The 100 Billion Message Mission, with CDN’s Jeremy Hase

Social media has given us something remarkable. A megaphone, a way to speak to the entire world instantly and for a surprisingly affordable price. It's a tool that's tailor made for sharing a message as big as the Gospel and yet sometimes it feels like we're not quite sure how to use it. But what if we could harness that power?

What if we could reach billions with the message of hope and truth that has the power to change lives? So basically the vision is 100 billion messages going out starting at the beginning of January of 2023 to the end of 2022. 100 billion messages to go out in the next 10 years. That's Jeremy Haas, the founder of Christian Digital Network and he's not afraid to think big. On today's show Jeremy shares his bold vision of reaching the world for Christ using the power of digital media.

I'm Luke Ferruccia and you're listening to the Blue Vineyard Podcast. Hi everybody, welcome back to the Blue Vineyard Podcast. My name is Luke and I am here with Jeremy Haas. Jeremy, welcome to the show.

Oh, thank you. So just to give our listeners a little bit of backstory, I was introduced to Jeremy some months ago and in the intervening timeframe we have worked together on projects and been collaborating on big ideas. So when we decided that we were going to do this series where we're interviewing the founders of digital service companies that are serving the Adventist ecosystem, Jeremy was just an obvious person to have on the show. Thank you for making the time and I'm really excited to give you the opportunity and some platform to share what you've been learning and doing and growing and where you've been.

Oh, excellent. I'm looking forward to it, Luke. So just maybe so people can have a bit of context around who Jeremy is. Can you give us a little bit of your background, where you're from and what you do?

Yeah, absolutely. So I'm Jeremy Haas and I'm the Chief Visionary Officer for Christian Digital Network. So Christian Digital Network I founded two years ago and so basically what we do is that we help ministries like yourself to be able to have digital broadcasting. So we developed the concept of being able to have both organic and paid outreach platforms to help spread the word in a big and mighty way.

So I'm based in the Twin Cities, Minnesota area and so I'm married to Anna Lynn and then I have one son, Grant. That's great. And is that where you've always been? You've always been around that area?

Or did you grow up somewhere else? So I grew up in Fargo, North Dakota. Okay. All right.

So first up, what is your background? What's your profession before you were doing CDN? Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, so prior to CDN, so I worked 25 plus years in corporate America.

And so I did a variety of roles. So my first major role, I did sales for eight years. I was one of the top mortgage producers back in the refinance stage in the early 2000s. And then I graduated with my master's degree and then I did a lot of, I kind of went around the block and caught a bit in corporate America.

But predominantly I had a very strong marketing background and especially in analytics and market segmentation. So that's predominantly what I did. I've worked for major medical device companies in my career, a good cultural companies. So some of the very big Fortune 500 companies in my corporate experience.

So I love being in ministry. It's been just a great venture. Yeah, that would be a big shift. Yes, absolutely.

That being your background, what about the spiritual piece of the puzzle? So are you a lifelong adventist? Like when did you join the Adventist Church? Yeah, no, absolutely.

So basically my story begins discovering Adventism back in 2014. So my son and I, we took a road trip to Yellowstone National Park and then on the way we stopped at a museum in South Dakota. And my son said, oh, I just want to check out this really cool castle. And it turned out that I said, let's just go there for, you know, 10, 15 minutes.

Well, four hours later, I was a conter, the pastor, you know, that runs the museum. And I told him, pastor, I read the Bible cover to cover in the past three months. He said, really, what do you know about the Bible? And so he started quizzing me on a lot of things about the Bible.

And I'm like, man, I don't know anything about the Bible, even though I read it in a cover to cover. So that's where it started my journey. So that was in 2014. And then basically from there, I stayed in touch with this pastor and we're still very well connected.

And so basically I decided that I wanted to get deeper into the word. So then I discovered all of these YouTubers that are out there, like it is written, amazing facts. It's a type of ministry Bible flock box at the time. So basically I invested thousands of hours, you know, in YouTube to learn more about our faith.

And it was in October of 2018. After watching it is written from John Bradshaw, he had me convince like, OK, I need to get baptized. And it was October 2018 when I got baptized. That's so interesting to me that you are the product, essentially, of to a large degree of online evangelism.

