Episode 2 Transcript | John Huntinghouse of TAB Bank

Peter Stevenson

Thanks for joining us today on By Subject a Silicon Slopes brand and marketing podcast. I’m your host, Peter Stevenson, and in this episode, my cohost Eric Dahl and I had a chance to sit down with John Huntinghouse, the VP of Marketing at TAB Bank. John, so maybe tell us a little bit about your background, where you grew up, where you’re from, what got you into marketing.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, that’s a whole podcast in and of itself, but yeah, I grew up in West Valley City and born and raised here in Utah. And as we were talking about, we went to Granger High School. And the goal was my mom’s Korean and she just like most Korean parents want their kids to be a doctor or lawyer, and so the goal was to be a doctor. And about a month before I started medical school, I ended up having a conversation with a friend of mine who was in medical school. And he didn’t mean it to be a life changing it was a throwaway comment, but he was just like, what are the things you study when you don’t have to study anything? And it wasn’t meant to be this career altering thing. But then I started thinking about it, and it was never medicine, ever. I only studied it because I had to for school. And so then I went probably a good four or five years of just like just finally trying to figure out, what do I want to do now that I’ve decided not to go the medical school route and become a doctor? Like, what do I want to do? And dabbled in a lot of different things and then ended up backdooring my way into marketing. And actually I got into marketing through blogging and social media.

Peter Stevenson

Dating yourself there.

John Huntinghouse

I know, right?

Peter Stevenson

So when you say back, kind of backing into it, where was that out? Were you doing that for a company? Were you doing it for yourself? How did you back your way into that?

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, it was just a hobby. We created a little media company. It was just sharing funny at the time. This was before again, I’m dating myself, but this was before memes were really a thing. And we were creating very culturally relevant and humorous memes and videos and context and content, and we just did it because it was funny and we thought it would be fun to create. It started off as a Facebook page, just like a little group because we didn’t know what else to do, and we were just throwing it out there. And then it started to pick up steam and we had some posts go viral, and then we started to lean into it a little bit more, and then I ended up doing it full time.

Peter Stevenson

And so what was that jump from like, this is a hobby, something fun that I can do to being full time? And where was that at and where’s that role that you took on.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, so we had a lot of traction as I was doing this just on the side. And we probably had both from our website, we had generated over 250,000 fans on Facebook and our website was getting around 1.2 million views a month. And so we were getting a lot of traction. But it wasn’t until we started to look into it was like, okay, so how do we change this from a hobby and make it into something that we could do full time? And one of the things was just like when you’re only doing things for yourself or things that you find interesting, that really is the definition of a hobby. But a career focuses on other people. And so then we’re like, how can we take this vehicle and make it help other people and dive into that? And as we started to do that and start to listen to our customer and not just put content just for the sake of content, but really trying to find a value add a we also kind of that’s how we ended up making money off of this to a point that we could go full time. But then it really got me into and helped me really understand and learn the value of listening to your customers. Because though they’re interacting with you and engaging with you until you actually ask them and talk to them and interact with them one on one, that’s when they really start to open up and just like, hey, I love the stuff you are doing. But this is really my pain point where these are the things I would really love to see from all of you. That’s when we kind of made that shift and kind of took off from there.

Peter Stevenson

When you say you went full time, you were starting out as your own media company was when you went full time and you did this with some friends?

John Huntinghouse

Just me and my wife.

Peter Stevenson

Just you and your wife?

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, it was just the two of us.

Peter Stevenson

It was more creative. You or your wife?

John Huntinghouse

Oh, easily my wife. You should see the first iteration of the website. It was awful. We were sharing funny, humorous, light content and the website literally was all black and there was chrome everywhere. Like we thought chrome we thought chrome would be awesome because it was cool. Well, I thought it was going to be cool, so I created it and I showed it to my wife and she’s like, what is this? We can’t run with this. And I was like, it’s awesome. And she’s like, okay. And so we kind of threw it out there and immediately everyone’s like, I feel like I’m in a spammy website or I’m at a website that I’m not supposed to be.

Eric Dahl

I want to get onto the way back machine.

John Huntinghouse

I know this website. I still have screenshots of the original logos and the above. The fold on their website. So I’ll have to share that with you.

Peter Stevenson

Yeah, we’re going to use that for promotion for this podcast.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, it was pretty bad. It was awful. So definitely my wife is the more creative of the two of us. But yeah, it was fun. It was fun being able to work with her and do something together. And that was our first time really being able to interact and work together in a professional sound point. And yeah, that’s kind of where it got started.

Eric Dahl

So tell me this. In working with your wife, what did you learn about marketing? You tell me that she’s an artist, she understands, she has a good eye for things. But what characteristics do you feel like that you picked up from her along the way and working with her?

