Though from different generations, our Editor in Chief Rob Stott and Strata-gee Founder and Chief Content Creator Ted Green have a lot more in common than you’d expect. Both discovered partway through their careers their entrepreneurial spirit, and both share a passion for improving the state of the trade media landscape. Here, the two journos commiserate on the current conditions impacting media and the custom integration channel, how their stories have intertwined, and much more.
Check out Ted’s industry coverage on Strata-gee.
Rob Stott: All right, we are back on the Connected Design Podcast, although I feel like we make this an industry agnostic podcast. Name it for those purposes because we’re about to have some fun. Mr. Ted Green, appreciate you taking the time and joining us. Founder CEO, what’s your title de jour over there at Stratacon and Strata-gee?
Ted Green: Mostly for Sstrata-gee, I go with chief content creator. For Stratacon, which is my marketing consulting company. My title layer is technically president, but you know, whatever you want to call me, just, just, just be sure to call me.
Rob Stott: Love it. Yeah, right. Dear friend and to your face. How about that, too? I appreciate you taking the time and joining us. I I’m looking forward to this. I think we’re going to have a lot of fun because I just know that just our phone calls between, I don’t think we’ve ever done one together in any of my stops. But the phone calls we have always end up, you know, into some really great conversations. So, I appreciate you jumping in and doing this with us. And, you know, I look forward to whatever we get into here in the next little bit,
Ted Green: Well, thank you for inviting me and I’m very excited, you know, to, I don’t know how much you’re getting into your new venture, but with Connected Design, I’m very excited to in some way, you know, contribute to the content on Connected Design. And you and I have not done this before. I did do one for a previous company you worked for, but that was with a different editor there. And so, yeah, this is our first time.
Rob Stott: Of No, that’s awesome. Well, so for those, I say those that don’t know you. I feel like everyone in this space knows who Ted Green is, but for those that may be listening that don’t have a sense or maybe haven’t had the curiosity to ask about your career history, talk about if you can, I don’t know how brief you can make it, because I know you’ve had some awesome stops along the way. Just walk us through kind of what you’ve done in your career to this point.
Ted Green: Yeah, I’m old guy, so I’ve had a very long career.
Rob Stott: That’s not what I was saying, I just want to point out that’s not what I was trying to say. I realized as I was saying it, he’s gonna take this away, but that’s not what I meant. I swear.
Ted Green: Well, I’m going to do the Cliff’s Note version because it can be very long. But I was a professional musician and had the great, great fortune to meet a girl that would become my future wife and decided that traveling on the road was getting old. And so, I took a job at a large-scale mass merchant type store selling back then TV and radio is what we called it, and realized I really enjoyed that; took a job from there to what I would call a step up to a specialty audio shop. This is in Michigan, Lansing, East Lansing, Michigan, right across the street from Michigan State University where I got my degree and where I went to school.
I was there for several years. Then I moved to New Jersey, got a job with a specialty manufacturer, company called AdCom, made components and phono cartridges and worked with them for a few years. then I took, then from there I went and took a job with Onkyo, which at the time was a top 10 electronics company, a top five audio company. First is the regional sales manager for the Eastern region, then I was promoted to national sales manager, then I was promoted to national sales and marketing manager and then vice president of sales and marketing. I was with Onkyo for 14 years and I left Onkyo to launch the Stratacon Group. Stratocon is a conjunction of strategic concepts and that is a marketing consulting company, you know, working with organizations in the technology space.
And I thought I was very clever with the name, but people couldn’t remember the name or didn’t know how to spell it. So, I thought, well, what I’ll do is I’ll create a newsletter that I can send to them every week. I’ll add value by putting in newsworthy stories and my commentary on it. And that was called strategy, the phonetic spelling of strategy, S-T-R-A-T-A hyphen G-E-E, and worked like a charm.
That put me in front of a lot of people and eventually kind of took on a life of its own, became a very big part of what I do. And now that is the bulk of really what I do is Strata-gee. I’m the chief content creator there. Yeah, so there you go.
