Then what was this thing you wanted to talk about?
Well, it was just about predatory marketing tools. I was having a conversation with somebody internally. They were learning to use Google ads, and he came to me and he said, you know, I've done this thing. I've followed all of Google's prompts and the things that it's told me to do, and I've set up this campaign. Big mistake. Well, this is my point. No, he's a smart guy. He's switched on. And what he'd created at the end was something that like, genuinely would not work and would have wasted him a colossal amount of money if he'd run it. And it's a funny thing, because I looked at what he'd done and I thought as a practicing PPC operative or whatever, you know, I was like, I have no idea how it's ended up here. It's terrible. It can't possibly go live. And I worked back through it and I was like, oh, I see all he's done is exactly what the tool asked him to do. But what it creates at the end is a campaign that is, you know, so loose, so broad, so poorly optimised.
Perfect for Google because it causes money.
You waste a ton of money. I pretend to be a dragon with that voice. She does not like it.
I hate to interrupt, but we've started a podcast. Oh.
Have we?
Yeah. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Budget week was the budget yesterday. You know, we often sort of wander into politics, don't we? Just start politics? We start with politics. No. Better not. We've, um, done hours of preparation for this podcast as we normally do, and it's all completely scripted and we are reading it off air. Hold on. Turns page a page.
Uh, Sean nos getting longer as we speak.
Yeah, I know. So as usual, we are here to talk about life at the coalface of digital marketing. Um, amongst other things. Like I say, we often wander off into other, into other territory, but, um, I've got a few things written down and I know you've written absolutely nothing down.
I've got one thing. I have one.
Oh. Have you? Okay. Oh, well, if I get fed up of my list. I might, I might invite you to bring in your stuff.
If it runs dry. You can have a go at your.
It's not much of a list, I've got to be honest. Um, I'm going to talk about B Corp first. We have read evolution have started their B Corp journey. We are part of a cohort of companies who are being um assisted if you like, by um an initiative, an initiative from um the Edinburgh Chamber of Commerce. Um and we've been um we're being assisted in the process of getting to the point where we can apply for B corp status. So if anybody's not familiar with B Corp, just go and Google it. But it's basically B stands for better and it's a movement global movement. And there are about two thousand registered B Corp companies in the UK. Um not very many in Scotland. Um it's a movement which is designed to make Companies better by making companies not just exist for the benefit of the owners, shareholders or whatever. It's actually so that it's for everybody. It's for people, planet and society in general. You know, we're, you know, making companies be a more integral part of society, contribute more to society, damage the environment less, and work for the benefit of, um, every, everyone involved in the business as well as, as I said, wider society.
Sounds very worthy.
It does. And it is a little bit I must admit. Um, I'm keen on the whole process. Um, because I'm keen for red evolution to be as good as we can be and at the same time, working through the B Corp process, there is some rolling of eyes. And we had a situation this this week where, uh, one of our, uh, one of the people who's, who's helping us and this has all been, you know, it's perfectly well intentioned, but like, I just need to check something with you. Do you do you actually work with any companies that extract fossil fuels? Uh, no we don't. We work with companies who work with companies who extract fossil fuels, but the companies we work with don't directly extract fossil fuels, but they certainly work with companies who do. So we might work for a large engineering company who in turn are providing services to BP, shell or whatever. And I don't know why. It just really ground me. Gears grinded my gears. Gears. Yeah. It just I just found it, it it ground my gears a bit because I just thought, well, here we are. I mean, we've created a business out of nothing we do. Right? By people, both people who work with us, people we work for. Um, the way that we operate the business in an environmentally friendly way is, you know, I think as almost as best as we can. Um, and then here we are like, And one of the things that really annoyed me about it was like, yeah, we want to go back to the B Corp people with in full disclosure. It's almost like.
It's like naughty.
Like we've been naughty, like we've been criminals or something. You know what I mean? It's like, we have, we have dragged this business up over the last twenty years from literally nothing. A computer in a spare bedroom. And yet here we are being judged because we might have worked for a company. And you know what really pisses me off? You know, what really pisses me off is companies like BrewDog were B Corp and they had it taken off them because they turned out to be a bunch of idiots, and they treat people really badly, even if their beer is quite nice, especially that Elvis juice stuff. That's quite nice. And then companies like Nespresso, who basically put about thirty trillion tons of landfill into into the planet every year, they got b-corp status. And, and I don't know, I mean, there's another one that springs to mind. Um, there's a company, I'm not going to name them because I'm going to be derogatory, but they make sausages and their B Corp. All right. Now, there's nothing wrong with being a B Corp and, you know, brutally killing animals for food. There's nothing there's no there's no there's no misalignment there. I get I get that, but the sausages weren't actually that good, if I'm honest. Well, it's.
It's better company.
That's that's that company's fundamentally dishonest because they were basically saying these are the best sausages in the world. And like, they kind of weren't. And not compared to the lovely sausages our butcher makes. And our butcher almost certainly wouldn't get a B Corp status because, well, he couldn't be asked apart from anything else, he's got better things to do with his time. So although I you know, I really hope that we get through this process and we come out the other end a better business, whether or not they deign to give us a B Corp status badge. Uh, I hope we come out of it as a better business because it makes you think about all aspects of your business. But I know you're dying to say something, and I will let you say something in a minute, but, um, um, I'm just going to go m quite a lot. And then. And then. Okay, what have you got to say about it?
Well, no, just that I think.
By the way, today's episode is sponsored by Red bull. We're drinking Red bull, but it isn't sponsored by.
If you want.
To do that, we'd have to actually do the podcast whilst dangling under a hot air balloon with no safety harness. Then Red bull might sponsor it.
Uh, yeah. It's interesting, isn't it? The celebrity endorsements? No, the podcast endorsements, the sponsored podcasts are just awful. Like, I really like political podcasts. Me too. I really like the wrestlers politics, as you know. I'll tell you about it quite a lot.
