Big Things Podcast

Goodbye Waves; Hello Big Things (E0)

• Mitzi Payne & Mike Payne

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Are you listening on a podcast app? Hop over to YouTube for the full video version: https://youtu.be/dnSC-WruYSA 

Welcome to Big Things! A weekly show where we talk about the big things happening in marketing, social media, pop culture and sports. You can catch the show every Friday on podcast players and YouTube, and be sure to follow us on Instagram for updates on every episode!

More from us:

  • Mitzi Payne @mmmitzi 
  • Mike Payne @mmmiiike

Timestamps:

  • 00:10 – What is Big Things?
  • 03:00 – Why we’re moving away from Waves and Tea for Lunch.
  • 05:30 – Some of our favorite episodes of Waves and what we learned.  
  • 11:00 – How Tea for Lunch helped our team think like content creators. 
  • 12:30 – Our new era. 

Show Notes:

  1. SCAN 👀 CLUB: https://scanclub.substack.com/ 
  2. Lisette Calveiro – @lisettecalv – https://shorturl.at/d7fMi 
  3. Karen Rosalie – @karen.rosalie – https://shorturl.at/82ctR 
  4. Monday Girl – @joinmondaygirl – https://shorturl.at/J0spn 
  5. Alyssa Yuhas – @alyssayuhas – https://shorturl.at/c6W4R 
  6. Valentin Ozich – @valentinozich – https://shorturl.at/5duTd 
  7. Franke Rodriguez – @frankeknucks – https://shorturl.at/H4kW0 

Thanks for tuning in. Don’t forget to subscribe!

Big Things with Mitzi (@mmmitzi) and Mike (@mmmiiike).

For more from Arcade, follow us on Instagram and TikTok @helloarcade. https://www.arcadearcade.ca/

Production by Morgan Berna, editing by Oliver Banyard.

Speaker 1:

All right, should we do this podcast episode?

Speaker 2:

Yep, Are we ready For the first time ever? Welcome to Big Things. I'm Mike and this is Mitzi.

Speaker 1:

If you're listening to this, it's likely that you were a listener of Waves, or Tea for Lunch, which was our weekly-. Or both or both Shout out to y'all if you listen to both, but this is neither of those shows. We're here to introduce to you a new show and share more about why we're doing this new show and changing things up.

Speaker 2:

We started Waves back in 2019. Crazy Throwback.

Speaker 1:

No kidding.

Speaker 2:

Pre-pandemic podcast. It was one year after starting our agency Arcade that we still run today. We loved doing waves. We loved interviewing people. It was people that we admired. It was people that we wanted to have a relationship with, or it was people that we had a relationship with that we knew had something valuable to share. So it was an interview-based show all around the topic of marketing, and we ran that. For what was it? Four years, yeah, 2019 to 2023, I guess. Yeah, it was super fun.

Speaker 1:

I had so much fun doing that. It was my first taste at podcasting, which really, like, I love podcasting, I love the work of podcasting, I love like prepping for podcast shows and I kind of think it opened up a whole new space for us. We also learned a lot about being on the mic At least I did.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, even just asking good questions. Yeah, it was a great learning opportunity for us, being earlier in our careers and being able to just pick the brains of people that had done something notable or been in their industry for a while, and I think it really accelerated our growth.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and we still plan to be doing podcasting. We're just going to change it up and although we loved interviewing guests and loved learning from some of these people, we just found that we were kind of in a place in our career, in our business, where it was just getting harder to book people and also we got a bit busier and it just kind of felt like we were trying to fill in spots rather than being like really selective and like I don't know, making more space to find the right people.

Speaker 2:

For sure, and we, I think we also started to get really topic focused and then some of the sometimes we would identify a guest based on the topic. That was a perfect fit, but we had no relationship with, so it felt like a colder intro, which also made it harder to necessarily have the same kind of rapport on the on the episode. Exactly the same kind of flow that I think some of you had come to appreciate, and tune in for. So yeah, a variety of factors.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, we plan to still have interviews. For those of you who are like listening to this and really like that. We do plan to still do interviews once in a while, but most of our episodes will be just you and me, baby.

Speaker 2:

And you'll recognize too that we've really done everything we could to step up the video side of this thing. So that was. One other limitation that we felt like we were consistently running up against with Waves was so many of the guests that we wanted to interview were remote, so we ended up having to approach video as that kind of like Zoom style treatment, and there was really no way for us to level it up from there.

Speaker 2:

So, this is our opportunity. Where this is on set in our office Arcade headquarters, inglewood, calgary, alberta, canada, with three camera angles, the right kinds of mics, some cool lighting, you know.

