Dentistry Uncensored with Howard Farran

How to perform dentistry faster, easier, higher in quality and lower in cost. Subscribe to the podcast: https://podcasts.apple.com/us/podcast/dentistry-uncensored-with-howard-farran/id916907356

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Eric Sperling is the managing director of The Social Television Network which is a video marketing and advertising company based in Phoenix, Arizona. He started the company back in 2011 after leaving a successful career as a local television anchor and producer. As a sports anchor, he noticed how local media and advertising were shifting to more digital and social platforms.  They put their talents as story-tellers to work creating videos for local businesses and teamed up with digital marketing experts to become and all-in-one video marketing solution. The company started in Eric’s upstairs bedroom, but they have grown tremendously over the last 7 years and have just opened one of the largest dedicated social media video advertising production facilities in the Southwest in downtown Phoenix. A majority of their video advertising clients are in the healthcare space, including dentists, orthodontists, and oral surgeons. 

https://stntv.com/

HOWARD: It is just a huge honor for me today to be podcast interviewing Eric Sperling with the Social Television Network. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

ERIC: Thanks for having me, Howard.

HOWARD: We met a year ago, two years ago?

ERIC: About a year, year and a half ago.

HOWARD: It's amazing. Let me read your bio. Eric Sperling is a managing director of the Social Television Network, which is a video marketing and advertising company based right here in Phoenix, Arizona. He started the company back in 2011 after leaving a successful career as a local television anchor and producer. As a sports anchor, he noticed how local media and advertising were shifting to more digital and social platforms. They put their talents as storytellers to work creating videos for local businesses and teamed up with digital marketing experts to become an all-in-one video marketing solution. The company started in Eric’s upstairs bedroom, but they have grown tremendously over the last seven years and have just opened one of the largest dedicated social media video advertising production facilities in the southwest in downtown Phoenix.

A majority of their video advertising clients are in the healthcare space, including dentists, orthodontists, and oral surgeons and [inaudible 01:11], but I don't want to embarrass their names because I didn't ask them, but he's got the most famous oral surgeon, orthodontist, pediatric dentists, and general dentists in the valley as your clients. And outside of dentistry you're still in healthcare, you’re a major for Dignity Health and Dignity hospitals?

ERIC: Correct. The Dignity Health hospital systems, Banner Health.

HOWARD: Banner Health and Barrow’s Neurological. I don’t know if you’re familiar with Barrows, but Mayo Clinic, Cleveland, MD Anderson, probably the greatest hospitals in America and Mayo Clinic only put two satellite locations. One down here in Scottsdale because of all the retirees and the other one in Florida, but Barrows is probably the number one global neurological.

ERIC: They're amazing, yeah they do so ...

HOWARD: When you go down there you think you're in the Middle East.

ERIC: We do a lot of live surgeries with them. So, a lot of live brain surgeries and to see those surgeons, what they're doing and to hear them talk about what they're doing. It's so impressive. We'll be in sometimes four or five hour surgeries with them and the work that they're putting in and the advancements they're making it's great to have them in our own backyard. I mean, being here in Phoenix.

HOWARD: America they think they’re number one, but they're number one in some things, they’re not number one in making cars. The number one car makers are Germany and Japan, number one in education is in Scandinavia. But America is number one in healthcare, military, insurance, banking, finance, music, movies, and medicine. When you go to Asia, Africa, Central and South America, the rich people say, “In my country, if you get sick, you don't want a doctor, you want a pilot. You want to fly to America, you want to go to Mayo Clinic, you want to go to Barrows Neurological Institute.” One of my doctors in downtown Phoenix, the guy that did my eyes, the laser keratosis or whatever. He has a map of the world with pins where all his patients are from, the whole maps covered in pins. People pay for premium healthcare.

But anyway so Amazon started with books but didn't call it books.com because the reason Jeff Bezos started with books in ‘94 was because that was the only thing you could sell with text because the internet pipes were so small. And, he knew he wanted to disrupt direct mail and they were selling clothing and cooking and all these things that needed images. And he said that'll be later down the road and now the pipes are so big that you can stream videos. I cannot believe that Netflix is now worth more in Wall Street than Disney, which I think is an internet bubble. I think that's ridiculous. Disney has parks like Disneyland, Disney World, Euro Disney, they have cruise lines. I smell that ‘94 to 2000 internet bubble. Gosh, Amazon's coming up on a trillion dollar valuation and American Airlines has more profit than Amazon. But is it true to say if a picture's worth a thousand words, a video is worth a million.

ERIC: And you look at statistics, Howard, and I believe I have this right, I think by 2020, 85% of all internet traffic is going to be video. It's just that pipe that you mentioned.

HOWARD: Say the stat again.

ERIC: I think it's 85% of all internet traffic is going to be video by 2020. That's why we were watching a video on our phones right before we even started this podcast. These are getting bigger, these are getting better. The screens are getting the resolution. Everything is video driven now and so, why would you want to read an article when you can watch a two minute video? And so, that's what we're seeing a lot of success with the healthcare industry is, is they want to educate the consumer. They want to educate their patients. And the best way to do that is through storytelling videos and that's kind of where we come in and you were reading a little bit about the bio where we were local television people and that's what we did for a living. We told stories. We were able to get the message to the consumer in the right way and we see a lot of healthcare professionals who kind of struggled with that over the years. They're super smart, they're great at what they do, but they don't know how to convey that message, especially in video form now.

And so, we help them do that. So, we create different styles of videos for them. Like what we're doing right now, we're having an educational talk about video marketing and then we'll create other videos. The one you just watched, and we can mention by name for the Dental Brothers, where it's a little bit more of a storytelling including testimonials and what they do for their practice and ...

HOWARD: Are you allowed to say his name, or would he be embarrassed?

ERIC: We’re talking about the Dental Brothers, right? They're great guys so I think they’re okay.

HOWARD: They are great guys. Timothy, do you pronounce that Chaf-fay?

ERIC: Who's that? Oh yeah. He's not one of the brothers. They have Tal and Dan Gafni who are the brothers. And then Timm is another one of the dentists over there.

HOWARD: That's not one of the brothers though?

ERIC: No, that's not one of the brothers, not one of the Dental Brothers.

HOWARD: There's the Dental Brothers right there. Dan Gafni and his brother Tal, which one’s the older?

ERIC: I think Dan is the older one.

HOWARD: I’m going to tell him you said that. Just the picture. Dan. why do you look so much older than Tal? Get a moisturizer buddy, get some face cream.

ERIC: He's a great guy.

HOWARD: Yeah, they’re legends in our backyard.

ERIC: Yeah and they're on camera telling us, they've been running one of our video marketing programs now. I believe they're in like their seventh or eighth month that they have set a record. They've had their best month ever. I forgot how long they've been in practice, but best month ever in their history and attributing that to us. They've tried direct mail before, they've tried a bunch of other forms of marketing and they're finally seeing the results they wanted and it's because of the video marketing that we're putting out there for them.

HOWARD: Well, the dentists are going to shoot me if I say this one more time, so I'm going to say it three more times. So, there's two hundred and eleven thousand Americans who are living with an active license to practice dentistry, but about a hundred and fifty thousand are general dentists. Thirty hours a week or more. Thirty thousand specialists, thirty hours a week or more. The general dentists are netting one seventy-five, the specialists are netting three thirty. And a couple of things you see as well, the general dentist, they won't even spend 3% of collection on advertising, the orthodontist spends 6% all day long. That's why they net three thirty. Another thing is that the general dentists, you call them, and they never have a room to squeeze you in for an emergency, but the endodontist, the oral surgeons, the orthodontist, they all have two emergency operatories that are never even scheduled.

