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Breanna Lawlor: 99% of content is forgettable. This is not a cynical take. It’s just math. The marketplace of content is so vast that even good work disappears. So what does a marketer do when reach is commoditized and attention is the only currency left? Whether you’re running a lean in-house team or navigating an industry with no established playbook, the pressure to do more with less is real. This episode is a candid look at what smart marketing looks like when the old frameworks stop working.

My guest is Mike Slatkin, CMO of RYT, a one-layer blockchain company building financial tools for unbanked populations in developing markets. He spent 15 years in agencies working on brands like Sony, Adidas, and HP before going in-house at Carvana and then making a full pivot into crypto.

In this episode, we explore the widening gap between brand and performance marketing, talk about how Carvana turned TV into a performance channel before most brands even knew that was possible, talk about what community looks like in a space as fragmented as crypto, and hear why Mike thinks curiosity is the most important thing a marketer could bring to any industry.

I’m Breanna Lawlor. This is The CMO Club Podcast. Mike, welcome.

We’re very excited to speak today with Mike Slatkin. He is the CMO and pending new role at RYT, and he’s gonna share a little bit about what his experience is, some of the things he’s noticing in the industry, some trends that are coming up.

I’m really excited to dig into this with you today, Mike. Floor is yours.

Mike Slatkin: Cool. Yeah, thanks for having me. This is an exciting opportunity. It’s my first podcast, I think, so looking forward to not totally falling on my face. Yeah, I’ve been in marketing and advertising for a really long time. I got my first job in 2005.

I guess that, that’ll date me, but whatever that is, and gone through sort of evolutions of working in agencies, working client side in big brand teams, and then eventually kinda like, kinda like changing careers at this point fully to doing marketing specifically in blockchain and now really doing product and strategy in blockchain.

So it’s been, like, an interesting, I think, experience over the years. I think that the fundamentals, I think, that I picked up in agency world, in marketing and advertising, problem-solving, and stuff like that I think has served me really well. And I think that sort of curiosity that it breeds, I think, has really helped me transition through the years from pretty traditional agency side roles to really non-traditional things in, in blockchain and crypto.

So yeah, like right now currently I’m working in a company called RYT. We’re a layer-one blockchain based in California. Our focus primarily is on sovereign blockchain products for governments, large institutions, and then kind of a, a select sort of product set for consumers as well. So we’re pre-launch, just kinda getting started, but it’s been a, sort of been a really cool opportunity and a fun challenge.

Breanna Lawlor: I bet. Thank you for sharing all of that too, and we’ll dig into sort of the nitty-gritty of your role and what the company offers in a bit. One thing that stood out to me just now is how you shared your expertise in marketing has sort of allowed for this career change towards product and strategy. And I wanted to ask you, and this This may come out of left field a little bit, but I think you know the answer.

Is it even possible to really separate marketing from product from strategy? Or do you feel like the best companies morph the three of those into a powerhouse trifecta, where the people who have the skills in marketing can also kind of come with a different lens and work in lockstep with people from those departments, and there’s some overlap there?

What are your thoughts?

Mike Slatkin: I mean, a product is one of the four Ps of marketing, right? So yeah, it is, I guess, seeded at least from an academic and philosophical standpoint in the world of marketing. But I think that I mean, what I’ve seen through my career, mostly no, right? I think that organizations are big, and product teams are siloed, and people who work are specialists, right?

Everybody is like, you know, titles have become so focused and specialized, and people that are in product side are not marketers, and they’re not often talking to marketing. That’s why you have product marketing there to kind of, bridge the gap between the product team and the marketing team.

And I think that maybe you see it more on smaller teams and in startups for sure, where everyone is thinking obsessively about the product. And the marketing person is right there, and go-to-market and bringing that thing to the public is kind of a, a group effort and happens within a really small group of people.

But as organizations grow, I think that, that there is a big separation between the folks that are working on product, the people that are doing marketing, the people that are doing communications, and the people that are understanding the consumer, right? The people that have the sort of relationship with the audience, and the people that might be, like, making the work oftentimes might not have the closest connection.

So I think that the bigger the organization gets, the further everyone gets apart from each other. But yeah, I think in its purest sense great founders have a really, really clear idea of what the product is. They have a really clear idea of who the audience is, how their product should be positioned, and how they wanna communicate it.

Breanna Lawlor: Absolutely. I would agree with you there, and then typically, the CMO’s job is to make that story come to life and get buy-in from the audience, from the team, from everyone else who’s meant to interact with it. Can you tell me a little bit about sort of your career evolution from the agency side and to where you are now, and kind of what the future looks like in the near term?

