Kris Longo Podcast Transcript
Kris Longo joins host Brian Thomas on The Digital Executive Podcast.
Welcome to Coruzant Technologies, home of The Digital Executive Podcast.
Brian Thomas: Welcome to The Digital Executive today’s guest is Kris Longo for nearly 25 years, Kris Longo has lived at the intersection of marketing and pop culture, creating winning marketing campaigns that ignite consumer passion and succeed by virtue of high levels of creativity.
And authenticity, no two ways about it. It’s been a colorful, some might say four color career, quite literally from a start packaging and selling advertising and branded content initiatives at Warner Brothers, DC comics division to serving as publisher of the legendary heavy metal magazine to founding and launching the web three award winning fandom focused marketing agency, Modern Fanatic, Longo has played in some of the finest IP sandboxes and evangelized content marketing long before it was a standard line item on an RFP. Longo is an ardent believer in taking an individual’s assigned at birth demographic, such as age, sex, religion, et cetera, out of the marketing and focusing on a consumer’s chosen passions and fandoms to target them.
As the current owner of a specialty marketing agency, he has delivered celebrated fandom focused multimedia campaigns for Sony Pictures, Red Roof Inn, Bernina of America, Toys R Us, and so many more.
Well, good afternoon, Kris. Welcome to the show!
Kris Longo: Thanks, Brian. Appreciate being here.
Brian Thomas: Absolutely. Fun-est part of my day, jumping on a podcast with amazing guests from around the world, 50 countries and counting.
So, Kris, I do really appreciate you making this time. I know sometimes it is difficult to traverse the time zones, but here we go, Kris, jumping right in looking back on your 25-year career that spans from Warner Brothers, DC Comics division to Heavy Metal Magazine, and now Modern Fanatic. Could you share how your experiences across these varied platforms shape your approach to marketing and content creation? And what lessons did you carry forward from each role?
Kris Longo: Sure. You know, each of these experiences that you mentioned here were the ones that really fortified me. There were a lot of things that happened in between, but these 3 are the ones that I think, at the end of the day, define the work that I’ve done.
My time at DC Comics and Warner Brothers. Yeah. That really set me on a path that I continue to explore to this day before D.C. I was just sleepwalking my way through a career in pharmaceutical advertising and being young and stupid and willing to take risks. I just decided 1 day to up and quit and then I went on a path to find the right opportunity.
Something that lit a fire in me and, you know, when you’re that young, you’re in 20s, you don’t even know what that is. You just know, you don’t do the things you don’t want to do. So, I wound up finding an opportunity and again, this dates me, but it was in the New York Times classifieds for a job at Warner brothers.
You know, it was an advertising entry level gig that I went in and interviewed for. And when the interview with HR was over, they said, well, now you get to go across the street to the building where you’d be working for DC comics and mad magazine. And I’ll tell you the young 10-year-old comic reader in me just exploded.
So, I did get that job and I was thrilled to be there. My primary role at DC was to go out to marketers and media buyers evangelize the comic book format and audience is a viable 1 and 1 that spends money. Not an easy job back in the late 90s and early aughts, because there was a real perception of this not being a viable audience back then.
We didn’t have comic book movies or TV shows. Then there was a real dearth of that. It was seen as something. Cult issues were something that ceased to exist, which wasn’t true. It was just a little bit more underground at that time. But, you know, even though the masses were not viewing geek culture is cool.
I knew enough about how varied. And viable this audience was that I was a really good salesperson for them. So, at DC, I sold a lot of advertising. I sold a lot of custom publishing back then. That’s what it was called not content marketing. But we sold to various categories. Some you wouldn’t expect, like, pharmaceutical.
But it was a really interesting journey and if anything, it’s sort of fortified for me. How assumptive decision makers in marketing and media can be. And how they let their personal biases sometimes influence a marketing message. So, I really love going out there and changing hearts and minds and bringing media buyers to comic shops to see what the audience look like.
And that literally formed the thesis of modern fanatic, which is. Saying to marketing decision makers, don’t assume, you know, the audience don’t assume, you know, who the gamer is, or who the comic reader is, or who the cause player is and certainly don’t assume they’re all the same and they have the same.
Affinities and shopping habits and all of that. We’re really talking about how varied and colorful the fandom landscape is today and how you really need to approach all of these different fandoms with caution. Moving on to heavy metal, that was another very valuable learning experience for me, different kinds of lessons, but very valuable as a marketer.
It was a little bit of an unplanned detour in my career that was driven by the pandemic and my business slowing down in general. And it was definitely challenging sometimes positively, sometimes very frustrating. But it did teach me a lot about how to navigate the waters of legacy brands. Heavy metal was a 45-year-old brand at the time, and it had diehard fans who had been reading since day 1 had a lot of opinions about what the magazine should be and what the brand should be about.
