Steve Goldhaber chats with Brian Macreadie, a B2B marketing pro with 25+ years of experience, about the power of creativity in competitive industries. They share case studies on marketing with limited budgets, the key components of effective marketing, and the significance of bravery and creativity in overcoming industry challenges.
For new marketers, Steve and Brian offer advice such as understanding clients, integrating technology, and surrounding oneself with experts. They also explore Brian's unique background in physics and software development. Ultimately, they conclude that boldness is the key to success in marketing, leading to increased brand awareness and engagement.
Key takeaways from this episode:
Tune in to this episode to discover how creativity can help your business succeed. Don't forget to subscribe to the Interesting B2B Marketers Podcast for more informative and engaging episodes.
Connect with Brian Macreadie and Steve Goldhaber on LinkedIn
With 25+ years of marketing experience, Steve Goldhaber is a former head of global digital marketing for two Fortune 500 companies and the current CEO of 26 Characters, a content marketing agency in Chicago.
Connect with Steve on LinkedIn.
Steve Goldhaber: Hey everybody, this is Steve. Welcome back to interesting B2B marketers. I'm glad to have you on the show today. I'm excited today because we've got Brian Macreadie here. Brian, say hello.
Brian Macreadie: Hey, Steve, thanks for having me on the show.
Steve Goldhaber: All right, so I'm excited because the theme that we're gonna talk about today has to do with a lot of creativity. over my career. I've always loved whatever it means to be creative, right? Thinking differently. Being innovative. So I'm super excited to talk today. Before we jump into the case studies, I want you to just give the audience a quick overview of your background.
Brian Macreadie: So, hey folks, again, my name is Brian Macreadie. I've been working in B2B marketing for about 25 years. You might be able to tell from the accent I'm based in London. So I've had a varied journey. I started out in big telecoms and media businesses in the states, big corporations. Bit of a stint in an Indian business. And then for the last decade or so, I've been working in the legal sector, all of it, B2B. It's been an amazing ride. I love what I do. Currently I'm the head of marketing globally for an international law firm called Addleshaw Goddard. We've got offices across continental Europe, the Middle East, and in Asia, we act with some of the world's biggest brands. So in the UK for example, 47 of the FTSE 100 companies, the biggest companies in the UK are our clients. We're already pleased to work with them and we promise our clients more imagination. And they'll get elsewhere. So, that's me. It's been a great journey. Long met, continue.
Steve Goldhaber: Nice. All right. So cool. Let's jump into the case studies. The first one, there's themes of creativity in all of these, but the first one is gonna focus on what do you do with when you've got fierce competition.
Brian Macreadie: I guess we'll know that different levels of creativity might be needed in different industries, depending upon how mature the industry is, how many competitors you're up against. But the legal sector that I'm working in now is really fierce. You know there's well over a hundred really credible, high-end elite law firms out there. And it's a fairly mature market, and we're all buying for market share from each other. And when there's those kind of fierce competitive dynamics, we're finding that one of the tools that you have to stand out there are things like innovation and there are strategy and launching new product lines, but creativity sits at the heart of that. You may have heard jokes. I've heard plenty in my career, people saying that the legal sector's not as much fun as might be other sectors, but I think those folks are missing something because it's so competitive that we have to try different things and if you dig deep, the legal sector's full of way more creativity than you might expect. I've probably focused on trying to zig when everyone else is trying to zag and trying to be as distinctive as possible, which has seen over the years sending orig army weightlifters to clients and using unicorns to communicate in a distinctive way versus other people we've sent elephants to clients. We've done all sorts. But Steve, when we recently connected, like we just completed a big campaign in my team that was focusing on legal poetry, where we had, some professional poets, some really awesome talent, interview a bunch of our clients, broadcast journalists, some industry influencers, some charities, and we just got them to write about what inspired them from the conversations that they'd had, and we ended up with this body of 16 legal poems. And the link, just in case anyone's thinking why write poetry about the law is because the lawyers and poets use the same principle tool, which is words. So there was this real kind of affinity there. And we knew we had to be distinctive. We knew that creativity is about trying to revoke and more emotional response. And so we wrote these kind of amazing poems about what LOB does for the economy. What's it really like when you're in middle of a massive merger or acquisition? While people from less privileged backgrounds are the future of the law, what's it like the night before you start your first job as a lawyer? We did some quite emotive stuff. We even did one, we had a fairly well known poet, did one about the laws that Santa Claus might need to be a bit more mindful of, you know, just did one for fun. And we put it out there and it was a bit of a brave moment. I was not aware of anybody else ever having tried it before and we're so pleased we did the seat the feedback, the sentiment from clients was just phenomenal. We had something like about 3 million online impressions for this poetry. We saw a double digit spike in people's searching for our firm. So it translated into kind of a much more hard benefit. We had something like, it was well over 6,000 higher read rates than anything else we'd ever put out there before we knew. We had hundreds and hundreds of people came to poetry events and who knew? We had over a thousand hours of exposure on the Financial Times website. So it proved that being distinctive can work. It proves that in any industry, there is an opportunity to be more arresting and more evocative.
