Chicago Digital Marketing Influencers

[0:21] Intro
[1:44] What did you like and not like about working at a big agency?
[18:30] What are some of the changes in the world of big agencies?
[20:35] The transition to independent work and Food Travelist.
[29:00] What is an example of foodtravelist influencer campaign that had impact
[34:00] Where do you see the future of “influencer marketing” going?
[36:51] What is your favorite place to travel?

CHRIS: Thank you for joining us on Matchcast, this is Chris, we are very happy to be joined today by Sue Reddel.

Sue thank you for joining us.

SUE: Hi Chris, thank you for having me today.

CHRIS: We are very happy to have you. By way of introduction, Sue is a media consultant working with various clients and vendors providing strategic leadership guidance and training and media buying, selling, and cross platform strategy.

She has both big agency experience here in Chicago as well as some independent work and these days she is co-founder of Food Travelist which is a blog at the intersection of food and traveling. So we are very excited to touch on all these topics and understand a bit more about digital marketing and the marketing industry through your experience.

So thanks again, Sue.

SUE: You’re welcome.

CHRIS: We met Sue through a mutual friend and client of ours, New Balance Chicago, Jeff Mack. And we are always trying to find ways to drive qualified buyers into New Balance Chicago’s five retail locations. Sue with her blogging prowess and experience, opened our eyes to the possibilities that might exist for some influencer marketing opportunities that we were exploring with New Balance Chicago.

That is how we met, we kept talking, we have a lot of things in common and areas in which we overlap so very happy to jump right in to it.

So Sue let’s start a little bit chronologically as far as your career goes. Do you mind telling us a little bit about your big agency experience? Maybe some of the things you really loved about it, maybe some of the things you didn’t love about it?

And just start there.

SUE: Yeah, Chris. The interesting thing is I did spend twelve years working at Starcom, which is obviously a very large multimedia agency in Chicago. I don’t think we’ve talked about this before, but I should tell you that before I was working at Starcom I actually worked at a small retail company here in Chicago and I was their ad manager.

So I got some really great experience working for a store very similar to the setup that New Balance Chicago has. They had seven locations in Chicago so I had a really good primer if you will on retail advertising management everything.

Because the company was relatively small I had a preview into everything that was going on in the company, not just the marketing. I worked directly with the CEO and so I helped him figure out where we would open new stores, how the merchandising would go; it was a seasonal business so I really got a wealth of information and knowledge during my tenure there. And I worked there for about 8 years before I took the plunge for working at a larger agency.

CHRIS: What kind of business was that?

SUE: Well the name of the store was called Fun In Motion and they were seasonal stores so during Christmas time we sold Christmas, so if you’ve ever seen a spot in Chicago where somebody was talking at a very fast pace and getting everything in, those were the spots we did to sell Christmas.

And during the summer time and the spring and summer we sold patio furniture and swimming pools. And in the fall we sold Halloween decorations so it was extremely seasonal. So you can imagine the strategies that went into that marketing was completely different than typical retail sales.

It was very interesting, we made probably 80% of our profit during the month of December, so you know, it was kind of a wacky business.

CHRIS: Pros and cons to that I would imagine as a business owner you’re super excited about December but there might be other part of the year which are a little more painful.

SUE: Exactly, but on the other hand it did lead for time to plan and really get things and our ducks in order. When you did have the down time. We did an immense amount of planning as you can imagine during that rush time, because when things came down to it, they had to go off without a hitch, there couldn’t be any second doubts at that time.

CHRIS: Yeah, so a lot of planning involved in that, preparation, and kind of an annual cycle. Interesting, so then I would imagine having that kind of access in a small business access, working directly with the CEO, feeling like you had a holistic view of everything going on and maybe had some really nice ability to have impact at a whole business level.

And then moving into a bigger agency, or to a big agency, would it be accurate to say that now you have a smaller slice of a bigger job, much more specialized, you’re focused on a smaller piece of your clients’ businesses. Is that accurate? What was that transition like?

SUE: Yeah, that’s totally spot on to what happened. Honestly, I was a little hesitant in the beginning to jump into a large agency like that. I had a friend who was working there who suggested I check it out, and I went to have many discussions with folks there before I actually took the job. And that was my biggest worry – going from an atmosphere where I did see I had full autonomy to create the advertising and also work with the merchandisers to figure out what items would be going up for sale.

