The Art of Bold Branding: How Kentik is Standing Out with David Klein, CMO

Today we have a very exciting guest joining us: David Klein, from Kentik. In this episode, we'll be diving into the world of marketing and branding in the cybersecurity startup industry, with a particular focus on the success of Kentik's unique and engaging video adverts. David will share his insights on creating content that resonates with their target audience, the importance of being both funny and sensitive, and the challenges of defining a brand identity in a rapidly evolving marketplace. We'll also discuss the role of comedy in marketing, the impact of creative sessions on campaign development, and how to effectively reach and engage technical audiences. So, sit back, relax, and let's dive into another fascinating episode of the Cybersecurity Startup Revenue Podcast!

Anchor text: The infomercial
Anchor text: The Perfume Advert
Kentik
David Klein on LinkedIn

Transcript

Andrew Monaghan [00:00:00]:

Recently, I've been talking a lot about the need for startups in cybersecurity to be bolder in how they go to market and how they get the attention of security teams and security leaders. There are 3,400 vendors out there with whom you're competing for attention. We've got to do things differently to be noticed. Earlier this year, I saw a video on LinkedIn that made me stop and pay attention. It was different, it was bold, it was funny, and it was unique. So joining me on today's episode is David Klein, the CMO at Kentik who created that video with his team. Find out how it was conceived, the surprisingly few resources and little budget it took to create it, and how you can do something as bold as this if you are not already intrigued by the sweet scent of observability, you may be after this episode, don't go away. Welcome to the Cybersecurity Startup Revenue Podcast, where we help cybersecurity companies grow sales faster. I am your host, Andrew Monaghan. Our guest today is David Klein, the CMO at Kentik. David, welcome to the podcast.

David Klein [00:01:17]:

Thanks. I'm excited to be here.

Andrew Monaghan [00:01:19]:

I'm looking forward to our conversation. We're going to cover some interesting areas today. David? Well, David, the genesis of why you and I are talking today is I came across a video advert, I think on LinkedIn two, three months ago, and it was for your company, Kentik. And I watched it and I thought that was awesome. I have to talk to the person behind it, the CMO at Kentik, to understand much more about how you got to that point of doing an advert like that, how it's accepted inside the company, outside the company, how you're thinking about these things and all that sort of stuff. Now, rather than being a little bit cryptic about what it all was, I'm actually going to play it right now. For the audience, this is definitely better watched as opposed to just listened to. So for the audience right now, if you can you're not driving or running in the morning or whatever, I highly encourage you to hit pause and go to YouTube and go to the Kentik channel, K-E-N-T-I-K, or even in the show notes for this episode. There'll be a link there straight to it if that's better for you. And look for a video. And it starts with the word Kentique, K-E-N-T-I-Q-U-E. So if you can do that, if not, let me set the scene for those that are in audio-only mode right now, imagine you're about to watch a perfume advert, a video in the style of a perfume advert. It's in black and white and it's quite arty. All right, so I'll stop right there and let me hit play.

David Klein [00:03:07]:

Candy. What does observability smell like? Like success intrigue. The aroma of telemetry from your data center. Networking clouds, dancing in a symphony of delight. So much data, and multi-cloud, traffic across regions comes and goes. But the scent of observability is forever. Forever and ever. Delightful, Kentucky. We've already made it easy to see and understand anything you could possibly imagine about your network infrastructure. But now we've bottled up that ineffable feeling and captured the very essence of reliability. What does observability smell like? Cloud data network, data container, and data center data available now@kentique.com. No, it's actually Kentik. It's kentik.com.

Andrew Monaghan [00:04:18]:

So there you have it, David. The aroma of telemetry from your data center answers the question, what does observability smell like? So for those of us that watch this for the first time, it's fascinating, it's super interesting, it's funny. Captured my attention. I had to go back and watch it two or three times the first time I saw it because I thought, this is so different. Let's start with the basics. What were you trying to achieve with this? What's going on at Kentik that says this is something we should be doing?

David Klein [00:04:49]:

Hard, pivot into the fragrance market? Kentic historically has partnered with service providers, and large telcos, to provide visibility and security for their networks. And a few years ago, we really have grown into the enterprise market and worked with large enterprises to provide observability for their networks, be that on-prem, container, multi-cloud, et cetera. But we're still relatively new to that market and it's a fairly competitive space. There are a lot of organizations, a lot of vendors, if I may use that word, providing solutions to cloud providers, providing solutions for organizations that are migrating to the cloud, have migrated to the cloud. There are a lot out there, and I thought we needed to start doing things that are going to make us stand out. And so to capture people's attention and I'd much rather someone know who Kentic is kind of by any means necessary in this kind of earlier phase as we grow into the enterprise business.

