The Step by Step Path to Turn Any Ecom Brand Into a $100M Retail Machine with Mark Young

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The Step by Step Path to Turn Any Ecom Brand Into a $100M Retail Machine with Mark Young

Dr. Mark Young, the Founder and CEO of Jekyll & Hyde Advertising, a powerhouse agency that’s been helping challenger consumer brands break through the noise and scale into household names with billions of revenue and exits for nearly three decades.

He’s also the host of the CPG insiders podcast, the number 2 podcast in all consumer packaged goods niche.

Mark is also the author of a new book 27 Unbreakable Rules of Retail, how to build a $100M+ brand in brick and mortar

Mark is not your average marketer — his background blends neuroscience, persuasion, and behavioral psychology with decades of hands-on experience in CPG and direct-response advertising. Through his agency, Jekyll & Hyde, he’s helped hundreds of emerging brands launch, grow, and dominate retail shelves and online marketplaces.

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> Here’s a glimpse of what you would learn….
  • Importance of brick-and-mortar retail in the consumer products industry.
  • Challenges faced by e-commerce brands in a competitive market.
  • Strategies for successfully entering physical retail spaces.
  • The significance of product differentiation and authenticity in retail.
  • The impact of traditional media, especially television, on brand awareness and consumer demand.
  • The concept of SKU rationalization and its role in retail product selection.
  • The necessity of creating consumer demand before approaching retail buyers.
  • Understanding the economics of media buying and the Media Efficiency Ratio (MER).
  • The principle of “Who Not How” in building a successful business team.
  • The role of AI as a collaborative tool in enhancing business strategies.

In this episode of the Ecomm Breakthrough Podcast, host Josh Hadley interviews Dr. Mark Young, CEO of Jekyll and Hyde Advertising. Mark shares his expertise on building $100 million consumer brands in brick-and-mortar retail, emphasizing that 80% of product sales still occur offline. He discusses the challenges of retail entry, the importance of unique, premium products, and the power of TV advertising to drive demand. Mark also highlights the value of expert partnerships and leveraging both human intuition and AI, offering actionable advice for e-commerce brands aiming to succeed in physical retail.

Here are the 3 action items that Josh identified from this episode:
  1. Prove Demand Before Approaching Retailers
    Build real consumer pull through DTC + paid media (TV, social, influencers). Retail buyers want evidence of demand, not Amazon screenshots. Come in with a buyer-ready pitch showing how you’ll drive traffic to their stores.
  2. Position Your Product as a Clear Upgrade or Category Expander
    Ensure your SKU hits at least one winning lever:

    • Premium trade-up (higher-margin, innovative)
    • Demographic expander (brings new shoppers)
    • Category expander (increases consumption)
      If your product is a “me-too” item, it won’t make it onto shelves.
  3. Build a Retail-Ready P&L With Strong Margins & Media Plan
    You need minimum 5:1 markup and a funded media strategy (TV recommended) to support retail sell-through. Retailers expect marketing that drives velocity—without it, your product risks getting cut during SKU rationalization.
Resources mentioned in this episode:
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Episode Sponsor

Sponsor for this episode…

This episode is brought to you by eComm Breakthrough Consulting where I help seven-figure e-commerce owners grow to eight figures.
I started Hadley Designs in 2015 and grew it to an eight-figure brand in seven years.
I made mistakes along the way that made the path to eight figures longer. At times I doubted whether our business could even survive and become a real brand. I wish I would have had a guide to help me grow faster and avoid the stumbling blocks.
If you’ve hit a plateau and want to know the next steps to take your business to the next level, then go to www.EcommBreakthrough.com (that’s Ecomm with two M’s) to learn more.
Transcript Area
Mark 00:00:00  80%, no matter how big e-commerce is, 80% of all the volume in brick in consumer products is still sold out of a brick and mortar store. The majority people still want to touch, see, feel, hold things before they give up their money. So in most categories, if you’re an e-commerce only brand, you’re only playing in a 20% pool. You’re in the small pond.
MC 00:00:28  Welcome to the Ecomm Breakthrough podcast. Are you ready to unlock the full potential and growth in your business? You’ve already crossed seven figures in sales, but the challenge is knowing how to take your business to the next level.
Josh 00:00:41  Do you want to learn how to get your brand into retail stores, and then grow that brand into $100 million plus in sales just in brick and mortar stores? Well, today you are going to love the guests that we have on the show. Welcome to the Econ Breakthrough Podcast. I’m your host, Josh Hadley. I scaled my own brand to eight figures in sales, and now my mission is to take it to over nine figures on my journey to nine figures, I bring you unfiltered conversations with the smartest minds in e-commerce.
Josh 00:01:09  Past guests include Kevin King, Ezra Firestone, and Michael E Gerber, author of the email. Today’s guest is someone who truly understands what makes consumers buy. Joining us is doctor Mark Young, the founder and CEO of Jekyll and Hyde Advertising, a powerhouse agency that’s been helping challenger consumer brands break through the noise and scale into household names. With billions of revenue and billions in exits for nearly three decades. He’s also the host of the CPG insiders podcast. It’s the number two podcast in the in all consumer packaged goods niche. Mark is also the author of a brand new book, 27 Unbreakable Rules of Retail, and that teaches you how to build a $100 million brand in brick and mortar stores. Mark is not just your average marketer. His background blends neuroscience, persuasion, and behavior psychology with decades of hands on experience in CPG and direct response advertising through his agency Jekyll and Hyde. He’s helped hundreds of emerging brands launch, grow and dominate retail store shelves in online marketplaces. With that introduction, welcome to the show, Mark.
Mark 00:02:19  Well, thank you, Josh, and I’m going to hope for the next hour or so I can live up to you to that introduction.
Josh 00:02:28  Hey, you’ve got an impressive introduction. That’s what helps when you’ve been in a space for three decades, I think, like the compounding returns of just getting better and better at your craft is like the results speak for themselves, especially when you’re doing billions in revenue, billions of exits that you’ve helped people with. So it’s very impressive what you’ve built.
Mark 00:02:49  So believe it or not, Josh, I give you this very quickly. I got my first job at an ad agency when I was 12 years old. That is that is a true story.
Josh 00:02:58  That’s a young age.
Mark 00:02:59  And I launched my first consumer product in national retail when I was 14. So besides for being an ad agency, I’ve also owned and do own brands. So I wear both hats. So and and here’s the reason when you think about consultants and agencies and you know, I know this is a family show, but I use this as my example.
