A Conversation with Xiao Faria da cunha of Westerlund
Agency founder and artist, with roots in China and boots on the ground in the American Midwest, Xiao sat down for a wide-ranging conversation about email, marketing and more. Her perspective and voice are distinctive and quite fun!
TRANSCRIPT
Matthew Dunn
This is Dr. Matthew Dunn, host of the future of email marketing. My guest today and I'm speaking to her from Chicago, I believe is shelf Araya takuna. Owner of westerland westerlund. is an agency fundamentally show. Yes, it is. Tell us a bit about the company first.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
So while here's the fun, nerdy facts, the name westerland came from the brightest young star cluster in a universe. We work with companies that are still relatively young, when it comes to digital marketing. And I love that superstar movie, you probably know about it. dancing girl. So that's where I got the name of the company, because I believe every business is a bride superstar. And you just need the right person and the right strategy to bring that light out.
Matthew Dunn
To bring that light out of it nicely put, how long has the company been in business? And you started you launched it yourself? Correct?
Xiao Faria de Cunha
Yes. So I think you know, marketing and PR world for almost 10 years, but I didn't take the entrepreneurship leap until two years ago. So this is our second year a we're going strong and super excited to see what's about to come.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Okay. And how did you end up in marketing was this and I'm always heading there or I got I got pulled into it.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
Yes, I actually, I came from China. So I started I started with traditional media, buy and Play Media. Okay, I came over here for school. When I came here, China was still like paniers backing technology. So I came here I saw a huge change from in person events offline print silversides advertisement to Oh wow, there's this digital stuff going out. And it's a lot more versatile. It's super fun. It's a much younger population. So you get people who are way more open or to creative ideas and just try out new things and all those things as an artists You know, that's straight up my sleeve, be creative. try out new plans and stirring things up. That's why I was drawn to the digital side. And as a digital marketing ever since.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Nice. Nice and and bringing international perspective to your work, obviously, which is a real asset.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
That is a funny product because we do offer marketing localization, which is partial translation services, and yeah, we are snobs. So it goes down to a translation conversation. Sometimes we make fun of certain campaigns down by other companies and we're like
Unknown Speaker
that is hilarious.
Matthew Dunn
Okay, interesting. Well, that's got to be one of the harder tasks still is to get that, you know, to get the, it's hard enough to get something to be expressive and onpoint. And to move people, even if you both have the same native tongue. So more than one language, wow, it's a big. That's a big lift on. Tell people a bit about your philosophy, like how do you approach making a cut making a customer company into a star?
Xiao Faria de Cunha
I am a huge storyteller. So I came from a writers background. While I was back in China, I was a full time creative writer. Okay. And when I came here, a lot of things change. But I still have that writer storytellers, personality inside of me. I always say, you know, a lot of people approach a company a business. And when we talk about marketing, we say, Oh, you need to put out a business profile you have this front is mentally impossible to maintain a front that is not you know, I talked to the business, the thing I care about is who I am speaking with, who that business actually is, what does the business care about. So I'd rather treat a business as an organic creature with its own thoughts was its own story, and it's got a path he wants to take. And then I bring in the story from the business owner, whoever is going to be involved with creating that brand voice.
Matthew Dunn
Got it. So so this is a fun rabbit hole to go down. Let's go down it for a minute. And this may just be maybe my, my particular point of view, I find myself struggling sometimes as a business owner. With what what feels like almost an imperative, like you have to tell your story, you have to have a personal brand. And at least in part, I'm like, I'm not the business the business is not me, it's none of my none of my customers. It's not necessarily at their concern, who I am and what I'm all about. And sometimes it feels like I'm running counter to what's effective or counter to what's mainstream and marketing any reactions.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
I actually agree with you You are not your business you are a wayward in your business and as your business grow it will become way more than just you as well. So I am 100% against whoever tried to force a personal brand every single person who has a business I think it is ridiculous. business should speak as itself so when you first start is just you're running the business of course, it's gonna sound like you like my business content sounded like me talking for a long time until I brought in someone part time to run the content. Okay, I think the business personality should reflect what's the team running the business believes when it comes to the professional center like what do I think about the marketing industry that is something my business will reflect but only to a certain extent, because I have pretty radical opinions on certain things that my business do now step four, because as a business, we do play by the rules on certain things and there are my business would argue against me, that's the funny day is it will argue against me on certain things. I might say one thing about marketing, but what I look from my business perspective, I have to think about my audience think about my clients and I'm like, you know what, as a business it's okay to go down that route. But personally, I don't really like it
Matthew Dunn
sounds like we're actually somewhat on the same page there. Yeah, it's refreshing to hear it I just dump it having having lived through the transition to digital and the you know, increased increased increased footprint we all have an exposure that we all have. Yeah, I I've gotten for myself, I've gotten more like I'm gonna pick and choose you know, what, what's personally invested versus what what the business needs Yeah, I
Xiao Faria de Cunha
saw a lot of bad also from being artists because you know, most creative small business it's a sole proprietorship, the artist is the business and I saw a lot of people try to keep you know what you were saying you were told that Oh, you need that personal brand you push yourself out there and all I saw were backfires burnouts and mental health concerns and that's just at that point it's not worth it social media is not designed to do that to you and that they should do that
Matthew Dunn
good for good for you. That's a I like this strong point of view. talk a bit about yourself show as it as an artist what, what kind of what forms why, and how do you make it make it go?
