Podcast Recap: Antonella Pisani Joins the Becker Business Minute Podcast

The Becker Business Minute Podcast is about a wide array of topics that are related to business. Grace Lynn Keller hosts a variety of entrepreneurs who bring their passion and experience to discuss critical topics in various industries.

Here are the highlights from Antonella’s conversation with Grace Lynn on trends in the media and marketing industry. 

Eyeful Media: How Do You Help Companies Succeed?

Grace Lynn Keller: This is Grace Lynn Keller with the Becker Private Equity and Business and Becker Business Minute Podcast. Today, I'm excited to be joined by Antonella Pisano, the CEO, and founder at Eyeful Media. 

So, Antonella, thank you so much for joining me today, and I would love for you to start by introducing yourself and telling us a little bit about Eyeful Media.

Antonella Pisani: Yeah, sure thing. It's great to be here. Thank you so much for having me. By way of background, I've been involved with digital for about 26 years. I started as a web designer back in college and worked on the corporate side up until about seven years ago.

I was working for companies like Fossil, JCPenney, Guitar Center, ProFlowers, and larger enterprises. I was consulting by myself about six years ago and have built it up into a business. We're now at about 26 people. 

We focus primarily on performance marketing strategy. Really what that means is a lot of digital marketing. We help people with sales and get more leads for their businesses. And we do a fair amount of work for private equity firms.

Making Leadership Training Accessible To All Employees

Grace Lynn Keller: Wonderful. Well, thank you for taking the time to join me, and I would love for you to start off talking about some of the things that you're most excited about this year and at this present moment in your career.

Antonella Pisani: As we've matured as a business we're focusing on training and developing our team this year. So focus on leadership topics, everything from five team dysfunctions, servant leadership, and committed actions. 

I was fortunate early in my career to be exposed to some of these topics. But for most companies that I had the opportunity to work at, this is training that is limited to senior vice presidents and EVPs. We're trying to make it accessible to everyone in the organization.

We've also been leaning into executive coaching for some of our staff and investing in them as people. I think that's been a lot of fun just watching leaders kind of grow and blossom in the organization.

On the personal front, I'm working on launching a nonprofit that should go live this week. So it will be a huge intellectual challenge, but also a lot of fun and something for the team to rally around as well.

When Private Equity And Nonprofits Meet

Grace Lynn Keller: That's so wonderful. Congratulations. And are you able to tell us a little bit about the nonprofit or is that being kept with closed lips until the launch?

Antonella Pisani: No, I can certainly talk about it. We're focusing on addressing hygiene poverty and hygiene insecurity. One thing I learned back in August was that food stamps do not cover basic goods.

Items like shampoo, deodorant, and toothpaste, and it's all these things that live at this intersection of physical health, mental health, education, and employment. It's something that most people don't know about.

I certainly didn't know about it until I had the opportunity to spend a few days with a friend who's a university president. 

He was doing great work alleviating poverty on campus to allow his students to finish their education. And so when we learned about it, the fun tie-in with this podcast is my co-founder's private equity guy.

We just decided it was worth attacking. So I'm just waiting for the lawyers to give me the thumbs up that we've filed paperwork with the IRS and then we can get going this week.

Trends in Media and Marketing To Watch

Grace Lynn Keller: Well, that's so wonderful. Congratulations on that. It sounds like you're doing some essential work there. But shifting gears a little bit here, what are some of the trends you're currently watching in the media space and industry?

Antonella Pisani: Yeah, I’d say there's three or four that I'm watching. We've seen a lot over the last couple of months as companies are starting to refocus on organic search. It’s the practice of optimizing your website to get it to show up higher naturally on Google and Bing.

What happened last year is a lot of the costs increased in areas like paid search and paid social, so companies are refocusing on how to drive down their cost (of acquisition). It requires this different mindset. It balances instant and delayed gratification.

Another trend we're seeing is CPG companies and brands that have historically relied on wholesale for their sales. They're continuing to focus more on taking control of their business and owning their customers.

Companies want to promote their products on Instacart, Walmart, and other retail media networks. They’re trying to take more ownership versus relying solely on wholesale.

Of course, everyone is talking about AI, including us. Everyone is trying to find a balance between it's cool and then where it's streamlined work. I've seen through some of the nonprofit work that there are solutions that use AI to recommend different donation amounts based on variables. That's cool. 

A lot of people are talking about ChatGPT for content creation and copywriting. Companies like Google have been using automation for a while. It's going to be about finding that balance between human intervention and technology to drive the best results.

The other thing we continue to see is shorter formats. Attention spans continue to get shorter, and so are a lot of trends. It’s bite-sized media, especially out on social.

Advice For Emerging Leaders

Grace Lynn Keller: Absolutely. Those are some great points. As you’re building your online brands, companies can look at what kind of content they've been putting out and what's been performing well. 

You have had this incredible career that's now culminated into being a founder and CEO. I would love to hear your best advice for other emerging leaders and people who want to become founders or CEOs one day.

Antonella Pisani: Yeah. I think we're fortunate. We've grown quickly and it's been strictly through word of mouth — I guess really just focusing on treating customers exceptionally well and then letting them spread the word for you.

I've learned that you get what you pay for when it comes to talent. If you're not ready to hire the big guns right away, maybe start with contractors, but get that thinking power you need for your team.

Another one would be to build structure and organization early. I think a lot of founders and entrepreneurs know how to juggle a lot at once. That's what makes us good entrepreneurs.

But I think the realization that not everyone is built that way was one of the lessons I learned probably a little bit too late, a couple of years in, just seeing that people aren't wired the same way and they need things to be set up in an organized manner.

I would say to remember that you have the right to get smarter — this is a line we use a lot here. You're going to make mistakes. You're never going to please everyone. And so just do the best you can every day. A couple more here would be just being realistic about how fast your organization's prepared to grow. 

You'll go through different inflection points, but you could let the ball drop with clients if you grow too quickly. You also don't want to burn out your team.

And so just making sure you're aware of some of those pieces. And then just checking in with clients early and often. We like to poll every single client once a quarter.  We want to make sure they're happy with the work and get their feedback. We want to hear about what isn’t going well so we can course-correct. Those are a few of the things.

Grace Lynn Keller: That's wonderful. Thank you so much for joining me today on the Becker Private Equity and Business Podcast and the Becker Business Minute Podcast. Thank you so much for your time and this wonderful conversation.

Antonella Pisani: I appreciate it. Thank you so much.