Episode 19 – Steve Sarner – Amazon / Goodreads

Quiz marketing veteran Steve Sarner (VP of Ad Sales & Program Management @ Amazon’s Goodreads) shares his insights about why quizzes and ‘opt-in’ lead generation work so well together – especially in this era of increased privacy regulations, ‘banner blindness’, and ad blocking.

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Transcript

Mike 0:04
Welcome to the Quiz Makers, a podcast from Riddle.com. Join our weekly chat about all things, quizzes, marketing, and everything in between. We’ll speak with entrepreneurs and marketers to get their quiz secrets, plus share our story, the highs and the lows of scaling and successful startups since we launched way back in 2014.

Hi, there, welcome to this episode of the Quiz Makers. My name is Mike Hawkins. I’m one of the co founders of Riddle which is one of the major quiz makers on the market. And in this episode, I’m very proud to be chatting with Steve Sarner, VP of ad sales and program management. Is that right, Steve?

Steve 0:56
Pretty close, Mike.

Mike 0:58
I was stalking you on LinkedIn and that’s the current title I saw. So maybe I should have Steve introduce himself.

Steve 1:07
Right. Hi, everybody, Mike, thanks for having me on. I’m Steve Sarner, VP of sales and program management at Goodreads which is a subsidiary of Amazon – we are the world’s largest community of readers with 110 million members. Basically, we are the place to come to find and discover your next book, see what your friends are reading, and follow your favorite authors.

And it’s a great place to be during this time, where people are finding a lot of great content to to engage with. So it’s great to be on the Quiz Makers podcast.

Mike 1:43
Thank you. And I have to say, just in the interest of transparency, I am way too much a customer of Goodreads at Amazon. The number of times I get prompted, “Oh, hey, you’ve read this author” or “We think you might like”... then sure enough, I bought yet another book, especially now!

Steve 2:03
It is working.

Mike 2:04
Yeah, it is. So Steve, you and I worked together. And it feels like five years ago. But really, it was quite some time ago. I used to work with you at Tickle and then Monster.com.

Steve 2:16
Yeah, exactly. Those were fun times together, for sure. Mike. We did a lot. We invented a lot.

Mike 2:25

We did indeed. So the reason I wanted to have you on this podcast is that Tickle was one of the very first quiz online sites.

This is centuries in internet time, way back from 2001 to 2006 or so. And Tickle was one of the very first sites to do the “What type of dog are you?” and “What is your IQ” tests, things like that.

And after all, this is the Quiz Makers. So I wanted to catch up with you. What was your role in the use of quizzes for marketing?

Steve 2:57
Sure, exactly. Back let me go back a little bit before that – you may not know this, do you know where I was before I joined Tickle?

Mike 3:03
I do not.

Steve 3:04
I was at a company and a site that still exists today called Real Age, which was a health assessment site. So that was kind of my first introduction to quizzes.

I’d come out of the travel industry and joined the health interactive side as VP of marketing to help them grow their acquisition base. And you know, that was very much in line with the whole test quiz model.

In this case, it was actually health assessments, a number of them. And you know, I think one of the beautiful things about tests and quizzes is that you’re actually providing value for the person taking them. I’m a huge believer in advertising, ALL advertising, particularly digital advertising should be invited versus invasive – anywhere where we can add value to the user experience.

So when advertising feels like it’s part of the product, part of the experience, it’s just such a plus. And so Real Age, we were giving people some great, you know, health tips and advice, and then at Tickle, our IQ test and ‘What breed of dog were you?’... and we had hund...