Dan, Lou & George - Co-Owners, Bandolier Media

Bandolier Media is an award winning company that has created original IP and relevant brand content along with managing day to day social media for clients. They have also developed and launched the world’s first spicy coffee brand, Roasty Buds.

 

Troy: Good afternoon, Austin. Hope everyone is having a wonderful day. Today I am joined on the Austin Spotlight by a gaggle of people. This time, instead of just one business owner, we got a trio of friends who are business owners here in Austin of, and, how do I pronounce, is it Bandolier Media? I'm sure I'm sure I butchered that cause I really, pronunciation is not my strong suit, it's what's the name of the media

George: company? Vanier, but we've also heard Van Vanier okay,

Troy: you're ki you're a, whatever someone wa you know, whatever you'll answer to a lot of things when it comes to the business name, and then also creators of Roasty Buds.

So that'll be interesting to talk about today as well too. But for starters, maybe just go around the screen here and do just maybe a quick, like one minute introduction. Who you are and what got you into the, your guys' current company.

Dan: Yeah. My name's Daniel. I live here in Austin, Texas.

I went to UT, my wife went to UT. She works at the LBJ Foundation right at the UT campus. We've got two little girls. I were born in Austin and I, fun fact was born in Winnipeg, Canada which is a little north from here. Yeah. And Yeah, I met Lou and we played some music together and we had a really good time.

We joined each other's company and we started this little social media project, which later turned into Bandier Media and then at an event at the LBJ Library, my wife worked with George's wife and they introduced us and they said, Hey, we have a work dinner function. My wife said, I'm gonna sit you next to Deborah's wife in case he is shy and doesn't wanna talk.

He's a big fan of baseball. So you two could talk about baseball. And then George's wife always jokes that, Hey, you guys are supposed to talk about baseball. And then you guys went into business together. I don't know if I left out some details of that story, George, but that's how I met both these

George: guys.

Yeah, that, that was pretty good. The only thing I'd add to that I guess for myself is that my background is I'm originally from Chicago. But my wife's from Texas, so that's why we ended up down here. And I have a traditional advertising background and writing background. And yeah when Dan and I met he and Lou had already had the thing going and I thought what they were doing was very interesting and what I was doing was related.

And then it just seemed to make sense after a few projects to work together. Yeah. So I'll kick it over to Lou.

Lou: Very quickly. Dan's intros are always pretty, pretty awesome, so I'll keep it to, I'm also living in Austin with my wife and we have two dogs one very tiny one, and one that's 10 times the size of it.

There's that. And then as George mentioned, we're not only Conners of the company, but George and I specifically focus on creative creative directing, things like that. And then I focused a little bit more specifically on social media strategy and social media in general. So that's my area of expertise.

But yeah, that's me.

Troy: I

Dan: have all final creative say on what the two of these come up with. Idea life.

Lou: We gave him one chance years ago to let his creative juices fly, and that was the last time, but not last the one and only since then. I will give him that. But yeah That's funny. What were you gonna ask Troy?

Troy: Sorry? I said are you, where are you from Austin then, or what, where are you from?

Lou: No, so I, we've been in Austin since, I've been in Austin since 2010. My wife since 2006 or 2005. But yeah, we're actually both originally from Laredo, Texas, which is a border of town. Okay. About three and a half hours

Troy: south.

Now, I'm originally from the Midwest, Michigan. Minnesota. So familiar with the cold weather that George and Dan. Had to deal with as well from where they're from. And kudos to your wife, Dan, for giving you some cliff notes for talk, like being able to talk to the rest of the table.

Hey, it's not just we're going to a function, it's, hey, here's some center talking points that you can maybe icebreakers. That's a definite a plus move by her.

Dan: Yeah. I'll definitely let her know. Yeah. I didn't need 'em. It was nice to have them. But yeah.

Troy: It feels being, presidential kind of stuff, it feels like getting, the president getting handed cue cards as he's going to meet random donors or something like that.

So that way he, with all the people he has to meet, that he's able to figure out, oh here's what you have to say and here's what you need to know. Feels like that's

Dan: I'll kinda let this joke go, but I supplied George and Lou with all their creative ideas through cue cards for meetings.

Troy: There you go. Yeah. You're like you, again, the creatives are great, right? You are able to provide the direction that they need as the business mind focused of the group.

Dan: Some, sometimes.

