Recapping 2022…and looking forward to the New Year!, with Michelle Burk-Gomez & Brad Steinbacher

Michelle Burk-Gomez is the Account Director at A Brave New, and she is passionate about building brands and crafting compelling digital experiences for organizations. Her ideas are informed by creative and quantitative perspectives. Michelle has over 15+ years of experience in the Marketing, Brand Strategy, Technology, Finance and Nonprofit industries.

Adept at knowing market trends and how to relate that to an organization’s targeted goals, Michelle is out to discover how best to use marketing campaigns and technology to impact market position and brand perception. She is excited about how to use the power of technology to make organizations more competitive.

She is experienced in concept development and strategy through execution; that is grounded in knowledge of brand, competitive landscape, and market trends. Storytelling, brand strategies and innovation with top ranking companies all play a part.

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Before he entered the world of marketing, A Brave New’s Content Director Brad Steinbacher spent 14 years as a journalist and editor at Seattle’s leading alternative newspaper The Stranger. His marketing work has included creating content for Fortune 500 companies, political campaigns, and penning opinion pieces for former members of Congress and professional sports stars. At A Brave New, Brad guides and oversees all content for clients, ensuring brand guidelines and voices are followed, and generating new ideas for content delivery. In his free time, Brad enjoys sports, playing video games, and pretending that he’s not actually middle-aged.

What you’ll learn about in this episode:

What it was like for our agency over the past year
Marketing trends we see on the horizon for 2023
Why our Content Director only just recently learned he could turn off notifications in the Slack app

Additional resources:

Transcript:

Intro:

Welcome to A Brave New podcast. This is a show about branding and marketing, but more than that, it's an exploration of what it takes to create brands that will be remembered and how marketing can be a catalyst for those brands' success. I'm Josh Dougherty, your host. Let's dive in.

Josh:

Hi everybody. Welcome to the show. So excited to have you here today. I'm joined today by two people who help me run A Brave New on a day-to-day basis. I have our Content Director, Brad Steinbacher. Hey Brad. Good to have you.

Brad:

Hello. Thanks for having me.

Josh:

I have our Account Director, Michelle Burk-Gomez, making her podcast debut, I think.

Michelle:

Nope, done it before. Clearly you missed that one, but happy to be here.

Josh:

Oh my gosh, I think that was before I was the-

Michelle:

It's fine.

Josh:

It was before I was the host, right?

Michelle:

It is. That's true, so that's fair.

Josh:

It was a B, before Josh. I will not abbreviate that.

Brad:

Off to a blazing start here.

Josh:

We're off to an amazing start, which is great because we're going a little lighter today with the content. We're going to spend some time looking back and reflecting on the year that 2022 was, the takeaways we had from it. We're also going to spend a little bit of time looking forward to the new year as we embark on 2023. Maybe it will already be the new year when you're listening to this. We'll see, and also going to close out a little bit of what we, talking about the holidays and how we rest and find some quieter times during the holidays in the midst of a crazy season. But before I dive into all that, I wanted to just take some time to think and reflect back on the year 2022. I think we do this really as agency people, kind of poorly. Oftentimes, we are just running along and going quickly and not taking some time to think about what we achieved, what we could change, all those things. We're going to do a little bit of that with you today. You can maybe process along as you go. First of all, I wanted to talk about, if we had a magic wand and could change anything over the last year, what you would change. I'd love to hear both of your thoughts. I have some ideas as well, but ...

Brad:

Go ahead, Michelle.

Michelle:

Okay, I can do that. I think what I would change for sure was COVID. A) That was exhausting, personally, to get it and to just have that brain fog and everything else. But seeing it really run through different clients as well. And seeing how it really impacted teams in different ways and impacted getting stuff done and deadlines and different things that we were working on.Tthat people were amazing and powered through and were so gracious when people came back. But definitely, if things could change, that was one big hiccup that was so annoying and frustrating for the people that had it and just everything in between.

Josh:

It was always a two-week thing for anyone, and then the three weeks afterwards as someone's like, I'm regaining my composure and my ability to breathe.

Michelle:

Right, right.

Brad:

Yeah, that's a good one. Mine is, I feel like I would like to change internet advertising in general. I feel like it's broken right now and could use a disruption. And I have no idea what that would be, but I feel like it's right for something to change.

