Category: Blog

We have all heard so much about how AI is going to change our world. And most of that really started to kick up in late 2022. Now, fortunately, I was at a marketing, artificial intelligence conference in summer of 2019 that helped me start framing my thoughts on the issue. In marketing, AI is going to be a game-changer. It already is in some ways, and in some ways that we can’t even fully appreciate. And while we are testing it and using it where we can, I felt it was important to implement an AI policy at the company to make sure that we had some guidelines on how to use it well. As more and more workplaces grapple with the effects of AI, I wanted to share our guidelines to potentially help your company think through it too. The first thing is that we, for one, welcome our robot overlords. We know that AI is going to change things, and we want to be inquisitive and use what we can to improve our work while maintaining safeguards from some of the unclear liabilities of the technology. And we have two main unclear liabilities that I’m concerned about.

One, where is our information going and who will have access to it? We are cautious about what AI tools we are using and what information we are feeding it. We are careful to make sure that we are not exposing secret information or trade information to AI bots. Frankly, we do not know who or what might be reading that data and what it might be used for in the long run. Number two, copyright for images and text is still up in the air. Any image generated by AI is generated from other images. The courts still have to deal with who owns what, and we would not want to put our clients in a bad position by creating a liability for them by using an AI-generated image that could end up in a lawsuit. Until there is more clarity on this, we will continue to be cautious. So with those two things covered, here are our 11 rules that we are using as an agency. One, we may use AI to generate ideas and inspiration. Ai is going to be able to help us look for new angles and ideas that we might not have easily thought of.

This is one of its most promising uses as a tool. Recently, I used AI to help find different DIY ideas for a home services industry client. I use those concepts then to write ads for our customers. Number two, we may use AI to generate text. We are willing to use AI to help write portions of content, but as you’ll see later, this is not the last step for anything. This is a starting block. Number three, we may use AI to edit, rewrite, reframe, or otherwise modify text we write. Ai can help us with the tone and examination of a topic that we may need help with. Number four, we may use AI to generate editable images. We are willing to use AI to help us edit our images and improve them. A staff member used AI to remove power lines from a photo recently. Number five, we will fact check any AI text because we know that AI is not perfect and any resources it helps with need to be fact checked. Number six, all AI generated content will be edited and refined by a writer. Nothing generated from AI is completed until it has been edited and refined by a human.

Number seven, the person who uses AI to generate text is responsible for its accuracy and fact-checking. This one is pretty self-explanatory, and it goes back to our core value of responsibility. Number eight, we will not submit or publish AI-generated content straight from the source. This rule spells out some of the previous rules. Number nine, AI does not replace the role of a subject matter expert, editor, or creative in the process of creating content. We value human creativity and seek to use AI as a tool for inspiration. Number 10, we will not use AI tools to generate anything based on the work of artists or creatives that they created that they have not been adequately compensated for. This one is tricky and it limits our use of many tools, but this one is going to be really key to the court’s determination of things moving forward. And 11, we will not use AI to generate deep fakes for content. I think deep fakes are going to be a social problem, and with a lot of our work is in video. It could be tempting to employ these, but we are going to avoid these for good or ill for our business.

These rules are not perfect and they will continue to change, edit as we go, but it gives us a start. I also want to give a shout out to Banker Creative that shared their list in the Agency Builders group that was an inspiration for much of this list. If you have any insight on rules that are governing your business with artificial intelligence, please send us a DM or shoot me an email at kevin@adelsbergermarketing.com. Thank you for listening to the Content Machine Podcast. And if you found it helpful, please send it to a friend. And unless the robots take over before next time, we’ll see you on the next episode.

Kevin Adelsberger
Welcome to Episode Two of the Content Machine podcast with LeAnne Bentley, who’s the CMO for Leader’s Credit Union. All right, so since coming to Leaders, what are some of the things that you’ve learned about marketing?

Leigh Anne Bentley
What I’ve learned about marketing since coming to leaders? I know I talked about getting in the weeds more, but really getting into the data has been great. Because you can really see people what their needs are, how to help them. I think it’s been a lot more smart marketing. And I think in the past, we had a lot of TV campaigns, and I still buy tons of TV. I love TV. But if you’re buying broadcast, you’re marketing to the masses. You’re doing cable, you can market to much more select targeted groove for the golf channel or the fishing channel or common, you know who’s watching those channels. But when you get into even the digital, which is the more trackable now, which is great, or when you’re trying to get to your data, you can really pinpoint what their needs are. I love the fact that I don’t want to send a checking account campaign to someone who’s had a checking account with us for five years. And so you do a TV campaign, you’re targeting people who… Everybody, in a sense. And so I love how deep you can get into the numbers to make sure you’re targeting the right people, that your message is the right, because I always tell our team, My job is to make sure it’s not just pretty, but it’s effective.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Do you have your right call to action on there? Do you have the right headline on there? And they do a phenomenal job. I mean, I’m not… That’s something that comes natural, but it’s being able to really get deeper in the data into the numbers. I love how you can track things now because again, we’ve even been trying to tracking some TV. We put some QR codes on some television. And so they have we’ll say, hey, that came from… We actually had an ad in Super Bowl. And so we had several come back to our ITM tracking and says, hey, this person watched it in Memphis. This person watched it in Jackson. And so it was fun to see where those came from. Now, broadcast is still a little different. It’s harder to track that still. And I wish I want that magic wand. This is how many came through this. Now we do ask those questions. When you join later, our questions at the end. How did you hear about us?

Kevin Adelsberger
Do you think those are accurate statistics?

Leigh Anne Bentley
I think some of the information is. They’ll say, I mean, it shows where they saw it. I think.

Kevin Adelsberger
It’s a magic wand. Or when they self-report.

Leigh Anne Bentley
And.

Kevin Adelsberger
So- Do you feel good about those?

