Cole Heilborn (00:00.482)

No one's sitting there watching the Super Bowl and going, I'm going to buy a cooler now and, you know, hop online and purchase a cooler. So we know what's going to happen is we're going to get this traffic bump. And we did. was, was massive traffic. We went up almost 1200 times what we normally do at that time. On this podcast, we go behind the scenes with industry experts as they break down what it takes to produce creative work that works.

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This show is produced by Portside, a creative studio that helps outdoor brands produce strategic and emotional video content. Welcome to the Backcountry Marketing Podcast. Today, I'm sitting down with Mike Lewis, the VP of Marketing and DTC at Bison Coolers. Mike, welcome. Hey, how's it going, man? It's good to see you. I got to say, it's not every episode that we get to sit down and talk with a brand who has been featured in a Super Bowl commercial. Yeah. I think...

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Gosh, I don't even know. How many outdoor brands do you think actually have been in the Super Bowl commercial? I think that number is probably pretty low. Well, and how many brands didn't have to pay for it is even lower. We might be the only one. Yeah, you did. I'm hoping we can spill the secret sauce here, because I think other people would love to jump on this bandwagon if they could. Yeah, but you guys were featured in the Super Bowl commercial.

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Google, I will give kind of the highlights here. Google reached out to you guys and said, hey, we're putting together this whole campaign featuring a bunch of different small businesses using Gemini products. And you guys were selected to be in an ad. And I'm excited today to talk about that experience, the impact that you've seen, and just kind of talk media as a whole.

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What was it, there's a video of you and the whole crew watching the ad air. Take me back to that moment. What was that like seeing, know, Bison Coolers up there on the screen in front of the country? Yeah, well, first, first I would be probably in big trouble if I didn't go ahead and thank Google Workspace for choosing us and, and coming down and spending time with us and filming it and giving us free advertisement. So thank you to Go-

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Cole Heilborn (02:16.162)

Google Workspace and Gemini specifically. yeah, so we had a watch party. decided once we knew that this commercial, you know, the whole time when this is going on, you're kind of thinking, OK, this can't be real. This is going to fall through. There's a catch. You're just constantly waiting for the other shoe to drop. So once we kind of got to

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like, hey, thumbs up, this is airing. And we even got kind of like, this is the window in which it's going to air. And it basically aired right after the halftime show, which was like awesome and perfect. And so yeah, we had decided that let's do a watch party and celebrate. We didn't do a Christmas party this year because we were actually shooting the commercial kind of during that timeline. And so we couldn't stop to have our...

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normal Christmas party. we're like, let's Jeremy wanted to celebrate the win and celebrate the year and, by having, you know, this big party and friends and family coming out and we rented a space. mean, we, hired a PR team to, kind of work on it. and, to help us, you know, bring media and writers out and magazines. I mean, we just,

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going to take the most advantage as possible as, as we can being a small brand on something big that was happening. And so yeah, watching, you know, when you see the video, that's out there on our socials and on Google, it's, I don't know, it's just awesome to watch like Jeremy in particular, his whole entire family's there. Half the people there who work for Bison, our family, and to see him and his wife, his wife's crying and,

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you know, Jeremy and his brother-in-law, who's our CFO, or they're like hugging and they're just, I don't know. It's like, you know, 12 years of hard work kind of being summed up in a video. And so I personally, as a marketer, love that video because this is real. This is a real thing happening. These are real reactions. All his neighbors, all his friends are all cheering and clapping. so it was an awesome moment and I'm glad we caught it.

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Cole Heilborn (04:34.568)

And I felt a little guilty because as a marketer, my creative director and I are there. And the whole time, we're not eating, we're not hanging out, we're not doing the party, we're just grabbing content. And we're just thinking, how do we use all this content? And how do we story tell and that whole thing? But we caught a real moment. And it was just cool to be a part of it. Yeah, so back up. Tell us how this opportunity came about.

