Episode Transcript
All right everybody. Welcome back to the podcast. Today we have Brian Wallace on the podcast. We're very excited to have him. Brian Wallace is the founder and president of now sourcing an industry leading content marketing agency that makes the world's ideas simple, visual and influential. Brian has been named a Google small business advisor since 2016 and joined the Southwest Southwest Advisory Board in 2019.
Brian, good to have you. Pleasure, man. Such a pleasure to be here, Ryan. It's great to meet you. We have a little connection with, with my cousin. Yeah. Yeah. Um, and uh, Adam's a good dude. I'm, I'm glad he introduced us, for sure. Tell us, tell us a little bit about yourself, Brian, uh, brag about yourself and how you're changing the world with now sourcing.
So my man, I appreciate that. I don't really like the brag thing, like, just so we're clear, like I'm just a regular. That being, I appreciate that Jeff Bezos said that your brand is what other people say about you when you're not in the room. Right? So the fact that other people or the internet intelligence brag about us, that's really what fame and expertise is.
Mm-hmm. . That being said, I do believe that it's important to have like, A healthy business. Ego. Okay. Confidence. Exactly. So ranting aside, you already kind of introduced and you said that we do content marketing and the thing about the simple visual and influential, we were one of the first firms on the planet, maybe like the third or fourth place that in existence to pioneer infographics and visual storytelling as a method for getting all sorts of press and traffic and SEO and viral.
so we're talking like maybe May of 2008. Most people never heard of an infographic until at least 2012 or 2013 when they all tried to do what I do for a living. So what I mean by being good at that and like really like world renowned. We've helped companies be a catalyst for their growth when it comes to getting funded, getting acquired, acquiring other companies.
We had something over a decade ago go so crazy that like Google and Adobe called us up on and hired us on the spot. There was a basketball player that we got a 64 million contract. Then you got $180 million follow up. He's like one of the top 10 paid guys in the game. If you ever saw the hustle on. It's Tobias who's like the main rivalry for the character in the game.
That's awesome. You know what a lot of people are thinking infographics. Oh, okay. So you just do like visuals. Dive into what you actually do because that is just, for those of you who didn't understand listening to this, I'm Eyerolling so hard because I get that a lot. It's like, oh, you just make graphics.
What are you doing? Right? Yeah. So let's tell us a little bit more about it. So help business owners who are watching this and listening. Understand what you really do exactly. Everything that you think you know about infographics is barely just a little smidgen of what we actually do. So visualize, if you will, if you're watching on video, you can watch how excited I'm, if you're just listening by audio, just close your eyes and envision this metaphor.
You ever see those pictures where it's like the top of the iceberg is above the water, but then when you go beneath the surface, there's a ton more? That's what you know about the world of infographics. Almost nothing. Mm-hmm. . Actual depth of how the human mind understands visual storytelling is very, very important.
So here's the deal. It's . It's almost like a smoke screen. Mm-hmm. . Because here's the reality people, and I'm not insulting people or their abilities, but people do not read on the internet. They actually do a different thing in their brain called chunking. There's a guy by the name of Jacob Nielsen who said this 20, 30 years.
It's a real, it's basically like renowned as the father of usability. So chunking means your brain and your eyes. You're scanning around looking for what you should pay attention to on a page. Mm-hmm. , that's why you have words and words. And words and words. Everybody has a header image. Everybody has different fonts.
They've bulleted lists they have. Mm-hmm. , different formatting. . They have category headers. They have a table of contents because even the words and the font and the size, all of that matters. Mm-hmm. . So infographic is just giving people more eye candy to get their attention for permission for more attention.
Mm-hmm. , I'm saying. So everybody's like, oh, this is a short read, but it's not, if you put a clock timer to that sucker, Easily 2, 3, 5 or so minutes. Yeah, so you can cram in a ton of information when you're hitting people with emotion rather than stats. Story and visuals. Mm-hmm. , and then stats to back it up all in a neat little package.
It's incredible what you can do. Yeah. Because what we're actually doing, we're really just packaging up simplicity. Mm-hmm. rather than talking over everybody's head and you know, beating our chest of how fancy we are with words. People don't understand. We're meeting them where they are in an emotional and visual perspective so they can remember more stuff for better cognition later.
Absolutely. You know, there's something from your website that I read that I absolutely love. Yeah. You are marrying the data and the facts with the art of storytelling and. This is, there you go. This is essential. And I think about that and you know, I am an entrepreneur, but I, I and the listeners know that I was professional dancer.
