This podcast was originally released on 09/09/2024.
So a gig comes along. The first thing to think about here is, as we did with the lazer people, you know, they came along and quite often they're nervous. I mean, I get it, they're just nervous. The fact that potential customers think we're thinking pound signs, pound signs. How much money can we get out of this? You know, like charge for this, charge for that. We're not. Right. The first thing that we think is can we actually help? We want to look at what they're doing online. We want to look at the business. We want to understand their motivations. We want to understand their market. We're trying to paint a picture and figure out whether we truly believe we are the right guys to help them. We are not engaging in an initial conversation with people thinking, how much money can we make out of this now? I'll caveat that because, you know, if a company comes along who clearly got budget, then we're thinking, ooh, this could be exciting to work on because they'll have the budget to do things properly.
The things we don't normally get to do.
And sometimes we don't get to do them with some of the, you know, tighter budgets with some of the smaller customers, for example. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface, where we talk about digital marketing, politics, love, life, and loss.
Jesus. How's that for an agenda? In ten minutes.
I think it's funny. These things keep coming up on, uh, on my tick tock. My tick tock knows me only too well. And they keep coming up and it's like it's got this same music every time. And it's like things that ripped my heart out. And it's like, but it's what authors said. Yeah, hold on a minute. I'll read you one and see if I can find it. It was like.
Um, David has wandered into the emo section of TikTok.
Uh. Oh that's right. Yeah. Uh, well, I'm sorry if I hurt you while I was hurting. Oh, deep. And then this one hour almost will always haunt me.
Oh, God.
I know it's pretty deep stuff in it, but it's got. It's like loads of things like that. I don't know why it keeps targeting me with them.
It's just. It assumes that you, like all fifteen year old teenage girls, really care about that shit. Stephenie Meyer's and Twilight. Yeah.
I mean, you immediately went, what was that thing you said? Emo.
Emo?
Yeah. What is that? Is that an acronym? I mean, I'm an old bloke, remember? I don't I mean, I know, I kind of know that this kind of, you know, black hair, black lipstick, long black coats, all that bullshit. I thought it was like goth like type stuff.
Yeah, it's like goth lite. Yeah. It's like diet goth. It's like.
Okay.
Goths are cool.
Goth.
Emo.
I always, I always have the full fat.
Emo like the generation behind. I think it's just stands for like emotional or emotionally vulnerable or, you know, some, some crap. But yeah, it's exactly that. And then you have like seen kids who are like emo, but they dye their hair pink instead of black. And that's like apparently.
But it's just like that whole kind of teenage young person angst that everybody goes through where like, nobody understands me, the world doesn't understand me.
And like every generation, every generation is misunderstood in a slightly different way. Yeah. I don't know what they do now. Whatever gen we're on now at school, I don't know.
I don't know either. Um. Full fat. So when you ask for a Coca-Cola and you don't want diet, what do you ask for?
Um, I don't know. Good question. Original recipe.
What do you ask for if you just want a normal Coca-Cola? What do you ask for? You know, because every diet seems to be more prevalent. Huh? Do you ask. Do you just ask for normal Coca-Cola? Normal Coca-Cola? What do you say?
I don't know. I can't remember the last time I asked for one. I'd probably say normal Coke. Normal Coke or Coke.
Yeah. Because it's quite common to ask for, you know, because one's called diet. So the other one gets called full fat.
But I'm sure.
I'm sure I heard somebody say that. Oh, it's a real old person thing to say, like ask for full fat coke. You know.
I don't know. I don't think I'd say full fat.
But everyone knows what you mean if you say it.
Yeah.
So even though it's a bit of a tough thing to say. Yeah.
Um, and technically incorrect because there's no fat in coke, so you know.
Yeah. But it doesn't matter if it's.
Fat milk is it?
I know, but what does, what happens to the sugar? There's like about a bag full of sugar in a can of Coke. What happens to that? Uh, Alex? Uh, what does it turn into? Alex.
Thank you.
Thank you.
Thank you. Can I have the coke that makes me fat?
Don't you just eat fat to get fat?
Thank you. It's good that we can delve into nutrition as well in these episodes.
Well, it's a it's a hot topic at the moment, isn't it? You know, because the new government is going to you know, I don't smoke. Never have. But they're going to stop people smoking, you know, probably on top of mountains or something, I don't know, just in case somebody happens to be walking past on the other peak a mile away. Um, and they're going to get into the whole like control and everything else. And, you know, how are they gonna control the apparently there's an epidemic in this country and plenty of other countries, you know, an obesity epidemic. How are they going to control that?
Well, the sugar tax was a very ham fisted attempt at controlling that, wasn't it?
Did it work?
I don't know, I genuinely don't know what the science would say about that. I suppose it's probably too early to say, but it certainly wasn't well received, and it's certainly not been much fun for anybody that does enjoy, as you say, full fat Coke.
You stop waffling on. This is supposed to be about digital marketing.
Yep.
Right. What's happening in your week ahead? Before we get into anything else, what's happening in your week ahead in the world of digital marketing at Red evolution?
Well, it's the start of the month. So talk to clients, agree priorities, do the work, do the work. I don't know, it's a bit early to say really. We've not planned it all out yet.
Well, if you actually plan to do some work that at least makes the month a bit different to every other month this year.
Find something to do with my time, I suppose.
Yeah, bring a jigsaw in. That was something, you know, when I was in Edinburgh and we went to the Edinburgh Chamber thing, which was great, it was at the Royal Botanic Gardens, which I have to say was looking a bit tired and neglected.
So what was the event? Was it just a mix?