Mike Slatkin: Yeah. I worked in agencies for, I think, 15 years or something about in that range. You know, creative agencies in Los Angeles working on big consumer brands. A lot of big consumer electronics brands like Sony, HP, Apple. Sports stuff like Adidas. Touched on things like Expedia and, I don’t know, a number of other things through the years.

Breanna Lawlor: Household names.

Mike Slatkin: Yeah, household names. You know, sometimes you’re doing the really big work, sometimes you’re not, and you’re doing support stuff. But I think the brands were always exciting, the categories were exciting. And so, yeah, it’s just sort of, the career transition from there.

So did that for a long time. Then I went brand side, started working at a company called Carvana.

Carvana is an online retailer for used cars. And so they were kind of one of the first companies to bring used car selling online, and really creating and manufacturing this new way to buy a car.

So we took this sort of industry that hadn’t really changed in 80 years, and had to do a ton of education on, “Hey, here, for a lot of people, this is gonna be your largest or second largest purchase that you’re ever making in your life.” How do you get people to do that sight unseen, never touching the car, and doing it fully online?

So it was a great product challenge, great communication challenge. Really cool company. Very smart, data-focused company. I worked there for years, and then I just got really into crypto and blockchain. And, you know, it was one of those things where my podcast feed started to really evolve. My Twitter feed at the time started to evolve.

And I just found that I had a passion in something, and I wanted to… I felt like it was a new industry where I could carve out maybe something a little bit more of my own space there. Bring experience from this long career of traditional marketing and traditional consumer marketing, and go into a space where there wasn’t a lot of storytelling, where brands were really weak, where the audiences were fragmented.

And I think that for sure contributes to it, but try to bring in some of this other experience I’ve had for my career, and make a space for myself in a new and kind of developing industry. And feel like I’ve done that. If anything, it’s a lot of the marketing stuff has been, not put aside, but the big storytelling stuff and maybe some of the ideas I had on creative have been sort of parked because there’s so much work to do on the product side and the strategy side.

And just you know, I’ve become an expert in ecosystem like in on chain ecosystems and liquidity and a lot of financial stuff that I didn’t really understand or know anything about when I got into the industry. And I think truthfully, it was, like, one of the motivating things was I just wanted to understand money more in my own life.

And I thought that working in an industry that was, like, a little bit more financially focused and just had a little bit more context to what was happening in the world, how money moves markets, how money moves the world, how things shape because of it, it just seemed interesting to me.

And so, you know, I understand that stuff a lot better now to the extent where, yeah, I can build products and talk to banks and help them understand what we’re trying to build and, you know, have those conversations. And I think that I never would have imagined that eight years ago or seven years ago or something like that.

Breanna Lawlor: It’s really neat to hear that you were able to shape-shift your career in pursuit of something that you were passionate, interested, and keen to learn more about. And as a result, you’re immersed in that world, and you learn so much faster than if you just did that outside of your nine-to-five. So that’s fascinating to hear because that whole industry has been developing quite rapidly.

I mean, I’m sure you can speak to it better than I can, but I feel like it’s a lot of a gray area. There’s tons of opportunity for education and also storytelling and getting buy-in from your user base. Have you found any sort of tactics have worked particularly well to get people familiar with what you offer?

And how are you doing that against your competitors differently? How are you differentiating from them?

Mike Slatkin: Crypto, it doesn’t often move like that. I think people’s persuasions are much different. In the end, it’s like everything is community-based. It’s very grassroots-based, right? And your communications aren’t necessarily the things that are gonna get people to move.

Communities in crypto are just code word for financial alignment, financial align, financial incentives, AKA like token holders, people trying to get rich together, right? That’s like generally how everyone has aligned folks, is you build these like little micro cults around these products or these protocols, these tokens, NFTs, like whatever it is, and you get people like really, really pumped up, and then the token kind of becomes, or the asset or whatever it is, becomes this thing and it kind of like holds people together.

I think there’s like– It doesn’t work. It like really most of the time like fails because these assets are so volatile and people that invest a lot of like emotion into these types of things, and then it kind of crumbles away when the token doesn’t perform how they want it to or whatever the asset. And this isn’t like the type of stuff I’ve done a lot of, to be honest, in my career, but this is like generally like how the category has worked for the most part.

It’s tough. And so I think that like very few products take like a narrative approach, or very few protocols take a narrative approach to their, their marketing and their communications. It is– You have that kind of like cult, community-aligned financial incentive side, and then there’s like a really sort of like financial and developer and technology-focused like messaging path, right?

A lot of like communications you see from great protocols are really about like what they’ve built, the technology behind what they’ve built, what it unlocks for developers, what it unlocks for composability. And I think that that type of like messaging can be really effective and persuasive because it is and historically has been this like tech-focused space, and If you get developers passionate about stuff, if you get people that truly understand the tech or the people that really understand what these new financial primitives unlock, that type of enthusiasm and excitement does filter down into communities below.

