Wanging On About Google & Stuff, Digital Marketing Chat With Alex & Dave - Episode 120

It does sound a little bit fanciful that Google's software can look at a piece of content and decide whether it's any good.

I think they're actually doing it really badly. One of the clients that we've taken on board recently have a load of their case studies crawled but not indexed, so Google's seen them.

So in the search in the search console, you'll see one of the tabs is crawled but not indexed.

It can be crawled but not indexed, or it can be not crawled, which means that Google's sort of aware that it exists, but it hasn't got round to looking at the content. If your content doesn't pass that check the first time, they won't look at it again. Go into these client Search Console, and you'll see a load of case studies that are about specific jobs they've done. And for some reason, Google has decided that that content is not interesting enough to be worth indexing. Well, it's completely unique to that client. Nobody else can have content that is about the same stuff because nobody else makes this technology. It's a world first and it's all quite interesting stuff, but it can't understand any of that because it is ultimately just a dumb robot.

Okay. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. I'm not interested in doing this today, by the way.

But people will just turn.

Off already.

If you start that low energy. And also you make my life quite hard.

If I don't put the effort in and come up with a big list of things to talk about, it makes your life hard. Yeah, because you've got nothing on your list.

I've got a few things on my list.

Yeah. Okay. It's been an interesting week. Um, I just, I haven't had a Red bull and my energy levels are really quite low. Yeah, I went out, I did a long walk yesterday because I've got this sponsored walk coming up. I thought I'd better do something. So I went out and had a long walk and um that's nice. It was lovely. Enjoyed it. But um, I don't know if that's the reason I've just, I've just got low energy today. Played golf in the howling wind on Saturday.

That's why then.

Yeah. Yeah. I scored my first ever eagle because.

The wind blew the ball into the hole?

No, because the other two low handicap golfers I was with, they didn't get eagles. Only I did. Um, so that was good fun. Although I didn't have a spectacular score. It was hard going in the wind. In fact, I was talking, um, just before we started recording this to a potential new customer. I went down to Edinburgh to see them and a couple of weeks ago and um, the chap I met, he plays golf as well, and he was saying it was uh, he played down on a course in Edinburgh somewhere at the weekend and he said it was pretty brutal. The weather was um certainly, uh, a challenge at the weekend, especially like a place like Aboyne. It's an inland course. So like if you play at links, you know, um, those courses, it's always windy. Middle of summer, beautiful day. No, it's windy. Always is. So you get used to it. But and you know when you play inland courses sheltered. Yeah, I quite enjoyed it because it felt like a challenge. It felt like when, when we finished, I felt like I'd achieved something. You know, that feeling or you won't know that feeling, that feeling of achieving something, will you? Um, okay. There's a few things to talk about today, and we'll try and keep it light hearted, as we always do. Um, what have you, um, what have you got to kick us off with, Alex?

Well, there's a few things. So the first thing I guess, that I really wanted to talk about today was this whole, um, Google indexing thing, which might get a bit geeky.

It better not because people will turn off. I wouldn't blame them.

That's a shame. Well, it's something that I don't know if we've actually talked about it briefly on the podcast before, actually about this trend of more and more content that you publish on the internet, not actually getting indexed by Google, which is to say.

Explain what that means to people.

So Google is, um, imagine it's a little robot, like a spider, right? And it scuttles around the internet and it finds things mainly by following links. And then it says, oh, I quite like this page. Or, you know, there might be something useful on it, sidelines it. And then later on it comes along and says, does this page belong in in Google? Does it deserve to be indexed or not? Should it show up for search results? And then it goes through this whole process of deciding which search results things would show up for and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But if that doesn't happen, as in Google finds the page and decides not to add it to its index, that page can never show up in Google search. Mhm. Um, historically, even if you publish content online, Google finds it in index. Is it? That's what's happened. And for the longest time, most of everybody's website was up on Google. Um, except for sort of huge e-commerce stores that had thousands and thousands of millions of product pages. And Google would sometimes say, well, do you know what? These are all boring and pretty much the same. So I won't bother indexing them. But you know, certainly people in our niche B2B websites, you could pretty reliably publish content and it would find its way onto Google's index.

So here's the thing. Um, is it a bit like someone like your good self writes a book? Yep. Self publishes the book. Yep. Right. Somebody goes to the library. They do still exist and says, I'd like the, um Idiot's Guide to, um, origami by Alex Bussi. And they said, no, we haven't got it. Is it a bit like that? It's a bit like. So the content exists but you can't find it because it's not actually in the library. It's not on the shelf. So if your content isn't indexed, it's not on the shelf. People can't come along and metaphorically pick it off the shelf and read it.

Yeah.

Not via Google anyway. They could still find it on your website by following links on your website. So the content still exists. Just like your book exists. Yes, but it's just they'll never find it if they ask Google about it.

But assuming that I wrote the book because I wanted people to read it, it's not a very good situation. You wouldn't find yourself.

You'd write a book and you'd actually be annoyed if people bought it, wouldn't you? You'd be like, I did this for me. I didn't do it for anybody else.

How to do origami underwater. Yeah.

Well, that's where my lamination, my laminating machine would come in handy, wouldn't it? Well, you can, you can fold it. It's harder to fold than a bit of paper, but at least you'd be able to do it underwater. You would? I think I'm going to start a website for people that laminate things and then do origami underwater with them. They'll catch on.

I'm so glad we're having this conversation.

Carry on.

Anyway, about a year or two ago, lots of people started noticing a trend where less and less of their content was being indexed by Google. Um, we have picked up a few clients over the last six months and gone into their search console account and found quite a lot of their content.

Tell people what the Search Console is. There are some people that listen to this.

You're absolutely right.

Sorry. I'm not no, you don't need to apologise. This is great because it gives me something to do because otherwise I'd probably fall asleep.

You need the beeper from, uh, what's it called? That shows that Stephen Fry used to do. Um, q I q I. There we go. Um, yeah. So Search Console is sort of like your, it's a tool that Google produce that let you see, lets you see how your site is performing in Google search. Um, what, you know, whether or not all your pages are ranking, what keywords they're ranking for that sort of thing it's supposed to be, or the gimmick is that it's data direct from Google. So it's fairly accurate and gives you a good idea of what Google itself actually sees when it looks at your website.

It's very useful, isn't it?

It's incredibly useful. Yeah. Um, and there's a little section in there that not very many people use that shows you whether or not like the indexing status of all your pages. So whether Google thinks that they're a duplicate of other content, whether it's indexed them, whether it hasn't indexed them, all of that good stuff. Um, and you know, like I say, over time, you sort of see, um, some sites collecting pages that have been published and that Google knows about. So it's crawled them as in seen them, but never indexed. And for a long, long time, there was sort of lots of conspiracy theories about why that was happening. Lots of sort of anecdotal evidence. Lots of people thought, for example, that as with the bookshop analogy you just gave, the internet was just getting full, um, a bit like, you know, a library where too many people are trying to get their books put on the shelves may eventually say, you know what, we've had enough. The library is full. So a lot of people thought Google was just slowing down because there was so much content. Um, and what's interesting, the case.

