Rick Cesari 12:19
You know, anybody that’s a marketer, if they haven’t had failures, they’re probably not being honest with you. And you’re lying, you know that even though you’re kind of seemed to be on a little bit on the younger side. But you know, you just, there’s always going to be failures, but the key is to be able to learn from them. So my my first really hard lesson was this goes back a long time ago, we had launched the Juiceman, it was fantastically successful. We went from zero to 75 million and a little over three years, we, it was a company that was built on health, and we were teaching people to eat healthy. And juicing was one way to get more fruits and vegetables in your diet. So we said, okay, how can we get people to get more healthy grains into their diet and bread machines were starting to become very popular at the time. And so we said, Okay, we’ll make the bread man bread machine will use the same marketing principles. We got a spokesperson, he had a book, everything was the same, the only and it was a good category people bread machines are selling like crazy. However, no matter how hard I tried, I could never get it to work on TV. And I did learn a very hard lesson which I applied, you know, learned from an applied and future campaigns was that you have to really understand the cost structure of, you know, if I always call it doing a financial analysis before you do any type of marketing initiative. And basically the problem with the bread machine with the juice machine, we were taking a product that costs $30, and we’re able to sell it for $300. But they’re bread machines, that’s a margin in there with the bread machines, we were paying about $125 for the cost of the product and selling it trying to sell it for that same $300. So the cost structure just there wasn’t enough margin dollars to make it work. So prior to doing any type of product since that time, you know, we look at you know, consumer response, we look at the, you know, unique selling proposition, we look at all the benefits of the product, but probably the single most important thing is to make sure it fits a financial model where you’re able to do a paid advertising program, which is a good way of scaling a product and and you have to have enough margin in the product to do that. So that was probably one of the biggest earliest lessons I learned. Which still holds true today I mean.
Joshua Chin 14:49
And and you’ve hinted on that when you mentioned or mail, the mattress brand that you that you currently work on. Can we dive a little bit deeper into that? They’re male are interested? Absolutely, absolutely. What makes Dormeo successful in TV advertising, you talked about having amazing margins, and obviously amazing products. But what else what set formula if there is one?
Rick Cesari 15:15
Well, I think there is one because you know, if you’ve ever, or any of your listeners have ever, like when shopping for a mattress or a mattress topper, you know, there’s like, literally hundreds of them out there. And, and it’s just a category where it’s a good category if you can be successful. But the thing that made the door mail unique is that it had a very strong, unique selling proposition, a differentiator, and it was what they call the octave spring technology, which is basically taking like a metal bed spring, which was the old technology, combining it with memory foam. And they made the bed springs pretty much at a memory foam and no one had a patent on it. So nobody else could offer that technology. So everything we talked about, in in the direct response TV and the Facebook ads centered around the fact that this that our product Dormeo had something called Octo spring technology, we explain to people what that is. But then more important, we explained the benefit to the end user one with the octave spring, it would basically support your your hips and shoulders at that people, these are different pain points people would have. But then also it was kept you cool because air could circulate through that octave spring technology. So we hit two major things that create sleep problems. One was that people get hot. So this had a built in cooling technology. And then to that, that address pain that people were having in their in their shoulders and their hips. And one of the most successful Facebook ads. And this is where we took learnings from online success. The one of the most successful Facebook ads for the product, basically just was the headline was was hips and shoulders. And people understood that if you said that, that you are offering support in areas where they not won’t normally getting it and sort of incorporated that into the TV advertising and it was helped make it successful.
Joshua Chin 17:24
What are what are the costs involved in producing a TV ad like, like the one at Dormeo?
Rick Cesari 17:36
Yeah, that would run anywhere from to do a 30 Minute. So normally, when a client comes to us to hire us to do a TV show, we asked him Are we doing a 32nd spot a 62nd Spot 100/22 Spot or our 30 minute infomercial, what I like to do being a marketer is I like to have as many marketing tools as possible. So I like to if the if the product warrants it, not all of them do. But in the case of Dormeo, it was a 30 minute infomercial, and then a 62nd spot and 100/22 spot. And if you do all of the creatives at once, you can save some money. But normally a project like that is going to run between 202 $150,000 to make all that now that that sounds like a lot of money for some marketers, and some product owners or business owners. But if you’re at that stage where your company is growing you you’ve had success on on some of the paid social channels. Now all of a sudden, you’re not just making a 30 minute infomercial and a 62nd TV spot, you’re also creating a huge library of video content that then you can take and use, you know through to create Facebook ads to use on your Amazon listings. You know, you just know how much everybody’s spending on content these days. You can basically kill several birds with one stone by producing these ads producing content that can then be multi purposed into different types of video ads for your product.
