Daniel Stone and Lou Montemayor don’t have an elevator pitch. When they founded Bandolier Media in 2015, they were focused squarely on social media marketing, but as a lean team of four, they’ve expanded capabilities over the years to meet the needs of clients.
Now they do video marketing, commercials, and more. They are driven by creativity and heart, and while they’ve made attempts in the past to pin down exactly what it is they do, they now prefer to keep things open and joke that they always take the stairs to avoid the elevator pitch.
This go-with-the-flow attitude has served them well. The two initially found viral social media fame when they created a song called “Beer Pong Anthem” with country music songwriter Thom Shepherd.
The song was a fun project for them—not anything commissioned by a brand—but when their social campaigns for the song started going viral, they realized they had an opportunity to create a business.
Thus, Bandolier Media was born. Since then, they’ve worked with everyone from local Austin, Texas brands to multinationals like Shell Oil and Walmart. Companies of all sizes want truly creative social media content, and Lou and Daniel know how to deliver.
Just as the decisions they make within their own business are driven by intuition and heart, so too are the campaigns they create for clients.
Bandolier’s success speaks to the magic that brands can unlock when they marry the analytics of big companies with the creativity of an outside marketing team. The brands come in with the analytics to provide a clear picture of who their customers are. The Bandolier team unearths unexpected, whimsical ways to reach them. The results are eye-catching, belly laugh-inducing campaigns that demand to be shared.
Daniel and Lou’s willingness to follow the marketing tides also speaks to the plasticity of the marketing industry. Social media and digital trends have accelerated the pace of change. TikTok, for example, wasn’t available worldwide until 2018. Now it’s a major marketing channel for brands looking to target younger audiences. Who knows what will come next. But whatever it is, Bandolier will be ready to explore new mediums and find ways to keep consumers watching and sharing.
Episode Transcript
Rob Ristagno: This week, we sit down with two unconventional founders. From their company’s origin story that involves writing a charting country song–yes you heard that right–to their decision to forgo an elevator pitch, there are healthy doses of fun and intuition fueling their business growth.
Announcer: This is the CEO Campfire Chat, with your host, Rob Ristagno. Taped in front of a live studio audience, join us to hear successful growth stories from middle-market companies just like yours. Sponsored by the Sterling Woods Group.
Rob Ristagno: Welcome to the CEO Campfire Chat, recorded live in front of a studio audience of leading executives. I’m your host, Rob Ristagno, and I have the privilege of introducing you to Daniel Stone and Lou Montemayor, the co-owners of Bandolier Media. Guys, welcome. Pleasure to have you on.
Daniel Stone: Nice to be here.
Lou Montemayor: Excited to be here.
Rob Ristagno: All right. Before we dive in, for those unfamiliar with Bandolier Media, give us your elevator pitch.
Daniel Stone: Well, funny thing is we don’t really have one.
Rob Ristagno: Just avoid elevators at any cost. Always take the stairs.
Daniel Stone: We always take the stairs. Lou, do you want to attempt it? But we honestly don’t have one.
Lou Montemayor: To briefly kind of touch on what we do and who we are, we started back in 2015 and we honestly started more as a social media marketing agency. It only took a couple of years before everybody started to catch up with social media and things just had to get stronger and stronger in terms of content and just materials that you were putting out there. And by way of that, we’ve sort of morphed into more of an advertising agency. But we still have that in our skeleton. It stays in our DNA and we’ve been able to sort of include that and adapt that into the bigger picture content in commercial work that we’ve been doing.
Daniel Stone: But to go back a step on the elevator pitch, we’ve tried, we’ve worked on elevator pitches as an exercise, but it’s whenever we kind of get something down the work requests that we’d get completely changed and it changes who our company is and what we’re doing. And we’re nimble. We’re only four people. We’re nimble and sharp enough to be able to pivot and say, “Well, that looks like a fun direction to go. Let’s be that.” So when we started, we were doing social media management and that entailed doing customer service, doing content creation, helping with ad strategy and this–at the time–very new, strange thing called influencer marketing.
