Skateboarding for Better Marketing - with Newcastle University's Matt Horne

When you do something completely different from your day job, you can get brilliant new ideas and inspiration, as was the case with Matt Horne's return to skateboarding.

Matt is the Head of Digital Media at Newcastle University and has learnt a lot about not getting lost in the data, while understanding and tailoring your message to your audience, internally and externally. Aside from his top data driven marketing tips, however, he shares life learnings and advice on the Shiny New Object podcast.

We talk about realising there's more to life than a job, how to test and learn and hustle when you're young, and how (re)discovering your passions can help you learn life and marketing lessons. Skateboarding optional - but opening your mind essential.

The following gives you a good idea of what was said, but it’s not 100% accurate.

Matt Horne 0:00
Back in the olden days, you'd stick a billboard up and then say, Yeah, it did a job, because we got X amount of sales. That's kind of back where we are now, but with a little bit more nuance, because you can say, right, well, if we plug all this data into a data warehouse that can then kind of do the work for us with AI, but it's still not 100% accurate, but people still think it is.

Speaker 0:23
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Tom Ollerton 0:56
Hello and welcome to the shiny new object podcast. This is a weekly podcast about the future of data driven marketing. My name is Tom Ollerton. I'm the founder of automated creative the creative effectiveness ad tech platform. And every week or so I have the pleasure and the privilege of interviewing one of our industry's leaders. And this week is no different, let me get your job title perfect Matt. I'm on this Riverside thing with Matt Horne. What a treat. Matt is the head of digital media at Newcastle University. Being a northern lad myself, this is quite exciting on a variety of different levels. But Matt, for anyone who doesn't know who you are, what you do, could you give the audience a bit of background?

Matt Horne 1:32
Sure, yeah, thanks for having us. My name is Matt, like you said, head of digital media at Newcastle University. I've been working in digital marketing for about 15 years now, originally trained to be a radio producer, and then there were no jobs, so I stumbled into marketing, and here I am, 15 years later, running paid media and organic social at I would like to say the UK's best university. The rankings would say almost the best, but not quite in Oxford, right?

Tom Ollerton 2:04
Fantastic. What were the other jobs in between there? So radio producer didn't work out. And in Newcastle?

Matt Horne 2:11
Well, ad producer. So I used to write and produce radio ads. Then 2008 happened, and nobody wanted radio ads, so I got a job at the job centre, and then I somehow became the district Marketing Manager for the North East at the job centre. And after that, I was working. I moved into further education, so I started working in marketing at a college. And then 11 years ago, 12 years ago, I moved to Newcastle to start their organic, social team, and kind of just stuck around, right?

Tom Ollerton 2:44
We have not had that career progression on the show before. Some pretty good... congratulations, man. So across that work for the job centre Northeast, and might would have been quite trying at time, so I'm curious to know something the in across that career, what are the new beliefs, or the new belief or behaviour that's really improved your work life?

Matt Horne 3:05
Being open to opportunities, I think, because I started off very much thinking I was going to be the next Zane Lowe and I would have an amazing career on Radio One, and that...

Tom Ollerton 3:16
There's still there's still time, there's still time.

Matt Horne 3:18
It probably wouldn't be Radio One, probably six, or maybe some random podcast now, but, yeah, it didn't happen. So I had to kind of adapt and find another way to scratch my creative itch, and that turned out to be podcasting before it was popular. So and then that opened up opportunities to get back into radio, and then opened up opportunities to do advertising. And it was just a case of, instead of being like, No, I never want to do that, because that's not what I've got my eyes set on. I was just like, I'll give it a go, see what happens. And turns out, whether it's just fortuitous to me or whether it's just that kind of mindset, being open to trying something new, and doing something new is expanding my skills, and also led to what I'm quite happy in my career. So it's, it's been quite, quite enjoyable.

Tom Ollerton 4:10
And I've heard that thought, like echoed a few times on this podcast. There's one I really believe in. But the sort of conundrum I'm coming across now the age that I am, is that when you're very young in your career, you can be like, Yeah, I'll do that. It'll do that, yeah, I'll run around and say yes to all of these things, right? Because you just need to show that you're good at something somewhere and someone hopefully pushes you in the right direction. But as you get a little bit older, it's like, well, I can't say yes to everything. So how would you how would you balance getting the job done fitting in around other commitments, when you really can't just jump on every new thing that you see that's shiny and exciting?

