Episode 12 Transcript | Quinn Curtis of Disruptive Marketing

Peter Stevenson

Welcome to By Subject, a silicon slopes brand and marketing podcast. I’m your host, Peter Stevenson. And I’m here with my co host, Alysha Smith, managing partner at Modernate and agency. And today we’re pleased to have Quinn Curtis, CMO of Disruptive Advertising. Welcome.

Quinn Curtis

Thank you so much for having me.

Peter Stevenson

We’re so glad to have you here.

Quinn Curtis

Hi.

Peter Stevenson

So tell us a little bit about you, like, where you grew up, where you went to high school and college. What’s your vibe growing up? Who are you?

Quinn Curtis

My vibe growing up? That 80s vibe, right? So I grew up in the Sandy midvale area of Utah and went to Hillcrest High School Husky, and actually are you a hawk? My goodness, what a small world. Yes. And actually met my husband there even in my junior year we met. And that’s cute, cute little love story that didn’t feel like a love story at the time felt like a stress and drama story, but it led to a love story, so it worked out great.

Peter Stevenson

So you went to Hillcrest High, and then where did you go to college?

Quinn Curtis

So my path is a little bit probably unconventional compared to a lot of the marketers that you interview, just because I was raised very orthodox, religiously, to the point where I was strongly, strongly encouraged to not be a career, not have a career as a woman interesting. And to not go to college for that type of thing. It was like if I was going to go to college, it would be to support my husband, to get his degree and have him be the provider. And so I didn’t even show up to my school’s career day in high school and to interview colleges or anything. And I had a couple of colleges that were like the okay, approved places I could go, and there were very limited degrees that I was allowed to pursue. So I ended up pursuing kind of a nursing path. It was nursing or teacher at the time, which were like, okay for me to go for. And so I went forward with that. Worked in the medical industry for a little bit, but was just miserable after the second doctor that I worked with having a nervous breakdown due to the stressors there. This is just not a happy path. I’m not having joy here. And so I left that and then did really surrender into just being the mom for a while. And so I really didn’t even get into marketing until I had to find the back door because it wasn’t at all okay for me to go. I had zero support if I wanted to pursue a career like that. Kind of a wilder path.

Peter Stevenson

What years was this? So you went and got a did you get your nursing degree then?

Quinn Curtis

The medical math class is what killed me, and so I dropped out after that. Okay, so I was a phlebotomist up at the U. I did medical assisting. I got my medical assisting degree from LDS Business College, which is so ironic because I could have had a business degree at that school and in hindsight I’m like, oh, that would have been so much more my alley. But I did medical assisting, did that for a couple of years and then that’s when I left at that point.

Peter Stevenson

And then went and did the mom route for a little bit. Yeah, which is an amazing thing to get.

Alysha Smith

Not easy.

Quinn Curtis

It is, yeah. And it just wasn’t ever like my dream and so I kind of more or less was just doing it because it was the right thing to do. And I am so glad, of course, in hindsight, but I have five children and they are all, it was like six pregnancies in nine years. So it was pretty wild. And we just hit this point around my fourth daughter when we were just really struggling financially. We had not had a great plan to go into having that many children. And so in that struggle was where I started to think, well, now is the internet so accessible? Which ages me, right? And I’m sure you guys can relate, but with the Internet there and what could I do at home while raising my kids and do it kind of subtly. So it kind of started as a hobby project. So my first hobby business was to set up an ecommerce store and I just went all in. I had a blast with it and even just had a knack for certain aspects of PR and marketing from the beginning, where the store was on Park City Television, they promoted it. There was such woman, did a big advertising for an event that we wanted to do for the store. It got a lot of traction, but it just still wasn’t my passion. But what I had thought at the time was you just build the website and then the online traffic will come, which as we all know, is not even possible. And so it just opened up this whole world of online digital marketing to me that I had to aggressively learn in the trenches to try to figure out my own businesses problem. And so I just became a sponge. Anything that I could learn, any mentor I could learn from, any program I could take online, I did it. So it was all in my spare time while raising my kids, just like learning. Absolutely everything I could learn was this.

Peter Stevenson

Business, your own business that you built this website for. So you created your own ecommerce company and you started to figure out how to do the branding and marketing for that company and that’s where you backdoored into loving marketing.

