HOW TO TURN A MEETING INTO A LEARNING JOURNEY

In this episode, we’re talking with the Director of Learning and Development for On-Cue, Matt Elwell. We invited Matt on to teach us about training, but we ended up learning so much more. This episode is full of actionable advice to help your attendees retain the messaging of your event. So hit the download button, screw your headphones on tight, and get ready to take notes.

You can read the transcript below or listen to Episode 13 on the episode page, Apple Podcasts, Spotify, Google Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts.

EPISODE 13 TRANSCRIPT

JEREMY: Alright, so I am here with the director of learning and development for On-Cue, Matt Elwell. Matt, how are you? It's so great to see you. Thank you for joining the podcast.

MATT: I'm good. I'm so excited about your podcast, Jeremy. This is awesome.

JEREMY: Yeah, we're into season two at this point. It's very exciting. We are here today to talk about training, and I will confess, to me, training is such an odd word. I really am excited to talk to you today and get to learn about what training really is.

I'd love you to just dive in. When we talk about a live event, what does training look like?

MATT: I will tell you this, you already do it. Everyone in creative production and developing live events does it because fundamentally training or what a lot of people now call, talent development, is closing a gap in knowledge, skills, and attitudes.

If you think about the CEO or CFO standing up and giving information on the state of the company, they're closing a gap in knowledge. They're essentially doing a training. I think one of the challenges is we don't treat it like training. We're always caught off guard when no one remembers what was said at the conference or you know at the meeting. There are a lot of things we could do from the training world that would help those really important, annual speeches continue to live on in the minds of the attendees.

JEREMY: You bring up two very important points. On one hand, you say you're already doing it, which makes me ask, what do I need a director of learning and development or a training expert for?

MATT: That wasn't the point.

[MATT LAUGHS]

JEREMY: Then you say, we get up there and we talk, but then nobody remembers anything.

I think that's a really important point because oftentimes people aren't looking at that. They aren't measuring that. They just sort of assume everyone's going to listen to the CEO and remember everything they say, but they don't. How does that play out for you? How do you help ensure that people do remember?

MATT: There are a lot of ways in which I would love to support general sessions by helping attendees remember later on. The simplest answer is retrieval practice. If we have the CEO of speech and we can identify the five key messages, there's no reason why the app couldn't ping you a week later and give you a quick quiz. Then you have a five multiple choice question quiz that you get, and maybe, you win something, there's some drawing, or there's some leaderboard.

I think my big coaching to companies right now about their annual meetings is that they shouldn't be an event. They should be the centerpiece of a learning journey. In other words, there's so much we should do with pre-communication and post-communication. These little incidental quizzes help people continue to use what they've learned. When they use it, they'll remember.

JEREMY: That's really fascinating. This notion of the centerpiece of learning, as well. It's not like a one and done. Talk me through that process of how you would help ensure that this kind of retention is going to happen if I hire you for an event that I have coming up and wanted to make sure that people remember what is said.

MATT: At On-Cue we say we like to play nice in the sandbox. It really is about what your goals are and us providing guidance and advice on the side as to how to achieve them. Once you say that you really want to do that and want to invest that money or time in the itinerary of the event, then there are a lot of things we can do.

The challenge I usually see is that the metrics that companies are using to assess the success of their meetings are what we call level one or reaction data. This basically means someone clicked a five-question survey and said, “I liked it. I enjoyed the speaker. The location was fun.” Nothing is mentioned about what was learned because that really does require a higher form of testing than what did you.

Sometimes we can provide the answer, which is doing intermittent quizzing. Let's gamify the experience around content, not just around attendance. The resistance that we'll meet with this is a good departure from how we've always done it. That's really not what people come for. They come for the awards night. This is just something they sit through before the awards night, so part of this is really getting the buy-in from senior leadership of what we are trying to accomplish here and how much change are we willing to accommodate to do it.

JEREMY: Let me throw that back at you in a slightly different way. If someone said, “This isn't just about awards or this isn't just about entertainment, I really do want my attendees to learn and to retain what we're talking about, but this is an expense that we haven't had before.” To your point about metrics, how do I know this is going to work? How can you demonstrate to me that this really is going to make an appreciable difference?