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and what did it end up becoming? Yeah, so Google, too, in a really clever, cool way, and I wish more large companies like this would do it, this same kind of thing. They're going around telling the story of Jim and I by using real companies and letting them tell the story of how to use Jim and I instead of them just pitching their, you know,

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the product, they are just going around and shooting these commercials for these small little businesses in all these different states. for the state of Texas, wanted, they narrowed it down to five or six brands, I mean, I don't know, Texas is what, the third largest, second largest market? I don't know. I mean, for the outdoor space, it's gotta be maybe number one. mean, it's a massive market, so.

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There's a lot of companies to choose from. There's a lot of people, they kind of zero it in. We've always, I mean, since I joined the company, we've been trying to tell the family run company story more because all of our competitors are run by private equity or they're public and they have board of directors. And so we're one of the few family run, like real deal. don't have a board. We don't have stock. don't have...

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investors, have like one owner. And so we've just tried to keep telling that story because man, can, you know, a consumer can believe in that. They can get behind that. It's a little bit hard to really get behind a brand where it's just money being thrown around and you're kind of like nameless, faceless thing, right? So we have really worked to bring Jeremy's...

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Cole Heilborn (06:54.178)

you know, as the spokesman for the company. And he actually doesn't like it. He doesn't like being out front like that. But we're like, hey, people are gonna really connect with you, identify. You're a nice guy. You're an outdoorsman. You play golf. You have a family. It's like, this is a story that people are gonna really connect to. And that's what worked for Google. They were able to see that through our socials and through our website and just through our normal.

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course of marketing and storytelling. And I think that's why they chose this, because they're like, there's a story here. This is an easy thing to shoot and win. And all the footage from that commercial is his family and our workers. I think that was just an easy win for Google to just send a team and capture the story. So you didn't have to pay for anything.

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No, this was a free commercial. team, they so they hired, you know, working on this, they hired two different production teams that were going all over the country. And so they're on a whirlwind of like shooting. And so they spent two days with us there in Texas and we didn't have to pay a penny. Wow. Yeah, that's incredible. what sort of impact have you seen? So the ad came out, like how did you prep?

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for the impact that you were expecting, and then what have you seen post release? Yeah, so I think the trick is in the outdoor industry, we're a seasonal thing, especially us, because we sell coolers. Drinkware is a little bit different. You can sell drinkware during the cold season, but it's next to impossible to sell a cooler to somebody in February.

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So the fact that this was landing during the Super Bowl, during the coldest time of the year, and even like that week, there was like snowstorms in the north. And it's like, man, it's really hard to talk about cooling properties of a cooler when everyone's freezing. So we were cautious with our prepping. knew that we needed, because normally we'd...

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Cole Heilborn (09:16.034)

we're dialing back inventory during really just kind of like once the Christmas run finishes, we're already pulling back on how much we're creating and making. we're just kind of, you're really bracing for this three, three to four month window of terrible sales. And, and, you know, it's a lot of work to sell what we sell during that timeline. And, and so,

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We just knew that we needed to stock up because worst case, we're just going to be well stocked. But if we ran out of everything, would just be, if we did not prepare and did not bring in inventory for a bump, it would have been a massive failure for us. Yeah. So can you speak to sales, what you saw? Can you speak to impressions or anything you saw on the website? can see you guys did a lot of work too, like.

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around messaging and prepping the website and kind of all your platforms to be ready. How much, speak to that, because maybe folks don't realize how much work you put into it. Yeah, when you know something like that's happening, you have to, so if you have experience in this industry and you've worked with this type of thing, you know that your pixel is probably the most important things that you have on your website because

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No one's sitting there watching the Super Bowl and going, I'm going to buy a cooler now. And, you know, hop online and purchase a cooler. So we know what's going to happen is we're going to get this traffic bump. And we did, was, was massive traffic, you know, to the website and people are going to investigate and see what you're doing, read a little bit of the, watch the videos, kinds of things. it's- know how much of a bump? I'm just curious. It was, it was-

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I mean, I think it went, like, we went up almost 1,200 times what we normally do at that time. Wow. And then that stayed like that. I mean, it cascades down and descends after, you know, that, you know, after it airs, but people are still looking. They remember they saw you, and then...