George Osborne no, no.
Alistair Campbell.
Alistair Campbell and Rory Stewart. Yeah.
But they've recently started doing this thing where at the beginning of every episode, they plug this like Weird Energy company, and it's just the most cringey artificial nonsense you've ever heard. Like there is no sponsored podcasts like script that actually sounds genuine. No, it's the weird.
If you listen to the Ed Balls George Osborne political podcast.
Do they do it too?
They. Yeah. And now whether they're still doing it. But at the start of it, George Osborne Um, and I've got no beef with George Osborne. His politics may be different to mine, but he always comes across as a decent chap.
Gideon.
You mean Gideon? Yeah. You know, and and he basically delivers. Or sometimes. Ed balls delivers the advert, you know, as if like. Oh, and by the way, if you're thinking of. And it's just like, are you.
It's really.
Cringe. I'm struggling not to swear and I don't generally swear in.
And it's the weirdest thing because like Alastair Campbell, George Osborne, these are like really powerful people. But it turns out that if you give them ten quid, they'll just say whatever crap you tell them to. And it is a weird thing as well, because obviously we're in marketing. So I hear those scripts and I can like, you know, I can hear the sort of junior copywriter scribbling away like it just sounds so fake. And why you wouldn't just say to those people, look, you know, we're trying to do this thing. This is the initiative. Please plug it and just leave it to them to come up with the the most natural sounding endorsement. I don't know, I know, terrible.
And this podcast is brought to you by wiggly tail pork sausages where not be caught registered. But our sausages are not shit either.
But the oil and gas thing, I mean, it just strikes me as profoundly illogical. And I think in general, in society, we have this problem. You know, we like to see things in black and white. This is a bad company. And if you work for them, with them adjacent to them, then you're tarred with the same brush. You've got dirty, sticky oil all over you. And it's a weird thing because, you know, technically, really, in my view, if we work with an oil and gas company, like say, we did work with shell directly and they paid us money, and then we used that money to pay people a living wage and put back into the economy. Isn't that better than shell giving that same money to a company that isn't as ethical? Like, it's a weird thing. It's like, isn't it better to take their dirty money and make it do good?
I would imagine there isn't a b-corp organisation in existence that if you didn't, if you dug deep enough, you would find shit going on that shouldn't be going on.
And this is the whole silliness.
Don't buy this holier than thou bullshit.
Well, you've seen I think I've spoken to you before about, you know, The Good Place, that Netflix series where they sort of tucked.
Ted.
Danson. Yeah.
Yeah, I watched series one and then went, oh, no.
Yeah, you said I really liked it, but fine. They raised a really interesting point in that, which is just that it is basically impossible. Like if you, you know, if the all seeing eye could actually see everything you do at some point, you commit horrible sins. You know, you buy things from people that are made in China by children. And, you know, it's impossible to lead a good life. And I think it's sort of a bit weird that we expect companies to, like you say, be holier than thou. Mhm. But no, it's interesting because certainly I've been sort of external to that process. And from the outside looking in, so far, it has looked a little bit like a box ticking exercise. But obviously I've not been involved in the.
Well, in the early stages you go through the um the, um, the assessment, the business impact. It's a business impact assessment. You go through that and it is literally box ticking. You tick boxes, you get points and you have to get eighty points in order to apply for membership. And you, but you have to evidence. You can't tick a box. So yeah, we do that. You've got to evidence everything. So it's rigorous. It's not it's not like a, it's not like a, you know, like a Google ads badge or something. I mean, our Google ads scientist, you know what I mean? Because I did a twenty minute exam and cheated by getting the answers off the internet anyway. It's not that.
Do they stick B in front of everything? It's like, do you remember the nineteen sixties Batman where it was like his bat phone and his bat shoes and his bat car, basically.
Yeah.
Brilliant.
Yeah. So they got a they they eschew B bullshit. See what I did there? I did um, but I mean, you know, I'm, I'm being somewhat irreverent, but it, it's a process that I'm excited about going through. Um, simply because although we do, I think so many things really well, I'm not talking about the stuff we do that we sell to people. I'm talking about the way we operate.
That's rubbish.
And yeah, that's rubbish. Um, that it'll be good to, you know, find situations but not, not just like fine things that we could be doing better, but actually to be more grown up. Yes, we do this and then figure out how we evidence that like we, we are very engaged with our customers. And this is some of the thing, one of the things that comes up in the, in the business impact assessment is like, you know, the, what they're trying to make sure that. Do you make sure that what you do for your customers actually benefits them? Well, yeah, we do because we sit with them every week in our weekly meetings with clients say, we're doing this, this has happened, that's happened. What's happened in your end? What tell us about the enquiries that are coming in. And we have this great conversation. It's not documented. Yeah, you know what I mean? So we need to figure a way of like, even if we just do like, almost like, dear diary, you know, met with client X, discussed X, Y, and Z. Um, can you meet with client X and discuss x, y and z. No you can't. Absolutely not. A, B, c.
The universe implodes.
Yeah. The universe doesn't like stuff like that anyway.
Um, yeah. It's interesting. I was having a conversation exactly like that yesterday, actually with a client where it was like we were sat around the table and we were saying, you know, this is the impact as far as we can see it, of the advertising we've been doing, and this is what it's generated. And what about from your end? And he was like, oh yeah. Um, I'll have to talk to the sales team about that. And, you know, just it was just that slow moment of realisation in his eyes when he's like, I don't actually know what's what's happening behind the scenes. And it's weird how common that is. Like, people genuinely act like it's the first time they've ever been asked that question. And maybe it is. And maybe that's a pretty damning indictment of marketing agencies in general.
