Afrotech is a global gathering where inclusive tech companies meet innovators. It's the only tech event you.
Need all year.
Get ready for Afrotech twenty twenty three in Austin, Texas, November first through the fifth. We built a whole temper you can use to help you get your employer to sponsor your trip and enjoy experiences built for every stage your career. Whether you're a college student looking for your next internship, or if you're work in a venture capital looking for your next business to invest in, and if you're looking for a co founder of a people that's join your team, there's no better.
Place to be.
The massive corporate layoffs of twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three have affected our community in a big way. An Afrotech wants to help you get back on your feet with skill development, making it easier to switch industries.
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In an afro tech you'll make connections to help you get your next opportunity. Visit afrotech dot com slash conference.
To learn more.
I'm Will Lucas and this is Black Tech, Green Money. Chaucer Barnes' Chief marketing officer of Translation Plus United Masters, the parent company of a war Rening creative agency, translation and artist services platform United Masters in creating a new normal for the way brands and creators enlikenment and trade cultural capital.
Chaucer applies tools and lessons.
From every chapter of his life as a media planner, brand strategist, creative director, partnership architect, and independent musician. Chaucer has said, in the early days of translation, people weren't talking about culture in the context of advertising. This interested me, so I asked, what has changed and what impact has embracing culture had on the metrics business cares about sales, and what impact has this focus had on culture itself.
Yeah, that's definitely true.
I mean I've been around a company for close to twelve years now, and when I say that, when I say, you know, culture wasn't mentioned in the in reference to advertising, it's because when we were saying it early almost Color twenty twelve, it felt really exceptional.
It was a moment. It was it was an.
Expression of differentiation at the time. The idea that you know, making people aware of these certain products existing at these certain price points, that these retailers had anything to do with the business of fandom or of social identity, How it's changed, and why it's changed. I guess I should start with is it's changed because people hit the ceiling
of growth and they felt it. They knew it, right, So you could look at that in the kind of individual cases of think about Budweiser, right, Budweiser at the time that they got into business with translation, they completely stalled out, Here's America's beer. Only one in three twenty one and twenty seven year olds that ever tasted America's beer. And so you have these huge, kind of ubiquitous brand expectations and this wilting undercurrent or sorry, this wilting audience
underneath that brand that just doesn't care. And so the sales, the metrics that they really cared about in that case, sales and their ability to move through various on premise off premise retailers, that was the forcing function that made them adopt new proxies for that success.
So it's not that the metrics change.
In other words, people to make beers still want to sell beer, people to make cars still want to sell cars, et cetera. It's that they see the proxy for that performance being better measured in adoption rate engagement rate. I mean, think about the idea of engagement rate as you know that came to popularity in the late or in the early teens, let's call it two thousand and eight to
twenty fourteen. Somewhere the entire advertising industry had come to maturity, full maturity, without any kind of notion of what consumers on the other end of that message do. An engagement rate was the first thing anybody started to measure. It was like, all right, so I did this, and then they did that, and they did that became so important because sheer delivery. Right, this is my impression load, this is my impression count. Okay, but how many people click?
Okay? But how many people took a step? Okay? But how many people shared?
That grammar of consumer engagement in the work that you put forward was all part of people having to come around to the fact that you can't win without creating a rational preference for your product, service, or your brand values. And you shouldn't be trying to do that in a direct response way. You should be trying to do that in a communal way. And then there was just evidence, it was just ample evidence everywhere that the things that were dominating pop culture were no longer the fruit of
a couple of gatekeepers. It was really an empowered populace. And so I think the confluence of all of those things have been a force and function for every single marketer to not get fired by appreciating that their job is not just to make everybody aware, their job is to drive affinity.
And then ultimately action.
You said a word, they're communal, and I think of a community in this way. So we've had this conversation a few times on this podcast where we've discussed the idea of if you're just directly trying to sell without having built a brand or community first, you might be successful, but it's not a sustainable way to build something. So what we've talked about is, if you can build your brand and build a community of people who will follow
you anywhere you can sell anything. Then what do you say to that concept?
