MEDIASCAPE: Insights From Digital Changemakers

Beyond Google: Rethinking Growth in the Digital Economy

• Hosted by Joseph Itaya & Anika Jackson • Episode 60

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Marc Viale takes us on a fascinating journey through the evolution of digital marketing, from the early dot-com days to today's AI revolution, revealing profound insights about growth strategy that challenge conventional wisdom.

Starting in Philadelphia before moving to San Francisco in 1991, Viale's path from direct mail shops to founding Lab415 wasn't straightforward. His breakthrough came when he taught himself SQL database marketing in the late 90s—a skill most marketers avoided. This technical foundation allowed him to access customer insights directly without waiting for engineers, giving him a significant competitive advantage throughout his career.

At The RealReal, Viale helped solve a fundamental trust problem in luxury resale. While eBay operated as a "buyer beware" marketplace, The RealReal differentiated itself through authentication, taking possession of items and verifying their authenticity before selling. This product-focused approach to marketing created a thriving ecosystem where sellers could quickly liquidate luxury items and buyers could purchase with confidence. Perhaps most surprising was his counterintuitive discovery that as marketing spend increased, customer acquisition costs actually decreased—a phenomenon he attributes to proper full-funnel marketing that continuously expanded their audience.

Now with Lab415, Viale helps companies think beyond just Meta and Google advertising. He emphasizes the importance of brand pillars, content strategy, and top-of-funnel awareness—elements often overlooked by companies focused solely on performance marketing. He's also passionate about helping marketers craft compelling narratives about marketing performance for boards and CFOs through media mix modeling that demonstrates correlations between marketing activities and business outcomes.

For today's marketers, Viale's advice is clear: never stop learning, especially about AI and emerging technologies. While he sees tremendous value in AI for content creation and personalization, he maintains that human judgment remains essential. Ready to transform your marketing approach? Start thinking beyond performance metrics to build a brand that scales through trust and innovative storytelling.

This podcast is proudly sponsored by USC Annenberg’s Master of Science in Digital Media Management (MSDMM) program. An online master’s designed to prepare practitioners to understand the evolving media landscape, make data-driven and ethical decisions, and build a more equitable future by leading diverse teams with the technical, artistic, analytical, and production skills needed to create engaging content and technologies for the global marketplace. Learn more or apply today at https://dmm.usc.edu.

Joseph Itaya:

Welcome to Mediascape Insights from Digital Changemakers, a speaker series and podcast brought to you by USC Annenberg's Digital Media Management Program. Join us as we unlock the secrets to success in an increasingly digital world. Hi everybody and welcome to this week's episode of Mediascape Insights from Digital Changemakers. And today we're really happy to be joined by Marc Viale, and Mark is the founder of Lab415, which is a marketing company for the dot-com marketing space to help pre-IPO companies overcome their growth challenges, and he's going to tell us a whole lot more here at the Digital Media Management Program at USC, thinking through storytelling, challenges, strategic challenges and opportunities is really one of the main pillars of our program, and at USC Annenberg, where we're constantly thinking about how to create communication that is both intimate and personal but then also has global possibility, and I'm sure that those are the kinds of things that you're thinking about as well. But, mark, why don't we get to know each other just a little bit? Could you take us back to the beginning of your career? How did you first?

Marc Viale:

get started. Thanks for having me on, joseph. And my career started way back in the 90s, you know, when this whole dot-com boom was starting to happen in the Bay Area. So luckily I made this. You know I grew up in Philadelphia, I went to school in the Midwest, at Marquette, and I came out here in 1991 just to, you know, be in the San Francisco experience. And you know I was just planning on being a student. You know I was taking grad courses in history and that I decided wasn't really for me.

Marc Viale:

But you know I've always thought back that a lot of my learning comes from, you know, just being a very curious student and history and like understanding trends and they, you see how they repeat themselves and you know different empires and things like that. And so everybody's like, how did you get into marketing? And it's like, well, you know, going into history and learning about different cultures and you know currencies sort of helps you with marketing. And so you know I started working at a direct mail shop when direct mail was still really you know it's still actually plugging along back in 1983. And then I would say around 97, I went into the advertising at an agency and then I was like, oh my goodness, what's all this dot com stuff? So it was just booming around me and I'm like I'm sitting in this agency just helping old stalwart clients plug away and I wanted to get into the big. You know what was happening then and you know this whole new trend in digital marketing.