It was the Edinburgh Chamber summer get together and it was lovely and it was nice. Lots of nice people there. Um, we met the very sweary and very much great fun, um person from Maggie's. Uh, the cancer support charity. And as a result of that, we're going to go and do a golf day down in Saint Andrews. Not on Saint Andrews, but at the Duke's course in Saint Andrews. We're going to do a Maggie's Golf day in October. So I met them, had a good chat with them. Uh, and that was all good. Although the Botanic Gardens, we were out on the deck, which is sort of outside the restaurant, you know, like some places you go to and they've just got that air of neglect about them, which is making them just not shiny when they used to be shiny and could be shiny.
Like those weird old holiday parks.
Yeah, it was a bit like that. It's a shame. But um, anyway, and that was fine. And then on the, on the, on the Friday we went to, uh, Simon Evans's show, which was fantastic. Uh, at the fringe. Um, alas, Smith and Hume. So you can work out what that was about Smith and Hume. Um, and it was fantastic. And he was talking about some amazing, um, and he said, well, if you, you know, if you can't get to Rome, There is a rather satisfying one thousand piece jigsaw of it, and I just really tickled my fancy. And then on the Friday night, we went to see, um, shitfaced Shakespeare, which was good fun.
That does sound.
Good. It was one of the actors is supposedly, you know, Shakespearean actor is supposedly shitfaced and she looked pretty much shitfaced. She looked she was hamming it up a bit, but it was good fun. It was much ado about nothing crammed into about an hour and ten minutes. So you can imagine what it was like. It was all a bit mad, but it was quite good. Quite enjoyed it. Nice little Susan.
Very cultured of you. I always assume that those things, the, uh, the mixers, the events that the Edinburgh Chamber do is just sort of like, I don't know, expensive members club for business people.
It wasn't that expensive. It was about thirty five quid and you got you got a few drinks and you got some food. And like I say, the venue was nice. You know, it's a nice walk. We stayed at the hotel Queen Street, so it was a nice little walk down through Stockbridge down to, uh, the Botanic Gardens, which was actually it was good. It was a pleasant walk on, on, on, on an almost summery evening. It was a summer get together, but it wasn't very summery.
Yeah, well, apparently we're not allowed to bitch about the weather. Otherwise we get told we're being pessimistic.
Fair enough. Yeah. Week ahead. So obviously the first week here is often like, you know, planning and making sure we're talking to our clients who are on retainer and, you know, agreeing the work we're going to do. In fact, we do quite a lot of that at the end of the previous month. So we're kind of ahead of the game, that kind of thing. And obviously, we've got a really big retainer kicking off this month with one of our customers as well, which you and I are going to be putting our brains on probably later on this afternoon. Um, so you know what's going on.
It's a strange thing because I think the end of the month you're sort of rushing always because, you know, there's always spillover. There's stuff to finish off the stuff to sort of box off. And then the beginning of the month you're rushing to plan and then you get a very tiny little bit in the middle where you're like, oh, okay. And then I've got.
Work to do. I know what I'm doing. I've agreed it with the client, or I'm waiting.
For the client.
To give me some stuff, that kind of thing. And you're actually managing to to get things moving along quite nicely.
Yeah, it's a hard life. What about your week?
It's similar. I've got quite a lot of, um, you know, we've got a lot of projects on just now, so I'm trying to keep myself me and make sure I'm across all them and asking the right questions and keeping people motivated and moving in the right direction with those. Um, I think there's a few kind of new businessy type conversations possibly going on this week as well. Um, and it's a full week in the office, I think primarily. Oh, well, it would have been a full week if we hadn't gone for lunch today and I hadn't dropped my iPhone again and smashed the screen again. So I'll be going into, uh, the iPhone store and, um, relieving the bank account of three hundred and fifty quid for a new screen for my phone just because we went for a panini.
We did.
What a pain in the ass, honestly.
I know.
It's annoying. It's so annoying. Anyway, so yeah, um, because last week was it. Last week I was I wasn't in the office all week. I can't.
Remember. Well, you never are. Golf days and, well, you know, if it's a working event.
Golf obviously.
Absolutely. Contractually obliged to, I think so.
I wish it was like.
That.
Anyway. Um, okay. So the week ahead. Plenty going on. Um, we are like really kind of full on just now. It's great.
Yeah.
Yeah. You know, we've got a great mix of project work and retained work, which is lovely. And, um, almost kind of like if you know, anything comes along at the moment, it's, it's tricky actually to try and.
It's got.
Shorts on today as well. By the way, if you can see them, I don't know if you can see them in the video. Second hand shop Stockbridge is quite a posh area. I believe in Edinburgh.
Is it?
Julie would confirm whether it is or it isn't, but I'm pretty sure it is. But like everywhere, it's predominantly charity shops. But I just love a charity shop.
Yeah, you've got that of Karen, I suppose.
Well, yeah, I've always been a bit, you know, my mum used to get all my clothes from jumble sales, so you know, I was a second hand clothes is nothing new to me. Um, and I got myself two nice pairs of shorts. Karen got a really nice jacket because she is the charity shop queen, as you know. And, uh, but there was some record shops and that sort of thing as well. So the price of vinyl.
Yeah. Well, it's a thing now isn't it? It's a hip thing.
My vinyl collection is probably worth a couple of quid.
Probably.
At least there'll be some in there that are worth a couple of quid. Like original the wall, for example. That's gonna be worth a few quid. Um yeah. So the week ahead for me is project stuff, retainer stuff. Um, and obviously the inevitable, uh, new business enquiries that come in dealing with them, that kind of thing. Uh, you know, we're obviously getting on with our, uh, the new customer in, um, in Edinburgh as well, you know, the, um, the very high tech business that we're currently working with there, which is, which has been good, isn't it? That's been an interesting challenge that project because first of all, the science is not straightforward. It's not to me anyway. I mean, I've got a fairly techie background. But I mean, you know, I've never looked at any depth into lasers.
