We speak with Charlie Katz about solving problems for clients, principles of writing copy and developing content, and appealing to the human component for success.
Intro: [00:00:00] Welcome to the LA Business Podcast, a form for business owners and senior executives to share the experiences about the elements that drive their success. Your host is Robert Brill, CEO of Brillmedia.co
Robert Brill: [00:00:15] Hey everyone. Welcome to another episode of the LA business podcast today. Our guest is Charlie Katz, executive creative director at Bitbean. Thanks for being with us.
Charlie Katz: [00:00:25] Very happy, very interested.
Robert Brill: [00:00:27] So tell us a little bit about Bitbean, Charlie.
Charlie Katz: [00:00:31] Bitbean was evolved by a unique individually name Afreidian Einstein who had a instinct predilection for putting things together and a very good heart. And his father was an engineer and he grew up in that environment through that instinct, that skills, that DNA in his bones.
And he was working at a campus special children. And he saw that what was lacking was a ratio of coordinating all the different counselors with all the different programs, and to make sure that everything flows properly and that the communications was correct. So he just sat down and started fooling around and putting together software for that on his own, just by what he knew and what he learned along the way.
And they put together a program that was coordinated the whole, the whole process of their camp. And it was extremely effective so that everybody was in sync with their projects that were being undertaken because when you’re dealing with special ed children, Communications and the flow of the time is, is, you know, it’s not smooth sodas child, is that their own child or the pacing of the child, et cetera.
So he put it together very effectively and then practice that, other people came to him and asked him to help them with their software. And that just evolved. And he created the extremely effective software for majorly companies in the mortgage industry, in the title industry, that a mortgage company, they do 5 billion in transactions, one of the largest in the country.
And interesting enough is Mr. Einstein. He’ll say, you know, I’m not a software developer. He’s a very good coordinator. He understands it very well. He knows how to excellent that putting together teams and that itself has played a tremendous role in only how to choose the right people to work on with the product, how to choose the right people who could work together, et cetera.
And, and so it’s grown. And basically is areas is broad from startups to, established businesses.
Robert Brill: [00:03:07] Essentially you’re a software house, right.
Charlie Katz: [00:03:11] Well, not really. We look at ourselves more as a consulting company, it’s offers consulting, and this is very critical. This is really the heart of it. We are a firm believer that it all starts with the owner of the company. What is really after it, what happens quite often is that clients come to us and they have this idea and that idea.
Oh, we make them step back and understand what they’re really trying to accomplish. We question them about their original vision. What was the intent, but what was the purpose? What were you really trying to accomplish? And when we do that, what we uncover and what they uncover in a similar fashion, Is that in the process of building a business or thinking about the business, you often lose direction.
You often go off on a tangent because the responsibility of an operating business has you so busy that you lose sight of original intent. You get to a certain level, and you’re just focused on the immediate and not the bigger picture. And the problems that you identify in the solutions that you’re after, aren’t really the ones leading to where you want to go.
So we have very, very determined to get to the absolute source of the vision and the purpose of their company.
Robert Brill: [00:04:40] Exactly the, fastest way to lead a project off track is to give the client free, free reign and not to provide leadership to the client. Like it’s so, it’s so fascinating because that is applicable to so many different types of businesses, including, including ourselves. We have to provide leadership to get the project, to be done the way the client needs it to happen.
Charlie Katz: [00:05:04] Also, because at some point our conversations that we have at a high level with the owner of the company that are the, you know, the people that are involved at that level transfers over to our teams and our teams are now working on the project or project manager.
They have to understand, because at that level, the game changes to a much more practical aspect of exploration before anybody sits down and starts toying around with all the codes, et cetera. We go out into the field and we explore that business and we explore it from many different perspectives. I call that a it’s sort of like a, kelidascope.
And you’re looking at it from many different angles, strategic perspectives, which is that we are looking at it from different departments because the software is a nurse, a structure of a company it radiates out and it touches upon everything. What happens that we find is that a client comes to us with a specific problem, and they’re looking for a solution for this problem.
Okay. We’ll need to come up with a solution. That solution may not resolve other issues going on, and the fact may complicate others because they’re not linking the way they need to link in order to make everything coordinated and work together. So before we actually get involved in creating the software, our teams go out into the field.