Marc Viale:

And so in 99, I went to work for Ofoto, which was, I think, you know, the modern day company that you know. It sort of transitioned into was Shutterfly shutterflycom, where you get your Christmas cards and stuff like that. But the whole like photo sharing thing was like a huge disruptive force. And photography with Kodak it sort of brought down Kodak. You know Kodak was a huge dinosaur that came down.

Marc Viale:

But I learned so much One thing I always talk about with students and also people that they're out of work or whatever when you have a time off a little time off between the advertising agency and Ophoto and I started to learn about SQL and I started to dig into like how to, because the new marketing back in 99 was about database marketing. You know how could you like all this data is coming structured data is coming online and it's easy to have these data sets versus this offline component, and that really pushed me forward, because a lot of marketing back in 99 was brand marketing, not really about response and direct performance marketing, and so I didn't want to wait for the data from an engineer. As a marketer, I wanted to have that data in my hand so I could understand the trends, and so learning SQL and database marketing was sort of a linchpin for me to really unlock a lot of opportunity.

Joseph Itaya:

It sounds like we're still fairly early on in the story of your professional journey, so we can jump around a little bit. There's a question I'd love to ask, because you're beginning to talk now about technology. It's interesting that you went from direct mail, which, as you mentioned, is still plugging along, and still plugging enough but that's pretty non-tech versus where you began to head, which was pure tech. So can you talk about your mindset related to looking towards what's next? Is there some advice that you could share about how important that is?

Marc Viale:

I think that's so important for today's marketers to really, you know, one is always, you know, be reading about the current trends, you know what's going on. And I think that was sort of. You know, they were putting out sequel books back in the nineties and like how you could sequel for dummies and things like that that you could actually learn and pick up, and I think a lot of marketers were scared of it. But that was something that really intrigued me and I think it's sort of, you know, I came from an educational background. You know, my dad was like a biophysicist and he was able to do computer models in the 1970s, and so I was very intrigued about learning, constantly learning, and I think that's sort of been my career is. You know, I've been constantly learning, reading a lot of books. I mean. A lot of folks you know think you have to. You know you have to actually learn on the job, but you can do a lot outside of work where you can learn about what's going on with the AI revolution that's going on. Like my big message to a lot of students out there is like learn as much as you can about AI. And you know, back in 22, when it started to. Really, you know it's been around forever, but in 22, when it started to come out for chat GPT, I started grabbing books about. You know how does this all work and why does it work? And it was just so intriguing to me and I think that's sort of been my story throughout my career how does SEO work? What's going on there? But really, digging in beyond the surface, I think a lot of folks I noticed in my career will just say that's some other department to do. You know, and I don't need to know, how SEO works. But you really do. In order to create a strategy, you know you have marketers. You know for an SEO program, for instance, you have to understand what a content strategy looks like. And then how does that come into a purpose to actually win with SEO? But yeah, I mean so Ofoto was sort of a. You know I was there till 2005.

Marc Viale:

We were really lucky that Kodak invested in us during the dot-com crash in 2001. And so we were able to survive a little bit and you know that kept going. I wanted to take some of that experience to a retailer because, you know, all the retailers after the dot-com crash were starting to get involved in digital marketing. They wanted to understand it better and so I went to work for a company in the Bay here I think they're in LA now BB women's retailer. Everybody remembers BB and I helped them with database marketing and also just sort of really integrating and this is sort of you know, back in the day this was sort of a novel, but I think it's still novel where we were taking store data and putting that into our database at corporate and being able to use that online, multi-platform, you know, and offline. And so we really developed, you know, just by using a loyalty program. And so this whole database marketing thing continued to be a really big advantage for me because I was able to leverage this into stores, online catalog and loyalty.