John Huntinghouse

Well, the one thing is understanding to learning how to listen, because this was as we were working together, it was just we were constantly like both of us, you know, we were both doing this. Like, I had a vision of what I wanted to do and I would run it and she hated the idea, but she had her own vision and she would want to run it one way. And in the early days when we were first starting to create this content, we didn’t really actually understand how to work very well together in a professional sense. And so we would just give up. So I would say, this is what we should do. And she’s like, Fine, whatever. Just do it your way or vice versa. She’s like, this is what I want to do. And I was like, fine, I don’t want to argue. Just run with it. And it rarely worked. And what worked best was neither of our ideas were actually solid initially, right? It was actually taking that initial concept and being patient with it in terms of developing and refining the content and digging a little bit deeper. And then as we’re getting feedback from each other and from other people, just being patient with it, and then all of a sudden we created really awesome content and then it was a much better product. And it’s something that I’ve just learned, even being more in kind of the corporate space now, learning that a never go out with a first draft. It’s my biggest pet peeves. And I feel like I understand the idea of you don’t want to analysis paralysis, right? You do want to ship things out, but I think sometimes it gets blown on the other end where it’s just like just ship whatever out, right? And there is a little bit of quality control and your best ideas are four, five, six layers deep. And then once you kind of work through that a little bit, then all of a sudden your best ideas do come out. And that was something that was really that we both learned through that process.

Eric Dahl

I love that because it is looking at it with a fresh set of eyes, but also understanding that it’s an evolution that’s powerful. So I completely agree with you and John. I followed you on LinkedIn for many years, and I love the content that you put out on LinkedIn. You have great posts. But tell me kind of about your approach to putting out just organic LinkedIn content and what you do to move the needle, because I feel like you do a fantastic job, but I would like to understand kind of your method behind it.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, it really is. Most of the time, it really is just me looking at things or observing something and really interjecting my own voice where I feel like I have something to add. I feel like I have something to add all the time. Right. I think a lot of us, we all have opinions. If I take a marketing idea and ask any of my family members, every single one will have an opinion, right or wrong. But if really looking at ideas and topics or just things that I’m observing, that I feel like I have a unique perspective or just something different than what’s generally being talked about, those are kind of the ideas that I like to dive into when it comes to LinkedIn specifically, just because I kind of treat it almost like ads. Right? Where it’s just like if I’m just going to post another post about Elon Musk that everyone else is posting about the exact same thing, I’m not really contributing to that conversation. But how do I add my unique voice to a conversation, to a topic? And I just kind of found a little niche in that. But learning to I just think it’s a general principle, whether you’re doing on LinkedIn or you’re sharing in front of a corporate boardroom or interacting with your boss or team, learning to find your voice and champion your voice, I think is a really big deal. And that was something I learned in the agency world when I worked at Epic Marketing, was learning to champion my own ideas because I used to just throw out an idea, it would get bombarded with everyone hated the idea, and then I would just sit back down. I’m like, sorry, I didn’t mean to throw out such a crappy idea. But I had an awesome creative director at the agency. It’s like, listen, if you don’t interject your voice out there or put your ideas out into the world, they’ll never get out there and your impact just doesn’t exist. Right? It’s everyone else’s opinion, everyone else’s thoughts. And so learning to just like, it’s okay if people disagree with you, but if you feel like you have a unique voice or perspective, to add that to it.

Eric Dahl

Yeah, and I love that because everybody has their own unique takes. But the consistency with that unique take, that’s what’s going to drive the results. I’m anxious to get in and to talk more about your experience at the bank, and we’ll get to that. I know you were at KSL for a while, so tell me a little bit about the experience at KSL.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, definitely had a love hate relationship with my time at KSL. When I first landed that job, it really was kind of a dream job. It was awesome, and there were so many experiences that I had there that I loved, and you got to do really cool things and be at really cool events and talk to really interesting people. But I think from a culture standpoint, my personality just doesn’t fit very well in a newsroom personality, in a newsroom culture, and vice versa, having been there for a while, like KSL’s cultures, it just doesn’t fit very well with my personality. But it’s funny because I have a friend Eric, and he was telling me about sometimes even though even your bad experiences you have in the corporate world, whether it’s bad coworkers or managers or culture, whatever, oftentimes that’s where you learn the most. And from a leadership standpoint, it’s definitely where I learned to make that jump from an individual contributor to a manager or a director or a leader, because I learned a lot of the lessons the hard way. I was really good at creating content. That’s what we had done, and that’s what got me to where I was. But learning to help the team grow and learning how to enable them and empower them to do well, that was a hard lesson that I had to learn the hard way. But, yeah, I definitely had, like, love hate relationship when I was there.

Peter Stevenson

What was your role when you were there?

John Huntinghouse

I was their social media director. I was the executive producer of their social content. Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

Scary.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah. And it’s funny because there’s a lot of hate on the media, and I understand where some of that hate or that distrust comes from. And partly is culturally, the newsroom is constantly just trying to put out you’re kind of constantly trying to feed this beast. But on hindsight, having worked in there, people really are trying to do the best they can. Right. I have never seen people talk about this agenda or trying to drive certain things, but I never saw that. Right. A lot of the mistakes or things that were made were legitimate mistakes, and I made them myself. And I think the people there are trying to do good work. But, yeah, it’s like you learn because of the nature of that environment in that industry, like, mistakes happen, and sometimes you have issues that kind of pop up.