But do you think this is related to this, this concept, if you like, which you and I have discussed before, where with us as an agency, there's a real pressure to deliver. It keeps us awake at night. People give us money to do stuff. That stuff is expected to have, have an impact, do something, achieve something, generate an enquiry or enquiries, or make people talk about the company in a positive way in, you know, online social media or whatever. You know, we are constantly checking ourselves like, is this going to have is this something that we can stand in front of a room full of people and say, that client gave us ten thousand quid, we did this and this good thing happened. Maybe this, this is, um, not something that's as prevalent with some very much some in-house type people where it's, it's more about being seen to do something rather than being judged around the effects and results of doing something that that's going to come across as bullshit. Because if you work for a business, you are under pressure to deliver, you have bosses to report to, you have goals to achieve, etc.. And don't pull that face when I'm saying it because you know I'm right. Go on. What are you going? What do you want to say?
Um, in my mind, the conversation, I always imagine when I'm going to present something to a client is what if they turn around and say, so what? You know, and this is something that.
Somebody sage like give you that.
Somebody really ancient and sort of they've lived through the ages and they've acquired a little bit of wisdom on the way. And yeah, no, it's something you taught me. And, but, but, you know, I always think to myself, right, if they turn around and they say, so what? So I say like, oh, traffic's up seventy percent and they're like, and, and then I'm like, well, we've also seen an increase in conversions or like enquiries. And they're like, and, and, you know, in your head you're like, well, if I get pressed on that, I need to have the answer, I need to be able to confidently say, good point. I like that and I see something odd. I mean, it happened recently and I won't give any detail because they'll be able to identify themselves. But a client, I had a conversation with a client recently and I was like, well, what we really need to be able to do is link all this increased spending to an increase in actual revenue. And they're like, oh no, it'll be okay if I can go back and say that traffic's up, it'll be fine. And I was like, I'm not sure you can. Like, I'm pretty sure if somebody presses you and say, well, why are we paying for traffic if it's not? You know, if it doesn't impact the bottom line.
The worrying thing.
Is.
That that question might not get asked.
But this is the thing, man. It's like all the way down, you have this sort of like naivety or and I think it's sort of in my mind, it's sort of why marketing isn't taken seriously enough sometimes, because people, especially sort of C-suite people that have, that have sort of come there from like business development or sales or whatever, just think that marketing is really hot air. And because they've never been able to attribute, you know, sort of profit to the activity, they just think, well, I won't bother. It doesn't it's not about that. It's about brand awareness. Or as long as more people are on the website, that's good. And I think it's just a real lack of sort of, um, I guess like soul searching or just like, you know, you can actually put that much pressure on marketers. You can say, well, what have you actually delivered? And people should then go away and be able to tell you that and track that entire process. But I don't think people realise that you can sometimes.
I think Certainly working in marketing is very high pressure. I mean, the turnover of in-house marketing people can be quite high.
Yes.
But something that seems to happen, and I'm going to tread very carefully here. I know you you you will have something to say. I'll just I'll.
Just blitz all over that. Yeah.
Um, you've already alluded to how ancient I am. Um.
Venerable, venerable.
Venerable, the venerable Venerable Bede. Um, it is definitely the case that. Well we certainly see very, very inexperienced. Yeah. Clueless people get in-house jobs in the marketing department. And I worry that that is indicative of the people who run the businesses just thinking, oh yeah, just tick the box. Yeah, they'll do put them in post or they. even make decisions based on other things, which I'm not even going to go into.
There's just a real lack of sort of intellectual rigor, isn't there? It's like nobody wants to put people under the microscope. And then I watch people come into companies and they get these sort of what I consider, and they're probably not. You're right, they're probably very high pressure, but like relatively cushy looking sort of in-house jobs. And then they sort of proceed to just do everything they can to sort of, you know, fluff up what they're doing and never really like dive into the problems. Like the classic one that the sort of stereotypical one is, oh, we need a new website, you know, new marketing manager, new website, new brand. And it's like all this activity to obscure the fact that they haven't actually sat down and thought, right, how am I going to deliver real value? What is the actual problem? You know, where are we failing to communicate? Which audience are we missing? You know, where should we be spending our time and money? None of that happens. It's just straight to well, I don't really like the brand. And. Oh, do you know what? I've never really liked orange. And now I'm working for a company with an orange logo, and I'm not really sure that's okay. And it's just like, where is the, you know, where is the like, oh, shit. Right. Okay, I've really got to get in here and I've got to fix a problem. And in two years time, somebody needs to see some really significant growth. It just doesn't really seem to happen.
It's really good. We're very fortunate to work with some fantastic in-house people. You know, I know what I've just said about, you know, the, the, um, general standard being maybe not what it could be. Uh, but we also work with some fantastic people. We work with one person in particular. And we've, we've worked with this person at different companies, i.e. when this person has moved from company A to company B, one of the first things they did was contact us about getting involved and helping. Right. But that aside, one of the companies that we worked with, this person, um, they hired them.
Yep.
And at quite a senior level. and when they started, one of the first things they were asked to do was, oh, there's some PowerPoint presentations there. Could you could the fonts are not quite right. And could you and you know, quite rightly, this person didn't last long at that organisation because they'd gone in to make a difference. But oh you're, you're the colouring in department aren't you. Right. Can you do some colouring in please. You know, and it's just like oh you know.
Well I will say yeah, I mean that's the thing. It sounds a bit like I'm having a puppet in house people. One thing I will say is I think I was having a puppet in house people. Some of them are very good. And I think the other thing is that it's not really their fault, because I think an awful lot of what I know and, and, and do day in, day out is, is very heavily modulated by like discussions we have internally being surrounded by other marketers trying to solve complex problems teaches you an awful lot. And it makes you think in a very specific way. And I think part of the problem is that if you employ somebody in-house, and I guess this is maybe like just advice for people hiring marketing managers in some ways, like you can't just hire a marketing manager and sit them there in isolation in a silo and expect them to do something good. It's not fair. It's not how people work. And I think that lack of sort of like, you know, ability to bounce ideas back and forth, that lack of sort of like, oh, you know, David's over there fixing that really gnarly problem and this is how he's fixing it. And that's probably like triggering something in my mind that I should go away and look at for another client. Like without that, I don't know how effective any of us can be if we're just left to our own devices and sort of expected to, to generate revenue or whatever. Mhm.
