Episode 5: Caleb Gardner on the One Key Strategy for Digital Disruption

This week’s guest is Caleb Gardner, a sought-after speaker on digitalinnovation, social change, and the future of work. Caleb has over two decades of experience in digital leadership, entrepreneurship, and social impact in the public and private sectors. He was lead digital strategist for President Obama’s political advocacy group, and he’s the author of No Point B: Rules for Leading Change in the New Hyper-Connected, Radically Conscious Economy.

During this episode, Danielle and Caleb discussed the ONE key strategy in managing digital disruption in the economy, along with holdover communications lessons from working in politics. Caleb shared his expert thoughts on how to spark positive organizational change from within, and addressed the question many brands are wrestling with today: how to decide when to speak up on the issues consumers care about.

Standout moments:

• (17:37) We all have a moral responsibility to speak out on subjects that matter. We have some of the most powerful communication devices in our phones and we need to learn how to put them to good use.
• (19:47) Calling out people for not calling out other people has become very common, and Caleb thinks it becomes problematic because we never have all the information about the person and situation.
• (21:17) Leaders and businesses need to plan ahead for when certain topics come into the public eye. “Is this a big enough threshold for us to weigh in?”

As always, we hope you enjoy this episode! If you’d like to hear more, all previous episodes of The Art of Sway are available from our podcast page.

Scroll down for the full episode transcript.

Episode 5: Caleb Gardner Transcript

Danielle Wiley: Welcome to The Art of Sway. This is a podcast that brings you inside the world of marketing through the lens of influence. I’m your host Danielle Wiley. Each week through candid conversations with industry insiders, we will uncover how influencer marketing is making an impact across all consumer buying habits and is changing the way we talk to each other. Let’s dive in.

Danielle Wiley: It was really great to catch up with Caleb. We worked together back at Edelman. So always good to see an old friend and colleague, but I loved talking to him just about how all companies these days need to be prepared to pivot all the time. Be prepared to speak up about the issues of the day, and how this is kind of difficult for a lot of traditional companies. Just very enlightening to hear Caleb’s thoughts on how to bring some of these more traditional companies into the future so that they can best optimize everything that they’re doing and succeed in today’s hyper-connected world. I hope you enjoy.

Danielle Wiley: Caleb Gardner’s career has been driven by curiosity and focused on change. For more than three years he was the lead digital strategist for OFA Barack Obama’s political advocacy group. Caleb led one of the largest digital programs in existence including the most followed Twitter account in the world @BarackObama. He’s also built operational frameworks for a variety of organizations in the public and private sectors, including at prestigious professional service firms like Bain and Company and Edelman.

Danielle Wiley: Now as the co-founder and managing partner of 18 Coffees an innovation consulting firm. Caleb help’s businesses like United Way Worldwide and Bose Corporation get a foothold in the future. His new book just came out it’s called “No Point B: Rules for Leading Change in the New Hyper-Connected, Radically Conscious Economy.”

Danielle Wiley: Okay. Hi, Caleb.

Caleb Gardner: Hello.

Danielle Wiley: Welcome. It’s so good to see you. I think I saw you pre-covid at a conference like passing ships in the night, but other than that even before that it had been a long time.

Caleb Gardner: That’s right yeah. It had. What conference was it? It was somewhere in New York, right

Danielle Wiley: Yes. It was in New York.

Caleb Gardner: Half the conferences are.

Danielle Wiley: And actually I was just talking to the organizer. I was with her this morning. What is it the, um…

Caleb Gardner: Oh social media strategy summit maybe?

Danielle Wiley: Strategy summit. Yes.

Caleb Gardner: Yeah. That’s right. That had to have been three or four years ago because it was in person, pre-covid. So yeah it’s been a little bit.

Danielle Wiley: Yeah and we were with a client who we no longer work with and is long gone from the branch. So for sure a long time, and I mean, I remember. I still remember interviewing you.

Caleb Gardner: Yes.

Danielle Wiley: I think I interviewed you at Starbucks. Like at the Starbucks for whatever reason, you didn’t even come into the..