That's what you're going to tell us.

Well, it is sort of the case. Well, what's quite interesting is that, like I say, for a long time, all of this was sort of conspiracy theory and anecdote. And we wrote a blog post about it a couple of months ago that was very much saying like, this is what the theory is. And a couple of days ago, basically, Google actually came out and said, like for definite what the, what the reason was. And what they basically said is that they, when they are analysing content on web pages now, which they didn't necessarily do before, they've created a special indexing, like a special part of the indexing process.

People can see that you're reading this, you know, they think you're clever. Up to this point, they thought you were clever. And now they can see the ones that are watching or listening to this on YouTube, and they can now see you just reading it outed myself.

Um, nobody can just remember all of this stuff, you know, it's not possible. Yeah. So they've added this, this index selection process that basically happens. So they find the website, the robot crawls it. And then now they've added this sort of extra check where they look at it and they say, is this content actually useful?

How on earth do they decide.

That they can't? But this is what's quite interesting. So what they're saying is that they're automatically grouping lots of pages that they think are about the same subject. And then because the index is getting so clogged with content, they will just pick one to be the page about that subject. So they find like seven or eight pages on various different people's websites that are sort of almost identical in the sense that they cover the same ground, the same topics, the same headings. And they say, well, you know, we're just going to pick one of these and we're going to run with it. And, and that's sort of happening at scale. Um, and they're, they're also talking about again and again and again, this whole idea that, you know, search results are competitive. They are going to prioritise pages that deserve their words to be crawled from now on. And again, that's something that previously they haven't really, you know, they haven't sort of outright said, you have to compete now just to be seen. It's not even like, where will we rank you on the page? It's just that we're going to straight up ignore you if you don't bring something new to the table. Do something interesting. And I guess a lot of this will again, be to do with the sort of flood of AI content and Google realising that it has to do something. But I do think it's quite interesting, because I'm sure there will be a lot of people listening to this who have either found that their contents not being indexed, or maybe don't know why, stuff that they're spending ages writing and putting on Google is just suddenly being ignored where it previously would have ranked quite well. And I think it is largely because of this process where they're now automatically going through and saying, well, you know, it's obviously about this subject. It's obviously, you know, these are the keywords in it. This is where it should rank. Oh, but actually it's too boring or not interesting, or we don't think it ticks enough magical boxes.

So algorithmically, how do you decide if it's boring or I mean, you've kind of you've kind of said it in a roundabout way, but it does sound a little bit fanciful that Google's software can look at a piece of content and decide whether it's any good.

Well, this is the interesting thing because I think they're actually doing it really badly because we know for a fact, one of the clients that we've taken on board recently have a load of their case studies crawled but not indexed. So Google has seen them.

So in the search in the search console, if you go into the pages section, you'll see one of the tabs or one of the, one of the options is crawled but not indexed. Yes, it crawled but not indexed or.

So yeah, there are sort of two things. Yeah. So it can be crawled but not indexed, which means it's it's seen it and decided or it can be not crawled, which means that Google's sort of aware that it exists, but it hasn't got round to looking at the content yet. Yeah. And that one is fine if Google says we know your content's there, we've not got round to crawling it like happy days. If it's and this is again, part of what was really interesting about this statement that came out a couple of days ago, because they're also basically saying is that if your content doesn't pass that check the first time, they won't look at it again. They'll just make this assessment. It's a low quality, low value page and that'll be it. So there's a sort of a I think a natural pressure there to try and get this right the first time. But like I was saying, we go into these client Search Console and you'll see a load of case studies that are about specific jobs they've done around the world using technology that is proprietary, that is trademarked and patented, patented, however you want to pronounce it. Um, and for some reason, Google has decided that that content is not interesting enough to be worth indexing. Now it's completely unique to that client. Nobody else can have content that is about the same stuff because nobody else makes this technology. So they're obviously getting it.

Are they basing it on what this is about? Nobody looks for.

I think so, or, or oh, this is about, you know, um, I mean, I don't think it gives too much away without like, this is about pipeline isolation. And we've got lots of articles about pipeline isolation. So never mind. And because it is just a machine and an algorithm, it's not actually capable of digging in and realising, oh, actually, this is about how a unique application of some pipeline isolation technology in a country, you know, where it hasn't been done before. And it's a world first. And it's all quite interesting stuff that would be of interest to engineers operating in that particular sector. But it can't understand any of that because it is ultimately just a dumb robot.

And you think this is being driven by the sheer volume of of crap that's out there. So they just, they just had to do something. Otherwise they would literally just index all the crap.

I can't see another explanation for it. I mean, the timing of it, you know, people start producing all of this content at scale, as Google calls it. And, you know, the number of pages on the web shoots up exponentially. And suddenly they're sort of saying, oh, actually, we don't index pages unless we think they're going to be valuable. Yeah, it has to be, doesn't it?

So this points to the requirement for an increase in activity research rather. Before you start to create content, make sure that there's an appetite for it.

Well, I think yeah, I think interestingly enough, it sort of dovetails with the discussion we were having last week that, again, we may have referenced in the last podcast episode about just not doing me two things right. It's like there is no space anymore for people to just be like, oh, a competitor's done this. I'll do the same thing. Google is outright telling you, we'll ignore you if you do that. And I think that has to be, you know, there has to be a sort of shift in the way that people think about web content. Otherwise, yeah, most of your output is just going to end up in that sort of crawled but not indexed pile really.

Is this phenomenon phenomena? Is it, is it, uh, niche related? Is it, is it like, are there some areas of business where you'll kind of get nearly anything published because there's a real shortage of interesting or sorry, there's a shortage of content on that subject, generally speaking. So is it, is it but you just you talked about pipeline isolation stuff, which isn't exactly mainstream. Um, I just wonder if, if there are, I think some areas of business where, you know, you don't really need to worry about this, I think.

Yeah, I think ultimately, one of the things that comes across in that Google statement is what they're saying is if we see lots of content around a subject and it's getting really sort of like hammered, and we're finding loads of stuff that could be ranked for the same keyword, we'll start to get more selective. I would have said, you know, prior to the client that we're just talking about and seeing their search console, I would have said there's still loads of industries out there where it's really easy to get niche content published. I'm not so sure anymore though, because like I say, I'll let you say pipeline isolation is a very specific thing that not very many people talk about. And yet even there, they're sort of falling foul of this. So I don't know is the answer to that question. I'd like to think that there are still plenty of opportunities left, but maybe not.