Rob Stott: You know, that’s a good, I like those. That’s a great, great sort of timeline and explanation, you know, sort of how we got to where we are today. And it poses a question that I feel like I should be asking myself. This is almost as much of a podcast question as it is maybe an advice question, you know, given our current states and what I’m doing. You know, your decision to venture out on your own. I mean, some would look at you like Onkyo, that’s, you know, stable and a very, you know, great place to be. What, sort of, led you to the decision like, Hey, maybe I can do this on my own or want to do this on my own?
Ted Green: Yes, imagine the look in my wife’s eyes when I came home from work and said, by the way, I quit my job today.
Rob Stott: Right? And you know what’s funny? I can imagine that because I did the same thing. Right?
Ted Green: Onkyo was a great job. I loved it. It was a fantastic education. Very smart, well-run company, great products, challenges every day. But after 14 years of doing basically the same thing, I mean, there’s always new challenges, but basically the same thing, we had a big meeting at the company. This is a true story. We had a big meeting at the company. We had a new head of our international division. So, there was the sales division, which were the local sales operations around the world, of which we were the largest in the U.S. And then there’s the factory division. And then between those two is something called the International Division, which technically buys the products from the factory and sells them to the sales division. And we got a new leader for the sales division. And we had a big meeting, and I’d been through so many of those meetings and realized that, you know, I was beginning to lose my enthusiasm, my joy, the taking on the mission of helping this executive understand our market all over again.
It just so happened that one of the top executives for the parent company in Osaka happened to be in that meeting and I asked him afterwards to meet me for a brief meeting. And I said, you know, it just hit me in this meeting that we need to start talking about my exit. Well, you probably could have knocked him over with a feather. He never saw that coming. And to his credit, they, after some further discussion and, you know, understanding that this was not just a momentary whim that I was serious about this, they made me a great offer.
So, the answer to your question is I didn’t know where I was going when I made that decision. There was no grand vision. You know, it’s funny when I tell my story, it sounds like all very well planned. I mean, I even left out some steps for, you know, for example, for AdCom, I was the Western Regional Sales Manager, but for Onkyo, I was the Eastern Regional Sales Manager, which of course made me a great candidate for the national position.
So, I can make it sound like I was a great master plan, but it was all basically serendipity. And so, I had no plan for what to do or where to go. And the day after I left and the word got out that I left, one of our largest competitors reached out to me and wanted to talk to me about coming to work there. And this is when I knew it was really real. I didn’t even go talk to them. Because it was the same role at a different company, same old wine, brand new bottle, right? That’s when I knew I really was ready to transition to something else. So, now I had to figure out what is it that I wanted to do. And one of the frustrations I had, at Onkyo, we had a very large marketing budget. So, we were constantly pitched by Madison Avenue ad agencies.
You know, we could have had, you know, any one of what we wanted. But one of the things that always frustrated me is that the general ad agencies know everything there is to know about advertising, but they don’t understand our industry. And they especially don’t understand somebody like an Onkyo, which is a specialty brand with a very carefully crafted position in the market. So, I would hire them, you know, and, you know, the spigot would start, we’d be writing checks. And for the first several months I was just teaching them all about our industry and then all about Onkyo and all about our role and why we take the position that we do, and you know before I could get decent idea one. So, I thought, well what about you know I’ve learned a lot about advertising just for doing that for 14 years and actually even longer than that. You know but I do have that industry knowledge. I can go to either a new, young, emerging company or even an established company that, you know, feels like they could benefit from advice from somebody that understands the industry and understands, you know, the landscape and the map and the layout and who’s doing what and where are they, what’s their position, what’s their role. And that’s when I started Stratacon Group as a marketing company to, you know, to give advice.
For the most part, I was pretty spot on that there was a thirst for, you know, to be able to talk to somebody that spoke their language and understood their challenges and, you know, could help them develop a program that would move the ball down the field.
Rob Stott: Right. It’s not to knock what, you know, the Madison Avenue, you know, companies, obviously were, were big, still are big in many, you know, senses of the word. But to your point of the specialty side of things, they, you know, it’s not, it’s not cookie cutter what they do necessarily. You know, they want to learn the industry, but to your point, right? They don’t, they’re not ingrained in it. And, you know, it’s something.