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, absolutely. Prior to that, I’d been dabbling in graphic design and so I already had a graphic design background. Self taught here again, though, because I wasn’t able to pursue that, brought that into the Ecommerce store and used some of those skills there. And then as I lost enthusiasm for the Ecommerce business, I became a food photographer. So it’s like such a random path. I had no idea at the time that all these little random steps would be totally preparing me really well to be a strong art director and creative director, marketing director, because I just got lots of experience in other ways. So as a food photographer, I was like Utah Business Magazines food photographer for a long time, a long time in those years. So it was a couple of years, but even wasatch woman magazines photographer at that time as well and just got a lot of great exposure and like, what does it look like to do all of those aspects of marketing as well? So definitely my background was more in. I was more comfortable in the visual realms of marketing, like the brand identity and messaging and visual aspects of marketing. But I had to really study and learn all the technical aspects and so that’s what I was diving into all the time as well.

Alysha Smith

Can I ask for some listeners that may also want to be learning in their spare time? What were some of the resources that you came across that you took advantage of to learn?

Quinn Curtis

Absolutely.

Alysha Smith

The technical stuff.

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, well, I had no idea who even was figuring it out to a degree. And so I joined a local women’s networking group right away for entrepreneurs and that helped connect me with some marketers in the space and businesses that were doing it right. And it just kind of grew from there that I just kept watching who is everybody else learning from or who’s mentoring the mentors and kind of following that trail back? I actually feel like in a lot of ways, getting my marketing education that way has been an advantage because I had no biases based off of how marketing should be done, like how it’s taught in a textbook. And so I was more or less just really invested in guerrilla marketing, like what’s actually happening in the trenches and what’s working for people. And luckily, the social algorithms, once they figure out you’re following some of those people, they’ll feed you the ads of the related people. And so it just expanded my world pretty quickly. But it was a lot of the coaches and or, I don’t know, funnel builders and just people who were out teaching how to do all of the online marketing kinds of things. I would really vet and research them really carefully and then I would invest in the programs and or masterminds and opportunities that felt like a good fit. But it was an expensive education. So I’m not saying it’s like the easiest way to learn it, but it was definitely a valuable way to do it too.

Alysha Smith

Not to mention I’m sure you made quite a few connections along the way.

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, absolutely.

Alysha Smith

Expanded that network.

Quinn Curtis

Yeah. Which was really important for where I was at at that point because I had so many limiting beliefs. Walking into even being a marketer and being in business, having a career path, that it was really crucial for me. To be in this incubator with all of these marketers and even female entrepreneurs and marketers who were just showing me you can do both. You can be a mom, you can do business. And it was like I needed to heal in a lot of ways. So it was a really important part of my journey, I think.

Alysha Smith

How interesting. And how does your family feel about your path now?

Quinn Curtis

Oh, they’re so grateful. My husband and I joke that we paid for my MBA through the school of hard knocks, but we love it now. It was hard. There were definitely moments where he was like, why are we doing this again? Is this really ever going to pan out? Or Are you really getting it? Because I think that’s something you guys could probably relate to in the listeners that there’s so much of what we do within marketing and the digital space that almost doesn’t seem literal or real. It’s hard for people to comprehend it sometimes. Even I find in executive teams that I’ve been on and working with CEOs, they have a hard time imagining how what you’re doing in the marketing is actually affecting the business sometimes. Right. So we’re continually needing to tell those stories. And so my family was definitely in that boat as well, of just like, we trust you, like, you’re on the computer a lot. We think this is helpful. So it took time, but then when I first got my first major marketing role as a director of marketing for a company that wasn’t my own, then that was like, a cool moment because very quickly, as I started working with them, they were like, wait a minute, you can provide such massive value for us. How much do we need to pay you in order to have you full time and bring your husband home to watch your kids? So I was still a little bit juggling both, and so it was pretty cool to then bring that into more of, like, a corporate or business space and see it just directly applicable and how I could help them find those cutting edges pretty quickly.

Alysha Smith

And then how about your parents? Do they feel proud of you now that you’ve blazed your own trail?

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, I think so.

Peter Stevenson

That’s a dangerous question.

Quinn Curtis

I know your parents are proud of you guys. That’s a tricky one, right? But I hope so.