Xiao Faria de Cunha
So as far as articles I'm all about the the cultural ambassador. I can talk about mythology and Asian culture for hours and hours. That's what powers my art. Those are The core symbols I use. And based on those symbols, I use my traditional culture combined with what I've learned since I came to the state, which, whoa, what a trip, I use that and to touch on topics, not necessarily marketing related, but my business and my r&d post focus a lot, you can probably tell by my LinkedIn focus on mental health awareness, it does focus on authenticity, and how to put yourself out there in the world, not a self exploiting way, but in a way that is influential, compassionate, and that will naturally build a community around you like in art, my stuff is pretty peculiar. So I know I have a very specific audience will get hooked to it. And it might not resonate with others. And I say the same thing, or any business. It's marketing or not, what we're saying is not going to resonate with everyone well, but as far as articles for me, it's like the moments I get those little direct messages on my art, Instagram, people say, You made my day, like I was having a really hard day I saw your payday, I read your caption and made me feel so much better. Like, those are the little moments and therefore, yeah, I think that should be the same whether you're an artist, or you're in marketing or anything. It's like, therefore the small moments, I know my art is touching people. I always joke like, I don't like kids. I'm like other people's kids. First of all, I don't think about kids. So I always tell others, like my artists going to be my legacy. The more people my art touch, the bigger my legacy is going to be.
Matthew Dunn
Wow, what, what, what, what artists? Can you name some artists that you yourself, like and get something out of?
Xiao Faria de Cunha
I'm living artists nascence for a friend of mine, a brilliant digital artist. He's also actually helped curator society six. That's his commercial side. And yeah, I know a ton of living artists, both my influences come from Japan. So like now Tsukiji bow was a very big illustration artists who was probably the first person to go full out in pushing the Asian symbol, like illustration wise. And you know, backstory wise, she was one of the earliest pioneers to actually be like, I'm going to throw all these wild little ideas into one painting, and you decipher it and take whatever you can take.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, wow. Yeah. So you've got to be informed. She's got to be informed. And it sounds like that's, that's someone your bailiwick as well. You've got a you've got a vocabulary, drawing from a specific culture and even specific visual, nimble said that you're re expressing.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
And it's fascinating because you know, a marketing we talk about, oh, you need to come by why the crap. And when I'm working with foreign cells, in my art, I'm actually doing the same thing is because my audience, most of them don't speak Chinese. They don't write anything about the stories I'm using. Right, I started to notice what it was expressing the visual for. They actually understand what it is about, even though they might have zero idea of the mythology I was referring.
Matthew Dunn
Really? Oh. So it translates somehow, regardless of whether or not right whether or not there's a literal translation. Exactly. Wow. Wow. Yeah. idiographic idiographic character set in in the written language, correct? Yes, it is that simple set part of your vocabulary as an artist.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
And I occasionally use it personally, I feel like the characters, the actual letters, yeah, take the visual expression power away from it. Because when you see a letter, you try to figure out what it is about, when you see a flower or a bird, you take it as a flower bird and look at it for the larger picture.
Matthew Dunn
Right, right. Okay. Um, let's take this a slightly different direction because I'm I'm intrigued as heck by by the juxtaposition of the things that you do. And and I do want to focus specifically on email in this respect on my observation is that email lags as a visual medium, compared to other other channels, particularly other digital channels, any reaction to that?
Xiao Faria de Cunha
I do agree, because most of time when we talk about email, we're still dealing with plaintext. Yeah, we also need to think about like, there are ways you can turn a video into it, yes, with captions and everything and just plugging into the email. There are plenty of fancy newsletters out there. But I think it's like, I look at email a lot of times closer as longer text messages, because most of us are reading emails on our phone nowadays. And when you think about it, the audience is at a different mindset when they open an email compared to the audience browsing social media or looking at a YouTube ads. So when it comes to email, my question would be Does the visual elements really matter that much or as it's the way you write it the same way you will be texting someone,
Matthew Dunn
I'm going to disagree with you or I'm going to ask you to support your attention that that the I agree that the habit an expectation of I open an email, I'm probably going to get mostly text is there. My question is why? Why are we sending mostly text?