Andrew Monaghan [00:05:50]:

And I think the parallels there for this audience are clear, right? I talk to people all the time. We've got 3400 companies in cybersecurity right now. The vast majority of those are going after the enterprise or the mid-market. You're trying to stand out even in the submarkets. There might be 25 to 50 companies in some of the submarkets of cybersecurity. So trying to figure out if you're a startup or you're relatively unknown compared to a bigger player or you're just one of the 30, you got to think about ways to stand out. So I really like the inspiration we can get from that. So when I think about that, you're trying to stand out, but this is a little bit different, right? This is not something, well, let's do a slightly different color or do a strap line on an email a little bit differently. This is wholesale change, let's say, or different perhaps than what was happening in the past. I'm curious how you went about getting I don't know what approval or buy-in or whatever it might be from the company, and say, yeah, we're going to try things that might be a little bit different and we need to go off and do that.

David Klein [00:06:52]:

In terms of approval. Sometimes you just need to take a leap of faith and put something out there, right? We have a really good founding and executive team and we let the team know we're going to do something a little different. And I think they saw it the day before it went live, but that's because we have such a good working relationship. I think for the sort of internal approval, it did help that we had the Infomercial video, a different video that came out first and we previewed that at a company, all hands for the whole company, and they were just bust. It was actually on-site in Phoenix and everyone was just laughing. We didn't know if it would work and we had 200 people just busting up and we knew, okay, this is funny, this is going to work. And so once you kind of set the sort of stage for something like that, people expect that to a degree. And market approval is a dangerous thing because you always need to make sure you have the buy-in of your customers and prospects and you want to make sure you're representing the brand appropriately and never punching down if you're saying anything that's controversial or funny. But it's marketing and if you want to stand out, you just have to be different, and sometimes being different could be something, as you're kind of referencing here, completely different. And we're looking for something that would get people's attention and we also wanted to put our message in there and it's not unintentional that a lot of Kentuck messaging around cloud observability is in the perfume ad, even though it's completely absurd.

Andrew Monaghan [00:08:17]:

Yeah, it is completely absurd, but it does stand out. I mean, when I watched it, it stuck with me, right? The sweet scent of observability was a line that stuck in my mind as I was watching it for the first time and certainly after that as well. So it sounds like you're building up internally and also externally now, this little bit of a culture of let's try something different, let's go and see if we can stand out. Is that something you're trying to do with the team that you have?

David Klein [00:08:45]:

I think from a go-to-market perspective, yes. It's interesting though, because you have to do that and sort of do the opposite, right? You need to do that deep research into personas and that deep product marketing so you understand the use cases and what really matters to your customers and prospects and then still be able to experiment and do these sorts of other ridiculous projects. And ideally, I think where we're heading as we have a lot of videos on deck right now, is to try to align them with those use cases. And so whether that's a security use case, whether that's a cloud compliance use case, whether that's a troubleshooting use case, we want really good, engaging, funny videos for all of that.

Andrew Monaghan [00:09:24]:

So if you were to guess how much of your time is doing more traditional foundational stuff to do with marketing, and how much of your time is spent doing things like the adverts here.

David Klein [00:09:33]:

This is an answer that I, on some levels, don't like very little time on these sorts of creative projects. I think the perfume video we shot, three or 4 hours, the whole thing, we probably only spent an hour, maybe half an hour messing with it ahead of time to set it up. And then David Hallen and my head of content, who's amazing, who directed and edited and produced this and wrote a bunch of it, just cut it up really quickly. And so not enough, I guess we probably do a brainstorming session once a month for about an hour for creative ideas. But, yeah, overall, I probably spend very little on these efforts and would like to be able to spend a little more time on them.

Andrew Monaghan [00:10:14]:

Take us into those brainstorming sessions. Right? What's the tee-up? Does everyone just come up with ideas, or are you sitting there going, okay, let's go to a different direction, or go this direction? How are you running those?

David Klein [00:10:25]:

We've done full-team ones before. Those are infrequent. Those probably happen once a year, once every six months. And that's kind of fun. You just allow everyone to yell out whatever wild thing they think of, and you kind of just try to facilitate some ideas. And sometimes really absurd things come out of it that we kind of check mark for later. And sometimes they're fairly practical. I released a meme calendar, I think, in February this year that people really liked I just took all the memes we made and put them in a calendar and sent it to people. And that came from that session, which was really fun for, like, network engineering memes. But then we'll do smaller sessions with the creative team or me and the head of content, and those are sort of just very rapid-fire. Throw out some puns, throw out some ideas. It doesn't matter. It's hard to explain what a session like that, I guess, is because you're kind of in the moment. I think in our last session we talked about maybe dressing like Macho Man and yelling about the cloud. And I really want to do like an AWS to BWS to CWS type of joke, which, of course, makes no sense. That's a terrible macho man impersonation. Also, I'm not in a position, nor should I be, to request an employee to dress like Macho Man for obvious reasons. So there's always, after the creative session, a lot of what are we actually talking about? But the last one was a little more focused. This is going to be a long answer. We looked at the use cases we developed and said, okay, we just went straight through the use cases. So cloud troubleshooting. All right, what's funny about that? What's not funny about that? Security. What's funny? What's not funny? And it just kind of started going down that list.

