0:00:01 - (Matt Widdoes): Welcome back to another episode of Growth@Scale. I'm your host, Matt Widdoes, CEO of MAVAN.com, and today I am joined by Brendan Bilko. Brendan is the founder of Robin, a studio reimagining sports through brand building and product development. He's got expertise in brand strategy and digital innovation. Brendan has also held key roles at companies like Elysian Park Ventures as an entrepreneur in residence and Dexter as co-founder and CEO.

0:00:24 - (Matt Widdoes): He also co-founded the creative agency May Day, leading campaigns and activations for brands like Levi's, Cadillac, Red Bull, Comedy Central, and others. I'm so excited to chat today. Brendan, welcome.

0:00:35 - (Brendan Bilko): Thanks for having me, man. First take. God damn awesome.

0:00:39 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. People listening won't know that I did that 50 times before hitting that, but that was the first take. Yeah, I appreciate you calling that. I had asked for permission that I could do it up to, but not exceeding 15 times. So for people who don't know you, tell us, who are you? What do you do? Where have you been? What's your story?

0:00:56 - (Brendan Bilko): Right on, man. Well, yeah, thanks again for having me. This is fun. This is my. Maybe my first podcast interview. That's not true. I did some, like, small podcasts relative to a fantasy football league I was in. So pretty big stuff. I don't want to brag. Anyway. So my background spans both service and SaaS. You had mentioned my first company, Mayday. I started that with a co-founder who was an art director at another agency.

0:01:26 - (Brendan Bilko): I had a project pop up and we were kind of doing a thing freelance, and next thing we knew, we looked around and we had twelve employees in an office in the Flatiron district and kind of had an agency. We worked with startups around the time that that agency started. That was in 2011. I like to say that it was around. It was peak app. It's when everybody had an idea. They were VP of something at, I don't know, the Methodist church, whatever it may be.

0:01:53 - (Brendan Bilko): And they were kind of taking whatever scratch they had saved up to create app X. Like, I'm gonna make Netflix for umbrellas. So we did brand building for idea stage entrepreneurs, and we also did campaigns and web 2.0 kind of UX/UI projects for Fortune 500's. I really liked the startup stuff, so wound up moving on to betawork studios, where I was part of their studio team, doing a mix of creative direction and user experience work for their hackers and residents.

0:02:29 - (Brendan Bilko): I really enjoyed my time. Kind of like spanning and working with all the different companies that were in that program, but ultimately kind of teamed up with a technical co-founder, started a second company, raised a round of institutional investment, grew a team, began to about a dozen people, had a failed acquisition, and ultimately found myself wandering the desert with this kind of idea that I wanted to work in sports, big sports fan my whole life.

0:02:56 - (Brendan Bilko): And that's when I met the folks at Elysian Park Ventures, who at the time were looking to start a services arm of their investment platform that was focused on communications and brand and marketing for their portfolio of companies. And so they brought me in as an entrepreneur in residence. Given my experiences with a technical founder and the fact that I started an agency, they were like, you know what, man? You might have a pretty good idea of how it works on kind of both sides of the equation here. Maybe you can kind of figure this out.

0:03:30 - (Brendan Bilko): And so that was in 2019 when we put it on the whiteboard. And today, Robin is its own independent agency that's been running for four years.

0:03:39 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, it's cool. The thing is that, like so many of these early stage companies, well, they need the same thing in a lot of different areas. Right? They all need a way in which the business is going to run. They're all going to need a bookkeeper. They're all going to need to think about their messaging and positioning. They're all going to think about their branding. They're going to be thinking about creative. They're going to be thinking about customers and UI and UX and research. Like, it's all kind of the same thing over and over and over again.

0:04:05 - (Matt Widdoes): And so, yeah, it makes a ton of sense to partner with somebody who's at the hub of the wheel of a lot of the same types of companies, even more so. We're like, in that sports space, they have, you know, everyone's got unique challenges in their own industry, but sports is kind of unique in how it's served and how it's viewed and the complexity of the purchase behavior. But there's a lot of sense to have the same.

0:04:27 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, the same kind of system put on top of things that are kind of ancillary or kind of interconnected, for sure.

0:04:33 - (Brendan Bilko): I mean, at Elysian Park, that was one of the things that they noted. They've been investing in companies for five or six years. I think by the time that I came into contact with them and they had really noted that within the vertical, sports was often painted with this really, really broad brush. And so everything is everything. Sports is volt green and italicized, and it looks the same, it sounds the same, but that's not it.

0:05:00 - (Brendan Bilko): I go to my three year old's soccer rocker’s practice and that's sports, right? That's sports for me. And so is the Dodger game that I'm gonna go to tomorrow night and our Miami game that I'm gonna go to next month. Like, all of it is sports, but there is nuance in who you're kind of talking to at each level. Be that at the youth side or if you're talking about a piece of media or a piece of like IoT tech, it requires the nuance that it deserves.

0:05:34 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, well, and so I'm curious, like, when you, you've seen a lot of things that are consistently the same either in process or in its function itself, but you know, any kind of strikingly clear or consistent kind of key components of a successful brand, like a brand we can unpack maybe next. Cause that can mean a lot of things. But are there kind of any key, like just elements that are required that are fundamental?

0:06:02 - (Brendan Bilko): Yeah, I think, yeah, we were talking a little bit about that off mic, the idea that brand has kind of become this ‘catch all’. But I think, I think successful brands, it comes down to a few things. One is just being yourself. I see it all the time. It's really easy for startup founders in particular, to see what competitors or adjacent brands or, hell, I mentioned volt green before Nike is doing and think, oh, I want to do that.