Mark 00:03:25  I think of consultants and agencies as people who claim to know, you know, 65 ways to Have Sex and Show Up in an orgy Without a partner. It’s different when you’re the person who knows what it’s like the right to check. When we are dealing with clients, I know what they feel like. I know the anxiety they have. I know the risks they’re taking. We understand what that risk is like. And my first hit product, which was decades ago. I literally mortgaged all the equity out of our house and loaned all the money out of our 401 K to make enough products to launch that item. So I know what it feels like to risk everything and bet on yourself and bet on your belief that I’m right. Fortunately for me, that particular bet that I took on that one was a very good bet. And I’ve never needed to mortgage houses and take money out of 401 KS anymore because that event solved that problem. And one of the beauties of consumer packaged goods is this is one of the rare industries where someone with an innovative mind and an eye toward how to do something better can go from an idea to millions of dollars and in sometimes billion dollar exits.
Mark 00:05:03  In what I consider to be relatively short periods of time. one of my clients came to us with, a single product. It was a tube of shaving cream. And in five years, Edgehill bought the company for $325 million. So this is a company where fortunes can be built. Now, I know that your audience is very focused on the e-commerce space, and we have an e-commerce operation, but I’m really here to talk about the brick and mortar space. And what I want to tell people is 80%, no matter how big e-commerce is, 80% of all the volume in brick in consumer products is still sold out of a brick and mortar store. The majority of people still want to touch these field hold things before they give up their money. So in most categories, if you’re an e-commerce only brand, you’re only playing in a 20% pool. You’re in the small pond. If you want to be with the big fish in the big pond, you have to go brick and mortar. Now, that being said, I’m going to kind of jump to the 27 rules here.
Mark 00:06:20  There are not every product that’s out there belongs in Walmart or belongs in brick and mortar. Because when we think of these products, when we think of brick and mortar, we want to think of and there are specialty retailers. So we’ll set that aside for a minute. But I’m talking about what we call food drug mass retail. When we think of those food drug mass we’ll call it food drug mass club. When we think about those, we think about products that are at the top of the funnel, not the marketing funnel, but the demand funnel. So we want products at retail that appeal to a wide audience. So some of the rules, the first rule is don’t make products that you don’t believe in. Because if you don’t really like your product and you’re not passionate about it, it’s going to come through and the business will probably fail. Make products that solve human problems. Don’t make a product because you know how to make a product because it has a purpose. It has a purpose in people’s lives.
Mark 00:07:24  Never try to be everything to everyone and never be a me to product. In brick and mortar, there’s no room for this. So when we look at when we look at like Amazon, we know at Amazon, if I come out with, I’m going to say a travel pillow. We happen to be working on one of those. 15 other people will launch a travel pillow on Amazon when they see that our travel pillow is selling right. A bunch of people are going to go make knockoffs, and they’re going to be out selling.
Josh 00:07:57  Because I’m going to interject right here to say this. This is actually probably one of the biggest, like, pain points that a lot of the e-commerce sellers are experiencing right now. They’re seeing over the last couple of years an influx of overseas competitors that are just imitating their product because they saw, hey, this is doing well. So I’m going to create a meta version of this. Whether or not there’s a patent or not. So like this is where prices are being driven down.
Josh 00:08:26  Margin is being lost on Amazon. And so what you’re talking about is like I think like the retail like frontier, as you talked about, 80% of the actual market value and sales happening off of Amazon. Like that’s massive. And so I think like people struggling there on Amazon need to again, hear what you’re talking about here to say like look at the world that awaits you if you actually focus on creating unique products.
Mark 00:08:53  But when? When we look at Amazon. So let’s say I come out with a great travel pillow, which my client did. And immediately a bunch of Chinese manufacturers are throwing knockoffs out there. To your point, it’s a patented design. They don’t care. They’re throwing it out there. And this doesn’t even count the counterfeiters. We haven’t even gotten to the counterfeiters. I have one of my clients, which is a product called DeArmond. DeArmond is a line of skincare products for mature adults. They’ve lost tons of money on Amazon because of counterfeiters who are making God knows what’s inside the tube with copying their their packaging and then selling it much cheaper than they can sell it.
Mark 00:09:41  So this is one of the things we see in Amazon. And one of the things that we see quite often, we have a lot of companies that will come to us, and we’ve been doing 10 million. $12 million on Amazon. And then we went to 7 million, and now we’re down to 5 million because the knockoffs and the counterfeiters are draining their business. That’s not unusual. This is not an issue in brick and mortar, because in in the world of e-commerce, the long tail is the rule. There is unlimited space for the next brand. There is unlimited space to be able to put in another me to product. In brick and mortar stores are limited by these things called atoms. These are physical things that take up space. You can’t have 950 different travel pillows in a Walmart. You can have three. So how do you get to be one of the three? That’s the game. So once you can get there. Now you’ve done something. Now there’s another issue. When we look at online sales, Josh.
Mark 00:10:59  When we look at how people’s brains work, there’s an incredible piece of work. And I actually cover this quite a bit in another book I wrote, which is called hypnotizing. But the original work was done by Carnahan and Pinsky, and the book was called Thinking Fast and Slow. And they got a Nobel Prize in Science for this work. And what we know is that human brains operate in two zones, what we call system one and system two. System one is fast, intuitive, and responsive impulsive. That’s system one. System two is methodical thinking and consideration. So an example would be if I say, Josh, what’s two plus two?
Josh 00:11:45  Four.
Mark 00:11:46  Exactly. Now I say, Josh, what’s seven times 14 divided by three to the second power?
Josh 00:11:53  Let me go to ChatGPT and I’ll get back to you.
Mark 00:11:56  Your brain has to go to system two, so you forget ChatGPT. You’re going to take a pencil and figure it out. But your brain has to go to the system too. It’s no longer on impulse.
Mark 00:12:09  It’s now deep thinking. Okay. When we look at digital digital ads, digital creative, what do we know about digital ads and digital creative? The first three seconds is the most important thing because I have to hook you. If I don’t have some gimmick at the very beginning, I’m not going to pull you in. What else do we know? When people go to Amazon, they don’t shop brands, they shop indications or categories. So they don’t go to Amazon and type in the name of a travel pillow. They go to Amazon and they type in travel pillows. Now I’m competing with everybody who’s knocking me off and everybody else in the category. But what if they went to Amazon and they typed in a brand of a travel pillow? Why come up first now, right. So now I’m at the front because they’re no longer looking for travel pillows. They’re looking for this travel pillow. The problem is digital buying is impulsive and it’s indication and category specific. It’s not brand specific. And digital ads don’t create brands.
Mark 00:13:22  So even though someone could be doing $10 million on Amazon and could be the number one in a category, nobody knows who they are because nobody went there looking for the brand. They went there looking for the item. This is where retail is different because retail is about building brands. So when we look at brick and mortar and this is why digital ads don’t work for brick and mortar. Digital ads drive digital sales. Traditional media drives. Brick and mortar. Television. Radio. Believe it or not, still print. some influencers can drive it. But what happens is we have to do brand building. Because in the world of brick and mortar, I see an ad on Wednesday, but my shopping day Saturday morning. So there’s not clicking by it’s follow the message. Consider the message. Think through it. Mentally add it to a shopping list. Go looking for it three days later. Four days later. Well, the only way I can do that is if I build brand recognition. Otherwise, I’m going to go to the plan of Graham, and I’m going to look for mouthwash.