Xiao Faria de Cunha
That is a really, really good question. Because we have graphic heavy email, like from a technological standpoint, they'll tell you adding too much graphic effects to an email deliverability that comes
Matthew Dunn
to small batches, which is horse manure. But keep going exactly.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
It's not even true. I think it's still goes back to a mindset thing. Like if I'm opening a marketing email that I know is a marketing email, I'm expecting pretty images, cute colors and things like that, you know, I opa email I received from someone I've bought before, you better be sending me a nice coupon here. Otherwise, why am I open? It goes back to expectation of I mean, the b2b sector, and most of my clients are into b2b sector. So we are still dealing with people who are down to the point where like, why are you emailing? And when someone opens the email with the mindset of Okay, why am I getting this email? Yep. At least from my experience, running client campaigns, running campaigns for myself, text emails work more efficiently. It has a higher or higher click high response compared to the graphic emails. But I'm not saying texting is a gigantic se. Yeah, people do that.
Matthew Dunn
But that there's you just said something fundamentally illogical. And I'm going to end I'm going to call it out because it because nobody says it is more effective, that text is more effective than visual is a is a dumb statement in this respect. Yeah. Which text and which visual, you can't indict the category by this specific, like, if, right, if you send a meaningless image, it's not going to do as much if you send a meaningful or impactful image to do something different. So saying image better image worse is like a meaningless statement to me. It doesn't
Xiao Faria de Cunha
Yeah, you cannot, you just cannot say and you cannot say it out any marketing pieces. Because right, I will say you got to think about what's my set your recipient essay? Are they opening the email? Because they actually just want to check for information? Or are they expecting you know, what the visual in this case, be helpful, or become an obstacle of actually building that relationship with your email link? Right.
Matthew Dunn
Right. My, I'd be curious to know your reaction. This, Mike, my categorical observation about visuals in email, is that they tend to be decorative, not as not necessarily meaningful in I got most of my information from the visual sound, it tends to be sort of the supporting characters and the bit parts, not the star, the star tends to be the copy. Yeah, the more complex the subject matter, the more likely you are to actually get it across with a visual than with a long block of text. Yeah,
Xiao Faria de Cunha
I definitely agree with you. I think most people gets distracted. Because how much people are like preaching led the visual brand guide, you need to have the look and feel. Yeah, I agree. It is important to be visually consistent and pleasing. But when it comes to communication, you need to understand if you're sending an email with visuals in it, that visual better have some functionality, it should be more than just that current, you know, for graphic is definitely more friendly there. 20 page white paper, I'm not going to read it good. I tell all that. I'm probably gonna look at the pictures first. Let's just be honest. Yes, yes. Yeah, no. So yeah, I agree with you on that.
Matthew Dunn
There's a there's a, there's an email newsletter that I that I pay to subscribe to, oh, it's worth pointing that out. Ben Thompson strategic curry. And he's a brilliant analyst. And he puts out a ton of very thoughtful and onpoint content, much of it or most of it written, but he'll frequently take relatively simple tools. And he uses the paper app on the iPad. And and draws the visual of the concept he's trying to get across. And yeah, it tends to really unlock what he's written. You look at and go, Oh, I get the concept. Yeah, let me go reread that again. So I really you know, get what he's saying about aggregators or whatever else and yeah, he's one of the few to my wine. That tastes
Xiao Faria de Cunha
good. I'm probably as I pay for a newsletter as well. I subscribe to media post. Okay. They said To me those days the reason I actually read it because they always have a graphic, there's a graph, a bar chart, a pie chart or something sums up the entire article. And it's right there when you click on it. Yeah, yeah. Otherwise, I don't think I have the endurance to actually read almost
Matthew Dunn
nobody reads all over email. Right,
Xiao Faria de Cunha
exactly. How they got me I'm like, Okay, so this is the topic I actually need to read about. graphic. Thank you.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah, yeah. And and we're, where we're accustomed to such a high level of visual execution. need other channels might be you open an app, it better be pixel perfect. You open a website, your standards are pretty high now, or design brand consistency, preferably meaning meaning meaningful or impactful visuals. Yeah, nobody's got a plain ugly website for long today cuz they're, they lose their credibility, and yet we send out that's not gonna last if it weren't for the first three months. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Um, you touched on text on and I had a, I had Kenneth Burke, from text request on as a as a guest of the podcast A while back, great conversation. What's your perspective? on it? Let's talk to us and it will broaden it, broaden it to China as well as I know there's there's apps and meeting different role but in the US, or Western market, email, text? How do you see those two? interacting? How are they different? How are they similar?
Xiao Faria de Cunha
text message, like if we're just talking text, text, it's definitely shorter, faster. Nobody enjoys opening a text message on your phone and your screen fills up. Mm hmm. I think people are a little bit more tolerant for it. But it's still the same mindset I get on point. Tell them why you're reaching out. Tell them why they're receiving this email. And what's the value? They're gonna get out of? That? What's your offering? It doesn't matter what you're offering all about that?