0:06:31 - (Brendan Bilko): But ultimately that might not be what your customer or your audience wants. And so they came for you and that's why they're kind of part of your community and your crew. And so I think those that are, are themselves are probably the most successful, as are those that are really, really.

0:06:49 - (Matt Widdoes): Sorry, go ahead.

0:06:50 - (Brendan Bilko): No, I was going to say the second tenet is just being consistent. Like the brand that I think everybody looks at right now as such a success story that kind of goes against the grain, is Liquid Death, but that in its own right is a very specific brand tenet that they have in terms of pushing the envelope, and that's not going to work for everybody. So for me, having a core thread or narrative that everything kind of ladders up to that, that's really important to creating that sense of consistency in addition to being yourself. 

0:07:23 - (Matt Widdoes): Well, I think that like being, I'll put my own spin on it, but it kind of being unabashedly authentic. It helps with the consistency because you can't fake. Well, you can, but you can't fake it forever, the authenticity side of it. And if you're just being yourself, right. This is kind of the, like, if you just tell the truth, you don't have to worry about consistency, right? Because it's like the truth is the truth. It's fixed. It just is what it is. Now, granted, you may have some different take, but you're never get. This is the, like classic. Why do, why do the, you know, in true crime, why did, why do the killers get caught? It's like they can't tell the same fake story. They're gonna mix up details, right. And so that I think, like, starting with the authenticity will help with the consistency, but the challenge. And how do you deal with this where, like, one person may have different views, right?  So you have, like, if you have like one arbiter of what that is, let's say Steve Jobs or something he's got all in his head, and you just say, well, ask Steve, like, is this on brand or not? Or it's your brand director or it's whoever, and then that person leaves. Or they're just like, maybe it's the CEO and they're the loudest person in the room, but somebody who has really deep experience in marketing brand understands, like, positioning within the market of the competitive set.

0:08:34 - (Matt Widdoes): They're like, oh, like, I know that's how you feel. You're like, we're badasses. We're unapologetic. We do this and like, yeah. And it's like, yeah, that's a little too bro y or a little too whatever. We don't think that is like the best opportunity. How do you deal? Or have you seen people navigate that, like, the brand can't just be an extension of Mike because Mike's insane. And, like, we have to tone Mike down a little bit or Mike's thoughts or whatever that might be. Like, how do you deal with that when it's essentially a committee?

0:09:02 - (Matt Widdoes): It's almost like you're creating a person. Right. That kind of Persona level stuff. But, like seven people are controlling its emotions. And so, like, how do you.

0:09:12 - (Brendan Bilko): I mean, for us, we usually, when we do foundational brand exercises, we're helping companies unearth who it is that they are. Right. And like you said, you've got five or six stakeholders in a room. We are very specific. Like, no more than six, please. Seven, including me. That's. That's it. But I give this presentation, and I won't click through it now because this is a audio medium, but I'll show different types of architecture. So I've got everything from Zaha Hadid to crazy Le Corbusier works to Victorian style homes.

0:09:49 - (Brendan Bilko): And just ask people, like, what do you think? What do you think? What do you think? It really spurns conversation. And some of that could be political, some of it could be aesthetic, but. But it's something. And the goal of that is to basically show everybody in the room, like, hey, everybody here has a feeling about something and a personal bias that they're bringing to the table before we've even begun.

0:10:14 - (Brendan Bilko): So what we're gonna do for this brand exercise is come up with a framework, a lens through which we're viewing everything through, to remove that personal bias. And so everything that we do gets viewed through that lens. And that way, you're able to, you know, if we're talking about visual identity that's going along and evocative of some sort of brand messaging or tenets that we've come up with. You might not like the color yellow, but if it maps onto the story, it doesn't matter. Like, yellow might be it. But using that sort of framework really kind of helps get everybody aligned and on the same table or on the same page.

0:10:53 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, well, and I think that. So there's a few things that come to mind. One is like this, the ‘would You Rather’ game where it's like, would you rather this terrible thing or this terrible thing? It lets you kind of understand where you are on this continuum. And then there was this thing that they had at the San Francisco Exploratorium. It's like a, you know, it's like a science-based museum, hands on kind of thing. And I thought it was really interesting, and it may play. It's probably similar in some of the ways that you run this exercise, but essentially, you and I align on one person that we both know pretty well, some mutual friend, or maybe we're brothers, and we say, okay, let's do this on Dad.

0:11:30 - (Brendan Bilko): Right?

0:11:31 - (Matt Widdoes): Like, but some person that we both know pretty deeply, not just kind of surface level and on the left and right, we independently set where they are on, like, um, things like extroversion versus introversion, or where they are on, um, like, willingness to take risk or. Or super risk averse. Um, these things that, like, if you know somebody really well, you should probably be pretty well aligned on that.

0:11:56 - (Matt Widdoes): And so we set it. We cover them as we go, and it's on this really big board, so I couldn't even see what you were doing. If I tried to peek, I wouldn't be able to see it. And then we kind of take a step back, and we reveal each other's answers, and you find that somebody like your father, like your shared father, who you both grew up with, you have wildly different views on things, like their risk tolerance. Right. So it's like you think dad's super risky, and you're like, yeah. And you're like, what? He's like, the most risk, like, intolerant person I've ever met.

0:12:25 - (Matt Widdoes): And it's like, no, no, because he did that one thing once. You're like, yeah, I guess, but, like, that's not that risky. Right. And so you have your own lens that's filtering that through what you consider to be introverted or extroverted. Right. And so. And it's not left or right. There's some continuum. It's not just like he's this or he's that.