Troy: I see. I see them wanting to shake their head but they're not going to at this point.

Lou: Big happy family.

Troy: Yeah. Previous to starting having your media company, like what got you guys into that line of work? Obviously it's become increasingly popular. Over the last especially since Covid last, four or five years because so many things with, different social media platforms, streaming platforms the breakup of just the traditional small.

Few media models that are out there, but what kind of got you guys interested in that line of work and wanting to start your own company? Cuz a lot of people might want to get into that line of work, but don't necessarily wanna start their own thing. So two questions.

Dan: Yeah I could start with that.

I, I, so I worked I went to University of Texas and I got a job at a college entertainment magazine after college. And it was a great family business and the owner would take me to a lot of magazine publishing conferences. And I just kept learning more about how the, these brands were utilizing new medias, like email marketing, what, website and social media to grow their brand, but act more like a media company.

And there was one company that I saw very early on, red Bull, which. Was, created a product, it was a drink with more caffeine, but it created a product that gave people energy. So they went out and created all this content around here's what you could do with all this great energy that you have.

And, I also saw the same thing happen with Lego, where they started, creating magazines and more media and then putting the media on social. And it, the big aha moment I had was when. I, my core function at the magazine was sell advertising, and I was trying to sell an ad to this new oh, I forget the name of the company, but it was just a beverage company and non-alcoholic beverage.

And they had something like 50,000 social media followers. And at the time, our magazine, we went out to 10,000 people just in Austin, and the owner of the magazine said, you know what, Daniel? I'm to the point where my social media is so strong and so big, your media company would get more benefit if I posted you on my social media.

And I remember being like, oh, wow. E every. I had this aha moment where I realized like every brand out there can be their own media company. And with, if you're in media, you have, it's a big responsibility, right? You have to have an editorial content focus or department.

You have to maybe potentially have a photography, a graphic design function. And and I always want to be my own business owner. And so that's why I made that jump. And I met Lou and Lou wear so many hats in the world of social media. He's a great creative director, but he's also an award-winning photographer and a self-taught graphic designer.

And one of the first companies that signed up for Bandier Media was an Austin based company called NMO Ice Cream. And I remember talking to the owner, Namo, and he was interested in hiring one person who run his social media. I remember telling him, gosh, Lou, what was this? 2015? 26. 2015. Yeah. And I remember saying, to run a social media program for a brand this day really requires like a graphic designer, a photographer, all these different departments.

Is your plan to go hire all you know, different people to run this? Or do you like to hire one agency? That could do all this for you. And I think for him, it was easy to say, Hey, yeah, it makes sense to hire you guys. And so that's, I definitely saw it very early on when it all started happening.

And as I was going to conferences and learning more I heard other publishers talking about it, but then I started hearing more brands talk about how they're using their social media to, to connect with audiences and grow their audience based.

Lou: I'll quickly add that. So Dan and I actually worked together at that company.

But we were in different departments. So he was running, advertising and publishing the magazine and the media company. And I was just doing some other stuff. I was like a marketing assistant, so I was pretty low level. But I was always watching from a distance and like in my head, I was more fascinated with social media as a whole.

So I was just really into learning it and seeing all the functions and seeing all the features and really learning it from the perspective of there's no gain other than just figuring it out. And I've always been that type of person that I like to figure things out and get good at something just for the sake of knowing it.

And so at some point there was a crossover where. I saw stuff that they weren't really doing. And so I wanted to bring that to their attention. And I had some ideas and things like that. And so at the time it just didn't make sense. Like the stuff that I was pitching, they were that's a little too extreme.

Like you need to dial it down a little bit. And I think Dan was taking mental notes and just watching what I was seeing to when then whenever I left that company, we stayed in touch and he kept on following up about Hey, some of those things that you were mentioning, like it's really interesting and then we kept the conversation going and then before you know it, we were doing that for brands, and it was a little bit of a road to finally get to that cuz it, at the time, social media, like brands weren't really using social media a lot.

And even when they did, they were still trying to figure it out. And so I think I wanted to do it from the lens of I wanna have fun, I wanna do stuff that's just like unique and different versus like plaster, the brand. Little too much and make it just like the photo of the thing and that's it, so just trying to think outside the box a bit. And so I think that was a pretty foundation for us to have fun with. The content that we do now and how far it's come is like very different, but same sort of feeling about it. And

Dan: one thing to add to that, we live in such an amazing city. Being in Austin, regardless if you had an official badge to South by Southwest, you probably ended up at, if you're out and about, you probably ended up at some events.

