NerdBrand Podcast
The NerdBrand Podcast is at the intersection of nerd culture, branding, and advertising. Nerd culture is no longer an isolated subculture; it’s THE culture of the day and makes its way into our daily lives through the entertainment we seek and the technology we rely upon. Listen as we discuss our views on visual design, branding, and advertising for movies, comics and novels, video games, technology, and other nerdy passions.
NerdBrand Podcast
Brave New Branding: Navigating 2025's Challenges and Opportunities
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NerdBrand is a national branding and advertising agency based in Louisville, KY.
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Welcome to this episode of the NerdBrand Podcast. Everybody, we're talking about Happy New Year. It is 2025, january 1st as of this recording, and, man, what a way that we started this off. We got this going with a real, real, just you know. Uh, yeah, welcome back. Thank you for sticking with us, and this is another solo episode of the Nerd Brand Podcast with just me, jason Davis, your host.
Speaker 1:Today, it's New Year's Eve, or not New Year's Eve? Man, I am really. I swear I don't drink, but you would probably think by that opening statement I do. No, it is New Year's Day and I've got a lot of stuff that happened last year, thinking about how things have changed and grown and what's not grown and what's contracted, and just all kinds of stuff. That some things. I could talk about A lot I can't, but it's something that you know. We're excited because NerdBrain will be turning five years old next month and that's a huge thing.
Speaker 1:We don't really do celebrations, though, very well, and we should. There's only four of us, so we can high-five one another pretty much every other Monday when we have our team meetings, but I understand that culturally-wise people will be like you should do something for your culture, right, because culture is important and it's like well, so is revenue no-transcript things going forward. A lot of the messaging is going to get revised and need to be changed and addressed, and you're going to need a brand agency for that. We'd love to talk to you about that. Maybe you've had a change in leadership and that could create a reason for that change. It could change the tone, it could change the voice.
Speaker 1:You know, if you think about looking at pop culture, look at what's going on with Disney and just, or anybody or anything in Hollywood, um, captain America four is really struggling to find its footing right now. Um, because it started filming in a world that was more DEI inclusive type thing, and then now people kind of are looking at that as a scam and as a negative thing, and so now they're trying to make some changes there. But then ultimately there's also issues just with story, uh, and so the tone and everything else is changing. Um, my fundamental issues with it are he doesn't Sam Wilson makes a great Falcon, not a great Captain America. That was evident in the comics, but they're trying to make that a thing in the films and they skipped over Bucky, who was actually supposed to be the next Captain America, and now we have the Thunderbolts, and so these, you know, marvel's kind of going through this like, oh, kind of not, let's say, lost their way in their messaging and what they're trying to do, the story they're trying to tell. Because, you know, robert Downey Jr is back as Dr Doom and a lot of fans are kind of like what is going on with this brand?
Speaker 1:What are you guys doing? I mean, you're trying to get us, you know, avengers 5, if you think about it, there's only been four of these, right, endgame was the last one, so now you have another one. But what are we building up to? What will be the hint? What's going to make us excited to stick with this?
Speaker 1:And then you have DC. They are completely shifting their tone and voice with having James Gunn now at the helm as the CEO. Right, and you can tell from the Superman trailer if you go watch it. Even if you're not a Super Eagle film fan, you should watch it, because compare it to other trailers on YouTube of past DC films and you'll see what I mean by change of tone. Little bit of a refresh here. So new copy, new photos, new art, new designs, new website will come out of that, all of the things that express your brand and what you want to communicate with people in 2025 to retain or to acquire new customers or to level up to a different set of clientele. That is definitely something you're going to have to address is your brand's identity and it's the pieces of it that express that identity, so that way, people can still be familiar with who you are but yet get reintroduced to the new leadership or the new vision that you have in your company. Or, if you need help establishing a vision in your company, we're happy to sit and listen and talk with you and help brainstorm. For that we do the consulting as always as a part of that, as a service that we are more than happy to sit in a room for the first time for one hour for free, and then after that they are working meetings, so that we do hope that. You know we can brainstorm and come up with some ideas with you while we are there, but you know now's the time to do it.
Speaker 1:It is really the beginning of the first quarter. Everybody's going to figure out how we did last year Everyone. Did you break even? Did you make money? Do you know? Those are going to be very important things the election, some of the policies for that businesses are hearing are very excited about. Other people are very scared about the tariffs. I know are part of that conversation and with ups and there's always downs, and it seems like over the last four years to me there's been a lot of downs and 2024 was a hard year. It was probably like the hardest one. It seems like, though I do remember some really rough patches, frankly, in 2021 and 2022. So we're going to see how 2025 shapes up and how things go forward, but right now it's still me, jonathan, mitch and Jacob, and we are still out here.
