Jay Acunzo, Unthinkable Media – Model the Masters – InnovaBuzz 126

Model the Masters – Jay Acunzo, Unthinkable Media

In this episode of Model the Masters, I am excited to welcome back to the podcast, Jay Acunzo of Unthinkable Media. We explore with Jay the topic of Gaining Attention from Your Target Market, and find out what values, beliefs and strategies are important to Jay in being a master of Gaining Attention from Your Target Market.

Jay is an award-winning podcaster and a dynamic keynote speaker. He works with fastest-growing startups and challenger brands to create entertaining B2B podcasts. Throughout his career, he has helped teams successfully break from conventional wisdom to do more exceptional work.

Jay previously appeared as a guest on InnovaBuzz podcast episode 118.

Listen to the Podcast to find out what is important to Jay Acunzo about Gaining Attention from Your Target Market

Show Notes from this episode with Jay Acunzo of Unthinkable Media

Values related to Gaining Attention from Your Target Market:

• Integrity above results.
• Serving the audience and giving them value
• Self and situational awareness – understand who you are and the context that you operate in
• Creativity and self actualization – there are a lot of things that work for other people but it doesn’t mean that they work for you. Break from conventional thinking and instead do something better.
• Curiosity – instead of acting like an expert, act like an investigator. Investigators care about evidence not absolutes. They care about what works in their situation, not what someone else says works in general. They go about testing and learning and picking up clues from the world around them.

Beliefs related to Gaining Attention from Your Target Market: 

• Acquiring attention starts with understanding what problem you solve or what desire you fulfill for the other person.
• Shortcut culture is bad.
• All best practices work in general or on average. We don’t operate our business in a generality nor do we want to be average.
• Great work begins with understanding who am I, who are we, what is it, and the context that you operate in.
• Podcasts are a great way to get in front of people, hold their attention and earn trust and loyalty.
• There is no “just”. There is no “one thing”. You have all sorts of things you can choose from. All these best practices and tactics are all possibilities. It is up to us to see those possibilities within our own situations.
• Resonance is more important than reach.

Strategies related to Gaining Attention from Your Target Market:

• Talk to customers – talk to the people you aim to serve.
• Scientific method – drop things that are not resonating and investigate further the ones that seem to stick.
• First principle insight – cut through all the conventional wisdom and reach this basic but hard to reach truth about your audiences’ struggles or desires. Figure out what is it they are actually dealing with that maybe we cannot find unless we talk to them face to face about their own reality.
• Search for true believers.
• Don’t throw out everything you are doing. Whatever tactic you have at your disposal in the past that has proven itself to be useful or just seems common in your industry, those can still be useful if you re-engineer what you are putting through those channels based on the first principle insight. Just revisit those using the new information that you have.

Model the Masters – Exceptions Round

Here are Jay’s answers to the questions of our Exceptions round. Listen to the interview to get the full scoop.

• What behaviour do you DO to be great at Gaining Attention from Your Target Market? – Fully owning and understanding the problem. Where are you willing to go that your competitors are not? I am willing to get very emotional using a lot of post production and techniques pulled from entertainment media, and a lot of people in business are not willing to go there. They are not willing to lay out their heart and they are not willing to kind of rally people because they are just focused on the smarts, whereas, I am focused on being entertaining AND smart.
• What are your 3 top beliefs for excelling at Gaining Attention from Your Target Market?

1. Integrity over results – doing the right thing is always the best path forward. Integrity over results tends to get better results.
2. Resonance over reach – finding and identifying what sticks, what people respond too viscerally, and then leaning in harder to that test, that channel, that message or whatever it is that tends to get you reach a lot easier or tends to get you more conversions because you found something worth marketing.
3. Don’t focus on best practices. Focus on what works best for you.

• What is the key difference that makes THE DIFFERENCE in you Gaining Attention from Your Target Market? – I am willing to go further into entertainment and try to do the delicate balancing act of not getting kitsch but using entertainment tropes and techniques to make something smart, irresistible.

Reach Out

You can reach out and thank Jay through his website, emailand on Twitter – @JayAcunzo

Suggested Model

Jay Acunzo nominated Bill Simmons of TheRinger.com, as someone that he admires in Gaining Attention from Your Target Market.

Links

• Email Jay
• Website – Jay Acunzo
• Unthinkable Media Website
• Twitter – @JayAcunzo

Listen to the Podcast to find out what is important to Jay Acunzo about Gaining Attention from Your Target Market