Steve Goldhaber: It's great idea. I mean, who would've thought poetry and legal, fit together, but the connectivity in words is nice there. What was the problem you guys were trying to solve? Is it an awareness thing? Is it a client engagement thing? What were you seeking out to accomplish?
Brian Macreadie: Yeah, it's a great question. So there was a business imperative behind it. So the firm I work in is nearly 250 years old. It's quite something and it's grown almost exclusively over the years through in-person client relationships. It really invests in it. 90% of what we do is client contact. Really showing a lot of curiosity in our client businesses and the firm, believe it or not, I had never done a brand campaign ever. It thrives so much on this one-on-one client interaction but we did a budget tracker. We went off and surveyed the market and understood what did people think of us? And behold, the clients that worked with us loved us. But there was a great many people that hadn't heard of us and in a couple of key markets, you know, a couple of our rivals had more than double the brand awareness than we did. We've all seen the evidence that brand awareness, if they don't know who you are, they're not gonna consider you. They're not gonna invite you to the pitch. And so it became an imperative that we needed to do something about it. One other really quite surprising piece of research we had a look at our number of our key rivals, we had some analysis done and we counted up in one year. In a calendar year, there'd literally been hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of thousands of content outputs, social posts, webinar invites, thought leadership reports, articles, you name it and we just knew if you wanna stand out from the crowding client inboxes, we had to try something different. So there was a real business problem at the heart.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. So I'm gonna, deep dive for a little bit. In most B2B businesses, it's always working with sales, right? At a law firm, clearly, like they're not only selling the work, but they're doing the work and I haven't done much in the legal field, but when I get into that a little, I've always found lawyers are one step above salespeople, meaning they can be more challenging, they have more restrictions. I've had people in the legal space tell me like, well, we're the only ones who can do thought leadership because we're lawyers, we have law degrees, and then less of writer has a law degree, then they can't do anything good. Right. So I'm sharing this context. My question to you is how do you sell in a campaign like that to lawyers who are traditionally a little bit conservative or they might say, this doesn't make me look good. Poetry. How is it gonna make me look good?
Brian Macreadie: Every business has got a different culture and I'm fortunate to work in quite a progressive, quite an innovative culture. And I think the law has changed over the last 20 years. I think people have an outdated view of what it may have been like, and I'm sure there's some very conservative firms out there. But it's a business. They understand the dynamics of competition, use of technology, and AI has transformed the legal landscape the last 10 years. So it's kind of more progressive than a lot of people feel. I enjoy working in it immensely. In this instance the other good thing about working with partners is they are smart. They are High IQ individuals, and I've shared over time there to kind of condition my colleagues a bit. I've shared a lot of academic research with them coming up Harvard Business School, or McKinsey or, the Bennet and field research that we're all familiar within B2B. I share that and they get the business dynamics. They like the fact that there is some weight and some academia behind modern marketing. And so I think that they were in a frame of mind where they understood, okay, that's how brands work. What are we gonna do about it? And luckily poetry is kind of viewed as a slightly elite art form. And I think it was when they got that link between poetry and words. Honestly, my managing partner and my business development director, the three of us sat down. It was like a four minute conversation. He's like, right, bring it on. Let's do it. Because there was some thinking, there was an idea and there was a link there. And not everybody was sure it was gonna work. I had at least one sleepless night. But we let the poets loose with some of the clients. I sat in on the phone calls. The clients loved it. They loved the poems. They were saying, wow, this is really quite moving and it just gave everyone the confidence to really go for it and we're just really pleased we did.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah. And I also think too, just like lawyers can relate, so much of it is writing. I think lawyers, we all think, oh, you're in making arguments. But so much of it is the written word of how you present your ideas or persuade people. Cool. Anything else about the first case study that you wanted to share?
