Reaching the Right Customer via Snackable Video with Cheetah Digital’s Tim Glomb

Katie Nehrenz: Welcome to the Casted podcast. This season, we're exclusively talking to our customers about how they're using the Casted platform to deliver audio and video that fuels their marketing strategy and grows their business. I've said it before, content marketing is still one of the hardest jobs out there. And we love sharing our customers' unique experiences, which in turn, helps our audience find ways to dig deeper into the challenges they face and the solutions they're discovering. I'm Katie Nehrenz, senior customer success manager at Casted, the B2B podcast and video platform built by marketers for marketers. And I'll be your guide on this episode of the Casted podcast. This might sound obvious, but the more you have to say, the harder it is to say it briefly. Well, that's exactly what content marketers wrestle with when they're creating content for their audiences. There's just one problem. They're competing against thousands of B2B brands doing the exact same thing. With so much content vying for attention, you can't expect everyone to set aside a whole hour to watch a video you just published. Worse, the people you're trying to reach the hardest might say, it's not that I think your content won't be valuable, I just don't have any more time in my day to find the parts that interest me. But here's the thing, when marketers deliver the most salient content in a brief and easy to digest format, they're more likely to get their audiences' full attention in return for that brevity. It might even be the only way they begin a journey with your brand and go on to engage with more content. My guest today is a big believer in brevity in marketing. As the VP of content and data at Cheetah Digital, Tim Glomb is not interested in millions of views. Instead, he's looking for a much smaller yet far more powerful subset, the right 10 views. And he does it by leveraging short, relevant video clips. Today, Tim's going to share how Cheetah's marketing and sales teams are mastering relationship marketing by knowing who's watching and what they're watching. This intelligence allows Cheetah to get the right content in front of the right eyeballs. And it's all about chopping up long form video into slippery, snackable, bite size clips. If you think this is unnecessary, but ho hum part of marketing, then you've never heard Tim Glomb talk about it. Tim, welcome to the stage.

Tim Glomb: Thanks for inviting me on to the stage. I'm excited to talk to you today. I know we've had some good conversations prior to this, so I'm excited to extend those.

Katie Nehrenz: Absolutely. Yeah. This is going to be such a good time. So excited for everyone who gets to witness this and I'm excited to be a part of it. So, here we go. So Tim, I know a lot more about you after just the last 15 minutes of chatting, but would you mind just giving the audience a little bit of a breakdown about who you are, your incredible experience. Tell us what you've been up to for, you pick the timeframe and go from there.

Tim Glomb: Yeah, sure. I'll work backwards. So as you mentioned, Cheetah Digital is an enterprise marketing platform. I am the VP of content there and now actually for the wider CM group. CM is a large organization that has multiple products, Emma email marketing, campaign monitor, sale through Selligent, Liveclicker, Cheetah Digital. We are an umbrella of brands now. So, I am the head of global content there, everything video, everything content, everything downloadable from the B2B space. Prior to that, I was actually using their platform. I was a brand marketer. So I've worked at many different brands, private equity firms, direct to consumer, global sporting goods. So kind of in that brand marketing space. And that's how I kind of found Cheetah. Prior to that, I was working with Mark Cuban. I ran all marketing for his television network and rebranded it from what was known as HDNet, which was the first ever true native 24/7 HD channel available on TV started, I think, in like'91 or so, and rebranded that to a mostly concert network access TV in conjunction with AEG, the second largest concert promoter on the planet. Prior to that, I was in television, produced the Jackass, partners with Bam Margera. We did a show and I'm not sure if anybody in your audience will know it, but I was a cast member, a writer, a director, producer for a show called Viva la Bam, which was a number one rated MTV show in the early 2000s. And even prior to that, I was in management in music. So managing platinum selling artists, touring around the world with bands like Motley Crew, Slayer, Everclear was a big band in the '90s that I worked with. So music, TV, technology, and now I'm just a software guy, I guess.

Katie Nehrenz: Just a software guy. It's so awesome. I'm definitely a'90s girl at heart, grew up in the'90s. So like Everclear, love it. And as I told you earlier, I mean, in high school, I loved skateboarding. I loved watching skate videos, CKY, Jackass, all my jam. And from what I saw in just some of my poking around earlier, it sounds like you might have had something to do, some things to do, with some of the pranks that Bam pulled on his parents, his uncle, a lot of inside jokes that I have with my friends in high school. So this is just some great full circle stuff for me today.

Tim Glomb: Yeah. It was weird. I grew up as a kid in construction. My father's a carpenter still is today and they always would say, " Call Glomb." Even before Jackass, all that stuff, Bam would be doing crazy stuff when something is built and they'd say, " Just call Glomb." We were buddies. We were on the same skateboard team as kids. He's a few years, five or six years younger than me. But yes, when Jackass was born, they were like, "Call Glomb." So, you didn't see me a lot on camera, but a lot of things that required building or pushing or moving things, I was there. So, yeah, poor April and Phil. God bless their souls. It was Phil's birthday two days ago. So, happy birthday, Phil.

Katie Nehrenz: Happy birthday, Phil. So you talked a little bit about your company and what they do at Cheetah Digital. And Cheetah has a couple different podcasts that serve different purposes, right, and they speak to different audiences. So can you tell us a little bit about each one and who they're catered to?

