Our guest today is an absolute powerhouse in the world of branding, marketing and advertising. Barbara Yola has worked with some of the biggest agencies and brands in the world. Companies like. PNC bank, John Hopkins, medicine, HomeGoods, Zipcar, world gold council, and many other national and international companies.
Barbara is currently the CEO and founder of the marketing agency, Ludwig plus, which is a full service women owned. Brand transformation and business acceleration marketing company that excels in mindblowing, digital technology, infectious, social media, brilliant strategic planning, and laser-focused media planning.
Barbara, welcome to the run GPG podcast. Thanks for having me. This is great. Yeah, I’m looking forward to, talking branding with you marketing and business growth. But first I do want to paint the picture a little bit for our audience and set the stage for our discussion here, by getting to know Barbara Yoles.
Now, when I said you are a powerhouse, that’s an understatement. You know, you’re the CEO of a marketing agency that works with some of the biggest brands in the world, as you mentioned. And as we mentioned on the intro there, but before we talk about that, I want to know a little bit more about your path and your journey.
So the first question is who is Barbara . Where are you from? Where did you grow up and how did you get involved in the advertising business? Well, I grew up in the Washington DC area. I’m a native Washingtonian. I’m from Bethesda, Maryland. I’m the youngest of six kids. So I’m truly the baby of the family.
And I re I’m really good at regressing to the baby of the family when I’m around my family. But I got in the advertising business. When I was in college, I had a desire to go into film. I was interested in kind of all aspects of entertainment and, started in my early years as an intern, in college.
And then just continued on. To where I am today. That’s interesting. Now, looking at your bio, how did you become known for architecting brand and business solutions that change the destiny of a company? That’s. Yeah, well, you know, I spent many, many years in the agency world and I’ve spent a lot of time on the client side of the business.
And I found myself constantly working with categories that were commoditized products. And when you’re working in commoditized products, you really have to find a way to help a brand or business breakout. And through the year. It’s allowed me to, to, find ways to really move that brand through a business and ignite it from the inside out.
And so the result of that has been incredible, incredible growth inside of the companies that I’ve worked for are driving incredible growth for the companies that we’ve done marketing and advertising for. And probably the most important part of it is getting the inside of a company. The team, the team members really riled up and ignited.
And inspiring them to deliver on what that brand promise is. Yeah. Interesting. We’re going to be breaking that down in a little bit more detail a little later, but, before we talk specifically about Ludwig plus, I’d love to get your thoughts on why the advertising world needs more female founders.
Well, I think every industry needs diversity of thought. And I think that women bring a different perspective to the workplace. They certainly are a primary decision-maker and many of the things that are in the open market, you know, whether it’s, the role they play in purchasing a variety of different products or even being an influencer.
So I think women having a role is an important part. Yeah, no, I, I liked that from the perspective point of view. That’s interesting, but it’s also interesting. If you look at the statistics only 0.1% of creative agencies are founded by women only 0.1%. So why is that number so low? And are there obstacles that a female founders face that we need to know about.
Well, first of all, isn’t that incredible. I mean, do you think that an entire industry there was that, I mean, you’re, you’re probably familiar mad men, right? It wasn’t mad woman. It was mad men because the industry historically was very male oriented and. You know, if you look the stats. I think yesterday I was reading, comcast pushed out their impact report and it’s a whole deep dive on diversity and equality and women in the workforce only represent, I think it was about 35.7% of.
People in the work place are women. And it actually declined through the pandemic because it was became too much for them women on boards of directors, only 20%, although it’s growing, it was it’s about 20 or 30%. So there’s this shift that’s happening. And I think in the agency world, women have always played a key role.
I know for myself, every company that I work for, every agency I work for is very male dominated. And I think that’s why. The way it is, but, but obviously we’re all changing and we’re finding ways to demonstrate the value, and work our way up. But my story is that I have eight children, so I have four of my own and four step.