So I was very, very involved so I knew when something ran in an ad and it worked I knew right away because we would run our reports.

The biggest challenge for me when I went to work at Starcom, the first client I was assigned to was Kellogg’s, as you know, as everyone knows is a giant company. And I was coming in as a Media Buyer Planner at that point in my career, that was really a very junior level. And the plans I was putting together, the first products I worked on were Rice Krispies, Corn Flakes, you know the long term products that have been around for generations, right?

We would put plans together and learn the strategies from the brand managers, and we had all the tools. We certainly had tools at the agency to use to make the job a little easier. But a lot of time and thought went into these plans as well, I mean we spent months and months putting media plans together.

But ultimately when we presented the plans and they were approved I never had line of sight to did that particular ad work, what kind of results did we get from that? And I didn’t at my level.

It was really interesting because I had a very smart Media Director at that time when they began in my career, her name was Karen Jacobs. And I expressed my concerns to her during one of my annual evaluations and she said, “Sue, I understand what your concerns are but have you done your homework? Have you gone and looked at their annual reports, have you gone and really studied the brands and how are they doing and what’s going on in the business?” And honestly I said, “No.”

And she said, “That’s your job to do, that’s your homework.”

And so maybe not everyone was asking those questions because I had had that background and so as people went up the ladder at the agency they learned those things but I kind of already had line of sight to them at my other job so I was asking them a little earlier.

Ultimately those kind of questions and those kind of projects I ended up doing because what I ended up doing was doing a project on the annual report of Kellogg’s which you couldn’t imagine what that was kind of a lengthy project.

But I was able to share that with the team and say this is what I learned. And I think some of them probably thought I was crazy that I cared but some of them “oh yeah, I want her to know how my work is impacted their bottom line.”

As marketers we have to know that, because otherwise why are we doing what we’re doing? Ultimately we want to help them sell product I hope.

CHRIS: That resonates with us for sure because we’re an agency that’s constantly asking those questions. And we do almost always have line of sight and sometimes there’s little breaks in your vision and you have to find ways to fix those but I think that’s a really interesting challenge to you that Karen gave you back in those days around you can’t really complain about not having holistic knowledge of your client’s business until you’ve ingested absolutely everything that’s publicly available that you can. And then when you’ve hit the wall and you know everything you can possibly know about the business in the context of working at this very large agency with this very large company.

Then you can start to be like, “Hey, we need, I would love to know x, y, z, thing.” I like that feedback from her.

SUE: Exactly, and that makes you smarter and makes you smarter working with the brands. Because how can you make them a better brand?

CHRIS: Yeah, it’s also about self-reliance and being a self-starter and going out and find thing those things out for yourself to help your work.

So you go from the small business where you have full visibility of everything to a large agency working with large brands where there’s not always line of sight. Did that affect any of your work satisfaction ultimately to not be able to see that direct impact from your work and your hours and your brain power into the client’s business?

SUE: I would say for the first probably two years I was there, yes. For me it was a struggle to get through that first kind of learning curve with them because at that time coming into that agency, they typically hired people who were just out of college. That was the way they did it. I’m sure they don’t do it that way anymore. And you had to go through their program.

I mean, understandably, you learned their methodologies, you learned their resources. We had an amazing amount of resource tools. And a research department that could get you almost anything. So learning that structure which I didn’t have. Think about it I came from a very small company, the resources were anything I could find and anything I could learn about our business.

So that was very embedded into the business and this was kind of the opposite. It’s like I knew and had all these tools we could use to apply to these other businesses. But I didn’t know about the businesses. So my goal once I kind of got over that two-year hump and worked my way through that ladder, then I could have more of a line of sight to more insights into the businesses I was working on.

You know once I became a Supervisor and then became an Associate Media Director and finally the Media Director and a VP. As you work through that cycle of moving up the ladder, you definitely get more of the line of sight into clients’ business because you have more access to clients and different levels of clients at the business. And that’s what the goal was.

Once I realized that very early in my career, I said, “If I can just get through these two years, I know I can be really good here, and I can do a lot of really great work.”

