From the ‘80s to Now: The Evolution of Advertising

You generally have a feeling about something and then you use some facts to justify the feeling you have about it.

There's a threshold that you cross where you know you've built a good brand if people are willing to tattoo it on your body.

Business people make decisions based on emotion and feeling as much as a consumer does.

Is there a trend in advertising? I never thought that this would be the thing. From South Bend to Evansville and everywhere in between, this is Get In, the show focused on the Hoosier State and the incredible stories happening here today. I'm Nate Spangle, founder of Get Indiana, and I will be your host for today's conversation. If you've been hunting for a brunch spot that understands food allergies and has bold flavors, look no further than Fire and Ice Cafe in Indianapolis. This hidden gem serves up European inspired dishes that are entirely gluten-free.

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Grab your brunch crew and head to Fire and Ice Cafe at 6211 Alisonville Road, and your taste buds are going to thank you. Now, let's dive into the episode. My guest today is Tom Daener, the president and CEO of Young and Laramore, a full-ervice advertising agency based right here in Indianapolis. With a career spanning more than three decades, Tom has led Y and L to a national recognition for innovative marketing campaigns while championing community engagement right here in Indiana. He is sadly a Wabash College alumni, but he balances leadership with mentorship and civic involvement. Today we're going to be talking about your background through the advertising agency.

You started in this industry I believe like in 1985

89

89 clipped into the 80s. Uh so I'm several decades into uh the career.

Well, you're just uh older, wiser, you've seen a few things when it comes to advertising. We're going to be talking about that journey from what it looked like in 1989 to today with the rise of social media and AI and all those fun things. talk about what you guys are doing because uh YL was started in 1983, correct? So, I mean, you guys have been doing this for a minute. The longevity is there. You're a staple of Indianapolis here in the advertising marketing community. I'm excited to welcome you to the show. Top, welcome to Get In.

Thanks for having me, Nate.

Man, I'm uh this is going to be fun because I mean, we've been doing this for a minute and like in in social media time like we're getting older, but like in advertising time, we're the young kids on the block. So, I'm excited to hear about your journey that took you from Crawford'sville into the advertising agency. Did Did you grow up in Indiana?

I moved to Indiana uh when I was about 9 years old. Uh born in Ohio and then moved to Indiana in the mid70s.

What uh what part of the state?

Uh Wabash initially and then

like Wabash Indiana.

Wash Indiana.

Home of the Apaches.

That's right. But I uh my dad taught and coached at Northfield High School and I know you went to Triton so you know that that neck of the woods pretty well. The Northfield is a great pull on the north side of Wabash count or Wabash Indiana. The Norsman great mascot, one of one in the state of Indiana. Okay. So, from Wabash to Wabash.

No, from Wabash to Westfield.

Oh.

So, moved to Westfield my freshman year of high school. My

Were there still fields there then?

It was very different. Very different. My high school, my my graduating class had 125.

Wow. That's I mean, I don't know what it is today. Probably 4 or 500.

Oh, it's probably 700.

Seven? Oh, man. It's It's huge.

It's big. And then Okay. So from from Northern Indiana down to Westfield, then out to Crawford'sville.

Correct.

Gotcha. Okay. So four years liberal arts college. When you graduate, what was your major in?

So I was an econ major, English lit minor. Was on the track

to law school probably.

And uh I had been interested in in drawing and art earlier in my life and and but didn't pursue any of those things in high school. So when I got to Wabash liberal arts, I think the only reason I became an econ major rather than an English lit major was that I felt like well in econ felt a little more responsible and hirable and uh

yeah, that's fair.

I was on the law school track. I was accepted into IU law school in Bloomington. Had my deposit in. But late in my junior year, a guy from Leo Bernett Advertising in Chicago, uh who was an alum came back and talked about this thing called client service. and he talked about how it involved leadership and team building and I didn't even know that career existed and so that planted a seed for me. So by the end of my senior year I had decided I just don't think law is where I want to go.

Yeah.

And so started talking to people about how to get into advertising. At the time the advice was you should go back to school get an MBA. I said okay but in the meantime I still need to get a job. So I worked at American United Life for two years. I took the GMAT in the fall of 85 and got into IU School of Business.

They wouldn't just let you shift that law school deposit.

No, they didn't. It was a whole different process. Take different test and everything else. Got in, ended up having to defer a year and save money because it was a full-time gig. My wife and I just got married.

We had no money. And so, uh, entered school in ' 87, uh, with the intent of getting into advertising and and probably going to Chicago, uh, working for a big shop and then coming back to Indiana at some point.

Wow. Okay. One of the the key pieces to start with is when you say advertising, a lot of times that gets bundled, especially today, into marketing and like what's the difference between advertising, marketing, like how do how do you guys differentiate that? I would say advertising is the communications part of marketing. Marketing is much bigger um in terms of price, promotion, the product. Advertising is I would call it a subset of that where you're doing any piece of communication that is helping to frame what that product or service is. That's how I would think about advertising.

Okay. Now, that's changed over time where when I first was in the industry, there were fewer tools. Um, and now, you know, you're a tool, right?

So to speak, to speak. Come on.

But, you know, these podcasts, uh, content creators, influencers, it's much more democratic than it was when I started. There were very few people that could actually get in the business. and now virtually anyone with a cell phone can get into it. And so that's that's maybe the biggest change I've seen over time.

I'm excited to unpack that. So you end up graduating from IU with your MBA,

correct?

And the thought going in was, okay, yeah, we're going to have to go cut our you're going to have to go cut your teeth in a big shop in Chicago. But that doesn't quite end up being what happened.

Didn't happen. No, I end up not frankly I didn't get the job offer I was looking for.

Oh. And at the same time, uh, I met David Young of Young and Laramore. Um, they were a young hot shop, uh, here in Indianapolis, up andcoming shop. They were formed in 83. They were in Broadripple at a little two and a half story house, not just a few blocks from where we're sitting right now. We just headed off. And he saw something in me, uh, where I think he felt like I would be a future leader of the company. Even as in our first interview, he just saw something in me. And so I jumped on board.

That was That was 1989.

That was 1989. Been doing this a while.

36 years later, here you are as president and CEO.

Wow. What did your role look like or just what did the industry look like advertising in, let's say, the '9s, the first decade?

Yeah. I mean, I started as an account manager. Um, and a lot of, you know, we had many more clients, more project work, uh, more B2B work. Uh, one of the first things I worked on was Prime Time pizza. And it was a concept. Again, this is 1989 on the west side of Indianapolis. And you could order a pizza and you could pick up a videotape. So, they had a catalog. It was like a Blockbuster and a pizza shop rolled into one.

I mean, that had to be a million-dollar business. It

lasted maybe a year or two. No way. That seems like a

It seemed like it would be a good idea

because I feel like Family Video might have put like like I think the collaboration of my childhood that was

Family Video and Little Caesars teamed up that was great. It was like and then it was and then it was gone then.