Um, and especially not quantum lasers.
And especially not quantum lasers. No. That's right. So that whole thing has been really interesting because the dilemma was, you know, this, this customer sells a high tech component or a, or a, a thing which is used as part of a bigger machine to inspect, um, uh, silicon chips, uh, to inspect cells and, you know, using, um, what's it called again? Raman spectroscopy.
Yeah.
See, I've even learned some of the lingo. And once I'd stopped using it using the word the term Newton meters and, and realised it was nanometers when we were talking about the wavelength.
Not in fact a car. And it's.
No. That's right. Um, it all started making a bit more sense. But the interesting thing about that, and I think you found it interesting as well, was like trying to figure out how people who need those high tech, super precise pieces of kit actually search when they're when they're trying to solve the problem of like, where do I get this? Are they looking by application or are they looking by characteristic? And we kind of resolved it to probably for the most part, the characteristics.
Yeah.
Of the of the laser.
Although I think this is one of those really interesting things. I was actually just writing about this this morning for our blog. There's a specific thing that happens when you're right on the sort of weird fringes of an industry like this, and it happens a lot in B2B, I think, where you're sort of talking about a pool of sort of twenty to thirty people and you're trying to predict it's probably not twenty to thirty is it's probably like two to three hundred people who are realistically going to be going out and buying like a laser diode or, you know, information on, on oil and gas tank.
Diode, pumped solid state lasers by any.
Chance. They may well be, if I knew what half of those words meant, I could tell you. Um, but the point is, you know, you're working with these really small volumes of people. The tools don't help you anymore because like, you know, for that example that you're just giving there with the lasers, if you ask sort of SEMrush or Moz or Ahrefs or sister or any of those tools, you know, how many people search for this a month? They'll tell you none. Yeah. And this is a thing that's sort of, um, we know it's not true because we can go into people's search consoles and we can see the search volumes. We can see that people do, we can just see that it's very infrequent and all the data gets sort of messy at really low volumes. So there is sort of an element with that gig and with a couple of the other gigs we're doing at the moment where you are sort of guessing. And I think you said this the other day when we were talking about a spreadsheet for another client, and it sort of stuck with me, is this idea that you just have to sort of take a gamble and wait for a bit and see what happens. And this idea that you can sort of know everything, certainly. And that's an.
Educated guess, isn't it? Yeah.
And I think some people are like really uncomfortable with that. Certainly some clients would be if you said to them, you know, this is sort of an educated guess, but you really are in the territory of, you know, there is no hard and fast data, there's no real Answers. And unless you're going to get thirty laser technicians in a room and say, right, imagine you're doing this project, what would you search on Google? You're never really gonna know until you start testing things and trying things. And it's why a lot of the time, you know, when it comes to sort of optimising, you'll end up doing a few passes, you know, and sort of we'll try this didn't work, but in Search Console because you've started to rank for this other thing, you're seeing some volume come in there. So let's actually shift gears and go after that instead. And it's, you know, it's, it's, it's an iterative process, especially with B2B stuff.
Yeah. I mean, like most people who are trying to help businesses generate leads online. Yeah. We, uh, you know, we, we make great use of Google search console. But if your website isn't talking about something specific, then you, you don't get any traffic, but you don't get any.
Sort of data.
Near misses either because you're just not talking about it. Yeah. So by starting to talk and use different language and then you start to see things and then like you say, you then see, oh, wait a minute, we're on page ten for this phrase now, which we hadn't thought about. And it's got massive search volume, you know, supposedly. And, you know, and it's, it's something to pursue.
And really extreme example of that is when you get a website that, you know, sort of the, the products page has been optimised. Let's use lasers as an example. It's been optimised historically for the word products, right? Search console is not going to give you anything useful. It's never actually ranked for the word products. You know, there's nothing in there. You change it to sort of like you say, solid state lasers and suddenly you see traffic starting to shoot up for, I don't know, solid state diode pumped lasers or whatever. And you think, oh, okay, that's where I should have been. But that's, that's the whole thing really, isn't it? It's, it's having your eyes open. It's being willing to sort of learn and react and, and move as the data comes in.
Yeah. That's right, that's right. It's um, yeah, it's been, it's been really interesting. It's, it's good to be, uh, stretched. Yeah. And really, really having to think about it, you know, because, you know, some of the work we do, it's very easy to get good data and understand where the gaps are and understand, you know, what the issues are and everything else. But like, just like, you know, more increasingly, I suppose you might say we get presented with these bigger challenges.
The data is rubbish.
Yeah. The data's no good. So you've actually got to go, you know, way back and actually start approach it rather from a, from a different perspective.
But I don't know about you, I, I actually prefer that I find it much more exciting. Like there's, there's sort of something quite nice about being given a huge data set and being able to say, okay, here's the pattern, here's what I can see out of it. But that is just sort of like number crunching. Yeah. I feel like when you don't have that data and you are being more inventive, that's when you're actually sort of using your brain a lot more and trying to, you know, get in the head of the person that's buying this stuff and work out what they would search for that sort of thing.
Yeah. That's right. What was I going to talk about? Something that I held back on, uh, during the last recording was talking generally about how agencies role. And we've we've kind of touched on loosely some of the subjects already today because I noticed that your laptop is closed and you've come, you've come to this recording without a solitary idea.
They call it.
Without a solitary contribution.
By the seat of your pants. I was hoping I'd get away with it.
Actually, you could call it seat of the pants. Or you could call it, um, something else. Rank incompetence.
There's something so visceral about the word rank, isn't there? It's brilliant. It's one of those proper, beautiful sort of English words. Yeah.
