This episode of Aqua Talks centers around the imperative of adapting marketing strategies to meet the evolving needs of federal and local agencies. Our esteemed guest, Brandon Nickerson, Director of Federal Business Development at Sinclair Inc., engages in a comprehensive discussion about the recent trends in government budget priorities and the significant role of emerging technologies such as artificial intelligence and robotics in recruitment efforts. He elaborates on how Sinclair is uniquely positioned to bridge the gap between local insights and federal outreach, ensuring that marketing campaigns resonate effectively with target audiences. We delve into the innovative solutions Sinclair is implementing to enhance engagement and foster meaningful connections in a rapidly changing landscape. Join us as we unpack these vital topics, providing you with actionable insights to enhance your marketing endeavors.

IN THIS EPISODE:

1. 00:07 - Introduction to Aqua Talks
2. 01:46 - Exploring Industry Trends and Challenges
3. 09:50 - Transitioning from Local to Federal Marketing Strategies
4. 14:50 - Emerging Strategies in Federal Marketing
5. 25:26 - Transition to Amazing America 250 Program

KEY TAKEAWAYS:

1. The discussion emphasizes the critical importance of adapting marketing strategies to align with emerging industry trends and audience preferences.
2. Brandon Nickerson elaborates on Sinclair's innovative approach to federal business development and their strategic partnerships aimed at enhancing recruitment efforts.
3. The podcast highlights the significance of utilizing local knowledge and tailored marketing strategies to effectively address community-specific needs and challenges.
4. Listeners are introduced to Sinclair's new initiatives, including the America 250 campaign, aimed at fostering nationwide engagement through custom content and localized outreach.
5. The conversation reveals the pivotal role of advanced technology and data analytics in shaping contemporary marketing strategies within the federal government landscape.

Welcome to Aqua Talks, where marketing meets bold game changing ideas.

Join your hosts, Larry Aldrich and Maddie Dudley as they explore the art and science of cutting through the noise, capturing attention and fostering meaningful connections with your audience.

Whether you're a destination marketer, government contractor, or simply passionate about the transformative power of marketing, Aqua Talks offers engaging discussions, fresh insights and actionable strategies designed to inspire and inform.

Hi and welcome back to Aqua Talks.

My name is Maddie Dudley.

I'm the public Relations director of Aquamarketing and Communications.

This is a podcast for people who are getting into marketing or they're pros within the industry.

Already is a podcast brought to you by Brensys Technology llc.

And as always, I am joined by my co host, Larry Aldridge.

Hello, I'm Larry Aldrich, President CEO of Aqua Marketing Communications and Brensys Technology llc.

Today we're joined with a guest, Brandon Nickerson, Vice President, Director, excuse me, director of Federal Business Development with Sinclair Inc. Hello, Brandon, how are you?

And thank you for joining us today.

Hey Larry, it's great to see you again.

It's great to see your team, Matti, everyone else looking forward to our conversation.

Yeah, so are we.

Thank you again, Brandon.

I'm sorry, my son's name is Brennan and I keep trying to combine both of them every time I talk.

We want to start this off a little bit with you.

Before we get into a little bit about your background, who you're with and what you do, let's talk about a trend or some industry news, anything you choose, anything top of want to bring up.

Great.

Well, I think starting off with, you know, what's happening right now in terms of FY26 budget priorities and spending priorities.

We've been, you know, really looking into the nuances of, you know, the FY26 spending priorities across the federal government, trying to track to see what are the big ticket items, the things that the administration, the federal government's looking to priorities this year.

One of the things that we've been looking at over the last couple weeks, maybe a month or so, is some of the priorities for the DoD and specific targeting for recruitment and retention for, you know, cadets and enlistment as well as not only, you know, like the war fighters, but also for the general build out of the workforce around these communities in these areas, specifically for manufacturing, robotics, AI, drone technology, all the new careers of the future that we're obviously it's, you know, very important for our organization to work with those agencies, but also for the, you know, the greater role for our military and for our country as a whole to prioritize these industries of the future.