And so I think that that can help either build awareness of the product or the protocol. Sure, drive token sales if they have a token. Certainly drive deposits into the protocol to grow the assets under management that they have. But, you know, a couple people you’ll see in my … I’ll see in my Twitter feed come across people do kind of like mantra videos or launch films and stuff like that, but it’s pretty far and few between.

There’s a handful, I think, of, of protocols that I can think of off the top of my head right now that try to do that, and even the work that they do, it’s, it’s just mantra videos. It’s just edits and compilations of found footage. No one’s really shooting new stuff. People aren’t necessarily, like, telling new stories.

They’re just creating ideas behind things. I think it’s just a very … Storytelling in this space is still really new, so.

Breanna Lawlor: Interesting. Okay. So it sounds like the community is central to momentum building, but how do you know which community to invest time in? Because building community is not something that happens fast.

You have to keep pouring energy into it, and you have to have your finger on the pulse constantly to get any value out of it. And so, I mean, you’ve probably seen this throughout your career, various forums of what community looks like and how it can be leveraged maybe from a marketing lens, maybe not. Do you wanna speak to that a little bit about how it’s done well and how it can flop?

Mike Slatkin: I would say at least in blockchain, 99% of the communities fail in the end. Again, because it’s tied to financial alignment aligned financial incentives. And so, if you think that 99% of the assets fail over time the communities that kind of, rise and fall with them are on the same path.

In terms of how you target and build the right community, I think like KOLs, influencers are really big in the space. I mean, like this industry, there is no like centralized kind of like media vehicle. There’s no like specific place where everyone kind of like follow the same trends other than like Twitter.

Like crypto Twitter has been the place where everyone historically has gotten together, talked about the industry, talked about what’s happening, like shared news and stuff like that. And so naturally, like influencers, key opinion leaders, KOLs, as they say in crypto, become like an important part of the mix and help you, I think can help at least build community alongside the protocols, like building relationships with those people, understanding who their audience is, like what their audience are naturally interested in.

And, and like KOLs, the good ones are good traders or really interested in tech or really interested in like DeFi primitives or like they have a specific focus where they find “Hey, this is a thing I’m passionate about. I speak passionately about it,” and they can build a passionate audience.

Like there’s a lot out there that are just like doing like pump and dump schemes for tokens and stuff, and it’s like you kind of have to sift through all that stuff. Ultimately, like people are attracted to the things that they’re interested in, right? Like blockchain is a small space, but there’s like different parts to it.

There’s people that are interested in like NFTs. There’s folks that just want to trade meme tokens. There’s people that want to do stable coin investing and earn yield. There’s folks that get really interested in like DeFi protocols and looping and stuff like that. And so whatever you’re building as a team, you’re trying to figure out like, okay, well, like who is our audience?

Like who has a real future for those audience, and how can we start to build that community? But you know, that community building historically then migrates off of Twitter, and it goes into these insulated Discord spaces where people really get into it. And so that’s not necessarily even out in the public.

So a lot of the true community building or deep conversations about what the product is or the project or whatever happen in these kinda small enclaves and closed spaces.

Breanna Lawlor: There’s so many parallels there to marketing in general now on how the channels are so fragmented, and there’s not a lot of cohesion.

You’ll have different groups saying different things depending on where you put your energy and where you’re paying attention. So as you’re saying all this, I’m trying to think for marketers now just sort of zooming out a little bit, how can they figure out where to pour emphasis into community?

Is it really just trying a bunch of different things, or have you found more success in a, a narrower scope as far as getting that feedback, that insight to what people are asking for, what the conversation is circulating around, and also where the interest is?

Mike Slatkin: Truthfully, I don’t know. I mean, I think every industry is different, right?

Every product is gonna be different, and people need to understand what moves their particular audience and how to pull the right levers in order to activate them as a community. For sure everyone wants to have a group of people on TikTok who are like, “I’m, like, a brand X girly,” or, “I’m, like, a brand Y guy,” and to create that content.

But I think, like, how you get from not having any of that to there is a challenge that every brand and, and product team’s gonna navigate differently. I think it does definitely come down to the product, right? People aren’t persuaded by messaging anymore. I think they’re, like, made aware of things through content, but I the persuasiveness of it is pretty weak, and all the persuasion happens kind of, in the middle from peers You can buy influencers, you can buy like clipping, and I wanna like talk about that stuff later. You can create the perception that there is an organic, authentic middle that is like moving consideration forward for your brand. But unless it’s like actually authentically there, you’re just like renting the conversation.