They meet literally with the executives and the operators of many different departments, the companies, what kind of company it is and explore with them what their needs are, what their problems are. And then when we come together, we’re able to paint the whole roadmap and see that what you really want something back to the original, what you really want to accomplish.
Well, it happens to be that there’s another department who will play a significant role that overlooked and getting to that point. Look, there’s, don’t you think about this problem and this department, why the influence it has on the other apartments. So we need to look at the whole picture of everything.
And then we begin to do their work and their work very effectively.
Robert Brill: [00:07:35] So, so Charlie, so one of the things that’s important here is I think what I mean hearing you say is that the client will come to you with a solution they’re looking for, for a specific solution, but they haven’t, I haven’t been able to, because they don’t have the skills, they don’t have your knowledge to be able to actually define a solution that actually fulfills on what they actually are solving for, rather than that one unique software thing that needs to be built.
It’s fascinating. I like there’s so many parallels to that, to the advertising business, because we often have clients come to us and they’ll say, Hey, we want to run. I’m making it up. Facebook ads, but then we need to backtrack it. Why do you want to run Facebook yet? And what are you looking to accomplish in our is Facebook as the right place.
And sometimes it is, and sometimes it isn’t. So it seems like the consultative white glove approach for your business is actually incredibly critical to a successful endeavor. How often, let me ask you a question. How often, like, what are the, what’s the scope of your engagement? Like how long are your engagements?
Charlie Katz: [00:08:39] We do it in stages, depends how, it really depends on the project. We could do something, I would say the shortest period. Probably two, three months, but it can be a long period because depends on what they need. And sometimes we revamping the entire system, we’re creating a new system.
And so it really depends. We do good work. Were at the high end. we’re not, we have many advantages that are critical. So that means for some of them. I think one of them that, which I touched upon is teamwork. And teamwork is I think the restaurant analogy I wrote in the end about this, and I did a series of, is about teamwork starting with Thomas Edison.
You know, we all know that Thomas Edison created a, I think it’s over a thousand, has over a thousand patents. What we don’t know is he didn’t do it himself. He has a team, everything that he did, went through a team and he called them his smokers. He may have used essence or whatever. What do you call them his smokers.
And he developed the concept of teamwork, which is still used in science, in medicine and industry. He was the one who laid the foundation over the need for teamwork. The other thing that I talked to, one of the other points I made in the ed. Is that very critical, very interesting story in their search. To reach the South pole when there was two people, there was, Robert Scott from Britain from England, and there was, Ronald Alanson from, from Norway.
Scott set off with a hundred people on his team. Ronald, all set off 16, 16 or 19. I think it was 16, but it could have been 19 people discovered the South pole two weeks before Stripe reached it. So yeah. Had a hundred against six 19 and the, the 19 won on top of which most of Scott’s team died along the way. Including Scott himself died in inserts. And the reason is a follows Scott out of a hundred people, but he did not do any investigation onto the skills of the people.
And how did they compliment each other? Ronald here shows every person on this team exactly. For what their skills are and how they work together. So the smooth operating team, and then why, why there was picture? Cause I lived in LA many years and you probably remember those views in well, when you have Showtime where the Lakers.
Smooth operation going down the court, thinking about certain videos I saw with a matcher coming down the center and the going down the right lane and everything just upgrade it, and that’s so super critical. That’s often overlooked. And the difference is that quite often companies call teams, but they don’t understand what a team is.
They wanted, they want a software team, but they don’t really understand what the team is supposed to bring to the project, their skillset, their perception of what the student and what their project is, and also how they work and compliment each other. And particularly, there is benefit off shore, certainly financially, et cetera.
But it’s another aspect that also it’s the communications. And when you have somebody here that you communicate. That’s also very important. So we take great pride in the teamwork. We take great pride in putting it together, choosing the right people to work within the company. I’m putting it together, the right team.
Robert Brill: [00:12:39] Operational excellence process, standard operating procedure.
I imagine is all part of that. So in your role as a executive creative director, what do you tell us about like what your responsibilities are? I mean, you know, the goal of this podcast is to really hear about stories of growth and scale. And we connected over The Authority Magazine, publication and, that we, you know, that, that, you know, we had, and I appreciate you publishing that interview on the Bitbean website.