So So my career seen a lot of changes and and the the account that really I cut my teeth on was Steak and Shake.

Oh,

picked up Steak and Shake in 1990.

Where were they based at that point?

Here in Indianapolis.

Okay. So they started maybe in Kansas or somewhere else. I started in Normal, Illinois.

There it is.

Normal, Illinois. And uh came on board. Uh they had about 117 stores. We started with a television campaign, launched it here in Indianapolis in 1991 and helped them grow from about 117 stores to over 500 and through 2008 and then there was an ownership change and everything changed after that.

Yeah. I mean it seems especially in yeah early 2000s like Steak and Shake was I mean it's been obviously had some ups and downs but like was very hot and that was who you were like

that was our advertising and and and that's where you talk about the 90s television was the dominant force and our TV ads if you remember those you might even be too young to remember some of them.

I was born in 97.

Yeah. So, um, you saw the late the later part of it, but we would do pretty interesting things where we would take a 30 secondond spot and chop it into three pieces and we would have three little ads within a 30-cond spot. So, you felt like you were seeing more ads and we would do goofy things like at the end of a spot when you had the little bean pot at the end and there would be a voice just said bean croc and and you're done. And so, um, that TV

bean croc.

Bean croc.

Bean croc. What's bean crack?

It's the little bean pot that the baked beans are in, which I'm not even sure they have anymore.

And you Bean Crack.

Bean Crack.

Whose idea was that?

Charlie Hopper, who was one of our creative directors and writers, wrote it. I'm not sure if it was his idea or not. It's that's the thing about this industry. That's try not to get too tied up in whose specific idea it was. Um

because it's the ideation. It's the creative process.

Well, and and you know, I was a team sport athlete in high school and a little bit in college. And for me, advertising is as much a team sport as there is because everyone has their separate role, but you're kind of interdependent. So you have account people, you have strategy people, you have creative people, you have media people, and we have all of those people uh involved in the process, developing the strategy um together as opposed to it's as opposed to a you know a assembly line process where someone does the strategy and hands off and hands off and hands off. Our stuff is baked together as a team.

Yeah. Where you know, whoever has the relationship brings the new customer in part of that process. You have your client relationship. You have your creative, your ad, the media buyer. All these different pieces are all working together to create cool campaigns.

But even even the bringing of a client in is not a single person. It's a team effort. It's you know, when when we're working with the kinds of clients we want to work with, it's usually a really big decision for them. And it's it's a relationship. I mean, the relationships we have with our clients are long-term. We've worked with the Delta Faucet Company on the Brizzo brand that we have that we helped create 21 years ago. We've worked with Goodwill here since 1996. We've worked with Indiana Farm Beer Insurance since 2009.

Spectacular partner. Just like we want our relationships with our employees to be longterm, we want our relationships with our clients to be longterm and really operate at a brand level, at a foundational level. So, we are true partners in that process.

And I feel like, wow, there's a lot to unpack here.

First, what did the job look like in the 90s? You're talking about like making television ads like that was like the big piece of it. take me through obviously you know emails client relations like that piece is like that's the floor like that's the bar the standard is you send your emails on time and all that stuff but the actual creative process like what were you bring because today it's social and it's website and it's this in the

back in the 90s it was TV radio some print you know with steak and shake we basically it was TV radio and coupons

and those were the levers you had the other thing that was really interesting is what's changed over time is what the deadlines are I first started in the business, the deadline was the FedEx box.

No way.

Because if you were sending something, a piece of art or an a print ad, you had to get it in the FedEx box to get it to the publication or the TV station or whatever. You weren't just beaming things through the internet. The internet had just, you know, we had email within our office, but it was a few years before the actual internet was useful

in a in a delivery process. Did you ever miss the FedEx box and have to like drive something across town like I got to get this where it's going?

We had a situation where we had a pitch in Ohio and the RFP was due at a certain time and we missed the FedEx box, so we had to drive it.

Stop.

So, I mean, that's how it

one person or like multiple people like

it. It depends sometime or you put somebody in a plane and they take it, you know, rather than FedEx do it. You did whatever it took. Isn't that wild? you did whatever it took.

Like that's

35 years ago and like someone was, you know, to make the RFP deadline in time, you were getting in the car and ripping down I7 over to Ohio. Wild. Wow. Okay. So then as time like kind of advanced there, when did you go from Okay. Obviously, um, is it David Young?

David saw something in you. Leadership potential. You're working in client relations. Where did you start to get some of these leadership roles within your journey at Young and Larore?

Uh within year two or year three. Um and we were a very flat organization at the time. It was basically David Young and Jeff Laramore and they were our owners and creative directors. You had creatives and you had account people and we probably had, you know, 22 23 people. And David and Jeff were both going to be for whatever reason gone during the same week. It didn't happen very often.

And so someone had to be the arbiter of basically creative that was going to going to go out the door that week and they assigned me to be the kind of quasi creative director. And so that I think they knew that the creative people trusted me and trusted my instincts. And so I think that was kind of the first time that they really recognized that okay Tom's a leader, he's a future leader and this is where it's going to go. Um when Paul Knapp came on board um in 1996, he was the our first then president and I became head of account service in 1996. One of the big balancing acts of marketing and advertising the whole nine yards is new growth, new business and really like high quality work, you know, like the creative versus the customer, you know, like how do you

do you bring on a ton of customers and overload your creative team? Do you have, you know, a lot of creative staff to overd deliver for customers? like just that balancing act. And I think a lot of times people um like marketing agencies, advertising like aren't necessarily eating their own dog food, you know, like they're not very good at marketing themselves, you know, like you're helping people put television ads out, but you you guys aren't running any television ads. No. So, it's like an interesting piece where you're like uh an agency gets hired to run social media like, "Oh, yeah, BR social, but like their social media is not that good." Like they don't have any followers. It's like, "Oh, that's interesting. How do you guys balance that? What what are your thoughts about as like the president and CEO of an agency?

You have to understand who your audience is.

And so then it's a matter of being where that audience is. You know, LinkedIn is huge for us. Part of the reason I'm on this podcast is to help promote us. And hopefully we'll talk about unreasonable in a little bit, our conference. And that conference is

serves a lot of purposes. is it's an educational uh venue for people to learn about how consumers behave. It's also a business development uh tool as well to help attract uh brands that we don't have relationships with. And so as long as you understand your audience and then you build the toolkit to help attract them and engage with them

as you kind of advanced, you know, through the ranks of of young Larammore, you guys started to expand nationally as well. So serving these these staple, you know, the Indiana Farm Bureau Insurancees, the Steak and Shake, the big brands of Indiana, Delta Faucet, but then also picking up some pretty large logos across the country. So I was just curious as we talked about, you know, expansion and growth and all that stuff as you continue to balance the creativity, the business, what were some of the challenge or just the fun milestones through the 35 years of YL that you guys have hit? The fact that we're an independent agency allows us

When you say independent, what do you mean?