And it was really difficult to navigate that while actively seeking a newer, fresher, younger audience. It was really a nonstop exercise and bifurcating all of my marketing messages and budget just to appease these 2 segments. And my hope was the legacy fan base would wind up catching up to the newer, nimbler fan base that we were onboarding and they would play nicely together, but it never really happened.
It never really jailed. And I think ultimately, we were making a product that didn’t please anybody trying to please everybody. You know how that goes. So it really showed me that, like, if you have a niche and you have an identity, you lean into that identity and hope the quality of the content finds you the right audience.
You don’t try to seek an audience that maybe is not ready for you. But bringing me into today with Modern Fanatic this has been the most fulfilling and rewarding chapter of my career by far. And again, my mission is still the same as when I was out pounding the pavement for DC comics. I’m just out selling a much larger canvas of fandom.
We still dabble in the comic world. I’m a fan. I’ll always love it. And I’ll always want to have a touch point in it in my career, but the agency’s mission really is 2-fold. We’d like to show brands from the outside, you know, by the outside, I mean, non-endemics think like consumer-packaged goods. Travel insurance, things like that.
We like to show them really clear paths to successful, renewable, long-term engagement with different subsets of fandom and for brands who are already on the inside entertainment brands, like gaming movie studios, publishing TV networks. We’re a really effective agency of record for marketing all of their products and their brands.
So, we’re lucky enough to dabble in both kinds of relationships with both categories of client. And it’s just been an amazing ride. Our message continues to resonate, and we couldn’t be more thrilled about where we are today.
Brian Thomas: Thank you so much. I appreciate the backstory there, the culmination of the things that gave you the biggest joy and some of the challenges.
It’s kind of like you were a kid at DC and then had to grow up into this heavy metal outlet and learn some of the challenges there. But, you know, you brought it all together and created such an amazing company with modern fanatics. So I appreciate the story. I really, really do. And Kris, switching gears in your work, you’ve emphasized the importance of authenticity and creativity and marketing campaigns.
Can you share an example of a campaign that epitomizes this approach for you, perhaps one that ignited consumer passion in a way that was both surprising and deeply effective?
Kris Longo: Sure. You know, to me, Brian, the most effective campaigns are always the ones that are simple, and they shoot straight. It’s really easy to confuse the visibility of a campaign with effectiveness of a campaign.
They are not the same thing. Very often, very large spends ensure that your message is seen, but it really takes a certain level of skill and effort and understanding an audience to make. A campaign is effective and actually affect consumer behavior. So great example to me is 1 that came through our agency.
It’s a small one. It’s very likely not on your radar, but it means a lot to me just in terms of resonating with the target. It was quite a success. In our very, very early days of the agency before I was lucky enough to, you know, have a bigger staff and things like that. We had the opportunity to work on a campaign with the hotel chain.
Red roof in campaign was called budget heroes. At the time, they had a very fandom savvy head of marketing who suspected that the hotel chain was leaving money on the table by not speaking directly to pop culture convention attendees. He happened to love comic books and games and he loved going to all those conventions.
And he had an inkling that, you know, there was a campaign in there somewhere. So, we actually created a campaign in tandem with them that implored convention employees. To stay at red roof in so you can spend more money on comic books and games and all the ephemera that you like at a convention and not default towards staying at the closest possible hotel or the hotel that’s connected to the convention center.
So, the proposition was to stay here. We’ll give you a discount code. That’s uniquely yours. You could share with your friends and anybody you’re going to the con with. And we’ll help you have some more money in your pocket. Really simple. We created a campaign that utilizes digital advertising influencer marketing, even activated some print.
If you can believe it or not in comic books and some pop culture centric magazines, no, 1 was trying to reinvent the wheel. You know, there were no assumptions made about the audience. It’s simply identified an opportunity based on a consumer challenge within that particular fandom. And in that regard, it was a really big success.
That’s the key. In my opinion, fandom based marketing and affinity based marketing. You don’t try to co-op the fandom and own it. You try and be additive to that culture and celebrate it. And that’s precisely what they did. And another 1, I’d like to mention we were lucky enough to work with toys are us starting in 2022 as part of their rebirth as a retail chain.
So, they reemerged in 2022 as an add on to all of Macy’s locations nationwide. They reached out to us simply looking, scrambling a little bit looking for some thoughts about how to put together sort of a socially driven relaunch program for toys are us and their mascot. Jeffrey the giraffe. So, if the timing actually happened to sync up perfectly with New York comic con, we were all planning to be there and work there.
So, we set up a scenario where Jeffrey, the giraffe an actor in costume, he was on the ground for the weekend meeting and greeting fans and then doing Dan costs has with excuse me, dance contests with them. To the toys are us theme and all of it was on tick tock and Instagram on toys are us as master accounts.