You’re renting time, you’re renting like space in people’s heads through influencers or through clipping or through whatever else there is. And so it’s like you wanna have that passionate fan base somewhere in there in the middle that you can help amplify that does drive consideration forward and helps like kind of reaffirm and, and continue to build that community.

I just think that every brand’s gonna get there differently. They’re gonna get there through the relationships that they build with partners in the space, through celebrities in the space. Like again, I think like probably through influencers as like a way that people can like jumpstart the way that the community builds is like finding people with reach, with a platform who are aligned with them and like starting to build in tandem with them.

KOLs are, aren’t– They aren’t just I think about impressions and reach and, and persuasion. It’s about building connection with the people that they follow in an authentic way because there is like a belief that there’s aligned interests there.

Breanna Lawlor: That makes a ton of sense. It’s a trust exercise in a way.

If you build up that trust, then people are more likely to be on board with maybe something. They might be aware that they’re being sold, but more into it because you’ve already developed that relationship and nurtured it, whether that’s through a creator or directly through community or both.

Mike Slatkin: Yeah.

The product still has to be good though, right? The whole thing like falls apart. As soon as the product sucks, like it falls apart. Like the KOL loses their influence, like they lose their credibility rather, then they lose their influence. The people get upset. They don’t trust them in the future. So I think that like that’s why I think good influencers I suppose are really picky about who they work with.

They understand their audience. They know it’s gonna move their audience forward. And you know, if you get brought in on those types of deals, it’s because there is this sort of understanding that, right, what you produce or what you’re marketing will speak to the people that I speak to in a credible, authentic way, and I trust you as a brand or a product maker or whatever to bring something quality into this relationship on the product side.

Breanna Lawlor: That makes a ton of sense too. And as you were sharing about this too, like we kinda mentioned there’s this barbell approach. There’s creative and there’s performance marketing, then there’s everything in the middle now. And it’s, it’s almost like for the last maybe decade, fifteen years or so, there was a heavy emphasis on performance marketing.

And now with AI prevalent in every facet of marketing and industry in general, brand differentiation is the core strategy to retain, to attract, to get buy-in from your proposed audience. In this regard, if you were to kinda draw a line in the sand, what separates performance marketing from creative? And do you think the pendulum has swung back more to creative than performance?

And if so, what does that look like?

Mike Slatkin: I mean, I think performance marketing can be creative, should be creative, right? I think if you’re, like, brand level marketing and performance, I suppose it’s how they’re evaluated, right? Brand marketing, I think, is gonna be primarily evaluated on those high-level brand metrics, like awareness and maybe consideration, things like that.

And performance marketing is just sales and revenue, whatever the particular company is looking at for their performance marketing goals. I mean, it could be, like, email signups. I don’t know, depends by campaign. But you have a specific outcome you have to hit, and you’re optimizing for those one or two specific outcomes.

I feel like brand marketing is different, right? You’re not optimizing for one specific outcome. You’re optimizing for awareness or general sort of Understanding for making people feel something, which you can’t really measure by a click. That is the difference. Can performance marketing make you feel something?

I don’t know. I mean, it makes you feel like you wanna buy stuff. And does it make you feel more? Probably. I can’t think of anything off the top of my head, but I suppose everyone wants to get to that place, right, where it’s not just a bunch of product slop that’s hitting your feed. And I mean, even if it is microtargeted and relevant and oh, that’s really cool.

Oh, I could use something like that. Oh, I was just looking for something like this the other day. So funny that this is in my feed. Even if it is extremely relevant, I think that the surprise is always the relevancy. It’s never the oh, I feel something maybe about the way that this has been presented to me.

I don’t know if you need it to, but I suppose there’s always room for there to be more evolution on, on that side, and maybe that’s where you go with more AI generative content. You’re having, We’re not that far from work that’s gonna be created on the fly that is probably performance-driven ads that are narrative-based, that are created based on our browsing habits or our search history or the things that we’ve expressed interest in the past that they know that we understand.

It’s like contexts and backdrops and narratives and stories that take you on a journey to sell you a very specific product at a very particular point in your shopping, in your customer journey through the funnel. We can’t be far away from that type of stuff. So maybe, maybe that is where the feels come from in the performance marketing space is when, you know, you’re getting truly on-the-fly generative narrative content served into your feed or wherever you’re consuming, consuming that content.

Breanna Lawlor: In a way that’s a gift, right? Because then it’s relevant, it’s useful. It’s not just a bunch of stuff you have to sift through. It’s kind of like, “Okay, I’ll accept that because it’s, it makes sense to me.” But when it’s completely out of the realm of interest, it’s like scroll on by.

Mike Slatkin: I don’t know. I don’t know how people are gonna react to it.

