Steven Pope

And I wish that on a cultural level, this eye for an eye makes the whole world go blind methodology would stop.

Because the whole world would be a lot more prosperous if people could understand that it's not a zero-sum game.

And you didn't come here for the philosophy lecture.

But once you embrace the philosophy, you will make more marketing dollars.

I have talked with and worked with thousands of different brands and brand owners over the years.

And even most recently this week, I got to talk with hundreds of more at a conference.

The very first one I think is just obvious in this day and age, and that is awareness.

you need to be having your brand get awareness.

Now, awareness can come through a ton of different avenues.

I think the most obvious one in this day and age is utilizing social platforms like TikTok, Instagram, Facebook, all of these different platforms to push things like UGC content.

If you asked me 10 years ago,

If you wanted to start a brand and you wanted to do it really, really fast, the number one thing you would do is you would find an influencer.

And all of those influencers on Instagram were going to charge you, you know, $10,000 for their, you know, 500,000 follower audience to see everything.

That's not how you build awareness in this day and age.

Awareness through UGC content is just a much better solution now because you can do things such as focus on small creators because nobody likes the polished ad anymore.

Nobody wants to feel like they are being sold to.

People want to grow with a brand and so they want to see like-minded people and just people like themselves who are talking about a product.

If I am trying to sell a product at this point in time and I'm working with a UGC creator and they want to read off a script and they want to make a high production circus of it, I don't want to work with that person because the thing that I'm going to focus on

when building awareness is making it feel very natural and not polished in the slightest.

Natural and just focused on the actual end consumer is how you should grow with your awareness.