Leigh Anne Bentley
I like seeing them. The ones that I like to see are the ones that we pull in from our Google tag manager. Oh, sure. I love seeing them on our dashboard. We know this media brought in X number and actually seeing the funnel. We were looking at here’s how many people actually may have clicked on our application and this number actually completed it. But what happened in the middle? And so why are they falling off? Where’s the hard spot that… What do we need to fix? Is there something that’s keeping them? So getting in those nuances and those little details is the fun thing that I wasn’t able to do on the agency side.

Kevin Adelsberger
Well, and probably something that’s changed.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Since- Oh, it’s changed quite a bit.

Kevin Adelsberger
What have been some of your big successes, you think? Big successes. That you can talk about here, I guess.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, I don’t think I can take credit for any just really big success. I think it’s been such a team effort. I think we’ve got a great leadership team that works well together. I think we’ve got a great marketing team. We do a lot of things that I’m proud of that’s a little different than agency worlds. Like I said, everything was billable hours and so my mind still thinks that way. But every Friday morning we have a marketing huddle. And so we read a book together and try to learn from that, or we have somebody come in from outside and come talk to us about something. And so I think it’s being able to be interested to have continuous improvement, not constantly being right at the computer, constantly productive. So I think we’re being more productive by bringing those things in. By sharpening your ax. Exactly, by sharpening your ax. With the first two hours sharpening your ax instead of cutting down the tree, exactly. So I think the successes have been really coming together. We’ve done a lot of great things. We’ve had great campaigns. We’ve launched our new website. We’ve launched a new CR-M.

Leigh Anne Bentley
We’ve brought in different… We’ve opened up new branches. Merchandising is something that’s fun with us that we do a lot of our places. But I really just think it’s coming together as a whole and seeing a single vision. Our IT department has really enhanced and we work really well with them. And I think the last couple of years, especially operations, marketing, and IT, including analytics, has just been we meet frequently, making sure that right-hand knows what left hand is doing, that we are maximizing our efforts. And it goes back. Instead of a one big success, it’s those small incremental things that makes a bigger difference in the long run.

Kevin Adelsberger
That makes a lot of sense, especially an organization your size. There’s so many things that could go wrong.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, I think that’s one thing. That’s something else I’ve had to do a lot with, is there is a lot more crisis management, I guess, in this. You think about it when an ATM goes down or something else happens or there is some data issue. Stuff happens. Things happen all the time. We have to make sure we’re on point that we’re communicating with our members. I think communication is key. I think that’s one thing I love about marketing is the more you communicate, I think it’s just if people know what’s going on, it’s so much less nerve-ing than being left in the dark.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah, because if you don’t have a good reason for something, you’re going.

Leigh Anne Bentley
To assume the worst. Our online banking goes down and we don’t have something posted that they can go and go, Oh, that’s what’s going on. Then they start getting on Facebook and then it’s like, Oh, something’s happened. Also my team is really good if it’s nose on a white day and we’re responsible to get up that morning, know, we work with operations on what’s going on. And then we’re putting out those communications, putting out our social media posts, our email, what’s going on in online banking, our in-app messages. So there’s more ways to communicate now than ever. So many more ways. So I think that’s something that’s changed a lot. There are so many ways to communicate. Sometimes there’s too many. Because sometimes I’m like, I know someone sent me something, but is it on my email or is it in my team or is it in my Slack or Facebook Messenger or they text me? Oh, yeah.

Kevin Adelsberger
So we actually… For our team, we have a standard of communication about what you use to communicate about what, because I was tired of getting text messages. I was like, No, only send me a text message if something is on fire or I’m not at my desk. Because yeah, there’s so many channels.

Leigh Anne Bentley
And it just keeps growing. We have 70,000 members right now. So you think, Okay, so how am I communicating with them? And what is their best method? Texting right now is one of the best methods, but you also have to make sure you’re compliant. So the hell goes back. Because one thing at agency world, because I did do bank marketing before, my area that I specialize in was professional services. I basically did banks, insurance, real estate, and then B2B. So I was already used to the compliance side on the banking side, but you still have to dig in even deeper and different things. And can I do this? And we have a great compliance officer that is not a, No, you can’t do it. There’s this. You can’t do that, but let’s find a way that gets you- Which.

Kevin Adelsberger
Is a great quality of the compliance- Fantastic. -is fantastic and not super common.

Leigh Anne Bentley
It’s not common. I’ll go to conferences and they’re like, Oh, don’t you hate working with compliance? I’m like, No, they keep me out of trouble. They’re like, Make sure if you add this on there, if you add this disclosure, then you’re good. I love working with our compliance department.

Kevin Adelsberger
Well, what are some of the challenges that you think you face in your role?

Leigh Anne Bentley
Challenges? Well, things are changing drastically. You have to constantly stay up what is the latest thing. Obviously, TikTok is one of the biggest things. But for security, we’re not on TikTok. You can’t do it right now. There’s different trends from that. I do think I talked about AI earlier, just got back from a conference where the whole conference was talking about AI. And so… And the changes with that. And everybody loves ChatGPT and everybody loves the programs, but people think of that one. But people think of that one, but AI is going into so many different areas. And so I will say the one takeaway, because the biggest question that we kept on being asked over and over again, Well, is AI going to take over? You’re going to have to cancel all marketing jobs because of AI? Absolutely not. But the marketing people who are not using AI are the ones that aren’t going to be long term. You just have to incorporate that and make sure you’re utilizing it in the best uses. And I would say the biggest threat to us coming up in a good and bad way is AI because so much fraud can happen in the AI aspect.

Leigh Anne Bentley
We’ve already talked about that. How can we look for different ways to thort fraud through different services. It’s very prevalent. Every day text messages going out, people spoofing emails. It is so prevalent that we’re actually doing a fraud campaign as we speak. We’ll be launching it. We’ve already launched it digitally. We’re actually even doing postcards. We understand this is not a money maker for us, obviously, but we want to make sure our.