Mark 00:14:36  And I’m going to see that there’s 47 different brands. And I’m going to figure out, you know, which one has the shiny bottle. I need to go there looking for the brand of mouthwash that I want to buy. So this is why it’s a different model. So we never want to be a MeToo product because in retail, no retailer wants a MeToo product. So this is the beauty of if I’ve got the travel pillow that everybody’s buying, all those knockoffs on Amazon are of no interest to Walmart. And here’s the reason one Walmart’s limited in space. Even though they do have 148,000 SKUs in their store, they’re still limited by space. So for Walmart and all retailers, they practice something called SKU rationalization. So now we’re getting into the A’s. And what the AI does is the AI examines their entire assortment and figures out which items could we live without and not reduce our annual volume in this planet? Gram. So the AI immediately knows if we have three pillows that all look the same, it’s going to take us the physical space of three pillows.
Mark 00:15:48  But if we only had one, we would still sell just as many pillows because consumers don’t need three. The second thing is what gets you at Amazon. What gets you at Amazon is you’ve got a $50 item. So somebody from China puts it out there for $34. That doesn’t work in retail. Why? Because retailers don’t want lower priced products. So think your way through this for a minute. I know it sounds a little counterintuitive, but it’ll make sense here. I’m Walmart. I have 15 mouthwashes. They sell between the prices of $5 and 12. Okay. Do I want to add a $4 mouthwash? Now here’s what that does. That takes up more space in my store, and my current $5 mouthwash buyer is now going to buy a $4 mouthwash. If I have a 36 point margin, I just made $0.36 less on the new product I just brought in because my customer traded down. So if I come up with the me to, that’s a buck less. Walmart’s going to say no way.
Mark 00:17:07  Not interested. Now I go to Walmart and I say, okay, your mouthwash is from $5 to 12. I have a new $15 month, and I have this ad campaign and I have this new technology, and here’s why I’m better. And I’m going to get your 8 to $12 mouthwash people to now buy $15 mouthwash. So now the buyer is saying, well, if I can get an average, if I can get people who spend $10 to spend $15 on the exact same item. I just picked up $5 more gross, and that’s 36% of $5 on everyone that goes out the door. So do you see why it’s so different? So in our world, being the best premium, highest price or higher priced product is the key to get in the door. Not being a cheaper version of something that’s out there. So this is how this really helps innovative, visionary entrepreneurs who make better mousetraps. So if you’re in the business of if you’re the person knocking off the travel pillow, not a thing for you.
Mark 00:18:24  If you’re the person who made a better travel pillow. Brick and mortar is the place you’re going to succeed. Now, that doesn’t even count the fact that brick and mortar is going to sell 80% of the market while you’re competing to sell 2%. So where I’m going with this is we have a thing. We have a thing in our book that is, you have to meet the three. There’s three levers for retail. One lever for retail. And I want people to really pay attention to this. Assuming you have a product that has broad appeal. Now we’re going to try to go to retail. Obviously we need a brand. We need marketing. We need advertising. But what’s our product need to be? Our product needs to either be innovative, better and higher priced. Because that means trade up, right? Our product needs to be a demographic expander. This is the second rail. And a demographic expander would be a given example. Let’s say we came up with an energy drink that appeals to people 55 plus.
Mark 00:19:29  So now the buyer is going to say, well, my normal energy drink window. My consumer that shops. This is an 1834. So if you can bring me an energy drink that’s going to bring 55 new people went to that shelf in my store. That’s a winner. The third rail of this model is what we call a category expander a category expander. I’ll give you a great example. This will make more sense to people in my age bracket. Years and years ago, there was no such thing as conditioner for your hair. There was just shampoo. You went to the store in his big shampoo aisle. Then a company called suave came out with a second bottle of stuff. Back then it was called Cream Rinse, and they demonstrated how women coming in to buy shampoo will now walk out with two bottles. That’s called a category expander. So it is. Do I have a hair treatment? So all of a sudden women are still going to buy all their normal hair care, but they’re also going to buy this new Split Enz treatment.
Mark 00:20:45  So if you have a product that I can say, put this on the shelf and all of a sudden people buying that category walk away with two products. Now you’ve got a winner. So those are the three places you want to try to stay in. Be the premium. Be the best. Be the higher price, be the demographic expander, or be the product that is a category expander and gets people to buy more things. oxi clean. Great example. People go and they buy tide. Then all of a sudden they were buying tide and a bottle of oxy clean. That’s a category expander.
Josh 00:21:24  Do you have to meet all three of these? This one? Just one.
Mark 00:21:27  Sometimes you’ll be lucky and you’ll meet 2 or 3. But you just need to be able to hit one of them.
Josh 00:21:34  So mark it. Just to summarize everything that you’ve been talking about up until this point. The product that you are selling is the core focused, right? Having an innovative product, it’s being unique or different.
Josh 00:21:48  It’s having a angle to the market as a category expander or a demographic expander. My question for you, Mark, is walk me through. Again the the people listening to this. They’ve already got there. They’re already successful on Amazon. They’re already driving seven figures in sales, eight figures in sales. They want to take it to the next level. So Mark, what would be your advice to these people to say, hey, here’s like my five step, five step like checklist or milestones if you actually want to get into retail. These are the steps that you need to take. Because I think like obviously we want to hit the retail market. But what is I, I think there are some big barriers. And I’m also going to segue into there’s a reason why in your introduction, it talks about you in it as an advertising agency. We’re talking all about retail, but I think people are like, so why in the world does Marc have an advertising agency? This is I’m not I’m not piecing these things together.
Josh 00:22:50  So Mark, dive into that question of like, I’ve got a successful product. How do I get it into retail now?
Mark 00:22:57  Okay. So what’s it going to take. Retailers have limited space. Remember we talk. You can’t just pile another one in like you can on Amazon. So it’s a lot harder to get a retailer to bring you in. It is easier for retail buyer. It is better for his or her job to say no to you than it is to say yes, because yeses put my job at risk. No means I’m still selling what I’m selling. So when we go see a buyer, we have to make the decision to bring this product in. So compelling and so easy that the buyer feels comfortable saying yes. The buyer believes it will make their store more money. Because remember, for my product to go into that store, someone else’s product must come out. Every inch of every shelf is accounted for, so somebody has to go away. So I have to convince them that whoever’s going to go away.
