Pod Insights MarTech Podcast ™ // Marketing + Technology = Business Growth How Consumer Engagement Is Evolving About this episode Chief Marketing Officer, Scott Donaton, from Versus, an innovative entertainment and technology company utilizing proprietary AI for enhanced audience engagement, delves into the evolving landscape of consumer engagement. Discover how Versus gamifies content to transform passive interactions into interactive experiences, fueling fandom through engaging strategies. Gain insights on leveraging AI and interactive platforms to drive consumer engagement and brand differentiation. Explore the future of marketing in the digital age with Scott Donaton on this insightful episode. 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. Yesterday, Scott and I talked about fueling fandom and creating better advertising experiences, and today, we're going to continue the conversation, talking about how consumer engagement is evolving. All right. Here's the second part of my conversation with Scott Donatton, the Chief Marketing Officer at Versus. Scott, welcome back to the Martech Podcast.
1:59 Speaker 05 Thank you, Benjamin. Great to be back.
2:01 Speaker 04 Excited to have you back and to continue our conversation where yesterday we were talking about building fandom. And I like the metaphor that you used, which is a marketer's job is to create the campfire that people can gather around. And once they're sitting around the campfire, that's your opportunity to sell them some popcorn. You want to be additive, you want to be integrated and not disruptive. Let's talk a little bit about the consumer side of that. We can create the fire, but we have to be able to get someone to think our fire is going to be warmer than the one that's down the road. How is the way that consumers engage, they think about brands? How is all of that evolving?
2:38 Speaker 05 I like to say right now that I think engagement is the new acquisition. And what I mean by that is the media and entertainment industries have been so focused the last couple of years on this arms race to the bottom of performance, media-driven, audience acquisition at any cost, profitably or not, particularly in the streaming space, we saw this because they were being judged and valued based on how quickly those audiences were growing.
3:05 Speaker 04 Because money was free. You can raise a ton of capital.
3:08 Speaker 05 And it's not. It's not anymore. And what was happening anyway was we always knew it was a race to the bottom. So a couple of things happened. And again, it happened most prominently in streaming, but this is true of almost any media or entertainment company right now, is that the acquisition piece started to become more expensive, less effective, less efficient, harder to acquire audiences. And by the way, as a lot of these businesses, again, in the streaming space in particular, moved from being single revenue stream businesses based only on subscriber revenue into dual revenue stream businesses that also had advertising, guess what? To get advertising revenue, you need engagement. You need an audience that hasn't just subscribed to your service, but is actually watching
3:51 Speaker 05 it and watching a lot of it. So the whole mindset kind of shifted overnight. This happened when Netflix had their blip and announced a quarterly subscriber drop, which they've obviously More than made up for.
4:02 Speaker 04 A wonderful opportunity to buy the stock. Thank you, Netflix. Go on.
4:06 Speaker 05 Couldn't do it when I was at Disney. Can do it now, maybe too late. But essentially, the shift happened almost overnight at that moment. And it was a necessary and a positive one, which is the focus moved away from top line, audience growth at all costs into understanding that the only path to sustained growth and profitability runs right through engagement, loyalty, retention, reducing churn. So that has become the focus of all of these companies. And that's what's great. And it's not a coincidence, but it is true, is that everything that we do at Versus is all about working with companies in media and entertainment to drive engagement, drive retention, drive loyalty and drive revenue for them. But I know every conversation we have,
4:51 Speaker 05 this is the key metric that success is being judged on.
4:56 Speaker 04 Allow me to stand on my soapbox and howl at the moon for a second. And this is at the macro level. Money was free. The interest rates were next to nothing. It was easy to just throw money at the problem to acquire users. And eventually those are going to turn into revenue. And, okay, well, that went away. And now, as it turns out, you need to be able to find users, engage them, get them to buy products, and actually have them be profitable relationships. That's how business works, not to you, but to the moon. No shit, Sherlock. I know, we're all into this and I live in the suburbs of San Francisco and in Silicon Valley and like, it is the poster child of
5:39 Speaker 04 growth at all costs turning into, hey, we should start thinking about actually making profitable businesses. And here we are. Now you actually have to run a business that makes money, not just give $2 away to get one back. So how has that changed the relationship between companies and their consumers?
5:58 Speaker 05 Hopefully, because the only way to really drive engagement at the end of the day is to create a better product and a better experience that people want to spend more time with. So hopefully, the outcome, I don't know that we're fully there yet. This pivot didn't happen that long ago. But if you have to drive engage, as we just mentioned, acquisition, there's a lot of artificial ways to prop it up and boost it up, at least for a period of time. And there are some ways to do that with any part of a business to incentivize engagement. But at the end of the day, you deliver an experience that people want and want to spend time with, or you don't. And they have so many options right now. You know, we all know the behavior of if you're opening and closing streaming
6:42 Speaker 05 apps and you're not sure about, I think about 50% of people who turn on the TV don't know what they want to watch. If you know you want to watch the new episode of Game of Thrones, you're just opening the Max app and you're all good for that episode.
6:54 Speaker 04 Until they change the name of it again, but go on.
6:57 Speaker 05 Max, you meant, yes. The service currently known as Max. If you don't know what you want to watch, I think the average amount of time you have is something like 15 seconds to get someone to think that there's something on Peacock, or else they close Peacock and open Netflix. If it's not something on Netflix, they close that and they open Hulu, then they open Paramount Plus, and they open Disney Plus. So you've got to, if you're trying to drive engagement, reduce churn and increase loyalty and retention rates, you just have to deliver a better product. So my hope is that what's going to come out of this shift will be better products and better experiences for audiences, for fans, really.