Daniel Stone: Which was great but we stopped doing that. We just wrapped this week, actually a project that’s Facebook Watch which is Facebook’s answer to Netflix, where we worked on a TV show called At Home with the Robertsons, which was Willie and Korie from Duck Dynasty. And so I think, had we taken our original elevator pitch of, “Hey, we’re a social media content creation firm” approach to this Facebook project, it wouldn’t have matched. Kind of, but not really. And so to not have an elevator pitch, it’s not by design. And I always tell people there’s no set way… Sometimes it’s a good thing, sometimes a bad thing. There’s no set way how you can work with Bandolier Media.
Daniel Stone: Let’s just figure out A, do we like each other? Do we have good chemistry because, unfortunately, you’re going to have to work with me and Lou, which is good and sometimes not good. And then from there we can figure out a good working relationship together.
Rob Ristagno: So it sounds like, this an interesting point. So an elevator pitch sounds like it might be limiting to you, and it might be choking off some opportunities or some ways to get creative, have fun, help your clients out under new avenues. And it sounds like you don’t want to be put in a box, per se, by having a defined elevator pitch. I think that’s interesting, but what do people from the audience think? People from the audience with your own businesses or companies you’ve advised or worked with in the past, kind of, where’s the truth? You have this heavy hitting defined, put me in a box elevator pitch, or is there something to what Dan and Lou are doing here with keeping it flexible?
Audience Member: I think this is so interesting. As my company has grown in size, I feel personally boxed in by our mission statement, our strategy. I think there’s two sides to it. Like your people, we’ve got over 1,000 employees, including our therapists and they want to know in really clear, simple terms, what’s our purpose? What are we doing? What are we getting at? And if you don’t have something that you can repeat again and again and again, they feel like the strategy is not clear. But on the other hand, I wish often, “Oh, if we were only four people. I could keep changing it.” Because I’m changing it in my head every day. I’m adapting to what I’m hearing from clients, what I’m hearing from employees. And I’m like, “Well, we shouldn’t quite be that, we should be this. We should be this, we should do this.”
Audience Member: And I definitely get pushed on a lot by my team for like, “You said this, and now you’re saying this, which is it?” And I’m like, “Well, it was that then, and today it’s this.” So like move with me, move with me. So I think having that elevator pitch or that standard mission statement can box you in. I don’t know. I guess I just told both sides. I don’t really have an answer to it. I think you got to give people clarity, but it would be nice to be able to keep moving.
Rob Ristagno: I can’t remember who said this, but someone said strong convictions loosely held, so
Audience Member: I like that.
Rob Ristagno: You have the mission statement but as soon as we get new market feedback we reserve the right to change it. So, maybe the truth is somewhere in between. Well, back to Bandolier, guys. Just to help us, the early days, what problems you were trying to solve? It sounds like you want to solve a wide range of problems, but just tell us a little bit about how you started so that we can understand your path along the way.
Daniel Stone: The way we started is, Lou and I, even though we like social media, we want it to be country musicians. So we created this song. And the song was called Beer Pong Anthem, and at the time, this is probably 2013, 2014, we got a pretty good partner that had written some number-one billboard hits. A gentleman named Tom Shepherd who wrote a great song called Redneck Yacht Club. And he heard about the song and he’s like, “Hey, we’ll partner. We’ll all kind of rewrite the song, make it radio ready.”
Daniel Stone: Lou had written a really beautiful version of the song, but Tom had a vision for it. And we put together a social media strategy for the song. And back then, we would reach out to social media influencers that were putting on local beer pong tournaments, whether it be in like Philadelphia or San Francisco or Johannesburg. It’s an international sport. And we kind of just said, “Hey, do you think you can play this song at the end of your tournament?” And Lou got really big into the social media, in the content creation, and he made a post and it was the night of the NBA finals. And it was a San Antonio Spurs versus the Miami Heat. And we didn’t have many social media followers, either like a few hundred or few thousand.
Daniel Stone: And Lou took a beer pong table. And on one side of the table, he put red solo cups in the shape of the Miami Heat logo and the other side of the table he… And Lou, did you spray paint the cups or did you buy gray cups? Could you did the spurs logo?
Lou Montemayor: I was able to make it work with the preexisting colors that-
Daniel Stone: Okay. And you shot it in your garage. And I was like, “Hey, we’ve got this song, we don’t want to pick… We’re a social media that’s kind of a brand.” We can’t say go Spurs, even though we live in Austin, Texas. We can’t say go Heat because we might upset some people. So we did this post and this post, everyone loved it. It got some great organic reach. And right then and there, I said, “You know what? This is something. I think we can go to brands and say, “Hey, let’s create social media for you.” Because at the time when brands were getting on social media, we would see the same thing on social media. 10% off promo now, buy this me, me, me, me, me.
