How to Use Disruptive Storytelling to Thrive as a Marketer
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Welcome to the Social Media Marketing Podcast, helping you navigate the social media jungle. And now, here is your host, Michael Stelzner. Hello, hello, hello. Thank you so much for joining me for the Social Media Marketing Podcast, brought to you by Social Media Examiner.

I'm your host, Michael Stelzner, and this is the podcast for marketers and business owners who want more exposure, leads, and sales. Today, I'm going to be joined by Mark Schaefer, and we're going to explore the concept of disruptive storytelling. If you feel like you're in a world of hurt right now and your content is

or your marketing is just not standing out. Well, today you're going to find some inspiration. By the way, if you're new to this podcast, be sure to follow the show. We've got some amazing guests coming your way. Let's transition over to this week's interview with Mark Schaefer. Helping you to simplify your social safari. Here is this week's expert guide.

Today, I'm very excited to be joined by Mark Schaefer. If you don't know who Mark is, you got to know Mark. He is a futurist and social strategist. He's author of multiple books, including Marketing Rebellion, Belonging to the Brand, Social Media Explained 3.0, and his newest book is called Audacious, How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. He's also host of the Marketing Companion Show. Mark, welcome back. How are you doing? I'm great. I'm great. Loving life today.

here in Tennessee, just up the road from you. Absolutely. And it's super cool to have you back today. Mark and I are going to explore how to embrace disruptive storytelling so you can thrive in this changing world. And we are in a changing world for sure right now. I talk to marketers all the time. You talk to marketers all the time. And there's a lot of disruption going on. Before we even get into any of that, let's talk about storytelling, right? Because why now is storytelling

perhaps, critical? What about today makes storytelling so important? You know, I heard a great analogy from a friend the other day. They said, creating content through AI is like bringing store-bought cookies to a bake sale. I just thought that was a beautiful analogy. Oh, there you go. So we are in a time, Mike, which is really sort of

an existential reflection for marketers. If you're immersed in AI, like I know you and I are, you've got to know that AI is nipping at the heels of our skill sets, nipping at the heels of our careers, perhaps. And we've got to figure out where do we fit? And so I'm not going to sugarcoat things. You know, if you're creating stories and content that's competent,

you're vulnerable. I mean, competent is ignorable. Content, AI is competent.

AI is more than competent in many cases. So I think the challenge is we've got to figure out the spaces where you humans are going to be able to thrive in this environment. And I think one of the most important areas and the area that I explore in my new book is the story, is having the power to bring your unique perspective, your unique humanity to your narrative. Okay.

Okay. So elaborate a little bit more on the storytelling side of it. I know that you have a story to tell us about how this whole thing came about. So South by Southwest, right? Tell me what happened there. Yeah. I never have a plan to write a book. I know you and I, we've had this great conversation together many times over the years and people must think I have a strategy to always write books, but I don't, I only write a book.

when I see a problem in the world that I need to figure out. And if I can figure out, that's going to make a good book to help people. And a few years ago, I was at South by Southwest and I was having dinner with a couple of friends. And all of a sudden, people in the restaurant stood up and quietly started to leave the restaurant. It was surreal. It was like a Stephen King movie.

Now, my back was to the door, so I had to turn around and look out the window. What is going on? These people are standing out on the sidewalk. So my two friends and I, we leave our hot food and cold cocktails and we go stand on the street.

And we look up in the sky and there's a drone show. Is it daytime or nighttime? It's got to be nighttime. It was a night. It was a night. Yeah. It was, it was a nice dark sky. And, you know, today we've seen drone shows, maybe at a music festival or a sporting event, but like three or four years ago, this was the first time we ever saw anything like this. And it was an animation for a new television series. And at the end of the story in the sky,

There was a QR code. Everybody had their phones and they clicked the QR code and went to a movie trailer for this show. Now, I became obsessed with this because I played this little mind game, Mike. If someone came to me and said, could you create a story so great people would leave their food in a restaurant to go see it, not just see it,

but record it and share it with everyone in their social media world. Could I do it? The answer is no, I could not. And I thought, is there a clue here? This is how you stand out.

in a busy world. And this is what we all want to do. Every person listening today or watching the video, we want to be seen. We want to be heard. We want to be discovered. And it's harder and harder to become the signal against the noise. And these people did it. And I wondered, is there a pattern here? Is there a system? How did they come up with this? Is there something we could learn that every business could benefit from?

