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In 2023, Derek Oyen (Senior UX Designer), Jesse DiFranco (Senior Account Executive) and Mikey Nichols (Videographer/Editor) created Ask a Better Question, a podcast that showcases agency life; how campaigns come to life; what marketers do at Marcus Thomas; and who these marketers are outside of work as well. 

In this episode, hosts Derek and Jesse welcome Marcus Thomas Chief Media Officer Raphael "Raf" Rivilla to the studio.

Transcript by Derek Oyen 

[Intro theme music] 

Jesse: All right, Derek, we're back. 

Derek: Once again. 

Jesse: Back in our favorite room. For those people who are at Marcus Thomas, we're in Shadow’s Shelter, the room up front. But there are talks of us soon getting our own studio space for these podcasts. 

Derek: Well, it's more like we want to take a room over. We're going to stake a claim. 

Jesse: We didn't ask permission to do this podcast.  

Derek: No, we haven't. 

Jesse: So, we're not in the habit of asking for things. We get an idea, we just kind of go for it. 

Derek: It's worked so far. 

Jesse: So far, it's working. 

Raf: Just get in trouble later. 

Jesse: Exactly. Yeah. Ask for forgiveness. But our guest today, who is Raf, did provide us with the two truths and a lie as the guests often do. So, Derek, do you want to start reading? We’ll guess which is going to be the lie. 

Derek: Yes, I will start reading. Alright. Statement number one: I once DJ’d at San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 

Jesse: I was in a motorcycle accident where my bike 360’d three times and landed on top of me. 

Derek: Ouch. 

Raf: Ouch.  

Derek: And third, I started my career in advertising in Portland, Oregon. 

Jesse: These are really tricky actually. Because I know Raf a little bit and all of these sound very true, and I think they are all a little bit true because he does DJ, he does have a bike. 

Derek: He definitely has a West Coast experience. 

Raf: Yeah. I was trying to be a little tricky with it. They're not so easy. It's in the fine details. 

Jesse: I think he's trying to he's trying to trick us. I think he did DJ at the Museum of Modern Art, I could see him doing that. 

Derek: One hundred percent. Yes. I'm in my head seeing his bicycle… his motorcycle spinning and landing on top of him. 

Jesse: But wouldn’t… I mean that's a serious injury, right? If a bike fell on you like that? Those things are really heavy. 

Derek: Yeah. 

Jesse: He's still with us, not even walking with a limp or anything. So, and “I started my career in Portland, Oregon,” I think that is true too. 

Derek: I don't know. I'm going to go with Portland because I've never heard Raf talk about Portland. I've heard him talk about San Francisco. I have not heard him talk about Oregon, so I'm going to say the lie is that he started in Portland, Oregon 

Jesse: I'm actually going to say the lie is the bike 360’d three times and landed on top of him. I don't think it 360’d three times. Maybe it was like twice. It’s that little detail. So, Raf do you want to go ahead and introduce yourself and then tell us which one is in fact the lie? 

Raf: Perfect. Yeah. So, Raf Rivilla, I am the Chief Media Officer here at Marcus Thomas, and Derek's correct. 

Jesse: Really.  

Raf: Yeah.  

Derek: Chalk another one up for me. 

Raf: Yeah. So, the bike thing. You're right, it sounds really bad. But again, thank God I was wearing a helmet because there was a big ding on my helmet. I did 360 three times before I finally skidded, like, to the car in front of me. So, yeah. 

Jesse: Did that deter you from riding for a while? 

Raf: It actually did not. They say to ride right away and don't get that fear or else you're not gonna ride right away. So, I actually got my bike fixed and that was the only period of time that I wasn't riding. And it was probably like two months. 

Derek: Bike needed to be prepared? How about body? 

Raf: Broken wrist and cuts on my leg, but that's it. I still cannot believe that I walked away from that that easily, especially with my head, like, hitting the floor. 

Derek: Was that in California? 

Raf: I was in San Francisco going down Market Street, yup. 

Jesse: Were you leaving the Museum of Modern Art where you were getting off the DJ floor. 

Raf: No, I wasn't. This was me just going to work actually. 

Jesse: But did DJ at the Cleveland Museum… not the Cleveland Museum, the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art. 

Raf: I did. 

Jesse: What's that story? How do you get…  

Raf: That’s super cool. So, the first company I started working at called Mediaplex – they're now called Conversant, so they still are around – they threw their opening party at the San Francisco Museum of Modern Art, and I was actually DJing at the time. And they were like, oh, why don't you just DJ the party? And so, it was really cool. It was interesting to be in that museum and then see all these people in your company, like, dancing. Like, C-level executives. Like, everyone. It was just interesting. Yeah. 