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Cole Heilborn (11:37.934)

So I think as a marketer, it's really important to not get focused on sales on, know, here's this one hour window of when the Superbowl win in our commercial and, know, all the sales are going to come in. Sales did, did go up, but that was not, um, what we were preparing for was to make sure our pixel was grabbing customers as they come in and people that had intent to buy so that we could turn around and, and

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you know, talk to them long after the Super Bowl is over. And when some of these, you know, when Mother's Day is coming up and Easter and Father's Day and Spring Break and all the different, those are the shopping windows that people who buy our product are spending in. And we knew that that was gonna be later on. And so it was just really important to be capturing emails, capturing SMS.

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making sure our pixels were firing both with Meta and Google and Bing, and that we were just loading up so that we could spend the time to message to these customers after this event. And so that's where we've been finding the success after the Super Bowl. Yeah, can you speak to the number of names or individual contact information that you've been able to gather from this?

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particular ad and then obviously all the work that you've done to capture it? Yeah, it's thousands. normally when we're like, for our brand, we're small. mean, we are a 12 person company. One of the, and I should, I think this is important to say, our competitors are massive, like just massive. And I think we do a great job with marketing ourselves and maybe too good in that.

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Some people think that if the large cooler companies are in the billions, Bison must be in the hundreds of millions. But we are a 12 person company out of Fort Worth and these companies sell more in straws than we do as an entire brand. They sell more in replacement parts than we do as an entire brand. So financially, is not all, all things are not equal. So

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Cole Heilborn (14:01.358)

We are very strategic with our marketing because we have to be. We can't outspend our problem. We can't spend money to solve things. And our competitors can't. They can outspend us like crazy. we have to be very strategic. And I've said all that to say, because you asked about numbers, we would normally, on a normal day, we would get, I don't know, 10 people.

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signed up on our email list, right? That's an average during our slow season. It goes up as our advertising spend goes up, as we're driving viewers and eyeballs to the site. That definitely goes up in the summer. And in the summer, can be, I don't know, 50, 150 on good days that are signing up for emails and being added to tour.

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a pixel, but the Super Bowl basically brought in thousands and on a daily. Again, it did kind of cascade down and start to descend, but we basically have a storehouse of people that we can continue to talk to for the rest of year. I think that's, I mean, we'll see that hit, especially in like May, which is our, that's where our season really starts to

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you know, kick in and sales and sales go up, but our sales are already up. Like we've been up since the Superbowl. That ratio percentage of new customer acquisition to your returning customer. Cause we believe in our whole entire models is built on lifetime value. So it's not about the first sale. We're trying to build lifetime value with our customer. We're the old

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buy from us 10, 20 different times. Now you're not going to buy 125 quart cooler from us 10 to 20 times, right? So that's why we have our smaller items and some of our smaller items like our cups and our drinkware are kind of a gate or what I say are a gateway drug to get you into the brand, to get you into our story. And then we move you down the line into our soft side coolers, our hard side coolers and our higher priced items. But

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Cole Heilborn (16:28.556)

Yeah, mean, the numbers have just been astronomical and we haven't even seen the tip of the iceberg on how much that's gonna come through. I think if we had this, if we did this interview for the summer, think it would just, the numbers would be extremely high. Yeah, when do you, how long do you feel like it'll take to fully kind of capitalize on this moment? Like it'll be a year or five years from now or?