Speaker 1:

Some nice chairs Stuff all over the shelves. Yeah, we're going in on it, look at this table. The table Glasses of water. I don't even know what the brand is, but people love it already.

Speaker 2:

Norman, someone is the designer. Ask our art director. But anyways, we could not be more excited and we really. Episode zero is for you who subscribed to Waves and Tea for Lunch and engaged with us on Instagram and let us know what you liked and what you didn't like, and we just wanted to really make sure we had an opportunity to let you know that we feel that big things, this new expression of our podcast, is worth you coming along with us, for it's going to be on the same RSS feeds and it's the same hosts, with more experience and more things to say, covering the stories that you care about, that we're following, that have something to do with something that matters.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and we also want to say thank you for listening to the show, for giving us feedback. We've felt like we've grown so much through this process and we're just so grateful for anyone, for every single download that we got. We're just so grateful for it. So we just want to be able to level that up and continue bringing as much value as we can and also, hopefully, making you smile or like feel like you have a buddy that's working with you.

Speaker 2:

So, yeah, we're working on us. We're uh, we're like probably gonna take an improv class. We're still doing the research of like where to find one and what's the best one, and stuff like that, but we want to be more fun for you to listen to and tune into as well, and yeah build on the chemistry that we have just as co-hosts and partners.

Speaker 1:

Before we move into like this new phase of the podcast, I thought it'd be fun to go through our favorite guests that we've had on Waves.

Speaker 2:

Good idea.

Speaker 1:

So if you are listening to this and like you haven't maybe listened to every episode, a lot of the episodes that we are going to call out now feel like they're still really like value rich, even though they were recorded a few years ago. So they're kind of like evergreen episodes. So if you're curious to listen to more of Waves before you get into big things, I highly recommend you go check them out. But for me, some of the episodes and guests that really stand out. One of them was Lisette Calviero, who is a social media educator.

Speaker 1:

She's a great person to follow, even still like I love her influencer space but she talked all about making an impact with social media, which at the time and even now, I'm like it was so nice to have her perspective on it, because social media can be a place that makes an impact, can be a medium for that. So it's really cool to hear her point of view on that.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, she's just a really dynamic, energetic person so aside from the riches of expertise that she shared, she's just really fun to listen to.

Speaker 1:

For sure. Another one I really liked was Karen Rosalie of Rosalie Agency. She talked all about creating a creative business. I guess Her business is an agency that does content for some of the biggest beauty brands in the world, and she talks about her journey of building that agency and like all the things that she's learned as a creative entrepreneur. So that's a good one too. And the other one I'll mention is the episode we did with Monday Girl. The co-founders of Monday Girl, rachel Wong and Istiana Bestari, and they talked about how to create an IRL community that can create a digital brand, and they're doing such a good job with monday girl they are crushing it and we got to interview them kind of like as it was starting to gain momentum, so it was a really cool place in their like business journey.

Speaker 2:

So I highly recommend checking out that episode too yeah, and then you ended up being a monday girl mentor like in their mentorship program, which is really cool, which was really fun experience yeah, a few of my favorites, um, one of them was with alissa yuhas on the enduring power of creativity, and one of the reasons aside from it just being an interesting interview that I wanted to mention that one was because later alissa because of the relationship we kind of forged through the process of having her as a guest a couple of times on our show later became our creative director and now she's the one that's established Scan Club, along with Morgan on our team, around this futurist practice that she has and that she's established within our team, and she's helped us publish our first trend report in the space of digital marketing. And it's their influence too that's kind of flavored some of the signals and stories that we're going to cover in our episodes coming up for sure, she's not the only person that ended up working with us because of the podcast.

Speaker 1:

Alex is another person who just recently joined our team true on the paid media team and she kind of became familiar with us because she was a listener of the show, which is actually really cool.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, there's many stories like that, which is why we started it in the first place and that's why we want you to come along for this next phase of things. But another interview I really liked was one that I feel like I worked so long to get it all started because I posted on Instagram stories one day what a few of my bucket list guests would be, and one of them was Valentin Ozich of I Love Ugly in New Zealand. It's now a global brand, but they're based in New Zealand, and eventually he did join the show because he responded to my Instagram story and was like let's do it. Took a while to make it happen, but we did it. We actually had him on twice. I'm calling out the first one, which was around mindset, ambition and sort of the comeback story from near bankruptcy for the brand I Love Ugly. But then we had him back to dive more into that mindset stuff, and that was a really quality episode too.