I was on TV shows and so you think you danced Dancing with Stars. I also coach competitors and in fact, I was just talking to a couple the other day and they were really bummed about how they did on the dance floor. I didn't dance very well and I said, what is the first thing that the judges. Are judging and they're like, well, are dancing.
And I said, no, they're not. They're judging the way you look, right. Your, the lady's hair, the dress, the boy's shirt. They're judging your presence, your energy. Um, so that, that reminds me of infographics right from the beginning. You are setting the stage. Um, for how your audience is gonna connect to you.
And that has, there's a lot of research that goes into that, right? If you, it's not just like, okay, we're just gonna put whatever . It's like you've gotta really research your target audience and understand what speaks to them and how, in just a split second you can communicate. , right. I hear you man. You're good at this, man.
I love this. You're, you're already better than like most people that I go on interviews, like every week or so. So good on you. And I think, and for everybody listening, like I think that's because Ryan is so media trained, he's just like, seemingly a natural, but you can just like come out of the womb like this, like you just, well, I did study pr, so I did get Right, right.
So like you've got like so much like high level knowledge that it's ridiculous. So I appreciate that nuanced response in. and good thing I put on like a decent enough shirt and brought the energy . Um, so you know what? It's, you're crushing it. You're crushing it. Don't worry about that. Thanks. I mean, I just live in this zone.
It's not just like a speech presence. This is just my stream of consciousness. So, you know what drives me crazy about what people think? People sometimes, when. , I guess like when they're looking at PR and marketing and seo, they forget how people think. Mm-hmm. . People don't think in listicles. People are emotional.
People are irrational. It's crazy. You ever hear these crazy stats that people have the attention of a goldfish? I don't know if that's more insulting to people or goldfish, right? People don't have an atten eight second attention span, right? Somebody can binge watch whatever's new on Amazon Prime or Netflix or all the shows you've already been on.
In a weekend. Mm-hmm. , that's second. It's just that people have a more finely tuned crap filter cause there's more and more garbage every day. And AI gonna be doing us any favors ever, either because everybody gonna make a thousand copies of the same thing. Yep. By the way, I'm getting a little bit of a reverb or something, not sure what that is.
Um, it sounds good on my end, so hopefully we're okay. So I'll be quiet on that. Let's keep going. No worries. Yep. So let me, let me ask. Okay. Yes, sir. Idea wins is, is the whole thing that we're about here, is simple things that companies can do that will make a big impact. And I really see that that's exactly what you're doing.
You, you are in a niche where, hey, you can use infographics and what we, what we do to make a tremendous impact, um, right. For your business. Mm-hmm. , um, so. , what else would you say or maybe dive a little more deeper into that. Like what do, what do companies need to think about in order to, in order to do that, in order to use infographics to accomplish what you do?
Like what, what is maybe, maybe a first step or what, what action can they take? Sure. So two parts of the answer there. The first thing is the idea has to be better than whatever they're thinking. So imagine all you ever had is a subject line in an email, and you're not allowed to write any text in the body.
No emojis, no high priority. Doesn't matter what your email address is, that's the only thing that you have, like just a line on a headstone or whatever. No, not to get a terrible metaphor anyway. Look, if all you have is just that headline, if it's not good enough, your toast. Mm-hmm. . So not just the headline, but is the seed of idea.
Truly interesting to the internet or is it just interesting to your corporate stakeholders and your C-suite and your round table? Okay. Chance you have not battle tested that with the internet, cuz I assure you all that there are gigantic websites out there that multivariate tests, tens of different titles.
on the fly. Mm-hmm. . And they see what works. So if you don't have an ability to know how to do that, you've already lost the game. The other side that I'm gonna answer on that is the strata of how our teams are composed internally. Mm-hmm. , because a lot of people just think, oh, it's an infographic. I'll just dump it into some free do do-it-yourself template thing and call it a day.
And I say, if you've got something like. , a publicly traded company. Like are you gonna put in like a kindergartner's PowerPoint presentation? Right? Maybe they're not doing PowerPoint in kindergarten, but you know, elementary school, whatever. Right. So here's the thing. So I already explained the title and the seat of the idea.