Just, I want to learn more about like some of the things you’ve done to grow bit being, and, you know, you spent many years on Madison Avenue. Tell us a little bit about.
Charlie Katz: [00:13:29] I’ll step back because most of my career was in Madison, near new, both on the East coast and the West coast. Actually interestingly enough, I started knocking on doors during the recession. So it was a lot of knocking and I was still have bruised knuckles trying to get in, but questioning my portfolio and I was.
Not even as a junior and I hadn’t think God, a God given talent, I was creative and I’m just, the rhino is very creative and they saw that and you could get into the door, but. You have to prove yourself every day you have to create results. I was fortunate. I was very creative and at the same time, very naive about advertising.
All I want to do is be the best ride in the world. I didn’t care about anything. I just want to be the best writer. And what I found out that is a lot of politics in agencies, which was not my personality, not my temperament, but also it was something that I struggled with. I wrote a campaign for a Wilkins and razorblades way back when.
That the executive creative director. So it was the best campaign they ever had. So I still remember that we went up to, to the president of the agency who haven’t been English now, Wilkinson England is second to the queen and it has long history because it was charged with the light brigade. It’s part of the position of England.
And I remember looking at the commercials and it said, I will never allow humor in Wilkinson commercial. Now my style was humor and we’re on the America and you is very big in America and we do not have the tradition and the history of Wilkinson. And we were up against track to Gillette. So we have really good competition, but he nixed those commercials.
And I remember walking away from his office and talking to my creative director, who’s totally, I said, David, you hired me for my paycheck and this is what happens. I don’t want to work on their campaign. He looks down very softly and says to me. You know what that means? I said what he says, that means your quitting.
That’s how bad the point I’m getting at is that decision process. I had to learn to understand what it was about and how it works. But I was fortunate that particular David, who does unfortunately recently retired, the vertical trend was really in Denmark and he fleshed out. My understanding of the marketing side of the business, you know, you learn from the trenches, you learn being there as an example, the very within the first ones that I was at my first agency, Dan, so it became part of Saatchi Sachi.
I wrote a campaign and the supervisor probably is looking over my shoulder and he says to me was really, you know, he says, Charlie, you know what you got here? You know what you got here? And I remember looking up to him and I said, two things. Creatively. I knew what I had there because I was creative. But from a marketing standpoint, I didn’t see it.
I didn’t understand it yet. So I was fortunate in this growth period that I had that really getting handled. And then one day I woke up, I was in the West coast. And I’m lying in bed. And I said, you know, advertising is not about creativity. It’s not about awards. It’s not about money, even though it’s all about that, it’s really about emptying warehouses.
That’s your responsibility. And when I understood that it became the greatest game in town and in LA I was in a boutique agency that we did unbelievable. We were hitting grand slams left right and center. We were well known, we took a $15 million annual company to 115 million.
We took an airline air Cal owned by Paul Allen. That was about to go out of business. So it’s 40 million in debt. Three years later, it was sold to American for 200, about 250 million. We kept it. We loved the underdog. We turned down Proctor and gamble. And, and, and the essence of it was is that we were out to, when we would like to like this, we wanted to win, and we knew what it took to win.
How to tell the story in such a way that, that the consumer bought the story, understood the value of it to him. I would choose it over the competition. So, and then I won awards. I won, I was nominated for Cleo. I won the New York advertising awards and so on and so forth. But I have to tell you that the biggest reward is.
Hearing that. Okay. This is in fact an interesting story. You know, our agent was known as a retail agency. Now retail is not as people think in store. That’s one aspect of retail. Retail is there anything where. The conservation happens quickly and results happen quickly. So that means we had fast food. We had airlines, you know, where the people that are wanting to get on that plane are not, you know, you can judge it very quickly.
They’re paid for the advertising. So one day I meet in front of mine, the creative director on your side, the airlines. And he says to me, Charlie, I don’t want to be in your shoes. So it was interesting. It says I created a commercial for United airlines is a good it’s beautiful commercial. That’s a really cool, I really liked it.
There’s work. Is it working? Nobody knows. But there happened. He says you’re in retail. The CareFirst doesn’t ring in three days. Everybody knows. I don’t want to be there. And I said to myself well I love it. You’ll know you’re done job. That’s what the hell. That’s what they’re paid for. That, that’s what advertising is about.
