Stop Chasing Attention | Leejon Killingsworth | Full Battery Media

In this episode of the Full Battery Media Podcast, we sat down with Leejon Killingsworth to break down what most creators and businesses get wrong about attention. 

It’s not about posting more or trying to beat the algorithm, it’s about clarity, positioning, and building something people actually care about. We dive into how Coyote Ugly became a global brand, why most marketing is just short-term performance, and how to create something that lasts beyond the next post. 

Are you building a brand, or just feeding the content machine?

Transcript

SPEAKER_01 0:00

Every company is a media company, is because you're not only producing goods and services anymore, right? Like that's part of the equation. But the other part of the equation is getting people to know your product even exists. And that used to be a very straightforward proposition back in the day. Okay, so I'm gonna go, I'm gonna create my brand. Now I'm gonna go advertise in my local paper. I might have enough money to buy a billboard. Perhaps I'm gonna jump into radio or TV. Like it's a very cookie cutter experience. Anyone can follow along. Now, whether whether their ads are great or not, that that's totally different conversation. But the methodology was pretty much the same, and it was the same for a long time. The introduction of social media changed the distribution model. And that's what changed everything. The distribution of content is the gatekeeper that used to make it very clear what pathway you'd want to take as a plan that a brand that's launching. Now there's the traditional route. If you have the money for that, if you can buy the attention, or you can use storytelling on social media and create your own marketing ecosystem that you can kind of control yourself. I mean, obviously you can't take your followers with you yet, which will be what three social media 3.0 is. It'll be built on blockchain and you'll be able to take your followers, would be my guess. Whoever the platform that builds that first will will win. Um, but that's the way I look at it. So you have control of your own marketing ecosystem if you can create your own channels of distribution. And that's what social media made happening. I am LeJon Killingsworth, and I am the chief marketing officer for Coyote Ugly Saloon.

SPEAKER_00 1:55

Awesome. How did you get into that like path, man? How did you find this? Like, where the fuck did you start to get all there? You know?

SPEAKER_01 2:02

Dude, so it is a very bizarre pathway. I um I moved to Vegas in the late 90s when this new sport called the UFC came out. Right. And I was in college at the time when that came out. And I don't know if it's because my initial path that I thought I was going on my whole life was to go pro hockey. And it looked like that's where I was going. Um, right when I got to the finish line is when I burned out. So I was uh playing junior A and I got my collarbone broken by my own team member in a warm-up. I was a goalie in a warm-up before uh before literally pre-season game. Got broke my collarbone, and I was out for the rest of the season, and I never just went back. And when the the UFC came out, that same kind of inspiration and love was there for me because I was a lifelong martial artist, so this was like bizarre to me. How is these little skinny Brazilian beating these 250-pound monsters? Like it didn't make sense. I was a karate guy, dude. And like I didn't know anything about grappling, I didn't really respect it. Like I had friends that were wrestlers, but it just wasn't in my calculus of what I needed to be doing until I got smoked in a street fight by this wrestler. And I literally, as a black belt, I couldn't do anything to this guy, so it really made me refocus. And I started looking at at this new sport. UFC came out. The first contest was actually illegal. So they recorded it. Yeah, it recorded it and it came out two years later in video stores. And I was running video stores at the time in college. I had worked for Blockbuster before I was even 18, and I got handed my first keys at 18 for my own Blockbuster store.

SPEAKER_00 3:49

So that's literally one of the coolest things that I've heard of late. Like, that's rad. That's a f that's rad.

SPEAKER_01 3:57

It wasn't though. All I had to do was really show up and be responsible and do the job. And I was able to get them to hand me keys for my own store at 18, dude. Like, that's crazy. But I mean, technically, I was already running my own stores at 16 for a small, small operation, like a mom and pa operation. So it wasn't that different, but it like looking back, I'm like, God dang, they handed the keys to a whole store to an 18-year-old, which is insane to think of now. Like, I wouldn't even think of doing that now. All I had to literally do though is really just show up and be a halfway decent employee. And I stood out from just doing that.

