Successfully Navigating Online Marketing For Profit with Dan Kahn

00:00 Andy Splichal Welcome to the Make Each Click Count Podcast. This is your host, Andy Splichal. We are happy to welcome this week's guest to discuss today's topic, which is successfully navigating online marketing for a profit. Today's guest is a marketing professional with decades of experience, following an accomplished career as an automotive journalist. He shifted focus and founded Kahn Media in 2008, building the innovative and fully integrated marketing firm from the ground up as given to him. Kahn Media, a unique insight and perspective into building brands, entrepreneurship, and what it takes for businesses of all sizes to be successful. A big welcome to Dan Kahn. Hi, Dan.

00:44 Dan Kahn Hey Andy, thanks for having me. I appreciate it. Good to be here.

Andy Splichal We're excited to have you. We're excited to have you. Love to talk about marketing, especially marketing for a profit. So let's start here. In 2023, what do you think the best way is for a company to connect with their audience?

Dan Kahn I am a big believer, Andy, in knowing your audience before you try to connect with them. So to us at Kahn Media, it's really the first step is always research. And we have developed kind of organically over the years. I wish I could say that this is something that we sort of started doing on day one, but my sort of life philosophy is make every mistake once. And that's sort of how we grow and we learn. And one of the things with digital marketing in particular that we've learned over the years is it's pretty challenging to be successful. And by successful, I mean to make sort of meaningful connections between brands and their consumer, their audience by just sort of diving in and going for it. So historically, we'll typically spend 30 to 60 days in research mode on both kind of working with the client to understand sort of their product, their culture, their community. We also spend a lot of time looking at who their target consumer is, their consumer's behavior, what their consumer acquisition looks like, where those consumers spend their time, how they consume content, their age, their demographic, their psychographics. We build out a pretty robust profile first so that we have like almost an avatar, so to speak, of exactly who that target is. And then once we have that sort of built out, we have a really deep understanding of who that customer is, where they live, how they shop, how they consume content. Then we start picking platforms and we start kind of building out content and paid files.

Andy Splichal Interesting. How, I guess the obvious question, how do you perform that research? And it's definitely unique because most clients, is there any pushback on a month or two before you start when you're doing this research?

Dan Kahn There is. You know, we ended up over and over and over again, we had this sort of same experience where we would go through our own sales process where we're a B2B business, right? So we service brands, everything from little startups to giant Fortune 50 companies. And we'll end up talking to someone who wants to work with an agency or wants a digital marketing program or a PR program, an integrated marketing program. And we go through the week or two week or a couple month long dance of sort of figuring out how we're going to work together. And then they sign on the line and they go, okay, like the following Monday, they're like, hit the light switch, turn on the sales. Yep, yep, absolutely. Yeah. And it's every time, right? It doesn't matter if you're working with someone who's never worked with an agency before or someone who's like a pretty diehard CMO with decades of experience, they all kind of come to the table with that same expectation that you're just like, hit the magic sales button and sales suddenly start materializing. And it's like, and so we've actually had to develop because you're absolutely right. It does create some awkward conversations where we go, okay, great, we're signed up. Now we have to start doing research and we're not actually going to like do anything that's going to develop real sales numbers for weeks, months, you know, typically 30 days is sort of a minimum 90 days.

Andy Splichal Yeah, no, I mean, that that must be a. I mean, how's that conversation go? I, you know, I mean, you're right. I, when I have a new client side with me, you know, the first day they're like, all right, I signed up yesterday, but I don't see any new sales today.