Brian Macreadie: No. You can go and kind of look at it online. The campaign was called Rhyme and Reason. You can still see some of the poems but the Poet's Worth will do it. Far more justice videos on YouTube. And it was quite a beautiful experience to work with 'em in honesty. I'm a big admirer of their profession.
Steve Goldhaber: All right, great. So we're gonna jump into the second case study, and I promise the audience, this is not a Halloween theme, even though it's gonna involve haunting. So scare us with this next story. What do you have for us?
Brian Macreadie: Yeah, so I'll start with what we did and then I'll explain why we do it, in case people think I've kind of lost my mind a bit. So, we took 300 and 80 or so VIPs, these are senior business executives in some of the largest brands on Earth, and we haunted them. We got them into our office. And we scared the daylights out of them for about three hours. We brought them in an educational event. The background to this, that there were a couple of things going on in the economy in regulation that we were worried that businesses weren't taken seriously enough. We wanted to make the point of you don't take this stuff more seriously, like data breaches, data protection, things like that. This stuff was gonna come back and haunt you. That was the very simple idea. And we wanted that simple fact to be inescapable that for a couple of hours in our office, when people came in, we literally haunted the daylights out of them. We kind of had Ghostbusters running into meeting rooms. We built a fake wall and we had people. Clients getting grabbed through this fate wall we served them edible eyeballs, which were tasted, and you might think they were actually made outta chocolate. We actually had this kind of camera set up so when people were sitting there that there was actually ghosts in the room. They had screens where they could see that they were sitting next to a ghost. We projected this stuff onto, rather than just on a normal screen. We projected it, we had this kind of smoke screen and it created this really ghosty effect. And yeah, we had all sorts. We had the shining in there. We had like people screaming, we had the lights going out and the electricity effects. Yeah, it sounded really gratuitous. But again, it had this very simple notion that it was a very serious educational event. They got really quite serious know-how and it came from a good place that we were really worried that clients weren't doing enough and it really was gonna come back and haunt them and for their white forgiving. They saw there was a bit of humor, but they got a huge amount from it and they forgave us because they're like, okay, we get the point.We got about three hours’ time with about 380 VIPs over half of which we'd never met before. They queued up and said, okay, you've gotta beat that next year. What are you gonna do for us next year? And they get laid down a gauntlet. We had a waiting list for the similar event the following year. Yeah. Got a huge amount of kudos. We did a feedback survey and a hundred percent event satisfaction. They said, we just didn't know law firms did this kind of stuff. And the point, the reason why I wanted to share it from my fellow B2B Marketers, cause you know, all of us on this podcast, we all do the same thing for a living. It shows that if you can be bold and be brave and you can do it in a legal sector, you can do it anywhere. And there's a number of reasons we're all marketers. There are a bunch of reasons why we don't do things. The budget might not be there, or we don't know, we don't have the creative ideas or we don't get enough of these examples that inspire us. But one of the things I don't think we should let ourselves get in our way is thinking that we can't try. And that, I just wanna share that cuz you can really push it. We've done a bunch of stuff like that in the last 10 years of where I've worked. It can work and I'm always delighted when we've done it.
Steve Goldhaber: Tell me about the numbers of VIPs. That was really interesting to me. Tell me about getting them to the event, did you tease out the haunting theme or was that just no, that was a true surprise the day that they were there.