Josh:

Mine was a little bit related to that because mine was, if I could go back, I would stop just trying to grind out work. And I think sometimes that's essential, and I don't mean that just in trying to kick out a ton of work. You're going to have to hit deadlines, you're going to have to do all that, but more in the, are we asking a big question of, Is this actually the most innovative thing we could be doing here versus doing the same thing that we've done before? Now certainly, some of those same things work, but it seems like we get caught in a rut of that execution a lot.

Brad:

Definitely.

Josh:

What are some theories, do you have any theories, Brad, for what the disruption would look like?

Brad:

If I did, I would be a billionaire right now, but I can't. Coming from journalism originally, I've seen what it's done to all publishing industry, the internet advertising, and how it's really broken that in a lot of areas. And there are a lot smarter people to me that are hopefully working on it, but I have no clue of how we can get past just driving for clicks.

Josh:

The unfortunate thing is I think that most of those smart people in meta are working on how to get you to click.

Brad:

Exactly. Exactly.

Josh:

While they get annoyed when they have to work more than a four-day work week. What about stuff that we learned? How did we get smarter in the last year?

Brad:

This goes into what you were just talking about, but content is still king, I feel, but I've come to realize that there's such a thing as too much content. There's just so much out there right now and it's more important to find ways to stand out, I think, than it is to just constantly put out content that makes you an expert and makes you sound smart. We have one client in particular that I've been writing for, for years and I look at their website and I'm like, God, that's a lot of words in there. Maybe we should start reexamining how we can be more specific and try to be more creative in what we're producing outside beyond words. Not that they aren't important, but I think now's the time to really start pivoting that way.

Michelle:

I think I was thinking about that, too, just the whole idea of just because we've always done it that way, doesn't mean we have to continue. I've seen us put process in place with trying to expand on our content, repurposing it, taking some of the webinars and videos that we've done, breaking it up into snippets, putting it on social, really trying to utilize more than just one piece of content in a campaign, and seeing how it can be repurposed and refreshed has been really nice, and we've seen a lot of traction in that space as well.

Josh:

I think really related to both those things is this idea was, my learning thing was the power of truly listening to people. One of the things that I get to do when I'm lucky enough to do as part of this podcast is, I get to have a bunch of really interesting conversations with CMOs, and when you sit and listen to them, you get all these different ideas about how you could communicate more effectively, topics that you could maybe talk about for hours with them, which is not the thing that you would think about talking about for hours with someone. I think a key to creating better content is that listening, and also, figuring out how do you bottle up that idea of a conversation in your content with people so that it's more of a two-way street. Now, if I had a silver bullet of how to do that beyond posting a lot on social media or LinkedIn and hoping that people comment back, obviously, I may not be doing this podcast either because I would be wealthy beyond my wildest dreams, but maybe I'd still be doing this podcast. Who knows?

I think to piggyback on that, the next thing I wanted to talk about was this idea of, what we wouldn't change. It's funny to start a reflection podcast on here's things we've learned and what things that we would do differently. Mine again, goes back to that listening and conversations because the thing I wouldn't change is this idea of investing in our team and being together in person, especially after COVID. It was kind of a grind for the last couple years to see people in boxes on Zoom like we're doing right now. That was the only way we interacted with people. I wouldn't change that. In fact, I would try to find ways to double down on doing that more because I don't think we'll ever go back to a full in-person office, but having more time when we're together to have those conversations that happen outside of a Zoom call, would be awesome. What did you guys think? What were things that you really liked about the last year that you would keep?

Brad:

I think the in-person stuff was a big one. Although, the first time we all got together, we kind of went overboard a little bit, post-COVID excitement.

Josh:

To be expected.

Michelle:

Some of us. Some of us.

Brad:

Yeah. One thing that I …

Josh:

A very sadly sober view of that experience.

Brad:

Well, one thing that I liked the past year is just the sheer number of ways you can reach people now and what you were talking about earlier, conversations. But there's all these different channels that I'm excited to explore and dig into, like maybe we could. I saw Amazon do a thing for AWS on Twitch, where they were talking about Kubernetes on Twitch and I was like, that's weird. Amazon owns Twitch, but to think that that would be a good place to do it, it kind of blew me away that they were willing to jump in there. I think it's great that we have all these new ways to reach people.

