Paid, Earned & Owned Media Strategies with Adam Stoker, CEO of Relic Agency

Alex Husner  0:01  
Welcome to Alex and Annie, the real women of vacation rentals. I'm Alex. 

Annie Holcombe  0:13  
And I'm Annie. 

Alex Husner  0:44  
And we are joined today with Adam Stoker, who is the president and CEO of relic agency and I would say AI guru in the world of DMO destination marketing. Adam, it's great to have you on.

Adam Stoker  2:34  
Oh, it's great to be here. And thanks for the kind words, I'm actually really excited to be on your show. Because you guys, you're the leaders in the short term rental space as far as creating content and podcasting, so I'm really grateful to be a part of it. 

Alex Husner  2:48  
We're super grateful. I'm gonna take a card out of your book, too. Before we get started, I listened to your podcast this morning. And we normally will do this at the end of the episode. But I just wanted to learn, learn from the greats and share this information to that if anybody is enjoying watching the show. If you could go to Apple podcasts or Spotify, and leave us a review, we would greatly appreciate that. If you want to follow us on other social media Instagram, Facebook, LinkedIn, Alex, Danny podcast is our handle on all of them. And most importantly, YouTube. So we actually just recently found out that some people consider this a talk show, because they watch it on YouTube. So if you'd like to watch this versus Listen, please head over to YouTube or if you're on YouTube, please listen on the podcast network. So anyways, jumping in. Could you give our audience just a little bit of background on who you are and what your involvement is within the DMO space?

Adam Stoker  3:47  
Yeah, like you said, I'm Adam Stoker, and I'm President CEO of relic. And, you know, my background is it's kind of funny. I'm like most people who have gotten into the tourism industry, I kind of tripped and stumbled into it. And then I was like, Hey, I like it here and decided to say so back in 2012. I worked for a small agency called Sorenson advertising and my job was to bring in new clients, and then kind of build infrastructure underneath those clients to serve or underneath me to service those clients and continue to grow the business. And so I did a lot of like cold calling and just just trying to talk to whoever I could and I drove by the Cedar City, Utah Tourism Bureau, and I was like man, they look like they might have a marketing budget so I walked in and I was like, Do you guys need help with your advertising and they said as a matter of fact we do and that was the start of an eight year relationship with with visit Cedar City Brian head and you know, I really, I looked at tourism, I was like, this is a lot of fun. I didn't even know these tourism bureaus existed. But but you know, being able to look at a destination and identify the valuable products that it has and trying to package those together and market them in such a way that people want to come visit was really fun for me. And so you know, referral after referral. Next thing you knew we were working with several destinations in Utah. And I had the opportunity to buy the business from the previous owner in 2016. And by the time, by the time I bought the business, tourism was 40% of our business. And I said, You know what, I want to go all in on tourism. And one of my motivations for wanting to go all in on tourism, was that I didn't feel like there was a ton of competition. But once we started to try to expand outside of Utah, I realized that that was absolutely incorrect. There's plenty of competition in the tourism space. And so we, you know, we struggled for the first little while to break outside of Utah. And I decided that I needed something somewhere where people could go, because I'm relatively young compared to most of the agencies that are in the tourism industry, or at least the owners of agencies. And so I needed somewhere where people could go see that I knew what I was talking about. And so I decided in 2019, in May of 2019, to start a podcast, and I call it the destination marketing podcast. And the idea was to just bring on really smart people from the industry, talk about maybe something unique that they're doing in their destination that other destinations could learn from, I'd sprinkle in a little bit of my philosophies and comments along the way. And, honestly, it became so much more than a credibility piece, it kind of exploded, and I had people like PR firms reaching out to me making a case of why their client should appear on my show, and had several people reach out I even I remember, one of the earliest messages I got was somebody from Italy saying, Hey, this is so valuable to me, I really appreciate the content that you're creating, keep it going. And so then it became, you know, instead of just this credibility or portfolio piece, it became much more of a passion of mine. And over time, it's kind of grown and grown and and in 2020, we launched a podcast network where we actually started helping tourism destinations, launch their podcasts and help them figure out how to build audiences. And you know, I'm sure we'll talk about some of that strategy today. And now, it's evolved to the point to where, you know, we're working with some of the largest destinations in the industry, like, Visit Myrtle Beach, I had the opportunity to come Alex meet you in person, which was really great at that event recently, and was able to speak at that event, and there is absolutely no way that that happens. If I hadn't started my podcast in 2019. It's now the primary lead generation source for my advertising agency. And I get to build amazing relationships and meet incredible people. And now, you know, like I said, I tripped fell into the industry. I don't see myself ever leaving at this point.