Speaker 1:You know Mitch is still in his role as a creative director and moving forward and strong with that as our lead in advertising and how things should look and developing a brand and messaging and, you know, helming the creation of ads, working with creative teams, whether they be videographers, designers or other people. I say that because it takes time. You know you got to give him time. It takes time to bake a cake and it's going to be more than a couple of months. It's going to be maybe two or three to kind of get something going, because you're working with multiple teams. I mean, if the president gets the first 100 days in office to get crap together, your agency is going to need that at least too. So if you're not ready for that call, if you're not ready for that commitment, then you know you really do need to think about just buying a widget on Upwork and getting something done there, and that might be the best thing for you at the moment. But if you're going to engage with an agency, you need to keep that in mind, that it's going to take time because there's multiple things moving and they're all moving for your benefit. You just have to trust that they're there, and that's the thing. There's a lot of trust. That isn't in the industry anymore, which is why a lot of agencies have started laying off. I think A lot of people are starting to go to the freelance market. So if you're in marketing right now, you're probably sitting there going like well, I just got laid off and I would believe that, but I wouldn't expect a long unemployment run. However, also, I do encourage you to not wait to try to find another job.
Speaker 1:At NerdBrand, our thing is that we have a certain set of clients, a certain amount of revenue, and it is split between four people plus contractors and expenses, and so, at the end of the day, we're not being greedy here, there's just only so much to go around. So we would love to have a fifth member on the team. We'd love to have somebody that has project management, account management and maybe some front-end web skills. That would be really great, but that's a really hard ask for some of the salary ranges that I'm hearing. I can't get there with those and even if I could, it's a very difficult journey. I think some salaries are starting to outpace expectations of what's reasonable. There's a lot of folks I've come across who want $200,000 to $300,000 a year jobs. A lot of businesses. They're just not going to do that. There's executives and VPs that don't even make that money.
Speaker 1:2025, I hope, is going to be a good year where we get to see prices drop on things and so subsequently, the desire to have those high paying salaries that can relax a little bit and realize you can actually stretch $50,000 depending on where you live. Quite a bit that I have seen in 2024 of just the wild things that have gone on from layoffs and tech and marketing and salaries just kind of exploding and going up and up and up along with housing prices. It's been a wild year. Inflation has hit everybody pretty hard and businesses don't have a lot of additional revenue. By that I mean small businesses, uh, not the big corporations, cause they they run their accounts and money's a little differently than the rest of us. Let's be honest, and I do not even pretend to understand how that works at the moment. Uh, I will say, for SEO, the future, this is not going to go away for 2025.
Speaker 1:There's going to be a lot of talk about SEO, a lot of talk about AI because of Google making changes. Google has revised their algorithm, I think, three or four times in the last quarter. That's a lot. That's a lot. One was for an error, but still it's quite a bit, and so I think it's gearing up for what we'll see for artificial intelligence, where listing websites has already come out. They have a couple of products where, if you have a review website, say like TripAdvisor, you would want to go take a vacation. You go to TripAdvisor, you go to one of these listing sites to kind of review is it worth my time to spend my money to super handy? However, google is not going to favor those anymore.
Speaker 1:A lot of the traffic on sites that are built upon sharing information, not necessarily probably transactions like e-commerce. I would suspect we're going to see in this year, as possible prediction of mine, that we're going to see huge drops in traffic, and the reason is is the search engine result page is fundamentally changing and there's even talks that the familiar search bar may go away. That's a big thing and and you know, the CEO of Google has not come out and said this directly, but it's been hinted enough in the ways you can go to search engine our friends over at search engine journalcom and read about it and uh, they have quite a bit of articles um interviews with him where it seems that he's not obviously coming out and saying what's going to happen, but everyone's feeling is, in interpreting what he said, that you know the search engine result page when you type in a result and you search for something, the results that come up. That's what's going to change and you're going to see more summaries. You're going to see more information. That doesn't really justify you to click through to the website that is displaying that information, because what Google's doing is summarizing. It's looking across several domains, several sites related to you, especially if it's a branded search, I would assume and then it's coming up and giving you sort of the cliff notes for those that are old enough to remember what those are of the results of what's out there. You can sort of see this in Gemini. Currently, if you work in Google Drive and you're working on a Google document, you can actually have it, summarize the document and tell you what it's about without reading the whole thing.
Speaker 1:Eventually, I would assume that this is going to come into my world of podcasting. Currently, though, as it stands, that is not the case. Podcasting can be somewhat automated, but it is only trying to say this in a way that sounds nice. It's only in the sense of removing the ums and the ahs. Still, you know, content is very important to be unique, concise and useful, and I know that the rule still applies that if listeners still find what they're listening to useful, that they will return to listen to that show once more.
