Mastering Creative Marketing with Austin Dandridge, CEO of Cobble Hill

In this episode of Curve Ahead, host Brian Wiles interviews Austin Dandridge, founder of Cobble Hill, a creative digital agency known for its impactful brand storytelling and innovative digital ad strategies. Austin discusses his journey from photographer to agency leader, sharing insights into how Cobble Hill transitioned from web design to focused digital marketing services.

Key Takeaways:
✅ Building a team of specialists to drive creative excellence
✅ How AI enhances ideation and marketing processes without replacing human creativity
✅ Strategies for crafting premium, authentic brand experiences
✅ Why storytelling is at the core of effective marketing

Tune in to hear Austin’s advice for creating impactful brand stories and succeeding in digital marketing.

Transcript

0:00

Hey, Austin. Welcome to the podcast. Do you mind introducing yourself? Yeah. Hey, Brian. Austin Dandridge. I'm the CEO of Cobble Hill, which is a digital marketing agency in Charleston, South Carolina. I also have a podcast myself called the Marketing Factor, which is at the Marketing Factor tv. And I interview founders and other marketers and kind of dig into what makes their business or their service click and maybe kind of uncover some insights on how to do things a little bit more efficiently and scale a little bit more effectively. Yeah, I love having engaging conversations with founders. It's. I have, you know, I have my mba, but through a lot of these conversations, there's so many, like, little nuanced things that can pick up through these conversations that you. I honestly think is more valuable for me as a founder than going back to school and getting a master's degree. Oh, for sure. That's why it's great living in, like, the YouTube era of content. I mean, there is something to be said for, like, being, you know, around other people and learning and engaging socially and the type of experience that you get in college. But you can learn anything you want on YouTube these days, which is incredible. I think that there have been more than one drywall tutorial in my history. If you go back and look at it. Yeah, A lot of car stuff, too. Yep. I've got a guy for that, so. I'm trying to get a little better at that, just doing it myself. Love that. So can you tell me about your background? Right. You kind of started out as a photographer, and then, you know, kind of did a lot work within the marketing space as well as kind of a project manager. And then you ended up founding Cobble Hill. Like, can you kind of take me through that progression and how each one of those experiences kind of added to one another to realize that, hey, I can do this better or I can do this also? Yeah, for sure. I. I'm a lifelong creative. My. I've always been. My favorite class in high school is. Was photography. I just remember going into the dark room and messing around in there, and the teachers always thought my photography was great. And I never got praised for anything in any other classes, like math or anything like that, so kind of took that and was a musician, too. And so my. My got a lot of kind of experience through just promoting, you know, the bands that I played with and marketing them and shooting photos for them and creating album covers and posters for shows and stuff like that, and just being exposed to the creative side of the business there. And I went to VCU and in Richmond, Virginia and started an Afrobeat band there. You know, kind of took that for as long as I could and then realized that I wanted to move to New York City and was just freelance photography up there and stumbled into a job at a social media marketing agency and had like a little graphic design background experience and some, you know, a little bit of web development experience just through just messing around and stuff, but kind of faked my way into this really cool job. And were doing work for like, the New York Knicks and, you know, Madison Square Garden and the Rangers and Absolute Vodka and all these cool brands. And it was right when Facebook was kind of brands were just starting to get on Facebook and were building apps for all these brands within Facebook. So Facebook, you know, much different kind of application back then, but you had Apple apps within. You would go to facebook.com, you know, New YorkRangers, and there would be apps that you could kind of play on their Facebook page. And we built all these great apps and, and stuff like that. And, and my wife went to school at College of Charleston. And, you know, after a few years in New York, we decided we want to move down to Charleston, S.C. And came down to Charleston and there was really no one doing any sort of like, cool creative work at the time. And I kind of took, you know, all of the experience that I had gotten from this agency in New York and kind of started making connections with people and saying, hey, yeah, we can design brands for you. We can, you know, we can shoot photos for your. For your product collection. We can build a website for you. I mean, this was in 2012 and no one was, you know, Shopify was barely around. People were, you know, barely thinking about e commerce for their business. And so we kind of got lucky and just we're, you know, kind of doing everything for them. And then within the past five