Jesse: When you’re DJing though, I mean, like you're picking out the songs and you're putting them all together? I mean, like, that's such a process in itself. There's a lot of, like, editing that goes into all that. I mean, has that always been a love of yours, or did you kind of find that relatively recently? 

Raf: No, it's always been a love of mine. So, I actually got into DJing through my white paper thesis in college. So, I graduated with a Communications degree with Business as a side. But yeah, USF in San Francisco. So, the thesis I did for one of my classes was the underground rave scene in San Francisco as a subculture. And at the time, this was again like ’95, ’96, and there was just so much good underground music in San Francisco. And I would go to these things and I'm like, oh, my God, these people have their own everything. Their way of dress, their music, their, you know, their belief system again. So, I wrote a paper on it and then that's how I really got into it. And then ever since then, I've just been into all of that stuff. And so I started DJing then, and I've always either been making music on the side, which you can see on SoundCloud. I've got some tracks there that I've made, but also DJ sets. But I've also been spinning, and I've kept doing it since. 

Derek: So there's more to it than just making a Spotify playlist? 

Raf: No, no, no. Yeah. You think about curating, like, a set, and so what you think about is “what am I going to start with?” It can't be like the craziest banger of, like, the set, right? You’ve got to get your audience into it. So, you pace it that way and you're, like, OK, by the third song, it's going to get a little bit crazier. It's going to be a little bit, you know, you get them really pumped up and then you think about these ebbs and flows and ups and downs and builds and you know, like, how do you like orchestrate, like, the party and then you're, like, OK, if I'm spinning for 90 minutes, what's going to happen in that 90 minutes and how do I want my crowd to feel? And how do I want to take them on a journey? And so you have this set list, but it always goes out the window. It always goes out the window.  

Jesse: That was my next question. Do you ever start to improvise? 

Raf: Yeah. The first two tracks are always the ones will probably be the ones you play, because you're still, you know, getting into it and getting into the mix or whatever. But then once you see the crowd and you vibe off the crowd, then you just ride that. You don't want to bring them down if they're, like, having a great time.  

Jesse: I think that's so cool. You have all these people who are basically depending on you for their good time and guiding them through this journey of different types of moods and everything. And I think that is the neatest thing. Has ever been a time where what you had planned was so tight that you didn't have to change it at all? 

Raf: Never.  

Jesse: Really, never. Wow. 

Raf: Never. Because the thing with DJing, too, is it's not just going from one song to the next. It's literally using the instruments from the record to play an instrument, which is the DJ set. There's so many knobs and the knobs control the highs, which is a lot of the high hats. The mids, which is a lot of the horns or the vocals, and then the low low end of the the knob, which is all the the, you know, the bass as well as the four by four on the floor like kick drums and stuff like that. Like the bass drum. So, you can take things in and take things out. Like, so you can literally use the drums from one record with a baseline from another. The high hats from another. You know you have four, on mine four, different channels. So, you can have four records and four songs playing at the same time. And you can use things from. When it becomes fun is when you don't even know what song it is anymore. 

Jesse: You're basically performing at that point, you know, but flowing in all these different sounds. Wow, that's incredible. 

Raf: Yeah, it's a lot of fun.  

Jesse: So DJ, and motorcycle rider, you also have a small job here. Marcus Thomas. Do you wanna talk little bit about what your day-to-day life is like here? 

Raf: So, yeah, I work with 26-27 fabulous media people and I always say, you know, what do we do? We spend the money. So, one that sounds fun, but no, there’s also a lot of risk in that. And each of them, they all have goals like we do with, you know, they want that money to perform a certain way. And you know, we're obviously, like, distributing the creative and the messaging and making sure that we are, you know, tweaking the right knobs [laughing] if you will.  

But no, yeah, I'm the Chief Media Officer. So working with this group, but I also am day-to-day on a couple of the accounts. You know, working with the team obviously, but optimizing the investments, making sure things are running in the right places and that we're constantly hitting the goal. And I also do a lot of new business. So, with the pitches where Media is involved. Usually, I handle those as well. 

Derek: Media is a world that I spend little time with. I mean, it's a black box to me. You mentioned this a minute ago. The clients have an expectation. They're putting a lot of money through this system, and you have targets that you're supposed to meet. And from my understanding there are a lot of levers that you guys can pull and push and adjust to make sure that if something isn't performing the way we expect it to, we don't just let it ride and things tank. We have ways to adjust. 

