Navigating the New Age of Marketing: Insights from Craig Cooke

That's good.

And welcome to a new episode of Digital Coffee Marketing Brew.

And I'm your host, Brett Dyster.

And this week we're gonna be talking about digital transformation because I feel like we're transforming a little bit more than usual.

Before we first had the smartphones, but now we have AI and all that other fun stuff.

And the Apple Vision Pro was recently announced.

So it's gonna be interesting to talk about that with marketing business and everything.

But with me, I have Craig with me and he is a successful entrepreneur.

He has the foresight to start a digital first company way back when that was the talk of the town.

I feel like most companies are mostly on that digital first thing.

But he also has been utilizing the Internet for digital transformation as well.

And he's just, he's just a great host to have.

He's done a lot of different things, a lot of different company and he's also have been really successful with just a limited budget which all small businesses and small marketing teams need to understand to be pivotal and pivot on where you need to actually go on this.

But he's just started, he had a company called rhythm.net.com with just started with a couple of different friends.

He also had a world class digital creative agency with multitude of awards within Orange county as well as I saw.

So just welcome the show, Craig.

Thank you Brad.

Thank you for having me.

I'm excited to be here and happy to share.

Yeah.

And the first question is all my guests is are you a coffee or tea drinker?

Oh, I never drank coffee till I was about 30 years old.

I always loved tea and then I became addicted to coffee and I drink both these days.

But yeah, like right now I have my coffee with me.

Yeah, I was a late bloomer too.

I didn't start until 25ish, so I was quite a late bloomer as you.

So what is your go to brew?

Do you like the lights, mediums, darks?

Do you like the flavored coffee?

Do you just put a whole bunch of sugar and cream just to make it taste better for you?

When I first started drinking coffee at 30, it was Starbucks lattes that kind of got me hooked.

But over the course of time, yeah, probably for the past, I don't know, 10 years at least, it's just been black coffee, non flavored, different blends, dark roast, this is my preference.

But what I've been doing lately, my kind of go to now because I've cut back on coffee to a certain degree at least because coffee has benefits.

But I do this, this cacao, roasted cacao, which you make just like coffee.

And I'll do like a 5050 mix of this roasted cacao blend with coffee.

And it's a nice blend.

And I throw in this shilaji, which is.

It's like a.

How do I describe it?

It's this black tarry stuff.

And it's really bitter and earthy, but it's super good for you.

So, yeah, it's different.

That's my daily brew.

Is it like dark chocolate bitter?

Because I cannot do dark chocolate bitter.

Yeah, it's like that, but even more earthy and bitter.

Yeah, weird, but.

And I'll throw some cinnamon in it too, just because.

But then there'll be times where I just do my black coffee, but just more power.

You're a little bit more of like, like doing all this different stuff.

I just do it black.

That's it.

And I only do light medium because dark rose actually has less caffeine.

For those that don't know light medium have more.

Dark rose has less.

Yes, that's right.

Yeah, I like dark roast.

Just plain.

Like some.

There'll be time, like this weekend I just had dark roast, black coffee.

It's great.

Nice.

Good stuff.

So I gave a brief summary of your expertise.

Can you give our guests a little bit more about what you do, our listeners?

Absolutely.

So I started a, as you mentioned, a digital first company, but way back in the 20th century, 1996, before that was ever a term, that really didn't become a term until probably 10 years ago or something like that.

And we were doing digital transformation work back then, again before that was ever a term.

And a small business started with a couple friends, just $1,300 apiece and a computer, so really limited resources.

We started marketing independent music online and struggled with that concept for a couple years.

It's just an idea.

Before it's time, people could discover new artists and listen to song samples and buy their CDs online through a secure server way back in 1996.

But there's no MV3s, no broadband, and et cetera, et cetera.

After a couple years, we pivoted, just like you mentioned, the importance of pivoting.

Put the music thing to the side and then really started to focus on web design for companies.

Because we started getting a bunch of requests and we said, sure, yeah, we'll do that.

And then it's like the light bulb moment.

Let's switch gears.

