✊🏽 ✊🏾 ✊🏿 Why We Matter: Brandon Butler and Fallon Blossom

Welcome to another episode of the Why We Matter Fireside Chat Series, organized by Afroflare, Cloudflare's ERG for folks of African descent and our allies. My name is Fallon Blossom, and I'm the content manager for Cloudflare TV. And today I'm chatting with Brandon Butler, the CEO of Butter.atl. How you doing? Great, great. Thanks for having me on. I appreciate it. Yeah, so I first happened upon your account and your work, thanks to my personal friend who works at Dagger. Thank you, Adia. And I have to say, I really just love your content. It's so authentic. It's so culturally relevant. And like I said yesterday, y'all don't miss. So I'm super, super happy that you're here today. So let's get started. You're the CEO of Butter.atl. And for those who may not be familiar with what that is, can you share a little bit? Yeah, so Butter is a media company that really is built to celebrate the culture of Atlanta. It's really about the people, places, and things kind of shaping modern day Atlanta. And we're just finding ways to kind of tell that story specifically through social content. You know, I definitely appreciate all the kind words and kudos, but you know, Butter as I always tell folks is 100% a team effort, and we just have a great team of creatives that are coming in and, you know, helping come up with those ideas and bring stuff to life. But, you know, really the idea is we were wanting to just kind of create something and, you know, in partnership with Daggers, we launched it through. I really want to kind of think about what it would look like to tell stories in kind of a modern format, right? So, you know, people always ask me like, why Instagram? Well, at the time we launched Butter like two years ago, Instagram was the main channel. And so what we were really trying to do is figure out how to tell these kind of like really interesting cultural stories. Through the lens of social, specifically through Instagram as a channel, obviously, as we've expanded and as social has expanded, we've expanded beyond that. But I always say that just because I don't want people to think that Butter is an Instagram page. We are very much a media company. I try to think of us like BuzzFeed, Complex, you know, Lavity, kind of in that same sense. We're just, again, centered in Atlanta, you know, no different in my opinion than the New York Times is centered in New York. So tell me more about Atlanta. So why Atlanta? Why choose to center that city in your work versus other media companies who kind of come up with stories? I mean, we're on Cloudflare TV. So why Atlanta? Yeah, absolutely. So again, like when Butter was launched through the Dagger Agency, like really the idea was we felt like all brands should act more like media companies and the brands are the most successful ones or the ones that do operate like media companies. And, you know, as we were just kind of going through different, you know, iterations of what this media company that we decided to start within an agency could be, which again is just really a really interesting concept in and within itself, right? Like there's not many agencies, if any, that have started their own kind of successful media companies and brands beyond just the core agency business. But, you know, as we were doing that, what we realized was that, you know, Atlanta, we just had so much kind of culture in our backyard, right? Like one thing I've always said is our number one export in Atlanta is our culture. And Atlanta's culture just travels so well. You can go almost anywhere in the world, anywhere in the country, and you can do an Atlanta event or say you're from Atlanta and people understand what that is and they look at it a certain kind of way. And so we just decided, you know, let's lean into that. You know, Atlanta is kind of the city, one of the cities that's really driving things from a cultural standpoint, not just because of music, but there's so many other things that are happening out here now, even with tech and marketing and business. So we just wanted to kind of lean on that and tell our own stories. And that's also just something that we've noticed over time, especially growing up out here is Atlanta doesn't always get a chance to tell its own stories. For so long, even from just like a media agency and culture standpoint, everybody kind of went to the easy stuff, right? It was always go to New York, LA, Chicago, you know, maybe Florida or something like that. And what even happened in Atlanta is as Atlanta started to become online and become more mainstream, you still didn't see people from Atlanta getting to tell our own stories. It was still somebody at a shop or agency in New York saying, oh, yeah, there's something going on in Atlanta, let's send somebody down there. Or even if somebody would get work in here from Atlanta, they'd go get out of town crews to come and shoot it and produce it. So we've just tried to do is put a lot of intentionality around making sure that the people on the platform are people that are closer to culture. And they're also getting a chance to, again, tell these stories themselves for the first time. So I think that's one of the reasons why Butter's kind of resonated with people from an authenticity standpoint is because this is us, you know, and we understand the nuance in and around this city more than other people. One of my favorite kind of explanations is if you've ever seen the show Atlanta by Donald