HBO every once in a while and we're mixing in YouTube. Like there's the Super Bowl, there's the Grammys, there's the Emmys.
17:35 Speaker 04 There's no universally watched media anymore. So that contextually relevant notion of marketing is not only with what you're delivering from your ad, but also what your targeting is. How do you think about matching not only the content you're targeting and the experience in a personalized fashion?
17:54 Speaker 05 What's great about us is we have a lot of zero party data, essentially intent driven first party data. People are telling us what they like, what they don't like, what they believe. And you know, if you and I were both even playing the same game on one of our partner's sites and you got a question right and I got it wrong, or there was a third person, friend of ours on the leaderboard, and that person just skipped the question because they weren't interested in the topic. We learn from that and we learn from everything people do. And the more we understand you and what you respond to, what you like and what you don't, the more personalized the experiences that we can deliver. And I think that's something that you're seeing every media company and every marketer try to do right now,
18:37 Speaker 05 which is the more you can understand what people like and dislike, the more you can serve them, things that are relevant and contextual and that they care about, and they will respond to those. I mean, I kind of hate how much I have now started clicking on certain things in my Instagram feed and buying them. I purposely actively avoided doing that for a long time because I didn't want to start being earmarked in someone's database. I was the kind of person who clicks on and buys from ads on Instagram. But the truth is now they've kind of got me and they I've got some of my favorite fashion designers and they'll suddenly pop a T-shirt and I'm like, now I have to buy that T-shirt.
19:12 Speaker 04 It's the only reason I go on Instagram these days. I used to be a regular social media user and I would post and comment and look for the dopamine of like, who likes my life? And now I'm like, that's silly and it's not healthy for me personally. Everybody has their own media consumption habits. I post photos of grapes that I'm growing in my yard because we're making home wine. And I don't even care who looks or likes or how much. And I basically use it to catalog what is happening in our driveway vineyard. So I have a record of it and it's kind of public record keeping. A little bit of it is like, this is my hobby. But I go on to consume the ads. I go on to be like, I could use some new clothes. I'm going to go check out Instagram and maybe I'll see some friends' pictures of their kids.
19:57 Speaker 05 Well, I was always the person, you know, I don't want to click on the sponsored link in the Google results. I don't want to click on the ad. And yet, as I have on some of these platforms, I suddenly find it's that weird way. This is going to really show my age, but like when we all first got iPods and you'd be listening, you'd be like, that's the 30th song in a row that I liked. And then you go, oh, right, this is my library I'm listening to. And in the same way, I think when advertising is done right, it starts to become so contextual and relevant based on information that you're sharing willingly and openly, obviously, in those cases. But it should start to become so relevant that all of a sudden in its way, even if it still appears in what we would call normally an interruptive format,
20:39 Speaker 05 it feels so personalized and contextual that it doesn't feel like it's interrupting the experience. But to your point, it's part of the experience and that's the beauty if we can erase that line.
20:50 Speaker 04 I'd say that's the thing that Meta did the best was it's not interruptive. It's integrated and you're in the existing experience and you're consuming content. And as you're scrolling through, you consume an ad. It doesn't stop you from seeing the picture that you want to see. It is in line in the feed, which I feel like is an enhanced version. You've got, going back to the sort of topic of fandom and advertising experiences. You've got a unique career experience where you have been a media man, a creator for a long time. And now you're working for a marketing company and you're a marketer as well, obviously as a CMO. Talk to me about the secret sauce here. Aside from versus, obviously there's your own way of doing this.
21:34 Speaker 04 For all of the marketers that are out there that don't have the media experience, what is the best way to get started? Or what is the one big gotcha that you have when you're trying to figure a way to integrate your brand more into media? As opposed to be more reliant on advertising?
21:50 Speaker 05 For me, and I've had, as you mentioned, a career that started as a journalist and became a media executive, then went to the advertising side of the business. I've worked in entertainment, now work in technology. I get to see that almost every job I've had has been very similar, which is it's about understanding what drives audiences, what they want. Whatever brand you're working at or a media company you're working at, who is the audience you're trying to reach? What is your purpose in their lives? What do they care about? And can you continue to create a product that basically becomes a campfire that they want to gather around and hear your stories? And that's kind of the path I've taken for almost any job I've had.
22:30 Speaker 05 I could argue that being the editor of advertising age and being the CMO of Hulu were the same job, which is what stories are we telling around our campfire that are keeping an audience coming to us and coming back to us? How are we fulfilling on the mission and the promise of the brand? I think my simplest definition of what a brand is has always been that it's a promise and the product either delivers on that promise or it fails to and people will know that. And so I think understand what promise your brand is making. Don't be tied to a specific platform, but be willing to be where they are. But really just figure out how to keep telling the stories around that campfire that people come to you for.
23:11 Speaker 05 You watch brands lose their way when they start to stretch into areas that they don't actually credibly belong in. And if you kind of just stay there and if you keep listening to your audience, make that a two-way conversation so that you can change as their needs and desires change. That to me is what it's about. It's build a campfire and keep people coming back to it. And then, oh yeah, sell them some popcorn while they're sitting around it because you have to monetize the attention that you get.
23:37 Speaker 04 I believe that we are going through a generational shift in the purpose and style of effective marketing. We've been doing it for the last 20, 25 years. We've gone through the rise and proliferation of connected devices. We all have our phones in our pockets and they're with us 24/7. And now there is a new wave of technology, this notion of artificial intelligence that is changing the role of a marketer. We went from being storytellers and media members and sipping bourbon cocktails while we figure out what billboards we should be putting up on what freeways, to being glorified
24:18 Speaker 04 database performance marketers. And now we're changing again. Now it's all about storytellers. People are getting tired of the ads. They're tired of disruption. And if you don't have a media strategy, you are a dinosaur. You are not going to last through the next wave of marketing. And that wraps up this episode of the MarTech Podcast. Thanks to Scott Donaton, the Chief Marketing Officer at Versus for joining us. Join us again tomorrow when Scott and I continue our conversation, talking about how consumer engagement is evolving. If you can't wait until our next episode and you'd like to learn more about Scott, you can find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or you can visit his company's website, which is versusgame.com, V-E-R-S-U-S-G-A-M-E.com. Just one more link in our show notes
25:03 Speaker 04 I'd like to tell you about. If you didn't have a chance to take notes while you were listening to this podcast, head over to martechpod.com where we have summaries of all of our episodes and contact information for our guests. You can also subscribe to our weekly newsletter and you can even apply to be a guest speaker on the MarTech Podcast. Of course, you can always reach out on social media. Our handle is @martechpod, on Twitter, Instagram, and Facebook. Or you can contact me directly on LinkedIn. My handle is Ben J. Shap, B-E-N-J-S-H-A-P. And if you haven't subscribed yet and you want a daily stream of marketing and technology knowledge in your podcast feed, we're going to publish an episode every day this year. So hit the subscribe button in your podcast app and we'll be back in your feed tomorrow morning. All right, that's it for today. But until next time, my advice is to just focus on keeping your customers happy.
26:14 Speaker 00 Thanks for listening to the Martech Podcast, an I Hear Everything production. Looking to launch or scale a podcast like this one for your brand? Then visit iHearEverything.com.
Next How Consumer Engagement Is Evolving Page updated November 7, 2026 · transcript and summary are machine-generated
