Episode 49: Brand Transformation, Growth & Marketing Paradigms: A Deep Dive | Van Diamandakis

In the latest episode of the Interesting B2B Marketers podcast, Steve Goldhaber sits down with Vyond's Chief Commercial Officer, Van Diamandakis, to delve into a rich tapestry of experiences spanning his multifaceted career.

Their conversation covers intriguing case studies including a large telecommunications company's $1.6 billion venture into the computer business, the challenges and triumphs of brand congruence, and a smaller company's impressive growth from $25 million to $400 million in the LAN optimization field. They also examine the complex transformation within a global $3 billion company, exploring the process of aligning various business units, overhauling disparate products, and unifying the brand over three years.

The episode then shifts to a reflective journey through different eras of marketing and advertising, focusing on the transformative power of creativity. Starting from Van's early days in advertising, they discuss shifts in marketing paradigms, including the Dell dude campaign, and the challenges and rewards of balancing product-centric advertising with compelling storytelling. They share insightful anecdotes and lessons from working with industry titans, illustrating the evolution of marketing and brand strategy.

Connect with Van Diamandakis and Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn.

Transcript

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Steve Goldhaber: Hello everybody. Welcome back to Studio 26 on the Interesting B2B Marketers podcast. I'm excited about the show today. Van, welcome to our show.

Van Diamandakis:  Hi Steve. It's great to be here. 

Steve Goldhaber: Alright, cool. So before we get to the case studies like we always do, we do a quick 60-second overview of who you are.

So tell everyone about your background, your thing.

Van Diamandakis:  Hi everyone. My name's Van Diamandakis. I'm currently the Chief Commercial Officer at Vyond. We are an AI-powered video creation platform and we put the power of video creation in everybody's hands. My background is in marketing mostly. I started out in the advertising agency business in the Midwest and I worked at several agencies including in Rubic and D E B, Chicago and Remy Publicists, and that was a really fun part.

Of my earlier career and then jumped into the client side and I worked at startups and scale ups and, you know, very large companies, you know, including, you know, at and t and, and Sage and Riverbed technology, WebEx when it was cool way back when, and I lived in Silicon Valley for 20 years. I also lived in Europe for six years and worked for, for companies over there and, and now, I'm based out of Chicago and Highland Park, Illinois.

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Steve Goldhaber: I'm loving the summer here, so we have a lot in common. We've both done the, the client-agency path. You've lived in Europe. I lived in Belgium when I was a kid. I didn't work there, but we have worked there. I, my only regret is that I did not do the time in Silicon Valley. I, looking back on my career, I would've loved to go out there.

When things are just starting to blossom. But anyway, enough about me reminiscing about our backgrounds. Let's jump into the first case study. This is gonna be from large telco company, so take it away.

Van Diamandakis: Yeah, sure. So this is a really interesting one and it's really about Brand Inc. Congruent. So it was about this very large telecommunications company, phone company, right?

Pretty clear as to what they do, and they wanted to get into the computer business. So they bought a, they bought a big computer company and so they wanted to really, you know, sell an end-to-end solution from the computer on your desk through the connection, the wire, all the way through to the backend big company servers.

And I joined there to help with that, had a brand transformation moving through the acquisition and rebranding the company, the telecommunications, and we launching a. Brand new Enterprise server family, you know, big Iron, you know, back then that ran all companies, backend services and customers and we had a big problem.

Big problem was brand congruent. So, you know, you're, you're selling these really expensive enterprise servers that cost anywhere from $600,000 to millions of dollars to the Fortune 500. Yet it's branded this. Phone company. So you know, how do we do that? That's a big problem, you know, so I've started talking to Fortune 500 CIOs and they're telling me, you expect me to buy millions of dollars of enterprise servers from a phone company.

Like, I'm gonna go buy it from digital. Or you know, back then tandem or SE went, or HP or any one of the, you know, well-known computer companies, compact. And, and so we were, we were stuck. That was a problem. And so then I just kept asking questions and this is where really understanding the customer and the customer persona and how they buy what they buy is really important.

And I asked them, so how do you buy enterprise servers? You know, what are the criteria? How do you make that decision on, on what to bot? And they said, well, it's a good question. You know, we asked software companies, so we'll ask our. Database. We'll, we'll ask our database providers, you know what, you know, what hardware does your database software perform the best following?