Well, I do think that there are limitations on selling anything that are frankly shaped by your brand, Like the contours of your brand dictate what you can and cannot sell. I'm about to take my wife down to Nola to see what was supposed to be the last stop on a renaissance tour, and I can't imagine a bigger fan of Beyonce. To my wife, I know that they exist, right, but I can't imagine a bigger fan. Beyonce can't sell everything. She can't sell anything, and we've seen ample evidence of that.
Right.
Beyonce can move the stock ticket for LVMH, She's done it. But Beyonce can't get rid of at Ivy Park merchandise. Beyonce can't sell a twenty five dollar bikini for H and M, no matter how great she looks in it. I remember seeing when H and M and Beyonce got into business. We were still in midtown, and they had these beautiful, you know, out of home units and it's Beyonce laid out in a swimsuit, Like, who's.
Mad at that?
But the truth of the matter is that the brand that she has built and what it is that people are responding to, she is fulfilling a need. She is Princess Diana for this generation. And nobody wants Princess Diana to wear a twenty five dollar bikini. Nobody's influence When Princess Diana, where's a twenty five dollar bikini? Doesn't matter how good she looks that's not the point. The point is Tiffany and Beyonce absolutely h and M and Beyonce absolutely not.
And I think it's I think it is.
There is a there's a degree of elasticity that any brand, whether it's you as a person or you as a corporate giant with just this just a logo and a wordmark, there's a certain degree of elasticity that you can accommodate. And then where you see people go wrong is when they try to stretch beyond that and they either alienate the people that originally embrace the brand. I think we've
seen that. I'm sure your views will remember, uh, a certain beauty brand that came to market looking a lot different than the way that they grew up.
Right.
And then I also think that there is there is taste, right, so are there beyond taste? There is expertise, and someone's perceived expertise in a given space really licenses them to be a credence bearer for other things that they may
be selling or maybe just referring you to. But the but the corpus of what you're saying one agree with, which is take your audience everywhere you can by yourself, never let a platform, never let a third party be an intermediary in between you and your audience, and you will have not just fans, you will have customers, and you'll figure out from those customers what you are licensed to broke.
Her to them.
I like that And I didn't prepare this question, but you got me thinking about you know, we do see Beyonce as like a princess Diana, but then I think about you got me thinking about Rihanna. Like, Rihanna can probably sell anything. If she came out with notebooks for school, she could probably sell a million to those a day, and you know, and she's shown it in various vertical verticals. And she could also probably also move the stock ticket on Lvmas.
So what is what is what's the difference? Yeah?
I think Rihanna actually does have more elasticity to her brand. I think that is tied to the fact that Rihanna is not as exceptional talent as Beyonce.
Hot take. One of the things that we admire about Rihanna.
Is that as gorgeous as she is, as tasteful as she is, as poised as she is as this that the other that raw talent does not feel supernatural Beyonce does, and so there's an accessibility to her that I don't think beyond you know, it's like.
The Serenas of the.
World, the Beyonces, and I think there's probably we might not have long enough to get into, but there's probably something with a gender line here as well.
But there are.
Certain people who who's undeniable talent or untraceable set of skills puts them so far out of reach that they get to be respected, admired and aspired to, but they do not feel approachable, followable, and ultimately they don't have brands to say I can do that.
They have brands to say wouldn't that be dope? Yeah?
So I feel like overall, Rihanna is a little bit closer to the ground, and I also think frankly, she has shown a level of investment in all of these other businesses that she's been running that is unlike Beyonce.
Beyonce will I'm not gonna say well she will always be that would be unfair, But Beyonce is still an entertainer, right and very much like Jay, Rihanna has taken on the mantle of being a mobile and so there's just naturally more license in that identity, she might have got famous for being a kind of okay saying and a great entertainer, but today she's known as a.
Mobile Yeah, it was probably Snapchat as a distribution channel who changed advertising for everybody when they got rid of the edited, you know, makeup produced thing. Are are we have we grown tired of traditional advertising produced content in that way? Or is it just no creativity?
You know? I don't.
I don't have a tendency to I don't think that most people. And this is tough when you're twenty years steeped in this industry, you know, you live your whole life and like your friends that drop.
By then we're all kind of all the same in that respect.