Again, really simple, just a fan engagement program. They were hoping for some shares of a little bit of virality, and they certainly got that. The program was so effective ultimately that modern fanatic 1, a W3 industry silver medal award for user experience for that last year. So, we’re very proud of that and we’re very proud of the fact that we can offer.
You know, brand marketers, the opportunity to actually infiltrate these fandoms without spending millions of dollars to do. So, we, we are big proponents of, like, the rolling up your sleeves, hard work, maintenance work of marketing.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. I love that. And, you know, a lot of people can relate to people that are truly part of that community and being authentic.
And I love both examples that you shared there. And that’s amazing. It just goes to show. Some of the creative work that you do there at your agency and Kris switching gears a little bit here, considering the rapid evolution of social media and digital platforms. What do you see as the biggest challenge for marketers today, especially those trying to engage with niche fandoms and communities.
Kris Longo: Yeah, it’s a challenging landscape. You know, you really need a navigator if you’re coming in blind and that’s really what we try to be. We try to create. Really nimble campaigns and approaches to marketing for clients that can weather any kind of a storm, you know, virtually or literally. 1 of the downsides to the rapid evolution of all of that that that you outlined is this perception that you’re marketing and your message and your success will be transmitted faster and easier as a result.
Like, the, you know, the shortcuts for all in place. And it’s really not true. It actually requires a lot more discipline to navigate through social than it would possibly in traditional means 20 some odd years ago. There’s more media than ever vying for fans’ attention. And to get their attention, you need to be super persistent.
You need to be absolutely genuine, and you need to be simple and clear in your intentions as a marketer and in your marketing message. So a clear, clear call to action. You know, a very crystal-clear value proposition for the consumer, because really nobody wants to, or has time to click 3 to 4 times to find the secret prize inside anything anymore.
So, you know, the advice we give all of our clients is, you know, be patient. Be steady and, you know, if you’re not working with Modern Fanatic, work with somebody who can help you navigate that particular world that you’re looking to engage with digitally.
Brian Thomas: Thank you. And that’s so helpful. You know, having a clear call to action obviously makes a world of difference and you are really.
Are sharing a message that people can relate to, you’ve got some substantial content there that again, people that are looking for what you’re trying to help market always makes a difference. And I appreciate that share in Kris last question of the day, content marketing was a buzzword long before it became a standard request for proposals, you know, the whole RFP process.
Based on your pioneering work, where do you see the future of content marketing heading, especially in relation to emerging tech like blockchain
Kris Longo: NFTs and AI? That’s a big question, isn’t it? I, I, you know, I, I really wish I had the answer to that question very directly, but I’ll certainly. Share some thinking with you about this.
So, it’s no secret. There’s a lot of bad press around some of this technology still. But at the end of the day, I think you and I know it’s a matter of intent behind anything. I don’t think anybody who created any of these technologies was looking to do anything negative with them. I think sometimes you get things into the hands of the wrong people just like anything else and terrible things can happen.
There’s so many potentially positive applications of and blockchain technology. But all that messaging and all that intent gets muddled when it’s in the hands of the wrong people. So that said, I’d love to see these tools used in a way that empowers and supports content creators without result in job losses.
That could be revolutionary. It could certainly democratize content distribution for the little guys and for an agency like modern fanatic, where we work with independent content creators on campaigns quite frequently. And that can be somebody who creates comic books, somebody who’s creating a board game and running it as a Kickstarter.
A lot of these challenges are very similar for creators. It would be thrilling to see these folks better supported with sharper tools in their toolbox. Quite frankly. The thing we hear most from our clients is we want to be more focused on creativity and if such tools existed to support somebody, rather than usurp the creative process.
I think that’s a really great outcome for, for just about everybody. And of course, the educational impacts of something like that would be phenomenal. But again, you know, we just want to see creators focused on doing what they do best and not losing sleep because they don’t know if they’re going to earn any money, or they don’t know if their material is going to be pirated, or their job’s going to be taken away.
We are believers that the human touch is what makes comics, games, and all storytelling resonate. And as an agency, we just hope to be stewards of those stories and those messages.
Brian Thomas: I really do love that. Kris, you’re all about again, at the end of the day, taking care of the people. Right? And that creativity needs to be left in the power of the people that do that stuff.
Again, talk to hundreds of people about AI and blockchain and all these other things that are coming out. Yes, some of it is going to be beneficial and help create some efficiencies around the creators, but absolutely. I agree. I think at the end of the day, humans need to retain that creativity and continue to provide the service that they provide best to the world.
So, thank you for sharing. And then Kris, it was such a pleasure having you on today. And I look forward to speaking with you real soon.
Kris Longo: I would love that, Brian. Thanks for having me on. This was a lot of fun.
Brian Thomas: Bye for now.
Kris Longo Podcast Transcript. Listen to the audio on the guest’s podcast page.