years, we've just really kind of focused on doing digital advertising and email marketing for e commerce brands and hospitality brands. It's just been like a progression of trying to get more and more specialized as we grow up. And we've been doing it for, you know, since 2012 and have kind of found the right types of clients that work for us and have built our team up and still small or 14 people, pretty much all based in Charleston, South Carolina, but everyone is kind of a badass at the team and they all kind of know exactly what's expected of them, which is a lot different than what I could say of the team. That I had 10 years ago where everyone was kind of like, what do we do? We built websites, we shoot photos. We, you know, we do branding. It's just a lot. So it's a, it's been great to just be a little bit more focused. So as you've focused your organization, you found more focus in and your team as well. So are you able to find more specialized hires to support what it is that you're doing with Cobble Hill? For sure. I mean, I think the biggest kind of unlock that I have found just over the past two years is being able to specialize allows you to just hire people that have experience in what they're doing and you pay a premium for that. But you, it opens the, it opens up the rest of the team's time, energy, respect, effort, anything that you could possibly think of. And the more and more you do that, the more and more that compounds. And it is, all of that comes back and frees up my time to start thinking about more and more ways to kind of grow the brand and grow the business and think about the types of businesses we work with and have more like meaningful conversations with those businesses. So specializing has really kind of allowed us to get our priorities in line, also kind of define what our process is and really just kind of determine how do we want to build this team and how does everyone know kind of what they're supposed to be doing? Take me through the process of discovering that self discovery to niche, down to something more and more specific in your organization. And how did you realize that, you know, the digital marketing space is the space that you as an organization excelled at? Well, I think that it's been a natural progression because we've always worked as a photographer. I was a fashion photographer and my interest had been in fashion photography. And then when we started working with businesses, we just naturally started working with more like consumer focused businesses and more aesthetically aligned businesses. And that was the type of work that were getting. And so as we started figuring out, all right, these are the types of businesses that we work well with, we are also saying, okay, well, we're doing all this stuff for them. But no one is, you know, we're launching these websites, we're building these brands, and no one is actually like they're failing or like they don't have the right kind of, you know, strategy behind them or their creative socks or like, you know, the founders aren't aligned. This wouldn't happen all the time, but this would happen pretty frequently, you know, enough over like a time span where it was like, okay, what can we do to accelerate the growth of these brands that we're launching? And it was when Facebook ads were really just starting to kind of get, you know, kind of take hold. This was in like 2014, 2015, and lots of brands were like starting to dabble with it and it was still cheap then. And we really started just working with the brands that we currently had and say, hey, we're going to start running ads now. We're going to start like running email. We have this creative experience. The way that we differentiate ourselves from other brands is we can actually like, we understand branding, we understand the design aspect of all of this, so we can design great ads. And back then that was a pretty novel idea. You know, people were just like, oh, let's just run ads, let's just show, you know, the product catalog or whatever. No one was thinking about how we're telling the story now. It's very like, you know, it's very in vogue to be like thinking about the creative for your Facebook ads. But, but back then it wasn't. And so we kind of positioned ourselves a little bit that. And then there came a point where it was like, hey, you can either continue to do all of these things, like kind of good, you know, like web development, branding and work with kind of these like mid level clients, or there's like this other way to focus the efforts and really double down one of these things. And I had no real experience in the advertising side, but I just found it interesting. And it also was recurring revenue, which I thought was pretty powerful because when you're doing web design projects, you're just constantly looking for that next project and it get, it can be really good, but it also just, you start stacking projects up, you know, and so then you start needing to fill that work. Whereas the recurring revenue of marketing businesses is just a, it's much more predictable to scale. You don't get these huge checks like you do when you build websites, but there is like a consistency to it. So that was pretty appealing and it just seemed new and fresh. And it also seemed like honestly like websites were becoming a little bit either super technical where you