Welcome to the show. I'm your host, Nadia Atwal. Today, it's all about business acceleration. I have an expert for that matter. Welcome to the show, John Sampogna. Thanks for having me. John, tell us a little bit about what is business acceleration? How can I envision it? Because it's not your usual marketing strategy. In simple terms, it just means growing a business, whether that's expanding it into a new audience or quite literally growing the revenue year over year. But in simple terms, for me, it's always about understanding as someone who provides services to brands that no two businesses are the same. You're going to encounter different business challenges, different customers, and at the end of the day, different levers you can pull from a tactical standpoint to actually accelerate that business. Well, it has a nice ring to it, but how exactly do you go about it? What sets you apart from other companies that try to help businesses? For me, it's understanding that the internet has, in my opinion, gotten smaller and smaller, even though the perception is that it's getting bigger and bigger. And when I mean smaller and smaller, it's this idea that the way consumers interact with things, no one really can tell the difference between like a media tactic, paid and earned, a creative idea, or the use of technology and meaning like building product. So for me, it's being able to advise clients on where the internet is going and helping them prescribe and build a brand that's going to reach their consumers in a really interesting way. So it's really being able to balance creative tech and media very fluidly to prescribe a set of tactics that will ultimately help grow the brand. So obviously, creative media and technology, all these things all need to work hand in hand. How do you go about it? Like, give us an example of a client where you successfully put this together into a mission that showed real results. I guess it depends on the type of business. But I think we're exiting this phase of kind of like everything being performance marketing in the sense that people became really comfortable speaking about customer acquisition costs, return on ad spend. And it's become this like formulaic thing where you expect you put money in and money immediately comes out. Very cookie cutter in a way. Very cookie cutter. Like everyone's running a very similar version of a marketing strategy. And what's funny is I think that brands have lost sight of the general idea of what building brands actually is, which is that over the long term, you shouldn't have to pay for every single customer experience. So for us, a lot of times it's helping our brand partners diversify their media mix. So there aren't so reliant on paid channels. And what that really looks like is focusing more on the traditional brand building tactics where we able to tell more longer form stories and things that you might not know if they impactful and successful until you look back over the course of 12 months. So it's kind of helping brands get out of the immediacy of performance marketing and into more, you know, the diverse funnel that we, you know, we always talk about mid to lower funnel and top of funnel. But it's one of those things where you kind of have to like balance all of these tactics and we help brands get there. Well, we live in an era where a lot of businesses are under pressure to perform fast. And there's also a certain mindset required when you're working with companies. What are you teaching them with regards to mindset and how to basically be best prepared for the market that is ever changing and sometimes so rapidly? The good news is there's always going to be someone that is spending way more than you and way less than you. So I think that when you understand that as a basic principle, it is a good kind of mindset trick. So when we're building out plans, for me, it's all about trust in the plan and not straying from that plan one or two weeks in. So if we go into a situation and we basically say, okay, we're launching this business and the goal for the first 90 days is 100% brand awareness. No one knows who you are. We have a general idea of who your customer is, but we want to validate a lot of stuff. And ultimately, we need to build market share. So sales are going to be slow out the gate. So that's the plan. So you basically have a PR approach there because that's what I think sometimes businesses are mixing up. They do need the marketing, but they also need the PR for credibility building, for brand awareness. So it's kind of like a parallel street that you are pursuing. Yes. And for me, like brand awareness, the idea is that like if we're going to say the first 60 days are all about brand awareness, I want to basically sit down with the clients and say like, what budget amount will allow you to sleep at night? So two weeks into the plan, you don't immediately say like, we need to pivot and we need to start, you know, converting immediately because that's going to kind of ruin a lot of things. So for me, it's really around building a plan you can trust and go through with. And yes, we can test, we can iterate, we can tweak things, we can optimize and, you know, pivot, of course. But like you don't want to be reacting from a position of panic early on. So whatever you can do to basically understand from a mindset perspective that, you know, as long as you're within the realm of realistic expectations for the cost of doing business to operate, you're always going to have people spending less and way more than you. So do what makes you comfortable and stick to the plan. Have you noticed great changes regarding companies that used to be a lot of B2B and now are choosing the path of B2C directly to the customer? Even big brands are suddenly realizing we go directly to the customer. We not so interested anymore in just getting into the big stores Yeah I mean I laugh because I been