And then at that time, I saw a vision for the future of how advertising Agency would evolve and that is really being able to produce communications in an offline and online world and eventually combine the two bridge gap.

So just started working to build out that model and over the course of time built up a lot of different competencies like email marketing, search marketing, digital video production, et cetera, et cetera grew.

The agency was on the Inc.

5000 list five years in a row.

Best places to work, top places to work four years in a row.

Yeah, a lot of awards, great stuff, great journey.

Eventually sold it in 2019 to a World class digital creative agency based out of New York City and then stayed on as my role as CEO for three more years.

And then here I am today in a whole new chapter in life and doing consulting work.

And I just released a book, Business Kung Fu.

I just released that a few months ago.

And yeah, that's.

It's a whole new chapter.

Got you.

And so like digital transformation was, it feels like most businesses are already somewhat there or there.

Everybody, every business has a website, everybody's using email, everybody has their email newsletters.

But what's the next evolution of it?

Because I feel like we had what in 1996, the actual Internet.

Because that's what actually when it was brought out to the masses, for the most part then we had every company needed a website.

And then smartphones was the next kind of evolution because then you could work while you're on the go and you didn't have to sit at an actual computer or laptop.

But I think now it's like more just the AI is the next digital transformation that businesses are going to have to figure out how to actually use effectively.

Am I right about that?

Yes, I would agree with that.

Absolutely.

We've gone through these various evolutions of digital transformation.

In the beginning, when first started, yeah, it was like this brochure where you get a website for your company.

It's very informational, not much functionality.

Then five years later you really started getting a lot of database applications being built, web applications being built, where you got a lot of utility, functional utility out of an online experience.

So that was like another step in the evolution.

And then after that I've got to rewind my mind here.

Yes, the mobile phones came out.

So now we were on the go utilizing the Internet as wherever we went.

And then right around that same time, social media started to become really prevalent and that was a whole other aspect.

And it really evolved to where you can't just rely on one thing.

You really needed an integrated solution, which was our thinking way back in the day anyways before all this stuff was coming to place, but now with the advent of AI, yeah, what can be done that in a highly efficient manner utilizing tools, AI tools to create better, more value through better products in a more efficient manner.

And it's really about leveraging the tools.

And yeah, maybe there'll be some job displacement and so forth, but it'll really be the people that embrace those tools that'll thrive.

Because it's just I draw the analogy of when desktop publishing first came out in late 80s or whenever it was where you had a lot of people doing the traditional paste up and typesetting, et cetera.

And then the Macintosh came in and with its like Illustrator and Photoshop and QuarkXPress and all that and how you can do things with the computer.

And a lot of people didn't embrace that.

Well, they got displaced.

And the people that embrace that technology, they're the ones that thrived for the next 10 years and beyond doing that type of work.

So it's the same thing.

We're at this big evolution.

I also think too with this blend of offline and online and how it comes together, that's going to continue as well.

How are marketers supposed to pivot?

Because it's going to be a pivot for them.

Because a lot of them are probably there's going to be some senior ones, middle management, and then the new ones, obviously the Gen Z and Gen Alpha and all that are going to be fine with it.

Because usually younger people have an easier time using new technologies.

Not saying that old people can't do it either, but usually it's the younger generation pushing the new technology onto businesses.

So how can the middle managers and the senior executives actually like figure this out to use it?

Because you have ChatGPT, Gemini, which was formerly barred for Google.

You have Gronk, which is Twitter, AI or X.

You have Perplexity Claude, you have a bunch of them and I've just named five of them.

I'm pretty sure there's another 15 of them that I don't even know about.

So how could they effectively get their employees to experiment with it for now?

Because I'm pretty sure experimenting is fine and businesses always move slow with new technology.

But how can you get them to experiment with this?

Yeah, that's the key, experimentation.

And there's businesses of all different sizes and types.

Right.

So you have say, your owners or managers, even middle managers of say large organizations, they're more slow to adopt, slow to move because of the size.

Right.

I think in organizations like that, you have to really rely on your team to do the research and development.