We've definitely seen some priorities in AI, robotics, technology.

And we're really excited to try to find a way to work with both the military as well as universities, community colleges, tech schools to really help grow, help the military meet their kind of goals for recruitment, but also really help drive recruitment for kids, you know, in these new areas of the, you know, the workforce in the, you know, 22nd century coming up.

That's awesome.

I love that.

Yeah.

And before we jump into a little bit more of a conversation, this is my, my stupid joke moment and I brought this up with Mattie earlier.

So I'm going to ask you now, especially after you talked a little bit about your, your initiatives, what you're looking at.

It's a question.

Do you know who Skynet is?

I do, I do and I do think about that from time to time.

As a kid, I was very obsessed about that movie, specifically of the scene where they're at the gas station and she's digging the weapons out of the ground.

So, yes, I'm familiar with that.

And it is definitely something that I think about from time to time to time.

My parents live in Vermont, very secluded area, which I'm like, if everything ever happened, I would try to get up there, but it would be, you know, tough driving a car on 95 during a global problem.

So yeah, that was, that was an inside joke because I asked Mattie earlier today if she knew who Skynet was and she thought it was a jet company.

NetJets.

Have you heard of NetJets?

Yes.

I haven't used it before.

I'm a little bit out of my price range.

But maybe I'll win the lottery one day and I'll sample their offerings.

Well, please invite us when that happens.

We're going to Vermont.

Yeah, Vermont.

Where in Vermont?

My parents live in Stowe.

They've been up there for about 15 or 20 years.

My father worked in a ski industry his whole life and they moved from New Jersey, where I grew up, to Vermont when I graduated college and my brother graduated high school.

And we still try to go up there once a year to visit family, go skiing.

Ben and Jerry's is down the street.

Beautiful town, lots of fun things to do.

And it's really nice now that I have a three year old daughter that I get to her, try to get her to experience all the stuff that I grew up with, fishing, just being outside, hiking, all that kind of stuff.

So perfect place to do it.

So back to business.

Back to work.

We gotta go to work now.

Of course.

So back to Skynet.

Important things.

The important things, yes.

So Brandon, give us a little bit about your background.

Who Sinclair is, your role at Sinclair and your role within the the larger organization.

Great, sure.

So I've been at Sinclair for about four years.

So I had always an interest in Middle east foreign policy and economic development, international development.

And I was taking Arabic at NYU and Berlitz, I'm sorry, Baruch College in New York City.

And when I got let go of my job in New York, I told myself that I need to move to D.C. and get involved.

My passion was and still is Middle east foreign policy, history, et cetera.

So I at 25, started over, moved down to DC, interned on the Hill, took about a year, a year and a half to get my first job down here.

And then kind of over the last, I don't know, 10 or 15 years, really have kind of weaved in between foreign policy, international development, federal business development.

Currently director of Free State Strategic Services, which is Sinclair's local and federal business development unit.

Currently work underneath the umbrella of Sinclair, which is as most people know, hopefully watching the podcast, is a national media organization, traditional broadcast television company in the past and we've really transitioned within the last several years into like a national media organization, really emphasizing not only the broadcast television capabilities that we possess around the country, more than I think 75 different telev television stations and you know, 200 DMAs across the country.

But also our in house digital agency within the umbrella of Sinclair includes AMP Sales and Marketing Solutions, which is our rebrand that we've done recently to consolidate and unify all the sales and marketing teams across the country.

We really want to speak with both the federal government, state, local government businesses, local communities as one unified voice.

And I think that's really been help helpful with us getting out our message, how we can help people, how we can help our clients reach their target audiences, how we can help communicate goals, help agencies meet their missions.

It is a big organization, but at the end of the day it's a local driven organization.

We really exemplify the best of our local communities.

We've got some really unique offerings that we can talk about later, including sports, audio, podcasting on our own really cool initiatives coming up for this year.

Quite excited about the World cup and some of the things we're doing around there if you guys like soccer.