And is Google saying much about any of this? Is it saying you might have noticed that we're not indexing some of your pages? And these are the likely reasons.

Yeah, well, that's basically what this whole thing was about. So it's part of a Q and A, and somebody was basically asking like, how come loads of my content doesn't get indexed? And that's when he turned around and said, you know, to clarify, there is this extra step when we're indexing content where we actually look at whether or not we, we think it's going to be useful. And then, you know, all the usual waffle about making sure you're using the right relcanonical tags and, you know, blah, blah, blah, only publishing unique content. But the, the sort of fundamental thing is that they have sort of said, yeah, we know that, you know, that we're indexing less of your content and that's intentional.

We've always had to, um, dance to Google's tune.

Yeah.

You know, we've, Google has made a multi-billion or even trillion dollar business on the back of other people's stuff. Yeah. You know it.

Well, that.

Is actually, you know, all right, it indexes it, it organises it. And that's a massive undertaking. But it's, but it's, it has, um, it has monetised that process very effectively. And I don't know the idea that it's also the arbiter of what's good and what isn't good is, is sort of problematic, as is a new innovation in search, which I wasn't aware of, that's been trialed in the States and is now going to be people who've signed up to Thingy Labs, whatever it's called, the Google Search Labs. Yeah. And now he's being trialed in this country, which is the AI generated search results, which in theory, you ask the search engine a question and it just gives you the answer. And it never sends you to the websites that give Google the answers in the first place.

Working spectacularly well for Bing, by the way, it's not everyone hates it. Yeah. They've been trying this for ages.

They're tapping it into copilot, isn't it? Which is their AI tool. So I don't know if the Google one's tapping into Gemini.

I'm not sure to be honest. I do know that I, I fully agree with you, though. I think one of the things that's really interesting is two days ago. Mehta, who obviously owned Facebook and Instagram, also released a statement about how they're going to handle AI content and what they've said is the polar opposite. So they've said they're not going to try and penalise it. They're not going to try and stop it showing up in your Instagram or your Facebook feed or they're going to do is label it. So they're going to use detection software. They're going to try and find out whether or not stuff's been manipulated with AI. But then rather than sort of making it so that you can't see it and deciding like, say, becoming the gatekeeper of what is good or bad content, they're just going to stick a label in the corner of it that says, this is AI generated, or we suspect that this is AI generated, and then it'll be for you and me to, to make that decision. And to me, that seems like the grown up way of handling it, right? It's like if Google thinks that this content is is useless AI drivel, then slap a label on it. Say you can skip this result because it's probably AI generated, but if.

You want to pick this whole thing, um, in order to rank in search engines, you need good content and I'll put good in air quotes. You need good content. And for years, getting on for decades. I guess Google has been encouraging people to create good content so it can index it and show up in a search result, which is good for Google because it can then flog people stuff in the paid search, but it's good for the businesses as well because the businesses then get traffic to their website.

Yeah.

If they start, if that model gets broken, um, I don't really know where we finish up. I'm not really sure where where we go.

I don't know.

The model is kind of broken already, but it's broken because, you know, Google said we index content. If you write good content, you'll be rewarded because we'll send people to your website. So people then got their mitts on AI and thought, wait a minute, creating content is expensive and time consuming. AI will do it for free. So it starts churning out. AI starts churning out this content for people that become prompt engineers your favorite term. And then suddenly Google then is like, okay, well, we kind of created this situation because we've encouraged people to create good content and rewarded them. And now there's a mechanism for creating lots of content, most of which isn't good, but probably isn't awful either. And it's kind of like, you know, it's like search is eating itself. It's like the whole way, like, you know, I mean, the way that search has worked is it's been a link based algorithm. So if people link to your content, your content gets promoted higher up the search engines. So what did people do? They figured out ways of manipulating and, and spamming, uh, getting spammy links in order to rank better. And it's just this tiresome, ongoing kind of struggle, if you like to, to kind of make any headway, I suppose.

I mean, in Google's defense, I suppose they would actually much rather that people weren't producing this content. I think that's the thing, isn't it? Ultimately, like, yes, Google needs content to survive, but I'm sure they would much rather that people didn't produce content to rank or with any sort of conception of SEO in mind. Just put all the good stuff that they did up on the internet, and then left it to Google to decide what was worth and wasn't worth featuring. Right. So I can see it from Google's point of view. I mean, it must be exhausting from their end too, to try and constantly engineer ways to cut people a bit like us. I'd like to think we're not the sort of unethical bombard the internet with content types, but it's our industry that's the problem, really, I think. Ultimately, if we didn't keep doing these things and trying to game systems and trying to use AI to churn out content, that in all honesty, we don't know anything about Google wouldn't have to learn these these sort of defense mechanisms. But it is frustrating and it is what I mainly feel for is business owners or marketing managers who are like, right, I'm just going to write about the good stuff my company does. And then through no fault of their own, I mean, like that example that I just gave of the client with the case studies, that's the right thing to do, right? Case studies about your good work, put them on the internet, but they're never going to get any eyeballs on that because other people have ruined it for them. Yeah, it's a it's a tricky one.

It is. I'm sure it's, uh, put people to sleep was talking about it as well. And I certainly feel like a nap. I don't know about you. It was it was interesting. It is interesting. It is good. Um, okay. Hit me up with something else.

Um, well, I think it, I think that one does. Unless you want to stop talking about this subject entirely. No one does lead into the HubSpot thing quite neatly, doesn't it? Because that's I think that is something we should sort of address without turning this into HubSpot advertising.

So let's, um, first of all, tell people what HubSpot is, uh, and then we'll talk about how they've changed their, uh, the tool that they build that they've created for building websites. A content management system isn't called that anymore. It's now called the content Hub. And it's way more than a content management system. And we'll talk about that. But just for those who don't know what HubSpot is, what do most people use HubSpot for? Well, start with what's at the core of it, what's at the very heart of the HubSpot.

I guess mostly it's built as a CRM or customer relationship manager, isn't it? Really?

Yeah. And what do you use a customer relationship management system for? Just in simple terms.

Can I be twee and say managing customer relationships or is that going to get thrown at me? Yeah.

Well, a lot of people use customer relationship management systems now, CRM, CRM, um, but they're also, I think there's still a lot of people who are kind of skeptical or dare I say, still a bit confused about what CRM actually is for.

Yeah.