Brilliant. Yeah, yeah. We do have many fantastic words which you don't have in France. Do you really? We've got so many more words. More than double, more than double we have.
It's not a competition. We. Well.
Much more words. Where did you learn to speak English?
To be fair.
Your English is impeccable.
We just have two words for lots of things, don't we?
So yeah. One word for lots of things as well. Identical word meaning. Completely different things. Oh, that's so hilarious. I'd hate to have to learn English. I admire people like Leslie who've actually learned to speak English because I'm, you know, my French journey, learning French journey has faltered many times. But what I have recognised is it's it's a lot easier to learn, I think, than English would have been if French was my first language and I had to learn to speak English. Yeah, I suppose you're surrounded by English, which makes it slightly, you know, music and everything else. You you you're kind of motivated, I suppose. Um, but yeah, just the sheer volume of vocabulary, but more but trickier than that. The identical word meaning for different things, five different things. It's ridiculous when you think about it. Anyway, what I was going to go on about was talking about how agencies role. And I think we've, you know, not surprisingly, we've kind of touched on it a little bit in the past. Um, but I just thought we'd explore the kind of, you know, what we think, what we feel, what we worry about. Um, the stuff clients don't see, basically the kind of the kind of deeper stuff. And, you know, you were, for example, how often do you find yourself thinking about a particular problem that you're trying to solve for, for a particular client at the weekend?
Yeah, all the time. It's interesting actually, because we're just obviously off the back of a weekend where I did, um, before I went off for the weekend, we did some work, um, for a client, basically putting together an optimisation spreadsheet where we were looking at what keyword should all of the, the main sales pages of their website actually be optimised for? Historically, it had been phoned in. A lot of them were optimised for things like products or services. Um, and it was sort of a job to, obviously we had all the keyword data. We had to sort of match it to pages. And yeah, I spent most of the weekend thinking about that, man, I spent most of the weekend sort of questioning and sort of questioning again, my decision making process and thinking, oh, but what if this and what if that? I think that's a big thing. I mean, the output for that task was a spreadsheet. And the client, without naming any names, um, spent about ten minutes looking at that spreadsheet this morning, ticked off a load of stuff, and then sent me an email to say that looked adequate and sensible. Mhm. Which, which says, you know, it's like, hiya. Cool. Um, it doesn't look like much. It was sort of, uh, I don't know, maybe like sort of seventy two hours of sort of constant mulling. Um, but I guess, and, you know, you wouldn't expect clients to see that or to say, oh, you know, wow, you know, clap, clap. What a fantastic job. You've tried so hard. But I think it is worth sort of emphasising that point is that, yeah, we take this stuff home with us. We think about it all the time. It has to be right. That's the thing a lot of the time, what people are coming to us for and what they stay with us for is the expertise, the fact that, you know, if they ask us to do something, we do it very thoughtfully. We do it very sort of rigorously. We do it in a very sort of, um, you know, there'll be no sort of surprises and we won't come back to them in three months time.
For yourself.
You know. Not at all. Not trying to be full of myself, but not. The point I'm trying to make is you do have to sit with it and think about it a lot. Yeah. Yeah.
Okay. So, I mean, so a gig comes along, potential gig comes along. I mean, the first thing, the first thing to think about here is, um, as we did with the lazer people, you know, they came along and quite often and I think they did, you know, we just want some information and I'm speaking to lots of people. Yeah. You know, that kind of, you know, they're nervous. I get it, they're just nervous. They don't want they don't want us to think that we're that they're a pushover. And the gigs, hours and everything else. They want to want to get our best price. They want us to be on our tours.
That we're back to dating analogies again, aren't we? Well, yeah. You know, I've got other options. You know, I could, you know, plenty of people want.
See, the thing is, with dating, I never read. Never did have other options.
No.
I mean, who'd want to date this? So, no, the analogy doesn't work.
Sorry. Not for.
You. Not for.
Me. You know.
Well, clearly.
Pretended you may have incorrectly, deceptively pretended you had other options.
I think I saw a brilliant headline in The Onion. You were there as well? We were looking at it together, weren't we?
Yeah.
It was like, he's no Brad Pitt. Call on Brad Pitt at sixty. I thought that was brilliant.
Clean isn't it?
Yeah, absolutely.
Um. Yeah. Um, I can't remember what I was saying now. Jesus. Good. Yeah.
What I was talking about was the fact that, you know, an opportunity comes along and the first thing we think. Well, I think that people think potential customers think we're thinking pound signs, pound signs. How much money can we get out of this? You know, like charge for this, charge for that. We'll rebuild the website. We'll do this, we'll do. We're not. Right. The first thing that we think is, can we actually help? We, you know, we want to look at the look at what they're doing online, you know, the way they're using social media, their website, anything at all that they're doing. We want to look at that. We want to look at the business. We want to understand their motivations. We want to understand their market. We're trying to paint a picture and figure out whether we truly believe we are the right guys to help them. And the reason we do that is because if we take stuff on and there are agencies out there, plenty of thirty Bob agencies out there, whatever it is you ask them to do. Yeah, yeah, we can do that. We can do that. And it's just about the money. It's just about the money. Now, don't get me wrong. We need to make money like any, like any business does. Um, so we can give it all to the labor government and they can stuff it all down the drain. Uh, you see, the thing is, that's the danger of me saying things like that is I sound like I'm probably a Tory voter and I'm not. I actually am, broadly speaking, a Labour voter, but I just look at the clowns that are in number ten just now, and I just think, er.
I'm afraid at your age, pushing eighty, uh, nearly ninety white male owner of a business, you're right in that bucket of people who used to be labour and are rapidly becoming conservative. Are you? That's what they would say. That's the sort of shift. But no, I agree one hundred percent with you. I think it's a really interesting time in politics in general, but I do think you.