Daniel Stone: So that project Lou and I, we were just having a blast. We really enjoyed working with each other. We’re always laughing. I mean, I think you can kind of see a smiling right now. We’re always having a good time. So that project, it went well, the song actually charted on the radios, which was really exciting.
Rob Ristagno: No way.
Audience Member: Come on.
Rob Ristagno: Is it on Spotify now if I go look for it?
Daniel Stone: No.
Lou Montemayor: Please don’t listen to it unless you’re playing beer pong.
Daniel Stone: But yeah, we got the world series of beer pong involved in Nevada, which is a real thing.
Lou Montemayor: At the time social media was at a weird spot. There wasn’t a lot of branding that was coming out or product brand related content. And if there was, you were still at this weird stage where on Twitter it’s like real time text base. Some imagery, but it was still sort of rocky content that you were trying to promote or put out to the masses. And then on Instagram, things were so iffy there because, for brands, they were so used to having this really clean imagery and really polished look for their brands. And at the time the iPhones, weren’t what they are today. So photos didn’t look super crisp if you took it on your phone. You would sort of have to have a photographer to get you imagery and all that sort of stuff.
Lou Montemayor: So we were in this weird middle space where I had a photography background just personally, I’d always enjoyed it. So I had an eye for it. So conveniently, if I had the newest version on the phone, it would still look really nice, even though it wasn’t 4K quality that it is today. But that was very appealing to people. When you combined nice looking imagery, but then some really creative sort of angles which you were showing on behalf of the client or on the brand. So we wouldn’t just post a photo of ice cream, pint of ice cream, for example, which Dan will go into NadaMoo in a bit. We would sort of create the content around what else somebody would be into, or somebody would be relate, like relatable content, really that just happened to include the product in there.
Lou Montemayor: And so, yeah. It was all experimental because it was pretty new at the time. And we just sort of, like Dan said, we were just having fun with it and I think our clients appreciated that part.
Rob Ristagno: Gotcha. I think these stories are really helpful in bringing the reason behind why there’s no elevator pitch to life. It sounds like you’re really just, I mean, you don’t want to put yourself in a… You just want to come up, come up with something memorable and creative and not to the standard, “Hey, what are the five words I should put in my post so I can optimize it and what’s the coupon I can give away?” And what’s the click bait or lead magnet that I’m going to try to convince someone to download. So it sounds like you’re really,, is it fair to say you’re just trying to be creative and create something memorable and figure out what the right channel or audience or whatnot is later?
Daniel Stone: I think we’re trying to have fun. We want to have a healthy… Healthy work culture is the most important thing. We want people that work with us to have fun, be with us. Let’s have a good day. Life’s too short to be in a miserable work environment, and we’re doing fun stuff. But I would say, can we be the guys with the 100 employees and not have an elevator pitch? Probably not. Are we losing a lot of businesses because we don’t have an elevator pitch? Probably. So I mean, I’m not like, “Hey, yes, we don’t have one by design.” I mean-
Rob Ristagno: I gotcha. So you were going to share another story?
Daniel Stone: Yeah. So when Lou and I went to go look for an office, we hired a leasing agent and we’re going to go look for an office, which–that’s a fun day. First office. So we were having a good time. And we went to go look at this office and someone said, “Hey, there’s a good office you can lease.” Austin has always been a hot, strange real estate market. I know it’s super strange now. It was strange 10 years ago. It was strange 20 years ago. There’s just a shortage. So we’re going to look at subleasing. And there was this company called NadaMoo ice cream, which… I don’t know if you’ve ever had NadaMoo ice cream, but it’s nationwide, it’s ice cream made with coconut. So we went to go look at the space and it was like freezer, warehouse, office, which totally did not make sense to us. We didn’t continue working with this leasing agent. But the owner at NadaMoo ice cream was like, “Man, I love y’all’s energy. You guys are a lot of fun. I want to hire you guys to do some work with us.”