Where, where is the, you know, the screen on? And I say, oh, so you asked like database companies like Oracle, like Microsoft, like back then there was a company called Informix. And I'm like, oh, okay. So then we had the insight. So how do we get these companies to endorse? This brand new line of enterprise servers, which was the latest and greatest technology really, it was as busy anybody else's.

So went out to California, you know, we convinced these companies, Oracle and Informex, and there's the ad right there. You see Larry Ellison back there on the Columbia ad, and we convinced them to do this ad campaign with us. It was a, a fully integrated marketing campaign, but the advertising part of it was kind of the focus of it, and we were everywhere on.

We convinced these CEOs. To, you know, lean on our enterprise servers and saying, look, Oracle makes the best databases in the world, and they stream on this telecommunications company. And, and they had, we had Jim Gray, who was then the, the very well-known and beloved c t O of Microsoft do the same thing.

And, and Bill White, who was the c e O of Informix, they the same thing. And this campaign ran everywhere. You know, we did direct marketing as well, where we had, like back then. You know, these like little voice recorders were really popular, so we had Larry Ellison's voice in the three dimensional kind of box mailing going out to 500 CIOs with Larry telling the c I.

That Oracle is the greatest, and you know, at t and Oracle are better together. And it was a very successful campaign. It won all kinds of awards and we sold $1.6 billion of enterprise servers because of it. There was also a. Partner marketing involved and, you know, going to market with those database companies.

So it was, it was a sales campaign with marketing integrated into it. And it was the last time Larry ever did a campaign with a partner. 'cause the other hardware companies were so upset that he would do a campaign with us versus the other guys. So it was, it was one and only campaign. So it was really good.

Steve Goldhaber: So, really interesting, I mean, good problem. And how you identified it. I like that you spoke to a lot of the CIOs to figure out kind of the key insight. I mean, it's ultimately like an influencer that you needed to win over and you did. So what was, what was the outcome of this? How did perception change?

How long did it take for that to happen? 

Van Diamandakis: Well, the campaign, you know, we ran the campaign, you know, for, for over a year and I. The, the impact was almost instant, really, because, you know, while the marketing was running, it was generating a lot of leads. The direct marketing campaign was a big hit. Our sales leaders followed up with all of those CIOs, and our conversion rate was like, you know, almost 50% in terms of getting meetings with those CIOs.

We brought in our Oracle, you know, whoever our Microsoft or Informex counterparts into these meetings. You know, it didn't take very long for the campaign to be, to be successful because there was just nothing else like it out there, you know, in the market. And to have almost celebrity personalities from Silicon Valley, you know, kind of endorsing it.

I, and being a part of it was a big deal. There was also some great PR that came out of it as well. So, and like I said, we generated 1.6 billion in revenue over the course of the year, launching a brand new Enterprise server family that was really branded incorrectly. Like I guess in, in hindsight, I.

The company should have left the acquiring company alone. You know, and just, and just, you know, like companies can, companies buy other companies and sometimes they just leave the company alone in terms of the brand. Yeah. Because if the brand is strong on its own, yeah. It's a good idea not to mess with it.

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Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, I agree. That's probably the, the number one flaw I see in the, in acquisitive company is just the, the assumption that, well, now we own you, so we're just gonna. We're gonna take that over and people will feel the same way. And many times it does not give us the inside track on locking in Larry Ellison to do something like that.

Like who? I, I'm interested in the mechanics of like, are you going through agents? Is it a personal relationship? How do you get Larry to ask him to do this?

Van Diamandakis: So it was definitely a c e o to c e o type ask. We had the, the c e o of the company that I worked for go to actually the, the C m O of Oracle at the time, you know, for example.

And that meeting was brokered by other senior leaders in my company and, and Oracle that were working together, you know, kind of on the alliances side of the equation. You know, 'cause we were a big company and, and we had business alliances with Oracle as other major hardware companies had. So it was just, Kind of through that networking and getting the introduction and then getting an introduction to Larry.