If you want to write a novel, write a novel, you want to write a screenplay, write a screenplay, but if you want to write copy, then you have to produce results. And when you produce results, then you know that finding the big leads and then the onion you’re reading the challenge.
Robert Brill: [00:19:45] So Charlie, let me ask you a question before, for those of us, you know, in 2020, everyone can be a media business.
Ultimately we can create the podcast. We can get on video. Like there, there are, there aren’t barriers. What are some? And I, and I get it right? Like having the creative talent is a whole different type of skill than that. Being able to do something and do it well are two very different things. What would you tell someone I’m a marketer like myself?
Who’s, I’m not a creative person. But we do go to market with various things and we do the best we can with our creativity. And we have other talents in, in house and out. Out and about who we work with, what are some principles that we should know about writing copy or developing content that you can share with us?
Charlie Katz: [00:20:35] Okay. So let me step back before I touched on is one point about creativity that is not understood. And the center for creativity is curiosity. Creative people are very curious. I wrote a whole article about it in that quote. So many ad people will burn back, even, even what’s his name? Albert Einstein.
He said I have no talent insatiably curious because your creativity is fed by curiosity because creativity work is really you’re pulling in other ideas and other sorts. And you’re finding a fresh way to look at your problem. I’m an insatiable reader. I’m curious about everything. I was born with that curiosity and it’s one of my joys of life because every day life is interesting to me.
I can walk down the street and look at the architecture and wonder about it. I could see the cafe and observe people and wonder about them, but let’s talk about the principles that you want. Principal caveats that are totally immutable. And that if you’re interested in being attractive, the incorporated is caveat number one, and this is stressed the way I’m saying it. We act upon emotions. We validate with intellect, no other way of putting it. And it’s just written up by the way recently in, in one of the major, not Wired, the other one magazine. Yeah. Yeah. That we seek that we’re, we’re logical people who have feelings when we really are people with feelings who think logically the feelings come first.
If you don’t deal with the emotion, you’re not going to reach the person, the intellect and the processing of evaluating through logic does not inspire any action. That’s just the nature of the human being. We are emotional beings. You look at a car. We may have a laundry list of why we want what we need in the car.
We need mileage. It has to read our budget, but when they actually choose a car, then we have to respond to that call. We have to feel, I remember years ago when we were originally fairly in LA and I knew that a family car and safe car. Oh, I’m sorry. was this really described Volvo? At that time. It was about, as
I can see Charlie Hanson, that car, a friend of mine turned me on to a nano and I was in love from day one. And it was the greatest thing, that emotional thing. Now on paper, if I only look lunch they’re about equal and maybe the Volvo was a better deal instantly, but it didn’t smack me. Yeah. The emotional connection, the now they’re really seems that triggered the emotion and, there’s all presser things that trigger motion. And even when you’re dealing on BTB, it’s still emotion. People forget, you know, we look at the person behind the desk, he’s got authority, he has power. He’s wearing a tie, he’s got a title out the door. People respect him, everything. He is some kind of a larger tone.
Like he just does things the way they. It’s not he is the same person and he has the same peers and I’m giving an example. Years ago, a friend of mine said he had a friend who came up with a software for reservations that American Airlines loved at that time, whatever it was. And it was presented to the marketing director, whoever, and here’s going to present it to the board.
They’re going to decide on it. And his friend was already clipping coupons. He’s retired, et cetera. I said, Tell him to hold back. I’ll tell you what’s going to happen at that table. He’s going to present it across the table. Sewing and sending who hates his guts. They’ve always had arguments in the company.
So that’s a no right there. Your other side of the table, there’s somebody who’s okay. But he has his own practice he wants to put, so it was competing with him. The third person over there is what do you call just insecure and is waiting to see what everybody does. And the head, the final decision maker knows that he’s going to talk to someone on top.
So he’s sort of having an orange. So your guy who say, what do I need this battle for? And he moves on to a different project and sure enough, they never heard from them again. Now, maybe it didn’t exactly happen that way. What I’m trying to point out that, we are human beings and emotions play the most critical role.