MATT: It's funny because what we're literally providing you is the metrics to make that determination. First, we have to evaluate how the content is received, retained, and applied. As I said, intermittent app-driven quizzing is a gold standard because most events now, especially a thousand people and above, have an app. You can hold that in the LMS so that we can say that not only did this person attend this event, but here's proof that they learned this and this.

BETHANY: This is behind the scenes Bethany breaking in with a fact check. LMS stands for limbic misalignment syndrome. Sorry, that's just fact-check humor. It actually stands for learning management system.

MATT: There's already the internal LMS and talent development resources are already there, so we're coming in with a really modest consulting fee to help wire it all together. Then, to your core question of how we see the delta, we do that kind of testing beforehand with our key messages, and we do that kind of testing afterward.

I will also tell something that is kind of my big passion right now is around something that's called level three or behavior, which says how we evaluate someone that not only knows what they should do but is actively doing it.

One of our solutions is our own call center where we have actors who are listening to attendees, let's say 30 to 60 days after their event, and walking them through a role play. They're the customer and the attendee has to use the new sales skills or, more often than not, sales product content that they were supposed to learn at the conference.

Then we get a really clear metric as to how much of that is present in their new talk track and their new way of communicating. Each actor then fills out a form on that individual, and you can then aggregate that data. Now we can see that we had a thousand people attend the course. We taught them this on this date and on this date, and they behave this way. We can see the percentage to which they use the new information. We get to test and see how well they did, and we get to share that information back with their manager.

That manager can then have a follow-up conversation, which means they had a practice session with an actor and have a follow-up coaching with their manager. That's two more points of legitimate training that occurred in addition to your meeting that is a part of this longer learning journey. Testing is part of the process of learning.

JEREMY: I love this. This makes a ton of sense with the before testing, check-in, and after testing. It feels like there's a step missing, which is at the event itself.

You're saying, I can see how they're doing before and after, but what are you doing during the event to help ensure that those scores come out better? We don't want to just say they didn't learn, whoops. It was a big waste of time.

MATT: I will say this though, I think sometimes you need that initial bad news to help people get the strength or the fortitude to go back and change how they do meetings. Right now, they're not doing meetings. They're doing entertainment, and they're doing like big pageants on stage. They're not really thinking about what's going to be different on Monday.

The CEO asked, “What was important to the CFO?” The CEO asked, “What was important to the COO?” Everybody got to say what was important to them. That makes them feel better and feel like they were heard, but what changes a needle and what needle are we trying to move? Sometimes that data, as much as it can be a wake-up call, is just good in itself.

To answer your question more narrowly of how we make that delta happen in the meeting, as before, I talked about that kind of app-driven quizzing gamification where we have leaderboards on screens in the conference. That kind of desire to win and grow is tied directly into absorbing content. I want to do better on the quizzes so that my team gets points, wins at the end, and we go up on stage.

There are all these natural things we can do to get people excited about learning the content because of how we pay attention to their success with retaining it and spitting it back in a quiz. There are also a lot of ways we can improve just the experience of learning at these kinds of meetings. What is called a learning-centered learner is where I just learned to learn. Most people are an outcome centered learner, which means they'll learn if you can really show what's going to be different for them on Monday. Why should they bother? I think that's where the case can be made in the breakout content that we're doing where we really lead with what's going to be different and why this is important.

I'll tell you that one of my favorite strategies for increasing the kind of learner attention in meetings is really building a bridge between the general sessions.

Here's what I mean. What I saw was a glitzy opening general session, and that just amazed everybody and got everyone on their feet. They're all screaming and hollering.

Then, there was a really amazing closing general session with an amazing keynote speaker and all the trimmings. Then probably also a really expensive awards night to celebrate the people who won awards.

In between all that is what I call dreaded day two, which is the learning and development day. Learning and development day is the day when we don't use the production company. We don't use all the things that we know to make people pay attention. We put up a PowerPoint rig with hotel av, and we have everybody sit at tables and listen for a day. We wonder why nothing changes.

It's because we're still training like we were doing prior to 1980. What we really need to work on is making that day as exciting, impactful, and emotionally relevant as the other two days.

JEREMY: It is interesting. It feels to me like the general session and the breakouts are treated like a left hand and a right hand, and they often don’t talk to each other.

MATT: Yes. Literally, it's different teams working on these things with very few dotted lines between them.