And so, you know, I, I was there with our head of marketing at the time and you know, we just played to this ego, you know, he was really kind of into his health back then. You know, I was into like yoga and green tea and all these things and we were playing to that and you know, there were several other.

Poses, like, you know, he's sitting on top of the server in kind of a yoga position, and that ad was probably the most popular out of, out of the series. But, you know, we were a big partner and we did, you know, good business together. And, you know, back then he really, he wanted to be in ads. So it was just one of those things just got lucky.

Yeah. And then, and then we said, well, you know, Phil Whiter and Informex is going to be on. He's doing it. And then Jim Gray, he's doing it too. So, and they weren't doing it yet, but you know, we were Uhoh saying, then Larry's doing it so you better, you know, so it was one of those things and they all ended up doing it.

I couldn't get, couldn't get Bill Gates, but we got Jim Gray. 

Steve Goldhaber: I'll take three outta the four for the, for the gets. That was really good. All right. Awesome Case study. Let's jump into another one. This one has to do with positioning and storytelling,right? 

Van Diamandakis: So this is a, this is a smaller company and, you know, we were, we were about 30 million in revenue and great product.

This was a, this was kind of like a crossing, dec chasm, innovative product in a new market and just on the back of this amazing product. The company grew, you know, really fast to to 30 million, and they really didn't have that much of a marketing function. So these people, this was in California and these people were, you know, PhDs from M I t Berkeley and Stanford.

They were really, really smart technical people that, that started the company and were running the company. And the product was something called LAN optimization, which is wide area networking optimization. So the idea. Of making data and applications stream across wide area networks to allow people to access these applications and work faster and collaborate faster.

So it was just at the right time, right place, right product, right time. When Cloud was out of the new thing, mark Benioff was pounding the drum on cloud. And another huge kind of trend, was it consolidation, where companies were consolidating multiple data centers into fewer data centers. So, You know, servers were moving further away from people in branch offices that were using 'em.

And cloud was a big thing, and cloud-based applications was a big thing. So there was this big hairy problem that CIOs were facing where they were doing these things and they were kind of moving to the cloud, but it was causing a big problem with all the knowledge workers around. A company in around the world that they couldn't access these applications and data fast as best.

They were just really upset and screaming at their c I o. And this product really solved that problem. But we were competing against very large networking companies that were ingrained into the CIO's office, like Cisco for example. And they said, well, we have, we have a solution for you just like this.

But it wasn't, so we had the innovative solution. The, the issue was, or the, the opportunities for us was how do we grow faster? So the company was kind of positioned as, as technical solution WAN optimization and their story really engaged and appeal to network engineers. So they were down at the lower la, lower ends of the company and we wanted to get to the C I O.

How do you get to the c I o? Well, it requires a different positioning. A story that is customer in versus product out. And you know, when our sales reps would go to the C I O or try to go to the VP level or c I o, they would say, what WAN optimization, why don't you just take that to my network engineers and leave, leave me alone, like wasting my time.

I've got these big problems I'm trying to solve. And so we went through a whole exercise, you know, where we again interviewed a bunch of. CIOs and really understood what their top five funded initiatives were, and then created a story that aligned with those initiatives. And, you know, the biggest issue that they had was how do I make cloud work, you know, in this new environment when bandwidth wasn't as plentiful and that we're doing it consolidation.

And my c i o was down my, my neck about cloud, cloud, cloud. And so, Told a different story, which had to do with, you know, we've got from the WAN optimization company to the cloud infrastructure performance company, you can't do cloud without our company. And then we told the story as to why. And so you don't mention your product until slide 10 or 12.

It's all about setting up a problem. And you know, today's approaches are falling flat, but there's a better way. These are your requirements and here's your solution. And smart companies like you have figured it out and you just tell that story. And we created a really great story that resonated and we rolled it out the entire sales organization and throughout all of our marketing.

But the other thing that a lot of Silicon Valley companies don't get is the difference between company positioning and brand strategy. They think it's the same thing. And sometimes they go to advertising agencies for company positioning and messaging like I was just talking to you about, and they end up with something else.

They end up, they end up with like a marketing kind of brand story. And so I found the most success by starting with company positioning and messaging, which addresses a big problem of your economic buyer, not your buyer today. Who's your buyer tomorrow? And tell that story. And with that foundation, You can go into an exploration of your brand strategy and then the brand strategy that fell out of that, which really kind of ignited the marketing and helped us generate just a bunch of leads and, and really create a brand that went beyond the rational reasons to buy it.