Alysha Smith

Yeah.

Quinn Curtis

I think that they still have a hard time and worry about, like, maybe are my kids okay?

Alysha Smith

So it’s kind of like they always will.

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, but we’ve navigated it well.

Peter Stevenson

Let me ask you about that first role that you got as doing marketing for a company. So how did you get that role? What was the company, what were you doing for them? Kind of tell us a little bit about that background and moving in that professional direction there.

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, absolutely. So the company was it’s just a little company called Seedstone, but they were like tiny but mighty. It was a multimillion dollar company with just a few people in it. So I was able to work directly with the CEOs. But how I got that opportunity was really through that network that I had established prior. They had just in fact the owner of the networking group I had first joined is the one who made that introduction to me for them to consider hiring me for that role.

Peter Stevenson

And what did they sell? What is seedstone?

Quinn Curtis

You said seedstone. Yeah. I actually don’t even know if that company is around still anymore. I think they’ve transitioned but they were wellness training and marketing development company. It was actually in relation to selling essential oils. It was kind of in that doTERRA world which was so random. So I came in like A, not believing in network marketing at the time and B like, okay, let’s try this. This is a little bit different than all the typical marketing application, but I found it really developed my marketing education skill set of just being able to help people understand what’s essential to be able to market yourself and to be able to get out there. So that training. The reason why I don’t think they exist anymore is because everything that we created was eventually purchased by doTERRA International and became their international training program. So I was leading both the development of all of the training aspects and materials as well as developing the marketing for all of those things too.

Peter Stevenson

Interesting. You talk about you had some early mentors who kind of were helping you and can you tell us a little bit about what made them great? And if you can name some of those people and shout them out and tell us what was great about them sure. And what they provided to you that really stuck out years later.

Quinn Curtis

Sure. Well, definitely that owner of the networking group. The networking group was called Startup Princess. The owner is Kelly King and she was massively impactful in my journey, has become a really good friend over the years. But at the time she just kept showing me, well, why not? Why can’t you do that? Why can’t you just go farther? Why can’t you try that? So she was a huge cheerleader and then also a really big connector. And so she was constantly connecting me to other resources and I felt like the way that she connected with me that I really resonated with is she just never treated me as if I was beneath her. She always treated me as I was a peer and so it felt very much like is it Abraham Lincoln’s quote of like I am who I am today because of the people who believed in me and I didn’t have the heart to let them down. Right. It felt very much like that in the mentorship relationship. Interesting, just drawing that greatness out of me that she could see, but I definitely couldn’t at the time.

Peter Stevenson

And so you mentioned as we were getting going, that you are really invested in education and invested in helping the next generation of marketers. How have those early mentors in your past influenced the way that you work with people now?

Quinn Curtis

Oh, man, what a good question. I think I was just even in a company meeting right before this, where I was hearing somebody else at the company use a phrase that I use all the time. It’s now become like nomenclature over at the office of just, is it in flow and on fire? Like, are you in flow and on fire with the work that you’re doing? And so we really focus in a major part of what I teach is all about finding your joy and genius zone in marketing and in whatever you do. And that that’s where the cutting edge is. That’s where you’re going to find your creativity and you’re going to find your opportunities that are going to really help you make an impact with the clients that you’re working with. So that, I definitely feel like is sparked from those early years where I felt very much like my own genius and my own potential was being drawn out of me and was seen, but I wasn’t realizing it. So I just think it’s important to have people around you that believe in you and to also trust wherever your heart is calling you to go. I think marketing is such a Wild West in so many ways where it’s just like right now in the trenches, somebody is developing what will be the norms for all of us tomorrow. It just changes so quickly. And so I think it’s very dangerous to only rely on what it should look like in the book or what it has looked like classically. And so I feel like it’s a much stronger true north, like, okay, you’re really excited about video today. Awesome. Lean in there, go deep, really get expansive and excited there, and trust that that’s a part of the path that’s going to help you ultimately with your career. And I’ve seen that time and again as I’ve mentored a lot of marketers who have then gone on to bigger roles and have had some cool opportunities. And it feels like when they connect with, oh, this is the fun of marketing. Oh, here’s where my joy is with this. That’s where their career starts to shift and things start to work better.