You could walk into any endodontist, oral surgeon, orthodontist in America today, and the receptionist will say, “Well, let's get you in a chair and we'll squeeze the doctor in.” And here's the dental office, “Well, I don't have any place to put you because chairs aren't our cost. Our PPO reduction is 42% of cost, labor’s 25%, labs ten, supply is six. Operatories don't even make the list, but we don't have one to put you in.” So, they don't understand that their constraint is chairs. But here's the funnel that I want you to talk about so we know three hundred people have to land on your dentist website before nine convert. Well, fix that. Three hundred and only nine convert. And you go on that website and you have a mug shot as opposed to a video, are you kidding me? A video would be ten times better, and then when nine call, the untrained staff can only convert three to come in and then the three people come in with just a cavity. We not talking bleaching, veneers, or fancy, just a cavity. They only convert one to get drill, fill and bill, and that's how they get to collecting $750,000 to take home a hundred and seventy-five because for one filling, three had to come in. For three to come in, nine had to call. For nine to call, three hundred had to land on their website. It's like, dude, if you could fix any part of that funnel, you'd be making the money the specialist did. Just get an extra operatory. Just spend more money on marketing. But what I want to focus on you with is, it's 3% of the people who land on the dentist’s website of all the experts that are attracted. How can you get more than three out of a hundred people who landed on your website to push a call button and convert to a call? 

ERIC: That is a great question, Howard and one of the again big keys to success we've seen across healthcare, as well as the dental clients we have is something I'm sure a lot of dentists out there familiar with called retargeting. So, you just mention the amount of people visiting a website.

HOWARD: Okay, my homies don't know what retargeting is, they’re a dentist.

ERIC: Retargeting is the ability to send content out to anybody that has recently been on your website. So, what we will do is, we'll put a tracking pixel on your website and so when those three hundred people visit the website, the next time they pop on Facebook or Instagram or YouTube or one of the most popular social media platforms out there, they will see a testimonial from your practice. They will see what we would call a tutorial or what you can expect from your first visit. So we are closing that conversion gap. You mention, what can dentists do to at any point of the funnel, get more precise and more consistent and that is one of the keys to success. That would be the first place I would look especially if you're generating high amount of web traffic. Three hundred is decent web traffic. If you're getting that a month and you're only converting three, the key is to stay in front of those three hundred people who have visited your website. I mean it’s basically like ....

HOWARD: So three hundred people land on the website. They're getting three out of a hundred website landings to convert. So those hundred people land on your website, three convert, but you're retargeting? I'm supposed to put a cookie on my website. So when they start searching other places that cookies on there?

ERIC: When that person leaves, they're doing their research. They've checked out three other practices, okay. When they jump back on their smartphone, whether it's that night, they're going to go to Facebook or they're going to go to Instagram or they're going to go on YouTube. They're going to jump on one of these social media sites. Your video is going to be there and not just a video, a storytelling video. A video that creates engagement because we don't want to just advertise to consumers. We want to tell your story to consumers or potential patients. So that is a very critical part in the patient journey.

HOWARD: I’m taking notes, I’m not texting.

ERIC: Are you texting? Who do you text? Are you texting your son? And it's a very easy thing to do, it's not a hard process. It sounds complicated. It sounds tacky, but it's not.

HOWARD: I know my dentists. They love to take courses on bone grafting and implants.

ERIC: Yeah, what is retargeting all about.

HOWARD: How does she know if she has cookies on her website that are being retargeted? How would she know that?

ERIC: Yes, so you got to have a web developer obviously, or somebody who's built your website and then someone like myself or somebody who's in charge of marketing, to send you what is called a tracking pixel, whether that's from Facebook, whether it's from Google, LinkedIn has tracking pixels now and once those are installed on the website, your tracking pixel is now active and it gives whoever is creating the content for your social media sites, the ability to stay in front of people who have been to your website. Does that make sense? I’m sorry.

HOWARD: Yes, so they should specifically ask their web developer, “Do we have cookies on our dental website for retargeting purposes?”

ERIC: There would have to be a retargeting purpose because you don’t just want a cookie and then you're not doing anything with it.

HOWARD: I'm surprised I don't know that because I love cookies and that's why I'm fat. In fact, the cookie monster is my idol. So that's what they ask their website developer, if they have cookies on there for retargeting purposes?

ERIC: It might be the website developer. If their website developer’s doing any sort of social video or social media marketing, that's where it would start because there's no point having cookies on your website if you’re not doing anything with it.

HOWARD: And, then when that person goes on Facebook or Instagram, if you have an ad on Facebook or Instagram and that person gets on their smartphone with your cookie on there, that Facebook ad will show up to them?

ERIC: Yup, as long as that person has created the ad to function that way.  So I’m going to create, like that dental work ...

HOWARD: Do dentists routinely figure that out or is this kind of a sophisticated thing?

ERIC: No, sophisticated. So, that Dental Brothers video, the one we watched before we started, anybody who's been to the Dental Brothers website doing research, the next time they pop on Facebook they're going to see that storytelling video of the Dental Brothers. And again, that's one of the reasons why they've been able to have the best month they’ve ever had, because they're staying in front of all of that website traffic. They're not relying on, like you said, the phone call to close the deal necessarily.

HOWARD: Well, you said something very interesting that I hear marketing experts say a lot, that marketing is really about telling stories. Marketing is telling a compelling story about you and your company.

ERIC: It’s about advertising. Yes, exactly.

HOWARD: Is that the essence of what you think advertising is, is storytelling?

ERIC: Especially in healthcare. You see billboard ads, I’m talking about digital billboard ads, with social media now and think about how people are scrolling, right? They’re scrolling through Facebook, they’re scrolling through Instagram, they need to stop and engage in something. So, if you're not putting a storytelling video out there nobody wants to see your ad. Nobody wants to see how great you are. They want something that draws them in and so, I mentioned retargeting, what we do a lot of is, we'll come up with creative content that will draw somebody in. I'm going to keep using the Dental Brothers is an example. They came down to our studio and they did a segment on how morning breath can lead to more serious diseases and you help me out because you're the dental expert, is it periodontal disease?

HOWARD: Yes.

ERIC: Yeah, so the whole segment on periodontal disease, what we're able to do is track the people who are watching that video. Were they watching on Facebook, how long did they watch for and then retarget to the people who have watched that video. In addition to having people go to the website and staying in front of them, we’re also staying in front of the people that are engaging in their storytelling content. To answer your question. That's why you don't just put ads out there, you put content that people want to watch out there.

HOWARD: I hate negativity and I don't want to go negative and all that, but the founder of Facebook is Mark Zuckerberg. Did you know his dad is a dentist?

ERIC: I think I read that in your book. I read your book.

HOWARD: Yes, he sat in this chair three times. The last time he came with his four kids. We're both bald dentists with four kids. One of his kids started Facebook and one of mine is in jail and wears an ankle bracelet. I'm just kidding.

ERIC: I didn’t know if I should laugh, he’s so serious.

HOWARD: A lot of dentists think that Facebook advertising is, they'll make a post like say they make a video, say they have pull out their iPhone and they make a video deal and they post that, but then they'll boost their posts. But a lot of things I'm reading is that when Facebook says, “Oh, you boosted your posts and you had five thousand views,” you minded that and like almost 90% of them are like under six seconds long, which was really scrolling. And the things I read about that, and I don't want to trash Facebook, but those metrics are designed to make you buy more boosted posts. But if you have a three minute video and almost all your views are under six seconds, no one watched your video.

ERIC: That's the key.

HOWARD: Have you heard about this controversy about the video metrics?

ERIC: Yes, I mean that's why they do it. You look at the view counts and that's anytime somebody watched for three seconds or longer, it's counted as a view.

HOWARD: Three seconds is how long it take your thumb to scroll over it.

ERIC: Yes.

HOWARD: I think it's an ethics issue. I mean they should know if you watched the video or not.