Speaker 1:But the podcast is another part of your brand. It has to be another extension of it. The Nerd Brand Podcast is an extension of our agency. It's something that you'll see familiarity with colors, with the statements, the things we do and what we say, how we are. Our personalities are very much molded to the podcast, even though many of us have not been on the show for much for almost over six months because of, well, john and Mitch are busy and I've brought Jacob in. Well, now I've got Jacob busy. So if anybody wants to hop on some shows with me, just feel free to reach out. I am on Facebook and LinkedIn. Just send me a DM and I will get back to you and we'll even try to get you dialed in remotely through a phone call if you like.
Speaker 1:But at the end of the day, it's like the message of this podcast is talking about branding and the nerd culture. We talk about the pop culture and how that relates, how other people that are doing it. For example, going back to the beginning of the show, when I talked about Marvel and DC, their brand, voice and tone, they have the same problems that you will have. They have just more resources. Is all Resources meaning money or actual staff? So there are a lot of similarities, though the problems are the same. It's just how they handle them and what they can do to handle them are very different than you. But podcasting is going to be hot, I would imagine. That's another prediction I have I don't think it'll last very long. The podcasting universe has been around a long time. 2004, I believe, is about when it started and you have basically it's the Wayne's World of Radio is what Steve Jobs said.
Speaker 1:So when you're podcasting about something, really think about what it is you're going to podcast about. What do you want to communicate with people? Do you want to communicate on behalf of your brand? Are you the personality or are you representing the brand? Those are very important questions and again we can consult with you and kind of help you flesh that out. Important question, saying, again we can consult with you and kind of help you flesh that out go work through some worksheets and stuff like that so that we can all see how we got there and arrived at this.
Speaker 1:Podcast is about this, talks about that and does not stray off into anything else. For these reasons, and so there's things that can be done to sort of help guide the creation of the show. But creation of the episodes, that is another matter. Everyone experiences writer's block. So when you're creating an episode for a podcast, you can kind of do like what I'm doing and kind of freestyle it and talk about what's going on in current events, kind of what you have on your mind. You can easily do that for like what I've been doing now for the last 15 minutes, and that could get you a show for that long. If you're able to do that, many people cannot. Sometimes you just need help figuring out how to format an episode. Ai can help you generate a lot of ideas, but here's the thing AI is probably going to give you an idea that's been done 1,000 times already over. So keep in mind your audience and who you're talking to.
Speaker 1:Podcasting is a very long strategy and game. We've been doing it for five years. Our podcast does help us reach our customers. It reaches potential customers and sometimes it just reaches people in our network that just like us and we're happy with all of those. But we didn't get there after 10 episodes. We didn't even get there after two years. So you think about a show that's published every week with 52 weeks in the year. This is a long, long, long commitment. It took two years to get to, obviously, 100 episodes. Everyone thought that was fantastic, as, of this episode, I believe it'll be 229. And so it takes a long time to cultivate an audience, to draw one in that you hope that you can draw referrals off of and business from to keep yourself fed, and I know that's what everybody wants to do.
Speaker 1:But again, go back to my earlier comment about being patient. If the president needs 100 days in office to figure things out and get stuff in order, even though he's already pre-planning before he takes the oath, I mean you need to be doing the same thing with your brand and with its strategy right now. Is podcasting a good fit? If not, don't go down that path. Is SEO a good fit? Well, if you don't have a lot of content to work with in the first place, probably not. So where do you start? Well, that's where we get paid for that kind of thing. So if you have any questions about it or if you're looking to kind of spruce up your brand, take it in a new direction. If you have new leadership and you're like you know what we need some fresh voices, some fresh ideas. You can find us at nerdbrandagencycom and we will definitely be happy to reach out and let's get a meeting set up and start your first consultation for free, and then after that we'll kind of see where it goes. It's between us, it's a relationship, it's kind of like. You know relationships, so it's not a simple transaction and with that, I hope you enjoy this episode Tune in next week.
Speaker 1:I don't know what we're going to talk about. We are in the middle of cleaning up some projects and finishing some things up. Hopefully, maybe we'll be able to discuss some of that. We also have a lot of plans that we want to do and execute for the new year coming up throughout the year, and we have our anniversary. We also have, quite pretty soon, our 300th episode will be coming up this year. So if you're interested in supporting us, go to nerdbrandagencycom slash podcast, follow me on Facebook or LinkedIn, like and subscribe to the show on your favorite podcasting app. It's out there everywhere, on every place. And remember, keep your nerd brand strong.
