I was down in Edinburgh last week seeing a potential client that I sincerely hope becomes a client. One of the things that came up when we were chatting was that they feel like with their current provider, let's just say this current provider isn't really a legit agency. It's like a one person organisation that uses a bunch of probably low cost economy freelancers, and they don't have full super admin access to their website platform. And they're kind of slightly nervous about saying to this person, look, we're going to go and use another agency. Could we have all the logins? And can we please take complete control of our website? And these guys are serious business people. And the guy I met, lovely guy. He's inherited the mess, but it just still astonishes me that there are businesses out there who are, for all intents and purpose, being held ransom by, I don't know. An idiot. Okay, welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. I can't even remember the title of the podcast where, um, me, Dave Robinson, and my, uh, colleague.
Oh, Alex. I think people know who I am by now.
My colleague Alex. Um, basically talk about our week at the coalface of digital marketing.
Mhm.
Is that fair?
Yeah. Yeah, definitely. It's a Monday. Good. We're doing last week, I suppose. Yeah.
Um, and then this is in fact, I haven't told you this before we started. This is in fact the last podcast. We're not doing them anymore.
Oh, no.
I've just thought there's too much energy going into this. Um, too much time being wasted.
I mean, to be fair, you are getting on in years and have a finite amount of energy.
I do have a finite, finite amount of time left on this planet.
Do you know that's a thing that Donald Trump legitimately believes? What? I've only found this out the other day that we're all born like a battery with a finite amount of energy. It's why he doesn't exercise, apparently because.
You save energy.
Burns through his reserve of energy. Yeah, that's a real thing.
That's why he's the shape he is. Um.
He made Leslie laugh. Then I hope the microphones picked that up.
I, um, I was only joking because it's April the first, although it is after lunchtime. Is that a thing on April the first? You can only do April Fools until after. Until. Until lunchtime.
I don't know.
Yeah. And why do the French call it something like Poisson d'avril? Why? Nobody can hear. You'll have to come and talk into a microphone, Leslie, if you want to tell people why the French call it Poisson d'avril.
There's a link with Christianity, obviously, since fish is one of the symbol of the Christian faith.
It's boring. Sorry. Off you go. I thought it was like some really cool kind of anecdotes.
Nowadays people are not really believers, so I think we lost that a long time ago. And we just like to like glue fake paper fish in the back of people.
Uh.
But do you play pranks on people the same? It's like like April fool. Okay. Yeah, I was kind of hoping it would be like, you know, it would involve garlic and butter and stuff and, you know, um.
Poor Leslie.
Uh, okay. Um, right. I've got some stuff on my list, but I'm not letting you see it because you'll steal my ideas. Tell me about your week. Tell me something that happened in your week in in the digital marketing world that we can, uh, talk about.
Um, there's a few.
Or something you want to talk about anything really?
Well, yeah. So I guess one of the things I really want to talk about is this whole March update, which is sort of finished now. Um, is.
This a Google update? Yeah, right. You didn't say that. You just said a March update. It could have been anything. I mean, I just got updated in March. It could have been talking about that.
This is a digital marketing podcast, so.
Well, we don't always talk just about digital marketing, do we?
That's true. Anyway, that is something that has been told to us.
Get on with.
It. Yeah. Google update, uh, finished rolling out. Um, there's a huge sense of sort of, uh, entitlement and, and anger and sadness going on online. Um.
It's good to.
Hear. Yeah.
Like entitlement, anger and sadness. Oh, explore. Please dig into that. Tell me all about it.
I'm a big fan of and spend a lot of time on Reddit and especially some of the digital marketing subreddits. And it's just been effectively what Google have been rolling out is an update to their helpful content, um, algorithm or the bit of their algorithm that's supposed to detect whether content is helpful or unhelpful. They say that the internet's getting cluttered up with spam. And basically all of the digital marketing subreddits have just been filling up with all these webmasters who are sort of they're complaining, you know, Google's ruined my business.
I occasionally dip into Reddit and I'm sure people listen to this. Some do, and some won't even know what you're talking about. So the subreddits are just topics.
Yeah, they're like forums. Yeah. They're like individual forums around a topic. Yeah. Um, so it fills up with all of these people sort of saying, oh, Google's eviscerated my business. You know, I've gone from getting ten thousand visits a day to zero overnight. My site's been completely if.
You've gone from ten thousand to zero. And I know you've only said that for effect, but. Well, you were doing something really strange.
Well, yeah. So basically what it turns out has happened at the end of this update is it turns out that, you know, all the affiliate marketing sites that like review children's pushchairs or headphones or music gear, to be fair. Um, and then basically send you a link to Amazon and when you buy through that, they get a kickback. Google's basically just deleted all of them. Wow. Most of them are gone now, much to the eye. Yeah.
Apparently like affiliate marketing is now not a thing.
Well, I mean, it definitely is still a thing, but basically everybody who's been doing it badly, as in, you know, just sort of like setting up.
For.
It. Yeah. Writing rubbish content and then hoping that it ranks well, have finally been hit by a massive banhammer. I mean, and it has sort of deleted huge banhammer.
Yeah, I like that.
So yeah.
I'm glad I came today. I'm glad I turned up.
Lots of internet terminology. Yeah. Um, it's just removed an entire sort of niche of websites that have existed for a very long time. And to be fair, I really hate them. I don't know if you've ever, when you've been shopping for music gear or something, found all of these sort of like ten top ten X, Y, and Z or like this is the one you must buy. And they're always, yeah, appalling.
So for clarity, you, you buy, um, either buy a subscription to Wix or, or webflow or even HubSpot or something like that. You put up loads and loads of rubbish content, most of it written by ChatGPT or even worse, even content spinners pre AI content.
I'm gonna say even worse content writers. And I was like, yeah, they are.
But basically you have, you then have a website that's got like ten thousand pages about prams, and therefore you're going to get loads of pram traffic and then you ram it full of adverts. And when people click the adverts, they go and buy something from Amazon or somewhere else. You get the kickback, as you've already said. That's it in a nutshell. That's what affiliate marketing is.
Yeah. And those sites have literally no value as far as Google is concerned. No. But for the longest time, Google couldn't tell because the content is long and it's full of the right words and it looks.
How have they told then? How have they been able to single out these affiliate websites? Because there's bound to be some collateral damage in there where legit sites have been hammered as well.
A lot of collateral damage. Yeah. And that's the thing that's really interesting about it. I mean, we're not really sure how they've done it or what they've looked for. We but well, the internet at large, the internet.
So when you say we, you mean the internet, SEO people like you. You're one of the very important people. So we, we have decided we we think it's a bit presumptuous.
So impress your knob Ed button before this starts.
No, but I did have a Red bull again.
Yeah. You're right. We nasty people that work in SEO like to like you. Yeah. On the fringes of the internet and sort of like little witches, covens and talk about how to.
Coven or coven.