I’ve had big, big jobs in advertising and generated hundreds of millions of dollars in revenue and I, at the end of the day, The spinoff to create my own agency to arrive to the level of running an agency. So it says a lot about the gap of what’s going on in the industry and the need for more women to get involved.
And I think it’s important because women by pressing. Yeah. And I think it starts with being aware. Right. So talking about it, being aware about it. So I think that’s good. So moving on to talk about Ludwig plus Ludwig plus is a full service women owned brand transformation and business acceleration marketing company that excels in mind blowing digital technologies.
We mentioned infectious, social media, brilliant strategic planning, laser-focused media planning, efficient media buying, insightful analytics. And wicked good creative that contains all those valuable keywords. Like the ones found in this run-on sentence to drive SEO and SEM. That was an amazing company bio.
When I read that for real, I loved it. I read it as you’re reading through it, you’re going, oh, this is amazing. This is incredible. And like this run-on sentence and I laughed. So I thought that was good. That’s that’s good marketing ladies and gentlemen. That’s good marketing. So, let’s ask specifically about lug brick plus what’s the Genesis of it.
Where did that start and how did you become, see. Well, it really started with the idea that there’s a lot of pressure on CMOs to perform and drive business results. I saw that there was a disconnect between the level of talent that resided inside of advertising agencies. Very high caliber. Creative talent that you really can’t attract inside of an in-house marketing company.
Because those types of creative talent really want to work on multiple pieces of business. And it’s more interesting for them. And, most companies have to go outside to get that. But on the flip side, there’s the value of being inside a company, being in the in-house marketing department, where you really get intimate with the brand, you understand not just the advertising that needs to take place, but you understand the training, the product development, the tech.
And that part is invaluable. And so where I saw an opportunity is to really bring those two worlds together and having grown up through the agency world and led big new business pitches, where I got to see the best in class talent. Being able to bring those two worlds together seemed like an incredible opportunity to drive a different level of value.
For a brand. So that that’s really was the Genesis of the founding of Ludwig plus was to create kind of a new world order around marketing and its role in scheming, a business. That’s awesome. If you could simmer the brand or the company down to a descriptive word or two, what would that be? Oh, that’s easy.
I would say igniting brands from the inside out. That’s more than a couple of words, Barbara, but we’ll let it go. I think that’s good. I spell inside out as one word, so I think I’m good. Okay. I stand corrected. No, well done. No, that’s good. It’s a good exercise, right? To some of your brand down to a word or two.
Okay. Let’s talk specifically then about branding and marketing. I love that your publicist mentioned that, one of your specialties is unearthing a brand soul unearthing a brand soul. I love that. How do you unearth a brand soul and how can that drive, you know, growth for the company? You touched on it a little bit, but specifically unearthing the soul of.
Well, that’s key, right? Because as I said, I worked in a lot of categories where it’s a commoditized product mortgages. There’s not a lot of differentiation from one mortgage company to the other. It’s a 15 year 30 year mortgage and they all sell the same kind of mortgage. Right. So the only way to differentiate is to look inside, look at the people, how do they work?
What do they say on the phone? How are they building the. And through that process, you’ll find some gold, you know, there’s gold in the things that they do every day that maybe they take for granted, but I’m on this quest kind of this search for information and content to find out how can I make a brand feel different?
And find, you know, as I said, their soul of the brand and we do it here at Ludwig, plus we make sure that our people, you know, whether it’s a mortgage company, we’ll sit on the phones with them and listen to the call center. When a customer’s calling in about their bill payment or an underwriting.
Underwriting alone to understand what is the underwriter growing through? What are they thinking about? And is that something that we could bottle and turn into a narrative about that company? Maybe they have core values in the way they work and the type of people that they hire. Those are the things that truly make a brand feel different.
And that’s when you create valuable brands. And so that’s where, that’s where we find real magic in what we do. Dude. I love that that’s incredible perspective. And if you can make, you know, mortgages or radiology looks sexy, you’re onto something. Forget about it. I mean, we’ve made mortgage super, super sexy.