And and that's the ministry that you're now engaged with. That's what led you into a greater understanding in the first place. You know what my vision is, is that for me to piece all of it together to even know whether the ministry was part of the remnant church or not, that was another layer involved. So basically it took a lot of pieces of being able to put it all together.

So basically the vision of Christian Digital Network is to be able to have a platform to where seekers are going to be able to find the truth a lot more easier and relevant. So so far, like I know you've got big plans, but so far of the work that you have done with CDN, what is the what's the work that you're most proud of? Well, I would say there was a couple major pieces that we did for one of our ministry partners. So basically we were able to get between 10 to 15 million views on them.

And I've seen all the comments that they have come through on those has been amazing. When we were first starting digital broadcasting, being able to help our ministry partners to be able to come up with the right video content to where they're constantly getting better view rates and clicks and things like that. So eventually last year, we were able to engineer what we call Generation 2.5 right now. And so basically that has substantially brought up what the view rates are and getting much more higher engagement.

So I would say being able to develop that process to get better content. You have mentioned a couple of times this term of digital broadcasting that you're in the business of digital broadcasting. And most people would say I'm in the business of social media or whatever, but you're quite intentional in that language. How do you think about digital broadcasting as a category that you're working on and perhaps how it relates to previous forms of broadcasting?

Yeah, no, absolutely. So basically we wanted to differentiate ourselves at Christian Digital Network. So basically yes, I mean technically we are the roots of Christian Digital Network. We are digital marketers, but basically we wanted to go beyond that.

So basically our concept is there's TV station like 3ABN is a more hope channel is a satellite TV station that broadcasts out on a satellite basis. So our vision is that we want to have a very similar concept of content and be able to do it in the digital space and utilizing all the multi channels that there is to be able to broadcast out the 3D Injust message. And from in your experience with CDN, what has been the most difficult part of growing CDN? Okay, well, I mean there's definitely a couple of challenges.

So first challenge, content is starting to get shorter and shorter. When the content that we had to start off with people were still utilizing what we call now generation one material to where it was like 15 minutes to half hour kind of content. The view rates weren't very good utilizing generation one content. So we had a lot of challenges at first, but with utilizing video editing and getting things a lot more shorter, we're starting to see much more improvements on that.

And in your interactions with the leadership of what you're doing, the entrepreneurship, I've noticed that entrepreneurs typically have a particular skill that qualifies them as a superhero in that area. Like what would you say is your superpower? What is the thing that you personally excel at that is has been really beneficial in what you're doing? Well, I would say, going back to what I was telling you about my corporate experience, so I would say two things.

So number one, probably because I have a very strong sales background has been very helpful as far as being able to drive forward the process and being able to do a lot of the innovation that CDN has been able to accomplish in the past couple of years. But I would also say the on the marketing side would definitely be the concept of understanding how important breaking down segments are going to be, especially when we talk about breaking it down to the point to where we understand exactly how a person likes to view spiritual to related content. So it's going to be very crucial for major and vaginalism that we get the segmentation broken down as small as possible because I see the power of that in my past experience. Who would you say are your dream clients, just so people get the picture of the kinds of people that you are aiming to work with?

What would be a picture of your dream client? Yeah. Okay. So one thing that we look for, I mean, both for whenever we're looking to hire at CDN and also for clients is how humble the client is or the potential candidate is.

So that's very important because this is a new space that we're looking to innovate and what worked yesterday is not working today. But as I told you, as an example, long content, medium content just doesn't perform as well. And so if you're humble enough to say, okay, do you know what? We need to change our strategies quick.

That's going to be a very important key right there. Number two that we look for is is hungry. We're hungry and the soul saving, right? So that's basically a very important aspect that we're looking for clients, clients that are hungry to be high performers in their space.

And then number three is making sure that there's honesty is also very important value of CDN and then also working either with clients or hiring for new employees at CDN. So I'm interested in your input on something that's happening in the social media space. So there is this trend away from truly social media to what I would probably call algorithmic media, right? Where we're not so much clustered around individual creators as we are around algorithms and the algorithm serves whatever the algorithm thinks that we want to watch and we're training those algorithms to serve well, to serve up things that will capture our attention for longer and longer timeframes.