So that’s number one. The second thing that we have to keep in mind is that feature benefits sell features don’t sell. Another critical thing and you see it open in advertising. We have people list, list, list, list. So let’s step back for a moment. Solves a simple reason. Why are you in business? I always just, you know, start ups and clients.
Why are you in business? So of course we are in business because they want to make money and they have to pay bills. So I say to them, you know, that’s it interesting because the reason why your client, why a customer is because she wants to help you pay your bills. He’s worried about your mortgage. He’s worried about son’s college education.
So he’s going to give his business over everybody else. So then a little bit of look recognition or comes on their place to you when it comes to you, it comes here. He has a problem, and he relieves that you have a solution to his problem. That’s why he comes to you. So the question really is a problem. So the features say that you have a, a, what do you call it?
Something that can help with this problem, but that’s not why he came to you when it came to you is for the problem. I give an example. I wrote for six years, a market in Colorado, a local magazine here in New Jersey. And I went through, out of the audience. I showed them 10 ads for tires. I didn’t go there.
Everyone was accredited to choose which one they felt was the best responses this every year it would show you let’s say holding the road. And rain and sleet and so on. They’re all about safety in that respect, how perform performance about the trends. I said, you know, I don’t know anybody everywhere, discrete and pointed off his wife and said, boy, look at that time, stress, we’ve got to get that tire.
We must, it must be great friends on the road. I said the campaigns that I thought was brilliant, the most effective was in Michelin. What’s riding on your tire and showing you that look kid in the tire. What you really want is you want to get home safely. You want your wife to get home safely car that had no tires. It was a hydro car. Which is like a hydo boat that floated on air. You wouldn’t send this out, but I knew they have tires, so let’s go buy tires and hang them on the wall. You wouldn’t even think about it. So the point is you’ve got to understand the problem when it really was quoted is no one buys a quarter inch drill.
They buy a quarter inch drill bit hole. They want to make a hole. So they’re looking for the bit. So to make that whole, what I really want is a whole, if somebody came along and hole a home for them, they will never show up at home Depot. So you have to keep that on what they want and your message. And the company has to lead to that.
It has to express the solution and then with the validation comes in through your features. So that right now I told you that terminology it’s really listen to me. I think that included the temporal woman. I told you a BMW suspension has the same, titanium metal in the suspension that, that, has in the cell phone. You’d be impressed, but you know, okay. It’s nice to know. Well, I told her that the BMW could take a curve at 80 miles anyone else who was on the straightaway, because it has that type of titanium metal that holds it firm then you’d sit up and say ha ha, now it’s interesting.
It’s translating the features to the benefits. That they want it in an emotional way. That is the essence of good advertising. Good calculating. If you go back then great answer. Because I think I threw their number one. Nobody ever beat them. I think they were the launch of the mountain area, even though they were in back in the sixties, but these people understood it.
I mean, going back to the Volvo to the VW lemon, Oh, let’s go to the very famous company. It was probably in most instances is don’t do not know, but I started advertising. So it was very formal in my mind, we try harder and it is really the story. We try harder campaign at that time hurts. It still is old, just went out of business, but it’s premium a car rental company.
It appealed of course to people with an expense accounts and your corporate expense accounts. So they weren’t wrapping up the course and it gave you a superior premium service behind that. You had a help on a car rental jet, nationally dollar. You had all these budgets. You had all these
people at Doyle Dane came over the campaign. It was called Avis. We try harder. We’re number two. So we have try harder. It was brilliant, brilliant on so many different levels. And there’s a reason which I’ll say for the end was beyond brilliant, was expressing the idea. Therefore, we have to do more for you.
And they showed it in the hands and they said, you know, it’s important to, for us because we want to this, we know we got to work hard to make sure the cars available and all the things that you wanted, but they couched it in an emotional way, in a very human way. And devotion was one of which is Mervyn’s love the underdog, the underdog, we try harder, brilliant and effective.
But it was effective and it’s where creative strategy comes in. For another reason that I don’t, I saw it once and it’s very rarely discussed, but certainly when it focuses on the remnants of this themselves, that Atlas has never really competing or trying to compete with Hertz. They couldn’t Hertz, a hundred more locations had all the advantages or they wanted to do was separate themselves from everybody else.
