#174: Daniel Whittington – The Chancellor, The Myth, The Legend

The Empire Builders Podcast

Daniel Whittington spent 7 months crafting the perfect message and a mere 10 minutes on the the plan of attack. How did it turn out?

Dave Young:

Welcome to the Empire Builders Podcast, teaching business owners the not-so-secret techniques that took famous businesses from mom-and-pop to major brands.

Stephen Semple is a marketing consultant, story collector and storyteller. I’m Stephen’s sidekick and business partner, Dave Young.

Before we get into today’s episode, a word from our sponsor, which is, well, it’s us, but we’re highlighting ads we’ve written and produced for our clients. So here’s one of those.

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Stephen Semple:

Hey, everyone. So we have a special surprise today. We’ve given Dave Young the day off because Dave works really hard.

Actually, Dave works for this guy, so we know why Dave works so hard. So I’m here with Daniel Whittington, and Daniel is the Chancellor of the Wizard Academy and basically created the Whiskey Marketing School at the academy.

Last time I was down in Austin, Daniel and I were sitting in the vault. We are doing a tasting, and Daniel shared a thought that just like rocked me back on my heels, which doesn’t happen that often.

What I loved about it is he compared the marketing of whiskey to the promotion of a band. And the more he talked about it, I said we need to share this idea on the podcast because I’m constantly going down this idea of looking elsewhere.

So Daniel, tell us more about this revelation and the journey you’ve been on. And at the end, let’s make sure we talk about why everyone should actually take a course at the academy and learn about whiskey.

Daniel Whittington:

My explanation of it now sounds just as good as it felt like it did when we were drinking whiskey in the vault together because those two don’t always line up. So thanks for having me on, Steve.

The origin of this whole idea was I’ve got a background in music industry. I spent 20 years as a full-time studio and touring musician and, during that time, did a lot of booking, did a lot of traveling, did a lot of promotion of bands, actually worked with bands, promoting and touring and growing their fan base.

Then I got out of that and stumbled backwards into Wizard Academy where I’ve spent the last years, 11 years, actually.

Stephen Semple:

Wow. Has it been 11 years?

Daniel Whittington:

Been 11 years.

Stephen Semple:

Holy smokes.

Daniel Whittington:

Basically getting a graduate-level super masters in actual marketing and communications and, during that time, started the Whiskey Marketing School and have now started working with my own clients that are whiskey-related right now.

One of them, they are poised for explosion and growth. They’re well set up. They’ve been winning awards. They’ve already got a huge fan base that’s kind of localized to where they tend to travel to most, not just their town, but in their region. But we’re ready to grow them. They’ve got some investment, they’ve got some money, they’ve hiring, they’re ready to explode.

So we spent seven months building the marketing strategy, the ethos, the brand voice, the architecture of the personality of the brand and who they are and what they’re trying to accomplish. During that time I was thinking, I don’t know how to grow these guys because… In other words-

Stephen Semple:

I’m glad this is taking so long because I need more time.

Daniel Whittington:

Yeah. Yeah. Because so much of the way that I’ve helped grow people has been very particular to my skill set, or it has been brands that could use traditional media. And this distillery, there’s no need for… like I’m looking at it, I’m thinking the worst thing we could do is use traditional media because you’ve already owned your localized areas.

And a whiskey bottle isn’t just a local business, isn’t HVAC where they can only service customers in a certain mileage, right? A whiskey bottle travels around the world so they’re going to have… I mean, they’ve got a huge following in New Mexico and Arizona, a huge following in California. They’re all over. So if we did a radio campaign, we’d have to figure out how to buy into markets in LA and Phoenix and Dallas and, no, we would bankrupt them in like two weeks.

Stephen Semple:

And these guys are Texas-based that you’re talking about.

Daniel Whittington:

Yeah, Texas-based, and I’m thinking like what do we do? And social media, this is coming from somebody who built no longer, but originally, the largest whiskey-focused YouTube channel on YouTube. I think I’m now like fourth or fifth because people are kicking ass out there and doing a great job of growing the whisky YouTube kingdom.

But I know social media real well, and it’s not a way to grow a business. It’s a way to augment a growth plan. It’s not a sword that solves all problem. You know what I mean? It’s just not, unless you’re specifically a personality and that’s your venue of growth. But if you’re just a business that’s going to actually have stuff people can go buy on the shelf, that’s not your game that you play.