What do you think of that trend? One is it a good one and secondly, what does it mean for ministries creating content? Yeah, I mean, it's definitely been, you know, very interesting being able to work with algorithms because one of the things that will they'll tell you about working with algorithms, especially on the paid outreach part and then also in the short stream. So basically one thing that is that we're constantly seeing changes pretty much not monthly, but it seems like every quarter, every three, four months that we definitely see major changes and shifts in how the algorithms are working.

One of the things that's been challenging for a lot of ministry. So I'll give you a good example of, you know, in the past six years that has happened. So a lot of these social media sites, especially YouTube in particular and to a certain degree Facebook. So if you understand data and if you understand the data triangle, right?

So basically at the tip of the triangle is going to be the most focus as far as what your content is. And then at the bottom is the greatest base. So if you take a look at an average ministry and if you're going to break it into at least three parts of that triangle. So at the bottom would say Christian, then the middle would say prophecy for most of them.

And then this is say, Adventist is the top. Basically what they've been doing is that they've been taking out that layer of Christian. So when you take a look at the people that started YouTube being back 10 years ago, nine years ago, and you take a look at their numbers. So the reason why that their numbers are substantially higher than anyone that got in after them is because they spent more time in that bottom tier of everything.

So we're starting to see a shift to where they're starting to get what more granular on there. So what you're saying is that if I'm understanding correctly, what you're saying is the algorithms are filtering out the broader sections of the audience and they're only showing you to the people that are more and more closely aligned with the content that you're producing. So that means practically for ministries that less people that are outside of the Adventist ecosystem are going to be seeing your content by design because the algorithm is trying to show people more and more tightly, tightly niche content that's around their interests. And so the ultimate goal of the algorithm is to show Adventist content to Adventists only, whereas our goal is to make the invitation to as many people as possible outside of that bubble.

Is that a fair statement? Yeah, exactly. And that's where you have to really understand the benefit of paid outreach and you have to augment paid outreach to be able to get to get to an audience like a Hillsong United. So Hillsong is one of the largest that's out there.

Now the good news is, is that if you know how to make good content in the short stream, the short stream did pull back a little bit, some of that. So we are seeing a little bit more flexibility as far as getting your content in the, at least in that middle part of the triangle versus your long and medium are going to be a lot more tighter on top of that triangle. So just keep that in mind in order for us to be very effective in evangelism and potentially complete the mission, we have to, have to augment with on paid outreach. So the way you can get into those other places.

Yeah, that was one of the transformative things when I was first talking to you because my, my default setting per say, not that I have anything against paid media, but I've, I've always preferred organic because in my thinking it's like, well, you want to earn your place, right? If you're producing content that's good enough, it will reach the people and that, that, that has been true, I think in the past, but it's, I don't think that it's true anymore. It's the content system. It's a pay to play scenario.

If you want to put your message in front of new people, then you need to pay for that. And on some platforms, if you want to put your message in front of the people you already have, you have to pay for that. So I think that that is transformative when you understand that you're never actually going to achieve a truly broad audience without thinking about paid media. That's an essential building block of the structure.

And I think that's really something that's really changed. And I think it's something we have to really acknowledge as, as ministries. Yeah, because one of the reasons why these platforms, you got to think about, you know, they're in business, right? So basically does two things by, by having that compression, I'm happening at the top of that triangle, the data triangle.

So number one, it helps their profitability. So it kind of, you know, like, oh, I'm not getting, you know, the penetration correctly. So they kind of forces the content makers to utilize more of the paid advertising. So it's a strategy on their part.

But on the other side of the coin, remember back 10 years ago, like, oh, why did they recommend this? It seems like a way up and it wasn't as your user experience wasn't as great. So it's all about user experience as well. So it's actually on both sides.

And what I think is kind of interesting is that we that work in this, in this media space, we look at these, at these changes. And from our perspective, we're thinking, oh, you know, why are they making me pay for that? These are my followers. But the interesting thing is, if you go back a generation of media and you're looking at TV and radio, is there anyone that's truly surprised by the fact that they have to pay to have their services displayed on those platforms?