Might get on to.
That. Yeah. Labour government are making a particular set of.
Things they maybe are. I'm not sure. I'm trying to give him the benefit of the doubt. But at the same time I'm a realist. Um, so this whole idea is that we are not engaging in an initial conversation with people thinking, how much money can we make out of this now? I caveat that because, you know, if a, a company comes along who clearly got budget, then we're thinking, oh, this could be a great gig. This could be exciting to work on because they'll have the budget to do things properly.
The things we don't normally get to do.
And sometimes we don't get to do them with some of the, you know, tighter budgets, some of the smaller customers, for example. Um, but our starting point is always like to try and understand who they are, where they are, what they're doing, what they're trying to achieve, and figure out whether we can help them. And that is genuine, which is one of the reasons that we offer the, the free of charge, pro bono, whatever you want to call it, pro bono sounds better than it makes me sound like I'm a lawyer.
So the They feel special.
Yeah.
Pro bono, pro bono.
That's a good slip there. Pro bono. Bono. I saw a funny sketch about that.
You're all over the place.
And it was to do with them. Everybody finally admitting that they never liked U2. And they only said they did like you two because. Was it you that was saying no. Was that on the onion as well?
But I feel it very strongly.
Yeah. I mean, I not necessarily put myself in that camp, but everyone was frightened to say that actually, I don't really like YouTube. But then it turns out nobody liked them. But anyway, I don't think that's true. Um, so the pro bono work, uh, is, is designed to try and make the customer feel comfortable, but equally, it's for us. It's for us to figure out whether we feel comfortable. And the reason that we need to do that is because doing what we do, if you can't help a customer, it's a, it's a thankless, horrible task. It doesn't matter how much money you're getting paid to do it. If you're not the right team, if you're not able to help, It's sleepless nights, it's difficult conversations. It's horrible. You don't want to be there. You absolutely don't want to be there.
It is as well being pragmatic. Just a question of capacity for us, isn't it? I mean, at the end of the day, we have clients who we're working with now who and I'm sure many other agencies are in the same place. You know, we've been working with for five or six years. There's only twelve of us. Are there twelve of us? Yeah.
Um, well, eleven and you?
Yeah, that's what I spent the exact same joke. Never mind.
Not fast enough.
You know, we cannot. And I think this is the same for many agencies. We cannot sort of fill our books with people that we can't help in the long term, because where we want to be is in a place where we have a stable client base of people who've been working with for a very long time, and that's not going to work. If we take risks and work with people we can't deliver for. So there is a sort of pragmatic angle to it too. You know.
I take a risk. Yeah, a client.
Yeah.
But I would make it clear to them that like, we're not sure. Yeah. But if they felt like, well, to be fair, it's a tricky gig and I don't think anyone would be sure. Appreciate your honesty, but like, we'd like you to have a go at it for us.
I mean, there's an element of.
That and that's great, but I would never, you know, take it on a, on a, on a false premise.
I guess what I'm saying is we're not really interested in making, you know, twenty grand off somebody this year and then losing them at the end of the year because we couldn't deliver, because there's no real value in that for us. The value for us is that in eight years time, they'll still be with us and they'll still be paying us twenty grand.
I think the point we're making is, is ourselves and any decent agency have got integrity. Yeah. And I think if you're looking at hiring, working with an agency on your digital marketing, and it is a noisy marketplace, as we've said many times, you know, it's definitely worth knowing that the good guys and gals. Yeah, I nearly did an impersonation then. I'm glad I didn't. Uh, the good guys and gals, um, do care. They are genuinely in a position where they want to do good work for you and keep you for as a client long term. It's not about trying to make a fast buck.
It is bloody difficult to tell the which, which lemon difficult which. Agencies are like that. It's very easy to masquerade as somebody with integrity. I think that's the thing, and I don't. I never really know where to go with this when people are like, oh, you know, could you give me advice on selecting an agency or whatever? Like, I think that's a real struggle, man. I mean, what do you say to people? Like, look for somebody that acts with integrity? It's really easy to fake that. Car salesmen have been doing it since, you know, I don't know whenever people started selling cars. Do you think carriage salesmen were the same beforehand?
Carriage salesmen, horse salesmen?
I don't know horse traders. Yeah, but, you know, point is, it's not difficult to fake integrity. You can't really trust case studies because everyone will lie about that. So I don't practically I don't really know how to how to navigate those waters.
Do you not think, though, that if you spend some time with some people trying to pick through a problem, you get a feel for whether they're full of shit or whether they're actually the real deal?
Yeah, I think I guess. I guess you would quite quickly, wouldn't you? Yeah. Are they actually keeping up with me? Are they listening? Yeah. They understand. Yeah.
I think so. And that's that's why I think in the past, we've always encouraged people rather than just chuck a tender document out to fifteen agencies and look at the prices that come back, you know, like narrow it down to three or maybe four max and spend an hour with each of them. Whether it's, you know, it's easy enough to do these days. Everybody uses Google Meet, Zoom, whatever, you know, preferably in person. Spend some time with them. If you spend time with some people. And at the end of that, you don't get a sense that they're the right guys for you, then they're not the right guys for you.
Yeah.
And they might be really nice people, genuine people. But if you didn't get a feeling, I mean, you go back to your dating analogy, you could you could meet somebody. And I think we we've maybe all been there. You know, you meet somebody and, you know, on the face of it, you're a good match. You may be physically attracted or everything else, but it.
Yeah, just not quite right.