Michelle:

For sure. I think I really thought about just how we listen to our clients and stuff like that. Stuff like that, I wouldn't change, but I think we spend a lot of time being really deliberate and trying to help our various clients create, obviously an amazing prospect or customer experience, but making sure that it's really friction free and that they're getting that information that they need in places that they actually want to consume it. So spending time at the beginning of campaigns and stuff like that before we launch and knowing, who is the target audience? Do they want to be on Twitch? Do they want to, we always have the naysayers that are like, "There's no way Facebook is doing anything," and/or what are these ads and stuff like that, but it's like, if you have the right visuals, the right content, and know who your audience is, you get results.

And you can't, at the end of the day, argue with what the metrics and analytics find out. Don't you guys think, coming into 2023 as marketers, we are so bombarded with click this, download this and that., And marketers are trying to get smarter and smarter and be like, I want your business email and you're like, allegedly. Sure you can have one of six that I'm working off of. How do you actually break through the noise and knowing that, ultimately, the consumer is going to be the driver and the decider, and it's not just generally a one-point person that's going to ultimately choose. But really a whole bunch of influencers, and what spaces are they playing in? What are they interested in and what's that value add there? Obviously, if we could all answer that all day, again, early retirement.

Brad:

Well, it seems like a lot of marketing for a long time has been trying to attract people to you and your business, but now it feels like we need to do more going and meeting people where they are and reaching out to them there.

Josh:

Yeah, I agree with that.

Michelle:

So that forever battle between lead gen and demand gen, how do we get there?

Josh:

Yeah, I kind of hate the word demand gen because ... We use it. You will see it on a new website that we're going to be debuting soon, but it's like you can't really drive demand for people, something people don't want. I was thinking about … so this is a funny story about my 2003 BMW that, recently, the key died on it because it's 20-year-old car, soon to be 20-year-old car. And maybe when you're talking, listening to this episode and of course, I never use the locking mechanism in the door to get into the car, so I go to do the locking mechanism and it's broken. Shocker there again. So I find myself, a couple nights ago, it was 10 o'clock, I had this guy who was a mobile locksmith for cars, and he came out and he's working on the car. He has this workshop in his van.

He replaces the door lock, builds a new key right there, and he got to talking about what I do for work, and we were talking about how we do branding and a lot of it was about standing out and doing something different. And he said something really profound, this guy who's amazing at his work, if you are looking for someone in Seattle, you should look if you need to get into your car, but he was like, "Well, it seems to me that branding is just a lot about having a really high-quality product and then people will buy it." And I was like, "Well, you're not wrong." It was the same thing. He showed up at 10. He did everything you need to do. If you've ever had to change a key in a BMW or a Mercedes, it's like the most ridiculous process to do …

Michelle:

Literally.

Josh:

... because you have to literally reprogram the security system in, or the anti-theft stuff, in the car. And he walked through it good natured, tried to fix the key before he replaced the key, so I didn't have to spend on a new key, did all this stuff, and his product was just good, and now, I would recommend him to anyone. To me, that's about cutting through the noise. It's like focus a fuck ton on what you do and make it the best that is out there.

Michelle:

Oh yeah, but how did you find him, Josh?

Josh:

I found him through word of mouth …

Michelle:

Interesting.

Josh:

... at my local mechanic who I talked to first and they were like, "Well, we can't figure this out. You go call Justin at…" I can't remember what the name of his company is. Now, this is a bad story. We'll put it in the show notes. You can find it, so you have a locksmith.

Michelle:

Quick plug for Justin!

Josh:

Justin at ... Wait for it … Just Cars Advanced Locksmith in Seattle. But, I found him through that and then found him on his website, obviously, but it was also the power of a website where you just call and it goes straight to his cell phone, and I didn't have to go through a bunch of bullshit to get to him. He answered the phone.

Michelle:

Lovely.

Brad:

Oh yeah.

Josh:

And then he is there that evening to fix it.

Brad:

If you go to a website and they're like, put in information here for a quote and it's like, no, just talk to me.

Josh:

Just tell me.

Brad:

Let me tell you what it is and what I need.

Michelle:

Right.

Josh:

Maybe that's something that B2B marketers can learn, make it easy for people to actually get the information that they need, which totally got us off track, but it's a good conversation. I wonder what are the other things in trends in 2023 that you guys are looking at? We're jumping ahead to the future casting, but what are things that you guys are thinking about? How to cut through the noise, how to stand out, what are other things?