No, because it's a mature platform and it costs money to run. And so that money needs to be generated somewhere. And what we're looking at here in this digital setting is, I think what you're explaining there is that the social media companies, they need to have that, they need to justify the financially justify those views. And so if they're not getting it from the creators, they're going to get it from advertising for the users.

And so if that is not justifying the algorithm showing our ministry related content to the people we want to show it to, then that naturally is then on us to pay for the privilege of getting in front of the eyeballs that we're trying to get in front of. Yep. No, absolutely. And going back to one of your questions as far as like one of the biggest challenges that we're encountering as well in the paid ad space.

So what we're seeing right now, it started really with the COVID era to where we started seeing like if you had the word COVID or pandemic or anything like that anywhere in the video, pretty much Google for sure would always shoot it down as far as like not putting it into the ad stream. And so we're starting to see now more and more, you know, where they're starting to say, Oh, it's Christian content. So we're going to limit your audience. It's just getting, you know, it's getting tighter and tighter.

Guys, we only have very little bit of time left to be able to complete this commission. And social media is the place where everyone is at. So we got to get going right now. And luckily we still have the paid outreach, which is the most effective.

Here's what I'll tell you what I like about social media more than any other platform TV radio or anything like that, because you can give like that exact perfect message to someone at a second. I mean, it's just, it's amazing like how well that the data has been refined to where let's say for example, if someone says in the search, you know, I'm having issues with depression, for example, right? And so basically in the two seconds, they can actually have our content to be delivered to them, you know, using one of the mythology of search paid ad, but also it does retain in there. So even if you use in stream YouTube, then they're going to be able to get served that particular content whenever they're watching the, you know, material, especially when you have a paid ad.

And that's another big advantage that you have with paid ads and like, oh, wow, I mean, wow, how did this happen? How did I get served and feel this love, you know, immediately is because of the technology is that our favorite for that? Yeah. Yeah, that's great.

That's an excellent opportunity. So I'd like to shift gears and I want to talk about your big vision. So if you can outline the big vision that's coming up over the next few years. Yeah, absolutely.

Super exciting. So basically in 2014, I was watching all this content and I had a realization even back in 2014, I'm like, because I was watching all of this content. And then next year, you know, a car ad comes on a insurance ad would come on. I'm like, man, there has to be an opportunity when I found out that you can get ad space for less than one penny for the most part.

I was like, why is it the Remedy Church taking advantage of this situation? That was in 2014, my revelation on that. So then I was just going through just a bad time in life in 2014, 2015. And my birthday of 2015 is when I really had, you know, I was just at a super low point.

You know how a lot of times that we get underneath like, or what do you want me to do with my life? It was so bad that I was prone on the floor asking for that guidance. And that's where the vision began because I knew the contents of utilizing the ad space even a year before that. So basically the vision is 100 billion messages going out starting at the beginning of January of 2023 to the end of 2022, 100 billion messages to go out in the next 10 years.

And then basically between 2025 to 2030, somewhere between 70 to 80% of those messages going out in that compressed five year timeframe. That's how powerful we need to be. Can we put that in context of how many messages have already gone out? Yes.

Okay. So first of all, let me kind of define messages. Yeah, that's true. That's an obvious question.

Yeah. So messages, it comes into a couple forms. So basically whenever, so in the ad stream, so anytime that you attempt to place an ad in front of someone. So as you know, in YouTube, you have a thing that comes up that says skip five seconds.

So basically if you skip anytime between the five seconds and 30 or 29 seconds, then basically that doesn't count as a view. It's only one that 30 seconds happen that is counted as a view in the eyes of YouTube. So then basically when you take a look at the views that the remnant system has produced so far. So our calculation is we have produced about 900 million views since the inception of YouTube.

And this is a part of the CDN index, right? So this is an index of all of the Adventist channels that are doing ministry on YouTube that you do a like a reindex every year basically. Yes, exactly. We'll be publishing a new one pretty soon here.

But yes, and then basically as of right now, the Adventist system produces approximately 100 million views per year. So that's where it's at. So if you can understand. It sounds like a lot, but in the scope of what we're talking about being necessary, it's really a drop in the bucket, right?