SPEAKER_00 4:35

You know, sometimes showing up, I I had to like I made a comment today. I was talking to my team and I said something, and my one of my workers turned to me and said, Who's the most dependable person here? And I was like, damn, that's like a brutally hard question because I was thinking about performance, what people are flashy, what people get the most done. And you know what I said? I said at the end of the, I thought a couple minutes, and I said, This one worker, and he's like, Why? I said, She comes five minutes early every single day and never takes a day off. You know, she's always here and she does a consistently good job. It's not flashy, but she shows up and she works hard. And he's like, but she and I was like, but nothing, man. I said, see if you can beat her here every single day to work. You know, she shows up, she lets other people in, and I was just like, that's pretty, pretty solid. And he was like, he was thinking there was gonna be some metric, you know, you know, person who completes the most of this, person who does that. And I said, No, it's like sometimes the most important thing is showing up. Agreed. Especially nowadays, like it's just hard enough to get people to do that.

SPEAKER_01 5:41

Ugh, I had to literally fly people in in my my key west location. I couldn't even keep locals hired because they could quit because they wanted to go to the beach on an afternoon instead of going to work. So it was really difficult. We had to import people, so it's just there's definitely a change in the dynamics between hourly staff and in today's business climate, so to speak. It's just everything changed after COVID in my industry.

SPEAKER_00 6:11

Everything changed. Super true. I it's interesting too. Like, I was just gonna make a point on that too, and it makes complete sense. Like, you know, I I was hiring last month and I booked, you know, 20 interviews. Do you know what happened to 10 of them? They were in the hospital, and I guess I did just use your quotes. They got they all these people said I was I was in the hospital, and I I I my workers were like, No, no one said that. I can't I took screenshots and I posted them to our group chat. I was like, look at this. And people were like, I'm not doing that anymore. I was like, see, some of you guys did that though. They're like, Yeah, because the people don't ask questions. People, you know, if you say, I don't want this, you know, I don't want that, people will judge you. But so I say that just to kind of walk away. But it one of the things too, it's wild to me because we live in this um state of constant attention, you know. And tonight I was in the bar with my wife, and there was a guy sitting next to us, and he's like, he's like just suddenly speaking Vietnamese. But like he didn't just talk Vietnamese, I speak Vietnamese too. And I was like, you know, when I order some guru, you know, it's just chill. And he was like really loud, he was like, She was like, hey everyone, I'm gonna order this. You know, and it's like, I'll think on the menu. I was like, wow. And what what I was thinking, I talked to my wife, as I was like, that guy is really, really, really trying to get attention. Like, he wants everyone to hear him. And like, we it's so interesting because I look at my daughter, how she gets attention, I look at my staff. I you see all these people that are seeking attention. Business is seeking attention. I once had one of my teachers in school say that attention is our most valuable resource. Yet he says, because it's this the one thing that everyone, everyone is competing for. And you say, and I want to ask about this, that attention can be designed, not chased. Um, what does that mean in simple terms? Because that that's fascinating to me.

SPEAKER_01 8:08

There is no simple terms, though. That's the trick. So, attention, I was first taught attention, economics, attention framework from massive brands. So the first company, like I just mentioned Blockbuster, but the first company I ever worked with that was really a brand-based company, I worked with Charles Schultz, um, who did peanuts, the cartoon strip peanuts. And I was working at the Snoopy Ice Arena. Now, the Snoopy Ice Arena, yeah, that's where I went to high school. That's where I'm from.

SPEAKER_00 8:40

Dude, I I grew up in St. Alena, right across the mountain in Napa Valley, man. Oh, okay. So I went, I lived in Heelsburg.

SPEAKER_01 8:46

That's where I grew up into high school. Dude, okay, cool, man. Small world. So yeah. So I worked there. Um, what most people don't know though is that his office was actually in the same parking lot. So they had a nice arena and then they had the gift shop. So the gift shop, which was a separate building, um, housed his office where he drew all peanuts in the second floor. So that's wild.

SPEAKER_02 9:09

I didn't know that.