JEREMY: I think that's an amazing, valuable point that the more you can connect those things and bring a line through it, then the real learning, which is the meat of the show that takes place in the breakout rooms, will be tied more organically and holistically to the general sessions. To your point, that's where all the fun, the glitz, and the CEO are. I love that.

Let me ask you a question. You used the word actor a couple of times. I know that On-Cue has its tradition, its roots in Chicago, and improv theater. I'd love it if you could just talk me through that a little bit. If I think learning and development are really psychological, sociological science, and then you say to bring in some improv actors and make it happen. What is the connection here and how do they work hand in hand? What kind of difference does it make?

MATT: There's a big movement in learning, and it's been a big movement for 30 years of increasing interactivity. One of the main ways we increase interactivity is by role-play simulation. We're teaching a variety of skills, but until we create something like the work environment, have the person practice the skills in that simulated work environment, and can then give them real feedback about it, their learning is always going to be a little academic and detached, especially where we're doing these large pharmaceutical sales conferences.

The one thing that's going to be really important is that they have a chance to practice this with someone, where we use actors to play that other person, to play that customer, that vendor, or whatever that person is that the attending needs to be able to apply what they've learned. That's what the actor is going to learn how to do. At the same time, we're observing that interaction.

What I want to disabuse people of is the notion that these kinds of things are just fun and games. They certainly can be fun, but we also have very serious actors who are doing grueling, patient work to help pharma reps understand what happens to the life of a patient without their drug. This is certainly not all laughs, but the other side of it is how you design the learning experience. That's where I come in around the simulation.

I think one of the real benefits of using a professional actor is that you still have that district sales manager or other kinds of sales advisor coach in the room. Now instead of that person having to play that role, they can sit back and go through a rubric and really give great targeted feedback to the rep on specific skills that they presented and specific things that they may have missed. That's really hard to do at the same time as you're trying to role-play. I really think that actor is a necessary added role.

The other thing that I'll say is that the role plays that I see that don't have actors are often like having rep A being the customer and rep B being the rep. Then we're going to switch. If I know that I'm role-playing with someone who is my peer, that really changes the relationship.

We usually get amazing feedback on this role play because it's so different from what people experience, but one of the big things that people say is that there was something different about doing this with someone I didn't know. The fact that they couldn't BS them really made them seem to be totally committed to being this hurried doctor who had a real allegiance to the competing product and didn't want to listen to me, like someone who presented that attitude forcefully. Now this person feels like they have a real sparring partner here and have to bring my A game.

This is the tri thing that just came to my mind. When you think of actors, the A is for a game because it makes your reps bring their A-game.

JEREMY: Yeah, that's really well said. The only thing I would add that I’ve experienced from working with you and your team is that this role-playing is hard. It's hard for the attendees to do, and, particularly, when you're doing it in front of an audience of your peers and bosses, you're nervous.

The actors can help you. They can help you to feel comfortable. They can help you to look good, not by feeding you answers or making it easy for you, but they get it. They understand what it means to be on stage. They know what that adrenaline and that fear feels like. They're there to be a partner for you, test you, and to work you, but to also make it safe for you. I think that's a really nice benefit. That is just a skill that just a normal person getting in a role-playing environment just would not have.

MATT: Thank you for saying that. First of all, we're really trying to figure out what is the name of this thing. They may have started out as actors, but with the level of training that they get from us before they go on-site and the rehearsals that they go through on-site, they really are almost like in healthcare. They're standardized patients. These are standardized customers.

They really take the time to learn the subject matter. It's fun to watch when time is called on these role plays where this actor kind of transforms from whatever tough personality the person had to deal with to this incredibly warm, supportive person who said, “You did great. Thank you so much for playing with me.” That embrace that we do of people lets them realize that they really accomplished something in this space. It's beautiful. It's beautiful to watch people grow and you can see it before your eyes in these.

JEREMY: The other thing you said is what word should we use besides actor. Even “actor” is insufficient for your team because they really are improv actors. It makes a huge difference because actors traditionally need a script.

MATT: I think what we've found is that there is this liminal space between acting in improv or even a higher space of coaching that these people have become these kinds of practitioners. What our professionals really do is they take the bullet points. They know what has to happen at certain times, but what they can do is really respond in the moment to people. It's this in-between of, yes, they're responding and they're being improvisational, but there is a very clear, consistent pattern.