So I found out who did it. It was an agency. I actually sort of had some relationships there. It was a giant spoon. I said, look, I want to come to your office in New York. I want to sit in your meetings. I want you to spill all your secrets. I want to see how you do this. And I'm going to put all your secrets in a book. They said, absolutely.

And that began my journey. Really? Okay. They were cool with it. They were cool with it. And people have read the book and they see the secrets in the book. And one person who read the book wrote me, she said, I want to hug these people because everybody in the book opened up to me. And because Giant Spoon is a very well-known agency, they were recently named one of the top

creative companies in the world, not just ad agencies, any company in the world. I think they were number 13 in the world. And now I'm saying, hey, I want to meet these people. I want to meet these people. They said, we'll make the introductions for you. It was so energizing for me

Because I got into this whole new world talking to some of the greatest creative geniuses in the world telling us how do we stand out in this world. Love it. We're going to dig in on this a little bit more. But before we do, I want to ask you about AI and marketing. I know we've talked about it a little bit. You coined the phrase that a lot of us have used, content shock.

And now we obviously are in a world where content shock is probably like an understatement. Where do you feel like AI and marketing, let's just riff a little bit on your thoughts on the threat or the opportunity, however you choose to come at it.

Well, I mean, like just about everyone, when I think about AI, it's the most exciting thing and the most terrifying thing that's ever happened in my career. Exciting because it unleashes new levels of creativity. It lets people who aren't artists become artists and people who aren't writers become writers. And, you know, people who have different disabilities all of a sudden transform

show up in new, bold, exciting ways. What a magical time.

It's just a magical time. We all need to embrace it. Even if it seems weird, even if it seems scary, you cannot put your head in the sand. You have to embrace it and experiment with it every single day. And you know what? It's coming whether we want it or not because it's already being integrated into all the tools that we use. You name it. Whether it's Canva or a Google product or a Microsoft product, it's there.

Now, the scary part is, I think it was about six months ago, Sam Altman, in sort of an honest moment, said on a podcast, oh, well, you know, in about a year or so, I think AI will rapidly and easily replace technology.

98% of all advertising and marketing jobs. And he said it for free. And he said for free. He added for free. Yeah, for almost no money. Yeah. For almost no money. Now, I pay attention to Sam. Sam really knows AI, but I really know marketing. And I also really know business culture. And I know every time we think everything is there, everything's going to change. Guess what?

It takes three years. It does. I call it Schaefer's law. You could test me on this. We'll come back in three years and you'll say, you're right. It took three years. But the challenge that I hear you say is it's coming. And Sam knows things he's not showing us, right? Obviously. Yeah. But the other thing is, I think you also have to have some critical thinking here about what's

Sam's view of the marketing world. It's formulaic, right? It's media buying. It's all that stuff that's a repeatable pattern. But there's a lot of marketing that's not a repeatable pattern. It's personality, it's story, it's instinct. So this is where I dive in the book is, where are the places that are uniquely human that we can own?

And I think that's the power of the book. That's why this is a book of hope. It's not sugarcoating anything. I'm not saying kumbaya, everything's going to be great. I'm saying if you're competent, competent is ignorable. You cannot just be competent and win in this world. You've got to disrupt what you're doing. You've got to somehow get rid of that fear.

and add some audacity to your work. I'm with you 100%. That's the whole reason I started my other show, AI Explored, because AI

We saw the same thing early in social media, right, Mark? I mean, everybody was like, social media is not going to be a thing. It's never going to matter. Very similar pattern. Right? And we saw the same thing when the internet came around. Everybody was like, oh, it's not going to disrupt traditional business. Of course, we know most jobs today are internet-enabled jobs now as a result of it, right? So I'm with you. It's going to be a threat and an opportunity. And I'm more of the optimist than I am the pessimist on this. So getting to stories, and disruptive stories in particular, when we were prepping for this call,

The beginning stages of telling a good story, you said narrative was really important. And what I want to do is unpack the importance of narrative and kind of the stories to help people understand what you mean by that. Okay. So this was such a revelation to me. As I went to Giant Spoon, I interviewed the co-founder of Mischief, which is the hottest agency in the world right now.

