we're going to get into a whole bunch of things today we're going to talk about marketing and we're going to talk about the market and we're just consider the conversation takes us so first off let tell me a little bit about quicksilver how you started it and kind of you know a little bit about your past in your background your quicksilver is a virtual marketing firm virtual and what i mean by that is there's only two people that are employees of quicksilver myself and my partner john pearson  kids i had kids we were sick of commuting in new york so he started working for a small agency in new jersey and announced to me and i come out and work for some firms in new jersey and we kind of reconnected and in two thousand and seven we decided to start a own firm and we didn't know where to start and we just sort of punted and went completely virtual the market had gotten really frenetic it had gotten really volatile we didn't know who we would hire first what office we would get and he's a creative director and i am a brand strategist which is really the two people that you need on a on a good account and we said everything else we can access through our colleagues through freelancing and it turned out to be the right model for a number of reasons the first is which was just self preservation this is two thousand and seven and two thousand and eight the market crashed and marketing dried up to a large degree and since we didn't have a whole lot of overhead a lot of staff we were able to survive it but more importantly from the client's perspective we don't tell the client what they need we don't bring to them a presupposed staff to try to drive that you should do web work because we've got a web guy who doesn't run out of enough work to do we listen to clients and it may be national advertising it may be posters and table tents to make employees feel better about the place they work anything in between once we talk to the clients and they say this is the kind of communication that we need we either do it ourselves because you can do so much yourself now just laptops but if we need an expert if we need someone to shoot some film you know great people who shoot film for you know someone who needs to design a website we bring them in for the project or even for a long term assignment so it's a virtual work for the coil it's it's what the clients need the drives the staff that we put in place and it's perfect because you guys have you know you guys can build the strategy and then build the creative program around it and right outside of that's just how we're going to execute that's right that you will have a network exactly and if you go to any good agency your campaign your communications are only as good as the brand strategist and the project manager person who's running things and the creative director who's coming up with a big ideas and whether those two in corporate america myself is knowing that there are so many times that he said i mean i mean you really need to have versatility and what you know might work perfectly for one client late not work and by the way the staff that's involved in that might need to change and be different based on just the the culture of that particular client and so as i like that versatility actually i think it gives you a leg up competitive advantage from from the guys that are set over here this is the way we do it in our ridiculously changing world so we need to have that kind of flexibility so yeah so that and flexibility sometimes when we are great opportunities i was speaking with a client recently who just needed a poster a physical poster great to spread a message with their employees and then one of their one of the clients brilliantly said if you put a q r code on the poster then all the employees can use their phones to access some talking before i mean that's a such a great point because the collaboration aspect like you said when you partner with a client is very much the way we work because we're doing some of the same work it's why we can partner very well together because we're doing the internal you know many times called change management it's really internal marketing and communications at the end of the day that's what it is but we're getting a little deeper into what do we need to change what's the behavior we need to change what are the outcomes we're looking for and ok of by the way how are you do this right and we're always looking for how we engage people but that that partnership with a client were like you said before i mean you're collaborating with them in a way where they're bringing some ideas to the table they governance and compliance or finance you didn't have access to marketing tools and even if you did you ran into the arrogance of your own marketing department right or the agency that's fallen away because you've got i pads where you can shoot straight on your you know write your own computer right right right if your own hands so you can bring great creative marketing messages piano things you couldn't before that really energize employee base energize executive suite energize investors yes the three minute video is sort of becoming the calling of the realm now and then did a three minute video on why i should follow this compliance initiative or or why it should invest in this company yeah the world is going there and some marketing for good and bad it's a double edged sword marketing is now a tool everybody can use but it's still a discipline that you have to use careful what you do and you know what you were we were talking before you brought up something that i think is is so important that quick example i mean we are quite recently who wanted to launch a campaign where they were using their phones and they were able to videotape one another hey what do you think of this right and they wanted people to be able to post that online so we we went round and round way because there are some dynamics with that there's some risk with that and there has to be a gatekeeper to kind of figure out how to do that but we were talking earlier about consistency and stuff like that you want to bring into the organization but you want to kind of blended in in a way where it's interesting to people excited but it's not so way out there that they can't relate to it as it as it's related to to what they've been doing their companies before because we're doing the work inside but we were