Annie Holcombe  8:10  
Like, we've all experienced that. I know, I've tried to leave Hospitality and Tourism twice. And it's like, you get away from it. And it just it pulls you right back end. It's just impossible, because I think the people are infectious. And they're passionate, and they're a lot of fun. I'd like to so I think, you know, one of the ways that we met you was like through Stuart or in Alex's area, and then you work with a really dear friend of mine, Jennifer Barbie, you know, so you know, it's so interesting to me. It's like the Hospitality and Tourism space is fairly large entity. But in terms of the number of people and like the connections were all like six, seven degrees from Kevin Bacon, you know, like, we're just, it's a very, it's a very small community. So you you started your podcast, you started to grow, but you're working with all different sizes. It's like, how did you scale your business to work again? Small DMOS large DMOS. I love the small DMOS because I feel like they're scrappier and they know what it's like to work without a budget. And it's great. I'm sure from a business perspective. Big DMO is because they have the budget and they can do lots of fun and creative things. But you're working kind of across the spectrum, aren't you? 

Adam Stoker  9:15  
Yeah. And it kind of goes back to when I started the business. And of course, I guess I should say when I purchased the business, but even even coming to the organization, I had worked in radio sales prior to being in the agency world. And I'll never forget selling a radio program to a client. And I was sick about it. So much so that I quit my job the next week because I just knew it wasn't the very best marketing solution for that landscaping company. And I'm like, I would much rather be able to provide a customized solution. That is exactly what somebody needs instead of trying to shoehorn them into my solution because it's best for me, and being a full service agency is something that's always been really important to me. And so when we got into tourism, we were already structured as a full service agency so that if somebody had a marketing problem, we could put together the unique set of solutions to solve it. And as I brought in more clients early on in my career, I would then say, Okay, well, PR as part of their package, we probably need to hire a PR person at this point. So we kind of grew the business that way. And really the transition from from where we were to where we are today to being able to service multiple different sizes of clients, is the fact that we slowly transitioned, we didn't just like, let half the staff go and decide to go all in on tourism, we slowly transitioned into tourism. And so we had the staff there, we just had to train that staff to become more specialized on the tourism side of things. And as another client would would go, we would replace them with a tourism client and, and so the evolution happened to maybe a little slower than then it sounded like as as I described our experience. But now, because I've got some really solid leaders in place, including people that I've pulled from the destination side, I've got a couple of people in my organization that have, you know, been in the destination side of the table have been managing agencies for different destinations. I've got a really knowledgeable group of people that puts their heads together and comes up with these customized solutions for our clients.

Alex Husner  11:28  
Yeah, there's so much in your story that I can just relate to, and being younger and advertising growing up. And, you know, my dad owned an advertising agency for 25 years, was the largest North of Boston, still small, this is a New Hampshire, but you know, they they really focused on three main areas, banking, healthcare, and tourism. And I think, you know, that was kind of more in different segments or categories there. But still having that mentality of finding specialists or just going all in on one, the riches are in the niches, you know, no matter what type of business it is. And when you build a team that really knows that industry, you're going to be so much more relevant. And I think there's there's a lot of advertising agencies out there that they just are trying to be everything to everyone. And that's really hard that you might have like the best business development person that sells you on working with them. But then when it comes down to being able to understand what the nuances are of that industry, that's tough for your account management team to be able to really serve us and provide good good recommendations. But I also wanted to mention, too, that actually, the first time that I had heard about your podcast was at destinations International in Houston. And it was the week before Andy and I launched our podcast, and I was down there with our chamber CVB. And one of the sessions was about how to use podcasting to grow your DMO. And it was somebody else from your agency that presented it. But I remember sitting there in the audience and taking so many pictures sending it to me, I was like this is all these are all the stats about like why podcasting is just like such a incredible form of media. And, you know, to your point, it was also about like, just establishing credibility that way, that's kind of what Annie and I wanted to continue with, we've just made this decision is, you know, continue to further our credibility within the industry, but then it's just like yours, it turned into something much larger than that and something that we truly love to do. But it's it's a it's a magical thing. And so when we reconnected over all this as like, we've got so much in common as podcasters. And also just in the back story there.

Adam Stoker  13:40  
Yeah, I love that and you brought up, you know, the presentation that kept and it was actually Camden Burnett's, one of the amazing members of my organization that presented there, he actually oversees strategy for all of our clients now and does an incredible job. But you talk about podcasting, and you were taking pictures of those slides. You know, I, I didn't really I wasn't passionate about podcasting. When I got into it, right. I didn't know all the value of it. But now it's become something that like, I think everyone who has a thought about anything, have a podcast, right? Because, and one of the main reasons is I've looked at the way people consume content, the way people want to be entertained. And time is our most valuable commodity at this point. And, and so many of us are trying to be as efficient as we can with our time. But when you think about websites, or when you think about watching a video, you're asking people to really commit to sitting down and doing nothing else and dedicating their time to what you have to say or what your video is presenting or what your website says which you probably heard me talk about this when I was speaking in Myrtle Beach a couple of weeks ago. But the idea that all after you spend all this time generating all this written content on your website, do you really think somebody is going to sit down and spend 45 minutes to read through all of it. But with podcasting, you give people the ability to consume content passively, which opens up a whole new set of doors that I can learn while I'm driving to work I can learn while I'm at the gym, folding laundry and shower. And those are all places where now I listen to podcasts. And I think that that method of passive consumption is why podcasting is growing so much, and why I still feel like we're on the front end of where it's headed.