Brad:

I'm really curious to see what happens in the social space in the next year, especially with Twitter being destroyed by a madman right now. What is going to spring up in that place? Is anything else going to come out? Is something going to replace Twitter? Is it going to be something completely different? I think that's going to be really interesting to watch.

Josh:

Don't you wonder if he's playing 20 dimensional chess with us, and he's going to come out and have recreated all of social media just like he did with space travel? I'm not rooting for him to do this, but …

Brad:

Yeah, it's really interesting. There's two choices, two paths you can take. He's either playing that chess or he's just not that smart, and we've all been bamboozled this entire time by it.

Josh:

Definitely.

Brad:

I don't know which way it's going into that, but he certainly doesn't seem to know what he's doing right now, but sometimes genius has to break everything before it comes through.

Michelle:

In the way of MySpace?

Brad:

Yeah, or it might just go bankrupt, and somebody will buy it for cheap.

Josh:

Maybe he's just also pissed that he was forced to buy it, so he's like, "What's $40 billion done with this shit show?"

Brad:

To have that problem.

Michelle:

Right. Real world problems.

Josh:

Exactly.

Michelle:

I think other things I'm looking forward to are more short videos. My attention span is so short for stuff of, if I'm watching it, I want to see it, know it quickly. I want to be either entertained, informed, or, hopefully, it's funny or something like that where I super enjoy the business humor. And, things when companies can laugh at themselves a little bit or make it a little bit different, have some sort of personality that as we go into a time where, dare I say the recession word, but where people are really thinking about that and kind of locking it down to forever stay middle of the road with no personality and just bland. It's like a beige crayon and hoping that people are drawn to it, that it's like you've got to do something.

Brad:

Do you remember years ago, there was these Old Milwaukee beer ads that Will Ferrell did that were shot on VHS?

Josh:

Those were amazing.

Brad:

They only aired in Milwaukee during the Super Bowl and then they were leaked online, and it was just, whoever came up with that, I was just really impressed by a) they were able to sell it. That they were able to say, "This is what we're going to do." But that type of short form video stuff, I think is really interesting and you wouldn't expect it at all. And the short attention span thing, if I'm watching a YouTube video and it pauses for an ad break and I’m just waiting for that skip ad thing to pop up …

Josh:

Totally.

Brad:

... so I can just be done with it. That's a problem everybody marketing in the digital space has to deal with.

Josh:

I also think that's so huge for our space, thinking about working in tech and healthcare. If someone could be bold enough to have a sense of humor like that, it really stands out because everyone's just trying to be the next, I don't know, the next presentable company in that space. I'm like, what's more funny than engineers making fun of themselves and having a little fun and doing it in a hilarious way? I think many people would watch that, relate to it.

Brad:

As always, it's bringing the client along.

Michelle:

For sure.

Josh:

I think finding the right way to deploy that instead of just being like, we want to make something super funny. No reason here.

Michelle:

One of the little dungeons and dragons skit that you can …

Josh:

Exactly.

Michelle:

... talk about how you develop behind the scenes.

Josh:

I think my thing is related to that of, I don't know if it's a trend, but I'm waiting to see who is going to have boldness in the face of the recession and when the so-called recession that may or may not be happening, that we may or may not be in, I don't know, but I'm interested to see who's going to actually look in our spaces and make some bold decisions and try to win in the face of an uncertain economic climate versus trying to just batten down the hatches.

Michelle:

If you look at what businesses did, the ones that were really successful at the beginning of COVID, really reinvented themselves and figured out how to reach their target audiences and stuff like that there versus just hanging on.

Brad:

I also think, who knows about the recession, but COVID did really screw up everything and that everybody, all these industries, overstaffed grew and then now they have to, especially in the tech space.

Josh:

Who knows if we're even in a recession. Last time I checked, it is. A recession is two consecutive months of a shrinking economy and the economy definitely grew in Q3, so we'll see. We'll see. Who knew? The rules don't apply anymore. Let's talk about projects that we were excited about working on last year. I think we're somewhat poor at sitting, stopping, all of us being people who are driving pretty hard towards what the next thing is or have worked on a project for long enough that we want to just move on and think about the next project because we've looked at that one too long. What were a couple projects that you guys were excited about working on over the last year that you'd love to do more of?

