Mike Birbiglia: B2B Marketing Lessons from the Prolific and Award-Winning Comedian with the Host of How Stories Happen, Jay Acunzo

Before comedians ever get a Netflix special, they have to run the gauntlet. 

Night after night, they’re putting themselves out there in front of judgmental crowds and trying to win them over.

Sometimes they bomb, sometimes they face hecklers, and what may be even worse: silence. 

Kathy Griffin once bombed so badly at a show in Montreal she said, “The audience was talking so much that they didn’t know my set ended.” Ouch.

But even after bombing the worst, comedians 👏 keep 👏 practicing 👏. And all the while they’re gathering data. What works? What doesn’t work? 

Because that data helps them get better and better. And that grit and resilience is one of the things we as marketers need to have too. 

So in this episode, we’re taking marketing lessons from comedian Mike Bigbiglia.

With the help of our special guest, Host of How Stories Happen, Jay Acunzo, we’re talking about developing your premise, aiming for resonance over reach, and practicing your material in front of your audience.

About our guest, Jay Acunzo

Jay Acunzo is consultant, author and speaker at Unthinkable Media. He helps his clients learn to differentiate easier and resonate deeper on the impact of their ideas, not the volume of their content. He helps them develop their premise, their storytelling, and their pillar projects in order to own an idea in their minds and influence the market.

After starting his career in media and marketing roles at Google and HubSpot, a tiny startup and a VC firm, he authored the book about questioning best practices, Break the Wheel, toured as a professional speaker (giving keynotes in 25 states and 3 countries), launched two celebrated business shows (the podcast Unthinkable and the docuseries Against the Grain), and co-founded the mastermind for business storytellers, the Creator Kitchen.

As an advisor, he has worked with more than 200 individuals and teams to help them differentiate through substance and stories, not stunts. Past brand clients include Salesforce, GoDaddy, Wistia, Drift, Podia, InVision, Zillow, Blackbaud, Dometic, James Hardie, and Help Scout, as well as hundreds of individual thought leaders and experts, including the author behind Google’s employee training program and the performance coach who helped develop Kobe Bryant’s Black Mamba persona.

He is a New England resident, a Knicks fan, and an obsessive grilled pizza chef. His grandest aspiration (though genuinely, it’s my biggest delusion) is to be the Anthony Bourdain of business storytelling.

What B2B Companies Can Learn From Mike Birbiglia:

• Develop your premise. Define your overarching theme or premise. If you were to give your campaign a title, what would it be? What message do you want your audience to get? Jay says, “The premise is an assertion you're making from which everything else follows. And that's true in comedy. It's also true in how you position a brand and every project that you or your brand might create. You know, a podcast has a premise, a video series, a book, a speech. We all need to better develop our premises the way a comedian does.” Mike Birbiglia has a premise to each show and a story arc. Like how The Old Man & The Pool is about getting older and swimming as a means of getting healthier. It gives the show shape and it also gives his audience an idea of what his show will be about. 
• Resonance>reach. Aim to make content that resonates with your target persona instead of aiming to reach a lot of people. This sometimes means decreasing your reach to be true to your brand values. But hitting home with your niche is better than falling flat with a bunch of people. Jay says, “You should care more about resonance than reach to grow your business. It's because from resonance comes action. It's better for business because that's why we start to care. If it doesn't resonate, we don't care. If we don't care, we don't act. Like Birbiglia is so good at making you care, not just about him, not just about the joke, but about whatever premise he’s there to explore through the arc of the show.”
• Practice your material in front of your audience. Keep dialing it in by seeing what works with your audience - and what doesn’t. Jay says, “This is what a pro does in Mike Birgiglia’s world. Being a professional, viable comedian [means] you are constantly working on material in front of the audience. Like, it is democratized to the degree that the audience decides. You're trying to put things in front of them. You're like, ‘I am convinced this idea or story matters,’ then you're trying to articulate the right way into that or the right construction and flow of the setup and the punchline and the tags, or how you explain things or the timing of it all, or your callbacks. All these hidden elements that go into, yes, a comedy special, but really standing up in front of anybody to speak to them. And the goal is to put enough reps in that you work the material out.”

Quotes

*”We need to reclaim creativity from what we have lost it to in the business world, which is the sum total of lots of hidden choices and lots of aerating and iterating and working on the material. Like, you might have conviction around your ideas. You're not going to drop that conviction and go, ‘I'll say anything that'll work on a social network,’ which is what people in business are too prone to do. You have an internal conviction about how the world should be, how you see something, your perspective, even one specific idea for a project. And the hard work now is, ‘I have to figure out the language and the storytelling and the frameworks and the construction of my words to get people to see what I already see and go with me on the journey.’”

*”We are trying to grab attention all the time as marketers. That's not what good marketing is. Good marketing is not about who arrives. It's about who stays. So get them to the end. That's your golden rule all the time. They hit play. Be paranoid now they're going to hit stop.”

*”Athletes watch the film of the game to get better. Marketers need to consume their own content to get better. Go for a walk, open it up in the morning, do what you have to do to consume your own work. You will notice very quickly what went wrong and what went well. It's like reading your writing out loud is the best, most foolproof way to improve your writing. You need to consume your work like the recipient.”

Time Stamps

[0:55] Meet Jay Acunzo, Host of How Stories Happen

[2:07] Mike Birbiglia's Creative Process

[6:35] Lessons from Mike Birbiglia for Marketers

[10:03] The Art of Storytelling in Comedy and Marketing

[18:03] The Importance of Iteration and Audience Feedback

[24:16] Nailing the Post-Story Moment

[25:30] The Golden Rule of Storytelling

[27:15] The Importance of Consuming Your Own Content

[28:04] Going the Extra Mile in Content Creation

[29:06] How to Create Engaging and Original Content

[36:12] The Messy Process of Creation

[39:15] Introducing Creator Kitchen

Links

Connect with Jay on LinkedIn

Learn more about How Stories Happen

About Remarkable!

Remarkable! is created by the team at Caspian Studios, the premier B2B Podcast-as-a-Service company. Caspian creates both nonfiction and fiction series for B2B companies. If you want a fiction series check out our new offering - The Business Thriller - Hollywood style storytelling for B2B. Learn more at CaspianStudios.com. 

In today’s episode, you heard from Ian Faison (CEO of Caspian Studios) and Meredith Gooderham (Senior Producer). Remarkable was produced this week by Meredith Gooderham, mixed by Scott Goodrich, and our theme song is “Solomon” by FALAK. 

Create something remarkable. Rise above the noise.