Tim Glomb: Yeah. Right now at Cheetah Digital, again, just to set it up, we are a B2B company. So we're looking to connect through thought leadership, client, case studies, things like that for marketers, brand marketers. At Cheetah, it's primarily enterprise brand marketers. So American Airlines, Starbucks, American Express, those are some of our clients, the big ones. So we've created a slew of different podcast to your point. I'll start at the ground level. One is a very practitioner level audio only. So new features, new functions, product marketing. We got some great gurus who host that and even interview some clients sometimes. And that's like peer to peer clients listening to each other what they do. Very effective, great for retention with our existing clients. Then, we also have the Pulse, which is kind of a cool product focused podcast, but doesn't just focus on our own technology. It focuses on everything going on in our industry and our landscape. We don't call out competitors. We talk about trends. And that's run by the product marketing team with Patrick Trip over there. And they bring in music flare. So they talk about music kind of like you and I just did. So that's fun. And then our big anchor, which has a hundred plus episodes, I think, at this point is called Thinking Caps. It basically was born here in the office. The former CMO and I were drinking buddies. He got me into the company. He said, " Let's do a video podcast." And that is short 10 minute or less thought leadership, reactionary commentary on timely news, things that are hitting our industry, privacy concerns, new legislation for cookies, all kinds of different things. And that's been a ton of fun, because it's been 80% just Richard and I riffing off and reacting to news and things that every marketer has to deal with on a weekly basis Ad Age, Digiday, Forbes, et cetera. And then, 20% are bringing in guests for different reasons, it could be a privacy expert, it could be Scotty Neely, a billionaire founder of some microsystems and anyone in between. So, those are the three main that we use. But then we also have a ton of internal ones. I mean, I could go on for days on how we're using all that stuff in Casted. So fire another question at me and we'll keep it going.

Katie Nehrenz: Lots of stuff in Casted. So you mentioned that these are video podcasts. So why is video so important in your strategy?

Tim Glomb: Okay, well, first off selfishly, I'm a video guy. I was working in television 20 years ago. We talked about Viva la Bam and all these different things like having fun, pointing cameras at guys, doing stupid stuff, all right, 20 years ago. But you can tell a story so much more effectively with video. A picture is worth a thousand words, totally agree. A video is worth a billion words. So being able to actually visualize what we care about in our produced videos, even some of our live stuff, we can bring up graphics. If I'm talking about a key moment, we know that you can read and hear and see at the same time all those sensory things are happening. And we can bring up key graphics as takeaways. So if you're going to sit down with us for 10 minutes or 30 minutes, there might be five things I need you to remember at the end. So graphically, video just brings that to life. Plus this is a differentiator, a lot of companies in the last few years, pre- pandemic for sure, they were kind of in video, but they weren't full blown. There'd be like a couple of video projects a week, maybe a month. We, we're 100% video. If we do anything that's recorded in content, it has video behind it. If we do a PDF, if we'd launch a report or some original research, there's going to be a webinar and a video webinar with it. So we found that video has been a huge differentiator for us in connecting with clients and prospects.

Katie Nehrenz: Absolutely. Absolutely. And you had also mentioned your internal content as well. And we didn't get too far into that, but I do want to circle back to that. I think you use it for some training sessions and different pieces of education like town halls and things like that. Why did you ultimately end up adding these to Casted versus another tool?

Tim Glomb: Whether it's internal or external Casted has, I'll call it a secret sauce, that many other players don't really have. And what it boils down to is the way that you allow us to chapterize videos. And chapters have been around forever. QuickTime had it, RealPlayer had it, Wistia, all the other players have it. But the way that Casted presents it in a video player and your recent updates in recent months really just even enhances this. The idea is if I'm lucky enough to get you to come watch a video online, I'd win. If I'm lucky enough to get you to watch 5% of it, that's a total high five. If I get you to watch the whole thing, that's like the Holy Grail. It doesn't happen, marketers, especially our audience, they're busy, they got a job to do. I mean, I have a job to do. I don't even watch all the video we produce. I just can't consume it all. So, Casted's ability for me to chapterize basically like a book and say, hey, thanks for coming to this Starbucks interview. I just did a Starbucks interview. I think there's like 15 chapters. If you are an IT, you can very quickly on the player, not like scroll across very, very simply in the player, scroll down, see the topics that are meaningful to you. Watch that two minute, watch that three minute segment, not the whole 30 minute segment. So, again, personas, the people we're trying to get. But internally it also works because we're on a big kick internally right now. We own relationship marketing. That is what CM group is all about. We are relationship marketing experts and our technology maps that. Meet customers, bring them through an entire customer life cycle of marketing. Some of the leadership, myself, product marketing, we do biweekly updates on where our progress is. Where are we going in market? What's the product feature that we added? What's the progression of this whole big rolling thunder initiative? Well, again, with 2000 employees, some of them don't give a crap about the marketing layout. Some of them don't give a crap about the product features. Depending on their role, they can easily go and say, I can't watch this two- hour all hands, but I can look at the chapters that are meaningful to me and get the information that I need. And it's so easy to consume. So that's your secret sauce. I was very impressed with the Casted product when it was audio only and I called you and I said, I want to be one of the first when you a launch video, I want to be one of the first. And I think we were probably one of, if not the first, to roll it out at scale for internal and external use.

Katie Nehrenz: Absolutely. And it's so funny that you mentioned that because my background prior to coming to Casted was in enablement. And I was always about making it easy for the folks who I was enabling to go back and reference material. Because as much as you want to make it as comprehensive as you can from the start, being able to quickly go back and reference something is amazing. So even here at Casted, we create internal trainings and we create those takeaways. And then it's really easy if someone's like, I remember that was covered. I don't exactly remember what I'm supposed to do. Going back and referencing that really quickly and being able to skip to that part, huge, absolutely huge.

Tim Glomb: It's huge. And our employees are now trained because we've been using it long enough. They know even if it was something they weren't invited to, if they browse that internal show, they'll find an episode and they know very quickly. Like if they only have five minutes, they're going to be able to watch one or two little quick takeaways and get something out of it. So they've been trained to kind of go look and it's great. And your search feature, there's a million ways our sales team uses it in a different capacity, which is even more impactful, I think.