Coven, I guess. Yeah. Um, how to game Google. Um, but but no, it's quite interesting because one of the things that Google have specifically said is, I don't know if you remember when AI content first started coming out, I'm just looking over here because I'm trying to pull up the update while I do it. So I can quote from it directly. But if you remember when AI content started to become a thing, Google said don't use it. And then they very quickly changed gears and they said.
Did they ever?
And then they said, you can use it, but use it carefully.
Well, only if you add value to it. If you read it and you're happy that it actually provides people with genuinely useful insights, then you can use. Yeah. All the usual.
Because what was really going on was they couldn't tell the difference. That's right. So they've now changed tack again. And what they now say is that it's scaled content that they don't like. So so any attempt to produce content at a scale that Google thinks is unrealistic will get you penalised. And that's how they've been catching all these affiliate marketing sites because they one of the things that they do that leaves a fingerprint is they publish large amounts of copy in a very short time frame. So they might publish three articles a day or something like that. And Google looks at that and says, okay, it's the scale of this that's unrealistic. So they're saying, we don't care if it's AI.
This is the this is a bit like, um, John's dog food shop that's in a tiny little place that that can't possibly be of interest to anybody else has a website and that website's got one hundred thousand links to it.
Yeah.
It's kind of like a massive red flag that something weird's going on here. Yeah. So that's what they're doing.
That's what they're looking at.
Now that's an interesting concept.
And well, what's particularly interesting is that back in the day, Google used to actually sort of reward sites for publishing content very quickly. You know, if you published huge amounts of content, like, oh, this is a really sort of hip and happening site. And that's a that's a thing that Google would say. I'm sure they.
Would say hip and happening.
But yeah, no. So it's now that's the key footprint they're looking for. And I think what's interesting is that a lot of people have got into the mindset of, we need to be publishing fresh content quite frequently. And okay, it's unlikely that you're going to be doing it at the scale of an affiliate marketing site, but it's still interesting to know that what was previously once a good tactic could now be considered a red flag. And I think back to your point about collateral damage, that's the thing that's really interesting about it, because a lot of people will have been hit in this that weren't really trying to game the system.
But mostly people that were gaming the system.
Mostly people that were gaming the system.
Yeah, it's a nice way to earn a living in it. If you, you know, you put all the upfront work in, you build a website, establish these rankings, then you literally sit there while the checks roll in.
Yeah.
You do. That's how it works, isn't it? You know, I mean, all right, if you're in a competitive niche, you've got to you've got to keep hammering out the content. I mean, I think it's, I think it's a really good thing if they've managed to do it, but already I imagine there'll be affiliate marketers who figured out how to.
Just change tack, won't you and change.
Change their tactics and somehow they'll they'll manage to game again, game the system.
Again. But I think this is the really, the thing that's really interesting about SEO, that sometimes I think people who don't really know or care that much about it don't realise is that it is sort of a constant arms race, really, isn't it? You're constantly looking for ways of.
Yeah, it's tedious, isn't it?
Well, I find it quite interesting, but yeah, it is pretty tedious when it's.
Because there's so much at stake. Yeah. You know, in a, in a, in an equitable world, like good content would be rewarded. Hard work would be rewarded, originality would be rewarded. But in actual fact, what's happened in the last ten years is, is tail has been rewarded.
Yeah. Well, that's the thing, isn't it? It's a problem of Google can't employ enough people to sit there and check.
And the problem is, as you've already alluded to, is and we'll maybe get on to I it's on my list, but AI means that scale is available to anybody for twenty quid a month. You can get ChatGPT four and just get it to churn out two thousand word bullshit blogs. You know, like the rate of ten a day if you want to.
They are bullshit, though. I think that's.
Mostly, yeah.
I mean, Google have an interesting take. They just call it unoriginal content. And I think that that's all.
AI content is unoriginal, isn't it? Because it's a copy of something else. Yeah.
And it can't think for itself. So yeah.
Speaking about Trump.
Yes.
Which you were, did I hear at the weekend listening to the radio? I think it might have been me. Geoff Norcott podcast, possibly. And they were talking about, um, is it Larry or Brin's ex-wife from Google is now on Team Trump.
Oh really? Yeah. I didn't know this.
She she ponied up like three million dollars to run some advert while the the Super Bowl was on for his camp.
Right.
Something like that. And and he's now like, not his running mate. Well he's. Yeah. Yeah. And it's one of the Google founders, Larry O'Brien. It's one of their it's one of theirs. Ex-Wife. As far as I'm aware.
Yeah. I mean, I do find that sort of thing that the intersect of politics and marketing quite frightening really. I mean, there's an awful lot of people who are very good at marketing themselves or their products, um, who are suddenly starting to sort of get involved in, in politics. Musk's a really obvious one. Um, but also people.
Do you see me write that down?
I can't read upside down. David.
Well read this.
Are you practicing? Yeah, yeah, he's been practicing that. Um, but yeah, no, I mean, and, um, Zuckerberg, all of these people, I mean, I guess it's fine. They have political views, right? And eventually those political views are going to come out. But I think it's quite worrying how much influence they can buy and how sort of unqualified they are. And they are unqualified. There's a thing Alice Cooper always says about rock stars, which is that you should never ask them about their politics because they're good musicians, but they know f*ck all about politics.
Yeah.
Yeah. And I think that's true of tech bros and tech founders in general.
I mean, my dear old dad who hasn't been with us now for a long time, he used to listen. Like if he was if we were watching the TV together, maybe we were watching something sporting. And the commentator would say, maybe we're watching some golf and.
It's not a sport.
Get yourself in a lot of trouble now. So maybe we were watching, um, something you'd be interested in then? I don't know, tiddlywinks. Tiddlywinks? Yeah, but you'd be watching something like a golf game of golf or a game of cricket or something like that. And the commentator would say, like, and here he is now the great man, blah, blah, blah.
Right.
And it's like, and my dad used to say, it's like, how do you know he's a great man. He's a great cricketer. He's a great golfer. All we know, he might beat his wife up. He might be an alcoholic. We just don't know. Well, you know, it's this idea that that we take one bit of, you know, people's I mean, I'm trying to think off the top of my head of people who are truly great men. Uh, you might argue that Obama is a great man, but.
He's probably got his own skeletons in his closet. Yeah, absolutely. I think that's a weird sort of logical fallacy, isn't it? We sort of associate greatness in one arena of life with greatness everywhere else.
Well, we.
Associate.
