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Steve Pratt is the author of Earn it: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers — this interview has been lightly edited for style and readability
A full, 30-minute version of this interview is available here
Steve Pratt: Earn it: Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers is a book about how to earn attention in an era where people are protecting their attention more fiercely than they ever have before. And an acknowledgement that a lot of the ways that we’ve been thinking about interacting with audiences don’t work any more, that interrupting people or making mediocre things or cranking out a lot of high volume of things that are not of exceptional quality are actually not the best way to earn people’s attention. It’s a mindset shift - and it’s also a guide for how to do it.
Sam Sethi: Why is attention so important in this digital age?
SP: I think it’s the most valuable resource on the planet right now. You know, if you don’t have any attention, you literally have nothing. If you’re a podcaster and people listen to one second of your podcast and leave because it’s not very good, you have nothing: you have no listeners, you have no completion rates, your advertisers get no impressions, no one subscribes. You can apply this to any medium on the planet. If you don’t actually have people’s attention, you have nothing.
If you start with understanding who your audience is and where you can create unique value, you begin to outperform other people because you’re earning lots and lots of attention by creating value for them. And I think it does require a mindset shift for a lot of people to think about. If you start with earning attention, you’re starting audience-first - you’re starting off with the understanding that… it’s just like a relationship. You don’t just instantly, on your first date, propose to somebody. You have to earn it. You have to build trust by creating value. And then hopefully over time, somebody becomes a subscriber or a customer or whatever your end business goal might be in that route.
SS: Is attention just another euphemism for advertising? In the book, you talk about 1% engagement rate, you talk about ad blockers, you talk about people don’t want the advertising… is attention “just be funny, be smarter, be clever” or is there something fundamentally that brands have to build before they get the attention?
SP: I think it is a fundamental mindset shift. The old ways don’t work any more: a lot of the status quo is broken. To your point about ad blockers or the success of online ad campaigns, if you’re sub 1% conversion rate, no one really talks about the fact that you’re either wasting money on 99% of the people there, or you’re giving them a really bad impression of your brand. And there’s a better way to do it. It’s just harder work.
I think there’s a lot of incentives to do giant “spray and pray” reach campaigns, where you get a giant reach number as your output. There’s not a lot of incentive to do a campaign that focuses on the amount of time that people spend with you, because that’s harder work to make something that’s really valued by people.
The argument in the book is that’s the only way forward. If you actually want to get people’s attention and make a difference of turning people into a place where they trust you and want to have a relationship with you, and welcome them into your lives… if you think about the choice of whether you’re a content creator or whether you’re a marketer, would you prefer to have a relationship based on interrupting people where they’re kind of frustrated and annoyed every time they see you? Or something where they are actively welcoming you into their lives because you’re creating so much value for them? It feels really obvious. But then you zoom out and you realize that there’s a lot of people who are not doing the obvious thing within podcasting.
SS: In podcasting, we are selling the idea that people are listening to the ads… but we actually know that when we are the listener, we just skip the ads.
SP: Well, I don’t know if there’s a blanket statement to put out on either side, because there’s a spectrum of ways that people are approaching advertising, and some of it for sure seems like a waste of money that is not doing podcasting or listeners any favors. There are examples of a lot of big ad blocks with yelling-style radio ads. I skip through them very quickly. I know lots and lots of other people do too.
I remember the very early days of Gimlet. It felt like they had rethought advertising. They were telling stories and doing little micro documentaries with clients. And there were just super interesting stories, and when you think about ads that are teaching you something or giving you something really valuable as a listener, or if they’re really funny or entertaining, I will give my attention to those because it’s worth it. The ones that don’t respect my attention and are just instantly selfish, I feel like there’s a bygone era - “if you want to have this show for free, you’re going to have to sit through this stuff that you don’t like. And it’s our entitlement to be able to just interrupt you and shove this stuff down your throat.” We don’t have to do that any more.
I think that a lot of advertisers don’t understand how fundamentally that is changed, that the consumer is the one with all the power now and the audiences have the power to bypass anything they don’t like. So the obvious answer is, why don’t you start making things that people really like? And the more that they like them, the more effective your advertising will be?
But, you know, I could say the same thing outside of advertising and marketing to just content creation. Mediocrity doesn’t cut it anymore. And I think there’s another message in the book. It is the bar is really high and you need to be different than other people and you need to be unexpected, surprising, interesting, and just really awesome, consistent over time. The subtitle of the book is “Unconventional Strategies for Brave Marketers”. It could have also been “unpopular strategies” because I know some people don’t want to hear it and they don’t necessarily want to do the hard work. But honestly, it IS hard work, but it’s so gratifying to be able to make something that people really love and want to tell other people about and volunteer to spend lots and lots of their time with. And it’s also really fun to make projects like that.
So I think if people lean into the mindset and understand that there is a way to do it that delivers value for both sides, it delivers value for audiences and for the people creating it. Whether you’re a podcast or a marketer, there’s a win win to be had there, and it’s not impossible.
There’s a ton of places you can buy the book - if you go to my website you can see all the different places you could get it.
NB: In the US, you can pre-order from Bookshop.org and help support the Podcast Business Journal
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