Katie Nehrenz: And we are going to talk about that. I cannot wait. I was so glad that you brought up clips. Obviously, it's a huge point of interest for me. It's a huge point of excitement for me. I really want to talk a little bit more about how you're using them. I know you have a very specific example that's very recent. I've seen a lot of buzz about it from the newsletters and things that I'm subscribed to for Cheetah. But let's take this one larger piece of content that you publish for, one of your shows or for customer case study, what happens next? What does that process look like?

Tim Glomb: Yeah. So look, I mean, Starbucks, again, it's a 30 minute interview with a thought leader over there, 17- year veteran VP in technology. It's really impactful for us. Starbucks is one of the largest brands in the world and every brand would love to be like Starbucks in some way. So, getting them on camera, A, was a win. B, having multiple topics in that 30 minutes that meet different personas' needs was incredibly important. What's been really, really impactful though, are those takeaways, those clips that we create, because now I've got a global sales team and I'll give you an example. So there's a fellow, Stewart, over in the UK who has had a prospect who was asking about emotional loyalty, Tim, what do we have on emotional loyalty? Well, not only can I say, well, Stewart, we talk about it for, I'm making stuff, 90 seconds at this point in it, here's the takeaway. Here's the link. Share that in an email with your prospect or just put it on your LinkedIn page. Being able to make that snackable, bite size, slippery content, taking 30 minutes and finding the moments that matter, 90 seconds, three minutes on a topic. Not only that, our sales team has access to the Casted platform as members inside, right, beyond just public viewing. They can go in and do a keyword search, a phrase search. They can search all kinds of different ways. So that example of emotional loyalty, which we're known for being able to go beyond points for purchase and traditional loyalty programs, they can do a quick search on that phrase. Starbucks will come up along with maybe a hundred other clips, maybe a thousand. I mean, they can refine that search and say, this prospect or this client that I'm trying to upsell or cross sale or even just win told me that these three things matter to them. They can do three quick searches, gather a quick library and get it to that client or prospect in email form, in a call, on a screen share. They can build clips and playlists literally for a sales call. So now, if you look at a library of 100 plus, we probably have 200 plus videos that are meaningful, they can now build a playlist that no matter what the client on that sales call brings up or hits them with, they can pivot and say, I got something for you. Not just let me, the salesperson at Cheetah tell you that we do that really well, right? Because salespeople say whatever they need to get the deal done. I don't care where you work. That's the way it works. But when you can pull up a clip of Barbara Spearing from Starbucks saying, yeah, Cheetah Digital is one of our best partners and they do X, Y, and Z for us. Even on a screen share call, it's like Starbucks says Cheetah is pretty cool. It accelerates that sales cycle. When people buy from people and meaning they buy from the people that already have your content. Look at how important reviews are on Amazon and all these eCommerce sites. Justification, third party validation, that's what people are looking for. And Casted allows us to literally bring video to life in short snippets so that we can almost get out of our own sales call way and say, I'm not going to tell you anymore. I'm going to let this playlist tell the story of the things you asked, how do we deal with emotional loyalty or whatever it is. It's incredibly impactful.

Katie Nehrenz: Absolutely. And so, all of these clips that you're creating today, I know that this was something that you were doing before. What did that process look like before you came into Casted to create all those different clips?

Tim Glomb: Yeah. Look, I'll name names. We were using Wistia and Wistia was great mainly because of the intelligence. If a known contact came back to our site or digital property and they were cookie, cool, we knew they were there. Skip from, I'm making this up, skip from Coca- Cola, came back and watched this video. And yeah, we might be able to see a little bit of like, well, they watched 5% of the video. And I'd be like, okay, which 5%? I'm going to assume it's from the beginning. YouTube has this problem with marketers. And I don't know why more marketers, when I was a marketer, I bitched about it. Like, okay, six seconds means a view, but my video's 13 minutes. Knowing what they watch was what I was trying to get to. So we dump up a large file to Wistia. We put it on the site and we say, great, Coca- Cola came by or IKEA came by or whomever. But we didn't have that much intelligence. With the clips, not only can I look at the intelligence into Salesforce, which Casted fix for us, right? All this, the same stuff we have with Wistia, slightly different, but the same digital body language. Hey, Skip from Coca- Cola is here. But not only that, I can look at the clicks because maybe the way skip even got to the site wasn't organically. He didn't say, oh, I got nothing to do. Let me go look at the Cheetah site. No, he was prompted by a salesperson or a customer success manager to say, please take a look at this 90- second quote. Now I know which clip he came and watched. Now I know just like 6sense and ZoomInfo and all these other great B2B marketing digital body languages can tell you, oh, Coca- Cola is looking for emotional loyalty, 15 people search that term from the Coca- Cola Atlanta HQ IP address. It's like, okay, that's cool. All right. Maybe we should get in front of them. Casted takes it even closer because now, it'll say, they watched this part of it. Hey, Stew, they're really researching their emotional loyalty. So what do we do? How do we continue that journey for them? And look, we've hit our numbers in the last two years. Everyone got great bonuses at Cheetah, paid out last month. So it worked and content is a huge part of that story and Casted is a huge part of our tactical play.

Katie Nehrenz: Hell yeah. Well, congrats to the sales team, congrats to all of you for hitting your quota. Congrats to them for their bonuses. That's incredible. Talking so much about the sales team, I love hearing about this because I always... I know from personal experience and I always hear about meeting the sales team where they are. It's very hard to get them to adopt new tools. It's very hard to get them to work within multiple systems. So, I guess, talk to me a little bit about once you had Casted, you knew that's where you wanted to house your content. How did you get the sales team using it? How did you train them and kind of drive adoption?

