Earn It! with Steve Pratt

Everyone makes content now, but having content doesn't automatically mean anyone will actually consume it. There are brands with long-running programs and audiences that come time and time again for their content, while other brands' programs fade because it became a thankless chore. What's the difference? Hey, Glenn here.

Welcome to Funnel Reboot, the podcast for database marketers. The brands that win make content that audiences don't see as branded content. Where the work that was put into that content is so genuinely useful, surprising, and true that instead of feeling exploited, recipients feel like they're favored. They're getting a gift, and a gift doesn't need your logo on it.

It has your fingerprints already on it. Our guest knows how to do this. His early career was in places like AOL and TV and radio networks. Then in 2014, he launched Pacific Content, an agency that asked brands to let them make branded podcasts, and it was acquired by one of the country's largest media empires in 2023.

What he learned doing that became the book Earn It, which came out in 2026. So let's go now to Vancouver, BC, to speak with Steve Pratt Steve Pratt, welcome to Funnel Reboot. Thank you. I'm excited to be here.

Steve, you wrote a book. What's the name of the book? The book is called Earn It: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers. And you say that there are a lot of marketers out there who have, maybe they started off as brave, but they have been brought up in a mode of thinking that they need to run ads and that they need to, buy attention.

You point out media companies who get tons of attention, but don't do ads in the typical way that we think of them. How do you think marketers are supposed to do this if they're not gonna run ads? If you start with what does a marketer need first and foremost, it is attention. And, and I think we live in a time where attention might be the most valuable resource in the world for marketers right now.

It's never been harder to get because there are so many people and companies and messages trying to get our attention. I think every single day we probably set a new record for how many things are trying to get your attention as a consumer. And the thing that's interesting about it to me is, our attention is finite, so it doesn't grow, right? Like, there's just like a flat line for like this is how much attention you have every day, and it doesn't change.

Out- outside of, yeah a pill that makes us not sleep. Yeah, we can't get any more. But there's more and more stuff competing for it, and so I think w- as consumers, we are getting pickier and pickier around what we give our time and attention to. Mm-hmm.

And the stuff that I see is a lot of marketers getting more and more aggressive trying to buy it or steal it or interrupt it or capture it or all these things that kind of feel aggressive. I don't think that works anymore 'cause, people have tools to protect themselves. They're putting up a fort around themselves to shield themselves, or they've got, ad blockers and VPNs and, they're paying for subscription services to bypass ads. Like, we live in a world where you don't have to spend time with things that you don't want to anymore, and I think, you and I are of a certain generation where we grew up, media was part of a thing where it's like, it's just part of the deal.

Yeah. You have to watch ads if you wanna get the free show on TV or on radio or wherever. That doesn't exist anymore, but I don't think the full marketing world has moved in acknowledging that, the power is more with the consumer than it is with the marketer, today. I'll grant you that.

And the, other thing you pointed out rightly was that ads are meant to catalyze action, but that actually has a cost that is nowhere on your balance sheet, and that is the cost of annoying the person. So we have to rethink things. You point out that We are defaulted to thinking of running any kind of marketing for selling our stuff, right? But you actually encourage us to think about doing the opposite of that, but that it will eventually lead to selling our stuff, and that is making a brand that is other than our brand.

Well, it's funny 'cause I love the name of this show, that you're rebooting the funnel, right? Because it is a funnel, and I think, the top of the funnel is where my favorite place is, and I know that there are gonna be some listeners who are like, "Oh, I hate the top of the funnel. but I feel like the top of the funnel is where you have that first contact with people where they get the impression of, do I wanna spend any time with this company or this brand at all? And if you think about it like the host of a party, you can probably think of different party hosts, and some of them are very, very generous and are there and making sure everybody's having a great time, and asking questions, and have a great spread out for everybody.

And some party hosts are like the whole party's about them, and they wanna talk about themselves all the time and be the center of attention, and it's less of a fun party. And I think too much marketing exists in the second camp, and the opportunity is to say, like, for a first impression, how generous can you be in making a fantastic experience that people are going to be pleasantly surprised that you are not trying to sell them something right out of the gate, or that you've not placed pixels all over the experience and tracking them all over the Internet for the next year?

W- what is the most generous thing that you can do where people are gonna be like, if word of mouth is the best marketing, you have to make something that is word of mouth worthy- Right … which means you kind of have to set a, a fairly high bar for yourself. And, and, like, interrupting people and, again, tracking them all across the Internet, not the good word of mouth worthy, Yeah. The opportunity, it's fairly obvious. Think about how you can create value for your audience first that is strategically designed to create the business result you are looking for if you do a good job with it.