ERIC: And that's the thing. When you're buying those boosted ads, you'll get detailed analytics. You'll see three, ten, 50% or more. So, what we do is we use that cheap traffic, right? It's cheap to go out and buy Facebook time, so you don't necessarily want to stay in front of the people who've watched your video for three seconds. You want to stay in front of the people who've watched 50% or more of your video. So, for dental practices, for any healthcare practices who are marketing, if we’re sending out, we get a hundred thousand impressions. We don't care about the seventy thousand that have blown right through with the three second ad. We want the people who really engaged in the video, did they watch for 50% or more? Those are the people we want to stay in front of. So, you can take advantage of buying cheap traffic at the top of the funnel and it's staying in front of them with the more storytelling content.

HOWARD: But, cheap traffic. It sounds so much like cheap trick. So, to me that would be a great thing. Rock and Roll Hall of Fame, from Missouri, buddy.

ERIC: We can talk music too if you want.

HOWARD: When you said watch 50% of the video, but what's the sweet spot length of a video? How long are these videos?

ERIC: This is a great debate, how long should a video be? It depends on where that is in the funnel too. So, what we've seen is if, for example, when we're creating a video for let's say a cancer center. That video can be five minutes long. If you are researching cancer, if you've got a loved one with cancer, you're going to watch all five minutes of that video because you want to learn everything you can because you're doing your due diligence. If you're trying to grab somebody's attention on Facebook, it's going to have to be shorter. If you're creating something that is very educational, like a Tip video or again, like back to the Dental Brothers and their periodontal disease, we do those for two minutes. Those are two minute videos that last on Facebook. Do we need to stay in front of the people that watch for twenty seconds? Not really. They watch for a minute or longer, we know that's a hot audience. We know those people are interested in what we're talking about. So those are the people we want to stay in front of. So, we're using the length of the video to determine who to stand in front of too. If you're just putting an ad out there, it’s got to be super short. If you're just trying to advertise and maybe brand awareness, it's got to be really short. It's got to be about thirty seconds long.

HOWARD: That makes sense. So, the more important the decision. We see that on Dentaltown too. There's two groups of people on Dentaltown. Half the people just log on and read whatsapp on today's topic. Like the first thing this morning, the front page of Wall Street Journal was about an orthodontist who graduated $1,000,000 in student loans and so that just exploded on Dentaltown. But then there's another behavior, like they’re thinking, “Should I buy a $100,000 laser, $100,000 chairside line,” So, they'll go to Dentaltown, they'll do a search for a laser and they'll read for three hours. So, what you're saying is that the more important it is, like a $100,000 decision, are you dying of cancer. They're going to watch a video for five minutes.

ERIC: It’s also the frame of mind. You mentioned search mode. If you're in search mode, absolutely. It can be a longer video because you're researching. If you’re in what we call social mode and you're scrolling through Facebook or Instagram, you're in discovery mode, right? You're there just to discover stuff. So, it's much harder to grab somebody's attention when they're in social mode than it is in search mode. So, we create different videos for different modes.

HOWARD: So, search mode could really be called research mode?

ERIC: Yes.

HOWARD: Search mode is research mode.

ERIC: You know what you want, you’re looking at that laser.

HOWARD: And you called social mode?

ERIC: It’s more discovery.

HOWARD: Discovering.

ERIC: You're there to discover something.

HOWARD: So, what's the most important subject in a health care that you would watch the video the longest?

ERIC: Are you talking about like different service lines or different service? What do you mean subject?

HOWARD: I mean, 70% of your business is in healthcare. I mean dentists, physicians, Banner Neurological, I imagine if I had a spinal cord injury on one of my kids hit some stuff on a trampoline or a swimming pool. You'd be watching those videos as long as they were.

ERIC: Right, exactly and you want to watch testimonials. You want to see what those patients are saying about that doctor. So, the point is when we're trying to figure out in social mode and in search mode, social mode would be a video, let's just go back to cancer, liver cancer for example. We did a video about an FDA approval for a new liver cancer drug so that grabs somebody's attention on social media. In the search video’s much different. The search videos about the actual program itself at the hospital.

ERIC: Like what technology do they have at the hospital? So, back to your question about subject, when you're in decision mode and you're researching, and you go, “Okay, is this the cancer center for me? Or is this the cancer doctor for me? Or is this the dentist or the orthodontist for me?” That is a much different video than you're going to use out on social media in a cold audience to grab that social traffic. That makes sense?

HOWARD. Yes. You talked about a drug for liver. I'm a health fanatic and I think cranberry juice totally cleans out, detoxifies your liver, which is why every night before I go to bed, I always have a double Grey Goose with a splash of cranberry just to detox my liver. When you talk about video testimony, I got a lot of thoughts on that. Because number one, you can't talk about boys and girls getting written off as a sexist, especially if you're a boy. But, the research is clear. Boys say under eighteen hundred words a day, women are north of six thousand. Every time this study is done, when they go into apes and monkeys, every time two male apes or monkeys, apes, gorillas, chimpanzees, orangutans, bonobos, gibbons, every time, two males fist bump and communicate, the woman will go talk to five. And you know, she's playing, nursing, feeding. And in healthcare, all the research shows that well over 90% of all family dental appointments are made by mom.

ERIC: Chief Medical Officer of the family.

HOWARD: You can verify this in the office. When mom comes out and you say, “Hey, we're filling out our insurance, you know your daughter's birthday?” Boom. “Do you have their insurance?” Boom. Dad comes out, “Dad, you have two children, do you know their birthday?” No idea. “Well, was it in your smartphone?” “No.” Well, how do you not know your child's birth date or their insurance number? So, back to that, if the average woman is saying north of six thousand words and talks to five people for everyone the man does. Testimonials are very important in healthcare because women are making all the appointments. And I think the video testimonials is golden because everybody knows when you see Google testimonials. Tell them your own family, half the people are crazy. So, you don't know what that lady’s saying. I don't know, is she crazy or what. But if you saw the video, you can see crazy.

ERIC: Yes, you could see crazy.

HOWARD: I have several aunts where if they were saying the deal, you would be giggling. But, then there's other people and the good news like, one thing they say, “Oh my God, his office was great,” but then giving them the mirror after you delivered veneers, bleaching, bonding or Invisalign, and she gets verklempt and sheds a tear. You would just dump Dopamine, Serotonin. So, I think social confirmation is very important in healthcare because women are five times more social than men. I can't tell you how many men I know where the man has two friends and the wife is texting ten. You just always see that ratio. So, talk about video testimonial. Do you think they're going to replace just the Google texts? Text was replaced by photo, photos being replaced by video. I really think video testimonial for social confirmation is…

ERIC: And I love what you said about, it's so true, about being able to look through the screen or see crazy, if you want us to call it crazy, but also see authenticity.

HOWARD: When you think about see crazy, were you thinking of Ryan?

ERIC: Yes, I was thinking crazy.

HOWARD: Ryan, come sit right here so the people on YouTube can see normal and no, I'm just kidding. But yes, you could see crazy.

ERIC: And that's another reason why sometimes you'll see a television ad or it's an actor giving a testimonial. So, in healthcare you want that real authentic testimonial. You want to connect with that person who's doing that research. You want a testimonial who is going to speak to that mom who's making the decision or that family member who's making the decision. So, when we tell our clients, when they're researching to find their own testimonials, to who was going to come in, who's going to appear on camera, we want to figure out who we're speaking to and we want that testimonial. As soon as that testimonial starts talking, we want the person watching on screen to go, “Yeah, that's me. I understand what he or she is going through and they're making complete sense and yup, my decision's made. I'm going to watch this video a little while longer and not want to pick up the phone and make a call.” So yeah, you're right. The authenticity component is extremely important in video because the Google text is going to be there. It's always going to be there, but people are doing lots more research? They're not just looking at one thing anymore. They’re going to the website, they're going to your Facebook page, they're going to your YouTube channel and the bigger decision they're going to make, the more research they're going to do.

