Justin Keller of Drift wants marketers to focus on creative storytelling over the stodgy metrics.

The Rebel Instinct Podcast, Episode 15: Justin Keller

Justin Keller says many marketers are bogged down by metrics, losing sight of compelling and creative storytelling. He shares how marketers can better deliver and grab attention for their brands in this episode of the Rebel Instinct Podcast.
Justin Keller says many marketers are bogged down by metrics, losing sight of compelling and creative storytelling. He shares how marketers can better deliver and grab attention for their brands in this episode of the Rebel Instinct Podcast.

On every episode of the Rebel Instinct, our team sits down with rebels from across the marketing landscape to share stories about bold moves they’ve taken as marketers. Subscribe for more.

Galen Ettlin:
Welcome to the Rebel Instinct Podcast everybody. I’m your host, Galen Ettlin with Act-On Software, and today I’m joined by a special co-host Suzy Balk, who is Act-On Software’s Senior Marketing Campaigns Manager. Suzy, So looking forward to having some innovative marketing conversations with you. Thanks for joining.

Suzy Balk:
Yeah, thanks for having me.

Galen Ettlin:
And as our YouTube viewers can see, our guest today is Justin Keller, Vice President of Revenue Marketing at Drift. Justin is an award-winning B2B marketer who prides himself in disrupting the B2B marketing status quo. So we’re going to get all of his hot takes on branding, digital marketing, account based marketing, and hopefully if we’ve got time, a little glimpse into his music producer experience and at home chef aspirations. Thank you so much for being here, Justin.

Justin Keller:
Thank you guys so much for letting me hang out with you. I’m really excited to have this conversation with you.

Suzy Balk:
So Justin, I know you’re passionate about storytelling. Same for me. I love that creative piece of marketing. How are you seeing styles change with evolving marketing strategies and what are marketers missing out on?

Justin Keller:
That’s a good question. I think there was maybe a bit of a heyday during COVID where people – it was like one of those things where once the dust settled – we were all at home, but once marketers had adjusted to the new reality, they felt a little bit of creative latitude. They’re starting a little edgy and do some bold things. And then coming back out of COVID where we’re now across the board, everyone I talked to, their budgets are getting pinched. Their goals and expectations aren’t changing, but the resources they have to get there are. And so now I’m seeing a lot of trends away from storytelling and being creative and going back to a place of safety where it’s like, let’s just invest things that are in things that are highly measurable that we can defend our jobs with saying, ‘Hey, look, we’re being very smart, pragmatic spreadsheet marketers,’ and I’m not so sure that’s the thing to do. I think when everyone’s zigging, you’ve gotta zag, and I think now more than ever, it’s the time to start telling really big stories because if we’re all in the same position, we all have limited resources. The only advantage we have is our ability to be creative and to tell really good stories and to get people thinking differently and paying attention to whatever’s going on when we all implemented resources to get people to pay attention with.

Suzy Balk:
Yeah, I love that ‘spreadsheet marketers.’ That’s definitely something it’s hard to get away from, but it’s really important that you do.

Galen Ettlin:
And especially, as you’re mentioning, if you move that direction for fear of your job, you’re really also devaluing what you’re contributing as a part of your job anyway, so it’s kind of a counterintuitive thing, but yeah.

Justin Keller:
It’s really true, and it’s one of those things where I get it. When people operate out of a place of fear, you do things that you think are safe, and I think that is not what the point of a marketer is. I mean, sure there’s times and places to be safe, but marketers are there at the end of the day to get people to pay attention, and you can’t do that by running a really smart performance marketing program. You can make your dollar go a little further, but that’s not going to deliver outsize results that your board and your CEO want to see from you.

Galen Ettlin:
Now, Justin, looking at some of your experience personally, you’ve worked across a bunch of B2B and tech companies. What was a defining moment for you would you say, on your journey toward these VP of marketing roles?

Justin Keller:
Quick obligatory shoutout to all the marketing leaders I’ve had in the past. I’ve been so lucky to have bosses who were willing to let me push the envelope. I think I’ve always naturally been one of those. When I got into marketing, when I got into B2B marketing, I should say, I had no idea that that was different from marketing – “Capital M marketing,” where it’s more like B2C, where you’re out there running really audacious campaigns and getting people to raise an eyebrow – didn’t realize a B2B was completely different. And it’s all about putting a lot of navy blue on your website, making sure you have stock photos of multicultural people shaking hands. And I’ve been really fortunate to have bosses that felt the same way, that that’s not B2B doesn’t need to be like that. You can be a marketer and do outrageous things. And so really grateful to the leaders I’ve had that set the tone for me there.

