Playful Marketing | Mike Montague

David McBee: Hello, and welcome to Simpli.fi TV, the web series and podcast for agencies, brands, marketers, and media buyers. I'm David McBee. Our guest today is Mike Montague, Director of Community Engagement at Sandler. Mike hosts the popular How to Succeed Podcast, Sandler Summit, and other live events. He's also the author of LinkedIn The Sandler Way. Mike has created numerous courses on sales and leadership for Sandler, HubSpot, Cornerstone, and more. He is also a game show host and public speaker at Playful Humans. Mike has partnered with some of the world's largest brands, including Google, Meta, Uber, Jiffy Lube, ThermoFisher Scientific, Express, Hanes, Subway, T-Mobile, and many more, for promotional and event marketing. Mike, welcome to Simpli.fi TV. Mike Montague: Hey, so great to be here. I'm excited for the conversation, and I'm a big fan of the show. David McBee: Thank you. Isn't it always fun to hear your bio and sounds so important? Mike Montague: You're like, "Yeah, I've kind of done a lot of things," but it has been a while now too. It's not like I did that all in the last two years. It's a little bit of a career now. David McBee: Well, it's your pedigree. It goes on, right? So Mike, tell us a little bit about your podcast, Playful Humans. Mike Montague: On Playful Humans, I interview people that play for a living. They're living their dream. I interview happiness researchers, that are working inside of companies and building company cultures, but the next week, I might interview a juggler or somebody like Justin Guarini from American Idol. He plays the little sweet character in the Diet Dr. Pepper commercials now. And I think that's a great example of playful advertising and how he's designed his career from Broadway to corporate gigs, in order to make things. And I just get to talk to cool people doing cool things. So I designed the podcast, quite in my favor. David McBee: And it's been a while since you've started it. How many episodes have you done? Mike Montague: Oh, we're somewhere at like 160 or so now, and so, I've interviewed a lot of people about their careers and their company cultures and their organizations. And it's fun to hear the same things and people coming at it from different directions. David McBee: So I love this concept of professionals incorporating playfulness into their work. That's why I invited you to talk to us today, and we talk to advertisers and media buyers and agencies. So I want to start with this question. How can brands infuse personality and playfulness into their marketing, without turning people off? Mike Montague: Well, I think it's critical to do so, right? Because the opposite is you get really boring, stale, kind of gray advertising, you've smoothed off all the edges, and it becomes a commodity. So I've worked with a lot of brands that like that. They even sell commodities, like steel. I worked with a steel company, and they're just selling raw steel by the pound. It's as much of a commodity as you could possibly get. Unless you do that with any sort of personality or unique value or something, it all comes down to price and you don't even really need to advertise anything other than the price. But when brands do interesting things like, I don't know, the McDonald's Monopoly game or the Diet Dr. Pepper commercials that I mentioned, or other really interesting advertising, like the Red Bull skydive from space or GoPros advertising with dog surfing, and other types of influencers, it becomes more interesting. It becomes not about the product, not about a commodity, but about a lifestyle and a value and something that you relate with and something that gets your attention and you remember. So you and I are old enough to remember the Budweiser frogs or other interesting commercials all the way from our childhood, because they were playful and funny, not because the beer tastes better, has more calories, or whatever would be on the spec sheet as differences in the product. So for me, it also is a lot more fun. Your employees get happier. There's research studies that show salespeople sell 31% more when they're playful and they're connecting with people on a human basis. And the same thing is true for marketing, advertising, and all kinds of internal company cultures. Reducing turnover is, sure, you can beat everybody up on your marketing team and work them to death until they burn out and they don't have any more creative ideas, or you can spur playfulness in them, reduce the pressure, reduce stress, and allow them to come up with more creative advertising, that could be 10 times as good, right? I think that's a big change and it's a big shift for most people. David McBee: So you've talked to over a hundred people who do this, and so, what are some of the main lessons you've learned from them? Mike Montague: I think taking the stress off is the biggest one. So I hinted at it there a little bit, but when your brain is under pressure and we're under stress, it's just human nature, it's built into our biology, that cortisol and other stress chemicals flood into our brain and we're focused on one right answer that will allow us to survive the situation. And so, when you have a big product launch coming up or you need to hit sales for the end of the quarter or the year and you're all stressed out about that, your brain is looking for a survival exit, and it's not necessarily the best option or the one that would even be most profitable for you. It's saying, "What's the one that won't get me fired? What's the one that will allow me to escape the situation, in order to survive?" When we relax, we take the pressure off, and we think, "Okay, how can we be more playful? How can we be creative?" We put ourselves into a playful state. We can now think, "Okay, not just what would allow us to not get fired, but what would allow us to be promoted? What would allow us to do a game changing campaign, that would 10X our sales or 2X our sales, instead of just getting five, 10, 15% better?" We can come up with more creative solutions. I think that also happens when we speak from our authentic selves and our playful voice. Now, that can be for yourself, but it can also be for brands, that, when we decide that we want to stand for something or we want