They should always be having the leaders that they supervise or however many levels there are, that whoever is under them, their direct reports that they allocate time for them to research and development on whatever products and services that they're producing.

Right?

Like what's emerging, what are trends for companies that are smaller in size, small businesses, then it's going to be really up to, I believe, the founder or the owner to do some direct research and development and make some determinations as to what could bring value to their environment and then allocate time for their team to get up to speed based on whatever has been selected.

For example, I know this one gentleman for the past year he's been diving deep into the world of AI and he was a traditional brand and consumer packaged good designer.

And he has a small team and he's been in business for, I don't know, 25 years or longer.

And they've dove deep into AI.

But he was the one that really initiated it, did the research, started experimenting and then he's been allocating time for his team members based on his direction to really take a deep dive.

And now they're doing some really interesting things that are really super cool actually.

I know like in 2022, at least the beginning and maybe 2021 and 2020, like web3 was the thing, it was like web3, crypto, NFTs like all that stuff.

And then all of a sudden AI came out and it's crypto NFTs obvious.

The industry crushed like it went, it catered so hard because crypto was not doing well during the pandemic at all.

And NFTs just cratered hard too.

Like a lot of the multi million dollar were worthless now.

So are we seeing the new evolution of Web3 to be AI and blockchain instead of crypto and NFTs?

Because I feel like AI and blockchain is more of a compelling and easier to explain than crypto NFTs were.

NFTs and cryptos are still hard to explain.

They've never had a good marketing message around it where businesses are like, I don't know how to use this, but AI I understand how to use.

Yes, crypto is very a nebulous thing, right?

But the underlying technology, blockchain, the distributed ledger as a blockchain, that's the true technology that has far reaching implications on the future of what can be done in all kinds of different industries.

Crypto is just one component of that and the convergence of AI with blockchain technology.

Yes, I agree.

There's definitely going to be some things that happen that are going to be extremely big.

There are companies out there that are AI driven blockchains.

That'll be interesting to see how things develop and how quickly crypto is that.

We have the bitcoin halving coming up here probably in about two to three months, most likely based on historical performance that is going to create a big interest in crypto again because the price, the values are going to be skyrocketing, most likely not guaranteed, but most likely because bitcoin itself is going to become more scarce because it's going to be harder to mine and produce more bitcoin.

So scarcity, whenever you have scarcity, the value increases.

Just the simple law of supply and demand.

So I think crypto is going to see a big resurgence over the next 18 months.

But the blockchain technology itself is going to continue to find new roads and the convergence of AI and blockchain is going to be extremely interesting.

So how can businesses prepare for this?

They don't have to do it now, but I feel like they need to prepare for eventual blockchain and eventual AI to basically be utilized in most, if not all their tools.

But that's like a five to ten year process right now.

But how can they prepare to do this transformation into it?

Because transformation is to me, it feels, it's more like a slow process.

No one ever does anything that quickly.

We all have different areas where we will do some things quickly and other things not so quickly.

So how can businesses start to prepare for this?

Because eventually they're going to have to use.

All marketers are going to have to use AI and blockchain, all PR people are going to have to use this, all business MBA people are going to have to use this.

So how can they prepare for that?

So I think on a foundational aspect they have to look at how they've structured their organization.

Like for.

So for example, at my company, yeah, we were a digital marketing agency, but we had three pillars actually.

So it's easy to say, oh yeah, design and technology.

But we also had strategy because back in the day that was something that traditional agencies had, strategy and they could be really good at design, but they sucked at technology.

They sucked for 20 years and even some of them still suck today.

It's only through like their acquisitions and pain staking ventures that they've grown capabilities.

On the flip side, you had a lot of the digital agencies that were great with technology and great with design, but really sucked at strategy because they just didn't understand strategic concepts.

So that's how we developed our philosophy, our philosophical foundation, and how we structured our company.

So I would recommend, to answer your question, I'd recommend to owners and executives of companies to really think about their philosophy, of how they've structured their company.

And they definitely need a technology pillar.

It's not enough just to say you have an IT person, right, or you have contract IT services to maintain your network.

