The Bluegrass Boomerang Can Finally Die
In 1992 a sports columnist for The Trail Blazer, the student newspaper at Morehead State University, made a half-wit joke about basketball phenom Jody Thompson, the pride of Feds Creek. Thompson played five games for the University of Kentucky before transferring to Morehead State to supposedly play for Dick Fick’s Eagles. Then, a few weeks into his transfer year, left for the closer-to-momma comforts of Pikeville College.
Never mind he went on to score over 2,000 points for the Bears and became a successful businessman in his home county. The smart-alek columnist was dinging Thompson for being another in a long line of mountain basketball prodigies to get big-time basketball opportunities, only to high-tail it home to be a big fish in a small pond.
I know all this because I was the columnist. And I didn’t know my youknowhat from a hole in the ground.
Almost 30 years later, I look at Jody Thompson’s life, or at least what little of it I can uncover via Google and Facebook, and know how ignorant I was. He’s got a wife and three daughters. He’s the vice-president at a bank. He lives close to his family. I’m sure that came in handy in 2017 when he had to undergo a kidney transplant forced upon him by a hereditary condition.
The 18-year-old me begrudged him for walking away from big-time sports and a potential future in the NBA. The 48-year-old me is jealous of the riches he found by just staying home.
The Indignant Pride Remained
From the time I was very young, I remember thinking I had to get out of Pikeville. It was too small. Too isolated. I wanted to see the world.
It wasn’t that I lacked pride in where I was from—just the opposite, actually. But I wanted to get out and show the world that someone from them thar hills could be somebody.
At 14, I marched into the local radio station and declared I wanted to be a deejay. They hired me. At 16, I took over the morning drive time show when the regular guy skipped town. After my ill-fated semester as an ignorant sports columnist, I spent the last three years of my undergraduate life essentially being a full-time assistant in the athletics PR department.
I was accepted into the graduate program in sport management at West Virginia University, at the time one of the top three such schools in the country. I graduated in a year and a half and landed an internship, then a full-time position at ABC Radio Sports in New York City. A year later, I was promoted to associate producer of The Fabulous Sports Babe syndicated radio talk show.
My credentials gave me the right to say I’d made it. I’d become somebody. I’d done Kentucky proud, in my own way.
Like many natives, I went out into the world and did my thing, only to become a Bluegrass Boomerang. I came back. I came home.
It was here the Internet allowed me the chance to carve out a name for myself as a thought leader in the emerging world of social media marketing. When I co-founded what became the Louisville Digital Association, I had one big event in mind that was an eerie foreshadowing of the very mission of Kentucky to the World.
My big idea was a round-table discussion on the big stage at the Kentucky Center for the Performing Arts about the potential of Kentucky to change the world. It was to be called the Kentucky Marketing & Tech All-Stars. The dais read like a Who’s Who, if you knew anything about marketing and technology:
Peter Kim (Lexington) - Global vice-president for digital consumer engagement at LEGO.
Drew Curtis (Woodford County) - Founder of Fark.com
Matt Cutts (Rowan County) - Head of Google’s web spam team and face of its infamous algorithm
Rob May (Louisville) - Creator of Business Pundit
Laura Schwab (Louisville) - Director of Marketing for Rivan and former President of the Americas for Aston Martin
Sam Ford (Ohio County) - Director of audience engagement at Peppercomm and MIT Comparative Studies research affiliate
I’m sure if I’d waited a bit longer, I would have added a few more to the list, like Justin Hall (Pike County), who was named to Fast Company’s 100 Most Creative People in Business after architecting BitSource and the coal miners to code story we’re all still so proud of.
(Justin and I went to daycare together. Srsly!)
Kentucky pride drips from me sometimes. But it used to stem from a place of righteous indignation. When I traveled beyond our borders, even if just in my mind, I became awash with a dogged determination to prove Kentucky’s worth to the world.
Wisdom Overtakes Enthusiasm
One of the talks I’ve given in my occasional opportunities to speak around the world is about storytelling and developing narratives through marketing. I open that talk by telling the audience that The Beverly Hillbillies and The Dukes of Hazzard have done more to bias the world against my neck of the woods than anything an actual hillbilly has ever done.
The media created a narrative about mountain people based on misperception and caricature. And the world bought it, hook, line, and sinker. I then proceed in the talk to illustrate my experience and wisdom to show them that even they … the flatlanders and city dwellers of the world … can learn something from a redneck.
But as my fire of youth has settled into the warm glow of experience, I’ve also realized the way to convince people of the power and potential one finds from Pikeville to Paducah is not to tell, but show.
BitSource was a revelation for me. Seeing my friends Justin Hall, Lynn Parrish and Rusty Justice walk the walk, not talk the talk, opened my eyes. No longer were we just gathering in meetings to brainstorm ideas on how to bring jobs back to Kentucky. Someone was bringing jobs back to Kentucky! And in a way that got the rest of the world really interested in our ingenuity, not our genealogy.
Traveling to Boston or Austin or San Francisco to brag about all the smart people Kentucky has produced in the last 40 years isn’t going to change the way the world sees us. Working together to build a new economy for the Commonwealth will.
Opportunity is Here
The circumstances of the last 18 months have changed everything and everyone. For the better part of a year, most of us shifted our work spaces to homes and our conference rooms to Zooms. And most of our businesses didn’t fall apart.
Work-from-home used to be a gold carrot hanging on the end of the HR string at forward-thinking companies. Now 34% of home workers say they’d rather quit than go back to the office. Even more impressive is that 64% of employees at large companies said they’d give up $30,000 per year in salary to be able to remain home rather than return.
Like it or not, COVID proved we could do it and succeed. Many companies even report improved productivity and profitability due to shifting to a remote workforce.
Do you grasp what this means?
A brilliant marketing mind doesn’t need to live in Miami, Chicago or Los Angeles to build strategies or creative campaigns for big brands. An engineer doesn’t need to be in Boston or Seattle to work on big projects. A talented radio producer doesn’t have to move to New York City to work on a syndicated radio show.
All of those jobs can happen in Cadiz. Or Russell Springs. Or up Mouthcard.
Prior to COVID-19 ravaging the world, the hot buzzword in business was the “gig economy.” That took work-from-home a step further. Now almost 60 million Americans work for themselves, as freelancers, contract labor, consultants or creators.
One of the more popular career aspirations mentioned by school-aged children in 2021? An influencer.
Hey, don’t laugh! The content creator economy is set to hit $4 billion in the United States next year. I’ve banked a good deal of my work at Cornett, a book and a podcast on it.
But we can’t just sit here and write articles about it. We have to grab the reins and steer that colt across the finish line.
I’d like to see us start teaching and training for that type of worker and career in schools … elementary schools. I’d like to see more initiatives like BitSource that take yesterday’s labor force and transform them into tomorrow’s and organizations like Kentucky to the World working to make sure that these narratives begin to replace the barrage of barefoot stereotypes that have plagued us for generations.
We need to seize the opportunity the world has presented all Kentuckians. That opportunity is here, as in now. But it is also here, as in Kentucky.
It may have taken me 30 years to figure it out, but Jody Thompson knew it then.
We don’t have to leave home to have the world.
Jason Falls is the author of three marketing books, host of two podcasts and the senior influence strategist at Cornett, the Lexington-based advertising agency named Ad Age’s Small Agency Gold Winner in the Southeast for 2021. The Pikeville native is a regular contributor to Entrepreneur.com and recognized as an expert in social media and influencer marketing by the likes of Forbes, The USA Today, Yahoo! News, BusinessWeek and the BBC.