So just a really great organization to be a part of and there's going to be a lot of opportunities for us in the coming year.

So would love to tap into a little bit more Sinclair's AMP Sales marketing solutions role within the state than the local and federal marketing space.

Sure, absolutely.

So I mean at the state level, like I said before, you know, we are a locally driven organization and I think one of the things that benefits us well is the fact that local broadcasters still have a great voice to contribute to the communities and they're trusted at the local level and we really leverage our broadcast television stations at the local level.

At State, County, City, we've done some really unique and cool things.

At the state level we've on our side on the business, on this specific business unit, we've grown contract opportunities at the city and state level through what you know, some might call QVL qualified Vendor list or multi contract awards.

Definitely something that we've seen in terms of a trend over the last few years where city agencies, state agencies, county agencies are coming out with these contract vehicles to lock in multiple vendors for a longer period of time rather than go on a one off rfp.

And we were really excited.

About two years ago we were awarded a contract with the State of Washington Enterprise Services, a contract that has allowed us to work with several state agencies already, including the Washington Financial Institutions, Washington State Office of Equity.

We've worked with their Emergency Management department to help them recruit 911 operators.

We were recently awarded a contract in Kansas through the Kansas Department Administration.

We've also been on several county contracts, worked a lot of law enforcement and local community affairs organizations, nonprofits.

So State is definitely something that that we're really, really excited about growing over the next few years.

At the federal level, we're currently on a contract with both the U.S. park Police and the U.S. capitol Police to help them meet their recruitment goals for the new year.

We're excited for future opportunities within that space.

Last year we were successful getting Sinclair on the GSA professional service schedule, which I personally was really happy about and allows us to sell directly to the federal government on that schedul and also kind of tracking all the new updates, which is a little pain point for myself personally having to track all the federal procurement updates for some of these new things they're doing.

But yeah, I guess summary is that, you know, we are able to really connect and work across all markets, whether it's on a single voice campaign at the local level for a Salvation army or nonprofit, all the way up to, you know, targeted communication and outreach campaigns on behalf of the federal government and their clients and allows us to move interchangeably between one or, or the other with, you know, with like a unified voice.

Speaking of gsa, are you on the GSA Interact?

I do.

I Interact is a Interact.

Interact is a manager.

Yeah, GSA Interact is a website.

You go on, you register and you can follow a lot of conversation.

Pretty much all of the GSA schedules, whether it's Oasis Vets, whether it's your GSA MAS schedule, professional services, you can, once you registered, you go on there and they have like a bunch of tiles that represent all of their GSA services contracts.

You just click join and then there's that communication where everyone that's a part of that schedule or eventually about to be, whether it's Oasis plus service disabled, small business 8A or if it's a mass, you can just, you know, it's almost like it's a communication tool and you can get updated on what's coming out and be a part of the communication.

It's very, very informative.

So GSA Interact, I would highly suggest you go to that site, register and follow that communication and they send you a lot of emails.

Yes, I, I, I know I get a lot of emails from you know, outreach for other contractors.

But yeah, the GSA stuff is something that I, I personally have been trying to do some more of the trainings that the they offer online and trying to track in terms of far compliance or help on subcontracting reporting etc.

So yeah, they offer a lot of help on sdl.

GSA offers a lot of support.

It's really good to follow them as much as possible.

So what are some of the biggest challenges companies face in federal government marketing and advertising and how does Sinclair help to overcome them?

Yeah, I think one of the challenges is I think probably like a one size fits all strategy that I think on the federal space when opportunities are posted.

I mean, just terms of like a first mover advantage, you know, as everyone kind of knows, the federal government has historically been slow to move and change with the times.

I'm interested to see what's happening recently with some of the transformations currently undertaking.

Talk about GSA earlier with all the new AI tools and new things that they're doing internally.

I know the army and other agencies are ramping up their AI internally, so.

But I think at the end of the day, one of our core strengths and how we can kind of help federal agencies overcome their problem is the local knowledge, like I said before, of what our local stations can contribute on the ground at first.