If you didn’t think of Hertz was I couldn’t afford it because Prince account or your post doesn’t let you spend that money. Well, the next thing to go is Avis and you would not think about dollar you would not think about blunted and so on and so forth of the strategy, the predator strategy. Was what’s critical to the how the whole campaign together and why so effective, but it was emotional campaign and understanding that we’re getting treated very special, it gave a promise.
The promise to us the same treatment of being a VIP. That hurts promise to the VIPs and it turned us into the VIPs. It made us feel special, all this wonderful attention. And we believed that was very credible. Cause the number two do that. So that emotion throughout the added benefit, what I want is I want to call waiting for me and I want to make sure that there’s no whatever in the car, et cetera, et cetera.
It was perfect. It’s a perfect campaign.
So advertising is, is human psychology. And this goes back to that period. This is probably the interesting, because today we’re so far from that, that those ads came out at the time of the creative revolution. Now, until then advertising was very straight forward. It’s almost scientific, Proctor and gamble, Colgate.
And they relied heavily pretty unresearched. And the research, even till today with Proctor and gamble and Colgate, and I worked at Colgate and accounts will tell you what should be in the copy. They would almost dictate you because they found in the research that this word and that word works.
Then, and it was a very waspy industry. You came out of the documents, you came out of Harvard. Then you went into that. And the sixties, it broke loose because a lot of ethnics came in jews, Italians, every type of ethic came in and they brought their own culture, their own way of thinking their own rebellious nature, their own, you know, they were not wise, but they don’t mind sticking it through everybody.
And so they broke the rules and they put a greater emphasis on trusting their own instincts. Of being able to relate to people. One of the, what are the side stories? Very famous again? It’s Oracle is Dell of Jerry Dell from Reno when he was working on Panasonic. At that time, it was a new company relative in America.
And. I can say this cause he’s booked, their book had this title and he read it famous. But when he made his present within the agency, the headline was ‘Panasonic from the wonderful folks who gave you Pearl Harbor’. It was that attitude, but it was at attitude. Okay. It was an attitude of like, you know, let’s break it.
Let us push the elbow.
Robert Brill: [00:34:32] What year was that?
Charlie Katz: [00:34:37] Some time in the sixties or seventies, I have to look back, but I’ll tell you something. That title was his book and then made the world famous and helped launch. His agency was a very creative guy. And so on. I’ll tell you another story, just to show you the temple George Lois, who was also a great author for that period.
I,again, very good student who advertising. So he was also from that period and he had a, a small Jewish account what they provide on the Passover holiday. It’s a year round. It’s like a Cracker and it’s year round, but a over a particular time that everybody. He wanted to run the ad and have the headline in like Jewish font like Hebrew front. Well, that would be English words, but Hebrew style, and the owner of the company and nice little Jewish man, you know, he’s worried about his too Jewish. You can’t do that in of field. Everybody is afraid it was too ethnic George and then the fifth floor goes over to the window, opens the window and says, if you don’t want that campaign, I’m jumping out the window. This guy blew Jewish guilt. Yeah, ‘no, no, no I’ll run the campaign’ and it was very successful.
It was free, but it was reliant on the ability of the talent. The author actor and the writer to instinctively as human being, being able to understand what humans were feeling and why they would address, prefer a one, a product, what their problems are and how to translate into a language that they want. They didn’t need research until today.
Why didn’t intend to do good. We Silverstein still work in that method. Okay. They want you to recreate it and you bring to the table that makes it happen. Now at that time, one of the things requires radical change, which is burn back. There are a girl named Jill Burnback. It’s switched to homeowner advertising until then the copywriter was keen.
He would write the copy. You get a, the marketing brief, he’d write the copy. And then it handed over to the art director to make the visual. So the art director was like a pair of hands. Burnback, changed that he said it’s teamwork. And both of them worked together. So during my career in which I was ready after that day, I was ready into place.
I always worked with an art director and it’s like your relationship in marriage. You have your fights, you all, you, you scream at each other, but somehow something very good comes out of it. Now I’m in while I’m not a wild person. I find pretty much what I believe in what, I’m not a new believer, but I will say one time, one time, I still remember that the producer.
Got involved in telling the director of the commercial, what it was about and the directors talking to really tell me. Okay. So where did that come from? That’s not our strategy at all, or what do you want to do then? He said, well, a producer told me this, so now the producer has nothing to do with the marketing and creative strategy.