One I realized that I was ok with it. What really makes it rewarding at a job like that are the people along the way. It’s like I mentioned Karen, but I had so many other great mentors along the way. You know I’m still friends with Karen I still have no problem asking her a question about something. Because they were great resources of not just tools but people. People who had been in the business for many years and experienced many different scenarios of different clients, and products and brands that you don’t get when you’re smaller.

CHRIS: Right, so a little bit of a challenge in the transition. That was really interesting to hear you explore that and then some really great relationships with people that came out of it.

What other things in the big agency life did you really enjoy as you look back you have fond recollections of?

SUE: Number one is always the people. The teams I worked on, the teams that worked for me were always, to me, the thing that made me get up every day and made me want to go to work. And we also got to work on fantastic brands. I was very fortunate in that I got to work at Starcom at a time when we had the first tech boom.

I was working on, I can’t tell you how many dozens of, tech clients probably the first year of the tech boom happened. They would come and go, come and go, and people had so much money to spend and wanted to put money down right away. And we worked in the media business where people put together plans, you spent a lot of months planning them then you put the money in the market and you move it.

People were coming in the door saying, “I want to spend these million dollars today.” It wasn’t what we were used to at all, and certainly wasn’t the usual structure but we figured it out and went along with it, of course, very shortly after that came the crash. All that money went away; all those businesses went away.

Literally I had one client I called one day and they weren’t there anymore. That’s wacky right?

CHRIS: So having a front row seat to some of those kind of bigger picture evolutions in business sounds pretty exciting.

SUE: Yeah it was, it was great and I got the chance to do that and work on the tech side which kind of helps me in my job now but then I’ve also had the opportunity to go back into the regular consumer pool and I worked on Miller Coors the last seven years I was at Starcom which again put me back into more structure and more a real true real brand experience working with brand managers who have a lot of experience in the beer business. And learned a ton from them and had a great team at Starcom that worked on that.

CHRIS: So you mentioned how the technology you learned about helps you a bit now. And you worked on Miller Coors, is it a food item I guess, beer is a food item for some of us more than others.

How did you transition out of the agency go? I know you had some independent work that you still do and then it transitions into Food Travelist, can you take us through those steps? It’s so interesting that in this one person here, dear listeners, we have such a wealth of experience of all these transitions of all the different ways you can work in the marketing world.

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SUE: Well I would tell you when I first made the transition out of the agency, I was a slow starter. I was very fortunate in that I had created a lot of really great relationships with folks while I was at the agency, So I had several clients right off the bat or people who wanted to work with me.

So I very slowly started building a private practice if you will, for my media business. And I must say probably the biggest challenge right out of the box was not having resources. Because all of a sudden, it was just me. And it was like how was I going to do that.

I remember the very first person who called me said, I literally wanted to take a couple months off before I started working with other businesses and other things. And this one gentleman kept calling me, kept calling like, “Please.”

And finally I was like, “Fine, in two months, I will come and work with you.” He wanted me to do this presentation for him, and he said, “Ok.” So I started putting together this presentation for him, no big deal I had certainly put together many presentations in the past that wasn’t an issue for me.

But all of a sudden I sat down, I was done with the presentation and said, “Oh my goodness, now someone has to make the copies, someone has to make sure it works.” I was very privileged because I had always had an assistant, a very good assistant, who I loved dearly who took care of all this stuff, so I myself didn’t stop and think I actually have to go to Kinko’s or somewhere and do this work myself. Because I didn’t have the capability at that time to do it myself in my office. I do now, but I didn’t at that point.

So that was my first awakening to the real world of, well you’re on your own now kid. You know, so how are you going to do this and how are you going to manage that?

CHRIS: Yeah well a couple things, as a small agency owner and a couple others who are in similar seats can appreciate, that’s a nice problem to have. Someone continuing to call you and saying please do work for me. That’s a good problem.

And then at the same time it strikes me that before we started our agency and got a little bit bigger to where we are now I think all of us who worked independently have that experience of ok I just sold this job, now I have to do all the work myself. And not only that I have to collect and you have to follow up and get feedback when the job ends. It’s almost too much for one person to do.

And I would imagine, I don’t know what year it was that you’re describing, but these days there are so many more tools that are readily available for free or cheap than there were, I would imagine ten years ago if that’s what we’re talking about.