But my hunches and most people don't make those distinctions about advertising versus the content versus influencer stuff versus what their neighbor is making. Good is good is good? And to the extent that you can add polished to good, like the high auction values to good, I think it just makes it better. It might make it more visible, it might make it more sticky, it might allow for more layers of your storytelling, brand development to come forward.
But at the core of this there's plenty of advertising that is indistinguishable from content, and it's just pure value, right, It's editorial value, it's intellectual value. And there's plenty of content that is.
Not really anything more than advertising.
Right Tho, the dividing lines between them is really more an industry thing than it is a consumer thing. In other words, who paid for it, how is it distributed? Is it paid to be distributed? And if so, who's behind that? Those are all questions that have very real that create these very real synapses, sorry, distinctions between these categories like this is an ad and this is content, and this is something else, this is an obituary, and
blah blah blah. But for most people, you know, think about the way that you consume media, right, You're consuming media on a couple of whether you're scrolling through it or you're kind of browsing through it, like on YouTube, you're bumping into content that has all of these different types of motivations at all points in your day. And I think this stuff is sticky. It kind of doesn't matter if Coca Cola is behind it or your homeboy is behind it.
The stuff is sticky, is sticky.
I think that equalization is part of, you know, our central thesis.
This is why.
Your attention minutes you will your attention minutes are increasingly budgeted by you. You don't have to interact with content you don't want to increasingly sell, and so so content that wants to sell you something has to get more persuasive and more worthy of your attention. I think that's probably a good thing. And that's certainly the end of
the pool that we like to swim. Man Like, I'm not here to tell you about the pepperone chini muffin is coming from Papa John Like, that ain't even my business. I'm here to put something in front of you that makes you feel seen or heard in the way that you didn't feel before. I want to put something in front of you, or put you in an environment, or
give you an experience. It gives you something noteworthy to talk about at various functions you go to that's worthy of you taking a picture or taking a video within and bragging that I was there. That's the business that all of us who are trying to push culture forward for whatever economic reward, that's what we're that's what we're here to do.
And so.
Yeah, I don't I don't think. I don't think a really really well done cheesy pool for her pizza hut or her little diseases is changing anybody's mind about what pizza they get to buy.
Yeah, when I started doing public speaking, I learned this. You know, hack or tip or whatever you want to say. It's you talk to one person at a time, no matter how many people are in the room. You make connections with one person at a time, and therefore everybody else in the room connects. Why is that do you think from a marketing and advertising perspective? And does it translate?
Absolutely? It does in my practice.
So one of the things that I use to evaluate work, and I've been very public about this is a reciped It was given to me by y'all Sinbek, not given to me like hand to hand, given to me because I was always a fan most and he goes it's commonplace in different, intimate and distant, fresh than in the infant, Fresh than the infant.
Is what everybody thinks of is creativity.
It's like they de viv makes something memorable, commonplace in different We saved for a different podcast. But what you're really talking about is intimate and distant, right the intimacy. The reason that these two things need to be in balance with one another is because things ultimately do have to scale, right, So you do you are ultimately on the hook to address that total audience. But the focus on the one person and making them feel like there's a.
Connection is.
In our practice, the one of the things that differentiates, i should say our practice from a lot of others. So a lot of advertising is about, hey, let's find the most neutral thing, the biggest tent that the most people can get under. So you start looking for you create all of these segments that may or may not have you know, real value to people in terms of way that they live their life.
Right. So like I got the soccer moms, and I got the football dads, and I got the like black kids, and I got.
The Latin people in wheelchairs, do this, that and the other.
And then you try to come up with a message it cuts across all of those.
Categories and you're like, this is meaningful to everybody, right, and this is how you get that big top creative and everything. This is like the majority of what you see on the Super Bowls, like everybody gets everybody knows the words too sweet Caroline First of all, nah be we don't know the words this week, Caroline, but you know,
let's go that hege hegemonic privilege, privilege, right. The desire to create these things that are designed to fit some fanciful average of people is fundamentally flawed in our opinion. And so when we study the greats and the people to really lead culture, it's never I shouldn't say, it's never in sync. Was a great example of this. Britney
Spears is a great example of this. You got a team of people that can observe patterns, they seem to be working all these other channels, put them together into one package and it looks like this and you present it. But look around you. Now look at the titans of pop culture. Now, did they grow out of very very specific niches.