SPEAKER_01 9:10

Now, being part of that organization was really cool because not only did he be such a big hockey guy, and I played for the state team, uh, Team California at that time. And uh he was such a big hockey guy that I actually played hockey with him. I played hockey with his son, who was a pro in Europe. And I taught, uh, I was a my first quality qualification for becoming a professional athlete was as a professional rollerblader teaching camp rollerblade with Charles Schultz's daughter. Um, she was part of the the governing board uh when rollerblade launched. So she was a famous figure skater herself. So this is who my first education into branding came from. Everything was Snoopy, everything was peanuts, you know, like branding was everywhere. So there was a consistency in that that started my foundation on attention and and uh how it how you can architect the architecture behind attention. Yeah. After them, it was Blockbuster, um, or video stores in general. So video stores are a great example of a marketing machine that is finely tuned, right? Yeah, when I was just a quirk, I would get in videos. Every Tuesday was the new video day, right? And some videos, some movies came with a whole package of promotion. It came with stand-ups, it came with posters, and sometimes keychains and giveaways and all this stuff. And you would see big movies have these entire packages that came with them, and then these small movies that definitely did not, and you could see the difference on what movies were getting rented versus which ones weren't. And then you're looking at, dude, I looked at box covers for years, box covers of movies, which was basically training me on which ones can get attention and which ones can't, right? Because I'm one putting these back. So this is where the education all started. Um, big brands, and I would go on to work with Macy's, and then I would go on to work with the Plant Hollywood team. Um, the company named Enoch is who really was the company behind Plant Hollywood. And they partnered with Warner Brothers in 2000 on a massive concept that was going to be an updated version of Plant Hollywood, but more upscale. So the food was fine dining, exquisite, like chefs. It was a 65,000 square foot venue that is now called Tau in the Venetian. But at the time when I was running it, it was called Warner Brothers Stage 16 and the Velvet Lounge. And that was a massive project that they took four of the set designers from four of the biggest Warner Brothers movies, and they actually recreated these sets of famous movies like Casablanca, Ocean's 11, and Gotham City from the original Batman, which was so one of the coolest rooms. Um, and so that's the last place I was working at that really was a massive marketing engine, right? So this is big dollars behind really curated, perfect looking content with the money behind it to get the attention. When Coyote Ugly opened in Las Vegas, I was over at the venue that's called Tau, and 9-11 happened. When 9-11 happened, Vegas shut down for a year, basically. People just stopped coming. Obama mistakenly said something in uh in one of his speeches about not going to Vegas, specifically. What he was trying to say is don't waste money right now. But what ended up happening is he kind of made a a push, a marketing push to not go to Vegas, and it worked. People just didn't come. Um, Hiot Ugly opened right at the end of September. They had over 1,400 girls just try out for the job. Just the job to try out for it. It was insane. Like the line of 1,400 girls going down the strip outside the New York, New York Casino. When it opened, it opened to lines every night of the week. I had never seen anything like it. The general manager from the restaurant at Warner Brothers went on to become the general manager at Coyote Ugly. And she called me and was like, listen, you need to come look at this place. We are doing 1.2 million a month out of 2,500 square feet in a venue that has never worked for the last 10 years. The spot we put Coyote Ugly in hadn't worked for 10 years. It was a Rita Rutner uh comedy shop that didn't work. And then it was Hamilton's, which is the famous actor who had a steakhouse there, didn't work. Coyote Ugly has been sitting in there since 2000, still operating today, which is the most bizarre part of that whole equation because Vegas, nothing lasts that long. They will take out whole casinos within you know 10 years of being built sometimes. So it's just it there's no appreciation for anything vintage. It's all about who's busy now, who's got the attention now. And we're still there. The question you asked me was, how did I get involved? So she's the one that turned me onto it, right? At the time I was running the venue tau, I was actually putting together my own concept in Summerlin, which was um like the young hip neighborhood of Las Vegas where all the scene stores would live, basically. And I was putting together a top restaurant in a project called Boca Park. Um while I was doing that, the Coyote Ugly thing just came up and I couldn't let go of it. Couldn't let go of it. So I I turned my attention away from the project in Boca Park and solely on becoming a franchisee of Coyote Ugly. Found some financial backers, put my shit in storage, and basically met well met up with Lil in New Orleans in 2001, 2002, right in the beginning of 2002, I think. And met with her, met with her with my team. Um, we wanted to get a license for Fort Lauderdale, which is where my my financial backers were based out of, and and Fort Liquerdale, which was its nickname at the time, was a very busy nightlife strip. Um so I put all my stuff in storage and lived on this dude's couch for for four months, found a location, was meeting up with Lil. And at the time, Lil started using me as an independent contractor to help her become a buffer between her and one of our franchise groups that had kind of fell apart. They they all split up. It was eight of them, and they all fell apart and split up. So she needed help dealing with just them alone. Um, when my partners saw that I was doing some side work with her, they tried a little shady contract switch on me and tried to get me to sign a contract that would basically make them have to give me approval before I could do that. And certain one of the partners, two of the financial backers, one of them, I wasn't very familiar with Wall Street at the time, but one of them was doing some stuff that just did not seem very real. It didn't seem like that's how business should work. It was boiler room.