Marc Viale:

And then, you know, just with everything in these boom and bust cycles in 08, I mean, we started 08, 09, we had the equity crisis and again, another great opportunity for everybody. Even right now, when there's all these recession fears and there's so much movement and everything's moving so fast with AI, it's always an opportunity. I always look at these busts as a opportunity and what I noticed is gaming was huge. I don't know if you remember back in 08, 09, but Zynga was like the talk of the town, you know. So I went and worked for the makers of Second Life, linden Lab, and so you know that was the virtual world of its day and it's still. That's still going really strong actually.

Marc Viale:

And you know you hear about Meta, the virtual world that Zuckerberg is working on, and all that, and you know that really came out of Second Life. You know a lot of the engineers that were critical in the early days went over to Meta to help Facebook on that, and then you know that was sort of a whole different world to me because it was all virtual. It was the most bizarre experience. We could talk you know hours about Second Life, but it was sort of amazing in that it was virtual goods you know that were on this market, that we had all these content creators and they were creating amazing things in world and then selling them on a marketplace that people would buy. And I mean back then you know it was their economy in the Second Life in-world experience was hundreds of millions of dollars. It was sort of crazy. And then the cool thing about Second Life is these content creators could actually cash out, not in game currency but cash out in real dollars and so it really was an attractive to a lot of early content creators using 3D animation and that kind of thing.

Marc Viale:

You know, second Life started to die down around 2012 because it just wasn't growing with. It was too hard and it was laggy and people couldn't move around. So so it was obvious that, you know, the writing was on the door that I had to think about, I had to pivot and I got. You know, the CEO of London Labs Second Life, mark Hengden, had left the company and he knew Julie Wainwright at the Real Real and Julie, you know, reached out to me and she wanted me to come out to Sausalito and check out their warehouse, you know, and see what was going on.

Marc Viale:

I'm like, ok, what's this crazy thing? You know, because I'm like you know this Julie Wainwright I don't know if you heard of her. She's she was the founder of Petscom, which had a huge boom and bust during the dot-com era, and then she created this, the RealReal, which was even bigger than Pets, and the RealReal was sort of this you know, it was the penultimate startup. It was in a garage over in Sausalito. You know where all those houseboats are. I don't know if you know the area. It's in the Marin and it was funny because it would always. Every once in a while it would flood and it would get closer and closer to our warehouse and we'd freak out.

Joseph Itaya:

Flooding's not great when you're dealing in luxury consignment.

Marc Viale:

Exactly, exactly.

Joseph Itaya:

So yeah, of course, the real deal is what you know. We were dealing with luxury again, things that are not digital at all. Fast forward a couple of decades and you find yourself back, strangely, in a similar sort of place where one of the big pillars of your career has been taking tangible some of these items are luxury, some of them are old and then figuring out how to bring them into a digital marketplace. I just love that, but you can explain it better than me. Just give us a quick highlight on what was the real real and what made it great, before we get into the story.

Marc Viale:

Yeah, so the real real was sort of answering the problem of eBay. So eBay was this huge marketplace of clothing and cars and watches, but it was always buyer beware, it was not authenticated, right, it was. So it's a marketplace of buyers and sellers. And Julie saw, you know, this huge white space opportunity for luxury goods, a focus on luxury goods, mainly apparel. We started out with women's and men's and moved into watches and jewelry apparel. We started out with women's and men's and moved into watches and jewelry. But she saw this huge white space opportunity where you know buyers need to know that it's trusted and real. It's not a fake, you know, and so you know.

Marc Viale:

I think now you see eBay really coming on strong with the authenticated message and so they sort of you know it was so funny back in those days eBay would actually let us advertise on their platform. So the real world was really answering the question of it was a trust issue out there. And the other thing is, you know you could every once in a while you found some Chanel and Hermes on eBay, but it was far and few between on eBay. But it was far and few between and a lot of this was sort of like what you were saying with Kodak, where people were taking photos online. They were going to brick and mortar, you know, and so it was funny. I used to. You know it's sort of sad actually, but I used to say those photo processing places are all going to go out of business soon and it's all going to be online.