Brad:

Well, one thing that Michelle and I put a lot of work into was stepping up our video game. Not video games, but how we create videos. We've really leaned into expanding how we do that and improving it, and it's been really fun to do. It's a lot more complicated, but there's a lot more logistics involved, but it's been very fulfilling.

Michelle:

Yeah, definitely loved the video stuff. Thinking about one of our larger healthcare clients and being able to be a part of their photography refresh and being able to roll it into their new brand was really exciting to see that completely develop and to be a part of the process all along the way, and taking them from where they were, then an acquisition, and really leveling it up, and then certainly, especially visually, diversifying their content and visuals and stuff like that was huge, and I think was an absolute game changer for them. You can definitely see it now as they're getting ready to launch various things. That was a lot of fun.

Josh:

For me, that was my favorite, too. I really enjoyed especially getting to do the new visual identity for them. I'll say apreehealth is the new brand. I will say it. Will put the link in the show notes to the work that we did for them on their visual brand at least, but that work was so fun to be able to start from scratch and to rapidly iterate on it, and help these people through what is a major transition. A lot of smart people that we're working with over there, but a major transition when you're trying to figure out how brands come together and can be successful together. I like those puzzles. That's why I like working with clients.

Brad:

I would also add the work we've been doing on the ABN website. I think that's been really fun to reposition and shift how we come across as a brand.

Josh:

I was going to say, that's one thing I wish I would've started sooner is that whole, if I could do 2022 over again. Some of the conversations and the work that we've done on how do we reposition ourselves as an agency? How do we focus more on strategy, more on big ideas, more on brand? It's been cool to explore for sure. What are the things you're most excited about as you look into the new year? Here we are, end of 2022.

Michelle:

Crazy.

Josh:

It's always fun to be like, let's take a pause and now in a week, we're going to feel completely fresh and new, and it's going to be a new year, but is there stuff you're really looking forward to in the next year?

Michelle:

I think for me, obviously, I love our clients and it gives me a lot of energy to hear about their goals and the things that they want to be working on and what they're trying to achieve and figuring out how we can collaborate together. And I know a lot of those plans are about to roll out here shortly. I'm excited to go into the new year, see what we can optimize, what we get to do differently, and really just help them achieve whatever their business goals are.

Brad:

I'm really excited about our plans and focus on growing as an agency, and how we're going to deal with that as we grow. There are a lot of pitfalls that we have to be on the lookout for, and figuring out ways to avoid them, I think, is going to be really interesting.

Josh:

I'm the most excited about building our team over the next year. I think, related to that growth, as I think many agencies, many companies had a ton of turnover through COVID, and I feel like this last year, we've been able to build a really solid team. We have amazing people and they're really the core of any of our success. I'm excited to be able to, hopefully, find as we're building the team, find a number of people and see the different perspectives they bring. Because that's one of the things I love about hiring people and as we put our team together, you get to see the different facets or the different ways people look at the company and look at the work that we're doing, get those different perspectives that you maybe don't have yourself.

I'm excited for that, and I'm excited to see the people who join, maybe the second half of this year, grow and grow into their voices of how they contribute to the agency because that's also cool to see as someone gets their feet wet, how they want to contribute. As we kind of close out, one of the things that I'd love to talk about is around how we help people think more bravely about their work. One of the things we talk about with our brand is that we want to help people be brave and bold, so that they can be remembered as a B2B brand. What does bravery look like? How do you want to push people to be brave in the coming year in the work that we're doing?

Brad:

Back in my previous agency, which was more in politics, one of the sayings we had was, "You can't take somebody from no to yes. You can take them from no to maybe, and that's a win." I think going to our clients and trying to encourage them to stretch more within their brand, take a bit more risk, but not jump in. Just say, "Will you consider this?" and keep applying that sort of stuff until they eventually get more comfortable with maybe expanding their wings a little bit.

Josh:

I think we can all do better at keeping that consistent list of, here's the things we would consider next if you decide to push things. It's good. It's really good.