I think that our larger format clients and pharma clients, with all their regulatory compliance concerns, really want to know what happens in role-play one on day one and what happens in role-play 1000 on day two has followed the similar flow and achieved the similar goals.

That's where our people are really hard to beat because we have found that raw improv actor talent. Then we've developed it with all of the corporate sensitivity by acknowledging that what these people do is really important, and we have to do what we do in a very specific way to support them.

JEREMY: Yeah, it's pretty brilliant. It's a great idea that you guys have keyed into. You’ve talked a good bit about the pharma world and a little bit about the sales world. I'm just curious if you're holding an event that isn't either of those two things, does that count you guys out? If I'm not doing pharma or sales, what do I need training for?

MATT: I got a little offended, like physically. I got a little “excuse me.”

[JEREMY LAUGHS]

JEREMY: I'm sorry Matt. I was just roleplaying. That's all. I was just roleplaying.

[MATT LAUGHS]

MATT: I would say if it's important enough to have a meeting, it's important enough to know something changed after, so that's where I keep going back to this about knowledge, skills, and attitudes. Oftentimes, that population of the ones who are not in sales, pharma, not doing a new product rollout, or there's not a lot of content to absorb may not be doing as much with closing a gap of knowledge and skills, but there's an attitude that you're trying to change or else you wouldn't have the meeting.

There's an attitude that you're trying to retain that you're trying to keep. I think there are a lot of good opportunities to apply this learning mindset, but even just being really clear on what the key messages are for the year, what the vision for the year is, and how do we operationalize that?

I think the other thing that groups that don't have a strong history with training ignore is everyone takes the same message in differently. How far they metabolize it and make it a part of themselves in their practice is different.

I would say a high performer can sit in a room, listen to the CEO outline their vision for a year, and think of three different ways that they can support that to help themselves get to their next position in the company. They could think innovation is really important, so they could take a class in innovation. They could upskill themselves in one of the programming languages that our company uses.

The high performer sits there and thinks about what they can do with that information. The middle performer sits there and goes, “Nice speech.” I think what we can do with these kinds of solutions is help the middle performer create an action plan for themselves. By hearing what the boss wants, they could think about what they are going to do in their own little role.

Sometimes people go think that something is great for the company, but they work over here and it's okay. Let's go on a journey together of you figuring out how you can bring that spirit into your team. I would say those are a few of the ways that this becomes important.

JEREMY: How do you do that? That sounds amazing, but how would you get a middle performer to personalize it like that?

MATT: The thing I just described could be literally part of the meeting app with writing your action plan. It could be a breakout. What I’d love to do is stick in more highly interactive small group experiences.

I would love to see a breakout after the general session. No one will ever let me do this. A breakout after the operational end of the conference, which is basically a reflection and synthesis breakout where all we do is talk with other people who have been there with a facilitator about what we're taking away. We go through an action planning experience, and maybe we build a smart goal or some other kind of goal.

Really what we're just trying to do is purposefully reflect on our experience. What the research shows is that the act of reflecting on what you've learned builds retention. In fact, they actually did a side-by-side of that process of just reflecting on what you learned and writing an action plan, and they were almost equivalent.

Even just sitting and going, “What did I just hear and what did it mean to me,” would be a really powerful tool. I would also say that what I just suggested doesn't have to be a live breakout at the conference. I would love to see little cottage meetings 7-15 days after the conference where you're just scheduled for a Zoom with eight other people who went to the conference.

If there was anything good about COVID, it was really enlivening our ability to use the virtual platforms to support live events. To really say virtual is possible. Virtual is not an inherent drag. It's necessary and that's what turns events into learning journeys. Now you can spread out the experience and it doesn't always have to be passive.

There's a lot in there’s a lot of soapboxes in that.

[MATT LAUGHS]

JEREMY: No, not soapbox, it’s philosophy. That's great stuff. How soon do you need to be brought into a planning process in order to implement these kinds of things? These things sound complicated. They sound like you can't come in the 11th hour and do this.

MATT: I want people to call me as soon as they think of it, and this is a general On-Cue thing that we've learned. The sooner we get into the room, the lesser rework has to happen. What we face is this kind of political upstream of the clients that already figured some things out on their own, quote on quote. When we come in and say that we could do it this way, there's this kind of internal shame because our way contradicts their original direction. Now they don’t want us to show up because we're making someone look bad. Our whole job is to make our clients look good.