talking about consistency we're just mention is before there are brand names out there and you wonder is it just genius marketing or or is it is it that consistent message where you know we kept it to two things and those are the two things people know about our product and that's it that's all and i think for the novice ray it's about what's new and exciting today maybe not about the longevity of right consistency is tough across to work sees it in real time when you launch the campaign there are a lot of stakeholders yeah you know internet in the company finance age or you know packaging for a very different a different experience using don't know each other how do you get them speaking the same language and then they all have vendors right and every time you instructed vendor what to do it gets taken for another wrinkle and it's taken for another change pretty soon you have lots of different voices speaking so that's the first act is getting everybody to be consistent cross buckets and political gas sometimes what's the message you we're starting way we don't care and sometimes you can't even get people to agree in a line on what still all do consistency on this axis that the other access axis is time which is everybody thinks that something needs to get changed haven't marketing marketing people are the worst of this every time you hire a new marketing person they want to start a and it just shows that's what human nature is everybody who takes a new position wants to show their value right i've come up with a new platform yeah well sometimes the platform that exists yeah is the best plan great and we've seen for years that the best extremal marketers the ones that hold to what their brand is whether it's nike or eminem's great or the powerful brands yeah it's the same with internal communications you can't just keep changing writing time over and over again because people that actually just get cynical and they say well here comes the next campaign old i'll say ideas from my leadership role and what i think is most important i'm shifting priorities and now you know we're working on this and so yeah how do you how do you keep other things that you're trying to in the mix of rolling out still a priority yeah there's always a challenge and in your world change management the name itself the branding of the discipline that kind of says things are going to keep changing and it almost tells people yeah but you can manage yeah exactly stuff it's volatile and i think it is for for both good and bad the technologies have made the world more eclectic more volatile and makes people think they've got a lot more power than they do everything's been completely change who we are and how we show up in the marketplace you know how we work with one another what we value want to change everything by the way we want to keep this well managed it is about at that for a while yes and in my world in branding again it's a great brands that that land on something and then and then stay with it over time you can continue to vamp it you can continue to do interation zaw it right but you have to be true absolutely and you can see if there's a lot of vamping going on but at the end of the day there's stuff you have to live by and companies are having trouble yeah sticking with the things that they the writers they can live by well you know we were talking about this earlier i mean if we're really sticky and we take a look at the rate of change in our world and we take a look at how you know how quickly technology is is just turning over constantly and becoming obsolete the second we learn something we're talking about our kids the second i'm taught something like my twelve year old you know we're switching it up on the you know i'm upgrading my operating system you know it's very different how we keep up with that rate so when you think about it i mean it's always interesting to me about about marketing internal  crammed into it that's where it gets crazy and you take a look at the marketplace and the volatility of so many things you know i think that is the biggest challenge like how do you stay consistent what does that look like how do you stay consistent but not yeah they knew a long time ago that even a brand that big there's only room with all the world's brains for you to be about one thing right and it might change a little bit over time but it hasn't changed more than once or two or three times they've changed major campaigns in the last twenty or thirty years and that's g e they've done hundreds of millions of dollars gastro yak at people so chan imagine a company that only has some billions it has in it there's not a whole lotta room for different things that they're saying right in people's brains we're all just assaulted by stuff any day and we only have room for a short number of things and you have to stand for that yep yep now so i know with some of design fallen to john's world to kind of decide like what tack we're going to take and what do you look at culture and that kind of thing when you're making those decisions sure ultimately it falls into john's department as a creative director to come up with the ideas but those ideas come from a brief that's written by me that has been coated from a lot of thoughts that the client had and then refined a little bit and shared with the client we all agree to that classic stuff whether you're doing a multi million dollar ad campaign or one of these films that you referred to where we did some governance and compliance work for a company that doesn't generally lead itself to creative stuff this is you know  actually sign a piece of paper on a regular basis saying that they've read read all the documents and agree to and that's important and all fair but to get people to be more engaged in it we just shot some some funny three minute films about you know people being safe on the job one of which we did and he'd say a reverse striptease where we had a large evacuee were a nice looking guy came in wearing nothing but boxers and when we played the soldiery music he put all of his stuff on the gloves entertainment factor not sure because again people yes spend their time where they're going to have a little bit of joy for two minutes yep if i have to read through you know this i'm major fan my name and it's a fine line is right up people's lives are at stake right but you know in the world that we live in now