HOWARD: And when I was little, only rich people could fly or you work for big corporations or government or whatever. Now these people are making amazing websites. These complicated procedures like All on 4 dental implants or cosmetics and people are saying, “Well, you know, I live in a small town in rural America, I think I'm going to get on Southwest Airlines, it's only $230 a round trip and I'm going to fly down there because I don't trust that my doctor from this small town of five thousand that when you go to the website, it's like one page, doesn't even have the picture of him.” And he says, “Oh, I could do implants.” And I lived through this with a friend who wanted to have cosmetic surgery and went to three doctors and called me and said, “Come on, you know all these doctors. Who's the bus?”

And there was a female surgery, cosmetic surgery. And I thought, well I don't really know. And so, she asked me if I go with her to these two consults and then went to one in Tempe and one in Scottsdale. And their brochure for this breast augmentation, it was a brochure that they bought from the American Academy of Cosmetic Surgery. So, what I did is, I got on the phone and start calling around and doctor they said no. So, we went down to his place and his place said, “Well, there's only four types of breast augmentation,” and he looked at her and said, “You're this type.” And then he pulls out a big screen, you sit on the couch and there's before and after. In every person on the left looked just like her and every person on the right look just perfect.

And so, when you're selling the invisible, you know when you go to sell an iPhone, well I trust Apple. When I go buy a Hershey's chocolate bar, I assume, Hershey's or Dr Pepper, Budweiser, they all figured out. But in dentistry you're selling the invisible. So, you're saying that I have four cavities. Well how do I know if I have four cavities and the women, they don't trust so much more than men. Like if a woman's air conditioner goes out and she calls the biggest, you know who they are in Phoenix, the biggest advertisers, say George Brazil. And George Brazil comes out and says, “You know, I can't fix your air conditioner. Yes, you need a whole new air conditioner.” Anybody would know you'd rather sell me a $5,000 new air conditioner than $50 a free on, but she doesn't know.

When the engine light comes on, I grew up with five sisters, I call it the idiot light because I played Barbie dolls till I was twelve. I never did any engine work with my five sisters. So, when the idiot light comes on and you come out there and you tell me that I need a whole new transmission and I'm thinking, well how do I know that? I know you do a very famous pediatric dentist in town and their babies are the most important to mom. Far more important than their husband and their grandparents, and the doctor says your baby needs four cavities. How does social media help sell trust and integrity? Especially in a time of our lives where the number one thing I've seen deteriorate in my fifty-five years in life, is trust, it’s government, social and Congress has run a single digit 9% approval rating for two decades.

Nobody trusts Congress. Everybody knows it's all bought and paid for and now you're starting to see the loss of trust in sacred incisions like the FBI, the Centers for Disease Control. When I was on that last water fluoridation campaign, I said, “Well, the CDC says this” and one in four people in Phoenix say, “The CDC, they're just a shill for the pharmaceutical research scientists” and it’s like wow. So, how can you sell more trust and integrity?

ERIC: That’s a good question.

HOWARD: So, that when mom takes baby to a pediatric dentist…

ERIC: I take baby to pediatric dentist too. I'm dad.

HOWARD: Yes?

ERIC: I take my kids to the dentist and making some of those decisions.

HOWARD: How do you sell trust?

ERIC: Multiple points of engagement. I'm just going back to what we do with the storytelling approach, it's finding the people who will authentically talk about what you just said. If it's a pediatric dentist, we want to capture somebody on camera who had a legitimate experience with that pediatric dentist, who's going to talk about the trust factor. And, honestly in healthcare, that is what comes out a lot in the testimonials. It's why they trust that doctor, or why they trust that physician or why they trust that dentist. The why becomes a huge part of the testimonial. Whether it's their bedside manner or their expertise, or their schooling, you want the trust component to come through the screen on camera, no matter what we're doing.

ERIC: And the more you can capture that in an authentic type of video environment, so that somebody watching can go, “Yes! I trust that person and I'm going to go see that” and they're going to get the same experience. Obviously, if you watch the testimonial and you get a completely different experience from that dentist or that physician, well that didn't work and they're not coming back. So, it's important as us, the people putting this content together to not stage anything. To make it as authentic as possible. And that's one of the things we preach to our clients is we're not an advertising agency. We're not going to hire actors and create a false sense of who you are as a practice or as a hospital or whatever. We are going to put the real story on camera.

And so, if that makes you nervous, then you probably shouldn't be doing what we're doing. If you can't produce those testimonials, if you can't produce that trustworthy content, then maybe you should do some other type of advertising or just do something in print. Because that does happen, where you run into a business and they like “Oof, we can't produce that type of content”. Well, then that tells you something about who you are as a business and that's going to really hurt you when people are researching you and looking for that type of content, that trustworthy content. I'm sorry I didn't go into the whole FBI CDC thing.

HOWARD: Well, it's amazing because when I got out of school, it was just the majority of all the dentists just had a listing in the white pages. And maybe paid extra to have it in black gold. And then full page ads came out, which I was buying in 1987, which was extremely controversial and a lot of the older dentists all just kept telling me to knock it off. But it kept getting so many because they thought it cheapened the deal. They thought, “You know, if you had cancer when you pick somebody out of the yellow pages”. And I'm like, “Well, I really don't think the market thinks getting your teeth cleaned is the same as having prostate cancer”. I just don't think those are two equivalents. This was an IBM supercomputer when I was in high school.

And so now with the internet pipes so big and the moms are researching so much more, you have to get an ‘A’ on your website. And I'm telling you guys, I get a gazillion emails. Thanks for always emailing me, Howard@dentaltown.com. Please tell me where you're from. Tell me how old you are, what country you're from, your website if you got it. And, my gosh, so many of them. If you email me, I just take off your blah blah blah at stntv.com, just put a www, got to their website. So, I look at dentists’ websites all day long every day and half of them are a joke and I know my dentists, I know them. Five years ago, they were at a dental convention and some guy says, “Hey, I'll build you a website”. So, he came over there and did the right thing and give you your credit card. Built a website five years ago. I was on three today that still have Flash.

ERIC: So, what I do is I go on those same websites and I look to see is there video? Is there a tracking pixel? Because I can see that. And so, I do the exact same thing. I'm researching people to see how far…

HOWARD: Will you research mine, Dentaltown.com?

ERIC: Yes. Do you want me to do it?

HOWARD: Absolutely.

ERIC: I'll look and see what you got going.

HOWARD: But, in your experience, give a letter Grade A, B, C, D, E, F, because my homies all made straight A's to get into dental school, med school or law school.

ERIC: These are your homies, okay.  

HOWARD: What would you give these A students and Undergrad who made it into dental school? What would you give their website letter grade, if you looked at a hundred dentists websites what would the distribution be?

ERIC: You mentioned, you see some that are Flash. I'm pretty pleased with a lot of the websites I'm seeing right now. Maybe, I’m just researching a lot in Phoenix.

HOWARD: Give a percent breakdown of A, B, C, D, E, F of what you're seeing.

ERIC: Just dentists? This includes orthodontists?

HOWARD: An orthodontist is a dentist. He doesn’t know that if you go up to an orthodontist and say, “Are you a dentist?” He’ll say, “No, I'm an orthodontist”. “Like really? Because on LinkedIn, it says you went to dental school and graduated with a DDS”. And he's like, “Oh yeah. But I tried to forget those, that I went on to become an orthodontist and now I walk on water and I don't talk to the little people”, but I blame that one oral surgeon in my life. We were climbing Mount Fuji and we were in Tanzania and there were three dentists and an oral surgeon. And the guide turns the oral surgeon and he says, “So, are you a dentist?” and he said, “Yeah”. And I thought, oh my God, I just heard an oral surgeon admit that he's a dentist. I've never witnessed it. He laughed so hard. It was so damn funny. But anyway. But yeah, just dentists, dental specialists.