Speaker 2:

And then, lastly, one of the people that I've looked up to for a really long time. His name is Frankie Rodriguez. He heads up Anomaly, which is a big agency, specifically the New York and Toronto offices, but we talked with him about committing to culture and staying in beta, which was one of the kind of fabrics of him building Anomaly and is now one of our values or standards at Arcade. That's how much he influenced us with that conversation. So we always say always be in beta. It's kind of our standard. We've built around this practice or posture of iterating as we go rather than striving for perfection. So, yeah, all of these things are so tied to the way we think about our work and the way that we've built our team, the way that we steward culture, the relationships that we have, whether those are clients or mentors or coaches or whatever.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, it's so true, it's really served a purpose yeah, it really set the foundation of like how we approach our work and we've learned so much from our guests. It also doing the exercise of recording podcasts inspired our second podcast, which is called tea for lunch, which also will no longer be in production because we're replacing it with big things. But tea for lunch was really fun and, for those of you who weren't listening, it was a show that kind of came out of this idea of going live on Instagram. It was when, like, the live feature was new. We're like, we really want to like play around and we always kind of treat Arcade as like the testing ground of anything we want to do with our clients, and we knew that live seemed to be something that people were talking about more and was coming up in other social platforms. We wanted to try it out.

Speaker 1:

So we started going live every thursday at around noon ish and it was a really fun weekly show that lots of people on our team got to actually be co hosts for. It was 15 minutes long. We covered kind of like what was happening in the world of pop culture and media and social media marketing. It was so fun. I personally loved that show because I love to hear the different like point of views of our team. It wasn't just us, it was like different people on the team. It was really a good time.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, and I feel like it really helped us become better on camera.

Speaker 1:

Yes.

Speaker 2:

Us too, specifically, but also the rest of our team as well, because we end up being in a lot of content that we produce on a weekly basis, even just for social platforms. Many of our team are creators as well, outside of the work that they do at Arcade. So it was cool for us to one really just practice our ability to show up and glow up, for lack of better words, like we didn't script it out too heavily, we had the key talking points and the key stories, but we just wanted to like have it be true to us and each of everyone's kind of individual personalities.

Speaker 1:

So it was a great exercise and we had a lot of fun yeah, and it's scratching it for me to like talk about pop culture, because I couldn't really talk about that on waves. I felt like I had more to say about that.

Speaker 2:

I like knew too much about stuff that I just needed to get out yeah, and as we started to do it, I feel feel like we realized because at first we were like, well, people care, but I think over time we realized that the stories that we were following and the moments that we that caught our attention were things that other people that were following along on Instagram were also interested in.

Speaker 1:

So yeah it created this kind of like micro space for us to just play in and we had a lot of fun while it lasted yeah, so we're trying to bring out the best of those two podcasts. Merge it into a brand new show called big things. This is episode zero, and you can look forward to more episodes of big things. Starting every friday no, starting the 27th and going every friday yeah we're going weekly.

Speaker 2:

that was the other thing tea for lunch really proved to us. It was that we could do this weekly. We always struggled with that with Waves, partly because we had the dynamic of booking guests. But we only really averaged like 20 episodes a year over the four years because we ended up around 80 episodes for Waves. But Tea for Lunch we ran it. We showed ourselves that we could do it weekly and that's what gave us the confidence to come to you with this higher production weekly show and we couldn't be more excited.

Speaker 1:

And apparently you can't be a serious podcaster if you don't go weekly.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, it's true.

Speaker 1:

And it's time that we were taken seriously.

Speaker 2:

We are serious podcasters.

Speaker 1:

now we are serious, let's do it.

Speaker 2:

One thing, as serious podcasters, we kind of forgot or neglected to do, though, for episode zero, was plan the ending. So we've kind of said everything that we're gonna say in 15 minutes or less, it's true, um, but I wish we just had something to kind of like mark the ending like a gong no do you think like? I feel like that could be a cool effect no, no, no no not like a gong sound effect, but like a real gong, like I want it on this table no, no, no no we'll talk about this after.

Speaker 2:

I think we could do like a triangle.

Speaker 1:

You know those like musical triangles that's too gentle little.

Speaker 2:

No, it needs to be like more aggressive why a gong? I don't know I'll. I'll track one down and I'll show you now I think you'll, I think you'll, I think we can end the show demurely and say thanks for joining us.

Speaker 1:

We hope that you continue watching, listening, listening. Catch us on YouTube and we'll see you next time. That sounds like a good ending.

Speaker 2:

All right, see you next time.

Speaker 1:

Bye.