people see entertaining videos about all kinds of things that has become the language we all speak so you claim to have to take that tool and use it to some degree as best you can and all tools yeah as best you can even for stuff that traditionally work in the marketing department right right right well yeah i mean again that's very think that we overlap in a lot of the work that we do because because really i mean we're just we're trying to engage for the same thing we're trying to you know engage folks in a new program and we need them to understand what it really means and why it's important and maybe sure why it's important to the growth of a cunt company but at the end of the day was a really mean for me you know where does it land in my part of the world and my own like we're in a company redoing all of their job roles right now ok you're really redefining my identity yeah they're really need at the end of the day you know i you know what's the reaction to that and for us i mean we look at how we prepare people right so how we preparing people to like take in that information which you know sometimes is interesting and one of the interesting things about your world where a lot of the communications are being done is being performed as it were by c d s by the piece of them that their messages to their internal people used to be very very heavily processed everybody's messages were very very heavily processed right and for the outside world to see anything yeah it's that's that's interesting because we were talking about this earlier just in terms of you know executive branch and he was a differentiation i mean like you said or you see the big buffer with the marketing department but you know world access you know anybody can go online and connect is the only thing what i'm saying how i am representing myself work with a lot of executives that are now you know writing books writing articles doing presentations  fabulous wonderful help but how are you visible and is it consistent with the brand of working for is a consistent with maybe where i'm going doesn't matter there's no hiding anymore there's no h know so it does it does make you think about that from we were talking about a lot earlier talking about consistent brands and one of my favorites i think i mentioned campbell's soup and just so interesting such a traditional traditional brand is switching it up switching it up you know trying to kind of bring that tradition forward but it is morrison who is just a very transparent very authentic c e o is out there talking about what she's doing you're making her point of view very known very collaborative by the way and her see suite is doing the same thing at her encouragement so they're very excessive all leadership team for that particular organization when you think about younger investors those are things that they're starting to be concerned with not just what are the numbers on the sheet and you know hey that looks like a good brand and it looks like it's you know performs pretty well but what's tomorrow look like you know who's driving that bus yeah my two sons who are was i thought it was a good bunch of guys in it in a brewery so funny that's just one thing that's important to them whether it's organic whether you know whether they're good corporate citizen or whatever yeah people find out about the backstory of the company yeah through the c oftentimes and we didn't see that before now you know jack jack welch at g e was the first you know whether you liked him or hated him people saw it at the time as being cult of personality and it wasn't so much that it was that he was willing to step up and represent the company across all levels sure and the myth at the agency that i worked at was that he looked at every piece of marketing material that went out of g e yeah we bring the things to life yeah and he made himself co equal with the both professionally and personally it's certainly it certainly provided a model for for where we are now with all these tools i want to know about your product yet i want to know how you people feel about embraer these lists of greatest places to work that's important to people that aren't even looking at it from an employment standpoint they want to spend their money on a company i want to buy their product yet my kids are your kids age same thing when the dollar matters where their dollars their vote and they're very clear to say it and for them yeah date they think you know they're not impulsive consumers and so that's interesting for us to think about and it kind of leads me to what i wanted to talk about a bit you were talking about earlier is kind of and so i think we were we were talking a little bit about me when i'm right when you tell me a little bit about that sure i'm the past president and member of the old barracks museum trent wonderful place as a history major in college it's my view that the battles of trenton were the most important battles in american history and yet there are some of the only battles fought on this continent that are in current urban locations so you can go to gettysburg and spend this beautiful picnic day in central pennsylvania trent's a little tougher right because it's an urban locations harder to invision what the battles look like when it was a little hamlet of the time but you can now write i'm sorry you can now you can now because we've put in place some of the things that people can see when i started working on it about ten years ago and the internet really didn't have the power that it has now the only way you could experience the old barracks was to go and see if yeah now we've made that virtual my two sons who i spoke about before this summer people that have got a story to tell yeah and so you're right it levels everything yeah and where we spend our time where we spend our time you just mentioned we are where we spend our money there are a lot of really good things going on out there  tennessee thinking forward you know does it has affect the lives of our kids and our grandkids and you start thinking that way ok there's a lot of good to be done out there so now if somebody wants to take a look at that they go to barracks over skateboard guys got quicksilver before our age dot com go out there they have some fabulous videos that are worth taking a look at and doing some wonderful work in the marketplace so pleasure to have you here today on inter