Alysha Smith

So it’s really like finding that passion and then helping them cultivate that and growing that from there.

Quinn Curtis

Absolutely. So cool. Yeah, I love that, which I think is very different from how I think marketing kind of has lost its soul in a lot of areas. I don’t know what hasn’t. This is so true. Everything has. Right. I think marketing has become very it’s easy for it to be transactional. It’s easy for us to go into this kind of robotic verbiage or robotic actions with our marketing. And so I do believe, especially I was just a couple of weeks ago at Google headquarters with my company, we’re Top Premier Partners, and we’re talking with some of their developers and learning about what’s going on over there, especially with AI and how things are being affected. And it was really my takeaway from that is that creativity is the new currency. It’s all about what you can creatively bring to put into those inputs, like AI and wherever marketing is going in the future. But if we don’t stay creative and curious and playful with marketing, I think that then that’s where machines have a lot easier time passing us, and that’s where there’s no joy actually in what a machine can just do for you. The joy is in the creativity. It seems interesting. Yeah.

Alysha Smith

So well said.

Peter Stevenson

Okay. So seed and stone I think I.

Quinn Curtis

Said.

Peter Stevenson

It was a cuter name when I had these.

Quinn Curtis

I like it. Yeah, we suggest that to them.

Peter Stevenson

So when was this? Like, what years did you work for them?

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, let’s see. My daughter was ten years ago.

Peter Stevenson

Ten years ago?

Quinn Curtis

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

Okay, so you left there to go where or to pursue what?

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, so I started my own business seven years ago, and so it was kind of alongside working there. And then I started your own agency. My own agency? Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

What kind of stuff were you doing with your own agency? Who are you targeting? What kind of work were you doing? What kind of marketing were you doing for people?

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, so we were definitely a boutique agency. So we worked with clients who usually were on, like, they had a brand established, but they were maybe like, either. I mean, honestly, we didn’t do too many small businesses. It was a lot of personal brands. So coaches, even politicians, like, the current head of the Democratic Party was one of my clients. We helped them get in through developing their brand and marketing strategies and really working on those hand in hand. So we would typically take what’s their existing brand, help understand who are they trying to target, who are they as a person, what’s their genius and magic, what’s their flavor infuse that into their branding, and then build out a marketing strategy that supported their goals. So it was pretty full funnel and.

Peter Stevenson

Mostly for individuals in their personal branding efforts.

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, I think because I just got such a high off working directly with one on one. I love that moment when we’re talking about even just mentoring. I love that moment of helping people see how all of their what they perceive as their messy pieces of themselves. So many people come to me and they would be like, I don’t even have a brand. Or I had one person who said, everybody says I can’t have my business look like me because I’m tacky. I’m like, oh, these are horrible things. And so as we dig in and work and then help them see, but look how beautiful your brand actually is. Look how beautiful your message is and what you’re bringing to the world. There’s magic here. It was just my favorite thing. So I loved hanging out in there in that personal brand space.

Alysha Smith

Did you have a process that you kind of followed to help uncover these things within the individuals you were working with?

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, definitely. By the time I left my agency or shut it down a year ago, it was a very dialed process too. And I even taught it all over well in multiple places. Most recently, before I shut the business down, I had this education arm of the brand where I taught a sole brand camp workshop and taught it on the east coast and west coast of Australia and lots of digital and online versions of it, as well as locally here in Utah. So that was where I was trying to bake that process and so it was more accessible instead of just those who could afford to work with our agency.

Peter Stevenson

Interesting. Yeah, that’s such a fascinating thing. I’ve never really thought about the fact that there were agencies doing personal branding work for people, but it makes total sense.

Quinn Curtis

Well, it was a blue ocean in a lot of ways because there’s a lot of people not doing it right. I mean, you guys know this from your industry as well and where you guys hang out. There’s a lot of graphic design out there and a lot of people claiming to be brand strategists, but to really understand the art of it isn’t common. So yeah, it was fun. Our prices were high. It was an investment to work with us, and so they already had to be pretty established. It wasn’t just like where I was in the beginning of my journey. I couldn’t have afforded that. But that’s why I built that education arm, because I found there are so many people with a passion for starting something and or just looking at, like now, even as I’m more in the corporate world. I see. So many. I mean, it’s almost like as corporate professionals, we’ve got to be maintaining our personal brands and or building our personal brands at the same time. I’m seeing, even with the brand or the marketing strategy for disruptive itself, which I manage, then I’m seeing the benefit of how many personal brands within the company can we be leveraging to support these efforts? Because it’s just a lot easier to grow movements and get people excited about things sometimes with that personal brand or influence or model even.