It went into the emotional reasons to love it, and that was this whole idea, and this is where we used that. A really great little agency in the Bay Area to come up with this idea of this company, you know, brings the world closer together. And it was about like busting down boundaries and doing business everywhere in real-time.

And the tagline that came out of it was St. Fast and it, and then the, there was a great campaign that came out of it that all kinds of awards that was, imagine a world where San Francisco and Singapore come together as one. And it's San F Port or Mumbai in Boston to become Mum Boston. Yeah. Or Dil Dusseldorf from Philadelphia becomes Dus Philadelphia.

So as a city mashup. Yeah. Campaign. And these skylines would come together digital and, and then people loved that. And then it became a game, you know. Like internally at the company. Okay. Come up with other mashups that we can use in our advertising. And then we asked our customers to come up with mashups that we could use in our advertising.

So it was, it was an example of company positioning and messaging that really engaged with the senior buyer and dramatically accelerate sales and marketing on top of it that leverages that company positioning to a brand story. Or an idea that is a perception of a company, you know, that we, that was woven through all of our kind of marketing and the result, you know, we went from 25 million to 400 million, you know, three and a half years.

So that was the, that was a ride. That was definitely the,

Steve Goldhaber: yeah, there's somebody, so many things I'd like about this case study. I mean, one is you've, you've hit on themes of. Product out customer in, you know, that's the, that's the classic challenge of most technology companies is their d n A is just product, product, product.

And it's almost uncomfortable for many of them to think outside that, that framework. And then I think the other thing I really like is that you just went and talked to people and, and figure it out what their pain is. I'm a huge believer in pain driven ideation or strategies because ultimately I. The role of great B2B marketing in my mind is for the audience to kind of learn about you in a way where they go, this company totally gets my problems.

And it's not even, you know, you're not even at the product level yet. Like it's still just, you start that relationship by saying, these guys get me now I'm open to learn more. You know, like to your point now on slide 10 or whatever it is now you can, you can have the actual product story, but if you have that story too soon, people.

Just, they don't want to hear it like we're, we are as buyers of these things. We're all very good at hearing it and then going, I'm tuning it out. I don't want to go there yet. All right. So great case study. We are gonna do one more. This one is Ill more in the spirit of transforming a company. So go jump into number three.

Van Diamandakis: Okay. And this is my stint in Europe. I was, I lived in Dublin, Ireland for six years and was working, I. A lot in London, in all over Europe actually. But this company was headquartered in London in The Shard, which is an amazing building at London Bridge. But this is, a story of a company transformation and a brand and marketing transformation.

And, you know, I was working in, in Dublin actually for another company and I get a call from an old friend that we used to work together at Oracle and he. Van, what are you doing in Dublin? I said, well, I'm working here. What are you doing? Well, I've, I'm just taking over c e o of this company. Wow. London based company, but all over the world.

It's the best company you've never heard of. And, you know, I was hired to transform the company and I want you to, to join the team. And I said, all right, what's the company? I actually never heard of it. You know, it's a $3 billion global company that I never heard of. Part of the problem. And so I joined the company as Executive Vice p, president of Brand and Global Marketing, and we were on a three year mission to just transform everything about the company.

So the company was created 30 years earlier, and it grew through acquisition, so it, it missed a memo on cloud completely. Okay, so the company grew over, you know, 30 years acquiring other companies, you know, 25 different business units and countries, and the company, you know, did accounting, payroll, payments, you know, mid-market e r P software, so accounting software, and, you know, each of the business unit leaders in the different countries, they just operated on their own.

And it was, don't bother me. As long as I deliver the number, you know, leave me alone. And so you can imagine the brand, you know, was all over the place and AC acquisitions, acquisitions were made at the, at the country level. And so we had 257 different products that did basically the same thing. And they were client server products when Cloud was here and companies like Intuit and QuickBooks and Xero and Workday.