Marc Viale:

And I would say we're going to take a big piece of offline consignment because that's where people, people trusted that consignment store that had someone that was knowledgeable handbags and fashion. So, julie, you know, julie got the big idea when she went out to Palo Alto to a store with a friend and her friend was sort of well-heeled and a venture capitalist and instead of looking in the front of the store where the retail was, she went into the back right away where the consignment was, and Julie was like, oh my God, you're buying consignment. And she's like, julie, it's Chanel, it's not consignment, it doesn't matter. And so that just popped an idea in her head that like there's all this inventory out here but it's not online, you know, and that was just a sliver of it.

Marc Viale:

Most of it's in people's closets owners of fashion and watches and jewelry and outlet, and a lot of these people didn't need money. They just sort of liked money, you know, and so and and they wanted to buy for the next season. So this gave them a really good idea of like I could buy last season, once I'm done with it, I could consign it and then make money and buy it the next season. So it really worked well with retail.

Marc Viale:

And again, you know, the consignor didn't care about authentication but the buyer did, and so it was this perfect, you know, seller buyer marketplace where the seller was happy because things would sell super fast and it was such a huge consumer base and the buyer was happy because it was authenticated and you know they were inspected, you know. So you weren't going to get something really smelly in a box coming, you know, and you know a cigarette burns on them because they've been inspected and we took possession of the goods. It was unlike anybody else because we actually took possession of the goods to inspect the item before we would actually sell it.

Joseph Itaya:

This is a fascinating story and for any of our students who are listening and we talk about product marketing a lot I hope that everyone listened to the story that Marc told just now, because that wasn't a story about marketing, it was a story about product.

Joseph Itaya:

It was a story about product and we tell our students all the time that in order to be a great marketer and storyteller, you have to understand the product inside and out, as well as the product managers, the product designers, do, because you have to crawl inside the soul of that product, also have to understand this target audience. So what you just shared, mark, is so fascinating and that was like a case study in what I think great marketing can be, because you really understand, really went deep. And could I just ask you a question also, mark, that I you know, as such a veteran expert marketers as you are, that through the process of telling the story, through the marketing and then going and finding product market fit and finding that audience, did those insights, as a marketer, help shape the product? Did you bring those insights back to the product team and say, guys, here's what we're seeing, here's how we can make this product even better, that symbiotic relationship between marketing?

Marc Viale:

Absolutely and I, you know, I would. I would say, you know, when you talk about this whole, I think a lot of people when I, when I go talk to a lot of companies that are under the a hundred million range and they haven't really cut through, they don't know how to talk about their company in terms of the product and how it sort of integrates with the brand. And one thing we were really strong about our brand pillars and they connected really to the product. So one, what was the differentiation? You know, and they connected really to the product, you know. So one, authentic. You know what was the differentiation? How do we differentiate our brand from all these flashmark, the thread ups? There were so many at the time. You know, how do we differentiate? We wanted to make sure that we sort of echoed that message over and over again.

Marc Viale:

And so one was authentication. Nobody else was authenticating, everybody was. You know they may say, you know we look at it through online pictures, but you have to smell the bag. You got to touch it, touch it, understand if it's the metal is actually the real metal. And you know, if the Cartier love ring has, you know you can, you have to get it under a lube to actually make sure it's an accurate ring, because they're reproducing these all over and you don't want that fake. It's a very embarrassing moment when you take that to a jeweler.

Marc Viale:

And so authentication was number one. Luxury resale was number two, where we had this amazing you could compare the retail price and the resale price, and so people love to see you know. So one of those things was we knew people wanted a deal right and we couldn't just discount all day because that would upset the sellers, and so we wanted to be able to communicate the deal they're getting Right, and I guess there's a lot of companies out there doing that really well. Today is like Quince. I don't know if you know Quince. com Some of your students may know about them but they're doing really good of comparing their cashmere sweaters against big name brands in the industry, and I think that's really good.

Marc Viale:

So you don't have to constantly discount. So people have this implied savings. So, yeah, that Chanel handbag is expensive. Maybe it's $4,500, but it was $6,500 at retail, you know. So we really worked with product to be able to show those differences and also that we would have the luxury managers who went out and secured this product, would you know, get receipts, so we would know the price and, like the, the buying price and we could see what it's going for now.