So in very simple terms, um, if you visited our website, read evolution dot com and something looking for something in particular, a solution to a problem, or maybe you've got a website that needs managing or you want help generating leads from your website, all the different things that we rank for and people find us. So they find us, they read the content, they go, I'm interested in this, what these guys have got to say, and they fill in a form on our website and or they ring us up, but we get their details one way or another. Their details finish up in the customer relationship management system, which says John Smith, Acme Engineering is interested in this. And then we can start entering a process that then gives John Smith the information that he's looking for and potentially tells him how we can help solve the problem that he's trying to solve, etc., and we can keep all that information in their customer relationship management system so that, for example, if I happen to not be in work tomorrow and you are and John forms, you could go in and say, ah, what, what have we been doing for John? All right. You asked this question. We gave him this answer and then came back and asked this question. Dave's not into this, or he's probably chasing down an answer to that question. But you've got the whole history there. You know who they are, where they are, what they're interested in, what problems they're trying to solve. It's all in one place. Customer relationship management system helps you manage the relationship profitably With with your customers.

I don't know what else people are using if not a CRM, just spreadsheets.

Yeah. Spreadsheets, wing and a prayer for folders and folders in outlook notebook. Yeah.

Genuinely terrify me. Yeah.

I mean, a lot of shoe leather salespeople would definitely, you know, they would not be wanting a CRM where their contacts and all the details that they have in their little black book, it's there for everybody to see for.

Sure, so that your boss can see that you haven't actually rung so and so back. Yeah.

I mean, you know, with us, I mean, we've got like the customer relationship management system, which gets auto populated from people filling in forms on our website. We'll then when we've had a conversation with people, we'll then create a deal and we have a deal dashboard so that we know that Acme engineering are in the market for X, and we have to give them the information that they need and answer questions that they've got. And, you know, gradually they'll move through a process until they either go somewhere else or become a customer, for example, all that's in the customer relationship management system.

Yeah.

But, you know, that's at the core of HubSpot. And then they've got lots of things which are bolted on to it, one of which was called up until this time last week, CMS Hub Content Management System Hub for managing websites. You can just like you can use Wix and webflow and squarespace and, and a million other systems. You could use the HubSpot software to build and, and host your website. It's a software as a solution, a SaaS solution. So you don't have to buy a server, you don't have to update software. You don't have to, you know, do anything other than put content in.

The main selling point being, of course, if you build your website in HubSpot, it's sort of everything automatically integrates with all their other, like you say, the CRM. And they also have like various marketing automation software and stuff like that. So yeah, historically it's been sold on the basis that you build your website in HubSpot and everything works really smoothly. You have this whole sort of ecosystem of tools and yeah.

So what's changed?

Um, well, like you say, they've rebranded CMS hub as content hub and sort of shifted the focus a little bit. I think it's fair to say.

Can you still build a website with it?

You can still build a website with HubSpot.

So it is, it is, uh, in a, in a large part, a content management system still.

Yeah. I mean, I don't think that much has changed. I think a lot of it's probably been driven by the fact that nobody, you know, if you say CMS hub to people, it's not immediately apparent what it does and what it's supposed to do. Um, but they have added a load of additional features, haven't they sort of made it a bit more sexy, I suppose. I really hate that word in a marketing context because very little of what we do is ever sexy. But but they made it more appealing, I suppose. Haven't they sort of added a bunch of features?

Yeah, they've made it. So it's a place to manage your content irrespective of where you use that content.

So actually, yeah, this is something I can't really speak about at all. But you definitely can cut the whole sort of headless. Yeah. Nature of.

It. Yeah. So there's a most content management systems like WordPress and and Wix and squarespace and webflow, etc. they are a place where you build web pages. So you create and you know, you create, have a template, new page up pops a template, you put your content in, save it. And as if by magic, it's then part of your website. Um, but there's a whole genre of content management systems, which are called headless content management systems. And they are tools for creating content irrespective of where you show it. So you can use these tools to create content that you can then display in a web app or in an iOS app, or on a digital billboard, in a shopping mall or on a website. It doesn't care. It's just a place where your content is. And it does seem that what HubSpot have done is sort of created a headless CMS. I don't think it's well, it probably is actually fair to call it a headless CMS, because one of the things that they've done is they've created a plugin for WordPress, so you can manage all of your content inside HubSpot, but you can display it on a WordPress website, but you still go and manage it and edit it and keep it up to date and create new content, etc. within the content hub. And some might argue that that's, um, a cynical move because they haven't been able to persuade enough people to use the content management system, although we moved to it, um, not too long ago. Well, it took us seven or eight months to move to it by the time we finished, but we moved across to it and we love it. And we're, as I've said before in previous podcasts where geeks, developers, etc., we can use WordPress, Joomla, any, any system you choose to, you know, craft whatever we can, we could build our website using anything and we like it, we use it and love it. But I just wonder if like, like cynicism is at the heart of all this, where what we've now got is a tool. If somebody turns around and says, yeah, yeah, yeah, but we want to keep our website in WordPress, HubSpot are like, yeah, that's no problem. But you can still manage all your content and importantly, generate new content using our fantastic AI tools inside the content hub. And then if you want to display on your WordPress website, that's fine.

Parking the AI tools for a second. The only thing I'm slightly confused about is that if you make that argument to somebody who has a pre-existing WordPress website, or you can keep your website and all the associated costs of managing it, maintaining it, hosting it. But we also want you to buy another content management system. Will they not just turn around and say, oh, but WordPress also works as a CMS? Like what I can get the argument for like move your website to a new CMS. I don't quite get how you'd sell somebody on the idea of.

Well, here's a, here's a simple example. They've got this, um, generative AI, right? So basically they've got AI tools in, in this new, um, in this new content hub that will allow you to create, in theory, interesting, compelling, indexable content. See how I made that link to what we talked about earlier?

Yeah. So what do they call that a callback? Yeah, I don't know.

Just just me being a clever clogs. Clever clogs. Isn't it a good term that. Oh, you little clever clogs.

Both patronising and hideously smug. Yeah.

At the same time. Um, so if you're in WordPress, um, then, you know, you could sit with ChatGPT open and WordPress open and get ChatGPT to help you generate content. Um, but what HubSpot have done is they've created tools that will, and we'll talk about some of the, some of the other AI tools, which I'm less convinced about, but basically they'll, they'll help you generate blog posts, for example.

Yes.

Uh, using AI all native, all inside HubSpot, um, which you can then just press a button and boom, it's in your blog. It's done, taken care of. So you could use that content and embed it on a WordPress website in a kind of headless kind of way. Um, but you can't do that in WordPress. You need to.

Yeah, you'd have to.

I think it's, I think it's possibly a tough sell because unless you're making heavy use of AI, although I think most people are either either are or planning to. So maybe it's not a tough sell, but it feels like possibly a bit of a tough sell to get people to buy into keeping their WordPress website. And no doubt like the tools you can use to embed it in WordPress, you could use it to probably embed it in craft and various other things as well. I imagine although there'll be a more faff involved. Another good word, um, more faff involved with that. Um, but the AI tools are um, I guess attractive because not only do the AI tools help you generate content, they'll help you keep that content in line with your brand voice. And we're starting to get into the realms of like, WTF now?