Daniel Stone: So he hired us to run his social media. And I think that’s kind of been a big selling point, a big part of why we’ve been successful is because A, we’re having fun with it. B we’re very transparent with it. I don’t think Lou… It’s not a hard sell. You don’t want to do it, want to work with us. That’s fine. That’s okay.
Lou Montemayor: Well, and another thing to add is that, what comes with transparency and honesty in terms of like deliverables and expectations, I mean, part of that is more that we want to just have some creative freedom. And that doesn’t mean that we’re trying to do something super risky that we’re going to pitch to them and they’re going to be like, “What were you thinking?” But we sort of want them to know that we might sort of shake things up a little bit, maybe make some waves, and we just kind of give them a heads up about that early on. So they know whenever we come back with a pitch deck, they’re not caught off guard, they’re almost like expecting maybe even weirder stuff. And then they’re like, “Oh, this is great. Love it.”
Rob Ristagno: So this makes sense for a consumer brands, especially a more irreverent consumer brands. What about B2B companies? How can B2B companies think about injecting a little bit more creativity and memorability into their own marketing copy and creative?
Daniel Stone: So really, I mean, we had a B2B project with Shell oil where they had a robot that they internally wanted to sell within Shell to other departments, and, I think, other chemical companies. And so, yeah. How do you make compelling content to promote a robot that has limited purpose, but really to hold hot chemicals? And so they approached us and they said, “Hey, we want you to come with some good content.” And when you make video, you make social media content, you want to make sure that you have these pattern interrupts that takes some data and puts it into our, I don’t know what they’re calling it now, the primal or lizard brain. Kind of a neuro-marketing thing. And we went out and what we did for Shell is, we made a plaque, an employee of the month plaque for this robot. And we kind of started it with that.
Daniel Stone: And when you have an employee of the month and it’s a robot, I think you’re going to get people wondering, “Hey, who is this robot and what’s this robot doing?” So I think our theory for that project work, where you wanted emotional-based content to kind of pull some type of trigger that made the user stop, watch and retain the information.
Rob Ristagno: And tell me a little bit more about, let’s keep pulling the string here. How do you make something memorable? I mean, whether for the specific Shell case, or other ones, how do you make sure something’s memorable? What are you looking for? What are some of those neuropsychology you alluded to?
Lou Montemayor: That’s the beauty of it. I think that there’s so much out there and there’s so much being done that you really have to try to find something unique. And even if you’re speaking to something that’s already been touched on a thousand times, you want to make it so when somebody thinks of said thing, they remember that one piece of content or that one thing that you produced–at least over 10% of the other a large majority of the other ones. But yeah. Ultimately like I think a big part of it is just also being human.
Lou Montemayor: I think these days, everything is so robotic and corporately polished and tightened up to the point where it feels like maybe it’s just lost a little bit of its humanity. We always try to bring back some of that, even when you wouldn’t really think it’s possible, we somehow managed to have fun with it and inject a little bit of that into it.
Rob Ristagno: I can imagine that’s more important this year than ever before.
Lou Montemayor: Yeah. Most definitely.
Daniel Stone: But then there’s fun things you can do. Back when Game of Thrones was the big Sunday night show, there was types of content that you can make before that show came out. Or we kind of knew what people might be talking about the next day if they followed that show. If they’re into the Golden Globes, there’s some things that we could pick up on and say, “Hey, maybe let’s kind of talk about this character or maybe use this font pattern.” Someone’s into Star Trek. Let’s look at, what is Star Trek doing? What fonts are they using? What colors are they using? What character names are they using? A lot of little things that you can do. And what’s great on social media is if you fail, sometimes it’s not the end of the world. You can post tomorrow.
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Audience Member: I’m curious. I really like your name Bandolier and I’m wondering how you came up with that. Is there a story behind that? I’m sure there is.
Lou Montemayor: So if we rewind a little bit and we’re talking about that song that we came up with. When we were recording the song in the studio with Tom Shepherd, because of how it was set up, we needed a label. It’s part of the deal. You need a label to connect the song to, in terms of like royalties and all that other stuff, which we had no idea about that world. So it was news to us. And so Tom was like, so really between us three, we have to start a label now. And we were like, “Okay, well, how do we do that?” So he walked us through it.
