[Top Agency Series] Digital Agency Elite Minds Live from Colorado

Brian Cosgrove is the Principal and Chief Data Strategist at BrainDo. BrainDo provides a diverse mix of digital services, including marketing, experience, and partnership. Over Brian’s 15-plus-year career in the digital marketing space, he’s created innovative strategies for Fortune 500 brands, including Digitas and Razorfish. He also co-founded the digital marketing application at TPG, garnering over $1 million in revenue his freshman year.

Susan Brake is the Senior Vice President at Development Counsellors International (DCI), a 60-year leader in marketing destinations. Additionally, DCI specializes in economic development and tourism marketing. Before taking on the Senior Vice President role, Susan served as DCI’s Vice President, where she was responsible for growing the digital department.

Philip Hill is the CEO and President of Purebred Marketing. The Atlanta-based marketing agency creates digital marketing strategies and provides services such as SEO, web design and development, and email marketing. Philip is an avid dog lover and launched his first business in the pet space while attending the University of Alabama. He’s also launched several e-commerce startups.

Glen Moore is the Co-founder and CEO of Bear Fox Marketing, which provides expert SEO services depending on your company’s needs. Glen is an author and a 20-year marketing executive veteran. Glen’s previous ventures include a four-year stint as the Vice President at PetIQ and six years as a marketing executive at Schiff Nutrition International.

Duncan Alney is the Founder and CEO of Firebelly Marketing, an Indianapolis-based social media marketing agency. Firebelly has partnered with major brands such as Sony, Netflix, Fiji Water, and Cisco. Duncan is a dad, partner, son, and servant leader. He draws from all those titles to create a set of company standards and values and considers himself the happiest problem-solver. A self-professed communicator and social media lover, Duncan also hosts The Firebelly Social Show, a podcast featuring food and beverage brands on a mission to make the world better.

Peter Cunningham is the CEO of Evolve Healthcare Marketing (EHM), a data-driven agency focused on generating leads. EHM’s primary clients include B2C medical practices and B2B healthcare companies. A father of three, two of which have special needs, Peter heavily relies on talented physicians and trustworthy healthcare providers. These are the motivating factors that inspire Peter and EHM to help the prosperity of healthcare organizations. They also donate 1% of the company’s gross sales to charities serving the needs of children suffering from chronic illnesses.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

• Brian Cosgrove talks about his company BrainDo and the services it offers
• The first step of consulting for BrainDo clients
• Susan Brake discusses Development Counsellors International and the services it offers
• How does Susan groom leaders at the firm?
• Philip Hill details his company and the services Purebread Marketing offers
• Philip explains the mistakes with affiliate marketing
• Glen Moore talks about his agency and the services Bear Fox Marketing offers
• Duncan Alney discusses Firebelly Marketing and the services it provides
• Peter Cunningham talks about the services Evolve Healthcare Marketing offers

In this episode…

Even the smartest, most talented, and most successful executives don’t have all the answers. That’s why Jason Swenk, agency coach, advisor, and mentor at Digital Agency Elite created the high-level Jason Swenk Mastermind.

At the Mastermind, a community of agency founders, owners, and entrepreneurs gather to connect, fellowship, share, and ask questions to avoid mistakes and scale businesses. If you want to learn some of the biggest tips, tricks, and advice from some of the smartest masterminds in business, stay tuned!

Join Dr. Jeremy Weisz, host of the Inspired Insider Podcast, as he speaks to some of the smartest minds on the planet, live at the Jason Swenk Mastermind. Dr. Weisz chats with Brian Cosgrove of BrainDo, Susan Brake of Development Counsellors International, Philip Hill of Purebred Marketing, Glen Moore of Bear Fox Marketing, Duncan Alney of Firebelly Marketing, and  Peter Cunningham of Evolve Healthcare Marketing.

Resources mentioned in this episode

• Jason Swenk on LinkedIn
• Jason Swenk Mastermind
• Smart Agency Masterclass
• Brian Cosgrove on LinkedIn
• BrainDo
• Susan Brake on LinkedIn
• Invest In Holland
• Development Counsellors International
• Philip Hill on LinkedIn
• Philip Hill on Instagram
• Purebred Marketing
• Glen Moore on LinkedIn
• Bear Fox Marketing
• Duncan Alney on LinkedIn
• Firebelly Marketing
• Peter Cunningham on LinkedIn
• Evolve Healthcare Marketing

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:15

You are listening to Inspired Insider with your host, Dr. Jeremy Weisz.

Jeremy Weisz 0:22

Hey, Dr. Jeremy Weisz here from Inspired Insider. This episode is going to be a little bit different. This is live. I’m at a high level Mastermind in Colorado right now. And I’m going to be interviewing some of the top entrepreneurs and what they’re working on and some of their biggest tips and tricks and advice, so I hope you enjoy.

Jeremy Weisz, here. I’m live actually in Colorado with the Jason Swenk Mastermind. I’m here with Brian. He’s one of the smartest marketing minds and business minds in the world. Brian, no pressure. So Brian, just tell people your name and your company and what you do.

Brian Cosgrove 1:19

Alright, I’m Brian Cosgrove, my company’s BrainDo. And we provide a number of different marketing consulting services for large enterprise companies.