ERIC: It’s a C.

HOWARD: The average is a C?

ERIC: The average is a C. So, the presentation of the website isn't bad. It's the functionality that needs improvement. There's no video on the homepage. I'm there, keep me there with a video. Let me zero in on something. Put that video right on the homepage. There are some dentists I've seen out there who do a good job of landing pages.

HOWARD: My homies don’t know what a landing page is. First it was “redirect” now it’s landing pages.

ERIC: Retargeting.

HOWARD: Versus retargeting, now it's landing page. This has something to do with Ann Landers, I assume.

ERIC: No, it is a specific site. It's not even a site really. It's a URL that is designed to capture ad traffic. So, you mentioned like the All-in-One day dental implant? Is that what you called it? If we're going to do an ad for that and we're going to post that ad on Facebook, we don't want somebody clicking on that ad and then showing up just to the homepage of some dental office’s website. That page better be specific to the ad we were pushing, so we want that whole page dedicated to the All-in-One thing we were advertising. So, landing pages, that's probably a D right now for most dental practices where they should be branching out and creating landing pages.

HOWARD: So, if someone is searching, they want dental implants and they just go to your website, they don’t have to do three clicks to find out how you do dental implants.

ERIC: Absolutely.

HOWARD: So he's saying, we do an ad on the implants, it should land on the page of your website which is [inaudible 37:30]. It's my number one complaint with Wikipedia. I always give them the money, they're always raising money, I always give them the money.

ERIC: Donate, yes.

HOWARD: But, you do a search, like when was this blah blah blah blah and the search shows oh, that information’s right. So, then you click Wikipedia, little do you know you have to scroll through nineteen things to find it.

ERIC: That's a great analogy. That’s exactly what we’re talking about. You're searching for one specific thing, don't have that person ended up going, “I don't know what I'm doing. I don't know where I'm going”. So, have a very specific landing page with one call to action that's make an appointment, if you need All-in-One dental implants. And there's a video right there that talks about your All-in-One dental implants. There's a testimonial there, there's an explainer video. It just, it's the exact thing you need.

HOWARD: Dentistry uncensored. We only talk about dentistry, we don't talk about anything you agree on. So, I know what my homies are saying. They're saying, “Well you keep mentioning video, but that's because you sell videos”.

ERIC: Yes, I do.

HOWARD: Since you sell video, prove to her that having a video on that website is more important than a still picture.You hold up your phone. I'll hold up my phone.

ERIC: You're not going to read about all the dental implant stuff. You're going to want to press play. Do this for ninety seconds and you're good. That's why I got back to the top of the show are these. That's why these are getting bigger and better because people want to watch a video when they're researching. So, if I was scrolling through Facebook, I saw that dental ad, I click, I’m on the landing page. I'm not going to try to read a bunch of articles about it. I just want to watch a video and be done with it.

HOWARD: And you know what, another thing that I want to say about videos, the illegal aspect of it. When we were little, the number one cause of car fatality was drunk driving. Drunk driving doesn't even make the top five. It's been eradicated and the country never really celebrated how successful they were. Now number one is distraction. So when people are driving and they're in our community, they're texting all that stuff, but I can't read your texts website for an hour, but I'm driving in traffic and I'm thinking about Invisalign. And, when I stop for a second, I click the video. Now, I don't have to look at the phone. I can listen to your sound. I can listen to that. You can hold that and you’re driving.

ERIC: [inaudible 00:39:53] promoting driving and watching? I appreciate it but…

HOWARD: And I don't’, what I do is, I turn off my phone. I really do because we're such monkeys. You'll be driving down I-10 sixty-five miles an hour and you hear a ding. But your monkey walnut brain’s like “Duh-uh, I heard a ding.” No, I turn mine off because I'm such a small walnut brain. In fact, I did that twenty-three and me. They talk about Google’s Sergey Brin’s wife. I'm 4.5% Neanderthal. I used to think I was dumb, but now twenty-three and me has proved to me.

ERIC: They really said that?

HOWARD: No, I am, I'm 4.5% Neanderthal and, no disrespect to Neanderthals, but anyway ...

ERIC: You look around you, there's four out of five people around you are on their phones while we're driving. It’s a different conversation.

HOWARD: I did three Iron Mans in a row and the reason I stopped doing Ironman, because part of the Iron Man’s is a twelve mile bike ride, every single year in our Ironman riding group, every single year, one of our group was ran over and killed by a car. And then you’re sitting there thinking, I'm doing this so I can see my grandchildren graduate from high school. Not because I have some fetish to ride a bicycle down the B lane highway. One time a semi-truck went right by us and two of us, the wind blew us over. But when you're out there and you leave the house at 5:00 in the morning, I got a couple of bike rides. I go to Maricopa and back, that's forty-five miles or I go around south mountain, that's forty-five miles or I go to the Fountain Lakes and back, that's ninety miles. So we leave at 5:00 in the morning because it gets hot. By ten o’clock, it's a hundred degrees. Every third car, you see this blue thing, they're just driving down the street like that and you're like, man, I am one Facebook post away from just being dead.

So you have to move your exercise inside. I joined Lifetime Fitness because I don’t want to get killed. And the first time I did the tour of Mesa, that seventy mile bike ride with that great endodontic group. What's the group, Jason Hale, Ed Carlson. Yes, Jason Hale. We’ve done three podcasts with those endodontists and he used to sponsor the dentists on the seventy mile. The first time I did it, a woman in our group going through an intersection, a eighty year old lady, t-boned right over, killed her, didn't stop, went to the next intersection, t-boned a truck and killed that guy too. And they think that she might have had a stroke, or she blacked out or fainted or something. How did we get there? Oh, we were talking about videos on the phone.

ERIC: Somehow you wanted to watch a video while you were driving, which I don't recommend doing.

HOWARD: No, but they'll listen to a video. 

ERIC: They’ll listen. Somebody’s listening to this right now in their car.

HOWARD: You know how many dentists have told me that they don't even listen to this podcast on iTunes. They listen to it on YouTube. So they open up the YouTube video, but they got a hour commute to work.

ERIC: I do it all the time. I listen to YouTube.

HOWARD: And then what's also sad is the dentists. I love the dentists, the fact that they love being technically excellent in dentistry, but then when you ask them very important questions like, “Well, how many people land on your website each month and how many of them convert.” They don't know. And then I'll say, “Well, okay so we just finished the first quarter, January, February, March. How many incoming calls did you have?” “I don't know.” This is why I feel sorry for you.

ERIC: I hear it all the time. Thank you.

HOWARD: I would never go into your business because you could get an A plus plus and deliver a hundred people to their website and their website’s horrible none of them convert. Even if you went and built their website so a hundred people landed and say ten converted, their untrained staff is going to answer the phone like, “Can you please hold?” and then they're on hold for five minutes, so they hang up. So you could get an A and their team could get three D's and F's in a row and then at the end of the day he’s like, “Well I gave Eric Sperling money and it didn't do anything for me.”

ERIC: I’m so glad that you brought that up because we're seeing this in 2018 and it's not, obviously it's going to get more intense to this multi attribution thing happening when it comes to marketing. And you're right, a) it depends on a lot of it on the intake itself. You're right, are they doing a good job on intake? But also, when you have all of this marketing going on, you have videos on Facebook, you have SEO going, you may have some traditional things going. You may have some direct mail, you may do some radio spots. Too many businesses focus on what's called last touch attribution. [There’s always, 00:44:40] “So where did you hear about us?” “Internet.” Then ask, “Where's the first place you heard about us?” “Whoa, it’s a different question.” “Where did you first learn about us?”