Matt Horne 4:42
Yeah, and I'm in a similar place, like I've when I'm talking to people at the early starts of their careers, and they're like, you gotta hustle, hustle, and I'm too old and tired to hustle now I can't. And my if, if somebody asked me today, why don't you hustle? It's like, because I have hustled, and I did a lot of stuff in my 20s, which meant I expanded my career options and then could hone back in, whereas now, if I was to do a big industry career change, I probably wouldn't be able to do that. I've got two small kids. I have a mortgage to pay. I have finite time. I like to sleep, so there's only so many hours of the day that you can hustle. And the one thing I've learned as I've progressed is you do it while you've got the energy, because you will burn out, and then you need to find that place where you can you're happily doing the thing you like to do. You're doing it to a level you're quite happy with. You've still got a little bit of ambition to go a bit further. But ultimately, I'm not aiming to be a CEO. I don't have that kind of mentality to be like I've got to be at the top. I'm just quite happy to be in a place where I get enough money to live and do something I enjoy, and by hustling, I've found that space.

Tom Ollerton 5:49
So you can't say that if you live in London. Do you know what I mean?

Matt Horne 5:51
Well, this is it. That's why I don't live in London. My old flatmate, we did a podcast together. He moved to London to chase the lights, and I stuck around in Newcastle. We both have quite very good careers, but neither of us work in radio. We've gone that different way, and I have a lot less rent. So actually, I've got a mortgage because I can afford to buy.

Tom Ollerton 6:13
Because I always think that one of the questions on the list is, what advice would you give to someone? And I always think like if you are in that earliest stage of your career when you've got time and energy and you can exist without sleep and you don't have dependents, then you've got two extra days over everyone else, right, pretty much if you can avoid your hangover, right? Which is, you know that it's not always possible, but really, you go at six on a Saturday, work till 10 at night, and do the same again on Sunday. And you like, you go fast forward your career like a bullet train, compared to people who were just having a good time, but then, I wouldn't condone this. It makes no sense to talk people out of having a good time. But it is possible at that stage.

Matt Horne 6:53
Yeah, I think it's at that stage. It's finding the balance. Because you, I mean, if it's your thing and you're really happy working really hard and doing nothing else but work, then crack on. But you gotta... most people realise there is more to life than a job. Even if you enjoy the job, there's still other things to do. And when I was young, I was working. I mean, when I was at uni, I had three jobs plus my degree. And then when I moved out of uni, I was trying to get into radio, I had the day job that paid the bills. I then did freelance. I then did free work to get the skills and the experience I needed to try and get in the industry I wanted to get into. So, yeah, it's putting those extra days you've got on other people to good use. And I think that would be my main advice to people getting started, is, yeah, I mean, I work at a university. Degrees are very important. They provide you lots of things that you... not just the thing you study. You get lots of other experiences. But it's those other experiences that make you so if you're not going to uni, do lots of things. Like, you can start your own podcast, you can start your own website, you can start your own advertising agency, and just like, get hands on yourself, and go to local businesses and say, hey, I'll run some ads for you. And then you build your client base from that, because you've got all this free time, and you can test and learn. And then once you get in your 30s and your 40s, you've got that experience, and then you can either slot into a career and be like, well, I've got 10 years experience running adverts for local businesses over a portfolio of, I don't know, however many 1000s of pounds, which then means you can go into a big brand and say, Well, I've managed 50, 60k a month, so I'm ready for a big brand.

Tom Ollerton 8:34
There you go. Matt, sorted, done. There's the blueprint. So moving on. So what is the best bit of data driven marketing advice that you have your head of media, Newcastle, you're responsible for a certain amount of inventory. What's the one thing that you find yourself sharing and passing on to people most often?

Matt Horne 8:51
I think it's particularly with data driven marketing, is don't get lost in the data, and that's something we're all guilty of. The thing with digital is you have so much data that sometimes it's difficult to know what you need to share and who you need to share it with. So I've struggled for years on like, Well, somebody's asked me for a report on how this campaign did to me. I need to know these things, so I will give them all the stuff I need, and then they're like, Well, what does this mean? What is a 6% click through rate? Is that good? Have we done well? Has my money been spent well? Whereas I'm like, Well, how can you not see that? 6% is amazing. Most people only get 3% so it's it's providing the context and the numbers that the person you're reporting to needs, but also understanding that the big kind of thing about digital because I was starting back in the day when they didn't give a shit about privacy. So you could target people, and you could harvest data, and you could get all the kind of conversion information you could have that end to end conversion journey quite easily, particularly, I mean, for me under eighteens, because trying to get people to do degrees, that's all changed now. So there's still this expectation that you can say, well, you spent this much money on a campaign targeting 16 year olds. How much money has that brought in? You can't now say, well, it's brought in, guarantee you it's brought in 10,000 pounds, because you just you're not allowed to get that kind of conversion data due to all the privacy laws and the changes in the platforms. So you've got to accept that, re educate people and explain we are using data driven marketing and AI marketing mix models to estimate this is roughly what we think we did back in the olden days. You'd stick a billboard up and then say, Yeah, it did a job, because we got extra X amount of sales. That's kind of back where we are now, but with a little bit more nuance, because you can say, right? Well, if we plug all this data into a data warehouse that can then kind of do the work for us with AI, but it's still not 100% accurate, but people still think it is.