Um, explain for the nice boys and girls what a brand voice is.

Yeah. So like we have a very kind of relaxed, informal, plain English approach to communicating with people using the written word. And I suppose with like.

As evidenced by this. Yeah, exactly. Absolutely.

So it's just the way we are. We don't sound like we've swallowed a dictionary when we're talking.

I think sometimes I do, to be fair, but you smack me back a.

Degree in English. You probably did at some point swallow a dictionary.

Um, that was the first semester. Yeah.

Eat a dictionary.

Tear it up, strip by strip.

And the second semester eat a thesaurus. Or is it a thesaurus?

It's a thesaurus.

Thesaurus.

Thesaurus. Okay.

Um, one of them, uh, I thought that was a type of dinosaur, but you can, you can, um, what? You can get these tools to do inside HubSpot is learn your brand voice and look at some content you've created either yourself or you've used AI, and then it will check and see if this works. I'm impressed. It's a massive if it is. I have no idea whether it works or not, but if it does, it's impressive. Again, you can't do that in WordPress. Yeah you can. Then you can actually take a piece of content and say to it, right, I want to see what do they call it mixes or something.

Remix.

Remixes. So you can say, right, look at this, look at this blog post, HubSpot Content Hub, and give me something to tweet and give me something to put on Instagram. You can basically get it to remix the content and give you lots of assets.

Chunk it up.

Chunk it up, and do things with it. Um, again, I think when Julie found out about that, she was like, oh, that could be really handy. That could be really useful. So again.

We don't muck, we.

Can't.

Do that, but we'd have to deal with that sort of stuff. But yeah.

There is one thing that they were bragging about, which we both kind of looked at and went, oh. you remember what that was?

Well, well, most of the generative AI stuff makes me roll my eyes, but we'll get on to that in a minute. Um, it was the, was it the AI podcasting?

Yeah.

See, we're gonna.

Tell everyone about that.

Well, so basically this is going to be the last episode of Digital Marketing From The Coalface, because soon the robots will take over and there'll be more interesting than us.

Yeah. But what they do is, um, you feed it a.

Script.

Correct.

And it reads it.

Could you imagine trying to script this bullshit that we come away with actually sitting down and scripting it all with the ums and the ears and the piss takes and all the rest of it. It's just not going to happen, is it?

Well, I was what was really interesting to me, I went on a little bit of an adventure over the weekend actually, because when they announced this, HubSpot announced all of this content hub stuff on like Thursday last week. Um, and while we were talking about it in the office, I found a wired article, um, wired, of course, being a sort of news site for tech stuff. Um, and they were basically talking about the fact that three years ago, one of their journalists had taken this sort of foray into the AI generated podcast sort of sector of the internet. And he says that lurking away on on Apple Podcasts and Spotify and all of those places are a bunch of these podcasts that are produced and voiced by artificial intelligence chatbots effectively. And there's millions of them because obviously they're very quick and easy to produce, but they never. Well, but you don't because people use ChatGPT three to write the script. So you say, write me a script for my podcast episode, and then you give it to the AI and oh yeah, oh yeah. But what's brilliant about it is that there are like thousands of gigabytes of these things lurking on the internet, but none of them ever get any traction. And I was like, that sounds really cool in a sort of spooky, sort of like internet graveyard sort of way. So I went for an explore and there are hundreds of these things, and they are all universally terrible, as in absolutely trash. Um, it's awful because half the reason that people tune into these things, I think, is because they are natural human conversations, and there aren't that many places where we can get that anymore. You're not being marketed to. Nobody's selling you stuff. Or if they are, they're doing it very subtly. Um, unless you listen to people who like that guy Steve Bartlett and the diary of a CEO where he like pushes product all the time. Yeah. Weirdly artificial.

He keeps cropping up in TikTok telling me, I've got to buy this health drink.

Yeah. Shut up Stephen. But, um, yeah, you know, people are here because they want the sort of natural human, like the cadence of human speech, a conversation, people that can laugh at each other and talk about things or, you know, anecdotally and sort of go off on weird and you're not going to get any of that. So I don't really see that there could possibly be a market for this stuff. Like nobody actually thinks, right, I'm going to sit down for half an hour, put my headphones in and learn. I'm gonna learn something. The AI is going to tell me how to do something. It's bollocks.

So yeah, the idea that, um, a robot voice, however natural they start to sound and some of them do sound pretty good. Um, the idea that a robot voice, uh, narrating, speaking, um, a podcast, um, you're right. I struggle with it. Um, I might be wrong. We might be wrong, but it just sounds like such a clearly inhuman in, in the, in the, in the sense that it lacks humanity, not in the, not in the sense that it's cruel. Uh, it seems like a humanless experience of the spoken word. Just. Yeah.

Who's that for?

Well, it's maybe for other robots.

Well, but this is the.

Did you speak to the robot community when you were actually putting all this together?

So I'm gonna go on my podcast and slag you off to your mind. And they were like, no.

Yeah, we will just come and kill you.

We will remember. Um, no, but do you know what's interesting is while you were saying that, I just had a weird epiphany. That is the same reason that I hate generative AI text too. And I think I think that's, again, weirdly, going back to the whole English degree thing, because all writing, all good writing is also about people's voices and unique perspectives, right? So in literature, especially, like things that are worth reading are generally things that are written from a unique perspective with, with sort of a unique voice. It's something completely different. And outside of your experience. And part of what really bugs me about generative AI text tools is that they just can't do that. It's just this sort of banal beige and it's fine. I get it. Like written text isn't always, you know, there to be compelling. It's not meant to be literature. It's just there to coach you through things or whatever. But I don't know, even.

Even I'm a huge fan of audiobooks. I like my podcasts, as you know. Um, I even listen to this rubbish sometimes. Uh, and I like audiobooks and there are some, there's a narrator that is used for the, um, David Baldacci books, which are easy to consume, good on long drives. I quite enjoy them, like Zero Day and stuff like that and.

Is it a sort of action.