I think one specific example I had was I had a CEO, one of my first jobs in San Francisco who would every day at the office wear a bow tie. That was his, just his trademark thing for himself. And it became such an inside joke that it became part of our marketing campaigns. We’d go to a trade show and we’d hand out bow ties to people. We’d have him come to our booth, we tie a bow tie on them, and what ended up happening was we’d go into marketing meetings and we do campaign planning or think about what are we going to do with this webinar that’s going to be different. And we’ve started to say to each other, ‘how do we put a bow tie on this?’ And it didn’t mean literally put a bow tie on it, but what’s that weird different thing that can become synonymous with our brand that definitely has our stamp on it? And that is something that I’ve carried with me. So it’s like, what’s the one thing, we only have so many different activities that we marketers can do, but we have different ways of expressing ourselves in them. And so what is that one thing that we can do that is distinctly ours that makes people pay attention and think that’s a little left of center and stress to build a little brand equity that’s consistent across all the programs we run.

Suzy Balk:
That bow tie thing is so cool. We actually just ran a webinar where our presenters wore capes because we were doing a superhero themed webinar. So I was like, what a great way to just have a stand out a little bit and put a little fun behind our brand, and I think hopefully it becomes a thing going forward. We’re not just people with corporate backdrops. We add some more personality to our campaigns.

Justin Keller:
I think that’s so important. People want that. People don’t identify with a B2B brand and be like, yeah, that’s cool. That’s who I am. People identify with a weird little quirk or people that are unafraid to be themselves, and that’s what builds the affinity.

Suzy Balk:
MarTech is a really saturated space tech stacks running pretty deep. What does it take for a company to stand out and win that business, especially now in a tough economy?

Justin Keller:
This is what’s really hard for a marketer. We can be creative all day, but we can’t tell stories that are orthogonal to our product promise. We have to root everything back to the company’s value propositions, to what the product offering is. And so being able to have really good big, bold ideas is one thing, but having big old ideas that align to a company’s promise is really tough. And so that’s where it’s as a marketer becomes a little tough because then you start having to work. You need to work with your product leaders and your product marketing leaders and say, okay, what are the things that are coming up? How can I align the message to that? You need to start aligning to your sales team because at some point the campaign you’re running is going to end up in a salesperson’s lap, making sure that they feel okay about talking about how this person ended up on the phone with them.

And that can be really, really challenging. Earning that trust and buy-in across the board is difficult. And so I think to answer the question, you have to be a zealot for yourself and your own ideas, finding a big bold idea that does mesh with those things I just mentioned, and then just owning outright and not letting go. That can be so hard to do. It’s so easy to do doubt yourself, especially like you said, it’s a tough economy and people are looking at marketing. It’s a huge cost center, making sure that everything they do is going to help the bottom line. And marketing budgets are big and you’re effectively playing with lots of people’s salaries at that point. And so it’s so easy to get frightened, and every time you get frightened of what you’re doing, you are losing the potential impact of the story you’re trying to tell. And you need to just believe as hard as you can that what you’re saying is the right thing for the company and other people will start to fall in line.

Suzy Balk:
I think that’s why it’s so important to find leaders in your work that support you. Part of your value to your company is your creativity and your ideas. So there should be a certain level of trust that if you have a big bold idea that you’re going to deliver on it.

Galen Ettlin:
Speaking to that creativity, you mentioned putting the bow tie on it as an example. Justin, what was maybe another out of the box or a big project that stuck out for you that you’ve contributed to and how did it perform?

Justin Keller:
I was at B2B MX a few weeks ago, and this campaign I ran, showed up on stage that I had nothing to do with. It was just like someone was like, this is such an outrageous thing that it’s still carrying weight.

I was at a company called Terminus and we were running, this was right towards the end of Covid, right? So people had lost all of their attention span. Webinars were performing like garbage because people were sick of sitting in their computer, and we still have to do it though. And so I wanted to do something that was highly consumable, that was highly provocative, that was ultimately something that people would be willing to suffer staring at the screen for another few hours for. So we ran an event that was all about just breaking up with the way that traditional B2B marketing should be done.