Jeremy Weisz 1:28

Ok. And so you know, someone I know, one of the things that you do is you when you talk, it’s sometimes above my head, because you analyze all that data that’s coming in from all these channels. And you work with large enterprise, sometimes e-commerce companies. So if someone comes to you like that, like we want to get a hold of our data, so we know what products services we should deploy what we should be doing. Talk about when they first come to you, what do you start doing with that

Brian Cosgrove 2:00

person that we end up doing is, you know, we very often do a bit of an audit to try to figure out what kind of data they’re actually collecting and how it’s being captured. And we spend quite a bit of time making sure that we’ve actually got all of the right capture points, the data systems, that we’re sending the data to be able to collect them all that we’re compliant with all the privacy restrictions with all the different legal pieces, and that we’re sending data to the right tools they’re going to be using moving forward,

Jeremy Weisz 2:26

what’s the goal, like when they come to you like, Brian, here’s what we want to accomplish.

Brian Cosgrove 2:30

Quite frankly, they want their data to be available to them start serving their business in a bigger and bigger way, some more than anything we’re focused on, is looking right there at the frontlines of the instrumentation to make sure that everything’s 100% locked in. And it’s future proof, so that we can send data to any different platform, they need to that we’ve got a really, really solid handle. But we’ve wrangle the data for both the improvement of the website or application as a physical product, as well as all the different channels, all the different traffic driving activities they have leading to it. So we spent a lot of time untangling a lot of that.

Jeremy Weisz 3:11

What are some examples for people like where you’re pulling in data from

Brian Cosgrove 3:16

We will take that data and the tools like Adobe Analytics, Google Analytics, amplitude, Mixpanel, things like that a lot of the different like clickstream tools. But we’ve actually been doing a lot more with taking data to companies first party, because from privacy standpoint, for companies that are bold, want to be a bit ahead of the curve of where things are going, they’d like to own their own data, they’d like to have first direct access to it. And that gives us the ability to bring in a lot more detail than they might be, then we might be able to squeeze in to the fixed schemas fixed kind of data structure that those other tools have for you know, they only have so many places for you to put the data.

Jeremy Weisz 3:54

So the largest companies are, they’re kind of fragmented, they have their data in all these different places, and you kind of bring it into one source and then analyze it?

Brian Cosgrove 4:03

We do so we aggregate all the data from other different marketing platforms, the equity data from their back end. So in an e-commerce, either order management system back end, but we’ll bring in data from any CRM and any other systems that they have. We’ll work with them to create a data lake so they can start doing a lot of their advanced reporting off of it. It’s a clickstream piece, though, that we’re getting asked to help out with the most right now, with the transition to Google Analytics for with a lot of things happening illegally. You know, a lot of like countries in Europe that have bands or certain tools, or different restrictions around privacy, we’re being asked to instrument things in a way that sets them up for the future in a way that they’re legally compliant. They can collect the most data and they can keep their operations. What kind of decisions do you

Jeremy Weisz 4:47

see the companies making now that you’ve advised them? You’ve collected the data? What decisions are they making based on that?

Brian Cosgrove 4:55

More companies are getting comfortable with the idea of first party data collection? They might still keep your toes around as for redundancies, but they’re looking at the fact that they can capture more data and better data first party. And then they can, they can determine on their end how they want to syndicate that data out, or how they want to join it. So we’re seeing that being a way to kind of, you know, circumvent challenges that arise with all of their data sitting with third parties.

Jeremy Weisz 5:22

I mean, they doing different things in sales and marketing or releases of products or services.

Brian Cosgrove 5:28

A lot of it is some of the team members are taking that some of the clients are taking that work, and they are feeding it into different kind of customer data platform type campaigns. So they’re feeding it into personalization engines, recommendation engines, they’re starting to use it in that way, in ways that we’re

Jeremy Weisz 5:49

sure they can get more kind of ideal clients that look like their ideal clients

Brian Cosgrove 5:53

now. Yeah, exactly. For that they can, they can, quite frankly, better serve the right offers and opportunities, the clients and the customers that are interested in them. So I mean, more than anything, it’s, you know, they had all the data before, but it didn’t talk to their other systems, and it wasn’t first party so they can make decisions on it. Right. Yeah. There were always delays and other challenges around it. Love it. Brian, where

Jeremy Weisz 6:19

Love it. Brian, where can people find you tell people the website again?

Brian Cosgrove 6:22

brain.do. So we’re easy to find

Jeremy Weisz 6:25

brain dot D O. Awesome. Check them out. brain.do. Brian, thanks again. Thank you, Jeremy. Jeremy Weisz here. I’m here live at the Jason Swenk, Mastermind. We’re in Colorado. I’m here with Susan and Susan, tell people a little bit about you, your company and what you do.

Susan Brake 6:39

Yeah. So my name is Susan Brake. And I am a Senior Vice President, at Development Counsellors International. And we are a place marketing firm that only works with cities, states, countries and regions to help attract visitors, help attract businesses, or help attract a workforce.

Jeremy Weisz 6:56

How do people find you?

Susan Brake 6:57

You go to about dci.com. And also we have a really good content marketing.

Jeremy Weisz 7:01

So are you allowed to say what type what states? Places?

Susan Brake 7:06

Yeah, so some of my clients are like the Netherlands, we work for a company called Invest in Holland. One of our states, we did those state website for mississippi.org, which is awesome, mighty Mississippi, Mississippi has some cool things going on. We’re also doing a full suite of websites for the state of Florida, to help attract talent to different places in Florida. So that will be

Jeremy Weisz 7:32

states and 51 is a client case they’re listening, they should contact you.

Susan Brake 7:36

Well, I’m from Kentucky. So if I could work for My Old Kentucky Home, it would make my heart slow.
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