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relatively soon, soon being, think by Christmas you've, you've run through that, list of people because people have just, you know, the buying habit of the, of the tumbler slash outdoor, cooler market is very transactional to, a very special, very specific need, whether it's

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birthday present, a father's day present. mean, you these, especially our coolers, we have a lifetime warranty, which is hard when you're, you're going to buy that cooler and have it forever. Right. And it's bear proof. They're built to last. So it's not a consumable that you're going to buy over and over and over. You're not going to keep buying 25 court coolers from us, but you will gift them. So you will, you know,

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fall in love with our cooler, see how well it works and go, man, I want other people have this cooler. You'll buy it for your dad. You'll buy it for your cousin and graduation presents and all that kind of thing. so yeah, so I think it'll, I mean, I think we will realize these sales this year. It's just going to be over all these ha these different holiday event runs. wedding season is another one. People gift coolers, buy coolers, they'll buy

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groomsmen, all of our soft sides, they'll buy like 12, know, one person will come in and buy 12, you know, soft side coolers for all their groomsmen. So that's when I think we'll really see the advantage of what the Super Bowl did for us. How many, was it a regional ad or was it national? It was regional, but they are assembling a national ad from all the different ads.

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Cole Heilborn (18:54.38)

So that hasn't run yet. also the cool thing about this whole program is Google's spending a year on this project. So we've only seen maybe 20 % of where this is gonna go. And it was very focused on getting ready and finished for the Super Bowl ad run. But they haven't run their social media campaign yet.

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They haven't run, they haven't gone through all the other processes of what they're doing. And the PR team, our PR team is working with their PR team and that PR team has been given the task to work on this for the next year. Like what was the reason for this lift? Was it purely the awareness being on a national platform or how much of it was that, you know, you're, trust that you built by being partnered with Google.

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as a trusted brand, like, you know, was it the awareness or was it the trust and the partnership with Google that has led to the lift? Maybe it's a combination of both, but I'm curious if one strikes you to be more potent than the other. That's great question, and I think your senses are right in that it's both, but because we're such a small brand, a lot of people don't know who we are at all. And a lot of people have gotten lost

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in knowing our biggest competitor. They're very well known. They're publicly traded in the billions of dollars. So after that, it's like a lot of people just don't know who we are. So it's been an introduction to the brand, which is another reason why we really pushed Jeremy to be out front.

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During this ad campaign, we went down and shot our own videos with Jeremy and our own interviews that we keep. If you watch our social media, you'll see we've released two of them, but we're gonna, they're like short little clips of Jeremy talking about, you know, philosophies on business and advice and all that kind of stuff. And we keep pushing that out there, but it's like, people, we were numbered to the high-end cooler market. So we were the second brand.

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Cole Heilborn (21:16.526)

to start making it after our largest competitors started making them. We've been around forever and we've been around before all the other competitors that are out there. So while we've been around for a long time and we've been doing this for a long time, there's still a lot of education to do and a lot of brand building to do with people because they just don't know who we are. Does this change how you think about advertising moving forwards?

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You know, it's funny, I just had this conversation. I belong to a round table of other marketers who work for different brands. are outdoor brands, with some are athletic brands. And we're always getting together and sharing what we're finding and what we're seeing. And the truth is, is that

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What this has done, so COVID, one of the problems with COVID with marketing is that if you put your pole in the water, you caught a fish. So it wasn't strategy, wasn't being smart, wasn't being, you know, we had the best photography and we had the best this and best that. Anybody who is doing DTC, consumer marketing online, put your pole in the water, you were catching fish. So when that went away and

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strategy came back and became the most important thing. And one thing that's always been true going back to old school marketing from the fifties is that storytelling has always been important. And so I think a lot of marketers and a lot of people are getting back to basics on a lot of things on, storytelling, on how to present, you know, a product. It's not about

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the product itself, it's about what the end use is. So it's about connecting people and making an emotional connection to what it is you're selling, not just saying, hey, look how thermal, you know, ceramic lining keeps your water two degrees. Like all the stats and all this stuff, I don't think people honestly really care. And at the end of the day, they want to be able to picture that

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Cole Heilborn (23:41.294)

that this is gonna achieve what I want and do the job. So as a marketer, I think this puts us back to basics where you can't outspend your way anymore because the marketing spin has gotten really tight. We used to live in a 12X world with Facebook advertising and anytime someone sends me a sales.