Ted Green: Yeah. Well, and one of the reasons they’re large is because, it’s like, yeah, we do Sony so we can do you. And I’m like, yeah, well, we’re nothing like Sony. All right, and so there we are. And now I gotta help them understand. So, I mean, I had those conversations over and over again and I almost never hired them. And if you know the way they work and I’m pretty sure you do know how they work, you interview with their superstar team.
Rob Stott: Right. But no, exactly.
Ted Green: And then you get some entry level administrative assistant that is now your person there. It’s how they operate. So, we never really had great results on that route. It was better for us to take a smaller boutique company that maybe has done one or two companies in the industry and then just help them understand the difference between what we do and what they do seem to be a faster path to better ideas and you know and
Rob Stott: Yeah, everyone gets the Don Draper show. It’s just it’s not how it is. Don Draper comes in, makes the pitch to hire them. And then and then you get so I don’t even know that they don’t even give the names. It’s like the uncredited, you know, actor, the the extra that’s in there sitting at the desk with the typewriter. Right. Yeah, it’s wild.
Ted Green: Yeah. Literally, they’ll send an intern. They’ll send an unpaid intern in. But yeah, the Don Drapers are spectacular, and those pitches were always impressive. But it would only take a few questions for me to realize they really don’t know what we’re all about. so, you know, so at any rate, mean, you know, obviously they’re big, they’re successful, they’re a billion-dollar company. So, you know, they know what they’re doing, but it just wasn’t right for us.
Rob Stott: Right. And, you know, right for this space necessarily, because this space, if you get it, what the heart of what it is and what it does, whether you’re talking about the manufacturing side, the dealer side, like every which side, you know, it’s all custom. It’s in the name custom integration, right? So, there has to be a certain level of white glove handle and care to the messaging to the I mean, you can get down to the projects where the space is installing like it all. It has to be cohesive in that way, and it can’t just be some sort of surface level message that you’re trying to deliver. Because I think everyone in this space reads through it.
Ted Green: Right. But I think you’re absolutely right. I mean, I take nothing away from them. They’re very good at what they do. The only advantage I could bring is I could get my client down the path faster because I understood the industry and understood all of those kinds of elements and dynamics. But yeah, they’re obviously very good at what they do or they wouldn’t be big.
Rob Stott: And that’s time savings to the industry too. So, you talk about a service and finding a need and addressing it. You know, that’s awesome to be able to do that and you know, bet on yourself too. Like that’s huge to figure it out. And yeah.
Ted Green: Right. But maybe the better question, Rob, is why did I decide to put more emphasis on Strata-gee and less on Stratacon?
Rob Stott: Yeah, that we’re I’m getting there because I know the trajectory of kind of what you’ve done. You mentioned it right? You started with that on the marketing side, but then we get to, you need to solve a problem for yourself, right? And get the name out there, help people understand it, remember it. And, you know, so there is the marketing side of things and kind of what you’re trying to build there. But the newsletter, I know marketing, writing, communications are all kind of relevant and, you know, involved the same sort of skills, techniques, things like that storytelling at the end of the day. So, was that something that the journalistic side of things is that your background or how did you purely get into it to try to get the name out there?
Ted Green: So, creative writing was something that I always was involved in almost my whole life. was not a journalism student. I was a telecommunication student at Michigan State University. But as part of their general education, right, I had a creative writing class and always did really well there. So writing is something I like to do. But ironically, if you think back, do you remember when you and I first met?
Rob Stott: It would, I have to imagine it was an HTSA meeting. 2015 or ’16?
Ted Green: Right. That was, HTSA was a client, something like that. HTSA was a client of my marketing company. That’s where we first met. The transition came because of, well, a couple of things. One is, so when I was in retail, I got to go back, I guess, a little bit, go back to go forward. When I was in retail, I actually was a buyer for some of the accessory products in our store. One of the things that used to always frustrate me is that it was so hard for me to get real data on products. And for my company, when I choose a product and I buy it, it’s kind of on me. And if that turns out to be less than we expected, well, that’s coming back to me. And it’s very difficult in an industry like technology, which is a very noisy industry, lots of advertising and lots of, especially back in those days, lots of trade news, tons of trade news, many, many long-gone media properties right now. I always felt like I wasn’t getting the sort of the straight story, right?