SUE: Yeah, we’re talking about eight years ago. I mean now obviously there are virtual assistants and a lot of people who are available to do that kind of work that at that point in time I had no clue about. I mean certainly my learning curve had to be really fast in terms of what was I going to do and what wasn’t I going to do. And like we’ve discussed too, I mean sometimes there are things I can’t do and I have to offline to someone else who I can trust that will do that piece of work for me then we can either present together with the client or I can take and present to the client.

So those types of things that came up along the way, and now it’s also lucky too because when I left the corporate world I also had a gig teaching at Roosevelt University. I love to teach and my background also included a lot of training so that was a natural fit for me and ever since I’ve been out of the agency I’ve continued to teach at Roosevelt which to me keeps my brain really functioning at a very high level with these kids, I shouldn’t say kids, students who are always bringing new ideas and challenging the ideas that I put forth to them which makes me smarter.

So I really enjoy that part as well.

CHRIS: It sounds like a great supplement.

So with all these changes we’re describing, you’re talking about staying on the cutting edge with students, and this constant exchange that you have with them. Talked a bit about tools that are more available now for us to do this kind of work, whereas in the past those things were not as well developed or as readily available and I know that this might be more of your conjecture because you aren’t at a big agency anymore, but do you have any sense of how those changes are affecting those big agencies?

SUE: Yeah, from the folks I know that are still there and also from what I read on the trades as well. I believe there’s less people at the agencies that are doing more work. I think when I was there we had what we used to call, this luxury, because we had this all of these people.

I used to say to people who worked on my team, if there’s ever a problem bring it to my attention right away because we can literally solve any problem very quickly. Because we can just put our energies and we can put staff against it. So I don’t think that luxury exists anymore. In having a huge staff that you can trust will be there to do that.

I think that’s definitely one issue, I think also clients have always been clients. Clients always want the best work, they are paying top dollar, especially the large agency so they want the best talent they want great work. But I think in this environment they also want to know their return. And that wasn’t always the case. It may sound kind of odd right now. People are spending millions of dollars and they don’t know what they’re going to get in return?

There wasn’t always a great metric to figure out what it costs on return as there is now, more so now with digital.

CHRIS: Even now, you can measure a lot better, but it’s hard to say it’s perfect. But if you’re Kellogg’s and your spending a million dollars, how do you see that in the throughput of Rice Krispies in retail grocery stores? That’s still kind of nebulous I would imagine. I’m speculating a little bit.

Anyway, speaking of Rice Krispies and beer, let’s get to what I most associate with you currently in my limited understanding which is Food Travelist.

You’re outside the big agency, you’re just through your network and your experience and talent, you’re picking up clients here and there to do work. You’re also teaching at Roosevelt, how did Food Travelist come about and where is it taking you?

SUE: That is a great question Chris, because just looking from the outside, people might say, well yeah you just started doing that because you like to travel and like to eat.

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And it’s like, “Yes, that’s true but there’s actually a rationale of how this all started.”

When I first left Starcom, I was gone for maybe two or three months and I got a call from one of my old bosses, saying that they had an opportunity for a consultant to come in and do some training, which he knew I was very happy to do. Because that’s part of my strong core of abilities. And so he asked if I’d be interested to come in and doing some training?

I said, “Well…” and he said,” Don’t worry it’s not a job!”

He knew I wasn’t really looking to come back to the agency full time, and he said, “well let’s talk about it.” And I told him I’d love to talk about it. He told me there’s a big downside to this job, and I’m thinking, “Well, ok, what could it possibly be, maybe it’s a horrible client?”

And he said well, the problem is the client has offices all over the world and the person who goes to do this training would have to travel a lot. And I was like, “Oh!”

CHRIS: What kinds of places?

SUE: If he could’ve seen my face on the phone he would’ve seen this face of puzzlement like, “why is that a problem?” Because I love to travel, and I’ve always loved to travel and one of the reasons I left the corporate world, was my lack of control over my time. Only being able to go on serious traveling when I was on my vacation time. Even though I must say, with all respect to Starcom, we had extremely generous compensation program and time program. So we had a lot of vacation and time off. But I still wanted more travel.

So I ended up taking this gig I literally traveled all over the world and I had the gig for three years and the client had this training program. So it was myself and four other consultants who put together a training program for them to learn how to work better with the agencies they were working with.