I remember going to so many tech events, so many south by interactive events where I didn't really understand what the company was, but I, I liked the party and liked the event, and I would learn about these companies that were like, Using social media to generate revenue. I remember learning about the tribe and I didn't know what it was, and somebody was like it's this company that, they create content and and I was like how do they make money?

They're like, oh, do they have t-shirts? And then I learned about, I think I went to a party for Whale Shark, which later became retail Me not, and just hearing about, oh they're taking this information and putting on. Social or you would just meet people in Austin. It's such a good networking social town in that regard.

So I'm I knew that this was the right city to do something like this, but I just continuously kept learning about these new texts, these new platforms and these new spaces from my peer in the Austin community. Nice.

Troy: How often do you guys in that vein struggle with finding con, say, so back Lou, like you're talking about back then you had a magazine that want, wanted to do stuff the way a magazine would do things versus you got, you're like, no, we should change it up and do stuff the way social media does it and the way that people are actually Getting, or people are actually paying attention to instead of a magazine that sits on the shelf at h HEB or wherever your guys' magazine was at, that people don't really pick up.

How much of a struggle is it these days with companies that you guys have to get them to want to, they understand nowadays, oh, I should be on Facebook, I should be on YouTube, wherever that may be. But actually like making content and stuff that's Designed for the platform rather than just say taking a television commercial and making it into a social media video per se.

Lou: George, I think you'd be good to answer that. Yeah,

George: I can start that answer. I think it's definitely not as hard as it used to be. I think one of the things that drew me to Bandier when I joined was that, I was living in the world of advertising where we were doing commercials, print ads, and a lot of that stuff.

And I did see, now we're so desensitized to change cuz things change like every day. But, five to seven years ago a new platform came out that was a huge deal and brands didn't know what to do. I think now enough platforms have been around that brands understand they have to engage a little bit more and you can't just take the spot and put it on social.

And to answer your question, I don't think it's as hard as it used to be. I think the hard part is getting maybe some people on the brand side over the hump of maybe they need this successor to, to see the value. As opposed to why don't we just put some more pictures up? Or, why don't we just do whatever other brand's doing?

I think trying to convince someone to do something new is maybe the only challenge we still face, because a lot of our stuff that we've done has been maybe a little bit different than what other agencies and brands have done. So in that regard, it's tough. But overall, I think brands are hungry to try something.

Different on social and they understand it's a just a landscape. They have to, be proficient and make sense in if that's, that'd be my

Troy: answer. Yeah. Challenge Social media is definitely not a niche that you can just kinda oh, that's nice, a nice thing. But we don't have to do that.

It's where a lot of brands and stuff are built and where they really are growing these days.

George: And we're their competitor. So I think it used to be even just five, seven years ago, you could say, oh, we don't need to be on that platform right now. And that was probably fine, but when you have actual competitors now who are growing on that platform and are maybe catching up to your brand, you can't ignore it at that point.

That's the hard part is it used to be able to ignore it. Now it's some shoe companies actually gonna become bigger than you on just on social, so you might need to, engage there, but,

Lou: And it could be like, it could be somebody that's running a company outta their garage, and then a year later through social media, they have a full on warehouse, and they're selling million dollars a year or whatever.

It's pretty crazy what social media can do now with how things have changed and how algorithms work. And there's just so much detection on like nowadays. Social media platforms know when there's a product in a photo, like it just knows and it'll recommend, Hey, you want us to tag your product? And it's if they didn't know there's a product on the page, how are they adjusting that experience for you because of that, whether good or bad, so that's why we try to be as organic as possible and as engaging and experiment with things to where it's just fun and different as much as possible. And, we always try to tell, be transparent about that with the client. And let them know the benefits of that. And in most cases they're very open to it and they're open to us experimenting and trying things cuz they know that these days you have to cut through the clutter.

George: Yeah. And one thing I would just add is we do a lot of work with TikTok is one of our clients and specifically working with's outreach to small businesses to learn their advertising platform. And I feel like one answer could be, oh, brands need to do this, but. I think sometimes we think about brands as these huge brands, which we have clients that are big brands, but there's also small businesses who are now, maybe they have one or two bricks and mortar locations, but they're doing something really big on social.