Kevin Adelsberger
Members- increases trust with.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Your members. Well, I hope so because we want them to be taken care of. We want the ones… We don’t want them clicking on a link in the text that’s going to a fraudulent aspect. We don’t want people getting phone calls from leaders that didn’t sound like us, but they’re saying, Hey, I need your username and password. We will never ask for your username and password on the phone. We tell our members, and I hope everybody listening here, no matter what institution you’re using, if you get a phone call from one and you’re not sure or even if you just want to be careful, say, You know what? I’ll hang up and call you from a number I know. And what’s your name? I’ll ask for you. We tell our people that all the time. If you’re concerned about who you’re speaking with, hang up. Don’t call this number back, because they spoof our number. And they said, Just get online, find a number that you know is us, and ask from me. And so we try to do that all the time, making sure people are talking to the right people and not getting scammed because it’s very prevalent.

Kevin Adelsberger
I am a citizen of the internet, and I am probably less prone to being phished or manipulated than most people. And someone hacked one of our customers’ emails a couple of weeks ago, and they got me. And I tried to log in to something that wasn’t the right link because I was chasing business. And then a couple of hours later, he’s like, Sorry, we got hacked. And I was like.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Oh, no.

Kevin Adelsberger
I had to tell my team that I got phished.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, no, I understand. We have very stringent security or IT department. I’d put them up against anyone, but things still happen. And so we’re trying to be so proactive. We also are reactive. We have services that we use that if you’re traveling, let us know you’re traveling, or you may get denied until we call you and say, Are you in Boston? Are you in Texas? Or did you make this last charge? And I think members really appreciate that. Sometimes it can be frustrating. Like, My car got denied. Yeah, you’re just trying to buy gas. I’m just trying. But in some foreign place, they weren’t not supposed to be, but we didn’t know they were. And so it can just happen that way. But we try to be proactive. I do think fraud and marketing against fraud and toward fraud and safety is a huge thing, and how AI is going to.

Kevin Adelsberger
Increase that. Oh, yeah. It’s going to get way more dangerous here.

Leigh Anne Bentley
You have voice. People can replicate voices and everything else. It’s going to be wild.

Kevin Adelsberger
So other than AI, what do you think the future of look marketing looks like? Which I know AI is a big part of it, but I didn’t want your answer.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Just to be AI. Just to be AI? Well, I think we don’t know what it’s going to be like in five years, because I think the transition has been so fast. They talked about the Internet took what, four years to hit 100 million people, and AI has taken four months, one of those types of things. So I don’t know what’s going to be next because I think it doesn’t exist yet. And so I think looking at big picture marketing, I still think it all goes back to knowing your… It goes back to the basics. Who is your target audience? How do you reach them properly and how do you treat them? It goes back to the whole umbrella, back to that see, smell, taste, touch, hear, experience. It goes back to treating your members or treating your customers the way you want to be treated and putting them first and smart marketing. Again, like I said, not marketing a product to them that they’ve already had, or don’t market a student loan to an 85-year-old. I might say that my 85-year-old doesn’t need a student loan somewhere, but that’s not- But statistically. Specifically speaking, know your audience.

Leigh Anne Bentley
And I think people want to be heard and they want to feel, I guess, one of the buzzwords that’s been around a little while that we use frequently and we talk about a lot in marketing, is the personalization, that marketing is not for the masses anymore. I mean, it is personalized and it’s personal. And so it goes back to that connection. I mean, two-way communication is here. People constantly posting stuff to you through email, through through chats, through all social media platforms, anything public, anything’s out there. And so we want to make sure that our members are heard and that we’re providing the services that they want and that we’re growing with them. Because some products we have now may not be needed a couple of years from now. So don’t- So it’s not just the marketing, but it’s what you’re selling. So don’t always hold on to something just because you’ve always done it. And that’s one thing we do say a lot in my department is just because it’s always done that way. That’s a pet peeve-like. And so we’re always, after every event, we sit down and have a continuous improvement meeting.

Leigh Anne Bentley
After something else happens, we sit down and go, We have done this better. And then that’s the first thing we look at when we start working on the next project.

Kevin Adelsberger
All right, one last question. If you had a little change in your pocket… Just kidding. We work with you guys on producing the pocket change podcast.

Leigh Anne Bentley
You did a.

Kevin Adelsberger
Great job. You guys ended that question. And so I was just going to set you up for that one. But LeAnne, thank you for taking the time to join us on the Content Machine podcast.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Can I just stay on that? Yeah. Watch the pocket change podcast.

Kevin Adelsberger
That is- That’s right. Anything you want to pitch? And then where should they find out more about the Leaders Education Foundation?

Leigh Anne Bentley
Leadersgives. Org. And please join, $10.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah. That’s hard to argue with. So thank you for your time.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Thank you for having me. It’s been fun.

Kevin Adelsberger
Thank you for listening to the second episode of the LeAnne Bentley podcast. If you missed the first one, go back in the feed and check it out. Thank you for checking out the Content Machine and we hope to catch you on future episodes.

Kevin Adelsberger
Welcome to the Content Machine Podcast. This is episode one of two with leaders credit union’s CMO LeAnne Bentley. Leanne, thanks for taking the time to join us.

Leigh Anne Bentley
I’m thrilled to be here. Thanks for having me.

Kevin Adelsberger
Leanne, you’re all about Jackson. You’re all over town. You’re on the United Way board.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, I just rotated off literally this past month. I just rotated off.

Kevin Adelsberger
After several years.

Leigh Anne Bentley
I’ve been on there since 2016.

Kevin Adelsberger
2016, and then I know you’re involved with the Leaders Education Foundation as well, and we’ll come back to that in a minute. But can you tell us a little bit about your background and how you ended up in Jackson?

Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, I was actually born and raised in Jackson. Okay, I didn’t know that. I was born and raised in Jackson. My family, my mother grew up in Jackson, so one of those long time Jacksonians. My dad’s from Crockett County, so all West Tennyas, Cillians. But I grew up here, went to J. C. M, to school, graduated there. Actually took my first marketing class at J. C. M, which has got me into marketing. Went off to Chattanooga for a couple of years, worked on there, did my marketing degree there and the NBA, worked at agency in Chattanooga for about five years, loved my time there, loved East Tennessee. But all my family is back here and my husband’s family is back here. So we came back here and the rest is history.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah. So you came back and worked.