We're eating our lunch and starting to come into the uk, other countries where we had leadership and chewing away at our market share. So my job was to pull together a global marketing organization to lead, you know, that company through a brand transformation. And we must have had 150 agencies around the world doing work for us, spending 70 million pounds.

And doing whatever they wanted to do. So the first thing I did was had to kind of break that down and build up an internal agency structure that supported, you know, the world. Different business units where we had a, a concentrated team in the United States, mostly in the Bay Area, and we had smaller teams in the different business units around the world connected by technology and a process and a brand, you know.

Our governance process, and we just had a few agencies for overflow. So that was the, the kind of foundation, and we saved a bunch of money. So that, that was the one foundation that I, I started with there. And then the other thing was the brand was all over the place. You know, you put all the, the marketing on the walls from around the world, I call it the wall of shame.

And it was like, who are we? Like it was really impossible to understand. The brand around the world, it was like 25 different companies. So, you know, we started a project to create a, a holistic brand strategy around the world. I had the people, I had the infrastructure, I had the process, and we started to clean things up.

But then we needed a big idea. How do I create a big idea that rallies the company, first of all? 'cause you know, the big thing is to win it internally. If you get people on board internally, and these are folks that didn't wanna work with corporate France, you know nothing about us, leave us alone. In Germany, France and Germany were Tufts, Italy.

Yeah. And, and so, you know, the same thing. It was, it was research based, so it was talking to all of these folks. I, I put so many miles on. Over that year period, or year and a half period, talking to all of these managing directors around the world about them, about their challenges, about the brand and their patch and you know, what they were going through and who was the competition and, and just, I did a lot of that.

And then again, talking to a lot of customers. We had a team that was doing this and we just, people along the way on this project and just getting feedback and. I was helping them, you know, I guess across their business. So part of it was to build credibility, you know, for myself, you know, in the organization as a person that's there to help as a person that listens, as a person that's not gonna like, come in there and tell them what to do and have all the answers.

So it took a while to build that rapport for myself and, and my team. And then, you know, once, once I had that foundation, We were able to just create, you know, an idea that was really grounded in our customers. So, you know, mostly we sold to small business owners. So we were small business, medium business software, and we brought that small business owner to light, you know, as a person and his or her struggle and as the hero of the.

And, you know, there are millions and millions small business owners out there in the world and they make up a big part of the global economy and their risk takers, and we just describe them and almost, you know, put 'em on a pedestal as, as heroes and the risk that they take and how they give back to their community.

So it was really like a romantic story about, yeah, about these people and who could argue with that. And we call them. We called them business builders and we told their stories and how our company supported them in their mission in life. Because for them it was more than business. It was passion, it was love.

It was who they work. Yeah. And they loved it. You know, how could they, how could they not like that idea? Right? Because that's who we were selling to. And so we launched this brand strategy internally and externally in the form of, you know, advertising and, you know, multimedia champagnes. And then it went all the way through to product naming as well.

Because as you can, you can imagine, you know, we had all these products around the world, different naming, you know, all this stuff and how do you make sense of it? How do you navigate these products to figure out what's best for you? How do you organize them? So we show with a portfolio brand naming and product naming architecture that, that bucketed these products into categories and, you know, we name them in simple terms.

You know, naming for me is, is, is for B two B is, is easy. It's the criteria are easy to set, easy to say, easy to spell, and easy to remember. That's it. For, for product naming. Make it descriptive because all that matters is the master brand. Everything ladders up to the master brand. Yeah. We're not, yeah, we're not proctoring gamble, you know?

Yeah, sure.

Steve Goldhaber: So how, you know, what you're doing here, and I've, and I can relate to what you're talking about. I've done this twice at two big Fortune 500 companies with a ton of growth through m and a. That just kind of became so big that was like, oh my god. We're not one company, we're a hundred companies.

Right. So I, I've been through this before. It's really challenging. I'm curious to know how long this process took you, you know, like you're, it's a lot of relationship building, a lot of alignment. What does that look like from a timing perspective?

Van Diamandakis: Well, to, to reorganize the marketing organization in an organizational design that worked for everybody and to build the relationship.

With the 25 managing directors and internal leaders that took a year to do all that. So it's almost like the mantra was perform and transform, like we still had to do business. Yeah. And so in that year period, you know, there, just try to hit some base hits, you know, some small wins and get things going and save some money and bring the brand together, get people.