Yes? Did they come stop with something that was appropriate for all or did.
They recruit a small hive, have that hive grow and influence and have that high that ultimately advocate on their behalf That this is something you need to be turned on to.
I don't care whether you're talking about Drake bad Bunny. This that the other.
The modern marketers desire to create something that is pre rinted for the broad majority of people is a fundamental flaw. There's nowhere you can look in pop culture, including especially in America, our politics. You can look across Europe see the same thing.
In politics.
It's getting more niche, it's getting more specific. And so to the degree that you can build something that is in service of a small but responsive group, you can ultimately scale that the same way that you can make eye contact with somebody in a room and you can scale the import of what you're saying to everybody in that room. And there's no greater example of that than what the agency has been able to do with beats I mean, like resuscitating beats. A lot of people don't
know it. Beats by Dre was bound for the scrap heap.
I mean, it wasn't. It wasn't doing well as a business.
And so when you have this moment where we get to defribrillate the brand and speak on behalf of black youth and do this piece of work called you Love Me that really resets and asks the question at all that everybody black, certainly, and then everybody that really was paying attention was had on the tip of their tongues like you love black cults, why don't you love black people? Where you can turn the brand in that kind of megaphone for the youth segment of twelve percent of the
American population. There are plenty of people in advertising that would tell you, oh, we're being too tight, like this isn't for can't we get it like a little room
year so it can include everybody? And you start whittling it down and you affect the purity of that message, and you can't create the level of advocacy that three years later, you look and Beats is now in the Verizon Holiday Bundle, and Paul G. Bodi and women from SNL are out there selling Beats as a carrot to get you to buy a two year Verizon plan in flyover states.
You will ultimately be able to achieve.
Marketplace dominance through an ethnic insight, a cultural insight, or even.
In some cases, geographic insite.
It is about, it is not about.
Afro Tech is a global gathering where inclusive tech companies meet innovators. It's the only tech event you.
Need all year.
Get ready for afro Tech twenty twenty three in Austin, Texas, November.
First through the fifth. We built a whole.
Temper you can use to help you get your employer to sponsor your trip.
And enjoy experiences built for every stage your career.
Whether you're a.
College student looking for your next internship, or if you work in avention capital looking for your next business to invest in, and if you're looking for a co founder or people that's join your team, there's no better.
Place to be.
The massive corporate layoffs of twenty twenty two and twenty twenty three have affected our community in a big way, and afro Tech wants to help you get back on your feet with skill development, making it easier to switch industries.
If that's your route.
In an afrotech, you'll make connections to help you get your next opportunity. Visit afrotech dot com slash conference to learn more. Where would you say the concept of influencer is going.
Down the rabbit hole?
Yeah, so, first and foremost, I think there was a time where it was obviously influencers were an alternative media channel. Increasingly and certainly collectively, they are becoming the pre eminent media channel if you compare it to what can raise audiences hold their attention and oh, by the way, because there's all these intermediaries also you know, cut the feed or create the space for Coke home Depot or whoever
else wants to talk talk in between them. And as as a result of that, it became a career for a lot of people, and certainly became a career aspiration for a lot of people. I think increasingly, being an influencer is going to be an ingredient and a lot of people's kind of economic recipe. Right, So you might it'll be one thread that you're probably braiding together with other ways that you earn for a lot of people, and that could be because of some standard expertise they have, right,
Like maybe you're teaching piano. Maybe you're teaching piano not just you know, putting the chords on YouTube, but maybe you have like clients that are in some private room with you and you're listening to who knows, but expertise
like that just sheer popularity. But I do think that, like we just said about brands writ large, whether as big as Rihanna Beyonce, increasingly what will happen with influences is the things that influences do to proverbially clout chase, in other words, the things that they trace that they already see or working, and they replicate what is already working, and they just put that little spin on it. So it's theirs that's gonna the bottom is going to fall
out of that. AI is going to eat the bottom out of that period. AI could eat the bottom out of the entire porn industry for oh, we know the original digital strategies and influences. By the way, I think we're at a tipping point. I think it's right for young people to be thinking about the moves that they
make as being part of a permanent record. I think it is important for people to start to think about the audiences that they're able to create on wherever they publish or wherever they present their brand as needing some other kind of.