Tim Glomb: Yeah. Well, first off we use Casted to do it, right. We did little screen share tutorials and then we chapterized it and put it into Casted in our internal... I think that was our first show for the internal show, first episode for the internal show. But look, I'm going to be real with you. There are a lot of people on the sales team who still have not adopted it. They just don't. If I had to guess percentagewise, I'd say 30% just don't lean on it very, very... Like it's not their first go to or even their top three go to. But the ones that did are making their numbers, they're incredibly efficient and are getting more clients and more prospect through the door. Because, look, if you need to dig a hole, you can go buy a hand shovel for$5 at the local hardware store, or you can get a foot shovel or you can get a backhoe, like how big is a hole. And when you find the right tool for the job and it works for you, you're going to stick with it. And what we're finding and what we found in the last year, you get some of those really intelligent sales people say, this is a tool I'm going to learn how to use it. Tim on the video said this was going to help me. They adopt it. And then the other sales people on those weekly, monthly calls going, I'm not really making my quota, but Skip or Sue, they're crushing it. What are they doing? And it just becomes that trickle down. It just becomes, hey, what are you doing? Well, I use Casted. And I do this and I do that. It's like, yeah, I didn't really try that, but let me try it. So the adoption has been steady, but there was no mandate at day one of like, hey, everyone needs to go into Casted. We're going to check. And if you're not in Casted, you're fired. You just have to let people, especially in sales, you got to let them do their, do their do. It's my job to give them tools that make their life easier. But sometimes you can lead a horse to the water. They're not all going to drink, but when they do, they sip.

Katie Nehrenz: And sometimes it's that peer to peer someone says, oh, I was able to accomplish X, Y, and Z. I was able to get into Casted and get this clip. This really helped. Are there any success stories that really stand out to you where one of the sales team was able to leverage Casted or clipping Casted and really make an impact on a deal. You're fired up. I love it.

Tim Glomb: Two. I'll give you two. One is very simple. I knew that Casted was working when, and we all have it. We got these giant Slack channels, which are a total pain in the, right? I must be part of a hundred Slack channels and I get added to more all the time. Please slow down on Slack people. But when somebody needs to go to a particular channel, like again, I'll use Stew. Stew is great. He's one of our best SDRs here. He's been with us for a long time. He's hungry. And he knows how to get stuff done. He'll go in and say, does anybody see this? Or someone else will go in and say, hey, do we have any content or do we have a paper or do we have a quote? Do we have anything on this topic? I've got a prospect that wants to know how we deal with this. And I knew Casted was working because people like Stew would say, here's a link to a takeaway. And when they start using the terminology, takeaway, which is a Casted internal terminology, right? Hey, Tim, create takeaways from your larger videos. When Stew and the SDRs who were using it said, hey, check out this takeaway and drop the link. Then I knew they adopted it. And it was great. So I knew we were on the right track for success specifically about a deal. My personal LinkedIn, sometimes I'm heavy on it. Sometimes I'm not. I'm a little light right now. We got to reorg. And I'm really, really busy and I haven't kept up like I should. But last year, we were doing Thinking Caps podcast, and we are breaking out small segments, right? So, again, 10 minutes is not a long video for a podcast. It's very short. But even some people don't have 10 minutes. For me to be able to take a takeaway topic, I'll make this up, why GDPR in America is going to be the downfall of your job. That click bait headline takeaway from a 10 minute podcast, let's say it was 90 second thought. I dropped that on LinkedIn with that title. And people are like, what are you talking about? Take away my job. I'm going to click on that. What are you talking about? And then you'll watch the 90 seconds. Well, I started dropping things like that in my LinkedIn. And an old friend of mine, I mean, this goes back to my music day. She worked in the music business out in Milwaukee and Chicago area. She now happen to be a part- time interim CMO at a giant restaurant chain anyone would know. I can't drop the name, but she said, " Hey," she hit me on LinkedIn. I hadn't heard from her in decades. She said, " What the hell is this podcast you're doing? And what are all these click bait clips you're dropping? You've got my attention. In fact, on this one, can you really do what... Can Cheetah pull off what you said in that 90 second clip?" I said, " Absolutely." She said, " Let's talk." So, caught up with her, had a conversation. How are the kids? You got kids. Oh, where are you working? Da, da, da. Next thing you know, multimillion dollar contract in less than three months. Now, that's just me. I'm not a sales guy. So for me to be able to drop a very short clip where someone doesn't have to spend 10 minutes, they could spend 90 seconds. And if you title your takeaways and those links correctly, you're going to get people to engage. And it happened. And now they're a client with a multi- year deal. So there's more like that. But that's probably one of the, one of the easiest ones. And I constantly remind our CMO like, oh yeah, that podcast where I dropped the F bomb and beat up on this and that and the other thing, remember, it's booking business. So, let me do what I do.

Katie Nehrenz: Yeah. Yeah. I'm just fired up. This is the stuff that really gets me going. So I'm ready to do karate in the garage right now. For those who are listening, if you have any questions or anything, make sure to hit the Q& A section. I saw a few of you already chatting in. Make sure to hit the Q & A section if you have any questions that you would like Tim to answer here shortly. But I'm not done with you yet. I want to talk about success metrics because you hear so much about grow, grow, grow, grow. You have a little bit of a different perspective. I mean, everyone loves growth, but you have a different perspective on what defines success within a podcast. So, I would love for you to tell us a little bit about success metrics and what you're looking at.