Mark 00:23:56  And oftentimes we suggest who should go away, whoever’s going to go away. I have to convince admirer that I’m going to outturn them. So how do I do that? I go in with here’s here’s one of my three reasons I’m going to bring you more demographic. I’m a category expander or I’m a premium upgrade. Do one of those things. I have a pent up demand for my product and a compelling ad campaign that is going to drive people to your store. So as an example, Josh, when you sit down with a buyer at a Walmart or Walgreens, target, whatever the case is. You have a 20 or 30 minute meeting. First three minutes are going to be introductions. Here’s who we are and here’s why we do this. Another 3 or 4 minutes on. Here’s the product we make. The rest of the meeting is going to be about your ad campaign. That’s the majority of the meeting because the buyer is asking. There’s the question. The buyer says, how are you going to drive traffic to my store? So if your idea is I’m a winning product on Amazon and all I need to do is get a Walmart shelf and it’ll sell.
Mark 00:25:11  You’re not getting in the Walmart. And I want you to think of something. There are 148,000 SKUs in a Walmart store. No one’s going there to read 148,000 labels. You need to be a destination. People have to go there and look for you. So you have to make that happen, and you have to have a compelling argument of how you’re going to make that happen. Walmart doesn’t care that you’re selling $10 million on Amazon. And here’s why. Because Walmart understands they are not going to convert the Amazon shopper to brick and mortar. They understand that 20% is over there. We’re working in the 80. So the fact that you’re doing great with the 20 good for you. That means nothing to us over here because we’re not going to claw them back. We have to deal with this group of shoppers. So again, you’re doing $10 million. Nobody cares. And you’re not a brand because people aren’t buying you because of the brand. They’re buying you because of the item. So you have to have a compelling ad campaign and a compelling marketing program that is going to show that retailer how I’m going to drive traffic to their store.
Josh 00:26:37  Marc, I love that. And I just want to emphasize that because I would argue that this is probably like the probably the biggest mistake most brands make, especially that especially e-commerce brands that feel like, oh, I’m the Amazon number one bestseller. Surely Walmart surely target wants to carry my product because I’m I am the best seller. But I love what you talked about. It’s like you need to be creating pent up demand so that almost to a point where people are coming into the stores asking for your branded product and the store managers I don’t like. No, we don’t we don’t carry that. Right. Right. So the question then is, Mark, how do I do that? How do I create pent up demand? How do I generate so much brand awareness that people are going into stores asking for my product.
Mark 00:27:27  So there are two pathways to market your way into retail, and I’m going to tell you that there are two paths and there are only two paths. There are there is always an exception to a rule.
Mark 00:27:42  There’s always a product that just catches fire because Oprah loved it or something. But you can’t count on that. So there’s two paths. The first path is drive. So the first path is we build the brand on television, and we sell the product direct to consumer through the website. Now, I want you to think of Harry’s shaving a Mando a Leumi. Think of all these brands that are now major retail brands. They all started as direct to consumer TV brands. Every one of them. When you when Lumi launched. I’m a doctor and I made, you know, I made this and it works for 72 hours on any parts of your body and go to Lumi. Com and buy deodorant. Now, who would have thought of people going online to buy deodorant? But it worked. Now here’s what we know. And one.
Josh 00:28:39  More expensive deodorant to.
Mark 00:28:41  Correct. It has to be because you can’t make money if it’s not more expensive. You need the margin to be able to advertise. And two, the retailer is not interested in bringing in another $5 item.
Mark 00:28:56  I have $5 deodorant. I don’t need another one. If I sell $1 million of this SKU for five bucks and I bring in a second one, guess what? I’m going to sell $1 million worth of this item. But now I just doubled the shelf space that it took to do it. Not interested. So what happens is, in retail, buyers know that for every one that we sell direct to consumer. Brick and mortar will sell 12 to 18 more. So when we go into a Walmart store. So let’s see. We go into Walmart and we say hey Walmart. We’ve sold a million travel pillows in the past six months on TV. Okay. That buyer is very quickly in their head going to say, oh, so we have 12 million. We have a 12 million consumer pent up demand because as I said earlier, most people want to touch, see, feel, hold before they buy. This is why retail is so much bigger. So I’ll give you an example of my good, good buddy of mine that we do stuff with is name is Mike Lindell.
Mark 00:30:09  And Mike sells a product called My Pillow. My pillow started on TV television only 14 years ago when my pillow hit Walmart. It was doing $100 million plus just in Walmart the day it hit. It was at $100 million run rate because he already sold so many on TV that as soon as people saw it on the shelf, that 12 to 18 factor kicked in. And it was it was an absolute freight train at that point. So that is route one. So route one is we build it into a consumer brand again, digital ads, system one hooks transactions. Forget it. I’ll ask everybody listening. Tell me the last digital ads you saw. You can’t. Then I’ll say tell me some recent TV commercials you saw. You’ll be able to tell me all kinds of. It’ll be the Geico gecko. It’ll be Flo, whoever. But you’ll remember the TV. You will not remember digital.
Josh 00:31:18  So we build the important topic on that. Two that you’re talking about here, Mark, is like nowhere did you say, hey, one Amazon sale equals 12 or 18 sales in retail.
Josh 00:31:30  What you’re saying though is like it’s that these TV campaigns driving to the website, one of those sells like the key is TV advertising and building your own Shopify store to to take that order. But it is the brand awareness that comes from the TV, not Facebook ads, etc..
Mark 00:31:52  It is specifically doctor TV, direct response television and radio. Sometimes we use radio. Now here’s the I’ll throw this out since you brought up Amazon, when you have your own Shopify site and you’re selling your product on TV, for every one you sell on your site, you will sell between one and a half and five on your Amazon page. So all of a sudden Amazon will just look amazing. and it’s like, wow, Amazon’s really doing well. Here’s the reason. The 60% of America watches television with a second screen next to them a phone, an iPad, a computer. You probably do it, I do it. Now, what’s the number one thing people do with the second screen? The number one thing they do is look up information on the show they’re watching.
Mark 00:32:42  Who’s this actor? I saw him in something else. Whatever the case is. The number two thing they do with that second screen is by something they saw on TV. So that’s a behavior. That’s the that’s the Amazon group. So when you go on TV, you drive the Amazon sales. But here’s the second thing that happens when people see your product on TV. 60% of people do not type the URL in. They go to a search engine, Google, and they type in a travel pillow. I just saw on Fox News which search result comes up first or second to Amazon, even if we’re even if we’re buying search. Amazon’s also buying search. So the majority of people actually click the Amazon result. The reason is one it’s at the top of the page. Two I trust Amazon I know that if I buy that pillow it’ll get here by eight tonight. And if I don’t like it, I can ship it back tomorrow. And I know Amazon will give me a refund. I don’t know these pillow people, so I don’t know how long it’ll take them to get it from me.