Means we are not part of a holding company. We I'm the primary shareholder. Um I make decisions for good or for bad on on which clients we take on and which ones we don't. And so we get incoming calls frequently from uh clients and brands that might want to work with us. And then we have to assess is that the right fit for us and our team. Does the budget make sense? uh do they uh emphasize marketing and advertising as much as we think they should? So that's that's something we look at. We look at our focus as regional national consumer brands. Now that doesn't mean we won't work with B2B brands that have really interesting problems or people we want to work with. We have a great relationship with Cumins, who's, you know, obviously a a Fortune Fortune 150 company.

Maybe you've heard of them. Yeah.

Yeah. Uh here in Indiana. Um, that's obviously not a consumer brand.

That's like a B2B TOC, right? Because there's like in the truck culture community, there's pride or hatred if you drive a Cumins, you know, like if you have a Cumins engine, you know, and obviously they're doing a lot of like the industrial space and all this stuff, but like a uh the the brand that goes into a Dodge truck, right? the diesel engine. So, there is a little bit of work to be done to continue to bolster that in the car culture community, the truck culture community, but it's not like there's you can't just go on their website and buy something.

No, you can't. But, but the thing I would say and I think the the thing that people often miss who are in a B2B context is they don't realize that they're actually selling to people also. That's the through point, the the thread that connects everything is that at the end of the day, we are all selling to other humans. And business people make decisions based on emotion and feeling as much as a consumer does. And that's one of the emphasis of the conference is to help people understand that we're all kind of fooled by our own sense of rationality. We all tend to think that we take in all these facts and then weigh our decision based on those facts. And there's plenty of evidence that kind of says the opposite that it's really you generally have a feeling about something and then you use some facts to justify the feeling you have about it.

Well, your take in YNL's thoughts about consumer behavior is what led you to start the unreasonable conference.

Absolutely. uh five years ago. This is the

2019. It's the fifth one. We we skipped the co year. Yeah. Yeah.

Nothing like first year conference and then year two you come back. Yeah. We're gonna have to take a quick pause on this. So talk to us then. We're thinking about consumer behaviors. One, there are a lot of whether it's finance or operations. There are non-marketers that listen to this show. Explain what we're talking about when we say consumer behavior. Like explain like I'm a fifth grader.

We tend to believe that we are all very rational people. It's all based on the facts, but at the end of the day, we generally make decisions based on how we feel about something. Um, and and that's what a brand actually is. There are all kinds of cars out there in the world, but some cars make you feel a certain way and other cars make you feel another way. Right? The simplest example I like to give is a luxury car. There's no rational reason to buy a luxury car. If a if the point of a car is to get you from point A to point B, you would buy the cheapest, most efficient car you could possibly buy.

We would all be ripping Honda Civics.

Exactly. But in our culture, plenty of people are spending lots and lots of money on luxury cars. And if I ask I don't know what you drive, but if I asked you why you bought your Audi or whatever your

I drive a Jeep Wrangler. There you go. And why? Because it's fun.

Yeah. But if I asked the person who buys the Audi, they'd probably talk about all the bells and whistles and the safety ratings and all this stuff. And what they probably wouldn't say is I want to make sure everybody knows exactly how successful I am.

And that's what we in in our research that we do with consumers. That's what we're trying to uncover. What's that what we call the unspoken truth? What's the thing that's really motivating someone to a decision that either they can't articulate or maybe they don't want to articulate?

Yeah. You don't want to say that out loud. You kind of sound like a jerk,

right? But but it's probably the truth.

But it's true. It's in the back of your head. And that's why a lot of those especially luxury BMW. It's like you're not just buying the car. You're buying a lifestyle. You're buying

success and golf and this and that and closing deals and Rolex watches and Ray-B bands and the whole nine yards.

Wow. I mean, so many products that people buy are based in identity. Am I the kind of person that would buy that kind of thing? Does that represent me? Does that reflect who I am? And one of the things I like to talk about, too, is this idea that so many brands want people to love them. I want people to love my brand. The way I like to think about it is this. Does that brand help me love myself? Does it help me in a sense complete who I think I am or who I'm who I want to be?

Okay, let's talk about it. Let's let's get in and we'll both we'll both open up and we'll talk about that. Okay. So, think about brands and purchases that you've made that there's no rational reason as to why and it doesn't have to be cars because of this, but like one that I have specifically, I spend upwards of $50 on a Viori on Viori T-shirts

because yes, they have this fit lifestyle and the clothes like the cloth the material is breathable. But like one person one time said I looked really good in that shirt. So, I went out and bought seven of them. Yeah. And I just like like the shirt. It's a It's like

I just feel good when I wear that shirt. And like you can check a lot of my pictures from the past like probably circa 2022 to 2024. I would every time I went out I was in a $60 and it's a t-shirt. It's not like a fancy college. This is a bare t-shirt. But it was one of those moments where the brand just spoke to me and I like had to buy them.

For me, it's probably Starbucks and what I used to I used to drink a lot of Coke and gave that up years ago. But then I got hooked on their iced tea and when we were on Mass, our office was on Massachusetts Avenue. We were right across the street from that Starbucks there. And I would literally go across the street every day and buy my venty black iced tea. Over time, I realized, well, that's expensive every day. So, I started making it myself.

But I continued to save the Starbucks plastic cups and I would drink it out of those even though I was making it myself. And later I've upgraded into the the permanent one, the permanent tumbler, but it still has the Starbucks logo on it. I don't use like an off-brand.

Yeah.

So again, does it make the tea taste better? Maybe it does. Then that's the other thing that that I would say too is context can literally affect how something tastes years ago. CocaCola had this promotion they did with the um polar bears or it was like some sort of fundraiser and they produced Coca-Cola in white cans to reflect the polar bear and people swore that the Coke tastes different. when they did blind taste test it was fine but the perception was that it was different and they just thought it and so again there's evidence that depending what you think it is it's going to lit literally affect

and the dieh hard coke people like you know the like multiple cans a day I'm sure they were up in arms they were just so cuz there is the whole and like there's the McDonald's coke and there's the this coke and that like but yeah perception is so is everything on that

these things happen in the brain there was a friend that went to Wabash uh fell off a fell off a porch and hit his head, lost his sense of taste. Oh. And so they would make fun of him and give him flavorless Kool-Aid, stuff like that. But again, it's just it's a it's a it's a reminder. We think taste happens in the mouth. Well, that's the starting point, but your perception of taste happens literally in the brain.