Tim Glomb: Yeah. Well, I have to go back to my prior days. So 20 years ago at MTV, we were getting 3. 0 ratings. I mean millions and millions of dollars in advertising. It was all about eyeballs. We were beating out Sunday nights with college football and rehash things. And it was great. Oh, you got great views and you got a ton of people. Mark Cuban, when I went there, it was like, " Tim, how do we get all the Rolling Stone fans to come Thursday night at 10:00 PM Eastern, because this is a live concert. It's only going to play once and that's it. There's no appointment viewing. It's not like we're going to have live concerts every Thursday at 8: 00 PM like traditional broadcast TV has had a train to do for decades." So those were about mass scale. The bigger the number, the better. If you could add one more view or one more Nielsen point to the rating, you were winning. Here, it's a completely different animal. I actually want to see fewer views, mainly Cheetah, again, we're an enterprise based business. So if Tony or Sue's pizza place, the mom had pop down the shop wants to watch my content. That's great. I'd love for them to watch it. But when they hit request a demo, instantly, they're not qualified. We don't have a product for them. Now at CM, through this merger earlier this year, I do have a product for Sue and Tony, so call me. But in general, the idea was, I want the right people looking at our content. I want qualified people looking at it. I would never, ever high five on a call if the content team comes and goes, hey, we've got 10, 000 views on that Starbucks video. I'll go, something went wrong. It's like the mass market and consumers got ahold of it. So, how do we fix that? Fix the STO problem. We only want marketers or people in our target audience. So, big numbers, they don't impress me. It's just like web views or anything else. What Casted has been able to do with us in conjunction with Salesforce, with our single source of intelligence is understand who is coming. So, if I only have 300 views on a particular case study in the first month, that doesn't bother me. As long as I can see who is actually viewing it and take that information, which is sales team and the STRs. They have access to all that in Salesforce. They can go, oh wow, look, so and so, they've been on my prospect list. They've been ignoring my emails, but they just watched that video. Okay. Now I got a good subject line. How'd you like the Starbucks video? Want to see more? That intelligence is how we measure success. It's not view counts. It's not time on site. It's not even really like total minutes watched. That would be a consumer based product, a Netflix product, something that's generating advertising from mass views. So for us, it's the intelligence layer that Casted allows us to harness and get it into, for us, it's Salesforce. We also have HubSpot so that data goes in there as well. So that's how I measure success. Did the right people actually know and come and watch a takeaway clip or the whole video?

Katie Nehrenz: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. I love that so much. And yeah, so it's 10 of the right audience members versus a hundred, a thousand of just audience members in general.

Tim Glomb: I'll take the 10 best prospects over 100 just qualified leads all day long. Because then, look, what did I say we're in? We're in the relationship marketing business. That means you have to start conversations. If I asked you, hey, do you love spaghetti or sorry, if I asked you, hey, do you eat meat? And you said, no. I said, great, come on over to my barbecue. I got all this meat this weekend. You'd be like, you're an asshole. Why? Same thing. If somebody came and interact with us, came to a webpage, watched a clip, that's intelligence, that's the next level in the conversation. It's a back and forth. So now, rather than me shooting for the moon going, hey, we're Cheetah, we've got these great products. You should buy them. You've started a journey. You watched something or you clicked on something or you engage with something. And that is my point, that's my next jumping off point. I can continue that conversation and refine the journey to what you're looking for. And Casted, among other technology non- video, but Casted is our partner for video for that.

Katie Nehrenz: That's incredible. And I bet it was incredibly frustrating before, too, when you had absolutely zero visibility into it. And that's what we hear so much from our customers is that they can see how many views they're getting. They can see how many listings. They can see how many subscribers. But it's all anonymized. They don't have any pains, any faces, any brands, nothing. So I can imagine that was very, very frustrating for you.

Tim Glomb: And I still empathize with a lot of our clients, right, because before I joined Cheetah, I sat in the seat of like, how do I get more eyeballs on this content for my brand? How do I tell them this is the world's best water bottle and get them to buy it. And you're right with the death of cookies, with tracking in limbo with all this state legislation coming around of what you can and can't do. Who can you track? Who are you bartering and buying third party data from to understand who these people are? I really empathize with the brand marketers who have to reach millions of consumers to turn them into hundreds of thousands of customers, consumers into customers. I empathize with them. I hope that there's a Casted for that mass market, but right now in the B2B space, it's a no brainer. The intelligence, the flexibility, being able to enhance that journey for a particular client or prospect, that's everything.

Katie Nehrenz: Yeah. Yeah. And that's a great kind of lead into, I wanted to talk a little bit about ROI as well because we hear a lot of, I can't tell who my audience is. I can only see growth or I'm really focused on numbers. A lot of people also are really struggling to calculate their return on creativity, their return on investment. And I love your perspective on it and how you've been able to impact your customer journey. So, I would love for you to kind of dive into what your perspective is on ROI and how you've kind of come to understand it with the podcasting that you're doing, working with Casted and all the bells and whistles in between.