We work with a lot of different mortgage companies through the years. We’re, we’re actually working with many healthcare companies, same thing, you know, there’s, there is sexiness in it and it’s true. If you can make a mortgage sexy, you really can make anything sexy. Exactly, exactly. Why I would hire your company.
According to the wall street journal. There was a, there was an article that talked about the average tenure of a CMO slipped from 41 months to 43 months in 2018. I didn’t realize it was that short. I didn’t realize that, in the pressures on CMOs have never been higher. Right. It was actually called America’s was dangerous job, a CMO.
I was actually really surprised by that stat. So what do you do to help see CMOs? Most specifically?
So Amir. Dangerous jobs in advertising. There was an article and I was featured in it as CML. And I think the reason is, is there’s this downward pressure on CMOs, the days of CMOs releasing a big brand idea and a big logo and just playing the role of brand police is gone, and CMOs today have to deliver revenue.
Because if you don’t deliver revenue, you’re not going to be around. So the pressure to deliver revenue and results is massive. So the role of the COO has radically changed and the COO has to deliver results fast. And so CMOs have to perform. And if they don’t, they’re going to be. What’s the difference between branding and selling?
I think they’re one and the same. Okay. I don’t think they’re different. And I think that if you’re thinking about selling different than branding, you’re going to have a problem. I think that the brand is about selling. I think that brand is about buying into something so that you can make the sale. and so when we go through our marketing process, we.
Literally interview people from all cross sections of the company, not just the top level, people will go all the way down to the frontline. And then we’ll take that back and look at the marketing and say, how do we take this big, giant idea, a big TV spot or a big video or whatever the, the brand launches and drill it all the way down to a call script.
Because if I can’t deliver the message right from the very frontline, there is not going to be a sale. And so it’s one in the same. You know, that’s one of the most profound answers we’ve had to that question over the years is that they’re one in the same, you know, you try and separate them into two categories, compartmentalize them, et cetera, but you nailed it, man.
That’s a really interesting thought. That’s a really interesting, I believe it. I, and I know it works. I can tell you the companies that we’ve worked with and. You asked me earlier, how have I, how have I, and the team here built our reputation because we are drilling these ideas down to the way products are developed, the way technology is created the narrative of everybody in the company.
And what happens when you do that exponential growth. And I’m talking exponential growth. We’re not even two years old. We’ve had two companies where we’ve launched them and they have had acquisitions. They were bought out within 12 to 18 months. So I know it works. I know it drives growth and that’s the key.
If you’re not driving growth for your company, call it, call it a day. That death by a thousand. I like it, which actually leads nicely into the next question, which is the creative process. I love talking about that. I really do. So where does it all start for you with the project? Like a company comes to you, they think of a rebrand.
They want to, you know, they have this call to action or they’re thinking of acts or this campaign. Where does the project start for you? What’s the process. So it really starts from the inside of the company. We’ll start off with a discovery with key stakeholders across the company, interviewing people on this incredible quest to gather information and content.
And it’s fun for us. I personally will do it myself. I just did a big rebrand, and we are getting a company to market and about six weeks, which my creative team keeps saying, can you stop doing, you know, promising. Six weeks, but we do it in six weeks because we move fast and we go inside the company and really try to unearth what this brand is about.
What is this business about? What truly makes them unique? Is it. The quality of their product, is it the, the expertise of their people? Is it the way their merchants byproduct? And that might be the difference maker. And so we start off by interviewing and looking for the process, the people, the possibilities of what the brand is about.
What’s the roadmap, what’s the aspirations of the brand. And then we’ll boil that down into what we call a transformative idea. And that’s where the creative process. Starts to unfold. Very cool. I love that. It does sound like a fun project, right? When you, you start unearthing them. Yeah. And they might, I would assume that companies, sometimes they’re surprised by what you find.
From time to time too. Yeah. And what’s cool about what we do is the creative team is part of that process with is with us. It’s not, you know, a marketing strategist going off and working in a corner and then coming up with a positioning statement and bringing it back to the creative team. We come in like a full.