0:12:41 - (Brendan Bilko): Yeah.

0:12:42 - (Matt Widdoes): Somewhere. Somewhere in between. And so, yeah, you see that I've got him at 25% and you've got him at 75%. Obviously. Big difference there in those early stages, because a lot of our listeners are founders at an early stage, and they've done some. I think sometimes you take these steps early and you can open a book and kind of get together, like, okay, what's our messaging? What do we stand for and where are we different and put together?

0:13:04 - (Matt Widdoes): Borrow from brand guidelines or things that you've done in the past where you're like, yeah, we value openness, and we want straight shooters or whatever these things that might be more internally focused with maybe some of that painting, the external brand itself. But how do you think through the kind of planning, setting it and leaving it, like, we have to leave that kind of untouched? It's not really meant to. I mean, it is living and breathing, but we're not meant to, like, wildly revise it all the time because we need to be consistent.

0:13:35 - (Matt Widdoes): And sure, you could refine it a little bit because we think that this gets, this wording gets more specific to the heart of that core value. But we shouldn't really be flipping those core values around, maybe ever. I'm not sure. But sometimes you go through this big rebranding for many different reasons. But how do you think about that kind of setting and forgetting? And is it something that's living and breathing in your mind that should be revisited regularly, although not maybe wildly changed? Or is it something that's like, no, we just kind of need to practice what we preach after we said it and, like, really entrench our. Entrench that even further so that people can really latch on to what ultimately will become the brand.

0:14:09 - (Brendan Bilko): Yeah, we're pretty clear up front when we do exercises that you got to use for a period of time and not change anything. People love to tinker and will tinker forever again, because you're out in the world and you've got your own personal preferences and tastes and whatnot. And we're sponges. We're ingesting everything. And so something's going to hit you and you're going to look at that brand book and say, like, you know what?

0:14:36 - (Brendan Bilko): This could really make that, why? A little bit tighter. But that's you and your organization. Maybe it could be two people, it could be 200, it could be 2,000. Whatever it may be, it's not just you that's in the mix. And in order to kind of keep everybody on the same page, that consistency is really, really important. We do the same thing for naming exercises, too. I think the most difficult creative pursuit that there is out there is coming up with a name. Big time. No matter how many rubrics you put around it, nobody cares. Name names.

0:15:07 - (Matt Widdoes): Everybody takes it personally, two people naming a child is hard enough, and now you have five people naming a company. It's. Yeah, we're like, you don't have a, you don't have a basis for it. Like, at least with kids names, we can be like John, Stacey, Sally. These are all like, well established names. It's okay that there are many johns in the world and many mats and mini brendans. It's not okay to have a second Google. We can't be Google. Google's already gone, so we have to make up completely new words with no basis other than words like Google, where you. Yeah, we know what Google means today, but if you had been in the meeting when somebody suggested Google, you might have been pounding your fist on the table just as hard as you are when we're naming it.

0:15:49 - (Brendan Bilko): Google's my favorite example, too, because it was a mistake.

0:15:51 - (Matt Widdoes): Perfect. It's like, oh, tell me the story. I don't know the story.

0:15:54 - (Brendan Bilko): Literally a mistake. So, gosh, I'm going to pronounce the act like what it stands for, wrong. But it's a GoogloPlex is what. It's like certain numbers that exist. Yeah, exactly. And so. That's right. Yeah. And so the spelling itself was actually a mistake, and so they ran with it. You know, like, so I use that all the time as, like, your name is, is one thing, but ultimately the substance behind the name, the brand itself, that's a, that's as important.

0:16:27 - (Brendan Bilko): I've, you know, you have, you used Doctor Bronner's soap. Sure.

0:16:32 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, yeah.

0:16:32 - (Brendan Bilko): Okay.

0:16:33 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah.

0:16:33 - (Brendan Bilko): So I also use Doctor Bronner's. Love the soap. Love reading the bottle in the shower.

0:16:39 - (Matt Widdoes): And all the crazy writings.

0:16:42 - (Brendan Bilko): Yeah, all one.

0:16:43 - (Matt Widdoes): All one, yeah. Washing myself with. For anybody who hasn't read or isn't familiar with Doctor Bronner's, it's like you can, you can distill it, you can clean dishes with it, you can clean your hair with it. The peppermint is quite nice, but all the, all the flavors are nice, but you start reading the side of it and it's almost like if you've ever seen a van driving down the highway with words written all. It's like borderline schizophrenic.

0:17:10 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah.

0:17:10 - (Brendan Bilko): A guy in the driver's seat has a tinfoil hat on. Yeah.

0:17:13 - (Matt Widdoes): But it's also like all. There's no harm in any of it. It's kind of like loving messaging and stuff. But go read a Doctor Bronner's bottle if with you there, it really is.

0:17:24 - (Brendan Bilko): And, you know, they have, they have some, like, really interesting core, core brand tenants. And, you know, things are organic and they're safe and it's good for the earth and good for the planet because we are all one, blah, blah, blah. And so I was in my local Erewhon, and this was maybe a year ago now, and I walked past the, you know, the section where they have all the really expensive chocolate bars where they try and get you right before you head to the register, like $20.

0:17:51 - (Matt Widdoes): Chocolate bars from Thomas Kemper. You thought I wasn't going to look at the price of a chocolate bar, but I will.

0:17:59 - (Brendan Bilko): I will, and I'm still going to buy it. And, and I saw a. It was Doctor Bronner's has. Makes chocolate, magic chocolate bars. And the first thought that went through my head was, am I about to buy soap chocolate? And I did, like.