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah, he's all about them. Texting is so it's such a high priority interrupt technical term. You know, like, even while we're sitting here talking, my phone went paying. And I had a very hard time not glancing over to see what the message was.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
I turned my phone off nowadays. Unless I know I have. Yeah, like, my phone is off right now. Sorry for my boyfriend. Hopefully he doesn't text me. Yeah, no, I keep my phone off for that exact reason. Because texts are some it's like cold calling all day, it's intrusive. You know, they're gonna see it, there's gonna be a notification. Yeah, and you're disrupting their daily flow was my text message you sent out? So for me, it's I don't think I've ever used text to follow up or to market. I've only used like, a client has been non responsive on email. I'm like, Okay, I'm gonna text you now.
Matthew Dunn
So you've used text for person to person communication, but not necessarily as as a one to many marketing channel.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
Know, personally, I'm not a big fan of text marketing. I think text marketing should call me when you are already at the clients retention stage. Because like, okay, for example, I use a third party platform to do my p2p loan application this month. Sure. I am glad they had a text marketing system, because they were able to update me, whereas my application process like that is a good use of text.
Matthew Dunn
And that was, I would argue that's not as much marketing as exactly service process.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
Customer Support. Yeah, yeah. It's a customer support automation. As far as text marketing goes. I see like, why it is being used. I get text notification from certain business organizations. I'm part of remind me of, like, stop texting me could have sent me an email.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. And and you'd prefer, would you prefer the email? I would have preferred to email me getting text message me to me too, because it's an interrupt. It's private. It's super intrusive, you know, super intrusive. Yeah. And it's also I mean, practically speaking, I expect my inbox to be sort of persistent long haul I can go back later and I really don't want to have to troll through my message. for that. I decided that's
Xiao Faria de Cunha
something most people do not touch out when they talk about text marketing, or they talk about Oh, yeah, it's instant. It's higher. deliverability Yeah, and you piss a lot of people off I do this a lot. Yeah, no, yeah, I'd
Matthew Dunn
agree. I'm also we campaign genius, technologically speaking, can can deliver real time content in text as well as email. And we've we've sort of poked at, should we talk with text marketing companies and say, you know, you guys could actually be a lot more Visual. But I don't think I've ever gotten a visual MMS message from a company ever.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
No, I have never gotten data either. And honestly, if they started like sending me funny GIFs and memes, I would have a lot more accepted. Ask me those texts. Why interesting? A lot of time when we look at marketing, it's like, what am I getting out of it by getting a message? If I get a good laugh, because like, oh, man, that's a silly picture. That makes me feel better to just getting swamped by a text message. Okay, okay, I guess it leaves me a good impression of the sender and like, okay, at least they put in some work, you know, they're trying to be fun and personal approach. I'm not just a number in their database, even though I know I am as a marketing professional. I know I am. But emotionally, you're creating intimacy. Yeah. You know, what,
Matthew Dunn
you've also got a chance to deliver something closer to an experience with exactly visual tools. It's it's not just it's not just data, so to speak, on. I've watched the rise of emoji, what emoji communication if that's a fairly high, right, as people started texting each other, we all make this gesture with our thumbs when we talk about that. We started doing more and more emojis and like that character set has just exploded. And larger it has and yeah, it means like, you pick the right emoji for your response to your friend on a back and forth thread. Exactly. It's something that would be very hard. Yeah, it's like,
Xiao Faria de Cunha
and see this is the funny day is because Asia actually has a separate set of emojis of their own are completely made of symbols. Yes. So now that we are talking about playing pecs,
yes. Has the visual effect,
because they're like your commas and punctuation. They're making little faces.
Unknown Speaker
Oh, that?