That is really fascinating where and I mean you hear it all the time, too. And we actively know they're like, "Yeah, you know, the the Great Value brand and the ma name brand are made on the same factory floor. They're they're ran through the same thing,

but like it just tastes better when it's a cheese it versus a cheese nip, right?"

Or like a Dorito versus a flavored tortilla chip. Like it is just different. It is.

So you guys decided to put a conference together. Yep.

An event all about this. What can we expect from this? the fifth iteration of unreasonable, a modern look at consumer motivations.

Yeah, it's it's like a TED conference. Um we h we'll have seven speakers uh plus um the final talk will be with Carrie O'Neal, our head of strategy and me kind of summing up the day. But um each talk is about 20 to 25 minutes. Um we'll do two uh in a row and then we'll do like a 10-minute Q&A. We'll take a break and we'll do that three more times. And so it's a it's a really nice cadence and different talks. Um one's going to be about uh dignity and respect and and understanding that brands have to demonstrate that with their consumers. Um we have one about value and one about how to frame numbers more effectively. Um so there are a number of different kinds of subjects that get at this idea that we make decisions based on how we feel about things more than how we think about them.

Yeah. You're doing one on pricing. pricing. Yeah.

And that's like there people have always heard right the like $24. 99 versus 25 or penny like all these different pricing strategies and how you know price attaches to value too where it's like sometimes people won't even they're like oh it's cheap so like I'm not I don't want that one. And it's like it could be the exact same product you price it at $25 and $250. And when JC Penney tried to rebrand themselves, which they do every few years, they had a campaign uh with fair and square pricing and they had an ad on one side of the ad they showed the sweater and it said at the top of the ad it said $49. 99 and then they discounted it and discounted it, discounted it to, you know, 25 or $24. 99.

And they said, "We're not doing that anymore. We're not going to fool you. We're not going to price things up so we can price them down. We're just going to offer this sweater for $25 fair and square pricing every day. And if you think about that, if you're a rational person, you know, you would never pay that $49. 99 for that sweater.

That was never going to be the price you were going to pay. But you see all those markdowns like, oh my gosh, a $49 for it's half price. That feels that gives you a little

feels like you're winning.

Feels like you're winning versus the $25 sweater which is like that's a crappy $25 sweater. And even if it was if it was 49 marked down to $25.99, right? Versus just a flat 25, you're like, "Well, this side I'm getting a more expensive sweater that's marked down a lot."

Exactly. Even though you would never pay $49.99. And that concept is called anchoring. That $49.99 is a what's called an anchor. And even though rationally, you know, you would never pay it, it does trigger something you to give you that feeling that oh, I'm getting a deal.

Do you have other advice? Like let's just give a sneak peek into what people can expect when it comes to psychology of like value. I think a lot of times especially like startup owners uh when they're first going out and taking they're just like I want to move. I want to get my services bought. I want to do X. I want to do Y. Like I want my business to survive. So they like fire sale cheapest pricing ever. Like I'm going to win by being the cheapest. And obviously cheap. A lot of brands like they don't want to associate their brand with the word cheap. They're like we're not cheap. We're quality, we're luxury, we're this, we're that. What advice would you have for startup founders out there that are going through their first iteration of pricing and packaging?

Every situation is different, but there there are, you know, tech companies that started with the premium model, right? Where Dropbox is like that where they started off with you can get this service for free and what they're then trying to do is get you to a point where now I have to pay for something at the next level. They're not changing the price of that base level. you can still get Dropbox for free

and you start to use it, you get into your workflow and then you're like, "Oh, I need to do this and here's the payw wall."

So, I think that's that's definitely a strategy you can use is to build your audience at a certain level. The danger is

if you set your price and get people used to that price, it's hard to move it. So, you better have some shift in value that allows you to move that number versus just

now we're going to double the price all of a sudden. Like let's like I feel like a lot of times uh the first side gig that a lot of like tech type people have is like building websites. They're like I'll be your website builder, you know, and you go to local pizza place or whatever and you do it for a,000 bucks and then you do a couple of those and all of a sudden you're like, "Well, my time's more valuable now and I want to I want to charge 10,000 but to 10x your price is crazy." You know what do you have advice for? Like maybe services side they're like trying to start their lawn care business. They're this. They're like, "Oh, I can't charge what true green costs. I'm just like John and my mower."

It depends how what how much money you have to burn.

That's true. How long can you survive?

Right? Because if you're, you know, if you're a website developer and you're you want to create a portfolio, then you might need to do some projects and do some things that might not pay you what you need to get paid, but it's a proof of concept that you can develop something so that you can leverage that later. So that's the challenge um you know with any business is knowing how to the hardest part of any business in many cases it's the pricing of it.

Yeah.

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Check out their open positions at homejart. com. Now, let's get back into the episode. I think a big piece that's when you're early on in your career or like your startup journey, building your company, you're like, you don't know how many at bats you're going to get.

And so, you have this almost like scarcity mindset where you're like, I have to close this. If I don't close this deal, we're so screwed. And then it's like once you've done it, like even a year in, it's like I know like I know that like other we're going to do the work that we want to do for the price that we want to do it because other advertisers will come along. Like other brands will want to work with us because our value is good. And honestly, not being everything to everyone is good. A year ago, it was like we're just trying to survive and make payroll and do all this stuff. Uh, and I'm sure that you know along journeys you've seen this time and time where once you get to an abundance

and you can test because the market will tell you on pricing, right? Oh, sure. The market's gonna like you put out $5,000 and they're like, "Our budget was two." You're like, "Okay, well, I guess we're too far away." You do that three times, you realize you're either too high or too low. And you got to kind of like adapt that.

And that's something we do with with clients that come to us is that we generally know what things are going to cost.

Yeah.

And so we say, "Hey, this is generally what the range is going to be." And if if it's something like uh we can't get there, then they're probably not a good fit for us.

Yeah.

And so we try to be honest with clients

and you know and you have to be like confident you as the owner, the founder, whoever's out there listening of like if you put out a a not egregious like you're not we're not saying price gouge your your customers, but if you put out a number that's like, hey, we're worth this. And they come back way you can't come off your mark and like, oh yeah, you're right. We'll do it for 90% off value. you have to say like no like one day and and I had a really good I literally yesterday I was having this conversation where it was like oh well either you don't see the value in what we're giving or it's a cash flow problem like on on your side like so you either have to like they have to say like oh we're just like not in the position to spend that or whatever

and I know we've probably lost uh business where we were honest about hey this is what we think it's really going to take and maybe somebody came in and lowballed and and it might have taken the same amount later on but we I I don't like the idea of bait and switch. I don't I don't I I I don't want to be treated that way. So, I don't want to treat anyone that way.