Peter Stevenson

Right. Okay. So I’m going to do something I haven’t done in any of the other podcasts, but maybe give us like two or three tips for people’s personal branding that they should think about.

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, sure. This is going to catch me off guard too. I haven’t had this conversation for a.

Peter Stevenson

Minute, but this is secretly for me to build my own brand.

Quinn Curtis

Okay, let’s build your brand.

Peter Stevenson

The listeners can also enjoy these tips that I’m learning.

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, I think the biggest place well, okay, so a couple of things. I would take my clients and students through a process of just going into Pinterest to figure out your visual brand identity. I think there’s a lot of times we get stuck in the well, I’m all about wellness, so it has to be I have to use green. There’s got to be a leaf in my logo or something. But actually going into Pinterest, especially if you’re building a personal brand and just set the timer for 15 minutes and pin anything and everything that just lights you up. It doesn’t even matter what it is. It could be home decor, it could be fashion, it could be colors, it could be places you’d love to visit. But as I saw everybody doing this over the years, you start to see themes and you start to see a flavor showing up. And I used to tell everybody that it’s your dichotomies that actually make you irresistible. And we usually, as we’re trying to establish our personal brands, try to choose one or the other parts of us. So we’re like, well, I’m really funny, but I’m also really emotional and sensitive, so I’ve got to choose one for my personal brand. When in actuality, the dynamics between your dichotomies of being that funny but also sensitive, heartfelt person is more what people would be drawn to than you choosing one or the other. So sometimes that style exercise helps define some of that because it helps you see, well, what would this look like in practicality?

Peter Stevenson

Sure.

Quinn Curtis

So that then you could start to see what kind of colors really inspire you to use in your personal branding, even if it’s as simple as what color do you use in your fonts on your Instagram stories or your reels covers? Right. It doesn’t have to be dramatic graphic design. So that would be step one. And then step two would be really defining who are the people that you’re the most passionate about serving and just clarifying what are their pain points, what are they struggling with, what are you so excited to show up and serve them with, and pulling out from that what are some common themes? Because oftentimes as I’ve taken people through that process and they’ve gone even deeper, we start to see your why kind of showing up in a stronger way than maybe it has here. Again, a trap that would keep us from that kind of clarity is usually like, well, I got to think of my demographics that I’m trying to target with my personal brand or business. And it’s X Y people within this age range that live in this area, that the whole demographics game. Versus if you really speak to like, well, what’s the heart of the problem that you’re really passionate about solving? Then it helps your message immediately get more clear so that you can bring more consistency in everything that you’re sharing on social media, even if it’s random posts here and there.

Peter Stevenson

Sure.

Alysha Smith

And you’re connecting with an audience on an emotional level rather than like a demographic level.

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, I mean, so much marketing. I feel like especially in that personal brand space, we just forget the human element and we just start talking about the product or about the service and then that doesn’t work. And so then we’re like, oh, I must need to discount it. So let’s just talk about discounts all the time. It’s on sale again. This is amazing. Right? And nobody’s biting still. But the minute you turn it more into like, what’s the movement that you’re leading with your brand? Even if it’s a small one. Right. As you can guess from my story, I’m very passionate about women having the opportunities to be able to make the impact that they want to in the world, to be able to have freedom to be able to provide for their families and or pursue the levels of education that they want. And so there’s this big women’s empowerment theme that comes through my personal brand. But then there’s also such a passion for just the art of marketing and storytelling that those came out because of these processes that now help make it easier for me to connect with my own audience.

Peter Stevenson

Interesting. I love the detail about thinking about who you’re serving in a better way. Often when I’ve seen personal branding tips, it’s all about the person who’s being branded and less about the people that they’re serving. And I think that’s a huge clue that I think is going to help a lot of people. So that’s a great tip.

Quinn Curtis

Well, you’re reminding me the two ways to think about that. Is there’s really just ever two aspects to a brand huge generalization? You guys would have your own opinions.