People who are wealthy as being somehow great. We elevate wealthy people. And, you know, they get they are given a platform because just because they're wealthy and then they open their mouth and bullshit comes out and or drivel. Yeah. And it's, you know, it's um, yeah. Anyway. Yeah. But you did mention Musk there, didn't you? Now, there was something I listened to again on, uh, Jeff Norco's, uh, what most People Think podcast and he was talking about, he was actually with, uh, Dominic Frisby. I mentioned this to you in the office earlier, and Dominic Frisby does these, you know, not a thing I'm a huge fan of, but the, you know, the funny songs, political bias, political funny songs. But Elon Musk had retweeted one of them and it had been viewed forty eight million times. And what that did is it increased his Twitter following by ten thousand five hundred people signing up for his newsletter. I mean, just look, think about those numbers. Forty eight million people saw it or at least viewed the video. Ten thousand and only five hundred people signed up for his newsletter as a direct result of it. And I think that's the thing that, you know, like we're talking about scale in content with your affiliate marketers and we talk about scale and big numbers a lot when we talk about digital marketing, but you know, we like, you know, we might work on a campaign for somebody and we produce, um, a fantastic piece of video or something like that. And it gets viewed, you know, sixty, seventy, eighty times, maybe a hundred times, you know, the chances of that turning into a piece of business immediately. When you think of forty eight million five hundred forty eight million people, five hundred people signed up to the newsletter. And, you know, and it was widely liked and applauded. It wasn't like forty eight million people viewed it and thought, what rubbish. Yeah, not at all.
Yeah. It's really interesting, isn't it. The sort of the the, the very small portion of the people that see something that will actually act on it.
Well, one thing we were talking about earlier is like, you know, you know, like you can't create viral content. He had no idea that that was going to be retweeted by Elon Musk and would then go viral. Did it go viral or did it just get retweeted by Elon Musk, which is the only reason it got viewed so many times. It didn't actually go viral, did it as such?
Not organically.
Not organically. I wouldn't have thought no. But anyway, okay, well, that was mundane and dull. What else have you got? Have you finished talking about the Google update?
I think, I think I've finished talking about the Google update. Yeah. Um, except I guess to say that if anything, it's just sort of like, um, another note to be very cautious about using AI content until we do know exactly what the impact will be.
Does this, does this take us back to that place that we've been to many times before where fundamentally, if you follow the rules of the game and don't try to game the system, and I realise I said game too often in that little piece of prose there. If you don't try and game the system, do you, in the long term stand a better chance of success? Or should you just be following one trick after another in order to succeed online? If you're a. For example, we work a lot with tech and engineering businesses. We even set our stall out that. That's primarily who we want to work with. The tech and engineering businesses benefit from following the little tricks and things. Or would they benefit from just playing it straight?
I think it's a really interesting question. I think it really does just depend on whether your.
Question came from me. Of course, it was interesting.
Um, I would respond to that. I think it really does depend on whether you're interested in medium or long term success. I mean, forget about the short term, right? Those tactics will always reward you in the short term. Absolutely. If you follow trends, if you I'm sure if you've been right at the front of chat, GPT three launching. When was that like last December two Decembers ago, something like that. And you've been there churning out articles and you'd written the sort of high and you'd got all of those rankings, you'd have got some short term gain from that. Um, medium term. I think you probably do succeed doing this sort of thing because it takes Google quite a while to catch up. Um, I just the thing for me is always with like tech and engineering, you're talking about companies that are going to be or plan to be in business for maybe a hundred years, sometimes maybe longer. Um, I mean, we work with companies that were sort of founded in eighteen eighty something. Um, and all that will happen is.
When I was a boy.
Yeah, yeah. You will eventually burn your domain, right? Eventually. Whatever tricks you've done, your website. Yeah, yeah, one of them will end up biting you on the arse. You'll end up either penalised or punished algorithmically by Google, which I think is in some ways worse. And the difference is that if you are penalised manually by Google, they'll tell you in Google Search Console that we've given you a penalty for doing something naughty, and that's bad, but you can fix it if you're punished algorithmically, as in Google's algorithm just decides that your website is crap. There's very little.
Yeah. Because broadly speaking, what Google do is when they see trends, they then adapt to just record their algorithm so that those tactics don't work, rather than try and find everybody who's breaking the rules and manually penalising them, they just go, right, we people are doing this thing, which is then gaming the search results. So we will just code record our algorithm so this thing no longer works well.
Another really interesting example of that pops up in their latest, so their March sort of roundtable thing where they tell everyone what they've done now that it's finished on their developer blog and they talk about expired domain abuse. I think we've talked about this before, because there's a couple of people in SEO that I follow that I quite like who do this a lot. And what basically the tactic is that in order to build authority for their website, they will buy old and expired domains that used to have relevant websites on them. So like a company that's gone bust or somebody that's stopped publishing or something like that, they'll buy the domain and they'll point it at their website. And for ages, that was a really good tactic. For ages. It was a sort of like Google approved tag. I mean, specifically say you couldn't do it. And now there's just a little footnote in this last update that says, oh, and by the way, expired domain abuse. We're just going to start penalising everyone that's done it.
How are they going to suss that out?
Well.
I mean, they could see that a domain, a website disappeared. And then suddenly there's another website there. But that could again, could be legitimate.
I guess. Again, they'll be looking for patterns.
Well, what I'm driving at is how often are Google able to spot this because they came up with a whole load of bullshit around AI. If you use AI, we will penalise you. And the truth was they couldn't tell you were using it. So in what context? Putting that in that context rather is this domain abuse thing just them trying to say, oh, people are doing this and we can't figure out how to stop them doing this, or we'll tell them if we catch them, we'll penalise them even though we don't know how to catch them.
Yeah.
If you see what I mean.
Yeah, there's a funny bit where they're talking about reputational abuse as well, which is basically where you post your content on someone else's website and they say guest blogging. Yes, but they're specifically talking about using somebody else's domain authority to sort of skyrocket your content. So if, um.
Is this expired domains again, where you buy another domain or you're actually talking about scratching people's back and getting your content on their website.
Yeah, exactly. So it's like if we went and paid HubSpot to put one of our articles like a buy read evolution article on their blog, and that ended up as the top article in a load of search terms, but it didn't really add any value. And it was just us trying to sort of like boost our profile.
That is guest blogging.
Guest blogging. Yeah, basically guest content. But there's quite a funny bit in it where they say that, um, we're now considering this to be very, a very low value tactic and we will begin penalising sites, but we're giving you, um, two months in advance. We're giving you notice of this. So we'll begin enforcement on May the fifth, which is like what? So if you can detect and penalise the behavior, why tell anyone and why set like a date. What they're actually saying is go and take down all your old crap guest blogs because we want you to. They can't really tell or enforce any of this stuff, but I think the problem is whenever we're advising or working with businesses, you do have to just sort of take the really long term view and say, look. At some point, following these trends and tactics could penalise you probably won't, but it might. And that's why it's probably not advisable. On balance, but I appreciate there'll be a lot of people who listen to this who think, well, you know, you know, f*ck that. I could have made ten million pounds in the intervening twelve month period or whatever until Google cottons on. So I don't know. I think it's all a bit of a balancing act, really.
All right. In a desperate bid to, uh, to break the monotony. I'll change the subject. Um, I was down in Edinburgh, um, last week seeing a potential client. A client, you know, a potential client that I sincerely hope becomes a client. And one of the things that came up when we were chatting was that they feel like with their current provider, let's just say this current provider isn't really a legit agency. It's like, it's like a one person organisation that uses a bunch of probably low cost economy freelancers, outsources stuff and they feel a bit like they're walking around on eggshells. Um, um, in terms of they don't have full super admin access to their website platform, for example, and they, and they're kind of slightly nervous about saying to this person, look, we're going to go and use another agency. Could we have all the logins? And can we please take control, complete control of our website? And these guys are serious business people. Uh, the guy I met, lovely guy, uh, really switched on. And this situation isn't necessarily of his making, right? Isn't of his making.