Rob Stott: Mm-hmm. Yeah. Without a doubt.
Ted Green: And so that stayed with me. And when I started writing the newsletter to promote the business, originally, strategy was part of Stratacon, really has become its own thing now. I wanted to, you know, I wanted to be really sort of true to the reader. So, my commitment is, you know, to my reader to give them the full story, the full picture. The positives, the negatives, and then you decide what makes sense to you. I don’t know if I can say it surprises me, but obviously a lot of companies would mistake me for traditional trade media, nothing against them, but I was not traditional trade media. And they would discover to the error that I would print the stuff they said.
Rob Stott: Yeah, right. Like, hey, funny how that works?
Ted Green: Right? And I would ask probing questions and I would ask sometimes tough questions and I would look for the sort of the outer limits of what they’re doing. Not because, you know, for any reason other than I want the full picture, I want the whole story, I want to be able to tell my readers the story. I’ve had I’ve had many angry executives threaten me this, that, you know, thinking that I really don’t care because, you know, if you’re angry at me for printing the truth, well, then, you know, that’s not on me. That’s on you. How do you not want to tell your customers the truth? And what matters to me is that, you know, my readers, you know, get the real story as best as I can tell it.
So, I was interested in creative writing. I was interested in good journalism. Read the Washington Post, read the New York Times, Wall Street Journal. And so, I tried to dig deeper, get more information. And the big difference with Strata-gee is that it benefits from my multi-decades of experience. And I tried to bring that to the table too.
So, I’m kind of like the reader’s unpaid employee who wants to get them the real story, the full picture, and here’s why we should do it or why we shouldn’t do it and whatever. And so that’s my mission. My mission is the reader, very focused on that.
Rob Stott: Yeah. Well, it gets to what I like about your answer there too. And kind of sharing that story. Thank you, one. Two, is like it gets to exactly why you started Stratacon is exactly why you started Strata-gee. It addresses something that you saw that wasn’t being solved for and you created the solution. In doing so happened to discover a space that—I’m sure you knew it at the time and continue to as we all do—it needed that support, right? It needed that sort of a differentiated view on things and way of going about it. Because what I love in there, too, is that you said it right that you got mistaken for traditional trade media and you’re not that. And like I want you to dive into that a little bit, too, because in doing in talking about your career history and kind of the experiences you’ve had, you’ve also gotten to see trade media evolve. So, talk about that evolution and sort of what it was, what it has become. And, you know, just sort of your thoughts and opinions there. I’d love to get your take on it.
Ted Green: Well, you’re probably better qualified to talk about the transition in trade media than I am. I mean, I can give you kind of an outsider’s perspective.
Rob Stott: Yeah, I mean, I think that to me is just as important because you mentioned it. You’re the reader, right? You’ve seen sort of how you’re digesting the content, no matter the strategy behind it, how that’s being done. But you’ve gotten to see sort of how the coverage of the channel has evolved over time. And I think to me that that’s more interesting to me as someone who’s back in the space, but also just to understand your take on it and kind of how it has evolved.
Ted Green: What, first of all, I don’t ever want to say anything that makes me think that I look down on trade media. I don’t at all. I mean, trade journalism, you and I have had this conversation. It’s a tough business, especially over the years as budgets have got cut. And pretty soon now, all of a sudden, the reporter whose job is to find and investigate and report stories, now all of a sudden, they got to be a photojournalist. They got to take pictures. They’ve got to, you know, they got, I mean, they got, their role more and lot of the editors were cut and so there’s no backstop for them and there’s way fewer resources. They’re the resource. Now they got to do social media postings and they got to, know, it’s really, you know, I feel for them. Their job has gotten much tougher and their pay hasn’t gone up as much as their responsibilities have gone up. And so, you know, I feel real tough for them.
Maybe one the best examples I can give. Go back a few years. Do you remember when 3D TV was sort of the big thing?
Rob Stott: Yeah. I think it was right around the time I came into this space, you know, moved back to Philly and started, you know, with that previous employer, you know, mid 2010s, roughly. Yeah.
Ted Green: Well, you know, I was immediately skeptical, did a lot of homework, had a lot of great deep sources at major companies and just collected a ton of data and, and, you know, really realized that I, you know, this was a kind of a gimmick that the industry was going to use after spending billions of dollars developing it, it essentially came down to just sort of a gimmick they were going to use to try to sell TVs.
