Episode 1: Introducing The Same Side

In this episode, host Jonathan Danz, Director of Ad Ops & Analytics at Digital Relativity, introduces The Same Side podcast.

About the Podcast

• Mission: This podcast is dedicated to breaking down the barriers between agencies and their clients to facilitate real, human-focused work.
• Core Philosophy: The show emphasizes that despite the tools or sectors involved, the most critical aspect of marketing is humans interacting with humans.
• Goal: To demystify digital advertising by providing context around metrics, terminology, and ad platforms, helping listeners feel more comfortable and confident in the space.
• Note: This show is a work in progress and is likely to evolve over time.

Who Should Listen

• Professionals who hire or work with agencies.
• Individuals who own or work for agencies.
• Anyone who feels the "human aspect" of marketing is being lost to technology and infinite growth.
• People who are aware they don’t know everything but are afraid to admit it.

About the Host

• Jonathan Danz is the Director of Ad Ops and Analytics at Digital Relativity, a full-service marketing agency.
• The agency utilizes a "Tradigital" approach, blending traditional and digital thinking to help partners in travel, tourism, and economic development achieve their goals.

Coming Up

• The show will focus on "leveling up" through curiosity and asking the hard questions.
• Future episodes will cover foundational digital advertising concepts, starting with an exploration of Impressions, Clicks, and Clickthrough Rate.