Like I said, we're a local organization that's driven by our television teams, our marketing and sales teams that really understand the local context of what's happening, what their communities are facing, issues that are important, that work their way up to the state level and then at the federal level rather than the other way around.

So when our team is looking for or looking at an opportunity, you know, we always start with our local teams.

We're not reporting or not submitting an RFP to the federal government or state government without at first connecting with our local sales and sales and operating teams on the local level.

To understand what are you guys seeing?

What are the things that your clients and your folks on the ground are talking about?

We really, really emphasize that.

I think one of the other things that really helps us, one of the unique kind of things that we've been working on is our implementation of AI on both our ability to make strategic recommendations on targeting for campaigns.

So we can really get very, very granular in providing tailored strategies for our clients.

So, for example, for higher education, for a university, community college, not only are we able to help a university or community college target within that specific DMA or zip code, but we can layer in specific custom audience segments to target kids who are interested in a specific program, whether it's an mba, accounting, education, et cetera.

Recently we've this kind of weaves back into what we were discussing before about the DoD and some of these, you know, technologies and programs of the future is we actually came out with a new custom audience segment over the last couple of weeks that's going to target specifically students who are interested in these careers in robotics, you know, STEM, AI, augmented reality, etc.

So we kind of use this sort of technology to help not only, you know, tailor our strategies, but also provide the optimization and the reporting on the back end in terms of monitoring impressions and Making sure that we have a strong attribution that shows conversion for our clients and what they're looking for.

So there's some really interesting tools that we use as an organization and as a large national media company.

We are at first Technology company which allows us to really get in front of the curve and really implement these solutions before a lot of other companies do.

I.

Well, I think the custom audience segment one was one there's one that literally just came across my desk within the last 24 hours that we had talked about over the last couple weeks internally that was based on some of the things that we've seen on grants.gov and sam.gov with new opportunities coming from the National Science foundation as well as DoD had a specific cybersecurity apprenticeship program where they were trying to drive student enrollment within schools that were accredited to an NSA accreditation certification program for cryptology and other things.

So what we kind of after reading some of these NOFOs or RFIs online, we immediately jumped in trying to get in front of this where we're trying to actually build this segment and we're hoping to leverage that now with some of our current clients.

We're currently working with South Texas College with their robotics program and we're hoping that will lead to more opportunities for us to work with them on targeting kids for those programs.

Another really great initiative that we're excited about for the year is America 250.

Amazing America 250.

So it's a nationwide campaign that we've recently launched that's going to be running all year multi platform campaign.

I wanted you to bring that up again but thank you for bringing it up without me having to ask.

No, no problem.

Yeah, we've.

We've really kind of transitioned into the long form custom content over the last few years.

Something that, you know, I've only been at Sinclair for four years but I've seen how quickly this transition has occurred.

Really specific in terms of influencer and social media marketing and the really custom content than a lot of clients are looking for.

A lot of it's focused on destination marketing and CDBs as you guys know from your, from your work and tourism specifically.

But I can definitely sense that that social media, the custom content influencer is starting to not only.

It's not only part of destination and travel marketing but it's weaving their its way into other areas too.

So once again, yeah, this amazing America 250.

It's kind of our nationwide unifying sponsorship opportunity that we're launching across the country.

And it's not only going to allow our company to leverage our local kind of broadcast messages, hometown heroes that we do at the local level, we're leveraging our lifestyle television networks across, I think 27 different markets.

But all the broadcast assets, all of our digital assets, we're able to really shape and use all of our tools and solutions to really build a custom program across the country.

And another kind of innovative thing, fun thing that I'm excited about is World cup as a huge soccer fan.

If you guys are familiar with some of the podcasts that we do too with unfiltered soccer, which is Landon Donovan and Tim Howard, we're going to be doing a whole series for the upcoming year for World cup with different activation events throughout the country.

And we recently did something during the NFL super bowl this last weekend in San Francisco.

And I believe a couple months ago we had a sponsorship with our triple option podcast which is college football focused during the Army Navy game.