I sat down and interviewed Michael Kravica, the king of viral video. I have profiles of liquid death, of elf cosmetics, of some of the most disruptive companies. And I found there is a pattern. There is actually a system. And so that is the system that I put into the book. And it's easy to grasp. It's easy to understand. There's only three ideas. And it's this.

So what is your story? It's your narrative. It's where you tell the story. And it's who tells the story.

And if you disrupt one of those elements, then you're on the path to audacity. You're on the path of doing something new and different for your industry. So those are the three main buckets of the book. I talk about other things like using AI, measurement, the role of culture in your company, and the narrative. But the three main buckets are we have to disrupt the story,

where the story is told or who tells the story. So it's very, very easy. Then I've got case studies,

For all of those with lots of practical tips. Let's talk about narrative. What do you mean by narrative? And what are some tips that you can give us on how to tell a better story? One of my favorite stories in the book, which really kind of opened my eyes to this. I went to this international conference and there were these two guys from Australia standing up on the stage, Andrew and James McKinnon. They're brothers and they have an agency in Melbourne called Taboo.

Their presentation was called Taboo by Design. I thought, well, that's interesting. So Andrew starts off his talk by saying, well, today we want to make sure you remember us. And so anybody, anytime someone leaves the room, my brother and I are going to take off a piece of our clothing. Now this rumble goes through the room. Like what did he say?

And he said, well, I know this is really unusual. And everyone we've talked to has told us this is an extremely bad idea. But I would rather be humiliated today than be forgotten.

Now, I started to take this personally, thinking, what if I have to go to the bathroom? I don't want to start this avalanche, right? Sure enough, they gave this fantastic speech about pressing into taboos, like breaking bad rules for good reasons, breaking industry norms because that's the way we've always done it. And sure enough, at the end of the talk, they're standing on their stage in their underwear with the name of their company across their undershirts.

Now, I was captivated by this. I went up, took a picture of them in their underwear and contacted them at the event. They said, oh, let's have breakfast tomorrow morning. We had a long breakfast, got to know each other. And we've been like collaborating now. And now they're in the book. What they were demonstrating was,

was making people anxious. So I know you know the book Contagious by Jonah Berger. Great research, great book. And one of the things Jonah says there, the stories that are remembered, the stories that go viral have a strong emotional impact. It's joy, it's happiness, it's awe, it's anxiety, it's fear. Now, wait a minute.

In social media marketing, we're all about the happy, but do we ever think about anxiety? Do we ever think about fear? So, think about what's happening with liquid death. Okay, here's the number one rule I learned in marketing school. Never associate your product with death. Here's the fastest growing beverage in the world. They call themselves death. Their company mascot is called Murder Man.

I encourage anyone, especially if you're outside the U.S., because I think this product is only in the U.S. right now. Go to YouTube and look at some of their commercials and you'll go, oh, my gosh. Well, and tell everybody what it is for those that don't know what it is, because, you know, it's not just water. Yeah, it's just water in a can. Yeah.

Yeah, and one of their latest commercials, they've got these children drinking liquid death and they're acting like they're drunk at a party. These little kids. And at the end of the commercial, the mother who's pregnant

is just standing there and she has this happy look on her face. She's holding liquid death and says, don't worry, it's just water. But the kids think they're cool because it looks like it's beer. Now, what's happening with the McKinnon brothers? They're making us feel anxiety because we'll remember that. Think about some time when you couldn't find your car at the garage at the airport. You probably can remember that time.

But you don't remember the hundreds of times you did find it. So it's anxiety that gets internalized. That's what Taboo is trying to push. That's what Liquid Death is certainly trying to do. And I think if you look at what Nutter Butter has been doing on TikTok, that's right out of the Audacious playbook. They're selling cookies, basically creating horror movies,

on TikTok. I mean, it's just completely mind-blowing what they're doing. And guess what? Their cookie sales have quadrupled. This is a brand that meant nothing to anybody 12 months ago, and they've just disrupted their narrative so dramatically. It demands attention, and it's showing up in their sales. So that's what I mean about breaking bad rules for good reasons, pushing taboos

pushing norms, just doing something different than what's average in your industry.