So most people when they are filling out an intake form, they will just mark in it because they probably went to Google to find either the phone number or the location. And that is where that practice is going to put a majority of their marketing dollars because they're saying, “Oh, we got X many clients or patients because of the pay per click ad we did or the SEO component we're putting in”, but they're not looking at the entire patient journey. So, to your point earlier, that's exactly it. It's I gave so and so X amount of dollars. How do I measure it at the end of the day, if (a) we have an attribution issue, but then (b) we're not properly handling our intake. And to be honest, you're never going to get it right. You're never going to get it perfect where you're going to have a sit-down interrogation with a patient. “Tell me, where'd you hear about us and let's talk about all the ways that you may of …” I mean, you’re not going to do that. You're going to hand them a form and they're going to circle Facebook, they're going to circle TV. They're going to circle radio, but what you have to do is start understanding and looking for overall lift in your business to say, “Well, everything that we're doing, or we've been doing is having a major impact on our bottom line.” And to your point earlier, do they know that? Are they savvy enough or are they looking at, who's monitoring that? Is that an office manager? Is that the dentist themselves? Where is that business mindset coming from? And I hear a lot of doctors and dentists will tell me they wish they went to school for marketing. They went, “Boy, I wish I would have done marketing in school” because these are the questions that haunt them when they're going over their books, they’re going over their marketing and they want to understand everything that they're doing. So multi touch attribution now is a really big deal. It's figuring out what avenues of marketing are the most effective for me. And there's different ways to measure each one of them. I mean, obviously if you're going to go back to video marketing, you can see how many people are watching your videos. If you're doing billboard ads or TV ads or print ads, sometimes that's a lot tougher to figure out. Do people come through my doors because of those ads, but they all sort of support one another. And then you look for functionality, where if those are all driving traffic to your website, there it is again, do you have an ability to stay in front of the people that have been to your website? So, if you're doing a radio ad, oh, visit Xyz dentists.com. What are you doing on the back end? Are you doing anything to convert that traffic that you're buying that radio ad for? So multi touch attribution is now, I know I'm saying a lot of buzzwords and things, landing pages that dentists should be aware of.

HOWARD: When you say intake, that's inbound calls?

ERIC: You know, the person at the front desk.

HOWARD. Well what's really amazing, the media. You were in the news. You were a sports ...

ERIC: I was a sports anchor for ten years.

HOWARD: Right here in Phoenix?

ERIC: Last stop was here, right here in Phoenix, CBS Five.

HOWARD: You have a face for TV and YouTube. I have a face for iTunes and I try to do sound only. The media, they always talk about the S&P 500, which don’t even employ 15% of America. All the news is on Disney and Netflix and Amazon and Microsoft. Eighty-five out of a hundred people work for a small business in America and when you look at those small businesses besides the owner of the company, the highest paid person is sales. Taking the inbound calls, making the outbound calls. They're the ones that are bringing in the million dollar revenue so that you got nine guys back in the machine shop making a side Baylor for a combine machine.

And then in dentistry, it's the opposite. The guy who's back there on the welding machine makes all the money and then that little receptionist who does all the inbound sales and outbound sales, no training, no money, no incentives. And then you go into offices that fix, there's some training places. One is The Scheduling Institute which has a place in Atlanta right here in Phoenix, or they start recording the phone calls or they start just getting this person up to speed. If you just move her conversion rate from one out of three to two out of three, you just doubled your whole business. It's just amazing. I can't believe the dentists don't see that. And the dentist has two assistants helping her, but just one little girl up front. And then you say to her, “Well how many inbound calls came in today?” “I don't know.” “How many went to voicemail?” “I don't know.” “How many of the voicemails were even checked?” “I don't know.” “Well, why don’t you know all that stuff?” “Because after work, I’m going to the airport and I'm flying to San Diego and I'm taking another course on technical dental excellence” and it's like, “Dude, you can't even do technical dental excellence because half the patients who need your technical dental excellence, can't even get through your gatekeeper.”

ERIC: Uhmm, and we see it all the time. It's not just dentists. Across a lot of the healthcare in the private practices that we do work with, that issue is very present where they don't know. You're right. You ask those key questions and they have no idea.

HOWARD: Okay, so your website is stntv, so that stands for Social Television Network TV. What does TV stand for? Television?

ERIC: Television, yeah.

HOWARD: So, it's stn, Social Television Network TV, S-T-N-T-V. It's just five letters. If my homies went to stn tv, what are they going to find on your website?

ERIC: stntv.com, you’ll find our various services. Sometimes we will just do video production for clients. Whether that's, like I’ve said testimonial videos for websites, storytelling videos for your websites. Similar to something like we're doing here, where there's a guest and an anchor with some sort of news about your industry. We can do those videos for you. Then there's the marketing component. So maybe you need the videos and then you need the marketing, you need the tracking pixel, you need the ads being created. So we can do that as well and most of our services are done in like a subscription base. We realize you don't need to pay upfront for all the video production. So we usually will, especially for the dentists we work with, it's a twelve month program that includes all the videos, all the marketing, all the tracking, all the retargeting and we're able and that's why we're talking about measuring lift there, back to the Dental Brothers.

HOWARD: Measuring lift?

ERIC: Lift in business. Measuring the lift in case volume or patient volume. Over those twelve months, we're able to track the trend of where we were before we started and where we are six or seven months in. I'll give another example, an oral surgeon we work with here.

HOWARD: The most famous one in the state. Agree?

ERIC: Agreed, I agree.

HOWARD: And most credentialed in Miami, he's all that and a bag of chips plus a box of twinkies.

ERIC: When we sat down with their marketing people, maybe like three or four months ago, we were analyzing the first twelve months of their campaign. We realized we generated almost a million dollars in new business for them, which became a tremendous return on investment. It was somewhere in the forty, fifty to one return on investment range. And that's what we're looking for. We're looking after the program. We're looking to see where you're lifting business was, what was the return on investment and what can we do to continue that trend of success because well you're seeing a lot with social media and you mentioned this before and the trust factor is once you start building a foundation of trust, those expert videos keep coming out. The testimonials keep coming out. That just starts to balloon, so now that trust factor goes through the roof because you've seen this person over and over again discussing different topics. You've seen their testimonials over and over again praising the practice or praising the dentist. So, you don't just want to try something for a month or two months now and say, “Okay, I gave it a shot. Let's not do that anymore.” You have to make a commitment to say, “Okay, this is what we're going to be doing from now on. We're going to be putting ourselves out there, putting our story out there and then staying in front of the community.” And then again with social media or digital marketing, as you know, you don't have to market to a huge… You don't have to buy TV time, you don't have to buy a billboard anymore, you can GEO-target specific zip codes in your area. And so, all of those marketing components come together in a real nice little package that ultimately is going to affect the results of your business.

HOWARD: My homies are driving right now. So, what I do is I retweet. I go to your Twitter. Your Twitter is @STNTVnow. So, STN, Social Television Network TV now. And, I'm following you. I just retweeted you to my twenty-five thousand Twitter followers. Thank you so much for following me @HowardFarran. And I just retweeted yours even though you're not following me.

ERIC: I will follow you.

HOWARD: And which one did I retweet? The dentist one. The weight loss surgery. I went to the weight loss surgery and they refer me to a vet to be put down. I think I'd quit marking those guys. And, so I retweeted this one.

ERIC: That’s the Dental Brothers.

HOWARD: And then I'm going to retweet, is that the same one?

ERIC: Nope. That's a lawyer.

HOWARD: That’s a wolf. Screw that guy. Is that the same dentist right there?

ERIC: Those are the testimonials, but they're talking about their results with us.