Caleb Gardner: Yeah I remember you interviewing me.

Danielle Wiley: I probably wanted to get some fresh air.

Caleb Gardner: It’s very surreal. Yeah. I remember that very, very vividly, because I was terrified. Obviously.

Danielle Wiley: I’m very scary. You should have been. It was very fun in your book just reading just all the old Edelman stories, like going on pitches and some of the crazy client conversations we had to have.

Caleb Gardner: Yeah.

Danielle Wiley: It was definitely a moment in time.

Caleb Gardner: Yeah. It was a weird transitional moment when we were trying to convince, like fortune 100 companies to open Facebook pages, which is crazy. Now I’d probably try to convince them not to.

Danielle Wiley: Yeah. I remember it was funny reading that story you were at a pitch and trying to talk them into doing something.

Caleb Gardner: Yeah.

Danielle Wiley: And the client was eventually like “I hear you and you seem really smart, but we’re too old-fashioned.” And I had an almost identical experience the beef client came in and met with us, like the Beef Association, and it was super early days and I was like have you ever heard of Pioneer Woman? She’s this woman and she has a food blog and it seems really popular and she lives on a farm. Beef is a natural choice, and they thought I was crazy. The looks I got from them it was like the craziest thing that had ever come out of my mouth.

Caleb Gardner: Was this right before Pioneer Woman really blew up?

Danielle Wiley: Of course.

Caleb Gardner: Yeah. Yeah, yeah that’s fun.

Danielle Wiley: And they did end up working with her, later on. “God I told you so!”

Caleb Gardner: Of course just like the brand that I mentioned in the book eventually ended up making huge investments in social.

Danielle Wiley: Yeah.

Caleb Gardner: Yeah.

Danielle Wiley: I mean everyone has had to right?

Caleb Gardner: Yep.

Danielle Wiley: I love that aspect of your book. I’m looking at our company values up on my wall and the first one is being agile, which I think that’s a key point in your book.

Caleb Gardner: Yeah. Might be the key point.

Danielle Wiley: I mean and for us it’s just been a matter of survival. I mean we started as an agency with just bloggers. Had we insisted on sticking with that, that would have been disastrous. I mean on and on and on I can list all the things.

Caleb Gardner: Yeah

Danielle Wiley: I think for us it’s obvious because we’re a social media agency. Obviously, we’re having to pivot and change and be agile, but what about companies that are more traditional, like a CPG company or a company that hasn’t grown up in that space where agility is life?

Caleb Gardner: Yeah, it is fun to think about like what the changing definition of even an influencer has meant the last 10 years. Then how you’ve had to ride that wave, I bet that’s been really fun for you. I think what we can agree on is that the disruptive influence of technology, even if you’re in a company that it hasn’t disrupted yet, it’s coming, and you’ve probably seen it coming for years and I mean I’ll give you an example. A couple of years ago I was working at a B2B wholesaler client when I was at Bain and Company, who had these old school kind of wholesale contracts that they had depended on for years and years and years and they were just now thinking about the effects of digital on their supply chain, and what they could gather from data analytics in terms of making their profitability and efficiency shoot up.

Caleb Gardner: They were starting to think about the effects of new consumer strategies when what we had seen in the consumer market was starting to play out in the B2B space, in terms of how you manage the engagement where you get insight from. Even the customer service like the effects of how we started to think about customer service on Twitter or on social we’re starting to bleed into the B2B world in terms of how people wanted to be able to manage their interactions in a really fast engaging real-time way. Versus kind of an old school go to dinner with a sales rep way right? So I think B2B is a really interesting case study where they were able to rest on the laurels longer, but it’s still coming and it’s still starting to really change how they’re doing business.

Danielle Wiley: And I think, I mean I’m in this group called “Vistage” which is like a CEO advisory. It is a CEO advisory group, and one of the things about Vistage is you’re not in the group with anyone who’s in the same industry as you. So I’ve been with someone who owns a construction company, someone who sells school uniforms, someone who makes cookies, you see all the different industries and through covid, it was so interesting to see just this instant need to have to “Oh my gosh! We have to do everything on Zoom.”