And I took somewhat of an anti-tone against 3D TV. Well, I got a call from an editor. I’m not going to say who, but a very prominent editor, somebody you know, I know, we all know, who was angry at me and really took me to task and said, you’re supposed to be supporting this industry, right? And you should be promoting this. And what is the matter with you? Don’t you understand what your role is here? And I said, my answer to this editor was, that might be your role, but that’s not my role. My role is to tell the truth and to use my judgment and to explain why I feel the way I do about it.
Well, I remember talking to one of the big companies, one of the biggest of the big companies, and asking them why they were so confident that they were adding upscale, upscaling to their TVs and real-time 3D generation technology. What was your thinking? said, well, because we want people to watch all the 3D all the time. I said, so let me get this right. You want my 85-year-old mother and father in the morning eating their Cheerios with goggles on watching Good Morning America in 3D? He said, yes. I said, I don’t see that happening. I just don’t see that happening. Anyway, long story short, I got, I went back to that editor and said, you know, that’s your role, that’s not my role. My role is to be honest, truthful. But it demonstrates kind of an ethic in the trade media, is, part of it is to promote the industry and promote their initiatives and promote what they’re doing.
In my view, this might sound strange, but in my view, my job is to, I’m happy to promote products I believe in, I feel like I do a better service to the industry by telling them that I see them stepping off into the curb in front of a bus. And so, I want to pull them back before they make this huge mistake. And, you know, look, I’m not always right, but that time I was right and 3D basically kind of went away and is not a thing now.
So, that’s one of the differences between what I view a Strata-gee’s role and what I view trade media’s role. But that doesn’t mean that the trade media role is not helpful. They’re very good at collecting data. This model’s coming out, it’s shipping then. That’s really, you know, that’s important for dealers to have access to that as well. But that part of their role is just not part of what I do. And it shows the difference. When an executive would say to me, Jesus, you printed the answers, my answers to your questions. I said, number one, you didn’t say they were off the record. don’t publish off the record comments, right? You didn’t say it was off the record. So yeah, I asked the question and you answered it. I printed it. What did you expect? Right? And what he expected was the wink nod, right? You’re trade media, so you will not print anything that makes me look bad. You’ll help me look good. And that’s a difference between what trade media does and what I do. I’m happy to make you look good if you are good, but I’m also happy to print, you know—like I said to one guy, if you say something brilliant, I’ll print it. If you say something stupid, I’ll print it. So, you want me to print your brilliance? Tell me brilliant stuff.
Rob Stott: Right. Equal opportunity. It’s just, yeah. It’s not so hard. When you put it that way, like black and white in that regard. It’s kind of a combination too of the, I mean, I know my, about decades worth, a little over a decade’s worth of experience here. Like it’s a combination of the things you’re explaining that I think have bogged down the media side of things, the trade media side of things, right?
They, we are asked to do a lot more than the trade media journalists of 10, 15, 20 years ago, which in turn becomes, you know, these outlets effectively becoming press release regurgitators to fill the pages that they need content for. And in turn, that steals away the time from being able to do the work of the deep dives and the investigative-ish type stuff that, you know, really benefits the channel, the reader, the industry. It doesn’t allow for that to happen at the same rate or to the same benefit.
It stinks, right? You want to be able to do that. And yes, there’s great research and surveys and everything like that out there, but that sort of independent eye, which that’s another word that I want to dive into with us. That doesn’t necessarily exist to the same extent that it had or maybe ever did, I think, in this space.
Ted Green: Right. Yeah, no, absolutely right. Spot on. And I think it’s all part of I mean, look, let’s talk globally journalism. I mean, it’s a changing world. And I’ve watched some of the biggest media companies going through all kinds of transformations. And I’ve been a New York Times subscriber for decades and decades and decades, and I’ve watched them change. They laid off two or three layers of editors. They used to have stories go through multiple stages of editing. And it’s part of why the journalism was so spectacular. But the business side of the business is difficult as you are about to learn.
Rob Stott: Yeah, absolutely.