Dan Kahn So we've made that conversation a little bit easier through some expectation management and some of that is with content. So we write a lot of content for our blog about kind of what this process is, how it works, how it's supposed to kind of the timeline. We also built something that we put in our proposals that say a client bill of rights. And so basically what that looks like is it basically says, hey, look, as our as your agency, here's what you can expect from us. When it details everything on including timelines and onboarding and research and on the flip side, it says now as our client, here's what we expect from you. So we actually talk about sort of the patients, the turnaround times in terms of like communication, like, hey, we ask you for certain materials, you have to get it to us in a timely manner. If you make us wait two weeks, it just pushes the timeline back two weeks. And so we put all that in writing. We also what started off as sort of a conversation we've actually developed into sort of like an HTML5 kind of questionnaire, the sort of animated and looks a little cleaner where we actually will send prospective clients. So they're signing a link and they hit that link and it starts popping up these questions about their business, their service, their products, their expectations, their KPIs, what their sales goals are. And they have to sort of fill in these questions and it sort of populates our own kind of spreadsheet with all this content so that we can have those early conversations before we even sign them. And no, if they're in financial trouble and they're looking at us for some sort of miracle, you know, one of my coworkers uses this phrase that I think is really good, which is good PR can't fix bad business decisions. And that applies to digital marketing too. Like if a company made a bad decision and has some sort of like giant glut in unsold inventory and they want us to like turn on some magic DM campaign and blow all this unsold inventory out in 60 days or something. That's probably not realistic, right? So it's not a band aid. Like it needs to be a collaborative process and we need to kind of come up with a plan that's realistic, that's going to actually work, but also isn't going to damage their brand because one of the other things that we are pretty firm believers in is if If a company starts leaning too hard on like heavy discounts and sales and an oral day sale, July 4 sale and Thanksgiving sale and they're using DM to sort of constantly discount the sort of move product, that's degrading their brand. So it also kind of violates their map, you know, pricing policies and stuff like that. So that's why we try to have those expectation setting conversations on the front end. So we know exactly what they're looking for, how they define the win. We can explain to them our process. There's certainly, you know, one of our challenges as an agency that has the entirety of our staff is based in the US. Everyone, we're all specialists. We have people in nine states. But we don't use these sort of like inexpensive labor overseas kind of shops that we like sub out work to.

Andy Splichal So let me ask, I think where could really benefit listeners is in developing that customer avatar. How do you get that in the research in that two months?

Dan Kahn Yeah, so good question. So part of it is we have sort of a fixed sort of questionnaire that we've kind of developed over the last couple years, which is what you would sort of expect. Right. So there's a lot of questions about sort of what your distribution model looks like as a company. You know, you're asking the company this now. Yeah. So we go straight to whoever our point of contact is. Usually it's like a CMO or maybe a like a VP of sales. Sometimes it's the principal of the company, if it's a smaller company or someone who's high up in the sales sort of food chain at a company. But we're asking the client questions about like, you know, do you sell direct to consumer? Do you exclusively sell through distribution? You know, who is that consumer? And hopefully like a good partner client is going to have at least some of that data already set aside. Like they're going to know I only sell through big box retailers and I need you to create pull at the bottom of that funnel. I only sell direct to consumer and I need to pump that up. I have some sort of hybrid of that. And then depending on sort of their answer to that question, if they only sell through distribution, they may not have a super clear picture of who that consumer is. If they sell even a little bit through direct to consumer, obviously that gets a lot easier because now you can start having those direct consumer conversations and you can send them surveys and you can actually start learning directly from your consumer. Even if it's like the canary in the coal mine and even if it's a small percentage of your total sales, it creates a lot of great opportunities to have those conversations. If they're not doing that, which half our clients don't sell direct to consumer, they sell through distribution only, we have to build out those profiles. And that's when we start doing our own market research. We have a market research team in-house. We can put together those demographic and psychographic profiles of who that target customer is. And sometimes it's very general. Sometimes it's very specific. We have a client that is the largest retailer. They sell DTC. They have print catalogs. They have a very robust online presence. They're the largest retailer of Jeep parts and accessories in the world. Well, you would think in your head, like the Jeep customer is a, like you probably have a vision in your head right now. All your listeners listening right now are probably thinking of some kind of like a guy in tacky pants, you know, and some sort of crocodile dundee had driving around in his Jeep. But the reality is more than 50% of Jeep owners are women. And a lot of them are young women and a lot of them live in urban settings. So we had to kind of figure that out the hard way, right? So we had to start figuring out who is this customer? Well, there is certainly the hardcore Jeep customer that they already knew about because that's part of their business, right? So they know how to sell to the DIY guy who spends his weekends installing a winch or installing some big off-road tires and a lift kit. They knew who that customer was. We had to try and figure out, well, where's the other 51%? Who's that other customer? It turns out that might be a mom who likes taking her Jeep for carpool. That might be a business professional who just likes the look of driving a Jeep and lives in Chicago. So we had to figure out kind of the different subsets of who those customers were, why they ended up with that brand, what the lifestyle accessories are that they're looking for that kind of complement, you know, the way they use their vehicle. And then we could start building out creative and content and funnels and targeting.