That kind of, um, clumsily, if you like, leads into.
It doesn't lead into.
Something I wanted to mention was it's not unusual for us to be asked if you like to educate, help, advise, not just no, not advise, educate, help, mainly educate in-house people. Yeah. I.E. companies hire people. Either they realise that they haven't got the skills that they should have, you know. Once they've hired them, or they just assume that it's okay to ask us to impart our hard won expertise to their in-house people. Now, I've got to be honest, naively, in the past I've been like, oh yeah, yeah, no problem at all. Yeah, we'll just show your people how to do all this and you won't have to pay us to do it anymore. Now, first of all, like anyone that any business that is like, sure, our in-house people how to do it so we don't have to pay you. Well, I would no longer show their in-house people. Neither would I want to work with them because frankly, I can. I've got better things to do with my life than work with users, and so I just wouldn't bother. But that is quite common as well. Well, it makes sense. Like where we find ourselves, you know, educating in-house people who frankly, have got more time than we have to sit and actually learn about all the stuff that they should know about anyway.
Yeah. But this is the critical problem, isn't it? Because people are employing in-house marketing teams who don't really have the skills or the knowledge they're expecting them to perform, and then they've got this really expensive investment, you know, four or five marketers or whatever, and they can't do the job and they're thinking, oh, shit. Like, what can I do? I know I'll get my agency to teach them and then they won't be an overhead anymore and they'll actually be productive. But I get it from a business point of view why that would make sense. But yeah, it's it's incredibly predatory.
Well, you know, I think, you know, we, we are going to get slated for this because I think we do sound like we're having a big downer on in-house people again. Um, and, and as we keep saying, we work with some fantastic in-house teams. We, we really do. Um, but, but if you read, um, if you read about the way that marketing has evolved and the pressures on chief marketing officers and the like, in-house people, just insane amount of pressure, I think, I think what I'm, what I'm saying, I think some people would listen to this and take umbrage and probably tell us that you guys have got no idea. You've got it easy working at an agency. You want to try working in-house. It's really, really hard.
Yeah. I mean, the.
Challenge never seen anybody break a sweat when they're working in house, to be fair. But I'm sure it happens.
You can help yourself there. This is the last little twist.
Yeah, I know.
No, like I was saying to you before, I think it's you know, there's some fantastic strategists. There's some really like intelligent people in in-house marketing positions who have a really good perspective on things and can guide agencies very effectively. Where I think it falls down is when in-house marketing people who are not practiced at the tactics try to get involved in the tactics and make an ungodly mess of things. And that's not their fault, but it's just, yeah, a very common problem.
Yeah. I, um, I was reading a, what's that Google email that comes out, um, Google something with blog posts and things in it.
Mhm.
Um, I can't remember what it was, but it was about the, the pressures around the marketing discipline. And it was saying like, you know, good marketers will, you know, in-house people will go and find the right people to work with, whether they build a team in-house. If you're fortunate enough to be the size of organisation where you can build a sizable, credible team in-house, that's great, but where you can't do that, you will actually work with agencies and potentially freelancers or whatever, and build a team around you and something that they that they said was, you can do anything, but you can't do everything. Yeah. And I thought that was quite nice. I quite liked it. I think, I think it applies to not just the marketing discipline obviously. Absolutely. But it was one little soundbite in that thing that I was reading that kind of resonated with me. And I think, you know, maybe that's the position that in-house people often find themselves in where, right, we've hired a marketing person now. So we want you to do the website design, right? The website, do the coding for the website, do the SEO for the website, do the PPC for the website. And, and they're just kind of like, you know, are you shitting me? Sort of thing.
Well, it's.
Interesting. That's a team of five people.
Well, it's really interesting because I was having a conversation at the weekend with one of my daughter's, um, friend's parents. As we all went to the park together and were having a chat, and she works in comms and she was saying she'd like quite recently got one of her friends a job, um, at a local company and that she felt really bad for it because it had effectively been tricked. He went in as a marketing director and on his first day, somebody was like, oh, like, I need you to like really quickly jump on this like project. We need some press releases to go out. It's urgent. Like we're launching this project. Nobody's done them yet. And then the next day somebody was like, oh, like, I really think it would be a good idea if we set up some like ad campaigns. And it was, you know, it was just like straight in being pulled in every direction, being expected to be like, you know, the, the sort of operative and the strategist and yeah, like one hundred percent. I really do feel for people like that. But I think the thing is, the question is, how do you approach that situation? I mean, we had a conversation today with a client who is an internal marketing manager, a pretty switched on one, I think. And, you know, he came to us and he said, I've been, you know, sort of tasked with this. How would you go about it? And then sort of listened as we gave input and then took what we'd said and used it to sort of, I assume, develop a strategy. And that's sensible. I think the problem comes when you, like you say you sat there and you think, well, I'll do that. I'll just quickly pop onto, you know, Google AdWords or LinkedIn or wherever and set up some campaigns. And it's like, that's the problem. It's knowing your limitations and knowing when to say, right, I need somebody to come in and sort this out.
Yeah. I used to do a good Clint Eastwood impersonation. I can't remember. It was dirty Harry or one of them. You know, a man's gotta know his limitations. What film was that? What film was that? Was it a dirty Harry film or a cowboy film?
Did you call them films back then, or was it like the pictures?