Peter Stevenson

So from KSL, you ended up is that when you made the jump to epic?

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, I did.

Peter Stevenson

And what was it that drove you to go again, going from in house at KSL now to an agency again, what was it that drove you to think about going from in house to agency?

John Huntinghouse

Well, it was kind of fortuitous, if you will, when it was literally my last day at KSL. I was on my way to drop off my computers and everything, and then I got a phone call from my friend Sean, who was their director of digital marketing, and he was like, hey, John, I know you’re at KSL and you’re probably loving it and having a great time, but would you be open to working at Epic? And I’m like, well, funny that you should ask. Like, today’s my last day. And so it was really interesting because I always wanted to be in that agency space, in a full service agency with a lot of these awesome and amazing clients. And so that definitely intrigued me. And then as I had that conversation and that interview with them and getting to know a little bit more about the agency itself, I was sold and bought in, and yeah, just jumped on that opportunity to work with an amazing agency that has amazing clients on board.

Peter Stevenson

So what was the difference, from your perspective of working in house at KSL versus agency world? What was your day to day like? What did you like about each of those places? What did you dislike about being at an agency versus in house?

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, no, the agency world, it’s a constant fire, right? The hardest part of dealing with an agency is just like, you’re working with so many different clients, and there’s always some kind of big issue or some kind of fire you’re trying to put out. But at the same time, I think that’s what was so rewarding about the agency life. And I teach a lot of college students, and I really do recommend for most college students, if they can find a way to get into an agency to do that, because I just think it provides you with so many opportunities to learn, grow, hone your skills. And when you’re working with anywhere from five to 20 different clients, you just see a lot of different marketing, you see a lot of different leaderships, you’re dealt with a lot of different personalities, and you get to test out a lot of different things. And so for me, the variety that an agency brought was awesome, and it really was where I refined and honed in my own. I started off in social media and kind of developed my digital marketing and paid social, which is kind of my wheelhouse. But at the agency is really where I fine tune that in and really honed in those skills and being able to test it out, it’s like, okay, I have these ideas, and I’ve done it in a narrow way. At a brand and previous to that but to be able to do it across 20 different 30 different clients and see all right, you know what? My thesis on this idea actually doesn’t work. It only works in this industry or this actually B to C works really well. This is something that there’s some legs to it and it was an awesome opportunity to really dive into it and really hone in the skills that I had developed up to that point.

Eric Dahl

I think what you said about agency life is spot on. I heard a Ted Talk once where the speaker was talking about multitasking and how if you’re dealing with different initiatives and so it’s very easy to plug into agency life, but if you’re juggling multiple things at once, it’s a creative boost. And the example that he gave was Albert Einstein wrote these scientific papers and he wrote multiple papers inside of one year, and it was probably the most successful year of his career because he was juggling multiple things. And so his creative juices were always firing.

John Huntinghouse

Right.

Eric Dahl

And as a marketer, that’s a lot of fun. But transitioning that from agency life and then did you go straight to the bank from Epic?

John Huntinghouse

I did.

Eric Dahl

So tell me kind of the dynamic from going from an agency life into again, back into in house to now a bank setting, what was that like?

John Huntinghouse

It was different, for sure, but I mean, one of the reasons I did want to go back in house was that you get to work banker hours, right? Yeah. And it was a lot of banker holidays. Yeah, the banker holidays. Like, I remember my first it’s actually Monday is a bank holiday coming up and I remember my first Columbus Day I showed up and I can’t get into the bank. I’m like, the heck, what’s going on? And I messaged my team and they’re like, yeah, it’s a holiday. I’m like, oh, yeah, that’s right, we have these things. But yeah, it was very different. But it was different in a good way. And for me, I really enjoyed and I love doing it because the one thing is agency gives you a lot of variety to do a lot of different things, but being in house allows you to do depth, like very in depth. A lot of the things that I wanted to do when I was at an agency just didn’t have the time or the bandwidth to be able to dive deeper in some of those things. And then ultimately, one of the things that bugged me is you would have a really awesome idea, right, or like a different approach than an agency, and then the VP is like, no, I don’t like that idea. You never get that idea out there. And so then having the opportunity to say, you know what, I want to get some of these ideas and test them out, even some of the ones that are a little bit out there and kind of see how that goes.

Peter Stevenson

So you chose a bank to put the wild ideas out.

John Huntinghouse

Yes. Well, I mean, to that point, right, when you look across most bank marketing and it’s funny because whenever we work with an agency or freelancer or whatever, they always want comparables. And I’m like, I’ll give you comparables, but don’t look at the comparables because most bank marketing is pretty awful. It’s not very well done. And so to be able to change or revitalize an industry that I feel like was stagnant was awesome. I felt like it was an awesome opportunity, despite dealing with crazy amounts of regulatory issues. And I’m so used to coming up with an idea, producing it, and an hour later, just throwing it out there, kind of testing it out, but having to go through that process, you kind of use those obstacles, if you will, as a way to optimize and be creative in your solutions. It’s like, okay, well, these are the constraints we have. How do we now get around them? Because most banks and most places that are in these highly regulated industries just don’t. They’re just like, well, there’s too many obstacles in the way. We’ll just play it safe. This is the easy path. But when you take that challenging path, then all of a sudden you’re able to do a lot of fun things. And, yeah, it was a lot of fun, and it still is a lot of fun. Still trying to navigate those hurdles.