0:18:15 - (Matt Widdoes): And absolutely delicious.

0:18:17 - (Brendan Bilko): The ingredients were clean and. Yeah, but it was, it was spectacular. And, like, I didn't really even. I thought twice, I guess, for like, a quick second. But realistically, like, the Doctor Bronner's brand and what it stands for is so strong that I was like, you know what? Sure. The things that I clean my floor and my body with, I will also put into my body and assume that it's, like, safe and probably pretty, pretty stellar.

0:18:40 - (Brendan Bilko): And sure enough, it was. I don't know if Doctor Bronner's is a good name or not, but everything that they stand for is, is pretty cool. And so ultimately, you know, the substance behind your name is what's important.

0:18:52 - (Matt Widdoes): Well, it's funny to think about like, yeah, if you were to see a Windex chocolate bar, which is obviously not the exact same thing, but like a dawn, maybe dawn soap, a dawn chocolate bar, and you're like, now granted, this is why Procter and Gamble and all these companies have a trillion brands under management. But yeah, I mean it does say something about, well it says many things though, that Doctor Bronner's one, a soap company could sell chocolate under the same brand and that you were like, hey, I know they're, they're crazy about quality here and like health. So I can assume that they've applied the same kind of tenants to whatever they put into this chocolate bar. It sounds like it's good. So you know Doctor Bronner's list?

0:19:30 - (Brendan Bilko): Yeah, no free ads, but yeah, chocolate.

0:19:33 - (Matt Widdoes): Send us, give some addresses. Easy to find, but yeah. And then, yeah, somebody had to fight that internally. Presumably if they're running like a normal corporation, it's not all being made in a van by the river. Somebody was like, are we really going to sell chocolate? Should we do another thing? But they're like, well, our brand is so good, I'm assuming that conversation ends up being like, our brand is like squeaky clean, no pun intended, but like we, we can sell chocolate here, right? But I.

0:19:59 - (Matt Widdoes): There's no question there was some struggle that says we're not selling chocolate under our, the same brand. We have only sold soap through as best as I can tell. So now I'm after this call, I want to go to the bronner's website and see what else are they getting into. Another example of this, by the way, for me is what is the, you may know it, it's coffee-maker thing that like you push down. It's got like a French press.

0:20:21 - (Brendan Bilko): Oh no, the Aeronaut press.

0:20:22 - (Matt Widdoes): The AeroPress. So the AeroPress is made by the same company that makes that Spinning Disc, the Aerobie.

0:20:30 - (Brendan Bilko): No way.

0:20:31 - (Matt Widdoes): You know that. So, yeah, so you know it's like a beach toy, but, but it flies like a thousand yards. Yeah, AeroPress, Aerobie. Same brand and they're just like, yeah, we're wacky inventors, baby. Like, yeah, we got a crazy, we got a crazy thing for the beach and we have this like amazing, portable, indestructible AeroPress that gives you the compression of an espresso, but it gives you the speed of this, like, and the temperature control, whatever.

0:20:55 - (Matt Widdoes): And you're like, same, same company, right? So it's like what is the brand consistency there? And again, they may have other things, but I'm like Doctor Bronner's now heading into AeroPress, you know, or Aerobie style because you're like, you're just so far off the map on these two things. There's no consistency, which kind of goes against most of the brand stuff for sure.

0:21:13 - (Brendan Bilko): Yeah, I think.

0:21:15 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, go ahead.

0:21:16 - (Brendan Bilko): I was going to say, I don't know this to be true, but my gosh, if memory serves me correct. So I believe that part of the reason behind the chocolate had to do with regenerative farming, which is pretty crucial to the entire operation of kind of growing things, putting them out into the world and then hopefully nothing. Not doing harm to the environment. And so if like, what they were planting wherever they have, let's say, lavender fields for the soap or peppermint, you know, whatever it may be, you know, cocoa and cacao and whatever, might also be something that's important to build the right macronutrients for the soil. And so, like, I guess we make chocolate now because it's a byproduct and so it does wind up fitting in the brand message and, you know, that's, that's it.

0:22:04 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. Yeah. Well, and I'm curious, like, brand means so many different things to so many different people. It can be this catch all. It can be somebody like, yeah, that's, that means logo. That's just a different word for logo. We, we unfortunately see that a lot and it's like, or it's like feelings that we are supposed to have. Like, I think it's. And there's just like anything else, there's like really amazing brand people and then there's really not so amazing brand people. I'm curious, like, from your perspective, what does brand mean to you and any kind of misconceptions you've seen and then kind of outside of that, like how should a well oiled branding team or brand function within a broader team be plugged in kind of across the board with a well organized growth team?

0:22:48 - (Brendan Bilko): Yeah, for sure. Yeah, we get it all the time where someone says brand and realistically they mean visual identity system. So give us our logo and our color palette and composition and all that stuff. The things inside the brand guidelines, not necessarily the words that are usually the guiding force behind the visuals that make up those brand guidelines for us. Brand is who you are. And so I mentioned it before, but when we do these kind of foundational exercises, oftentimes that's what we're helping companies on earth is that sometimes it boils down to a tag or it's a classic, simple brand statement in terms of getting the whole organization on board.

0:23:32 - (Brendan Bilko): The most ideal ones for me serve as both rallying cry for an organization as well as an evaluation criteria. So if something can be authentic and a business decision can be made from it, I think that's when you're cooking with gas. So that, for me, is kind of how you get everybody on the same page.

