Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?

[00:05.6]
Welcome back to "Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?", the podcast where we decant the BS, swirl around the dashboards and toast the people still doing things that actually work. I'm your host, Adam W. Barney, and today's guest is someone I'd gladly split a bottle with and hire to fix my brand strategy.

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Megumi, founder of Merobebe. She's helping authors build credibility, not chase bestseller lists, and she's built a passionate wine-fueled community without ever boosting a post. Let's pour one and get into it. Megumi, welcome. Thank you. Happy to be here.

[00:39.0]
Awesome. First off, tell us about this recent pivot. How did you find yourself deep in book marketing for authors, especially keynote speakers? Yeah, so it kind of happened by accident. I was on the corporate side, agency side, and then I was at a startup, and then I started doing freelance marketing and somehow got connected to some keynote speakers, and one thing led to another, and you know, keynote speakers also write books.

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And one day, one of them was like, can you help me with my book launch? And I said, I will be honest, I've done marketing, I've done keynote speaker marketing, but I've never done book marketing. And they were like, we'll learn together. And I was like, great. And now I am fully entrenched in the book world.

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What would you say is surprising about how authors think about marketing? What have you learned from them? Honestly, so many of them, and I will say this has specifically been in the nonfiction space that I've worked in, they aren't necessarily thinking about marketing.

[01:44.6]
Like a lot of them, especially in this lane I found myself in, are keynote speakers, or consultants, they're coaches. And, so they understand that marketing is important. A lot of them have understood the importance of marketing themselves and being their own salesperson, so to speak, in order to book new gigs, promote their work, get new clients.

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But, book marketing is also oddly specific. You need someone to purchase this thing. That's not urgent. I want you to purchase the book now. And it's not a high lift. I'm not asking you to pay me a thousand dollars for a coaching series.

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I'm asking you to pay maybe $20 for one book. But I need to convince you, I would like to convince you to buy the book now. And so how do we do that? Instead of like, maybe I'll put it on my list, and maybe I'll buy it, maybe I'll read it someday.

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That's a good point. And most of those authors also aren't trying to sell copies or sell themselves. But how would you say having a book shifts someone's positioning, even if it doesn't make money? I think a lot of it is credibility, right?

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To be able to say, hey, I have this book and I wrote a book. It adds this sort of gravitas, I think to be able to say also like, you know, founder/author, speaker/author, and especially, obviously, if your book does well, if it gets good reviews, those are just additional things that you can point to when you're trying to grow the rest of your business, whether it's speaking, or coaching, consulting to get more clients.

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Right. I mean, I totally felt that with, you know, my own first book, Make Your Own Glass Half Full; it wasn't necessarily about royalty checks, it was more about opening doors. And it helps you feel like you're guiding folks, in some way. I love that you're guiding folks through that same book as a platform kind of a journey as well.

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That's also just cool, right? To be able to say, I wrote a book. I mean, that's just whether it adds value. I mean, it will add value. But even if it didn't, I think that's also, I think it would be really cool to just write a book. So congratulations on writing paper. Very hard. It's fun. It's a big lift.

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Let's move to Marobebe, which I love. You know, you've built a storytelling first wine brand that digs into women wine makers and also shares real people, real opinions with zero ad budget. What lessons from the wine world apply to marketing?

[04:21.6]
Honestly, the wine thing is a very selfish endeavor for me. I love wine, and I wanted an excuse to be able to keep drinking wine. Not that you ever need an excuse to keep drinking wine. And so I was like, But I'm studying wine, so I need to keep drinking. And I really think that community is so important.

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I know community is such an overused word now, especially in marketing. But I do believe that there is something about finding a reason to bring people together. So for me, that was wine, and with a focus on women.

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And like you said, women winemakers. And I do think it is interesting, the more I learn about wine, the marketing that goes behind wine. I want to clarify, I've never worked in wine marketing, but I have talked to people who do work in wine marketing, and there are just as many.

[05:14.7]
I mean, it's the same thing, right? At the end of the day, marketing is convincing someone to buy or consider your product or your service. Same thing with wine. You're trying to sell the producer. So let's say Adam's wine. You're trying to convince people Adam's wine is great, and then you want to convince people that they should buy Adam's wines.

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Cab or Pinot Noir or whatever. And so you need to do the label and the language. And so especially when studying, learning about all these different terms and, you know, people talk about how sommeliers are snobs and there's all these, like, fancy wine terms, but so many of them are also total BS, right?

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They don't mean anything like producers select, or winemakers select, or barrel select, or reserve. In America, specifically, those words don't mean anything. But especially in wine, where there can be so much lack of knowledge in the consumer space, especially because it feels so foreign, or it can feel so arrogant, honestly, and aloof.