HOWARD: Well, I just retweeted them twice and the first retweet I've ever done when someone didn't follow me.

ERIC: I appreciate it. That’s big.

HOWARD: I'm just teasing. So, what happens if they call you up and then you're going to do this first class video and put on the retargeting and the landing page, but their website sucks. Do you fix websites?

ERIC: No, we don't do any of that.

HOWARD: Who’s in your value chain to do that?

ERIC: We would refer out to somebody who would.

HOWARD: But is it like one guy that does your websites?

ERIC: We have several that we work with.

HOWARD: Nobody would want to mention right now?

ERIC: No, nobody that we want to mention right now. It depends on who you are to like if you're a dentist.

HOWARD: Do you know where most people see a picture of me first? I can't believe I'm going to say, where did you first hear about Howard, is when they were at the post office. They see my picture on the wall, the ten most wanted in every office and they say, “Who is that guy?” “He's a dentist from Ahwatukee.” And, so back to your website.

ERIC: And what happens is, and you may be familiar with this, Howard, too, is sometimes they don't even make it to the website. Nowadays, the content, if it's hosted, for putting a video out on Facebook and we're seeing this back to the oral surgeon we work with. We see his activity directly in the comment section of, I need an appointment, where are you located? They never even gone to the website. They're staying, what's called natively, on the platform, whether that's Facebook, Instagram.

HOWARD: What does that mean staying there natively?

ERIC: They're not clicking off to go to the website, so some people will, some people will click off the video, go research the website, but in some cases, they’re staying right there. They're in the chat room or they're in the comment section saying, “I need to speak with this doctor, I need to speak with this dentist where you located at? When can I make an appointment?” So, they've never even been to the website. And again, with video retargeting, let's just say they watch a little bit of that video and they've never gone to the website. Again, we can retarget people who've watched the video. So, we've cut out that whole process of even needing to go to the website. They’ll be served up another video.

HOWARD: You dropped a lot of terms, retargeting, landing page, multi-channel distribution. You talked about video production, you're talking about video marketing, but then you have digital television. What's the difference between digital television and video production?

ERIC: So, in addition to creating content for all of our clients, we’re all former local TV people who are creating community content, sort of like you're doing right now. That is back to what we used to do in local television. So, we do a couple of live Facebook shows, we do some sports segments and we do a lot of those through paid social ads. So, we're growing our own local news station while we're creating content for our advertisers. Where back in TV, the way we made money was we would put on a half hour newscast and then the way we would generate revenue was those thirty second television commercials that would pop up when I would say we'll be right back after the break. So now we've kind of changed the model a little bit where instead of making thirty second television commercials, we make content for you, about you.

And then in some situations, we're able to link that brand with some of the content that we're creating. So, let me give you a quick example of this, where we do a local sports story on Arizona Cardinals, Starr, Patrick Peterson, creating libraries for children. Well, that segment can be brought to you by x business who works with us. So, they're getting a little extra brand recognition for something that, yeah, the contents not about them, but a hundred thousand people have watched this story on Patrick Peterson and there's that brand that we work with similar to what we used to do in TV, this segment is brought to you by x business. So that's the digital television part. And then there are some organizations that are creating their own shows with us, their own Facebook live shows or their own weekly series with us. They have enough content that they need consistent shows, again, similar to what we're doing here, but for them. So, we would make the Howard Farran podcast show.

HOWARD: You're talking about storytelling, building trust. You remember Rick D’Amico.

ERIC: Yes, at Fox.

HOWARD: Yes, he just retired after thirty years. I can't tell you how many little old ladies were sad for weeks and it’s like that guy was in their front room every morning for three decades and when he went off the air, I had little old ladies that just couldn't watch morning news anymore. They miss him like it was the loss of a family member.

ERIC: Local TV was, we had our golden age, right? I mean it was eighties, nineties and the anchorman was based off, it's kind of making fun of how big the local TV people really were in the city.

HOWARD: Will Ferrell?

ERIC: Yes, I mean it's poking fun at how big of a role we really did have. And then when I got into the business in the nineties, the internet where there wasn't there yet. So, I really got to see firsthand how the internet really took away from our attention. And then all of a sudden here, early two thousands, social media came into the picture. And boy, if we were really struggling with the internet as our competition, once social media came about, that's where we really started to suffer because people stop watching us live at five, live at six thirty. Everything suddenly, and DVR, everything is on demand now. So, I always use this as an example. I can remember it was a ten o’clock news cast and I'm reading the teleprompter, giving fans sounds highlights and remembering that game was ten o’clock in the morning that day on the east coast. You saw all the highlights you needed on your phone. We weren't a service anymore. You didn't need me to bring you the sounds highlights and then I would toss the commercial, right? “Oh, we'll be right back after the break”. But nobody's watching me. Who's paying attention to that poor local advertiser who's paid a bunch of money to get a commercial in my sports break. So, it was a natural transition from, this is the way the world is shifting. What do we need to do? We need to start creating content for local advertisers, not just having them advertise on what we’re doing.

ERIC: Are you a Netflix guy? Are you a streaming guy? That's HBO Go. So, you go in and ask people what their habits are, what their home habits are. Rarely do you find people now who are watching live local TV. Everything is on demand and everything is streaming. So, for our world, the local newscaster world, think about what that did for us. We had to post stuff on social media. We had to find ways to be relevant and unfortunately when we're posting our stories on social media, nobody needs to watch us at ten. Jimmy Fallon, Jimmy Kimmel, they don’t watch the shows anymore. They just go to YouTube to watch the clips. You have James Corden, the Carpool Karaoke. I love that. I've never seen one single episode live of James Corden at night, but that's how people are consuming content now. It's just on demand. It's on YouTube, it's on Facebook and it's short small chunks. So that's what we create for our advertisers now. It's not a thirty television commercial anymore. It's a series of videos and getting those videos into places where people watch the content.

HOWARD: I cannot and will not watch anything on television unless it was recorded before. Like say Sunday morning, you want to watch Freed’s Akari, it's five minutes of news, five minutes commercials. And it's such non-targeted. They're not targeting a fifty-five year old man here. Showing me restless leg syndrome and some wheelchair lift up the stairway. And, there's no targeting. My main news is that HBO Vice and those guys always claim about how, it's no advertising. Are you out of your freaking mind? I have to record that. The first five minutes is just how sad, other shows, HBO bullshit. HBO, your in-house ad is the same ad to me. If I wanted to watch all that other bullshit you're advertising, I'd be watching that, but I have to actually record it because I got to speed through all the crap that HBO ads are.

ERIC: Nobody's going back to the old way. To your point.

HOWARD: So, what do you think is dead. Obviously in our lifetime phonebooks died.

ERIC: So, follow the pattern, right? Phone books, print. Local TV was for us the next big thing to go.

HOWARD: Local TV?

ERIC: Local TV. The ability to reach people live and on demand, it we don't need it anymore. So, they're struggling. They're trying to come up with different ways to stay relevant. And again, back to my point of sort of cannibalizing themselves where if they post stuff on social media, if they give the content on social media, nobody needs to watch live at five or six thirty. So, you run into that thing of, “Hey, make sure you join us live at ten.” I want it now. I'm not going to stick around.

HOWARD: Yes, we’re also moving into two different worlds, the affluent and the poor. Ryan, what did you buy me on YouTube, you subscribed me, so I don't have to listen to those ads on YouTube? 

RYAN: YouTube Red.

HOWARD: And then there's also a YouTube TV isn't there? 

RYAN: Yeah, there is. I don’t know anything about it. 

HOWARD: But, like Spotify, they have the subscribers and then the ad driven ones and they have more subscribers than the free ones that have to listen to an ad because it's like, I read a deal on Facebook. I think it was from Professor Scott Galloway at NYU school, Scott said that the average ad revenue per Facebook user was something like $3 a month and they're like, Facebook, why don't you do a subscription revenue? I'll give you five bucks a month and what do they give at Netflix? $12 a month?