Ted Green: I don’t think anybody goes into journalism to get rich, but you can definitely make a living. The economics really get tough. And then also the change in online media versus print media and the different dynamics there, and then the influence of social media and the pressure to drive eyeballs. And to maybe do things that are not very savory, but in order to do that, in order to drive eyeballs, it’s hard to resist that. And when I first started this, as I always do, I did a ton of research and I learned that content was growing at that time earlier on, is a highly growing area. But if you really break down to what content sells, it’s listicles. It’s short, 300 words or less listicles. It’s “3 Ways to Make Your First Million Dollars,” “5 Keys to Better Sex.” I mean, it’s this kind of stuff.
Rob Stott: That’s why BuzzFeed got so hot, you know? Right?
Ted Green: Today’s world, we have more content than ever before. There’s just a ton of content. And now with AI, we’re about to have a tsunami of artificially generated content. It’s going to make it harder for all of us legit people in media. And, you know, it’s going to be tough. Although my strategy—not to promote my name—my strategy is to stay committed to not artificial intelligence, AI authentic insights. I think that what this will do is this will create demand for more authentic insight. And if you look at how I read all of this on how to do content, and then I broke all the rules.
My stories are sometimes two, three thousand words. You know, I rarely do listicles. And but and I do a lot of deep dives like I don’t know how avid you are reading Strata-gee, but I do. Actually, I’m a little surprised when I watch my statistics very closely, I’m even a little surprised about some of these things. So, I’ll do earnings report, quarterly earnings report for major industry brands. And I mean, these are if you’ve ever done one of them, these things are, you know, it can be an 80, 90-page single space document full of, you know, financial and legal mumbo jumbo. And my stories on those just get amazing readership.
And then another one that I like to do is legal coverage, coverage of lawsuits, you know, “Sonos Sues Denon,” right? And that, I mean, that’s a three-year long litigation. I can’t even tell you how many hundreds of thousands of tens or hundreds of thousands of pages of filings in that lawsuit. And I do that. And again, those get very high readership. So, I’m probably addressing a very small segment of the greater industry. The advice I read on content is probably correct for the mass market, if you will, or consumer market. that segment is, mean, they’re very, my average time on page is like three minutes. The internet average is like 27 seconds or something.
Rob Stott: Right, five seconds shorter than a goldfish’s attention span or something like that.
Ted Green: Yeah, and the story I like to tell about this is literally one day my service provider called me and said, hey, tell me again what it is you do and start asking me all these questions. And I’m like, you know, what’s going on here? Am I in trouble or something? No, you have the lowest unsubscribe rate of any of our customers. Now, this is a big service provider, right? You have the lowest unsubscribe rate of any of our customers. And we’re trying to figure out why.
Rob Stott: Yeah. That’s awesome. But it’s a testament to what you do. You know, that’s incredible.
Ted Green: Yeah, I mean I have a smaller community than some of these larger media groups, but I have a committed loyal community, and they read what I write and they apparently appreciate that.
Rob Stott: Yeah, absolutely. And I mean, it kind of it gets at the heart of what trade media was supposed to be or is supposed to be with but somewhere along the line is like we’ve been talking about a lot. It sort of lost its way. You know, so. I guess, you know, maybe an obvious way of asking, but, know, what do you see is missing today? Like, where are those gaps or what are the kind of the biggest challenge that the space faces, maybe it’s the editor’s face or just the kind of the trade media channel as a whole faces.
Ted Green: Yeah, you know, I wish I could give them advice, but their world is a very tough world. And all of those things that we’ve talked about, the economics of it, I mean, a lot of people are still struggling with it. And I think that, you know, I guess the only advice I could give anybody starting any business would be to try to really get inside the head of your reader and really understand, you know, what’s missing in their, you know, in their media consumption, what are they looking for?
And sometimes, and you have to be careful how you ask that question. Another story I tell because, and this is true also, when I was going to start Strata-gee, I called up all my friends. I don’t think we knew each other then. So, I didn’t call you. But I called up all my friends and I said, hey, I’ve got this idea. I’m going to start this newsletter doing industry news stories, you know, with my take on them. And what do you think about this? And my friends, right?