0:23:54 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. And for me, like, brand is, you know, I've. I would say that probably the two best places I ever worked as it relates to brand would be Red Bull and King. And with both of those companies, it was pervasive in everything that they did. So when you say, like, what is a brand? It's essentially the lifeblood. It is the DNA of the company. And, like, how does that actually actualize itself is. Yeah, we're leaving interviews with people and saying they.

0:24:21 - (Matt Widdoes): They're not this, they're not this other thing. Like, we value that. I have that. You have that. We both work here because we have that. And they did this thing that didn't strike me as supportive. Like, maybe our value is it's we're supportive, right. We're good listeners, and they weren't supportive or good listeners, therefore, they're not getting hired, even though they're amazing on this other thing. And then all the way to, of course, our website copy and the events we might throw.

0:24:48 - (Matt Widdoes): But then at the event, all the way down to the, like, type of cardstock we use and the type of thing that might randomly happen at 9:30 p.m. is like, all that has to feed back into it. And so it serves as this north star to ask. It's almost like, if it's not the what we do, and it's not like the how we do it, although it kind of is, but it's like, it's not the how and, like, how we actually operationalize it, but it's like, it's like the feeling behind what we do in this experience.

0:25:18 - (Matt Widdoes): And it's very soft in that way, so it's kind of hard to describe it because it's almost. It's basically personality. And so versus, like, oh, yeah, this. We make widgets. We are based here. We do these things. Our customers are people who like these things. It's like, yeah, but what do you like? Like, what do you. And this is where some of that kind of what can feel a little bit more fluffy in some of the brand exercise work, which is like, take a make a dream board with like pictures of famous people that would be you if they were a person.

0:25:50 - (Matt Widdoes): Right. And so you're like, well, we want to be like approachable but serious and we want to be, you know, whatever. And so it's like, it's hard enough to get people to align on it and then when they are aligned and you've codified that, it's hard to get everybody to hold that unless those people inherently kind of all agreed from the jump that like, yeah, that's just how we all are anyways. And so it's a challenging thing. And I think as you, you've seen this a lot. Well, you've just seen a lot of companies from early-stage and growing. It's also hard to maintain that because the six people that were in the room and that was set originally and those were the only six people in the company and they all kind of naturally gravitated toward those answers.

0:26:30 - (Matt Widdoes): Now you're a 2000 person company. Do you have any thoughts, a question we get a lot on, like how do you maintain brand as you grow and as you release new product lines and as you become naturally more corporate. Right. They're like, we don't serve water. Like that goes out the door at some. How do you manage that? Or have you seen people deal with that type of transitional work to hold on to the brand and maintain it and like honor it so that you can keep, so you can maintain consistency and have that place, you know, for all the benefits of brand.

0:27:03 - (Brendan Bilko): Yeah, I think when you establish something that's, that's good and true, ideally it doesn't really have to change.

0:27:09 - (Matt Widdoes): Right.

0:27:10 - (Brendan Bilko): Like Nike and Apple are always like the two kind of leaders in the space that everybody looks to the point where in our, like, discovery kits we always say, you know, give me three brands you admire. You're not allowed to say Nike or Apple. It's always, always what we say.

0:27:24 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, but they've, I like that caveat.

0:27:28 - (Brendan Bilko): Yeah, I gotta have it, gotta have it. But, but they've been, they've been the same and they've been able to use the kind of core backbone of who they are and do something from dancing in the shadows with your kind of white iPod headphones on to thinking different to whatever other kind of campaigns. So I think if that kind of core statement that you come up with is true to who you are, it's easy and it winds up kind of helping with the business decisions.

0:27:59 - (Brendan Bilko): One of you said the word support before, so make me think of it. A startup that we worked with, for a while was this company, SNAP! Mobile. They started as Snap Raise, and they were a fundraising platform for after school programs, predominantly used in high school football, but also sports. And it expanded to band and robotics and Science club. And, you know, basically, if you were doing something after school, and I, you know, as typically happens with budgets in municipalities, after school programs are cut first.

0:28:32 - (Brendan Bilko): Fundraising is pretty critical to kind of keeping those things alive. And we're working with them and trying to figure out what is it these guys are, like, really doing as they kind of move from being known as this fundraising platform to this kind of all encompassing SaaS solution that worked not just for fundraising, but for getting gear to your, to your team on time. They have a program called Snapstore, where you can order uniforms or spirit wear for the team to wear in class before they board the bus to go play whatever rival school. And the more we looked at their kind of software offering, the more that it was all about was this ethos of support.

0:29:18 - (Brendan Bilko): And everything that they're doing is about supporting causes that are really important to them and allowing and facilitating families and people all over the country to support those as well. And so we came up with this, like, very, very simple tag. Support matters. That's it. And it's like, support is important. Like, it is really important to have that feeling of support and also support matters that are important to you, support the things in your life, the people in your life that are, that are critical.

0:29:48 - (Brendan Bilko): And so for them, I remember when we delivered it, it's rare that you, in the service business, you do something and it hits the first time we presented it. And I think at the end of the call, the COO was like, I already put in the trademark. Like, that's. That's it. Like, we needed it sold. Yeah, this is it. And like, I gave the brand presentations to their organization when they had to get together.

0:30:19 - (Brendan Bilko): I think at the time, it was like 250 employees, and you could see that everybody there felt it and embodied it. And we were taking it a step further. I remember seeing, because we were in a shared slack channel, someone on Twitter, back when it was still Twitter, saw that a local high school coach had tweeted something about wanting used gloves for a baseball program he was trying to revive. And that went through to some sort of general channel, which went up to, like, you know, whoever needed to approve. All right, we're going to start a fundraiser for them, and we're going to capitalize the first, however much money, but, like, the goal. And I watch someone say, like, hey, support matters. We need to help these people. Like, this is what we do.