Andy Splichal Yeah, let's talk about that. So you've figured out who these different avatars are. The Jeep one's a great example. How are you using that and in what channels as far as making that creative?

Dan Kahn So it totally depends on the demo, right? So for the college age female consumer, that this is probably their first new car. This is like they want to kind of have, they're putting out a certain vibe, right? So that's why they want to have that Jeep and not a Honda Accord or something like that. That is a specific consumer. They have a specific personality profile. We're probably talking to them on TikTok. We're probably doing a fair amount of paid, you know, feed insertion posts in Instagram. It's a lot of lifestyle content where we ended up doing a lot of photo shoots where it's, you know, young couples at the lake. The guy's got a fishing rod in his hand, the girl's sitting in a reclining chair. There's a couple of beers in the background, the Jeep sort of in the foreground. We're selling a lifestyle, right? And then that ad is marketing all, it's marketing their chair holders, it's marketing the cooler, it's marketing all these sort of lifestyle accessories. We're certainly not putting that stuff on Facebook. To the hardcore Jeep off-road customer who's probably more like my age, you know, middle age, you know, house in the suburbs, got a couple of kids, drives this thing to work one of the weekends wants to go off-roading or use it as a tool to get to the mountain bike trail. Different demo, that's going to be, there's going to be a fair amount of paid search. There's going to be some YouTube pre-roll ads that customer is doing the first group. They don't even necessarily know that there's a category of products they can buy to accessorize their Jeep. So they're not going to go looking for us or for our client because they don't know our category even exists. So we have to get into their feed to share these lifestyle images to show them that, hey, we can compliment your lifestyle, check out these cool products that actually fit what you're already doing. For that second category, which is the middle-aged guy, that's the researcher, right? So he's out there looking, he wants to buy a lift kit. He wants to know which lift kit is the best lift kit. What's the best price? What's the best ride? What's the best handling? So there's going to be paid search. He's doing research on YouTube. So we're going to have some pre-roll ads on there. He's going to look for things on Instagram. He's certainly in some Facebook groups. So we're going to be in the Facebook groups talking about it. We're going to have paid promotion on Facebook. Are we spending a lot of money targeting that guy on TikTok? Probably not.

Andy Splichal Now you make some great points. I wanted to add the content's unique because most agencies do not offer content creation like you do. When did you make the decision to get in and offer content creation?

Dan Kahn Day one. So we were sort of a unique situation in 2008, 15 years ago. I worked as an account director at another HCS, straight PR agency. All we did was traditional PR. And I had come, I started my career as a journalist and I had worked in both print and digital. And I was at some of the early automotive blogs when, well, I was there when the term blog was coined. So we did a fair amount of work early in my career on sort of SEO and on sort of creating digital connectivity. So when I went to the PR side and ended up pretty high up the food chain at this agency, it became very clear that you could start fostering relationships between brands and consumers through digital. And a lot of that needed to be facilitated through content. And so I wrote a business plan, presented it to ownership. He didn't feel like that was a good way for them to go. He said, no, we do PR and we're at Pitch Stories for magazines. Okay. So I left and started my agency, but that was the kernel. That thing I'd done on kind of nights and weekends on my own, that business plan was what I used to build my company. So on day one, my first hire was a videographer and graphic designer. I have a background as a photographer, so I was doing content creation. He was doing content creation. And so as we've grown and scaled over the years, we've always had an art team. We've always had video people on staff. We've always had graphic designer photographers on staff.

Andy Splichal So you started more as the graphic designer and the content and then moved into managing the different paid channels?

Dan Kahn Yeah, we didn't do paid for about six years. So in the beginning, it was organic social and content creation. And then we did do some some ad creative, but it wasn't so much digital. It was on Syngman Print. And we've always done PR. And in the early days of social 0809, 2010, the reality is you could build a pretty robust audience and a targeted audience organically. And so back then, as long as you had better content than the other guys, your page was going to grow faster and you were going to do more consumer acquisition that way. And it was all organic. And that was kind of the era of wine and roses. It was easy. And all of a sudden, when all these companies started doing IPOs and suddenly they had this fiduciary responsibility to shareholders start making more and more profit. They started turning the screws on the algorithm and it made it harder and harder and harder to connect with new audiences organically. We said, hey, well, we need to start doing more paid digital just to continue to kind of carry on with the way we've been doing business for these clients. And they're growing audiences and they're creating relationships with these consumers and they're creating brand awareness and they're driving sales. And so that was kind of the impetus behind starting our paid digital program in the first place. We already had the content. We just needed more ways to kind of get it out there.