They all said, “God, don’t do it. Don’t do it.” You know, what else is there? There are all kinds of trade media out there already. You know, you’re just going to get embarrassed, and you know, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. Well, you know what? I had to dig deeper, and I had to understand their perspective. I understand what they were looking for.
And then they also are, you know, there was a great interview many, many, many years ago, Inc. magazine interviewed Steve Jobs. And the question they asked them was, you know, they asked them to explain the product planning role or product planning process at Apple. Do you just go out and get some panels of customers and ask them what they want? And he said, I can’t do that. Because they can only answer those questions based on what they know. Right?
We have to be able to extrapolate out where technology can go, what that would bring. We have to understand their needs and desires, but they can’t answer those questions because they have no idea what’s possible. This is, by the way, this is like the number one topic. I bring this up a lot with custom integrators. You know, you can’t go to a customer and sit down with your clipboard and say, what do you want? They have no clue.
Rob Stott: Right. They may have an idea in their head, right? But yeah.
Ted Green: Well, need a TV, right? And I want music, but they don’t know what’s available. And so, you’ve got to walk them around your experience center. You’ve got to let them see what’s possible, what’s available. And then you can sit down and talk to them. But you have to dig deeper. I mean, this is life.
If there’s one thing I’ve observed in my career when a company is failing, any kind of company, when it’s struggling or failing, usually there’s a common mistake they all make, which is they go, you know, this used to work before, so we just have to do it more. And we have to do it faster and harder, but we have to do that same thing more. Which just gets you to bankruptcy faster.
Rob Stott: There’s no evolution. There’s no adaptation. Right. There’s no desire to adapt, evolve, change with, you know, sort of those external forces or, know, what, what the, where the industry’s heading. There’s no foresight. Yeah. Yeah.
Ted Green: I think people are creatures of habit and that’s what they know and that’s how they’ve done it. They’ve always done it that way and it’s hard to break out of that box.
Rob Stott: For sure, for sure. I mean, it kind of too, I think begs to, you know, finding that story from the integrator’s perspective with their customer, understanding them and, you know, getting at the heart of what they want, not necessarily what they need, you know, helps you to that answer of what they need in that system. It sounds like I’m talking a lot bigger than what I am, but I’m getting at what they need in their system, in their home. But then when you do look at more broadly, kind of, I think addresses or starts to at least point to what I, you know, to kind of turn the conversation to Connected Design. What we’re hoping to do here, right, is to get at those conversations and explain to, you know, integrators like, you know, how to have those conversations with the other industry professionals that you don’t know. They don’t know technology necessarily the way you do. They may never, they may not care to.
But at the same time, know, the technology has become such a big part of the home, right? These home systems, the control, the automation beyond just AV and, you know, the lighting, the energy, you know, when you start adding all those things in, then they, then you’re starting to speak their language, right? And it’s how do you have those conversations? And that’s kind of what I’m hoping to accomplish is just have the conversation. You figure out how to have it with the architect, the designer, the, the home builder, and just put you in a position or this industry in a position to, you know, work better together and provide that promise of a brighter future for you, for your business, because you can expand your partnerships, get involved with more people, get those right into the projects earlier. I think that’s how long we have been hearing about that integrators that want to get into the project earlier, but they’re delayed because, you know, technology is an afterthought. Well, you’re the technology you’re thinking about is the TV is the amp is the, you know, the speakers in the wall not the areas that get you there earlier. So, it’s just, that’s kind of where I’m hoping to go. And I hope that gives like a little bit of insight into what connected design is or can be, but that actually, and me talking about it kind of opens it up, right? Like, you know, yeah. Yeah, exactly.
Ted Green: I love it. I love it. What you’re really talking about is being like a cross pollinator. So, in other words, you know, or a connecting point really for bringing people together. And I think that there have been well-intentioned but unproductive efforts at that from others in the industry. It’s a worthy goal. And your objectivity could be the catalyst to make it work.