Caleb Gardner: Yeah.

Danielle Wiley: And I need to do Slack and I need to…

Caleb Gardner: Yeah

Danielle Wiley: It just kind of propelled everyone into the computer age it sounds like.

Caleb Gardner: What a great real-world case study of the immediate need for agility.

Danielle Wiley: Great or terrible?

Caleb Gardner: Yeah. Both.

Danielle Wiley: I mean we used to kind of hide the fact that we were all working from home, because we felt like it made us look small and clients didn’t want someone who was in a home office. They wanted someone with a fancy high rise and a receptionist.

Caleb Gardner: Right.

Danielle Wiley: Which is crazy because all the overhead that comes with that.

Caleb Gardner: I know.

Danielle Wiley: Everything really flipped very quickly.

Caleb Gardner: Same. I mean we’d been around I think only about the last five years, and the first few years it was definitely. You figure out was to punch above your weight and look larger than you are. Right?

Danielle Wiley: Yeah.

Caleb Gardner: But you know covid hits and all of a sudden we have our clients going “How do you do this remote work thing?” It was fascinating.

Danielle Wiley: Yeah, now it’s an asset.

Caleb Gardner: Yeah.

Danielle Wiley: I feel like I could probably go out there and give speeches on how to optimize for remote work.

Caleb Gardner: Yeah, we just found ourselves doing training about “How do you communicate in a remote environment?” You don’t [crosstalk] how.

Danielle Wiley: Well that’s awesome [crosstalk] so you actually have done that?

Caleb Gardner: Yeah. Yeah. Just based on our experience.

Danielle Wiley: That’s great.

Caleb Gardner: It was great.

Danielle Wiley: So speaking of experience I wanted to talk. So you were at Edelman and then Bain and then you went to go work for Obama for America.

Caleb Gardner: Yeah close to that order. It was Edelman, Obama, and then Bain.

Danielle Wiley: Okay, so I wanted to talk about the political piece because obviously I know you and then we have a mutual friend Jessie who also did some work for Obama and Michael Slayby. We’ve kind of interacted in spheres with folks who have been agency side and then gone into the political space and then kind of used that to propel themselves forward. I mean it’s similar to what covid did for everyone in terms of how they work. I feel like working in that political space you almost get 15 years of experience in the course of a year because it’s so intense.

Caleb Gardner: 100% that’s right. Yeah actually I credit a lot of our colleagues at Edelman for even helping me get that job. It was just serendipitous how many people from Obama 2008, Obama 2012, that we ended up working with. Jessie and you know Michael and all the people you mentioned definitely helped guide me and refer me to that job.

Caleb Gardner: Yeah, I think what’s unique about the political world, I heard it described as “one of the fastest moving, highest risk startups you could ever be a part of” because you’re basically spending all your time building infrastructure for this one goal and then tearing it all down. It’s wild, and I think because I worked in it for four years we kind of did that for every political cycle. So like the midterms and then the 2020 campaign and we were much more engaged in the political advocacy of policy making and decision making. So there was also like campaign by campaign staffing up and executing and tearing down. So it was wild, I mean the government shut down and we had a roll out of the ACA market places and a roll out of the Paris Climate Accords.

Caleb Gardner: We were attacked by a hacker group and it was just wild.

Danielle Wiley: This all feels like 20 years ago.

Caleb Gardner: Right? It does.

Danielle Wiley: I feel like I lived like 86 lifetimes since the roll out of the ACA.

Caleb Gardner: You and me both. It’s crazy. It wasn’t like guaranteed to be a thing. We were all like, “If this fails it’s going to be terrible.” It was so stressful. I was not as gray. You know me back then. I was not as gray as I am now after that experience.

Danielle Wiley: Same. Same.

Caleb Gardner: It’s a world-changing experience. I definitely recommend anyone to spend just a little bit of time in it and you’ll never regret it.

Danielle Wiley: So you did that and then you went to Bain and then you started your own. So talk a little bit about 18 Coffees. Let’s pimp this out. I love everyone who works for you so.