I mean, it could be people are like, “Man, this is really great,” or it’s just “Oh my God, this is gonna make me sick.” Just the repulsion of, I don’t know, it becoming so intrusive and understanding what you want. I don’t… Maybe people don’t want narrative-based performance content.

I don’t know. And for people just don’t want to so much AI slop in their life. Right. It’s hard to say. Everyone’s different. I mean, some people love a social feed full of really bad AI images, and I think some people like more authentic things. And I don’t know. I, I guess I’m not here to say one thing is right or one thing isn’t.

Everyone makes their own choices in life based on their taste and their preferences and the things that provide them joy and the things that they find to be entertaining. And it’s I think that marketing is always about finding relevancy with your audience, right? And so it’s like some audiences may be predisposed to loving generative work, and some may not be.

And so I think that the tools and the levers that you pull, again, it’s really just comes down to, like, how much you think you know about the people that buy your product.

Breanna Lawlor: And therein lies the truth within the data, I imagine. So it seems like you’ve had success with this in the past. You had the TV campaign, what was it, with Carvana, and then you leveraged insights on what people were clicking on in real time.

I mean, you can probably speak to this more succinctly than I can, but you were able to make adjustments based on what people interacted with, how they responded, which is the same thing that marketers are trying to do now. Can you share what you were able to attribute your success to throughout that campaign or surrounding it?

Mike Slatkin: Yeah. Basically the company had a really sophisticated approach to understanding TV performance and had tools that allowed the company to understand that based on any particular spot that aired, so one commercial, one airing on one network. So understanding what the creative is, what show it ran against, what time, how many people went to the website, how many people took a performance action, whether it’s walking a car, looking at a car, doing whatever.

And they could see on a very accurate level which TV spots performed and which TV spots didn’t and when and at what time and on what networks and stuff like that. And so it turned television into performance marketing in a really real way, and it shaped everything that we did in the, in the brand marketing team.

It shaped creative development, shaped like how we approach creative development, shaped how we approach production. The data and the results that we got from that were always at the core of everything that we did. And I think that like there were times and you know, we understood that brand level work wasn’t really in the cards for the business at the time.

The industry was too new. What we were asking people to do was too new. And so always like value prop and education-driven content was the stuff that moved the needle. I think that like we took swings on how do we communicate these ideas in a more creative way? How do you make them more entertaining? How do you do them in like different approaches?

And you know, there are times when we spent like millions of dollars and created work that we love, that we thought would move the brand forward and communicate some of these like product ideas and spend money on celebrity talent and like it didn’t work. We knew like we put the stuff out there and it was like, hmm, didn’t move the needle as well as like this thing that we did for twenty thousand dollars a year ago and self-produced.

And so it’s when you’re a growing business and trying to scale a business and really take over an industry, you kind of on the marketing team and brand team and for the creatives that we had, all the work was done in-house. We, we did a lot of production in-house and like the creatives were on house.

Like sometimes it’s tough, like you have love for work that you do, but the company isn’t there to put out the work that you love. It’s the point of the company is to sell cars and to grow as big as it can and return value to shareholders, whatever. And so you, you teach your paths, like you try to take the learnings that you have evolved.

Like I think we were fortunate to be able to take stuff that we liked or maybe didn’t and revise the work as we went along and put it back out and ran it for a week and got the results back and it’s like, “Okay, well this solved the problem and, and now we can run the work we like or that didn’t help and we’re just gonna go back to some of the other stuff that we know works really well.”

And it can be hard to keep, I think, creatives motivated in those situations. It can be tough to keep the team feeling good. I think when– it’s different, I think if you’re in an agency and that’s happening, you’re doing like great work and like the client just is killing campaigns and just wants to go back to the thing that they made in-house.

I think when you’re in-house, it’s okay, the count isn’t going anywhere. You know that the marketing budgets are going up. You know you’re gonna have another bite at the apple in a couple of months to do a new spot. And so you just try to like keep people motivated by that. And there are like financial incentives to the company doing well for people that, that work there, right?

So we all want the company to succeed, but it doesn’t take the burn away, I think of, you know, you spent five months working really hard on a campaign and it’s just not gonna be something that gets seen very much.

Breanna Lawlor: Yeah, that’s frustrating. And it’s also just par for the course. That’s how it goes.

And hopefully if you take some learnings from that and then adjust and then try something slightly different, maybe it lands, great. One I wanted to ask you is do you think that there’s a place for agencies more so now than ever based on how things are going for marketing leaders? For CMOs to bring in an agency to sort of fulfill that creative pursuit rather than leaning in-house, maybe because it brings a different line of perspective, or it just brings a, a more tactical sprint Based on what you’ve seen, what you’ve experienced throughout your career, do you feel like agency growth is heightening or it’s diminishing as far as their value for in-house brands?