Andrew Monaghan [00:12:00]:

Comedy is notoriously in the eye, the beholder, right? So what I find hilarious might not be what most people find hilarious. What do you think about that?

David Klein [00:12:10]:

That's a great question. Part of it, is we think about our audience. And our audience is often network engineers, and they tend to be fairly tenured. They've kind of maybe seen the world shift from primarily physical devices and data centers to the cloud. And I think we understand that perspective a little bit. And more and more audiences are also security engineers and cloud teams. Cloud engineers, platform engineers, and infrastructure engineers. And their leadership, a slightly different mentality. Possibly looking at their professional, at least from a cloud-first perspective. Maybe they care a lot less about the network. Maybe they think less about the network. Maybe the network is just a burden. So we have this bifurcated audience where one side of the network is the world, and the other side of the network is sort of a nuisance or an afterthought. And we try to think possibly about those different audiences and what that might mean. You get into really dangerous territory once you start trying to stereotype or make blanket statements about any group of people. That being said, when you're thinking about something like this, it's sort of like, well, what if their core matters to them or what matters to them about something like this? I agree there's no such thing as anything that's universally funny, but I don't know. We're fortunate to have a lot of really good engineers on our team, too. So we'll talk to them about an idea and they think it's funny. We think it's funny. We'll try to get as diverse of a group as possible to hear about it before we really go through with it. But again, there is an element of a leap of faith. And also the execution matters, right? Like the perfume video is so dumb. It's so objectively stupid. But making sure we kept it moving really quickly. And we argued about where to cut for the Shakespeare laugh part or the piano keyboard playing part. Just cutting it so the pacing felt right. So you're kind of getting hit with visual punchlines, if you will, pretty quickly. That matters. And again, David Holland on my team who runs content, he's just got a lot of vocal range and so he did the background voices, which I can't do. And his voice is just funny. So that helps, right? So that affords you the ability to kind of do more. Again, so no one straight answer. But it's strange to talk about comedy and marketing in the same breath, but it's like they're the same in that what matters is deeply understanding your audience and what's going to matter to them.

Andrew Monaghan [00:14:23]:

Well, I think that both the infomercial one and the Kentique one. It seems like you truly do understand your audience. I mean, you're talking about things that I would imagine they'd be nodding their head to a little bit and chuckling along a little bit because they kind of get it right. And if you're moving, it sounds like to do use case things as well. That's the opportunity, I guess, for Kentic to say, we get you right, we understand you.

David Klein [00:14:48]:

Yeah, I completely agree. Right. Because if you're going to purchase Kentuck or any other solution for anything, it's not just what does your software do, what does your service do, what does your SaaS do? It's also like, who are you? Who's your vision? Like, you understand me and where I'm going, are you going to evolve with me? And I think that hopefully helps build that relationship, that we understand who this audience is and we care about the same things. Like we care about reliability and network performance. And we also understand some of the inside jokes. We get to write those, too. We had to check with some of the network engineers on our team. Like, does this make sense? Greg talking about Prodigy or whatever old dial-up stuff, right? That's fairly universal for someone in this age group. So there's a bunch of that to lean on.

Andrew Monaghan [00:15:37]:

Well, since you brought that up, let's play the infomercial advert for the group now. Again, better to watch this rather than just listen. But if you are listening, think of the cheesy 90s early 2000s infomercials you might have seen in late-night TV. And this is about, I think, a minute and ten or 20 seconds. So just stick with it and let's come back after that time.

David Klein [00:16:03]:

Are you frustrated with the inability to see what's happening in your network? Where in the world is all this traffic going?

Andrew Monaghan [00:16:10]:

I can't run my infrastructure like this.