Matt Horne 9:43
Yeah, I like that idea of packaging up the data that's really obvious and exciting and emotional to you in a way that it will be received. I think that's very simple. Like, just, just look, yeah. I mean, the amount of times you hear about marketing bouncing off the C suite is because you're going upstairs with things like click through rates and the baskets and what have you, and they're like. And what does that mean?

Matt Horne 9:48
I think it's it's tailoring it to the person you're speaking to. So if you're speaking to the finance officer, they want to know what the return on investment is. If you're speaking to a tech officer, they might want to know, well, what kind of tech stack are you using, and how is it performing for you? And it's again, making sure you're telling the right story that explains the journey that you need to tell that person.

Speaker 1 11:37
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Tom Ollerton 12:14
So we're now going to come on to your shiny new object. And we've done over three hundred episodes of this podcast, and we've never we've had some weird stuff. I think Rory Sutherland was my pen or something, or a pen and a whiteboard that was pretty out there. But yours is my skateboard, so Mark, bring it. Why is your skateboard the future of data driven marketing?

Matt Horne 12:32
Well, I don't know if it's the future of data driven marketing, but it definitely it's a mindset changer that's that's helped me. So, I mean, I was a very, very, very mediocre skater in my teens. It was the mid 90s, and I lived in rural...

Tom Ollerton 12:49
How old are you Matt?

Matt Horne 12:50
I'm 43 this year.

Tom Ollerton 12:53
Okay, yeah, I'm 48 this year. But I was, yeah, skating in the 90s fully. Yeah, very similar time option.

Matt Horne 13:00
And we had, there was no YouTube. You could get Thrasher mag, if you were lucky, on import, you could, there was no TV shows. So to learn how to skateboard, you literally just had to try it yourself. And I gave it a go. And I was like, Yeah, I can do basic stuff. But then it kind of drifted away. Now last year, I was like, I'm gonna give it a go again and see what happens. Can you teach an old dog new tricks? Can I actually learn how to properly Olly? How can I learn to do all these things? Bought a skateboard. I started my old one from the 90s, and then I realised I probably did... it was a complete I bought back in Canada when I complained. So it was just a complete deck from a local skate shop. Got a new one from our local skate shop, native skate up here, and then went out, started messing around, because I work in digital marketing, obviously, I opened up an Instagram channel to document my own journey. Put it on Tiktok, just rate my skate. So it was also kind of an experiment to see. Could I start a brand new Instagram channel while I was doing learn new stuff? And it turns out, skateboarding is a good teacher at how to be determined, how to keep going, how to try new things, how to learn new things, and just it's a mindset that isn't just about skateboarding. It's something you can take into the rest of your life, because you're like, right? Well, you need to experiment to learn how to do something, but you also need to share stuff with other people, learn from other people. And overall, it's kind of, it's also helped me keep fit, because...

Tom Ollerton 13:00
Rate my skate all one word and underscore.

Matt Horne 13:00
There's an underscore in there somewhere, right? Okay, but, yeah,

Tom Ollerton 13:00
There. There we go, mate, 2344 followers.

Matt Horne 13:00
Yeah, somehow, because it's just a 42 year old doing some seriously bad skateboarding, but people seem to like it.

Tom Ollerton 13:00
This is fantastic. Sorry, we're getting slightly but yeah, it's all right. So it's forced you to learn something new. But also giving you something to to get out and create your own content, to be a sort of, you know, the spokesman of the 40 year old learner skateboarder.

Matt Horne 13:00
Yeah, it turns out there's more of us. There's quite a lot of people in their 40s and 50s that just...

Speaker 1 13:29
I had a different way back into it, like my wife for my 40th bought me an electric skateboard, right? And I live in Newham, and used to skate through to Leighton, and they're kind of mad, right? Because you know how to skate, right? You know how your body works and all the rest of it, but it's got a brake on it, right? But the problem is, is it breaks the board, not you right? So you can do a hard stop, and that thing will stop in a yard, a six foot geezer, like, you know, going at speed. So it's like, unlike an electric like, what you call, like scooter or something, or a bike, you know, you the machine, and you are resisting the same thing. And I had an awful crash on one, really horrible. And I might pop my whole neck when yellow is a story for another time. But, um, one time the skateboard ran out of battery, so just had to skate home. And then I rediscovered that, that the beautiful feeling of being able to just push yourself on a skateboard and try, trying to get the best bit of pavement, or the smoothest bit and like, and then, and then I went, just got, like a cruiser board and the ice skate, the work for years, and it's just, it's an incredible feeling to get that back, yeah, that feel, that spirit and that excitement that you had when you were, you know, when you were 10 year old or 12 year old, or whatever it was, yeah.