Leigh Anne Bentley
As an agency here? We did. I worked for Young Associates. It’s a great firm. They still do great work. They do a lot of research stuff on a national level and then marketing on a regional level. And they do fantastic. Yeah.

Kevin Adelsberger
And you were there for?

Leigh Anne Bentley
I was there for all over 12 years.

Kevin Adelsberger
Twelve years. All right. And then an opportunity showed up at leaders. So what was your excited to jump into leaving the agency space and into a, well, I guess, a captive space? You’re working for one client all the time.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, I really never thought I would leave agency space because I did love agency work. That’s all I knew. For my first job out of college was at agency. And then when I moved back here, that’s where I gravitated to. But I got a call one day from leaders, and I wasn’t really planning on moving, but I can say that they were doing some really great stuff and some lot of stuff that really listened to my heart about financial wellness and things that we were doing. I guess one of the conversations that really spurred me into really even considering it, one of the questions they had asked me, who said, Well, if you were working here, what’s important to you? What do you want to see? And I said, Well, it’s ironic that you asked that. I said, My husband and I were just at church. We were just talking about programs. We were trying to brainstorm programs the church was having, and both of us independently put down financial wellness. And so that’s one thing that through our conversation, I said, We really believe in that. There’s something you believe into. You can put marketing dollars behind it, and they’ve put their money where their mouth is. And that’s something we’ve done and been a part of to the community. And so I feel like it’s a mission base in a sense. And so it’s hitting a different level. Although I love my agency days, I feel like on an individual basis, I’m making a big difference in the community for the people who need that step up or need financial wellness, counseling, or need to understand a credit score, or how to get out of debt. And so it’s been a passion from that aspect of seeing what I believe in and being able to put marketing dollars behind it.

Kevin Adelsberger
That’s neat to get to make that transition. And part of your work at leaders, well, not technically at leaders. I don’t even know if you explain how it’s connected to the Leaders Education Foundation.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Yes, it’s actually a separate entity. Leaders Credit Union is actually obviously a non-profit financial institution that was started in 1957. The Credit Union decided back in, I guess, several years ago, we want to be able to do more in the community. There’s one thing that I love about leaders, credit union, is we’re very community minded. As a non-profit, we look at it and go and figure out ways to give back. That’s how we’re able to help some of different companies. When we go do classes, we go do different things. How are we able to sponsor events is that our money is reinvested back into our members because we are member-owned, and so we invest back to the community, to our members, and technology. But we wanted to be able to do even more. So in 2019, we formed the Leaders Education Foundation. It’s actually a separate 501(c)(3), and it’s a terrible organization. It’s a nonprofit, not to be confused with a not-for-profit. Okay, that’s a good decision. So our leaders credit union. It is a not-for-profit. This is a nonprofit charity, 501(c)(3), so tax deductible type of things. And so with this, we’re able to expand. We have sponsors ourselves, and then we go out and sponsor different organizations. But we started as education credit union. So that’s why we created the Leaders Education Foundation. That was our heart and soul of where our mission was.

Kevin Adelsberger
Because teachers were the first customer.

Leigh Anne Bentley
We were. In 1957, we were started by teachers, just because back in the day, I did not realize this until I got to the credit union world. But teachers were considered part-time employees. So a lot of times they did not work 12-month contracts. So a lot of banks in different places would not give them loans without being cosigned or something else by somebody who had a full-time position. And so that’s one reason there were so many teachers credit unions created throughout the country. And then obviously we’ve grown since then. We merged with West to Seek Healthcare Credit Union. We’ve merged with Jackson-Sun, Cable, there’s a lot of different ones that we’ve merged with to become what we are today. So we’ve gone from 10 members to over 70,000 members. And now instead of just being focused on just teachers, we’re focused on educators, businesses, factories, healthcare, and communication. So healthcare, communication, and education are our three focal points, but we obviously work in much more other verticals as well, just because we’ve been able to grow so much through the mergers and different things that we’ve done. But the foundation, going back to that, how it’s really different is we are an arm of support for the community. So we have three areas of focus that we work on. One of them is educators, like right now we have our Leads Educator Grants that we’ll be giving out. We’re giving out probably, I think, $35,000 the next couple of weeks to different educators. They’re broken down into three categories. One’s our teacher classroom grants. My mom was a teacher. As I was a member of the credit union back when I was in high school, it was my first bank account. And so she taught school here at Jackson-Masson County Schools. So we give back to teachers, they can apply to how they’re going to spend a thousand dollars to their classroom. I know how much money she personally put in her pocketbook, out of her pocketbook, I should say. It was definitely a family sport. We were going in and helping get classrooms ready and putting bulletin boards together. And she spent a lot of her own money on her class throughout the year. So we said, What can we do to make a bigger impact? So right now, 25 of those grants, $1,000 grants, you can apply for say, How would you use this for your classroom? And then they have to create a video. They’re on our Facebook right now for voting. And then in October, we will give away 25,000. We also have professional development grants. So if someone wants to get additional certification or something and they need a little more funding, so if their school agrees, has to approve on that, then they can apply for grants for that. And then our last one is teacher appreciation. So just because we’re helping the classrooms out, sometimes they need a little extra loving as well. So principals and district leaders can apply for teacher appreciation grants to maybe stock a closet or throw a coffee party or whatever they want to do. So that’s our area for we support our teachers. The other is supporting students. We do that through collegiate scholarships and workforce development scholarships. Our workforce development scholarships, we have three times a year. Those are giving out people apply for TCATs or community colleges can mostly apply for those. And then our collegiate scholarships, we do every spring, and we’ve been giving away about $25,000 worth of grants or scholarships every spring for that. So that’s how we support our current students. And then our third area of focus is current programs. We know we can’t create and do all these new programs when there’s so many ones out there. They’re doing great things. So we try to find ones that are supporting education and see how we can help fund them, how we can help fund volunteers for them. So the ones we support right now, we support the Reed team. They’re one of our larger donors that we do. So we’ve got a five year commitment with them to help make sure they’re covered and then we support them in their while wagon, which supports the children, all the books going behind the rifeabust and different neighborhoods. We support West Teach, the program through Westar. So we make sure that that program has got funding to keep the teachers when they need additional fundings and how to pay for those programs. We’ve given money to the Imagination Library. Right now we’re doing programs for different scholarships for different arts. We did the art boxes past year with the Jackson Arts Council. Those were boxes that went to school system for different counselors that they can have projects when they talk to students. They gave them an activity and they could keep the art boxes. And there’s just a few of them that we’ve done. We look for different ways to increase that. And so actually, we just launched this past Friday. We’re helping the Jackson Grown program out of the co. So we just started that last week. So that’s our first year sponsoring that program. And we’re very excited. They’re doing a lot of great things too.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah. One of my Sunday school students is in this class with Jackson County and he is excited about it.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, it’s a great program. We’re excited to be a part of it.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah. So you guys are giving out a lot of money every year.