No, you need someone really driving technology as a pillar in your company to stay on top of technological trends and how to take advantage of emerging platforms and technologies that can allow you to create and realize new efficiencies to produce whatever value you're producing in the marketplace.

And I mean for.

There's another aspect of it for the new people, the colleges.

Now, when I was in college, no one was really talking about social media strategy because social media was still new.

Facebook was still in its infancy.

They still didn't.

They only really allowed.

I think I was there when they only allowed college students.

And then they eventually opened it up for everybody.

So how can colleges do.

Because colleges don't pivot very well at all.

They are stuck way in 10 to 15 years in the past sometimes.

So how can colleges.

Because I feel like for them to offer, I guess, a way to market, hey, look, we want to be digital first as well.

And we want to give students the keys to.

We want to respect the old school strategies because those still work.

Like word of mouth, it will always be king because you cannot replace word of mouth, that type of stuff.

But how can they bridge that gap?

Because like I said when I was there, they didn't talk about any of that stuff.

They just, yeah, social media figure it out.

Yeah, so that's a great question.

And that was my experience too.

So I went to College from 89 to 1993.

I got to rewind dating myself here and I had the same experience where I was a business major and there was a variety of technology driven business courses.

And then you would go into maybe the MIS management information systems and CIS computer information system classes as part of your curriculum and you had to learn some things.

But yeah, it was like 10 to 15 years back, just like you said.

Not once did I hear anything about the Internet at that time.

And the Internet was just being created until I was actually working for two professors on campus.

And they would travel all over the country doing what they do.

And we had email and I was like, wow, I can communicate with them instantly, no matter where they're at.

This is amazing because it was the Internet that was my first exposure to the Internet and then, and then starting to read about it in like a web browser and some catalogs that they had me always ordering from.

But I never had a course that mentioned the technology and how the Internet was going to work and how it was going to evolve.

The university was easy, 10, 15 years behind.

So I think the university system is highly challenged today to compete with producing value for its students.

Because someone who is disciplined, has some passion and they have a desire to improve their situation, can get online, teach themself a ton of different topics and really develop expertise with a set of skills and to bring value to the market.

When I hired a lot of people at my company, some had college degrees, but some didn't.

And for me the college degree showed okay, they have a level of discipline that they can finish what they start.

Great.

And there might have been some other aspects of that experience.

Cool, right?

Great.

But with like designers and programmers especially, it was like, show me, show me what you can do.

Let me see your work that you've done.

Take this test, sit here for an hour and here's what I want you to do.

Now do it.

Let's see what you got.

And we hired a lot of people that didn't have college educations.

They were self taught and they did awesome.

They're great.

And then we had others that were formerly taught and they did great too.

But I think so I think the universities really need to evolve and somehow get like some innovation labs centers to where they're really focused on what's happening in the marketplace and somehow work that into the curriculum much faster than they have in the past.

Because I think I'm older than you and that was my experience.

And then you had your experience which seemed to be echo the same experience I had.

So is that still the same experience today?

I wouldn't doubt it.

And now they're charging people tons of money to attend these universities where you become a debt slave coming out of school after a quarter of a million dollars of attending the university where a lot of people who can just learn stuff on their own, not every profession, doctors and things like that's different.

But for a business, people can learn a lot on their own.

Yeah, I mean you have like Eugenie and all those other online courses that you can take and they're a fraction of way more than a fraction.

They're like like 1%, even that of the cost.

So that's gonna, that's gonna be the college's thing.

And so let's say they went through college.

Like how can the college students like just learn on their own?

Because I know it's challenging but.

And I'm probably gonna be talking about more of the graduating college students because they'll have a little bit more time on how to learn from themselves.

But how can they like gain that skill and be ahead of the curve?

Because being ahead of the curve will give you leverage a little bit more than being where you're at right now.

Where social media and ads, which ads are going through a tremendous time.

Digital ads, because you got the iPhones like new privacy things and you got the destruction of cookies eventually from Google.

So how can they like maintain that market advantage when they're graduating?

Because you want to find a job and you want to find a job as quickly as possible usually.

Yeah, absolutely.