to express something creatively, that's really different from our competition, there's this fear that "It's not like everybody else's, we're going to stand out in a bad way." But the opposite is usually true. It usually creates something that stands out, makes you unique. It disqualifies people who are not going to buy it anyway or who weren't aligned with your company values and voice. And it allows you to connect deeper with the people that do love what you're doing. So an example, again, could be like the GoPro one, that "We want to start with extreme sports, and so, we're going to connect with the skating and surfing communities. And we're going to be really great for them." And then, other people have ideas, and they go, "Oh, well, if you can use that GoPro camera for dog surfing, you could also use it for biking, or you could use it for your family vacation, or you could use it for some cool film project that you want to make, that's out on the streets and moving around." And you start thinking, "Oh, there's other ways that we could use a camera," but if we just say, "Hey, we made this small camera, that's for everybody and you can use it however you want," nobody gets any ideas from that. It's just too bland, and it doesn't stand for anything. David McBee: So a lot of the examples you've shared, Mike, are fun products anyway, right? Dr. Pepper's fun, GoPro's fun. Red Bull is fun. I'm thinking about Progressive and Geico and how fun their commercials are, for something that's not fun. Insurance is not fun, but where's the line between "We are very professional," maybe it's software or something like that, and "We're fun." Where's the line? And how do you surf that line? Mike Montague: Well, I think you hit on it with a lot of the insurance commercials. They know that insurance is a commodity, so they have to come up with something fun and interesting, in order to separate themselves. So whether it's the Aflac Duck, Flo, or the GEICO Gecko, they need a mascot, they need a voice, they need personality and playfulness, in order to get your attention. But the same thing goes for a lot of other unplayful things. So things that are serious, they found, even need your attention, that, if we only talk about heart disease as killing people and stuff, then it doesn't resonate. It scares people, and it doesn't attract customers that we want. So instead, the NFL comes up with a PLAY 60 campaign and encouraging people to move more, and there's crazy stats that, if people just exercise more, we could save over a million deaths a year, from people just getting up and moving more. But leading with that message is going to depress the heck out of everybody. So how can we spin that around and take it in a more interesting voice? And I think there's alignment here. So even when you mentioned insurance companies, I was thinking about, how can they sponsor extreme sports or something that's risky or a big contest, that's really rare. When do you want insurance? You want insurance when things maybe aren't going to work, right? So I think that brand can tie in and it makes sense. When we see brands go wrong, it's when they're not aligned with their vision, their mission, or their audience. So we've seen that a few times, where brands try to get too cute with it or they get outside their lane. But I think you can line up with your audience, where are they? What are they looking for? And when do they need insurance? And then, we can make a fun contest about it. So if you're a brand that sells to families, Family Feud might be a fun game structure for you, and you could create environments or sponsor something that's a fun family activity and it aligns with the brand and you're starting to connect with the people that want it. If you're something that's for families and you're sponsoring, I don't know, something that's weird and not for families or it's really corporate-y, then that's not going to work. It creates that misalignment, that doesn't generate that extra synergy with your campaign. David McBee: I love that you invented the word "corporate-y." Thank you for that. We quickly ran out of time here, so some powerful stuff on being playful. I really appreciate it. Before I let you go, do you have a favorite podcast of your own or a book that you feel has helped you become successful? Mike Montague: I think Seth Godin's stuff, his books. The Purple Cow is a great analogy for the stuff that we've been talking about. The Akimbo podcast, if you're not listening to it, go check that out. He's kind of branched outside of marketing now himself, but he's proven over and over again that, when you go to the edge, that's when people notice you. When you try to play it safe and try to go to the middle, you're just chasing other people's treasure maps. So even if you do follow that treasure map, somebody's already been there and gotten the treasure, so you're getting a small piece of it. When you go to the edge, when you go to blue ocean, when you get outside of normal safe advertising that we got the template off Canva and we put our stuff into it, that doesn't work. When we create something new and unique for us, that's where we really get those breakthrough innovations. So go for that. Go for crazy. David McBee: Mike, what is the best way for viewers to learn more about you? Mike Montague: PlayfulHumans.com is really easy to remember. Also, I love connecting with everybody on LinkedIn, so Mike Montague on LinkedIn, you'll find me. There are dozens of Mike Montagues, but I'll pop up there, because I wrote a book on LinkedIn. And I also love to help sales teams grow, so I do that with Sandler. If you're a marketer and you're one of those that "We're creating hundreds of inbound leads and our sales team can't close the door, we're fumbling the ball," that's what I help people with on a daily basis. David McBee: Awesome. Mike, thank you so much for being my guest on Simpli.fi TV. Mike Montague: Great to be here. So much fun. David McBee: And thank you guys for watching. Simpli.fi TV is sponsored by Simpli.fi, helping you to maximize relevance and multiply results with our industry leading media buying and workflow solutions. For more information, visit Simpli.fi. Thanks for joining us today. I'm David McBee. Be awesome, and we'll see you next time.