Caleb Gardner: I mean what I was always interested in when we were doing work at Edelman was the stuff where we got to go beyond just a good marketing campaign. I mean we got to do some fun, creative work, but the things that I was always most interested in was “How is this changing business going forward?” We’re not just adding a YouTube video onto a Facebook page to support an ad campaign, but we’re actually restructuring how you are going to market and what your value prep is with clients, with customers. We’re learning interesting things from the market and pivoting our products accordingly. We’re getting people in the organization to not work in silos anymore. We’re getting them to work together, to go to market together, and so some of that more infrastructure type building around digital capacity was some of the work that I was always most interested in. So coming out of Obama world when there’s no natural “What do you do now?” I was just like having coffee with people and being like “I don’t know what I’m going to go and do next, this is kind of the work I’m interested in.”

Caleb Gardner: So one of the reasons why I went to Bain, and went to a consulting firm, because I was like “Oh these are the people who are really reorging and building business for the next generation.” And that turned out, to be fair to Bain, half true. They’re super smart. Loved my experience there, but one, we were entering the Trump Era around then and I was definitely like having an existential crisis about leaving politics, and not doing work that really mattered to make the world better anymore.

Caleb Gardner: But also I think the ways that a lot of the big consulting firms think about strategy and transformation are using toolkits that are 30, 40 years old. I was like “No we need to be leaning into what’s possible now in a digital world.” And so we started building something that I think is really needed. Which was how do we take the effects of digital disruption and the effects of social disruption, think about those together in terms of what that means for business going forward. So all of our clients tend to be in a transition based on the effects of those things and that’s kind of why we started focusing on building capability around change management. Because we could be the best strategists in the world, we could be the best subject matter experts in the world and if our client’s organizations were constantly running into cultural problems, were constantly running into power dynamics, were constantly running into “Oh, that would never work here. Oh we could never get the budget approved for that.”

Caleb Gardner: All the things that you and I ran into when we would talk to clients at Edelman. It had nothing to do with whether or not the idea was good or the strategy was right.

Danielle Wiley: Right.

Caleb Gardner: It was all cultural bureaucratic things that would kill it. So we were like “We need to have capability not in being just good strategists, but in how we actually make change with an organization so that they are able to execute on that strategy. So that’s been the most fun work we’ve done in the last five years. It’s not only being able to think big picture. Being able to really innovate with clients, but bringing everyone along. Here’s how the organization needs to change accordingly to be able to do that kind of work.

Danielle Wiley: I feel like there’s a real social good element too that runs through everything…

Caleb Gardner: That’s right.

Danielle Wiley: …that you do. Is that just the price of doing business these days? Which I also want to talk to you about, or is that like “Okay we’re advising these companies” and so is it just good business advice, or is it the way you have to be now, or is that purposeful? Because you want to be doing good in the world, and so by helping companies kind of incorporate that, not that it’s self-serving, but it’s helping everyone and it’s kind of making a bigger impact.

Caleb Gardner: The correct answer is D. All of the above. Both we saw a market opportunity for it. We didn’t think there were enough people talking about the fact that we as consumers are now carrying around the most powerful communication devices in our pockets, and now have access to be able to tell companies “Hey you’re not living the values that you’re saying that you’re living.” We thought that those things were going to intersect in a really powerful way. We came from, I mean I came from a political background, we felt like we had a point of view on that. We had expertise and network connections in the, what I will broadly define as kind of the social impact space, and we really wanted to do that work. We thought it was important, and we wanted to be able to come to work every day feeling like we were doing important, world-changing work.

Danielle Wiley: Same.

Caleb Gardner: Yeah. Who doesn’t want that right?