Just stop doing, I mean, almost what we’re talking about here. And so we didn’t want to have it. We went all the way. We were like, if we’re going to do it, let’s do it big. So we called the event break. Shit, we had a bad word in the name of the program. We formatted it in a way where we got, I think it was 10 very influential marketers, and we got them to speak for five minutes a piece, or maybe it was 10 minutes a piece, very short. So it’s kind of micro content. And we got these big name influencers to participate. We didn’t pay them. We just said, you guys are competing. We will donate $10,000 to a charity of your choice. So they got bought in on that, but we didn’t stop there. Really provocative name, really great speakers talking about how do we break the status quo of marketing. We also hired, again, I think he’s actually from your neck of the woods, we found a guy called Sax Scotch. He’s a saxophone playing Sasquatch. We hired him to do musical interludes between every presenter, so he would be out in the woods playing saxophone. We got him to play Careless Whisper by George Michael, a bunch of stuff that was really awesome.

Galen Ettlin:
Very Pacific Northwest.

Justin Keller:
Exactly, exactly. And was I think to this day, still the highest performing pipeline campaign that the company had ever run because it was way out there. But everyone that was involved with this, we did really crazy promotional videos. So me and the team got together in a field somewhere. We brought a bunch of fruits and baseball bats and just videotaped us blowing stuff up, honestly, and had nothing to do with the campaign except for that we were breaking stuff. And so we just bought into the message so wholeheartedly that we had like 4,500 people register for it, eight figures worth of pipeline driven. And this is just to go to show that B2B marketing doesn’t have to be, like I said, navy blue and people shaking hands on your website. You can do really off the wall stuff. My sales team did not love this at all. They did not having to invite people to an event called Break Shit, but did not let go and push, push, push and ended up being just one of the biggest campaigns I’ve ever been responsible for in my career.

Suzy Balk:
That’s so cool. So many cool elements about that.

Galen Ettlin:
Definitely fits the brief of out the box.

Suzy Balk:
You get that guy’s number, Galen, we’ll have to have it.

Justin Keller:
I can make an intro, Galen, if you need more woodland creatures that play saxophone, I got a line…

Galen Ettlin:
I mean, when do we not need that? Always. <laughs>

Suzy Balk:
It seems you feel really comfortable being out of the box and doing and executing these ideas. What advice would you give to people listening to this to be more rebellious, to take those risks, whether they pay off in the way that yours did or maybe not?

Justin Keller:
I’ve done really out of the box things. I’ve proven that they can work and still I’m afraid all the time of doing it. It’s not a comfortable place to be when you’re trying to be out on a limb as a marketer. And every time I have doubted myself, bad things have happened. It’s all of a sudden you lose the ability to lead as well as you could. All of a sudden your ideas start to get diluted and watered down and they lose that magic that once existed in them. And it is much easier said than done. I mean, I know how cliche this sounds, honestly, I’m just saying believe in yourself, which is just the dumbest after school message I could possibly be saying here. But if you’re a marketer and you really want to make an impact, especially if you’ve got a smaller budget, especially if you’re in a very noisy, crowded marketplace, there’s no other option than to believe in yourself and believe that your big idea is what will separate you from the pack. So there it is. Believing in yourself is just about the most prosaic thing I could. I want to vomit a little bit, having said this out loud now, but I think it’s true and it’s very easy to not believe in yourself. It’s easy to doubt yourself and catch yourself, stay mindful of it.

Galen Ettlin:
Always an important reminder. In the words of Whitney Houston and Mariah Carey, there can be miracles when you believe. <laughs>

So Justin, how are you a rebel in your non-work life?

Justin Keller:
Oh, good question. I am, you guys mentioned a musician. I like to, and I think this kind of bleeds into my work life too. I like to try to do weird stuff that hasn’t been done before. So I’m not a musician that’s trying to get thousands of listens on Spotify. I’m trying to make music that I would want to listen to, which is usually a little bit weird. It’s definitely not top 40 stuff. I am also kind of an avid artist, so I channel a lot of my creativity into other ways that just shows up in awkward places. So I like most of the paintings in my house, not the one that’s behind me, I don’t think. No, none of these are mine. But a lot of the things on the walls of my house are things that I’ve painted just for whatever reason or for my wife. You mentioned I’m a cook. I’ve got a lot of creative energy that just needs to find an outlet. And so I don’t stop it. I kind of just always leave the spigot running and try to just make things happen. It’s nothing that I’m necessarily super proud of that I want to share with the world, but I’m always making it just because I feel like I just need to keep that circulation going of my creativity.