ERIC: It incrementally goes up.

HOWARD: I would give Facebook $12 a month if I didn't have to ever see another ad again. And that YouTube deal, I thought, do I really want to pay $12 a month just to never have an ad on YouTube. So, I thought, what the hell? I could never go back because every single YouTube video you got to sit there and wait for that five, four, three, two, one, skip. Now that's all gone. So, what's your predictions ten years from now? Magazines and newspapers, what would you say?

ERIC: That's tough. Well, newspapers, obviously, that ship has sailed. Every day, you would be, I mean, you can do it right now. You can go online and see which are the biggest newspaper chains that have recently shut down and recently closed. Radio stations. Consolidation is happening. So, you look at a market like here in Phoenix where we've had station I used to work for CBS, who merged with Channel Three. So, consolidation is going to be happening and what we would call you know, when you're airing two shows at the same time on different channels. You’re going to see the same newscast on Channel Three as you're going to see on Channel Five at night. That’s unheard of. We wouldn't ever do that before, but now because of the consolidation thing, you're seeing the same newscast on Channel Three as you're seeing on Channel Five. So, what's next? I really don't know. From a virtual reality standpoint, I just think the Apple TVs, the smart TVs, that's the future. Everybody's going to be on an app based sort of experience in their home. Yes. This is number one screen. They always call this the second screen, and this is now your number one screen. The number two screen will be your Apple tv or your smart TV device.

HOWARD: Well, I think people don't realize that if you look at your big screen, 90% of what you're seeing is all the periphery and if you hold your iPhone out in front of your big screen and pull it in, it's not very close and that covers up your big screen. Take Shark Tank. If I go and turn on Shark Tank, it's just all these commercials. I can go out to Google or YouTube, search that Shark Tank episode show, set it right there next to my beer. I mean my orange juice, cranberry juice cocktail and watch the whole thing and it's dark out. But you know, the scariest thing I ever have seen on the iPad? My two year old granddaughter. One day I was trying to get her to eat and she was on the iPad, so I tried to take it away from her. I had grabbed her arm to take it away. I lifted her up by her forearm and she was hanging onto her iPad like it was for dear life. Like if she let go of it, she'd be eaten by a hyena.

ERIC: My daughter’s the same. It's one of those things that you never thought you'd have to deal with, but it's very true. So many studies out there that basically say, the iPad, cocaine, same thing happens to the brain of a child and you just have to, as a parent, take precautions and take the right steps to eliminate screen time as much as you can. Because that experience, yes, the whoa, she’s gripped, this is a Kung Fu grip on my iPad. This is not right. And it affects their mood too. If they're on that thing for a couple hours, we can tell. And when we remove it from play time or an extended period of time, we see a difference. We really do in the moods of our kids.

HOWARD: But you know how you make money with that addiction? When you go out and drink with your four or five friends, everybody puts their smartphone leaves it on the table. And, the first wife that calls your drinking buddy, you pick up the tab. So, you tell your wife, “I'm going out drinking with my boys. This is serious time. Don't call me. The first wife that calls, picks up the tab”.

ERIC: You don’t even have to do the call thing. You just have to put your device in the middle of the table, and the first one to grab their device, just out of an addiction habit, the first one to grab their device, loses and has to pay the entire tab. You see that happen all the time. You can go out to dinner and you see somebody across away…

HOWARD: You go out to dinner. You go to Macayo's and you look at the table next to you and there’s a mom, dad, two kids, and they're all looking at their screen.

ERIC: Yes, everybody is. And I don't know how you want to get into the philosophy of it or the ethics of it. It's sad. But at the same, that's where we are today. So, as an advertiser or as a business, trying to get your message out there, that's where people are. You can't ignore that fact. So, what are you going to do to get their attention there? And so, when you go to Macayo's and you look down and you look across the restaurant and you see all those people, your business won't be there. You want to have their attention.

HOWARD: What it tells me, is this. The biggest lucrative businesses are the addiction businesses. Nicotine. They banned all the advertising. Caffeine. Starbucks. It's just an addiction. Chocolate is just cafermine. Nicotine, cafermine, and chocolate, caffeine, and coffee. It's the same molecule amphetamine monkey. And I think the reason that now Facebook and Google and Alphabet, the valuation is so high is because they're in the addiction business. And, they specifically know how to make it addictive by leaving an open loop, giving you notifications, given you noises and they're in the addiction business and it's going to backfire on them just like it backfired on Marlboro, just like it backfired on cigarettes. The companies knew they were gaining addiction by increasing the nicotine content. And now we know the social media people are increasing their addiction with open loop cycles, notifications, sounds, all these things that make your daughter have the Kung Fu grip. And, if they don't back off and it'll never come from Washington, D.C. because they're just too incompetent.

HOWARD: It's always going to come from the EU, who’s like the smart brother in the family and the Americans are the big tall bully dumb one, or a renegade attorney state general. Kind of go back to the Microsoft days, you know. So, what's going to really go after and possibly break up Facebook and Alphabet? It's going to be the EU. Everybody on a website is getting all their notifications to upgrade their user deal and that's not because of America. That's for the EU. That's why on Dentaltown, that's why you got that, man, we were with lawyers for days and days and days because the penalties are off the charts. But mark my words, with the social media deal that within the next five years, some attorney general is going to have it up to here, wants to make a name for himself and is going to go after these guys because it really is changing society.

ERIC: And, they’re changing as we speak. There's different algorithms and different newsfeed things happening that they're trying to rectify everything that has been done. And we see that firsthand with businesses coming to us saying, “Hey, what do these changes mean? What do I have to do?” And you just have to continue to roll with the punches and follow the policies basically. The most recent one was Facebook saying, “Okay, we're going to give less weight to businesses in the newsfeed.” So if you are a person sharing a photo, your post is going to get more weight than a business who's posting content. And again, that's just another way of saying, advertise. You advertise with us, you're going to see more exposure in our newsfeed.

HOWARD: Facebook has never been, in my opinion, been honest or sincere. I have nine years of college and whenever they have a privacy update, nine years of college and I read it and I don’t understand it and I'm pretty sure I'm smarter than the average kid in high school reading that policy.

ERIC: They got it for all of them. iTunes, Spotify, they're all going to send the policy ten pages long.

HOWARD: Eric Sperling, the Social Television Network, how do they contact you? Just go to www.stntv.com?

ERIC: Yes. So stntv.com is our website. There's a contact form right on that website. The way the process typically works is we'll schedule a strategy call with your practice to determine what your needs are and then we usually have what's called a pre-production meeting. We determine all the video content that is required and then after that we kind of schedule the shoot and typically those shoots can be done on location, at our studio, whatever works, whatever's most convenient.

HOWARD: Well you've been extremely informative and ...

ERIC: It’s been fun.

HOWARD: And thank you so much for coming over to the house and spending an hour with my homies. It was damn informative for me, so I know it was informative for them. Thank you so much.

ERIC: I saw you. You were taking legitimate notes.

HOWARD: Oh hell yeah, and I was texting. I emailed you and my website guy about those questions because I wanted to. And that's what keeps the show real. I'm a real dentist in Ahwatukee and my dental office is thirty years old. I know I look like I'm only thirty, but I'm actually fifty-five and so yeah we're keeping it real in Ahwatukee. Thank you so much for coming on the show.

ERIC: Alright, thank you Howard. Appreciate it.

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ERIC: Okay, so let's get started. Contact us today for your free advertising analysis tailored specifically to your business needs and goals. We want your business to achieve the highest return on your marketing investment. And now with the Social Television Network, we can help deliver. So, what are you waiting for? Contact us today.