Annie Holcombe  15:39  
Adam, where like you, where are you at in terms of like the industry and recovery from COVID. We've talked to a lot of people kind of how specifically vacation rental has benefited from what happened, but I think the general hospitality space, the hotel space tourism space, really, that you know, without vacation rentals, it would it would probably still be struggling to get back on its feet, you obviously are, you know, use it are in a broader subset of hospitality and tourism. So what are you seeing? And what do you think, you know, the future looks like for our industry?

Adam Stoker  16:14  
Well, man, that's a

Annie Holcombe  16:17  
loaded question. I

Alex Husner  16:19  
have a whole conference on that question.

Adam Stoker  16:21  
Exactly. We can invite speakers. But, you know, for me, specifically, as I look at my business, 2022 was the hardest year that we've ever had. And so we had a little bit of a delayed reaction from COVID. Because I think you had the, you know, everybody said, Okay, let's stop running media for a minute. And we'll focus on coming up with a recovery campaign. So for my business, it was like, Okay, we might not have the media revenue in the second half of 2020. But we're able to build new campaigns and recovery campaigns and things like that. So that kind of carried us. And then there was some of the federal dollars that came in recovery money that destinations were spending. And so that sustained us, and then when, when a lot of the federal money dried up, it took a minute for us to kind of recover as as an organization. So for us, it was a little bit of a delayed reaction. But 2023, it's actually pretty amazing the momentum that we have compared to last year, we've picked up some really new and interesting clients and kind of feel like we've we've at this point in 2023, left COVID behind, right, so that that's really good. As an industry, this is gonna sound really strange, but I think COVID may have been one of the best things to ever happen to the tourism industry. And I'm not saying during those three months where everything completely right, but I'm talking more about some of the realizations that came out of COVID. I think one of the biggest things that I watched tourism destinations recognize is how important it is to have a connection with your local community. And that includes your owners of short term rentals, by the way, we think, prior to COVID destinations may have even looked at short term rental properties as a necessary evil, because it's like they're here, some of them pay taxes. But as opposed to hotels, I have to work with each of them. And individually, it's a lot of legwork, and things like that. And so I think they may have taken the vacation rental owners for granted a little bit prior to COVID. And I feel like once COVID hit and once, you know, the communities all kind of mobilized and started working together, I think destinations realized holy cow, this is a very important part of our stakeholder group is these vacation rental owners. And I saw destinations recognize the importance of building local relationships as opposed to just focusing on outside of market because there's even legislation in many places that you're prohibited from even spending any money inside of your market. And a lot of that legislation actually changed as a result of COVID allowing destinations and I'm aware of destinations that are running community pride campaigns to try to help the locals have a better perception of the local destination. There's also destinations that are actually running Workforce Development campaigns, which I don't think a lot of people ever thought the tourism destination would be running those campaigns. And so the relationship between individual stakeholders and the tourism destinations that support them, I think were strengthened and the the relationships were accelerated at an incredible rate thanks to COVID and I don't think we're going back as far as that's concerned.

Alex Husner  19:40  
Yeah, I think you're you're spot on. I also think that it's almost like it was like the impetus of they were dealing with the short term rental operators and whether they you know, what saw them more as a nuisance than a value to the community but they in a lot of cases and a lot of areas. They did become a nuisance that there was So much supply that was put on Airbnb, and VRBO. And it kind of became a little bit of the wild wild west for a lot of destinations trying to deal with things and the cities and municipalities. But it really became a way for the DMOS and the cities to come together and say, Okay, we we know, this is an important part of tourism, they're not the majority of short term rental operators are doing a good job, we've got to figure out a way to combat some of the things that are not being done, right. So not paying the taxes or having house parties and noise violations and trash and things like that. So it's almost like that was just it was the necessary push to now bring things up to speed. And I think, to your point about the local side, that's really just come full circle of the DMOS. And the cities seem to be working together in areas I see better, because now they're also realizing they have to keep those locals happy. I mean, like, they have to have programs for them, they have to get them to, um, to embrace tourism. I mean, we can't be isolating them and making them feel like, you know, they moved to this beautiful place, but now we want nothing to do with them. And it's just it's been a very big mind shift. I think, among a lot of those different sides of the of the industry, but interesting to see.