Glover. Yeah, if you if you're from Atlanta, you you have a different level of appreciation for that show than you do if you're not like if you're not from Atlanta, you look at you like, oh, this is a great show. It's great writing like the other show, like Always Sunny in Philadelphia. There are just other elements of it that if you're from Atlanta, you really appreciate the intentionality they've taken in doing certain things and making it feel authentic. So if they're at a certain gas station, it's like, oh, man, they're actually at this place or a certain restaurant. It's like a restaurant before like they're not even going in and taking all the stuff down and called it. They actually like, oh, I'm at this restaurant. So I think for us, we're always trying to do that same type of signaling with Butter to let people know, like we know because we're in the culture with you. And that's, again, one of the reasons why it's really taken off of people. It's like a wink. Like if you know, you know, and it will hit you different if you do. But it also works for folks who might not be in the in -group, so to speak. Exactly. Also, being from New Orleans, like that resonates very deeply. I feel the same way every time I see my city on screen. I'm like, I'm from there. That's me. It's a pride thing. We'll say pride. Yeah. So, you know, as I mentioned, we're on Cloudflare TV. It's a streaming broadcast for Cloudflare, which is also a tech company. So social media is technically tech. But I know you have a little bit of a technical background yourself. Can you can you share more about back when you were a techie techie? Yeah, that was actually kind of my background. But I've always been in that space, went undergrad, Morehouse, Georgia Southern, came out there doing IT, computer science. And that was kind of my thing coming out of college. I was doing everything from started off doing tech support to going in and being actually a certified hacker at a certain point. I've done a lot of web development and app development. Did that for a while. Worked for the NBA, a bunch of other large brands. And that's where I kind of found my my sweet spot is I always I was doing websites. And then I kind of started getting I always wanted to get into radio and TV until I heard myself on tape. And so I went to Connecticut School of Broadcasting at one point because I just wanted to kind of get into that space. And what I found was this really interesting skill set is that we were first starting podcasts. And I kind of became the podcast guy because I was the only person there that really knew tech and the web and computers. And so I can actually build websites. I can actually help people build their podcasts, get MP3 set up. And then that actually snowballed into me becoming the kind of like the web radio guy for Atlanta. I ended up becoming the head of digital for Sports Radio 79 The Zone, which was the biggest sports radio station in the southeast for about 10 years. They were a flagship for the Falcons, Hawks, Braves. The two live students were a really big show that shot out of there. They were the largest syndicated black hosted show in the country for years. And that really got me kind of into the marketing world and I kind of saw this opportunity as, OK, I like marketing. I understand marketing creative, but I'm the tech guy and everything's going online. And so I kind of got into this space where everything is starting to converge and radio stations and TV stations saying, like, how can we go online? And I just was kind of in the right place at the right time. So having that deep tech background helped me get into the building, learn more about marketing, creative, kept kind of just rolling it up into different roles from product management to, you know, digital marketing, doing my own thing. And as I always say, you can only kind of connect the dots when you look backwards. But even that kind of do with butter, it just encompasses so many different skills. There's, you know, business development. There's marketing. There's creative. There's tech. I mean, I'm the one that's, you know, we have designers, right. But like I was the one that coded the website, you know, I'm saying your hands are in everything. Again, that's why I say it's very much a team effort. And I think, you know, one thing I've learned in my career is one thing I kind of try to tell people is, you know, start start, you know, kind of like a shallow and wide and then find a way to get very narrow and deep with the skill set. And then once you kind of find that place, you can kind of widen back out. So I think for me, I kind of started very wide from like an IT. I was, again, I was doing it. I was fixing computers. I was building websites. I was, you know, I had a job one time where I used to literally set up a we just call my checkout systems in libraries. So if you ever go into a library and you like scan your books and like drop it on this like RFID pad, like we actually would do that. And I mean, you know, I was I remember at one point I was crawling around through the ducts in the Enoch Pratt library system. Even the Baltimore is like the biggest library system in the world. And it's here in Baltimore. And I'm like, we've wired that whole building up. So, you know, 15 years ago when I was crawling through ducts and, you know, fighting off cobwebs, I never would have thought that that would be coming into play now. But, you know, now, even as we do like experiential stuff with butter, just being