Jesse: We could take the drums from one song and mix it with another one. 

Raf: Yeah, exactly. Yeah. And it's it's the TV versus the, you know, the social media. And within social media, it's which channels, right? So yeah, there are a lot. 

Derek: Yeah. So how do you come up with a media plan for somebody? 

Raf: Yeah, that's a great question. So, the media plan is really a hyper integrated approach with other communities of practice here at Marcus Thomas, so it isn't just the media department saying here's your media plan. It's really a joint effort with Planning and Strategic Services kind of saying, you know, these are our audiences. These are the personas. These are the people who buy these certain products. And our goal is to reverse engineer, like, the research to find addressable audiences. So, if you say these are the personas, well, we're going to recreate those personas and then we're going to find out where to have these conversations with them. And there's a lot of research behind that. So, media consumption habits: if this is our demographic or audience, where are they spending the most time with their media?  

You couple that with the best places to target them, right. So, it's really a mix. It's a science, and it's also an art because there's a lot of numbers towards what we're doing. Like how many people can we find in certain channels? But it's also, like, an art in the sense of you're taking risks with new media, new technology. There's new data all the time. So, yeah, it's a joint effort. It's also the creative execution. Like, how do we want to communicate with this audience? What's the value exchange? And where can we communicate that the best? So, if we want to break through and do something really fun, that is a Creative, but it's also what media will make that happen the most. You know, is it experiential? Is it a takeover somewhere? So, yeah, it's not just the Media department. It's really a combination of a lot of the different departments here. 

Jesse: We had Pato on the show a few weeks ago, and he talked about marketing automation. He's creating personas from different people who are visiting websites, and they have an idea of who the personas are going to be going in. But that always changes, and they create their own personas. When you are creating new personas in what you do, are you finding that you're reusing a lot of the same ones or are they constantly changing? 

Raf: No. So they're different by clients. 

Jesse: So they are different. 

Raf: They are different by client, and it's fun because you always start out with who you think your target audiences are. And then when you run, that can change based on the media that you're driving, the data that you're gathering. Yeah. And we do work a lot with Pato's group as well. So, he is again collecting a lot of e-mail addresses, and those e-mail addresses we use to create audiences from. And we can do two things with it. One, we can analyze them because, again, if you all you have is an e-mail address, you don't know who that person is, right? You just know their e-mail address. What we can do on our side is actually get a whole list of your best customers if you segment them a certain way. And, say, you know what? This is who these people are. So we can then find more of them. 

Jesse: Yeah. And as the head of the Media department, you obviously have a whole team of people working under you. When you're bringing on new people to that team, are there any specific kinds of characteristics you're looking for? 

Raf: Yeah. For sure. Definitely, people who are analytical is key. People who are also passionate about what they do. What we do is so dynamic. You know, things are changing all the time with regards to privacy, tracking, cookies going away… and because of that there’s always new solutions that people are creating and we have to be on top of those things. So it's never the same, and, so, because of that we’re always looking for people who are, you know, passionate but also people who always want to learn. Like students of the craft if you will. 

Derek: Keeping up on the… I'll call it technology changes, you know, you mentioned the cookies disappearing. And the systems that we use, we have no control over. But we are so dependent upon them. And it's interesting to me that we need to know this for ourselves, but we also are the stewards for our clients. Our clients aren't aware of what's going on. So, we need to tell them, “Hey, this is coming next year, you have to be ready for this, and here's how.” So, what is that like? Not just in the operational side of running a media plan but making sure that we are up on top of things and informing our clients of what's coming ahead. 

Raf: Yeah. Again, I've been here for 11 years and one of the things that I have always thought was important that I hopefully have brought to the team is that thirst for always knowing what's next. And I always say, you know, with regards to media, you're always balancing what you know works really well with what's new. And the cool thing about Marcus Thomas, which is also a challenge, is that we've really trained our clients in always looking for what's new. If it's been done before they they're like, OK, we've already done that. Like, what can we do different? And so we're always trying to balance both things. But for us to always know what's new, we always have to be researching things. Like, we're always like, OK, what's the hottest trends right now in media and culture, in technology? And again, we're lucky here because our clients allow us to do those tests and learns. And, you know, if we want to test something new, as long as there's a rationale behind it and a small little bet on it, then we can scale it if it works. 

Derek: That’s one thing that your group did… 

Raf: Media trick or treat? 