Lou Montemayor: And more importantly, he was like, “Well, we need a name for the label.” And he goes, “I’m not a creative one, so you guys need to figure it out.” I’ve always been into that even before I was in this industry or doing anything like this. I would come up with imaginary brands in my head and just like come up with names all the time trying to think of something clever. But yeah, I thought it was a country song, country-ish label. And I thought, well a bandolier is a holster for ammo. And so I figured all the different things that we’ll be doing and songs and all that stuff will sort of be like our variation of ammo, I guess you could say. So that’s where it came from. And then it automatically got passed over to the company when we started it.
Audience Member: Nice ring to it.
Lou Montemayor: Thank you.
Rob Ristagno: Tell us a little now about how you’re developing your business, growing Bandolier.
Daniel Stone: Luckily, some of the awards that we’ve won have really helped bring in a lot of inbound business. So those have been great for us, the AdAge awards, especially. And then a lot of referrals. This industry, I think, turnover moves fast. So a lot of people that we worked with them when they were at this company six months ago, and now they’re at this operation. That works really well. I haven’t done any cold calls, but I’ll do cold emails. That seems to work really well. And that strategy, I just want people to see our work and just let them know that, “Hey, you’re different.” I like to–the differentiator in that email is to say, “Hey, you’re going to work with us.” You’re not going to be passed over to another team.
Daniel Stone: So you’ll get kind of our attention and dedication to the project. And then we like them to see our work. And one piece that people like see when they’re, and people always are like, “Hey, we want a project like this is,” we did a project called Lawn Whispers. Lawn Whispers is a mockumentary about competitive lawnmowing. And when people in… We now partner in and do a sponsorship with Scotts Lawn Care. And then there’s a lot of just inbound to the account we run, Classic Dad, where people are like, “Hey, we see what you’re doing. We’d love to figure out a way to work with you.” We do a lot of phone calls with brands and we like to start, if it’s a new client, we like to say, “Hey, let’s do a test project to see how well we work together.” And then from there we can qualify each other to say, “Hey, we’re a fit. Let’s keep working on some stuff together.”
Rob Ristagno: You mentioned a few times, it’s important for you to get chemistry with your clients. And part of that chemistry is making sure that people are having fun. What are some other things that you’re looking for when you’re thinking about working with a potential client?
Daniel Stone: I mean, they have to know that we’re all family men. I’ve got a wife that has a full-time career and it’s very important to her, and we have children. Lou is the father of animals. And that pretty much, when we say that, we kind of set restrictions. We’re going to shut down at five o’clock and you can’t reach me until the next day, because I have another job and I have a life of my own that I want to maintain. And so I kind of want to make sure that they understand that. We had an RFP where they recently said they kind of need on call. And we could set up something for that, but you need to let them know that how that would work.
Daniel Stone: So I think that’s important. Most people, I think when you throw that out there, they understand. I think the second thing is we want to all make sure that we kind of can laugh and joke. Could I go out to dinner with this client and spend some time with this potential partner and then could I be stuck with them? What did they call it, the airport test? Can I be stuck with this person at the airport for X amount of hours?
Lou Montemayor: I think what Dan is saying too with that transparency of having our lives involved in some of the work mainly because there’s only four of us, so and it started with Dan and I just us two. So we’re always scrambling around trying to get stuff done, probably taken off a little more than we can handle, but we made it work. But part of what comes with that honesty and transparency of like, this is kind of this is us, this is what you’re getting. It also, I think is intriguing and a lot of times attractive to clients because they’re like, “Well, what you see is what you get.” You’re these three guys. Typically, it’s Dan, myself, and George in a meeting.
Lou Montemayor: And when we go to a meeting, we’re not there to just transactional, shake your hand and just tell you everything you want to hear. We’re always ourselves in these meetings. And we have been from the beginning. So whenever we sit down and talk with people, I think by the end of the meeting we’re all super relaxed. Everybody’s kind of casually just talking and going through the motions of like, “Well, how are we going to work together then?” It always feels so natural. And it always feels like a good start? And with the few over the years that have not been a fit, it was never anything that it was like, “Oh, there’s absolutely no way.” It really just didn’t make sense for us and the work that we do. And we’d be the first person to tell them that too. That’s probably not our expertise and we’d be happy to connect you with people that would do an even better job. And they appreciate that as well.