able to have those experiences and haven't been hands on, like all these things kind of come into play. So there's this running joke that I've kind of done everything with the team because I've had a million and one jobs. But I think they all I think it all works itself out in the long run. And it builds character. My my favorite one of my favorite stories is my first job was I used to work on my grandparents farm in Alabama, and we used to pick everything from, you know, peas to cotton and everything in between. And we used to actually take that and sell it in the small town they used to work in. And that's actually how I got into tech. So I'm the only child. My parents would send me out to Alabama because we couldn't really afford babysitting, you know, back in back in the day. You go by your grandma house. That's it. And I would be out there for like two or three months, like for the whole summer. And, you know, and I remember one year I got invited to an engineering program at this school called Rose-Hulman. And it's like one of the most well-known engineering schools in the country. It's super small, but it like it competes with the Purdue's and the MIT's of the world. It's up in Terre Haute, Indiana, and it's like really selective. And they invited me to this program called Operation Catapult for like minorities trying to get in tech. And I begged my mom, like, please let me go because I just didn't want to be outside in the heat all summer. And I learned that if you go to school, you could stay in the air conditioning. And so I was like, you know what, I'm gonna stick out this computer thing and see how it goes. So this worked out very well for me. You just put one foot in front of the other, just figured it out. I love it. That's also a very Southern way to approach it. I'm like, this resonates with me very deeply. So, I mean, again, you're collecting all these experiences. Do you see yourself as a griot or maybe even kind of an ethnographer? Because it seems like you're a storyteller, you're sharing stuff. Yeah. Have you ever kind of thought about what you do in that frame? Yeah, I mean, not specifically, but I can definitely see how that could be a consideration. I think for me, I've been and this is again, maybe more of just I get so hands on sometimes. I don't always do a great job of kind of taking a step back and looking at just the totality of what we've even created as a team for Butter. So, you know, that's something I'm trying to get better at in full transparency. So, yeah, when I take a step back and I look at what we've kind of done, you know, it definitely seems that way. And I think we've definitely kind of cataloged, you know, culture and they kind of just told stories in an authentic way about how we see it in a kind of a modern lens. Again, I think, you know, it's very easy, especially with Black History Month, to fall into the civil rights version of Black history. And I think that's... Slow singing and kumbayaing and yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's look, no disrespect to Martin Luther King or anybody, but I just think there's so much more that's happening and has happened. And there are so many other stories that have to be told. So while that stuff is great, we're also not doing black history a full justice if we only go back and talk about the same stories over and over again. So I think even what we've tried to do is just find ways to still give nods to the past and still show appreciation, but also still, you know, appreciate what's happening in the present. And what's happening in the future. So, again, when I kind of take a step back and look at it, I definitely see it. But, you know, a lot of times just because I'm so into it, you know, we're going from one thing to the next. But, you know, we all believe it's about kind of that past, present and future when it comes to this whole culture thing. So now that we've talked about culture, let's talk about some content. We're content people. So let's talk shop a little bit. So what is your philosophy on content, content creation in general? Yeah, so you ever seen The Matrix? Yeah. Yeah, most people have. That's why I'm like, you want to make sure, you know, you know, so, you know, there was a scene in The Matrix where Morpheus asked Neo, right? Like, you can take the red pill or the blue pill. And the way I kind of look at content is like, what is the red pill that you're kind of trying to give people? And I know, again, I know red pill can have some crazy connotations. I want to be really clear about what I'm talking about. But what I'm talking about is like, what is a uncomfortable truth that you're kind of like bringing to light? And what I mean is just something that people maybe it makes people stop and kind of think about it. So with us, you know, our truth is this is Atlanta. Here's kind of a modern view of Atlanta. Now, again, we're not trying to be world star hip hop like we get. And I've told you before, like, please, you don't have to send us videos of crimes. You don't have to send us videos of people being hurt. If you want to share that stuff, there's plenty of folks out there that will post that kind of stuff. That's not what Butter makes. But for us, we just want to be truthful and honest in how we kind of represent the city. So the trick for me is I always say, again, when it comes to content, it's all about what I call vitamins, candy and painkillers. Right. So, you know, some content, there's a lot of candy content