Andy Splichal So let's let's talk about public relations. You had mentioned, you know, you did that right off the bat. Is that still viable in 2023 and how many of your clients come to you for that?

Dan Kahn So the first question is, is it viable? Yes. Is it what a PR person from 20 years ago even recognize what we do as PR right now? Maybe no. That whole both. Both. So there's this sort of two sides of the same table with media and PR and the media landscape and business model has been completely turned upside down. You know, and it's it's been fascinating to watch because for 75, 80 years since a guy named Edward Bernays kind of came up with the concept of PR and sort of coined the phrase. It was always kind of the same. You had sort of a press agent who would call like a staff editor at a newspaper or a producer at a TV show or a reporter at a magazine or whatever and say, hey, I've got the story or I'm going to send you a press release. Let's come up with a way for you to get some content and my client gets written about. We all were right. Well, yeah, as that sort of traditional business of media kind of collapsed. And that was sort of the big publishing companies that produced huge numbers of magazines. They all sort of collapsed because the Internet sort of ate their lunch and newsstands sort of disappeared. The newspaper business is a shadow of its former self. All that stuff started to kind of collapse at the same time that there was a sort of rise in independent content creators. So people like you. So you've got, you know, millions and millions of podcasters out there creating their own content. Things like substack where suddenly now you can be a publisher, you can have a newsletter, you can monetize it and actually make a living. And there's actually mainstream journalists leaving the New York Times and the Wall Street Journal to start a substack where they can actually still kind of do the same thing they're doing, but do it in a dependent way, still get paid. And then obviously the most obvious example is things like YouTube and influencers and content creators on the social platforms. So for us, is PR still valuable? Absolutely. Is it a bunch of people sitting in a boiler room, cranking out press releases and pitching them to magazines and newspapers? There is an element of that. I mean, we still have clients that if we get them in the Wall Street Journal, they are over the moon. And that's why they have a great publication. So like our New York Times or Bloomberg or the traditional media, they still exist. We still work with them. It's very relationship driven. It's super valuable, especially for more like corporate clients.

19:23 Andy Splichal So how many of your clients want the PR though? Or I guess my question is, are they looking for the content creation to manage ads or is it looking for everything? Do all of them want PR? I guess that's really where I'm interested.

Dan Kahn Yeah, good question. So about 20% of our clients are straight PR, PR only. About 20% of our clients are straight digital marketing, no PR, no organic, just paid digital funnel. And then the other 60% is both. So it's kind of a mix. And it kind of usually depends on the size of the company. Our sweet spot for the most part are sort of mid-size, $50 to $250 million a year companies where they have enough marketing budget that they need an agency, but they're not so big that they have multiple agencies. So those are the areas where we're doing PR, we're doing content creation, we're doing digital marketing, we're kind of helping out with a lot. We're sort of like an entire marketing department, just the hallways a little bit longer. We do have some clients like big OEM car makers and stuff like that that are so big, they end up having three, four, five agencies. And one that's just doing advertising, one that just does PR, one that just does digital. So in those cases, maybe we'll only have one task versus many.

Andy Splichal So when you're running PR, what is the goal of running PR? I guess I'm thinking, you know, when you're running consumer ads, trying to get them to purchase, you're thinking the ROI, the ROAS, when you're doing PR for a company, are they looking to expand their brand awareness? And how are you showing profitability on that?