Alysha Smith

I’m sure, but we’ll see if it.

Quinn Curtis

Passes your sniff test. But I found you have the visual aspects, so I would call that the style of it. And then you have the messaging aspects of the brand, right? Sure. And so the style aspects I found best success when a personal brand and or business goes after really describing themselves with that style and then with their messaging, it’s all about their target market.

Peter Stevenson

Interesting.

Quinn Curtis

So that balance there is where it seemed to really sing. So I had an automation expert that she is just like a brilliant business strategist and she had been in the boys. Club. Like, everybody in that space, they’re all men. And so she had done tried to kind of copy what they were doing with their branding to look on par with them. And she was very afraid of being herself. But then when we went through this process, we found out she’s like bubblegum and sparkles and pastels. That’s who she is. She’s just like this magical automation fairy. Right. And she was so afraid, will people receive this? And so it was really in helping her understand. The more that your style represents you, the more that actually builds trust quickly because people get you and then they understand how to connect with your brand. And immediately, I mean, her business grew like, I think it was 40% within six months after we made that shift. It was pretty dynamic of just like, letting her be her, but then making her message all about the people she was showing up to serve.

Alysha Smith

Yeah, and of course she’s not going to serve everyone, but she’s going to serve the people that need her most.

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, and they weren’t even the people that happened to love Bubblegum and Sparkles and Pastels. Really. It’s the people who found that energetic, even of the playfulness or the creativity was what they were needing. Love.

Peter Stevenson

That okay. So a year or two ago, you made a switch to disruptive advertising, which is where we met. So tell us what drove you to make that switch during the pandemic era of going from running your own agency to then going to working at an agency.

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, I was very surprised about that change as well. I was at this pivotal moment where I was either going to grow my business exponentially or I was needing to make a big shift. And so I had had a lot of mentoring to try to help me with scaling the business dynamically, but I knew it was going to be a ton of work. And I was hitting a point where I had done entrepreneurship on the side of directing marketing for companies and or had seasons of just doing my own business as well, where I just was tired and I was kind of lonely even. I had my own business and my people that work with me, they were amazing and still are amazing. I still have relationships there, but it is different, like having a relationship as the boss versus just having a tribe. And so I just had this vision of, like, hey, if I made that switch, it would be incredible for it to feel like a tribe and a family that I was joining, and I could bring all this fun, magic, joy for marketing that I’ve been playing with into a community that was excited about it and wanted to play with me. So even like the CEO after my interview and it looked like this was the right decision to go because I really aligned with his vision and mission even with marketing and we have very similar values and dreams for the impact that marketing can have or meaningful marketing can have in the world. I wanted to give him this massive box of crayons on my first day as like, let’s go play with marketing because it would just seemed like such a symbol of finding my marketing playmates. That’s really what drove that decision and I’ve been so happy with it. It’s been amazing.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah. So I’d love to hear what it’s like being a CMO of a marketing company. What is that like? Are you utilizing your internal resources a lot? We find that when we’re trying to market our own agency, that stuff gets pushed to the back and we do our clients work first. Right, so what’s that like on a day to day basis? What are you doing for marketing and agency?

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, well, when I got there, it was the Cobblers kids have no shoes situation where they had done that very thing and it had definitely slipped. It was the afterthought. And so when they brought me in, that was a clear intention of we want our marketing to show what we’re doing for clients even, or showing what could be done. Beyond that, we would love the marketing team to be where we can test new strategies and try things out to then take back into the organization as well. And so we use our marketing team a lot in those ways, but there was a lot of groundwork to build up again and so that took most of last year even. We just launched our brand new beautiful website, which was a long process in the making, but it was such a needed asset that they just hadn’t had a strong website. But yeah, it is interesting being the marketing leader of a marketing agency, I mostly love it. But the part that sometimes I just have to have patience with and or it invites me to become a bigger, better person. Is you have kind of a target on your back all the time, because maybe not even a target, but everybody has an opinion about what you’re doing and how it’s being done and how it could be done better. So we hold ourselves to a very high standard on the marketing team and it is like the best of the best marketers within the agency that have the privilege of getting to work on that account and that helps shift some of those dynamics so that we’re bringing more of our best work into it instead. And that’s been a big shift. But in my role, we merged the sales and marketing team, so I manage both, which has been absolute joy because I have a lot of passion for sales as well and it gives me full access to the entire funnel and allows us to really make sure we’re impacting the whole thing.