Mark 00:33:48  And I don’t know if they’ll take give me my money back, but I know Amazon will. The other reason people click to Amazon is because everybody trust Amazon’s review project their review numbers.
Josh 00:34:01  I’m not a big Amazon. Sellers know that. You know you can trust them. We know. We know that did not trust Amazon sales or reviews. But I think that it is. What’s interesting, you just highlighted the fact that like for the majority of the population, 99% of them. They think they’re all legit. Amazon are important.
Mark 00:34:20  Amazon is the number one review site in the world. So what am I going to do? I see this pillow on TV. I’m going to jump to Amazon. I’m going to look at what the reviews are. And it’s got a 4.5 star. Okay. That’s pretty good because honestly most people won’t buy something if it doesn’t have four stars or above, so it’s got four. Plus I like the ad. I’m going to buy it. Now the other thing with Amazon I’m a Prime member.
Mark 00:34:46  I can buy the pillow with one click. I don’t have to go to your website and start an account. So this is why you’re going to sell one on Shopify, and you’re going to sell one and a half in a very bad case, two and a half average. It can go as high as five. But this is why you go this route. Now there is a second route though. Josh, here’s the other route. The other route is you want to not do drive and you want to jump straight to retail. Okay, here’s how that works. The way that works is you build an ad campaign. You haven’t launched it yet, but you build it. And here’s our television commercial. Here’s what our media plan is going to look like. Here’s everything we’re doing. We now recruit brokers, try to get the best brokers to represent us. We send the broker in to see the buyer, and the broker explains to the buyer, if you bring in this pillow or whatever it is we’re selling, we have this campaign launching in April, and in April, we’re going to launch this campaign, and we’re going to we’re going to run these TV commercials, and we’re going to we’re going to advertise our pillow to 65 million people a month.
Mark 00:36:03  Now, if the buyer likes the product, likes what you’re doing, believes that you’re really going to do that, you can get the buyer to bring it in. I’ll give you an example. We had we just did this this week. we had a client go to Walmart with a new food item that is not sold anywhere in any stores and not sold on TV. We got Walmart to say yes. The way we got Walmart to say yes is we went in with a finished television commercial and a complete media buy. These are the commercials. These are the times of days. These are the network’s total media buy. Here’s our commercial. Here’s our media buy. We’re going to launch this within four weeks of when you bring the product in. Okay. That’s the other flip. But here’s the downside on that one. Josh. The downside is in the world of retail we have like in digital you guys are used to helium ten. I go to helium ten. I can see what everybody’s doing in our world.
Mark 00:37:08  In the brick and mortar world we have equal to helium ten. It’s called iry or Nielsen. So these iry reports show us every last item that was sold at every chain retailer in the country. So I can go to I or I, and I can tell you in the last four weeks there was exactly this number, bottles of scope 16 ounce sold in America. And I can tell you exactly who sold. Here’s what Walmart did and what target did. So on and so forth. So what happens in brick and mortar? You go and you make your pitch. And let’s say you’re trying to get into chain drug and you go to Walgreens. And Walgreens says, yeah, we like this. We’re, we’re going to take a roll at you. Guess what? I promise you, CVS is going to say no. And the reason CVS buyer is going to say no is because Walgreens buyer already took the risk. So I’ll just wait and see the IRR numbers. And if the if the IRR numbers look good, I’ll bring you in in six months.
Mark 00:38:11  6 to 12 months. I’ll cut you in. Because now I can bring you in in six months, and I have zero risk involved. So what happens is you have to run this national campaign because, remember, a dollar that lifts sales at Walgreens is also a dollar that lifts CVS is also a dollar that lifts Target and Walmart. But I only have Walgreens. So now I’m spending a dollar, but I’m only talking to a percentage of the country. Even though Walgreens are every place, only 25% of people in America go to a Walgreens, so I’m still missing 75% of the country. So I have to spend at a much heavier rate than I should be because I don’t have enough chain retailers, but I have enough that makes me have to spend, because if my eye or eye numbers are bad, everyone’s going to say no to me and Walgreens is going to throw me out. So I have to spend. So you can go either route. The advantage to going direct to consumer. The drive is in drive.
Mark 00:39:16  Your chances of getting everyone to say yes at the same time is really good. And the reason is because in drive we have another data sheet which are called green sheets. And this lists the top 100 drive advertisers of the month. So if my spend gets me on that list, which is the goal, and I walk into Walmart and Walmart says, oh my God, you guys are number 80. You’re number 80 for the past three months on the green sheets. The Walmart buyer knows that he or she already has 20 other items in their store that sells less than me, because the goal is I want all hundred in my store because these are the hottest products in the country. So now target doesn’t say no because Walmart said yes. Because now target doesn’t need to know how sales are. They have it in front of them. They have a spend report in front of them. And now the goal is how many of these can I sell before Walmart gets all the business? So now it becomes the old FOMO problem, the fear of missing out.
Mark 00:40:30  Well, if Walmart’s got it, I have to have it because it’s hot. So that’s why drive tends to be the better flip. And if we look at what’s happening in the market, think about all the products you can think of, whether it’s Leumi, whether it’s Mando, whether it’s Harry’s army, whether it’s Shave Shave Club. Think of all these products you see at retail. Where did they start? They all started in TV.
Josh 00:40:56  I love it. Mark, I’ve got a few questions here for you on this. Okay. Number one, I love what you’re talking about. Love the I get the theory. And here’s one thing I would add to the audience. What I like about the TV approach getting into retail is that you’ve had to have figured out doctor TV to make it work anyways for your brand, so it’s already lifting. It’s already right. It’s a rising tide. It’s going to lift all of your sales channels as is, whether you’re selling on Walmart.com, Amazon.com.
Mark 00:41:28  All the the rising tide lifts all the boats.
Josh 00:41:31  So it’s gonna it’s going to help that way. It’s going to help your business no matter what. Now, what I’ve also heard from people that have gone into retail is like they’re not doing well at retail because they probably got in from some broker that knew somebody and they pulled a string or two and they got in, but they’re lacking demand. And so how long.
Mark 00:41:52  By the way, sometimes they get in because the buyer uses the item. The buyer bought it on Amazon and likes it. And I just like I like your skin lotion. I see that actually as a reason buyer says I like it. I use it doesn’t mean to sell.
Josh 00:42:06  Yeah. And so you hear oftentimes where people are like, no, I had to pull out or I had all this inventory that I then had to eat. And I think the buy back a lot of that comes because, like, you’re not creating the top of funnel brand awareness about your product, creating that pent up demand. So my question to you is Mark sounds great.