21:05 Dan Kahn That's a really insightful question. So that the, the win is a little different. And we have sort of two types of PR clients, we have sort of the retainer clients where it's sort of an ongoing process. And then we have project clients, the project clients, it's a very defined KPI, it's usually a launch. So either we're promoting an event, we're promoting a new product, that's a very straightforward answer, because that's like, hey, we have this new widget, we need to launch the widget, we need as much. There's also a lot of startups involved with that. And so we're working with like product launches and PR projects, or maybe they're doing like a Series A, and they need a bunch of PR, so they can get like attention from investors, or it's an established company, but they're in a product launch, and they just want as much consumer awareness as possible to drive either direct to consumer sales through their website or foot traffic to a store to go buy it at the local Costco or whatever. The retainer thing, it kind of depends on the client. So when we have sort of ongoing PR relationships with clients, it's a series of campaigns. And so usually with those campaigns, we'll come up at the beginning of the year or the fiscal year, whatever their client calendar looks like, and say, okay, you know, in the first quarter, we're going to focus on sort of general brand awareness, or this particular product that's maybe selling a little slow, we need to get awareness up, or maybe there's a crisis communications challenge where they have a recall, or something like that. So it kind of depends quarter by quarter and client by client, what sort of their needs are. But the overarching answer with those types of clients is they want that third party endorsement. So the kind of the three sort of things that we focus on as an agency or earned media, owned media, paid media, paid is obviously advertising, right? Even if it's digital, PPC, funnel based, it's all advertising, right? And then owned media is their own channels, their own social channels, their own blog, their newsletter. And then the earned media is the PR stuff. And that's basically getting other people to say how great you are.

Andy Splichal Now, if somebody wanted, you know, they have their own business, but they can't afford an agency, where would they start? What are some action tips to try to get some of that earned media?

Dan Kahn So if they're gonna try and tackle it in house, right? Yeah. So that's actually a lot easier than it used to be, if you're willing to put in the work. When I started out in PR, and this is gonna make me sound really old, like media databases were printed in on like paper. And you had like, like you had to subscribe to this like book that they would ship you once a year that was the size of a yellow pages and it was like five grand. And then you'd have this like, you know, 10 pound book, and you're like looking up the names of journalists and all that. It's so much easier now. And so I mean, honestly, the first thing I would do is there are certainly database services you can subscribe to for a fee that will give you access to like journalists and search by subject matter if you build sort of, you know, whatever, you know, if you build fidget spinners, you can look up, you know, people who cover children's toys or whatever it is, and you can see different journalists who have different beats, even influencers ran some of those databases. But before I would do any of that, because that's sort of the That's the tactic you would take. But first you need to come up with the strategy. And to me, I always start with competitive research. So figure out who your competitor is, whether you're selling a product or service. And you could have a little regional company that services your local community or some national product, whatever it is, who are your competitors. And as crazy as it sounds, because it sounds super simple, go on Google and click the news tab, plug in your competitors name and start looking to see or several competitors names and start looking to see what media outlets have covered them, what influencers have talked about them, sort of go onto the social channels and search for those competitor names. And just start figuring out and start build out a spreadsheet and start figuring out like, who are they talking about? Why are they talking about them? What angles did they use? The other thing I would do is really study the news cycle. That is a real thing. And the news cycle used to be like a week. And now it's a couple of hours where just the velocity of content coming at people is so intense that if you can find either a person, whether it's a reporter or an influencer that's sort of open to covering your type of product or service, reach out to them. Say hey, I have something similar. I saw you wrote an article a couple weeks ago about this fidget spinner. I make fidget spinners too, but they're better fidget spinners. Here's why I send you one.

25:46 Andy Splichal It sounds like it's a numbers game a lot, right? I mean, you're not going to get a response from every person.

25:53 Dan Kahn There is an element of that. And so the part of it is a numbers game. It's really building relationships. It's making calls. It's getting enough kind of lines in the water that you're eventually going to get a nibble. The other part of it is absolutely understanding how the media cycle works. And that's figuring out like on the PR side, the thing that the conversation I've had the most over the years with potential like people come to me and say I need help trying to figure out how to do PR myself or hiring an agency or whatever, is everybody thinks that their own story is inherently interesting. And I hate to say it, like a lot of conversation I have all the time is like, hey, our company is having our five year anniversary. So like we're thinking about putting out a press release and putting it on the news wire. Like, what do you think? And the tough answer is nobody cares. Like the only person who cares about your anniversary is you. And if you're just saying, hey, my product exists because it's a product and it exists and my name is Bob and I make great products again. Maybe your spouse cares. Nobody else cares. You have to give them a reason to care. And if you look at the media cycle, you can create, and again, same thing with the press release thing. Maybe 10 or 20 years ago, that was an issue. Putting a release on the wire at this point, and I say this like three times a week to clients, is a waste of money. It doesn't do anything. At least they used to go out on like on RSS feed and have like some sort of SEO value. It doesn't even have SEO value anymore. Like there's no reason to do it. No one picks up anything from news feeds. Journalists are underpaid. They're overworked. A newsroom that used to have 20 or 30 people in it now might have two or three.