online. There's a lot of stuff that's just, you know, just like candy. You know, I love chocolate. But if all I eat is chocolate, my teeth are going to fall out. No teeth. You watch a certain news channel. That's very much your perspective of what the world is. Right. So what you consume also impacts your health, but also your mental state. Right. So there's certain kind of content that's candy. There's certain kind of content that's vitamins. Right. Like it provides some incremental value. You know, I like to call this like the Gary Vee content. We're like, yes, like, look, that's what you want to listen to. That's great. But you listen to Gary Vee tell you to hustle all day long. If you don't actually do anything, then it's worthless. You know, it's the same thing when you take vitamins. Right. Like your doctor can tell you to take this vitamin, but you have to take it. You have to be consistent. You have to get incremental improvement when you actually do stop and go back and get checked again. And then the painkillers, there's like, you know, just like there's medicine that solves a problem. There's content that solves a problem. So for us, what I always say is I don't care if we're making candy, vitamin or painkillers. I just want to make sure I'm not confusing my candy or my painkillers with candy. You know, so for us, that's how we kind of look at all our content. Right. Like, is it creating some kind of value? Is it shareable? Like we've we've moved past this world of just being like, how many likes does it get? You know what I'm saying? To saying like, really, like, why are we creating this content? Like one of the things we think about is what is the job of content? So of this content for somebody to use to tell a story, you know, are they going to send this post that we made to a friend and be like, I see this is what I was talking about. I told you. And like the content itself is the proof point of whatever it was they were discussing. You know, is the content something that just helps that person identify with themself? Were they going to post it and share it and say, this is so me? You know what I'm saying? Like we go into how we approach our stuff with that level of intentionality. Again, it comes across fast because we've we've just gotten really good at getting our process and kind of staying ahead of what's happening from a culture standpoint. Like, you know, when things are going to happen. Right. So it's it's easy to kind of plan for those moments. Let me call that stock and flow. So, you know, you have things that are kind of stock, right? Like, you know that, you know, that Valentine's Day is on the 14th. You know what I'm saying? Like history month is in February. OK, we'll plan for that stuff. But then you also know that like there are things that are just going to happen. And so we already have things that we have planned out because we knew that these, you know, things that happen every year are going to happen. So that allows us to keep our heads up and our eyes open for things that are happening on the fly culturally and allows us to respond faster to those. We've also developed a number of like templates and treatments for certain things, because, again, let's say something happens at five o'clock in the morning. You got to go. Yeah. I don't necessarily have a designer that can come up with a custom idea. But if we want to have something to say, we have formats that we can still apply content to to get something out. You know, one of the things I always tell the team is like if you've ever learned how to juggle, a lot of people think that when it comes to juggling, it's about the catching. But it's really about the throwing. Right. So if you throw consistently, the ball is going to always land in the same place. And so with us, I tell the team, right, it's about throwing. Like, let's again, like everything doesn't have to be, you know, on a scale of one to ten to ten. I'm cool with ones, twos and threes as long as they're done intentionally. Right. So these are some of the things we kind of learned that have allowed us to kind of turn things fast. Again, the same thing when it comes to sports, like whether people realize it or not, a sports game is going to have a winner. You know what I'm saying? Like if the Falcons play, I mean, we know how that's been going this season. I mean, I thought we weren't going to talk football. You know, like if there's a game, there's going to be a predetermined winner or loser. And that's actually something I learned from the folks at Bleacher Report. So like I got connected with the folks at Bleacher Report and one of the things they kind of shared with us was, you know, one of the reasons why they were able to react so quickly is because when a game happens, they go ahead and create content regardless of the outcome. Right. You have to. You know what's happening. Football will happen. Yeah. So if the Warriors are playing, like they're already going to have some kind of graphic if Steph Curry like goes crazy. Now, again, maybe it's not going to be so detailed to where like, oh, he made 40 shots. And so there's this. But like they're probably going to have something like him with a crown on or something. And that just allows them to move fast. And so that's something we've kind of adopted is, again, where are the things that we can just move fast, iterate on? Yes, we might design things that might never see the light of day, but on the flip side, we're able to ship stuff quicker. And