David Klein [00:16:13]:

Have you adopted a hybrid or multi-cloud architecture? And now your cloud costs are through the roof. I can't stop racking up these egress charges and I don't know what to do. Is it taking too long to troubleshoot issues and ensure an exceptional experience for your customers? Is it the data center? The cloud? The Internet? Why is this so hard? Why? Well, fear not, because help is on the way. Introducing Kentik, your new best friend in network observability. With Kentic, you can ensure reliable, cost-effective, and secure network infrastructure at scale from the Internet to the data center to the container to the cloud. Dazzle your manager by staying on top of critical network infrastructure. We're going to lose the Henderson account. Their latency is through the roof and we don't know why. It was their EKS instance. In US West Two, one of their namespaces had a rogue pod that sabotaged the whole cluster. We sniffed it out, we shut it down. It's finally over. Delight your customers by stopping network outages before they start. It's DNS. It's always DNS. Develop complete visibility into on-prem and cloud. I can see everything. Kentic is a trusted network observability partner for service providers and enterprises alike. This offer is good for network cloud and infrastructure engineers, cloud architects, NetOps DevOps, SREs, people who like to look at stuff, and so much more. To receive your trial of Kentic, call 1866 Go Kentuck today. Operators are standing by and waiting to assist you on your Observability journey. That's 1866 Go Kentuck. But wait, there's more. Kentuck is now available on the World Wide Web. Simply use Netscape, Navigator or any of your other favorite Internet browsers to go to http www.kentic.com. What are you waiting for? Go Kentuck today.

Andrew Monaghan [00:18:42]:

So there you have it. Wait, there's more. I love that towards the end. Wait, there's more. And then I guess the 90s reference, I guess, where you say, go to http www. I thought that was fantastic.

David Klein [00:19:00]:

That's the thing too. It doesn't mean we can all get deep on use cases and specifics, but anyone that was around during that time remembers that. And a lot of people who work on the network have been in their career for a while and remember the days, so it's fun to do those things.

Andrew Monaghan [00:19:16]:

So as you've done these two so far, how do you think about measurements and knowing whether they're working? What does working mean for you?

David Klein [00:19:24]:

It's quantitative and it's anecdotal. Like quantitatively, we're getting a good number of views, and people tend to watch at least 35% of the videos, even if cold, and they don't know us. And that's actually pretty good. There's the anecdotal thing, I think I've had a couple of investors shoot me notes saying people in their network have seen it without them sending it to them and say they really liked it. And we have partners at AWS who've reached out to us and different team members and said, oh my gosh, this is great. And so you start that anecdotal evidence of other people in the company saying that it was sent to them by someone else. They didn't have anything to do with it. That's a pretty good signal that it's resonating. Marketing, like anything else, is all about continuous improvement. I recognize if our community was larger and we had a bigger distribution model and we had, let's say, 100,000 LinkedIn followers instead of 10,000, it would exponentially enable us to kind of increase our engagement with something like this. So while I'm really pleased with the initial experience and outcomes, it's also like a stark reminder that we need to grow our opportunities to share things like, yeah, quantitative anecdotal. And there's some sort of little poking at myself for knowing that we need larger ways to distribute this content as it grows.

Andrew Monaghan [00:20:45]:

Has anyone on a deal inside Salesforce said the source is the Kentik advert? That's how they first heard about us.

David Klein [00:20:52]:

We did get one person that emailed us that I think was a former customer and was interested in looking at Kentik again, and they just said, hey, this video is amazing. It reminded me I wanted to reach out. So we did have that Direct, which is awesome, but I tend not to view this as this. You're right. It's very rare anyone creates content, especially content that's brand related and not lead conversion related, where someone's just going to see it and immediately move all the way through the funnel and be like, that's where it started. I think looking at it like that is maybe not the right methodology because you're going to set yourself up for failure because it's very difficult to assign some sort of dollar amount to something like this. And that also makes it so challenging. Right. If you're trying to incorporate this into a marketing strategy and how you present this to the board or you present this to other executives, when you're calculating ROI, this has to become part of a bigger picture. And then there are mechanisms by which you can measure awareness and measure engagement. And we, like everyone else, could probably improve how we do that as well.

Andrew Monaghan [00:21:54]:

I kind of feel like it's a red herring to chase after an ROI on a video. A hard ROI on a video like this. Like these ones, right? Yeah. How do you measure that? I look at your channel. Right. So your usual videos let's call your usual videos where you've got experts talking about various things, detecting and mitigating DDoS I'm seeing in here exploring your network data container performance monitoring. These get 200 I got 278. 258 views. 487 views. 259 views. And you've got 642 subscribers to the YouTube channel. And then you've got Kentique. Your perfume advert so far has 23,000 views and the infomercial has 45,000 views. Right. So I just kind of look at that and go, it's not that we have to ignore the expert videos, but there's got to be a role sprinkling in these other ones as well. Right. The two must go together, surely.

David Klein [00:22:52]:

They must go together. And this is like an early stage, as we figure early process for us, we figure this out and as we look at the brand, the degree to which they are part of who Kentuck is is yet to be determined. I guess right now, I think we're going to continue to make them because they're effective and they're fun, to be honest. For me, as someone who's, I guess, managing the process and also very involved in it, it's important that we do it as quickly and as low cost as possible.

