Flavor Flav Is The World’s Greatest Hypeman

Willam Drayton, Jr. - the human version of a B12 shot & the owner of the world’s most famous clock - is better known a Flavor Flav. From knowing when to Fight the Power to sponsoring the US Women’s Water Polo team, Flav is there with his gift of focusing attention.

In some ways, Flav makes his living as a clown. But he isn’t unserious. His signature - the big clock around his neck - is his version of “Momento Mori”, the stoic reminder that our time here is limited. (Worth reading Ryan Holiday’s books about stoicism, btw.)

But he has mastered the art of attracting attention without feeling exploitative, inauthentic or sales-y.

Attention is Expensive

As entrepreneurs, we peddle in attention more than anything. While Gary Vee taught us to day trade in attention (a slight, but good read) I’ve been thinking about attention and messaging for most of my adult life. (I made a blog post in 2014 called Chief Selling Officer which I think is my early take on this idea.)

One of the crucial elements of entrepreneurial attention is knowing what you want attention for… If you are Cash App - a non-product focused ad featuring Timothee Chalamet might work super well because your product is pretty applicable to almost anyone who sees it in Times Square. Cash App can do that because a) they have a very broad audience & b) they have gobs of cash.

As an agency entrepreneur, yew are missing 3 things that Cash App has:

1. A really broad target market

2. Gobs of cash

3. Access to Timothee Chalamet

So, the Cash App attention playbook isn’t gonna work for you - its way too expensive.

What do you need?

1. You need to know who your buyer is

2. Why they buy services like yours

3. Why they should buy from you.

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How To Earn The Attention You Need

Your agency - typically - helps generate attention for other businesses. As an industry, we are masters at leveraging other people’s resources (money, products, services, platforms, creative) and turning it into attention.

In fact, that is all a marketing agency does. It uses resources to create attention for their clients.

It is almost universally true, however, that we AREN’T good at using our own resources to create attention for ourselves. Part of the issue is economics - most agencies aren’t at a sufficient scale where they can invest 20-50% of their revenue to acquire clients. Plenty of B2C & B2B marketers do that on the regular. But that doesn’t work for agencies - the economics are wrong.

So what we have to do is figure out how to be our own Flavor Flav - cuz last I checked, he ain’t working for spare change you’ve got lying in the cushions of your couch.

How Do You Become Flavor Flav Without Actually Being Flav?

OK - so I am not a magician - I can’t tell you how to be Flav, but I do want to tell you how to hype yourself in a way that works for you.

CONTENT: This might sound stupid, but very few agencies create content that does what they need. Recently, a creative agency asked me what would make their “sizzle reel” better. I told them “nothing”. At first they thought I was telling them that it was good…(and it was - it showed off their skill well)…I told them it is a waste of time when it comes to attracting potential clients. They were surprised, then I explained buyers don’t make decisions based on the quality of your reel, they make decisions based on how well you understand their business issues and can show them how working with you can solve that business issue. (Obviously, that is an over-simplification, but I don’t want to keep you here all day.) So the content that you need to create isn’t about what you do, but rather how well you can express that you have a solution to a potential buyer’s problem, and that you can demonstrate the impact of the solution. So, here is your content checklist:

1. Make content that is relevant to your target market, not to your particular service or your process. Ask yourself if the content addresses a concern or opportunity that the potential client might have on their radar. (In Fight the Power, Flav helped bring attention to the power lyrics - he sang “People people” so Chuck D could deliver the punch “we are the same”. He was getting that audience’s attention so the content could have impact..

2. Make content that is helpful without being too soft. Obviously, you want your content to drive business, but nobody is going to engage with something that is bland and boring… The content needs to be generous, but also show what it is like to work with you. Flav adds voice and volume to the chorus “Fight the power” and encourages people to join “C’mon, c’mon we’ve got to fight the powers that be…”, but he also exposes what Public Enemy stands for by amplifying the fact that Elvis was a racist, “…m0t#3rf@ck him and John Wayne…” So you know EXACTLY where Public Enemy stands. No “trying to appeal to a broad market”, no “we can help anyone”. If you don’t want to fight the powers that be and the racists, Chuck D & Flav don’t need you. Your content can be helpful, but it should also be clear and LASER FOCUSED on who you want to work with…

DISTRIBUTION: Content used to live on your website. That was the environment you controlled, so driving organic traffic or email clicks was a good way to get your audience into your environment. Today is different. Your properties (website, blog, etc) are at the END of the hype - not the beginning. You gotta think like Flav. He didn’t just rest on his Public Enemy laurels. He took center stage in videos. He released his own music (Hollywood). He became a reality TV star (Flavor of Love)… he became a pop culture figure that eclipsed, in some ways, the success of Public Enemy. He took what worked as Chuck D’s hype man and turned it into his own platform. So think about all of the other channels that you can use to engage with your clients. Can you find additional ways to engage with your audience - a slack group, a newsletter, a You Tube channel - whatever. The world is bigger than your current reach - and I am not saying that you have to be everywhere, but just increasing your reach is crucial. Best, in many ways to think of “distribution” not as how to increase the size of your audience (that will happen) but rather how to increase the depth and frequency of your engagement with your target audience.