Inherited.
Them? Yeah, he's inherited the mess, but it just still astonishes me that there are businesses out there who are, for all intents and purpose, being held ransom by, I don't know, an idiot.
I do think one thing I will say on this because it's funny. Funnily enough, we were having a conversation about this in the office earlier. I do think sometimes you can get into these situations accidentally.
So yeah. Okay.
When I was, um, when I used to freelance, for example, um, and manage people's Google ads for them often if the person was a little bit of a technophobe, they didn't really want to sort of delve into the murky depths of Google's account system, which is admittedly baffling. I would often just set up the account for them and then, you know, manage everything, put their billing details in and everything, but manage everything for them. And then when it came time to part ways, I would obviously give them you.
Mean when they sacked.
You? Yeah, absolutely. Happened all the time. Um, no. I mean, you know.
You should say.
That. Yeah. What was it. Um the the PE sixty end of tax return notification the other day and I saw it pop into my inbox. I was like, oh. Um the, um, the thing is, it's easy to get into those situations because it's quicker and faster to set things up for your clients. You don't want to sit on a screenshare and talk them through the really complicated account system. So I see how people do it accidentally. But I do think an awful lot of people do it on purpose because they know that if they hold the reins.
Yeah. But what you're describing is you being helpful if any of those clients are turned around to you and said, could you please give us the username and password? Or rather, you know, we've actually logged in and we've changed the password so you can't access it anymore. Thanks for the thanks for everything you've done for us. We're leaving now. Or even if they said like, we haven't got the username and password for this, we want to move on. Can you please give that to us? You would have given it to them. You wouldn't have played silly buggers.
No. Absolutely not. But I'm in the lucky position. Touchwood of having never parted ways with a client on bad terms, but I can see how if the relationship had become acrimonious and everybody hated each other and they didn't want to talk to each other, that you'd end up in a. And sometimes, you know, in business, ultimately we're talking about personal relationships, and some people just feel too awkward going to people and saying, I'm leaving you. Give me. Give me the details.
But the bottom line is business is business. And no matter what the personal differences might have been that have led to the parting of the ways, it just makes no business sense from a reputational point of view, from a professionalism point of view, to be a dick about it. You should literally just, if somebody decides they don't want to work with you anymore. And we mentioned this in our previous podcast last week, you know, where like last month, last month now, because it's the first of April today, um, you know, we've parted ways very amicably with a company we've been working with for about three years. We get on really well. There's no issue. They just fancy a change, absolutely no problem at all. And we'll do everything to make sure that there's a smooth transition because we're grown ups, for Christ's sake.
But we're also I think the other element of this is because we're an agency of a certain size, we do have to worry about our reputation. People will talk about us if we do something unpleasant to them. I think an awful lot of people in our industry, and to be fair, in lots of industries float around in this situation where they're just about small enough to get away with it. They don't really, you know, they're not going to actually suffer from that bad publicity. Mhm. And they will just do whatever they fancy because of that. It's a sad truth, really.
So, you know, if you have a conversation with them, they'll just flounce off and it's just, you know, and it's just like, really kind of petty and unprofessional and ridiculous.
Weirdly, some people almost seem to thrive on that stuff. I don't really understand it at all. But yeah, you do meet them occasionally. They just seem to almost enjoy the drama of it. Which. Yeah.
Well, don't you just come across that in life all the time? People look like a bit of drama. Yeah. Yeah.
There's always the first people that tell you I don't like drama. I don't do drama. It's like I can see you coming. I know what's about to happen.
The thing is, you can spot them a mile off. You can be you can be literally 30s into a conversation with a complete stranger and know, like, oh, God, here we go. It's one of those.
Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. Um, so the whole idea of being trapped by, um, an agency stroke freelancer, um, that should, it should just never happen. It should never happen. I mean, we've, we have rescued businesses who've been in that situation. There are ways and means of.
You.
Know, of making sure that you've got an escape route if you like. Uh, no matter whether you're technophobe, technophobe or not. Um, so I'd be interested. You know, we don't like we say we don't have guests on this, on this podcast, but I'd be interested in hearing from, from anybody who's been in that situation. Just, just kind of if anyone wants to get in touch with us at red evolution dot com and relate the story of, of how, you know, extracting themselves from a relationship with a freelancer or, or another agency played out. I'd be interested to hear it. Yeah.
I think one thing I will say about it is I think it's probably a bit of a red flag. If you even think for a second that you might have difficulty, uh, divorcing or parting ways or whatever phrase you want to use with your agency. I would be very concerned because generally you won't find yourself in that situation with a good agency. The professionals will let you say, provide exit routes for you and a way out. Yeah.
Yeah. That's right. Okay. Um, we did mention, um, AI earlier. What do you know about Google's Gemini?
Not very much. Only. Well, this was the one that when they launched it, it didn't work very well. Right.
Oh is it that one?
I think so. And then. And then there was also that thing.
What did they do. Did they ask it a question. And it came back with a complete nonsense answer or something.
But they did it live in a big demonstration.
They did do it live. Yeah. That's right, I remember that.
Embarrassing for them. Yeah. And then I think there was a thing recently about it. Where was it? Was it Google's artificial image generator that was generating pictures of like, um, colored Nazi troops and stuff like that and just, you know, just like historical inaccuracies and stuff like that.
Okay. Okay. so the whole idea of AI obviously is you can't turn on the radio or pick up a newspaper. Do people do that still? Anyway, you can't consume content these days in whatever, from whatever channel without the subject of AI coming up. And I'm gonna, um, upgrade our Google workspace account that we've got that we all use. Um, it's, it's, uh, I'm going to upgrade it. And one of the things we get with the upgrade is Google Gemini. Now, one of the things where AI seems to be finding a niche for itself and, and doing extremely well is the whole idea of AI assistant, a personal assistant. And I think that's where Gemini is coming from. Um, and we had that show and tell, um, from the guys who were speaking to again this week about that. Um, like if you like private AI system that will learn your systems, it will talk to your accounting system, your CRM, your ERP, uh, your document, um, repository. I nearly said suppository your document repository.
All of.
That. And look at all of that stuff. And then you can literally say, hey, what's our policy on this? Or could you give me a checklist for putting a website live? And it'll go into to your ISO nine thousand and one and pull it out for you and present it to you because it knows about it and stuff like that. That sounds to me, broadly speaking, like a good thing.
Yeah, it sounds sensible.
Because it means that a lot of the drudgery of, of, um, finding information in order to be able to do something creative or productive or whatever will be taken away.
And probably also it'll really help with things like sales, for example, because one of the things I really hate when I'm being sold something and you're going through that whole sales cycle is when you ask a question and the guy just sort of like flubs it, it just makes something up on the spot and you're like, no, no, no.