Collecting trade other than.
Ones that are controlled by Elon Musk or Mark Zuckerberg or.
Yeah, I mean, you name it, you name it.
Daniel Eck is increasingly important, and I think the jury is still out, so I'll take a rold listen.
In the United Masters.
Right now, it is impossible to know what kind of formats are going to present themselves in music in the coming five to seven years.
It's just impossible.
But when we say that we believe that independence should be the default setting for the music industry all around the world, it should matter less. Right, So you think about the last couple of format changes. Just think about the fact that when the ring tone you seem old enough will to remember the ring tone era, when ring tones came to be, that was an entirely net new revenue stream that should have been enjoyed by this industry. As you can well imagine, it really just went to
the rights holders in that case. And at that time, the rights holders were almost never, almost never the people that actually created the thing that you love. Then, when you get to streaming, right, streaming is in that new format change, the negotiation and you've seen I'm sure you've seen this, right, the negotiation of what a stream is worth was handled by effectively three companies. And now when you look forward, so now imagine a world where both Taylor Swift, Bad Bunny Toby Wigway, like.
All these.
Millions of people on United Masters and tens of millions who are using platforms like United Masters to get their work to the world.
Imagine a world where they all own their work, or at least this portion of their work.
Now you can't have a ringtone era that purposefully excludes them in a future state. So I can't tell you
what the ringtone is about to be. I can tell you it's coming, and I can tell you that the creative class is better armed by owning their data, their relationships with their audiences, owning their IP and frankly, really figuring out how they can do something other than trace what has already worked, and really lean into the creative in creative class then ever before, I think the best prepared are going to satisfy those three checkboxes.
And.
The rest of it is the rest of it. I'll watch it play out. I don't know how influencers are going to go, but I know just raw titillation is just this algorithmic a task as poking holes in a legal document. And if AI can eat the entire legal profession or eighty percent of it, you can eat this too.
Damn.
Let's go a level deeper.
There is you know, I think about ten years ago, fifteen years ago, you asked kid what they want to do, they would have said, you know, I want to be in the NBA or the NFL. Today they want to be I show speed or logan Paul or Jake Paul right, and you know, so people we often create content with the goal in mind to be found, to be discovered. You know, it's kind of like chasing the A and R back in the day. You want to be found by somebody at a record label who could give you,
you know, a shot. So posting to social inconsistency on social and delivering quality content is one leg of the stool. How can we be more strategic in creating opportunities? Though a while we're creating content.
More strategic than what than we are, because I would say kind of a bull market, right, kind of everybody got everybody got podcast, everybody can be logan Paul right now, that I shouldn't say everyone, I should say anyone can be right. So when you say more strategic.
And creating things that actually get the attention to the guy goes, Okay, Geico now wants to be a part of this movement that I'm doing or you know you mentioned home Depot. But so it's one thing to create content and have a podcast out enough I mean to actually make money from that podcast.
Yeah, yeah, So you know I want to underline one one of the or one of the I suppose dependencies underneath what you're saying. You know, Soldier Boy doesn't get enough credit.
He does over here, he does over here.
Oh no, But but Soldier.
Boy was really the first time you had something that was really popular also directly pay I mean, like the notion that's spread on YouTube and that the absence account was on and that the mere consumption of this thing in this other media channel. You got to remember, like, he's a guy that probably made that under the assumption that one day, hopefully somebody liking him TV would take right, Like in TV, it ain't pay you for every time they spun getting jiggy with it, right, they're like, yo,
you're welcome. And so that I did it, your promotional asset could actually be your revenue inlet.
That was kind of that new and add sense.