REPURPOSE: Flav wasn’t just going to keep bouncing beside Chuck D on stage - he took what he did and brought it to other media. You should too. Got a LinkedIn post that slapped? Translate it for Instagram, and an email, and a YouTube video, and a Threads post, and a blog and a TikTok. Sure - each of these platforms has its own rules and customs and ombre and tone, but you can use tools (I will add a list below of tools I recommend - that drew a lot of attention in Agency Inner Circle 81 - 4 Things Agency Owners Need To Stop Doing Now.)

OTHER PEOPLE’S AUDIENCES: You’ve got content. You’ve got self-powered distribution and you’ve got a great engine to adapt content from one platform to another. Now what you really need is someone else’s audience. Start thinking in this order: 1) Partners 2) Podcasts 3) Publications 4) Presentations

1. Partners - referral partners, or partners who handle different channels or different company sizes, or even just friends - is there some way you can leverage their audience to increase the reach of your message. Start with them reposting something you put on LinkedIn, and then maybe graduate to writing an article for their blog, or even doing a sponsored email to their list. Anything that can get your content seen by more people in your audience.

2. Podcasts - Holy moly everyone has a podcast. All those podcasts need guests. Start using a service like PodPitch to get your mouth in action. And the best thing is that you can use that podcast recording and repurpose it into content for other channels.

3. Publications - believe it or not, there are still a ton of narrowly focused industry specific publications. Obviously there are giant publishers like TechCrunch that are likely pay to play, but there other places like Ad Age that will publish good quality opinion pieces from agency folks - and there are some really targeted publications that address your target market (I have clients who publish articles in publications that focus on dentists, propane dealers (Hank Hill is back, y’all!), & menswear boutiques.

4. Presentations - this isn’t for everyone because it requires you to present to groups of people (and public speaking is a wildly popular fear - right up there with spiders), but there are thousands of conferences that can get you in front of your target audience. I’ve spoken to Boston digital marketers at Digimarcom, furniture retailers ay the HFA show, Pinterest agencies at the Aorapulse Pinterest Summit, users of particular software platforms, etc. There are organizations like The Home Furnishing Association or The American Baseball Coaches Association that have annual events where you might be able to speak, or there are narrowly focused conferences like Digital Marketing for Financial Services or the NextGen Headless CMS Conference. Your target audience has national or local events - and you can get on their stage (with a little elbow grease and persistence).

Don’t be shy about what you have to say - you are in this business because you are good at what you do.

Attention is a gift that you’ve earned - don’t waste it by not being your own Flavor Flav

By the way - the whole “become your own Flavor Flav” is at the heart of my GEN+ program. Market focus, message focus, content mining & repurposing made fun again.

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Tools For Distribution & Repurposing

This isn’t an exhaustive list, these are just the ones that I have used, or know to be excellent.

Distribution

PodPitch: Mentioned above, but it makes it really easy to find and contact the right podcasts that cater to your target audience. They are rolling out something for PR too. Save $100 via this link.

Beehiiv: Newsletters are an amazing way to keep your content in front of your audience. It’s not easy, necessarily, to do a twice weekly newsletter like this, but a 1x a month newsletter to prospects and a custom one to clients is a really great way to keep in front of your audience. Get a 30 day free trial & 20% off your next 3 months with this link (and plans start at $0, btw). There are other budget options, too: Brevo is solid and value packed, Active Campaign is a good value, and lots of folks like Substack or Ghost (haven’t used either)

Blaze.ai: I did a quick trial of Blaze.ai - and worked with Matt Heytens - had a great experience with him. Blaze basically takes content from your site, and whatever else you load into it and automatically and it will create social posts automagically.

Agorapulse, Publer, HootSuite, etc: There are a bunch of social publishing platforms. They all seem very similar to me. The last one I used was AgoraPulse and it was perfectly capable of doing what it promised.

Repurposing

ChatGPT: This is my go to - drop any text you have and tell it “Turn this into a <insert format>” and it will do a very good job. Not perfect and needs editing, but easy and cheap.

Fireflies.ai: All meeting recorders are pretty equal, in my experience. I use Fireflies (save 10% forever with that link, btw)- I like it, it is easy and connects to all the stuff that I want it to connect to…but it gives me the transcript & the video that I can easily use for repurposing.

Descript: This is my go to video editor - easy to edit, add b-roll, fix your flubs, it can help you create vertical and horizontal videos, use AI to make solid clips of longer content, it can write scripts, give you YouTube headlines & synopsis that don’t suck. Other solid alternatives are CapCut & for really good clips and social distribution, Opus is really solid. An advertiser from last week, Syllaby looks kind neat, too. It helps you make faceless videos.

Relay.app: This is a workflow/agentic builder (there are a ton of these, but this is the one that I use.) I’ve built a silly little workflow that grabs calls from Fireflies, identifies the major themes in the call, sends me a notification in Slack, and if I think that the themes are right, it will turn the themes of the call into a blog post outline, a 90 second video script, a LinkedIn post and an instagram caption. Join Relay for free here and try out my Transmorgrifier Workflow here.

There are a TON more apps for repurposing - but these will be a great start.