Peter Stevenson

I’d love to hear some of those ideas that you came out of Epic saying, I want to try to push the boundaries or push this. What are some of those specific ideas that you had that you brought to Tab Bank that maybe other people could learn from?

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, I mean, there were a lot of different things.

Peter Stevenson

I only want to hear the ones that worked.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, well, yeah, there is a lot that didn’t work as well, but I would say probably the one thing that has worked really well for us right now over at Tab that we just have a brand new consumer product that we just launched about a month ago and it’s learning to leverage influencer marketing in the right way. And so there’s a lot of again, it’s a bank. There’s a lot of regulations, a lot of hurdles around that. But oftentimes we look at influencer marketing as a very simple thing, as, like, you hire an influencer, you create some kind of message, they share it with their audiences and kind of run with it. But being able to create a shared community with your influencers as well as with their community as well as yours, I think there’s a lot of power in that community building, and that’s one of the things that we’re building out, right? Like, we’re one of the first banks to have a discord channel. Why do we have a discord channel? People are just like, well, that’s stupid. That’s a dumb idea, but it is to build around this community and have a two-way conversation. And I just feel like a lot of times when we’re trying to work, you know, in banking specifically, we we’re stuck in we’re still stuck in this, you know, 2019 90s era of like, you know, one to many, you know, broadcasting. And when you’re dealing with a community and specifically with influencer marketing, finding the right influencers that will help that a believe in your brand and then be that will interact with it, right? It’s not just shouting it out or sharing your message out to them. And having been in that space, I’ve been on both sides of that influencer space. And the brand campaigns that sucked, that were awful was when the brand is like, hey, this is the script. Like you run with this, only do this, these are the guardrails, and then you run with that. But when you work with those influencers to kind of build out a community and have more of a long term approach to influencer marketing, I think it becomes wildly more beneficial. And you create massive amounts of brand advocates when it comes to organic brand advocates who are just naturally wanting to talk about your brand.

Eric Dahl

So when you say influencers and banks, to me that’s like oil and water. So it’s fascinating to explore that. And I love the idea of bringing in influencers. But what’s been the result so far? Like, what have you seen as far as the reception of having influencers? Not the yell and sell, like you said, but taking a strategic approach to it, how’s it been received.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, and let me back up a little bit. And when we say influencers, we automatically go to the TikToks and the Tik toks and social media influencers. While they are part of this community, they are part of it. They are not the only part of the influencer marketing campaigns. Like influencers can be CPAs lawyers, right? And so for us, our working capital campaigns are built around these referral programs that we treat like an influencer marketing campaign. But we’re working with CPAs and lawyers who end up referring it’s a win win situation for their audience, which is essentially their customers, where they’re trying to be a value add and where we can add value too, but having that same interaction in terms of producing content, both content that they themselves can use but also working around thought leadership and whatnot. And so just to go back a little bit with influencer marketing, it is more broad than just TikTok. But that being said, we do have social media and your traditional TikTok influencers. But yeah, it’s been like our working capital campaigns. That was our second big campaign. The first campaign that we leveraged was our high yield savings accounts. And so our goal, our high yield savings and high yield checking. And our goal was to generate $60 million over the first five years. That was kind of the goal in the first campaign that I was given. But we ended up generating $230,000,000 in the first six months that’s amazing. And so it was just like, crap, what do we do with all the money? It’s like we had planned for what we were going to do with like 12 million a year. Well, now we have 230,000,000. And so then it had to kind of shift our internal strategies to the working capital, which we just kind of cut and paste a little bit and leveraged that in the working capital space. And there’s a lot of people, even internal to the bank who said, this is not going to work. It’s never worked. Marketing has never worked in this space. It’s worked in other areas, but not this space. Well, let’s try, let’s see what this looks like.

Eric Dahl

We’ll never know until we test it, right?

John Huntinghouse

Yeah. And you know, and we’ve had record results and we were able to grow. Two years ago, our pipeline was 20 million with our working capital to over 200 million now. And so to be able to ten X something and spend of two years has been really rewarding in that sense.

Eric Dahl

So tell me, as you’re going through and explaining how things have gone, clearly there’s been growth at Tab Bank since you’ve been there. Walk me through kind of what the marketing team looks like inside of Tab Bank and what do you enjoy about working with that team? What are they doing differently that you think is moving the needle to the degree that we’ve uncovered?