Annie Holcombe  21:14  
Yeah, we I know, we've talked to a lot of people from the regulatory side of things that recognize and our we have friends that rent responsibly, they're a great asset to the vacation rental industry. But one of the things that they recognize from the CEO is kind of like the experience that he had as a rental owner was like, he didn't know other people in his market, he was just renting his properties, and then getting backlash from neighbors and not but not knowing his neighbors, not knowing other people that were doing the business. And so when he started rent responsibly with other people, it was about like, let's get all the stakeholders that touch tourism, let that touch this, this party industry at the table. So it became important to have not only the people that lived by there, but the people that you know, maybe ran the local restaurant or had the school down the street, you know, just a really, really getting everybody involved in and I you know, Alex and I've talked about this a lot. And I've said it multiple times, I'd probably every day, it seems like but COVID was a really horrible thing. And nobody will new will ever discount that. But it was probably the best opportunity for tourism, vacation rentals for sure to kind of get together and have a collective voice and kind of create a path forward, where before everybody was just doing their own thing. And there was no consideration of how it impacted the local community or people outside and just all of the impacts that it had. So again, it was a complete blessing. In a weird way that one that I think that we needed. I mean, the whole industry needed it.

Alex Husner  22:49  
Yeah, yeah. I Adam, I'd like to pick your brain a little bit about the concept of branded media, and owning your own audience. We talked to Stuart about that recently. And it's something that you know, in the Myrtle Beach area, with our DMO, and of course, being led by Stuart, I hear about this all the time. But I think it's something that you know, heading into 2023 and just the future of a more competitive landscape. All businesses need to be thinking about, honestly, whether you're tourism or not, but certainly within tourism, you know, the ability to compete is getting harder and harder on on Google on Airbnb and VRBO. Talk to us a little bit about the the concept of branded media and owning your own audience.