Brian Macreadie: Yeah, we'd kind of built it up, we played the entry card pretty heavily. We promised that they were gonna come away with useful insights on how to cope with the data breach, how to cope with data protection or key contractual things that were going on in the world that they really needed to be careful of on their supply chain. So we were absolutely clear that they were gonna get tier one ranked lawyers providing unmix useful stuff that they would need in their boardrooms. That sat at the heart of that. And we were clear, but we did also say we did kind of dare people to come because they were about to have the scariest morning of their lives. That it was unlike anything they would ever experience and they would be upset if they missed it. So we played the entry card and we actually filmed a ghost movie in our office and we sent them as a teaser video and it kind of had all sorts of scream effects. We had people walking through walls and that got quite a big clickthrough rate. And so we found, you know, I'm not sure what everyone else's stats, it's not unheard of for 30, 40% of people to not come to an event. Every one of us experienced dropout rates from webinars on this one, but this one had almost no dropout rate. So were really proud of it and I felt a little bit sick. I'm not gonna lie the night before. I think that if you're not feeling sick, it fills you're in. It means you're in your comfort zone and you realize you're not pushing it too hard. And it wasn't the first thing I did for that business. I'd built up a level of trust with the partners in that firm. Long beforehand, I had built up that trust. They were prepared for me to give it a whirl. They knew they'd fire me if it had backfired. You know and I thought it was a lot of fun, but yeah, it was scary for us too.
Steve Goldhaber: I mean, I think it just speaks to like, you gotta have confidence as a company or if it's a client, you're doing this for you. You've gotta have the confidence just to say, let's try something different. I've worked with some really conservative organizations over the years and they've gone at the level of almost like, what's the color palette in this year, thought leadership venue or forum. And it's kind of like if you're getting down to that level of creativity, then you are going to bore your audience. And it also reminds me of, I think there's a great Maya Angelou quote about, people don't remember the words you say, but they remember how you make them feel. And just having that feeling of something different. If the law firm is trying to lean into like we're bit different, we're more innovative. We can capture your interest and attention, then that very structure of that event makes your point as opposed to just relying so much on the keynote speech or what the brochure says. So I applaud you for really going out there and really it's great to see that it made a lasting. All right, awesome. I don't know if you can top case study number two, but we're gonna transition to case study number three. And this theme of creativity that we're gonna talk about, this one specifically has to do with what you do as a B2B marketer if you face budgetary constraints. So walk us through the third case study.
Brian Macreadie: Yeah, so it is something we face. And we know that I kind of believe that you can't really expect exceptional results as a marketer with unexceptional tactics and the budget constraints do limit that. They do make it more challenging for us. But I think there is a way and I just wanna share example of something I'm pretty proud of that we're working on right now that is on a real shoestring budget. When you don't have large budgets, we find that you have to go niche, you have to go super targeted. And so there's a business line that we've got where we provide freelance lawyers, into clients, perhaps to kind of fill a gap if they've got some maternity leave or they've got a fire calling on extended sick leave. And so we have a business that hires freelance contractors, but there's again, many people that do this, now we're only one. And we can't grow that business if we didn't have more freelance contractors. So we once go out and just get a handful of new freelance contractors to come and partner with us and we can put them into client relationships. We've got so much more demand with clients than we have freelancers deliver it. So we've got this really cool thing going on at the moment. And it was just some really simple copywriting and we had this really simple idea, our service, because we're small and because it's niche, it's super personalized, we really get to know the consultants, we freelancers, and we really get to know the clients. And we had this idea that a hundred percent, you know, if you don't get a contractor or a freelancer that goes into client and it's a hundred percent right. Then it's a hundred percent wrong. You have a perfect match or you're not a perfect match. And so we had this simple idea that if you come to us, we're gonna get it just right. We're gonna get it perfectly right. And the simple genius piece of copywriting that an agency helped us with is that they brought together things that were almost right, but not quite. So we've got this campaign going live at the moment where we've got mac and trees. Not mac and cheese We've got this campaign going, a knife and forklift, not a knife and fork. And we've got a whole bunch of these that, it's a really grim looking one, but it, it's proving quite effective where we've got a burger, somebody getting served, burger and flies, not burger and fries. And again, really just simple copywriting. We've got some really simple little illustrations to go. It is seriously marketing on a shoestring, but we got the target number of contractors that we were hoping to reach within the first 10 days or something. It just utterly nailed it because it was a simple idea brought to life. And in your line of work, Steve, just really well-crafted copy can sometimes nail the day on and save the day on a budget. And we've done a bunch of stuff. We've done really simple video games and I've sent cookie fortune cookies to people all on a budget. But this one we're really proud of and sometimes that constraint forces us to just think in a very different way. We're really proud of.