had to have like some headless type of CMS running on Shopify and have this entire technical team and then it would always break and it's doing this. Or websites were like, you could just get a theme. And if we're being honest, like most of the time, for most of the clients. Unless you're like absolutely crushing it. Themes do the trick. There is a level of like Shopify themes that is just as good, if not better than your average web designer. And that isn't to say that you don't necessarily need custom websites, but I don't think every brand does. And so I was thinking, okay, how can we be more bespoke and offer more strategy here? And really it was like, let's just get, let's stop doing web design. It's like a headache. And there's, it's, you know, and it was a good call because now if you even think about it, AI is making writing code and developing much more easy. You know, where people are not necessarily paying that premium that they were when brands were first starting to get online. AI is a whole nother trend to that. I think that, I think AI has huge implications when it comes to marketing. How have you seen or how are you leveraging AI on the work that you're doing? It's awesome. You know, like AI is from a marketer's perspective is great because it allows us to ideate at a much higher frequency that just would be impossible to do with the team size we have now. We don't take AI content and use that to, for anything really. Like it's not like the final output ever. But there is this, there is a little bit of just the way that you think of, start thinking about creating that. AI can be a great tool and a great jumping off point for it. We like to do mood boards and so having a consistent theme in a mood board is pretty easy to kind of to see. But how do you describe it is a lot harder. And I think that when we're starting to think about let's say Black Friday, Cyber Monday ads, right? And we're starting to concept these ads or these emails. We can take a look at a, a lot of data, a lot of artifacts all at once and find a defining thread that really just boils the concept down and helps create maybe the action items or even just jumping off points for ideation in minutes. Whereas before that would have been a, an all day affair, right? And it would have been. And it also would have like not been done by me. You know, it would have been done by like an intern or a junior employee and you wouldn't have necessarily gotten the quality of work that I think would have been possible. And so the benefit for me is it's a huge time saver because I like to get my hands dirty with creative and I like to strategize and I like talking to clients about that stuff. But that isn't my only job. It. So I think that having the ability to prompt an AI through a variety of different, whatever chain of events that needs to happen to create something just becomes. Creating briefs just becomes much easier. Creating, you know, meeting agendas becomes much easier. And honestly like taking Excel spreadsheets and starting to put tables together from them or do, you know, different types of formulas and calculations. When it comes to business forecasting for the brands that we work with, AI just kind of crushes for stuff like that. It's never going to replace the actual like the art of content. Like we don't use it to write our ads. Like if anyone does that, they're not going to have a job for much longer. You know, like there's not like a, that it's pretty obvious right when stuff is created like that. But I think it's used more as the same way that we use Google Search. It's just a, it's an enhanced version of Google Search. You had mentioned ideation. When it comes to AI, I think the other really big application from an AI perspective is to be able to look at historical performance of specific ads or campaigns or what have you and see which ones really hit and understand why a little bit better to be able to replicate that in something moving forward. So looking at just like the data that's behind it and using AI to help analyze that information is great to be able to leverage because it's thinks a thousand steps ahead of what I would think as analyst and just different perspective on something that I may have not thought about for sure. I mean you just, you can weed through stuff so much quicker and summarize things. I mean one of my favorite things to do with it is if there's an article out there that I'm interested in reading but like it's not going to like necessarily benefit me to read this entire article word for word. I read a lot so I'm not missing out on something by summarizing it, but taking an article and being like summarize the key points to this. What are the action items? Like where should I look for further information? Just like copying and pasting something like that is so powerful. I think you just can get through a higher clip of things and the same way with data or same way with. Hey yeah. Let's take a look at how our ads performed last Black Friday Cyber Monday. Here's the actual artifacts that we ran as ads, right? Here is the ad spend. Here's their current performance, you know, year to date. What do we need to do to achieve the same results? Or what do we need to do to get 30% more based on, like, historical performance here? Where should we generate new ads based on these? Like, what are the