Episode Summary
Working for Google at the beginning of his career, Jay became fascinated with the overuse of marketing buzzwords, even ranking them weekly like a list of best sports teams. He eventually decided the buzzword “best practices” encompassed all the other buzzwords, which have a tendency to become meaningless and stunt both business and personal growth.
Success is a byproduct of diligent effort, not the reward of a grand moment of creativity. Jay learned by working, over and over again, educating himself about podcasts and how to interact with audiences, until he was able to put systems into place that aided him in sustaining higher success.
The podcaster has to balance creativity with results. One of the best ways to do so is to ignore overused trends and strategies, such as “gaining brand awareness,” in favor of doing the hard work of trial and error. Jay went from knowing nothing about podcasting in 2012 to running and owning highly successful podcast projects in 2020.
He didn’t get to that level of expertise overnight, and neither will the new podcaster if he or she rides the waves of popular buzzwords and trends. One key ingredient to successful podcasting is discovering why you want to make the podcast in the first place. What is your service goal, and who are you helping?
Guest Profile
- Name: Jay Acunzo
- What Jay does: Jay runs the highly successful 3 Clips podcast and is a sought-after expert on how to build podcasts from the ground up.
- Company: Marketing Showrunners - 3 Clips
- Key Quote: “Creativity has become interpreted anyway as big, but when you actually execute every single day on a creative project, or you have a creative career, or you’re just creating, that’s the job really. It’s not to be creative. The job is to create.”
Key Insights
- Businesses today are swept up in certain marketing buzzwords that don’t mean much anymore due to overuse. The term “best practices” makes for a good captain for these buzzwords. The term creativity has also developed a meaning unclear, and it is used in ways that don’t actually benefit companies as much as they think it does. Instead, Jay recommends developing a system of processes based on a lot of trial and error
- Creativity is neither a talent nor a skill. “It’s a way of operating. But somewhere along the way…we’ve started to construe creativity as [an] attempt to save our [rear ends]. Like we’re going to have to go big here. We have to innovate” to achieve bigger results. But creativity comes from doing the work day in and day out, a mindset rather than a hard-to-grasp talent.
- Another buzzword, “awareness,” helps companies to ride the waves of the biggest trends, which they hope bring them to the top of the business world. Again, though, awareness isn’t winning anything so much as working with your marketing and building, over time, what people respond to, paying attention to your audience and building something to serve them, rather than serving a get-rich-quick company attitude.
Episode Highlights
- Buzzwords are a buzzkill to real innovation
Buzzwords are slowing real innovation because they are less practical and more abstract. “[A]ll these buzzwords…community and customer centric and all these things that actually do mean [something]….I mean, we’ve made storytelling a buzzword….It’s just that we use this as a slogan and we lose sight of what it means.”
“So the mother of all buzzwords for me is best practices, and all the other buzzwords kind of dull up [into] that one….It really did claim number one.”
- Creativity is being misapplied and it doesn’t mean “to go big”
Creativity isn’t a separate action from what a team should already be doing. It’s not something you pull together to save a project. Creativity is “a way of operating.”
“When you actually execute every single day on a creative project, or you have a creative career, or you’re just creating…[i]t’s not to be creative. The job is to create.”
- Build small things first and create systems to sustain success
- Developing a show isn’t about hitting home runs (going viral) or choosing best equipment
- Achieving great success through trial and error, mixed with pure joy of podcasting
Podcasting is something Jay has always had a lot of fun doing. He didn’t wait to know what all the terms meant; he learned as he went and made adjustments. For example: “How do I come up with a concept for the show? And then later I learned, Oh, that’s called the premise and you can build it with intention, not just with gut-feel.”
Don’t wait for the perfected idea. That’s unnecessary. Learn by doing. “So I guess the short answer is I just made a ton of stuff with no agenda.”
- Are you gaining awareness or are you doing something that matters
Awareness is important to many companies, but awareness in and of itself means nothing in terms of new customers. To know something exists is not the same as wanting to interact with that thing. Affinity must be the aim. Getting customers to like you will translate to new customers.
“And by the way, in any relationship, the action come after you’ve earned it. So everybody out here is trying to do things that grow. No one is stopping and wondering, Are we doing anything?”
- Balancing the control/certainty teeter totter