And so I think it's not just the the Nikes of the world or whoever that have to figure it out. There are small businesses that actually could do a ton of business online. That just wasn't possible, again, five or seven years ago. And so now it's just, it's actually really exciting, to be honest, to be able to work with brands of all sizes and all types.

Dan: It still blows my mind where we are, and with the technology today. One of the brands that we own is classic dad moves and we have a t-shirt line called classic.co. And Lou, you're gonna have to help me with this story. It's gonna kind of mess it up, but, classic.co sells e-commerce t-shirts.

And it's powered by Shopify. And we have a printer, Marco, that is the app plugin to print that t-shirt. If that printer goes away within the Shopify platform, there's 10 other t-shirt printers that we could select and be onboarded in within minutes to sell and fulfill our t-shirt. One night.

It was Game of Thrones and I forget the character. I think it was Tyrion who said a, who made a quote about I, I know things I

George: drink and I know things. That's what I do. And then

Dan: immediately Lou came up with an idea for a parody shirt that said, what did it say, Lou?

Lou: I, I. I mow and I drink things I can't.

George: So something like add?

No, it's, I drink and I grill things. That's what I drink.

Dan: Oh, there we go. I drink and I grill things. So we saw this thing happen on TV and within like probably less than 24 hours, we were to able to add the graphic to our website and people could buy and get the t-shirt printed in their house by the end of the week.

It's just amazing how fast that you could go. They could get a multitude of different colors, red green, black Navy So it all really boils down to the idea and what you can come up with in, in what you can think of.

Troy: Yeah. No, it's like I say the, it's. Cool to now it's been enough time that you've seen brands that I say that started just on social media.

You say small bra, a lot of people's garages or homes or whatever with the one location that now become, not that they're necessarily the Nikes or anything like that these days, but they're multi-million dollar brands that are getting bought out by huge companies. Or there's a baby food company here in Austin that I don't know if they have a huge social presence, but like they're literally in stores nationwide.

That they, one point in time was literally working out at, started out at somebody's ki own kitchen type of thing, right? Now you're suddenly a nationwide food company. And the stories and the ability to get your product or service or whatever seen through social media are pretty, pretty amazing.

Even

George: just, sorry. No, go ahead. I say even not just the brands that are. Emerging on social media and selling their products, just the way that they influence the larger brands is cool too. You start seeing that they're moving markets and they're making decisions at, some of Pepsi or whoever it is, because some other soda brand is doing something online.

They say we've gotta react to that. And so it's not just the brands that are, growing, it's how they're affecting the established brands too. I find interesting on that front.

Troy: As somebody, as a company that works with some big companies and some smaller companies, do you see a big difference in the speed at which.

Companies are able to move to grab that attention, right? If, if Pepsi was gonna make that commercial, or Nike's a clothing. If Nike was gonna make the I drink things and drill, t-shirt, it probably wouldn't have been a 24 hour turnaround that they would've had that shirt ready to go and social creative ready to get that happen.

There's so many different. Pieces of red tape and things that have to kinda be done. So are you still seeing a pretty big difference between smaller companies and larger corporations as far as the speed to be in the moment?

Dan: I would say one thing to that is we're hearing more and more because the speed, what slowed things like that down in social usually was the legal team.

And what we're hearing more and more from our clients is they have quicker fax, faster access to their internal legal team, which tells us that the legal team now realizes, Hey, we have to have a quick solution if we wanted to be quick and relevant in the days of social media.

So they're, the bigger companies are going faster and faster. And faster.

George: Yeah. They, a lot of 'em have in-house agencies too now. One of the things that we as an agency work with is, we now work with a lot of in-house agencies and we partner with them. And it always goes a little bit better when there's someone on the other side who understands social and understands the speed at which it has to move.

And so companies, Nike's maybe not the best example is so big, but companies understand what they need to do. And they have people in place now to do it. So they can't act as, as quite as quickly as, your usual social media grown brands, but they're not far behind anymore, I don't think.

Troy: Yeah. One thing you have internal people that are on your guys's side about pushing the speed versus just all pushback. Yeah. In that way. One

note

Lou: about that though is that I do think the one thing that hasn't fully transitioned to what smaller scrappier brands are doing, Is the creative because they do have agencies, which is, fine.