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, so they’re all just really good people, right? I always talk to them in our one on ones. I’m always telling them they make my job really easy because we’re not just trying to get them to the bare minimum just to get them to do their jobs. All of them go above and beyond. And so then it’s like, okay, how do we leverage this and lean into this and leverage the skill sets? So that was the one thing that when I first came on board, I probably didn’t do that great of a job. I had an idea of what a marketing team was going to look like and with who we had, and I just kind of put them where I thought they should be. But over the last two years, I’ve really started to look back and say, okay, they might not be a good fit here or in marketing ops or with our analytics space, but where do they thrive? Is it in the event space? Okay, let’s just let them run with it and let them use their superpowers and let them do what they want to do. And so everybody has a title, but in terms of what they actually do, it’s like nobody actually does what their title says. Right. And it really is matching them to a their passions, things that they love to do, but then also what they’re really good at doing and it’s all the same. And then after doing that with the existing team, then we’re. Like, okay, now that we’ve done that, where are our holes? Where are the gaps that we still have? And we’ve made a couple of amazing hires and who’s just been able to come in and are rock stars in their own right. And for me, the biggest thing, technical things, we can teach. We can teach a lot of those marketing things, but a lot of the soft skills, learning to be proactive, being proactive to me is like, the number one thing. And with that new hire, she came in with the playbook, and she just came ready and like, hey, even though some of these ideas are wrong because she doesn’t have context, but the mere fact that she was willing to attempt that during an interview is, like, a good indication of what later on ended up being a great hire.

Eric Dahl

And I love that you explain that because you mentioned these rock star hires and I was like, I want to know from the marketing ops perspective, what does John look for for a rock star hire? And for me personally, I’ve always said all along, it’s a can do attitude. Somebody who comes in and they can be adaptable, they can understand, okay, well, I don’t know how to do this, but I’m going to give it my best shot, like you were talking about. So I think that that’s huge for people who are listening in and wanting to get into a deeper level of their career within marketing. But going back to the growth that you’ve had at Tab, what’s the goal over the next five years? Like, what does that look like?

John Huntinghouse

Well, I mean, we just surpassed the $1 billion mark.

Eric Dahl

Congratulations. That’s awesome.

John Huntinghouse

Which is funny, we kind of avoided it for a little bit because it has a whole new set of regulatory issues and rigor and things that you have to do. But now that we’ve crossed it, the goal is to be a $5 billion bank, right? And really to lean into our strengths. And while traditionally we’ve always been a digital online bank, but for a good part of our history, we’ve probably been run just like a normal community bank on the back end, but probably over the last 710 years, really starting to lean into that technology. Right? And it’s like we ought to be the thought leaders. We ought to be leaning out in this space. We’ve been in it for 25 years. So we like to say we were doing digital and mobile banking before it was cool and to lean into that strength and really be thought leaders in our own right. It is really exciting. Like, it’s an exciting time to be part of Tab and what we’re working on. But yeah, that’s kind of what we’re working towards.

Eric Dahl

So basically, by Q one of 2023, we’ll be at the 5 billion mark on this pace, right?

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, exactly. We have a five year plan to get there. We’ll just get it at the end of next year.

Eric Dahl

I like it.

Peter Stevenson

I’d love to hear a little bit more about that. Creative. You’ve got two major campaigns under your belt. Both have been very successful. Tell me about the story of one of them, how it came to be kind of who was in charge of running with it. Did the call come from in house? Did you use an agency?

John Huntinghouse

Kind of.

Peter Stevenson

I’d love to hear how that came to be and how you pushed it out.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, so our working capital campaign, actually, for me it was really rewarding because it was such a big hurdle and there were so many obstacles that we had to go and to get around it. And the rocks are higher that we had. She was instrumental in getting this up to pace and yeah, when we were trying to work through that campaign, it was hard to get any kind of budget. So we talked about how we’d raised $230,000,000. Well now we needed to know what are we going to do with that $230,000,000 that we hadn’t planned for? And so we’re like, okay, let’s focus on our working capital campaigns. And these working capital campaigns, they’re not easy, right? They’re million dollar plus. They’re very in depth. There’s a lot that goes into the underwriting process. It’s very labor intensive and the sales cycles are long. Right. You’re looking at on average nine months plus in terms of the sales cycle. And so when internally you already have a little bit of hesitation of, I don’t think marketing can do this, and then you combine it with, hey, we need a year to be able to prove this out, because even right out of the gate, if it starts working, we’re not going to be able to see that until nine months down the road. One of the key things that we had to do is mark and be very thoughtful of what does success look like along the way because we had to report back into it so that we can continue to have that investment into this, into those marketing campaigns. But leaning in heavily into data and really understanding the analytics and the insights around that was a big deal. One of our insights, like I said, was leaning in and leveraging. Like when we were talking to a lot of the owners or the product owners within the bank, the number one thing that everybody said is the key decision maker is the owner of the company across the board. That’s what everybody said. But then when we looked at the data and we borrowed this from Clayton Christiansen, this is an assumption checklist. And so we created this assumption checklist and created like, we have a bazillion experiments that we need to run, like which ones do we run first? And so you compare it based on business impact and knowledge, like an amount of uncertainty. And so both in terms of impact as well as uncertainty was actually who is the decision maker? And the assumption was it was a business owner. But then when we’re looking at the data, there wasn’t actually any data that kind of showed that this was the case. And so we kind of leaned into this and we’re like, okay, who’s the actual influencer when it comes to this? And this is kind of going back to a little bit B to B sales and things that a lot of people in that space understand, but at least institutionally we didn’t understand that. And then we realized it wasn’t that it was a CFO, right. It was the uncle that shouldn’t be a CFO, that is a CFO or whoever. And then the other key insight was learning about the lawyers and CPAs. And when we looked at them, we’re like, they work just as well as some of our brokers. I mean, even more so the customers that they end up referring to us stay longer, and they’re just doing it because it’s a value add. Like they don’t get anything from it. It just helps their own customers. So it really became a win win. And so when we started to lean into that and kind of use some account based marketing techniques and strategies in addition to the digital strategies that we were already implementing yeah. All of a sudden we started to kind of see the slow trickle to the point now. It’s kind of a solid process now. And that was the other thing that I had to do at the bank that we did as a team, is everybody gets their one off wins. Sure. And so how do we codify that? Right. How do we replicate the wins and successes that we created? And so creating systems and processes that are built around that was a big deal.