0:31:05 - (Brendan Bilko): They don't know that we exist, but like we can jump in and kind of help them right there. So just from like general living, breathing it, these guys, like, like nobody was using their product. They just saw someone who needed support in that moment and they went ahead and did it to- ultimately they wound up building new products and acquiring other businesses. All through that ethos of continuing to support their customers and the kids who are ultimately the end beneficiaries of their platform.

0:31:32 - (Brendan Bilko): You know, it stuck and it's still their brand vision and mission today.

0:31:38 - (Matt Widdoes): Well, you brought up something that I'd love to double click on because I think it's so important, it's often, so often overlooked, especially the earlier and the smaller the company and the less, sometimes the less capitalized, but that the importance and the value of the simplicity of it, not just in a statement, like support matters but even the logo design, the color schema, the font, the whatever, it's like. And factoring out like accessibility and like legibility, like, sure, but like, so often it's like you can tell, you can actually tell how advanced, I'm using this very loosely, but you can kind of tell how advanced somebody is in their path on design, right. Which is not always the same as brand by how simple they make things, right. Because there's this inclination that, like, especially early in careers to like, it's got to be like, I got to do something crazy. It's got, it's a pizza place. So like the eye is going to be a spinning pizza and like the z is going to be melting. Geez.

0:32:33 - (Matt Widdoes): Like it's gotta be that way. And it's like, it doesn't. Red and white, checkered box, you know, whatever, like, that's fine. Yeah, you look at like the Domino's Pizza logo, the Pizza Hut logo, you look. But you mentioned the company, the unmentionables of Apple, Nike, I can't remember Google, maybe they're simple. They're super simple. And so you can have these situations where like less experienced teams or people are like, they could take that same thing that you said where you're like, support matters. They're like, what?

0:33:02 - (Matt Widdoes): Like, no, it's got to be like that. It empowering sports leagues to do, you know, game changing. We need game changing in it. And it's because we games get it and it's like, guys stop. And so it's like, or they were, yeah, they look at it and they're like, that's it, like you guys spent ten weeks on, on this. Like it's just, you just made the dot different in the eye.

0:33:26 - (Brendan Bilko): That's it?

0:33:27 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, that's it. And it's like why? And like all that boils down. So I think that's a really another challenging piece for people who haven't seen it done well because it like, stuff matters and it matters at different depths. And so I've seen this aversion, I think in the early stages and maybe this is worth talking about. I don't know if you have an opinion on it, but like, I think people also kind of, myself included at some point in my life kind of think of it as like, well, brand is like quote brand.

0:33:53 - (Matt Widdoes): That's a million dollar problem for multimillion dollar companies. Like we are a startup in a garage. We do, we are not going to go invest a quarter million into branding. Um, and it's like, and again, it serves as this catch all, which is like, well surely you want to say like what you do, right? Like that's going to be a piece of it. And then you also want to like talk about who your audience is and you want to understand like, so it's like it starts to reveal itself slowly. But like how do you think about that? Like when that, and maybe there's not a singular answer here, but what does that, is there a typical path that people typically follow that lets them kind of walk down that line? And is there a point where you should say, okay, now it's time to pump the brakes like you are, you've reached product market fit or you've done some other thing? Or like are, are there any signals that say this is the time to stop and pull back and like tighten this thing up before we go bigger? Like how does somebody know when to make a legitimate investment in a brand versus like I'm going to pay somebody $20 k to come in for a month and like walk us through a few exercises and that's going to be a baseline for the next six months kind of thing?

0:34:56 - (Brendan Bilko): Hell, or less than $20k. I know people that, like logos, yeah, we did this on Fiverr and it's like, all right, great.

0:35:02 - (Matt Widdoes): See that melting cheese? That's fantastic. You guys are a pizza company. That's so clever.

0:35:12 - (Brendan Bilko): You nailed it. You nailed it. The example that I use for this all the time is at some point you've been around long enough or you're trying to do something, whether it be pushing some sort of marketing effort or you've reached a sticking point in your growth or it was just you at your kitchen table. And now you've got ten employees and eight sales guys, and they're all doing something different and telling a different story, and none of them are very effective.

0:35:41 - (Brendan Bilko): I equate it to the surge protector that's behind the tv. You know, you move into your apartment or your house and, you know, you plug in the TV and then three months later the cable box arrives. If people still have that or whatever OTT thing that you bought from Best Buy, you plug that in, then you've got the lamp and you've got the router, and like three years go by, you haven't looked behind that television set. You have no idea what the hell is going on. You can't find a space to plug anything in, and you look behind it and it's just an absolute tangled disaster.

0:36:09 - (Brendan Bilko): And that's ultimately what it is, right? You start, and you start running when you start up a company, and that's hard. And it comes with tons of pivots and turns and inflection points and how you message yourself changes, because you may have started as this, but now you're something completely different. And the widget is the thing that stuck through, but you're still using the same messaging.

0:36:31 - (Matt Widdoes): Right.

0:36:32 - (Brendan Bilko): Often a point in time when people come to us and say, like, all right, we gotta, we gotta start making sense of this here. Especially as we're about to either go from, you know, we've already gone zero to one. We're trying to go one to ten now. Like, how do we go ahead and do that? That's typically when, when folks will come to us. And for me, like, yeah, when you, when you see those differences and the craziness, it's a, it's a feeling.

0:36:58 - (Brendan Bilko): And that's probably when it's, when it's time to evaluate.