So the reason that what we do is successful, even if you try to mimic it and mirror it. and you probably will fail. I'm not saying like we're the only place in the world that can do this, but the reason that we know our game and we're good at it is that we always continue to get better. And we've been doing this since 2018.
Mm-hmm. . So rather than reinventing ourself, and this year we're the crypto expert, and then we're gonna mm-hmm. be AI expert and whatever. Just imagine that you take your 10,000 hours of expertise and then you keep going and you just reach the world Elite mastery on something when you just stick in your swim lane and you only get.
guess what? You get better? Mm-hmm. , finish the sentence. So, back to the strato of the team. Once we have the concept, we've got a research team. So the research team does research. It also almost like writing a TV show or a movie script is making it where we are putting together the blueprint, which is again, a motion story and stats in that order.
Mm-hmm. to put together to. , the undercurrent of what we're going to build the pixels or build the visuals on. Yeah. And in design, we're un uncompromising. Mm-hmm. people apply all over the world and we say no all the time because guess what? Design. And by the way, everybody, people, designers won't tell you this.
You ready? Designers hate making infographics. Why? Because you have to be good at like 12 different things instead of the one or two that they usually coast on. . It's not just making pictures. No, it's not. Just making pictures. Ready. Let's list a few things you have to be good at. Are designers, data scientists?
Uh, no. That's why they need a research team. Are designers good at typography? Probably not. Are they good at photo manipulation? Are they good at putting together an understanding charts and how they're representing and map visualizations? Mm-hmm. , 3D isometric design and character design. Not a chance.
Mm-hmm. So. . We have really, really good OG people at design specifically for this. Yeah. Okay. I love it. And not to cut you off. Mm-hmm. , the important part for a lot of companies is the fact that we have a media promotion earned media arm. So it's not just like, You know how the internet works for, by the way, for anybody who doesn't know how the internet works, it isn't some scam artist that's gonna say, I'm gonna get you an X, Y, Z publication.
And really that means they're just gonna spend a hundred dollars on a press release that's gonna go on Yahoo or whatever, and then get flushed down the toilet in a month. Cuz it's not a real link. It's not real press stop. Believing lies. So we have actual relationships with places because editors like us, cuz we build their sites.
Mm-hmm. , so we. Keys to things that rob, lots of people that don't have the relationships, don't have, think of it like this. So I love it's always been that way. It's who you know. Exactly. It's, it's, it's not just, interestingly though, Ryan, so I like using the metaphor of a safety deposit box. So if you ever go into a bank vault for a good reason, you're opening a safety deposit box, not, not rather your head outta like, you know, like bank robberies and stuff, right?
So imagine you're just in there and you're, you know, checking out like your family's valuables or whatever. So how many keys do you need to open the. two. So what are the two keys of the internet? Ryan already said one, and it's who you know. The other thing is having something world class to give them, because I can be best buddies with a journalist, and it doesn't matter if I don't have something that's actually rising to the level of interestingness.
They're, we're all not being intellectually honest with each other. Who cares if I know somebody if I'm giving them garbage? Yep. That's what a lot of people do. Yeah. And they're not gonna want to use it. They're not gonna want to use your stuff again. Totally. Like you're gonna burn a bridge cuz they're like, great way to burn that.
Yeah, exactly. They'll never talk to you again. You know how many emails journalists get every hour? It's absurd. Yeah. Well, I love what you're doing. I, I think, I mean, you are changing the world and you have a very specific way that you're doing that. That's what I love about business. Like real, like if you really get down to what business is, it's okay.
I, I have an idea for a service or a product and I want to change the world with this. I wanna actually make an impact. Businesses who succeed are businesses who have that mentality. Um, let me ask you another question. Yes sir. What do you see as the greatest challenge right now for business? Ooh. All right.
Well, not to be like a pessimist or anything, but I believe that there is some major world financial downfall happening. Like didn't the US government like literally change the definition of a recession to pretend we're not in one Pretty much , even if you're not an economist and you only like reading, like that's what politics is about, right?
Yeah. Right. Like takes the message so it aligns. Like we don't really understand politics or economics or whatever. So I'll give y'all like the TLDR too long, didn't read version. , there isn't a lot of financial growth. There's horrible inflation in the United States and beyond. There's a lot of problems with war and conflict, supply chain issues, covid, you name it.