Tim Glomb: Yeah. Look, there's one that was a no brainer for me from an ROI perspective. Casted is not a multimillion dollar cost center to us. I mean, it is a very affordable product, you guys. And what I also love about Casted, you're a startup. I mean, you're in Indianapolis. Your CEO had a great vision as bringing it to life, but you're a startup, which means you're nimble, you're hungry, right? I've always seen the space of technology. You are either innovating and you're like keeping your customers super excited because you're innovating or you're at this top level where you're like, this is the product end of it. Maybe we'll add a couple of widgets once a year, but we're just scaling. Now, we just want like a million customers on it and make our money. At Cheetah, we put 25% of our top line revenue back into research and development. We are constantly innovating. That's why I think we're better than some of the big cloud marketers who are just big public companies and just scale. They don't innovate. Casted is innovative. We call Adam. It's like, hey Adam, is this possible? He's like, that's a great idea. We should have thought of that. Yeah, let's do that. It's on the roadmap. I'm not saying that everything we ask for is on the roadmap and you should never, Mark Cuban taught me this a long time ago. Your customers are never always right. Meaning they have great ideas, but don't let them drive your roadmap fully. So you guys have a good blend and balance of that. But when it came to ROI, I looked at the time it took. I knew slippery content was the way for us to get out there that 90 second clip with that title, right, 30 minute interview, 10 little clips that I can distribute as needed. I knew that's the way we're going to win. To do that in a production world and go into premier and say, oh great, thanks for editing that 30 minute sit down interview. Can you now make these 10 clips out? Oh and by the way, load them up the Vimeo or Wistia or whatever. Now I got all these different URLs I got to manage. And I got a library. Oh crap. I did, I'm making this up, 10 big interviews in the last quarter, but now I have a hundred clips to manage. Where's that one clip? Casted simplified that. It took post production out of the mix. And right there, the time saving alone meant the opportunity cost was gone. Now my editors can work on continually creating new content, load it to Casted. The transcript is there, very quickly highlight, make your takeaways. Nobody needs to know Premiere Pro no one has to edit or blade or render or export or upload or manage a list of URLs. It's all right there. So, that was the biggest ROI for me, was getting time back to do more with less. As far as ROI, I can't say enough. Now, the way that we got the restaurant client, my old friend, yeah, we could have dropped that through a YouTube link or VIM link, but I would've had to have created those short little bits and that takes time. So Casted, literally, I mean, if you haven't looked at Casted player, go to cheetahdigital. com under Resources, look at podcast or videos, and you'll see it clear as day. There's a tiny little link on every single little takeaway every chapter and you can just share that link instantly. That was the biggest ROI for me.

Katie Nehrenz: Yep. Yep. And takeaways, I mean, like I said, they're my jam. There's so many podcasts I want to listen to. Our customers have amazing content and I can't sit there and listen to every single episode from beginning to end. So, being able to go in and boom, boom, boom, through those highlights and still get a great dose of what they're talking about and great takeaways. Huge. Absolutely huge.

Tim Glomb: And look, one other thing that's been a differentiator for us, please, even if you're not in the market, go watch one video that's linked off on our website. I try and do comedic, funny introductions. Anytime you sit down in a B2B, you got to explain who you're talking to, right? Hey, I'm sitting down with Barbara Spearing at Starbucks. If you don't know Starbucks, they're a giant coffee company started in the '70s and da, da, da, da, da. And you waste that time with two people in a room. Hey, what do you do? What's your revenue model, da da, da? We do these really fun, comedic intros. Like on Starbucks, I flew around the city in a chartered plane and like narrate what Starbucks is about, where it's founded and even show off like the big eye and the sports stadium from the air. I've jumped out of an airplane to start a session. Being able to take that as a takeaway and throw that on LinkedIn for the shock factor of like, hey, I'm sitting down with Starbucks jumping out of a plane, come check it out. That gets attention. So a blend of creative being, able to take that little like 60, 90 second intro, drop that on LinkedIn and then follow up with more specific topics that we talked about, the meat and potatoes, of what we actually wanted to achieve. But we put a creative flare on the front of it. And that also has gotten eyeballs. We've had CEOs from brands that deal with our competitors, they don't deal with us, send emails to our CEO and go. That was really funny. I got to give kudos to you. Next time we're up for renewal, we should definitely talk. Your team's doing some, some interesting stuff. You got my attention. You jumped out of a plane with Tommy Lee from Motley Crew. So get creative. Don't just lean on the technology. That's what bit us in the ass as marketers with cookies. We got too fat eating cookies and we got reliant on it. You still have to be creative. You still have to tell a good story. But Casted is part of that technology that can help make that more impactful.

Katie Nehrenz: Yeah. Yeah. I just cut screen in my head to like marketing, having a conversation with Lindsay and saying, we want you to jump out of an airplane on this next podcast episode and just picturing her reaction right now, man.

Tim Glomb: Yeah. Well...

Katie Nehrenz: That's good stuff.

Tim Glomb: Our CMO did it and that videos on our site. Our CMO did it and he was dropping bricks as we were in the plane. He's like, "We're really doing this?" I'm like, " Let's go." And it was great. We literally jettisoned out of an airplane and we landed in a field, took off our parachutes and started an entire conference, a virtual conference. It was fun.

Katie Nehrenz: We're not worthy kind of moment right now. This was absolutely awesome. And again, for those that are listening, if you have any questions that you would love Tim to address or expand upon, definitely hit the Q& A section. I see a few that have already come through. The last thing I'm going to hit you with today, Tim, before we jump into Q&S is there's a lot of B2B marketers that are listening today, or that will listen. They're either baby content marketers, or they are getting their feet wet and they're just trying to become more efficient. So if you could offer a single piece of advice and you've given a lot to think about so far, but if you could offer a single piece of advice, what would that be?