We really want to be there as early in the process as possible so we can suggest things. They can say yes or no with their eyes wide open, and we’re there to be a partner.

For some of these, whenever we come in, we just start asking questions. We want to know what the capabilities of the event app are and how we can plug in that team. We want to know if the talent development group in the organization is actively part of the meeting and how we can partner with them to make some of these breakouts great.

We start by trying to do what we call discovery and figure out what are the moving parts of this meeting. What does the production company really need to be successful? We don't work directly with clients. We work directly with production companies, and then they introduce us to clients. Then we partner with that client to whatever degree with the production company.

We are really seeing ourselves as consultants. We want to go in and just be Jell-O. We just want to fit in around the edges where you're comfortable with us being, but then a lot of these can be fairly lightweight things.

If we say, “Look, the CEO is speaking for 45 minutes, what if we did a sketch afterward that highlighted what life would be like if we did everything the CEO said?” Now the audience sees funny sketches that make them laugh and brings some energy back after listening to somebody talk for 45 minutes. What we have done, kind of sneakily, is those five keynote messages that we already agreed with the CEO on are embedded in the sketch. We're doing that kind of repetition training.

It’s things like that. You just needed to give us three minutes of your general session, let us bring some actors in, and let us write. A lot of that doesn't really get in the way of the workflows that you already have set up around your meeting. Then there will be other times when we may need to work with your internal resources, more specifically, but that’s always that open conversation that we have of what is your bandwidth to do this.

JEREMY: I love it. I love it. I want to do it.

[JEREMY LAUGHS]

Alright, I'd love to move on to our Lightning Round.

[AUDIBLE THUNDER]

The first question is, who's your biggest get? A speaker, entertainer, or subject matter expert that you would either love to see at a live event or someone who you would love to coach.

MATT: I got to see Angela Duckworth at a bunch of events and Grit is everything. It's just such a great perspective. I feel like she was my real answer in terms of what I've already seen. If the person doesn't have to have any use or relevance. Do you know who Christopher Eccleston is?

JEREMY: No.

MATT: He's the first doctor of the new series of Dr Who. Technically, I think he would be the ninth doctor, but he's an amazing actor. He's also really outspoken. He just says all kinds of crazy stuff.

BETHANY: This is behind the scenes Bethany breaking in with a fact check. Matt is correct. Christopher Eccleston was the ninth doctor in the beloved British sci-fi series Dr. Who. Well done, Matt, you're a true Whovian.

MATT: What would he be like within 45 minutes of talking to a group of reps at a company? I think it'd be crazy.

I want to give you one real answer because I have not seen these people do a lot of podcasts or a lot of keynotes, but their work I think is really important. Neel Doshi and Lindsay McGregor wrote the book Primed to Perform. They have a bunch of ideas around play, high performance, and play is very important to me. They have this idea of total motivation or TOMO that they call it. Their research is really academic-level research, but they've translated it into business.

I'm just floored that they're not keynoting everywhere right now because I think it's something that HR, OD people, and C-level people in almost every organization should be really paying attention to.

JEREMY: Wow, those are great. Do you by chance listen to No Stupid Questions?

MATT: I don't.

JEREMY: You would love it. It's Angela Duckworth and Stephen Dubner from Freakonomics. It's a weekly podcast that the two of them do together, and they just explore interesting questions and topics. The two of them have great chemistry, they talk about all sorts of psychological experiments, how to live your life, and the kind of things that you would see in Freakonomics. It’d blow your mind a little bit. It's really fun and you would love it.

MATT: Alright, I'm going to search that on Spotify.

JEREMY: Yes, you can get it anywhere. Download your podcast.

MATT: Spotify is where I believe ProCast is because that's where I saw the podcast.

JEREMY: Oh indeed. You can find the ProCast, anywhere you download your podcast.

[MATT LAUGHS]

Second question, what is one thing you wish presenters did more of or less of?

MATT: That's interesting. I do a lot of presentation coaching for executives, as well. It's funny, my first kind of reaction to you asking this was, I'd like them to do more of what I'm saying. I think when an executive has a speech, the town development department should do a short online course, just like a page, that has a couple of video highlights from the speech and a couple of quiz questions. That should go out within 30 days of that course.

