Yes, I'm going to say that the My Pillow Guy is great at marketing
Like if the American Revolution were just a ploy to sell bedding (wait, it wasn't?)
Hello Gobbledeers,
This is a painful one to write.
I can’t believe I’m going to say this.
(Breath, Blank. You can do it. We practiced, remember?)
I’ve been reading about someone in the news, and the more I read about that person the more it started to slowly occur to me that he embodies everything a great B2B marketer does.
(One second while I vomit…)
OK, I’m back.
One person who has decided to focus his efforts on one, incredibly well defined, yet still large target market.
One person who has built a content marketing strategy that is so specific that only his target market relates to it at all. But his target market has embraced it to the fullest.
(Bllaccchhhhhhhh)
One person who has tripled-down…no, quadrupled down on marketing channels that work to drive sales.
One person who…
(bbbbbuuuuullllluuuchhhhhhhhhh)
…is able to track where nearly every sale comes from and uses that data to direct his marketing dollars where they have the most impact.
That one person, somehow, improbably, irredeemably, upsettingly, is Mike Lindell, the My Pillow Guy.
Last week the NY Times had an article about Mr. Guy and everything was laid out right there. Mr. Guy is a marketing genius.
I wish I were being sarcastic. I’m not.
(And I hope you expect more from Gobbledy than to take cheap shots at Mr. Guy - c’mon, man!)
Let’s take a look.
Mr. Guy used to sell his pillows at trade shows, then branched out to placing small ads in newspapers. Each ad included a unique promo code, allowing him to track which ads (and which newspapers) were driving the best ROI for him.
As his business grew, he expanded that strategy to buy cable TV ads and paired unique promo codes with each ad, again allowing him to track ROI well beyond what most advertisers were doing.
(It is here that I will make a very slight diversion to mention that back in my analyst days in something like 2002, I spoke with Overstock.com CEO Patrick Byrne who showed me a system he and his team had built to track product-by-product profit margins for everything on the site, which he then tied to a system which tracked the promo codes being used for each of those products so that he knew the margin - not just the revenue - generated from each code. This is pre-Google Analytics. The dude was very, very ahead of his time…Fast forward nearly 20 years and Byrne is a tangential figure in the “rigged election” world. Also he claims he was a secret agent for the FBI. Somehow the two people I most admire in digital marketing are also the craziest election deniers. Go figure. Clearly this is a reflection on me.)
Where were we? Oh yes, Mr. Guy was able to track all his media.
He saw how right-leaning media like Fox News was generating lots of sales for him, and he branched out further into the world of right-wing podcasting. How far?
Mr. Lindell has spent nearly $80 million on advertising on Fox News’s prime-time lineup of opinion shows since accelerating his activism in January 2021, according to estimates by iSpot.TV. His advertising on podcasts in that same period is valued at more than $10 million, according to estimates from Magellan AI.
As I like to say, “yowza.”
Mr. Guy found what worked and multiplied it as far as it would go. The article notes he was responsible for 8% of all ad impressions on Fox in 2022, and his ads appeared on 45 top ranked podcasts (up from 29 the year before).
His found the channels for his audience, and then he had to back it up with content marketing to keep that audience engaged.
Sure, he could’ve published white papers on how his pillows increase sleeping minutes by 13% (or whatever). But that wouldn’t have created a tribe.
He needed to create a tribe. Us vs. them. PC vs Mac. Frank Pepe vs Sally’s**
(**For those of you anywhere near New Haven. For the record, I would never eat at Sally’s.)
So he created content that cleaved off exactly the audience he was reaching with his ads.
He built an election denial content marketing factory.
An ad exec is brilliantly quoted in the article:
His customers are “supporting a guy they believe shares their worldview,” said Benjamin Pratt, an advertising executive who focuses on conservative media. They say, said Mr. Pratt, “we’re going to support him, he’s being attacked and they’re trying to silence him. OK, we’ll buy more pillows.”
(I mean, What’s more American than using democracy-threatening conspiracy theories to sell pillows? I guess using democracy-threatening conspiracy theories to sell fried chicken? Or 3-liter bottles of Pepsi? Stuffed-crust pizza? 3-liter bottles of pizza where the crust is stuffed with Pepsi?)
Have you ever created content so good that it made your prospects buy your products just to piss off people who didn’t like the content? (If so, I’d REALLY like to read that white paper.)
Mr. Guy hit on something that most B2B marketers miss - if your content doesn’t elicit any reaction, it’s not going to accomplish anything. Blaming the loss of your preferred candidate on vote machine meddling by Venezuela is going to elicit a stronger reaction than saying that headless commerce is an interesting way to put together your difference commerce technologies. Nobody cares either way. It won’t elicit any reaction, and it won’t make anyone want to buy anything.
Yes, election denial is (OBVIOUSLY!) an extreme position to take (I, for one, am anti-election denial, and I’m not afraid to say it!). But it causes SUCH an extreme reaction that it can - somehow - get people to buy more pillows.
God bless America.
It is here that I recommend a podcast
I have been listening to a podcast called The Content Mines (listen on Apple Podcasts) and I have been enjoying it so much that I’m sharing it with you. (Unlike the previous 14 paragraphs, where I have heard something I hated so much that I had to share it with you.)
The Content Mines is all about where internet content comes from (well, it’s about that broadly). Internet content is a unique beast, and the algorithms that drive how content gets in front of you determines in lots of ways how that content is created.
(I know that that description is terrible and I wouldn’t listen to that podcast.)
But the 2 guys who host it are funny and if you lived in NYC in the early 2010s you will appreciate the references to LCD Soundsystem and Titus Andronicus and other bands of that era, even though the podcast has nothing to do with those bands.
However, if you’d be interested into deep dives about how specific Twitter posts go viral, or what in God’s name is happening to Facebook (and how it got there), and the factories (basically) where all that content comes from, you will enjoy it.
Put another way, if you liked Reply All, you’ll enjoy it**
** not a guarantee
If you want to be as successful in positioning and content creation as Mr. Guy, I help companies do that for a living. Minus the pillows. Also minus most of the election denial. But also with some of the conspiracy theorizing.
Thanks as always for reading Gobbledy.
Such a patriot. All in the name of democracy. I used to tell my wife that Mr. Guy was a brilliant marketer. He knew where to find his audience. If you're watching reruns of Monk at 4am on USA, chances you have a sleep problem are high.
My daughter, 4 or 5 at the time, used to get excited when his commercials popped up. She was certain we needed his pillows so I entered my CC and gave Mr. Guy $100 for two pillows with his "patent-pending technology". Not a good investment.
This article made me tired.