Yeah. I mean, it's it's but, you know, generally based around a giant of a man who like a bit Jack Reacher, that kind of thing, you know. Um, it's puller isn't it? It's it's John. I think it's John Puller in the Baldacci series. Yeah. It's quite, it's quite, it's quite readable, listenable. Um, and one of the guys, or maybe the guy who narrates that he's very good, but he just kind of borders on sounding a bit robotic. And if I contrast that with, um, sadly no longer no longer with us, uh, Bill Wallace, who narrates the Rumpole of the Bailey and he, his range of voices that he does, the way he brings those stories to life is, is mesmerising. Now, I wouldn't dare to suggest that that, that we sound our voices are somewhat mesmerising voice. Um, well, you've got a very nice voice. There you go. Finally, a compliment on the podcast. Um, you know, I've got my voice is a bit of an acquired taste. It's northern English, it's rounded vowels, etc.. Um, but you're not for one for one minute thinking you're getting like a robot talking at you. I mean, it's, you know, it just, it does seem to me very odd because one of the other tools that they've offered in the new content hub is pod, not podcast, a blog post because we've often well, we've, we've flirted with reading, um, blog posts for people that can't be bothered to read them. They can just click a button and listen to them. And one of the things that it does, and we all kind of went, well, yeah, we'll probably try that is like, if you don't want to read this, this blog post, then press this button and it will be read to you. Yeah, it will be AI generated. I sense I get a sense that. And this isn't because we are thinking of using it. So we haven't used it yet and we might or might not use it. So this isn't like me saying, oh, people will like it because I've decided to use it. I could almost see why if somebody gets the convenience of having a blog post read to them, rather than having to read it, they won't mind so much if it's a robot voice. I don't know what you think.

Yeah, I think so. I think you're right. I mean, I think you're looking there at a sort of a tool that's offering you an alternative. And I think if you, you know, if you if you're consuming something and somebody says, oh, do you want to do this a slightly different way, you're going to overlook the sort of natural flaws of that because they've offered you something quite helpful. One thing I do think that that will definitely not work, however, is if you use, again, ChatGPT or something similar to generate your blog posts and then get a robot to read it, because I'm sure there is nothing worse than robot content read by a robot, but you know, you're in one of those funny places with that where I think like the AI narration is again, like a convenience tool and a way of repurposing content. And I think that is sort of fine. I think that's where like, you can use AI intelligently to do stuff like that. And to be fair, back to the thing you were saying earlier about chunking content up the the remix thing, I think those are probably like quite good use cases for artificial intelligence because that's what it's good at, right? It takes the content, it reformulates it in a way that's readable or whatever, but it's not trying to create on its own, which is. Yeah, I don't know. While you were talking, I was trying to look up because we were talking about voice actors.

While I was talking, you were looking into my eyes and hanging on every word.

Absolutely. Thank you. I was reminded of the fact that, um, you know, Andy Serkis, the actor. Um, you do know Andy Serkis. Wrong generation. Maybe Gollum from Lord of the rings.

Oh, right. Okay.

Yeah. So he just got paid what I assume is millions of pounds. And that's what I'm trying to find out. To narrate the Lord of the rings books recently for audiobook. And it's, you know, in an age where more and more people are like, oh, a robot can do it just fine. People who actually understand the value of this stuff are still willing to pay lots of money for humans to narrate things. So it's not a sort of, you know, we're not at a point where you can just say, oh, well, the robots can do it as well as people. That's clearly not the case.

What else was there in the box of tricks that HubSpot unveiled last month? Last week, rather.

Let's find our blog post on it. Is that a cheeky plug? I don't know.

Is that published now? Yeah. Oh, good.

Yeah.

It's up with a load of AI generated images.

There are no AI generated images.

But there are.

Well, Diana, is Diana a robot? That's a good question. We'll ask her. Um.

This is a bit of a pregnant pause. See what I mean? If you don't have this stuff. You wrote a great long blog post about it, yet you don't know where.

My head's.

Like.

A sieve. Absolute sieve. Um, yeah. The gated content thing. So that's a yeah.

To me it's not quite gated content.

Okay. Well this is okay. So for context, this is another thing that's getting added in content hub. And to be fair, apparently it was already available in um, CMS hub enterprise that you could do this.

You could password protect content.

But they're now making it so that you can just with a normal professional subscription, you can, you can now password protect your content and you can do that I think on like an individual basis. So you can say this blog post I want to put behind this.

It's almost identical to what you get. If you click a click a link in X to say a story in The Scotsman, and it gives you the first couple of paragraphs and it says, this is a premium article, you need a subscription to read it. So it's a bit like that. So, you know, pure gated content was often here's a landing page saying, Wowza, you're not going to believe the stuff that's in this PDF. But if you want it, you need to tell us who you are. And it's kind of, you know, maybe run out of steam a bit. This is kind of like on an, on an article by article basis. It's basically saying it's probably not going to be used to sell content, but it's going to be used to try and get people to sign up. But all you're going to do is just get like, you know, mouse at Disney type email addresses.

Can you stop that? Is there stuff you can do to sort of counteract that or not really?

Well, there is in HubSpot, you can press a button which stops people with gmail accounts and yahoo accounts and Yandex accounts or whatever. They are all that bullshit. It stops all them being able to register. But yeah, there'll be it'd be dead easy to get around it, I'm sure. Um, the only, the only way is I suppose if the, if they then email something to you in order to give you access to it. Yeah. Then you know, then that won't work. But I think broadly speaking, it might be useful, um, for companies who've got some really valuable content and they can mix that in with the freely available content. Just like, for example, the newspapers do already where you can download, you can, sorry, you can access an article and it's freely accessible. And then something else is like, this is a premium article. So you could have premium content and freely available content and use the premium content to generate leads or potentially make money if you wanted to.

I suppose it is interesting that you say that, though, because I'm still I mean, the newspaper thing is a really good example. The Telegraph do that quite a lot. So they read some of their content and then occasionally you'll think, oh, that sounds like quite an interesting article. Click it and think, oh fantastic. Now I have to subscribe for seventy years and give away my life details. And then I contrast that with like the Guardian where like, everything is always free. And I'm like, ah, I like it still annoys me that people try to get content, but I get what you mean. There are probably times when the content is so valuable it's worth doing.

Yeah, the newspaper one's an interesting one though, because like newspapers, uh, you know, people pay their mortgage with the money they earn working for newspapers. So if, if newspapers just give their shit away, then how do they make any money? And how do those people keep a job? So, you know, you have to either.

Beg.

For money like, like, well, the guardian beg for money and what all what a lot of the newspaper sites have done. In fact, probably all of them is they just have that horrible clickbait all over their the website. So even if you you get a free piece of content. A story that you might be interested in, and you have to try very hard to read the whole story in between all the ads popping up and all the all the stuff going on it, it is in no way a pleasurable experience. And surely it can't be that cost effective either. Sorry, it can't be that profitable. Profitable? Yeah, it can't be the best way. I mean, surely getting the content and asking people to pay a small subscription is way more.

It seems more grown.

Up, makes a lot more sense. And there's a lot more grown up than this, this way that you just get. I mean, these pages are virtually unusable. I mean, unreadable because they're so full of adverts and crap.

Yeah, I think yeah, I think so. And it's worth pointing out as well that the Guardian and newspapers like that do haul themselves out a little bit. Like you can buy backlinks from the Guardian, for example, for SEO, you can buy editorial content. So yeah, I think there's something like slightly more grown up and trustworthy about websites that are just honest about the fact that they're going to charge you to use them. And, you know, probably for a lot of niche businesses get you get away with it. Because if somebody really wants to read what you're going to write and nobody else is going to write it, then. But again, you know, back to content and value really, aren't you? Your content actually has to be good for that to work. So yeah.

