Welcome to the Marketing in the Wild podcast. I’m Julia from Stratos Creative Marketing, where we are obsessed with finding real life examples of the good, the bad, and sometimes wild, in marketing.

Guys, I could not believe that we are finally launching this podcast. Let me tell you, it’s been at least a year in the making. We have come up with this idea and, partially through my procrastination, it’s just taken us this long. But I’m really excited to give you guys a preview of what to expect and just tell you a little bit about how this came to be.

Two-ish years ago, Ryann, our content coordinator, and I were trying to figure out what we would send out to our email list every week to serve them. So we came up with some ideas for resources, we came up with some ideas for behind the scenes, and then we suddenly had this idea of Marketing in the Wild.

The reason I got this idea is actually because in Wisconsin, where I was living at the time, there’s this highway called Highway 41 that goes up to the north woods. And every time I drove it around Appleton or Green Bay – if you’re from Wisconsin, you know where those are – I would see this series of billboards. And we’ll get into my love, my obsession, really with billboards some other day.

But this series of billboards was posted up by a car sales business. And they had their logo in the corner, but you couldn’t really tell that it was them unless if you were from the area. But they also had this famous football player, which probably everybody else in Wisconsin knew who it was except for me.

But I was just curious why they would choose to have the head of this football player with the words like “We serve you” or “Best customer service” or “Good pricing”. I realize that people in Wisconsin would know who that was, but 41 is used by a lot of people from Chicago, Michigan, et cetera, going up to their summer homes.

And so I really felt like this was like a missed opportunity because nobody actually knew who this company was unless if they were from the area, and the billboard actually didn’t tell them what they were selling. 

And so we started collecting photos, we started collecting screenshots, all sorts of different things of different marketing that then, in our newsletter, we would kind of critique it. We’d approach them with curiosity and we would figure out what was working well? Where was the room for improvement? And then we had the opportunity to then apply that to our own marketing and to our client’s marketing. And so as we were kind of figuring out what we wanted this podcast to be, that’s what kept on coming to mind

In the end, there’s a bajillion, different podcasts that will tell you how to do marketing and how to do it well, but we really wanted to create a podcast that would talk about how and why marketing matters in the real world. And so we’re super excited to bring you these conversations. We’re hoping they’re going to be really fun and invigorating and that it will reach people even other than marketers because there’s a lot of us who are interested in how social media affects our mental health. And there’s a lot of us who can relate to the idea that body image and diet culture is kind of affecting us a lot and social media is playing a part in that.

And even there’s some big players. AKA Pinterest, making some cool moves to help restore humanity, even amidst marketing. And so we’re really excited to bring you things like that. We also are cooking up a series about how different generations interact with marketing. So we’re going to bring on some guests who are in Gen Z and we can hear what they like, what they don’t like. We’re going to hear from millennials. We’re going to hear from boomers. What is it that feeds them? And what is it in marketing that attracts them and what is it that turns them off? So we’re really excited to see how this intersection of culture and marketing applies to both our lives, but then also we can pull those principles into our marketing to create better and more engaging campaigns.

So here’s what you can expect from us. We’re going to be putting out weekly episodes, different series of meeting with different people, interviewing both our team and the public. But this is what we’d love from you. We’d love to hear your feedback. What kind of stuff do you want to hear about? If there’s anybody you think we should interview, tell us! 

We’re really, really excited about this project. We get so many chances to be creative with our client’s material and this is one thing that we get to call our own and that we get to be creative with as much as we want to. So we’re excited to co-create this with you — our audience. So thanks for tuning in again and feel free to listen to the next couple episodes and check us out.