SPEAKER_00 16:15

If you ever saw that movie, yeah, totally boiler room, man. And Vin Diesel, yeah.

SPEAKER_01 16:21

Dude, this is what he was doing. Same kind of bullshit stuff. So I dissolved my partnership and I was I had nothing. I'm I'm in Fort Lauderdale, not where I'm living. I've now been out of Las Vegas for months, which might as well be years in Las Vegas terms. I I put all my eggs in this basket and it wasn't working out. So I ended up having to walk away. But Lil at that time had a franchise group in Dallas. Now the Dallas franchise group were military, so they did not have a hospitality background and they needed help with their opening. So I came out there and helped them with their opening and did such a phenomenal job that at the end of that opening, myself and Lil and Kevin, who is um the hammer and nails guy, and our attorney sat in the Adams Mark Hotel lobby and formed the new company that has opened every coyote ugly six. So that's amazing.

unknown 17:18

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 17:19

Not the way I thought it would have. Right? But I mean, dude, I moved it to fight in the UFC, ended up working in my moonlighting job as a career, and now I'm next to probably the most famous bar owner on the planet, and I'm helping her expand her brand. So that's kind of how it worked out for me. You know, was this all to uh like intentional, or did this just all kind of fall into place, though, man? It was not, I mean, there was intention behind everything I was doing, but this was not the the plotted path that I laid out for myself. This is not the direction I thought I was going. Um, but I needed to zig and zag at the appropriate times when the opportunities arose, right? Like there was a big opportunity in UFC, don't get me wrong. But even today, and I was talking in the late 90s when no one had even broke a million dollars yet. Chuck Liddell was the first fighter to break a million dollars. And to be perfectly frank, if I'm gonna be honest, there's maybe two or three UFC fighters that have made the money that I thought they should make. That's it, right? Boxing, that's way more money in boxing. Um, so well, the YouTubers are doing it right now, you know. Exactly. And my whole plan was I wanted to fight in the UFC just to get a name for myself so I could open my own school. That was the end game for me at that time. It was not on my radar to be opening a chain of bars all over the world. At that, at the moment, I was moving to Las Vegas. But I'm an opportunity arose, I seized it, and I've been doing it ever since.

SPEAKER_00 18:48

See, and that's that's where it's at. Like the one of my friends said that, you know, great business is seizing the opportunity that's in front of you. And you know, if you are able to do that, you're gonna be able to move forward. And it's just about moving incrementally forward. And certainly we all take steps back, but if you can take enough steps forward, you start, you continue moving in the right direction, you know. And I think they're more pivoting now than they used to be. I agree though, you you you have to like do kind of this dance. Like the success is not a straight line, success kind of is this winding thing that goes all around and back and forth, and we just have to get there how we get there, you know, and yet I feel like if you can be intentional about what you're creating, it's powerful, especially in the day of like we're we're you know, looking at uh people that are building media and content, and like if someone's starting from zero and they're trying to get real attention, what should they focus on first?