I believe that people need to take it upon themselves to make sure they're studying their industry and their industry trends.

And how do they do that?

They go about that by getting online because the old days of going to the bookstore and getting magazines is done.

It's too old, the information is too old.

Right.

That's just more for recreation but for like serious study and work and finding out what's brand new.

You gotta jump online.

And what are the associations in the industry that you're looking at?

What kind of events do they have?

Also what are the different online publications, media outlets that are very specific to that industry that are pumping out news and information that is highly timely, covering the newest breakthroughs?

They really, once college is done, the learning doesn't stop.

That's just the beginning.

It's really upon them to study.

It was one of the interview questions we asked people.

How do you stay current with your skills?

What kind of publications do you read, what do you attend, what do you do on your own to keep up on the latest trends?

So it's really up to each individual to be very proactive and get online and soak it up.

Yeah, like for me, like podcasting, there's pod news that just does only news on podcasting.

That's how I keep up to take what's going on.

Because.

Because Google, they're a great company but they change so many times and they have so many confusing strategies.

A lot of time like Google Podcast, Apple Music or YouTube Music.

Now we're gonna.

The Google podcast is gonna go away in April.

Now we have YouTube music.

Now you got to make sure that you're podcast is on YouTube, music, it's not go.

Podcast isn't going to do anything for you because it's going to go away.

So yeah, it's a lot to take in just for one industry.

Now I try to keep ahead of the curve or at least understand like the marketing industry too, because obviously I'm doing a podcast for marketing, so I got at least.

No, but that is the one thing that the college did teach me in my PR classes.

Learn and figure out a way to keep on top of the relevant trends in your industry.

So I agree with you on that.

That is probably your lifelong goal, is to figure out a way to keep on top of all the industry that's going on.

Yeah, yeah.

Because the world of business, which extends to all fields.

Right.

Because everything's driven by business.

At the end of the day, the world of business is highly dynamic, is constantly changing and evolving.

So yeah, once your education is done, you still have to continue even, let's say something that's very hands on, say physical therapists or people that study kinesiology.

I'm going to mispronounce the yes, thank you.

And they go like sports trainers and chiropractors.

And there's something that's been around for a long time, but there's all this new technology and devices that are coming out that enables them to work in new ways and to have more effectiveness, especially like working with like high performing athletes.

I've seen some of these devices that are out there that are breakthrough technologies.

That's amazing.

And how are you going to stay up on that if you're not proactive with it?

You're going to rely on your employer.

What if your employer isn't staying up on that?

You stay up on it yourself.

You make yourself more marketable out there because now you have skills and you can go to a place that has needs and say, hey, this is what I know.

I can bring value because I have this skill and this added knowledge of this cutting edge development out there.

Brings me to the next question, because when I was doing marketing a few times I'd be ahead of the curve and then I scare people because I was like, if you do this because your website's behind and these are the new protocols or the protocols that are eventually in a few months going to be mandatory.

And all of a sudden they're like, whoa.

So how do you ease them in?

Because I had to learn how to ease people in and not like, I guess digital, verbal, throw up on them and be like, oh, I don't Know what to do, this is too much and I'm out.

Yeah, that's a great question.

Different organizations at different stages with their size and their industry.

Some are very fast moving or willing to adopt new technologies and trends.

Others are very slow moving and just because of the nature of their business.

So that's one thing.

And then the size, smaller companies are able to be more nimble and adopt.

But I think what one has to do is show value, prove value.

What's the use case?

Are there any case studies that have a similar company, similar situation where they've adopted this technology and the results that produced was did they realize efficiencies so they saved money so they were able to be more profitable, or were they able to reach new markets, expand their reach and create additional revenue because of this technology?

Both perhaps reaching more, maybe more effectiveness and response and at a less cost.

For example, I'm going to go back rewind.

Before email marketing really started to catch hold, that was something that we were always contending with because we were a reseller for what was called at the time, exact Target, which was a major email marketing provider service provider that eventually got acquired by salesforce.com so we're a reseller of that platform.

And we had to show the value of why email marketing can really help drive revenue and help save cost compared to their direct mail.