Eric Dahl

It’s funny you say that because my biggest marketing mentor taught me create, validate, and replicate. And that’s exactly what you’re talking about right now. And so I think that is that’s an immutable law of marketing, if you will. But tell me about a mentor that maybe you’ve had along the way within the marketing realm. I mean, to me, it seems like the people who I talk to who are engaged in marketing, always one or two people will come to mind as like, oh, I learned this from this person or I learned that from that person. What has John learned along the way and who did you learn it from?

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, like the OG in terms of my mentorship, like the people that I kind of learned a lot from was a it was with my paid social when I was really starting to learn and craft understand that. Dennis you was just awesome in terms of helping me. And I actually just ran into him yesterday and kind of chatted with him and we were reminiscing about all of the things that I kind of learned from him. Another person was Susan Winograd. And so Susan was, like, amazing. She was the first time that I would go to a conference or read her stuff. It wasn’t just like, hey, focus on the customer, or really listen to the customers, but like, really granular, in depth, tactical things that helped you understand it’s. Like, okay, listen to the customer. But this is how you actually do this, right? And when you’re deep diving into your Google search with your search ads, learning how to create that structure and learning what to look at, how to pull, those insights really helped those two individuals. In the early days of my digital marketing career, as I was growing into it, definitely were the ones that I kind of looked up to. Kind of followed their stuff on Facebook, LinkedIn, and they’re published everywhere and just following and just being a sponge. Typically with most mentor models, when you’re first learning it, you copy it almost exactly, right? Because I don’t have any other models, and this is something that I’m going into new, so I’m just going to take their model and replicate it. But then what happens is then over time, then it’s like, okay, I’ve done that. Now how do I add my own flavor? How do I add my own expertise to this? And then you start to build out, and then you start to I mean, in my mind, that’s how you find your voice, right? That’s where you find your own voice and your own perspective on how to run these marketing campaigns. But the start was definitely Dennis and Susan. They were awesome mentors and people that I still stay connected with because of that.

Eric Dahl

And on the flip side of it, now, understanding that you’re in a leadership capacity and you have you’ve made it a mark on marketing within our realm, you’re a well known, established name, but at the end of the day, what’s the most important to you? Like, what do you hope that people learn from John Huntinghouse?

John Huntinghouse

I mean, very high level, really, to treat people like people. Because like I said, I’ve just been in so many jobs myself, and we had crazy talented people who could do amazing things because they were treated poorly or weren’t allowed to lean into their superpowers. That superpower was never able to come out. And learning to allow to trust your team, right? And you have to validate that trust. But there’s this old saying, right? Like, trust but verify. Sure. And I hate that saying so much because it’s so micromanaging, right? It’s just like, I trust you, but I’m going to keep one eye on you the whole time to verify that this is true. It’s fine to validate beforehand. It’s like, okay, let’s walk through what are some of the things that are going to build that trust? But once that trust is built, just let them do their thing. And oftentimes, more often than not like when I interject myself constantly all the time, I usually screw it up, right? But when I allow the team to do what they do best, great things happen. And so from the high level, that’s kind of my big champion thing. But then also when it comes to marketing, learning to be just different, right? And not to add to the noise, there’s so much marketing, whether it’s from company blog posts or white papers or ads or whatever, learning to not just create content for the sake of content or create ads for the sake of creating ads, but finding a way. How do we break through this noise, right? How do we add value to it and how do we differentiate ourselves? It’s not that different. And then probably the third thing that I would say is learning to have a little bit more rigor when it comes to the marketing processes and systems. For me, our basis is kind of following kind of the scientific methods. And this is kind of pulled back from my background of doing so much cardiovascular research back in the day. But what happens is I see so many marketers, right? Like, we constantly talk about experimentation and running experiments, but then when I look at their experiments are running, they’re all wrong. They don’t run actual experiments. And what they’re doing is they’re like, all right, let’s come up with the question. Let’s test something out. And then when they’re creating their hypothesis, A, they don’t create a hypothesis normally. Their hypothesis is, let’s just see what happens. The problem with that hypothesis is that you always see what happens, but you don’t actually learn from it, right? It’s just like, okay, this worked well, I don’t know why it worked because I didn’t create something specific to learn from. And then when it comes on to your next experiments, right, when you’re following the scientific method, the last part is you analyze and you draw conclusions. But those questions that come out from that analysis, those are the questions that lead to your next experiments, right? They build upon each other, but so many marketers, they run something and it works or it doesn’t work, and they’re like, great. And then they run another experiment completely irrelevant to the first one that they just ran. And so oftentimes what you’ll see is six months down the line, they’re still trying to figure out how to run the campaign. It’s fine. Initially, it’s going to be a mess. It’s going to be awful because there’s so many unknowns, so much uncertainty. But a year into it, a year and a half into it, you should know a lot more definitively because you’ve run these tests in a systematic way to learn from it. And so oftentimes, I think marketers, we just throw stuff on the wall. And again, when you’re first starting out, it’s fine. But then when you’re actually going into these campaigns six months, a year into it. You shouldn’t be just throwing stuff at the wall. You should know have at least a general idea in terms of understanding the channels, what the messaging is working, what’s resonating, where you should lean into, where you should be avoiding.