And nothing's worse than whether it's even like marketing or like construction where they give you a number and all of a sudden you're over timeline, over budget, they're coming back and you're like, "What the heck are like your hund your discount that you were getting for in the first place is now like you're paying 2x that." It's interesting. Are there specific brands, maybe some you do work with and some that you don't work with that you just think do a spectacular job of knowing their consumer behaviors and making people feel something more than just the utility of you know like Pachu for instance pull that up but like they've done a good job like you when you walk into the one of 49th and Penn you like feel a little more than that you're just eating at a breakfast joint.

Yeah. I mean that's what we try to do. I mean, a really good example of one of our long-standing clients is Goodwill Retail Stores. When we started with them in 1996, they were admittedly kind of dusty stores that people didn't really understand. And part of the strategy, both with the advertising as well as their retail strategy, was to make it feel like a legitimate retailer. And so, the advertising we did was on television.

and he probably saw the Goodwill guy um where he's talking about, you know, things going on the store with some humor just like a regular retailer would do and the store environment felt like something again it's not going to be Target but it feels like it's a legitimate retailer and so they just continue and continue to expand which allows them to create more services to help people and so that's been a huge success over the last 30 years. Oh my. And I would say, yeah, definitely going from like straight up secondhand thrift store vibe to one, when you drop stuff off there, it's a good experience. When you buy when you go and shop there and like thrifting, thrifting has never been hotter than it is today, right? Like

it the kids generate the kids, the youngans, they love it. like they and there's no shortage of new stuff being put out into the world that needs to find a second life. That also what I think Goodwill has done probably the best job is that when I shop there and when I donate and drop off my stuff there, you were fueling this economy of the nonprofit behind the scenes. Absolutely.

You know, like there's

the employment. There's a bunch of services that Goodwill provides uh throughout their territories because I know there's like central and southern Indiana. There's there's, you know, different regions and

whatnot,

but when I drop, you know, oh, I do I still say grow out of these days? Like when I grow out of a shirt, it's like I'm just getting a little bit bigger. when you grow out of and you you drop it off at Goodwill, you know that that's not just going to be them profiting off your whatever, but you're fueling all of these other entities and programming that are going on behind the scenes. And I think telling that story is very very impactful versus it could be yeah, you know, like your golf clubs or whatever. You could take them to

you could put them on Facebook Marketplace, you could do this, that the other thing to make profit off of it. But it's almost like

you have like this good sense of I don't know the feeling that you feel, right? the the consumer behavior uh as you drop your stuff off at Goodwill. Yeah,

that's a really good one. Are there other brands?

Uh Brizzo is another one. Originally, it was called Delta Select. It was the premium faucet. You would if you were doing a kitchen remodel or or building a house, you might go to economy plumbing or something like that where you would look at these high-end uh faucet brands like a Coler or Growy or something like that. Delta Select was one of the brands. It just wasn't moving. and the rest of the category was doing well. It just wasn't. They came to us and said, "Help us figure this out." And after going through our consumer research, it became evident that the problem was the word Delta. In a premium context, Delta felt too accessible for people.

Oh.

People wanted if they're going to do a kitchen remodel costing 50, $60,000, they wanted something that felt more premium, more special. And so our strategy to Delta was this. We basically broke it down very simply and said, "Whatever you do, you need to position this brand as far away from Delta as possible." And at first they're like, "I'm not sure. What are you saying?

What are you are you insulting our brand?"

Exactly. And and we said, "No, it's Delta is a mass market brand. In this category, we need something that's feels less access less accessible." Once that was agreed upon, we came back and said, "We think the space you should take is fashion, fashion for the home." And so we named uh the brand Brio B R I Zo feels kind of European. Uh doesn't feel, you know, American. It feels special and it's it continues to just grow and grow and grow over the past um

almost 30 20 years. like going out and getting market research and consumer behavior like if you have budget in a brand and like an agency like easier to do. Do you have advice for maybe testing the waters on how to get customer feedback or potential customer feedback?

We do one-on-one research with consumers. I would advise people not to do focus groups and limit your survey research to very fact-based information. People have a hard time telling you why they do something. So, I talk about this unspoken truth. We try to f we try to find what we do is sit down with people and do oneonone one-on-one interviews, but in many cases, we're just trying to learn about them and how they behave and try to basically deduce why they do what they do. It's pretty interpretive.

So, we would go we would go into people's homes. We take a video camera and we would interact just like this. We have all of our team members involved in it. So we would take two person teams. You might have a strategy person and a creative person. You might have an account person and a media person and go in and do these interviews.

Then we would compile all these look at all the video you know get together as a group and say what are you hearing? What are you seeing? And what we try to do is boil that down into what's the unspoken truth that we're hearing? What is it that people and in this case it was that Delta was too accessible and we needed to separate this brand from the base brand.

How many of those interviews do you have to do to get like stat statistical significance?

You know, it's people ask that question all the time. It's not a statistic because you're talking about human truths. It's usually a spark of an idea that you're trying to get. So, it's not about how many you do. I mean, we'll we'll do 10, 15, might be 20 depending on the market, but usually around 8 or 9, you start hearing the same thing over and over. Before COVID, everything was done in people's homes one-on-one. We would travel. during COVID when people became more comfortable uh in front of their computer screens. Now we're doing more and more of these one-on-one interviews virtually and feel like we're getting the same kinds of emotional responses that we were getting before. I used to judge whether I was doing well if I got someone to cry

because then or like just kind of choke up a little bit

about their faucet.

It might well because you're not just talking about their faucet. talking about their lives. We we helped launch Angie's List nationally when when they first were on national television and we were doing some

um interviews in Columbus, Ohio and there was a woman who had lost her husband and she was talking about how Angie's List was very helpful to her because her husband had taken care of everything. And so she started kind of, you know, getting clamped about

talking about him and how this was so helpful to her. And so that's what I mean by that is

get getting people to to drop their wall um and really be honest and and kind of emotional about what they're doing.

That is intense. And I feel like today too it's like you have a Zoom call, you record that, you transcribe it, you could I mean we're going to talk, we're going to round out the episode talking about like the advancements in the industry and content creators and the whole nine yards. But just like I think like putting that into chat GBT and saying like you know here are 50 transcripts of interviews that we've done like what are common themes and it pulls out like

and you're like oh yeah there it is like

oh man that's wild. So unreasonable your guys's um the event is happening at Newfields

at Newfields

on September the 26th correct

starting at 8 a.m. It'll go most of the day

till about 4 o'clock.

Till about 4 o'clock.

We have a cocktail hour after that too. And you've got, you know, you're talking through dignity, numbers, imperfection, neuroforing, fandom, pricing, responsibility, strategy. I think that it'll be uh a heck of a time. You can get your tickets at unreasonablevent.com. Correct. Wel, you guys are putting it on with your friends. I love that Cummins is involved. Heck yeah. Uh, is there any final things that people need to know when it comes to the event?