Danielle Wiley: Yeah. Yeah. I think one of the things I wanted to talk to you about. I actually wrote down this quote from your book, from towards the beginning, about the need to morally perform, in the global social media theater, and how this not communicating might as well mean not existing. This has come up for me personally a lot this year. I think there was this period of time in the spring. Where it was just like one awful thing after another, that were really hitting the people who work for us. So you know the leak of Roe vs. Wade, and then the Buffalo shooting, and then the Uvalde shooting and then the actual overturning of Roe vs. Wade and inflation. And just everything is so heavy right now, and I think even back when we first started the company, you might talk to people one on one about it, but it wasn’t typical to be sending out a message to the company. I found myself having to send out messages over and over again, and explain that we were here, and that we were holding space for people, and we get if you can’t work today.

Danielle Wiley: I think the brands that we work with as well, have kind of been faced with, “You can’t stay silent anymore.” Which is the total opposite of how things were maybe 10, 15 years ago where they would never work with an influencer who did have strong political feelings. And now we have brands who won’t work with influencers who don’t have strong political feelings.

Caleb Gardner: Wild right.

Danielle Wiley: [crosstalk]

Caleb Gardner: That’s crazy.

Danielle Wiley: I’d love to hear your thoughts. I mean obviously again this is a key point in your book, but just the fact that you can’t stay silent anymore. That’s just no longer an option.

Caleb Gardner: Yeah.

Danielle Wiley: And I’d love to hear just your thoughts on that in general, and also how you help get people over that hump because I think that’s a hard leap to make if you’ve been in the business world for a long time.

Caleb Gardner: It is. This is a really tough subject matter. It’s one of the reasons I felt like I needed to write about it, because I don’t think they’re easy answers to this question. Some of it is a judgment call, but I do think that we have to recognize the moral responsibility we have to use what are the most powerful communication devices we’ve ever had before to good ends and that there is some ethical trade-off every time we decide not to do that. We decide to take a digital detox. We decide to delete our accounts. I’m not saying that that’s not the right answer, but I do think we should have some consternation about “Am I giving up my power to do good right now?” I’m definitely a supporter of digital detoxes.

Caleb Gardner: I think that we have to treat this doing good, as a marathon over the long run. And so I do think people need to take care of themselves, and figure out the context for themselves in where they’re going to engage so that they don’t feel like they have to be engaged in every single issue or responding to every single thing. But ultimately we have to find that context for ourselves and make those decisions for ourselves about where we are going to use our voice, and we’re always going to lean in.

Caleb Gardner: So that’s one thing from a personal responsibility standpoint, but I do think that it’s hard. And I do tell stories in the book about it. It’s hard for us to make judgments about other people’s choices about that because I don’t think we have all the context for why someone chooses to lean into an issue and not lean into another issue. We don’t know anything about what’s happening in their personal lives. We don’t know anything that’s happening behind the scenes, about their ability to even lean in. So we have to make those moral choices for ourselves and then actually do our best to not make judgments about other people and how they make those moral choices because we just don’t have the full context.

Danielle Wiley: Yes. I mean giving people the grace to, at least opening up the dialogue about it. I liked that story you told about your friend who decided to, instead of just posting about stuff that he was actually going to go out there and volunteer, and make change and he had a friend who was like, “I’m so angry at you for not posting about all of these issues in the world right now!” It was a total misunderstanding, but I think it’s indicative of a lot of the judgment that goes on these days.

Caleb Gardner: Exactly. That’s a true story, and I’ve heard of other people who have had very similar experiences. I think the calling out people for not calling out other people, has become like a common practice, when we’re all trying to lean into things like online activism, but to me it just becomes really problematic, because we just don’t have all the information.

Danielle Wiley: And I think it’s really hard as a leader too. Going back to the spring where it was just one hit after another. Not to be a sob story. But leaders are people too. And when you yourself are hurting about everything going on, it can be difficult sometimes to step back and put those feelings into words, and let people know that you’re there and have the exact right thing to say. And to know that people need to hear something, but you’re struggling to even know what’s the right thing to put out there. I mean I think it’s a difficult space. I’ve heard a lot of leaders talk about how hard that is.

Caleb Gardner: Yeah. It’s especially hard. When you have any sort of platform, any sort of leadership responsibility, because then not using that platform at key moments is even more ethically dubious. Right?