Adam Stoker  23:29  
Yeah, this is my number one topic that I like about and talk about more than anything else. And it's because, you know, I've stumbled into this, like I said, I started the podcast, and I didn't even care about podcasts when I started it, like it was something that I wasn't sure what it was going to become. And as I've taken these different steps in in my career, and with my organization, I feel like my view has expanded on on what even marketing is as a whole. And as I look at the three different types of media that I believe a good marketer needs to be keeping an eye on nurturing. One is paid media and paid media is important because it's the ability to take action and immediately receive the results of that action, right, you can go, you can you can rent access to an audience that someone else has already built. Think like Facebook or Instagram or even on a more micro level, your local newspaper or your local, you know, radio station or whatever. They've all done the work to build those audiences. And through paid media, you are renting access to those audiences in an attempt to generate a purchase action of some sort, right. The second method is or the second type of media that I think a good marketer needs to be keeping track of is earned media. And that's usually referred to as public relations. And that's where you're you're trying to come convince other people to tell your story to their audience through unpaid means. A lot of times that can be, you know, media advisories, press releases, even through relationship building. And you can get other people to tell your story. The third one and the one that I think is completely ignored by 90% of businesses, by the way, that's a made up statistic, but it's 97.4% of businesses now, I just feel like most of the businesses that I encounter are completely ignoring owned media as a channel. And when I look at owned media, there's some real benefits to creating owned media. And, and the only reason I know this is after creating it on my own and seeing how that's benefited my organization. And the way I look at it is and Alex, you might be sick of hearing this analogy at this point. But I look at it as farming versus hunting. Right. Let's say theoretically, zombie apocalypse happens. I'm out in the middle of nowhere with my family, and I'm trying to feed my family on a daily basis. I can go out and I can hunt. Let's say I get a deer or whatever, I bring it back, I feed my family for a few days, it's an immediate, I go out perform an action, I have food to feed my family. Farming is a little bit different. Farming takes time. Farming takes a lot of energy, effort, but I can actually take my efforts and build at scale, and fill an entire silo with the harvest if I've done a good job of farming, right. And I think it takes a combination of both you can't just hunt because after the three days, you have to go out and hunt again. Right? Yeah. But with with farming, you know, if you if you have a tough winter or something like that, you know, it could be negative as well. So I believe that that you need to do all three, paid, earned and owned. But if everything you're doing is just hunting all the time, you haven't built anything in preparation for when things happen. And to give you an idea paid media, they're all private organizations, which means they need to make more money, which makes media inherently inflationary. Right. So your costs to acquire a customer through paid media go up every year. Well, at some point that becomes economically unviable. Right. So I'll give you an example. Salesforce, Salesforce, Salesforce. Salesforce is one of the most important tech companies in the industry. It's the largest CRM for b2b companies in the world. And they because they're a public company, they have to publish a lot of their metrics. And the way they handle their marketing is they calculate what's our cost to acquire a customer, versus what's our lifetime value of a customer. So if you ever hear people see, say the words LTV to CAC, they're basically saying lifetime value to customer acquisition cost, right. And so, in fourth quarter of last year, sales forces cost to acquire a customer went up by 70%, just in fourth quarter last year. Wow. Because of the most recent inflation that's happened. And it's not just inflation. And I definitely don't want to make this political. It also has to do with some of the issues with first party data, because you can't target the same way on social media platforms as you could prior to some of the first party changes that have happened. And so it's not just inflation, but it's definitely a factor. But But it went up by 70%. So my question is, if the largest tech company in the ER one of the largest tech companies in the world, had this happen to them through paid media? Is it realistic at all to believe that it wouldn't happen to a small business or a struggling Asian rental owner that's trying to make things work? The cost is going up. And so my question is, if you're Salesforce and your cost to acquire customer went up to 70% Does your lifetime value of a customer I add to your marketing expense, right, yeah. And so I fundamentally believe that we've got to change the way we look at paid media. I believe that every organization and I don't care how big you are, every organization needs to be building owned media assets. And one great example. In fact, the one that's the lowest barrier to entry is a podcast. So for example, if I start a podcast, and I'm creating really interesting content around whatever it is that I'm selling, so for example, I own an advertising agency for tourism destinations. I created the destination marketing podcast, right? I'm creating valuable content that's interesting to the audience that I want to communicate with and build relationships with. But what I can do with that podcast is I can transcribe the episode, and I can upload the transcription to my website, and that is very keyword rich, right? There's going to improve the search engine optimization of my website. But then I can take that transcription. And I can slice it up into four separate blog posts, that I can now post on my website as well. And I can take those blog posts, and I can slice it up into into a smaller piece of content. And I can use that as a Facebook or an Instagram post, and use it to link back to the blog or back to the podcast episode. And so now I can take this, what I call a content pillar, right, which is the podcast. And then I can make dozens of content slices from that content pillar, and use those slices, through paid media to advertise on someone else's, to capture someone else's audience, and try to bring them and help them become part of my audience. And one of the reasons that I liked that so much is when you really think about paid media, think of every ad as a proverbial billboard, right, you have essentially eight seconds or less for your ad to make a difference. Okay, so let's say you have a short term rental, and you're running an ad on Facebook, on Facebook, and you want people who are scrolling through their phone, and nobody stops for eight seconds. But I'm being generous, I'm giving you a beautiful picture of a room in your house that might be unique, right. And then you've got a button that says click here to book. And you can't put a whole lot more than that, because Facebook controls the the restrictions, the advertising restrictions and things like that. So when when I run that ad, I'm asking someone to go from awareness. So they didn't know who I was, before they saw the app, I'm asking them to then consider me as one of the places that they might book a trip to. And then I'm asking them to purchase in eight seconds, I'm trying to get them entire funnel in eight seconds. I'm asking too much. I'm asking the customer to get married on the first date. And instead, what I'm suggesting is ask them to consume your content, if it's interesting enough, say check out this podcast about such and such. Yeah, see if I can get them to be a listener. And now I can build a relationship with them if they'll engage with me in some way. And I'm not asking too much of them in the first interaction. So that's kind of my like, if I if I was to sum it up is I believe that if you're if you're using all three, you can build owned media strategies that are going to help you build an audience. And you can do more farming instead of just constantly relying on hunting deeds, you're

Annie Holcombe  32:29  
so for somebody starting out, like what what what things would you say are owned media that they could build up?

Adam Stoker  32:37  
Yeah, so some of the easiest things. And it's funny because Alex, you're in Myrtle Beach. And so, you know, Visit Myrtle Beach has a larger budget than I would say a lot of organizations do. Yeah, they might have a little bit more flexibility. And I love working with them, because we get to try things that we couldn't try with with other organizations. But for a smaller organization, a podcast is definitely one, starting a podcast. And it's the lowest barrier to entry as well, and probably the one that gives you the most flexibility on creating slices to support it. So I would say, as far as barrier to entry goes podcast is the lowest hanging fruit. The second is a YouTube channel. If you create a YouTube channel and are consistent with creating that content, you get a lot of the benefits you would from a podcast. I also think that a lot of organizations look at their website as something that they redo every five years. But outside of that they don't do much unless the hours change or something like that. I think destinations and organizations should be looking at their website as an active living, breathing owned media assets. Are you creating your website in such a way that it actually tells the story of the different components of your business of your organization? And I mean, I could I could talk for hours about just that specific component. But if your website isn't telling your story in an additional way to just a few paragraphs of written content on each page, yeah, I think you're I think you're in the dark ages. Like I think you got real work to do. And

Alex Husner  34:10  
yeah, I mean, marketing has just changed so significantly over the years. And I think, you know, definitely went more from you know, we'd never thought about owned media. 10 years ago, it was really, you know, paid media and r&b. And those are really only two that you really quite thought about. I mean, an own media can mean your email list to him and but at that point, it was just never really something that people who are thinking of additionally in the more creative ways that we are through through YouTube and podcasting, but can I