consistent themes here? I mean, there's so much that you can do with it that. Yeah, it's like. It's like having a team of analysts. I was just thinking about something and now it's stuck in my mind. You were saying how you would never use AI to create content for ads. And it's funny, I thought about an ad that I saw. I think I saw it on Doesn't Really Matter, one of the social platforms where they actually use ChatGPT to generate images for their ad. I don't know what happened, but someone didn't proof it well enough and they actually spelled their company name wrong. Like in the ad, it had too many P's for, like, pepperoni or something. It was the most ridiculous thing I've ever seen. I was like, all right, guys, if you're going to use AI to help generate any sort of content for you at least as a human, need to proof what's being generated. You can't just publish it as your own. For a couple of different reasons. One, because things like that happen. Two, because it's not necessarily protected by copyright. And I know that's still kind of a point of contention with a lot of organizations on how that's going to shake out in the future. Yeah, I mean, it also. The creative sucks, you know, like, it's not creative. It's, it's clearly made by, like, people know what's made with AI. I mean, there's great ways to use AI to like, edit videos. I mean, if we think about content, right, It's. We're thinking of short form, disposable content. It's. You could say that for a lot of the type of ads, even the ads that were generated by humans, the creative is not great. But there is something that's like, how do we get to the brand essence? How can we tell the story about something? How can we, like, utilize the selling points and the features and what makes this brand great into an ad and have that feel like it's coming from a real person and not. It doesn't, it doesn't click when it's like, stuff you've thrown into some sort of modeling AI software that's going to Generate a ton of ads. There's like great uses for it from a creative standpoint when it comes to editing photos, editing videos. I think, you know, I mean I think that's different from the like large language models type of behavior that we're seeing. But like there's there, you know, people, I think in terms of ads and brands, they always want to feel at least the brands we deal with which are premium, there's somewhat of like an emphasis on the brand. It's not like something we don't work with many brands that you can buy on like Amazon. Let's just say that there's an emphasis on the human feeling of how this product or service or hotel is like, is talked about. And it's a feeling of like you discovered this place and, or this thing and you want to be there and only you know about it and you want to tell your friends about it. Right? And you don't get that with like mass produced AI stuff. And I think you're gonna see the difference there. I mean that's gonna be what differentiates premium versus not in the future is like stuff that's. And you see it with products already come, you know, stuff that's like mass produced from China. You know, if you think of like a pillow that you get or something like that they can buy it like bed, bath and beyond versus like a really nice like eight sleep pillow they can buy on their website that does that has all these features that's like clear, that's like love was put into it and stuff and it just works. You see that the same way with just general creative. And I think that will be AI will be kind of the defining feature, you know, in the next year or so about how stuff is premium or not. So you think that campaigns or creative that's being produced by people that have like a human touch and feel to it is what is going to define premium or premium for brands in the future. It's not the only thing that's going to define them, but it's going to be the thing that will make the marketing for premium brands effective is the human touch. And I think it always will be, right the storytelling aspect of things. I mean you see it already in like so much content. That's content that you see on like, you know, I've got a six year old daughter and she watches these shows on Netflix and they're like were talking about, we're like this is definitely created with AI or something because it's just like, not good. There's no storyline. Like, all the voices sound the same, and it's just like, kind of crap, you know, and it's not premium. You could tell it's just like, junk show. You're not gonna think about the show ever again. Whereas, like, I don't know, Stranger Things or something. You know, something that's just, like, good that was, like, clearly created with, like, a lot of love and detail. And you can tell that it was like there was a human touch to it. It's such a. There's such a difference between those two things. And really, like, that's what most people who value something, if they're going to pay a premium price, that's really what they're paying for. I mean, they're paying for the quality, and that's just part of it. Let's dig into that a little bit more. Tell me, you know, you collaborate with a lot of clients to help drive authenticity or, like, an authentic brand experience. Like, tell me about that process and what are some of the key elements to being able to deliver that for your clients? Well, they have to have it, you