SPEAKER_01 19:53

So basically, if you are starting from zero today, and you the temptation is to start with logos and colors and identity. But the reality is you really have to establish clarity before you do any of that. Like who you are and who you your customers are and what problem you're solving are more important than the logo is at this stage. You have to really understand what you are doing and what you're building. And and if you try to appeal to everybody, you're gonna appeal to nobody. And that's that's the biggest lesson right there. You're gonna be incentivized, you'd think, to try to make this as vanilla as possible. So the the market cap is as big as possible. But the reality is, especially in the beginning, you have to show what team you're on. Who, you know, they ain't us. Okay, well, who's us? And if they ain't them, who who are you? That's the most important thing, I think, at the beginning, you have to establish.

SPEAKER_00 20:49

And it's interesting, too, because you've said that every company is a media company now. What does that require from leaders? And what does that even mean?

SPEAKER_01 20:57

So every company is a media company, is because you're not only producing goods and services anymore, right? Like that's part of the equation. But the other part of the equation is getting people to know your product even exists. And that used to be a very straightforward proposition back in the day. Okay, so I'm gonna go, I'm gonna create my brand. Now I'm gonna go advertise in my local paper. I might have enough money to buy a billboard. Perhaps I'm gonna jump into radio or TV. Like it's a very cookie cutter experience. Anyone can follow along. Now, whether whether their ads are great or not, that that's totally different conversation. But the methodology was pretty much the same, and it was the same for a long time. The introduction of social media changed the distribution model, and that's what changed everything. The distribution of content is the gatekeeper that used to make it very clear what pathway you'd want to take as a plan that a brand that's launching. Now there's the Traditional route, if you have the money for that, if you can buy the attention. Or you can use storytelling on social media and create your own marketing ecosystem that you can kind of control yourself. I mean, obviously you can't take your followers with you yet, which will be what three social media 3.0 is. It'll be built on blockchain and you'll be able to take your followers, be my guess. Whoever the platform that builds that first will will win. Um, but that's the way I look at it. So you have control of your own marketing ecosystem if you can create your own channels of distribution. And that's what social media made happen.

SPEAKER_00 22:34

That's amazing. I even think about that, being able to like take your own followers with you at some point in time, but it makes sense, you know. But you know, that's what everyone wants to do now.

SPEAKER_01 22:41

You can't. So that's why everyone's cross-pro posting and uh trying to just spaghetti hit the wall, everything, you know. Right cross-promote my TikToks on my reels on and Instagram, and now you're seeing it on LinkedIn too, like videos for years. You didn't do anything on LinkedIn. Now, I'd say last year, that's changed. Yeah, seeing it changed in lives.

SPEAKER_00 23:04

It is, and you know, and it's like because everyone's trying to build demand, everyone's trying to, but yet no one's figuring out how to do it, you know, because everyone's doing it in these roundabout ways. What I mean by that is especially with AI, I see people just going, Well, I need to get stuff out there, I need to put content out. And so they're getting AI generated scripts, and it feels spammy, man. And you know, one of the things very spammy, it feels super spammy. I I stand by that tonight. I posted a uh a picture on on LinkedIn that was just me and I met up with some like my brother recommended this business guy who was a here in Vietnam, and he's like, hey, meet up with this guy, he's a really cool guy. And I posted like afterwards, I was like, dude, I just met the coolest motherfucker. Like he was cool as hell, you know, dude, chill. And it was no pretense, it was a guy from Texas, and it was just that Texas, like, you know, shoot straight shooter, and we just had the greatest conversation. There wasn't any of this, like, what's transactional? What can this person do? We just had a great dinner, and like we went back and I took a photo and I was like, this is where I'm at, you know. And I said, Sometimes the best thing you can be in business is not a jerk, not an asshole, you know. Dude, I think that is the key. Yeah, and I mean, uh yeah, exactly, right? And I shared that because you know, it was where I'm at in that moment, but like I can go and generate AI generated scripts too and put that out there, but people don't care. I you know the craziest thing the other day, I told you my daughter, and for anyone who's listening that doesn't know, my daughter was sick for like a week and a half. She had a bad stomach flu, started as a nasal thing, went into her throat, cough, and then it went into the digestive tract, and she was vomiting everywhere like crazy. And projectile vomiting. We were walking out of my room and she just like shooting on the floor. And the other night, I went to bed and I was doing this. She's staying home, her mom's traveling. I'm working from home with my workers, trying to manage a sick kid at the same time for three or four days while her mom was on these, these, these, this, these business trips. And finally, like that night, she was like, she had just vomited, and I took a picture to send to my mom. My mom's like, How are you doing? I took a photo and I was like, just look like shit. And I was just like, This is where I'm at right now, mom. And that photo looks so horrible. Then I was like, I'm gonna post that shit on LinkedIn. I was like, it's funny, you know. For me, it's it's funny because I'm like, everyone posts this, like, you know, be productive, get it on. And I'm like, this is where I'm at.