0:37:01 - (Matt Widdoes): Well, there really has to be, in my experience, there has to be an ambassador who is going to, one, own this and make sure it gets pushed through, but two, like, after people like you leave, who are going to be the champion of the brand, to be like, no, no, like this, that's got to get, that has to be updated, too. And this is still using the old branding or this isn't current or any number of things. Right? Because somebody's got to then take that because it's essentially a tool.

0:37:27 - (Matt Widdoes): It's really like, it's not even so much a tool. It's a lens by which everything has to be done from hiring and firing to rewards to, of course, the website, of course, your emails of course, your documentation and your like, your support and many people are like, uh, it's like, roll their eyes. It's busy work. And this is coming from somebody who spent their life in a huge piece of their life in performance marketing, which there's performance marketers are supposed to be cats and dogs with brands, right? They're like a brand whatever, it doesn't matter.

0:37:56 - (Matt Widdoes): And the bad brand people are like, performance, like whatever, like, you know, it's not anything without our branding when in reality it's got to be both. And so it's like, yeah, but you get so many people can be very hand-wavy with the brand and like rolling the eyes because yeah, it is harder to pin down. You can't say how much money that make us last year, like, yeah, to say and it's like, it's so squishy. We know it's better when we do it and we want, we know it's better. All of these things lead to people remembering us and knowing like, I don't know that I would remember Dr. Bronner's from Dr. Squatch if they didn't have the crazy stuff on the side, right? Because I'm like, yeah, it's one of those two.

0:38:37 - (Matt Widdoes): But like Doctor Squatch knew Doctor Bronner's existed and they came out with crazy different everything from packaging to style. Like I don't even think Bronner's runs paid ads. I've never seen a paid ad for Dr. Bronner.

0:38:49 - (Brendan Bilko): I've never seen one. Never seen one.

0:38:51 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, see Doctor Squatch is all over the place, right? And they, but they're serving different people and so anyways, but like that matters. So somebody says like name every soap that you know and there's, and so, or whatever, it's like that. It is really squishy and there are other things that are similar to that. But how often do you see brands that you, you know, they've had a lot of work done, whatever and then they don't have that steward internally or that champion who like pounds their hand on, you know, their Fist on the table that says this is important and rallies the troops and makes sure that it gets integrated and it gets like, it gets the support it needs and just like all this work go to waste. Is that a common outcome or typically people investing with the.

0:39:31 - (Brendan Bilko): Yeah, it is unfortunately a common outcome and it is devastating. Devastating. Like I remember the first time I witnessed it, I remember 72andSunny did this, did this brand work for supporting LA small businesses and they put out this sizzle video for it and the art direction was awesome and the ethos and mission behind it and the way they kind of hyped this whole thing up was incredible. And I went to the website and I was so heartbroken. I was like, oh, my God, someone. I was like, whatever happened with that campaign? And I got there and I was so bummed. It just didn't work.

0:40:13 - (Brendan Bilko): And, yeah, I mean, like the squishy factor and having a champion inside, like, it's so important. Like, we love when people kind of keep us on post brand foundations. So then say, like, okay, we've got all this awesome stuff now. How do we run with it? And the way that I think of Robin and what we do here, we're primarily focused on startups in sport or working with larger sports enterprises to launch new ventures.

0:40:44 - (Brendan Bilko): And so the muscle to kind of run with the thing and be the brand champion or whatever it may be for what it is that we're building or branding or marketing, they're just not there. And so often having us for like another six months or a year kind of helps imbue that sense of responsibility to the brand and what was just created as insurance almost, that's been really helpful. But we love it when there is someone that we're working with, be it a VP of marketing that has some good brand chops and has an understanding that you can't lose sight of a brand when chasing impressions.

0:41:24 - (Brendan Bilko): That for us is always such a win, is such a win because those, those two things have to go hand in hand. You can get all the eyeballs in the world, but if somebody doesn't know who it is you are, how you're differentiated and why you should be a part of their life and see all of that with, with consistency. And it doesn't matter because they're, they're moving on. Like you mentioned the Doctor Bronner's thing. I don't know if they do paid advertising, but you've had, you know, the rule of sevens, right, which is probably closer to the rule of eights, nines, tens, twelves, whatever it is these days.

0:41:57 - (Brendan Bilko): You have to, you know, see something that many times before you act and, you know, they haven't changed. They've been, you know, beating the right drum for a really, really long time. And eventually you were like, oh, I'll check it out. Like, have you seen the new Tubi campaign? Or do you know the brand Tubi?

0:42:14 - (Matt Widdoes): Based in LA, they raised a ton of money, like hundreds of millions of dollars. And they're kind of like a YouTube alternative or no.

0:42:23 - (Brendan Bilko): No, Tubi is a OTT free video streaming platform that I believe it's owned by Fox Corp. But, yeah, it's like tens of millions of users that you can watch a catalog of free movies and television that are available on your Roku or whatever. But I'm thinking about something that happened to be recently related to Tubi in particular. I'll go on about it for a second. But so they were just whatever one of the free apps that came with your Samsung smart TV or whatever that people were kind of blowing through.

0:42:59 - (Brendan Bilko): And so they recently went through this rebrand, and I think the agency that did it was DixonBaxi, and they're based in London, and they did this absolutely incredible job. But the backbone of the rebrand embraced this, like, this youthfulness and playfulness of their audience and how they tend to go down rabbit holes of context, of content. Excuse me, but they took the rabbit hole idea back to this really kind of, like, playful Alice in Wonderland thing and away from the nefarious connotation that it had in the Kevin Ruse Rabbit Hole podcast way, which was an incredible podcast. But anyway, so they.