Galen Ettlin:
I know it is kind of a sidebar, but on that music side of things, just because I think it’s an interesting piece that we don’t get to hear from executives a whole lot of “here’s something really creative and different that I do, that’s nothing to do with my work at my company.” How did you get into that and what does it look like for you now?

Justin Keller:
So I have always really just been a fan of music and wanted to make things, and I moved around as a lot, so I never really had a chance to form a garage band with friends or whatever. So what ended up happening is I learned to play a lot of different instruments. I learned how to record myself and how to build tracks on tracks, on tracks and things, and ultimately write songs all by myself in my bedroom. And so that continues to this day. I started when I was 16 and I was recording to a literal cassette tape and skip to today, right here on my desk is work, and then right here is a bunch of music stuff, different monitoring. So I go from work mode, I turn 90 degrees to the right and I can get into fun mode. So yeah, I’m honestly always just trying to… I’ll work on a song for a year before I feel like it’s done, but it’s just a little bit here and there and it’s just, it’s almost like it’s gardening for me. You do a little bit of time. I get to watch it grow and then at some point it’s ready to be picked

Galen Ettlin:
Such a skill. Very cool.

Suzy Balk:
What rebel in our culture do you feel needs to be celebrated and why?

Justin Keller:
get asked a lot, where do you go for ideas for work, for marketing, and I always say I’ve read enough business books. I don’t read business books anymore. I don’t go to the obvious marketing blogs or LinkedIn. I go where everyone else, right? So I try to find a lot of countercultural touchstones, different artists like meme culture even what is just kind of the bleeding edge of culture right now and what are they doing that’s making people resonate with it and trying to figure out how to apply that. So it’s almost like, I don’t know. So the answer is, yeah, all the rebels is who I want to celebrate, but at the same time, if you celebrate a rebel too much, all of a sudden they’re not a rebel anymore. And it’s kind of like, I grew up listening to a lot of punk rock when I was a kid. And the thing is with punk rock, as soon as they’re a popular band anymore, they’re not really punk anymore. They kind of sell out. And so that’s where I, when I think of a rebel, I’m like, who’s doing things that are new and original or they’re unafraid and have not yet broken through into the mainstream?

Galen Ettlin:
Okay, well finally here it is. Time for our “honey, I don’t think so” Segment talking about what’s annoying you lately that needs to stop in the marketing or MarTech space. I’m going to give you 60 seconds to make your case. So whenever you’re ready, go for it.

Justin Keller:
Okay. There’s a thing going on on LinkedIn that’s driving me crazy. And this has been a couple years now. LinkedIn is already, I think, in my opinion, a little bit of a toxic place. The amount of bro tree and just kind of like the hustle culture I just am not on board with. But there’s one thing in particular that drives me absolutely bananas. And that’s this trend where there’s one line space, one line space, one line space on a LinkedIn post where people are just very short sentences and then they do all these hard line breaks and it’s just impossible to read. And I just can’t stand it. But that’s what’s really annoying me right now.

Galen Ettlin:
Well within time, that was about 30 seconds and I know exactly the types of posts you’re talking about. And broach tree is a new term I think. Yeah, we should use that as well. Well, Justin, I want to thank you so much for taking time to join us here today. It has been so much fun catching up with you and learning all about your skills and your music and everything else that you bring to the MarTech table. Thanks again for joining us.

Justin Keller:
Thank you, Galen and Suzy, this was a hoot. I appreciate you guys letting me join here.

Galen Ettlin:
Thanks everyone for listening to the Rebel Instinct Podcast. Be sure to follow Act-On Software for updates and upcoming episodes, and remember to always act on your rebel instinct. Until next time.

Check out the next episode of the Rebel Instinct Podcast with Wrike CMO Esther Flammer, sharing how marketers can demonstrate their work’s value, even in a tough economy.

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