Stephen Semple:

I just want to clarify this because it’s really interesting. So what you’re saying is like if I am building myself as a person, like I’m a consultant or I’m a celebrity or I’m something like that, absolutely social media, you can do that.

But if you’re selling a product or a service, basically it’ll augment your existing plan, but it’s not the lead of the story.

Daniel Whittington:

Yeah, I would say that, I mean, we’re going to start really nitpicking here, and this is a different conversation, I feel like. There’s a fine line where it’s like, yeah, if the shit that you’re selling is like under $100 or under 50 and you can turn and burn a million of them, then yeah, maybe you can do a whole bunch of Instagram and funny YouTube ads and sell a bunch of it. But if you’re selling an HVAC system or real products, that’s a losing market. It’s really noisy.

So I was sitting there-

Stephen Semple:

And that’s a good distinction.

Daniel Whittington:

Yeah, widgets, if you’re selling a widget.

Stephen Semple:

Perfect.

Daniel Whittington:

But whiskey is about community. I mean, it’s treated as a commodity, but it’s really about the community and the people and the story around it that matters. So we can use social media, but that can’t be the only way that we grow. There’s got to be another way to reach people.

Then one day, I was talking with some of the tasting reps that travel around and go into these physical stores and do tastings and go to whiskey events, instead of tables, and I realized I’ve seen this pattern before. This is band street teams.

Stephen Semple:

What do you mean by band street teams?

Daniel Whittington:

So like I’m a rock band. We start off in Austin, we play a little coffee shop, then we get into a club, and then we start selling out the club, and then we start playing theaters in Austin. Now every show has 500, 800 people. It’s time to go on the road. We need to go into Dallas.

Well, you can drive into Dallas and you can have your people start going around and putting up flyers, but if none of your band lives in Dallas, that’s tough.

So what do you do? You find a fan who lives in Dallas, and you make them part of your street team, and they go around putting up flyers. In exchange, they get tickets, and they get merch, and they get backstage access when you come in and show. They could hang out in the green room with you when you play the show in Dallas.

And then, “Oh, you want to break into Phoenix? All right, let’s do the same thing. Let’s find a fan in Phoenix and let’s go,” right?

But the way that that works is you cannot build a fan base in a town unless you’re willing to show up regularly. So you can’t show up in Dallas once every two years and expect to grow your audience. You got to show up in Dallas once a month, once a quarter, minimum once a quarter, until you’ve got legs and you’ve built it.

Then you get in danger of saturating your market. So then you back off to twice a year, you hit Dallas, right? Then you use that space that you gained to try to crack into a new city, Phoenix and so on. Then when you’re big enough, you can sort of do regular circuits where everyone knows you’re coming through on a regular basis, right?

But at first, you have to do all the hard work to carve out awareness, and the way you carve out awareness isn’t getting on the radio in Dallas, isn’t getting the DJs to play all your music. That’s helpful.

The way you get on the radar in a town at first is play the clubs, meet the bands, meet the promoters, meet the owners of the bars, meet the other bands that are playing in town, get them to book you when they’re doing multiple headliners, meet the fans, get to know them, and you just grind it out.

And I went, holy crap. We could absolutely do that if we take all the money we would’ve spent on radio or magazine ads or whatever and, instead, we start paying tasting reps, and we grow our two-legged army out of the whiskey brand into the world, then we can start making our presence known. We can hire a local who can hit all the right bars that they know would pour our whiskey and would love it, and a local that can go to the local whiskey events and the local whiskey meetups and introduce and speak for our brand.

Then they can book an event where one of the owners comes by once a quarter, and you get to meet the head distiller or meet one of the owners of this brand. It’s a real special thing because they’ve been prepped for it, and they’re all excited because they all love your whiskey now. Then you just keep growing like that.

And it’s not near as expensive because you don’t need a full-time person. You need to pay someone with part-time money and perks, right?

Stephen Semple:

Right.

Daniel Whittington:

Then make them feel like a true insider of the brand, and that’s it, you could take over the world, one major city at a time.

And even better than a band, you can do it faster because we could have five reps doing that simultaneously in five major cities. Then once a quarter, you hit all five major cities with one of the owners or one of the headliners. You know what I mean?

Stephen Semple:

Yeah.

Daniel Whittington:

I was like, oh my God. I ran the budget on that, and it was a fraction of a radio account.

And because we had spent seven months, while I was mildly panicking in the background, but while we had spent seven months so carefully crafting the message, it took me 10 minutes to write the manual that you would hand to these street reps that would have them speaking on message, on brand and in character at every level.