That's how, um, some podcasts survive my, um, you know, the ubiquitous ubiquitous, what most people think podcast. Geoff Norcott you can listen to it with adverts or you can subscribe using Patreon and um, you get the.

Advert.

Free, you get the yeah, you get, you get the episode early and advert free.

The Patreon model is an interesting one. A lot of content creators do that now where it's like sort of you have those optional income streams and if you subscribe, you get benefits and you get episodes early and stuff like that. It's quite interesting. It's not really something that's ever filtered its way into sort of B2B marketing, I presume, because nobody's really that interested. But but yeah, we're quite behind, I think, in a lot of ways on and that sort of thing.

Talking about not being interested, what else have you got to talk about?

What else? Um, well, the only other thing I have really, which is more an advice thing, um, than anything else. Um, can we use this podcast like Mystic Meg? I don't see why not really working with a client and the client has an in-house team. Um, they have an in-house team that quite closely matches ours in profile, as in they have dev, they have design, they have some UX. They want to be able to do more of the web work themselves. Historically, they haven't been able to because that team has been doing other stuff.

I think I know who you're talking about.

It creates all kinds of conflicts because we have that resource in-house and have been doing stuff historically, and now they want to sort of get involved, and it's basically just making more work for everybody, because now there are like two designers looking at everything and arguing with each other, and there are two developers looking at things and saying, oh, we could do like this. You could do it like that. Um, what is the proper way of negotiating that situation and how what is the best way of working when you already have some in-house resource with an agency that's more efficient?

That's a really good question. Um, first things first, and you mentioned, um, being grown up just a moment ago, um, for, for it to work at all, then any sort of adversarial situation needs to be completely defused. If you're working with an in-house team, you have to get on. You have to understand that you're all, in theory, pushing in the same direction, trying to achieve the same thing as in prosperity for the company, because the in-house person relies on it for their salary and the agency relies on it for income. So everybody is is trying to achieve the same thing. As soon as you get situations where somebody is starts playing games, whether it's agency side or in-house, then you've got to tackle that. You've got to address that. You really have. I mean, if if that is, you know, it will be it will very quickly become a serious problem if you've got these mind games going on.

Yeah. Obviously, I'm from the agency side, right. So I'm going to have a natural bias. But I think part of the problem is that like in an agency environment, we survive by making sure that our clients prosper. And we're all very aware of that because if clients stop prospering, they stop paying us. But I think for in-house people, sometimes it's almost like more important to protect their patch or to sort of retain control or, you know, the appearance of being in control of a certain aspect of the business than it is for that aspect of the business to do well. And I think that's quite a tricky thing to negotiate. And the other thing is just that so much of what we do eventually boils down to opinion. And that's the bit that like is often a real struggle to negotiate because it's like somebody can say, oh, I don't like this, but it's like, based on what? And it just seems like such an unnecessary roadblock. And I'm sort of of the opinion personally now at the moment where I am with it is that like, if you want an agency to come and work on your website, you should just redeploy your in-house resource. Like somebody has to be the final arbiter. And if you make it so that your in-house resource can constantly sort of interfere with what the agency are doing, everything's just going to be less efficient because you're just going to have three people's opinions on everything instead of one.

I think I know who you're talking about. Are you are you saying that it is becoming an issue?

Um, not like a massive issue. It's just a frustration. I'm just very aware of the fact that the work is now happening less quickly, which is just because I'm sat there from the perspective of like, I just want to get stuff done and get on with it and see it go live and then move on to the next thing. And I don't want to get stuck, like having these weird sort of like opinion based kind of they're not even conflicts. It's just like this, this back and forth. And I just, yeah, I don't know what if there is a grown up way to deal with that, or if you just have to say, right, you are going to look after the website and you're going to go over here and look after something else.

Well, I think there is a grown up way of dealing with it. And quite often these situations, um, escalate because of a lack of face to face conversation because people get very brave when they sat behind a keyboard. And they'll, they'll fire stuff around and copy their boss in because they're trying to score a point or something like that. I mean, I'm, you know, I'm a good few years older than you and you know, it, it really is water off a duck's back. Anyone that tries to score points against me, I just like, you know, I mean, life's far too short, far too short to, to play those stupid games. Um, but I understand that it sometimes can become, um, an issue, one of those sort of keep you awake at night kind of issues. And if you sit down like we are now and have a conversation and you can't come to any sort of agreement, then the agency should just part company. Mhm. That's it. There's no you know, life is too short to kind of try and keep banging away at that stuff. I mean, I've been, um, getting all serious now. You know, I've been criticised in house here for being, uh, to, to coin a phrase, a bit trigger happy with, with certain customers.

And I was gonna interject with something much worse than.

Well, that's fine. Um, you know, and, you know, we're all I understood where, where people were coming from. Um, you will find as you get older that you tolerate assholes a lot less. You just don't have the capacity to, to, to put up with people's bullshit when you, when you are, when you can clearly see that they're just playing games.

Yeah, I think, yeah, I think.

Having said that, just let me finish having said that, hold the thought. Having said that, you know, with that maturity also comes the the capacity to self-reflect and just think, right, am I being the asshole because I'm capable of being an asshole. We all are, you know? So if I'm being that person, then I'm. I'm probably, you know, I'll be quick to to point out, wait a minute. I'm getting this wrong. You know, I'm, I'm kind of digging my heels in, you know, in a, in an unrealistic, unreasonable way. But once you look at the thing in the round and isolate that this this person is trying to make my life difficult, you sit down like this, you have a conversation. If you're not getting anywhere, you just say, have a nice day. And you go and fight because there's so many people out there want to work with us and want to work with you. Not just us, but agencies, good agencies who give a damn. You know, there's plenty of there's plenty of work out there. You just don't have to put it. And ultimately the business is, you know, the people come unstuck eventually.

Yeah, yeah.

Because some people will start around an empty house. It's just how they're wired.

That's nice. I like that one.

What were you gonna say?

I was just gonna say it's one of the really interesting things about working in a service industry, I think, isn't it? Because I think, you know, in a weird way, I sort of always default to the idea that, oh, we're employed and we're providing a service. Therefore we should be like, um, not, uh, I don't know the right way to articulate this. Not, not.

Take your.

Time. Not that we should sort of like crawl along the floor.

Over there, tapping your fingers, bored stiff. And she wants you to wind it up, but you take your time.

Um, no, you know, we're not, um, you know, not sort of crawling along the floor like a waiter in America begging for tips. But, you know, it's a service industry, right? And it comes with the territory. And I guess that's why I always default to.

What do you mean comes with the territory?

Well, almost that you should sort of expect to have to sort of justify and prove yourself all the time and have these silly.