So in some cases we were showing people how they could get rid of their printed newsletter or drastically reduce their printed newsletter and bring people over to their email newsletter and save a ton of money and still reach those people and get all the analytics on what was actually resonating with their audience, which was all kinds of additional value there as well.

Yeah.

And so what do you think the future is going to look like for digital transformation?

I know it briefly.

I just briefly mentioned the Apple Vision Pro.

Even though it's super expensive right now, it's like the first Apple computer that was super expensive.

You had the famous 1984 ad campaign on the super bowl, which super bowl was just on.

So like, where, where is this digital transformation going?

Are we going to see more VR professional VR units?

Because right now it's just gaming and gaming.

It's not really taking off very well.

Still.

They're cheap, they're cheaper.

But there's really.

I'm not even like convinced about the use cases.

Even though VR is not new.

It's.

It was made in like the 90s and I used it once in the 90s in a mall playing a game.

And I was like, this is awful.

And so where are we going to go with this?

Are we going to see like people?

Like I saw a video of someone using Apple Vision Pro in a subway and you saw him like move his heads and look like working.

Are we going to see that dystopian future where no one's going to actually look at each other anymore?

We're just going to be looking at screens?

Are we going to get more interesting use cases for technology, for advertising to people?

Where's this all going?

Yeah.

God, I hope it doesn't go to that dystopian future.

That's a perfect word for it.

It's funny because you see a lot of this angling of the consumer, the end consumer, wearing these devices and walking around and all this stuff where I think there's low hanging fruit though actually for that technology is in a highly technical, professional environment.

So I was just speaking with someone a week ago or so who does car design, automotive design, and he's utilizing VR technology to actually help teach other designers on car design using some AI tools as well.

And VR combined with other platforms, a new way to go through the design process that is very efficient, highly productive.

And he's working with people from all over the world and they're meeting in a virtual environment with the headsets on and really going at it.

So that's like a case where there's true value to that technology and experience where it's effective.

So I think in very specialized industrial type applications, that's where it could actually thrive.

The consumer stuff.

Yeah.

I think, like you, like me, I think there's a lot of people out there that just don't want to see all of us walking around with these headsets on and not paying attention to each other.

I think what could happen is as holograms become much more viable.

Yeah, I've seen them at CES and wow, that's amazing.

That thing's just floating in the air right in front of me and it looks pretty awesome.

Wow, that's cool.

When we have wearable devices that are projecting holograms that are very crisp, vibrant and possibly maybe even responsive to how our fingers react with those photons or light molecules, however, that would be registered.

That could be very interesting.

I could see that's where more of that consumer marketplace could really take off.

But that's a ways out.

I think the headset VR thing, there's.

I think we want to be jacked into the matrix, even though r.

But to turn off.

I agree with you, but people listen to this episode are like where can I find Craig online to learn more about what is does any your book as well?

Oh, great.

Thank you.

Yes, my website's my primary point of contact.

So that is C squared pro IO.

So that's the letter C.

And then squared pro IO.

There is a page on there for my book.

People can learn about what I call the five elements of entrepreneurship.

And it's in the first chapter.

So people can download that first chapter for free.

And if they live, they get value out of the book.

Hopefully they do.

They could go to Amazon and purchase it on Amazon.

It's in paperback, hardcover and Kindle format.

I'll probably be releasing it in other channels later in the year, but that's where people can get it at the moment.

And then connecting with me on LinkedIn is another good source.

I actively monitor LinkedIn.

I'm on social other social channels too.

Instagram and Twitter as Craig Cook TikTok as C squared 777.

But my website and LinkedIn are the two that I monitor the most closely and the best way to contact me.

All right, thank you Craig for joining Digital Coffee Marketing Brew and sharing your knowledge on digital transformation.

Thank you, Brett, and thank you as always.

Please subscribe to Digital Coffee and all your favorite podcasts and absolutely five star review really does help.

And join us next week as we're talking a great auditor in the PR marketing street.

All right guys, stay safe.

Get to understanding your digital transformation for your business or for yourself as well and see you next week later.