Don't be fooled into thinking it's only about consumers. If you deal with people in whatever context, whether it's marketing or anything else, you'll learn something and learn something about yourself, too, because I think it again helps you understand why people do what they do. The other thing that's really interesting is we got the the conference certified by the American Banking Association. So, if you're a banker and you need to do continuing ed, it's five and a half credits. So, that's pretty cool.

I didn't see that one coming. And you tested this some of the the content that we're going to see here, right? You guys had like a collab with South by Southwest.

We did. We took a small group to South by Southwest uh back in March.

Yeah.

And uh did a a venue with them and and had a round table with three of the Unreasonable alums. And that's the other cool thing is that every year has been easier and easier to recruit speakers because they know each other and they respect each other. And so, you know, the first year when I was putting it together and talking to speakers like, "So, what is this about?" But then once they saw who was involved, like, "Oh, she was involved. Oh, he was involved. Oh, I I'll definitely be involved in that."

Yeah.

Very, very cool. And like you just get more credibility, more credibility. You just can like it's a it's a long process building up the events. Final thing I want to wrap out with before we we have some fun Indiana questions at the end, but

the shift in advertising, we kind of alluded to it a bit ago. Genai, you've got everyone's a content creator, everyone's an influencer, UGC, all these things. Uh like anyone can go viral whether it's disparaging your brand and your you know your logo or elevating it like randomly out of nowhere like oh my gosh what was the like Papa John's like a guy is making videos he works at Papa John's and now he's like on the Papa John's national commercials within 6 months. It's a very dynamic shifting industry as you've seen it over the past let's say decade. We'll go from 2015 kind of like the rise of smartphones were pretty readily available then social media to then you insert these short form video now you have social shopping with Tik Tok shop and all that stuff. What are you guys seeing and how are you one keeping up with the trends and and being the thought experts

uh in the space and what opportunities are you seeing from like the creator side of how you can get plugged in to work with big brands? The main thing I would say is continue to remember that you are always selling to people and you want to figure out how to engage with them. The way I look at all of these things is they're just tools. Just like television was a tool back in the day. The goal was still the same. How do I affect that person emotionally and how do I move them to do something and understand that it is not just about facts and figures.

So the biggest difference is that it's so much more onetoone than it ever was where before it was mass single to mass now it's one to one but it's also fascinating to you know that my wife and I will both have separate social media streams but we'll be seeing the same things and I find that really interesting. So some of the thing same things are hitting each other together at the same time. The challenge for a marketer is now which things do I use?

Yeah.

Before it was it was easy. What could I afford? Now it's like, okay, what do we do? We we've been working with the Spangler Candy Company um for a few years now and and we uh work with them on Bit of Honey, which we redid the packaging for Bit of Honey.

Come on. Look at that. That's good stuff.

Updated the the bee in the packaging a couple years ago and it it's just flying off the shelves.

That bee is funny looking. Oh yeah, a little chew to get you through.

Yeah.

Not to be confused with Spangle. This is the Spangler

Spangler Candy Company. Also owns Dum Dums. Uh Brian, Ohio. Terrific company. So if you've had a Dum Dum, who who's not had a Dum Dum?

Every bank that something else is certified by the United Banking Association, Dum Dum.

Exactly.

And so we helped them celebrate their hundth uh birthday uh last summer. And so we engaged with people on Tik Tok and we looked at kids, families, and food. And so looked at engaging with people in different ways so that you kind of cover the the landscape of how people think about Dum Dums. And so again, just like developing a TV spot is a creative process, developing that social strategy is also a creative process. So we have again just like we do with our creative strategy, our social strategy is a team effort as well. So you've got

the entire team looking at and engaging with social media and all of these tools to say where's the best place to make it make an impact.

Do you have advice? The final kind of two questions we'll round out there. One will be from the marketer side. There is all billboards and radio and TV and print and influencer marketing and newsletters and there's so much stuff. It's very loud. Do you have advice for developing campaigns? Let's say you can't afford to use an agency. You're inhouse. Maybe you're a small startup. You're growing. What advice do you have to marketers out there to find the right vehicles for their advertising?

Test and learn. I think sometimes people think, "Oh, marketing is not a science." When people say that, I think what they mean is it's not perfect and it's not fixed. But when you think about the scientific method, the scientific method says you try something, you measure it, and you adjust. Whatever you do, try to measure what you're doing. And that a good example might be time frames.

Back in the day when we did television, it was not clickable. You couldn't measure literally whether someone saw a TV ad and whether they bought, but you would organize it so you ran TV during a certain time frame and you watched the sales during that time frame and then you saw what kind of tail that you lost when you turned the TV off. So in every case, whenever you're doing something, measure what you're doing during the time frames that you're doing it. Don't just rely on the clicks. Think about what the activity is during the time that you're doing it. And maybe there is a tail and maybe some things do create a halo that lasts longer than others.

And that's those are the things you want to try. So test and learn. Definitely try a few things at a time. Don't just scattershot everything. Then you don't know what's working and what's not working. So over time you want to build an arsenal where you're doing more than one media form.

But in the early days you may just want to try a few things so you know what's working and what's not. and we've learned it like you know we know what days and what times to post what type of content and some of it starts out with gut intuition and feeling but if you don't track it and learn then yeah you're just going to be continue to kind of fly blind there uh and a lot of people are like it's hard

like I will say marketing

and like tracking your data and doing all like and it's like I'm definitely not the best at it but we try and we're we're working there uh it's definitely hard because it's not as fun you know like tracking that and doing that is not like What's fun is like for us like making a fun video.

Yeah.

But you're making a series of bets, right? You're saying, "Okay, if we spend this money on this, what do we think the return is going to be?" And if you said, "For this to work, it's got to create a 50% return." You might think that's probably a hurdle. It's not I'm not going to make, but you said, "Okay, do we think we could do a 10%." Okay, that's a bet I'm willing to willing to make.

Final question kind of in that vein is I mean tailored towards creators whether you're influencers or podcasters just this modern media uh like the easy thing to do let's say for creators is like you do the food the beverage the this that like that part's not very hard but working with brands like we just partnered up with Indiana Farm Bureau insurance is not like a traditionally Instagrammable field like a delta faucet could be challen unless you're like a home improvement influencer. Do you have advice for creators to start working with these bigger organizations? Uh, and how do I, you know, start to build those relationships? How to to make something like happen? Or are are these big corporates like thinking about that strategy?

Either be relevant or be entertaining. If you have content that people want to seek out and want to enjoy, and you see that all over the place where someone has something that I just can't not look at, that's important. Or some something that's just helpful that, oh, they're reliable. Whatever it is that they're going to do, I'm going to get something helpful and useful out of it. So, for me, either being helpful or being just fun and and interesting are the two things I would say.