SPEAKER_01 25:37

Look at my milestone.

SPEAKER_00 25:38

Yeah, yeah, exactly. Right. And I'm like, this is where I'm at. And I was like, sometimes being a business person is about just show it's like you don't have the win, you just you know, you're there. That post crushed it, it absolutely crushed it. And you know what was wild is because everyone was able to like relate to it. People are like, dude, I was there last week. Another guy was like, Thank you for posting this. He's like, I am so overwhelmed, and everyone says I'm supposed to be doing X, Y, and Z. He's like, My kid's homesick too, and I don't know what to do, man. I'm exhausted. And I think that that authenticity is something that's so important, and you know, I don't know, man. I don't know how you we always create it without it being fake, but you know, and that this is this is a question too. Like, how do people because that's such a catchword? Be authentic. The best authentic marketing I've seen lately, though, is this this battle that's gone on. I don't know if you've seen this, but like the battle between Wendy's and the CEO of McDonald's, right? Dick, oh my god, so funny, man. He dropped it blocked, could have he could have fired back, like McDonald's dropped the ball so horribly, like they could have run with that attention, but instead he's fired back. The the funniest part about that is the guy trying to be like, it was a normal bite, and then he's like, You are now blocked. And I was just like, That's the funniest thing yet. And Wendy's is just leaning in on it, and like Wendy's is winning that whole thing because you know McDonald's could have won, could have won.

SPEAKER_01 27:01

Wendy's taught me the clapback strategy, they started doing it on Twitter. I started doing it on one of my pages on Meta. I went from 87,000 followers, which took me 20 years to build, to I'm at 200,000 followers six months later doing a clapback strategy. I'm getting paid thousands of dollars off of this page because of trolls.

SPEAKER_00 27:25

And that was taught to me by Wendy's. I love that. Well, how do people keep it authentic without feeling because like when companies try to be authentic, like like uh you know, McDonald's was trying to be authentic. Let's have the CEO take an authentic bite. Look at this burger product.

SPEAKER_01 27:44

I think legal made him call it a product. Is that what happened? That's what it seems like. Did legal make them call that a product?

SPEAKER_00 27:52

Oh man, it had to have been because that he's like, everyone calls a product it a product. I was like, dude, and everyone online is like, yeah, I work in restaurants, we don't call it a product. It's like ridiculous. But like, what's the what's the difference between like brand building and like performance? You know, because like that authenticity can feel performative, you know?

SPEAKER_01 28:09

Is one way to find out if you are doing performance marketing or branding, and that is if I turn the money off on the machine, will people still be looking for me? Or do I go flat? And if I go flat, then it's performance marketing. If people are still searching me out, that's branding. That's the easiest way to tell. If you suddenly lose everything because you stock the machine, pumping money into the machine, the marketing machine, then you've been doing performance marketing.

SPEAKER_00 28:38

Interesting. So, like, how much do you create things or have you created things that last beyond just the next post, you know?