Eric Dahl

And I love that because the evolution optimization component of it, it proves that you’re going to be rapid fire, where it’s like one after another and the consistency element is there. But there has to be that evolution or else it’s just, it’s going to fall on deaf ears.

Peter Stevenson

Can I ask a question? And we may even cut this out of the podcast.

John Huntinghouse

No, you’re good.

Peter Stevenson

Give me an example of that hypothesis idea that people are not doing. Right. So you said, you know, is it like this? A 15 2nd video works better than a 22nd video. Is that essentially what you’re saying? Like testing that specific thing?

John Huntinghouse

Yeah. So let’s just say a 15 2nd video is going to work better than a 32nd video, but then the hypothesis around it, right, is based on attention span maybe. Right? And so the hypothesis is that the 15 2nd video is going to work better than the 32nd video because people’s attention spans are lower, and therefore we need to grab the attention sooner, quicker, and faster. And so that will work. And so then what happens is then you see what happens, right? So let’s just say the 32nd video worked. Well, clearly that invalidated your original hypothesis. So there’s something that’s going on that you’re not seeing. And so as you’re doing that analysis, it’s like, okay, well, maybe this is why. And then maybe that the creative wasn’t strong enough or the messaging wasn’t soon enough. Okay, well, that becomes our new test. So we’re going to now make the creative like the messaging sooner or whatever we come out from that analysis now becomes our next experiment. Right?

Peter Stevenson

So it’s an intentionality behind the experiment, rather than just testing creative or just testing audience per se, but a reason why I’m testing that creative or that audience.

John Huntinghouse

Right? And when you look at all of these, you go to the UVU or BYU or any of these research institutions, you’ll notice one of the things that a lot of these doctors and PhDs, they tend to go more granular over time. And the reason that happens is because they’re following that same path. They start these experiments and they start to become really subject matter experts around this one particular thing. But they connect them. Right. And there’s a whole other thing that we can talk about in terms of documentation, because you go to any of these PhDs and it’s like, hey, you wrote a paper, you ran an experiment two years ago. Could you tell me more about that? They can provide you with all of the documentation. It’s like, hey, this is what we did. These were the experiments we ran. This is what we learned and they pulled back from that, whereas marketers, you go, hey, you ran this campaign 18 months ago. Can you walk me through the results and what you learned, the lessons? Nobody documents it. They just run with it like it’s good, and then I even go on to the next one. And so documentation is actually part of that process of that scientific method, is documenting your learnings along the way so that you can reference back as you’re running into new things.

Peter Stevenson

And are you doing this at Tab Bank? Are you documenting this? Yeah, I’ll be there tomorrow.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, you could totally come. And not only do we document it internally, we do it externally. And this is what I don’t understand, why more marketers don’t lean into this, right? You can absolutely document your learnings externally, and then it becomes content. Right. And so for us, like, marketing, sherpa doing an in depth case study on our working capital campaign, for example, and it just breaks it down very granularly. Like, what were the steps? What were the lessons learned? What was our hypothesis when we were creating that? And then you can leverage that and continue to get more publications or more thought leadership around the things that you’re working on.

Eric Dahl

That’s brilliant.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah.

Eric Dahl

Because I think that so many times people say, well, can you provide me some case studies? And it’s like, I’ve done this for this person or this client, and it’s like I have all these ideas that are floating around in my head, but I haven’t taken the time to chart the progress and to show what I’ve done. And that’s frustrating, where if that can be a part of the system, I think it can be like you’re saying right now, it’s beneficial on multiple levels.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, we did that at the agency. Right? And with the agency, it was wildly helpful, right. As we’re doing these case studies, like, taking our internal information and knowledge and sharing it with Google and Facebook, and they’re like, oh, hey, this is really well done.