No, they were they were, um. Um, moving picture shows, the movie talkies. Uh, anyway, um, one of the things, something that came up, um, this week was, um, calling it. I've just written my notes, calling it out when the budget is too low. Oh yeah. So yeah, um, we want to put food on the table like any other business. And I think in the past, and hopefully less so in the last few years, we've taken on projects where the budget just wasn't enough and kind of delivered it anyway because yeah, the budget was maybe ten grand. It should have been twenty. But you know, ten grand's quite a lot of money. So okay, we'll do it for ten grand and we'll just, we will.
Do as much as we can. Yeah. Well, and it never works out because, you.
Know, you're always, you're always going to deliver.
Yeah. Well that's.
The problem. And that is the problem. Yeah. But we also had a situation quite recently where we were trying to do something for a customer and the budget just wasn't really enough. And so the thing was floundering because, you know, it was a paid search type situation. So we needed so we just, you know, said to the client, look, we either need to stop doing this or we need to increase the budget tenfold. That's like quite a hike.
Yeah.
And to be, to be honest, you know, it was, I, I wasn't entirely convinced that they would they would recognise what we were saying and go along with it. But they did. And so we now have a situation where we have got the budget that we need in order to do a much better, more thorough, um, execution. Even though I, you know, I did say to them at the same time, like, I'm not saying that chucking all this money will definitely have the result that we want it to have. But what it will do is it'll mean that we'll very quickly know whether we're barking up the wrong tree with this. And rather than like death by a thousand cuts, we'll just get on with it. And, you know, we've, you know, we've, in our typical style are taking a view on some of the work that we're doing. So we're effectively putting some money in the pot as well. Um, in order to see if we can turn this thing around quickly. But I think being realistic about budgets and that has meant in our case more than once that we haven't got work because, oh, somebody else said they can do that for twenty grand. How come you want forty grand sort of thing? Well, you know, we are not an expensive agency, but we're realistic about what things cost.
Yeah. There's a I think there's a thresholding thing at play where a lot of people think that, you know, if I, I don't know if you say to somebody like, I need twenty grand for a PPC and I'll talk about PPC because it's where I'm most comfortable, but I'm sure it has applications outside of this. If you say to somebody, you need to spend twenty K a year on PPC and they turn around. Well, I'll say I'll just start small. I'll start with a ten K budget and or five K budget. And you sort of in your head you're like, well, yeah, that's fine. We can just sort of like do less. But the problem is that an awful lot of these things only really work at scale. What happens when you try and do something like AdWords with not enough budget isn't that you just get a proportionately smaller amount of leads. It's that none of it works at all. And AdWords is a really good one for explaining that to people, because it's simply the case that if you don't pay enough in, it's.
Not called AdWords anymore.
It's called Google ads. You're right. If if you, um, I out myself as like a millennial all the time.
It hasn't been called AdWords for a number of years. Carry on.
If you don't, um, if you don't offer Google enough money, you will simply never appear in a position where anybody will ever click your ads. So it's not that you'll get fifty percent of the clicks, it's that you'll get none of the clicks because you're just not present anymore. And people, and I'm sure it does have sort of like, uh, you know, um, parallels in other bits of marketing. It's just the case that you really do need to stump up the money to see anything for it. Otherwise it is just a waste of time. And I think it's explaining that to people that, you know, it's hard.
Yeah. And certainly in, um, in the marketing sphere, if you like, not just in marketing in, you know, it could be software development, any number of things. You're always going to find people who think that that ten grand budget is a lot of money and they can definitely nail it with that ten grand budget. And, you know, it's, let's just say they probably hardly ever do. Um, and nobody wins.
I mean, yeah, especially with things like LinkedIn advertising, paid advertising is the worst trick because like, I mean, in the time that I've been here three or four, two or three years.
Too long, I don't know, about two years.
The average, the average cost per click on Google has gone up by fifty percent. So, you know, the price of playing in all of these different arenas is just going up and up and up and up over time. And you know, what used to be a good budget is a rubbish budget now. And that's, that is just the way the industry is going.
I'm just saying up and up and up and up have more impact than just saying going up.
Yeah, probably.
This is I'm asking this question because I've noticed that when I listen to political debates, you know. Oh, yes, of course, this has been going on for years and years and years and years. And I'm thinking all you had to say was years. You didn't have to say all the other words, but is it just me? Probably is.
I think it probably reinforces the the idea. Yeah.
It reinforces you being a dick.
Yeah. You're just being an engineer about it.
It's funny because I was talking to Karen about it and and then I almost immediately, within minutes said something and oh yeah, he was, he was going on and on and on.
Oh.
I've done it myself. I don't know, maybe when I'm just, it's just it's easy to find fault isn't it, when you listen to other people. Um do you, we, we do this quite a lot. So we are used to talking on microphone. And to be fair, it honestly just feels like you and I are in a chat. The fact that Leslie sat over there behind the lights and, you know, we've got a team of makeup people in the corner. We've got the we've got the green room with the sandwiches and everything else. And the sponsors are in that room out there just making sure we don't say anything bad. So, you know, all right, there's there's forty or fifty people involved in the production of this podcast, but it only it literally just looks like it literally just looks like you and I sat around the glass table downstairs at Red bull HQ having a chat, doesn't it? But little do they know what's going on behind the scenes. But, but you and I are very comfortable just having these conversations with a microphone stuck in front of us. Um, I've completely forgotten what I was going to say, but it's, it's very easy, I think, to be critical when people are put under a spotlight and asked to say things. I listen to talk radio quite a lot. And if you really listen when people phone in, it's utter gibberish a lot of the time. And I don't mean I don't mean gibberish because I don't agree with, I don't agree with the point they're making or anything like that. It's actually just gibberish that, that they're, um, that they're spouting.
I always think it's really interesting with public speaking, especially because when you see when you go to like, um, SEO conferences or whatever, and you see public speakers who are obviously not very used to public speaking, just the amount, the volume of waffle, you know, as they try and like desperately fill the space and then they're really uncomfortable with just being quiet for a few seconds and letting points land.