And all these platforms that are with one hand I'm kind of wagging my finger at like, don't let them own your audience. They also enabled so many people to never have to figure out, never have to learn anybody at Geico's name, right, because you can flip a switch and all of a sudden your content is monetized. You might not have ultimate control over it, and you're certainly
not getting the lion's share of the revenue. But the point is you can go off and you can go back and invest in your craft and your craft alone knowing that some money is coming in and you ain't have to do nothing to throw a switch.
So layer one.
Of that was what enabled a lot of the media escape they were seeing today. And it's really really important that everybody not think that they need to go stand next to the CMO of this or.
That or the other in order to have fruitful careers.
Like that's still a very viable path to be able to monetize through these third parties.
You're not going to get the lion's share, but that's a real.
Thing as you move up and you want to catch somebody's eye. Look, one of them is the obvious one, Right, have a hit. Obviously, very very easy.
To say, but successful is success.
Right, success is a crowded room, and you got to remember that in most cases, you got to think about if brand marketers are the people that you really want to chase down. It's a very conservative environment, right. This is why sports is so replete money, Like people throw money in sports all the time because it's so many different places to throw money in, right, do a league deal, you do a team deal, you buy an agency to make you some stuff.
You do an.
Athlete deal and then the athlete shows up at the thing. You do a naming rights deal at an arena. You can There's so many different ways to park money, and most of those are tied to all of these other people's financial uh reward. And you know that they're not going to lose. Cia is not going to lose lose an artist might an artists wrote them, shake them dice, throw it up against the wall all the time, and they've seen that over and over and over, right, So
it's just a natural. It doesn't feel it's safe to invest in music. And frankly, increasingly other creators and other formats twitch streamers like how many people got to how many kids from Connecticut got to say the N word? Before people start to like, chill on that space, right? Or what is kai kaisat in Union Square the other day? A second ago he was like, oh, yeah, we want to work with him, he's edgy, And now it's.
Like, oh riot yeah.
And so there is a there's a great degree of grooming that goes in and even knowing how to deal with a brand like that of that statue and and most of them are not going to rock with you until you achieve a certain level of prominence. Now are they exceptions to that rule, Sure, but the rule is shorter to say than the exceptions. And sorry, I want to I'm gonna give a real answer. This the last
thing I will mention. If indeed the gatekeepers that you want to get to are people that you want to patronize, you like brands, the only advice I can give you is just remember that they're real people. Like if you're really the creative entrepreneur, it really feels like there's something that Tender or Geico or twenty three and me should be. That's a story you should tell, and you really want
to get to them. And you tried the LinkedIn thing, and you tried to you put the ePK together and you wrote the thing and blah blah blah bah blah. You know, look those people out, Look those people up on all those other platforms. Those are real people behind all behind all of those corporate all that corporate signings.
Those are real people that have real preferences, and if you want to find them, they are not hard to find because guess what marketers are self promotion and so you need to spend time figuring out what it is that they like and what they think about Beyonce and Rihanna and so on and so forth, and you know you're can customize off of that.
It's not.
There is no magic app and there is no shortcut. And now in a hyperconnected world, almost everybody is accessible. You know, figure out who their trust circle is, penetrate that trust circle.
Love that.
Dame and Jay did it. In the nineties, man, nobody was playing on radio. They start sending champagne bottles.
There you go, there you go.
I want you to talk about the five c's because you talked about you know, you got to have a hit. That's the easiest way, the first way to get in. And you think, so content, cretence, customization co incentives for seas. I I do my research. It's for seas. And so, how so you talked about this, miss I missed, missed the fifth when content.
Content is your idea that you want to spread, right, credence right right?
You got carriers, carriers, that's what I missed. Customization co incentives. Yeah, yeah, So how do you know when something's going to be ahead.
Man, come on, bro yo, If I knew that, I would, we wouldn't be having this conversation.
You don't, You don't, right, But what you can what you can recognize are the early symptoms, and you can nurture those symptoms, right. And what you can do is prepare yourself so that when you get a little bit of lyft off, it can become a lot of lyft off because you're.
Not trying to figure this out for the first time.