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pitch email saying they can get us 12x, I just immediately delete that email. You don't know what you're talking about. That world does not exist. We live in a 4x world. Sometimes we live in a 3.5x world. And so it's gotta be going back to basics because you can't spin your way out of this. There are diminishing returns to spend. So storytelling and connecting to the consumer is

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is what's always worked and it's what's gonna continue to work. So that's the challenge to people like myself, that we have to be better at storytelling and making sure that we're doing that and less about having cool pictures, you know, and being cool. And even like on a social media level, marketing's changed where they've gone away from

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You know, we spend so much money just getting, you know, the most professional photo of your product and spending a ton of time doing that. And then we started seeing that the crappy iPhone photo that I took on a Saturday real quick because we were out of content and I needed to post something on Facebook. Sometimes had way better reach than the super nice, you know, photo. spent a lot of, a lot of time and energy and I actually liked the more professional photos myself.

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Like I love that. It's beautiful. And that photographer, I know that photographer, he's really good and he has a great eye and all that stuff. But at the end of the day, it's like, man, some of the crappy stuff is what's trending on social media, which it's kind of a bummer, honestly, because I think it hurts. I think it hurts creatives a little bit. But but it just opens up, you know, the door and kind of changes how we're all doing it. But at the end of the day, it's about storytelling and making sure that that's

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Cole Heilborn (26:06.178)

You're going back to basics with marketing. Yeah. So how do you continue to storytell in the future? Are you prepping for Super Bowl 2026 and going to put your own ad out there? No. No. I mean, what's awesome about this, and that's been kind of this as, you we got a lot of local TV doing interviews with Jeremy and.

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you know, talking about how great this is. And it's like, one of the storylines is we can never pay for this, not in a million years. We, for us to run a, I don't know, like we would have to do a lot of growing to ever do that. But also, I just don't think that that works anymore, honestly. I don't think, that would be a terrible use of our money in full disclosure. Nothing against the people who sell Super Bowl advertising, but.

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I mean, I think I was reading there like there are $8 million ads for a 30 second spot. And I do not, I don't know if that's regional or national distribution, but either way, it's that's, that's a lot of money. Yeah. And I think, you know, a lot of people, there's an awesome documentary out there about advertising and, I forgot the name of it. Gosh, you can look it up later, but, it, you know,

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They refer to the Apple ad that was so cool from 1984 showing the smashing the thing. And they took a huge risk. it just changed the trajectory of that brand. I'm not sure that that's there anymore for brands. I think a liquid death could probably pull something like that off as far as. Well, they did on their own Super Bowl ad. Yeah. Yeah, but you can.

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but they can do that because they're being humorous and it's something memorable. I just don't know that, that would be a terrible use of money for us. That's not where we would find our customer. That customer, is it gonna stop what they're doing and just start buying coolers, right? no, I mean, for us, I think partnerships is gonna be a big one for us going forward.

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Cole Heilborn (28:26.74)

And making connections to things, whether it's bands and music and how, because for a long time, marketing coolers and marketing, everyone was using aspirational marketing. The mountain climber by himself in the Alps, buy coolers, right? Like that's the thing. That was...

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That was all the rage and that's been the storytelling. I think the reality is that we're coming down to who is the user? It's the weakened warrior dad who's like, I'm going to the soccer game for my kids and we're gonna be at this tournament all day and I need to use this cooler. And that's really the marketing. That's really the person you're marketing to. That's really the story. And while maybe climbing the Alps is cooler or looks better,

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and copy and you can, people want to imagine things. think for us, that's where we're going to, you know, that's a story that we're trying to tell is like, buy this cooler. You're, you're going to need it. You're going to use it. And here's all the applications of how, of how that you're going to need it and use it. Yeah. So how do you do that? Like what can you speak to your strategy or specific deliverables that campaigns you're creating?