So we've been able to leverage some of these long form podcast, you know, unique kind of solutions for most events, sports related ones, and we're obviously going to be doing that for the coming year too.

You shared a couple of your videos with me from your campaign that we were just speaking of.

We work a lot with influence, want to kind of give Mattie a little bit of an example and everyone else watching about that campaign, I know I can't give it any justice when I tried to explain it.

And I know you have influencers and partners you work with all over the country and their role in that is to.

Can you take it from there before I.

You give it more justice than I do and I, I seen the videos, but do you want to go into that a little bit?

Yeah.

Yeah.

So we've, we've had the Amazing America content series that we've developed in house after a lot of work by our teams agree social media team internally to come out with these like custom series.

And a lot of that, you know, was, you know, based on a lot of the great work that people have done throughout the company and putting something on paper to capture, you know, opportunities within space.

As we've seen these RFPs over the last few years, really ask for more localized social media influencer bases stuff.

And we want to play with our strengths, which is telling stories and, and being local and connecting people with the things that are most important for them at the local level.

The, the Amazing Americas.

Let's see, an amazing Itineraries series that we put together I think have been fantastic.

I know we did something recently in West Palm beach where we, we visited the Palm Beaches Monte Carlo for, let's see, went around and sampled some of the best fares and she went to a lot of great restaurants.

Hunter from Amazing Itineraries had his own amazing sort of list of places that he visited to really draw attention to the great things that made the Palm Beaches unique.

And we've done some stuff in the past in Tennessee and Reno as well.

And it just lends itself to working, you know, trying to create a very unique message with our clients versus I guess what we talked about initially in the beginning of our conversation with a one size fits all strategy.

At the end of the day, everything is so cut down now with the 15s and 30s that you have to be very specific in the messaging and the branding and targeting.

And I think this just lends us, lends ourselves better for that because at the end of the day it really allows us to be more unique and create, you know, messages that are already impacting the local community on their own without, you know, a large company sometimes not knowing about it unless it's local.

So we kind of start local there and we're transitioning now to this amazing America 250 program, which we're really excited about.

And we're hoping to have some some more original content coming out in the near future too for that.

So you touched on Influencers a bit, but would love to give you the floor to celebrate any recent campaign or any project you've worked on recently that you're very proud of.

Sure.

I mean, I just.

I'm really excited for what we've done as an organization over the last few years.

I think we've had done an amazing transition from this new within this new media landscape that really lends itself to the important things that we focus on, which we've definitely seen the trends, which is a baseline for attribution and monitoring campaign performance, digital first strategy now rather than traditional broadcast television.

I'm really happy with the way that we've grown as an organization with working with our state and local partners.

I think some of the contracts that we've won at the state level in Washington State, the great work we've done there, and we've done some great work with Army National Guard units across the country.

We've had a successful campaign so far with US Park Police for some of their recruitment goals for Park Police officers.

I think the level of engagement that we've been able to show at the local level has really helped us grow.

And as you guys know, in the federal space you have to have lots of small wins before you get the big ones.

So it's baby steps in some spaces.

But I think as an organization, we're growing and we're not following.

We're leading in some areas and I'm excited for the next five to 10 years to see where we can go with everything.

Thank you, Brandon.

We're actually excited to see that also.

And I know we're looking at a few things we're working on, trying to work together on a few opportunities that are coming up and more.

We thank you for wanting to work with us and we'll continue to build that partnership throughout the state and the federal government and possibly even not possibly, but definitely even the tourism and destination space.

So thank you for, for believing in us.

Thank you so much.

It's been just a great partnership so far working with you guys and we're really excited to continue that in the new year.

Amazing.

Thank you for joining us today.

Thank you.

It's my pleasure.

If you want to learn more about Aquatacs or about Brandon or about Sinclair, please go to aquatacs.com we will have show notes within there.

Anything else that Brandon would like to add, we will also drop in there, but as usual follow us on social media.

We're on YouTube as well and we will see you next time.

Thank you.

Thank you.

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