But look, there will always be The reason that casinos work at all is because the slot machine makes the same amount of noise, whether you hit for five million dollars, the same exact noise, right. And you know, I don't think knowing what is a hit has everything to do with how you're defining a hit, of course, right, So like knowing you got to hit. There's a great piece of footage. I'll send it to you. You might have even seen this, like Lil NASAs the day he releases
Old Town Road and he goes gets his pizza. He got these crummy blinds behind him. You could tell like everybody's had that apartment and he's in right there eating pizza and whatnot. And he comes back, He's like, yoh, so I'm gonna check in with you in a year. Boom and he comes back and yeah, he's got the white mink on right.
First of all, that could have been engineered. I will say it required.
That level of ambition is required for anybody's going to program like you gotta believe that. We watched that same recipe with Kanye West most I mean probably most notably, Like you gotta believe that. And hopefully you know, we as a class people who are who are gonna benefit in so many ways from from a viable creative class. Hopefully we don't see that and try to dim everybody's life. But the point is, like some people just really feel
that way. I'm gonna be the next you name it for everybody else like myself, you can't know if you got to hit per se. I just heard a great story about a record that I'm in love with right now.
It's by a band called Dirry. They're not even on the.
Platform, this band called Dirry. This guy's been working, he's been a journeyman musician for twenty years. It's a garage it makes like a garage rock product kind of he's been doing it forever, right, and he's never really the needles never really moved for him. And he releases this snippet and it starts to take off on TikTok, and the snippet is wild Side. The snippet goes the bridge to the snippet is I'm just as broke as the day I was born, but I still make it work
like everybody else does. It's all just a cruel joke, and everybody knows there's no way. I mean, it's that dark. It starts getting adopted on TikTok because people people, people can relate to that. People go through dark things themselves, so it could be just as trivial as like I put the I put my drink too close to the ledge and it fell off, and people are using that
that sound to be like to signal regret. But it lifts off so much that this guy decides he's gonna release it as a full song because he's chasing performance, because he's studying enough to know, yo, I got I got the similance to something here like these are the
right conditions that I need to pursue. I need to take a next step, right he decides to write the next song, but on the way to write the song, only way to deliver the song to record the third verse, he realizes on the ride over there, oh my god, it's working. I feel great actually, And so the third verse of the song is you know, the third act of Rudy or Rocky or Black Panther.
I mean it, just it. He turns it so.
That it is this positivity anthem, and he releases that, and now the record really takes off. Say that to say this, the tenor of that song changed from when he first released it as a snippet to when he released it as a song, and the only difference was what happened and the response that he got in between. That's what changed his entire outlook and therefore changed the
artist self. You can't know if you got to hit, but you can know if you feel something and if other people feel something, and whether or not to invest more energy right there at that spot. And that's what I would tell everybody that song. I think I listened to that song over and over. I think this guy could burn down Coachella with that song. I don't know if he ever will, but I know he made it to my inbox. I now care about his story, I now care about his brand, and hopefully that's hit enough
for him. But he did, he played the game the right way. You see some response, you invest, you change what it means or sorry, you follow your own license, you obey your own license to change what it means because you're in a different place. You present that to people and they respond even more so to it, including CMOSA. You know major distributes like I don't, I don't. I don't have a cheat code for having a hit. I have a cheat code for working really hard when you see promises signals.
So I interviewed Marcus Collins on a couple of episodes ago, well this.
Is why you know the cookbooks. So well, here's my co author. That's that's my brother.
Yeah yeah, So I asked him. I'm like, so Marcus and I am going close. I'm I need you to send me some questions like what should I ask Chausa? And so he sent me some questions to ask you. So, so the first one, the first one is what responsibility do marketers bear who leverage culture as an influence as a way to influence commerce? What responsibility do they have?
A huge and significant one and is one of the more.
Advertising specifically is one of the final we talked about how you consume content today. Advertising in particular is one of the few creative disciplines that gets you, whether you want it or not. It's got an final standard out and the onus that that puts on someone is so crazy when you consider that we got I mean, just look at what is going on in Congress right now. You can completely independently live in a totally separate bubble.
Of reality writ large. And so if you are gonna if you are.