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And you might feel like, oh, I don't know enough. I think it's really interesting that they're. I'm not trying to poo poo the wine marketing people at all. But it is, it's definitely an interesting sort of world where the consumers specifically are behind such a big knowledge barrier.

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And it kind of feels in some circles that they want to keep it that way. There are plenty of people who are trying to make wine knowledge more accessible. And then on the other hand, there's all these words that do really mean something and are very complicated concepts, and also words that mean absolutely nothing but just make the bottle look nicer.

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I love how that gets into sort of, you know, the flavor, nuance, personal palates, they all show up in the mix. But we're also in a bit of a generational, shift in terms of alcohol consumption in general and approach to wine.

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How do you see that continues to possibly evolve, and especially affect women winemakers over the next five years or so? Yeah, it's really fascinating. I feel like, remember back when millennials were killing all of the industries?

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It's like millennials are killing this, millennials are killing that. Now I feel like, especially in alcohol and wine, it's Gen Z isn't drinking. Gen Z isn't drinking at all. And actually, I think it's been this year, there's been a few studies that are like, actually, Gen Z is drinking. It's like, yeah, some of them maybe couldn't afford to drink.

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Maybe they were interested. And now they're interested. Maybe the world is just so screwed up enough that they're like, you're right, we need to drink. I don't know. I do the research on why they're drinking. But. Right. I don't think that it's going away. I think that there is such a small number of female winemakers and I'm not going to give a whole history lesson now.

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But if you think about the fact that women couldn't own land, women couldn't get a business loan without their husband's approval, yada, yada, yada. Land has been passed down from generation to generation. Of course, women didn't have access to the capital or the land in order to make their own wine.

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So that is changing. And I hope to see more and more women, and also people of color, making wine. Because the majority of winemakers are, or, sorry, the majority of wine consumers in America are women. And so it makes, only makes sense that the people who are making the wine are the people who are drinking the wine.

[08:47.1]
Similar to beauty and fashion. I'm not going to do my whole rant, but it's like the CEOs, the straight old white men CEOs at the top of these fashion and beauty companies telling women what they should look like. And it's the same thing with wine.

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And so I would love to see that shift. And I think that that shift is going to keep on happening, especially as there's more ways to make wine where you don't have to own your own vineyard, you don't need the land, you can buy grapes from other places and make it yourself.

[09:19.8]
That's becoming more acceptable. So I'm really interested to see how that changes. The evolution. I mean, there's also, if you do want to rant a little bit, there's the impact of climate change on wine production. That's another piece of the puzzle.

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But I think that there's an aspect you focus on where you're not just posting for conversation. You're trying to educate the world from a connection standpoint and actually introduce people.

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And you said something to me before that I wrote down; that trust is built like wine, and the seller is not on the shelf. And that's a bit of the piece of the puzzle there, right? Absolutely.

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So this is a good example that we were talking about books. Right? Not that there aren't cheap wines out there, but if you're trying to buy an expensive bottle of wine, it means so much more than buying a book. I can buy a $20 book. There are so many books that I've been meaning to read that I just never read.

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And then I buy another one, and I'm like, there's just this bookshelf full of books that I haven't read yet. But with a bottle of wine, I feel like there's so much added pressure, especially if you're gifting it. I was talking to someone else about this recently of how do you buy a bottle of wine and give it to a host without feeling nervous about it?

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You're bringing wine to a dinner party, and you don't want to embarrass yourself, or you're on a date, or you're at some team dinner and someone hands you the wine list, and you now have the power to make or break this meal. There's so much pressure.

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And like I said, there can be so much snobbery. And wine has been traditionally this kind of elitist world. And so that barrier is something I'm trying to break down because really it should be about a conversation and about, it's just a drink, right?

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Like, it's just grape juice that's been fermented. And there's been a lot of money that has been put into this grape juice, sometimes. But it's something that should be enjoyed and hopefully enjoyed with other people. It's a way to bring people together and build trust amongst each other.

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And you, especially if you have a little bit of that social lubricant, hopefully it lets you open up a little bit more. And so that's kind of where, for me, that community aspect comes in. And so I would love for the wine world to be a little bit more transparent as well.

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There's so many additives that you can put into wine, speaking of marketing. And if you, you know, get a protein bar, it says all the ingredients. Right. Of what is in this protein bar. With wine, there's no ingredient list.

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It might say no sulfites added, but that's about it. You know there's grapes in it. Sometimes it'll say whether it's Kosher. It may or may not say that it's a vegan wine, but other than that, you really have no idea what is in the wine. And so I think from a trust perspective, and building trust, there's a lot of work on the industry side to bridge that gap.