Danielle Wiley: It’s at what point, when there’s so much that’s going on that’s terrible, like what’s the threshold? How many people have to be shot? How many people have to be impacted? It can be very hard to figure out how to not go through every single day being like “Okay here’s a list of terrible things that happened today. I’m holding space for you, and then Tuesday here’s everything else that happened.”

Caleb Gardner: Where do you draw the line? It’s a very terrible decision to have to make. What I usually say is, the best thing to do is try to think through that before those issues start to hit the news cycle, before they come up. Like “What do we care about? What is directly involved in the way that we do business?” Are the things that are part of our supply chain, or that are directly effecting our employees for example. Some pre-planning really saves a lot of heartache in the moment for having to make terrible decisions like you said, about “Is this a big enough threshold for us to weigh in?”

Danielle Wiley: So I know that you did social media management for Barack Obama, and I love that quote you had that he said you’re a better Barack Obama than he is. I think being a social media manager, is one of the hardest jobs there is these days, and certainly doing it for such a high-profile person, all the more so. That has to teach you a lot, about how to do that pre-planning, and how to react when there’s stuff to react. The kind of mix of reactive and proactive. I would imagine that that experience taught you a lot that you can now bring into your consulting with companies in terms of how they can navigate these issues.

Caleb Gardner: Oh yeah. 100%. I think we benefited from the fact that when you are a politician of any sort, but especially the highest profile ones, the bell curve kind of flips on it’s head of what normal community engagement looks like. So you know, if you or I were running a brand account you would have people who really loved the brand, people who really hate the brand and most people are right there in the middle. You’ve just got people who couldn’t really care less to be honest. They’re just kind of engaged and you want to push them toward being more engaged, but really there all in that normative brand.

Caleb Gardner: I think when you’re running an account like the Obama account it kind of flips on it’s head where basically everyone who engages either loves you, or hates you. And the people in the middle are not engaging at all and completely tuned out. So I think we benefited from the fact that basically everyone responding to us, or like the entire political environment meant that we weren’t doing things like “community management.” You know, we weren’t responding to people as the Obama account. Can you imagine, it’d be a Fox News story the next day. So it made the operation of the accounts simpler in certain ways, but obviously a lot riskier and a lot more involved in other ways. We had to make sure we were spelling things correctly or things were capital “T” true and had research backing, and the way we phrased things were exactly the right kind of policy nuance about how those things should be phrased, in a tiny 280 character tweet.

Caleb Gardner: We had to respond to news cycles a lot faster with a lot more intentionality than most big accounts that could just kind of go quiet until things settled down a little bit, or they figure out what’s going on. So it added a layer of complexity in terms of how far out we could plan. We didn’t really do three-month long content calender. That was not a thing. Probably, the longest timelines we were looking on were a couple of weeks. You know, looking out at a policy decision or something that was going to be rolled out in a few weeks. Like the roll out of the ACA marketplaces for example, making content that could be options that we could lean in on that, but still having a flexible enough workflow and governance where we could shut things down or adjust in realtime if we needed to.

Danielle Wiley: Yeah. Yeah, and I think now even brands can’t plan out. I mean maybe a vague understanding, “Okay, in November we’ll start talking about holiday dinners.” or whatever, but like the world is moving so quickly right now and everyone is just hyper-connected all the time it’s just kind of disastrous to plan that far in advance.

Caleb Gardner: Yeah. That’s one of the things that makes being a social manager now so hard. Is that you can’t just load things into a scheduler and expect it all to be tweeted without your like really paying attention to what’s popping in the news cycle that day, or how things are going to be interpreted. Yeah, I don’t envy people who run accounts right now.

Danielle Wiley: It’s hard. We just had a thing. I mean it was so, so, silly just my own Twitter. I had a pre-scheduled tweet just talking about some of the successes of Snapchat, and it was scheduled to go live today, and I had totally forgotten because it wasn’t anything controversial or remarkable. Of course, they laid off like 25%.

Caleb Gardner: That’s right.