Eric Dahl

Good stuff.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah. And so what do they do? They share it on their stuff on their pages. Right? And then in turn, it’s like, all of a sudden, it becomes the social proofing. So from the agency standpoint, we’re like, hey, look, Facebook posted even though it was our internal case study, it’s like Facebook posted this. Don’t take our word for it. Take their word for it. And then all of a sudden, it becomes self validating on the work that you’re doing. And it’s not just Tab Bank saying that we’re doing good stuff like other parties are validating the work that’s being.

Eric Dahl

Done, proof in the pudding that is now working for you as your own marketing lead magnet.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, exactly.

Eric Dahl

Good stuff.

Peter Stevenson

And you mentioned your professors or you’re doing some work teaching the youth of America, so tell me where you’re working and what sort of classes you’re teaching.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah. Right now. I teach marketing strategy at Weber State. I taught forever about seven years over at Enzyme College. But living up in South Weaver, it’s a little bit of a drive. Weber is a lot closer. So, yeah, I teach marketing strategies. Marketing Strategy? At Weber State University.

Peter Stevenson

How is the marketing program up there at Weber State? We hear a lot about what’s going on at the U and BYU just because of their sizes, but tell us a little bit about the program up there.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, no, it’s really good. And it was one of the things when I first came there, I didn’t know much about the program because I wasn’t heavily involved in it. But now being more into it, the faculty, they’re amazing. And it’s crazy when you start to look in their background and the work that they’re doing and the research that they’re putting out there is anecdotally. How are you still at Weber? Why are you not at a larger university? Because some of the work that they’re doing is pretty amazing. But in addition to the faculty, the students are just awesome. They’re so engaged. And again, just like as a manager, when you have proactive engage team members, it makes it a lot easier. Same thing with the students. When the students are fully engaged and they’re just sponges and they just want to learn, it’s been really helpful.

Peter Stevenson

Awesome. Well, we always end with a couple of questions. So first one is give us some bars, restaurants, coffee shops, places we should go visit that have good food or drink.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, it’s a good question. So for me, I’m always going to represent even though everyone probably already knows it. I love cup up. Cup up is like my go to.

Eric Dahl

I’ve seen you with some cupboard before, the silicon slopes of it. I remember seeing you with a cup up.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, I guess there’s a personal connection there, but I love eating there.

Peter Stevenson

Will you go into their storefront or do you just have to get the truck?

John Huntinghouse

Both. I’ll do both. Okay. Yeah. Forever, when they were only food trucks, we lived in North Hall Lake. We would drive to Utah County. Right. Just for cup off. Just because I loved eating there and it was so much fun. I always love Mooches. Mooches is one of my kind of favorite go to.

Peter Stevenson

What do you order at Moochies?

John Huntinghouse

It’s always a Philly steak.

Peter Stevenson

I’ve been going with the meatball sub lately. Yeah, I love it there.

John Huntinghouse

One of these is all actually do something different.

Peter Stevenson

But I’m telling you, it’s worth making that jump to that other side of the meatball sub there.

John Huntinghouse

All right. Maybe pretty good. I’ll have to try that. And then I would say the last one, red Fort. I love Red Fort.

Peter Stevenson

Red Fort.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah.

Eric Dahl

Tell me about this.

John Huntinghouse

It started in St. George. Okay. And so they had one location there, but they just opened one up north. Up in Layton and it’s just this Indian, the Indian food there is amazing. So to show how good of it, how amazing it was. So my wife literally our entire marriage and we’ve been married for 16 years, not only does she not like Indian food, she can’t stand the smell of it.

Eric Dahl

Okay.

https://intermountainhealthcare.org/intermountain-health

And so like when I would go on business trips, I would always get Indian food because it’s the only time that I would get be able to eat Indian food. But finally we just basically me and my friends, and we just peer pressured her and she’s like, hey, listen, you’re coming with us. We’re all going to come. You have to at least come. You don’t have to eat anything, just come. And while she was there, she kind of took a couple of bites of my meal, right. And now she loves it. So she hated her entire life. She hated Indian food because of Red Fort. It was so good. She’s now a fan.

Peter Stevenson

What’s the go to dish at RedPort?

John Huntinghouse

Honestly, any of their yellow red curries. I like their coconut kind of their chicken coconut curries. Okay. That’s always solid.

Peter Stevenson

All right, I’m going to add that to my list.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah.

Peter Stevenson

Thanks for the recommendations.

John Huntinghouse

You’re welcome.

Peter Stevenson

So tell us how people can find you. Where are you at on social media? What’s your TikTok handle so they can come follow you there? How do people get in touch with you if they want to come to school? We were stayed or find you on the interrupts.

John Huntinghouse

Yeah, the easiest way is just to find me on LinkedIn. So it’s just John huntinghouse and I’m the only hunting house you’re going to find on LinkedIn. I’m on the other channels, but primarily LinkedIn. Okay.

Peter Stevenson

All right. Thank you so much.

John Huntinghouse

Thank you.

Eric Dahl

Thanks John.

John Huntinghouse

Thank you.

Peter Stevenson

By Subject is the production of modern8, a8ency, and Silicon Slopes. Executive producers are Alysha Smith and Peter Stevenson. Editor and producer. Producer is Dave Mecham. Video Production by Conor 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.