27:24 Andy Splichal So you're not a you're not a big believer of PR web.

27:27 Dan Kahn No, I think that it serves a purpose for SEC compliance. I think if you're a publicly traded company, I think there's lots of wire services and some are better than others. And again, I think there are certain like if you have to do something for a compliance reason, do it. But as a former journalist, even though it's a long time ago, I used to get like 50, 60, 70 pitches a day before the wire ever hit my inbox. I didn't have time to read all that. So the way you can drive stories yourself if you're trying to bootstrap your own PR is either find someone who's already got a beat that aligns with your product or service or find a way to insert yourself in that cycle. So, you know, a perfect example would be, you know, And I don't know, you know, the day we're recording this, I'm not sure when it's actually going to be released. But like the thing that's been in the news the last couple of days is like in Ukraine with the whole war situation, like the dam exploded and there's like flooding. Well, if you run a series of like surf pro franchises, and you do flood mitigation and flood cleanup, and that's your business, That's a news angle. You can call the local news, even if you're not in the Ukraine. You could be in Louisiana or you could be in Texas and you could say, hey, you know, we feel so bad about these people that are going through this thing across the on the other side of the planet. Here's a local expert who does flood mitigation for a living to talk about what those people on the ground are probably going to have to deal with at the macro level. And then you get on the news talking about here's what flood mitigation looks like, especially if you're in a community that's had to deal with flooding in the past. So that would be a way to get your business on the news. So if you're paying attention, you know, Apple comes out with they did a phenomenal job with the rollout of the new VR headset. You don't have to be Apple to do that. You just have to pay attention to the fact that like everyone said the metaverse dead. And AI is going to replace it as the hot new story in tech circles, then Apple comes out with their own headset never references the word metaverse. They have their own phraseology. They have their own messaging. If you're in the tech space and you have anything product or service wise that's even remotely related to VR or augmented reality, this would be a great time to start calling the tech press and say, hey, we have something that complements what they're doing. And we'd love to talk to you about it. So it's really news cycle monitoring.

29:51 Andy Splichal Yeah, no, I mean, those are great tips. Make it not about you. Make it interesting and monitor the news cycle. Hey, um, we've gone through a lot, but let's talk about your agency, Kahn Media. What, what are all the services that you offer?

30:09 Dan Kahn So we offer kind of the top level answer to that is we offer public relations, content creation and creative, digital marketing and organic marketing. So everything on that kind of owned, earned and paid media, we can do. So we do everything from managing clients, organic, social, influencer and affiliate marketing, creative PR and digital funnel.

30:34 Andy Splichal And do you have a favorite success story that you would like to tell?