saying a long time that like I don really understand the difference between B2B and B2C and the modern world Right Like we all consume the same media mix on a daily basis. Right. We're on Instagram and TikTok and LinkedIn. We watch the same stuff on streaming services. The only thing that's like live and concurrent that we all watch together really is like big moments, like sporting events and maybe some larger cultural things. But in the on-demand economy, there's very few of those things now. So if we're all consuming the same types of things on the same channels, then if you're marketing to the same person on Tuesday, then you're marketing the same person on the weekend. So it isn't like, okay, on Saturday, I'm only consuming B2C content. And then on Tuesday, I'm locked into my B2B mix. It's all mixed. So, yeah, I think there's a huge opportunity for traditional B2B marketers to go B2C because, you know, the media mix is completely shaked up. Now, your company's name is Wondersauce. The first thing that I thought is, okay, there's somebody who has this secret sauce that is so good that it's actually a miracle. So what is it with Wondersauce? What is the special secret sauce of your company? The secret sauce of the agency is really understanding where human behavior is going and making sure that our brand partners are best suited to reach their customers in a way that will resonate and ultimately help them along their growth path. So for us, it's always been a mix of three things. It's on the build side. It's making sure your owned properties, your websites, your apps, your e-commerce experiences are optimized and built for the future so you can convert on them. From a creative standpoint, it's ensuring that it is a mix of what's working today, which is a mix of brand creative and influence and content creation and how that all lives together to drive earned and paid opportunities. And then ultimately a diversified paid strategy. So it's a mix of all those things and understanding that some clients are going to need a little bit more of one or all three of them. But it's helping clients along this path and ensuring that they're set up for the future. Also very interested in your take of the power, the punch of using influencers. Has that changed over the years? Is it still as strong as it used to be? Or does it just simply depend on whom and how you're using the person? I think it's just like an always-on tactic at this point. It's proven to work. And whether it's a huge influencer play with someone with a ton of clout and reach or a bunch of micro-influencers who are serving a niche that you kind of like recycle through on a monthly basis, or even taking a pure creator route where you're just briefing people who are amazing at creating content for the internet and understand either a channel that they know how to activate on or how to resonate with a very specific group of people. It a tried and true marketing tactic that I think 90 of brands need to tap into and become really good at doing it on a week basis and understanding how their brand organically fits within that creator economy that influencer economy. So yeah, for me, it's something that we use for most of our clients. Very insightful. And 2026, what are you planning for yourself, for your company? What's on the menu? What are you expecting to do in terms of scaling your own business? Well, it's, I think like everyone, it's trying to keep pace with the rate of change and everything that AI is bringing to the table. I think, you know, I wasn't old enough to be working in the mid nineties when, you know, the internet was working its way into office culture. But I imagine that we're about to see a really dynamic few years of change. And it's going to be really exciting to harness the power of this technology to do incredibly creative and strategic things. I think that so many people talk about the efficiency that it will bring. And I don't need to talk about that. It's pretty well documented. I think on the creative side and on the idea of like seeing things for the first time. I think we're going to see a bunch of interesting things. Like what does the future of news and shopping and all of these things look like again? And I think it's going to be really cool. I was talking to someone recently about how, you know, we all remember what it's like to shop in stores. And then it was like getting familiar with shopping on the internet. And then it's this idea of both. And I think we're about to see like, what does the next version of that look and feel like? And it's going to be radically different. And I hope we start to see people testing some very experimental use cases of that as soon as next year, which I'm excited to kind of jump into. Yeah, we as New Yorkers, we are kind of a difficult customer. On one hand, we want the real experience, but we don't want to go physically shopping anymore. That's for the tourists. And that's where I think AI is actually going to present an opportunity because, you know, for the first time, I think you'll be able to like sit on your couch and like shop for a winter wardrobe and see exactly how you will look in all of this stuff because you could be the model on the website. Your exact like, you know, proportions and everything like that. And I think it's going to be one of those things where shopping on the internet could be either really efficient or it could be like something you pour a glass of wine And it's like incredibly experiential. So I think we're in for some fun over the next few years. Exciting times ahead. And it was lovely having you here in the studio. I hope you see us again. We're definitely going to follow your journey. And yeah, as a fellow New Yorker, I would say we're always up to speed anyway, right? Always on the forefront. Thanks for having me. Great having you, John. Take care. That was another episode. Join us again next time. you