Joshua Chin 19:15
That makes a ton of sense. In in your in your career, your seat, you’ve built a tonne of successful ads, a lot of successful direct response TV, TV ads as well. What’s your favorite that either you have built or you’ve seen in the recent years?
Rick Cesari 19:42
That’s a That’s a great question. At first I’ll answer the first part of that my personal favorite of all the different ones that I did were two kind of at the beginning of my career and more towards the more recently you know the very first one that juice man was I was very proud passionate about health my father passed away when he was very young from a heart attack. So I was always into health through good nutrition. And so I was personally a person who drank a lot of fresh juices. And when I was able to take my personal like, love of doing that, and eating this way, and then turn it into a successful marketing program, that’s where, you know, you always read about, you have to be passionate about what what you sell. And you’re not always that doesn’t always happen when you’re a marketer. But in that case, it was a perfect blend of the two, then I have to say that the GoPro because it just the way it started, the founder of the company, Nick Woodman, he had heard about some of the successes I’ve had in the past, and he flew up to Seattle. And we went out and I remember we had like a three hour lunch. And I remember what year he ordered a beer and a plate of chilli cheese fries. And we sat down. And he basically told me what he wanted to do with the company. And they were stay at this point, he had already launched the product, but it was basically just selling through some surf shops on the West Coast. And we talked about the strategy on how literally sat down at that conference at that lunch meeting and talked about how we wanted to build a company that was doing a billion dollars in sales. And he was like, totally, so totally, you know, believing that it was possible and that that was he was going to accomplish. And then we were just basically mapping out different ways to do that. And I liked it because that was the first time where for a product I had worked on where TV took a backseat to the online marketing they were doing. But we were able to do one really, really important thing with a GoPro, when we ran our TV ads, we had an offer at the end, you know, a normally a product like that would be like a brand commercial, they would like you know, using seen all the cool footage and people jumping off of mountains and wingsuits and snowboarding and bicycling. But we told them that at the end of every commercial, we made an offer. They had a contest, they said go to our website, people win one of everything we make every single day. So you know being indirect and email. Basically, people would go from the from the TV commercial, they would leave their name and email address because they had to do that to sign up for the contest. So then obviously, you could remark it to them. But then the other thing that happened once they got to the website, so that was the first good thing, we built the database. The second thing that happened was that people would come to the website, they would see all the cool videos, and they would share them with their friends. So it created kind of a viral effect. That just was, you know, inherent to GoPro footage because it was so cool. And then the last thing that happened was more strict, you know, tried and true direct response, people would come to the website and buy cameras, and that revenue offset the advertising costs of which let us ramp it up. And when we started running the TV, we did all the TV advertising for GoPro, when we started ramping up, they were probably doing about five or 6 million in sales. And eight years later, they hit a billion dollars. And they went public on the New York Stock Exchange. And yeah, that was a pretty, pretty intense ride. But it was because really, it was the perfect blending of a successful TV campaign. And and this is the part that I didn’t contribute much. But they they had the internal expertise. They were really good online marketers and they’re able to leverage the all the awareness that TV was generating into into orders and it was a that was I think the reason that was able to grow so fast. So those are the two of my own personal that I did that were my favorites.
Joshua Chin 24:04
Right. There’s so much to unpack there. Like a couple of different paths here. But I’m curious. Were you there when they rang the bell at the New York Stock Exchange?
Rick Cesari 24:17
I wasn’t there. But I in my PowerPoint presentation. I have a I have a message. I had sent Nick a text message and he sent me back a message. He was actually standing on the podium with a ringing the bell and he goes it goes WTF. Thanks to your. I can’t believe this is happening. Thanks to you and your team. You know, everything we talked about is finally happening. And it was a really cool text message. So I show everybody that in my PowerPoint presentation.
Joshua Chin 24:53
That is super cool. That beats any any testimonial. It’s really talking about using revercite for testimonials and video. Yeah, foods that beats anything ever.
Rick Cesari 25:06
Yeah, and I have I end and so you know, that’s probably the single best testimonial but then, you know, I and you do the same thing when you have successful client campaigns, you know, the people that Joelle Apple who was one of the founders of Oxy clean, really good testimonials from him and the marketing guys that Sonicare I have testimonials from them. And you know, if you do a good job for people, they’re really happy to give give you a good, good testimonial.
Joshua Chin 25:37
Absolutely. And, Rick, you talked about Nick having this crazy, insane vision. Yeah. Oh, yeah, making a billion dollars in sales when they’re just at five, 6 million a year?
Rick Cesari 25:50
Well, actually, when I when we first met with him, he was doing about a million in sales.