SPEAKER_01 28:47

And it it it has to I think the ever last the evergreen content is becoming a theme. Like it didn't used to be. Dude, I started on MySpace, and when I got on MySpace, I had one of the top 10 accounts on the whole fucking platform, bro. I I gamed it a little bit, I could tell you exactly what I did. So I want here. I was in the nightclub business. Obviously, I'm in the bar business, and I opened a nightclub in Atlanta with a couple buddies a month. So MySpace was pretty popping at that point. So I wasn't from Atlanta. I had a decent MySpace, it was okay. But when I got to Atlanta, I don't know if any of these promoters are still in the business, but they're gonna hear what I did. Um, so basically what I did is I went in to every promoter in Atlanta, and there was this thing I could use to basically create a list of all of their followers, and then I could friend request it. Auto friend requester. It wouldn't make people like anything, it wouldn't make people interact with you, but it would send out requests for you. I was able to build to one of the top 10 accounts using that strategy. And now, of course, you can't because I was like requesting thousands of people at a time. And that strategy put me on good top of one of the MySpace lists. I had twice the followers that Carson Daly did at the height of his career on Total Request Live on MTV. So it worked, and then I used it to just promote my bars, to promote my bars, promote the nightclubs, and to be honest, I was a single guy. I was I was using it to date. I traveled all the time, so I was never in the same city very long. So I would use MySpace to just meet people, and it worked. Before MySpace, I was using, I don't remember what it was called. There was a picture rating site where you could throw a picture of yourself and let people rate you of hotness, hot or not. That's what I'm saying. Hot or not, hot or not, and so that was the first thing I used for market research. And and that's the way I looked at all of these kind of platforms as a way to to really dig and get data that was not easily available to me. So that's how that's what I use them for. Now it's this whole ecosystem that's completely changed since the MySpace days. And I I I tried to throw a boycott on Facebook because I was so mad after building MySpace so high and it just crumbled overnight. I've never seen anything like it. I I I boycotted Facebook for a minute. I tried to, obviously, it didn't work, and here I am. But um, but yeah, that that that was an interesting period of time. I'm very educational as to why you do not want to put all your eggs into one platform's basket. Because I had to start over from scratch after that, and that was rough.

SPEAKER_00 31:29

Yeah. I want to ask you this like, how can you tell if a brand is truly breaking through versus just paying for visibility, too?

SPEAKER_01 31:37

Yeah, so that that goes back to the branding versus performance marketing. Essentially, once the machine stops getting fed, if you're not giving it the revenue to start keep putting your ads in front of people or your posts in front of people, and everything stops, that's performance marketing versus branding. That that's what it boils down to.

SPEAKER_00 31:57

If you were to like give someone advice today, they're working for either a brand or for their own thing, and they want to start making an impact in the next 90 days, what should they do?

SPEAKER_01 32:06

So in the next 90 days, you're all I had them all organized in a reporter. Um basically, you want to definitely define your positioning and and highlight what makes you different. What's your unique offering that that's different from your competition? Um, that that'd be the one thing. The second thing, you'd want like some sort of signature asset or experience that embodies the difference that you guys are offering. So it's something like visual or repeatable and story worthy, which is like us having girls dancing on the bar, bringing customers up on the bar, body shots, penalty shots, singing, all of the above. Like all of that is the stuff we used in the early part. Like that's what helped make us as famous as we were. For sure. The uniqueness of what we were doing. I mean, look, what did we do? So, Lil in 1993. I don't know how familiar with the bar industry you are, but I can tell you that the movie coming out had an impact on staffing on all Las Vegas concepts. Everybody. I can tell you, because I was hiring people going from the 90s to the early 2000s, that the thought was that you hired all male bartenders and one female bartender, maybe. And the thought always was is that oh, men are just faster than the women. That's why you want the guys back there because they're faster. But what Coyote Ugly pointed out, and and my entire staff shifted, I shifted my own club staff to mostly women behind the bar after the movie. Um, what you find is that people, both men and women, preferred ordering from women. They just did. They do as a street promoter. I would always use a woman over a guy. I don't care if the guy is Brad Pitt. An average girl's gonna smoke Brad Pitt as a street pro as a street promoter. Just gonna do it. That's what's gonna happen. They're just better at it. They're better at getting attention. They are less what I don't know, dangerous is the word, but there's just an easier, it it takes it's a lot easier telling people to go to a party as a woman than it is as a guy. They just people care more about what she had to say than what the guy has to say. And and we took that and we saw that the male-dominated industry that has been going around for 2,000 years, this industry goes back to ancient Rome, right? Like they used taverns to empire build. They used to tell distance by how many taverns you would pass in order to get to the place. And they used it as missing infrastructure. It was a hotel, it was a medic bay, it was a court, it was a jail. It's where you resupplied. So this industry goes back thousands of years and it's been male-dominated since the beginning. She saw an opportunity by putting just women behind the bar. That created quite a spectacle so big that it became a movie, a reality show, and a global operation because we put people that had been kept out of a job in place and then gave them a stage and a spotlight. And look what happened when we did that. I mean, there's not a lot of bars out there with movies made out of them. Shit, there's not a lot of companies out there with movies made about them. There's something compelling about the story of Coyote Ugly. And part of that the compelling part is that we put women in place where Moon had dominated for 2,000 years.