So for any who are fence-sitting right now, you used the word party. Love that, because there are different, personalities to parties. they kind of get their own vibe, and you will- Have somebody say, "Oh, I went to this party last month. There's another one coming up this month.

You can't miss this party" and, the party itself, like for any that are worried that their own brand that they, eventually have to sell isn't there, your answer is, "Don't worry about it," because your personality is gonna bring that through. They're gonna know who it's from. They're gonna know who put the party on. And what do we get at parties?

Gifts. And you describe the thing that you are giving them as a gift. Why do you call it that? Well- It's a gift that only you can give them.

Well, I think there's like a, if you think about gifts a- and some of the best gifts that you've ever received versus the worst gifts you've ever received- Yeah The worst ones are things that it's just a generic gift that you could just get the same thing for every single person, or it's just something you quickly grabbed and bought off the shelf. Here's a m- a box of chocolates. The best gifts I've ever received have always been the person who gave it spent a lot of time thinking about me and showing that they knew who I was, and that there was also an element of them in terms of their filters around curating what they thought would be a great gift that I would value a lot.

I think when you get both of those pieces where there's, an element of like what are the values or the taste or the, the personality of the giver- And are they thinking with empathy about, like, who the recipient is and trying to create unique value that is gonna be memorable or word-of-mouth worthy? That works really, really well. Like, I will tell people about great gifts that I have received, and they're the most thoughtful ones. And I, I think sometimes … Again, I, I'm not trying to be… I feel like I'm being too rude, to the marketing community in general as, as a member of it, but it's, it's often just too selfish, is- Right is, is, these are not gifts.

They're, there's, There's strings attached. Yeah. And it, and most of it is really, it's, it's Give me your email address. there's a fabulous PDF waiting behind the gate for you.

I really like the phrase, something that is from you but not about you. Right. And I think there's too much marketing that is about you, where, when something is from you, again, as you said, people know who it's from. And, you could think about this in media terms if you want.

, If I said, , what is the network that makes Curb Your Enthusiasm and Game of Thrones and The Sopranos and The Last of Us, you probably know who that is, and it's not because there's, HBO executives cast in all those series, and the plots do not revolve around how great HBO is. We know the people who make the things that we like because they made them for us. And- Yeah … the same goes with the kind of the top-of-funnel marketing, is you don't have to have your brand all over it.

You can show them by creating a gift that can only come from you, that shares some of the experience or the education or the things that you're interested in, or pulls in the people from the outside world that are experts in the things that you care about, and create something that the recipients are gonna be like, "This is one of my favorite shows or newsletters or-" Instagram accounts or whatever it is, your goal is to make people wanna spend more time with you. And I think if that's like the only thing you care about is like how do we get the right people to wanna spend more time with us in a way that they understand who we are and what we care about and what we're experts in, I think you win.

Yeah. People can go down the funnel after that 'cause y- you- Mm-hmm You get a lot of people signed up, people opting in saying, "I would like to spend more time with you," that's the … for me, that is the best possible starting point, and everything good comes after that. Yeah. So few things there that you insist on is that, we- we're not just aiming for good enough.

This is not, we put out a newsletter monthly, and it's the first of the month, therefore we push out whatever we've got. This is getting really focused on the people who we already should know. These are our customers and prospects. But it's getting to know them not with the immediate need to sell them, but instead to get them to do something as simple as subscribing.

Your two parts are you've gotta be brave, but you have to have commitment. And the commitment is that you're designing something for what could be a very long time, and and you've sat with people for boardrooms and for days coming up with these sorts of things. At the start of every strategy session with a client, I'll put up this XY graph, just very basic, and on the bottom axis is creative bravery, and the vertical axis is commitment. And creative bravery for me is, are you gonna make a show or a piece of content or something in the marketing world that is going to cut through, that your audience is gonna remember and wanna s- spend time with, that is, and y- it is not average?

a- and if I think again about how picky we are Something has to be really exceptional for us to say, "I would like to spend time with that, and I'm gonna keep coming back to doing that." And, av- average won't cut it. And, to me, creative bravery starts slipping when you start saying like, "Hey, why don't we have our executives as the hosts of our podcast?" Or, "Why don't we start talking about, client case studies about how smart we are and how our new products are like…" As soon as you start g- heading into that stuff of talking about yourself, there's a whole bunch of flags for audiences being like, this is a veiled infomercial.