Just not just kind of isn't. And you know, you both kind of like, well, hopefully both kind of recognise that. And I think it's the same, you know, in like when you're trying to find like an agency to work with. I think that's why, again, from our point of view that that pro bono. Session that we do, it's to help us figure out because let's say, for example, you know, we had one of those sessions and one of the people on the client side, uh, was just full of it, you know what I mean? And throwing the weight about and, and being a bit of a dick, then we'd be like, you know, thanks very much. That's great. And then it would be thanks, but no thanks, because we would, you know, we would actually decide you're not right for us. But it is more about whether, you know, it's more about the client. It's about them looking at you, seeing how you operate, look, see the questions that you're asking because, you know, like with the with the laser guys, you know, they are embedded in this high tech industry and clearly knew this industry inside out. And they knew the technology inside out. But we went down there, me and Stu and, you know, Stu's, you know, he's a physicist. He got, you know, Imperial. He got a degree from Imperial in physics. He worked in the nuclear industry. And, you know, they saw that like, okay, these guys are industrial tech marketing specialists. But actually, you know, that guy's an engineer and that guy's a physicist. It's not just yeah, kind of.
Dumb and dumber. It's not.
Yeah. I mean, suggests that people in marketing and design and everything are dumb, but.
I would never suggest any such thing.
You say that to me all the time. Not around, but. Oh, Rob. Oh, Leslie. Um.
Designers have a very unique set of skills. It's just that maths isn't one of them. Math, math.
Um.
Get out.
Yeah. So you the, you know, spending time, you know, is, is important I think, for both sides. Um.
Yeah. Although it's interesting, isn't it, because I think sometimes it's one of those things with, with clients like that where just having the humility to say, I don't really understand your niche. Can you explain it to me? Sometimes all it takes, right? Because I think one of the things, one of the mistakes a lot of agency people fall into is they sort of act like, yeah, man, don't worry. Like I'm across this. Or like, it's like, no, just, just be honest with people. But I think that's the thing that's what we're talking about really, isn't it? It's about vibes. And ultimately.
Yeah.
Do you see opposite somebody and think, I could sort of like, I want to get in the trenches with this person, you know?
That's right. And I think, um, you know, that takes me on to the other thing, which again, we touched on briefly a second ago, which is this, this idea of, um, there's a lot of stuff that goes on in agencies that clients don't see one hundred percent. Um, they, you know, they especially, I think when you're onboarding a client and you're really trying to understand their market, their, their business, what they do. Um, and like, you know, they're ideal customers and all that kind of thing. There's, there's a lot of stuff goes on at that stage, which is we don't really charge for it all to be fair. And we get, we get some.
No.
Recompense for it, but we, we often think, well, it's up to us to try and get up to speed with this and, and demonstrate a willingness. It's almost like we're making an investment in this as well, because, you know, we're in it for the long term, preferably.
So it's interesting, isn't it, because we have a client that makes pressure vessels for a living and, uh, one of their, well, not for a living for hundreds of people's livings, but you know what I mean. To make money. And one of their sort of lead engineers always talks about this, how, you know, the product, the thing that people are buying is the, the vessel at the end of it and what they're not paying for and what they're not interested in is the sort of like enormous amount of sort of engineering and design work and people sitting around bits of paper and drawing things and, you know, going to the pub after work and carrying on to like scribble things on napkins and that sort of thing. And it's very true. I think that's the thing. It's like we measure things by their outputs. You know, I went to a marketing agency and I bought X, Y, and Z, but you don't think about the time or the energy or any of that sort of stuff. And again, it's not really to sort of like, you know, play a miniature violin for us. So I think it's just worth sort of realising that that's what, you know, when somebody says, right, we're going to work to identify who your real target audience is, that doesn't mean somebody sat down and thought, those people that'll do. You know, it's sort of four people around a table discussing things for several hours. And that's the the bit I think that, yeah, like you say, it's very easy to sort of miss or gloss over.
Yeah. I mean, the whole point of this little piece was to kind of kind of paint the picture as, as, as about how, yeah, you know, decent agencies like us and many others, you know, operate. And I think it is seen as a bit of a kind of black box from the outside. Yeah. And this, this great content, this, these great designs, these ideas, these soundbites, these whatever, you know, they come out of this black box and it's, I think it is helpful. Hopefully it's helpful to kind of understand really what's going on inside the black box.
Well, we're our own worst enemies, aren't we? I think as an industry in general, it's like, oh yeah, we just because again, you know, back to the whole dating thing, there's that there's that sort of innate desire to make things look sort of effortless. You know, it's like, oh yeah, of course we like designed a logo for you. You know, like we just sort of like cranked it out of thin air, like we do it in our sleep sort of thing. And, and we sort of, I think a lot of agencies, a lot of people in this industry want to sort of culture that impression that it's all very sort of easy. And for them, very effortless. We're at the top of our game. So we just do this stuff. And I think what that does do is sort of devalue the product to the client. You know, they see a logo and they think, oh, somebody drew a logo, not somebody drew forty of these, sort of crossed thirty of them out, agonised over the remaining ten. You know, I think we really do sort of undersell ourselves a lot of the time because people are not really willing to talk about the process or to say, do you know what? This was a real struggle. This was a slog. And it took me sort of three days, not three hours of charged you for. But I don't know really. It's a it turns into a pity party quite quickly, I guess, doesn't it, once you start doing that sort of thing.
But it's you know, that's one of the we're not unique in our industry, but that's one of the things I think that that, um, is difficult to quantify and to a certain extent put a price on. Um, it's this idea of, of, um, well, it's the wrong word really, because what I was going to say, it's the idea of the ideas, um, um client in Edinburgh, um that we've been working with for nearly a year now I think, and they're in property management. So, you know, if you own a flat in Edinburgh, you can, you know, rent it out and, and you become a landlord, but it can be a lot of hassle. So they'll be the landlord if you like. So when the roof leaks, they'll get it repaired. When the, the boiler stops working, they'll get it sorted out. And they decided they wanted to advertise on the back of their new vans. I think their electric vans, I think so they're not on the road very much, obviously, because they only do about four miles before they need recharging. But anyway, so they've got these electric vans fleeing all over and they wanted us to come up with an idea. Now, you know, you could easily go, you know, be very literal about it. But, you know, I won't go into the idea, but we came up with an idea which kind of it kind of told a very nice story to the people who have got the properties that they want to, to manage sort of thing. And I was sat in the hotel and one of these things where you have your breakfast looks straight onto Queen Street, and I was just chatting to Karen and I was like, oh.