Stephen Semple:

But thank you for saying that because one of the things that we’re always talking about as Wizard of Ads partners, and I’m always talking to customers and prospective customers about this, it’s message first.

What I think is really important, what you just said right here was it’s a tactical idea that will work and is brilliant and is amazing, but the reason why it’s going to work is-

Dave Young:

Stay tuned. We’re going to wrap up this story and tell you how to apply this lesson to your business right after this.

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Dave Young:

Let’s pick up our story where we left off and, trust me, you haven’t missed a thing.

Stephen Semple:

The reason why it’s going to work, look at it, seven months on the message and a short period of time on the execution. And, in fact, I’m going to argue how to execute that message emerged out of the creating of the message.

Daniel Whittington:

Oh, hundred percent. Hundred percent. That’s why I stumbled over the idea in the first place.

Not only that, but if we took that same money without a message and we launched people who just happened to already be fans of the distillery, the message going out into the market is going to be chaos. Because everyone’s going to be talking about their own preferred why they like that brand that may or may not have anything to do with the culture and brand we’re trying to create. It would be detrimental to the brand.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. That’s so interesting because it’s funny, I’m going out to California in a week or two and basically doing an uncovering by the client, and the client was like, “Hey, could we start rewriting the website before you guys have got the media plan put together?” And it’s like reason why I don’t have the media plan put together is I haven’t got your message plan put together. And if I don’t have your message plan put together, how the hell do we do a website?

Daniel Whittington:

Right.

Stephen Semple:

And while that seems so obvious, when I meet somebody and they hear I’m in marketing, what’s their very first question? “Well, should I be doing YouTube? Should I be doing…” And I’m like, “But what’s your message?” “Yeah, yeah. Well, we got our message, but…” It’s like, “No, you don’t. No, you don’t. You need to be spending 10 times the amount of time in messaging than on the strategy.”

But anyway, but I do grasp what I’m hearing from you is as you were creating this messaging, that’s when this idea emerged.

Daniel Whittington:

Yeah, absolutely. Across the board, what we were able to find is that I wrote medium-specific messaging. So I’ve got it broken down to if you’re talking in Instagram, here’s how you deliver. If you’re talking in your newsletter that goes out to your fans, here’s how you deliver. If you’re talking at a generic public event, here’s how you deliver.

Then I also had, for all the individual reps, here’s a 90-second, 60-second, 30-second, 10-second versions of the story. So depending on how much time you have with people, you just pivot to the long version or the short version.

Stephen Semple:

That’s brilliant. You’ve given them those tools, which a lot of times people don’t. They just sign up a rep and go, “Here’s the product.”

I just had a thought about marketing of whiskey, and correct me if I’m wrong on this, because it’s weird to me. Whiskey is much more of a commitment, feels like a commitment when I buy a bottle of whiskey versus a bottle of wine.

Daniel Whittington:

Yeah, because it takes so long to drink it.

Stephen Semple:

Right, because it’s not just about the price. I’ll buy $100 bottle of wine, and it’s a different feeling buying $100 bottle of whiskey. Because I can’t bring myself to drink a quarter ounce of that whiskey and go, “I don’t like it,” and pour it down the drain, where a bottle of wine is like, “What the hell? We’ll finish it.”

Daniel Whittington:

Yeah. You will hear that in the language in social media. You’ll hear this phrase, “Man, I got stuck with this bottle,” right? No one says that about a bottle of wine. They will say, “I didn’t like it,” but no one says, “I got stuck with this bottle.”

Because after you’ve opened the wine, if you tried it, the worst case scenario, you dump half a bottle of wine down the drain and that’s actually… It’s like, “Eh, it’s a bummer,” but it’s not as bad as dumping most of a bottle of hard liquor down the drain, feels way worse.

Stephen Semple:

It feels very different. But isn’t that interesting? It’s not about the financial commitment. It’s this different type of commitment to whiskey, which is what makes it like that whole tribal involvement so much more intense. That’s really interesting.

Daniel Whittington:

Absolutely.

Stephen Semple:

I hadn’t thought about that until just now.

Daniel Whittington:

Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

That’s cool. That’s cool.

But the other thing I think that I like that’s really interesting is how you made a plan to make people feel like they’re an insider.