Matt Horne 16:35
And that's, it's that flow state, like, as much as I've been trying to teach myself some flat out, flat ground tricks. And working with like the skate park opened an indoor one last year. So I started going there, met a few people in the local community. So again, learning some networking skills, because I don't like speaking to strangers. Just, I thought it was about tricks, but actually just pushing and carving and just gliding, it can help you just, it's like a form of meditation, almost like you just clear your brain all the stuff around you. It just kind of disappears as you focus on the wheels on the pavement, just turning and cruising and gliding. And then you have to stop and get back to reality, but for that hour.

Tom Ollerton 17:16
But I think it's the same. We're like, I've done surfing a tiny bit. I've done rock climbing a tiny bit. It's like, It's you versus gravity, and it's fundamentally skateboards. Skateboards a bit like that as well, right? It's like, the how effective you are, as you say, is cruising around, or just, you know, operating in a space. It's about you and gravity and momentum, resistance and inertia, with all that coming together. So I think there's, there's quite a lot of similarities there, but because it tell me a bit more about Rate my skate, what, how did? How did, because you work in a paid environment, mostly, I assume, and that's very much in the organic space, like, what, how? How did that learning journey...

Matt Horne 17:50
I head up both. So I work at the university. I head up the organic social team and the paid. So as much as I run a lot of paid I do manage the organic side. And it was, it was kind of seeing if I could apply some like, higher education is a weird world in every way, because there's all the Industry Insight, both on paid and organics. Like, do this, do this, get influences, target people. Do a marketing funnel, remarket to people, click Add to Cart. So that doesn't work for he most of the time we're targeting under 18. So the paid space, there's very little tracking and like funnel work you can do with them. On the organic side, you're a brand, but also you're a brand that's promoting a certain like, uniqueness, like your product is your location, your product is your degrees. Like, you can't just get an influencer to say, Oh, hey, come on, kids go to Newcastle University's Open Day. It's great because they haven't been they haven't experienced it. And it's not like we're going to pay them to do a four year degree and at the end of it make some content for us. So that whole kind of the experience and the expert, the advice and like, use AI to make your content and stuff. It's not what we can do. So it was whether I could learn and use my organic experience to blossom an account that has starts from zero, essentially, or would it fall flat in his face? To be honest, it fell flat in its face on Tiktok, it fell flat in his face on YouTube, shorts, but on Instagram, it just seemed to find its feet, and it's helped me in my organic work at the University, as much as it has the other way around, because I've learned techniques. I've learned things you can do with reels. I've learned some features that we don't use at the university that work for the skate side. And just it's, they kind of sit. There's a slight Venn diagram where I can learn from both sides and help grow both sides. But yeah, it's, it's just around.

Tom Ollerton 19:35
I think that's absolutely brilliant. There's a very, very small amount of people who've been on this podcast who are practitioners in their own business, and let's call right mouse gate is a business, for argument's sake, right? There's like Pollyanna, a few other folk, what they've done is they've set up a business on the side, like a small, little kitchen sink thing. So they can learn how a website works, how to do paid, how do you brief it creative. I use AI to build, and it definitely makes it certain sort of market I really look up to, because it's because you're, you're, you suffer the pains of that craft, as well as, like, you know, sitting above it and strategizing and building decks and stuff. So I think, yeah, it's, I think it's, I can understand what value that must bring to your role and make it more fun as well.

Matt Horne 20:27
Yeah, it's because there is no pressure either. It's like, I still will go out and skate even if only six people watch the reel. It's not like I'm gonna stop doing that. I might not spend so much time making the content, but it's, it's still something I'll enjoy on the side. I'm just kind of documenting me falling off a piece of wood.

Tom Ollerton 20:46
Maybe it's going to be like have strong historical significance, in 100 years time.

Matt Horne 20:51
I mean, internet archives already getting on that straight away, making sure it's kept for posterity. Because clearly I'll be the next Tony Hawk.

Tom Ollerton 21:01
No podcast has ever finished with someone saying "clearly I'm gonna be the next Tony Hawk." So Matt, we're at time. Thank you so much, man, if someone wanted to get in touch with you about skating, about your job, where's good place and what makes a message that you'll respond to?

Matt Horne 21:17
LinkedIn is probably the easiest way, or email, there's two. And LinkedIn, the I will respond if someone sends you an invite to connect on LinkedIn and doesn't add any kind of context and they just use the automated one. That's a red flag for me. But email, like matt@matthorne.co.uk is probably the easiest way

Tom Ollerton 21:37
Skateboarding maybe will get a response?

Matt Horne 21:41
I don't feel I am in this position to give advice on skateboarding just yet, but if you do want to rate my skate on Instagram, you can find me there and you can look at me fall off

Tom Ollerton 21:54
Matt, Thank you so much for your time.

Matt Horne 21:55
No problem. Thanks for having me.

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