Joshua Chin 25:56
But even smaller than that, okay, so a million. Geez. Okay. Now, I cannot envision what it’s like to be making a billion dollars in sales a year, let alone a billion as a number, like a million is a lot. But a billion is 1000 times of that. Did you? Did you believe him? When he pitched the idea?
Rick Cesari 26:26
You know, the only reason I did believe is I had been involved. Prior to Nick about this was probably about 15 years earlier, with launching the George Foreman grill. So I watched a product go from zero to a billion dollars. And and so I knew it was possible. I and I, you know, if there’s an inventor, our product owner that has that much
Joshua Chin 26:57
conviction,
Rick Cesari 26:59
conviction, that’s a great word. I’m not going to throw any water on the fire. You know what I mean? I don’t know that. I didn’t believe them. But I I, I was not going to kind of dampen the excitement. And and then it just started happening. You know, it’s like, yeah, and the other way is, I think, in my mind is what’s wrong with shooting for a billion dollars. And if you only make it halfway, that’s still pretty good or a quarter of the way. And, and so, you know, not every product you’re going to do does that. Well, but anyway, I just I I didn’t put it this way. I didn’t not believe them. You know what I mean? Okay.
Joshua Chin 27:42
Yeah, that is fantastic. Now, Rick, as a from I suppose you I would consider your business a an agency partner off GoPro. Is that accurate? Say?
Rick Cesari 27:56
Yes, we were we at the time. My company, the legal name was Cesari Response Television, but at the time we were doing our DBA was Cesari Media, and we were the TV agency for GoPro.
Joshua Chin 28:11
What was it like growing with a company that’s that thoughts, because I’ve experienced clients going from making 10 20 million a year to 200 million a year in a matter of, like 18 months. And that’s, that’s kind of that that’s already quite a bit to handle, and puts a lot of stress on, on the internal agency operations. But we managed to pull it off. But that was tough. I cannot imagine someone going from one to a billion in sales a year, in a matter of eight, eight years. What was that like?
Rick Cesari 28:47
Well, it was, you know, you just explained it, that you’re basically it’s like an old saying, it’s like drinking from a firehose, you know, you, you’re trying to always keep up. And luckily, for the work that we were able to do, we were able to keep up just by adding more media buyers to, to to the case and that but we had a core team that basically was with Nick from day one, and just went almost on a weekly basis. He was based down in San Francisco, just south of San Francisco, and they would fly down there almost on a weekly basis to meet and this was before zoom was very popular and even zoom was around so there was still doing a lot of face to face meetings and stuff like that. But it was it was fun because you got to do with because of the high visibility and the type of product it was you got to do a lot of fun things like the TV stations that would carry the Olympics because we were spending so much money they gave us you know, free, free like tickets and, and flights to the Olympics. And obviously we’d pass that along to the client who was really happy about that. And, and just all sorts of really fun things like that. And then when it came to Superbowl ads, and this is interesting, because you know, you probably see different companies like doing Super Bowl ads, and it becomes more of an ego show than it does a successful marketing campaign. But one things we did with GoPro that was really smart, is that we instead of buying and paying a huge amount of money for a 30 second spot, we then went to like the top, like 15 markets, and just ran local inserts. And so for a fraction of the cost of a Super Bowl, you know, a Super Bowl on a national level, we were able to cover the top 15 markets with Super Bowl ads. And so there was lots of fun things we were doing like that, that, that, you know, you can only happens with a really good, good client that, you know, growing really quickly.
Joshua Chin 31:04
And a really good agency. Yeah, yeah. What? How would you describe? If a really good friend, would you describe Rick? Uh, how would how would we how he described you? Or she
Rick Cesari 31:21
Yeah, that’s, people say I’m kind of quiet. I like in a meeting, instead of talking I, I’m, I’m the one that’s kind of listening to everybody. And just observant, I guess, is a good, good description, you know, and I think that’s a good way of what led to many of these successful products. Because I tell everybody, you know, one of my favorite things to do when I’m first doing a project is I like to contact like 10 or 20 people, usually 20 or 25. People, you know, we reach out to the database of the company that we’re working with, and, and then talk to these people. In my case, I happen to have a video camera running. And after doing about 20 of these interviews, we might find two or three that can be testimonials, but I’ll tell you what you hear enough good input, to know exactly why someone bought a product, what got them excited about it, what they don’t like about it. And I’ve always found it easy to really create the advertising or the marketing, if I’m able to talk to 20 or 25 real customers and be able to ask them, like interview them. Like like we’re doing right now. Like you’re asking me questions, and and I get enough information to be able to craft some ads out of that, because you really you start to see trends, if you talk to 20 people you start to send doesn’t have to be 20 Exactly. But you start to see trends again, like I said, of what made them buy what they liked, and and then you just basically, make sure that you’re including that information in the advertisements. Love that.