Andrew Monaghan [00:23:24]:

Well, that's a great point.

David Klein [00:23:25]:

Right? Yeah.

Andrew Monaghan [00:23:25]:

It's not like you're going out and hiring a video team and booking a studio and racking up tens of thousands of dollars. I don't know. Is it done on an iPhone or a digital SLR? Is that kind of model canteen.

David Klein [00:23:38]:

We did in a digital SLR? And again, David's talent is very talented. I was right there with them in his house. He's like, oh, we need a perfume table. And he just drew it by hand and printed it and slapped it on the thing. I was like, oh, my gosh. I was like, you are fast. I did work with the director, Brent Hodge, who I have a friend of mine who's amazing, who did the Bronis documentary and the Kasfarley documentary and a lot of really great documentaries on the know. He helped us put that together really quickly and affordably, and he's just incredible. But now that we've done one on our own with the Kentik video, we're going to keep doing a lot on our own until we have a couple of high-production value ones I want to shoot. But I think you have to earn the right to do that. So we have to be in a position where we really are viewing, seeing a lot of success with these videos. But I have some I really badly want to shoot, but it's pretty expensive to get. Like, I need a house that's burning on fire. I need a bunch of people on the ground. You start thinking about these really big grandiose sets. You have to be very careful that's.

Andrew Monaghan [00:24:35]:

You have to start calling a lot of favors.

David Klein [00:24:37]:

Right, exactly. Never mind. I'm not going to make arson jokes. That's probably not appropriate.

Andrew Monaghan [00:24:47]:

Let's learn a bit more about you. I'm going to ask you for three numbers to be more than 35, please.

David Klein [00:24:54]:

Okay. 715. 18.

Andrew Monaghan [00:24:57]:

Seven. Okay. What is your favorite summer pastime?

David Klein [00:25:01]:

That is a tough one, I think hanging out with my family and my daughter. Okay.

Andrew Monaghan [00:25:06]:

Doing anything in particular or just any family time?

David Klein [00:25:10]:

She's four and a half. So we do a lot of axe throwing and aggressive mountain climbing and extreme sports. We go to the beach, we color, we do stuff like that.

Andrew Monaghan [00:25:21]:

All right, 15 is beach or mountains?

David Klein [00:25:24]:

Oh, well, I've already kind of shown my hand. I'll say beach.

Andrew Monaghan [00:25:28]:

Any particular beaches that you love?

David Klein [00:25:31]:

We live in outer Richmond in San Francisco, so we spend some time at Ocean Beach, which is just a not descriptive name for a beach.

Andrew Monaghan [00:25:39]:

Right. Like most beaches, it's right by the ocean.

David Klein [00:25:42]:

Yeah.

Andrew Monaghan [00:25:43]:

Water is cold, though, at Ocean Beach.

David Klein [00:25:45]:

It is really cold, and I am not particularly strong against that cold. It gets its good. It's good. It makes you feel like you're alive.

Andrew Monaghan [00:25:56]:

Yeah, it does. I was born and bred in Scotland, so I know what cold seawater feels like. Actually, when I learned to swim, our town that we grew up in is on the North Sea, basically, and it had a saltwater swimming pool that they just basically took the water out of the North Sea and put into it and they say they heated it. I have no confidence whatsoever that the heater ever worked. I just remember being so cold and my mom would force us to go there for swimming lessons. So I have a love-hate relationship with seawater and swimming pools. All right, 18 tea or coffee?

David Klein [00:26:33]:

Oh, coffee. Without a doubt. I drink an absurd amount of coffee.

Andrew Monaghan [00:26:38]:

Any particular kind of coffee or what's the right word? Choice of type of cup of coffee.

David Klein [00:26:45]:

I don't really have a penchant for artisanal coffees. I'll kind of drink anything like I'll drink tons of junk coffee. I'll drink good coffee. As long as it's hot and caffeinated, I'm good to go.

Andrew Monaghan [00:26:56]:

Hot and caffeinated, there we go. One of the things I thought about was Kentik is making this change from selling to service providers into selling to enterprises, right? So you're into a bigger audience, let's say, of potential customers. I'm wondering how the business model fits into this. If you were still just going after the service providers, would this have so much play? Right, given it's such a small audience? And if it's a sales-led company where you're really just trying to go for the traditional demo, POV closed kind of environment versus maybe freemium, is that a freemium better model for this type of thing? I don't know if you got any thoughts about that.