Organized around the idea of, look, you know, we're here to help you as corporate and we're gonna give you things and we're gonna support you with dollars and programs and great creative and people, and you know, we're gonna create a framework for you that you can leverage and localize because localization for.

To create programs and assets and ideas and strategies in a way that they could take and localize and, and have it be easy for them. Yeah. It required knowing their market, knowing their customers, knowing the competition locally, knowing culture. So that took a, that took a year to do that. And, you know, some small wings along the way.

And then the, the brand transformation, another probably. Year to launch and then another year to fully execute around the world. So the wall of shame turned into the wall of fame, you know, or everything. And I had that before and after picture. Yeah, which was dramatic. And, and that

Steve Goldhaber: was good. Yeah. I've, I've created the walls before and it is such a gr, I mean, I really, as a marketer, I enjoy taking these steps back and looking at like a wall like that because they're just great representations of like, every day you're being pulled in a bunch of different directions.

But when you just step back and kind of say, well, what do we, what's the impact that we're having? And when you can tell that story, A couple years down the line, it's, it's really powerful and it, and it's fun to see that

Van Diamandakis: physical Yeah. Representation. And I think everybody was, was proud, you know, they were proud of, of the brand and the marketing and the perception that we were changing in the marketplace about this old stodgy company that, you know, couldn't find its way.

And yeah, it was so fragmented and so at least. The face to the world started to come together and, and it was working, you know, and then there's all the other stuff internally too, right around aligning around shared vision and mission and strategy and values and, and getting the company to work together as one company.

And then, you know what, what helped also, there was this idea of OKRs objectives and key results, which was something that came out it. Silicon Valley and John Dore and Intel and just aligning everybody from the c e o on his or her top objectives and key results for the quarter, for the year, and how that ladders down to everybody in the company and then everybody can see everybody else's.

And so you're aligned. Yep. At some level that that really helped a lot. That was a end of that idea. That was very foreign. Yeah. This company in the past. Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: I love the case study. I'm gonna jump into Q and A now. So tell us Van, your first gig in marketing, what were you

Van Diamandakis: doing? Well, I was doing grad school at the University of Iowa, getting my M B A.

You know how companies come in and they interview and they try to, an advertising agency named Young and Rubic Camp came in there and they were just interviewing people and you could go in there and talk. So, and the recruiters and, and I thought it would be fun. To being the advertising agency business.

So they brought me in as an intern when I was still in graduate school, and I was just loved it. It was super fun, great place for young people. Really sparked people there, creative people. I really loved the creativity there. And I, I joined after I finished my M B A and, and that, that job took me from Cedar Rapids, Iowa to.

And, and that was my first gig. And, and 1, 1, 1 of the clients that I won was this company that we were talking about the first company. A telecommunications company and that's when I jumped over for the first time into the yeah. Client side.

Steve Goldhaber: Well, tell me culturally, Y N R back then, what was it like when you're walking the halls?

What'd it feel like? I didn't spend

Van Diamandakis: much time in New York. I was mostly at satellite offices in different offices, Y R Chicago. It just was fun back then in fast pace, and it was more about the creative than anything else back then, it wasn't as much about, you know, the technology. Or, you know, now it's, it's more about the, the technical marketers that are kind of running the show more about account-based marketing, targeting and, you know, AI and personalization and, and all these different things, programmatic advertising.

You know, back then it was, it was simple and it was about the best creative and the best creative one. And, you know, media, media was really important. Back then, I think it was, it was a little more diverse media back then. It was more about TV and radio print and those type of things. Yeah. And, and buying remnant and all these different Oh, yeah.

Tricks of the trade back then.

Steve Goldhaber: I, you know, I started my first job I was, I was an intern at an ad agency, Campbell Meth in Minneapolis. Yeah. I remember, you know, every agency's trying to be unique and the, and the big push that they were using at the time, 'cause traditionally it was the creative people came up with an idea and then they tossed it, you know, down the hall or to another floor, to the media team and they said, here's the idea.

Bring it to life. And, you know, it was the idea that, no, it's, it, it shouldn't be that. Idea centric, like, yes, it has to be driven by an idea, but the media people should be part of that process. So they should inform the idea or say, Hey, this idea can be brought to life in these different ways, but have you considered this?