Steve Goldhaber: Those are some great lines. When you look at the effectiveness of marketing, you break it down into like, who's the audience? What are you sharing with them? Right? Or if it's an offer, what's the offer? If you're in the direct response world, they say like, oh, the creative can only do so much. Like, the creative is not gonna be as impactful as the audience in the offer every now and then you see some great creative, whether it's a headline or a concept that really just stands out and trumps all of the normal science behind any type of like, direct response or branding campaign. So, awesome. Well, I appreciate you sharing those three case studies. We're gonna jump in now to how it all started for you. Like what was your first B2B marketing gig. And what were you excited about it? Did you stumble into it? How did you get started?
Brian Macreadie: So Plan A was never to be a marketer. I majored on Physics. I did a degree in Physics at a place called Imperial College, which is like a British version of MIT and plan A was to be an astronaut and this really young guy made an utterly naive attempt to get into NASA and that didn't kind of work out. I didn't have a green card. I couldn't fly a fighter, hadn't done anything in the world of science. So I was kind of left with this, what the hell do I do now? I got a job in a defense industry, got a job coding software on defense algorithm. And this really strange thing happened a few years in. I found that I was better with clients and customers than I was with code. I kind of managed to cut through in some client meetings where there was some clashing going on between coders and clients. I sat in this meeting with an admiral from the Royal Navy and the coders and the military folk weren't talking the same language, and I found I was able to bridge the gap and my managing director pulled me out the room. I thought he was gonna roast me for like, speaking up in front of an admiral and he said, you seem to be okay with clients. I'm gonna send you on some sales and marketing courses. Do some account management and some pitches for us. And he sent me on a marketing course in this kind of light bulb moment, and I thought, oh wow, why didn't I think of this before now? I love it. Invested, I educated myself a bit and decided that was the job for me. And a job came up for a huge American telecoms business where they were prepared to invest in people that wanted to go into the marketing team and put some more training and the rest is history. So I spent a bunch of time in New Jersey and London and learned the trade of B2B marketing, and I've been in B2B marketing ever since. So, haven't looked back.
Steve Goldhaber: That's a great story. I feel like we can look back on today's show and say, all right, if you're not going into space, the backup plan is to be in marketing. It's very clear path. I'll ask you, up a two folded question. What do you love about marketing And then at the same time, what's driving you crazy these days?
Brian Macreadie: Good question. I love the variety. It's a crazy job. We all do. You've gotta be a strategist, you've gotta be a creative, you've gotta be an analyst, you've gotta be a technician, you've gotta be a project manager. I love the variety of it. It's just been so interesting kind of typically the people that come into profession are pretty cool, fun, interesting, upbeat people, and that's been great. I'm kind of competitive as well, so I get stressed out. It winds me up a little bit. Sorry if I use London language, but it winds me up when I see rivals doing good thing and that I found it being a great outlet, drawing creative stuff that others aren't trying. So it's really ticked all the boxes for me and I having moved defense, telecoms, media companies, law firms, the skills are quite transferrable. So it's been fun in that I've traveled the world, so it's been amazing. The older I've got I've become quite aware of things that I'm good at and things I'm not great at. And I surrounded myself with people that are great at the things I'm not.We're going through a big new CRM system rollout at the moment and all of the technical integration with our analytics platforms and our email marketing systems and our webinar platform and, Technology integration, we could spend our whole lives sweating over that. And that's not my forte. I prefer looking strategically about how we're gonna win in the market, but I surround myself with people that are great at that. So if I could, if I didn't have to spend a day of my life on tech integration, I'd be a really happy guy. Thank the Lord for people that are good at that.
Steve Goldhaber: Yeah, that is a whole unique skillset there. I mean, if you've ever been invited to a five to six hour meeting where it's like, we're just gonna hammer this out in the work session and get deep into tech, it's just like, I actually enjoy the detail that's required to do tech the right way and integrate it with marketing. So selfishly it's like, I've enjoyed what I've done that a couple times, but now when I see it coming, it's kind of like, it's not my strength, similar to what you just said. But it's like so I wanna be involved, but I can't get so deep into it because the stuff as it relates to technology today is just insane. You can't go so deep because you'll get lost. There's so much out there in the technology.