But I do think that some of these big brands, corporate brands because they do so much high quality, high production work, sometimes it leaks into the content that they're doing on social media. And I think it's probably because they're spending a lot of money to produce those things.

So there's a lot of high level ideas that trickle down and become social media. Whereas some of the smaller brands, because they need social media to grow, they don't have the big budgets, they don't have the backing or the funds to do that. They have to they're working backwards, like they're having to start from this small, really scrappy, homegrown sort of thing to grow their brand to be seen.

And so I think sometimes you see that in the content. And it's funny because some of these big corporations and big brands could easily do that cuz they have all the resources and all the means. But I think their heads are just in a. In a different category, or in a different space.

Yeah.

Troy: Yeah. I know a guy that works for Powerade in the marketing department and Right, like they're they basical, they're creating these big commercials for events and then it's while we're spending these months to create these commercial spots, I. During that we can get social media content out of different components of it.

And so it's again, that mindset of that, that TV commercial's still the big thing. And then the social media is however we can put that in. Whereas we say for a smaller company that couldn't spend the money to, for the TV spot to begin with, they're like let's focus on being native to the social media aspect of it.

And so it a lot of times feels more, more native, more natural in that regard, in my opinion. Yeah. Yeah,

Dan: totally. I don't wanna, there's a lot of utility. Sorry.

George: Sorry. I was gonna say I feel like a lot of times we still get the question from other agency friends or brand friends what's the spot?

And it's I don't think the spot dictates the idea anymore. It's not what's the spot, it's what's the idea? That idea might be a Social ex execution. That was the first thing. It might be an event. But I think the days of, what's the 32nd spot is maybe gone. There are great 32nd spots and we love to make those, but that's not the end goal of a campaign anymore.

Troy: For the two creatives, are you guys pretty excited with the changes and obviously it's been a little while now, like the changes to iOS that, for the last number of years, a lot of social media, especially when it was Facebook primarily, was very analytics driven based off of.

Cost per clicks and those kind of things where now that a lot of that, those metrics have started to go away to a degree, it seems like it, it seems like there's a renewed focus on the actual creative and the idea that you're talking about there versus just something that will get clicks per se, because you can't measure things quite the same way on a report.

And so it's more hopefully holistic and brand related. Are you guys seeing some of those. Types of things. And is that, I'm sure, again, as a creative that yeah, I'm sure you want these spots and the social media to work for the businesses that you're doing them for. It's gotta be fun to be able to have a little bit more creative license that way.

George: Yeah, I, Lou I'll have a short answer and you can respond as well, but for me, anytime that the focus gets back on the creative and a little bit less about the data, I mean there are still every project out. There are ways we get measured. But it's not about the data that's informing the creative, it's about maybe informing the strategy or decision ahead of time.

But anytime we can focus back on what's gonna actually engage real people on social and, some people call, likes and things, vanity metrics, I don't like to call it that because those are actual things that people have responded to. And so we focus at least my opinion on things that are relevant and engaging.

And those usually hit the measurements that were judged by, later, Lou.

Lou: Yeah I would, I pretty much agree fully with that. But I do specifically when it comes to creative I think one of the things I appreciate the most is especially with us, like we're always testing, we're doing different stuff, and even with like our own brand, to learn what's working, what's not, try to find patterns and trends and things like that.

And one thing that we've noticed is that organic content, That we have more fun creating and that feels more natural and feels more human. That's the stuff that we find if we do promote or use ads through some of these platforms, those are the things that perform better. So it's the best of both worlds because we get to create things that we enjoy to, we enjoy creating.

And it also seems to be the thing that produces better results in terms of paid media and stuff like that. So it's like we've finally got into a place where those two things, those two areas I've met and it makes it easier for us because we don't feel like we're following these very rigid parameters of what you had to do before.

It feels like now you can just enjoy making the stuff that you want to make and doing it your way in, in a fun way. And then actually get results out

of

George: it too, which is great. Yeah. Go ahead. I was gonna say. And the other thing is there are still the guidelines of, you wanna stay within brand voice and brand guidelines and those types of things and tone.

That makes sense. But what you can do pretty much anything you want within those now. And I feel like there's just a little less restrictions when you're not so focused on the analytics or the platforms and places like TV that things had to live before,

Troy: yeah. You guys mentioned, we talked a little bit earlier on about kind of Red Bull becoming a marketing company to sell their product.