I think I would love executive presenters to be partnering more with their LMD department and say that there needs to be another step for them to rehear this content.

Since the way you asked, that really tangled the presentation coach part of my brain. Your slides need to say less. Take a note from TED Talks. Your slide should be something that kind of helps us have context for what you're saying. The more words that are on a slide. The less room our brain has to process the words you're saying.

I always challenge people to take their presentation deck and have their takeaway, like I'm going to mail this out as a PDF afterward. Now what I'm going to do is create a very similar version that has as many words removed as I can. They'll see this, and then they go back and look at the takeaway later. They'll be this kind of fuzzy brain connection of thinking that generally looks familiar, but now there's more information to absorb.

I would say less stuff on slides is my big battle cry right now.

JEREMY: Yeah, a hundred percent. I fall into that trap all the time as an audience member. Someone puts up a slide that has a lot of words on it. I read it because isn't that what I'm supposed to do? Then by the time I finish reading it and come back to listening to what they're talking about, I'm a little bit lost.

It takes a second to get back to where they are saying. Why do that? Why split their attention?

MATT: If I may say one more thing about that? Charts are the same way. People will throw a big dense chart on a screen and go, it's just a chart. They're not paying attention to the enormous amount of cognitive load that it takes to find where I'm supposed to be in the chart. I would much rather there be a chart kind of watermark in the background, the number I need to care about, and the delta from the previous. That's all that's on the slide.

JEREMY: Agreed. Alright, last question, what is something, could be a book, a movie, a song, whatever you like, that was a big influence on you and particularly, if possible, influenced your professional career?

MATT: None of my career is. from Dr. Who, obviously, because I already mentioned Christopher Eccleston and all things nerdy. Influence on my career? Wow, that's a really good question. I'm going to say ATD, which is the Association for Talent Development. I think it was 2007 or 2008 when I was really bit by the talent development bug, and I wanted to do less acting and more teaching people. I didn't know where to begin.

I was an actor. Those were the skills I had. I had degrees in philosophy and English. No real skills but I had taught a couple of improv-based workshops because of my improv background. I went to an organization called the Association for Talent Development. They had a Chicagoland chapter. The nicest people just surrounded me and helped me find books and things to read.

There's a great book called Telling Ain’t Training, which is kind of like training for non-training managers like all those books about finances for non-financial managers. It's that level, but I think it’s really a valuable foundation. That helped me change my vocabulary and learn the principles of learning outside of improv and outside of any theater world. It was just legitimate. How do we get an individual performer to perform better by closing a gap in knowledge, skills, and attitudes?

JEREMY: Wow. That's great. We will link to all these books and stuff in the show notes. Matt, here we were meant to talk about learning, and I feel like I just learned so much from talking to you. I really came into this conversation wanting to understand training better, and not only do I feel like I understand it better, but I also feel like I get it more. I'm like, okay yes, this should be applied everywhere as much as it possibly can be.

I really appreciate that, and I just want to thank you for taking time out of your day and coming on the ProCast and talking with me. This has been a real pleasure.

MATT: I'm so excited, Jeremy. I'm glad to have infected you with the learning bug, and I hope that it ends up in all your shows. It's just been a blast being with you today. Thank you.

JEREMY: Well, getting to talk with Matt about how to expand the role of learning and development at corporate events was so great. He really got me to see that meetings shouldn't just be a singular event. They should be the centerpiece of a learning journey.

For me, there were tons of takeaways. These are the four tops:

           • Number four, the right training can help ensure that after the event, attendees not only know what to do but are actually doing it, so use something like follow-up                    quizzes after the conference to test, not just what attendees liked, but what about the messaging they remember and are acting on.

           • Number three, roleplaying with a professional is much more beneficial than roleplaying with a colleague.

           • Number two, try to build in some activities to reflect on the experience because reflection increases retention.

           • Number one, general sessions and breakouts should be intimately tied together so the learning itself feels cool and like part of the larger whole.

Look, I could talk about this stuff all day. If you want to talk to us about today's topic or anything about live events, check out our episode notes for more information or just go to proscenium.com to drop us a line. Send us a guest suggestion or tell us why you would make a good guest. We would love to hear from you because at Proscenium, we help presenters do their best in front of their most important audiences. As we like to say, we help brands perform. I have a sneaking suspicion that we can help your brand perform.