Joseph Itaya:

Another couple of quick questions, because I see that when you were finishing up at the RealReal, you were the chief growth officer. You moved from VP of integrated marketing to SVP of marketing, but then you moved into this place of more than just the CMO, which was sort of the brand thing.

Marc Viale:

I wanted to sort of bridge brand and performance marketing into growth. And one thing that also you know I was, I worked really tightly with business intelligence and so you know it was sort of bridging business intelligence and marketing. So you know it was sort of bridging business intelligence and marketing. And then, you know, eventually towards the end of my career at the Real Real, I took on the sales part, was actually going out and you know we would take leads from marketing. It was really interesting.

Marc Viale:

One thing that we do at the Real Real is everybody used to think like, hey, you got to go out and get consigner leads, but nobody wants to consign, they want to buy.

Marc Viale:

And so, like I want to buy Chanel, I don't want to consign it. And so what we would do is we would always lead with the buying message and it would always be much more attractive from a performance standpoint than a consigned message. And we would get, you know, every marketplace has like four to one buyers to sellers. You know, maybe it varies a little bit, but we would always have more buyers and sellers and so out of those buyers they're able to buy Chanel. They already had Chanel right, and so we would use that database to mine for sales leads, and so we would actually look at that and talk about data. You look at zip codes, you try to figure out who lives near Anima and Marcus and Saks and they're going to be your best sellers and then we would put those into a CRM application for outbound selling. So eventually, more than the buying but also the selling part, how we CRM those part, those leads, came under my area of expertise and so it was sort of like the full buyer seller situation.

Joseph Itaya:

Now, mark, it seems like every entrepreneur's dream but maybe it's also a little bit of a nightmare to have a company that becomes so successful that now you start thinking about IPO and going public. I've seen it on both sides. Can you tell us about that process going public? I've seen it on both sides. Can you tell us about that process for you as you guys were taking it?

Marc Viale:

Yeah, so you know going IPO is like an amazing process. You know it's just like you're doing the roadshow of analysts and it's sort of amazing. You know you're being filmed and to talk about the company and like it's sort of a once in a lifetime thing. Hopefully I'll be able to do it again one time. But you know, after you go IPO it's like you've done this big push to get there and you sort of are a little bit worn out. You know, and so you'll see this often with most IPO companies. Eventually the folks, the founding team, moves on and you know it's sort of that opportunity to all that vesting that you did in stock. You're given a chance to sort of sell it at some point. And also I think sort of some of the decisions that you have to go through when you become a public company are a lot different. Like it's so focused on the quarter rather than the mission. You know it's like we got to get earnings in, so let's not grow so much this quarter. Let's cut marketing a little bit to get our earnings looking good. But you know, make sure we have solid growth. And you know, and so you're not thinking about how do we take over the whole industry. You're really marching towards the quarter. And so I see of a lot of companies and you know, a lot of times you'll see earnings calls they'll do layups in terms of forecasts because they don't want to overshoot, because then they'll get nailed in the next call and so it really slows down a company, you know, and I love a fast-paced company. And also, I think, because when you're a public company and there's so many people you have to answer to, you have customers, you have investors, you have your board and you have to be really conservative in your thinking, you know. And so for me, I'm a serial startup guy and so you know I want to sort of push the envelope, try things and fail, and that's not a thing you can do as a public company. You know it's too risky. I mean, right, look at Tesla, right. And so you know it's too risky to do that.

Marc Viale:

And so I had this urge to one, I wanted to relax and unwind from the big IPO process. And then, two, I wanted to rethink my next path and so I did the CMO thing for a while with a caregiving company, carewellcom, and because caregiving is such a huge industry right now, with the huge boomer All the baby boomers, yeah, and tried that for a while. It was an interesting concept, but then I wanted to. I wanted to sort of be my own boss a little bit, and so Lab 415 was always in my head Like how can I get companies past, especially like under a hundred million dollar companies? How can I get them past thinking about just meta and Google, you know? How can I get them thinking bigger in terms of you know what their brand pillars are? How does that relate to a content strategy? Oh, by the way, there's a whole top of funnel thing about awareness that you miss on Google, right, and like everybody spends a lot of money on Google.