Well, that that kind of smacks of old school sales, doesn't it? Because, because because modern sales, twenty first century sales is generally conducted by people who really understand the product and or all the service in great detail.
Is that true?
Because because because the idea I know, because the idea is that you don't even then try and sell them something. You just keep educating and helping and, and kind of, um, you know, educating and I think I've said that twice. Sorry. You know, you basically.
Yeah, you like usher people through a learning process rather than selling them something.
And that's where AI could come in useful. So like, you know, some of our clients who sell complex engineering solutions, it's not unreasonable to assume that some of the salespeople don't have, um, a degree in, you know, finite element analysis. They're not necessarily engineers or whatever some of them are, but some of them are not, you know, and for them to have access to a wealth of information, even if they're only sort of asking AI, you know, frantically tapping away on the keyboard while they're talking to somebody, an AI storing answers back at them. Um, if that stuff really works, and I guess we'll find out when we start playing with Gemini. Yeah. Um, I can see the benefit of it.
Yeah, absolutely. If it works, that's my big problem with all of this stuff. If it works, I think a lot of a lot of what we hear about AI is just science fiction. Yeah. It is. Honestly. Yeah. And do you.
Think it's the same as, you know, some people in life, they've learned to say something loud, loudly and confidently. And and if you do that, you sound convincing, like you know what you're talking about when in actual fact, you haven't got a clue. What is it that is that what AI is doing? It's talking loudly and confidently at us so that we believe.
It all about. Absolutely, man. Like you. Just like I say, if you actually dig into the output from some of these tools, you're just like, no, that is all wrong. It's all garbage. But, but, you know, at face value and it just, I mean, one of the other things I have earmarked here to talk about is an article about AI in the drum. So I'm a big fan of the drum magazine generally, um, and their awards and all of that stuff that they do, which is great. But sometimes, I mean, I'll just read you a little bit. So this is an article about industry leaders at a big round table event and their hopes for AI. And it is literally the consensus among marketers is that AI will revolutionise the creation of digital and programmatic advertisements, weaving an intricate tapestry of highly personalised and seamlessly integrated content. And it's like, seriously, like people are just drunk so much Kool-Aid at this point. It's like, come on, these are like, these are like sort of just predictive text tools. And everybody's like, literally like the CEOs and CFOs and CTOs of like massive fortune five hundred companies are standing up and saying, yes, AI will revolutionise the future. It's predictive text. Yeah. There's an emperor's new clothes thing going on here, where I just think the bottom will eventually fall out of all of it. And people are okay. These are vaguely, I think, but I think things like Gemini, personal assistants, document retrieval. Fantastic.
That's what we've been trying to use AI for, aren't we? I mean, we have I mean, we've been using it to help us, you know, get through some mundane tasks, carry out a bit of research for us, that kind of thing.
And we had, um, a client, um, that had a really interesting use case for it as well, didn't we? Um, I'm trying to remember, um, end of last year they were looking for funding and that was about using AI to sort of minimise. Yeah.
To minimise errors in putting information into a system. Yeah. The consequence of those errors being potentially millions of pounds worth of waste. Yeah. Actual hard currency.
And I think stuff like that's genius. Yeah. It's just not flashy. Yeah. Yeah.
Yeah. So yeah, that was interesting. And that still might come back. They might come back to us to continue that conversation once they move on to the next stage of delivering it. Um, but yeah, effectively that's exactly what they were doing. But that, that feels more that, well, it just felt like it was sense checking. Yeah. You know, this type, this field in the ERP or whatever it was, normally accepts this kind of data and you've put this in. Are you sure you meant to put that in?
But do you not think, I mean, without making this conversation really depressing? Do you not think that's the more likely like sort of place AI ends up? That's that's where it's actually useful, right? It's like sense checking, double checking, collating information and going and looking at something else.
So tell me this then why do I have to sense check the garbage that AI throws at me?
Well.
Certain AI, I mean, predictive text, honestly, I mean, the number of times I've tried to write something like instead. And instead of writing instead, it puts like I dread grammar. Grammarly is awful. And Grammarly will completely change what you were trying to say. And so yeah, I mean, it's amazing, but it's also rubbish. Yeah. Not all of it clearly. You know, some of it is genius. I mean, the stuff that the guys use when a photograph isn't quite the right size and it needs to be extended it that stuff is pretty useful.
But there again, it's a very mundane application, isn't it? If what people.
It's not as mundane as actually hand cranking. Something like that.
No, but what I mean is it doesn't sound as flashy or as showy if what people are saying is, oh, look, we've we've, they should actually be saying is, look, we've engineered a new type of algorithm that takes away some of your busy work. And then, you know, that just sounds really boring, doesn't it? Where are the flashy headlines about how AI is going to replace you? And there'll be no jobs left, and in the future, it'll be a bleak dystopia. Like the real applications for this technology is, is just very mundane and boring, as all things in life tend to be really.
But that's truly is, is, is where that stuff should be. It should be doing the mundane and the boring.
I think. So, yeah. Working away. You don't trust it to write your website copy, but you do trust it to sort of tell you what should be in your website.
So it should be able to, for example, mean that we don't have to do this podcast anymore. We can just get AI to do it because it's mundane and boring, and AI could just do it instead. So we don't have to bother our eyes.
You could be an AI for all or for all I know right now.
I could be, could be. Okay. Um, earlier on we were, we had a little group hug and we were looking at, uh, our own video strategy. Um, I don't, I'm not really thinking we should talk about necessarily what we decided to do or anything else, but we did realise how difficult it is. So we keep hearing in marketing that video is everything video, video, video. You know, and I am a personal consumer of bite size video. I love tick tock. Um, not so much some of the others like, um, YouTube shorts, whatever it's called. And Instagram, I just seem to have in the last twelve months really kind of got into tick tock. And that doesn't mean I believe all the shit that I get thrown at me from tick tock, but I actually like the format. I like the bite size video format.
Well, you're their target demographic, aren't you? Young women aged eighteen to thirty five.
That's exactly me. That's right. I am a young woman aged eighteen to thirty five.
No, I'm surprised. I'm interested actually, because I I've dabbled with tick tock occasionally. I like YouTube's shorts.
What do you mean, dabbled with it? You mean you've sat and watched it?
Yeah.
Well, that's not doubling. Doubling is when you create something or try and figure out how the algorithm works and and chord it.
I've looked at TikTok a couple of times. Um, it's never.
Just trying to elevate your, your, the fact that you installed an app by pressing a button and then flicked with your index finger through a load of videos.
Working marketing am a reckless self-promoter. What can you do? Uh, no, I've tried it out a couple of times. I didn't really it didn't really get me. The algorithm didn't get me fast enough to keep my attention, if that makes sense. It didn't show me enough relevant content quickly.
I think the algorithm took one look at you and just thought, nah.