Xiao Faria de Cunha
Yes, that's the Asia emojis. And I use that sometimes in my messaging, too, even if I'm talking to the US clientele, because really, it's because of the Asian culture as well as in the how many people watch animates nowadays. Yes. Yes. And when I use those those sometimes before, like, what does that face that looks so funny, and I got a response out of,
Matthew Dunn
Okay, interesting. And it's already part of your vote. It's part of your vocabulary, right? Yeah. linguistic sense. But an expressive, yeah. And you know where to find it on the keyboard, which matters to Oh, I have a secret keyboard. That's good. That's actually pretty awesome. I find it vexing sometimes those as a, I've worked with Unicode and emoji sets, like, I know what it looks like here. I don't know exactly what it looks like there because different device different rendering. So you've got to be a little bit. A little a little bit careful about that. Um, do you think we'll see, do you think we'll see text as a marketing channel, expand and get get used more and get richer? are we all going to go? No, no, no, stay out of my, you know, stay out of my messages.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
It's probably going to go richer. As you know, the younger population take over larger portions of the marketable audience because young people like me yell enough. But I grew up in China. So I think differently, but people my age here, there used to like pop up notifications and things like that, which are also, you know, some of that still feels intuitive to me. I'm like, Oh, my God, just leave me alone. It's my flow. But I think there is a growing population that will be more and more comfortable and accepted when it comes to text marketing. But like you were saying, it is lacking a lot of things right now. It's still a young industry. We don't have visuals. We don't have interactivity. There is no experience there. Yeah. Text marketing to grow. You need both the audience and the technology.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. It's interesting, who say that it's a it's refreshing and unusual that you recognize that in the impact of the interruption from from your phone, and you're willing to turn it off? Is that hazard a guest? Most people, most people in your generational bracket never turn their phone off. It's always on them. It's always on. Yeah, yeah. there's a there's a writer named Neil Postman who is postman is still living he. He's a wonderfully, wonderfully curmudgeonly about technology in a you know, saw a lot of saw a lot of the problems coming way before anybody else did. He wrote a book called amusing ourselves to death. I hate to read that just by the title. I like it. Yeah. It's like, it's like, yeah, we are we all are we all you know. Squirrels chase it, you know, dogs chasing squirrels and not getting a darn thing done. As a result.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
I think so. Well, I mean, I'm a traditional media audience. So that says enough that
Matthew Dunn
you're working physical media. I work with
Xiao Faria de Cunha
pen and paper watercolor. Next media copy and pasting.
Matthew Dunn
Okay, wow, that probably a refreshing Lee get your hands on it feel compared to all Exactly. Yeah, it's because most of your marketing practice is probably digital tools digital media. Wow, okay, um we touched on it I want to go back to it you've got a you've got a foot in two very different cultures right? Us US and China What what? And you said it was quite a ride what what are some of the some of the surprises initially adapting to us culture when you got school here?
Xiao Faria de Cunha
Well, that's that's a good portion. A big way to make. Yeah, my biggest culture shock was ordering for one person like, Oh my God, that's my meal for the next three days. Well, you
Matthew Dunn
lead them you Missouri, right, Kansas City? Yeah. Okay, Midwest, especially land of big film. Oh,
Xiao Faria de Cunha
oh. That's funny. Yeah. But besides that, like, like, Asia is what we call a high context culture. So you say one thing, you need to read an entire essay out of it. What those people actually me. And coming over here, it's interesting because us is, is a much lower context culture. And a lot of times what people says as what they need, like you don't need to over analyze it as I mean business and I've met working, they're like, Okay, let me know how I can help you with how we can help each other. Let's get out and call in China, it could mean 20 different things, where it's like, Okay, let me send you an email follow up, let's get something on the calendar. And that's something I definitely had to adapt to. Because at the beginning, I was like, Did he really need that? Are they really gonna help me? Is that what they meant? Yeah, after half a year, I'm like, okay, just forget about it. You want to call us again, I'm gonna call. So it dragged me down from this extremely high context. Now. I'm super low compound like me what I say, Man, you got a problem. You got to talk to me. But I like that. Interesting. Interesting.
Matthew Dunn
That's a wow, there's a lot. That's that's a that's a lot to unpack on. Because coming from the low context, culture, your phrase, of this age, I never would have seen that. Nobody
Unknown Speaker
makes it. So
Xiao Faria de Cunha
yeah, Asian culture has all these like, unspoken rules. They think you should just by default, no, like, Oh, you don't need to say that out loud. Everyone understands. That's what you mean. Right? Okay. That's a high context, culture.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. And we're, like, more explicit.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
And that's the main reason why like, a lot of time a Western company tries to market to the traditional Eastern Market, and they have a lot of troubles. Because what they probably going to do the research on their culture at all. And to it just different cultures talk differently. And to create an effective communication, you need to learn how they talk, even if it's just within the same culture, because age demographics, education, you know, the psychology profile, there are lower and higher context with a low context culture as well. There are people who grew up in what do you call the guest culture in the family, which is often your you know, mid age and older female population here in the Western world, and speaking to them sometimes need to be there. Because they grew up in a guest culture, there are things they don't feel comfortable about, but they'll never bring up to. So how to evaluate based on the response you got from email from their behavior, whether they opened it and click that click and move forward. They also know that all
Unknown Speaker
psychology games that goes down email marketing, the little, the little, little signals, well, I'm
Matthew Dunn
struck by your high context, low context. framework, which different puts a different spin on what you were saying about laughing at poor translation? That is that translation is not just a question of what's in the sentence or paragraph. It's also what's the context for that so yeah, they're
Xiao Faria de Cunha
a famous example was when they translate the classic there was a phrase if you could read translate it is even the best housewife cannot cook rice without you know, right, the rice, but back there when they were translating it, it didn't make sense because you guys didn't really eat rice back then. Okay, so the best translator, swapped that phrase and turn it into not even the best housewife can make bread without flour and bath salt. Right? That's just a good example.