Marc Viale:

But the big thing for the real, real to to get beyond people searching for consignment was to expose the idea to a larger population, and that we did that with TV. And today, you know, tv still like direct mail, still plugging along. And then there, you know, there's podcasts as well. Podcasts are like the big piece today, and so I try to expose people to more of a full funnel where they're thinking about top, where these are people coming in with less. They're not doing a considered purchase at that point, but they're thinking about you, you know, and then you know. Then you have your middle funnel, which is your, your engagement on on social, and then you have your bottom of funnel, which is your Google like hey, I'm searching for Chanel handbags and I'm ready to purchase now.

Marc Viale:

So I think that sort of getting companies to think a little bit more about the bigger picture.

Marc Viale:

And also, when you start doing that, when you start going to people beyond your bottom of funnel, that's where the product thing really comes into play, because you're learning through your messaging that, hey, product folks, we have to make this a little bit easier for people that are not in the buying consideration cycle at this point.

Marc Viale:

We have to and you really have to do that earlier in the game to understand how to scale your brand, because if you're down in the $300 million range and you don't know how to scale your brand, you've been just doing Google and Facebook and growing 10% a year. That's where you get in trouble, because investors are like you don't know how to, you can't move this 50 points. And that's something that you need to start thinking about. What are your big levers when you're under a hundred million and then when you get investment, because these a lot of investors want to scale you, they want to get payback, and if you can only move the business 10% every year, nobody cares, you know, and so, but a lot of that's changing, you know. I would say venture capital has changed a lot.

Joseph Itaya:

Oh, yeah, yeah, so hard time for venture right now.

Marc Viale:

Yeah, there were a lot of firms before and it's starting to consolidate and a lot of them are moving more into the AI B2B sector. So it's tough in retail today the AI B2B sector.

Joseph Itaya:

So it's tough in retail today. So, mark, take us now and you've been talking about the strategy with Lab 415. You know, this is the last question I want to ask you specifically about your career, and then I'd love to ask some more general, pointed, philosophical things.

Marc Viale:

Yeah.

Joseph Itaya:

But with 415, tell us why you decided to start that company and tell us you know it looks like you're about two years in now and how's that going? You're back a bit in the I wouldn't call this an agency, but you're not tied to one specific company anymore. Right, you're fractionalizing your work.

Marc Viale:

I think it really came out of the need, for when I was on the brand side, there were never true growth partners that you could work with, and that's what Lab 4 and 5 is. We're a growth acceleration company, so we're not invested in selling you media. You know we don't make money on the media. We're invested in helping you grow and so whatever that would be. So if it's not Google, you know we're not going to make a point or two on Google. We're really sort of helping that CMO, that CEO, on some of the challenges they're going into A lot of.

Marc Viale:

You know the funny thing about marketing a lot of times it's how you tell the story. You know, and like you know how does, because you know everybody's trying to figure out attribution of your customers and it's like it's a really it's not an exact science. You know it's a lot of correlation. Like we spent money on podcasting and Google search actually improved, and so you have to understand these correlations that hey, the top of funnel is bringing in a lot of brand search and you know from people hearing about the brand on TV or radio or podcasts, it's helping Google out and like, how do you tell that story? Because a lot of times when you look at the peer attribution, oh, podcast and TV, that's a $2,000 CAC. Throw it away. So the CFO will be like to understand that you know we spent money there and CAC went down and customers went up. One of the biggest thing that investors could never understand, the real real is like as we spent more, our cost of acquiring customer went down and they were like that makes no sense, it should go up as you scale. And it's like no, because we had a full funnel working where we were always bringing people at the top and eventually they would get to the bottom, you know, and we would convert them, and so you're expanding your audience, and so I think that's the big thing about Lab 4 and 5. And the message I try to tell people is like hey, I'm going to help you beyond selling you some media. I'm going to help you figure out this growth. I'm also going to help you narrate the story with your board and the CFO so that you can continue to spend and do the correlation. It's really called media mixed modeling, where you're looking at spending and correlating it to activity, and there's lots of great AI tools out there today that can help you with that. But you have to craft that story, and so I do a lot of that with helping them with the board and explaining that.