Peter Stevenson

And when did that transition happen of you taking over sales was that right away or was that something that just sort of happened as you showed your impressiveness?

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, so I started in February and the transition happened in June 1 was when I took over the sales team.

Peter Stevenson

Okay, amazing.

Quinn Curtis

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

What are some learnings there that you.

Alysha Smith

Can highlights we want to hear?

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, well, I did a ton of research because I was just trying to also support the executive team with making the right decision for who should lead the sales team. And I wasn’t even convinced fully that I should. But there was so much research backing up the value and the impact of when you do combine marketing and sales into one department, typically companies were finding like at least 30% growth year over year as soon as they made that shift. So pretty dramatic. So I would say we’re definitely seeing that kind of synergy happening, which has been a cool learning. But I think one of the best parts is you no longer have the finger pointing of like, well, we don’t have enough ops marketing team. Well, you guys aren’t doing a good job of selling the ones that we’re sending and instead it feels like our problem that we’re solving together and it requires everybody’s creativity. So we find that our marketing team can give us an amazing feedback loop on exactly what the pain points that our target market is having that they’re seeing and talking to in the sales calls. Then we can go and apply directly into the marketing. And so it’s giving us this great process and just feedback channel to get that happening.

Alysha Smith

It is really interesting.

Quinn Curtis

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

So what’s next for the world of marketing? I mean, you are in the trenches, in the trenches. So I’d love to hear what you sort of see as the next couple of years of marketing and what the future holds for this world that we love.

Quinn Curtis

Such a cool question. This is what I dream or endure the pulse that I see based off of what I’m hearing. But I think the biggest call is towards leveraging more AI, just how we can do that better. Even within our digital marketing platforms like Meta and Google, there’s so much more AI and machine learning that is happening within those platforms that even our specialists at Disruptive are becoming far more like it requires a different skill set, a different level of expertise to work with that machine learning. And so I do feel like our days of the one person who can run all of your different channels are gone. And I think that especially as we go to more of a cookie list future, it’s going to just require more proactivity with marketing and being more aware of your full channel. Meaning that we’re gathering more first party data as part of our marketing as a continual best practice because all of this machine learning is going to depend on that data. So that’s like integrating your lifecycle marketing efforts with your ads efforts instead of where they have been able to play in silos. So I just see us having to merge more. I also see that just our ability to get great data is a little bit limited. It’s almost like we had this golden era where we could measure everything and it made us feel very secure. But the real grassroots of marketing and advertising definitely were never that way. You were always trying to prove the value of the marketing and what was happening. So I think we’ve gotten a little too comfortable with data. And what’s actually true is we’re needing to look at more of, like, blended results, blended effects instead of as much by channel. So I see a lot of even clients that we work with who are still preferring let’s work with PPC and or Meta because it’s so measurable and they’re scared to branch out into even something like TikTok, which is incredibly viral and a great opportunity, but they’re terrified because they don’t have as strong as visibility as they do in Meta and Google. Right? And so I think we’ve been pushing a lot of or not pushing, but encouraging a lot of our clients to start looking more at blended results. Like, for lead gen, what’s your CAC to AOV ratio? So your cost to acquire Total, are we driving that down overall through your blended results, including SEO efforts? Right. Or in Ecommerce, is it your Tacos, are they decreasing your cost of acquisition there? So I feel like the future is moving more so in that way, especially as we’re meeting with Google’s engineers and just seeing like, yeah, it’s not getting better, guys. We’re not going to get more visibility. That golden era is really over. So I think we just have to learn how to work with the machines at a higher level and bring more of that creativity to the process as well.

Peter Stevenson

Interesting. Well, man, I’m excited about this next future of AI and AI marketing and where that’s going to go, and I think I’m going to bug you offline to get some of those other tips.

Quinn Curtis

That you sort of talked about. Please do.

Peter Stevenson

Alicia’s got a question that she asks at the end of every interview.

Alysha Smith

Okay, well, if you were to just give one piece of golden advice out there to aspiring marketers or marketers that maybe just need a little nugget, what would that be?

