How to Turn Customers Into Advocates for Your Brand

John Jantsch (00:01.602)

Hello and welcome to another episode of the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. This is John Jantsch, and my guest today is Zac Froud. He is the founder of Advocacy, a company that helps brands turn passive audiences into real relationships. He spent nearly 20 years running marketing and audience growth at Warner Music Group, Universal Music Group, Disney, and Coinbase. And Billboard named him a global power player in 2025. So, Zach, welcome to the show.

Zac (00:31.33)

Hey John. Thanks for having me.

John Jantsch (00:33.356)

You bet. So that must have been a little bit Warner, Universal, Disney, and then to Coinbase.

Zac (00:40.608)

Yeah. yeah, some you know, some some I I've been in and around kind of music, marketing and media for for the best part of twenty years. and really liked the idea of applying the skill set to different industries, different verticals, came back to music more recently, but really like honing the skills and honing the the the kind of

John Jantsch (00:41.558)

Yeah.

Zac (01:10.114)

the learnings that I had across all of those industries to have kind of a diversified career, you know, and it's it's always something like as I mentor kind of other people that I say, you know, it's a great thing to that, you know, it's a great thing to do. And I would recommend, you know, I'd recommend that to anyone that, you know, go and go and try a different few few different industries and see where you fit and where you don't fit.

John Jantsch (01:34.04)

So you you put out a guide recently and and I picked up on the sub subtitle more than anything else. Broadcasting is dead. it's a pretty strong claim from somebody who spent a lot of years in essentially broadcast companies. what what has you th making that's that bold claim?

Zac (01:53.293)

Yeah, l look, broadcast marketing for me is old school, right? It's kind of the it's the now and it's it's the it's the past. And when I kind of reference broadcast, I don't mean it in the traditional sense of broadcast kind of media or TV, like linear TV. I I I'm referencing that in the way that right now marketing is very one dimensional and one way, right, with with your customer, with your consumer.

John Jantsch (01:59.886)

Mm-hmm.

Zac (02:22.304)

Or your audience. So the idea is that you know we we kind of solved reach with social media, but we haven't solved relationships. And the idea that actually now technology has unlocked the ability to have relationships at scale that aren't broadcasts, right? It's not traditional email or social media or running ads. The premise here is that, you know, actually you can have individual relationships at scale.

and connection and that is a different reflex to traditional marketing, which is broadcasting, shouting at people, right? And and hoping that they're gonna lean in and and and react and and and you know be customers. there is an alternative route now and and that's something we're exploring at the advocacy.

John Jantsch (02:58.424)

Mm.

John Jantsch (03:08.648)

So you mentioned personal relationships at scale. and the and I know one of the things you talk about is the difference between a container and a community. I think a lot of people when when you say personal relationships at scale, I think a lot of people kind of default to community or a Slack channel, you know, circle, you know, all the various tools that are out there. tell me if that's what you're talking about or if you think that there's a a different job to be done.

Zac (03:38.659)

Yeah, you got it. look, like the the thesis here is that the platform is the container, the community is what happens between people. and actually what you find when you talk about community building, right? Which is a really important part of the marketing ecosystem now. most of the kind of top frontier labs, you know, big tech companies, you'll notice that people are

moving back to IRL and building community and hiring for community and hiring for events as well, in kind of the the spirit of, you know, we've gone down the algorithm and the the the kind of digital AI route really heavily. So actually the antithesis to that is how do you bring people together and how do you create more human experiences. And the container really is that a lot of the platforms and the Martex

John Jantsch (04:10.05)

Mm-hmm.

Zac (04:36.562)

you know side of things right now is they are great containers to house people they're not so great at building the relationships within those environments and no one has really focused or or kind of like brought up the the idea of the relationship layer right the idea that actually by understanding individuals contextually at scale you can surface better content you can surface better ideas

John Jantsch (04:54.126)

Mm-hmm.

Zac (05:05.344)

You can surface people to the right people, right? And and that's what this is about, right? And that is kind of, you know, I always say that the the kind of the holy grail here for for for marketing and the outcome of marketing is to create more advocates, right? To create more advocacy in your business, right? And and there's a couple of like really important reasons why that becomes important, right? It's you know, advocates do a couple of things, right? They

John Jantsch (05:24.11)

Right. Yeah.

Zac (05:33.571)

They they firstly they they buy from you, right? That they're the ones that are gonna buy from you first. They're the ones that are gonna lean into your selection and and they're gonna, you know, they're gonna care about what you do. they're also like w you know, when I put kind of my marketing hat on, you know, when I've worked in in in tech and you know, big tech, they're also the ones that build with you. They're also the ones that give you the most feedback on your product, right? They're the ones that kind of lean in the most and say,

John Jantsch (05:36.462)

Yeah. Sure.