F*ck this guy. We don't cater to his thought. Um, but it's quite interesting to hear that it, you know, it has sort of landed with you and that you have ended up sort of consuming it and using it because it's not. But I think that's.
Go on. Sorry I interrupted.
You. Well, it's just not the story we're told. I think if you consume any marketing material about TikTok, it's like TikTok is edgy. It's for young brands, it's for kids. But I think an awful lot of people are probably in your situation where you know that you are a key decision maker in a business. You are sort of, um, wealthy ish.
I wish I was.
Um, elderly statesman like, but, you know, I mean, you're not the, you're not the sort of target demographic we're told that TikTok has. And yet there you are using it all the time. And so, you know, if somebody wanted to market to you, that would be a fantastic way to do it.
But the thing that, you know, we we are very much aware that successful video content is entertaining and educational. And if it's not entertaining and educational, it's just usually entertaining.
Yeah.
Because if it's just educational, it's can pure educational content work? Maybe, but it needs to entertainment. It needs something that hooks you in. And, and not only that, you become acutely, um, you, you come acutely aware of when you're being sold to sold out, you know, I mean, literally, I said to you earlier, I'm a second in to a video and I've flicked past it because I can just straight away this coming.
Yeah.
Sometimes it's because it looks too polished. So it's like this is clearly a polished advert. No, thanks. Um, but.
I find that really interesting because it's sort of. Yeah, we're sort of like moving towards a place where we really want authenticity. There absolutely isn't any authenticity on TikTok at all. Um, but there's that sort of illusion of it is really important.
Yeah. It might be an illusion. Yeah. I've certainly come across interesting people who I probably wouldn't have been exposed to in, in, in any other context in, from any other channel. And um, yeah, I've certainly found the content really interesting. And I, I do sometimes find myself mindlessly flicking through and I go, I've just spent forty five minutes of my life doing something that's just ridiculous and I shouldn't have done it. I get that, but what we were talking about earlier is with, with like the demand for video being high, the, um, the propensity if you like to produce Shiite to just to produce stuff that's like nobody's ever going to be interested in is quite strong. It's quite high. So it still requires some thought or probably thought and a bit of luck, you know what I mean? I think, I think you do need a bit of luck to be successful because like we said earlier in this podcast, you know, you don't create viral videos, videos go viral for, for some because of some wizardry that nobody really understands. Um, so what we were finding is that like, I think we've got somewhere now. I think we've kind of cottoned on to possibly something that we, um, that we're going to do, but the essence of it that I related to you and the guys when we were having the conversation was like, what have we got access to that people are interested in that nobody else has got access to. Yeah.
So that's all that really ultimately is gonna.
I mean, sometimes when I'm, uh, because, you know, I play in a band sometimes when I'm playing playing, I play in the drums, I play the drums. So I mean, I'm sat at the back. I'm sat at the back in a band, and I'll sometimes take photographs from the drummer's perspective. In fact, there's one of them on my profile page, on our website and read evolution dot com of me sat behind my drum kit when we were playing at some venue.
Three people in the crowd.
Three people in. No, there was only two. One of them was a waiter.
The other was your mum.
Thanks for that. Anyway, I used to do that. And years ago, you know, before digital photography, I used to take my camera with me when we played gigs. I would take photographs from the drummer's perspective. And the reason, because I was into photography, and one of the reasons I did it is because nobody else.
You never see it, right?
Because my favourite one of my favourite photographers is Elliott Erwitt and Elliott Erwitt said F8 and be there. And that's like the best advice you can give any photographer F8 and be there because if you're there, nobody else is. You get the shot. They don't. It's as simple as that. It's like the guy with the movie camera on the on the grassy knoll. Yeah, he was there. He took the time to buy a camera, learn how to use it because this was in nineteen sixty three and learn how to use it. He's on the grassy knoll. It was sixty three one sixty two, was it? It was just before I was born.
In American history.
And so there he was. And that that film has become.
Incredibly.
Famous. Infamous. Yeah, absolutely. Uh, and so F8 and be there. And so that's what we need to try and figure out with video. It's like, what have we got access to that nobody else has got access to? Because we were talking about, you know, like, um, giving people video tips or SEO tips and all that. It's like, fine, we can do it, but it's already been done to death.
Yeah.
Everybody, there's no barrier to entry to creating that. Yeah. But, you know, so I think for most businesses thinking about trying to use video, you know, you can go down the me Too route and just try and do it better than anybody else. And there's some merit in that. I'm not saying there isn't. But like, I think if you stop and really think strategically, what have we got? Some of the engineering companies, for example, they've got access to take footage of amazing engineering things.
And people are always really fascinated by that, sort of like the intricacy of it, how it works. I mean, there's.
Even programs on yesterday channel, you know, it's like big engineering or engineering that didn't work or bridges or massive constructions.
And maybe clients shouldn't be doing videos of how their stuff doesn't work. But yeah, I mean, maybe not how we f*cked up. We'll leave that.
We'll leave that for the guys at yesterday. But I think, um, I think it, you know, thinking about video. Yeah, it does need a strategy. It's not just because we've all got the equipment. We all carry broadcast quality video cameras in our back pockets these days, as we've said before. So.
Well, I mean, but the same is true of all content. Do you not think? I mean, you could you could apply this to like our blog, for example, like there's a big whiteboard upstairs covered in my scribbly handwriting about exactly this, which is.
I wipe it off later.
If we're gonna bloody not. Uh, well.
I am, and I'm just. I'm assuming you took a photograph of it because it's gonna get wiped off.
Forethought and planning from me. No. Um, but no, I mean, you know, and that was a big effort to sort of refocus and make sure we we're blogging about the things that are, you know, sort of target audience, people we want to talk to actually care about. And, you know, I think this is part of the problem with all things is that people think, oh, I have to be doing that, so I'll just do it. I don't care what the output is. I don't care why I'm doing it. And it's just do things with intention really, and do things with a clear sort of like you say, strategy and an idea of what you want out of the other end.
Have a strategy and do it properly. Yeah. Yeah. We, um, talking about the band, I was talking about taking photographs from the drummer's seat. We played at a local pub on Saturday night, uh, the boat in Aboyne, and it was fantastic. It was a great gig. It wasn't, it wasn't thousands of people. It was a pub. It was a small room in a pub and we had a three piece band. Um, what we did with the band is we decided like when we, when we decided to get this band going just over a year ago, thereabouts. Um, when we decided to get this band going, we decided to invest in equipment and do it properly. So we bought one of these I showed you earlier. We bought one of these mixing deaths like a headless mixing desk. So it's, you know, like a mixing desk traditionally has got like sixteen channels. Each channels got like twenty buttons. So it just looks like a desk completely covered in buttons and sliders. So I was like, doesn't look like that because it uses, um, a Wi-Fi connection and you do all the mixing on, on an iPad. Now, you know, the bass player goes through a helix, uh, line six, uh, helix and the guitarist goes to a line six helix and the drums are Roland drums and they all feed into this mixer, as do all the microphones and then outputs. We've got each got our own output so we can create our own mix, which we have into our ears, in-ear monitors and we mix. You know, I want the guitar a bit louder. I want my vocal a bit up and Neil's vocal a bit down so I can hear myself better and that sort of thing.