And I, I'm not sp- I don't know how many people here listening are like I like to spend all my free time listening to infomercials." Not too many. And so that's, just starting stakes, don't make an infomercial, make a real show in, on whatever platform or, distribution method you want, but, make something that is worth spending time with. And, a couple questions you could ask yourself as you're designing, your offer, your gift for people, would I tell other people about this if I didn't work here?

Is it so good that if I was an audience member, I would tell other people about it? And it gets you to kind of take off your work hat a little bit, because that's what the audience is. They don't work for your company. That's the question they're gonna be asking themselves, and it needs to be that good.

If, at the end of spending time with your gift, your piece of content, if I could go back in a time machine to the start of that decision, should I spend my time on this or not, would I make the same decision? Was this time well spent? And if you can answer yes to those two questions, I think you've made something that is creatively brave, and I think that's the starting point. The second one is, on the commitment side, are we going to tell all the right people that we've made a fantastic gift for them?

'Cause there's a lot of… It just sounds weird, but, like, your marketing needs marketing. Right. And people don't really think about that. Sometimes they think, we've made this thing and we're just gonna put it out, and people will find it.

And it's like that, the Field of Dreams thing, Hmm. They're not It's a very crowded space. I think there's no harm in telling people that you have created a gift for them because you're not selling them anything. You're offering them a gift.

And so whether you, you look at all the different assets that you have, and, honestly, brands have a lot of the time, like some really, really fabulous distribution channels that they don't think about all the time. So it could be your own email list. It could be your employees. It could be your social accounts.

It could be partners and customers that have accounts. If you create something that is really valuable, you can actually get it out to a lot of people very quickly in a way that, most creators, most media companies often don't have reached the size of those sorts of things. And they're probably exactly the right people that you wanna reach to start for. So if you've made something and you can get it in the hands of people, and it's word-of-mouth worthy, that is the kind of the commitment side of things.

If you have high commitment and high bravery, you win. If you have low commitment and you tell a whole bunch of people about it, you're telling a whole bunch of people about something that they don't like, it's not gonna go very well. suppose that, the smart marketers listening to this are, able to niche down to exactly who they should be talking to, and that they know a lot about that persona, and they have even canvassed the media landscape and found that they're underserved.

You mentioned a media company earlier, so yeah, there are things we could do that maybe outstrip them, but we should at the very least be matching what media companies, do. They understand how to tell a story and how to make it well told. They have different departments even, if we think about journalism and media entities, where they too have editorial plus promotion. They put the effort into spreading that word.

They will do teasers of their upcoming content. They will figure out how to make feedback loops so that you get people who liked this also like that, and they understand production. I had a podcast company, for a number of years called Pacific Content, and we worked with a lot of different companies to help them build creatively brave podcasts and then market those and build audiences for themselves. So I got to see… Like, honestly, it was, over the course of working in the company, it was just like this master class in going inside a whole bunch of really fascinating, interesting, smart brands and seeing the weird superpowers that they had in their own back pockets.

Some of them were very aware of them, and some of them were kinda like, "Oh, we hadn't even thought of using that to be able to tell people about something." So, I can give you a couple quick examples, we made a show, called IRL with Firefox, which is the Mozilla Foundation, and it was basically kind of this idea around educating people around ways to think about the internet that, you wouldn't do a whole bunch of these things in the real world, and yet we do them all online.

You should pay more attention to some of the things that you do online so that you're not being tracked and followed around the internet all the time by marketers. but the front page of Firefox, y- they used to have this piece of real estate right below the search bar called a snippet, and, when the show came out, they put a little thing saying like, "Hey, we have a new podcast called IRL," "Here's the first episode" or, "Here's what this is about." It just converted like crazy.

Like, it, it was like- Wow … so many people go to the front page of Firefox every day, and those people are baked in. Like, they've chosen Mozilla and Firefox. They have certain values. They are just a perfect fit.

Massive podcast. - And not too intrusive. And it was… It's not selling anything other than a fantastic show about something that you're probably interested in based on where you are right now. We did a show with, Dell Technologies, who had just merged w- like Dell had just merged with EMC and VMware and a whole bunch of other companies to kind of form Dell Technologies.

And their business outcome, like the job they were kind of hiring the podcast to do, was to change the awareness of what the, this combined set of companies stood for, and move away from the idea that like Dell was a laptop server, desktop company, and more, a really integrated set of companies that really understood digital transformation and could help you, prevent yourself from being disrupted i- in a way in, in the digital era. And it was fascinating 'cause we worked… Like they had just an amazing team of marketers, and they knew who the audience they wanted to reach was.

They knew it was senior IT business decision-makers and C-suite executives, which is a very hard group to reach. And they had done research on this group. Again, know your audience. Yep.