Tim Glomb: Look, just do it. I mean, it's a great slogan. It works in all situations. Don't sit on the rails. Don't have conversations back and forth. Should we invest in this? Should we invest in that? Do it. If you're thinking about going heavier in the video, just do it and measure it. And if it fails, okay, well at least you tried. So, you got to be willing to take risks. And when I landed here at Cheetah, the CEO Sameer Kazi, at the time was like, "You want to do what?" I'm like, " Just trust me, just trust me." And we jumped out of airplanes. We hung out with Tommy Lee for Motley Crew. It has nothing to do with marketing technology. We did some really crazy stuff. Our first interview with one of our clients when I got here, we are hanging in trees in a forest. It's an outdoor hunting archery company. And we had the interview in full blown camouflage in the forest. And the CEO was like, " What are you doing?" And I'm like, " Just trust me." And now, everyone's like, " Oh Tim, what are you going to do on the next one?" And now, I'm putting other people in precarious positions and just do it. Do it differently, put your stamp on it. And I'll steal something from Barbara Spearing at Starbucks, where she told me like, take the heart of what your company is doing and the head. And the head is like, we got to execute it. We need to cast it. We need to commit and try video, go deep. And the heart is, what do you stand for? Make sure that comes out. I stand for fun. If you're on my team, I got a global team. I tell all of them. If you're not having fun, hit the panic button, hit the ejection button, call me. We're going to find a way to make your job fun. It's work. We all have to work. You got to have fun. So do it have fun. Just do it.

Katie Nehrenz: Love it. Life is too damn short.

Tim Glomb: Yeah. Way, way too short. We were just talking. I'm almost 50 and I feel like an 18 year old kid. My hamstring injury from skateboarding a couple of months ago would tell you different, but you know...

Katie Nehrenz: Yeah. It's not so easy to do those things anymore. Yeah. Even going to concerts ... Yeah. Yeah. Even concerts, head banging, you're usually stiff in the neck for a couple of days. It's not a week afterwards. So, the struggle is real.

Tim Glomb: That's what you need Advil for. And look, in Colorado, you got a lot of recreational products to fix those problems.

Katie Nehrenz: All right. Let's get into some Q&A. This has been awesome. Thank you so much.

Tim Glomb: Yeah.

Katie Nehrenz: We have a question from Nicole that says, " Can you expand on the enablement piece? What tactics have you employed to communicate the resources available and get people to take action?"

Tim Glomb: Yeah. So, a good one there. I mean, look, you can put SMIFs in place. You can put monetary. You can put kind of goals and dangle carrots in front of people. Sometimes that works. I don't know how your sales team, your enablement team is... What lever are they driven by? What I did very quickly is I went out and found the, I think, it was five people that I knew. I was like, if I can get these five people in two months to adopt it, give me feedback. Why my idea of using Casted in these takeaways either works or doesn't. If I can get those five people to do it and get them on board, again, it's back to the trickle down. So it took some time, but get those taste makers, get those influencers inside your organization on board and you'll win. It's like anything else. If you're all rowing in a boat and you're all going in different directions, you're going to go in a circle. Get those key tastemakers on board and the rest will follow.

Katie Nehrenz: Awesome. Next question coming from Mark, " How do you figure out which content to send a customer in the initial outreach?"

Tim Glomb: Yeah, that's a good one. We here at Cheetah Digital and the CM group, we have a letter called first call decks. Usually, the suggested content that we're going to offer up to the sales or biz dev team has to align with what do we know about the brand, right? So the biz dev team is doing a little bit of research. And like I said, we use some tools like 6sense that tells us, hey, Coca- Cola is doing a search for emotional loyalty. That's probably where you should go in. We have an email platform, we have an acquisition platform, mobile platform, but we also have a loyalty platform. So, understanding what the client wants and needs. But, again, remember what I talked about, our teams, either the content team can craft it for them or an individual salesperson can build their own playlist. There's a great playlist feature inside of Casted. So if they're going into the first call and they're like, oh, I don't know what they're going to want to talk about. It's like, all right, well cool. Set up a playlist and have like 20 options. And if they say, yeah, yeah, yeah, you're pushing me into emotional loyalty. But realistically, my biggest RFP or the biggest advantage is an email marketing platform. Can we talk about that? Have that in your playlist, know your playlist. Just like if you're having friends over for dinner. I have some friends that come over for dinner, I go right to Slayer. I got some other friends that like counting crows. Know your audience, but be prepared, have those playlists and know what's available in your library. You'll win.

Katie Nehrenz: That's fantastic advice. And that really speaks to me right now, as I've been working on building the playlist for my seven year old son's birthday party this weekend. We will have friends. There will be kids. So we're figuring out what kind of appeals to everybody there. And it's actually been a lot of fun. So that hits me right now.

Tim Glomb: I would shy away from the Slayer on that one.

Katie Nehrenz: Yeah. Probably going to leave the Slayer on a different playlist, but yeah, yeah. Let's see, we've got two more it looks like. And it looks like we're doing all right on time. Whether they're B2B or general consumer, do you listen to any audio only podcasts and why or why not?

Tim Glomb: Yes, that's a good question. Do I personally? I really don't. I do have books on tape. I love the HBR series. Harvard Business Review has some great stuff. I own all those books, both in hard copy, I just have it on the desk earlier. Hard copy and in the virtual world. I do a lot of driving. I put 28, 000 miles on my truck last year. I love to drive. I live in the mountains at 10,000 feet in Colorado and I'm constantly driving. So audio is huge for me in that capacity. I can focus on the road but still take in what I'm listening to. But in general, personally, I'm not an audio only listener. I need that visual. I've always been a visual guy. If you can show me a stat, a chart, something like that. I'm just visually driven. So I don't know, maybe I forced that need onto Cheetah, but it's working like we're heavy on video and it works.

Katie Nehrenz: Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. What video podcast do you like?

Tim Glomb: There's actually not many video podcasts that I watch. I'll go to YouTube for like life hacks and things like that. I love YouTube, man. There's so many things out there. Like you got a gadget or this or that, or you don't know how to do something, YouTube it, and literally you're a rock star. You don't need a handyman anymore. But there's nothing that I really watch or listen to on a consistent basis outside of those HBR series that I'm a subscriber to.