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A lot of marketers are thinking, I need to ask this question. How do I persuade my boss or my CEO? Because this is going to be a problem, obviously, with a conventional leader inside the company, right? Wanting to push a taboo because they're going to be concerned about pushback, right? What's your thoughts on that? Huge issue. Huge issue.

I've got an entire chapter in the book. It's near the end of the book. It's called, this is the most important chapter in the book for this very reason. Because the whole book, I'm saying, you've got to be bold. You've got to be audacious. And then by the end of the book, people are saying, yes, I'm in, but how do I do this and not get fired? Culture is a big part of it. So

What I've done is I've interviewed people who have worked in traditional companies and agencies. I've worked, I interviewed people who are running companies.

businesses and agencies that are trying to change the culture. And I interview even like freelancers who have to convince, you know, a client to try something new. And so there are strategies, there are strategies. And the thing, as I look back at my career, I was always pushing the edges. I was always experimenting. I was always like forcing people to look at things in a new way. And the

The two most effective strategies I ever used is number one is make your boss afraid. Okay. What I mean by that is hopefully you work in a company where people are honest and they're well-meaning and they're not mean and manipulative. But if they're honest and well-meaning, they want to adjust. And if they learn that they're vulnerable to the way the world is, and if you're average, you certainly are.

If you're not responding to AI, you certainly are. And so how do you create this anxiety to say, to go to step two? And step two is, let's try a pilot. There you go. Experiment, right? Let's do an experiment. Now, what I've found in my life is almost nobody can say no to a six-month pilot program. And here's the good news. Because of the internet and the technology we have with AI...

We can do pilots for almost nothing. You know, it's not like you've got to spend a lot of money on R&D to create something in your basement. You can do very great experiments for almost no time, almost no money. And it's just harder and harder to say no to experiments. And then, you know, the other thing is, if you have an experiment that runs...

six months, about 50% of the time, at the end of that six months, your boss is gone anyway. You got a new boss. But they didn't know it was an experiment. So it just becomes a thing. Okay. All right. So-

You don't have to be taboo, but it's definitely a way to stand out, right? I mean, like there's other aspects to this. I would imagine really good storytelling is kind of the key, but you have to be different is really what I'm hearing you say, right? You do. And then it kind of moves into, like I said, there's literally hundreds of ideas and hundreds of examples. I was very careful to include small businesses, startups, nonprofits. So there's lots of different examples.

Then, you know, the next big bucket is disrupting where you tell the story. So this is like showing up in an unexpected place. And I think a really cool story from this section of the book is ELF Cosmetics. ELF, E-L-F, stands for Eyes, Lips, Face. Not many people know this, but for the last five years, they've been the fastest growing stock on the New York Stock Exchange.

not Nvidia, not Apple, Elf. So their CMO is not just disrupting stories. She's disrupting many of the foundational ideas of marketing. And one of her philosophies is lean into the signals.

So one of the hurdles, I think, in marketing today is we're obsessed with optimization. We're obsessed with engagement and tracking web visits and improving our SEO. And that's all good. There's a place for that. But that sort of data and that sort of research is available online.

to everyone. It's just everybody's chasing the same keywords. Everyone's putting out the same types of content. What Elf is doing is they're really studying where are their customers showing up? How are they acting differently? And an example is here we have Elf Cosmetics. They created a whole experiential world in Roblox. Now, if you think about cosmetics,

What do they do? They take out an ad in Vogue magazine. That's what cosmetics does. How can you even show cosmetics and Roblox? They're just squares, right? Well, they have a Roblox world. Oh, I see. Okay. Where people enjoy elf cosmetics. And the reason is most of their customers are, you know, generally young women. Got it.

And the young women are in Roblox. And the preteens, especially, that's the next generation of customers. Now, they're leaning into the signals. And this is a huge opportunity, I think, is to look up.

You'll look up from the daily spreadsheets and the daily dashboards and really study. Go out and talk to your customers, interview your customers, study your customers and see what is different. How are they changing? Where are they showing up? What do they really enjoy? Another example of leaning into signals is young women. What do they love most of all? Music, videos, Taylor Swift. So they created a music video.