Like there's just like a wheel of it's not getting better right now. It is not getting better. So what does that mean? That means, oh, and by the way, like big tech and huge companies laying off, laying off, laying off every, like nobody's immune. Like Zoom's just laid off 1200 people. Microsoft laid off 12,000.
and it's happening and it's growing. Yeah, it's happening every day. And that should scare you as a business owner, whether you're a Fortune 500, global 2000, or some guy in his basement, whatever. and, and you're probably in the middle. Yeah. But let's say most people are, you know, just small business or whatever.
The sad reality, or the good reality I guess is that people must do more with less. So when you have a hundred million dollar budget, you can do every stupid thing in the world and it doesn't matter cuz you've got a hundred million dollars. Yep. When that gets cut to three, you better pick the right thing instead of awarding it to your buddy on the golf course cuz who cares about that guy?
Go play golf. , like hire people who are. , nothing makes me more annoyed than all these people that say that they're full service, this and that. Full service marketing. We do everything. And I was like, how can that be true? How could you be great at everything? Mm-hmm. , I just hope you've been doing like a thing for how many years?
Like a decade and a half. Yeah. Right. I may be pretty good at a lot of other stuff, but gimme a break. Okay. The riches are in the niches. Exactly. Find your niche and deliver value. Exactly. And, and deliver better and better and better every. Exactly. So that's your question is do you have anything else to add to that?
So that's the first, yeah, that's what I'm saying, right? So because everybody's gotta do more with less. As long as you do something that is world class and people know that you do it, then you should do well or better than average in a chaos market, which is what we're approaching or in already, depending on how you read the financial.
Yep. Yeah, I love it. Perfect answer. Beautiful. Thanks. Okay, one more question for you, just on a lighter note. Cause this has just been awesome. You've totally crushed it today. Um, if you had one superpower Yeah. This is superpower, what would it be? . Yeah. So I don't know, like I'm, I don't really think I'm a superhero.
I'm kind of just a normal guy, but maybe once in a while I have to like break through and that's, you know, Clark, Kent, man, you know? Yeah. Let's go. I got the glasses on, so like when I'm in like a total beast and I throw my glasses off and I fly around in the world rather than being Superman, because like that's kind of like a weird power and he is got the kryptonite.
Um, I really think that the world needs a little bit more. because I don't know about you ma'am. When was the last time you said to somebody, Hey, how's it going? And then they responded fine. And then you just go on with life as normal. Everybody, everyone is like totally like abnormal on tilt hurting. Do you remember like, you know what the word of the year for, I think it was Miriam Webster dictionary was for what?
2022? Yeah. Uh, All right, so to ruin your day, it was called goblin mode. Do you know what goblin mode is? It's not a nice thing. It sounds like a video game. Yeah. No, it's not a video game. It's not war to the rings or whatever. Like we could geek out about that, but that's not what it means. So goblin mode.
and you're gonna look this up like right after I totally cook up. So it just means like imagine somebody just all disgusting and grungy and like not putting on a good shirt and their hair is like disgusting. Mm-hmm. and they're just in sweatpants all day, like peeing themselves or whatever. Like ruins the metaphor for you.
So that's goblin mode is like you've just kind of given up on. . Oh, humanity. How depressing. hard. So I think that the world must be met with a level of empathy and I think everybody has that superpower to try a little harder to reach them. So that's what I'd say. I love that. I love that. Um, I would a hundred percent agree with you.
I think we are so divided. Mm-hmm. man. We are. So I don't own my entire life. I just turned 42 on Monday. Nice. And I've never seen the world so divided in 42. , you know? Um, so I think that's a perfect answer. Thank you. Thank you. Very, very nicely done. So how do people find you? Where can we send people so that you can help them change the world, right?
Because you are changing the world by helping them change the world. So where can people go? Yeah. So there's too many people in the world named Brian Wallace, so you might get like random, different Brian Wallace's. I'm pretty sure like when you Google my name, we actually show up pretty high. These. By we, I mean me, but because I said we, I'm actually talking about our business.
Mm-hmm. , which is now sourcing. So usually if you look us up on all the socials under now, sourcing like the word outsourcing, but N O W and then just now, sourcing.com. Perfect. All right, well we're gonna put those links in the show notes and management and absolute pleasure having you on today. Likewise, my man.
This was fun. Really, really great. Yeah. Meeting you and just learning more about what you do. I just love what you're doing, so, uh, I will, we'll send people your way. Sounds good, my man. Appreciate you. All right. All right. Thanks everybody. We'll see you next time.