Rob Ristagno: So it sounds to me, you don’t have a classic market segmentation that you would learn about in business school. You’re really focused on segmenting your audience by attitude and values and things that are important to you and make sure it’s going to be a match that way, no matter what industry they’re in or how big they are or what their title happens to be.
Lou Montemayor: I think most people get enough of that in their own world where they’re just they’re having to go through all the procedures and all the different layers. And in a company you have 10 steps before you can get a decision made and all that sort of stuff. So whenever it’s like, “You guys want to do this? We can start next week or we can start next month or whatever.” That’s always pretty exciting for people because then they don’t have to worry about like, give us two weeks to get back to you with half of an answer or something like that.
Rob Ristagno: All right. Are you guys ready for our new segment called Campfire Games?
Lou Montemayor: Let’s do it.
Rob Ristagno: All right. Tonight we’re going to play, Would You Rather…?, As we’re sitting around the campfire. So I have a couple of scenarios here and I’d like to get from each of you and the audience is welcome to chime in. But let’s start with the first one here. Would you rather put all of your marketing budget into television or paid search?
Lou Montemayor: Dan, you want to go first? Oh, you muted yourself. That means that you’re like–
Rob Ristagno: He’s passing the mic.
Daniel Stone: Oh no. I said it super quick: television. I mean, no ifs, ands, or buts.
Lou Montemayor: I got to say, I don’t agree. I mean, it depends what you mean by television. Some people still call streaming television. So I’m not sure if that qualifies or if you’re talking about paid local TV commercials, that’s pretty different. So I know that the proper paid search that we’ve seen in that we’ve, especially experts that we’ve worked with, have yielded some pretty impressive results for certain things. And then now with all the social media stuff that you can also tap into, if you we have a budget, there’s a lot of potential there.
Rob Ristagno: Daniel, you want to say more about why you’re bullish on television?
Daniel Stone: Yeah, TV all the way. I mean, who’s going to watch the NBA finals? Who’s going to watch the Super Bowl? TV is great. TV is fantastic. It’s a great way to make a lasting impression. I still love commercial breaks. I love watching live TV, the commercial breaks. I go to the other room. Do a bathroom break. I go get more coffee. The audio is still playing. I’m still getting those sounds images into my brainwaves. I’m learning a lot about all these new… I’ve never learned this much about self-driving cars through all these automobile commercials that we’re hearing right now. About traffic jam assist. I never would’ve searched that ever. Now I know what it is. And I know who sells it. I think Mazda has it. I think a Honda has it.
Daniel Stone: So yeah, TV’s great. You have to be clever with what you put in the TV spot. I love what’s the AT&T, I don’t know her name but–Flo. I like Jamie. I like the guy from Progressive, when they had Drake as his body double? That stuff’s good. It’s staying top of mind for me.
Rob Ristagno: I like that capability point where you’re not going to search for everything, but…
Daniel Stone: I’m not going to search for them but I know what Progressive Safe Drivers means. I never would search that term, but it’s in my brain.
Rob Ristagno: All right. Would you rather use Clubhouse as part of your marketing mix or have your own podcast?
Lou Montemayor: Dan’s in Clubhouse more than I’ve ever been. So I’m curious about his answer.
Daniel Stone: I was super big on Clubhouse, but it takes a lot of work and you really have to kind of have energy for it. I have a hard time doing my morning commute with Clubhouse, but I do my morning commute and I do my daily weekend chores listening to podcasts. So I would say podcast.
Lou Montemayor: I would agree. And mainly because on Clubhouse I feel like you’re approaching a lot of that from an individual standpoint. So you’re sort of speaking on behalf of your business or your agency whereas on a podcast, if we were promoting our business or representing our business on there, I feel like you’d be able to kind of feel the chemistry between all three owners and just the way that we get along and sort of show what clients see in meetings and our personalities that sort of end up what we think, helping us land some of these projects.
Daniel Stone: But it’s fun to interact in a live event with Clubhouse. So I would recommend watching the NBA playoffs in Clubhouse. That’ll be neat. If you’re attending event, like I went to a NASCAR race on Sunday and it’s neat to attend that with Clubhouse so you can hear different perspective of what’s going on. So, I mean, I do both, I guess. It’d be good to have the bandwidth.