But it, it was funny just for years how simple it was. It's just, just conceptually create a campaign and as long as you could manifest a 32nd TV spot, a print ad, or three, That was it. So it's funny how you mentioned, you know, you fast forward to today's world, you could almost be an amazing marketer without having the skills of, of 20 years ago.

And I say that as a downside, right? Like that's not a good thing. There's still still something very powerful about the ability to do that. You're just working in a, in a modern tech stack. But I, I do think that art of ideas and storytelling has been diminished because again, you can just, You can almost use technology to your advantage to get decent results, but you can't.

You can't get those big breakthroughs like you've been talking about in so many of your case studies. Like those big movements where you could move the needle in a month or two if you had a really compelling

Van Diamandakis: idea. Yeah, that's so true, and that's what I discovered in Silicon Valley coming out of the advertising agency business and even working at companies like Oracle and.

And it's just like it wasn't valued. And we never had great created, you know, at Oracle, I mean, Larry didn't believe in advertising. I mean, we used to go into his office and he'd pull out his computer. I mean, he was a back then Cork Express or something like that. And he would make ads. He would make ads.

He would make these. These ads with product benefits on the side or features, and then on the top it would be like Oracle Informix, Microsoft, you know, full row level locking scalability. Just feature that feature Oracle. Click, click, click, click. Yep. We have it. Other companies know they don't have it. Run it in the Economist.

Mary? No. Run it or you're fired. Yeah. Okay. And so, you know, we, we ran these very product-centric boring ads and, you know, no one, no one can say that, you know, I love Oracle, you know, I just love that brand. You know, there's nothing Apple about it. Yeah, right. It's, it was a very sales and. The sellers were killers and they made a ton of money and they locked you in.

And, you know, the art of creative, I call it the marketing product, is lost most of the time in Silicon Valley, except for some companies like, like, you know, apple and, and, and some others. But it's, it's a struggle even for me now at Deon's. You know, we're a great company and our customers love us. They tell me it's the most fun part of their job.

I. To make these animated videos for, you know, onboarding, training and things like that. And it's a struggle for me to come up with great creatives. So the companies that can nail that down, you know, great products, great technical marketing, digital marketing, really nailing that down, using the latest and greatest techniques and great creatives, they're gonna kill it.

Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: I think you know the example of, you know, the feature and the benefit ad that LA Larry insisted you run. I mean, my take on that is there is a time and a place for that. So that's the perfect, you know, when you are in a meeting and you've got a C I O C T O, they want that. Like, okay, give me the product information.

Right? That's when you right reveal that. That's where you kind of battle it out. And I think the downfall of many CEOs is, They think that that magical moment where you actually like ask for the sale and you get it, get it. They want to take that exciting moment. 'cause obviously it's great for business and just have that upstream and you know, it, it's a problem that has continued to go on.

It will cont it will continue to happen. Right. But it's just, if they only understood. Time

Van Diamandakis: and place. Time and place. Yeah. Yeah, yeah. No, it's like their baby. The product is their baby and so they wanna lead with it. Oh my God, look at this amazing product and platform and a APIs and oh my God, there's nothing else like it.

And that's why, you know, that's why these, these positioning and presentations start with that. They wanna start with that because it's amazing. Yeah. Don't you get it? And that's why they wanna put like, feature ads in The Economist. But you're right, there's a time and place for that. It's not at the top of the funnel.

Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: The other thing too, it's like, you know, marketing can make you appear bigger than you are. I remember reading something about Salesforce, who they have historically over-indexed on marketing spend as a, you know, proportion of overall revenue. And it was, it was Mark's idea early on. He was like, I wanna be bigger than I am and I can use marketing to do that.

And I, you know, I could tell a little bit more of a story there, you know, you know, when you experience the annual Salesforce meeting, what's it, I think it's Dreamforce. It's overwhelming in a way that you're like, oh my God, this, like, these people run the world, like they put on, they put on

Van Diamandakis: an enormous event.