unknown 35:28

Wow.

SPEAKER_00 35:29

What do you think? Um, if you could go back and change, you know, anything earlier in your career, what would you change? What would you try to focus on more or learn more of?

SPEAKER_01 35:39

I was a bit of a I think a butterfly at times when I could have probably been more intentional. There was a period of time I moved to Vegas and I got divorced shortly after, like everybody that moves to Vegas married. Um, and it did put my life into a bit of a tailspin where I call a few of those years like a really long weekend because it's just what it was like. I was just chasing the next party, the next night, so that I didn't have to think about how my entire life fell apart when I moved to Las Vegas and my wife betrayed me with my best friend. Like it was awful, an awful period of time that I tried to just numb myself from. That was probably not very useful. And I could have probably started on this path a lot earlier, but at least I didn't waste a lot of time on it. You know, it was a couple of years where I was a one long weekend, and that would be the only thing I would say. Other than that, like I've just kind of always pursued what I was passionate about, and I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I may have, I could have gone a more traditional route and I probably would have been an easier time to make the same kind of money that I'm making now. But this was an interesting, unique challenge that I apparently needed at the time in my life. So would I do it differently now? Probably, but it's hard to hard to second guess it because it did lead me to where I'm at. That's awesome. Well, where can people go to find out more about you and what you do? Right now, the only place I'm really posting is on LinkedIn. And it's uh linkedin.com forward slash I-n forward slash Lejon L-E-E-J-O-N 00.

SPEAKER_00 37:18

That's awesome, man. Well, I appreciate it. Yeah, dude, you dropping some wisdom on me today. And I I just think that I think that it's so interesting and important to talk about attention because I don't think we talk about what's captioning our attention enough. And we're we're constantly getting pulled into different things. You know, you see people that um are just super focused. And I love asking why? Why are we so into this? And and if you're working in the business of getting attention, how can you do it better? You know?

SPEAKER_01 37:52

Dude, we I went in and I took every article ever written about us, hundreds of articles ever written about us. I took them and I fed it into AI and I looked for common patterns. And it turns out there was like nine common patterns in almost all the stories that they really focused on. So I took that and I built on what we have been doing for the past 20 years with this brand and created a book called Make Them Look, which is about how you engineer the attention economy. How do you master the attention economy? Because attention is literally the only currency that never devalues. It's the only one. Um, so we basically took what we've been doing for the last 20 years and I've compiled it into a book that is was about to be launched. And unfortunately, my CEO felt that I was being too forthcoming. So I'm on a rewrite right now, trying to dial in what she would prefer. Um, but that book's coming soon. It's awesome. So basically detail everything we did and all the steps we did and the key elements to our brand story that were really important for journalists to start amplifying our message so that people can use it as a code and build in their own brand stories in a way that's compelling to press so that they hopefully can amplify what you're doing, and then you can build upon that attention. That's what we did. We took attention and turned it into a global empire with our fingers in licensing, franchising, merchandising, reality shows, movies, music groups. You know what I mean? So if you do it right, you can get your hands into a lot of different things. If you build your brand's career,