Daniel Whittington:

Yeah, and I couldn’t have done that, except that this brand already does that to its fans. Like that’s a core marker of who they are. They don’t put themselves on a pedestal. They’re not these like special people, who you don’t really get to hang out, they’re artists who don’t really meet the public. These guys are feet-on-the-ground, talking to people, showing up and doing tastings in people’s living rooms. Like these guys are connected to their customers, and so it works because of that.

Stephen Semple:

Right. So you’re leveraging something that was also already part of their DNA.

Daniel Whittington:

Yeah. It would not have worked for the guy who wants to be the secret artist behind the closed door.

Stephen Semple:

So it’s pretty obvious if somebody is a distiller and they’re looking for marketing ideas that they should give you a telephone call, which breaks my heart, because I’ve always wanted to work with a distiller, so you’ll have to call me and break it down to the team.

Daniel Whittington:

I used to [inaudible 00:17:24]

Stephen Semple:

But most people involved in this podcast are not distillers. So if you are an HVAC company or a retailer or something like that, what lesson could they take away from this observation that you have?

Daniel Whittington:

If I was just improv-making shit up, the only lesson I can pick out of it is that your solution may not be in your market.

Stephen Semple:

That’s a good observation.

Daniel Whittington:

But I don’t that I would take this strategy and say, “Here’s how you use this as an HVAC company.” I would need to think that through more.

Stephen Semple:

What I really liked was the whole idea that you started unclear in terms of what the medium was going to be and what the tactic was, and through the process of creating the messaging that that became evident.

Daniel Whittington:

Right. What’s funny about that is that you keyed in on my pain point in that, because for me, the fun part of the story is that I solved the problem.

Part of the story you wanted me to talk about is how I spent seven months carefully crafting the message, the whole time freaking out that I didn’t know what we were going to do when we were done with that.

Stephen Semple:

Yeah. The reason why it really parallels with me is this client that we’re going out to see in California in a couple of weeks, we’ve done a one day, we’ve done a starter session, I still don’t know what media we’re going to use. I’m, literally, living right now what you are living where I’m like, “Okay. Well, as we figure out the story, I’m sort of really hoping that something will emerge because I’m still not sure.”

Daniel Whittington:

That’s funny.

Stephen Semple:

So I feel it. I feel it where you were, and I hope that I could do it in less than seven months.

Daniel Whittington:

Yeah, yeah. No, that would be nice. Yeah.

Stephen Semple:

But it’s a little bit less complex than the storytelling around a whiskey brand.

So before we finish up, we got a couple of minutes, tell us a little bit about the Wizard Academy and why people should do a class there. And what I’m going to sit there and say to folks how I first got involved with the Wizard of Ads was through attending Magical Worlds. That was my first exposure. It changed so much in terms of the way that I thought about things. It was entertaining course, is amazing course. There’s so many fantastic courses.

But you’ve sat at the back of many, many, many of these courses and you’ve seen so many people transform. What’s your pitch for the academy?

Daniel Whittington:

I would say that to do what you did. I would say specifically, come to Austin, take Magical Worlds of Communication. It’s a fundamental communications class that goes through all the arc table ways that the brain works and how we communicate with each other and how to apply that to business and business marketing and business writing. It will fundamentally alter how you see the world around you. I’ve never seen it fail.

Stephen Semple:

It really does. So the extra thing I’m going to say is you go to wizardacademy.org, go to classes, sign up for Magical Worlds, sign up early enough that you’re able to stay on campus.

And here’s the thing I’m going to say, and I say this to my customers, I say this to my friends. When you go to that class, do not plan on doing work that night.

Daniel Whittington:

Yeah. Nu-uh.

Stephen Semple:

Plan on hanging out and talking about the class. It is so immersive that you will not want to do that.

In fact, my recommendation is don’t even plan on trying to boot out of town at the end of the last day. Stick around and you’ll thank me for taking your time on it and really letting yourself experience it, and it’s so absolutely worth it.

Daniel Whittington:

Yeah. Rock and roll.

Stephen Semple:

All right? Awesome.

Daniel Whittington:

All right. Thank you, sir.

Stephen Semple:

Thanks for your time, Daniel. This was awesome.

Daniel Whittington:

Cheers.

Dave Young:

Thanks for listening to the podcast. Please share us, subscribe on your favorite podcast app and leave us a big, fat, juicy five-star rating and review at Apple Podcast. And if you’d like to schedule your own 90-minute Empire Building session, you can do it at empirebuildingprogram.com.