And, you know, the best presenters, I think, are people who just read exactly what's on the PowerPoint presentation. I love that, don't you like that? I really enjoy those kind of presentations.
SEO is really.
Yeah. Anyway, um, this week I finally got around to doing some blogging and I wrote a blog post. It's really interesting because when I, I said, I asked you to sense check it for me. Um, you and some bloke who was walking past because I value his opinion more, but I asked you to do it as well. Um, when you did sense check it from me, you came back to me and you said, uh, yeah, it's fine. Um, either the AI is getting better or you didn't use AI. You know what I mean? Now, either that was a just a cunning plan to, to sort of tease out whether I'd use AI now. And I said to you, I didn't use AI at all. Sometimes when you're writing, it's helpful if you're getting a bit stuck to set AI or give me some words around this particular subject, just, just to get the thing moving again. And because it was a subject that I understood fairly intimately, I didn't need any prompts and I just wrote the whole thing without any recourse to use AI, despite the HubSpot tool that we use, constantly jumping in saying, I can help you with this, I can help you with this. Do you want me to help you with this? The only I, the only AI that I, that I did employ was I do, um, quite like Grammarly to help me making sure I've to make sure I don't know.
That that counts as AI.
Well, it tries to. And the, and the only time I mean, it just gets in the way because Grammarly gets it, in my view, spectacularly wrong. And there's an interesting one that it that it does like um um something it isn't exactly this, but in, um, when I'm writing an email, um, particularly if I'm using HubSpot, the CRM to reply to it or write to a customer. And, and at the end you put, uh, looking forward to hearing from you. Cheers. D and it tries to change it to something, something ridiculous, like delighted to, to, to be in conversation with you or, you know, it's just, it's not that, but it's, it's absolute wordy, wordy bollocks. And it's really funny the way, the way it tries to help. But you know, I'm certainly not anti AI at all. I mean, you, you can't, you can't be these days. Otherwise you'd just be, you'd probably get um dipped in water on a seesaw or something. And if you drowned.
Actually I'm happy.
To. You didn't believe I was.
I'll see if I'm heavier than a duck. I don't mind.
But it it, um, although it is phenomenal in, in so many ways when it comes to just like writing good content. I mean, I know you're quite, you've got quite a strong opinion on this isn't the subject that you want to talk about. Is it? You said you had a thing you wanted to.
I could bitch all day about AI, though. I'm perfectly happy to.
I don't think you and I are in exactly the same place where AI is concerned, but when it comes to. I think there's two things like you can use AI to either write digital slurry or to help you write digital slurry, or you can write decent content by putting the putting the the hours in and putting the time in and writing good content.
And critically drawing on your own experience, which the AI cannot access. And this is all a question of value, really, in my eyes. It's like if we that blog post that you wrote and it was a good blog post and I thank you, I really asked the question because it appeared quite rapidly. And I was like, oh, that was very f*cking fast. So I was like, did you use AI? I don't know, um, either. But the point is you cannot write a blog post about that. I mean, the subject of that blog post, for example, was I think how to sort of make a business case for SEO, right? You can't write a blog post like that and not drawing your own experience and add any value to the conversation. Like anything the AI has got to say about that subject. Other people have said millions of times before, by definition, because that's how it works. And really, where we can add value from our own experience, we should be. And I just the tool is completely antithetical to that idea. It's just it just creates average things. So yeah, I get it. And I understand why people use it. I don't personally like it at all. Mhm, mhm.
If you recorder, you might because certainly like getting it to complete some monotonous piece of code that you're writing because it knows exactly where you're going with it just and it'll just like, I know what you're going to do here. You're going to write this great long piece of code that does this thing because I can see the pattern there. Do you want me to complete it for you? Click. Yes. Done. That's fantastic. Stuff. Like that's fantastic.
It is, it is, it is it is. What's its error rate? Because I only asked that because I read something really interesting yesterday, which was about transcription using AI. and they were basically. So they did a really interesting study where they basically looked at the AI and asked it to transcribe a load of conversations between doctors in a medical setting. And what they found is that it had a forty percent error rate, as in, it would make things up that the doctors hadn't really said, like in forty percent of the cases, which is incredibly dangerous. Like it's insane. But the point that they were making in the study is that despite that, doctors are still using it because in our in our brains, we have this thing where it's like, the AI is wrong. I made a mistake. It hallucinated. Oh, it's okay, I'll ask it again. And we're incredibly patient with it. Whereas if a person made the amount of mistakes, if you had a friend that coded and you asked them, can you just help me finish off this little bit of JavaScript and they got it wrong. Would you then go back to them and say, oh, you've got that bit wrong, mate. Can you try again? And if you did have to do that, would you then ask them again the next day? Or would you just be like, that guy's an idiot? It's, it's this weird sort of like, you know, thing in our heads, giving.
It too much benefit of the doubt.
It's like, oh, well, sometimes it's right. And it's like, well, that's a very low bar, isn't it? I mean, you know, the dog on the street is sometimes right about code. I'm sure it's.
I used to know a very good spaniel who was brilliant at JavaScript.
Yeah. I mean, you backed the monkeys with a typewriter thing. It's like. Yeah, of course, occasionally it shits out Shakespeare, but most of the time what's coming out of it is nonsense. And then we're just sort of blind to that, because it doesn't play into the cognitive bias that we have.
And you shouldn't have opened that Pandora's box. Go on then. What was this thing you wanted to talk about?
Well, it was just about predatory.
Uh oh.
Predatory marketing tools. Um, so obviously, um, we were having a, I was having a conversation with somebody internally and they were learning to use Google ads. Um, not sort of like, you know, completely new to it, but sort of like we're experimenting with it and trying to learn how to use it well. Um, and.
Does his name rhyme with Hubert Barrison?
It does, it does. And he came to me and he said, you know, I've done this thing. I've followed all of Google's prompts and the things that it's told me to do. And I've set up this campaign.
Big mistake.