Rob Ristagno: All right. Third Would You Rather…? Question. Would you rather use a 30 second video or two minute video on YouTube to promote your business?
Daniel Stone: I think we’re going to say the same thing.
Lou Montemayor: Yeah.
Daniel Stone: Do you want to say at the same time?
Lou Montemayor: Sure.
Daniel Stone: 1, 2, 3. 30 sec.
Lou Montemayor: 30 sec. Yeah.
Rob Ristagno: 30 sec, short and sweet.
Lou Montemayor: Yeah. Attention spans these days, they’re not what these to be. It would have to take something really interesting for me to stick around for more than a minute. And I’m not even trying to be snooty or, I’m very open to all types of content, especially on YouTube and things like that. But I would say the majority of people, especially the younger generation, I mean, especially now with TikTok, everything’s just happening so fast and coming at you so fast that unless you’re doing something really wild and out there, or unforgettable, people are just ready to jump on the next thing. So I try to get them as quickly as we can, if possible.
Rob Ristagno: Humans have a shorter attention span than a goldfish or cat or whatever those things, anyway. All right. Last one. Would you rather, assuming that you inherited an extra million dollars of marketing budget, would you rather put it toward brand advertising or direct marketing?
Daniel Stone: Brand advertising.
Lou Montemayor: I’m surprised, I thought you would’ve said said direct. I agree. Brand marketing by far.
Daniel Stone: 100%.
Lou Montemayor: Yeah.
Rob Ristagno: All right. Any comments from the audience in terms of what you would rather do in terms of brand advertising or direct marketing?
Daniel Stone: Brands do good things.
Audience Member: Yeah. I would always opt for direct marketing because I know I can drive guaranteed results with direct marketing, where brand marketing sometimes is a little softer and harder to read the direct result. So that’s why I would choose direct marketing.
Audience Member: I always want to spend more on brand marketing than my investors want me to. So if it were a true freebie million, I would definitely spend it on the brand.
Rob Ristagno: Right. Yeah. The question was freebie but if you then have to be accountable to your board, then maybe our answers are being slightly different, but anyway, it’s great.
Daniel Stone: Can I ask Lou one?
Rob Ristagno: Go for it.
Lou Montemayor: Classic Dan, let’s hear it. Try not to embarrass me too much.
Daniel Stone: One platform to create content on, Instagram or TikTok?
Lou Montemayor: I mean, it’s honestly a little scary and simultaneously sort of sad for me to say, because TikTok has taken social media by storm. It’s almost a little scary too. I would easily say TikTok, and I wouldn’t have been able to say that a year ago. And the fact that that’s changed so quickly just goes to show that we’re always wondering what the next thing is going to be. And I always feel like, is there another thing, but there most definitely is. So I’m actually pretty curious to see what the next thing is going to be.
Daniel Stone: Okay. Can I fire, like, three at you?
Lou Montemayor: At me? Yeah. Go for it.
Daniel Stone: Okay. IG reels or YouTube shorts?
Lou Montemayor: IG reals.
Daniel Stone: Augmented reality or QR codes?
Lou Montemayor: I think augmented reality is just barely sort of getting anywhere in terms of consumer and the masses. Right now, with the pandemic, I’ve used QR codes more than I ever have before with menus and things like that, that I normally would have never done before. And quite honestly, whenever they integrated the QR stuff to the Apple, the iPhone itself, it just made it so easy that I think that I’d go with QR code for sure.
Daniel Stone: Pinterest or Facebook?
Lou Montemayor: That’s such a you question because, for everybody here, Dan’s super into Pinterest, which is good because I’m totally not–the furthest from it. So he’s always thinking of like pitches for Pinterest and I’m like, “You can’t ask me these questions because I know nothing about it and I’m not as interested in it.” So yeah, the easy answer for me is Facebook.
Daniel Stone: Okay. The last one, influencer celebrity endorsement, I’m sorry.
Lou Montemayor: Go ahead.
Daniel Stone: Endorsement from an influencer or endorsement from a traditional celebrity?
Lou Montemayor: Well, some of those are now the same exact thing. I feel like some influencers are become bigger celebrities and traditional what we know as actors and musicians and things. So I feel like I’d be getting a two in one if I chose a massive influencer to be honest.