And they found out this group was like, "I don't want listicles. I don't want tips and tricks. What we actually would really value is talking to people who have been in situations that we're in where their industry gets disrupted or where they've had tough decisions at a crossroads in their company or their industry, and how they did it and what happened and how they thought about it." And the Dell team was like, "Okay, let's make that show.

Let's go do the history of innovation and disruption in a different industry for every episode, and we will talk to all the people who are in those positions. Now who should we get to host the show?" This is a commitment decision. Who are you gonna get to host the show?

Like they could have had Michael Dell, the CEO and founder of Dell, very well-known person, very well-connected. They recognized that might be a barrier to getting people to listen because even though he's a fabulous guy and a great host, having your CEO host a podcast might make it seem like an infomercial and might be a barrier to have people listen. Yeah, can't be helped. Yeah.

And so they were like, "Who's the next best person on the planet that you could get to host that show?" And we're like, "How about Walter Isaacson?" The guy who wrote all the biographies Right … of all the best innovators on the planet. and so we were like, "Okay, well let's reach out and try and see if he's interested in doing it."

Asked, and? Yeah, and I g- Googled the phone number for the Aspen Institute where Walter was running it at the time and asked to speak to Walter Isaacson. And I got through, and he ended up hosting the podcast. Amazing … and it turned into a thing where it was like it was a real show.

It, it was a real like from Dell, not about Dell. Right. And I think the key piece about this is, when you think about, again, kind of brand presence in a show, there was no logo on the artwork. it was not called, the Dell Disruption Podcast.

It was called Trailblazers with Walter Isaacson. And the only mention of Dell in the entire podcast was like, maybe a couple minutes into the show Walter would say, "You're listening to Trailblazers, an original podcast from Dell Technologies," and that was it. We had a research company go and have a, a two different samples of exposure and, and control group. And- One single exposure to one episode, this group of s- C-suite executives and senior IT business decision-makers knew it was from Dell, appreciated the fact that Dell did it for them, like, they liked Dell more as a result of creating the show, and they associated Dell with expertise in digital transformation from listening to the show.

And because it was a real show, Walter ended up getting invited to go on CBS This Morning, and he did a- To talk about the show … talk about the show, 'cause it was a great show, and he spent seven minutes on CBS This Morning, and this show from Dell became the number one business podcast in America in iTunes- It's, that's earned- after the CBS thing … media to die for. Yeah. And so to me, that's great marketing. Like that, like th- that's the stuff where you're like, "That is a-" It's, it's marketing hiding in plain sight.

Yeah. And they end up with a very large audience that, grew, like a 100% had the core target audience, but so many other people started listening to the show as well. I think Walter even in, he's a, a professor at Tulane, and it ended up on, like, curriculum in a , in an, in a MBA program. So yeah, if you make something great that is valuable for the audience you're trying to put it out there for, and you use all the hidden strengths that you may not know you have as a brand, you can build up a very large audience fairly quickly, and you get lots and lots and lots of time and attention that you can't get from spamming people, at high numbers.

And for any listening who have been nervous and, buying into what you're saying, but thinking, "I have a bean counter of a, s- C-suite, they want measurement," you've presented it. You have, not only said that we can do things like those brand lift studies, you mentioned completion rate reports. We can find how much our, audience is, either coming once and sampling, or if they're returning. This is even available on, platforms as, detached as podcast syndication.

You can still get this data. Of course, you can also get it on social media channels, but that's all in service of, to use your words, the job that this thing is doing. So I, I want people to make no mistake, when you use words like it's great or it's a gift, these are- aren't squishy terms. They have to deliver results.

You have actually pointed to- Yeah … hard business outcomes these deliver. I think the interesting thing is, when we talk about this idea of doing the opposite, I think that comes to measurement also, because- Okay there's a real priority for reach and just volume and short-term conversion in marketing. I, I totally get it. There's reality around how human beings work, and, I've seen so much pressure on short-term results that don't deliver the results, and people are disappointed over and over and over again.

We live in a shortcut, short-term culture that is looking for silver bullets. But I always encourage people to think, y- like really what matters in all this. Think about yourself as a consumer, and think about yourself as an audience member, and how, like whether you spend time, in a heartbeat making most of your buying decisions, or give lots and lots of time to things that are, again, infomercials, or whether you actually take time to build stuff up and build trust. the same way you build a relationship.