I don't see why you can't explain the idea. I think it's a great idea.
There's one of the vans. And as it went past, it was one of the vans that had our.
Thing.
On the back of it, and I took a photograph of it and sent to put it into the into the group chat, which was, which was good fun, but and it looked great. But more importantly, what he told us the owner of the business was that somebody called up. I was driving around Edinburgh, saw your advert. I thought, why am I not going to phone them? And then our clients. And it was, it was great. It was nice. Nice to get that back. So. So what value do you put on on that. Yeah. You know what I mean. I mean we we didn't charge very much for the idea or even the production of the idea, turning it into their three or four different variations for the different vans that are flying around the city. Um, and I suppose, um, you know, where I'm going with that is, is it's this stuff that you do, which is, you know, we don't charge by the hour anyway, not not to clients, you know, we might try and work out what something's going to cost by looking at rates and things because, you know, everyone who works here is here for a finite amount of time and that it's very easy to work out what that costs. Um, but when you find the right agency, you know, they are going to agonise over these things for you and come up with what they think are good solutions and yeah, and everything else, which is, um, as you would expect, really, I suppose, you know, architects, engineers, you know, any, anybody that's in a creative, um, type industry and, you know, and I do think engineering is a creative industry in many ways, you know, it's, it's, um, it's just kind of what you do, but, you know, uh, and I'm just waffling now, but it's, it's this idea that we, that we give a toss.
Yeah, absolutely.
And it's not just about like, you know, how many hours can we bill for this piece of work sort of thing? Yeah, that kind of thing. Um, so, um, I think I've kind of covered what I wanted to cover. What's, what's going on in the world around us that you want to talk about for not very long.
In the world around us of, of marketing. Not very much interesting. The world in general. I don't know, seems a uniquely pessimistic time to me.
You see, uh, the far right AfD managed to secure a foothold in.
Enormous footholds.
In Germany.
Yeah, it's not even a small thing, is it? No. Everyone's panicking about it.
Well, they only narrowly missed to the CFD. Is it the Christian, the conservative or Christian? The centrist kind of party, I think, or the Conservative Party? They narrowly missed out to them in another election in Saxony and then this other place, and I can't remember the name of it. It was just on the news this morning. So all kinds of interesting things happening there because obviously we had earlier this year all the scary stuff that was going on in France where it looked like.
Narrowly avoided.
The Marine Le Pen was gonna finally, um, fulfill her dreams and, and actually get, you know, get, get some power in France. And, um, that was obviously, um, foiled again. Foiled. It might come back to bite, might come back to bite.
Leslie making strange noises.
What she actually said was, oh, he.
Fear and panic. It was a little racist. You can cut that out or not leave it in. Um, yeah. No, it's a funny time, isn't it? I mean, we're seeing this in America. This is all sort of playing out at the moment where it looks like in polls, you know, Trump is now going to narrowly sort of lose to Kamala Harris. But it does seem like the flirtation with sort of extreme right wing politics hasn't really gone anywhere. It's bubbling away.
It won't go anywhere.
Yeah, it's a scary thing.
It's um. Yeah it is. Um, yeah, I suppose it is.
I don't really know where you, you know, I don't really know where it takes us. It's difficult to imagine a place that isn't quite pessimistic and dark really in the future.
I think the danger is that it's in in many cases, it's not really far right politics. I think it's poorly articulated concern more than far right politics.
So this is the thing with the AfD in Germany, right? Because I was listening to the radio this morning and they had somebody from a, you know, German sort of center left think tank on there. And they were sort of saying, you know, what, what is this about? You know, why are people voting for this? And he was saying, well, you know, if you look at it on paper, they don't actually have any policies. There's no you know what I mean? There's no people are not voting.
In this country.
Well, sort of not really. But people are not voting for something. They're just voting against something. You know, it's very easy to do this whole like, you know, immigrants are the boogeyman. And they've done a very good job of sort of connecting, you know, mass immigration.
Do they come in and dance boogeyman.
You know, a very good job of painting these, these lines between like, oh, you know, the, the National Health Service is stressed, housing stock is stressed, immigrants are coming in. Therefore immigrants are stressed, all of these systems and, you know, but there's no sort of like fundamental reason or philosophy or push for anything positive. It's just a sort of empty reaction. We don't like this. So we'll vote for this protest party. And the scary thing is that they do then get into power and end up making decisions. And I think that's the bit that people, you know, and maybe they just don't care. But the people that vote for these parties, you know, when you end up with Nigel Farage as your MP, that's it. You've got him. You're stuck with him. He's not going anywhere. And now he gets to make decisions. And that's I don't know really where you go with that. Like you say, the people that policy. And to a degree I think you're right. You know that is what propelled Labour into power was protest. People were sick of the Tories. They wanted change. And that's what Keir Starmer campaigned on ultimately fourteen years. And that's a good impression. Not very nice impression, but a good one. Um you know, ultimately it turns out that they're pretty empty on the policy front too. And that's yeah, it seems to be the thing with modern politics is it is very much sort of sound bite. Well propel yourself into labour thing.
Um, was, was I think sort of prefaced on the idea that we're just not the Tories. That was it. That's all they had to do.