He’s here to put together the production team and make sure everything’s coordinated. So I went over to the guy, said, what is going on here? And he telling me, I said, well, that’s not what you know, that didn’t come out as a client isn’t coming out of anywhere. So you said, since I said coming in here at the conference room and he was still staying firn.
I literally picked up a chair and threw it at him. Now, the only good thing for me then when I’m talking to you, I’m not, you know, behind bars still is that about one inch as far as I can throw it, but the agency was balanced. If you believed in something, you fought through it and, you know, and it brought out the best.
Robert Brill: [00:38:31] Charlie as we wrap up, I want to ask you, tell us about the marketing you’re doing for Bitbean like, tell us about your, well, what I do is I’m is, is behind the scenes. Cause I’m not involved with this shop. What I do is I honestly, sometimes to the profit is about the intent of the client.
Charlie Katz: [00:38:52] And I try to bring that, that purpose into it because ultimately it’s who they’re talking to at the end of the day, software is a communications platform to reach out to the end user. So what does the end user want out of this service? Okay. It’s a vehicle for that end user being able to. Solve his problem.
Right? We, go to a website because we’re looking for something, right? So what am I looking for? And therefore, what do I want the map of the website? To lead me where, what intent is, what am I going through? And then, so behind the scenes, and I deal with the psychology of the end user. And I do that. And I also reevaluate it from that standpoint. So it’s bringing, I would say this this matter scenario, understanding of human psychology and interpreting you then from an advertising viewpoint into building software. Now the teams are very good at that as well. And I am not in any way. The single voice, the teams are excellent in an understanding yet, but real work today and as it should be always. It’s teamwork in the sense of hearing it from different perspectives.
It’s when you see somebody else’s viewpoint and you either argue with it or you agree with it, but together you shaped something that is right. So I have another voice in helping shape what the viewpoint should be.
Robert Brill: [00:40:39] That’s fascinating. I really like that. Our, our time is our time is coming to a close here, Charlie. So, if people want to reach out to you and bit being, how, how can they, how can they find you?
Charlie Katz: [00:40:55] [email protected] and our website is bitbean.com yeah, full story over there, our case history, how we work. And everything, you know, we discussed, meet the team members, plus, I have a blog called TEO Speaks. And, I interview people like yourself has their companies. I find they’re very premium. We started the podcast. I love it. I think I’m done.
Maybe, probably like you as well. We’re the most fortunate people in the world. We meet wonderful people. We learn so much every day, practically that we do it is a new insight and new something else that we walked away with. It’s like education, a life we’ll wrap up in one. And, and I’m very grateful that this turn came to me.
Robert Brill: [00:41:52] You know, you bring that up. And I, I agree because you know, one of the best parts about doing this podcast cast is I get to ask people like you really interesting, smart people. Things that I want to know that will directly affect my business. And it’s like, I’ll give you a case in point where, we’re turning on a new lead magnet, which is about how to create effective lead magnets and market them.
So you get a constant stream of leads. And literally for the last two days I’ve been working on a filming, one or two minute intro for the landing page and I cannot get it right. I have the copy down, but I cannot get the filming of it right in the editing of it right. I’m not emotional enough.
It’s a little too dry, but now as we’re talking, I think I’m actually going to change. At least the intro to focus much more on the emotion. So it’s just one small example of how great it is to talk to someone like you and just get the insight directly from the source.
Charlie Katz: [00:42:55] And, and you’re saying something that I often say to people, particularly in marketing, I say, you know, it’s a game of inches.
And every insight gets you closer to the goal. And sometimes you get this big vision, but usually it’s a stuff, small detail that suddenly gets you where you want to go. And that’s what I loved about the pockets of the interviews. When I know also about the reading they do, sometimes they’ll come across a quote someplace and I’ll buy the book just because I want to read that chapter because I learned so much from that chapter or whatever I spend on the book as well worth it.
It’s a, it is being open to grow, being open to learn, and, and being open to life and curious.
Robert Brill: [00:43:39] Charlie Katz, executive creative director at bit bean. Thank you so much for being with us today.
Thank you for having me, it was wonderful. I enjoyed it very much. Have a great day.