And all of us go in and interview. We have copywriters and art directors sitting with the sales team or the tech team. We have marketing people sitting with the product or the HR team. We have people interviewing partners, customers inside, outside. On this hunt. And when you do that, you start to feel what the brand is about and the idea just lifts out of all of that information.
Yeah. You really touched on why it’s so important for executives and creatives to work in tandem to fuel that brand grow super important. Is there any other accelerated marketing tactics that can get brands to market faster? You know, there’s a lot of things to help brands get to market faster. I think that first and foremost is doing that homework at the onset of the work that you’re going to do.
And to always have an ear towards thinking about the way people are working inside of a company or the way a business is delivering and thinking about it in the sense of how do you drive the business? Is this going to make the cash register ring? Is this going to drive a lead? Is this going to elevate our people over our competitors?
People because they’re better. And we take ownership of it. So there’s all the, the kind of narrative around the getting to market faster. But then obviously there’s a lot of digital tools. You know, technology plays a big role for us in how we get messages out to market, but, you know, sometimes it’s creating a product.
So. Interesting. Yeah. Fantastic. Appreciate that. Can you talk to us about, one of my favorite subjects, which is unique selling propositions, you touched on a little bit key differentiators and the importance of identifying them to drive growth. Like I guess the question is how important are unique selling properties?
I think they’re critically important. I think that you have to, most brands have some sense of commodity. We just did a big research study on what’s going on in retail and fashion. And so you have to have something that’s a unique selling point around it. Is it the fabric? Is it the way it was sourced? Is it the people who purchase the product that made it unique and different?
And I think you’re seeing more and more of that now, because. For consumers are looking to brands to stand for something more. There was a recent study where they are looking to brands more than they do the government. So a brand has to have a USP. It has to have something that they can buy into and a brand with a core purpose at the center of it perform higher than brands who don’t by 400%.
Dude. I love that you broke that down. That was a clinic on USP’s. That was a clinic on USP’s making the closet smaller. I that very interesting. I never heard that phrase before where that terminal. I am not my closet. I need a bigger one, but I think these millennials have it all wrong. I’m all about shoes, boots and bags.
So I don’t know why they want a smaller closet. I need more room. Listen. It makes sense. Husband, can you move into the other room with. Yeah, yeah. This closets for me, you know, this closets for me. Okay. Here’s a question. What do companies need to pay attention to with regards to their brand in 2021 and beyond?
I think you kind of touched on it, talking about standing. What I just talked about. I think grant, I think companies really need to think about their higher or. What is their north star and why should their people want to come to work every day? I always start there. If you, if your people aren’t excited to come to work every day, then we have some work to do there because sometimes your marketing might start with culture and core values.
Before we ever put an ad out in the market. We might say, Hey, your sales team is not architected. We had a client just about a year ago. We said the sales team is an architected properly. Let’s architect the team before we go live with everything. So I think know who you are, know what your north star is, know what the higher order purpose is.
If you don’t stand for something, we’ll help you figure that out. Sometimes it’s staring at you in the face and you don’t even know. That’s amazing. That’s amazing. Here’s a question we’ll wrap this section up with what advice you would give, and it’s an aspiring ad executive looking to make an impact in the world of advertising and branding.
are you a new real estate agent or thinking about getting a real estate license? If so, you’re going to want to ask about the greater property goose agent scholarship. Y paid for the cost of the course yourself. When the greater property group will subsidize the cost for you, make sure you reach out and get all the details on the greater property groups, agents, scholarship program, what advice you would give. And it’s an aspiring ad executive looking to make an impact in the world of advertising and brands. I would say you’ve got to speak many language. Today as a marketer, you have to be able to speak a tech language. You have to be able to speak a product language. You have to understand culture and hiring and recruiting.
You have to meet. Play a much broader role than thinking about advertising or marketing in, in a very narrow manner. And, and depending on where, where you fall in the advertising world, whether you’re on the agency side of the business, or you’re on the corporate side of the business. But if you really want to knock it out of the park, don’t limit yourself.