Leigh Anne Bentley
We do. We try to look for money for ways to really support what’s here on education basis. And so those are the three ways we do it through those lenses in a sense. But we get that it’s a membership based organization. But the great thing is it’s only a one time $10 membership fee.

Kevin Adelsberger
Who are the members?

Leigh Anne Bentley
Anybody can become a member. I encourage anyone listening today. It’s just $10 to join a member. But the only thing that really does is it allows us… You supply online, your $10 goes to our base, in a sense. But that allows us to collect your information and make sure that we can continue to inform you of what’s going on through our newsletters, through our social media. And then there’s never another ask after that for membership fee. Now, if you want to make a donation, anything over $10 can be giving you a donation. And it is a 501(c)(3), so it is a tax exempt donation. And then we’ll send anything out for any memorial or in honor of some people. And so we also have sponsorships. So other companies around West Tennessee and other places sponsor us. So their money helps to expand our efforts. And so we partner with them. And then just people join and make donations. We participate in the Give 731 Day and all of those programs. And so that’s how our funding continues to go and grow each year.

Kevin Adelsberger
The $10 membership fee, is that a marketing or a business decision?

Leigh Anne Bentley
It’s really a business decision for this aspect of showing commitment. I mean, not business decision as in we have to have $10 in order to just stay active. But it just shows a level of commitment saying, Hey, I want to be a part of this organization. I want to make sure that I’m making a difference as well. And then I just know that I’m contributing to that aspect.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah. No cheap email subscribers. They’re literally paying you to get on your email list.

Leigh Anne Bentley
And so we just keep this informed and let them know that they’re not just on an email chain, that they’re making a difference. Their $10 was used because everybody who works for the foundation, including myself, I have a service president, we have a vice president, we have a director of community engagement, we’re all volunteers. So none of the money that goes towards the foundation goes towards any staffing needs. And I think in our policy, I think 95 % of all money raised has to go back out in the form of scholarships or grants or programs. The five % just covers our hosting every website or whatever, all the different expenses that filing our tax forms.

Kevin Adelsberger
Or just the CRM to keep track of those $10 memberships.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Exactly, our CRM program. So all of those dollars are very intentional that may use for educational purposes and really helping the Westlande community. And we service the Wesley community, river to river, border to border.

Kevin Adelsberger
So it’s the leaders education foundation. And this is not like an accusatory question, right? No. You’re clearly doing really great things. How does that fit in with the larger public perspective of-.

Leigh Anne Bentley
Of who leaders is? Well, I think it just shows that we know we’re not alone in giving back, that we want to make sure that other companies can partner with us to show that difference. Leaders is very generous, and they’re obviously very good to donate to us each year. They keep funds and then within the year we get some funds from them to make sure our programs are good. But we want to expand that. And we know we can do more scholarships. We can do more leads grants. We can do more supporting as we grow with other organizations. Just having that partnership with other people, I think, gives validity to us. And so it doesn’t seem so individualized.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah. It’s not just an outlet for leaders, philanthropy, because you have other people contributing.

Leigh Anne Bentley
We do, and we try to market them. Right now, we’re trying to do some focus and some profiles and some of our sponsors that give to us and our scholarships. We have some of our scholarships in their name. So town and country realtors is one of the first ones that stepped up and said, Hey, I want to be a part of this. One of our scholarships each year is a community service scholarship sponsored by town and country. And so that money that they give goes back out to the scholarships in their name.

Kevin Adelsberger
Well, who doesn’t love Joey Hale?

Leigh Anne Bentley
Absolutely. Absolutely. Agreed.

Kevin Adelsberger
So that’s a great outlet for a lot of good work to be done. Let’s talk a little bit about marketing. Okay. So if you were to approach marketing from a philosophical, like a big picture level, what comes to your brain in that moment?

Leigh Anne Bentley
Well, I really think marketing is sometimes underestimated. They think it’s just advertising. And so so many people think marketing equals advertising, and that’s all it really is. We’re marketing is really the umbrella that encompasses everything that has to do with your product, basically the four P’s. What you’re actually your service or product that you’re selling, what’s it going to cost? How are you manufacturing and how are you selling it? What are you selling it for? How are you getting it to somewhere? And then how are you promoting it? So that fourth P, people think that’s all that marketing is. But what’s so great about marketing, it touches everything. We talk about the four P’s of marketing, but I also talk a lot about the four walls of marketing, meaning everything that you see, touch, smell, experience, are the bathrooms clean? Is the parking lot clean? We actually have a scent that we put in all of our leaders’ branches. So if you go in, every one of our branches smells the same. And so everything that we have that you experience is part of our overall marketing umbrella. And I really focus on it’s not just what’s a great campaign or, hey, we launched our website, because those are great and fun and a little more, not tangible as physical, but tangible as you can see the campaign, you can see that. But we really focus a lot on our brand and focus a lot on our culture, because one thing that we love is how our members are being treated. Our brand goes into brand phraseology. We greet people the same way. We have the same, What brings you in today, is a phrase you may often hear when you come in. Like you always say something you need something from someone instead of saying, Oh, no problem. We always say, Absolutely, happy to help. And so it’s just those little bitty nuances of being able to, first of all, connect the dots that people hear that, they start recognizing it. They get to the point where if you don’t say it, they recognize that you don’t say it.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah, that’s when you’re doing a good job.