In 2020, I think it was 2023, they had the all-time greatest video on TikTok. It created 5 million challenge videos, billions of views. It even ranked on Spotify.

the song. So, I mean, if our customers are on music, we're going to be in music. So, lean into the signals. Tell the story in a new and unexpected place. Now, you might think, well, I don't have the money for that. But you don't need money. And sometimes money ruins everything. It's a bane to creativity sometimes. A really cool example from the book is a company called Litographs. Litographs

is a company that puts the entire text of a popular book on a t-shirt or a blanket or something like that. So it could be like Alice in Wonderland. So what they did for their fans is they created temporary tattoos of every sentence in a popular book.

and sent them to their fans. How can they do that on a tattoo? I mean, it must be very small. Temporary. It's like a thing you just rub on. But they got the whole book on a tattoo? No, each sentence. Oh, okay. Each sentence of the book. So every tattoo is different. Oh. They sent them to their fans. The fans put the tattoo, took a picture, sent it back to lithographs so you could read the whole book on body parts. Oh, that's unusual. Think how many thousands of customers...

book lovers, they engaged in this fun project for pennies. So wait, just so I'm clear, what does the company sell? What does Little Graph sell? So let's say your favorite book is Alice in Wonderland. You can buy a shirt that has the whole book. Oh, so they sell clothing. Okay. Clothing, blankets, merchandise, mugs,

Whatever. Anything you can print the words of a book on, that's what they sell for book lovers. How did they get the tattoos out to their customers? Do you have any sense of how that happened? Well, they just engaged them in their community and said, who's in? And what they've done now, Mike, I think they're up to 10 or 11 different books. So every time they want to promote a new book, everybody's ready because everybody loves this. And they'll put the tattoo on the neck, on the chest, wherever. And so-

And now my body is on this website. So do they make a video out of it? How are they actually using it in there? I don't think they made a video, but they just, they put the pictures consecutively. Oh, so you can read it. Got it. Okay. You can read the book. And they're on obviously different color skins and stuff to kind of show the diversity of all the audience. Yeah. Very interesting. Different color skin, different body parts. There you go. So how did that

Do you have any sense of what happened? I mean, did that help spur sales? You know, I don't know. I honestly don't know that because it's a private company and they wouldn't reveal something like that. Got it. But, you know, what it did for them is it helped the customer tell the story. So first of all, it disrupted the story in a dramatic way by telling a story in a different and unexpected place.

but it also engages the customers. I'm having a flashback and it might've been you or David Mirren Scott, where he had people, he sent books to him and he had him take pictures holding the book in the most strangest locations in the world. And I don't know if the book was about going to unusual locations, but is this the kind of example or is that not really the kind of example? I think it's the same because what we need to do is we,

Nobody believes our advertising, if they even see it, because we live in a streaming economy. We spend extra money on Netflix and Disney+, so we don't have to watch ads. We spend more money on Spotify, so we don't have to listen to ads, and we listen to audiobooks. We're living in a virtually ad-free world other than maybe news and sporting events.

And, you know, traditional advertising is becoming less and less relevant and it's not believed anyway. So what we need to do instead of us beating our chest and telling the story is

We need to do something so interesting, so remarkable, so worthy that our customers can't wait to tell the story for us because we believe each other. Nielsen had this famous study a few years ago. 92% of adults will believe anything

a stranger telling them something before they'll believe an ad. We believe our friends, our family. We believe influencers. We believe reviews. We believe testimonies before we'll believe ads. Now, here we have Lidograph.

saying, hey, customers, let's get involved. Now the customers are saying, look at this. This is this awesome company. I get to be part of it. Look at my arm. I have my favorite quote from whatever book. And let's put it on Instagram and then have some fun with it. And come to the website. You could see the whole book. So, I mean, the marketing mindset today

is really entering that space where we do something so cool that the customers tell the story for us. Instead of holding the mic, we kind of write a script, this cool story, and then we hand the mic to the customers, say, you take it away. That is the most effective marketing today. And by the way, come together with this theme of AI. That's something AI cannot touch. We own word-of-mouth marketing.

Humans own word of mouth marketing. It is the purest, most trusted, unadulterated form of marketing that there is. Well, and the oldest too. It's been around forever, right? It's been around forever, but it's an afterthought for most marketers. How many people have word of mouth marketing in their marketing budget?