Think about the narrative in a broader manner. And while you may have a core competency, you may be a copywriter. Think about the role you play in running the business, try to build out your competencies so that you’re thinking about the impact of what you’re doing to the internal team members, to the bottom line, to the top line.
To all the external audiences, there should be some common thread. And when you’re able to find that common thread across all that, it’s like, boom. Yeah. That’s fantastic advice. That is, it is. So,that was an actionable takeaway. That was an action. We’ll take away. Fantastic. Okay. This is. Segment. We’d like to move to the personal development side of our successful guests.
So this is one we can kind of chill out and just kind of talk about you and what makes you tick and all that kind of stuff. So what would you say your super power? Oh, my gosh, you know, I would say my shoes, I love my shoes. I love heels, you know, and I feel that’s my super power. We actually, we do something here at the agency where we do strength finders.
So we it’s really important to us. We take our own medicine. So we try to understand our own people. We do strength finders and let them understand their strengths because we really believe that if they find their edge. They’re going to be better at what they do. So then we take their top five strengths and we say, draw your superpower, your super hero with your top five strengths.
And mine was, super stiletto. And, and I used all my strengths and, you know, it was a very thin high hill and a very pointy toe. And I highlight all my. Strengths, which one of them is competition. Cause I love winning. And that’s my super listen. I, you know, I can’t hate on that and I can’t judge because I like my Yeezys.
I’m a sneaker collector, so I’m the same thing I got out of my shoes. That’s true. Is there an app or a piece of technology that you cannot live without on the daily? My phone, my iPhone, I, first of all, I’m all in on apple. I don’t know what I would do if I lost my phone. So let’s just say it’s, it should be implanted in my head or pocket or something.
My whole world, I run a company with this. I run a company with its crazy. No, it’s great. You know, I love my phone because, I can also see what’s going on with my. But I have a lot of children, so we are all really hyper-connected through our phones. And that for me is really important. What does your daily routine look like?
Well, my day starts early. I like to cook, so sometimes I’ll get up super early in the morning, cause I want to make sure my kids have a great meal if I’m not able to be at home for dinner. I do a lot of work in the morning because it’s quiet time. I try to get a run in before the day, because I think it’s important to take care of yourself.
And I think every leader and every. Buddy. And the workplace needs to find a moment where they can have chill and a little bit of me time. And then, you know, we just go at it, you know, the day is tight, fast, and before you know, it it’s like snap it’s nighttime. Certainly the days through the pandemic have felt longer.
The volume of work has felt higher. And so it’s really important to lead a very structured day, but I, I run, I, you know, I think sleep is sleeps a little overrated, so I don’t sleep a lot. I don’t require a lot. I work, I wake up early and I’d go to bed late. Yeah. It’s funny. You said that I always, you always hear the, you know, suggestions on how much sleep you need to have for your age and all that.
And it’s like, I can’t do it. I, I actually, I go to bed late. I do get up early. I don’t need a lot of sleep, so I always feel guilty. I’m not getting enough sleep. Like maybe it’s affecting. And then I’m like, maybe it’s not like, I don’t know. Like, I’m so confused about sleep. To be honest, I do a lot of writing actually, when I sleep.
So it does serve a purpose. Sometimes if I have a big thing that I have to write, or I’m trying to work through a strategic idea, Sometimes in the middle of the night, I wake up and I’m like, oh my God, where’s my phone. And I quickly put it in my phone, so I don’t lose the thought. Yeah. That’s important.
You should always have a, something besides you better write that, those ideas down. Cause they just come to you, you know, in the weirdest times, what, how early do you get. I get up around 5 30, 6 o’clock every day. I’m a mom. I have a lot to do. It’s not just a job. I’ve got to make sure my kids get to school.
You know, there’s food in the morning at night. So, you know, I’m, I’m a CEO at work and I’m, you know, chief of the house at home. Yeah. It’s miracle morning for advertising agencies. Yeah. Yeah. I’m proud of you, Barbara. What do you do for fun? I love to cook. I love to travel and, I love to, I love, running, so that’s yeah, I’m a runner too.