Leigh Anne Bentley
I have a story I love telling. I was actually at a medical clinic just having a checkup, and I had my name tag on and I hadn’t taken it off. And they said, Oh, can I ask you a question about this so-and-so product? I’m like, Absolutely. And so I talked to them a few minutes. I got my app out, showed them how to do things and how to find something. And I said, Do you need anything else? Do you know anything else I can do for you? And she’s like, No, that was great. And I said, Well, a lot of help. Happy to help. And she goes, Thanks for choosing the Women’s Clinic, which is one of our absolutely happy to help. Thanks for choosing leaders. And so I think she’s just very… It’s just hits… When you hear it repeated back to you, it’s great. And talking about wearing my name tag, I love the fact that when I wear my name tag to Walmart or somewhere else, I’m stopped nine tenths of the time just to tell me a good story about some of our employees. And that to me, I know it’s not a campaign, but it talks about our culture, talks about our training, and talks about the overall, the full marketing scope of all that we’re doing. And it doesn’t just the marketing department. It takes our operations, takes our training department. It’s all of us working together. We’re all going together. It’s absolutely all going together. So that’s the fun part, is seeing the cohesiveness between all the departments, knowing that brand is so important to us that training is really hitting at home all the time. But our brand phraseology, how we’re doing, and everything that we wear inside the branch, everything that we do, everything else is part of that all encompassing aspect.

Kevin Adelsberger
Is that something that you were able to do in the agency world or something that you’re really able to do when you got in-house?

Leigh Anne Bentley
I will say it’s been much easier in-house. One thing that’s been so great about being an in-house person versus an agency is how much deeper you can dive. And so I had some fantastic clients and people I loved working with that I still stay in touch with today. But you put a campaign out and they go, Oh, that was great. And they were happy. But what was the bottom line numbers? You didn’t always know. You didn’t really get into the weeds. And so especially within the financial industry, there’s so much data you can really get in the weeds and work with. We have a great analytics department. So if we’re trying to find how to help someone we can find the right target audience to really go for. It’s very interesting talking about going from agency to in-house because I always thought, Gosh, I don’t know. I’m afraid I’d be bored in one sector because I had so many different variety of clients before and different marketing budgets and different target audiences and different geographic markets. But basically, we run our marketing department like an agency. We have our front line clients, we have our mortgage clients, and we have our investments clients. We have our community investments. We have our workforce partners. We have what we do for the community. So in the same sense, because my mind has been structured agency world for so long, I don’t have billable hours anymore.

Kevin Adelsberger
We avoid those as much as possible.

Leigh Anne Bentley
But outside of that, we have everything in-house. We have a phenomenal team. We do our own graphic design, our own videography, our own PR, push releases and distribution, our own community engagement team. We even have someone in our marketing department who focuses on innovation and member experience. And so they’re the voice of our member. So as we’re working out campaigns, as we’re working out with, we’re launching a new product or a new service or how that’s going to be experienced, they look at it like a member journey. Where are the roadblocks? What can make it easier? She really knows a lot of our systems because she’s been there for 20, up to teenth years. And so she says, Well, we can change this in this system or remove these questions or add these to have a more seamless approach to make that member experience, that member journey better. And so she makes constant improvements daily. They’re little, but over time, they make a huge difference. And that’s what we’re constantly striving to do, is small incremental changes that make a big difference to our members and our community. Yeah.

Culture is key to success in a business. It attracts talent, it retains talent, and that overflows to your customer’s experience. Sometimes broken culture isn’t obvious because we like to blame things that are easier to see. But as this book says, your company will only be as profitable as your culture allows it to be. Sometimes companies treat the symptoms and not the problem. One of the good things about this book, Culture Built My Brand, is that while good culture is frequently pointed to as a way to keep and retain employees, Mark Miller and Ted Vaughan, the authors, point to its value in winning more customers. After all, the reason you want to keep good employees is to keep value in your business. Turnover can hurt customer relationships and cost enormous amounts for recruitment and training. It also helps to point to the value of it to those who don’t get it. Company culture is not just a nice thing to have, it’s crucial to building a business that will last in the long term. Here are some of the insights and parts that I really enjoyed from this book. One, everything in your business should point to the culture you want to build.

From the budget to the communication tools, these things should be culture-oriented. Building a culture that wins is in the DNA of a business. One of the sections I really enjoyed in this book was about rituals. What are repeatable things that you can use to build culture? At Adelsberger Marketing, we have two weekly meetings and one quarterly meeting that we use to try and instill our culture’s core values of responsibility, team, and creativity. But annually, we have an event that reflects on our values for our team members as well. When I give our annual state of the firm talk and then talk about next year, I always review the last year by reviewing how different areas reflected the mission of our firm. Using your mission statement to review the life of your firm or your business is a great way to integrate the two things. And these rituals extend to onboarding as well. A company of our size, we do not onboard staff super frequently, but we onboard interns three times a year, which gives us a test of our systems regularly. We always start a new onboarding process with a team lunch to help the new hire get on a first-name basis with the rest of the team.

This book also recommends sending out new hire kits with swag, having staffs and greeting cards to clients, and a lot of other practical and implementable ideas. The last thing I want to highlight here is the importance of developing a company vocabulary. Talking about anything is difficult without the right vocabulary. We run into this all the time with clients when we were talking about creative things like design. Again, imagine a customer trying to explain that they don’t like a gradient without knowing the word gradient. Eventually, we will be able to figure out what they mean, but how much time is saved, and how much meaning is conveyed by using the right word at the start. Our company has many internal vocabulary words like clarity, which is based on our annual theme this year. But when one of us says clarity, we know that someone needs to pause and give more information. And these words help build a culture by building something that only insiders will know. And it’s a great way for my team to give me a hard time. It will save time and build relational trust with anybody who knows the same vocabulary. This book is one of the best I have read on culture building.