Matthew Dunn
Right? Okay. Um, wow. Yeah, that's a that's a that's a heck of a lot of richness, to bring to what you're doing, doing for clients as well on pad Do you have any business involvement with customers or markets in China?
Xiao Faria de Cunha
Yes, we actually work with clients across the globe. Most of them are more on the translation and language service side and marketing. Okay, but we do work like I work with a lot of video game companies. And when you come to video game context, localization or marketing localization, yeah, now we're going down a rabbit hole of some video games create fake culture. Are you going to translate a fake culture? Yes. Another real culture? Yeah, there are a lot of things going on in there we do. We did a little bit of content marketing for some Chinese firm. And that's the same issue was like, you need to write differently. You need to structure your sentences and paragraphs differently. And if you want to go deeper down the rabbit hole SEO is completely different over there, too, because it's a different language system and keywords are different.
Matthew Dunn
Right? Right. That actually, that actually makes a lot of sense on that's a that'd be a very difficult
Unknown Speaker
rabbit hole to me.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Difficult belting. Video games, like strikes me as particular. There must be some massive misfires in video games. Yes.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
There used to because I'm a pretty aviod gamer myself. Yeah. And we've made fun. We've made our own translations growing up because the official ones were just so crappy. So we volunteer translation groups and just started reading games and translating it
Matthew Dunn
right. Yeah, right. Well, and anime that you that. You may not you may mean this more broadly than just language, but I'm thinking in terms of, in terms of games on doing a lot of visual and symbol. Yeah. appropriation that that might end up reading just completely tone deaf. So
Xiao Faria de Cunha
the worst game to ever translate are puzzle games, really, especially spinning off traditional culture. Oh, wow. Why they decided to puzzles based off traditional culture. That's the worst type of job trust, like game localizers want to get? That's what we're like. How are we? He was supposed to just like,
Matthew Dunn
right, okay. Interesting. So how would you know how does a an adult play the game myself? But I've seen enough screenshots? How would How would Grand Theft Auto read to someone from China and countering it for the first time but they say what world am I in?
Xiao Faria de Cunha
Now you're touching an interesting topic, because a lot of deals games aren't even legal in certain counties in certain types of Asia. Yeah. Violence because of censorship. Yeah, that's another loophole. A lot of us working in marketing, working in content need to familiarize ourselves with our what are the trigger words for that country's censorship process?
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. We need to wiggle around it. Yeah. Or just say or say this is not gonna frag not gonna fly? It's just some that are not gonna fly. Yeah. Yeah. Interesting. Not not easy. And a lot of subjectivity, I would think. Yeah. Wow. Wow. What a what a, what a great background to bring into your experience in the world. Do you get that? Have you have you? I know we're in the middle of coming to the end to hopefully have a pandemic. But do you travel back home still have family in China?
Xiao Faria de Cunha
All my families are back in China, but I haven't been back for like seven years. Oh, wow. Yeah, it's the Hakka fly. It is starting our deference. So you want to talk about jet lag?
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, seriously? Yeah.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
There are reasons why I came to the States. Yes, there are things I disagree with how, you know, my government treated artists treated the freedom of speech, and especially coming from a writing background. So there are reasons why I'm hearing Oh, you're there. Yeah. While you're here. Yeah. And the longer I'm here, it's probably harder for me to get back there and now cause trouble. So I figure I will, I feel more comfortable honestly, here. Definitely come back over in China because I'm from the mainland. I'm from the strip actual central government now from my Taiwan and Hong Kong. Okay, so even during my writing base, we have a lot of problem with censorship. We have a lot of issue with what you're legally even legally allowed to say or not. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. Ah,
Matthew Dunn
that's a tough balancing act. You can't can't blanket say, good, bad, right? Wrong. Yeah. But at least you made the choice for yourself. Exactly. And so far, I'm pretty happy about it. Yeah. Used to hopefully you have not adapted to Midwest Food portions though. Cuz now
Xiao Faria de Cunha
I don't think I ever well it makes me dining out really cheap
Unknown Speaker
you know
Matthew Dunn
it's a little it's a little I know there's no marketing tough it is a little appalling. I mean, I'm a I'm a fairly large guy. And I don't eat Midwest sighs Porsches like are you kidding me? Who wants to put that much in there buddy? You'll just explode
Xiao Faria de Cunha
exactly I have adapted to the Midwest email lingo so all those y'all whatever curbs and slayeth There you go.