It was a great program for them because they got to be smarter in how they worked with agencies because sometimes people coming in as brand managers or junior brand managers or even just marketing positions, didn’t really know the structure or understand how agencies worked. Or how many people were involved in decision making or what they should expect to get from them. How they should critique it. All these types of things they may not know coming in. And it’s actually very smart on their end.

And so we did that for three years and I got to go to a lot of amazing places. I got to go to places you’d probably suspect that are business meetings, London, Paris, Rome, Madrid, but then I got to go to kind of some off the grid places. Like Kazakhstan. I’m been to Ahmadi. A lot of people haven’t been there. I’ve been to Kiev, Dubai, Jordan, Vietnam, Singapore, China, Turkey, so the list just kind of goes on and on.

It was a great experience but the long answer to your question is that job was the impetus of Food Travelist, because I had learned really early on when I was traveling that I could have a great experience in these meetings and teaching people how to do their jobs better, but then sometimes I’d be by myself and have to go out to eat and whatnot and learned how to do that and that was great and wonderful, and usually I was in and out of markets pretty quickly because I’d have to go to another meeting, but in the time I was there I could learn a lot about the culture and the best way to do that was through the food and eating with people.

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And honestly, what really sparked the idea, I was in Dubai for a meeting and I met a colleague there from the Starcom office in Dubai and we were chatting and he said, “Oh when are you leaving?” and I said, “Tomorrow morning.” And he said he wanted to take me out to dinner that night, and I said “no, it had been a long day, we’d been there all day, and I’m sue you’d want to get back to your family.” And he said, “no, you’re in my country, I insist that we go out to eat. So I said ok, I’ll meet you down stairs in the lobby of the hotel at like 6.”

And so I was so pleasantly surprised when I went downstairs and he was there to pick me up, his wife was there and their young child. So we went out and they took me out to this gorgeous restaurant in Dubai which is part of a hotel complex. And I have to be honest I didn’t know what to expect with the food. We were there in Dubai in the summer and it was 120 degrees, and he said we’re going to be eating at this restaurant that’s outside. And my Midwestern self said “oh my lord, how am I going to survive that?”

And so we went into the restaurant and it was really amazing, because we walked out into this courtyard and the first thing you’re struck with is everything is open at the top. You see the stars and it’s gorgeous they’ve got the palm trees and everything, but the thing that’s very odd is that it’s not hot.

It’s like ok we just went from the car into the hotel and it was steamy just in that 10 steps that we walked into the hotel. And it’s like why is this not hot here.

CHRIS: Well, why not?

SUE: Well, it was air conditioned.

CHRIS: Outdoor air conditioning, only in Dubai.

SUE: Only in Dubai. We had a wonderful meal, they walked me through the menu I had some great things I had not eaten before. We told some great stories, they asked me about Chicago, they asked me about the United States. And we kind of dispelled myths about each other’s cultures that we both were surprised about.

His wife was fascinated with Chicago and because at that point Oprah was still here. And so she was like, “Do you know of Oprah?”

CHRIS: I know of her; I feel like I know her.

SUE: I watched her show, does that count? But it was cute, but we had great meal and that was, to me, if we could come together and have this great meal and understand each other a bit more. Here we are in a Middle Eastern country, people were telling me, “You’re nuts to go there alone, aren’t you scared?”

And I will tell you, I couldn’t have felt more safe in the country than I did when I was there. That happened probably 6 years ago, and we’re still friends. We keep up with each other, and of course with Facebook it makes it that much easier. They have another child, and it’s all wonderful.

So having that meal with them kind of sparked something of, how is this important? It’s important because people that travel need to learn about the culture through food. So that’s when we started Food Travelist because really the core goal in that aspect is World Peace. You know, small goal.

CHRIS: Yeah small, not ambitious at all, Sue.

SUE: Because if people could come together around a meal and understand each other a little bit better we hope to make the world a better place. And so that’s where we are today with Food Travelist.

CHRIS: Wait, so we have World Peace?

SUE: We’re getting there, little by little!