David Klein [00:27:38]:

Yeah, interesting. But we still work and sell to many, many large service providers. We've just added the enterprise part of our business in the last few years and some of those service providers are huge, these large telcos. But I do agree that if it were only a service provider, again, part of it, our brand awareness is fairly strong in the service provider segment as we've been working with them for a pretty long time. And that's kind of what the company was founded on. So I don't think this would have as much value because the purpose is different. The purpose is also just like you yourself, Andrew, be like, oh, who's Kentuck? What the hell is now trying to answer that question for the enterprise audience many of whom don't know who we are just yet. So I don't think it would be as effective if it was just a service provider segment in terms of we currently don't have a trial, we don't have a freemium model. Yes, I think if we had a freemium model, this would enable faster conversions. This would enable faster conversions. Yes. But we're certainly not in a position to shift our current go-to-market strategy based on the success or relative success of a couple of ridiculous videos. But it's worth thinking about.

Andrew Monaghan [00:28:46]:

I'll tell you a quick story. I've been doing a series of briefings for CEOs and CROs at cybersecurity companies on its basically five barriers to growth right now that I'm seeing both from the podcast episodes I do, but also my consulting that I do with companies and. One of the things I talk about is we're not being bold enough as an industry. If you're trying to compete in your submarket with 50 companies, the same old words in a different order are not going to stand out. Right. You need to think about things differently. And one of the things I do is I show the advert, right? And one of the briefings I did, the CEO said, yeah, but we're a quite professional company. We like to think of ourselves as solving important problems and things like that. This light-hearted approach isn't really what we're all about. I have my thoughts about that. I'm curious, as you hear that, what your initial reaction is.

David Klein [00:29:41]:

Well, this gets into discussions about the brand level and it's unique to every company and organization and it depends on what they do. This may not work for them or who knows, long run. Perhaps this becomes a challenge for Know one thing we're grappling with right now. Just to begin internal response that looks untoward is Doug Midori on my team, who's amazing, I think the Washington Post dubbed him the man that can see the Internet. He does a ton of really great work on the impact of the war in Russia, on the Ukrainian people and their access to the Internet. And he does a lot of work globally around internet rights and the people's ability to access free and open information and it's pretty serious stuff. And he works with a lot of journalists at The Washington Post and the New York Times, et cetera. And that's very starkly different from something absolutely absurd that we're running like this. And so from a brand perspective the Kentuck brand needs to be able to hold together in one coherent world the work that Doug is doing that truly is serious and meaningful and has, like, a very much political slant in a lot of ways and something knows, absurd. And I don't think we figure that out just yet. It's on my mind. And of course, there are other inputs into the brand and I'm taking this long-winded answer to say to the CEO or you were speaking with, there are so many variables that can help determine what is best or arguably best for a brand as it grows and changes and so it may not make sense. I do agree with you though, especially in B to B, being bold is an advantage and allows you to stand out and allows you to move faster, but it comes with its challenges. Right? And so we're kind of looking at that right now and trying to figure out, as we start to look at the brand level, who Kentuck is, how do we fit these pieces together.

Andrew Monaghan [00:31:21]:

Yeah, I like how you tackled that. Thinking back to the discussion that we had, I think a couple of things came to my mind. One was that we don't confuse professional with boring.

David Klein [00:31:32]:

Yeah, exactly.

Andrew Monaghan [00:31:33]:

You can be professional and you can talk about things that matter in a business environment without it having to be the same blue that everyone else's uses in the same words in a different order, right? There are things that you can do to stand out. And maybe you're right. Maybe a perfume advert isn't your jam, right? But the question is, well, what is? What are you doing to stand out then? If that not it? There has to be something that you have to do differently. I was reminded that I had an interview on the podcast with Andy Raskin about nine months. Go, Andy. Right? So one of the things that came up with the discussion now, this idea of an emotional narrative doesn't sit well with technical. And Andy. And Andy called BS. He said, you know, they're human too, right? They have emotions, believe it or true.

David Klein [00:32:22]:

We don't work with DevOps and developers directly as much. But when I was running marketing for LightStep, I can't remember who I was getting an argument with because we did a couple of out-there things. Nothing like this, though, and getting the whole standard, I think, really trite and tired argument. Oh, like developers don't like to be marketed to. Developers don't like to be marketed to. Well, one, pretty much no one likes to be marketed to. And then two, who is covering their laptop with a billion stickers? Developers. That's marketing. That's what marketing is. Whether they like it or the marketers like it. It doesn't matter. It's just finding the right method in the right vehicle and the right platform, where both parties, the people who are ultimately your audience and the people marketing the audience, both feel like that it's a good relationship and a healthy relationship and one where everyone wins and is happy about the experience. And so it might be for developers. Maybe it's a much lighter touch and there's stickers and there's comics and there are things that may resonate more with them, where they feel like the process itself doesn't make them feel wrong or have some sort of disillusionment with who they are, if you want to take it to that level. But going back to these videos and the brand-level questions you're asking, you have to kind of project that outward to the global audience, which is exceptionally diverse, both in terms of whether you're a user and influencer a buyer, whether you're just in geography and different cultural backgrounds. Right. It's really a diverse spectrum of people. And so it becomes challenging to kind of fit that into a cohesive global brand. But that's now, it's fun because it's hard.