Almost nobody. Okay, so here's what we've learned so far. First of all, you got to have a good story to tell. And ideally, the story should have some sort of emotional trigger and taboos. We explored that. Then we talked about where to tell the story and where could be a virtual world like we talked about with Roblox. Could be the side of a building. It could be a sidewalk. Yeah, we had Adley Kinsley on the show and she talked about how she was making a muffin mix in the aisle of a grocery store.

So it was a really unusual location where she was doing her short form videos. Literally, she grabbed a bowl, grabbed some eggs and did the whole thing, literally a no bake thing in the aisle. Right. So that's that's just like a really unusual location. I love it. Right. Yeah. So the idea that you can think a little bit out of the box as far as where you do something. I love that. And then the who you really talked about the importance of customer.

customers. I would love you to also talk about employees and creators and just any thoughts on like getting these people involved. Yeah. So that's the third idea is that, you know, we just have to get out of this, this norm that, you know, we're the ones that own the message. We're the ones that control the message. So this section is broken up in a couple of different parts. And I start with the math behind word of mouth,

marketing and why it's different from influencer marketing. And the key idea is that there was research about 10 years ago that unlocked the, I think the key

to how word of mouth marketing works. And this is a researcher, very famous researcher named Ed Keller. And what he discovered is that if you create that story that we've been talking about, you create some cool, unmissable, disruptive story in an amazing place. 10% of the population across every culture in the world has a personality that is a super sharer. Now, this is different than an influencer.

And an influencer self-identifies. You give them the story. Maybe you make a deal with them and they share it. But for word of mouth marketing, you just put that story wherever they are. You fish where the fish are. 10% will pick it up, tell the story, share the story. And once that starts to go, a story could be amplified dramatically.

630%. So this was sort of a breakthrough idea that helps you start to think about, okay, how does this really work? Where do we really find the value? How do we start to activate this thing? And the idea is to put the story in the hands of entrepreneurs.

the customer or get someone else to tell the story. As you mentioned in the book, I also talk about employees. And for the record, I do not favor at all incentive programs to get employees to tell your story. I don't think that's sustainable. I don't think it's fair. I don't think it's effective. The programs I've worked on with companies are

We actually make it like a career incentive for employees. We're teaching them a new skill. I worked with a company in Texas where they actually train their hourly employees to

to tell stories on Instagram and on TikTok. - About the work that they're doing, basically? - About the work that they're doing and what they like, you know, it could be about anything. And so we made it a club and every month we had a social media marketing club and we learned about storytelling. How do you build an audience? What are the legal things? And then as people started having fun with it and getting a response on social media,

Other people wanted to join because it's fun and these people are getting a benefit from it. You know, these are people who are, you know, mixing things in a vat and they're becoming Instagram stars. That is the better way to do it. You know, another case study in the book,

is right down the road from you, Tractor Supply. Tractor Supply is based in the Nashville area. And they started Instagram, TikTok campaign run by their employees. And they'll bring in cameras and they've told the employees, just talk to us like you would talk to your customers. And they light up.

Because they're so excited about the things in the store and the new things that are coming there. Macy's Retail, Macy's Department Stores, same thing. Almost all of their marketing is done by their employees who work in the departments. And we're going to love that.

and embrace that and listen and believe that more than we're ever going to listen to an ad on TV. What about Yeti? You told me some story about Yeti. What's the deal with them? Well, we know Yeti now, especially in America. It's become a big... It's like a cooler and water bottle. But you think about, I don't know, I think it was seven or eight years ago, and I started seeing people wearing baseball caps and t-shirts that said Yeti. And I thought,

Wait a minute. Isn't that an ice cooler? Yeah. Why would you wear a shirt promoting an ice cooler? Well, the truth is, at least for the first five years of that company, they didn't spend one dime on advertising. It was all word of mouth marketing. 100%.

They connected with fishing guides, hiking guides, hunting guides, anyone who's sort of like leading people into the outdoors. Did they give them free merchandise? Is that the idea? They would give them merchandise, but more important, they told them the stories and explained why you'd pay $400 for an ice cooler, right? Yeah.