CHRIS: It’s good to hear some optimism. So that is an amazing background into the inspiration and the genesis and your purpose of Food Travelist. Let’s flash forward to today or kind of more recent times. Can you encapsulate a little bit some of your favorite connections you’ve made apart from the wonderful world peace humans getting to know each other angle? But maybe from a brand perspective. Are there any brands or examples of kind of campaigns you’ve done through Food Travelist that connected whatever to the food to the location? Whether there’s a brand that’s pushing this with you. Do you have any good kind of case studies you can share with us briefly about a campaign that encapsulates Food Travelist?

SUE: In fact, there’s one that we just finished up yesterday that we’ve done work with in the past. Hong Kong Tourism is a brand that we work with and we have a chat that we run every Wednesday night at 7 pm on twitter that’s called #foodtravelchat. And we started it two years ago. As an adjunct to the site. Because we were getting good traction on the site, brands were interested in us but we wanted to create a community around Food Travelist, people who really love to travel and love to explore the food when they travel. But they also explore the food before they travel.

 

“Thank you so much Sue! We were very pleased with the results and everyone had a lot of fun participating. We’ll be back!!”

–Social Media Manager at Saatchi  (handles the Hong Kong Tourism account)

 

It’s like, I want to go to Turkey because I know I can have the best shawarma there. So it’s like what were the things people were traveling for. We started #foodtravelchat and slowly built a community around there and so every Wednesday night we have a chat a particular topic. And Hong Kong came on with us last year to do a chat and we did a chat that was called Asian Feasts and Finds. And they were the sponsor and what that means is we are very, very, I don’t want to say picky, but we are picky about who we choose to sponsor with the chat.

When we have the chat we ask 10 questions within the hour and people interact on twitter with pictures about food, pictures about places. And so when we have sponsors come out we tell them, this is not about you coming on and saying, buy my stuff, buy my stuff, and constantly, “don’t forget about Hong Kong, don’t forget about Hong Kong.”

Brands have been really receptive about that. We aren’t saying we don’t want you to tell your story, but we want it to be a very integrated way. In a way that doesn’t hit somebody smack in the face. And so the first one we did was really interesting because people love Asian food, just in general.

And not just Hong Kong, but Indian food, Chinese food, Thai food, you name it, people love Asian food.

CHRIS: It’s delicious.

SUE: Yeah, and there’s so many kinds of flavors. Everyone is unique and different. And so the first one we had, people were so excited to have this chat about Asian food and everything that happens on the chat happens very organically which is great. And so people were sharing some pictures of food from Hong Kong, they were sharing some tips about Hong Kong, and I had no idea that there were 42 Michelin restaurants in Hong Kong, and so everyone was blown away by that and just little tips that would come out.

And then slowly throughout the chat, you could just see it, there were many people that were just saying on the chat, “I can’t wait to go to Hong Kong, what hotel should I stay out?” So this kind of positive environment of people that were already like-minded wanting to look for food in new places, saying, “Hey I’m thinking about going to Hong Kong now.”

CHRIS: Without hitting them over the head with it or kind of forcing it.

SUE: Exactly, and they were just a sponsor again last night, as a matter of fact. And the same thing happened again, just really positive feedback about new ideas. And we even had some people on the chat who were going to Hong Kong. There was somebody was going next week, somebody was going in a couple weeks. They’re like, “These are great ideas, I’m so glad I tuned into the chat tonight.”

CHRIS: That’s so cool.

SUE: So that makes us feel good, yes of course I pay attention to the numbers, how many people were on, how many millions of impressions did we get. All that fun stuff that we look at. And in the aftermath. But, to me, more importantly are the things that people say. The tweets that come out that are very positive about it. So we are really looking to expand Foot Travelist chat into something else along with the community that we’ve built.

The next step we think is going to be building a program where we can have these folks meet up in a destination and actually have a food travel chat, or a Food Travelist destination. Go there and experience some new place that they may not have thought about before in a very unique way where they can get some different types of cuisine and get a look into the culture in the destination in a way that revolves around this culinary travel.

CHRIS: Very cool, and so this is getting the, and I don’t know how recent this is, but this is getting the name influencer marketing and that’s again how we were introduced to you through New Balance Chicago. What we just mentioned as far as going a step farther for Food Travelist and having people in the location, getting together, and discussing food and travel while on site, that seems like one step deeper into authenticity, or into the experience.