Katie Nehrenz: Awesome. All right. Last question, on average, how many pieces of content do your customers touch before they reach out for a meeting? And what do you think that says about Cheetah's marketing team?

Tim Glomb: Yeah. This is an interesting one. I don't know that specific answer. I probably should know that answer and I think it varies by industry again and you got to put a lot of filters on this answer, right? If I'm Emma email marketing, you can go and swipe a credit card today online and have an Emma email marketing campaign up for your pizza place. Like single location, pizza place. Cheetah Digital is completely different. We are really only going after big enterprise brands. So, I'll talk in that context, going after big enterprise brands. The industry, we found that financial services is probably the ones that lean forward the most to have calls. Number one, if you've ever met an accountant or anybody in finance, they're very matter of fact, they don't dilly dolly around. They know the cost of time, literally like they know what the time costs. So they're not browsing. They're not in the background poking around. They just, hey, can we have a meeting? I want to know if you could do X, Y, and Z. I have a lot of requirements. All right, cool. In the retail space, we do see a lot of passive, I'll call it, consumption. Retailers, both the retailers themselves and the brands that are selling into retailers like, for example, I'll say a Walmart and then maybe... I think I bought this at Walmart, that bottle company. They are always looking to stay up on the trends and how to connect with consumers. So they consume a lot of content. The average piece before they ask for a meeting? I don't know. What I worry about is and I close my eyes and I say, if I'm back, if I'm that brand marketer, and luckily I have that empathy, right? I was a brand marketer for a decade before I landed here in technology. I'll say, what are my biggest concerns? What are the other whirlwind of the day tornado things I have to do in my job? And can someone just put in front of me a piece of content that is meaningful, not like, oh, here are the five email tips for better email open rates. That's tactical level. That's not going to win an enterprise million dollar contract. But if I can say, like I talked about in our podcast Thinking Caps, we talk a lot about it. Oh my gosh, Virginia, Colorado, California, they all passed all this new legislation. How's that going to affect my business? Do I need to go to a masterclass? If they can get 10 minutes from me going, you probably saw the Wall Street Journal, the Forbes and so, and so launch these articles. I'm going to distill them down what you need to know and what the takeaways are in less than 10 minutes. I just solved their problem. Hopefully they trust me. And even if they don't know me, they're like, all right, I'll at least give this guy a chance because I don't have time to read all this stuff and we get to the heart of the matter. So I worry less about how much content they're consuming. And I worry more about is my team creating the right content that's differentiated from my competitors. And am I addressing real problems? Not beating my own chest going, great, we sent 30 billion emails on black Friday. Who cares? How are you solving a problem for somebody? If you can solve somebody's problem, they'll do business with you all day long. So make sure your content is solving problems.

Katie Nehrenz: Yep, yep, yep, absolutely. And I actually lied to you. I said that was the last question, but Nicole, step one more in and hi Nicole, she's one of my customers. So I'm really excited that she's digging this. " Do you invite guests on your aspirational client list? Those not necessarily in your pipeline yet. And if so, how do you approach the ask?"

Tim Glomb: We've done that a couple of times, mainly because people have reacted to our podcasts saying, that's an interesting take, we disagree or we agree with your point of view on that topic, whatever it might be. But we have not and maybe I should. I'm producing what we call The Signals Event. This is like our fourth year, it's a big virtual content event. Casted is going to be a huge part of that. Probably 30 plus sessions for the month of October. Every Wednesday and October, you're going to have pre- recorded content by topic. It'll be a huge promotion. Hopefully you see that promotion and you come. That's probably an area of opportunity for me to go out and say, hey, you don't do business with us, but you want to talk about these topics, privacy, loyalty, email marketing, the death of the cookies. Come on, let's talk about it. Even though we're not doing business, we're wide open today The good news is we have so many great clients that want to get involved in our content. I got to fulfill that need and that's where I've been focused. But Nicole, you got me thinking, maybe I need to put out a Craigslist ad and say, hey, come talk to us.

Katie Nehrenz: I love it. Customer sharing stuff, sharing ideas. That's what it's all about. I love it. Well, I've walked away with a new term that I am really excited about and that's slippery content. I'm going to be using that like crazy. But thank you so much.

Tim Glomb: Yeah.

Katie Nehrenz: This was so much fun. I love all the insight that you shared today and hopefully it got everybody else's wheels turning a little bit too.

Tim Glomb: Yeah. Yeah. Look, always happy to do it. As you can tell, I'll talk for hours if you let me. I'm passionate about this stuff though, that's the other thing, you got to love what you do. You got to have fun. And if you're passionate about it, hopefully that comes out. So happy to do it anytime. And look, anybody watching, anybody sees this, I don't care if it's live or a year from now, you have any questions hit me up. I'm on LinkedIn, Tim Glomb in LinkedIn. Just look at Cheetah Digital, CM group. I'm easy to find. I'm Tim Glomb on Instagram too if you want to watch some stuff there. So reach out, I'm happy to answer any questions for anyone.

Katie Nehrenz: Awesome. Awesome. And I'll take you up on that long talk track next time you're in indie. So we'll go to Kuma and we'll head up the Tiki bar across the street.

Tim Glomb: I love it. We'll go listen to some Gwar, some metal and have some great hamburgers.

Katie Nehrenz: And that's our show. Thank you so much for tuning in. To learn more about Cheetah Digital and all the incredibly cool things Tim and his team are doing with their content, make sure to visit cheetahdigital. com and check out any of their podcasts, like Thinking Caps the Pulses and Uncage Wisdom. To learn more about how Casted can help you, visit casted. us. And be sure to subscribe to our newsletter to get the latest on all things, amplified marketing, B2B podcasting and more.