Zac (05:59.863)

Right, hey, you know, like this, we we want this feature, we want this solution. so they will be the ones that are the most active in building your solution or building your product or your go-to-market with you. And then the third most important one is, you know, they advocate for you, right? They ultimately they will bring others in, you know, and and and when you look at marketing and CAC and and you know, all of the measures of success that we've had from a legacy perspective.

Impressions and reach and those types of metrics are vanity, right? Versus an advocate who is gonna market for you on your behalf, right? Which is why we're seeing now obviously the the the growth of influencer marketing or creator marketing, is because we are artificially creating advocates, right, around the business. And those advocates will bring others in, they will create cultural capital around the brand and and and cultural movements, and it's a way for us to tap into cultural movements as a brand as well.

John Jantsch (06:45.422)

Yes.

Zac (06:58.722)

But what I'm really fascinated with is, well, if that's the most valuable customer you have and and that's the person that's gonna buy, build and bring others in and market for you, how do we create more of those? Right? That's become the real kind of like question for me. Like, how do you create more advocates in your business? Because the more people that love what you do, the more powerful your brand is gonna be. And we've seen it play out, right, with with Nike, with Patagonia, with all of these big brands, like actually what they have is

fantastic advocacy programmes.

John Jantsch (07:32.793)

So I don't think there's anybody, even the smallest of businesses that would argue with that premise at all. however, you know, how does a small, mid-sized business that's not Nike, not Patagonia, look at that when they're a lot of times juggling, a lot of, you know, founders juggling, maybe they don't have big teams. you know, how do they start and and get that community? Cause a lot of community building just takes work that doesn't necessarily turn into

dollars right away. like I said, I don't think anybody'd argue with the premise, but but how do they practically go about it in a way that that kind of balances everything else they're trying to do?

Zac (08:14.774)

Yes, a good question. I mean, I mean, look, like advocacy seems to be what happens when belonging becomes behavior. Right? So like traditional loyalty marketing has been like, I keep buying something. Advocacy is saying, well, I bought something, I I brought someone with me. I I didn't just buy something, I bought someone with me. So, you know, when you look at the traditional marketing funnel, it ends at acquisition or purchase, right? Advocacy starts there and

John Jantsch (08:41.346)

Mm-hmm.

Zac (08:44.32)

When I'm working or or or or speaking with like startups or smaller brands or smaller organizations, hopefully, you know, they're cre they've created a product that has some love, right? It has a niche. It has a small audience of people that really need that solution, it solves their problem and is really interesting, right, for for for that niche. So then it's about saying, Well, how are you cultivating that niche? How are you bringing them in and how are you turning them into an advocate?

And it's similar to a loyalty program, right? It's a similar thing. You're putting your arms around them as a business and saying, okay, you're our most important people, and we want to create more of you, and we want to celebrate you and we want to reward you, right, for being part of the journey and part of our of our brand. And and then it's about understanding them, right? So then it's like, you know, it's strategic, right? It's behavior, it's psychology, it's understanding, okay, well, how do you measure this, right? Between two axes, right? On one hand, you've got

John Jantsch (09:40.333)

Mm-hmm.

Zac (09:43.179)

r people that really love what you do and and you deem them as super fans or in music well that's what we call them or advocates, right? If if you're working in a brand. And then you've got people that have just maybe just heard of your product or your or your solution. And then you say, right, okay, well there's a spectrum here that there's a there's a journey that our customers need to go on. Not dissimilar to the funnel, but I'd argue it is very different actually. because you're what you're trying to do then is graduate people.

John Jantsch (10:06.765)

Mm-hmm.

Zac (10:11.82)

And what I've been fascinated with over the last four years, you know, working in the music industry as well and working with large fan bases, is, you know, how do you approach advocacy at scale? And how do you approach taxonomy, right? Building taxonomy of your customers from advocate right the way down to people that have just heard of your solution. And how do you graduate them? What are the things that you can do? Firstly, by identifying where they sit in that journey with your brand or that relationship with your brand, I like to say.

And then how do you graduate people through that through that I say you know conversation or or marketing you know flow? and I'd argue and this comes back to the original point around broadcast, right? I'd argue it's difficult to graduate humans, people, customers, right, through a journey with you as a brand if you're just talking at them. Okay, so this is where in the last kind of year, really 12 to 18 months.

John Jantsch (11:04.844)

Mm-hmm.

Zac (11:10.968)

Conversational marketing becomes really interesting. and the idea that you can have conversation and relationships that scale with people becomes really interesting. You can understand contextually who someone is and where they sit in your, you know, in your flow, in your funnel. And then you can identify the things, the levers that are going to graduate them to become closer to advocates, people that love what you do, buy, build with you, et cetera. so yeah.