Derek: Yeah. Media trick or treat? Yeah, that was so intense because we absorbed, or at least tried to absorb, six different stories [Raf: laughing] in in eight minutes each about all sorts of different facets of media and what's changing. It's really great the way you share that, I think, with the rest of the agency. 

Raf: Yeah. No. And again, to your point, we tried to make it digestible and so the key is to digest a little bit, but if you want to know more reach out, and, like, we would definitely love to sit down and like go deeper on any of those topic. But yeah, we're always glad to share things because we feel like, again, it's such a dynamic marketplace for media and technology. It's always changing. You know, our our partners are always iterating and creating new things for us and for our clients and that we need to share that with the agency as much as we can. 

Jesse: When it comes to something like Google, which I know is something you, of course, have to stay up to date on, you don't always know what Google is doing. Google is kind of secretive, so you're kind of guessing or making educated guesses. How tough is that to do to stay on top of that stuff and there are no real concrete answers when you're just kind of analyzing and figuring it out on your own? 

Raf: The way you asked that question is really interesting. It's actually so much easier now than it was a long time ago, which to me “a long time ago,” let's just even say six years ago. So as a search marketer within Google, it was really a hyper focus in how you set up your campaigns, set up your ad groups, pick the right keywords, write the right ad copy, send them to the right landing page, and you thinking about the intent of someone searching so that you can grab that click. And there's a huge algorithm behind that with regards to how much someone is clicking on your ad, how relevant that ad copy is to the searcher, plus how good the landing page experience is. So, all of that was what we used to call the quality score. And so, there was really a lot of discipline and art in in search engine marketing.  

Fast forward to now and, to your point, it's a black box. Soon, probably in the next couple of months, all you will need to do is put your landing page in and Google through AI will actually ask you questions. What are you trying to do with this campaign? Who are your audiences? What are your goals? What are you…? It will literally create your whole campaign for you. It will select the keywords, it'll write the ad copy, suggest the right parts of your landing page, and then through AI as you're running, it'll refine everything. Like, oh, here's the new copy that you need. Here's the new keywords that you need. Here's, you know… as a marketer, you know, our clients are always asking us, you know, what are you doing? What insights? What tests and learns? With Performance Max, it's a black box. It's like you load all the creative in and you load, your settings in, you load your budget in, and it will optimize towards whatever your goal is. So, you will stipulate a goal: the goal is to drive return on ad spend, the goal is to drive traffic, or the goal is to drive reach. Based on how you set that goal, the black box runs. 

Jesse: So, quite a big change. 

Raf: It's a very big change. It's challenging because the insights that you glean aren't as clean because, again, it's a black box with an algorithm running all your creative, optimizing using AI, and the way that you used to test and learn is by doing very controlled, like, tests, right? Like, I'm going to try this landing page. I'm going to try this ad copy. I'm going to do a 50/50. So, there still are tests you can do, but, I mean it's a black box there. Definitely is a black box behind all of this. 

Derek: And a lot of the testing is happening automatically on the fly on the backside of that, and you’re not even involved. 

Raf: No, it's not A/B anymore. It's like multivariate AI. 

Jesse: I think we could do a whole podcast on just your DJing. You could do a whole podcast on what you do with the Media department. I also want to talk a little bit about you and your husband, John, who own a bar. The holidays are coming up and you have a bar right across the street from the Christmas story house. Do you wanna tell us a little bit about how you came to be and owner of the Rowley Inn? 

Raf:, Yeah, definitely. So, John -- like you said, my husband -- he's always been in the service industry. So, when we moved here to Cleveland, he was like, OK, you know, I'm going to try something different. So, he was in real estate for a while. And then the way this whole thing happened was my brother was flying in from LA and he landed at, I think, 8:00 in the morning, and for some weird reason, he wanted a drink. So, he's like, are there bars open at 8:00 AM here? Or can we have a drink somewhere? And so we Googled it and. The Rowley Inn came up and this was probably like, I don't know, 11 years ago, maybe something like that. And we went there, and it was a third shift bar, a complete dive bar. I mean, there wasn't even the windows that we had installed. But you go in, and it was a fun time, you know? It was like, steel workers, you know, all third shift people at that time when we were there buying us drinks and stuff like that, and it was the funnest time in the in the world. And so, we were like, oh my God, this Rowley Inn is super awesome. And they're open in the morning. People are just having fun, and you would never think of this place, you know? It's not in the heart of Tremont. It's not in Ohio City. It's not in Detroit Shoreway.  