know, like, they have to have the authenticity already. It can't be fabricated. And that's the kind of. The biggest thing is what we can do is help them tell that story and. And maybe unspool it for them a little bit and help them make it palatable from a marketing perspective. But there's no way to generate authenticity out of thin air. And authenticity comes from passion for what someone's doing. It comes from, like, a sense of trying to make something better, then make something new, make something fresh to inspire people. That comes in all shapes and sizes. You have a lot of people who can. Who have great stories, you know, who. How they. You know, how they've. We have a great. A great client who makes biscuits, and not just any biscuits. It's not like Pillsbury. This is like, her mom's recipe. And it's. She's been, you know, passed down to her. She's makes them with real ingredients. There is, like, a passion in what she's doing. And the way that we communicate that is through storytelling. Right. How does she tell us about, like, the time that. The first time that she had these biscuits from her mom and why it was important for her to share that with her kids, her daughters, you know, and how she's doing that and how it's bringing people together and why she chose us a new recipe and stuff like that. And there's. There's a way of being authentic in that storytelling that she just naturally is good at. And then there's clients that are less prone to having a story to tell, but they have a really great product and they might just be in the right kind of time and place in this moment of the life that we're all living on the same trajectory, that it just might be like this just works right now. And so it's. But they might not have a story that is unique, authentic or anything like that. So for those we try not to fabricate it, but it's trying to think of, okay, well, what are, what problem is this solving, right? What are we doing for this brand and what is this brand providing and what are people talking about that is different? And so we always try to think of like, what are the content pillars of the brand that needs to be kind of woven into each of the stories that we tell, whether this is from an advertising perspective, an email perspective, or just like positioning for the brand as a whole. And so a lot of what this does is it opens up our brands to start thinking that way in everything they do. And what we find is that if there's a level of consistency in how they're talking about this, just the content just keeps getting better and it feels real, you know, like it feels like there's gonna be. There is something that is unique about it. I'll give like one final example as we work with this table linen company, right? It's table linens. It's literally like potentially one of the most boring things you could possibly think about, right, in terms of a product. How do you make table linens fun and unique and cool? But they've created hand blocked prints india. She's sourcing them herself. She's updating the different designs and the patterns on every. She's launching new products every month. And she's been doing it for 20 years. And it's just continuing and continuing to grow. And what we found is worse. We're, we're not just selling like table linens and tablecloths and napkins. It's more of like the experience of hosting and entertaining that we're selling. How can we make it feel like this is something you have to have when you're entertaining? And you do that through imagery. You do that through the words that you use. You do that through what your website feels like and how your Instagram feels when someone comes to it and the stuff that you're talking about. And you're less of like selling something every single time that someone Opens up their Instagram and looks at a story for you. But you're more like, all right, here's the vibe of this really cool, like, dinner that was hosted or something like that. And there's like a subtle touch of table linen in the background, but it's not over. And I think that people are hip to that. They also want to just know how things are made. And how things are gives you kind of an insight into. Into a brand that makes it feel like you discovered them. Think that kind of brings the conversation full circle where were talking about, like the things in the YouTube era of just being able to learn kind of anything right away, right? Like, being able to understand how some of these things are made actually draws you in as a consumer and be like, man, the quality that's going into that or the thought or this, that or the other thing, it's like it kind of draws you into the product and you immediately connect on a different level as just a consumer and more of like, okay, I mean, I understand the story. I know where they're coming from. I know how it's sourced. I need to have it just from like a support level. Yeah, I mean, there's definitely like, you know, my biggest, my favorite brand of all time is Patagonia. Right. And that, I don't even like, really like, their products are cool, but like, I'm more just like, love their brand, you know, and it's because I'm like, their marketing is genius. Because it's not. It is not. Buy this jacket. It's like telling a story and the jacket is just like, it's not even part of the story. Right. It's like, might not even be