Adam Stoker  34:35  
speak to that? Okay, sure. Yeah, actually touched on something that I left a little bit unfinished. Yeah. You need to create the content pillars, like I talked about, and then you engage with your audience. And the goal is to get them to become part of an active community of some sort. Maybe that means your social posts, but maybe that means they join your email list, right? And in when someone's in your active community What you're then going for is permission, permission to continue to communicate with them, whether that's through text, or email, or they join a social group or whatever it is. Because from that point forward, if you have a good CRM, you can actually monitor their activity as they engage with your content as they go to your website. And now, if somebody is going to a specific page on your website, you can serve them customized email content based on their interests, that will then hopefully inspire them to book a visit. So I love that you brought up email, and I'm sorry, I interrupted you there. But I think it's critical to understand that once you actually have that permission, you can lead them through the buyer journey in a much more intimate way. As opposed to buy now buy now buy.

Alex Husner  35:42  
Right, right. Yeah. And, yeah, gosh, there's so much to this, like, we can have a conference just on this topic as well.

Annie Holcombe  35:51  
We talked about like, flip to like they're the journey, taking the journey through the website. That's That's good. That's a good point, though. Really?

Alex Husner  36:00  
Yeah, I think, you know, the way that we've looked at it, obviously has changed. But you know, those fundamentals are still the same as they were at that time. But it used to be that I forget what the statistic is, but it was like the average person looks at 15 different websites before they vacation. That's just not the same anymore. You know, I think things have changed. I think AI is going to change that dramatically. How people aren't going to need to go to a bunch of websites, I mean, just the way that vacation rental OTAs have come about for people to very easily be able to know I want to go to Destin I want to be actually not even Destin, I want to be in Miramar Beach, I want to be Gulf front and a two bedroom condo, I don't have to look all over the place anymore. I can just find that. So in the way that people actually go out and search for vacations is different. Also the way that I mean, how they're actually interacting when they when they land on these different platforms, right? Like, are they still sharing things with their family and friends? Like what is that decision making process. And really, with vacation rentals, it is a number is a longer term decision when you're booking a vacation. It's not a typical ecommerce that I do this all the time that I see something on Instagram, I see an ad for makeup or clothes, and I might buy that right away, like I don't need to go listen to their podcast, that's not the kind of stuff that you need to really like build a relationship necessarily. But for some of these larger things, whether it's services and in our business at Costco, we're selling vacation rental franchises. And that's that is definitely a process to get somebody from day one to the end to understand what it is. And it's you know, the podcast has been great for us and you know, personally on that and with the company, but you have to be able to point to something and build that relationship. So I think that creative process of how things have evolved over the years, it's just been interesting to watch and will be interesting to see where it goes with with AI, which would also love to get your thoughts on it on AI a huge topic, but

Adam Stoker  37:56  
I'm sorry, what? What's AI? So I

Alex Husner  38:01  
think so. Good for? For Alex. There you go. I'm not sure.

Adam Stoker  38:08  
No, I think AI is is this concept that I've talked about the owned media, AI is going to facilitate it like crazy. And so for example, I can take the transcript of a podcast episode. And I can upload it into Bard or chat GPT four. And I can ask it to create social posts and blog posts from that. And so, again, well, I don't have time to write blog posts, I don't have time to, to write for social posts for every single episode, take your transcript, upload the dang thing into into the AI tool. And it's going to spit out the different components that you need. There's no excuse to not be generating a ton of content right now. Because AI makes it so easy. But that being said, I want to warn everybody for some with AI and no, I'm not talking about the end of human civilization. With AI, one thing that I think we have to be careful with is because AI goes and pulls from all of the content it can find. I actually think authenticity is going to become more important. Because for example, if you in the past, let's say let's say in the past you at your short term rental, I know that's your audience. So I'm trying to keep it trying to tailor it a little bit to your audience here. Let's say in the past, I had a hot tub at my vacation rental property, right. And so the content that I've got out there says that I have a hot tub. Well, now maybe the hot tub stopped working and I didn't replace it or whatever. But there's still content out there on the web somewhere that says I have a hot tub. Well, now when somebody asks AI, a question and they want a hot tub of their vacation rental, I'm going to show up in those search results. And I could end up with an unhappy customer. So I actually think the increasing the volume of relevant content that we create is going to be really good with AI. But I actually think There's a purging process that needs to happen for outdated content to be removed from the internet, if we can, right? So if we've got blog posts out there that are no longer relevant, no longer true, we need to get rid of those. If we've got pages on our websites that no longer makes sense, let's let's kill those pages on our website. Because AI is going to pull from all of that and could result in authentic experience for the customer.