Well, this is my point. Like, Hubert Burston is a smart guy, relatively. No, he's a smart guy. He switched on. And what he'd created at the end was something that, like, genuinely would not work and would have wasted him a colossal amount of money if he'd run it. And, you know, it's a funny thing because I looked at what he'd done and I thought as a as a practising PPC operative or whatever, whatever term you want to.
Use, any expert.
I was like, man, f*ck you, you know? I was like, I have no idea how it's ended up here. It's terrible. It can't possibly go live. And I worked back through it and I was like, oh, I see all he's done is exactly what the tool asked him to do. But what it creates at the end is a campaign that is, you know, so loose, so broad, so poorly optimised.
Perfect for Google because it causes money in their general.
Money. And it's like, oh, well, we need you to just give the algorithm one sort of broad theme and then we will spend lots of your money finding out if people who search for things within that theme bucket really like want your product. And Google is not alone in doing this. Loads of tools are like this now. They are sort of, you know, they purport to be very user friendly and they have very user friendly interfaces and they have a beginner mode and they walk you through things step by step, but they don't actually work to actually get anything useful out of them. You have to have a ton of insider knowledge or to have been through this process before. And I don't know when that started, but I certainly think it's become a really prevalent problem. And I do think it trips a lot of people up. You know, there's there's been times recently where we've spoken to new clients and they're like, oh yeah, I've been messing around with PPC in my own time. And you look at it and it's just like, wow, like, that's terrible. But, but it's not their fault. Again, you know, they don't know that, you know, all of their clicks have been coming from, you know, Kandy vibe mobile apps or something. Do you know what I mean? It's very deceptive. And I don't know when that sort of became the norm, but it's just something that I thought would be interesting to sort of chat about because I just think it's very, very sort of worrying that that's the direction of travel really.
But don't you think the online world is full of the most horrendous deception?
Yeah.
I mean, if you think about advertising and I've spoken before about newspaper websites, they are full of deception. You know, like you will not believe what this celebrity looks like now. You know what I mean? All this clickbait, all this utter nonsense and, and where deception seems to be the norm online and maybe it's filtering its way through into tools. SaaS tools and some of the technology that is, um, that is.
You know, I, I'd put, I'd put HubSpot up there. I mean, you said yourself, you're creating a blog post. It's constantly prompting, you use AI, use AI. Now if you know for a fact that you can write better than the AI, you're going to ignore that. But if you don't, it knocks your confidence. You're like, oh, I could just maybe I should. The tools, you know, the expensive platform that I pay thousands of pounds a month for is telling me to do this thing. Maybe I should do it and it will produce garbage. I was listening to a GoDaddy advert the other day and it was like, oh, when you sign up for GoDaddy domain, you can use our new AI tool to build your logo, your website, your social media posts. And it's like, people will think that these are genuine offers. They will take you up on them and then and then they will be bankrupt because of it.
And I am like, you know, use our web tool to build your website. And it's, and it's optimised for, for SEO or Google search in mainstream advertising, as if like all you do is click a few buttons and you've got a highly optimised search friendly website that's going to generate loads of money for you. And they just make it sound that simple.
Um, Hubert Barristan has a, uh, an iron ores website, as you well know. And there again, you know, it was like, oh, do these things and your website will be one hundred percent SEO optimised. And people will, you know, people who don't know any better will think, oh, if I just fill out these fields in this form, then my website will be optimised for search and I don't need to worry about that anymore. Yeah. Some people think that by installing the Yoast plugin in WordPress, they have SEO optimised their website. And it's not true. No, I really do feel for them because I feel like it is a predatory business tactic to sort of sell people this fake peace of mind and, and then not deliver on it.
Yeah. Well, um, what is it? We were using the PageSpeed insights tool and tools like PageSpeed insights, which give an overview of some of the issues with your site. This page is very slow because if you do this, it'll fix it, that kind of thing. And then, you know, in the dashboard, it's got like performance score, it's got an accessibility score. And one of them is the SEO score. Yeah. But you can have a page that scores one hundred. So anyone else, anyone would think, right, well, that means it's going to appear in Google search and get people looking at it and generate business for me, but that it doesn't mean that it means it might be garbage, but you've got something written in this bit of the page where you should have it written, and you've got something written in this bit of the page where you should have it written. So yeah, well done. Great job. It's SEO, you've nailed the SEO because. But that isn't what SEO is.
Surfer SEO is the tool that everybody uses at the moment for that. I don't know if you've seen it, but you put your page into surfer and it gives you a score and people are like, yep, I have got a surfer score of one hundred, so all my articles are brilliantly optimised and you're like, well, for what? Yeah, they're like, uh, but it's optimised. It'll be ranking for something, I hope. And it's like, yeah, it's just you've got to understand these tools are prompting you to do something, but you have to understand the why and the how. You can't just it's just reducing things to inputs is just massively oversimplifying.
People have often spoken about being number one in Google. Yeah. Without the for what?
Yeah. Which is just completely not. Yeah.
It it's I think it's still out there. I think it's it's, you know. Hello? Hello. Can you can you help us? Can you help us be number one in Google? Um, you know, the for what bit you, you wrote, I think a blog post and I think we've spoken about this recently, you know, because we work in some, in some fairly tight niches or niches, if you're in America say that every time.
I do believe they say that, but they do.
That's really funny. But anyway, um, I mean, we're in the original niche. Um, but people.
What route did you take to get.
You know, it gets real. Yeah. It takes really, it's really difficult sometimes to get any sort of meaningful data.
Yeah.
To try and understand what, you know, what your, your potential customers are actually typing into search engines.