Marc Viale:

And then, lastly, I would say it's always you know we've talked about direct mail and things like that it's always what is old is new again always, but it's like a nuance, you know. And so direct mail you know it's so funny, gen Z loves to receive direct mail because they don't get any, you know. And so if you find out the right message to get to them, they're going to open that direct mail and they're going to be like amazed, right, and so that you actually looked out for them. And then you know email marketing. I mean, I used to think email marketing was so hard because you had to constantly do that messaging. And you know I'm a big proponent of daily emails at some companies. But with AI it's become so good that you have no idea that there's a machine writing it. It's so much better than a human, though. It's just like.

Marc Viale:

So you can actually really craft true one-to-one communication with AI, with email marketing. And, you know, talk about like, oh, you're in Paso Robles today, you know the weather's great, you know. And, like you know, I noticed that you've been shopping for these kinds of things. Are you ready for a reorder? And so AI brings that all into play in a one-to-one play, and so I think I'm also part of the Lab. 41 5 technique is also trying to bring in new technologies that they may not think about, because when you're in a company, you get siloed Right and you're not really. You don't know what's going on unless someone in the company tells you about it, and so I have the time for eyes and ears of what's going on. What's the trend, and I think following the trend is so important in terms of what's happening in marketing and sometimes they die, sometimes they come back, but it's a constant education. Got it.

Joseph Itaya:

All right, Marc, as we're getting ready to wrap up, I just want to ask you some bigger picture questions. Many of our students are in the middle of career pivots, where they're trying to find their way, and for you it sounds like for many folks in tech and entrepreneurship, it's not a straight path. Path it takes some winding. I'm sure you've had plenty of setbacks, things that came out of nowhere even though you're trying your hardest, and suddenly you found that you've had to pivot. So, in terms of career advice for students who are getting started off and want to follow in your footsteps and become, you know, like you one day, to achieve these great heights as an entrepreneur, but also as a growth marketer with really substantial companies, is there a piece of career advice, something that really stands out to you, that everybody should keep in mind, regardless of what industry they're in?

Marc Viale:

Well, yeah, I think it's regardless of industry. I think to me it's always been like something I could. You know I could see that others would love it. You know I'm not a handbag lover, of course, but I could see the market. I know. You know people out there are into it and you know I could see it.

Marc Viale:

Back in 08 and 09 with Second Life that people wanted to escape from the recession and go into gaming and, like I think it's really being aware of society and what's going on, you know, and also just doing something that really is tangible. You know, I love tangible things that, as we were discussing before, that you can bring online and sell them in a scalable way. And I would also say that if I was out there today, I would just be digging in with all these AI apps. They're, you know, they're not that expensive because they're they're startups and so they're doing a lot of trials, and I would just be digging into you know, some of these. You know you could even just use chat GPT to start doing blogs, using Canva to do videos and you can use AI with Canva and all that good stuff. Yes, I would just say, you know, and poor folks that are in between, just sort of really refine their skills with what's going on today with AI. So AI content is, you know, front and center for marketers today and I got to say you know it's going to give people that embrace it an advantage, you know, and if you know the insides and outs, it's going to make you be able to talk, to talk about it, much better.

Marc Viale:

You know there's a great book out there. It's called Shoe Dog. It's by Bill Knight, who was the CEO of Nike and you know his whole thing was grow or die. And I think you can sort of think that from a company perspective, where you've got to keep on growing and pivoting and to keep going, like I'm always. You know Nike may be down for a little bit, but they keep going. You know they keep reinventing themselves. Maybe down for a little bit, but they keep going. You know they keep reinventing themselves.