Michelle:

I think just coming to the table with those new and innovative ideas of, I think people are fear based right now, and there's a lot of uncertainty in being able to report back to clients and to be able to show the metrics, to get them comfortable. What the conversations that we're having of, here's what’s working, let's double down, and here are some new ideas. I think we've done a great job this last year of presenting in some of our quarterly meetings, here are some things that creative recommends, pulling you guys in and showing them what's trending more. This may be different than what we've always done, but here are things to consider and where we might show something that's super crazy, off the charts and they're like, and we'll go this far. I'm willing to put my toe in and/or wade in a little bit, but any movement is better than just being stagnant.

Josh:

Totally. As it goes to pushing our clients to do more, the thing that I think about is I want someone to be really brave. I want to land the pitch of someone being really brave about telling of the human side, of the human impact of what their tech brand has on the world. I feel like there's this retreat that happens into features and functionality that feels really familiar, but I think someone really cares about that when they are ready to purchase, but that isn't going to catch their attention, so I think it'd be really cool to get one of our tech brands to show, to really focus their marketing in a major campaign on the human impact of their work and not just on the code. The Kubernetes. I don't know, any of the technology.

Brad:

It feels like so much of the tech marketing is, you remember the teachers on Charlie Brown? All you ever heard was “mwa mwa mwa.” It feels like that is how it's coming across a lot of the time, so I think making it so people will actually be like, okay, this actually would affect me in a positive way.

Josh:

For sure.

Michelle:

I think that's really how you're going to reach various prospects in all these different markets is, they want to know, how does it impact me? What is this for me, and how does this solve my problems or pain points or whatever else, not just all the widgets and everything else that go along with it?

Josh:

I think too, if you can make those people feel a little bit more proud about what they're doing, too, because if it's like, oh shit, I don't usually make that connection of what I did really impacts this person down the line. That's a pretty powerful motivator, too.

Brad:

Speaking of pain points, it goes back to the listening thing you were talking about earlier, Josh, is listening to what their pain points are and not assuming it. I feel like a lot of stuff I'm writing is, here's the common pain points that companies have. It's like, well, what is the actual pain point that this company would have that our client can solve?

Josh:

Maybe it's a great time to do some research and actually talk and listen to some people at your clients.

Brad:

That's crazy talk.

Josh:

Crazy. Well, I'd love to hear as we close out, we're about to, at least at this time of recording, we're about to head into a holiday season. I'd love to hear from you guys how we all know that the value of resting and the value of taking time to recharge and how important it is. I think Brad just wrote a piece on our blog even, that's about creating great B2B content, and how it's important to unplug and get away to be able to do that. We'll put that in the show notes as well for people, but I'd love to hear from each of you, how do you rest in the middle of the craziness in December and heading into January?

Brad:

I focus on, it can't be this chaotic forever, even if I'm just fooling myself. I think that's a big thing, and carving out time to actually rest and relax and try to ... I think you guys are the same way that vacations, oftentimes, feel like they're more bothered than their worth because you come back and you just have piles of emails and tasks you have to do, but it's really important that you do that because otherwise, you're going to lose your mind.

Josh:

And you have piles of work to do when you're here anyways. It's not like, it's not different.

Brad:

The world is not going to end if that thing is, if you don't get to it for a couple of days.

Josh:

Exactly.

Michelle:

I definitely think it's carving out that time, and also, having that perspective. It is always there. It also is B2B or B2C marketing that when we get back from holiday and stuff like that, we have the next project, more tasks, and deadlines. I know for me, my family, we try and take a little bit of a holiday, get away for a little bit, and I really disconnect, where I'm unavailable, won't be answering really anything that other people should be able to solve for this. I selfishly try and take that time. Also, we do it with friends and family and people that we enjoy, that life's too short not to be happy and not to enjoy what you're doing and who you're doing it with, so we really prioritize that.

Brad:

I came to a sad but exciting realization last week when I took some time off that I could turn off the notifications of Slack on my phone, so I did that.

Michelle:

You just figured that out?

Brad:

Because my phone would keep going off the first day, and I'd see these Slack notifications coming in. I'm like, oh, I got to stop looking at that, and I'm like, wait a second.

Michelle:

That's so funny.

Josh:

Spoken like a true creative, who's never been like, what is this technology? I have all my notifications turned off on my phone minus my texts. Period.

Michelle:

Brad's like, I do all my writing on my typewriter in the basement. Fine.

Josh:

And then transpose it. He pays his dog to then type it onto the computer.

Brad:

Very, very exciting.

Michelle:

Yep.

