Cole Heilborn (00:06):

I am back in the studio solo after some time away from the mic. It's been a busy, very busy last few weeks. I wanted to provide an update to where Port Side is at these days, as well as just provide some updates on some things that I've been learning and paying attention to. Over the last weekend, I had the opportunity to host a panel discussion at the Northwest TuneUp titled Perspectives. It was conversation hosted by Freehub Magazine and the Backcountry Marketing Podcast, and we brought together four industry experts from a variety of different backgrounds. Joe Lawelle, who's one of the brand managers at Shimano, Jill Kintner, a athlete, Aaron Lutze, former Red Bull Athlete Manager, as well as the content creator and a podcast host and Brendan Carberry, who is a content creator in the bike space. And our conversation centered around the topic of athletes, content creators, influencers, and ROI.

(01:05)
How do you balance the equation amongst all of those various categories? And then how do you begin to measure the return on types of those different categories? And there's a lot of nuance to it. All right? And it was a really engaging hour long conversation, and we had some great questions from the audience chime in. But at the end of the day, as our guests set on the panel, again, this type of stuff you can't really track. It's hard to determine the ROI. And I think something that Aaron Luzi shared from his time at Red Bull that was fascinating, that really stuck out to me was this story. I think everyone's familiar with the Red Bull Stratus Project, right? Where Red Bull sent a guy to space, he jumped out and well, he lived, this comes from Aaron himself. He said, red Bull has no data to show that that project sold any cans of Red Bull directly. Now that's Red Bull's largest, most ambitious athlete project they've ever undertaken. And even Red Bull can't see a direct correlation between that project and sales. Now, of course, you could say, well, people were inspired or it was top of mind, or next time they were in a convenience store, they thought of a guy jumping out of space, et cetera. All probably true, but the point is they can't show the impact directly.

(02:38)
I wonder if we as an industry spend too much time trying to track things. And I know that sounds so anti-business, I understand the need and the desire to try and see results and track performance and see what's working and what isn't working. But I guess question is if you generalize here, are we tracking too much? Are we relying too much on the data and the inputs? And the answer is maybe, perhaps, but one way to think about the ROI of these brand investments, these brand projects is asking the question, what happens if we don't do this? And that question is an entirely different way to measure the ROI on something like Red Bull Stratus Project. What happens if we don't send a guy to space and have him jump out? And as soon as you start to look at things in the negative, you start to realize the missed potential and the missed opportunity.

(03:47)
And instead, we started to try and understand, well, what's the risk of not investing in brand? And I think those risks are much more obvious than perhaps the positives that come from investing in brand. Another thing I was thinking about too, and this actually comes from Fitz Hall's episode a year or so ago, this idea that storytelling around brand is nebulous or it's hard to define, it's hard to put numbers to, but he said something really profound. He said, no one would deny that Nike didn't build a great company. Nike is a very successful company, right? They built that all on brand. They built that on storytelling. So again, another example of asking yourself that same question of, well, what happens if Nike didn't invest into storytelling and didn't invest into brand? The results might be very different. So I know that comparing Red Bull and Nike to smaller, more niche outdoor brands is hard to do.

(04:55)
And you're probably thinking, gosh, if only I had millions of dollars to send someone to space, of course we could do something really rad. But I think what it all boils down to is again, this idea of not taking the creative risk is the risk in the first place, because otherwise you're just a brand in the sea of sameness. How do you stand out? And obviously, storytelling and branded content and video content is one way to stand out. That is certainly not the only way, but I think the moral of the story is what does your audience want from you? What are they expecting? And then how can you go above and beyond that? How can you literally send someone space and jump them and have them jump out in your own way that in a way that doesn't cost millions of dollars? I think those are the types of things that get me really excited, especially when you pair that with the direct problem that you can solve as a brand.

(05:54)
This leads me to my next point. Port Site has been going through a massive evolution over the last, well, we rolled out our rebrand about three or four weeks ago, and it's been so good. I can't tell you how good it has felt to have this rebrand out into the world because it truly feels like it's been the culmination of 10 years. All of the mess and all of the confusion and all of the stress and all of the winds all bottled up into something that feels very us. And for the first time, we've never had that before, which is very encouraging. And I've talked about this in some social media posts, but it's given me so much confidence as a founder to pitch ourselves, to get us out there into the world and say, this is what we do. This is why we do it, this is why we're really good at it.

(06:50)
Here's all the examples of things that we're done that we've done, but really the biggest challenge we have is reeducation. We have for so long pitched ourselves as just a production company and the direction that we're moving in. While it includes production, it's very much focused on problem solving, content strategy, creative development, and then production when it fits. So that's one of the challenges that we face is reeducating folks about where we're going and why we're doing it, which is another reason why I need to keep up with these particular individual podcast episodes. But something that's been really cool is we've been working on a project for a long time. Client of ours, and I can't share too many details, but one of our core staples here at Portside is this idea of leading with emotion, leading with feeling, and then creating a strategy around how to use that emotion.

(07:49)
And we're working right now on a film project that's going beyond just the film itself and into a much larger campaign around the film. But something that I say a lot is this idea of get to know your audience, but get to know them emotionally. And this has been a really cool project to put that to test. Our client has a particular audience that they are trying to, that's one of their core audiences. And this audience in particular, there's a lot to this audience. There's a lot of emotions, there's a lot of change. I think that's the best way to say it. And so we've been doing research to get to know this audience, to get to know what drives them emotionally, how are they feeling, what sort of things contribute to how they're feeling. And I know I'm speaking really vaguely because I can't tell you what the exact specifics are here, but it's been really cool to dive in and get to know this audience on a very intimate level.