So it wasn't just a piece of merchandise. They told them the stories because these people were in the 10% that love to tell these stories. So then what happens? They lead some trail group. 10% of those people start buying Yeti and telling everybody about it. And it spreads and spreads and spreads. This is a company built 100%.

on community and word of mouth marketing. Because they didn't have a lot of money. They didn't have a lot of startup. And little known fact, very popular drink in many parts of the world right now, Red Bull, same way. Early times in the company,

It was all built on word of mouth marketing. Okay. So I want to talk about the front of your book because you've done something rather unusual. For those that are watching the video, they can see your book behind your head there. It's up on the shelf behind you. Why don't you explain to the audio viewers what the heck you've done? By golly, if you write a book called Audacious, it better be audacious. Yeah.

You know, we had a brainstorming session and trying to think, you know, what can you do? And it's so limited because the publishing industry is the publishing industry. They've been making books for 200 years the same way. And you can't spend a lot of money because the profit margin on books is so low. So what we did is we created a QR code that took up the whole cover of the book. I thought, all right, now,

What do we do with it? Where would people go? And we thought, well, maybe it leads to a new world. Maybe it leads to a quest. Well, that was too complicated. So then we thought, what if this is a book cover that's never the same twice? It's an infinity cover.

So what we did is we took the book, uploaded it to AI, and we also uploaded some art samples so that it would give a consistent sort of tone and color palette that kind of goes with the colors. Yeah, for those that aren't seeing the book, it's gradient orange to red, and it's got white text that says audacious, and it's got a massive white QR code. So what happens when you scan that sucker? All right. So then when you hold your phone up to this and you scan the QR code,

And you line it up with the book. The book cover changes. There's abstract, colorful art that is informed by the stories in the book. And it changes and changes and changes and changes. And every time you do it, you're going to see new images.

So it's the first in the world. It's the first time anybody has ever done this. And it took us about six months to figure out how to do it, but we did it. And it's a lot of fun. And in some of the people who are buying the book, Mike, are even saying, my children love this. It's kind of like a little movie or video game on the cover of the book. Is it using, like, I know when Zach King wrote his book, he had QR codes inside the book that would animate like some of the stories in the book. Yeah.

But is this actually like, can you see through your camera and it's kind of three-dimensional or is it more like, oh, really? Okay. So you can see the book. It's an augmented reality experience. Interesting. It overlays the book, even the spine of the book. And you can walk around and it conforms to the book. Wow. That's crazy. It's crazy.

All right, Mark. Well, first of all, thank you for being audacious and exploring and having the willingness to go out and talk to all these awesome companies to share all these amazing stories. I know you're going to be in San Diego at Social Media Marketing World and folks that are going to be there, be sure to come up and say hello to Mark. If people want to get the book, I'm going to be there.

I'm assuming they can get the book anywhere, but is there somewhere you want to send them? And if they want to work with you or connect with you on the socials, where do you want them to go? Well, the book is available in paperback, hardback, ebook, and audio book through Amazon.

And you don't have to remember me or my name. If you just remember Businesses Grow, that's the name of my website. So you can find the book we talked about today is Audacious, How Humans Win in an AI Marketing World. And there's a lot of bonus content on the book website on my site. You might want to check that out. There's actually a game inside the book that can unlock bonus content and prizes for you as well. And

And you can find my blog, my podcast, all my socials. Boy, I hope I do get to meet some great new people in San Diego. Mark Schaefer, thank you so much for sharing your insights with us today. Thank you, Michael.

If you missed anything, we took all the notes for you over at socialmediaexaminer.com slash 659. If you're new to the show, be sure to follow us. If you've been a regular listener, I would love a review on whatever platform you're listening on. And would you do me a favor and let your friends know about this show as well? You can tag me on Facebook, on LinkedIn or on X.com.

And do check out our other shows, the AI Explored podcast and the Social Media Marketing Talk show. This brings us to the end of the Social Media Marketing podcast. I'm your host, Michael Stelzner. I'll be back with you next week. I hope you make the best out of your day and may your marketing keep evolving. The Social Media Marketing podcast is a production of Social Media Examiner.

We're in the biggest shift in marketing history with AI and social algorithms transforming everything. That's why Social Media Marketing World 2025 isn't just a conference. It's your complete marketing transformation. Whether you join us in San Diego or virtually, one breakthrough could change your entire career. Secure your spot today at socialmediamarketingworld.com.

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