Mike Slatkin: You know, I don’t know. It’s not something I’m tracking very closely. I mean, maybe this goes back to kinda like the barbell thing where… Well, obviously a lot of brand, even when I was in agency brands are bringing work in-house, right? So, a lot of brands just wanna do their own work in-house.

They don’t wanna kind of like… I think they want the buy-in from the creative team. They don’t necessarily want the friction with an agency that’s trying to do work for the client and also do work to make the agency famous at the same time. That can be a struggle. They think they can, at least good brands think they can attract top-tier talent internally, can compensate them probably better than they can be compensated in an agency, and do great, great work in-house.

So I think that that’s one of the problems obviously agencies have faced over the last 10 years is just talent drain moving in-house. You know, I feel like with everything in the world things are just becoming really polarized, and so maybe that’s the- kind of the same place that agencies go, where you have the handful of agencies that focused on very high-level brand work, big spots, big productions for the companies that need that type of expertise and want to do that type of stuff.

And then maybe there’s, on the other side, very, like, niche, specific small shops that are, who knows, like, setting up generative campaigns or understand, like, how to create AI tools for brands, and they’re, like, more operating as a service provider versus a big sort of brand communicator.

But I think it… the middle is getting chewed up by… I mean, I have 1,000 AI tools that can do whatever I want for me at, at any point in time, and I need to be, you know, as a CMO, I’m, I’m, I’m a CMO, I’m gonna find a couple people that understand how to use these tools really well, a few people that are just good multidisciplinary problem solvers who are hard workers, have good work ethic, are adaptable, and we’re just gonna run at marketing ourselves and use the tools that we have.

And I think for a lot of brands they might find that that’s enough at this point. You don’t need an agency to lay out your newspaper ads anymore. You don’t need an agency to create your digital ads anymore. You don’t need an agency to make your social content or whatever it is, right? All that stuff can be kind of, done for you, and even the strategy can be done for you.

Not that it’s I think, necessarily great strategy, but a, a lotta clients might feel like it’s good enough, or CEOs might think it’s good enough. And so we’re not gonna give marketing the budget that they used to have because they can just get all this stuff from generative sources now from AI.

Breanna Lawlor: There’s a risk there with leaning so hard into it.

Mike Slatkin: Probably, maybe. I don’t know.

Breanna Lawlor: Depends who you talk to, right?

Mike Slatkin: Yeah, depends on who you talk to. I think if you told someone, “Hey, there’s a risk in leaning into social media” 20 years ago or 15 years ago I don’t think they would call that a risk right now.

Or, you know, any major communication or relevancy step change in, in how people connect or communicate Embracing that stuff early has always seemed to be, like, the right move. Certainly not rejecting it outright. The Luddites who just sort of like put up the blockers and say “This isn’t for me.

This isn’t for my brand. This isn’t what I wanna do,” it hasn’t worked. That culture is gonna move, the world is gonna move forward, and you can’t your brand can’t be, like, making decisions on whether or not you want to participate in that or not. You have to go with the flow to some extent.

You can make choices on, like, where and what you wanna say and who you want to engage with. But I think that just pushing back on things in general, like not embracing change is, is always gonna be pretty detrimental to individuals, organizations, whatever it is.

Breanna Lawlor: Yeah, absolutely, especially with the pace things are moving.

I mean, comparing now to even January of this year, like how much things have changed and the rapid evolution for folks, for individuals, for organizations. If you’re not at least trying to keep pace or you have your finger on the pulse, you will be left behind, and maybe that’s okay, but it does depend on what you’re doing.

Mike Slatkin: Yeah. The world is changing really fast. These are exciting times. They’re scary times. There’s definitely been moments I feel like this year, maybe like towards the end of last year, I was just like, “Whoa, hold on.” Like, when you look back at what’s happened over the last three weeks and what people are now capable of doing that they weren’t capable of doing just a very short period of time ago, and it’s incredible I think it is really empowering, and I’m not gonna get into the sort of doomer AI stuff or whatever, but I think that people’s potential is being unlocked right now.

And I think if you have ideas and you have initiative and you wanna do something everyone’s always been like, “Oh, there’s never– There’s no excuse to not do it.” But truly now there isn’t. You can build anything in tech that you want. You can design products. I have a side project I’m working on where I’ve designed a product and I filed a a provisional patent for it, and AI helped me do all that.

And so I think that people’s potential is becoming unlocked in really exciting ways, and I think that it increases competition, but in the end competition’s good for consumers. And I think that hopefully it just creates a better, more thriving marketplace with better products, better services, better things for people.

Entrenched systems, entrenched companies that had a corner on the market because they had-

Breanna Lawlor: Resources?