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Yeah, think humor's gotta be a big part of it. It's an interesting time right now because there's so much negativity bombarding us nonstop. We're a divided country. There's never been so much noise. There's never been so much fervor of just bad things flying through our eyes through

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through these small devices. So how do you cut through that? And I think the only way that we can do that is to connect positive storylines to people. And I think that has the ability to break through the noise. Now, what I just said sounds awesome, doing it is another story. And that's the trick. That's gonna be the trick for the video op.

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Cole Heilborn (30:50.836)

the video author, the photographer, the copywriter, the creative director. That's going to be the trick. How do I break through with this positive storyline that's going to be lasting? And I think humor is a big part of that. I think humor's worked for years. You know, back in the day, people used to watch the Super Bowl because of all the funny, you know...

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all the funny commercials and that's what you would talk about. It's how funny that commercial was. And it's like a lot of that's kind of gone away. And sometimes I see these commercials and I think, how did that get greenlit? This is the most boring nonsense. And most people just kind of click off of it or leave the room. I mean, was just this morning before chatting with you, I was reading an article about all the different types of emotion that advertising and content can elicit. And...

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The first one was humor. That scored the highest in terms of all the social content that's out there. Humor generally performs the best. Second was inspiration. Yeah. And so, yeah, I mean, it proves your point. Like humor works. To your point about this is maybe a theme for advertising as a whole. And when I was watching the Super Bowl, I only watched half of it. I was only really paying attention to the ads and the chicken wings that I was eating. But...

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I felt the same way that you did watching. I feel like the ads have lost the big idea. What's the big idea? What's the creative? I know we like to look at the Super Bowl and we're like, that's just the big ad world. We're here in the outdoor marketing world. It's a totally different story. Sure, it is, but I also think what we're seeing, what we saw on the Super Bowl was a lack of creative, a lack of...

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big ideas and I think we're seeing that also in the outdoor industry. And that seems like a huge opportunity. you know, people talk about Liquid Death and we've done interviews with Liquid Death before. I highly recommend folks go and listen to those episodes, search them on the back catalog. It's fascinating. They just have big ideas and they run with it. you know, not every brand can be them or should be them. But like, what's your brand's big idea when it comes to creative?

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Cole Heilborn (33:09.164)

And I think that's a huge opportunity. Clearly it works. People are looking for it. How can we find more of that and champion it? Well, I think you can't be afraid of any blowback. that's one of the things is I think a lot of brands are really worried about protecting the brand and what the brand is. And they don't want to offend anybody. They don't want any...

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backlash so liquid death doesn't care and actually when they do offend people and they get backlash they turn that into more marketing so I think and and I'm not saying that everyone needs to go and be shock rock and you know just shock everyone constantly and you know push the boundaries but humor like it's everyone everyone takes themselves too seriously all advertising takes itself too seriously and there's some lofty

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I, you concept of what they're doing and, and, we've seen it all at this point. So being creative is all that's left. Like you, like we have to be creative. We want to see something new. want to see, you know, I either want my heartstrings to be pulled or I want to laugh. So those, those are the two things you either have to hit me with some emotion. And there was a video, a commercial about this person who's who has dementia and they were forgetting and

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and they're driving the car and it's like, man, I cried watching that video. I was like, it's like how many, think the, so one thing when you're talking in the commercial world with my previous life is everyone's talking about, viral, you know, we got to make this thing go viral and make that go viral. And they think almost like, you know, like the staple button, like there's a viral button as a creative that we can just push to make things go viral. And sometimes we have

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No one knows, has any idea why this thing's gonna go viral. But the only chance you have at something going viral is if it does one of those two things. Either it makes you laugh or it makes you cry. And maybe you could even argue makes you mad, I don't know. But how many commercials have you ever shared to one of your friends, to your wife, to your, like, you have shared some.