John Jantsch (11:38.04)

So so you actually break that down into layers. I mean, are there actual are there actual kind of moments of truth like the first twelve hours, you know, somebody buys something, you know, the the you know, the next area that you get into a community, how you continue to educate. I mean, are there like milestones that roughly fit most businesses?

Zac (11:41.687)

Yeah.

Zac (11:59.063)

Yeah, I I would say, you know, every business is different and and every customer is different. And that's really important, right? And and so this is where, you know, if you have a CRM and you're doing mass marketing, you know, through ads or or you know, email marketing, it's really hard to understand your customers, your audience, right? It's really under it's really hard to understand touch points with your brand or or or with what what you're selling. So

John Jantsch (12:03.276)

Right. Right.

Zac (12:27.694)

You know, there there is different you know, kind of signals or different data points that you would layer into each part of your customer journey, right? Your customer taxonomy. That might be purchase intent. that might be, you know, looking at click-through rates and engagement on on what you're doing. That might be customer acquisition cost, that might be looking at kind of more, you know, what is the longer term like

play or the l or the LTV, long-term value that you're deeming from this like funnel with with these individuals. So absolutely like every business is different and falls and has different ways of building that taxonomy and absolutely should be customized. But what you often see after doing it, you know, various times in it with within different businesses, the graduation moments, the human psychology and behavior around turning people into

customers and turning people into pe you know people that love what you do is actually quite standardized and there is actually quite a lot of literature and research around how you do that. And it's interesting, you know, because when you go down the the hole, right, the sh the the the the the hole in this and what you see is governments do it very well in their policies and in their campaigns that they run. So you know they they

the the the transtheretical model of behavioral change, but like that type of work actually is really fundamental to marketing, right? And and how we're bringing customers on board and and graduating those customers. So there is actually you know a a a lot of like I said literature about that and and and how it works and and then it's about tactics, right? It's about, well, that's great, right? That the research is great and and the, you know, all of that deep that deep work is is fantastic. But I'm a marketer and I have

John Jantsch (14:10.104)

Mm-hmm.

Zac (14:17.48)

loads of different things to do, like how do I bring this to life? What does that look like in my technology stack? What does that look like in my comms plan? Like how do I action that day to day? That's a completely different thing and and that's ever evolving as well.

John Jantsch (14:29.954)

Yeah. S s so I came across five layers that you talked about and one of them stood out to me and personally I just want to know more about what you mean by this, that that consent is the richest data moment a business gets, you know, rather than just being a compliance box. Can you unpack

Zac (14:32.418)

Mm-hmm.

Zac (14:50.53)

Yeah. look, th the moment that somebody like opts in and says, Hey, I'm interested. Like, hey, like I'm willing to hand over, you know, my my my data or you know, my keys or my information. you know, th that that is the moment when the relationship starts, right? And it and it shouldn't end there, right? Like it shouldn't just be a ledger. and and you know, what what you find and what you see is

With traditional CRM, for example, like it's a static ledger, right? It's like a it's consent, but it's like it's not evolving, right? It's actually what it is is their name, their job title, and hopefully they fill out a form, right, that tells you a little bit more about them. But most people don't want to fill out forms, right? So the idea is, you know, that consent should be weaponized because it's it's important, right? It's it's showing intent and showing interest.

And then how do you build on that relationship? That's the starting point, right? That's not place that person into a list and email them four times a week. That's okay, they've shown interest here. What's that next stage in the journey of building an active relationship and a connection with that individual to again bring them into the funnel and bring them into, you know, turning them that person into an advocate ultimately?

John Jantsch (16:13.15)

over the last few years, community platforms have really cl popped up. you know, the idea that gives a place for people to gather, talk about a brand, maybe it's maybe it's an influencer or a thought leader or something that creates it. we've all seen launches of those that were spectacular that then went nowhere. you know, how do people get that idea of building a community, an online community, say on one of those platforms?

I I guess there's two parts to this question. How do they get it wrong? And then I'd love to hear you've probably seen some that, you know, really exploded and people were very engaged. So how do you know, how do they get it right?

Zac (16:57.89)

Yeah. So when like now, like, you know, we're really deep in community right now. We're working with lots of large communities, small communities, you know, dinner clubs, run club, you you know, you name it, right? From from large to small. What's really interesting is there's some like there's some real common mistakes, common learnings, right, that that that you that you start to see. one of them is like

John Jantsch (17:05.634)

Mm-hmm.