Marc Viale:

And I think, as a person you have to do that too that I have to keep on learning. You know when you leave school, that's not the end of your learning. You're constantly reading, like you know. Another great book right now is, you know, forgive me if you don't like the person, but is Walter Isaacson's Elon Musk. I mean just learning about the journey that he went through and, you know, pushing forward. Now I wouldn't say he, you know he's the best example, but it's good to hear all these things and understand what you can change, you know, in terms of how you go about.

Marc Viale:

Even there's a book on Uber's Travis Kalanick and like you can say he was a horrible person and all that, but what he went through to take over that industry and change the way we think about taxi cabs is just amazing. You know, yes, and you know to me, if I were you, I would figure out how to get a job at Waymo. You know Waymo. I don't know if you guys have it in LA. Yeah, waymo is this robo taxi industry and there's a couple of them. I think Amazon has one, but Waymo was nurtured by Google and I just started taking them in San Francisco and there's just like this amazing experience where I've never had such a good driver. You're right.

Marc Viale:

And you don't have to hear the Uber driver tell you how much they hate their job, and so it's just amazing experience. They play mood music and they actually can learn from your YouTube account, you know, in terms of what kind of music you like and, and so Waymo is an amazing thing and they're going to you know, they're going to pop up in every city and to me, the biggest thing is, just like we did, the real. Real is the trust you have to build. The trust, you know, because people are going to be freaked out about Waymo, right, and that's how we all felt about Airbnb, for instance, in the beginning, yeah, or even Uber.

Joseph Itaya:

You know, it's the first thing that you teach your kids is don't get in the car with a stranger. Don't go to a store how you scale.

Marc Viale:

those things is all about trust. You know, and I think you know, airbnb did a great job, uber did a great job, the real real did a great job and I think that is like the linchpin. But, you know, finding something amazing like a product like Waymo which can use marketing to break through. You know, like if I was a marketer at Waymo, I'd be trying to figure out how I can help them keep their cars clean. Because you know, when you get in a car and somebody left a beer can in there and you're like, oh, you know, like, how do you deal with that issue?

Joseph Itaya:

But let's see, that's interesting, Marc, that you say that, because there again you're coming back to thinking about the product, yes, and you're letting your marketing drive how the product actually changes and evolves and becomes more optimized.

Marc Viale:

Yes, and you have to understand how you can scale that. And so I think you know there's so many interesting opportunities out there today and I, you know people are saying that marketing. You know there's not going to be as many jobs out there, but I disagree. Know there's not going to be as many jobs out there, but I disagree.

Marc Viale:

I mean there's always going to be a human factor with AI. Like I can't just release content that comes back to me through chat GPT. It's not good enough, you know, and so it's really good. But you know, sometimes you got to put the human factor in there, and so I think there's always going to be a need for that. You know, just thinking about, if I asked chat GPT to give me a media plan today, it wouldn't even touch TV. But I got to tell you, if I want to address 80% of the wealth in this country, you're going to have to talk to Gen X and boomers and guess what? They're still courted and so, like you know, you may want to have a TV play and so you have to have the human part to all these AI pieces. And I think that's. I don't think people should be feeling dejected or like they're not going to be able to make it today, it's. There's always an opportunity with technology.

Joseph Itaya:

Marc, I want to thank you so much for coming and spending this valuable time with us. My big takeaway is what you started with and that rolled through your Real Real process and you said it right there at the end is the word trust. That's what made the real, real work, because suddenly consumers could trust that it was real. And when we we see so much noise and we hear so many things and we live in this era of fake news and we're all wondering what's real information or misinformation, or disinformation? If you can create a marketing story, as you mentioned, that is trustworthy. Boy, that is an amazing place to start. Yeah, mark, we're going to share all of your socials with people so they can follow your company and make sure that they come and see what you're up to, and we'll track your progress and your journey. But we want to thank you for being a friend to our program and for caring about students and for sharing some of these wonderful insights today. Thank you so much, mark.

Marc Viale:

Thank you, joseph, it's fun, thank you. Thank you, joseph.

Joseph Itaya:

It was fun. Thank you, to learn more about the Master of Science in Digital Media Management program, visit us on the web at dmmuscedu.

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Anika Jackson

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Joseph Itaya

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