I mean, you know, this obviously from a technology standpoint, this work comes back to tech. To me, it's about that MVP approach, like how are we getting that kind of stuff out and just shipping as much as possible? Yes, yes. Very, very that. So how has COVID-19 impacted your content strategy or your ability to create content? I mean, it seems like you have a pretty good system and it's been working for you. What did the pandemic do anything to that? Yeah, I mean, it made us go completely virtual. And that was a big adjustment. I mean, you know, I remember telling a buddy of mine just I think it would have been extremely difficult to start butter in this current situation. This is so many nuanced kind of things that happened that, you know, just sometimes sitting next to somebody and just an organic conversation happens. So like to me, that's what I've realized that we've lost the most is, you know, our team works really well together and we know each other really well. But, you know, I definitely think that when we were all kind of together in the office, there were just a lot more organic things to kind of just happen, whether you're passing somebody by in the hallway. Now, even if I have like an organic idea, I got to slack you. I got, you know, I got to wait for you. And it's harder to even kind of write it. Sometimes when I'm flowing and I get something, I just want to talk it out. And like having to write it makes it not as fun. I don't even know, but it's different. Every interaction has become so much more structured, is what I kind of say. Even if I'm like you, even if I just want to talk about it, I still have to ping you and then I have to, hey, are you busy? I just want to talk to you. I think that's the part that has been the hardest, you know, just kind of trying to work around that and just trying to keep and develop new processes for like how we can kind of keep some of that organic energy going. And it's just a continual process. I think, you know, one of the things that I'm really proud of the team about was when we first launched Butter, I made everybody on the team read this book. It's called Radical Candor. And one of the reasons why is because, you know, I've been a part of a lot of teams before. I've been in a lot of situations that had businesses. And a lot of times I've seen things fall apart from a communication standpoint, just because people aren't talking to each other. And so I honestly like this book is called, you know, it was one of the best kind of management books I've ever read. And really the idea around it is if you're going to have a high performing team, you all have to have radically candid conversations with each other. Like we have to be able to talk and everybody can't get in their feelings and emotions. And so what's really interesting is when we launched Butter, I actually, I remember for the first week or so, I literally bought everybody on the team a copy of that book. And we sat down and we talked about it. I said, before we do anything, y'all, we are going to get super clear. Cause I told them, we are not, Butter is not going to fall apart because I looked at you funny and you think I meant something. The interpersonal stuff, this is business. Yeah. I said, if there's one thing that Butter is not going to fall apart, there's going to be that. And so I think what's interesting is that now fast forward a year later when COVID hit, we had already kind of developed that like kind of relationship with each other where we could have kind of had those conversations. So even as things have come up during COVID that we've had to address, like I can just hit somebody up and be like, yo, I need to talk to you. And like, I don't have to worry about them being like, oh, the tone in his voice and da da da da da. Like I can just say it and it's, you know, and it's in the vice versa. Like if they have a concern or whatever, they want to come back to me, it's completely like that. I mean, we had somebody join the team a few months ago and the same thing with that person. I was like, yo, here's your book. This is onboarding. Well, COVID has changed some stuff. I mean, never would have known this would have happened, but I'm really glad that we took that time up front and kind of put that intentionality in place. Because I think it's just helped keep us together in other ways with all the craziness that's going on in the world right now. Yes, indeed. Yeah, and 2021 has been interesting, to say the least. So just time checking, we're about five minutes till we're off. I'm already sad about it, but I do have more questions for you. So predictions. What's going to be the new branding, marketing content thing for 2021? Did Clubhouse, you know, bring voice only to us? Like, what do you think? So I'm being honest, I can't stay in Clubhouse. Cloudflare does not confirm or deny or endorse that, asterisk, asterisk. So my reasons are more around just optimization, how they do the app. Like I had to turn my notifications off. Like I just, I couldn't get 8,000 notifications. But no, I mean, I love what Clubhouse is doing just from an audio only standpoint. I think it kind of speaks to where people are. I don't know if, you know, I'm still on the fence as whether or not I think it's the new thing. And this, again, comes from a person that sits on conference calls all day. Like it's just, it's very difficult for me, a person that's on conference calls all day, to now be on conference calls in my personal time and call it