Zac (17:26.868)

a bit disruptive actually. It's like sometimes the ultimate success of a your community is helping someone no longer need your community. Right. And that that becomes like quite a a jerking thing to say, right, to a community manager. But it's like don't just measure how long somebody stays in the room, right? Whether that's a chat room or a physical room. Start measuring what happens because they entered it, right? Because they were there.

John Jantsch (17:36.504)

Hm. Yeah.

Zac (17:55.631)

Right, start measuring the outcome of that. So the other thing that you start to see is lots lots of communities treat it like you know, I I think this is going back like we've had a legacy of lots of platforms that have gained our time, right? Algorithmic platforms, social media, etc. and and interestingly, when we when we think about community, lots of people think of it in the same way. It's like very one way, like I said, like kind of broadcast.

it can be very you know, t time sucking of people and and almost hacky, like like marketing became a little bit hacky and so the community building. Look, placing a thousand people in a WhatsApp group isn't a community. It's a WhatsApp group with probably five percent of your users actually engaging and everyone else being like, I'm not sure what to say actually. I feel a bit a bit awkward, you know? You don't, you know, just going back to the human behaviour point, you you don't go into an event and all stand in a circle of a thousand people and shout at each other.

John Jantsch (18:30.509)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (18:43.394)

Yeah, yeah.

Zac (18:52.974)

And and and whoever chats the loud. You know, so like there's some real misconceptions around community tech and the idea that, you know, a couple of things, right? That that a container, like like we said, like a like a WhatsApp group is a community. It it's not, right? We need to be more dynamic in the way that we think about community. You know, when you enter a a room and you know, it's an event of a couple hundred people, like I said, you kind of find a couple of people that you want to talk to, and then you might form a little group of conversation, you know.

John Jantsch (18:53.501)

Mm.

Zac (19:22.668)

That's a much more dynamic human experience of how you you know, how community exists in the real world. advocacy, we're building the virtual or or the the the technology layer for that, right? Of that exact thing. Community rooms are dynamic, right? They're based on the intent, the challenges, the context of the individuals. and we say, like, hey, John, you should like enter this conversation with these four other people because

John Jantsch (19:35.277)

Mm-hmm.

Zac (19:49.401)

They all have similar challenges to you. And by the way, they're they're in the same town as you, you know? You guys should go for a coffee. Like that, that's much more pointed, you know, a way a way of building a community around very pointed conversations. And by the way, when those conversations finish, because indicat, you know, they just do, right? That that that's the nature of of of having conversations and you know, especially pointed ones around challenges or objectives or intent. Spin though spin that group down and place those people into another one, right? Put put them into something else that they would

get a lot of value from. the other thing that we've seen in in in community, which is which is interesting, is everyone's trying to create another container, right? Another application layer. And I've built many apps and you know, as an entrepreneur in kind of residence within these large organizations, it's really hard to build an app in 2026. And anyone that i is, I I I kind of say, well, what's the existing infrastructure or what's the habitual

John Jantsch (20:29.855)

Mm-hmm. Right.

Zac (20:48.678)

user behavior, right, of what you're trying to build. And when you'd look at community, you've got to say that like firstly to try and onboard people to a new app is is is really challenging, right? Because it's it's not somewhere people don't want another app on their phone, really. secondly it's like, well, once you have the app and you have your community there, it's really hard to get people to to retain people, right? To actually to actually keep people there or or have people come back.

John Jantsch (21:04.619)

Mm-hmm.

John Jantsch (21:13.761)

Mm-hmm.

Zac (21:17.294)

'Cause habitually they're really used to in the US they're very used to using SMS, you know, iMessage or WhatsApp. And in Asia they're really used to using Lyme or Kick. And, you know, around the world there there's maybe Telegram and Signal. These are the places that as humans we are very used to communicating with each other and being part of groups and communities and family groups and business groups, etc. So our argument has always been create as little friction as possible.

meet your audience where they already exist and build on top of these platforms to make them far, far more connected.

John Jantsch (21:55.659)

Yeah, I think that's really why so many people have groups on Facebook because even if they hate Facebook, they're like, everybody's there, it's not another login. So I I I guess we'll do it. Well, Zach, I appreciate you taking a few moments to stop by the Duct Tape Marketing Podcast. Is there some place you'd invite people to connect with you and learn more about advocacy?

Zac (22:03.246)

Exactly, exactly.

Zac (22:08.558)

There we

Zac (22:14.402)

Yeah, we're at advocacy dot AI. That's ad v c y dot AI. and you can reach me on there. it's Zach Z A C at advocacy dot AI. And yeah, reach out and have a we can have a chat.

John Jantsch (22:30.582)

Awesome. Again, appreciate you stopping by, and hopefully we'll run into you one of these days out there on the road. Yeah.

Zac (22:36.227)

Thanks so much for having me. Appreciate it. Take care.