Daniel Stone: Was there one that you’d be like, “This is influencer.”
Lou Montemayor: It would have to make, I don’t know. It depends what we would be promoting but I would go for some of the top YouTubers or top TikTok people right now, if I had to pick somebody. Just depending on what we’re promoting.
Audience Member: But not Pinterest.
Lou Montemayor: Not Pinterest. And I may be missing out because Dan seems really strong about it, so.
Daniel Stone: Okay. Well, all right. So I said, that was the last question. So now I have more. Traeger or Green Egg?
Lou Montemayor: Traeger. Yeah. Traeger. We went into grilling territory for you guys there.
Daniel Stone: Business partnership over.
Lou Montemayor: That’s Classic Dad stuff.
Rob Ristagno: Anyway. So yeah, if people want to learn more about Classic Dad or Bandolier Media, where should they go?
Lou Montemayor: Bandoliermedia.com is where we have some of our work and some of the partners and clients that we work with. So that’d be a good place to check out Bandolier stuff. And Classic Dad, I’d say our most active social media channel is Instagram. So our handle there, @Classicdadmoves. And you’re really just going to go there to have a few laughs and look at a bunch of dad culture stuff, and maybe go down the worm hole for an hour. So just like scrolling through there.
Daniel Stone: I just want to see if there’s any suggestions, or comments you have for us, we’re still young guys trying to figure it out. I mean, by no means, like, we’re having fun. I think it’s clear to say that. If there’s any suggestions y’all have, we definitely would be open to hearing them.
Audience Member: I’ve been thinking about that elevator pitch this whole time. And I think that your elevator pitch is that you’re creative and you bring humanity to brands on social.
Lou Montemayor: I love that.
Daniel Stone: I like that.
Lou Montemayor: Yeah, thank you.
Audience Member: Thanks.
Lou Montemayor: Dan, we got this recorded. So now if anybody asks.
Daniel Stone: Thank you for that.
Audience Member: The mundane stuff is, just make sure you have your legal and your financial side executing well, because that’ll bite you as you grow fast. It can point to where there’s issues and if you’re not paying attention to it, it can overwhelm you. That’s just my piece of advice.
Daniel Stone: Yeah. We’ve learned a lot about the legal and the accounting and the financial world. A little too much.
Audience Member: It can take the fun out of it if you don’t get good advice.
Daniel Stone: I mean, I can now read a legal contract and understand it. Year one of the business, I was like, I have no idea what this means. It took me a while to feel comfortable with the books, know how to do quick figures. But there’s a great organization called score.org. And they’ve got a fantastic chapter in Austin where I think for the first six months, I pretty much lived there. And I would just go and just I had no idea and there was a lot of great people that helped me out, helped me learn A, the financial side. On the legal side, we are fortunate. We share an office with two attorneys and we’ve gotten to know a lot about their business. And they’ve gotten to know a lot about our business.
Rob Ristagno: All right. Any final words guys? How can, you can be memorable to our audience.
Lou Montemayor: Dan, this is a perfect opportunity for you to do a magic trick. He’s always telling people to do magic tricks on meetings. So this is your shot right here, man.
Daniel Stone: So we have some ongoing meetings every Tuesday with this client. And I think to make them engaging and fun, we put someone in charge of doing either a joke, a party trick, or a magic trick. And we just kind of randomly assign that task to somebody in the call. I’m not going to do one. I don’t have a magic trick on me right now. But that’s kind of made our meetings fun. And I feel like it’s made everyone A, want to attend the meeting in kind of being engaged, in the trick and the joke can happen anytime. It doesn’t have to happen in the end. So it kind of keeps you on your toes because nothing’s worse than you get on a meeting and the Zoom call zones out and starts doing other things, even when their camera’s on. I know people have figured out brilliant ways to do that. So that would be my suggestion.
Rob Ristagno: Have you ever sawed Lou in a half in a meeting?
Lou Montemayor: Not with Zoom, we haven’t done that lately, but we would do that all the time in person.
Rob Ristagno: Thanks guys. This is Daniel Stone and Lou Montemayor, the co-owners of Bandolier Media. This concludes this week’s CEO Campfire Chat. I’m Rob Ristagno. To listen to more episodes or sign up for bonus content, visit us at ceocampfirechat.com. See you next time around the fire.
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