Andrew Monaghan [00:33:54]:

Yeah. David, I'm going to put you in the spot a little bit right now. So I was just thinking that one of the submarkets in cyber is governance risk and compliance. I think someone's going to tell me I'm wrong and they're probably going to be correct that I'm wrong, but I want to say that right now there are maybe 150 companies in the government risk and compliance space in cyber, right? So let's imagine we're the CMO at one of those companies and they've got this amazing product and they go amazing people developing the product, and they've got amazing salespeople, but they're just not getting much traction. They're just not breaking out. I'm wondering if you've got any advice for them about how they might get going with thinking differently like this, not copying your perfume advert. But how might a company start becoming a little bit more bold?

David Klein [00:34:38]:

Who would their audience be?

Andrew Monaghan [00:34:40]:

Their audience would be GRC professionals at companies, and major enterprises, who all they do is think about risk and compliance and governance of data and governance of the assets of the company.

David Klein [00:34:55]:

I mean, kind of shooting from the hip here. I don't know that audience particularly well, but I'm guessing maybe look at the extremes of the things that impact what matters most to them. So is there something where a handful of milliseconds or just a few bytes of data leaking is enough to cause some giant thing? And can the team start to lean into something that seems innocuous, but ultimately is quite problematic and perhaps is an existential threat? And is there a way to take what they know is a pain point, use the case and build that to a bigger narrative that's emotionally resonant or the converse? Right, sorry.

Andrew Monaghan [00:35:30]:

Well, I was going to say that some context is that the world has lived and breathed on spreadsheets for a long time. There are a bunch of solutions they use, but it's almost augmenting rather than completely replacing spreadsheets. So the spreadsheet is the evil thing in place that no one likes to work with. I would guess very few do, anyway, I'm sure there are some spreadsheet people that will be offended by that, but very few want to continue running their client's program on Excel all the time.

David Klein [00:36:02]:

Got it. People love their spreadsheets. So if your competitor is a spreadsheet, it could be a difficult competitor. But weirdly enough, yeah, I would find out what it is, whether it's keeping the spreadsheets up to date. But there are ways to show, I think, just to make it feel real and hit home. What happens when perhaps because of permission errors or other issues with compliance from the spreadsheet, like, what shows what the outcome of that is or what the outcome is for that person? Whether it's a video, we could brainstorm 100 different ways to shoot a 22nd video about this, but it's finding a thing that's to be emotionally resonant and getting that in front of that prospect. And you know better than I, as a sales professional, right? Like, why now? Why switch from what they're using? You got to be able to still answer those questions, and none of that's easy. But once you get one first big win in, you could hopefully leverage that conversation and the ROI from that to have other conversations.

Andrew Monaghan [00:37:02]:

Well, what I love about what you did there on the fly and I apologize for putting you on the spot, was that the foundation is the problems you solve for people. The emotional state they're in as they're trying to deal with these problems and then thinking about, rather than just saying, frustrated with spreadsheets, what are the ways you might represent that or develop an image or a video that might hit home around that beyond just using pretty bland words or images to do that, right.

David Klein [00:37:31]:

Yeah. There are so many ways to put a campaign like that together. I think ideas are infinite, ideas are cheap. I think in this world where NFMA says such a blanket statement, it's really breaking through the noise. Even if you have something that merits breaking through the noise is still how do you get that in front of the right people? Part of that there's certainly LinkedIn and other platforms that can help with targeting, et cetera, but really, I think it's important to build those communities and understand the audience. And so people are hopefully sharing what you have to say with each other. It doesn't have to be an absurd video. Maybe it's just such a coherent analysis of why something is out of compliance or at risk because of this antiquated model. And it could just be like almost a mission statement, a vision for the company on a blog if it's just so clearly spoken. I mean, it could be a Twitter thread if it's clear enough, that could break through the noise. So it doesn't have to be some sort of visual masterpiece. It's ultimately like, what's the argument that's being made? I think people, especially what's nice, and why I love marketing to technical audiences is that they tend to be intelligent people, they tend to be thoughtful, and they tend to care about what they're doing. Now, that's not always true for everyone, but that means you're able to speak with them at a level of discourse that you might not be able to in other types of marketing. And so whoever you're speaking about here could probably take advantage of that. I imagine their audience is similar.