If you get it, let me know. I would love to discuss it with you. The title is “Culture Built My Brand” by Mark Miller and Ted Vaughan. Do you have any rituals in your business that help grow the culture? I’d love to hear about them. Shoot me an email, kevin@adelsburgermarketing. Com. Thank you for listening to this episode of the Content Machine Podcast. If you found it helpful, please send it to a friend. See you on the next episode.

Kevin Adelsberger
Welcome to the Content Machine Podcast. This week, I’m joined by one of our own, Alex Russell. Alex, thanks for joining us.

Alex Russell
Thanks for bringing me on. It’s a pleasure to be here.

Kevin Adelsberger
That’s great. I’m glad that you’re excited about it. You’re going to talk about all about video interviews, which is a big part of what you do. Yeah. We lost him folks.

Alex Russell
Yeah.

Kevin Adelsberger
This week, Alex, you’re going to talk to us about how to interview someone for videos, right?

Alex Russell
That’s right.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah. Can you tell us about your first interview that you did on Video?

Alex Russell
Yeah. I say I have a rich history. I’m in my late 20s, but I remember my very first interview in a very embarrassing way. Yes, can I help you? Okay, go ahead. Okay, I’ll start right there.

Kevin Adelsberger
This is going to be. Okay.

Alex Russell
Sounds like he’s making fun of me. It’s okay. People can’t take me seriously, so this is my fault. You should have had someone else interview me. Now that you’re about to interview me, I’m just…

Kevin Adelsberger
I need all the tips I could get. Yeah. Tell us about your first interview.

Alex Russell
My first interview was right at the beginning of high school for me. With the accessibility of video and being able to edit, shoot video rising as I was going through high school, I, believe it or not, was part of what they called APUSH, which is Accelerated… I don’t know what it’s called. Ap History, that’s what it was. I had to do a book review about George Washington, and actually by Ron Chernow. Yeah, I didn’t read all of it because it was long. It is very long. I skimmed it, but don’t tell my history teacher. Anyway, we had an option of writing an essay or producing a video as a form of book review, a book assignment to, so that we read the book, what we learned. That was my first dip into it. A lot of cutaways, a lot of talking to myself. I was very proud of myself. I did a very, some would say, a very nuanced special effect.

Kevin Adelsberger
How did you score on the paper? How did you score on the video?

Alex Russell
The video itself, I did really well, yeah. That was-It was encouragement. -it was encouraging for me to be able to do that. But also, I think just that experience of making, because even to date, that was one of my earlier videos that I actually set down to produce. I have wrote a basic script, which most of the interviews I do today aren’t scripted, but, you know. It was the first really structured video that I did. And so it just happened to be an interview with myself, which is totally normal.

Kevin Adelsberger
That’s high school. What about college? Did you do any interviews during college?

Alex Russell
Sure, yeah. I just had some experiences in college where I was able to conduct a few interviews for classes that we did, where we would… It was an assignment at the time, but I was able to conduct interview that if you look at, which I won’t reveal the footage of the high school one because it’s really embarrassing because I’m an awake. But you have it? Yeah, I do have it.

Kevin Adelsberger
Is it at your parents’ house?

Alex Russell
No, it’s on YouTube. I’m sure somebody can find it if they work hard enough.

Kevin Adelsberger
First person to find it. I will give you a $5 Starbucks card. Leave that in the edit, Eric.

Alex Russell
That would be a lot of work for $5 at Starbucks. But you also get to view it, and some would say that’s worth more than anything. In college, a level of experience, I was able to produce this interview with… It was a local artist at the time. For the first time, I was incorporating some significant B-roll, which is just supplementary footage to help push the narrative forward, give some visual examples of what the interviewee is talking about. And so, gained experience from that all the way up to I had a multi-year long internship with a local church media team where we would conduct a lot of testimony videos that they would do within the church setting. And so, which is probably where I learned the most because I was able to, in that setting, this wasn’t like… In student settings, it’s very forgiving if you mess up. The person you’re working with, for example, was also a student, so in some ways it felt very easy-breezy. But for the first time at the church, I was dealing with stories that had a lot of meaning. Not that the interview I did with the artist didn’t, but this one had implications that more impacted people’s lives and serious and heavy. Very personal, yeah. I think that’s where I actually learned a lot about how impactful an interview can be because like I said, both of those prior interviews, although they were fun and they were great for experience, they didn’t really provide me… They didn’t really have that, and some of that was on my part being so novice in it, but it didn’t have that impact that I realized later that interviews can have.

Kevin Adelsberger
Alex, what’s like the first thing that you tell an interviewee when they come into the room?

Alex Russell
What I tell them? I usually, after they get settled, try to make sure there is as comfortable as they can be when they’re in front of the camera. But there’s this… Before I start any interview, there is an anecdote that I commonly go back to, which is, if I were to ask you, this is it, by the way. I’m not continuing what I’m saying. This is the actual, so tune in, this is it. If I were to ask you what color the sky is, and you just said blue, which is a great answer. It could be true. However, what I tell the interviewee is within the editing process, although that answer is true and the answer is good, it sounds very confusing without all the context of what I asked question-wise. So all the people watching the video are going to know is that you said the word blue, which could be anything. It could be- Color of a dog. -color of a dog. It could be the color of your favorite candy.

Kevin Adelsberger
-color of your clues.

Alex Russell
-color of your clues. Yeah. I don’t think we can bring up blues clues. But anyway, yeah, there’s so many blue objects in the world, like who knew that I was talking about this guy. This exercise of, if I ask you what cover this guy is, it’s an opportunity to teach the interviewee how, when they answer a question that’s being asked. It teaches them that adding some context or repeating the question a little bit to add context to their answer can be really helpful when conducting the edit can be really helpful when putting together the edit. It creates that context that without it, can just make it where the answer is not as usable because, like I said, without the context of knowing that I asked what color the sky is, the answer blue doesn’t make a lot of sense. Instead, maybe they could say, This guy is blue, when they answer or providing some of that context.