Joshua Chin 33:09
Love that. Rick, what’s what’s one message, one message that you wish more people would know about? Or in the spirit of the internet, if you could send a push notification onto every mobile phone that has that exists that exists today in the world more with that personal notification, say or contain
Rick Cesari 33:35
that’s it that’s a great question that makes you really think but you know, in this environment right now, obviously with the war, you know, invasion the Ukraine going on and you know, we’re coming at it two years of, of COVID. And it’s, it’s really just, you know, to kind of chill out and relax and I don’t mean that in a in a slacker type of way. I just mean that kind of take a step back and just observe what’s happening before taking any kind of action or reaching out you know, you’d asked me some trades if someone were described me and I still still think that that is true that I that I just like to observe something before taking any type of action and I think a lot of people these days react I mean, if you read any kind of Facebook groups or things like that people just react so strongly to things and you know, just think think for yourself and and observe before before jumping to conclusions, I think would be a good message.
Joshua Chin 34:49
breakdowns. That’s a wonderful way to end an episode. Thank you so much for gracing your time. I’ve had a lot of fun. I have I still have a bunch of questions I would love to ask
Rick Cesari 35:02
If you want to do a follow up a follow up session, but let’s plan on doing that because I, I even have a lot, you know, I haven’t even shared with people how much I enjoyed speaking with you because I love what you do the email marketing and and and that it’s such an important way of important component to building any business. And you and I haven’t worked on a project together yet, but I’m sure that’s going to happen relatively soon.
Joshua Chin 35:29
Yeah, I represent. That’s absolutely. And I think building an email list, building an audience that you own, that you have direct access to, is paramount to any brand’s success. Today and beyond,
Rick Cesari 35:44
I agree with you. And we didn’t even talk about that every one of those products you mentioned, they all had email lists, we all marketed to them. We, you know, we talked about the Juiceman, I had a half a million names on a juice man list. When we when we went out, we sent out a postcard just offering people a new cutting blade, and it generated half a million dollars in sales. And you know, that was the old snail mail type of thing. But I agree with you 100%, that that should be the kind of the foundation of where a company growth comes from. And you should do it while you’re small and understand how to do it. So as you get bigger and names start coming in. And you really know how to take advantage of those and build lifetime value like you mentioned at the beginning of the podcast.
Joshua Chin 36:39
I love they say that, Rick? Because people often ask me, When do you think I should start? I’m building a new brand. What do you think? When do you think I should start investing and putting time into email marketing, and building out my, my own marketing channels like email and SMS? And my response is always as as soon as you start launching your first ad? Because that’s Yeah, yeah, immediately, basically, it’s gonna pay off. It’s
Rick Cesari 37:04
even before your first ad, however, customers are finding you and buying your product as soon as they start buying your product. They should be on your database. You know that, but But yes, immediately start it, because the more and Yeah, exactly.
Joshua Chin 37:21
I couldn’t agree more. And it’s such a strong learning. It creates such a strong learning loop, because he gets to see what people respond to so cheaply, emails free, effectively, when you’re sending out an email. I would love to dive deeper into that, we probably
Rick Cesari 37:38
I think we should. And I think I should do a photo shoot interview you a little bit on the next on the next session, and email, because talk about specifically, I want to hear more about the email techniques that you implement and when you implement them, and how that differs for each product. And then I can compare it to what we did with some of our products, because we talked about TV advertising, TV advertising, was the thing that generated awareness and generated names, but then there was the follow up through direct mail or email or that type of thing. And that was a huge part of every one of those businesses.
Joshua Chin 38:17
I love that 100% I would love to geek out with you. And we should probably schedule a separate session for that. In the meantime, for people listening who are interested to connect with, with you learn more about what you do, where should they go to?
Rick Cesari 38:32
they should just go to my personal website, which is Rick@Rickcesari.com. And they you know, they can connect with me there or just send me an email. I love getting emails from people. I do a lot of podcasts like this, and I always give out my personal email address, which is Rick@rickcesari.com. And if you want to send me an email and ask a question about anything we talked about, or any problem that you might be marketing problem that you might be having with your business, feel free to reach out at Rick@rickcesari.com and my last name is spelled Cesari
Joshua Chin 39:07
I thank you. And as per usual, all links will be in the show notes. You guys can go to Chronos.agency/podcast for the latest show notes. Rick, thank you so much for being on the show.
Rick Cesari 39:23
All right. Thank you and great speaking with you.
Outro 39:29
Thanks for listening to the eCommerce Profits Podcast. We’ll see you again next time and be sure to click Subscribe to get notified of future episodes.