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That needs to be done to bridge that education gap, and maybe some standardization in terms of classifications or more than just the Wine Spectator score placards that are sitting on the wine shelves sometimes. Yes. And we only need to get into the marketing aspect of the Wine Spectator.

[13:00.1]
Not specifically Wine Spectator, just all reviews, all awards. All reviews. Right. Let's get into what this podcast is really about; the noise in the paid ad space. You and I both know five years ago you could throw, as a winemaker, an author, $50 of Google Ads every month, and maybe validate a product.

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But now the targeting is questionable. Questionable. The data is shady. And it's just kind of. It's a crowded market. It's a loud market. You mentioned being suspicious of ad dashboards. What's the biggest BS you've seen? It was a few years ago when there was that story that came out that Facebook knew it was inflating its dashboard numbers and an employee, maybe a product manager, was trying to improve the dashboard to make it more accurate, but Facebook told them not to make it more accurate because that way they can just keep making more money.

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Right. And so, it's stuff like that. And, you know, Google, as we all know, has been hit with what, second, third, antitrust case. And I just feel like. I'm not saying that the dashboards are lies; I just feel like there's a lot more room, again, for transparency and ways to make it work better for the consumer side or the marketing side.

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And the consumer side. Yeah, right. Do you advise authors or brand clients to run ads at all early on, and if so, when? I honestly haven't. I'm not against it. And honestly, I think that for authors, especially Amazon, no matter what you think about Amazon, Amazon is extremely important for authors.

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And so to be able to say, I'm a #1 bestseller on Amazon, it's just a great discovery platform for books. And so I know that buying ads on Amazon is a big thing to do for authors.

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I don't know if I would necessarily want to recommend that they buy ads on Meta to run on Facebook or something. Maybe if that's their target. I don't know. So, I haven't done it, but I wouldn't be against Amazon if someone was like, I have so much money to throw at this.

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Right. But a lot of times, and I think a lot of people don't realize, and Adam, as you know, it's not like some publisher, and this is if you're working with a Publisher, some publisher gives you a book deal, and then they're like, here's $1 million dollars to promote your book.

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They're kind of like, here's your book deal. We'll publish it when we publish it. Good luck. Is the short and short of it, but so you don't have all this money. If you're,a Tony Robbins, and you're publishing your bajillionth book, and then you have so much money.

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Sure. Run some ads. But if this is your first book and you don't have this massive ad budget, I don't think you need to. I think there are other things you can do. Yeah, Yeah. Have you ever had an Instagram ad ever worked for you? No. I mean, you know, you know that I dropped about $1,500 on Meta ads earlier this year, and I got nothing; not a single qualified lead.

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And that was me beginning to ask this "is anything real" in the space sort moment. Yeah, I will say there's one client I work with, and they do concerts. And I have done ads for those through Meta.

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I believe that has been successful. But it has been a very limited budget. It's a nonprofit that hosts some events sometimes. And so they have concerts. But it's also a much older audience. It's like classical music.

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So Facebook is like the perfect audience. Right. Like there are audiences on Facebook still. So, that has worked. Has it been this, you know, mind-blowing result? No, but that's really the only time where I've been like, yeah, it's worth throwing like a few hundred dollars at this.

[17:26.9]
Interesting. Okay. You know, Megumi, this was incredible; from books to bottles to branding, you're really showing everyone listening here that the path to resonance isn't through hacks. It's truly through hospitality. Where can folks find you, follow Marobebe, or connect with you about book or brand marketing?

[17:46.9]
Yeah, you can find me on LinkedIn at Megumi Calver, on Instagram @megumicalver. My website is megumicalver.com, so that you can find me in all the places under Megumi Calver. Awesome. And those will all be linked below, of course. Megumi, final question: aomeone listening right now is wondering if they have to run ads to grow, what's your real talk answer?

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If they have to run ads to grow? I would say, if you truly have the money to throw ads at something, and you are okay with it not working, potentially, that's the kind of budget you have. Then do it.

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Otherwise, I would try to find another way. Put that money towards something else. Something else. Something else. I appreciate that. At least until you validate it and know that it works.

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Or at least test it, take a small part of that budget and test it to really see what works. I mean, I don't want to come on here and be like paid advertising is fake, and it doesn't work at all. It can work, but I do think that there's a very specific strategy that you have to use, and for specific products and with specific budgets.

[19:03.3]
I love it. Awesome. Well, thank you, Megumi. This has been "Is Anything Real In Paid Advertising?", the show where we toast the truth tribe and trying stuff that actually connects subscribe, leave a review, and check the show notes for links to Megumi, Marobebe, Thank you again Megumi.

[19:19.0]
Thank you.