You get to know somebody- Right … you trust them, you enjoy spending time with them. And when the time is right, who are you going to buy from? If I've spent 10 hours- Yeah … listening to your podcast, or I'm a regular viewer of your YouTube channel, when the time comes to buy, who am I gonna buy from? And so f- for me it's, in, y- as a maybe a counter to just reach and the kind of the spray and pray buying sprees, I would prefer to reach fewer people but more of the right people, and I would like to measure things like time and attention and engagement to show that I'm creating value for those people.

If I look at how much time is spent with me per person, that kind of shows you what the impact you're having. If I can get half an hour of your time and attention over and over and over again for 61 seconds- Yeah. Trying to think of other examples in the real world where someone gets that. Yeah.

But I feel like that's a hard message to hear. Like the subtitle of the book is that, Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers. It was almost unpopular strategies because so much of these things are like- Right hard truths, right? Like it's like there are no shortcuts.

Nope. And you need to be patient, and you need to be consistent, and you have to make great stuff. It will come. Now, you brushed against something you're going to be asked, particularly by budget folks, can this thing pay for itself?

and you tell us to resist temptation. So one format is just overt, it's for content to have pre-roll and mid-roll ads. You're telling us it's really not a good idea to do that interruption. It infects us because we think, "Well, if I pump out twice as many episodes, that's twice as much inventory which they can put their pre-roll against, and I will get twice as much money."

You're facing the prospect of maybe making more shows than you could output and maintain quality, right? There's always a trade-off between volume and quality, and if we go back to the very start around, like, everyone is getting pickier and pickier, people don't want average, right? I just feel like I'm always a fan of fewer things better. The algorithms want us to put out more and more stuff.

On the audience side, we only have so much time and attention. I don't want more. Like, I'm exhausted by more. I love The White Lotus, and I will wait multiple years for a new season that is only six or eight episodes long because it's so good and special.

There's so many shows like that where I'm just like, " Take your time. Make it awesome." Leave people wanting more. And yeah and don't make those, episodes so in your face that, it's like you're trying to browbeat them into consuming.

You quoted good old Seth Godin, "Better is better than louder." Love it .. You broke my brain with a phrase where you were explaining that, we have to think about our marketability, but we also have to think about how we market this thing, and the channel is a very big part of that. You gave in one point, you said, "You can be a sports psychology YouTube account, or you could be a psychology expert who happens to have a YouTube account, and there's a big difference between them."

What's the difference? I think one is you define yourself by your distribution platform, and the other one is that you define yourself by your area of expertise or your specialty or your content, bucket. And I'm a much bigger fan of the second one, And I think the key is, when people start by defining themselves by being like, "I'm a YouTuber," rather than a sports psychologist- Every other channel becomes a billboard to get you to leave where you are to try and get you to go to YouTube because my priority is YouTube.

If I think about it as an audience member, on the platform that I enjoy spending time on, I would be very happy to connect with a sports psychologist in a way that is like, "Here's the best sports psychologist channel on Instagram," versus, "Please leave Instagram and go to my YouTube channel." You have to kinda choose your things that are sustainable where you can do great work on an ongoing basis within your resources and budgets. … But starting with the fact of, like, own your subject matter or your area of expertise rather than your platform a, Steve, this clearly is not just some, hypothetical.

You mentioned that you built a company that produced podcasts and, I'd like you to tell people just to give them a sense of how well this works, what you ended up with doing there, and what you do now, and how can, people can find out more about you and the book. We started this company called Pacific Content, we relatively early on decided to be like, "Let's be the only company in the world that makes podcasts only with brands and helps them think and act like media companies."

And so we did that in 2014. Everyone thought we were crazy, 'cause before podcasts had blown up. And, It's funny, we took our own advice to grow the company, which was, in s- we chose a newsletter instead of a podcast, oddly. But we decided to share everything we knew and not sell the company or whatever, but just share the things that we believed about podcasting and brands, and just gave it all away.

And that turned into a , really strong inbound channel where people just sh- these big brands would just show up in our inbox over and over and over again. And it was a really surreal little ride. We ended up being acquired by Rogers Sports and Media multi-billion dollar company … it, and ended up, I guess, at the peak of it about 60 people, when I left, working with just a lot of really wonderful, smart companies who were brave enough to make real shows and built up fairly large audiences, of people who spent a lot of time with them.

And then I left in 2022. I wrote the book, which it was a real treat, and then now I'm mostly doing consulting around marketing content strategy and speaking about the ideas we've been talking about today. Amazing. And the book is Your Gift, and where can people find it?

Stevepratt.com. Good. We'll have that in the show notes.

Yeah. Steve, thanks again for coming on the show. Thanks for having me, Glenn. This was a really great conversation.

I really appreciate it. Until next time, get more insight into your funnel so you can make it even better.