And then fast-forward to six years ago, it was on the market. So, we were like, OK. What should we do? Like, we really like this place, and to your point, it's in front of the Christmas Story house. And so, we said, you know what? Let's do it. Let's, let's buy this place. And so, we went there and we were like, look at this place, it could be so much better. But we don't want to change everything. It's got the vibe. It's got the authenticity. We also believe in TRU here, T-R-U, which this place had. It was so authentic, and it was unique.  

Jesse: Can you explain that TRU? 

Raf: Yeah. True, relevant and unique. And so, if you're thinking about a brand and trying to like find the value in that brand and how to connect it with a consumer or human, what is true, relevant and unique, right? That is the core. And so, this place had it, I mean this is Cleveland, this is real. And the one thing we were like, OK, just doesn't have food. That was the big thing that was missing. There was no menu. Why is there this neighborhood bar that everyone loves, but it's really just a bar? Like, it should have food and it should welcome families, not just people who want to drink. So that's what the place is. It's, you know, it now has really good food, but we've retained the same vibe. 

Jesse: Really good food is kind of under selling it. You had Guy Fieri. 

Raf: Yeah. Yeah, we did. We were in Diners, Drive-ins and Dives last year. And then think six years ago, we just bought this place, and we were like, OK, well, hopefully it becomes something, or we do something well with it. Now, it's just really such a fun place, yeah. 

Jesse: Last December, my wife and I did the Trolley Tour where they bring you to one of the stops is the Christmas Story house and when we were there we said let's just run across the street and get a drink at the Rowley. We couldn't even get in, it was so full. And I’ve got to imagine the holidays, being location you’re in, across from that house, that's got to be pretty consistent that type of business. 

Raf: Oh my gosh, we. Have two-hour, three-hour long waits and you have people waiting, and I always feel like it's funny during the holidays because our core clientele are probably like, oh my God, this is our place, you know. So yeah, we expanded because of that. Yeah, we have, like, way more tables. We can fit more people in and we have a bigger kitchen. So hopefully the waits aren't going to be as crazy. 

Jesse: So do you ever want to do the bar full time or…? 

Raf: Probably not. No. 

Derek: John's gig. 

Raf: That's John's gig. I just go there and have drinks and really good food. I enjoy it. Anytime that you see the Christmas decor or the Halloween, the whatever. That's me. I also do all the social media marketing for it, so, in a way, I do kind of, I guess, help him out more than I think I do. [laughs] 

Derek: Just not on a day-to-day. 

Raf: Just not on a day-to-day. No, Marcus is my day-to-day. There's enough going on here. 

Jesse: I just want to ask you just a quick question. As you being a partner of Marcus Thomas, what excites you, kind of, just the most about the future of Marcus Thomas, where things are going now and tell us, you personally, what excites you about the industry? 

Raf: The question is aligned between the industry and Marcus, right, because we're always trying to think of what's next. Where do we go? What are our clients looking for? And what I love, being a part of the partner group, is how we all listen to each other. We listen to, you know, just everyone at the agency, and if there's something that is worth doing, we're willing to do it. So I think with regards to where the industry’s going, we are positioning ourselves as you know, human centric plus the Value Exchange and really understanding that human journey. And being hyper integrated across all departments is such a key differentiator with who we're competing with. Like, other agencies, were like, oh Media’s, you know, couple blocks down the road. Creative’s a couple blocks down the road. So how do you market the right way when that's the case? Like, we all talk to each other. We change things on the fly. We are able to still do that. Which I think when you think about where companies are going and they want that integration and they want to be that nimble like we can offer that. 

Jesse: I love hearing about just the connection between you DJing and thinking and making a plan, then having to think on the fly, adjust that plan and then how you kind of applied that to your job too, and the similarities. 

Raf: Yeah, I didn’t think of that, I mean, yeah, but it's aligned. 

Jesse: Well, you're a man of many passions yourself. You're very busy and we appreciate you coming on here to talk to us. For a little while. 

Raf: Same here. This was fun. Yeah. 

Derek: Thanks a lot for coming. Yeah, you bet. Thank you.  

[Outro music starts] 

Today's show is hosted by Jesse DiFranco and me, Derek Oyen. It was recorded and mixed by the man to my right, Mikey Nichols. Our theme was composed and recorded by David Bemer. Thanks, David. Ask a Better Question is produced in and by Marcus Thomas. The opinions on this show are not those of Marcus Thomas. You can take that up with Jesse and me. 

[Outro music fades]