I’m a runner. I run exactly like exactly. Seven kilometers every morning. Exactly. That’s not. Yeah. It’s I got this one loop. I do anyways. It’s not in, it’s not about me. It’s about you. Here’s a question. This one really makes you think. I love this question and you’d be surprised at some of the answers we get from some of our guests. If you could have dinner with any three people in history, pastor present, who would they be and why? Gosh, that is a hard question. Hmm. Any three people in history. Okay. Number one, Jackie Kennedy. I really think she was a cool lady. I think she was a smart woman and I think she set a lot of trends and she was extremely diverse in her thinking.
And I liked learning about her. So I think she would be really cool person to have dinner with. I did get to meet her once in my life, but I didn’t get to have dinner with her. Right. Wow. So that would be one person. I think I would probably like to meet Robert Frost for doing. You know, I like his poetry.
I’d like to understand why, what inspired him. That would be interesting. You know, I especially love, you know, the, the poem about the path less traveled because I tend to take that path. So it would be fun to have dinner and talk about how did you write that and why? And then three, I guess, Lizzo.
That was probably the most eclectic mix of dinner gas I’ve ever heard. So we got Jackie Kennedy, Robert Frost.
I wonder what her and Robert Frost would talk about. I don’t know. I think it would be incredible. Or they suit one dinner party, one dinner. Oh, dinner party. I thought they were one-on-ones if it was one dinner party, it might do it a little bit differently, but well, you can’t not know. That would be incredible if you had a cool group, right.
That would be a fun group. If you learned anything from Jackie Kennedy, you knew how to run a dinner. She would have heads of state. She would have artists, she would have actors, she would have authors. She always made sure that there was an eclectic group. And so I think there is a lesson in that. And I can tell you having pitched a lot in the advertising industry, a lot of the big picture.
Tend to be like that big behemoth ad agencies. And then, you know, newbies like us who are new to the industry, we may have a really big reputation, but we’re forced to be reckoned with. And so we get invited and it’s kind of, I always equate it to a Jackie Kennedy dinner party. So. Oh, that’s good. So Jackie Kennedy, Robert Frost and Lizzo.
Yeah. Okay. That was the summary. Okay. That’s good. Okay. Here’s a question. And actually you’d be surprised some of our very successful guests have a hard time answering this one, which is you’re opening a bottle of champagne one year from now celebrating something you’ve accomplished. What would that be?
I would say, I would love for us to be on the ad agency list of top small agency of the year. That would be let’s pop open the champagne. And I think we’re on our way to do that. I think we’ve got an incredible talent here. We’ve got highly decorated creatives. We’ve got top of their class coming out of college who are incredible.
They walk around like this. Totally cool. And we’ve got brilliant business minds. We’ve got brilliant media and, behavioral analysts and I think we’re so, so, so poised to make that list. And that would be a pop open, the champagne moment for us. Amazing. Final question, Barbara, what’s your legacy. That’s a word that, you know, a lot of people have been using lately when all of a sudden done, what does the Barbara Yoles legacy look like?
Like what do you want to be known for? I love that question. In fact, we have a really strong culture here. We do a lot of onboarding to teach people the way we work. And, and it just so happens that a lot of the things in our. Onboarding process are things we’ve picked up from, some of the campaigns that we created for our own clients.
And one of our clients is a company called trademark. And the line we created for them was what mark will you leave? And we adopted that internally to our team to say, what mark are you going to leave? And at the end of the day for myself and the company, I would say. I want to make sure we’re creating an environment where our people can really pursue their own greatness by doing that, that allows us to deliver greatness for our clients.
And so we’ve defined our why as the pursuit of happiness. And for me, the legacy I want to leave is that we’re helping people deliver the greatest all time. They can be. That’s awesome. What a fantastic answer. Thank you so much for those answers and joining us today. So good to get to know you better.
Tell your story, hear your journey. Very inspiring, fantastic takeaways for anyone who hears this interview. Great stuff. Thanks again. Thanks for having me.