But they sort of are They've had all these opportunities to roll back on things and to undo things. And they've just been like, oh, well, you know.
They've given they've given the various people that were on strike what they wanted and they've given them pay increases and all the rest of it. So they're clearly not the Tories.
I mean, they all they've done is agreed with what an impartial pay review body said anyway. And let's be honest, the only reason the Tories didn't do that is because they wanted to push the problem down the road because it's expensive.
You do wonder whether or not, um, the Tories were quite happy to lose that election.
Absolutely.
Well, it's very likely that they'll come back into power in the next election, because it's going to be a torrid five years. And everyone's going to look and say Labour, you were supposed to fix everything and you've fixed nothing and everything's worse now. So we're going to go lurching back to the other lot.
It's a tricky thing because there is very little honesty in politics, and nobody really has the balls to stand up and say, look, actually, I don't really know how to fix this. I'll have a good go if you tell.
Me how we fix it. If you tell an outright lie, you're done. How about that? How about that? For starters.
What do you mean by outright lie?
A lie something that is demonstrably untrue that they knew was demonstrably untrue. How would you prove it was untrue?
Well, how would you prove it?
I think I think there are certain things that you could, you could demonstrably prove was a complete untruth.
Like the three hundred and fifty million.
Potentially.
For the NHS thing. Yeah, I get what you're saying. I think yeah, I think it's tricky because.
I know what you're saying as well. I understand that like if somebody thought something was true, you can't then do them and do them in for saying it because they actually genuinely thought it. But I think when it's demonstrably the case that they knew what they were saying was untrue, then you're done. You're finished. Like, no, no second chances. You're finished in public life. How about that? For starters.
Do you think we have time to sort of police whether or not people were telling you just end up with sort of endless enquiries?
The BBC do it. Channel four do it. So this stuff is fact checked all the time. There was, there was um there was the BBC. It was actually so, you know, um, not exactly a right wing press. The BBC were fact checking some of the things that Harris had said in America, and they said, she said this and it's completely untrue. She said this completely untrue. And she said this, that is true. And she said this. And that's probably mostly true. But there were some things that she said which were completely untrue. And you're standing on that platform telling people this stuff. You know, to me that's not that's it. You're finished. But that's a very simplistic point of view, I realise that.
No, it's a tricky thing. I mean, I think it just goes back to the nature of politics. You know, we live in an era where the the reality is that if you want to get elected, you have to give people nice little soundbites. You have to give them crisp little sort of, you know, we did this, we achieved that. This is bad, this is wrong. And none of it. The problem is none of this stuff is absolutely true. Do you know what I mean? It's all. Yeah. And you're always messing about in a gray area. And it's really easy to say things like, oh, you know, um, the Tory government completely failed on their promise to build forty new hospitals. Um, the reality is they started building twenty three of them and, you know, some of them got upgraded instead. And, you know, people try really hard and work gets done. And sometimes there are delays, but it's really easy to reduce things. And I guess the question is, at what point do you say, well, you've reduced this to the point at which it's no longer true and therefore you're going to jail. I don't know.
Without supporting the Tories, the soundbite that's been overly used is the, you know, fourteen years of Tory mismanagement that that that irritates me because I think that is fundamentally dishonest.
Well, it's it's fundamentally true that they're in power for fourteen years.
It is fundamentally true that they were in power for fourteen years. And they came in on the back of the GFC. And then there was the oil crash, then there was Covid, then there was the war in Ukraine. And it's like, yeah, but it's, you know, we're only in this mess because the Tories are rubbish. And that that to me is just despite not being a Tory supporter is just bullshit. If it had been Labour the other way around, I didn't blame Labour for the GFC and the mess that ensued after the global financial crash. I didn't blame Labour. They were all in government.
But voters did. And I think this is the problem. Yes, I think ultimately.
I am a voter. Although I did spoil my ballot paper at the general election.
I don't think he meant to tell people. Are you?
Yeah, you can tell people, can you?
Yeah. There's, um, a fundamental problem in the way that people think. And it's a real problem in football. You know, a football team loses four matches back to back. They miss out on an opportunity to go to a big sort of international competition. The manager gets fired. It's clearly the manager's fault that the players didn't play well. And we have exactly the same sort of, um, cognitive sort of, uh, bias in politics. You know, it's like the economy is doing badly. The politicians are to blame. If you look, there's probably very little influence there, probably completely disconnected, but it doesn't play well to people's sort of like feeling that the managers are in control. To turn around and say, well, actually, nobody could really influence those events. We are all of us sort of at the mercy of of global trade winds is a frightening thought. But I think that's probably the reality. I think in football, for example, you could just fire managers a lot less and you get the same results anyway. I don't think it doesn't really have that much to do with it. I think we just really like a scapegoat. And I think to a degree, that's what politics has become. You know, you stand up, you take responsibility, you get to gloat when things go well. You didn't really do anything. You get to, you know, sort of like, put your hand on your heart and talk about how disappointed you are when things go wrong. Uh, you know, they're not really influencing stuff a lot of the time. The policies are simply just sort of like shuffling some numbers around or slightly influencing something.
Mhm. Yeah. Anyway, that's one way to finish a digital marketing podcast.
Yeah. There's some good digital marketing.
Yeah. Maybe what we should start doing is saying, all right, we've kind of stopped talking about digital marketing. I'm going to waffle on.
You can tune out.
So feel free to stop. Although probably people will go, wait a minute, they've gone off on one again. That'll do. I've listened to enough of this drivel.
Well, the stats will show that, won't they?
Speaking about listening to enough of this drivel, you've been listening to Dave and Alex on the Digital Marketing From The Coalface podcast. I can't remember the name of the podcast now, and we'll be back with more next week. Bye.