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Cole Heilborn (35:36.066)

but you don't share very many. And so when you do, what is it about that commercial for this product that made me, I shared it with someone. So that's what viral is anyway. That's at least the ingredients of it. so this concept of like making things go viral. And then sometimes you just don't know because they've changed the algorithm on you anyway. And I'll give you a short example. We spent so much time at Bison.

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You know, we look at our stats constantly in our analytics constantly, and we AB one video versus another. And we always try to walk away weekly with learning of whatever happened happened and how to apply that the next week. And I recently on my personal, on my personal social posted this video of my neighbor's kid trying to open this chair and

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The chair's really hard and we're all counting down. going one, two, making like seconds, like how long it's gonna take him to open the most difficult chair. And it's a stupid video. It's useless video. And I just posted it for fun on my own socials. That thing did 158,000 views. And I don't have a lot of followers on my personal one on purpose, but that video took off. And then I started using that example in our meetings going,

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We spend so much time as a brand working on this thing and it has a thousand views. And this stupid video of my neighbor's kid trying to open a chair did 150,000. So sometimes we don't know what makes things go viral. But I think if you wanna set yourself up for some success and for the, to really, think to get to the heart of your question, I think the job is to

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create an environment for something to have the potential to go viral. And so that's how you have to make your content. That's the job that everyone has to work on is how to make that this, will this be at least in the environment to possibly go viral? mean, yeah. Everything you're saying is so in line with everything we've been doing here at Portside. Like, you know, we've done

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Cole Heilborn (38:01.336)

coming up on 200 interviews with marketers. And we've learned a lot about what works with our content that we create on the production side. We've also learned so much doing all these interviews. And what we started to realize is, you know what, there's actually a lot of like kind of boxes you have to check in order to give whatever it is, a commercial, like social content, like brand storytelling. There's boxes you have to check in order to give the piece of content.

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its best chance of success in that world. And so I think to your point, emotion works, emotion will always work, but if you can couple that with strategy and if you can kind of hedge your bets and be as strategic as you can, like you're only improving the chance. So we've been, we've to this for this reason, this exact reason we've been developing like a methodology to try to take everything we've learned and distill it into, okay, what's the checklist?

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to make content that's strategic and emotional. yeah, I'm with you. think moving forward, the creative matters and the strategy matters. And that's what's going to break through the noise. But yeah, even then, you can't guarantee it. Yeah, think you almost have to look at these things like a pie chart and say, come up with whatever percentage you want to get to 100%. But.

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It's a certain percentage of emotion, a certain percentage of strategy. But then I think you also have to have this percentage of wonder, meaning you're open to be wrong about all of it and that you're willing to... Sometimes with marketers, it's like this no-no to look at what other people are doing and not as a copy or... But there's nothing wrong with being in...

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influenced by good work. And so you have to have a little bit of wonder in what you're doing and leave room for it. and even so if you're a marketer who is an agency that works with other brands and you're selling this thing, I think it's perfectly fine in that moment to also say we have a strategy. We have, we have a methodology and we know that we're going to add these things, but also we're leaving a little bit of room to pivot.

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Cole Heilborn (40:24.55)

and to adjust based on the analytics, based on what we're seeing in the market, because those things are on a sliding scale anyway. The minute you figure out the algorithms, they change. They're all separate. Meta has an algorithm, TikTok has its own, Google has its own, and they're all just a little bit different from each other. They're all looking at each other too and what they're doing and they're adjusting their algorithm. So it's like...

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Try now, smart, everything is impossible work. But I think the strategy versus what your knowledge of what you already know works, and then keep room for a little bit of wonderment. I love that. That's good. You mind if I steal that and add that to our methodology? Yeah. The wonder factor? Yeah, it's patent. It's the Mike Lewis patent.