You guys didn't start a product to then create a marketing company, but you guys also have a product that you guys have started cz Zoning, a marketing company called Roasty Buds which is a spicy coffee company. How did, what was the genesis of deciding to start your own brand within the company?

Or not necessarily just within the company, but together as well?

George: Lou, you wanna go for that one?

Lou: I You go for the story and then I'll jump in

George: for the Yeah. We, we've had a local coffee client, Kube coffee for years. And they understand social and they like to do interesting things on social.

And one of the things that Lou came up with was this idea Willow espresso, and it was a TikTok series of. Trying to express all these different food items and then seeing how they tasted. And we had actually, Mike, the owner of Kube, do it. One of the more popular things that he did was hot peppers, is he ground up hot peppers, ran it through an espresso machine and tasted it.

And you can imagine how hot that was. People just liked that content. And then, as a couple years later we still were just thinking of content we wanted to create. And one of the things that came up was let's tap into the spicy and coffee markets online and create some content.

Around that. And then we thought we can do a video, but that product doesn't exist. Spicy coffee doesn't exist, and it should. And at Bandier we always think if something doesn't exist and it could be interesting, let's create it. So Lou and I basically decided we were gonna do this, and then just told Dan, Hey, you gotta figure it out for us.

And then we moved from there. Lou, did I leave anything out?

Lou: No I think that we'd always talked about potentially creating something. And I think when we're going through those ideas and figuring out like what was something that was possible to pull off, that we had a connection to resources and knew a way to get the ball rolling a little bit.

When we put those pieces together, there was a bit of a light bulb moment where we realized like, Hey, I think we can do this. Like it's something that we can actually launch. And we worked with so many people in the past that we feel so strongly about in their work. Like our artist Robert Lynn, for example.

We worked with 'em in the past and it was like finally getting to do that with our own concepts and our own ideas was like super exciting. And not to mention just getting a sample of that spicy coffee made and seeing what that would even be like, and then hoping and, crossing our fingers that it wouldn't be horrible.

And then tasting it, all three of us, sat around and tasted it and although it was spicy and it burned there, it was actually very delicious. So that was super motivating and encouraging. And then, Now we're here. So

George: yeah, whether it's a, whether it's a video or an ad or a product, we don't wanna put anything bad out in the world.

And so it started as wouldn't this be cool? And then we tasted it. And unlike a lot of flavored coffee companies, this is actually really high quality craft bean. And we're like, wait, this is good. This isn't just funny to try. This is good. And that was born out with our sales.

And then we've expanded to other flavors. So Mexican chocolate, again, just trying different things. Lu wanted to do a Mexican chocolate coffee. And that's a very authentic flavor for a lot of people. And that's actually become our top seller. People still like the spicy, we did barbecue coffee, smoked with a very specific process that again, our roaster uses.

So it's just always trying new things. And again, it just helps that we're starting with a high quality beans, which is not usually the case for flavored coffee. So you'll have to

Troy: partner with Amy's ice cream and get some Mexican vanilla ice cream to go with the Mexican chocolate coffee.

That'd be

Lou: great. Yeah, that, and that's a good point. Like those are the things that and thankfully we've had so many clients that have been open to doing a lot of the stuff crazy or not that we want to do. And that's been such a privilege to be able to work with people that kind of get the way we think and feel the same way about their brand and want to do fun stuff.

But, I, when you have your own thing, it's like there are really no rules. Like you could do whatever you want. And, partnerships and collaborations and things like that is like such a. A thing that we enjoy. We've always seen people do it like the Mountain Dews and the, Dr.

Peppers and, all the people that just do these crazy collaborations that normally you wouldn't even think would make sense, which is the fun part. And so we have, we're really looking forward to being able to do more as we grow. Sure. In terms of like things like that.

Troy: For the coffee place for the coffee.

What's the best way for people that are, maybe interested in that, to try it out? Or where can they pick that up at or get it? Adam, I'm guessing it's online exclusively.

Dan: Yeah. Ro roasty buds.com. There you go. Yeah, there

Troy: you go. Rusty bugs. And

Dan: then yeah, so just to kinda have on one quick thing, Lou said, we gotta do whatever we want.

That's the good and bad thing because we have to figure out, okay, how do we finance this? How do we get the funds for it? Our banker has probably gotten some of the strangest calls from us ever saying how do we figure this out? Or how do we do it? And our insurance company, who usually, we buy policy behind everything.