To tell you a real quick story, several years ago, I was still with Onkyo. I went to the Big Builder show out in Vegas. And I was kind of on a covert mission. And my mission was to talk to as many builders as I could talk to and take their temperature on the technology industry. And I have to tell you, now it’s very unscientific, but I mean, literally, you know, standing in line to get a hot dog or something, I would just strike up conversations with people around me. I probably had 20 or 30 such conversations and it’s a builder show, so they’re all builders. And some work with production builders and some work with custom builders. We were more interested with the custom builders. And I would just ask open-ended questions. Are you guys involved in building smart homes? Or do you do that in-house? Do you seek out partners? Tell me all about it. What I came back to and reported to my company was, this is a shit show.
Rob Stott: Yeah, they have no idea.
Ted Green: They all hate technology integrators. Not just dislike them. They hate them. They had a bad experience with one or two and you know, they’re flaky and they don’t show up when they’re supposed to and that, know, blah, blah, blah, blah. And for the builder, when a subcontractor drops the ball, it hurts their relationship with the client, and they can’t let that happen.
Rob Stott: Right, they loathe that.
Ted Green: So, some builders solved it by hiring an integrator, a person or a couple of people and doing their own integration from the builder themselves. But what a lot of them have is hands off. A lot of them will say to the customer, if you know, there’s lots of good companies, know, open your yellow pages.
Rob Stott: Go find one you trust. Wow. Yeah.
Ted Green: Find them and give them a call. So, and this again, this is many years ago, but it shocked us. And I also went and talked to CEDIA, the trade association about this. And I still now, you know, many, many years later are talking to them about it. And they’re making efforts to do that. And Daryl Friedman is, you know, connects at least at his level with a lot of these associations. It’s a hard thing to do. It really is a hard thing to do. But that’s an example of the example you gave for Connected Design, which, by the way, welcome back Connected Design. You should have a launch party or something. I’ll come to it. I’m excited because, there’s room for good ideas in the technology industry, trade media, know, B2B media.
Rob Stott: Thank you. Heck yeah.
Ted Green: And of course, I know you and I know you’ll do a great job. So welcome back, but there’s great opportunity for somebody to come in and try those ideas. It all comes down to just understanding the market and understanding the needs and then applying the pressure to move it in that direction.
Rob Stott: Yep. Right. that’s, I think exactly where, you know, if it, if it was easy, I don’t think it would be rewarding either. Right. So, I think there’s something to that of wanting to see how difficult it’s been and hoping to move that needle a little bit at least. yeah.
Ted Green: Yeah, you gotta really understand what your goal is. You gotta take the long vision, the long view, and don’t let naysayers or complainers drive you off your path because they don’t see that picture. They don’t see that vision. so yeah, it is definitely a doable thing.
Rob Stott: Right. Yeah, I appreciate it. And the support is always needed for one, but I’ll take it. Looking forward to hopefully building this thing. I don’t think, you know, to your, like everything we’ve talked about, the mindset and everything, there are more, more, I think you said it during one of our in between phone calls here of just like kindred spirits or like brothers from separate generation type deals. So, it’s, you know, I appreciate that. And, you know, why I was looking forward to having this conversation on the record conversation, because it kind of just gets to how I don’t think we’re, you know, very different in how we approach things and want to just better the industry. You work on behalf of everyone involved to, you know, change sort of the, the, the feelings around the trade media space, but also how, you know, we go about it and, and what we look to do. And, I have a lot of fun doing it. And if I wasn’t having fun, I don’t think I would be doing it, crazy enough to want to do it in this way. So, you know, I,
Ted Green: Yeah, I mean, at the bottom line, why do I do this? I’m not doing it for the money. I mean, I make a living, but I do it because I love it. I love doing it and I hope to be having some kind of an influence or an impact on the industry.
Rob Stott: Right. Yeah. Exactly. Yeah, no, I appreciate that for sure. And yeah, this was a great conversation, man. I know, you know, we could probably have more like keep going. I could tell allow you to turn the tables truly and start questioning me. And, you know, I also understand your time on site time on podcasts, get it back to the longer they go.
What we should plan, I think we could plan to do it again. I would love to have you on again and give you the chance to, you know, take a Connected Design Podcast and flip the script a little bit. If you want to pose the questions directly to me, we could have some fun doing that. But, no, this was, this was fantastic, man. And I appreciate it and I look forward to seeing you out there.
Ted Green: Sounds good to me. All right, buddy. Sounds good. Congratulations. hopefully everybody signs up for Connected Design.