in the ad itself, but I'm still like, there's such an authenticity of what they're doing and it's through storytelling, right? It's through the power of story. And I think that's like what's most important in advertising. And I don't think that's going to change. I think that Patagonia is kind of like this interesting use case because they're a consumer product that kind of is like anti consumerism, right? They. They will take back their product if there's a hole or whatever and patch it for you or, you know, they'll, you can trade it in and they'll turn that into a new garment. It's. And then the founder, you know, giving back his fortune to, you know, help the environment. It's such an interesting use case because it, like, I said it's a consumer product that they're like, anti consumerism. Yeah. I mean, that's the craziest thing about that business and that's obviously like, from a positioning standpoint, that's bold of them to do. It's also a little bit like it's. Yeah. It's antithetical to capitalism or anything like that. And so it feels a little bit like. That's cool. Like we're. Yeah. Feel like I'm, like, I'm down for that, but for me, that is like, it's tertiary to the fact that they just tell cool stories, you know, and they have like, great brand ambassadors who I really like. And there's something that's like, just ingrained in that brand that everyone knows about and everyone can kind of get behind. It's really hard to create that. I think that if you were to think about it a little bit. But they were inspired by them. But like, Yeti is doing a pretty good job of kind of also creating something that's somewhat similar from like a brand positioning standpoint, where you could see that brand like 40 years from now still kind of having a really strong story to tell. Yeah, no, that's a great point. Marketing and branding is such a. Such an intricate thing now. It's not just a logo. It's, you know, how you represent your brand out in public. It's who else represents your brand through their actions or through their storytelling on your behalf. Branding has become such a much bigger thing to, like, I've got a friend of mine who she curates her entire Instagram page that like, everything. Like, if you were to not just take a look at one picture, but her entire page, it's like everything's blocked out the same way. And that's kind of her personal brand there on Instagram. So it's, it's such an interesting becoming, I think more and more of this bigger thing than just like a name and a logo. Yeah, yeah, right. I mean, it's everything that you do and now that people have the. There's so many place. It's like goes back to a little bit about why we don't build websites anymore. Because I don't think that necessarily people are like, website is. Yeah, it's just a spoke now. You know, like, it's not the main factor of a brand anymore. You can, you know, we see shifting in purchase behavior on, you know, moving 30% to meta and less of the website. So what that shows me is I don't think the website's ever going to go away, but I don't necessarily think that it's like the centerpiece of your brand anymore. Your brand now is kind of everything. You know, it's. It's your Instagram feed, it's the ads that you run, it's your website. It's sure it's your logo a little bit, but like, branding agencies now, like, they kind of had their work cut out for them. You know, it's less about, like, there isn't. Like, here's your style guide and how your logo should be applied and the type of font you should use, and you can't stack this, blah, blah. It's like, that doesn't really work now because there's. There's a much different way of communicating a brand that is very complex in terms of the platforms, but at the same time, it's more about the way that you're telling the story from a branding perspective and less about esthetically how this logo stacks. And that's what makes. Makes those brands like Patagonia and Yeti, I think, universal and have great branding examples. I mean, I'm sure they have great style guides that are built in there, but their style guides are constantly evolving, I can tell you that. All right, Austin, so it's been a great conversation so far. We've come to the end of the podcast. This is where I give you 90 seconds to pl anything that you're passionate about that could be Cobble Hill. It could be a charity. It could be anything you want. So without further ado, the floor is yours. Yeah, well, I definitely check out Cobble Hill. Cobble HillDigital.com Cobble_Hill on all the socials. Check out my podcast after you listen to Brian's at the Marketing Factor tv. Got some great guests and great content there. Yeah, Check out. If you're looking for a place to donate, Charleston Waterkeeper is a great organization. You can find other waterkeepers potentially in your area there. It's a. It's called the Waterkeeper Alliance. It's a great organization that keeps the watersheds of these local communities clean and safe and for fishing, for, you know, recreation and everything like that. It's. It's a nonprofit we've been involved with since their foundation in. In Charleston. So, yeah, those are. Those are the three that I would. I would promote. And. Yeah, that's. That's about it. All right, well, thank you for your time today. I really appreciate it. Thanks, Brian. It's great. Great chatting with you, man.