Explain and qualify why you're doing what you're doing justifies. Not to me isn't the right word. Yeah. If you have to justify yourself to a client, then the chances are that that relationship is not good. Yeah. Because if they don't trust you, if they don't listen to what you've got to say and go, that they might listen to what you've got to say, have some thoughts, maybe some challenges. But I think the idea of justifying yourself, you know, not sure about that.

Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? Because a lot of clients do sort of talk to us, you know, even clients who are quite good working relationships with quite a long time will sometimes talk to us in ways that are sort of like very, you know, explain what you're doing, sort of type emails. And it's like, seriously, um, I think that just sort of comes with the territory in my head anyway. Um, but I guess you're right, I guess as you sort of get older and wiser, maybe you learn to sort of think, actually, hang on, that's not quite right. That's not how we should be talking to each other.

It isn't. But I think, um, I think it's absolutely fine for customers, clients to challenge us and ask us why we're doing something. Because it's important to us anyway that our customers understand what we're doing, why we're doing it. It's why our model is that when we have customers on retainer, we meet them every week, discuss the work we're doing, discuss the work we're gonna do, discuss the results of the work that we're doing and discuss when things go well, discuss when things don't go well. That's, you know, that's how we operate because we want that kind of very.

Transparency.

Clear lines of communication, transparent in everything that's going on. Uh, and we found that that's a recipe that people really warm to. They really like. Yeah. Um, but that doesn't mean that sometimes relationships don't go slightly awry. Yeah, they do, but I think it's, I think it's important. We're a small business. She actually yawned. Then she actually yawned. I think it's important. Um, um, yawn is usually contagious as well.

So it's a very interesting podcast.

Yeah, I think, um, so let me try and get my train of thought back. Like we're a small business. We're a small agency. There's ten stroke eleven of us. If we, if we count film, if Phil's been with us forever, even though he's not a member of staff. Um, so there's eleven of us. We're a small business, but like, it's, it's how we are making our way in the world. We're just as relevant as Mr. Big, who works for shell or BP or anything else. These organisations are you know, I was thinking about Brian earlier. He's just just messaged us in America that Brian. Um.

There you go. That was a classic northern ism that he's just messaged us.

He just messaged us. Yeah. Um, so I think it's not like, you know, you mentioned we're a service industry recently completed for the second time, uh, all six seasons. Six seasons of Downton Abbey, right. So you get this idea of like, you know, people being in service and even though those upstairs, um, are quite often thick as mince and are completely wrong about things that, you know, if you were downstairs, if you were in service, then yes, yes, my lord. No, my lord, yes, my lady, normal lady. And that's all there is to it. And you just, you know, you, um, you do all that good shit, but we are not, we're not in that position. So you might be surprised. I mean, next time it happens, anything that like this comes along, first thing, discuss it internally and say this is and be as factual as possible. So kind of, you know, like loading it in in favor of like, you know, so I'm right on that sort of thing, you know, none of that. But, you know, like discuss it internally, get everybody's opinion of it, self reflection, try and understand their perspective. I do say this to you guys quite a lot like, like try and see this from a customer. Well, we do it, you know, when we're marketing to people, when we're helping our customers market, we're always trying to put ourselves in the customer's shoes and like, you know, client will say, oh, you know, we're going to build this page and then people will click this and then they'll click this and then they'll click, no, they won't. They won't do any of that. They really haven't got time for any of that shit, you know? So, you know, we do understand that. We have to understand. Like empathy. Empathy. That's the word I was looking for. See, that degree in English did come in useful. Um, that's what I'm looking for. And that's good. But but yeah, we're never, ever in a situation where, well, one of the hardest things when you run an agency is, um, having to do something that, you know, is the wrong thing to do. Yeah. And I don't mean like something illegal. I mean, like, we've got a situation, not a situation. We've got, we've got, um, a thing going on just now, project going on just now where we've created a brand new name for a business and we've got, we're creating the whole brand around it and everything else. Now without going into the details, because as you know, we don't name customers and clients. There's the, there's the, um, name, blah, blah, blah. Services dot co dot UK dot com or there's the name spelled differently dot co dot UK and dot com. Now I know for a fact if we go for the name with nothing else after.

I'm laughing at you because you just bought all the domains for the wrong one.

If we do that and that's what they want to do, it is the wrong thing to do. It's absolutely the wrong thing to do. But if I have to just shut up and just say, well, okay, that's what that's what they want to do.

No, I'm with you, man.

It's just like sometimes you know what should be done, but you just have to accept it's not going to be done.

People take shortcuts or whatever.

That's right. But, um, kind of lost, lost, lost the thread a little bit there. But yeah, but, but as long as we've had that conversation with them and said, this is what, this is what we should do. And if you don't do this, chances are down the line you'll wish you had. But fair enough. You're gonna you want to do it this way, that's fine. But people, um, being unreasonable.

Yeah.

Um, is not fine ever. Zero tolerance on stuff like that. We have, we've certainly parted company with people in the past. um, because they, they were extremely unreasonable and were just like, you know what? This could be somebody else out there who's right for you. We're not.

I think you hit the nail on the head, though. I had a weird a weird thing earlier today. Uh, you said upstairs, downstairs in Downton Abbey. And I think that's the crux of it.

You remember this TV series? Upstairs? Downstairs. Gordon?

Too young for that.

You would.

Be. Yeah, I've heard of it. Yeah, yeah. Um, but I think that's the crux of it. It's when people start to treat you like there's some sort of, like, class imbalance. Um, and have.

You never heard the customer is always right.

Well, this is the thing because I'm gonna fess up to being an absolute asshole. Now, I nearly did this at lunchtime, so I booked my it's a, it's a podcast episode. We have to mention cars at least once. It's contractually. We're obliged. Um, I was booking some new tires for my car. I booked it through black circles, which is for those that don't know, sort of online marketplace. I booked my tires to come to a place and I booked my fitting, and then they rang me up and said, oh, we can't do the fitting on the date that we told you. Um, and I like my initial response was like, that's not good enough. And I caught myself doing it and I was like, it's not like it's nobody's fault. It's just a thing that happens. But you just sort of like my default was like, well, you'll have to sort this out then. Weren't you just entirely unreasonable? But it's so easy to do that. And I think as soon as customers do do that, you're right. It's just a sort of losing battle because their heads in the wrong place. Really?

Mhm. Yeah. That's right. Okay. Um, didn't quite cover off everything on my list, but I was.

You didn't have a list.

What's that? Just because you haven't read it upside down like you normally do. Um. Damn.

Let me steal your, um.

We've covered everything we need to cover. Uh, you've been listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface, uh, with Dave and Alex. Um, we will be back next week with more drivel. Meantime.

Yeah. Goodbye. And thanks very much for listening.