Annie Holcombe  40:24  
I'm really, really weirded out by AI. Like, I see the value in it, but like, you know, it was it was a watching some of this stuff, I guess the gentleman who was part of like, creating the chat GPT I think it's who it was, it was in front of Congress, and just talking like he's concerned about where this takes us and, you know, false information that gets embedded into things. And I think there was something yesterday that came up that scared the stock market where somebody had put out a picture and it was an erroneous picture, it had been photoshopped, and it was an explosion. And I don't remember where it was. But, you know, there's just stuff that can get out there so quickly, and like, how do you? How do you prevent that? And so is it a matter of being able to purge old content? But how do you keep up with the bad content? That's that's where I'm like, just I don't understand how all that's going to play out? I guess it's anybody's guess at this point.

Adam Stoker  41:18  
Yeah, I think so much of that right now is is unanswered questions, right? Yeah, I would recommend content that, you know, isn't accurate anymore, I would recommend purging it. However, I think trying to predict, you know how that's all going to play out. I don't know if we're there yet. But here's what I will say is, we don't have any control over what's happening right now with AI. But the only way we will have any control is by learning it, understanding it and understanding how to use it. Because it's happening, whether we use it or not. And I think we're in a very similar situation to actually there's been two events that I think are similar to this. Number one was when the internet was was created, and there was this, you know, the people that decided I'm going to immediately jump on the internet. And that's actually I don't know if you guys are familiar with Gary Vaynerchuk. But Gary Vaynerchuk, took a winery and he was a wine salesman, and put his inventory online and made the foundation of his fortune through the wine business that he was working in. So So you know, the early adopters to that were the big winners in with the Internet. And then when social media came out the early adopters of Facebook, and Twitter and some of the early social platforms that came out, they won. And I think we're at another big inflection point right now with AI, that we saw in the past that the early adopters with some of these different technologies that came out, the early adopters, one of the early adopters of AI are going to win. And I think in five years, everybody's going to have it incorporated into every facet of their life. And it just depends on when you decided to adopt, you know, and if you have an influence on does it help us or hurt us in the long term, even then you have to understand it in order to influence it. And so I even with the dangers of AI, I think it's really important that everybody give it a try.

Alex Husner  43:15  
Yeah, and I think what it's gonna look like in the future, even even just a few months and three months, six months, nine months, is gonna be very different than what it looks like. Now. I think everybody kind of jumping on the bandwagon that is kind of just getting baseline, you know, comfortable with it. They're using it to rewrite things to write social media posts. And you can tell when social media posts are written with AI, that they're not written by somebody in a thought leadership mindset or in their own authentic voice mindset. As at least the ones that I've read, I've read so far, and I think what it's going to actually do, and actually at that presentation that we were just at here in Myrtle Beach, and St. Onge from flipped to gave us a completely different view, or we have a completely different view of what it will be that Microsoft has that product coming out that I mean, you'll be able to just build presentations, and do your spreadsheets and do all these different things that not everybody is inherently great at with so much more ease that it's really it's not that AI is going to replace humans or, or jobs unnecessarily, but it's going to make certain humans do their job a lot better.

Adam Stoker  44:21  
Well, in Ed's presentation, he said something really important. And it was a great quote, he said, AI is not going to replace you smart humans who know how to use AI will.

Alex Husner  44:33  
That was the line I was trying to think. Yeah, that's true.

Adam Stoker  44:37  
I think that's actually really interesting because what AI is going to do is accelerate knowledge and intelligence, right? But what AI is also going to do is eliminate mediocrity. Because you said the blog posts that you read right now that are produced by AI you can tell that they're not great, but guess what? There's a lot of People are out there writing blog posts right now that you can turn out great. Yeah, no, yes. If I can write not great content in 30 seconds or great content and four, or excuse me, or mediocre content in four hours, I'll take the five second, okay, content any day. And so then we've immediately gotten rid of mediocrity. And so what I think is that smart people need to learn to use it to 10x their output. And I don't mean quantity, I mean quality, right? Like, how can AI help you really improve the value of whatever it is that you're providing? That's how people are going to be able to maximize and win with with AI?

Alex Husner  45:40  
I've got a question that you had mentioned with your blog posts that you take one episode of, then you turn it into four different blog posts. Are you using AI to do that?

Adam Stoker  45:48  
Yes, in fact, there's a product called pod squeeze that you may want to take a look at. Okay, writing that down, does a lot of that for you. And, again, it's not 100% Like when when when pod squeeze kicks out some of the stuff, you can't not look at it and go post it like my team has to adjust and edit and still make sure that it's correct. But shortcuts so much of the effort.

Alex Husner  46:12  
Yeah, yeah. Interesting.