Exactly. So basically to get to the 100 billion messages, that's actually impressions that we're looking for. But on average, our content generally gets about 33% as far as an impression rate. So basically how we're going to understand when we reach the 100 billion is that we're going to look at YouTube because that's the only platform that you can look at all of the ministries to understand where they stand and everything.

So somewhere between 12 billion to about 24 billion, somewhere in that range will give us and plus the other platforms you can't track will give us that indicator that we're at the 100 billion. But as of right now, we're pretty much on the 120 year plan. Which doesn't feel very sustainable to me. That doesn't feel like a good plan.

Yeah, obviously we don't know the time that the Lord is coming, but we still have to make that effort to get there. And so basically in order to achieve a plan, first of all, you have to have a vision. So what's that number? 100 billion impressions. And then what's the timeframe?

Now we define it in 10 years. And so we have to have those metrics in place in order to accomplish a goal. And so what would you say, because I know when I first spoke to you about this vision, I love the sound of the vision, but I felt like, wow, this is just too big. And I really struggled with that.

What do you say to people who say, Jeremy, this is too big. This is something that is like way bigger than what anybody could hope to coordinate. I know. Yeah, I say, I struggle with that.

I foresee you. But if God wants to complete this, complete this commission and complete the work, we think He is in charge of all of this. And I've seen miracles happen. Ms.

Furs, when I said, Lord, I'll go ahead and do this. Yes, I went through the, of the Autosythea, when I said, Lord, I'll do this in November of 2015, I went through the wilderness from 2015 to April of 2021. So I went through a mass of amount of being in the wilderness in that timeframe. But I kept on saying, Lord, I'm not seeing progress in that six years.

Well, I did see progress, but it was just a lot slower than, than I would like it to be. But ever since, since then, I was like, whoa, I can't believe like the big steps that I've been taking. So basically what I tell everyone in my team is that every day we have to wake up and we have to say, Lord, what's the step on the mountain that I have to take today? Longest we're willing to take that step every day, we're going to make it.

If we don't take the step, we're not going to make it. If we just hang around at, at the trailhead. That's true. That's very true.

So the people that are hearing this now and saying, this is amazing. How do I get involved with that? Can you speak to that? One, how can people get involved?

What are the different kinds of help and participation that are going to be needed? And how can people get in touch with you to offer to get involved? Yeah, no, absolutely. Okay.

So a couple of things, you know, if you want to be involved in the ministry itself, we wouldn't probably need anywhere from, you know, about a thousand to 1500 people to engineer a big team like this. So there's going to be a lot of opportunity if you have any digital marketing experience working with machine learning. That's the big next thing that we definitely need to work on. We need to get our machine learning application up and running.

And then we're going to need a lot of people with, you know, with video editing. So there's multi different ways. So let me just tell you three ways. So I told you one, you can, you know, work as a profession in this and there's going to be a lot of openings and they're coming on and, you know, CDN, we're looking for like private commanders, we're looking for all kinds of people in like your firm as well.

And then number two, so one of the things that is going to be needed to complete the work is that what we have discovered is the concept of people, you know, liking spiritual content from a person that's most like themselves. Okay. And so basically that's what I was telling you about segmentation. So we have to break down the segments into the smallest possible segments that there is.

So that means that everyone now has an opportunity per se to be kind of like a pastor, right? And so in a digital format. So we are launching our nonprofit arm called Reach in the World. So we now have the entity and so now we're going to be going live with it.

And so basically one of the things that Reach in the World is going to be doing is going to be seeking out the remnant church to come out from the views. You might have a story that you're, that you want to be able to be a witness to people. And then all you have to do is just record yourself. And then next year, you know, it's going to go in front of millions of people like yourself.

And so that's, so that's a big opportunity that you have. You might want to just record one video. Just one. Or you might want to say, do you know what?

I want to do 20 videos. And I'm passionate about a certain subject or I'm going to be a personal witness or you have an expertise in something we need to have that breakdown of, there's five segments that we need to break down the people into for this to work successfully. The 100 billion messages to go out. And then number three, there is cost with this.

So of course, major cost with this. So basically, you know, being a financial contributor as well, will be a big thing as well. So we all have to come together to pitch in to make this work. No, that's, that's great.