We bought Policy for Rain once when we shot in Orlando, California, and then we bought, or

George: Orlando, Florida. What did I say?

Dan: Oh, yeah. They can edit that in post. Yeah, so yeah, so figuring out the logistics, the financials is also a fun, creative challenge as

Troy: well. Sure. And as a business mind, that's probably the fun, creative challenge for you.

Where the actual creative guys, it's probably the figuring out the business side is sometimes less of a fun, creative challenge. Boy, is

George: it, I remember I, I'll just say this, I, we spent a lot of money on the coffee business and some other things we've done, and then at one point Dan kind of referred to it as research and development, and I was like, that's exactly what it is.

That's all these lessons we've learned we used for our clients, but I didn't have in my head the thing I needed to say to myself to make it okay that we do invest that way and it's oh, it's just r and d and that made it all better.

Dan: It's r and d. And had we not, committed to that, we wouldn't have figured these things out.

I tell my wife all the time that I'm a scientist, then she quickly reminds me I'm not. But we're doing a lot of scientific research and developing and pricing out some of these projects.

Troy: I know we don't have a lot of time left, but one question I want to ask on that front as far as where things are going.

What do you guys see with AI and how that looks in the future as far as like writing and, social media content and all those kind of interesting components?

Dan: It's gonna replace my two creative partners, which I'm okay. Kidding.

Lou: I will say that I don't know where it will be at in the future because it's already very impressive.

There is that human element, obviously that's missing. It's very, it's getting scally close, but you could just tell. But one thing that I do appreciate and that I feel like it is a nice little version of it, or part of it that I like. It's definitely a good thought starter.

Like sometimes I'm sure George can relate or maybe he can't, but sometimes it's just mental block there's so much stuff going on. We're. Wearing so many hats, doing so many different things that sometimes when you finally sit down to do something, if you're gonna brainstorm or try to concept something, you're, you can't just kickstart.

Like you're stuck there and you're trying to, just get some kind of momentum going. And that's one thing that, it's just like the click of a button. It's boom. There's just something there that just at least. Open your brain up a little bit to start letting those ideas flow in.

So that's one thing that I've appreciated about it. So hopefully it doesn't replace me. But yeah, for now, I think that sometimes it does help and it has its place

Troy: and it'll probably make like a lot of technologies, it'll, I mean it, sure, it will end up replacing some people, but in a reality, it'll probably make people like yourselves that are already very talented, more productive, like you say, able to not spend 30 minutes.

Trying to brainstorm something like, Hey, let's put punches into AI and within 30 seconds I've got that the ball rolling to then get to where

George: I need to go. Yeah. One thing Lou and I talked about at one point was it does At least right now, the iteration of AI I've seen with chat G P T, it pulls from the internet what it's, what's going on.

So you're not gonna see something new. It's going to give you a sense of what's been done. And so it's almost a good thing sometimes to stay away from those ideas because you know that oh, it's pulling what's been it's seen. And so we need to try to think of something it hasn't seen. So that's a challenge too.

So it's a momentum starter, but also a watch out of if it thinks this, maybe we should think differently.

Troy: Very true. Very true. I know up against the clock here. So just wanted to thank you guys for taking the time to join me. Your guys' website. Got it down there for the media agency as well.

You can always find out more information about them there and links to stuff. And then if you wanna Since they are, do a lot of social media, you got the Roasty buds for all the different social handles. I'm sure you can find some interesting content there. And Vandellia Media for the media side of things.

Anything I missing there for you guys? No I

Dan: really appreciate it. I think you could tell I, I very much enjoy working with these guys and everybody at Bandier Media. We enjoy each other's company and and

Lou: Working together. Yeah, we joke around all the time and that's the beauty of our relationship is like it really is brothers in a sense cuz like we're all very different.

So yeah it is, it's been quite a few years, but it doesn't feel like it when you get to work with people you enjoy working with.

Troy: And like I said, for you guys, it's awesome you've been able to do that now, getting close to 10 years. I think that's another thing with the pandemic is the flexibility in people's jobs have realized that, More and more people get to hopefully do things that they enjoy doing rather than just doing things that they have to do.

So it's awesome. You guys have been able to do that for quite a while.

Lou: Thank you. Thank you. I appreciate that.

Troy: Appreciate everyone listening in today and hope everyone has a wonderful rest of their day.