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All right, I'll give you 3 % of whatever comes in. Well, Mike, let's wrap up here. If you had to summarize this whole experience, what would you want to leave our audience with? Short of like, go find yourself an opportunity to get a free Super Bowl ad. Yeah. Yeah, so a lot of it's luck, of course. Everyone...

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There's not anyone who's had success who didn't say, there's a percentage of luck in there. I think, and this will, I have to say this without sounding like it's a little bit of a brag, but a lot of your previous work to getting to the point that you're at is really important. If we, because one of the things, they didn't tell me this, but they told Jeremy on their call,

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is we looked at your brand, we loved your storytelling, and we liked this whole family. They were pointing out to all the marketing that we were doing. Jeremy congratulated my team and our creative director and I, and that was awesome. But I think you have to look at, there's a lot of pre-work to get to wherever you're gonna be. You have to do good work to get to this.

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Cole Heilborn (42:44.639)

certain level where people are going to start picking you for things. I don't know that if we didn't have that or if the, sorry, if the brand did not have that up until that point, I'm not sure they would have gotten the Google opportunity that came along. So there's still that work to set yourself up to do the right things. And I think speaking to small business owners, it's really hard for them to do that work and to spend money on that work because a small business

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owner, the thing they spend the least amount of money on is marketing. It's always last. Every CFO in the country hates marketing and they don't understand it. So, but all of that storytelling, all that, you know, the X factor that you could not measure that made certain environments happen had to happen for this opportunity to happen.

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And that's a really hard thing to quantify for a CFO, but to say, hey, if we didn't have the great logo, if we didn't have the good video and all the things you hate writing checks for, if we didn't have all that stuff, then the next level of opportunity that rises your brand to doesn't happen because it looks like you were not ready for it. So the long and short of this is I think that the opportunities come as you're doing

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the better work and really knowing who you are. And some of that work is brand work. And if you can't do it as a owner of a business or a small business, if you can't, if you're not doing that well, you need to hire people to do that for you and get you to that point. And that's when the opportunity, the random opportunities start coming because you are now visible and people can see it. and so a Google who wants to tell a better story,

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can easily find, I mean, they found us through Google search. It's like all of those things through their own search, they found us. So those are the things, because when they were researching, they just did a search for companies in Texas that do XYZ. And so you have to check those boxes as a small business and as an entrepreneur, and you gotta spend the money on it. It's it's hard to, I redid my house where I had to,

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Cole Heilborn (45:06.786)

do foundation work, it's the worst money you can ever spend because no one ever sees it and they don't understand what it is, but the foundation work is super important to keeping my house up. And it's the same thing with this kind of work and this kind of business. There's branding, there's storytelling and all that stuff that has to, that work has to be done to get your company to this level where people will pay attention. Yeah. If you had to leave the audience with any of your recent learnings or thoughts about

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the world of storytelling and marketing and creative. Well, we'll end here with your whatever thoughts you have for us. Make sure you answer that Google email that comes in. Simple as that. No. Yeah, I just think as you toil away as a marketer and as a creative and you think, you know, sometimes these things get overlooked.

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you know, because everyone focuses on sales, then that work's important because these opportunities wouldn't happen without it. So keep up the good work creatives and stay creative. Incredible. Mike, thanks so much for taking the time. It was awesome to get to chat about this cool milestone in the company's history. Well, recent history.

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And I'm excited to see where it goes. And I'm excited to see the momentum that you and the team capture and continue to push the ball forward. So thanks for sharing. Yeah, thank you. I appreciate you having me on. Have a great rest of your day. And I look forward to seeing what's next. Yes, sir. All right, see you.

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Cole Heilborn (46:54.434)

Thank you for listening to this episode. If you enjoyed it, please consider sharing it with a friend or leaving us a review on Apple. And remember, as you're working on that next piece of creative, the difference between creative that works and doesn't work often comes down to the hard questions that you ask while you're shaving.

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