And so just to, just to take a bit of a step back and zoom out and look at the, the Adventist digital ecosystem as a whole, from your perspective, what are the gaps that need to be filled? Yeah, absolutely. So, so I would say the biggest thing right now, I know I get people to tackle a little bit. Basically, the way that we work right now is that we're a bunch of independent cats.

So what we've been tasked to do, I believe Luke, is that we're kind of like the cat hurters right now to get multi people to come together to be, to be able to do that. And that's why we created reaching the world, reaching the world is going to be that one entity that we can all collectively go to as individual, you know, marketing companies or like machine learning engineers and things like that will all collect together at reach in the world to make this project work. So that's probably the number one thing is just the cooperation of and be able to say, do you know what, in order to complete the work, we have to come together. And I call that the dog sled team.

So we got a, that's, so that's number one. But some of the major areas that's in critical need right now is number one machine learning is probably the biggest thing because what we want to be able to do is that we want to be able to push all of these billions of messages into conversions and in order to be able to get that right path, we got to be able to utilize. Yep, exactly. Is that is the machine learning application.

So we need a lot of, we're going to need some machine learning engineers out there. So that's probably the biggest need currently. And then I would say for our Christian Digital Network, where we struggled the most with, we can always find video editors any day of the week at copywriters, creatives. But the biggest thing is that we're having a hard time finding anyone that has digital marketing, campaign manager experience that's, that's tied to the App Inc. system.

So that's probably the biggest need that we have, at least on the CVN side. And if you were to look at the, like all of the other, the all of the other cats that need to be herded, what would you say are some of the most interesting things that are happening in the advantage digital space outside of what you're doing at CDN? Yeah, so I mean, I would say what's been the most interesting is the gravitation right now in the digital space. Because I see it, you know, a couple of different areas.

So there's seems like there's two major like camps that I kind of see forming right now. So there's one camp of that a lot of people are coming together to become, to create like games and things like that. So that seems to be a major trend that we're seeing. So a lot of people want to make these video games and things like that.

And then on our side is more on, you know, gravitating more towards, you know, quickly getting into the short space because that's, because we have to move on from formats and medium formats in order to be able to do that. And I'm seeing just amazing amount of creativity that that's going around. I'm trying to get people, you know, bigger numbers and things like that organically. So yeah.

That's great. So just to, to wrap us up, two things, a two pronged question. One is if anything that has been said in this podcast is someone has found interesting and they would like to talk to you. One, how do they do that?

And two, is there any final message, any, anything that you want to say or ask of the audience? Yeah, absolutely. So first of all, become a subscriber on our Facebook and in YouTube page and LinkedIn. So those are the three pages that we like people to become subscribers of.

So Christian digital network. So we're definitely growing that. And then we also are looking for email addresses because we want to have one of the biggest email databases as well. All right.

So basically, we need to come together to complete this commission. We have a great platform in the digital space. It's so precise. This is just the most amazing time in the speed and accuracy that we have.

And not only that, here's something that's super amazing. It's the, the, probably the absolutely cheapest method that has ever been to do that. So I'll give you some examples. So we can do, we can do a lot of outreach is as little as you won't get this Luke.

I've, I've done campaigns as little as a 20th of a, of a sense of one penny. So just imagine you can get five out reaches for one penny in certain campaigns. So most campaigns you can do definitely for under one penny or close to one penny. So it's never been cheaper to be able to get the message up and people resonate with it really well.

And they interact with it because there's that component that they get to click. And especially if we have that machine learning application to where they're going to be able to offer their journey. So just amazing time in history to be, to be able to do this. And 80% of the world right now has capability to have, you know, digital access.

So basically when they say every year can hear, there's a big possibility because of that. Yeah. That's amazing. Jeremy, thank you so much for sharing all of that.

Thank you for being on the show. Really appreciate everything that you're doing and look forward to collaborating together in the future, but I really appreciate you. Also, I believe this is your first podcast experience. So thank you for making our podcast the first ones.

All right. Thank you so much. All right. No worries.

God bless. Thank you everyone for listening. If you enjoyed this, please share it with a friend, leave a review for us on wherever you get your podcasts. And we look forward to catching you guys for the next episode.

God bless.