0:43:42 - (Brendan Bilko): Yeah, so they did this beautiful rebrand. They currently have a campaign called more popular than popular things that really kind of ties back to their audience and the rabbit hole. And I landed at JFK a week ago or two weeks ago, and walked out of the gate and all the kind of video boards in JFK were like, I hadn't seen them to be rebranded at that point, but, like, big, purple, yellow, motion driven, absolutely gorgeous.

0:44:09 - (Brendan Bilko): And the content that was on the board itself would be like, I'm going to get the numbers wrong. There are like 75 million or, sorry, like 4 million babies in the United States. 75 million Tubi subscribers. Tubi is more popular than babies. There's X million people in France, 75 million Tubi viewers every month to be more popular than France. Super fun, super motion driven. Um, like, I stood just, like, watching all of these things.

0:44:40 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah.

0:44:40 - (Brendan Bilko): As if I was going down the rabbit hole of this campaign just to figure it out.

0:44:44 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah.

0:44:45 - (Brendan Bilko): How many millions? 75 million is like a lot. And then I leave the airport and I see wild postings, and then I'm on my computer and I've got a bunch of ads that are surfaced up to me, and I learned that tubi has live sports. Had no idea. Big sports fan. Anyway, I'm a tubi subscriber now, and the, like, backbone of really fun, youthful brand, like, tied into this beautiful, fun, youthful campaign, which tied in really, really nicely to a mix of outdoor and programmatic and everything else that ultimately landed in 75 million and won subscribers.

0:45:20 - (Matt Widdoes): Well, there you go. And I think that that speaks to. None of that can be done without a brand. Right. So, like, that willingness to play and all that stuff is definitely part of the brief to the agency that put that together. And then talking about kind of comprehensive campaigns, granted, it helps have a ton of money. Right. Because obviously those things aren't cheap to run.

0:45:35 - (Brendan Bilko): Oh, yeah, they spent a lot, for sure.

0:45:38 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah. I'm like, and all the interactive screens and all that stuff. And a takeover at JFK, like, those things are expensive. And then. Yes, and then running in parallel, lots of digital content, you know, to back that up. But it can expedite the trust. It can expedite the, like. All right, I'm gonna give this a shot. And, yeah, live life sports. Great. And cheaper than YouTube TV or Hulu or whoever else that I believed I could get good live sports from, you know, yesterday.

0:46:03 - (Matt Widdoes): And then, yeah, using that. I like. I like the premise of the campaign to drive the social proof, which is like, yeah, there's a lot of people, like, that's.

0:46:10 - (Brendan Bilko): There's gotta be something there.

0:46:11 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, exactly. And so, yeah, that's cool to see that out in the wild. Well, for, for any listeners who are either large, you know, sea level, maybe at larger companies, or early stage founders who are kind of thinking about brand or are doing it or kind of questioning whether or not they have kind of the right stuff there currently, any advice that you would give them, any parting words of wisdom or just kind of lookouts or gotchas that they should be, you know, keeping an eye open for?

0:46:41 - (Brendan Bilko): Yeah, I would say there are probably two things that I see more often than nothing. One is just kind of chasing your competition. I see it all the time, and I think I alluded to it at the top. But this idea that you've got a competitor that has a great athlete endorser or has launched some TikTok campaign that has gone moderately viral or whatever it may be, whatever medium or modicum of storytelling that they're doing that may work for them, that does not mean that it's going to work for you.

0:47:16 - (Brendan Bilko): And ultimately, it just becomes a distraction. So just because your competitors are doing it doesn't mean that you need to do it. People are there for you, and so stick to who it is that you are and do the things, do the things that work for you. And then the other thing I would say that we see all the time is people just trying to do too much. I mentioned TikTok. If you're like some sort of, like, enterprise health tech SaaS solution, like, you probably skip the talk, man.

0:47:50 - (Matt Widdoes): You know, hey, fellow kids, the best way to, you know, check your blood health.

0:47:55 - (Brendan Bilko): Yeah. Like, you probably don't need to do that, right?

0:47:58 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah.

0:47:59 - (Brendan Bilko): And what brand and investing in it might mean something completely, completely different for you. We actually did just do some brand work with this awesome health tech company, Epicor. And for them, it was really making sure that when people came to their website and came to learn about their products, which are all related to hydration monitoring, the kind of science and the idea of using science to better human conditions is the thing that they really wanted to come through. And so whether you're an athlete or an industrial athlete, being hydrated is kind of crucial to your wellbeing.

0:48:42 - (Brendan Bilko): And that's ultimately what they provide. But they're beyond working on their messaging, tightening up some basic brand elements, visual brand elements, and reworking their website. That's what they needed to do. They don't need to go beyond that, you know, versus, you know, other companies we've worked with where it's a full, you know, visual identity refresh. And we're coming up with the campaign because you've got a partnership coming up with the Dallas Cowboys, and your brand is going to be all over AT&T Stadium. And so, like, that has to be absolutely dialed in that sense, because you paid a lot of money to be on those boards.

0:49:22 - (Brendan Bilko): And so let's make sure that everything is looking tight. So sticking, sticking within your lane, making sure that you're not doing too much. Those are the two things that I would say to look out for.

0:49:33 - (Matt Widdoes): Cool. Well, thank you so much for the time today. It's always great chatting with you. I look forward to the next time we get to do it.

0:49:38 - (Brendan Bilko): Yeah, bud. Thanks for having me.

0:49:40 - (Matt Widdoes): Yeah, looking forward to the next one. Thanks again.