Josh 00:42:27  I would love to do this. I’ve never spent a dime on TV. I know, I know social media ads. I know Amazon pay per click. That’s great. But how much am I a budgeting for? Just like if I’m if I’m to start working with you, how much do I need a budget on a monthly basis to actually run some of these to test the waters, see if it works. And then my second follow up question to that is like, how much do I need to be spending per month to hit the top 100 on that green sheet?
Mark 00:42:57  Good question. So let’s start with the last one. What do I have to do to get on the green sheet. I haven’t looked this month. Probably. You probably. So. And I’ll let me qualify this. You probably need to spend a half $1 million a month. Scary number. Now, let me point something out to you. In the world of TV. We buy television media for about $0.20 on the dollar. So when a national advertiser pays $10,000 for a TV commercial.
Mark 00:43:31  Companies like ours is not that many of us, but companies like ours who do PR. We buy unsold inventory on a daily level. So a spot that Procter and Gamble paid ten grand for, I’ll pay 2000 for it. So we have this enormous math advantage. And I want to share this with people. Anybody who’s doing digital, let’s say you’ve done meta ads. When you buy meta ads, you’re probably spending between 25 to $80 for a thousand views, a thousand impressions on meta. I buy television for $2 a thousand. I buy radio for under a dollar a thousand. You can’t compete with me. I’m spending $2 for a thousand views, and I have a 65 inch television screen with no way to scroll and nothing else to interrupt it. You can’t compete with me. The numbers will not work. This is why the commandos and the Harry’s and everybody are on TV. And they remain on TV. Because the math is on our side. Now, when we talk about how much we’re going to spend, what we look for is what we call an Ma media efficiency ratio.
Mark 00:44:51  First off, your product needs to have about a 5 to 1 markup or better. If you don’t have a 5 to 1 margin, keep doing your Amazon. Don’t try to get into retail and don’t try to get into the TV. Assuming you have that 5 to 1 margin, we’re going to look for a model where we can bring in an Ma of anywhere from 1.7 to 2.0. What does that mean? That means $1 on television is is creating $2 of sale. So we’re spending at that point we’re spending 50% of retail on on media. We’re giving that to a television network. But we have a 5 to 1 margin. So we’re okay. But what we’re doing here, Josh, is, is this once we find the message and the demo and the offer that all line up and the stars align, and now we’re getting that 2.0 mark. Now the job is how fast can you build products and how much media can you buy that fits your model. So now the business turns into by as much media as humanly possible that we can ship because you’re flipping dollars.
Mark 00:46:11  So all of a sudden, we’ll go back to my pillow. My pillow spends $1 million a week on TV, but my pillow brings in $2 million a week from the same TV. So my pillow has a $100 million television campaign that cost nothing. Because every dollar that goes in brings $2 back. The following week, we’re just flipping the dollars. So this is how think about those Mando and Lumi ads on TV. They’re everywhere. Why? Because they can afford it. One they’ve got margin. Two, they’ve got distribution. But three, they had a direct response model that had a two Ma. The other thing we look at in this business is not only our Ma and our what’s our customer acquisition, what’s our lifetime customer value? So do we have a product that can be on subscription? Do we have a product where people will replace it like deodorant? I’m going to have to get a new one every month. So what’s the lifetime customer value? So what we’re really doing in drive is we’re building a major brand with out without investing dollars, because we’re not investing dollars, we’re turning dollars.
Mark 00:47:27  Now to your last question, what does it cost to start it? Well, typically you’ve got you’ve got some branding work to do. And that depends where the company is in that space. You then need to produce television commercials, and TV commercials can cost anywhere from 50,000 to 1 million. Especially if you want to put a big celebrity in it or something creative can be all over the place. And then you have your launch media. So launch media that we usually tell clients to be prepared for is to do three testing phases, and each test is about $40,000. So figure about 40,000 worth of media that media runs for a couple of weeks. What worked, what didn’t work is the product is success is the product of failure. Is a product doing okay? Is there are ways we can make it better? What effect will frequency have? Let’s make the changes. Let’s go test again. When we test the second time, what happens? What happens is the laws of constraints. I corrected some things.
Mark 00:48:32  So when I corrected those things, that now shows me other things I didn’t correct that I couldn’t even see because the previous problem hid that from me. So maybe I make some second changes and I go test again. Now, the product I was telling you, we just rolled out a a pillow that we rolled out a week ago Monday. quite honestly, the the test on it is so good that we’re not even going to a second test. We’re literally just going to roll out because it’s profitable right now. So if it’s profitable right now, we’ll certainly optimize it. But we’re going to paint the airplane in the air. This product makes money. Well then go buy all the TV commercials you can humanly find. And by the way, that’s a big job because television commercials are not unlimited. Remember, there’s 13 commercials in a half hour, and that’s all that exists. And lots of other people are buying them. So you can’t just say, let’s run a thousand TV commercials. No, you have to find the right networks, find the right places.
Mark 00:49:36  Know what? What is the maximum amount of money you can afford to pay for it? And those are the offers you make. So some weeks you won’t have any TV running because it was too expensive that week. And you know you can’t spend that much because if you spend that much, you get outside of your ma. So there are limitations to it. But it’s the scale. It’s the scalable model. This is how you scale. This is how you reach 100 billion hundred million dollars quickly.
Josh 00:50:07  Mark. Really well said. And then I think like once you’ve built that, that kind of traffic engine, that’s when you then leverage the power of the brokers. And that’s where your contacts come in to say, hey, we’ve already got the story, we’ve already got the right offer, and this is what you want in your store. We’ve already done all the hard work. This is easy.
Mark 00:50:29  Oh, your brokers take you in and meet the retailers and get that product on the shelf. Then as that product gets on the shelf, most of your direct consumer media are 60 or 120 second spots.
Mark 00:50:42  As it gets on the shelf, you start to wean off of the 60s and the one 20s and your media cuts down to 30s. So now your media costs just dropped dramatically because you don’t need an offer anymore. Because you’re just telling people available to Walmart, target, Walgreens, CVS and writing. So you’re just telling people where to go get it so you can make your commercials shorter. And the other reason you can make your commercial shorter is because everybody knows who you are now. So now I don’t need a minute to two minutes to sell you, because I just need 15 to 30s to remind you.
Josh 00:51:14  Yeah, I love that. And at the same token, here’s what I’m looking. Here’s what I’m realizing. Just like you took that big bet for yourself to mortgage to, you know, mortgage your house and to take out all the equity and to take out the money from the 401 K to go all in. I think the parallel is this, right? You have to believe so confidently in your product that you have a unique something that you truly want to bring to the world, and then you’re going to have to like, budget.
Josh 00:51:43  Like we’re already talking six figure type of budgets here just to get these tests going.