Quinn Curtis

Man, it would be get in the trenches and get scrappy in your education. Prioritize your education, always, because what worked six months ago may not work in six months. And so the more that you just include continuing education is just part of your job description. It’s just part of how you are a great marketer, as you’re always learning. I think that will future proof your career and help you actually have more of a cutting edge than marketing peers who are maybe just relying on what they got out of college. I have major concerns and actually want to actively do more to support our local colleges and universities to prepare marketers better when they leave. Because I do feel when they come out of college they’re already almost two years behind and have to bring a lot of other knowledge in right on the job or through their own research to even catch up to where it actually is. So I just think if you’re pursuing that career, please include that love of learning in it and don’t be afraid to go after that. Proactively yourself even if your employer doesn’t provide for that. Yeah.

Alysha Smith

And can you share with our listeners maybe a couple of those resources, maybe even that they could look into now for that continuing education?

Quinn Curtis

Yeah. Goll, there’s so many I’ve even been really impressed with even like domestica and even skillshares courses. There’s a lot of digital marketers who have tried cool stuff and then they’ve put courses out there so you could test drive it very affordably on those platforms and then get to know people that you really respect and appreciate what they’re saying, then go follow them and look for what else they’re offering. But I think the other thing that I would love to highlight there too is also to not discredit the original OG models of advertising. There’s so much that we can learn there that I think is very easily discredited right now. But we’re actually going back more and more to those kinds of methods. Like I see a resurgence of even mail advertising coming back and some of those are traditional methods. So the more, you know, just good marketing principles as your baseline and what’s worked historically and then you pair that with what’s working in the trenches and what are some of those cutting edge elements, I think the more you’re going to have that educated balance.

Alysha Smith

Yeah. Love that. Thank you.

Peter Stevenson

And my final question and my favorite is tell the people where they should go eat or drink or go to coffee shop. Where are some places that people should go and check out here along the Wasatch front?

Quinn Curtis

My absolute favorite has to be Braza Grill. I really love Brazilian food.

Peter Stevenson

Okay.

Quinn Curtis

So they are the best. There’s a lot of good Brazilian in this state. But Braz is my favorite.

Alysha Smith

Okay, good to know.

Peter Stevenson

Is that the one that’s down by Fashion Place? Is that where it is?

Quinn Curtis

Yeah, there’s one by Fashion place. There’s also one up here right off just in Lehigh. Okay. You’ve got one really cool and it’s.

Peter Stevenson

Like an all you can eat place, right? Isn’t that right?

Quinn Curtis

Yes. Meat. Yeah, you’ve got meat, an amazing salad bar and then the grilled pineapple. It’s just perfection.

Peter Stevenson

So braz is the place yes. All right. I’m excited. It’s been a long time since I’ve been to a Brazilian steakhouse. I’m going to need to check it out.

Quinn Curtis

I think it’s time. Yeah, it feels like it. I was curious what you guys would say, though.

Alysha Smith

Do you?

Peter Stevenson

Well, we talk about this all the time. I think right now, if you were to ask me, the thing I’m hankering for right now is probably like a pretty birch sandwich. Like a hot chicken sandwich sounds really good right now. Yeah.

Alysha Smith

And I would probably say it’s a toss up between sweet potato fries and a good burrito from Alberto’s.

Peter Stevenson

Have you ever been to Alberto’s downtown?

Quinn Curtis

I don’t think I have. I feel like I need to happen.

Alysha Smith

But it’s just like it’s open really late, almost all night, and just good stuff just satiate.

Quinn Curtis

Albertos, I think we’re ready to go eat now. That sounds amazing.

Peter Stevenson

I’m starving.

Alysha Smith

I’m always ready.

Peter Stevenson

Thank you so much for joining us, and we will see you out and about in the Valley.

Quinn Curtis

Thank you so much for having me.

Alysha Smith

Great.

Peter Stevenson

Bisubjects is a production of modernate agency and Silicon Slopes. Executive producers are Alysha Smith and Peter Stevenson. Editor and producer is Dave Mecham. Video Production by Connor Mitchell development Production by Eric Dahl production Management by Shelby Sandlin Original music composed by Josh Johnson. Website designed by Modern8. Please make sure to follow and share the show with your friends and your enemies. Thanks for joining us.