Brian Macreadie: You know what? It just makes you love people that are great at that. The people in my team that are major on that are operations people, data people, you know, I love the outputs. I love the efficiency the tech provides. But I'm in awe of them. I think marketing's at great thing that there's so many skill sets that need to come together. There's room for people of so many different backgrounds. Right. It’s a great part of it.
Steve Goldhaber: What about looking back, if you could talk to yourself, besides understanding the green card situation, so you couldn't get into NASA, right? If you could give your younger B2B marketer an advice on the industry if they were just getting started, what are some things now that you can kind of say, yeah, don't do this, or don't worry about that.
Brian Macreadie: Do you know, I have reflected on this in the past, and I think that I'd probably say to my younger self, do you know what's gonna work out? Fine? Try this stuff. You're not gonna get fired over it. I think I'd say that to myself. I think I tell my younger self that you're gonna be most proud of yourself when you've tried something new and you've been brave and you've pushed boundaries and it's all right, buddy. You've got this. I think I'd say that to myself, but I've had a pretty good career, but there's one thing that I think that has always stood me in good stead. I think if I could points to the key to any success I've had to one thing it would be, I was really fortunate to spend a lot of my early time in marketing, doing a lot of market research and spending a lot of time with clients and customers at their premises, and I think that knowing what clients, what makes them tick, the pressures in their world, what it looks like in their office, what their objectives look like, what their routines are like. I think having that empathy has set me up more than anything. And in every industry I've worked in, I've either been fortunate or I've forced myself into situations where I go out and spend time with 10, 20, 30, 40 customers and clients and really get to know them cuz I don't think I've been able to do anything or build anything without that foundation. So yeah, I'd say to my younger self, every chance you get, say hello to a client. Take it. I'm a strong believer that she who knows the client best, has the best possible chance of winning. I believe that to my core. I would tattoo that on myself somewhere, I think.
Steve Goldhaber: Nice. You think, my goodness, if we've gotta do an audit of your tattoos. I agree with that. I think you get such insights out of face-to-face time with a client. And beyond just talking to the client, you get so much cultural context because ultimately in the world of marketing, I was once naive enough to think, oh, well it's just the marketing idea is if it's a good idea, it's gonna get sold and that's it. And there's so many cultural factors at play when marketers pitch ideas or campaigns. And sometimes it's just you use the wrong language that scares someone culturally. It's like, well, if you position it that way, that idea will never become a reality. And when I've spent time with clients over the years, I always say like, the greatest indicator of a client's culture is walking into their lobby. And just by sitting in the lobby, you can understand how dated is it? Is the look of that lobby important to them? Some clients like have automated check-ins where there is not a human, right. Those are the tech companies. Like, well, we don't need a receptionist out there. We we're just gonna have technology do it all right? But I've always loved to just sit outside in the lobby and just take it in. And it's so telling for the culture of a company. All right. Anything else that you wanted to touch on? I've enjoyed our conversations around scaring clients in a good way.
Brian Macreadie: No, I just everyone of this totally different industry. We've got mature businesses, new business, fast growth industries, small industries. We're all facing fundamentally different challenges. At some point I think you can't do the same things in the same ways as everybody else and the cross. We're gonna have to bear the demons we're gonna have to face each one of us is at some stage, we're gonna have to do something distinctive. And it takes bravery to try it. But it's worth every moment in my experience of the engagement that you get and the results that come out of it. And we all love what we do and, and just encourage those that haven't tried it yet to just push harder.
Steve Goldhaber: That's great. Maybe I'm gonna start giving out awards on the podcast. And you definitely get the bravery award for having the courage to go do things in an industry that most people would not bring a lot of creativity and innovation to. So, my congratulations to you on that and thank you for joining us on the show and all the listeners out there, thanks again for joining and make sure to like and subscribe and we look forward to seeing you on the next episode of Interesting B2B Marketers. Take care, everyone.