Gonna occupy spaces that definitionally I mean, for example, out of home, Like I ain't talking about commercials more, out of home is something you got to negotiate. If you're gonna be in the world with out a home, billboards and so on and so forth, you've got to negotiate what it says, whatever is what's presenting you with. And that is an awesome responsibility because it's one of the few places in which it's It's inarguable nobody gets to to choose to unsee what you just presented, but people
can choose to unsee almost everything else. But I would argue even people that don't know that they are in the push culture forward business still are they still are? You know, look at bud Light. Bud Like, bud Light was one of the artifacts of Trump is America and it is now a rejected artifact because of these decisions that were that were made. And you can think whatever you want to think about how.
You might have, as.
A senior employee of ABM BEV or at bud Light, handled it or prevented it. The truth of the matter is that huge things that mean the same thing to a lot of people at one time are very very very rare, and they're so rare that you can watch it break. So all of a sudden, bud Light means this to so many people. It's like it's fun and it's football, and it's this, that and the other, and it's like, no, it's not.
It belongs to us.
And if you give it to anybody else, if you let anybody, if you acknowledge anybody else, we don't have a problem in here, right. So, just the bigness of that brand alone is something that is delicate and rare, and so the.
It is a tight rope exercise.
It is a tight rope walk to have anything that huge in pop culture, and it's one that I, you know, I feel really great about being able to nudge broad pop culture in the direction of values that I share and I'm able to unearth from these humongous corporate giants who.
Don't know to write that down.
In other words, beats right, like we were just telling them, we were just talking about the Beat story. It is terrifically meaningful to me that we have proven over a thousand or so days that you can completely resuscitate a brand globally at retail by focusing on and speaking.
On behalf of black youth.
Not all you do, but starting there as the lynchpin for everything else you're gonna do, to the point where this is now so hot that you know your retailer is all excited and your partners are all excited too. It's not even just it's flying off the shelves. It's like Verizon executives knowing that this is hot all of a sudden. Again, that's a great that's a great story for the agency.
But what I love about it is that it licenses.
Somebody else who works somewhere else to be able to follow in those footsteps and go, hey, maybe you know those values they don't. That doesn't have to just be reserved for black youth that could be deaf athletes.
Somewhere, somebody's gonna.
Be able to present that case of beats and be like, Yo, they went from absolutely cold to being the number one gen Z brand and being able to sell out all over the globe because they focused on this one thing. Now, this is what I'm trying to tell you about these deaf athletes, and to the extent that I can enable that just in my own success, I'm terrifically proud. But I will tell you somebody's got to figure out They
just haven't figured it out just yet. Somebody's got to figure out how to treat trumpest men with the same care to day've treated other small groups. It is a culture, and it has It is a network that has correspondent rituals, artifacts, languages that express underlying beliefs, and people that are cracking it are only kind of sort of cracking it. Eventually, somebody's gonna create a multicultural offering that is specifically for trumpet men.
You gotta be ready for that too.
I've got one minute left. He gave me two more, but I'm gonna do one more in an interest of time. He asked, what does the future of advertising look like when there are so many factors eroding at its core offering creativity?
What does the future of ties look like?
Say it again, what does the future of advertising look like when there are so many factors eroding at its core offering creativity?
Look, I reject that thesis creativity is not being eroded at all. The rights of a very small, highly trained feud to suggest that they have brought creativity to bear, and they and they alone, you know, have access to it.
That's what has eroded. And you know, as proud as I am of any.
Standing staff that we have here and their ability to go out and do this work on behalf of great brands will not.
I see artists in pipeline all the time that have ideas that are black level ideas.
I'm talking lying monster ideas, and they have shown I just feel really grateful that I have and pay attention to.
The creative class that never comes up under the roof of any advertising agency or any marketing discipline or not, and I get to study them if I get structed as much game from a seventeen year old managed to make it into my feet as I ever got from Dan Widen my.
Steve Style.
Black Tech Green Money is a production of Blavity afro Tech on the Black Effect podcast Networking I Hire Media. It's produced by Morgan Debonne and me Well Lucas, with additional production support by Sarah Ergan.
And Rose McLucas.
Special thank you to Michael Davis, Vanessa Serrano and Maya Moldrew. Learn more about my guests and other text as well as an innovators at afro tech dot com. Join your black Tech dream money, Share this with somebody, Go get your money.
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