Danielle Wiley: Which is not funny. It’s terrible. I thankfully saw it a few minutes after it went live and I was like, “That’s super tone deaf,” to be like, “Yay Snapchat!” the day after they lay off so many people. Yeah, so even on like a small scale you have to be constantly on top of everything.

Caleb Gardner: Yep. Absolutely. It’s exhausting. On top of the fact that we still have this divide in terms of digital competency within a lot of organizations, where they expect you to be able to solve every PR crisis that comes up online with your social team but they don’t necessarily provide resources ahead of time to plan for that kind of thing. They’re still pretty resource-strapped both from the team energy standpoint and anything else. So it hasn’t been an easy job before, but I feel like it’s increasingly getting pretty hard.

Danielle Wiley: Yeah, I don’t know that it’s going to get any easier any time soon. Well this has been amazing and everyone should go get your book and read it, and review it and tell folks about it, but before we close out we have this fun question that we ask everyone at the end. Hopefully, you’re prepped or you can think on your feet. Just because we talk all about influence and sway, we are curious what commercial from your childhood still sticks in your brain today?

Caleb Gardner: Yeah. I love this question, because I was trying to think. “What are the ones that have really stuck with me?” And naturally it’s the ones that had the best jingles. Right? What’s the creepy doll? It’s funny because I remember the song, but I don’t remember the actual name. Buddy! Oh, my buddy.

Danielle Wiley: My buddy. Yes.

Caleb Gardner: It was in the song. My buddy. Yes. That was one, or kid sister was the [inaudible] of that. I also remember the Trix, like “Silly rabbit, Trix are for kids.” It was like that golden era of jingles and catchphrases that would just brand powerhouses. Of course all the ones I’m thinking of are aimed at children, because that’s when you were the most impressionable.

Danielle Wiley: As I shared in our first episode. I was talking to Mary, who you know and hers was a game that was aimed at children, and I keep sharing my embarrassing fact that mine was a cleaning product. I just really liked the jingle of it.

Caleb Gardner: What was it?

Danielle Wiley: Murphy’s oil. It was a good song.

Caleb Gardner: That’s good.

Danielle Wiley: So clearly I was… I did watch Saturday morning cartoons and I do know all those jingles as well, but for whatever reason the Murphy’s Oil stuck with me.

Caleb Gardner: That’s funny. That’s the one, I think silver lining of my kids having so much in demand content. They’ll never know the exquisite pain and pleasure of having to wait for your television show to come on like we did, but they also aren’t as influenced by ads, because they don’t really watch as many ads as we did. So the worst things, the things I probably worry about the most are like YouTube interstitials that are on their YouTube content, but other than that they don’t really get a lot of ads directed at them.

Danielle Wiley: Yeah. We had a brief moment, where YouTube conspiracy theories, like not full like QAnon crazy, but there was a brief moment where our kids were kind of like “Could this thing be true? This sounds crazy!” And something about it was very appealing to them. That the world could have these secret things going on behind the scenes. So yeah a lot of kind of “Oh gosh. We have to talk about this right now.” They both have moved past that I’m pleased to report. We educated them. Okay.

Caleb Gardner: We’re living examples of having to teach our kids some digital media literacy in ways that more people need.

Danielle Wiley: For sure. For sure. So thank you again, so much. Why don’t you tell everyone where they can find you. So obviously Caleb Gardner on LinkedIn and…

Caleb Gardner: I mean I’m Caleb Gardner pretty much anywhere. Calebgardner.com, Caleb Gardner on Twitter. So it’s pretty easy to find me.

Danielle Wiley: And then “No Point B” is your book and everyone’s going to go out and get it and read it. And…

Caleb Gardner: Yeah, please, and leave a review and reach out to me and tell me what you thought.

Danielle Wiley: Awesome. I hope they will and thank you so much.

Caleb Gardner: Thank you for having me, Danielle. This has been great.

Danielle Wiley: Thank you for listening. Don’t forget to like, share and subscribe. Please check back next Monday for a new episode, featuring marketing conversations through the lens of influence. I am your host Danielle Wiley and this is The Art of Sway.