Matthew Dunn
But wait Kansas City Did you? Do you end up with a with a fondness for barbecue? That's that I have to do? Sora I think I'll still go with my Asian barbecue most of the time. So I'm biased on. Casey is Casey is famous in the US for barbecue. It's Yeah, we definitely have some pretty good spots. Yeah, you definitely have a backyard campfire. griller. There you go. I'll take I'll take that one myself. Well, let's let's steer back, Tim, let's get back to marketing, and maybe even steer back to email a little bit. Where do you see email going in its competition for time and attention with other forms.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
Email will stay strong, because it will remain our one of our primary communication methods, especially in a b2b sector. That's my opinion. The issue is I think email kind of took a pretty bad detour during its development was all of these so called templates, and automations, bloody, I am all about automation. I am 100% against live lazy automation without research. Okay, so I don't think personalization will remain that big of a deal. Like, oh, every message needs to be personalized. But I think smart segmentation and batch messages that are properly tailored to you know, resonate to your demographic to your audience group you're talking to, that is going to develop even further, which will bring a lot more technology support, maybe automations, that are now allowed right now, because like I use a very well developed CRM. So a lot of my emails are automated with tags and with templates, but those templates, I still have to go in there and manually switch things out. So if it continues to develop, you know, I would see that the field a was either artificial intelligence or a different type of workflow. But yeah, email is gonna remain strong, it's probably going to come back even stronger, because the audience is starting to get exhausted. Whereas the over floody influencers on every platform with social media policies, so much crap, and we're at an information overload in stage, and we are going back into choosing the highest value information, and direct communication, because we want to filter through all these things come in and you know, is where we felt her face because it's our email. It's our inbox, not social media.
Matthew Dunn
Right? Yeah, I own my inbox. You know, social media company x doesn't mean my inbox although Gmail makes that a bit of an interesting edge case. On your your issue with templates is that interview I think you said kind of a kind of a four day tour for a while. Is that too formulaic? Not enough thought in the actual content?
Xiao Faria de Cunha
Yeah, cuz like, I can tell with someone cold email me from a template, the pride and even look through now. Yeah, like the worst case I've got was they did, he will swap out the first name tab. It just had a packet. Yes, yeah. Yes, most people are that bad. But still, they owe
Matthew Dunn
the lot more. I actually put, I put the Dr. Matthew, in the first name field in LinkedIn, partially deliberately. Because now I can tell when it's a baloney email or baloney, LinkedIn outreach, because they don't even bother to read enough to go. His first name is Matthew. Matthew, like, bullshit. Delete it smell it. Yeah, there are plenty of people do it that I'm doing that too. Yeah. Yeah. It's like, if you're too lazy, if you're gonna, if you're gonna try to pretend to be personal, and not go to the length of identifying my name. I'm disqualified. Like, sorry. Yeah,
Xiao Faria de Cunha
like for me, helpless. All my emails are templated Yeah, I just I care. About what I'm sending out. So I'm cutting the effort to make sure it's going out. Right. But I'm 100% Pro template, I think template as a statistic method. It just grew a certain audience who will respond psychologically the way you want them to get this type of message. That's what templates are.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah. Yeah. I mean, yeah, they are. I think we're, I think we're in for an interesting ride as AI starts to become not just a lab rat, but something something useful, because the sorry, let me let me restate that just just to provide a platform for for debate. Email Marketing, is is a, it's a it's a fiction right out of the gate, because you tend to pretend that this is one to one. And it's not right. It's one to many. But you want the tone and the impact. And the reason we discuss things like personalization be like, Oh, you made that just for me? No, you automated that and send it to let's call a spade a spade. As we start getting smarter tools, make that make the content more, you know, even more tailored, are we getting hit a point where it really looks like you sat down and wrote that just for me?
Xiao Faria de Cunha
I don't think so. I think that will be counterproductive. Because like when I will say, I don't care if my favorite clothing brand, address me by my name. As long as you're pushing the right conference me Oh, that's the discount, I could totally use that stuff I buy. So it goes down to behavior, real silence goes back down to customer side consumer psychology. You know, that's the funny thing was you were talking about? We were both talking about AI technology. And that's an issue I see marketing nowadays, overall, is we've become overly dependent on the technology we have how many people have actually read about consumer psychology? How many people actually educated them on those old school ways? That actually are still the elements of marketing?
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Yeah. The the who if we leave the who out of it. The rest of it is just tactics is roughly what we just had to say about that. I that's a great example. Right? Like, give give me the I don't care if you use my first name, because I know it's baloney. But I do care if you're sending me things that are completely irrelevant to my interests, especially if I bought enough stuff, where you should know my interests.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
Exactly. And if you don't, that's like some off any abalone pamphlet. You're like, Okay, I'm not asking you to sit down with me one on why email, but at least send the right information to the right segment.
Matthew Dunn
Right. Right. Or or give me give me a way to tell you is this and this Yes. That that and that? No, yeah, I'm not that not that most people would actually bother on. What are your thoughts about the the theoretical impending doom of third party cookies and the effect on the advertising digital advertising space?
