We’re talking print and digital marketing with Stewart Cohen on this episode of Workbook Radio.
Workbook Regional Representative Mary Pruessel talks with long-time client and long-time friend, Stewart Cohen, about the importance of marketing and how to adjust to each marketing medium accordingly.
MP: “Okay, so let’s get into a little bit about how you’re doing your marketing. What do you do? Do you feel more comfortable reaching out directly to creatives? Phone, promos, emails, directories? What is your comfort zone?”
SC: “All of the above. (Mary laughs.) So back when you were at your first job. The first seminar I ever listened to of somebody was at your predecessor, The Black Book (which is no longer), and I remember somebody saying, ‘You need to spend 10% of your gross income on marketing.’ And I thought, ‘Okay.’ And it wasn’t even a number. I would usually just advertise in whatever I thought the best mediums were that the creatives were looking at. So, when I started out it was the Black Book, then the Workbook came along, then there was the Black Book and the Workbook, and there were other directories along the way. Then we were on the back cover of CA [Communication Arts] for probably 10 years and Archive [Magazine], and then we were off all of them. And now we’re actually on the back cover of Archive, as well as Workbook, plus a variety of other things.”
MP: “Tell me how many spreads you did, gosh, in the Workbook, I think it was in the late ’90s?”
SC: “Oh, that was just because there was some deal they had that they would print a booklet for you.“
MP: “Right.”
SC: “If you did x number of spreads, and it was a deal that a lot of the reps were taking advantage of.”
MP: “Yeah.”
SC: “And I figured, ‘Well, why can’t I get the same thing just for me?’”
MP: “Right.”
SC: “So I think it was 8 spreads.”
MP: “16 pages.”
SC: “Yeah. Yeah, and it was good. It was a good piece. I think we only did that once or twice though.”
MP: “Right. But I mean that drew a ton of attention to the way you were marketing. Everybody just thought ‘Holy crap! Look at this guy!’ It was, I thought, just a very bold move.”
SC: “Well, I’ve always thought from day one: I live in Dallas, Texas for a variety of reasons, especially not being from here. But I didn’t move to Los Angeles, I didn’t move to New York, even though I felt there was a lot of my competition was there. A lot of great jobs were there. But I felt I could have a bigger staff and a bigger studio and live well in Texas, and I could travel to anywhere I needed to travel to from Texas. But there was a stigma attached to it. It’s not so much now, but especially earlier in my career. Like, every job I go on people say, ‘Why do you live in Texas?’ My rote answer was cause it has a great airport.
“Back to the marketing. I always felt like I never want to look back later on in my career and say ‘What if?’ And just because I don’t live in New York or LA does not mean I shouldn’t play in that same arena. So, I decided that my ‘tax’ for living in Texas (cause we don’t have state income tax) was I would spend it on self-promotion.”
MP: “Nice.”
SC: “And I have.”
MP: “Yes, you have. I think at one point there wasn’t a promotional piece that you weren’t a part of.”
SC: “And again, you never know where creatives are looking. I think it’s gotten even more difficult these days. But at any given time if you think about the number of times you need to see an ad to act on something. Sometimes I feel like it becomes like wallpaper, but at the same time you just have to be in the mix with whoever’s playing in the game.”
MP: “Right. Whenever they start looking, you want to make sure that you’re not overlooked.”
SC: “Right. And there are still days where I meet people every week that have never heard of [SC Pictures] on jobs, that their art producer found us or something like that. It just baffles my mind with the amount of marketing that I’ve done that there are still people at big agencies that just haven’t heard of you. So I think it’s really hard to get noticed.”
MP: “Well I think also that’s probably another reason why you’re doing a lot in the digital world, right?”
SC: “Well I’ve always gone where the marketing was. Right?”
MP: “Right.”
SC: “So everybody was looking at the Black Book, so day one of my career, even though I probably shouldn’t have, I threw the money down because any job in the country was going to the people in the Black Book and all of a sudden I was considered to be part of the people in the country, even though I probably sucked at the time.”
MP: (Laughing) “I do remember your portfolio at that point.”
SC: “Yeah! So the point is that wherever people are looking is where we try to go. And of course, all eyeballs are on screens. So that’s how that came to be.”
MP: “I really want to know more about of your digital world?”
SC: “Well I think the digital marketing that [SC Pictures] is doing, it goes back to other things I’ve said, that as things change we try to change with them?”
MP: “Right.”
SC: “And I was lucky enough to meet a super amazing woman who comes from the digital marketing world who works here now. Who kind of splits her time between SCP and SuperStock. So it’s allowed me to be able to afford it? She’s really opened my eyes to the way that digital marketing really works and everything that I think. Most photographers and most of our websites are kind of bs in terms of the SEO blows.”
MP” “Right.”
SC: “So I’ve learned a lot about them. But again, it’s just another piece of marketing that we’re doing now because that’s where the eyeballs are. I mean, I look at myself. I don’t look at printed materials as much as I used to, unfortunately, even though I love the printed page. Everything’s on a screen now. “
MP: “I noticed that you were advertising on Instagram. How do you find your market?”
SC: “Well I think that’s just boosting posts, right? We’re learning, we’re trying to figure out how it works. We’re trying to target campaigns. We’re trying to target things to creatives, to people in our industry. As hard as it is, we’re trying to figure out how to do it.”
MP: “Right. Based on keywords.“
SC: “Yeah, keywords, people that come visit us. I mean, we want…look, as much as people who are interested in what we do, we want them to be able to see us. So I think…and that’s a hard thing to target.”
MP: “Right.”
SC: “And I don’t think just boosting a post on Facebook and saying, ‘I want advertising community from this age group and this gender.’ I don’t think that actually works as well as we think it does.”
MP: “Do you use LinkedIn very often?”
SC: “I do. I live on it. But I use that…you know, it’s [for] the people that were…that I connected with, clients, prospective clients. I mean it’s always a great way to cyber sleuth just to see where people have come from. It’s always interesting when you get a phone call from somebody, and you’re on a conference call, and you look them up and you realize, oh, three years ago they were working at da-da-da agency when we did da-da-da, and then you say, ‘Hey, were you on that job?’ and you realize that the world is pretty interconnected, and that’s when you go back to you have to be nice because it’s a small world. We’re all interconnected, it’s a really small industry at the end of the day.”
MP: “Right.”
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Photo above by SCP. To view more of Stewart’s work, click here.
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