Josh:

I think for me, it's all those things. It's also, spending a little bit of time doing ... We have family close by, so my parents on both sides of the family, so it's also figuring out when is it enough to say, we don't need to spend all our time with family. We can have time with just our little family. Also, for both my wife and I getting that time to be like, we also like to have time ourselves away from each other, so carving that out, too. It's always a challenge, but what's life if not a challenge? As we close out, do you guys have any crazy holiday traditions you'll be doing? I put this question in the notes and then I was like, I don't really have any off-the-wall holiday traditions, so feel free to share if you have one.

Brad:

We always every year, when we put up our Christmas tree, instead of an angel or something on top, we have a stuffed chimpanzee that we call Clyde the Christmas Monkey, and he sits on top of our thing with his Santa hat on, and that's all my daughters have ever known was Clyde the Christmas Monkey for Christmas.

Michelle:

That's amazing.

Josh:

Love it.

Michelle:

We do the typical elf on a shelf.

Brad:

Elf. Elf on a shelf is the worst.

Michelle:

It's not because we've convinced the girls that the elves are in different time zones, so just because they didn't move, they might not be participating in the time zone that we're in, so it's fine.

Brad:

That's so smart.

Michelle:

Generally, the elf is fairly naughty, and now they have animals that come with it. There's two sets of elves, two sets of animals that have to go all over the place and it's intense, but usually, it's notes left up until that time, and usually, they're just terrible record, so the elves were drinking and all kinds of stuff and one just left wine bottles out and …

Brad:

Oh, it was the elves who did it, that left the wine bottles out.

Michelle:

Totally. 100%.

Josh:

Feels like a great scapegoat to have.

Michelle:

Without a doubt. There's definitely been terrifying moments of the elves are no longer allowed in bedrooms because it's been terrifying that people can't sleep, so that's fine, and it leads up to, we do the holiday pickle. I don't know if you've heard of that, where you hide …

Brad:

You hide it on the tree. You have to find it.

Michelle:

As soon as the tree goes up, the pickle gets put somewhere on the tree, and then it's somewhere and all the kids fight over it, and we have three trees in the house. One's a Charlie Brown tree, so if it's on that one, you know what's up.

Josh:

I have three as well. Secret additions.

Michelle:

Yeah, I'm like …

Brad:

What are you people doing with three trees?

Michelle:

They're themed. It's a thing.

Josh:

Mine aren't themed though, so this is impressive. I would also expect Michelle's whole tradition to be the strongest here because she is a lover of holidays of all types.

Michelle:

Yes, for sure, of all holidays. I'm here to celebrate them all. It doesn't matter.

Brad:

Just wait for Arbor Day. It's going to be so lit.

Josh:

It's crazy. Arbor Day.

Michelle:

Things are lit at our house on Arbor Day.

Josh:

Let's do that as our next group podcast. Arbor Day podcast.

Michelle:

Well, I'm sure we can because they have every other holiday that's celebrated or it's National Sock Day. National, I can't keep up. Whatever. It's fine. No, we try and knock them out.

Josh:

It may be a new podcast idea. National Blank Day. That could be the podcast.

Brad:

There has to be a national marketing day.

Josh:

Exactly.

Brad:

If not, we should start it.

Michelle:

With all kinds of ads, just some [inaudible 00:38:58].

Brad:

Just ads and then alcohol.

Michelle:

And retargeting. One of Brad's pictures.

Josh:

Happy hour starts at 1:00 PM for everyone in the world.

Michelle:

Oh my God, so good.

Josh:

Well, with that, we'll wrap up. I think we'll share a bunch of the stuff that we talked about onto the show notes, and we hope that all of you guys have a great wrap up to your 2022. We'll be back with more harder hitting content in 2023, but hopefully, you enjoyed this time, and Brad and Michelle, thanks so much for coming on and having the conversation.

Michelle:

Of course.

Brad:

Yeah.

Michelle:

Thanks for having us.

Josh:

See you later, everybody.

Outro:

Thanks for listening to this episode of A Brave New podcast. Go to abravenew.com for more resources and advice on all things brand and marketing. If you enjoyed this episode, show us some love by subscribing, rating, and reviewing A Brave New podcast wherever you listen to your podcasts. A Brave New podcast is created by A Brave New, a branded marketing agency in Seattle, Washington. Our producer is Rob Gregerson of Legato Productions.