Mike Slatkin: Yeah, the resources. Yeah, I’d say the technical capital to kinda retain that position now have to actually fight for it. I mean, there’s been so, so much churn, but I think that’s good for consumers.

Breanna Lawlor: It is, and the friction’s been removed for your layman. You’re able to create things, like you said, in a way faster than you ever could before, and you can iterate on it quickly too and get that feedback and just the momentum, it has unlocked so much. So much in such a small amount of time.

Mike Slatkin: It’s funny, the place where I think it is the most corrosive is, is on the content side.

Thinking about your feed filled with thousands and thousands of generative influencers that are being served to you through some sort of ad network or optimizing based on clicks and just becoming more and more relevant, more and more smarter, but it is all just kind of, a facade.

It’s all fake. Nothing is real, nothing is authentic anymore. And so I guess that kinda goes back to the conversation around community, right? People that want authenticity. It is the sort of connection that you have with other fans or followers or whoever that is that brings authenticity back into your life, and it doesn’t just have to be, like, you know, brand communities or whatever, but just communities in, in general, and-

Breanna Lawlor: It’s not so much about what you could create or how fast.

It’s the community and the connection behind it that you’re able to build as a result. ‘Cause you had said in one of our earlier conversations that nothing matters as far as content goes. It might land, it might not, but things are gonna change so quickly, and then you can just try something else.

But do you feel like we’re kind of in a race to the bottom, or do you feel like in a way this is almost coming full circle, like back to the peer-to-peer or person-to-person or online community member to online community member connection again?

Mike Slatkin: Yeah, I think like 99% of content is like disposable. It’s like worthless, completely forgettable, has no value.

Not because it’s bad, it’s just because the marketplace of content that it competes in is so vast, and then we have so many messages every day, and the placements themselves are commoditized. There isn’t you know, people aren’t watching network television that much. They’re not watching big events or where like the placements become not commoditized, right?

But so much of the placements now are just commoditized online placements that people interact with on a day-to-day basis. And so it’s like, you know, you’re competing with clipping armies, you’re competing with like self-optimizing, like generative video systems. Like it’s harder than ever to break through.

And it’s yeah, I think it comes back to just taking shots on goal. Like everyone just needs to take a lot of shots and see what sticks and hope that you find success that way because, you know, you’re just flooding people with messages and content every day the same way anyone else is. But I don’t think we’re necessarily always asking people to make that purchase decision, right?

Like performance marketing we cover, is, but I think what we’re asking people to do is like most brands like aren’t, yeah, not asking people to just go off and buy something. Like you’re asking them to go on TikTok and post about the thing that they bought, right? Like that’s what people actually need now is like that persuasive middle, that like consideration place to be driven by, driven by humans.

And I think that smart brands are probably using like their big placements to build community, to build sort of like around thisism and create a space where they can persuade people not to go off and buy the product, but to go off and post about the product, right?

Breanna Lawlor: Yeah, attention is the currency.

Mike Slatkin: Yeah, for sure.

Attention is the currency.

Breanna Lawlor: Basically all we have left is our attention. Where are you gonna put your energy, time, resources?

Mike Slatkin: Yeah, for sure. If I were talking through crypto project briefly for a guy that was trying to tokenize content, tokenize attention, basically. You could mint your tweets or mint some of the stuff that you were working on into tradable assets because it is an attention economy, and posts create attention, video and content creates attention, and so have you put a little financial layer on top of that.

I mean, we live in a world where everything’s financialized, or certainly in my view everything’s become financialized. But prediction markets have changed the way that people consume politics. They’ve changed the way that people consume sports and stuff like that. Yeah, this financialization of things is, of course, you financialize attention.

Breanna Lawlor: Yeah. Why wouldn’t you?

Mike Slatkin: Why not? It didn’t work. But I’m sure someone will get there, or the market will be ready for it at some point.

Breanna Lawlor: Yeah. So looking ahead, short term, dare I say long term, what are some things you’re really excited about? Are you looking forward to the next three, six months, especially in the space that you’re in, or just as someone who has the marketing chops and is maybe seeing an evolution in your role that’s more strategic?

What sort of things are showing up for you, or what are you hearing among your peers?

Mike Slatkin: Some of the stuff that we’re working on right now I am excited about because I think that it starts to get into that place where maybe I can do the type of marketing work that I’ve wanted to do in crypto. So some of the products we’re building at RYT are basically financial products for folks that are unbanked in developing countries.

So we do– or we’re doing a lot of work in Pakistan, for example. Some of it is standing in for banking products and services. Another one is an online tool to organize savings circles. So in Pakistan and in a lot of sort of de- developing nations around the world, people who has historically not had access to banking or saving tools have done group savings, ROSCAs, savings circles, whatever.