Mark 00:51:49  Just take the bet, just to take the bet and see if it works. But remember, the number one rule in my new book Don’t Make Products You Don’t Believe in, because there’s going to be a day that you need to make a bet, and you’re not going to bet on something you don’t believe in. I describe our business as walking out over one of those rope bridges that go over a big gully that is 700ft down, and you’re walking across this rope bridge, and when you take your first step onto the rope bridge, you set the ropes on fire. And now you run for the other side of the mountain. Can you get there before the rope burns through? And what I mean by that is there’s no turning back. You’re either committed and you’re in and you believe or don’t do it. Because this is not a business where a hard time might come. This is a business where hard times will come, and this is a business where you’re going to need to bet on yourself.
Mark 00:52:53  And it may mean mortgaging your house, and it may mean draining the 401 K. It may mean getting money from your parents or doing whatever it is that you’re doing. So you better really, really believe in what you’re doing and really, really do your homework. So one of the things I will tell you, Josh, that we do here all day. So we get contacted by 3 to 5 new businesses a day here, which is amazing because that’s pretty unusual for an ad agency. but we do because we have so much, so much media out and books and podcasts and, and what we do is we in fact, this I can back up and this will make sense to you. I created the original show Shark Tank, and I shot the pilot here in Detroit, and we went and sold it into NBC. We play, I literally play Shark Tank with everybody. And by the way, we have we have one of Mr. Wonderful products online. We have one of Daymond John’s products, online products from Shark Tank.
Mark 00:53:59  Come here after there on Shark Tank.
Josh 00:54:01  Mark, you should have just led with that. I mean that’s impressive.
Mark 00:54:04  Yeah, I don’t really think about that much.
Josh 00:54:06  Oh come on let’s go.
Mark 00:54:08  So the reason the idea for Shark Tank came to me in a combination of watching American Idol and realizing, geez, I’m kind and I’m Simon Cowell for for inventors, that’s literally what happened. I’m Simon Cowell for inventors, because people bring this stuff to me and I either shoot it down or I give him a thumbs up. So we will never lie to somebody and say, no, no, no, this is a great product. Let’s put this thing on TV. If we think the product doesn’t have television legs or retail legs or it’s not, doesn’t have a wide enough demand, we’re going to tell you that and we’ll tell you the better place to sell it? Maybe this belongs in hardware stores. Maybe this belongs at Home Depot. Maybe this belongs just on Amazon. And there’s nothing wrong with having a successful $10 million business on Amazon.
Mark 00:55:01  That’s awesome. But that may be the end. You may have a product. That’s kind of where it lives. And I’m going to say if you’re a knockoff of somebody else, that’s that is where you live. If you’re not innovative, if you’re not unique, if you’re not premium, you probably need to stay where you’re at. If you’re just a me two item that you can sell a couple of bucks cheaper, run the crap out of Amazon and make all the money you can. But that’s where you’re staying. And we’re going to tell you that because we don’t make any money. Again, we don’t charge people, retainers and stuff. So for us, we’re not going to make any money with you unless we can make you into a hit for month after month after month and year after year. The sad part about it is and I will tell you this, Josh, the sad part is I can’t tell you how many times I’ve told somebody to not spend their money. And then they went to somebody else and another agency.
Mark 00:55:57  Oh no, no, we can make this work. And they’ve peddled away every dime they had and have seen it happen, because so many times those people have called me back a year later and we just have to tell them, sorry, there isn’t anything we can do for you. So the last thing I will leave people with is don’t take a bet that you’re not willing to lose love. That when we mortgage, when we mortgaged our house and took the money out of the 401, I went to my wife and I said, this is what I think we ought to do. And my wife said to me, do you believe it? I said, I do believe this. I believe I’m right. And then her second question, my wife’s a very smart business person. And her second question was, can you live with the failure? It’s not going to be easy, but yeah, we’re going to have to start all over paying the house off. I can do it. But we’ll have to start from scratch, paying the house off again, and we’ll have to start from scratch on a 401.
Mark 00:56:48  And her comment was, as long as you believe it, I’ll sign. You know, because she had to sign it to her house and we signed it and went and did it. We took, I will tell you, we took out, this is a long time ago. We took out, like, a half $1 million, which doesn’t sound like a lot of money, but it was a lot of money 30 years ago. And that half $1 million became $10 million in 12 months. So I bet correctly, I made the right bet. I will tell you that in the world of consumer packaged goods, there are 45,000 new consumer packaged goods, you know, created and put on the market every year in the United States. 24 months later, there’s only 450 of them remaining. So the odds on success are less than 1% at this agency. We’ve never had a year. Where we’ve been. Some years we’re at 100%. Some years we’re maybe in the 95%. So your odds without somebody that knows what they’re doing is less than 1%.
Mark 00:57:59  Our odds are 95 to 100. There’s two reasons. One, we’re really good at what we do. But the other reason is we don’t do it if we think it’s going to fail. So a lot of what makes us successful is we don’t take losers to put a plain mark.
Josh 00:58:16  This has been a fantastic episode. I know I’ve got a full page of notes here that I’ve already written down, and you and I have talked about these topics many of times. but I’m still like, I love learning from you and your your wisdom that you have.
Mark 00:58:33  Very kind job.
Josh 00:58:35  Mark, I love to leave the audience with three actionable takeaways from every episode. Here are the three actionable takeaways that I noted. You let me know if I’m missing something. The action. Item number one goes back to what you just talked about, which is create products that are unique, differentiated, and that you would truly believe in, and.
Mark 00:58:57  The premium.
Josh 00:58:58  And that are premium, right. So go for that top end of the market.
Josh 00:59:02  But that’s where it becomes like that uniqueness. Right? When you have that uniqueness you can command that that premium price. But I love the analogy that you shared. And it’s the same analogy David Goggins uses, which is burn the boats. Are we going to burn the boats? Which means there is no turning back. Right. And I think too many e-commerce entrepreneurs and myself included. And Mark, you and I have riffed on this a lot of times, which is like, we’ve got 1600 SKUs. Great. A lot of those were finding product opportunity after product opportunity. However, since you and I started talking now, the uniqueness of our products is taking things to a whole new level because I see where things can go if I create the right offers and I create the right products.
Mark 00:59:49  And the right heroes.
Josh 00:59:51  Yes. So that is your action. Item number one is to create true products that you would believe in, so much that you are willing to bet a half $1 million to run a test and experiment to say, I think I can get this into retail when I work with an expert like this.
Josh 01:00:09  So that’s action item number one. Action item number two is if you believe that your product is meant for a retail store shelf, it is not as simple as like, oh, I just need to reach out to a few brokers, or I need to find the buyer’s email address on LinkedIn and pitch my product. I would argue based on the mindset shift I have had after speaking with you, is that if you want to find success in retail, even from the get go, is you have to create offers and TV the A you’re already winning on your website, on Amazon, on Walmart.com. All of your other sales channels are already winning. And then retail, when you plug that in, can give you explosive growth. You then tap into the remaining 80% of the market that is not buying your products right now, but it all comes from you creating pent up demand, which again, Mark, we talked about this separately. This is why I love TikTok shop so much. I love TikTok shop in the aspect of I can have a lot of creators that are creating a lot of demand for my products, and naturally we see that halo effect onto Amazon.