Xiao Faria de Cunha
I think you should bring that up. Because I think not too long ago, Apple changed their day, that data collection rule. And my colleagues were freaking out, because they can no longer collect those data on the back end. Yeah. And that goes back to we never had a message to collect those data. In the old days. Like when I was back in China doing offline event and emergency. There were no big data cookie collection, that those campaigns live. Yes, they did. So if we're freaking out, because of the doomsday of cookies and third party data collection, I think a better question to ask ourselves is what are we lacking better making screen out? Because something bad? Shouldn't have the bottles this much? are finalizing regularly?
Matthew Dunn
Good for you. Well put again. Yeah. Yeah. Like, sound practice isn't going to be affected by this shift. But you know, lazy sort of let the browser chase him around with the ad. Yeah, I don't I don't know that. I'm gonna miss that. To be honest. Like,
Xiao Faria de Cunha
exactly. Yeah, I had the same conversation with a colleague back in Kansas City to was like we were all saying this whole digital marketing industry has been so unregulated up till now. Yeah. And it's that's tends to have a big earthquake and shake out people who are lazy and who are just slacking off.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, I think Facebook. I think Facebook is vulnerable. I'm not sure. Which, which I'm fine. I'm fine with because I think they're kind of overdue. They're overdue to get to get some barbed wire around the Facebook. It's overdue for a lot of things. Yeah, I mean, that you know, just just just a personal opinion, which is why I never use the 10th But But structurally, they never managed to get a direct relationship with me there was a I mean, people who are habitual users? Yes. But all of the sort of third party apps, third party, browser, etc as a feed were too integral to their business and you look at it just as a sequence of events you go, Well, if Apple and Google change this this in the browser, you guys are gonna get cut off? Exactly. If it didn't change that. Too bad.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
Yeah, you gotta stay relevant. And like, when it comes back to market, why the reason I pay so much attention to email, is because I think email is the most effective way to nurture your inbound and outbound. Yeah, and when it comes to marketing, it's about relationship. So Chase, people was asked, because you can spend as much as you want. And if you're not nurturing What's wrong, a minor as
it just, it
doesn't matter. You know, you're wasting your time and money on.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, you just do, you're eventually gonna lose me because you're bugging me too much. Stop stalking me. stuff, stuff like that. I like that. So what next on the horizon? Where would you like to take westerland.
Xiao Faria de Cunha
Um, we are steadily growing, we are launching a initiative called a solid initiative, third quarter, which is my way of cleaning up for myself and my colleagues that we have good relationship with. It's a education focused program for small business owners who may or may not have enough budget to hire an agency like ourselves. But I don't want more victim to 2999 Guru courses, because it comes back and hurts people like me. So start initiative is designed for small business owners who wants to learn a little bit about marketing and do it themselves. And also marketers for those smaller organizations. So you're one person marketing departments. Yeah. And as a part of that, it also touches business development, and you know, fundaments of running your business and has a little networking group that comes with it. So for westerland, like the name came from a star cluster, instead of a single star, I am super community focused, I want to give that knowledge back because a lot of people don't understand that worrying for my prospects are, the quicker they will see value in what I do. And the more likely they're going to sign me up. Right, let's just be straight up. Look, I am a for profit company. But I'm going to do the for profits, ie as ethical and helpful way as I possibly can. So the go for westerlyn is started initiated as a huge focus for me for at least the next few years. And outside of that, of course, let's keep growing to the point. We are. We're a five people team now, which is super awesome. Went from just me, you find people now. Nice. And hopefully at some point, I'm not a big physical office person, but I will like to have some sort of administrative level Person A so I'm now managing everything right?
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Gotcha. Yeah. So what you're all the colleagues you work with are virtual and potentially distant from you?
Xiao Faria de Cunha
Uh, well, most of them are still back in Kansas City. Okay, so those are at I have a huge referral network, too. That's how I've gotten around. But my Yeah, my employees and my contractors, they're 100% remote. Well, so we took those accurate around 100% of them all from the very beginning.
Matthew Dunn
Yeah, yeah. Which is, I've done it a long time. And, and I'm a fan, but it's not for everybody. And you definitely miss something. For sure. Yeah, you definitely. It's different. And zoom fatigue is a very real thing. Well, that's exciting. The initiative is exciting. You'll have to put me in the listing and keep me apprised of what you're doing because I'll put you on a partner's list because we're also looking for speakers and workshops, sponsors, things like that. You have an awesome podcast writing the marketing world so yeah, yeah. Yeah. Well, cool. What a great wandering and fascinating conversation. I'm so glad to come on and be a guest Show. I'm so glad you sent me a link in a message. Cool. Well wrap it up my my guest for this episode has been shall for ride to Kona owner of westerlyn that's at westerland.co correct? Yes, sir. So if you're interested in what she said, check it out. I'm gonna guess the starlight initiative will have its own home of digital home at some point on top of that, shell Real pleasure. Thanks for making the time. Thank you, Matthew. I have a wonderful time with you as well.