Transcript

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SPEAKER_01 0:14

Hello and welcome to the Same Side Digital Marketing Podcast. This is a podcast dedicated to breaking down the barriers between agencies and clients so we can get real work done. No matter what tools we're using or what sector we're in or what mediums we work in, the buck stops with humans interacting with humans. I'm Jonathan Dance, the director of AdOps and Analytics here at Digital Relativity, a full service marketing agency. And so if you've tuned in, you may be wondering who this podcast is for. It's for people who hire and work with agencies. It's for people who work for agencies. It's for people who own agencies. And ultimately, it's for people who feel like the human aspects of marketing are being whittled away by new technologies, infinite growth trajectories, or shrinking pie, or the extremely online lifestyle, any of those things. And that's not to say marketing isn't without its stereotypes back before the digital age. You watched Mad Men, maybe you have an idea there, but ultimately it's for people who want to work with people and who want to break those barriers down. If you've watched any of the World Cup over the last month or so, one of the things that really struck me, and I think struck a lot of people, is this idea that if we're online all the time, we make assumptions about people and we're operating really at a huge remove. And what we saw and what we heard was that when all these different people from all different cultures came together, they had an amazing time because when they got together in person, they realized that people are just people and we all want to live our lives and we want to do our jobs. And we don't necessarily want all this extra baggage that makes it harder to do that, whether it be raising your family, whether it be working at an agency or working with an agency. So I'm definitely bringing it back around to the agency connection, but this is really, I would say, especially after watching the World Cup and witnessing what we saw, that it's universal. As I mentioned, I'm Jonathan Dance, the director of AdOps and Analytics at Digital Relativity. And we call our approach Tradigital because it's a mix of traditional and digital thinking. I like that because it also indicates that we don't exclude one thing for the other. There's room for all approaches. What's really important is the ability to problem solve and help our partners do what they want or need to do. My day-to-day spans high-level strategy and goes all the way down to ad performance analysis, placing ads, working with partners in travel and tourism, convenience store and economic development to figure out what they need and how to get there. There are a lot of metrics involved on the ad platform side and the website side. We track what people do at every step from the first click to the landing page to what happens after, anonymously, of course. And so we're trying to understand human behavior through digital signals, which is really weird. And I think that's also useful to step back from and try and understand well, what do people want? Not what can we sell them, but what do they want and how do we get them what they want? My marketing career began in 2004. And like any of you who have been around for that long or longer, you know the landscape has changed dramatically. When I was starting out, email marketing and paid search were about as complicated as it got. People were still building websites and front page. Maybe, maybe they're going nuts and using Dreamweaver. SEO was like a frontier town during the gold rush. If you were in the SEO trenches then or watched Deadwood, you know what I'm talking about. My years of experience have taught me that context is king. Without it, we're just throwing around numbers, we're making assumptions, and I'm proud to say that I've come a long way. But of course, it wasn't always that way. Once upon a time, I was working as a consultant for an engineering company doing environmental work. It was a good paying job, and it was bleeding my soul dry. So I wanted something different. In 2004, I quit my job and I took a marketing position, making $13,000 a year for the rafting company I guided for in the 90s in West Virginia on the New River and the Gali River. I knew nothing about sales and marketing. I just wanted to get out. And so this opportunity presented itself. I took it. And to bone up, I read books, I listened to old audio cassettes of sales techniques, and I explored what had come before. At that time, the company I worked for, we were behind the curve in digital marketing. We had an out-of-date website, and I tried things and I failed, and I was learning. And if I'm being honest, I wasn't really that good at the job. It wasn't something that came easy to me. However, in 2006, I had an opportunity to buy into the company, become part owner and general manager. At least that particular part, I was able to wrap my head around the tangible aspects of the business, logistics, bus schedules, guides, boats, equipment, all that kind of stuff. But I was still the marketing guy. And now it was all on my shoulders because I was making all of the marketing decisions. In that time, I inherited Google and Yahoo search campaigns. Social media and blogging was blowing up. Websites were getting more sophisticated. Google had IPO'd, and as I mentioned before, SEO was booming. It was a fun time. It was interesting. And it wasn't weighted down with the baggage that we have around these industries today. So yeah, that part of it kept me going because it was new and it was interesting. And so I muddled through the next two years, getting better, making more mistakes. At one point I worked with a two-person agency to launch a new website, complete with Flash. Don't laugh. But they were easy to work with, and I think that's the thing that I remember most. They built trust through transparency. They spoke plainly and honestly. They were genuinely interested in my company succeeding, because if I succeeded, then they would succeed. They set my expectations, whether I knew it or not at the time, about what an agency can be. In 2008, we were bought by a larger competitor and they had an internal marketing team. It was mind-blowing. This was the first time I got to sit around a table with other people and actually plan. It felt better. And then the company that bought us also worked with an outside agency. And so here I am in a new context as a sales and marketing person. The learning curve got steep for me again as these established groups used a lot of marketing speak. They had way more experience. In some ways, I felt like I was starting over. I was afraid to look like I didn't know what I was doing. I didn't ask nearly as many questions as I should have. Here I was a guy who had owned a rafting company doing sales and marketing for four years by this point. I should know what I'm doing by now, right? Well, not really. As I mentioned before, the marketing landscape is always changing, but I was afraid to admit I didn't know. And I think to some degree, being afraid to admit I didn't know hindered my ability to learn at a faster rate. A year later I left the rafting company and took time to be with my family. Then in January 2011, I joined the outside agency that I mentioned earlier as a content creator. This is the outside agency that the rafting company that bought us was already engaged with. Over time I wound up taking on more responsibility and sliding into account management, and suddenly I was on the other side of the table. I was trying to build trust with our partners. I needed to be the expert. But if you've even dipped your toe into digital marketing, there's an avalanche of information out there, a thousand ways to do the same thing, countless platforms. There's a saying in writing that you only learn how to write the novel you're writing. It doesn't translate into the next novel. And marketing can feel that way. Partners, even those in the same sector, have different needs, different challenges, and they also have different approaches. Over the next eight years, I evolved along with the digital marketing landscape, but not as rapidly. Leveling up was a slow burn. And by the time I signed on with DR in 2019, I'd been marketing for 15 years. The longer I'd been in it, the more I realized how much I didn't know, and that still goes on to this very day. Even as I gained more experience and more knowledge. However, here at DR, being lifelong learners, being curious is encouraged. And not only that, but the people I work with are super supportive. It's okay to try things, to bounce ideas off of each other, to not have them work perfectly. It's okay to try things again, to iterate, to improve. It's okay to ask questions, and more importantly, it's okay to admit that you don't know something. Which brings us back around to the purpose of this podcast. I mentioned from the start that this is really about human-to-human connection. A lot of times we get in each other's way because we're not listening, we're not paying attention, we're not taking a step back, we're just trying to figure out what we're going to say next. Listening is a fundamental skill that you constantly need to refine, especially with all the distractions that are in the workplace today. You get your Slack notifications, you got email notifications, your phones pinging you. It could be anything. The key is really to be present. And if you can manage that, it makes it a lot easier to do good work for those people. And also to have those conversations where maybe what they're asking for isn't what they need. Another layer of that, and we're going to get deeper into this in future episodes, is just marketing itself. It's full of terminology and lingo that we all use with each other because it signals that we know what we're talking about. But so many times our partners don't have that language. And in fact, they probably don't need it. Right? I mean, they need to know what we're talking about, but it's up to us from the agency side to make sure that we're conveying meaning in a clear manner that you don't need to go onto the internet or have a marketing dictionary to understand what's being said. People will not ask because they're afraid to show that they don't know. So it's important to bring that to the table from the get-go. This podcast is also where I talk about things that we're afraid to ask, that you're afraid to ask, I'm afraid to ask. At least at the beginning, I'm going to dig into some foundational concepts around digital advertising, things that marketers talk about all the time. And the goal here is to demystify these things, whether it be metrics, terminology, ad platforms, whatever, by providing context. And again, we'll come back to context over and over again. This is a conversation to help you feel more comfortable in the digital advertising space, regardless of where you're approaching it from. And at the center of it all is the humanity of it, our desire to learn, to understand, to connect, to let that shine through without fear, because this is where the leveling up occurs. This is where the good things happen. When you can see someone smile as you work through a problem together and know that you're both headed on the same track and that you're both working toward the same thing, it just makes it so much easier. And that again, that doesn't go just for marketing. But boy, if you're in this industry, it goes a long way. There's an old sales saying that people like to buy from friends. And it's not pretend friends or obviously fake friends. They want to buy from people who genuinely care about them. If you can respect someone where they are and you can meet them there, regardless of which side of the table you're on, you're going to have a better go of it. And if this sounds good to you, please join me next week when I roll up my sleeves and start digging in. I'll be talking about some basic metrics, impressions, clicks, click-through rate, just really basic stuff, which maybe if you're listening, you've heard all these things before. But you might be surprised at what you'll learn in terms of how these things relate to each other as opposed to being standalone metrics and how they fit into the context of the current digital marketing landscape. Thanks for listening. I'm Jonathan Dance, and I'll see you next time on the same side digital marketing podcast.