Yeah. Or if you're the wild combination, you get to do both. You entertain people and you educate them. That's perfect. Come on. Right. Amazing. It's been great to learn more, especially diving into deeper than just advertising, deeper than, you know, the overarching marketing consumer behavior, your unreasonable event that you guys are hosting on September the 26th starting at 8 a.m. Cocktails to follow. I mean, a ton of cool like sessions going on there where you're going to learn about consumers. And if you're a banker, you're getting some CE there. Yep.

Right. Come on. Uh, finally, we wrap up the show with just some fun questions. Has there been a campaign in your career that has just been the most fun, has stuck with you, or you're just like, "This is amazing."

The stake and shake campaign that we started was huge and it it helped shape my career. The Goodwill campaign that we've that we've done for almost 30 years, helped change that business. uh Brizzo. Um obviously this new work we're doing for for Spangler's been good. It's been great to see Indiana Farm Bureau Insurance continue to grow as well. Um so you love all your children, so it's hard to pick one. Uh we even worked with some Carmelite sisters uh 25 years ago to help them grow their uh group and got them on the Today Show back in back in 200 or Yeah. 2000. So that was had a lot of fun over the years. Yeah.

Yeah. Uh, do you have advice for someone trying to break into the advertising agency or uh, field?

I would figure out who it is you want to work for and study them and really understand what they're about, know what their work is about, be able to talk about it, know who runs the business. There's so much information out there that you can get. When people reach out to me, you can tell whether or not they've done their homework or not. I've written enough in ad age and ade over the years that you should be able to find something that I've written about. So, you know, flattery is will get you everywhere. So, if you reach out to an agency, say, "Hey, I love your work and this is why or I've seen something you wrote and that's fascinating." Um, that will get someone's attention if you just send the typical, you know,

I'd love to pick your brain.

Yeah.

Uh, is there a trend in advertising like that's surprising to you? like something that's really hot right now that you're like, I just I never thought that this would be the thing.

I don't know if it's a trend in advertising. I'm I'm ready for the Coldplay thing to end at any point. The fact that that got so big was insane.

That's like one of the memes, like one of the moments in the internet that bridged generations. Yeah. like older people, kids, everyone's like I just can't I guess

it's a fascinating I mean someone should study why that was so fascinating for people

a crossgenerational moment on the internet yeah if someone said hey we need this creative something constructed we need to be creative who would you take

and what kind of facility would you put yourselves in like build me the most creative spot in the world to you

we we have kind of one I mean we we are in a hundred-year-old school building in downtown Indianapolis. Um, it's got a gym in the middle of it. It's a place that people love to come to every day and you're not in a typical office setting. It's a fairly open concept, but we have a lot of fun there. And um I I think that's part of the reason again why people come and stay. We have of the 70 people, nine or 10 of us have been there 20 years. We have 20 people been with us 10 years. So my goal is to to create an environment and a place that people want to come to every day.

Yeah. Is there a brand that you don't work with that you see somewhere out in the wild that you're just like, man, they have a really good brand,

a unique following is Harley-Davidson where people identify with it. And again, when you think about why someone would want to ride on the loudest motorcycle ever, but they do because they just connect their identity with it. And so I again I think that is a brand over the over the years that it's really interesting brand that's been able to do that.

There's a threshold that you cross where you know you've built a good brand and the threshold is if people are willing to tattoo it on their body.

Absolutely. Like if someone's willing to get that Harley tattoo, get the Nike tattoo, get the Jordan Jump, man. Like that's kind of the threshold. Like that's how you know you've done it.

Or defend your brand. I mean, I think that's the other thing. One of the the talks we had a couple years ago by Michael Platt from Wharton, he they did a study on iPhone owners and Samsung and the people that owned Apple were more connected to each other where people Samsung's like, "What? It's just like it's just a phone." They didn't really have an identity with it. where the people that you know, you think about people hating on Apple,

people get riled up about that and will defend it even though the other product might be technically better.

It doesn't speak to

There's nothing worse than when the green message guy is trying to like tell you why his Amazon phone with 17 screens and 17 cameras is better than your Yeah, buddy. Green messages. Come on. Uh that's really that is a when when you have people coming to defend you and I do think that's a piece that Harley or Apple like you have to build your thing for someone you know like if you're trying to be the phone for like eventually one day like they might get there. They'll never have 100% of the market but they'll have a lot of people. If you're trying to build everything to everyone and like make everyone like you like no one's going to love you.

But if you have this specific subset of people that just love your like you know everyone knows it. You can see the Harley-Davidson guy in your head and I'm sure there's like Kawasaki riders that are like a gosh that guy like okay buddy and it's like that's good.

Like you have a loyal tribe of people who like go who tattoo your brand on their body.

You have Duncan people and you have Starbucks people and those people tend not to overlap. People either one or the other. They don't cross over.

That's crazy. I love that. We're coming to the the final segments of the show here. Uh this segment is brought to you by our friends at JC Hart. They're a leader in creating enjoyable living experiences at apartment communities all across Indiana and beyond. Check them out at home isjart.com. So my question for you, Tom, is why do you call Indiana home?

It's got to be about family. Um my dad grew up here as a kid. went to how high school and then you know like I said we lived in Ohio when I when I was early growing up and um he was a basketball coach and uh was was drawn here to go to Northfield and then Westfield. And so when I was in Ohio there was always this allure about Indiana high school basketball. And I remember even before we moved, he took us to a game between Richmond uh and I think maybe Anderson or Logansport at Richmond. And it was just a completely different experience. But my family is here. My mom and dad uh were here. They they've both passed since then, but it's where family is. I'm a I'm a transplant, but I'm I consider myself a Hoosier.

Oh gosh. Yeah. What you're like

I'm way more hooer than Buckeye for sure.

Yeah. Oh gosh. Yeah. I mean, otherwise we wouldn't have you on the show, right? Tom, you've been able to I mean, you literally just got back from New York yesterday. You've been around the country. You've traveled. You've seen these places. You've worked with brands from crazy different states, but what's something the world needs to know about Indiana?

We have amazing healthcare. You know, when people um think about where they want to live, that's something that's important. Um it hits close to home for me. My wife had a cardiac arrest seven and a half years ago. um saved by some people in her neighborhood in Meridian Kesler, taken to, you know, IU Health and Methodists and and saved her. And then a year and a half later, um got a heart transplant at uh St. Vincent. She's now six and a half years past the transplant.

Oh my god.

Yeah. So, I mean, they know what they're doing here.

Well, I mean, one thing is like IU downtown, like the one of the biggest schools that trains doctors, you know, like Like people come here to learn how to be a doctor like and then a lot of them want to stay which is cool.

Uh I cannot imagine what so you're saying in your neighborhood they were just happened to be medical professionals that were around.