Josh 01:01:25  What I love about what you’re working on with WRTV is like, all right, imagine those TikTok viral videos that, again, it’s it’s almost like a lottery. You’re just hoping for your next hit. But on WRTV you can actually forecast demand and you can run the ads over and over again to millions of people that then increase that overall demand. So that’s action. Item number two is like figure out how you’re going to increase the demand for your product before you ever consider taking it into retail in droves.
Mark 01:01:57  Really the cheap. Keep in mind you go spend $100,000 on Facebook. You’ll reach 3 million people. Okay, I can reach those same 3 million people in 30s for 7500.
Josh 01:02:11  Yeah, that’s a massive cheat code, isn’t it?
Mark 01:02:14  It’s ridiculous.
Josh 01:02:15  So that’s the last thing I would say here for action item number three. I think for ecommerce entrepreneurs understand that the game of retail is a totally different animal. Know that the the metrics and the way you’re operating your business is a completely different mindset shift.
Josh 01:02:33  It’s a different business model. So with that being said, I would argue the best thing that you can do is go find the best experts to work with, from the brokers that you work with, getting you into retail to the brokers or the advertising agencies you are working with that are creating those TV ads, creating that pent up demand for your product. Understanding that the whole end goal is to get into retail. it’s a who, not how.
Mark 01:03:05  Which is, by the way, a great book written from two dear friends of mine, which is Dan Sullivan and Ben Hardy. It’s a great book.
Josh 01:03:13  And you were recently featured in Ben Hardy’s most recent book as well.
Mark 01:03:18  So I am Ben is very kind and he’s, he’s a he’s a very smart guy.
Josh 01:03:22  I love.
Mark 01:03:23  It. So is Dan Sullivan Dan Sullivan is brilliant.
Josh 01:03:27  So Mark, those are my three action items for our listeners. Anything you think I missed here?
Mark 01:03:31  No, I think you got it. And you know and so you can’t.
Mark 01:03:37  just go back to Dan Sullivan for a minute. Dan invented the concept of who, not how. And the whole purpose is for entrepreneurs. It is not important to know how to do things. It is only important to know what to do. Then go find. As Dan says, go find the best who’s in the business. Surround yourself with the best. Who? I always try to tell people there is no such thing as a discount lawyer or a discount CPA. You are going to get what you pay for. So if if you were on trial for something and your freedom is on the line, are you going to go hire a $1,200 an hour lawyer if you can afford it? Who you know has a track record of success, or are you going to bet it on the $150 lawyer down the street with a storefront? What’s your odds? Your odds are going to be the better lawyers going to win that case? You want to go on a tax audit with a with a bookkeeper. Do you want to go to a tax audit with an experienced CPA? Same thing goes for brokers.
Mark 01:04:46  Same thing goes for ad agencies. Surround yourself with the best you can find.
Josh 01:04:52  Yeah. Love that. Really well said Mark. All right, Mark, we got the lightning round. So you got 30s to answer each of these questions. Here we go. Number one, what’s been the most influential book that you’ve read and why?
Mark 01:05:04  Well, I read a lot and I go through a lot of books. So probably two recent books would be Doctor Ben Hardy’s new book, which is The Science of Scaling. And the second book would probably be Primal Intelligence and Primal Intelligence. I don’t know if you read that book yet.
Josh 01:05:22  I have not.
Mark 01:05:23  Check it out. Primal intelligence, fascinating book. And it is really about how it’s very much built about the Navy Seals, but it’s very much built about how human intuition is unique to humans and not to AI, and how you can master your intuition and bring out this ability to see around corners and bring out this ability to see what other people don’t see.
Mark 01:05:57  That’s what it’s about.
Josh 01:05:58  Fantastic. Well, on that note of AI, what’s your favorite AI tool and how have you been using it?
Mark 01:06:04  We use a lot of AI tools. I use ChatGPT a lot. The key for people is a lot of people use ChatGPT as an expanded search engine, and that is not what it is. It’s not what it should be. You need to think of AI not as tools, but think of AI as collaborators. So ChatGPT has an IQ of 135 and the education of a PhD in every topic possible. So think of it more as I have this other person in the room with me who has a 135 IQ and a PhD. How can I leverage that intelligence, not ask them where to buy something? How can I leverage that intelligence? That’s how you use them. The other thing on chat or on any of the AI’s is AI is a 1080, ten model, 10% human at the beginning. The better the queries, the better the questions, the better the input, the better the 80% of the work in the middle is.
Mark 01:07:09  Now you need a human to polish it and correct it and make it actionable on the last 10%. So it’s 10% human, 80% machine, 10% human.
Josh 01:07:20  I love that 1080 ten principle as it relates to AI. I love that one. Very good analogy. All right Marc, final question. Who is somebody that you admire or respect the most in the e-commerce space that other people should be following and why?
Mark 01:07:33  There’s a lot of people doing great stuff in e-commerce, including yourself. So I mean, obviously they should be paying attention to what you’re doing. Probably the the smartest, most capable person that I know in that digital. Not AI space. Well, also AI space, but digital space is another doctor Mark young. Only this doctor, Mark young happens to be my son and he is just unbelievably brilliant in this space.
Josh 01:08:07  Awesome. Great recommendation Mark. If people want to learn more about the Jekyll and Hyde Agency, they want to contact you. What’s the best way to do so?
Mark 01:08:17  So you can go to Jekyll Hyde Labs comm.
Mark 01:08:21  You can also go to CPG insiders. Com for the podcast. If you just want to learn who I am, you can go to meet Mark Juncker. Okay. I’ll leave you one other business that we have. Very quickly we also own the company called Pharma Vision. So if you visit any Kroger anywhere in America, you will see kiosks with large televisions playing TV commercials in the pharmacy. We actually own and operate all that entire television network, which gives you a little bit of an insight as to how deep our relationships are with major retail.
Josh 01:08:57  I love that. Another way to increase brand awareness.
Mark 01:09:01  Yep. Right in store. Love with with doctor TV in the store.
Josh 01:09:06  Even better. Mark, this has been a fantastic episode. Thanks so much for your time today and sharing your wisdom with us all.
Mark 01:09:13  Thanks for having me Josh. It’s been fun. Seriously.
MC 01:09:16  Thank you for listening. Visit Ecomm Breakthrough Comm for more information. If you’ve enjoyed today’s episode, the best way you can show your appreciation is by clicking the subscribe button and quickly leaving a review.
MC 01:09:28  See you again next time!