Not here Neil.
All you know, all that mix is, is for me. It's a personal mix and we invest in all that equipment. And it's it's one of the reasons it works. We made that investment. We planned it. We did it properly and it's paying dividends. You know it's working. You know the the pub said, oh could you, could you do Hogmanay for us for example, you know, and the feedback has been really positive and it's just good fun. And I guess what I'm driving at is this, this whole idea of doing things properly. We've spoken a lot over the last few podcasts about migrating to HubSpot and HubSpot. CMS costs three hundred quid a month or whatever it costs. And people like, oh, WordPress is free, Joomla is free, and all the rest of it. But like, and you had a conversation last week with a, with a, with a client about.
Possibly my list.
Yeah, about moving them, moving them over to HubSpot. And we, you know, we still are trying to persuade people a lot of the time, maybe in the engineering and tech niche is maybe peculiar, although I suspect not to do things properly.
Yeah.
And if you do things properly, everything about that gig, you know, setting up a kit of drums is a pain in the ass. It's like it just takes time. I often arrive at the gig early so I can get all that done and get everything plugged in before, you know, I always, I always joke and say I arrive and then, you know, the the musicians arrive about half an hour later after I've set the drums up. Um, but by making the investment, doing it properly, all the output, everything we did was great. It was first class, it was, and it was well received and everything else. And our life was easier. We could hear what we were doing. The audience had a great mix and they could enjoy what we were producing. Having the right kit is what I'm driving at.
And I mean, you know, that.
Lead on to what you wanted to talk about maybe.
Yeah. But just before we do, I mean, I think one of the things that's interesting about that is you'll know full well that even amongst professional gigging bands, you're in a minority there. Yeah.
Although it was watching, it was it was the band at Rob's wedding, you know, one of. Yeah, one of the Red Eagle team, Rob's wedding in Ireland. And the band rocked up and they had this kit and I was like, oh, that looks like the sort of thing we should be looking at investing in, you know, because our band at that point was in its early stages of being formed. And so, you know, we, I just saw somebody else using it. I think I was vaguely aware that the technology existed and just assumed it was horribly expensive, which it isn't. Yeah. And that's how I decided like, that's how to do it.
But I think that's key to the whole thing, isn't it? Lots of professional bands are still out there trying to wing it. And we know like from this, for example, when we said we were going to do a podcast, you went out and bought all this equipment and it's good equipment and it's stood up really well. And one of the things that a friend of mine who is a sound engineer said the first time he heard it was, oh, that's surprisingly well produced for a digital marketing podcast, because most of them sound.
Thanks.
Leslie. Most of them sound like crap, and you can hear people's slack going off in the background and all this background noise and interference.
And we don't mind. There's a lot of background noise. Now, you might have heard, but because this is, you know, from the coalface, like this is this is an active office where people upstairs are busy working.
Um, but we, somebody's.
Now clunking down the stairs while we're recording our podcast. Who's that?
Caron says that you have a meeting.
Who has a meeting.
You have in four minutes?
Yeah, I've got a meeting in four minutes. Alex?
You're up.
No, no, actually, I want. I want Dave to take that meeting because it's a Joomla. It's a Joomla migration. Yeah. So just get Dave to do it using my Zoom.
Literally from the podcast. Yeah.
I remember the guy booked the meeting. I know what the meeting's about and I'm not the best person to speak to Dave Marshall.
Yeah, that makes sense. Yeah. Um, where was it? Yeah. We've always been like this, but we also know that other people who are both in our space and in other spaces who want to set up podcasts, try and do it on a shoestring budget because they don't want to make the investment and it doesn't pan out. And unsurprisingly, you know, if you if you sort of hedge your bets and you say, well, I don't really want to go all in in case it doesn't work, it probably won't work. And that's the sort of self-fulfilling prophecy, I think, that a lot of people in business do get locked into. It's like, I'm going to hedge, and then when it doesn't work, I'll say, oh, it was never going to work. Not I've failed to invest properly. Mhm. Um, yeah, I think that's the thing. I mean, I, I wanted to take a slightly more sort of like positive take on that, that thing that we were going to discuss. Basically a long term client of ours asked us to come in and sort of do a rediscovery, as it were. And they've they're changing up a lot of their business. They're changing up the markets that they're going for.
They're greenwashing it. Like every other oil services company.
Had a big investment of cash to help them, uh, make everything shiny and green and pretend that they were never in the oil and gas industry in the first place. And, um, yeah, they want to, um, as part of that exercise, they want to explore the idea of, um, redoing their website as well. Um, and it was a good meeting. They were very enthusiastic, but they critically weren't the sort of key decision makers. Uh, so, so you can sit in a room around a table getting very enthusiastic and very excited with people. Um, and that's great. But at the end of the day, they didn't actually have the power to press the go button. So what the end of that meeting, what we discussed after sort of we talked to them about where they were now, we talked to them about how much better things could be, and we sort of brainstormed different solutions. We looked at all the different things they could do, and we said that we thought, you know, HubSpot would be a really good fit, blah, blah blah blah. And at the end of the meeting, they turned around and said, well, yes. Can you put us together a proposal that basically puts the cost of sitting still against the cost of moving and what that looks like, and then we can try and take things further forward. Yeah. Um, and I don't know, I mean, I guess when I put that down on my list, what I wanted to talk about was how to help businesses navigate that process. Because I think it's probably a situation that a lot of marketing managers find themselves in. You know, they want to invest in this shiny new technology. They want to invest in stuff that will actually drive growth and help them do their job, but they really struggle to get it past people who are bean counters, I suppose, who don't care and who just want to sort of like justify the investment or not. Um, and I don't really know what, I guess I'm a little bit naive to that process really as to whether or not you can really help people through it, or whether that's just a place where we can't really help.
It really depends if the decision makers have, um, value the stuff that you can do for them because the, you know, they're the, ultimately they're the ones that have got to go back to the investors and say, we want to invest twenty grand in this new website, and the investors will say, well, what's wrong with the current website? And they need a good answer as to what's wrong with the current website and why, why you need to make this investment, etc.. Um, so yeah, it's always, it's always worth trying to figure out if the people you're talking to have actually got the, the power, they might be feeling the pain, but they might not have the power.
I guess that's the thing, isn't it? I guess back to the whole equipment thing is you have to be in a place where you can invest in it otherwise. Yeah.
And when it comes to that, I mean, like going back to that analogy, if you like, or the reality of the of the band, we could produce a sound which is equally as good with a lot more hassle.
And a.
Lot using a more traditional approach. Just like, um, you don't need a HubSpot website to use HubSpot CRM and sales and, and service hub and operations hub and everything else. You could have all, all that HubSpot stuff or some of it and a WordPress website and it'll all work. It's all fine, but it's just like it's just more hassle and friction that gets in the way of doing what you want to do, and that is to communicate with potential customers.