So you get to- together with a group of people. Everyone puts in a fixed amount of money, let’s just say monthly. You put in a hundred bucks every month And then one of the people kind of like takes that pot. And so it can be used for like a general, like cyclical savings tool, you know, that like once a year you’re gonna have like sum of money that comes to you that you can use for, I don’t know, whatever, upgrading something in your house, buying something that you need, like hosting an event.

Sometimes people will use these ROSCAs as kind of like predated, like Klarna or Affirm. You would say “I really need something. Like I got a job delivering food. I need a moped.” So I’ll start a committee with my friends and say “Hey, let’s all get together for a committee. I’m gonna take the first pot because I need this for my job.”

So now I’ve gotten 1,200 bucks to go off and buy a moped. I’m gonna pay that forward $100 a month, like throughout the rest of the year. But it’s like basically an interest-free Klarna idea. So we’re basically building an on-chain version of this for people because there’s always one person in the middle that organizes all this stuff.

It’s like off-chain, it’s like inconvenient. So creating a more convenient way for people to do this.

Breanna Lawlor: Frictionless.

Mike Slatkin: There’s, yeah, frictionless. There’s like billions of dollars that go through like these ROSCAs o-over the years. And so I want to create storytelling content around like the people that use these types of products.

People that like, how did this remove friction? How did you– When we add in, like we can stack in features like earn yield or do better savings or kind of micro-lending or other types of basically you’re just like stacking sort of like products on top of each other and it’s like really easy to do in, in blockchain just because like things are interlocking and they’re kind of made to work that way.

And so, you know, I want to go to Pakistan and talk to people that use this stuff and create so much of crypto products like don’t actually help real people. They’re used by hobbyists and tinkerers and people that think this stuff is really cool, or they’re used by like hyper gamblers and risk takers that want to hundred X something that they’re making or hundred X an investment.

But it is a really small group, and it’s not like there’s a ton of real people that are actually seeing the benefit of these products, and that is changing now. I think in the last year that’s changed a ton. Though still what you don’t have is like great storytelling around, like how does technology, the removing the financial barriers, the creating of accessible financial tools, changing opportunity and life for people in places where they live like much different than we do.

Their access to opportunity, the access to like financial tools and money that they have is much different. And so I think that like being able to tell those stories I think is persuasive. I think it like certainly if it’s not like going to get people to use the product because, hey, maybe that’s not a product for someone in the West or for someone, whatever, on crypto Twitter, it does like at least say “Hey, this is a company, a protocol, a brand that’s building stuff that actually has meaning.”

We’re transitioning out of this period of vaporware and crypto for the sake of crypto and scams or whatever into a place where I don’t know maybe this can actually really help people. And so to me, that’s exciting. I wanna make products like that. I don’t want DeFi protocols that are used by DeFi enthusiasts that don’t matter.

Breanna Lawlor: This is product with a purpose.

Mike Slatkin: Yeah. That’s exciting to me. I mean, hopefully we can bring it to market and we can wrap up development and, and it’s a, a success.

Breanna Lawlor: Yeah. It sounds incredible, and it’s also really good to think out- outside of the box in that sense. We exist in the West. We kind of are familiar.

We have everything at our fingertips, and it’s really neat to go into a country where they’ve been doing something like this for probably centuries, and now you’re just… you’ve got the benefit of technology and knowledge and community, and you’re bringing it all together to make something meaningful happen and scale it.

What an incredible niche to be working within.

Mike Slatkin: Yeah. I mean, Pakistan’s the fifth-largest country in the world by population. They have 80% of the people are under 40. It’s actually a really neat, exciting place to do work just because I think there’s a, a tremendous amount of opportunity with people that are young, that are tech-savvy, that are open to opportunity, that are aggressive and hungry and looking for, looking for a change.

Breanna Lawlor: Mike, this has been so awesome. We have covered a lot of ground. You have shared some fascinating insights throughout your time in marketing and also the evolution of your career. Is there anything else that you wanna leave us with, other marketing leaders who are maybe either exploring a career change or wanna double down and really demonstrate impact, especially over sort of the back half of this year?

Any advice, sentiment you would leave us with?

Mike Slatkin: Stay curious. I would, yeah, try to use new tools, stay intellectually curious. You know, continue to pursue, I think, the problems and the problem-solving stuff that I think that marketers have… This probably brought people to this industry, right? People who are in marketing like problem-solving.

They like challenges. They like being adaptable and not being stuck in their own way, right? It’s al- always been about flexibility and curiosity, and I would say there’s never been a better time to be curious.

Breanna Lawlor: I would agree with you 100%. Thank you.

Mike Slatkin: Thank you very much.