Andrew Monaghan [00:38:53]:

Yeah. Going back to the infomercial, you said that you ran that internally first and people thought it was hilarious. Was that the original purpose?

David Klein [00:39:02]:

We ran it once it was done, yeah.

Andrew Monaghan [00:39:04]:

But was that the original purpose, just as an internal video?

David Klein [00:39:09]:

When we did our initial actually, Team Brainstorm, I think one of the ideas that came up was the Kentik infomercial, and I was like, obsessing about it. Then we just decided one day we filmed it. That took us two days to film and edit and shoot. That one took us time. But I remember one of our founders called me. He's like, what are you doing? I was like, oh, I'm busy filming an infomercial. He's like, what? For what? For Kentuck. He's like, what are you worry? I think I said, don't worry about it. It'll be good, I think how the conversation ended.

Andrew Monaghan [00:39:39]:

Don't worry, everything's going to be okay.

David Klein [00:39:41]:

Yeah, but again, in marketing, you got to take risks. And what's the point of marketing if you're not either helping someone, helping the sales and the company and the product team understand the audience, or finding a great way to engage with that audience? And that's it. That's what marketing is. There are other things, sure, but I mean, ultimately, if it sounds like it's going to be fun for the team, it's probably going to be enjoyed by everyone.

Andrew Monaghan [00:40:06]:

And you said something earlier on about not punching down. I kind of feel like what's the downside to doing something like this? Might be different, right? So long as you're not offending people or breaking some cardinal rules about, as you say, punching dimes to the little guys. Or it might be, I guess, the worst thing that happened. It falls flat and it's boring, right?

David Klein [00:40:25]:

I think, yeah. If it falls flat, you probably lose some political capital for other endeavors, or people start to question time spent, et cetera. I think the punching is really important to me. When you're doing a video like this, punching down should be viewed in the most broad terms possible. And if there's even an inkling that it could offend someone, it's not worth doing because the joke is never so good that it's worth upsetting anyone and it's never worth someone's feelings being hurt for something that's ultimately, like in the grand scheme of life, not that important. We had a joke around, I'm not going to say who when we were doing the httpp http blah blah, we had a joke around some antiquated Internet tech that we realized was owned by a current customer and they probably would never notice or care. But it's just like, what if or anything that gets into the realm of being offensive to a particular type of person. It's just one, that's wrong, and then two, it's just not worth it. It's a video for a company, and so you can be funny and you can be engaging without doing any of those things, but it takes more work because it takes, like, a very critical review. I like to watch a video and pretend I'm a different type of person and watch the content and think about how they might experience this and really try to imagine how it would feel because it helps me at least cover a broader set of bases for how it could be perceived. And I think in my role or anyone running a marketing team, anything you're putting out? And that's what's so dangerous about even though social media is wonderful dangerous about social media, anyone can fire off anything from the company and it represents the entirety of the organization, whether they intend to or not. And it's so important to be sensitive and thoughtful about how people might experience those things. And I think videos like this are no different. It's just that under a microscope because it's with the intent to be funny. And so, yeah, as I'm thinking about the macho man thing, are we going to make fun of really strong people like no, we're not. We're going to elevate them. But you have to think about it.

Andrew Monaghan [00:42:19]:

Yeah, you do. But so far the two that I've seen are I love them. Fantastic. Right. And in my role, what I do in my business is I'm looking at it for companies. I'm trying to understand what companies do. I'm looking at a lot of different companies and things do blend together. Right. What happens a lot is I get asked, have you heard of this company? I have. But trying to remember exactly where they fit in sometimes is really difficult. And when something comes along that makes me stop and pay attention and listen and, you know, I remember what Kentik does from the perfume know, to me, it seems like maybe there are some other folks like me that had the same impression. They now remember what business you're in. So I applaud you for taking that risk and going off and trying something a little bit different. Love the conversation, David, today, if someone wants to get in touch with you and seek some inspiration or go deeper or talk about this sort of stuff, what's the best way to do that?

David Klein [00:43:12]:

LinkedIn is probably best for me. I am on Twitter at Devopera. D-E-V-O-P-E-R-A. But I don't use it that frequently. But LinkedIn is great. My Kentik email is open. D-K-L-E-I-N that's dklein@kentik.com. Yeah. Say howdy good.

Andrew Monaghan [00:43:31]:

Well, I encourage you to do that. If we can get just a few more companies in my world, in cybersecurity doing things a little bit differently, maybe it's not an advert, maybe it's something else that would be awesome to see. So I hope this inspiration gets other people's create flowing and we can see some changes happening and some more companies standing up. So, David, love the conversation today and hope to chat with you again in the future.

David Klein [00:43:54]:

Thanks, Andrew. I appreciate it.