(08:52)
And so that's been one of our first steps in this project was to get to know the audience emotionally. So we put together a list of 10, 10 or 11 different attributes that describes our audience and who they are emotionally. And then from there, as we've been working on the storyline, we've been coming back to what are these emotional beats that our audience experiences and how are we highlighting and seeing them unfold in the story that we're telling? Because the whole idea is to help the audience feel seen. And when someone feels seen, they feel loved. And when they feel loved, they build an affinity, they build a relationship with a brand, and that's the play. That's what we're going for here. And so it feels so ethereal and woo woo and mushy. We're talking about feelings and love, but that's what we are. That's what humans are.

(09:54)
That's how we relate to each other. That's how we connect with each other. And when you're using those tools in a business sense, one, you have to be careful. You have to be responsible with how you do it and steward that power well, because it's immensely powerful because everyone knows that people buy with emotion and they rationalize their purchases logically. The other thing I was thinking about was this idea of long form content is dead, right? People talk about this. There's this belief out there that everything has to be 10 seconds or less, and that long form is gone. That's just not true. And I think you look around at society and you can quickly see that isn't true. Maybe it's true in the case of the content that your brand is producing, maybe that's been the experience or the results that you're seeing, but ask yourself, why do we all love to binge Netflix?

(10:55)
Why when Stranger Things come out, will people literally sit down for 12 hours straight and watch a new season? Why are three or four hour long form podcasts so popular? And I think there's this, I have a theory that people, because of the short attention span world that we live in, people are craving depth. People are craving meaning, people are craving something that's of substance. And maybe that stranger thinks, maybe that's listening to a podcast creator, but why can't it be your brand? I think what's more important than attention spans and what's more important than the length is the content and the depth of the content that you're creating. Now, I'm not suggesting that going deep means you exclude volume and quantity. There's certainly a place for that. But what about going deep? What about creating something that actually means something to your audience? That's why Stranger Thingss is so popular.

(12:05)
It's a great show. It is a great story. It's nostalgic. Everyone who's between their twenties and their fifties can relate to that storyline. That's one of the reasons why it's so popular. Not to mention the killer art direction, but I think that's what I'm seeing and that's what I'm noticing. And as soon as you start to mention long form versus short form, people take sides. Brands have a lot of opinions. I think brands have done long form very wrong in the past. There was that wave of branded content in 2015 through 18 that every outdoor brand produced and every outdoor brand thought that they were going to become the next Yeti presents. The truth is, most of those didn't pan out, and I think it's left a bad taste in people's mouth.

(12:56)
But a great example of who's thriving right now with long form content is Huckberry presents their dirt series, right? Incredible 20, 30 minute episodes. People are gobbling that stuff up. They've done it right though They know how to work the system, they know how to produce long form contents, and the impact on their brand is substantial. Granted, they still have challenges, but I think there's so much to be learned from going deep, combining everything that I've been talking about today, what are we measuring versus what are we not measuring versus what happens if we don't do this? Combined with how do you understand your audience emotionally, how do you help them feel seen? And then how do you package it all up into a content that's truly good or creative or interesting? It doesn't have to be an emotionally deep, super compelling, sad story. It could just be funny, it could be goofy.

(13:55)
It could be whatever's on brand for you and is of interest to your audience. There's so many options. Last thing I'll say. Two years ago, we produced a film for athletic brewing company called Inches to Miles. It was a film about three triathletes competing in Ironman, leg Plad. And just yesterday, yesterday, two days ago, Lynn Rogers, who was featured in that documentary, went back to compete in Lake Placid and finished her Iron Man, if you've watched the film her first time there, she did not finish. This woman has an incredible story. She has suffered from this disease called CIDP, which basically has left her body paralyzed two or three times over the last eight or nine years. And she's had this incredible journey of trying to figure out what normal is. Again, she can run, she can walk, she can cycle now, but life is very, very different than it used to be.

(15:02)
And she went back to the Ironman, she crushed it, she finished it. And what's really cool though, is that we were texting and she was telling me how many people came up to her and told her, Hey, are you the woman from that film? And she smiled and said, yes. She said she literally had 20 or 30 people come up to her throughout the Ironman weekend and say something to her. And how cool is that, that in today's world, you can produce a story about a real individual and that community of individuals can find that story, see that story, love that story, and then when that person shows up in the world, they recognize her. That's super cool. This woman isn't a professional athlete. She isn't podium on the podium. She is very much an average athlete, but she has an incredible story and people latched onto that.

(16:03)
And so I think that's just such a cool testament to the power of great storytelling, but doing it in a smart way, right? There was strategy in choosing and telling a story in the world of Iron Man and triathlons. One thing that Lynn said that I think was really interesting to me was everyone said, not everyone, most people said, I discovered your film while I was on the trainer. And that's such a unique insight about an audience that can help inform how you create content. People who are training triathletes are often spending hours on the trainer spinning away, and a lot of them set up in front of their TV and they watch a movie, or they watch a TV show, or they browse YouTube and look for inspiring content. And that's how most of these folks found this film featuring Lynn. And again, it's just one of those things that if you understand your audience and you understand how they consume content, where they consume content, it can start to help demystify how you show up in a way that your audience will find you. So that was a really cool kind of success story that I wanted to pass it along. But I think to sum it all up, get to know your audience. And the best way to do that is to speak to them emotionally.

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