Kevin Adelsberger
That could make an entire interview be very different for editing purposes. It could go from a useless interview to a very useful interview.

Alex Russell
Right. Because without it, you could totally lose that answer. You totally just have no use for it. And especially when people are starting to answer a question, sometimes they say some really good stuff at the beginning. It’s just such a great sadness whenever that answer is just not- Usable later. -useable without that context. Yeah.

Kevin Adelsberger
It’s hard to hear that in the moment, too, because you might think you got this awesome answer because you heard the context and then you go watch it out of context. You’re like, Oh, I can’t do anything with this. Right.

Alex Russell
Which is great for comedy, but not great for —

Kevin Adelsberger
Not great for editing videos. What are some do and do nots of interviews?

Alex Russell
One of the do’s that I stick to pretty commonly is how I try to make sure the guest is as comfortable as possible, encouraging them, really, because you have to realize most people in their lives, sometimes even some might do it just semi-regularly, but often times this might be their first time on camera, first time doing interview. And so, naturally, you’re going to be, if you were the one being interviewed, you’re going to be pretty uncomfortable. You’re going to be under the lights, and that pressure is really going to start getting to your head. One of the things I encourage them with is, thankfully, they don’t have to look at the camera when it comes to interview. They look at me. Oftentimes, that creates a more natural conversation feel.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah, because they feel like they’re talking to you and not talking to a camera.

Alex Russell
Right. Which talking to the camera can be very whole black hole experience of Am I actually talking to somebody? How do I look? It can be very disorienting. It also keeps the eye contact from being directly into the lens, which when you watch a video that someone’s… When you’re watching a video where someone has been looking directly in the lens, you’ll get this effect where they’re almost talking directly toward you, which is great for some videos, but for a lot of interviews, you want to be like, I’m catching this interview from a bystander perspective. Got you. Yeah.

Kevin Adelsberger
Then do you go in with a script for interviews?

Alex Russell
In the hopes of being more of an authentic experience, the interviews themselves are not too scripted to a T. Usually, there’s outlines to add some direction. Sometimes I’ll even share that with the interviewee just to give them some comfort of where we’re going, how many questions they’re going to be, because once you start, sometimes they could be like, How long is this going to be like? I don’t want to be here for another hour. They can keep up with the direction of the interview. There’s generally a rough outline, but as far as a full script goes, it’s very bare bones because we want it to, again, that conversational aspect of the interview. We don’t want it to control the narrative at all. We don’t want to make it so that the person feels like they have to say certain thing and being willing to follow the interviewee if it’s appropriate, if it’s not too much of a tangent, because then there’s so much you can prepare for an interview. But if the interviewee surprises you, you might end up in a more unique perspective that you just even-

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah, you wouldn’t even know I was there.

Alex Russell
Yeah, not at all. That’s something that’s always important to do, is just be ready to be loosey, goosey, creative. Don’t get too strict on it.

Kevin Adelsberger
Yeah, you can go off book. Are you saying if you see a path that’s maybe off the question you’d planned because they’ve said something, that could be a great opportunity to get another piece of insight that you hadn’t planned on.

Alex Russell
Yeah, absolutely.

Kevin Adelsberger
Is there anything we should avoid when we’re doing interviews?

Alex Russell
Yes.

Kevin Adelsberger
Great. Well, that’s been the Content Machine Podcast. Is there anything we shouldn’t do when we’re recording an interview?

Alex Russell
Absolutely, yeah. There’s numerous things. Some things that come to mind, though, is to, I mentioned earlier, definitely don’t want to manipulate someone’s answer, but don’t be afraid if someone needs help finding out what they want to say. I think there’s some fear of that layer like you’re talking with them a little bit off to the side of an interview of like you’re working through a question that you just asked them and they just seem so lost, which happens because again, there’s that pressure and you want to make them feel comfortable. And so sometimes some people need some of that direction where, of course, you want to preface it with, I don’t want to force you to say this, but see if you can figure out what direction they might be trying to go in to encourage them to be like, Okay, you can go that direction. Go down that avenue of answering the question that way, if that’s what’s true to them. I think because so much, if you’re just throwing questions at them and they’re just like, I have no idea, it’s not very helpful to just keep their own questions and then just already in an uncomfortable situation, they’re feeling like, Oh, I can’t answer these. I need a lifeline. So being that lifeline is something that you want to make sure you’re not straying away from, even as the interviewer. My other don’t is something that it’s a personal problem for me. I have the tendency to, especially when I meet a new person, even something as small as a waiter or waitress, I want to create this small talk atmosphere that makes them feel like, Okay, I can talk here. We’re having a casual conversation. But don’t ask them too many questions that are off topic, right? There’s some time at the beginning to do that as they’re walking in, you’re having small talk. But while it’s good to be creative and take, not tangents, but follow their direction as they’re talking, right? You don’t want to end up somewhere where you’re talking about something totally different, even for the sake of being a conversationalist or just being a nice and cheery person of wanting to have a conversation with them, don’t let that. There’s some professionalism there where it’s important to make sure that the interview is not becoming so casual that you miss the point of the whole interview. That’s something that you have to really reel it in sometimes, even if your natural tendency is to not —

Kevin Adelsberger
Just keep talking.

Alex Russell
Yeah, keep talking.

Kevin Adelsberger
Well, let’s say you get that really good interview. What’s the value of one of those really good interviews?

Alex Russell
The impact of a good conducted interview has the result of offering this unique perspective, whether it’s for you could be interviewing for a company, for their website, maybe it’s for a program that they’ve started. Maybe they’re just talking about what it’s like to work for this company or this nonprofit in a way that you can’t really get across personally as a bullet list of facts of like, We treat our coworkers like this. We have this percentage. Those are great for understanding purposes, but to hear it come from a person directly from them, from their experience means so much because we, as people, we relate to that. We relate to experience.