Diane Moca: Welcome to our Creator Economy Entrepreneur Learning Series. Today, we're talking about the state of media and where it's going. I'm Diane Moca, a reporter at TalkLab in Aurora, Illinois. And I'm with our CEO, Jimi Allen, who started as a photographer and now owns a digital marketing agency, a video production studio and a media channel. Jimi, you call TalkLab a digital experience platform, but what does that really mean? Jimi Allen: Well, I think the thing that I've learned over the years is that people have a lot of trouble communicating and it's just notorious. I think growing up in a home where my parents didn't communicate really well and that created a family change, and just all these years, just thinking, how do people communicate really, really well? And now throw into the mix, there are technical things like recording and sound and all of these things, and so we've created TalkLab as a space where people can practice communicating, getting themselves together in a way that is roadmap oriented. They know where they're going. There's an agenda. They're thinking about what their value propositions are in their business or whatever it is that they're communicating, and then they're getting the practice. They're getting the rehearsal time. They're getting the back and forth. They're around peers, and they're getting feedback on things, so TalkLab is really in and of itself that incubator around the idea of communicating really well in the digital economy. Diane Moca: Definitely needed. Now, we know Talking Cities and Talking Plant Protein are examples of TalkLab's platform, but some people look at those and just think they're websites, so how are they different than websites? Jimi Allen: So we have two, we have TalkLab, the brand, and that's been launched about a year ago. And so we stood up two vertical experience platforms, and I've been saying and believing for years, really, since the beginning in 94, 95, 96, I was building websites, and those were Hardy HTML websites. And that was really the first time as a visual communicator I could put things out on the internet and anyone could see them, and so now, 25 plus years later, we've been building websites wrong. We've been building them, most businesses have websites that are passive. Like you go there and they're not being utilized or designed in a way that really enhances the way that you can communicate on the internet because you can use visual communication, that can be still images and video. You can do animations, you can use voice, you can use music, you can use interactivity. There can be response things. You can be live back and forth on the web, so when you're designing a website today and if you've had your website built and it's frustrating you or it's not where you want it to be, what we're talking about is an experience where people want to return to it, and you want to keep putting content there and developing the dialogue. It's like when I was in college, I used to love the idea of showing up the first day of a class, and they would unpack where we were headed and then over 10 weeks we would go somewhere. There would be a knowledge journey, an experience. You'd get to know people around you, and if you were curious at all, that was an amazing experience. And that's the same thing the internet offers every single day now. And it is the learning platform in the universe. I mean, everybody's using it, and what I'm really blown away by is the idea that even the founder of YouTube was in Aurora at [inaudible 00:03:30] at one time. So these aren't things that are far fetched or are out there, and I think maybe that is the problem is they're so close to home that people just don't recognize how powerful the tool is. And so if you're a business owner or if you're a student or anything that you're doing where you want to communicate things, the best way to do that is in an experiential way on the internet, and that's what we've designed TalkLab for. Diane Moca: It's like utilizing more of the potential that's there. Jimi Allen: Right. Leverage every advantage you have on the internet, but it is tough when you start to think about all the tools, so when you go into any kind of situation and there are lots of tools involved, the first thing that happens is in workshop. You may be afraid to use a saw or a welder or a drill or whatever it is. The sound may bother you, whatever it is, but when you slow down and somebody instructs you how to use each one of those tools, you learn to master the tool. But where that all becomes really wonderful, and that's what the digital experience is all about, once you've learned all those tools then you can go in and use them all together to try to create something that's very unique. And I think we are products of as a gen Z or gen Xer, I guess, I am... The television occurred for me in a way that it wasn't the very beginning, but it was a really rich period of time where you saw things like live shows, Saturday Night Live or talk shows were emerging. Watching what Oprah Winfrey did at Harpo Studios. All of those things are relatively recent but they're part of our experience, and that's what's going to happen in the future. From this day forward that is going to be the wave of communication on the internet. It is absolutely going to happen. You heard it here first, keep hearing it over and over again and get on board. Get involved because it's going to take playing with all the tools, getting someone to show you how to use those tools, workshopping those tools with other people, and then really getting into what it is that you want to communicate to people. Diane Moca: Yeah. And cities want more of those tools. They're looking for new ideas to reconnect with their residents because traditional sources like newspapers and television, like you said, they're dying and social media is oversaturated. So how does your platform give them something different? Jimi Allen: Well, let's imagine there were five sky rises, six sky rises, maybe a dozen sky rises in the city of Chicago, and they all had these great, they were just incredible structures. And you could imagine going up to the top of the building there, maybe there's just swimming pool up there and a view and everything else, but those are the verticals. Those are the social verticals that are going on in our culture right now. Those verticals are the LinkedIns and the Facebooks, and the Spotifys, and the Amazons. All of those are gated guarded doors that are verticals, and they have algorithms which give you preference for this, that and the other, and it's all paid media. It's it is the business of you paying for impressions, that's what that game is. And so what our platforms are, they don't have those gates right now. One, because we're early stage and maybe our business model as it evolves, won't involve that type of advertising leverage at all because with Talking Cities, we want to be hyper local. We want people to be able to hear each other, that are neighbors. Again, a roadmap. Let's say a neighbor wants or has an agenda to get