Yeah, he was, I worked for Mark at Oracle back in the day and he was, he's a brilliant marketer. He just innate just. Born with it. Brilliant storyteller. A brilliant marketer and brilliant seller. So sales and marketing was always his thing. And you know, we used to have like the work group products back then really do products Oracle, like you know that Oracle had a power browser, Oracle power browser, power browser, Oracle Blue, Oracle, all these products that never made it that.

We're designed to compete with Microsoft and the work group area, but you know, mark made them amazing and we had amazing launches and storytelling and everybody wanted to be a part of it. And so he's always been really good at, you know, punching above the weight class. And, you know, the events that we had were amazing and, and a lot of those folks, you know, you know, went to Salesforce, Elizabeth Pinkham, who used to work for me at.

Oracle is, so she started Dreamforce, you know, it became the, as you know, the, the biggest kind of event there is out there and a whole event strategy and branding across different event kind of levels. The Success tour and, you know, they have a whole strategy at different events that they launch around the world that ladder up to dream for.

So there's a whole branding and strategy there. Then of course, his real estate strategy for building the, the largest towers in every major city, Salesforce towers. So yeah, absolutely. That is the, the quintessential example of sighting above your weight class. Yeah.

Steve Goldhaber: Who are some other people you've had the pleasure of working with?

You've had some great stories from, from Mark and Larry. What are some other figures that you're like, and it could be either way, like they, they loved marketing and were an enabler,

Van Diamandakis: or they dismissed it. Well, you know, I'd say one of the. Would be Michael Dell. And when I was working at D two D Chicago, right downtown there in the amicable building, now it's called the AON Building.

We won the Dell account globally. And you know, I was working with the late great Paul Tilly, brilliant creative director and we, bunch of us went to Round Rock down there by where is. We worked with Michael Dell and you know, he'd say, vad, if you can't measure it, you can't manage it. So, yeah, you know, we, we created a whole how marketing r o I, this was before Salesforce, before Marketo or Eloqua or anything like that.

A whole loop measurement system to actually measure the, the results of the ACT campaigns. And we had University of Chicago. Kind of metric modelers at at D D B, and we would create call TURs. And Bill Bryant would, he ran SS M B and he'd say, van, I need 247,000 calls in the call center next quarter. How much?

How much money? I said, I'll get back to you. And we models for that and we'd come back and say, okay, it's gonna be 29 million this quarter and here's how we're gonna spend it across these channels. And the calls are gonna come in like this on a, on a daily basis, on a call curve. That was, yeah. In your I V R and it's 90% accurate.

And, and you know, the, I guess the, the most memorable thing was going into his office and Michael Delia. We were pitching the Dell dude campaign, so, oh, nice dudes. You're getting a, and he knows about this. Yeah, she had Steven, who's lovable, approachable. Wearing long hair surfer dude. And Michael is like, no way.

This kid here. You know, it's just like, it's like gotta represent the, yeah. Yes. And here's why. And here's what we're, you know, we're targeting these people and this is, it's gonna really work. And he was hand ringing and he wasn't into it, but he gave us a shot. And the rest is history. I think that was the most, I don't know, successful.

Campaign that I was a part of. I mean, Stephen was one of those talking heads that became kind of famous on Yeah, Leno and Letterman. He was busted walking, caught in Amsterdam back then, and That's right. And then yeah, Michael didn't want anything to do with him after that, but

Steve Goldhaber: yeah, so that's a great story.

I, I really appreciated Michael's book that he wrote where I think it was his first book and he was like, my first lesson in leadership and when not to do everything. Started when I was in a board meeting, this is when the company was really young and I was like getting ready to present and someone came in asking for the keys to the soda machine because it was locked up.

And he goes, it was that moment that I knew that I was, I was not delegating enough 'cause I held the key to the, to the coke machine. I always like that story. Yeah. Well, van, I want to thank you. You've had some great CA case studies, really interesting background, so thank you for being on the podcast today, and thank you to all the listeners.

If you ever want to view all the podcasts, you can go to the 26 characters website. We've got everything cataloged up there. So thanks again for listening today and thank you once again, Van for joining. 

Van Diamandakis: Great to be here, Steve. Thank you very much.

Steve Goldhaber:  Alright everyone, that's it for today. Thanks for hanging out with us in Studio 26.

Take care. Bye-bye. 

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