Annie Holcombe  46:16  
There's limitless potential with it. But I go back to like that, yes. People say, you know, just because you can doesn't mean you should, you know, so is it like, is it good to create a situation where these people are like, Well, I have an idea, and I'm gonna put it out there. And so to your point, it's not necessarily it's getting rid of mediocrity, but it also introducing people that just maybe shouldn't be speaking like, they're they just don't have the right voice or the right intellect to be part of the conversation if they like. We talk about people within like short term rentals, vacation rentals, that it's like, just because they have the money to buy a property doesn't mean they should be in the space, because they don't have that hospitality that backs it up. So yeah, they'll get weeded out after after a while. But does AI like enable kind of, like mediocre behavior to enter the space? I don't know. It's a one of those things like that. Again, it's another episode we can have.

Alex Husner  47:06  
And I think I mean, from an SEO perspective, like how does this in the long term went? None of us know the answer to this. People are companies like I've been associated with for years that I've, you know, spent so much money on SEO and so much time on developing this, like true good content about destinations and properties. Is that going to be outspent by just AI generated content? And how does Google look at that when everybody has access to be able to do it at that same velocity? You know, that's, that's really where I'm interested to see. I think it can help SEO a lot. But there's got to be something that still allows you to differentiate based on your than your competition.

Adam Stoker  47:44  
Well, but But Alex, the real question here is not like how does this increase in content? affect your SEO? It's, will SEO even matter in two years? Or it's true? Yeah, I'm going to replace search engine. So I, that's where we're at from an early adoption standpoint, it's really important to start learning and trying this, because what if you spend two more years of 40% of your budget on SEO, only to discover that that money over the next two years was wasted? Because search engines are obsolete now. So I just think you've got to be trying it. And Alex, to your point, you know, is it going to facilitate people using it that shouldn't? Absolutely, you know, and I think with any technology, there's, there's things that are going to be facilitated that, that maybe shouldn't be, but I also wonder if we'll people that that maybe would try something, could they use AI to invalidate what they're trying to say quicker, as opposed to, you know, validating a bad idea. And so I also wonder if it's going to help weed out some of that mediocrity earlier to buy at because what's with Google right now, if you search something, you're going to get a list of results that are, you know, may or may not be exactly what you're looking for. Whereas with AI, you're getting the answer, right. And so you don't have to go do the research that Google still required you to do. It's just giving you the answer. And the answer isn't always right. So you still have to, you know, validate and make sure on your own, but I think could get in the way of people making bad decisions as well. Yeah.

Annie Holcombe  49:21  
Well, I like that. I like that balanced approach you balanced me? Exactly. I think that's I think that's a good point, I think, you know, because people will start to see you know, back to your earlier comment about being authentic and you know, the authenticity is going to that's where the human factor is going to have to play into this and if people aren't checking it and making sure that that voice is there and that it is authentic, it'll be people will start to ignore it and not pay attention to that particular blogger or content creator if they're not checking it.

Alex Husner  49:53  
Yeah, absolutely. Still a lot to to be seen with this. But Adam, it's Such a pleasure to finally have you on the show. And we would definitely love to have you back. I think this is going to be an interesting year for destinations, with all these different things that are on the table from from Ai from building their own media assets and audiences. And it'll be interesting to see how many people start to really go in that direction. And, and if they do, I think it's going to be a lot because of the work. You and Stuart are shepherding. Which is great.

Adam Stoker  50:23  
Well, thank you, I really appreciate that. It's been so fun. I can't I just looked at the time. I can't believe how fast

Alex Husner  50:31  
I feel like this would be one of those episodes.

Annie Holcombe  50:34  
Talking about and talking about it got away from us. But if anybody wants to get in touch with you, Adam, what is the best way to reach out to you?

Adam Stoker  50:40  
Yes, so I'm pretty active on LinkedIn. So if you search Adam Stoker on LinkedIn, you can also go to our website, relic agency.com. Or, of course, wherever you listen to podcasts, search out the destination marketing podcast. And you can hear I think we're three episodes into our six episode owned media series between me and Stuart Butler, the CMO of Visit Myrtle Beach. And honestly, it's one of the parts of the owned media content that I've created that I'm most proud of. So make sure you check it out.

Alex Husner  51:11  
It's great. And we're excited to come on your show. We'll be over on the destination marketing podcast here soon. But in the meantime, if anybody wants to get in touch with Andy or I could go to Alex and Danny podcast.com. If you listened to all the way to the end, I'll ask again, if you could leave us a review on Spotify or Apple or wherever you listen to your podcasts. we'd greatly appreciate it. And if you want to watch on YouTube to watch what people call the talk show, please go ahead Subscribe and find us on social media Alex nanny podcast on all the channels. But until next time, thank you everybody so much for tuning in. And thank you again, Adam.

Adam Stoker  51:46  
Thank you. You guys have a great show. Thank you so much for allowing me to be on