something done in a community and you know them, but when they come in and produce a show or regularly communicate about what their issue is, that gives them the chance to practice and perform and to express exactly what it is that they want to say and then you can listen to that. And of course, that can happen in a book club or it can happen in groups, but this just provides an entertainment value in a way for it to be seen on a phone or at home or whatever it is. But it canonizes somebody's thinking, and that's the key. It creates the canon of what it is that you are as a communicator trying to convey. Diane Moca: And then it reaches more people in this new way. I mean, is it really like a game changer? Jimi Allen: I think it's a huge game changer, and you've said that to me before. And I do try to convince everybody I talk to that it is, but I just happen to be that kind of thinker that's always pushing the edge. There's, for me, the three sides of the coin, and we are the edge of that coin. And that edge is the very edge of the issue that you're converging all of the advantages that we have right now, currently, and this isn't something we just decided to do three years ago because of the pandemic. This is a 25 year plan. We have been working to build this company as it is today, and it's ability to express and help people do what they need to do in the digital economy for 25 years. We've been working on it, Kate and I and hundreds and hundreds of people that have been part of the team have been building incrementally towards this moment to say, "Here's a way that a community can get at what they haven't been getting at before," which is you cannot use social media to be any journalistic or news outlet. It's just not built that way. We've seen that, I mean, gosh. I don't even want to go into what all that's about, but right now Talking Cities, Aurora, it doesn't have any filter on it. It doesn't have a gate on it except ethical communication, trying to take what is being purported in the community and fact checking it, being journalistic about it. And if it's out there, we want to share it. Now, if it could be a story about a business, and they're, of course, going to tell their story from their business perspective. But developing that platform and growing Talking Cities and getting more viewers on, it will bring the community together. That's the point of that. Diane Moca: And TalkLab is more than just Talking Cities. TalkLab gives companies the unique ability to own the news in their industry, control the media platform where their customers interact, and learn about new information in that field. So can you give me an example of a company, a city, a nonprofit that's really had success using that platform? Jimi Allen: Well, there's several different levels of that. So we stood it up in Aurora because we built the facility here. We over 25 years, we built a studio space that's really unique in the sense that it was forward thinking and the style that it was built in, so that it had a studio vibe to it and that would look good for years to come. And it wasn't that same look that, perhaps, broadcast television or the way studios were built out in the past. That convention happened a hundred years ago. The way a sitcom was lit, it was lit so the actors could move around, and all of those things were designed maybe a hundred years ago, working through that. So we built this facility for right now and the future as we move forward, so we're in a booth right now. It's a glass booth. It needs to be aesthetically pleasing, architecturally pleasing. You come into the building, you see it, but now you can come in and you can record. Everything's pretty quick. We have several cameras in here, they're all on prompter, and we can be live. We can go straight live [inaudible 00:11:07]- Diane Moca: Like we're doing right now. Jimi Allen: ... right. Like we're doing right now, so we don't have to go into post and edit that, and that creates the cost effective model that we needed to understand and be able to offer to people. Because there are people in the community that want to get messaging out or get information out that can't afford to come in and pay commercial prices for a video. So Talking Cities concept and Bureau Gravity as a parent company, we want to facilitate local commerce, locally economic development around... And it's all communication, and at the end of the day, I don't care what you do. You have to be able to communicate it, and whether it's Math, Math as a language, it's all about communication. So what we're doing is helping people communicate on the internet in the best possible way. And that's today, just starting now, but this entire facility, all of the technology and all of the staff have been groomed to be where we're at currently, and I think we're just waiting on, perhaps, a healthcare vertical or an education vertical or a corporate vertical to grab hold of it and take off understanding that they could have their own digital channel essentially immediately. There's no ramp up costs. There's no R&D in there, and they don't have to mix a bunch of different vendors together to try to get them to do this one simple thing which is to record and publish and promote their content. So that's what we were built of, and it is very much a today kind of thing. Diane Moca: And that's because TalkLab offers one place for organizations to produce a professional video, have it featured on a media platform and get it distributed to a targeted audience. So are there other agencies out there that do all of that together or is that pretty unique? Jimi Allen: Yeah, I think right now it's really unique. I don't think that anyone is offering the level of expertise that we have brought together to produce the outcome, so the attraction and the reach and the conversion are all part of what is the digital lexicon right now around being effective and trying to prioritize an audience. But I think a lot of times, if you're extremely digital, you'll see that from a landing page conversion mindset, but if you're really production oriented, you're going to see that from an attraction standpoint. You're going to attract everybody because your content's so great, but what we are at is just creating a balance where a client can come in and they're going to emphasize one or the other, but you need to have all three of those things. You need to have the production side. You've got to have some type of paid media campaign. Just being successful organically is not going to be- Diane Moca: Not anymore. Jimi Allen: ... not going to be the way to go. And then you need to be able to categorize your audience and handle a CRM or handle a landing page conversion process, but those three things are what digital broadcasting is today. Diane Moca: It makes me excited. Jimi Allen: Yeah. I love it. Diane Moca: I know it makes me excited. Jimi Allen: Yeah. Diane Moca: Thanks for sharing that, Jimi. And thank you for joining us for this edition of the Creator Economy Entrepreneur Learning Series. For Talking Cities, I'm Diane Moca.