social media. So like, that's probably the biggest hang up that I've personally had with it. It's just, I'm doing that all day anyway. Like I just like now, oh no, now it's in my personal life. It's everywhere. Okay, so if it's my voice, what do you think it might be? No, I definitely think there's something with audio. I mean, I think audio is super important. I mean, again, like, I'm a big, I'm a big Audible fan. Like I, you know, like I think I did 50 books last year on Audible. And, but I also noticed this because I'm in the car a lot. And so I've had to actually change around my process now because I'm not in my car as much to still listen to my books on Audible. But, so I think audio is going to be important because it's a very like, you know, passive opportunity, but I really think that I'm, I'm calling like this idea of like hybrid experiences is really where the future is going. In other words, like we've all kind of gone virtual now. And, you know, as you notice too, like working in tech, virtual has never been all that great. But that's also because like, people just haven't had to make the technology that much better. We could always just meet up. It's been like alternatives, right? So like now we've been forced to use this for an extended period of time. We've had to do birthdays on it. We've had to do holidays on it. You know, I think now people are like, they, they, they like it, but they also still want that physical experience and they want to find a balance. And so for me, I think one of the things I'm really interested in is just this idea of like, how do you kind of do things that are hybrid? Like how do you develop an experience that has a very specific online component and a, you know, in-person component for the people that want to experience it safely in person? So that's something I've been thinking a lot about is like, how do you just apply that to different brands? Because, again, people want to get out. We want to be safe. And especially as the vaccine starts to get out and people start to just back out in line, I think, again, we're not just going to go, you know, I think that we're not just going to stop being virtual altogether. But I definitely. It's probably going to be like a rollout as people feel comfortable being together. Yeah. That's just my guess. Yeah, but I think it's going to be here though. And so for me, it's like, yeah, how do we start to balance that experience to where, cool, whatever it is, right? Like think about the Super Bowl, right? Like how do they do that to where there's, again, a virtual component and again, an interactive, a virtual interactive component, but as well as something for the people that are there because, you know, it's the same thing we've talked about with sports, right? You know, even working in sports radio for a while, it's like, you know, football, football's competition is my couch and my flat screen TV at home. You know, so like how can, you know, how can the NBA do things that, again, bring people into the experience more because, you know, selling tickets right now, I mean, we've developed, again, it's just crazy, right? Like we've developed these stadiums, which made sense, but the whole purpose of it was to get as many people as possible into a small space. I mean, it's the same thing with restaurants. Like restaurants literally make their money by saying this is how much square footage we have, this is how many tables we can fit in, and their whole business model is based on that idea. Now you're telling them, yeah, we'll cut that in half, but you still have the same. And so I think it's going to be really interesting to kind of see, but that's something I've been just looking at and, you know, thinking about a lot is like how do we bring this hybrid experience back to where, again, you can still get the value of online and virtual, but you can also give people like something tactile they can like experience and kind of take with them. VR headsets, AR headsets for all. That's my thing. I'm throwing it out there. All right. So we have less than a minute left, and I want to ask you the question that we're going to ask everybody this month. Why does it matter that you, Brandon Butler, CEO of Butter ATL, why does it matter that you specifically are doing this work? You know, one thing I told somebody I work with is I do a lot of the stuff I do just so that y'all can see it's possible. Like I am authentically myself all day, every day. I am a kid from the east side, Stone Mountain. You know, I say shouty. I say y 'all. I also was the top student in my class at my Georgia Tech when I got my MBA, and I do it all being myself, especially as the world has kind of changed. Like I'm just fully embracing my awesome black self, and so I just think it's important that I'm here because I want people to see that it's possible. I want people to see like I told the team like let's be crazy. Like we can do this, and we're making, we're doing things now that are going to change the face of Atlanta, and so I just want people to see like you can look however you want to look. You can wear the same thing every day. You know, you can wear a black t -shirt every day. You can have purple hair. It'll be great. You know what I'm saying? You know, I just want to show people that you can be yourself, your full authentic self and still be super successful. Love it. Well, it's been so great chatting with you, and folks, stay tuned into Cloudflare TV for more fireside chats this month. Thanks.