Yeah. Is that true? I mean.
It.
Is operating from the assumption that people are inherently lazy because I am. Um, and I think most people are. Um, do you not think that once you put all that hassle and friction in front of like marketing teams, for example, the chances of them actually doing their best work are vastly reduced. Like if you make things.
I think that's overstating it. I think I appreciate where you're coming from. Um, I mean, the way that we had our tech stack, uh, in place, uh, arranged, if you like, meant that like, if I wanted to change a couple of words on our website, I could just go in using a content management system and change it. I then had to use a whole deploy system, which took five minutes in order to make that change, you know, but that was our choice. You know, we decided to do it that way for reasons I won't bore you with, but and now you can just go into the HubSpot site and just make the changes. I mean, although having said all that, you know, the latest changes from HubSpot with their per seat licensing and everything else makes selling that CMS now even harder than it was before because previously it's like it's going to be three hundred quid a month, but WordPress is free, you know, and that is a difficult thing to overcome. Yeah, there's lots of stuff out there in WordPress. WordPress being free isn't strictly true because you've got to run it and host it and update it and buy plugins. It's definitely not free. It's not free, but it certainly isn't three hundred quid a month. However you carve it up, no matter how many plugins you're using, no matter how posh the server is that it's sat on. And so I think personally that HubSpot with their CMS anyway, have made selling it a lot harder by making it per seat licensing. Seats are really difficult. I think it's a ridiculous move. Maybe I can understand the sales seat and even some of the others, but the CMS one kind of just pisses me off, to be honest. I think it's you know.
It's a tough sell. Yeah for sure.
Anything else?
Yeah. Well, the only other thing is, um.
Leslie's actually gone to sleep over there.
Because he sofa's too comfortable. Then the other thing I had done was a business of ours that was, uh, a business was a client of ours that, um, went into business about a year ago, I think. Um, they do storage, personal storage. Um, I don't think that's giving too much away, is it? Um, and for the longest time we've been trying to help them, um, sort of, uh, fill up their site effectively, uh, market it. Um, and they recently started doing some radio ads. Um, I don't know if you know this story or not, but basically like they started doing some radio ads and then that seemed to be working really well and they got this like massive sort of, uh, boost in sales.
I'm going to give you a quote. I'm gonna, I'm gonna misquote something.
Go.
It sounds like a good story. Would it were done name that Shakespeare play an English graduate.
I don't know the Shakespeare play, but I do.
Know The Taming of the shrew.
And, uh, and, uh, yeah. So anyway, they started doing radio advertising. Big boost in sales. They say turn the PPC ads off. We turn the PPC ads off, sales go down. The radio advertising is still running. Conundrum. And I think there's this thing in marketing, certainly for people who are outside marketing, where they expect it to be a science and they expect there to be reasons for everything. I had a conversation with a client and they were like, explain to me, how can this happen? How can it be? You know, PPC is chugging along, sales are chugging along. They're steady. Suddenly I do radio advertising and the sales skyrocket. And so I think radio advertising is driven sales. Turn the PPC off. The radio advertising continues and now my sales are plummeting. Well, that doesn't make sense. And sometimes.
Have you wrestled that one down or is it still still don't have an answer?
Absolutely no idea. I mean, we're working at it, but I mean, I think inevitably the answer will end up being something really annoying and nebulous, like the combination of having the sort of local presence. And then when people do think, oh, actually, I could do with a self storage site, You know, go to Google. Google self storage near X and it pops up. You know there's probably a sort of symbiotic um correlation there. There's some sort of thing happening where you run both in tandem and it works to build awareness and get people on the site. But I don't know is the answer. And I think that's quite a tricky thing to, to have a conversation with, um, a client about and also just in general about marketing. And I just wondered if you had any thoughts on that, really like how you sort of wrestle down that, you know, when it becomes more art than science and everything seems a little bit nebulous and hard to.
Yeah. In that bookshelf behind you, there's a book called the Art of SEO. And that that's immediately set its stall out at the beginning saying SEO is, is a technical thing. It is a science. But at the same time, there's an art as well, because there is sometimes there are sometimes things that happen and it doesn't seem like there's any rhyme or reason to it usually eventually. Right. And I think with this one, I think you and I can sit and look at the, look at the data and see if we can figure out what's going on. Yeah. Um, because it does to me, sound anywhere. Like there has to be an explanation in there somewhere.
I'm sure there absolutely will be. It's just one of those funny things, isn't it? And it's just like there doesn't seem to be.
Sometimes it's really something very simple. Like actually the adverts were still running and there was an overlap or something like that, you know what I mean?
Yeah, absolutely.
Drop me a pencil.
And I'm sure we absolutely can wrestle wrestle it down. It's just like it's one of those really interesting things about our industry. And in general, I think it's something that people are very uncomfortable with. People want repeatable processes, and they want to know exactly how and why something's worked. And it's, I guess this is maybe just not the industry for that, but I mean.
Just because everything's measurable and there's lots of data telling you about things that happened in the past, it doesn't always mean that you can make sense of it. Not always.
Yeah.
I mean, usually you can usually it's like this thing happened, this thing happened, and there's the sales as a result of it. So that's fine. But, um, I think we're always going to get those curveballs where there's no rhyme or reason until.
Until you figure it out, I guess.
Yeah, we had one, um, some time ago where we realised that we were telling Google quite clearly that the content, the particular content on our site was very, very old. And it was about a subject which is very, very new. And even though that page had been updated, it was originally created in like two thousand and eight.
And we'd gone to great.
Lengths and we and we went to great lengths without realising that we were telling Google, like this. This page was written in two thousand and eight. So and wondered why the the rankings were crashing, you know. Yeah. And, you know, we fixed it and, and, and things turned around quite quickly.
Um, there's always something.
There is, there's always something hidden somewhere.
I suppose.
And there's lots of false dawns as well.
It is. Well yeah. And I suppose just to go back to, I mean we can't end a podcast episode without some sort of car analogy, but I suppose it is like when you take a car to the mechanic and there's like a wiring fault or something, and they will spend ages diagnosing it and they'll ring you and excitedly tell you, oh, we fixed it, we found it. And then it turns out to be something different. I guess it's a process that everybody goes through, isn't it?
Yeah. The more complex the system, then the more chances there are that you get a false positive. Yeah. And I think we get false positives in in digital marketing. Quite clearly you do. Well, I don't know about you, but I'm bored now so we'll stop. Yeah. We'll stop. That's, uh. Jesus. We've gone over an hour. Have we? That is absolutely ridiculous. But, um, hopefully you've enjoyed some of the drivel that we've come away with today. Uh, Dave and Alex on the Digital Marketing From The Coalface podcast. And tell all your friends and family. Yeah.
Maybe one of them could.
Come to not listen to it and tell all your friends and family to avoid it, because it really isn't worth listening to.
Which you probably should have opened with that. Really?
Yeah. Go and grab a coffee and then go and find another podcast to listen to because this one's awful. Yeah. All right. Thanks.