Well, that I mean, that whole point as well about SEO and the way it's sold, it always absolutely baffles me. And people like, I'll get you number one positions in Google. It's like, okay, so, so first of all, like you say, for what keywords, that's the really important part of the puzzle because you don't just want to be number one for the keywords. You think you want to be number one for the keywords that people in your target audience actually use to buy whatever you're selling. And then the other part of it is like, when they get to your number one listing in Google, are they going to click it? I mean, we've talked about this recently about like title elements and making them more than just sort of a SEO fodder. You know, you've got to convince somebody to click it and then they click it. And like, half of SEO surely is what's actually on the page. And how are you going to convince people? And what are you going to do with the traffic once you've acquired it? But it's just all reduced to this sort of like, what are my rankings? What's my traffic? And it's just it massively oversimplifies the problem to the point where it's almost absurd. You know, it's almost sort of a farcical sort of situation where you've just got loads of people sort of desperately shouting at you, I'll get you number one rankings and that's it. Apparently that's the extent of the the sort of.
What's going to happen. This is probably for another podcast, but what's what is Google's end game when it's showing AI snippets at the top of pages. Now for searches and meaning that people are no longer visiting web pages, i.e., doing what SEOs want them to do go and visit a client's web page. They're actually just getting the answer to the question in the search result in the AI snippet. What's Google? Yeah, but but what is Google's end game?
I don't think they know. I think it's I think it does them far too much credit to think that this decision to integrate AI into the top of search results was anything other than a panicked attempt to keep up with Bing and Microsoft. And like, basically what I think happened is Microsoft acquired OpenAI. They were like, oh shit, what do we do with this generative AI tool? I know we'll replace our crap search engine because Bing is crap. Let's be honest with an AI overview of topics.
And although it often delivers pretty good enquiries because although it does fewer, it's a lot less, a lot, lot less traffic and fewer people using it. Often people are force to use it, and we've certainly generated business from.
I'm not saying that Bing is a bad platform. I'm saying it works poorly as a search engine. If you use it to try and find something on the internet. Shits the bed. Nine times out of ten. That's been a lot of swearing in this episode, and I'm sorry for it.
Sorry. Not sorry.
Yeah. Um, but you know, the the point is Microsoft did this and then Google were very quickly like, oh, we, we've got a generative AI tool to, and they smack it at the top of search results. But yeah, what is the end game there? It doesn't do the critical thing that Google wants it to do, which is provide a good user experience, because nine times out of ten it's either slightly wrong or just garbage.
One thing it is doing, it's it's giving, it's giving the information and it's saying, this is where we got this information. It's rubbish. Yeah. Yeah. Because we were it was quite funny. Was it last week we were appearing. If you search what is HubSpot. We were were not anymore. We were. No, we were appearing in the AI stuff And we noticed that like um people in Dublin, which incidentally is the European HQ for HubSpot were actually visiting our website, our what is HubSpot page. And I'm assuming that they were looking at the search results and who the hell are these guys? You know, who the hell are red evolution? And they're like in the, in the AI search snippet when people type in HubSpot and like, we are HubSpot, what the hell? You know what I mean? But I think we've, we've kind of slipped away from that. Now he's one of those little anomalies. But, um, yeah, I don't know. I, you know, there was, there was something came through in email, I think it was from the agency hackers guys about one of, one of their next meetups. And they said that this SEO agency were kind of had panicked, partly because their customers were no longer getting the traffic and the enquiries because people were just getting the answer to the question in AI, in the AI snippet, in the search result. But when you think about it, the AI snippet in the search result isn't going to magically turn into a company that can actually take your problem and solve it for you for a fee.
So it's good for informational searches. And again, it's good in the sense that it gives a broad overview of a topic, but not in the sense that you could actually use it to sort of drill down and discover more. So there's still always going to be a place for properly good organic content, I think. One thing I do think Google has to be quite careful of is, you know, I quite like my Land Rover. It's quite good. You're aware of the Enos. Enos Grenadier.
Yes.
So basically what happened is Land Rover drifted further and further and further away from their core value proposition, which was making properly rugged four by fours.
Defender ninety and stuff like that.
And started making sort of whatever forks effectively, sort of what do they call them? Are they called like Chelsea, Chelsea tractors? Chelsea tractors? That's the one. Um, so somebody else came along and was like, right, you know, f*ck it. I'm just going to make like a nineties Land Rover from scratch and sell it. And they look really nice. And I think Google want to be really careful because what made Google famous and what made it the world's most used search engine, was the fact that it did actually find you really good, authoritative content in response to your searches. And now with a combination of like for ads, an AI search box, a bunch of like questions, you might also like to know, which are never your question. Like it's just getting further and further away from actually providing any value. And if somebody did come along and say, right, you know, here's a search engine with no ads, no AI bullshit, a pretty good algorithm. It actually works, you know.
You think, yeah, it'd be interesting if that happened, wouldn't it? I mean, of course it could happen.
If I was.
Names have disappeared in my lifetime.
They do all the time. This is the thing. And everybody just sort of looks at Google and says, oh, they're they're the world's biggest company. They're untouchable. But like, people's fortunes change overnight and it's not a very good product anymore.
Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's you think about Kodak. Yeah. All these digital cameras will never catch on Didn't they famously didn't.
Isn't there a story about Kodak where famously, somebody within Kodak had like developed a digital camera and they like, laughed at him because like, oh, we want to sell film, not do this digital nonsense. And then yeah.
Yeah, I'm pretty sure I don't know if it's apocryphal or if it's actually it actually happened, I don't know, but it certainly I've heard that story for sure. Right. So I think, I think Leslie's getting bored enough waffle.
So and we didn't even need to touch on the budget.
We didn't know. We didn't need to touch on the, on the budget. I think there's plenty of people out there who will be, um, talking about the budget. So we'll just keep our eye on the news. There might be an odd thing or two written about it over the next twelve years. Yeah. I think it's, uh, yeah, we live in interesting times. Okay. You've been listening to Dave and Alex on the Digital Marketing From The Coalface podcast. Uh, hopefully you enjoyed this drivel. We certainly enjoyed making it and we'll speak to you next time.