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If you don’t know who The Shadow is please turn this video off, you’re unworthy. Thanks! 😀

Transcription

The Shadow knows…content marketing?

Hi I’m Brian Pombo, welcome back to Brian J. Pombo Live.

I have a lot of odd interests and one of the strange interests that I’ve brought up in the past is, I really enjoy things that I want. It’s tied to my interest in all things from the 1930s and 40s.

I’ve got a strange fascination with things, you can see the old-style radio back behind me.

I’ve always had an interest in this time period ends because listen to my grandparents growing up during that time. And one of the things I have a real interest in was old-time radio.

So before the days of television, they had movies, you could go and watch a movie. But if you wanted ongoing entertainment beyond just going to the movie theater, there was only the radio. You could grab a book, or you can listen to the radio and they would perform just like they perform today on television. And a lot of the same standards that we have on television with 30 minutes, 60-minute shows, that all started on the radio.

Even soap operas themselves started on the radio, situation comedies, you know, drama, especially police drama, all that started on the radio, and they would have these radio shows.

And we still have a whole lot of them still available, even though a lot of them were performed live. Many of them were recorded, many of them were lost through time.

One of the shows was a show called The Shadow, and some of you may be vaguely familiar with this because in the 90s, they came out with a movie with Alec Baldwin as The Shadow.

He was basically an old superhero, I’m not going to get into the depths of all the shadow lore, but he was always one of my favorite characters from these radio shows.

And if you watch old movies and stuff, he was so popular at the time, you watch old movies, you watch cartoons from the time they make reference to him. And so you’re going Brian, what’s this have to do with business?

What’s this have to do with content marketing, which is the area that I have a modern interest in right now. And something that I’ve worked on quite a bit. And been and working with companies right now and helping develop content marketing, because it’s a burgeoning field, within online within social media, within the law, all this video and stuff that we’re putting out on a regular basis.

That’s all content marketing, but content marketing didn’t start with the internet.

Content Marketing has always been around. And it’s one of my most favorite types of marketing because it takes creativity. And I enjoy things that take creativity. I like the idea behind it.

So I’ll tell you how the shadow ties into this.

How the shadow came about is there was a company it’s the Street & Smith publishing company. And they had started publishing a magazine called, Popular. This was back in the early 1900s. Let’s see 1905 they had a real successful magazine, they branched out into all different types of magazines, and they had detective stories and Western stories. You know, most of the cases, these are fictional stories that are written that and they’d put these magazines out, I think on a monthly basis.

And they’d sell well all over the country and they make good money off and eventually, they sold internationally. So they had they in order to try and get more people to buy their magazines. They’d advertise their magazines in a million different places.

And one of the places they started advertising was on the radio.

Now how would you go about advertising a magazine of stories on the radio was a perfect fit. All they had to do was take one of the stories or a piece of one of the stories and dramatize it, have a bunch of actors play it out. They already had these actors hired at the radio stations.

You just had to go through the process and have them acted out and say hey, if you want to read this story and others like it, go pick up this magazine.

So they had a radio show. This was in the 30s they had a radio show called, Detective Story Hour.

And Detective Story Hour was an advertisement. It was an infomercial innocence for the detective story magazine. It’s very simple.

They’d have these stories. Well, they needed a narrator and so they had an ongoing narrator and what was the narrator’s name?

While they didn’t want to name them just anybody because that they couldn’t have any actor play it. So, they wanted something they kind of had control over.

So they created a character called, The Shadow.

It didn’t mean anything. It was just his name, his name was The Shadow.

Here’s what ended up happening though.

This show started getting popular, people started going to the magazine that the places where you get magazines, which most cases that’d be a newstand back then. You go they go to the newsstand and they say, hey, I want to get The Shadow magazine, where’s The Shadow?

Because he was the only thing that was consistent on the show. They couldn’t remember Detective Story. they remembered The Shadow, because he’s the guy that told the story.

So they got wind of this over the magazine, they said, Wow, people are already asking for it, let’s give them what they want.

They created a magazine called The Shadow, they created a character that was a little deeper than just a narrator on the show and they started having him going off and having adventures. So that got popular.

So you had a situation where they ended up making the radio show about the magazine that was created because of the radio show about the magazine, you see.

It’s really cool too and then it grew from there that show ended up becoming extremely popular, ran for years and years, never truly made the jump to television.

So many cool ideas and stuff are found out. And so many things have been taken from the shadow. If, if you look at his outfit here, it’s there’s been a whole lot of characters that have kind of copied this outfit, including a Disney cartoon, Darkwing Duck, if you I grew up watching those, it was based on the shadow so that there are little echoes throughout society from this one character that was created via content marketing, he was an advertising piece. That was his old purpose and he became one of the most popular magazines that this publishing company ever put out.

To this day is still a character that is licensed and controlled. In fact, they just came out, they just licensed a book with a Patterson, what’s his name? The writer…of course, it’s completely skipping my mind right now, who just who and he, in turn, had a ghostwriter put together a book. And it’s there’s a new book out there called The Shadow because it’s still as a valuable asset that produces money all these years later.

So you can use content marketing in a million different ways. Imagine now being able to have a back and forth conversation getting back and forth reaction to what you’re putting out there.

Because of social media, you can have direct communication with your end-user, and be able to improve whatever product or service you’re trying to provide.

It comes with really dedicating yourself to putting something out there on a regular basis, that tells a story that gives people communication that gives allows people to see you on a regular basis in a way that it especially in a way that other people in your industry are not doing perhaps even competition to you.

Here’s another idea.

In terms of competition, if you’re really scared of competition, if it’s really something that keeps you up at night, go check out my book, 9 Ways to Amazon-Proof Your Business. Even if you’re not scared of competition, you ought to read these 9 ways to Amazon-Proof your business.

It’s about making your business completely competition-proof. And it starts right here. It starts with just changing your own mindset and changing how your entire company deals with competitive forces.

You get a free copy of this book at AmazonProofBook.com. You see, here I am creating content that promotes my material promotes my publication and also promotes everything and the publication, in turn, promotes my company and the fact that I’m a business investor and so on so forth.

So hopefully that all makes sense to you. If not, stay tuned, we’ll have more content just like this in the future.

You have a great night. Get out there and let the magic happen.