30:40 Dan Kahn Yeah, so, you know, we have lots of success stories on the on the digital marketing side that I'm very proud of where we had like crazy ROI numbers. In fact, we just won a couple of awards, including a Stevie Award for one of our DM campaigns that just because the ROI numbers were like 1200%. It was crazy. But my favorite one actually sort of involved all of our departments. And so there's a really cool company called Bring a Trailer that was founded by a guy named Randy Nonnenberg, who I have a huge amount of respect for. And he was an engineer up in the Bay Area, worked in the automotive industry. And as like a side hustle, he started a WordPress blog for him and his buddies where he was like finding and this is going back like 15 years ago. He was finding just like quirky cars that he has like very specific car taste of like interesting collector cars that are sort of not the usual things that he thought personally were interesting on like Craigslist and eBay. And he would just write a little blog post about them. And then he started a newsletter and all of a sudden it started getting traction. And that's when I started finding out about it. He started sort of charging people to include their own car for sale on Craigslist or eBay or classified site or whatever in his newsletter and write a blog about it. And he started to scale it. And then the big sort of tipping point moment for him was he started a marketplace. So he actually started an auction. And it's sort of different than like an eBay auction and that like there was no sniping because the countdown timer would just reset every time a new bid came in. And it was entirely powered by a comment section. So it was completely community driven. And so these people suddenly for the first time are buying five figure, six figure, seven figure collector cars site unseen. Because the community in the comment section was policing these auctions saying, hey, this is a good buyer. I know this car or I know the seller or I don't know this car and be aware of it. And so the community sort of allowed everyone to have this sort of confidence and resiliency. We started doing PR and digital marketing for them. I don't know about eight years ago. And we helped them with getting a huge amount of PR in the mainstream media to help facilitate a partial sale. So his co-founder sold out to Hearst and Randy has stayed on as CEO and has continued to just grow the company and do incredible things with it. And we were definitely part of that process. But the thing I'm most proud of was just this past year. And we just won Hermes, the luxury brand does these like World Creative Awards and we won the gold award for this campaign that over time they've ended up amassing a huge amount of data because they've sold so many of these vehicles and they're sort of the world leader and collector cars. They sold a billion to worth of cars last year. And so we looked at the data to see if there was any interesting trends. And one of the trends that came out of it was the category of vehicles that was showing the largest percentage increase in value. So maybe not like dollar increase in values, but percentage increase in values or 80s and 90s cars. And they were mostly like kind of interesting cars like guys like probably about your and my age grew up wanting to buy. So it's like OJ Broncos and like third and fourth gen Camaros and all these cars that were never really considered collector cars and they were always kind of cheap or like 90s Impalas like all these cars that like you wouldn't consider necessarily a collector car. But what we figured out is this is a nostalgia thing where all of a sudden you have these these gen Xers and these millennials who are finally at a position in their 30s and 40s in life where I have a few bucks. I have a stable job. I have a place to live. I really wanted that 5.0 Mustang when I was in high school couldn't afford it. So now I'm going to go buy it. And the way we built a campaign around that was beyond doing a digital marketing campaign. Our creative team built out a press kit that was a physical box like they used to do in the 80s and 90s. And when you opened it, we had all the digital imagery that we used to illustrate it turned from digital images into slide film and Chrome's we put those in the box. We got Oakley to recommission frog skins, which are those like late 80s early 90s kind of rainbow sunglasses with VAT on them. Put those in the box. And then the entire press kit looked like the actual physical press kit was a cassette tape and it had a USB tab on the end of the cassette tape. So everything was on brand on theme 80s and 90s. Then we snail mailed it to the media and the resulting coverage was unbelievable. I mean, it was in it was in Bloomberg and the New York Times and a bunch of stuff. So it was kind of a cool hybrid of our creative team or DM team and our our PR team kind of all working together to come up with something really cool.

Andy Splichal Nice. And what were the results? How did the company end up growing based on them?

Dan Kahn So they had a record sales year by far a huge record sales year was up like 20 percent. They had record close rates on their auctions. They had record total sales. They had a huge amount of influx and traffic as a result of the media coverage. So in general, it was kind of across the board considered pretty big win. So we were really excited about that.

Andy Splichal And how does your face structure work at Kahn media?

Dan Kahn So for everything except digital marketing, we just have an hourly rate. And so we sit down with the client, whether it's creative or big video production or PR or influencer and affiliate marketing. We sit down, we figure out what are the asks? What are you trying to figure out? What do you want to do? What are you trying to accomplish? It's the same thing we talked about at the beginning of the conversation. We define the KPIs first. We define the win first. And then we say, OK, that's going to take 40 hours a month, 60 hours a month, whatever sort of hour burn we think it's going to take across multiple teams. It's a blended rate. And then that's how we set sort of our monthly fee. And then as we go, occasionally we'll have to adjust it up or down based on sort of workload. On the digital marketing side, we always sort of price that out separately because it's mostly pass through costs. We do charge kind of an onboarding fee because like I talked about at the beginning, the research phase is very time intensive. So that's kind of part of an onboarding fee where we're sort of doing all the consumer research, all the market research, building out all the campaigns, building out the funnels, doing all the A-B testing, all of that sort of on the front end. And so we do have like a startup fee. And then after that, it's just pass through costs. So we just mark everything up. So they give us their total spend. We take a percentage as commission. And then that's how we get paid month after month.

Andy Splichal And how can an interested listener learn more about working with you?

Dan Kahn They can reach out. Our website is Kahn Media, conmedia.com. You can look me up on LinkedIn. I've got a pretty robust presence on there, including a lot of thought leadership stuff. And I write a lot about digital marketing on there again DanKahn, or they can just reach out to us directly.

37:47 Andy Splichal Well, this has been great. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?

No, Andy, I really appreciate your time and I've really enjoyed this conversation.

Great. Well, thanks for joining us today, Dan.

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