Well it ended up being one. Um there were a couple people that just jumped in and started doing CPR and then the third person that came up uh was a former ER nurse and was a nurse is a nurse practitioner and jumped and helped do CPR too until the EMTs came.

Oh my god. happened a couple blocks from our house. In that situation, the only about 10% of people survived that.

So, that was pretty amazing. And then, uh, over time going to St. Vincent and getting a heart transplant.

What's your wife's name?

Maggie.

Six and a half years post heart transplant. That is incredible. I mean, that has to be I just can't. We could do a whole another episode. You could. Yeah. Oh, wait. We

We could have her on next week.

Yeah. There we go. We had a doctor of pre-natal surgery.

So, she's performing surgery on babies that are still in the womb. My mind was blown of just like what modern medicine is capable of doing is wild.

It's truly amazing. I mean, the guy that Dr. Zenady who did the transplant and and Mary Walsh is her cardiologist. But after the after the surgery, the head of the surgeons came over and was telling me about Dr. He said, "We were really lucky to get him, Dr. Zenady." It was almost like they were talking about a baseball pitcher like we were lucky to able to recruit this really talented guy.

Yeah. Okay. So like this is a whole industry like a thing where so like Riley Children's Foundation like one piece obviously supporting families helping children another is attracting talent. Absolutely. So like they'll you know you go to the the gallas or whatever and like you know you they raise a bunch of money and a piece of it goes to like well we're competing against Minnesota in the Mayo Clinic to get the best pediatric specialist or heart transplant specialist and you're like you're like a GM working deals

wild man that is I can't imagine just like the moment like you as Dr. Zenari

Zenati

Zenat Dr. Zenati where you like unattach a heart and then reattach some another heart.

I mean I can laugh at this now but uh so the the surgery started at 1000 p.m. and ended at about 4 a.m. So we're you know waiting all night and about 1:30 the nurse comes down and says okay everything's going really well. we're about to stitch in the new heart and like that's maybe more detail than I I needed at this moment. Uh but um

like people are really incred like as we say advertising like right you think about like podcasting it's like there are people out there like legitimately curing cancer and transplanting hearts.

Yeah. And it it you know it does it does kind of give you a different perspective you know. My god nobody died today you know nobody died in the office today. Amen. Well, right. Yeah. Shout out to Maggie and shout Dr. Zenady. That's incredible. What a journey. Uh we have two questions left for you.

Uh this is the opportunity uh to share a little bit of your Indiana to the rest of the world. Uh you to shed some light on a place or a person or a thing or whatever it might be that more people need to know about. What is a hidden gem in Indiana?

Crown Hill Cemetery.

That is a little bit of a weird Okay, talk to us. It's not. It is beautiful there. If you're on a bike ride of that side of town, absolutely beautiful. And it's the highest point in the city, too.

It is the highest point in the city. And it's like there's like a bike trail or something, right? That

Yeah. You can ride I mean, you could ride for hours there, but it's uh it's a beautiful park. It really is.

Yeah. And it's like uh there's a lot of history around Crown Hill. Uh you know, when you talk about vice presidents and just, you know, famous hooers that are uh their eternal resting places in Crown Hill. Absolutely.

And like uh they're they have like a marketing department. They put out some interesting content about like amplifying voices from that are within Crown Hill. Um I Yeah, that's a that's an interesting hidden. I've never got that one before.

No. Yeah,

that's a good one. Okay, finally. This is where we get recommendations for guests. Learn about other people in Indiana that are doing wild things. Who's a Hoosier that we need to keep on our radar? Someone who's doing big things.

I'm going to give you three. Taylor Schaefer, who's president CEO of of Downtown Indie. She worked with us in a PR capacity a number of years ago. Um then the left to run the communications for Hogset campaign and became his chief of staff. Um and now is running downtown Indie. Super bright young woman. Um really helping downtown continue to grow and thrive. Um someone who's who's super sharp.

Taylor Shaver,

Sarah Meyer.

Oh, she rocks.

Indie Sports Corp. Um, again, another uh just great leader, super dynamic. Um, really impressive woman. I I know her just a little bit. Um, we serve on on the YMCA board together and she just came on the board this past year, so worked on some strategic planning with her and been super impressed with her.

Yeah. Um and then the last one is um this might be an obvious one but uh Carly Ers Gordon again

you know the transition uh now into the third generation of the ERS family has been really impressive and she is just a super impressive

person and and again I don't know her at all but just from what I've read and seen and her interviews just really impressive

and when you think I mean there's a ton of research to back like third generation familyowned business like it doesn't Like I think it's like 10% or something like that pan out. And it it honestly seems like there is just like a some new life and blood and like it just definitely seems like energy versus like sometimes when the third generation comes in they're like okay they're just like riding it out.

No, I think they've done it the right way and and she's been involved for a while um and very intimately involved even to some degree. You know, watched the game the other night and listened to the interview where you know she's on the field with the coaching staff. she's at every practice, which is a different kind of management style. She basically said she she decided that if I'm going to run this thing, I need to know how it's running versus just sitting back in an office and hearing from people how it's going. And so, she's intimately involved and I I I just respect how they've made that smooth transition. And that's something that we've tried to do at Young and Larore over the last 40 years where the transitions that we've had over time have been very smooth and not jarring.

And you know, at some point I'll be transitioning out and that's my goal for the next next generation of of Young and Larore, too.

I love those are three spectacular Hoosiers doing amazing things. This is an open invitation. Carly Ers Gordon, you are welcome on the Get In podcast anytime you want to stop by and talk all things Colts or just Indiana in general. We'll talk we'll talk shop. We don't have to talk ball. We could talk shop. It'll be fun. Tom, thank you so much for coming on sharing about consumer behavior and your journey through the advertising career. Even though it started in then Crawford'sville and W match, whatever. We won't hold that against you. Um, I really appreciate the time. It's been awesome to get to learn from you for the last hour or so. I had a ton of fun. If people want to connect with you, if they want to attend Unreasonable, if they want to, you know, work with y'all, how can they do that?

A lot of ways. Uh, go to our website. My email is there. I won't spell it out. Um, but at yandel.com is our website. Uh, look me up on LinkedIn. Pretty active there. Um, and unreasonablevent.com is where you can find the website for Unreasonable.

Amazing. Uh, thanks for coming on and, uh, good luck with Unreasonable. We'll talk soon.

Thanks, man. Thank you for listening to this episode of Get In. If you like what you heard, make sure you leave us a review wherever you listen to podcasts. This show is made possible by our friends up at Sweetwater. Whether you're looking to start a podcast or take your content to the next level, click the link in the description to see all of my gear recommendations at sweetwater.com. If you want a behind-the-scenes look at everything we're doing across the state, make sure you follow me on Instagram and Tik Tok @ Nate Spangle. Thank you so much for listening and being part of what makes the Hoosier State great. We'll see you next time here on Get