Is that what you see happening in influencer marketing generally, is it going to get more and more genuine I guess, or authentic? Where do you see influencer marketing, if we can even use that term, where do you see it developing?

SUE: Yeah, I think, people especially in the niche that we work in in food travel. People want experiences. They don’t want to just read about it, they don’t want to just know that you have a great thing, or look at your pictures on Instagram and say, “Oh that’s great.” It’s that they want to experience that thing or the next thing. It’s like what else is there.

I think that for us the natural progression is to have people actually going places. I think that will happen in other niches as well. And I think niches are the way to go. Because everything is going to be coming down to smaller communities, smaller groups. People that are very interested in specific things rather than large based ideas.

And in terms of influencers, there’s a lot more influencer networks than there ever were and I’m sure there will continue to be growth in that area. And yes there are big brands that use huge influencers. You’ve got these YouTubers out there that have huge audiences, huge reach. That folks watch religiously, for ideas, and things that they’re interested in and learning.

You know, YouTube being the largest search engine that’s out there right now, it amazes me and this circles back to my time at Roosevelt. I have students, because I also teach in the grad program there, I have students that are a bit older and have children. Their children the first thing they do when they say we want to go, we’re going to go experience some kind of entertainment somewhere, they look it up on YouTube first. And say, “Yeah I don’t want to do that, that’s not cool” Or “That looks dumb” or “That looks too babyish for me.”

So it’s crazy when four, five, you know maybe I don’t know where does it start anymore, three, four, five year olds, are making buying decisions based on what they see on YouTube.

CHRIS: So as the platforms continue to develop, whether it’s a platform like YouTube, or a platform that connects influencers to brands, you’re saying continuing niching and continuing kind of getting closer to the experiences. People value experiences more and more.

SUE: Absolutely.

CHRIS: Sue, thank you so much, this has been awesome. Quick question, and I don’t know how quick this can be because it’s a big one. But if you had to pick one, where’s your favorite place to travel?

SUE: Chris, that’s like picking your favorite child.

CHRIS: I know, I know, it’s not possible. I won’t hold you to it, I won’t get mad if you mention more than one.

SUE: I hope nobody that I know, or destinations I’ve been to and adored will hold it against me either.

I’m so thankful to be able to go to the places I have been able to go to. They’ve all been amazing, I’ve never been anywhere where I’ve said, “Oh this place is horrible.”

But personally I have an affinity, I’m drawn to France. For some reason, not just Paris but everywhere in France. I just love it. I’ve had a love for France since I was a little girl. I remember the very first report I had to do on a destination, I did on Paris of course. But with no pull from anyone, it wasn’t my parents, it wasn’t my teacher, it was just something that I had a fascination for.

And I can tell you, I’ve been to Paris many times and it never grows old for me, but I’ve also done several driving trips around France, and I just love it. If you had asked me the question, where would you move to?

CHRIS: You’d say France.

SUE: If I had to, yeah, it would definitely be somewhere in France.

CHRIS: That’s amazing, the part about you being a little girl and being drawn it is interesting to me personally, very personal quick tidbit here.

I remember my 25th birthday or so, my mom gave me a book of writings I did when I was like 2nd grade. At this point in life, I had lived in Costa Rica for a few years and was living in NYC. And I opened this little book of writings I did at age 7 and was writing about Manhattan and the jungle. And I was like, “Oh my lord.” I was seven years old and was obsessed, well not obsessed but these were things that I was just really interested in.

So it’s funny how those things maybe embed themselves in our brains for whatever reason when we’re young and they continue to stay with us.

SUE: Yeah we’re going to have to get together and talk about Costa Rica.

CHRIS: I would love to. I was married there a year ago almost exactly. I lived there for years, and it’s one of my places that feels like home. So I would love to share my experiences with you.

Anyway, Sue, thank you so much, this has been very enjoyable, I think that breadth of experience that you have, big, small, as well as the kind of innovative approach that’s very entrepreneurial that you’re taking now will resonate with all sorts of people. And that kind of breadth again is really, helpful to lend perspective to people as they progress on their own journey. So thank you again so much for joining us and we look forward to staying in touch with Sue Reddel.

SUE: Thank you Chris.

Resources:

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Sue Reddel is the co-founder of Food Travelist.

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