7:37 Speaker 04 It goes into, and I'll use social media terms because I'm a tech nerd at heart, you need thumbs stop ability. And it doesn't matter whether it is in an advertising format. Let's say you're scrolling through Instagram, you need that one, I'm gonna make you stop and observe moment. Or if you're talking about streaming media, you need something that's going to be attention grabbing, that headliner, that attention grabber that's going to stop people. And to me, that makes sense from a business perspective. It also creates, I don't know, maybe A downturn or a dumbing down of culture where we're always trying to do the flashiest thing to grab someone's attention. So how do you balance when you're talking about trying
8:19 Speaker 04 to engage your customers to get their attention, to wave your hands, but not always be like, hey, the sky is falling, the house is on fire and do something that has perceived quality and meaning? How do you balance the need to stop a thumb with the hope to engage the brain?
8:37 Speaker 05 What we do versus in our whole theory is that you enhance the experiences that people already are telling you they love. So if I love a TV show that I'm watching or an article that I'm reading or a sports team that I'm following, if I have the chance while consuming content in that direction to also have that content become interactive, or I can weigh in with my prediction on what's going to happen next, my opinion on what just happened, my knowledge to show off in a trivia sense that I'm smarter and I know this area, this sport, this show, this movie better than anyone else. We all have those natural human behaviors that are already going on. And if you
9:17 Speaker 05 can give people the mechanisms to engage that way, that's a lot easier if you're taking something they already love and enhancing it than it is necessarily to grab their attention with something completely new. And I also think that if it's contextual and relevant to the content they're consuming. Now, this is not always going to be the case because I can think of one case, the New York Times, we know has had incredible success when the game front, we're all probably already tired of talking about what an amazing job they've done. And I'm one of those people who plays three to five games a day with the New York Times. That sounds like my boss is going to hear this and think I'm not working hard enough.
9:55 Speaker 04 You're the CMO, your boss already doesn't think you're working hard enough.
10:00 Speaker 05 It's a good point. But you know, look, Wordle, they fell into Wordle and God bless, I'm addicted to Wordle. It isn't connected to the core product of the New York Times, or maybe it actually is going to become the core product of New York Times. But things such as Timeline and the News Quiz are directly enhanced. Enhancing the brand and the experience I want to have with the brand. And that's what we do when we work with partners is we gamify the content that they're already creating to let audiences go deeper in expressing their fandom for that product, for that show, for that article, for that sports team, whatever it might be. And I think that that is often the best way to engage people. I always think it's kind of interesting when somebody tries to do it by bringing in something
10:44 Speaker 05 that maybe is completely unrelated to the purpose that someone came to that brand for in the first place versus I'm going to enhance the experience you came here to have.
10:56 Speaker 04 I'll go back to what I said, I think it was in yesterday's conversation. It's about having an integrated experience, about understanding who the consumers are, what their interests are, and building your brand into part of the ethos of the things that they care about. You know what did a great job of this? Yeti, right? Anybody that believes in the outdoor lifestyle, or maybe Stanley now is apparently the metal cup de jour, but that notion of this brand stands for high quality being outdoors, and they put themselves in places where the people who want to go camping or buy fancy metal coffee cups live. And I think they do a great job, and it's one of those brands that understood what they were there for, and then were able to integrate nicely.
11:40 Speaker 04 Last thing before I let you go, give me an example of a great brand who's doing a good job integrating into what their customers care about.
11:47 Speaker 05 I think that Elf Beauty is a brand that's actually done an incredible job of, in its voice that it speaks to its audience with, the respect it has for its audience, the sense of itself that it has as a brand, the channels that it markets on and communicates through, and really its bravery and its boldness, which are not words that I throw around easily with regards to brands often, but in some of the things they've done, including most recently, I can think of a partnership that they did with Liquid Death that was just a great example of how well they know their audience and what it's going to respond to. And I think it was about creating goth makeup looks to go with your Liquid Death consumption wherever that's happening.
12:28 Speaker 05 Barbie was such an overused example a year ago, but when you think about the willingness that brand had to basically defang all of the criticisms of it ahead of anybody being able to make those criticisms by addressing them head on in its content in the movie in this case, letting these girls talk about how outdated they thought it was or irrelevant they thought the brand was, or even the fact that the founder was a convicted felon. Brands have to be bolder about how they go to market. Sometimes that means being more willing to let go. In the case of media brands, letting go of their IP and their tight control over it a little bit because fans are going to remix it. They are going to make it their own. They are going to want to weigh in on what that content is. And rather than fight
13:10 Speaker 05 that, give them the tools to help them do it, whether it's confronting your negatives head on, or whether it's just being relentlessly true to who you are as a brand and how you speak to your audience regardless of the circumstances. Those are the brands that are winning and they should.
13:26 Speaker 04 Scott, I appreciate you coming on the podcast. Thanks so much for telling a little about how we can all integrate our brands into our customers' lives more effectively.
13:34 Speaker 05 Thank you, Benjamin. It was a fun conversation. I could go on for hours.
13:38 Speaker 04 And that wraps up this episode of the MarTech Podcast. Thanks for listening to my conversation with Scott Donatton, the Chief Marketing Officer at Versus. If you'd like to hear more from Scott, you could find a link to his LinkedIn profile in our show notes, or you could visit his company's website, which is versusgame.com, V E R S U S G A M E dot com. Just one more link in our show notes 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, M A R T E C H P O D, on Twitter, Instagram and Facebook, or you can contact
14:22 Speaker 04 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.
15:10 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.
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