What you've got to do is persuade people with your messaging that you're probably not rubbish. And then from there, you've got to persuade them, like to have a conversation, to have a chat.
What does the person you want to contact, you think while they're reading this page? And that's all that matters.
And you and I agonise over this a lot. I mean, a good place to look at it is when you use paid search, these people who would benefit from this service that we offer are typing these things into Google. We know they are. You see it get clicked. You see them spend 10s and then bugger off. Yeah. What are we not saying? What are we playing around with? We've set some a B tests up on a few pages. I think the pages had forty views with the original message and six views with the new message.
And converted once.
And the new message has has created a conversion. Okay, so I'm delighted to welcome Alex back to the show after, um.
I've not been replaced. I've not lost my job.
I don't I've you say that, but actually the guys did a great job and, um, yeah, I'm toying with the idea of, um, of never inviting them back again. Yeah.
I assume I've not actually listened to it yet, but I'm assuming the whole.
You haven't listened to it.
Podcast.
Your ego just not take it.
I just, I thought, you know what, I can't what if they're better?
Anyway, welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Last week I had the, uh, the devs on Amy and Dave. Well worth a listen. Um, he said and um, Alex is back off off holiday. So, um, apologies for that. Now, I do believe that Alex has actually prepared for this and I've prepared.
For it.
Somewhat as well. So we have got some stuff to talk about. Uh, just a reminder to any of our army of new listeners. Um. Oliver's army, we run a digital marketing agency and what we do is we talk about some of the stuff that we do, some of the things we get asked, some of the projects we're working on anonymously, we don't name our clients. Um, we just talk about what it's like being at the coalface of a digital marketing agency and, um, things crop up and we make a note of them and we talk about them. That's about it really. And sometimes we wander off into politics and things. There's plenty to wander off in.
I do have some. I do have some politics notes, some.
Oh, I'm excited already. I'm excited by that possibility. That's good. But because you actually bothered your ass to make a few notes, I'll let you kick things off.
Um, shall we start with the Rachel Reeves thing? No, we'll save that. We'll save that. One of the things I actually really wanted to talk about today was the whole piece around messaging, talking to your audience and doing it properly.
Telling a good story.
I pinged you something, um, the other day in Google chat actually, uh, which is the West Midlands Combined Authority. Yes.
You did.
It's amazing. It's a, it's a piece of pure modern art. It's sort of like the apex of marketing. In my eyes, they have this fantastically. I assume it's a brand new website. It's sort of fantastically corporate, and it has this brilliant headline at the top of it, which is building a better, connected, more prosperous, fairer, greener and healthier West Midlands. And that's the hero text on the homepage of their website.
Which means nothing.
It means absolutely nothing.
But they've said all of the buzzword bingo wanky words that they needed to say.
Well, I think it's interesting, right? Because I sent it to you sort of look at this terrible example of copywriting on the web thing. And then I sat with it over the weekend, and for some reason, my brain kept coming back to it. And I think the reason is that I can so clearly see what's happened there. Like a group of ten people have sat around a table and they said, right, what are we really about? And everybody in there has had an opinion, and everybody's opinion is valid and everybody's opinion needs to be listened to. And so you end up with this sort of hilariously tortured list of, of sort of like you say, buzzwords that don't really mean anything. And I think what's interesting about it.
Is there's a council, aren't they?
Yes. Well, there are, you know, the whole like combined authority mayoral district, you know, sort of like the. Yeah.
But it's public sector navel gazing bullshit, the usual kind of like people who've got far too much time on their hands to do stuff like this type stuff. They're not trying to sell anything.
They're not trying to sell anything. Well, they're trying to justify their existence. And I think it's that's something not to be overlooked, you know what I mean? Like what these people do have to do is sort of prove that they're genuinely useful and doing something worthy, but it's not too dissimilar to situations that I find myself in sometimes where, you know, a client has got a, you know, there'll be a head of marketing, there'll be a CEO, there'll be a CTO, there'll be a CMO. Yeah, there'll be a see many things. See you in what? Um, and they will all sit around a table and they will say, right, you know, the homepage of our website is the most important page. We have to have like a sort of brand message. What is our brand identity? And then everyone has a pop at sort of outlining what they think is the most important thing. And, you know, I wrote a page of copy for a client last week where this happened. I wrote it for the client. The head of marketing at the client looked at it and said, it's absolutely fine. We can put it live before we do. I'll just run it past a couple of other people. And then he came back with a literal hit list of feedback from these other people that he'd given it to C-suite executives. And it was all stuff like that. Like, well, I feel in my opinion, our business is about this. So let's mention this somewhere. And in my opinion, we've really undersold our sort of like problem solving expertise. And we haven't mentioned that we're an innovator anywhere. Can we get that in? And it's like that whole sort of like right by committee, you know, sort of bullshit that sort of infect. And I think a lot of the time you set out with really worthy intentions. You know, we're going to tell a really great story. We're thinking about the audience. We're thinking about what they really want to hear. And by the end of it, you just sort of lost that because you desperately need to say all these things about yourself or your business.
Do you know what the the most important aspect of brand is. According to Rory Sutherland. Actually, I wish I'd come up with this, but I didn't because Rory Sutherland is a lot smarter, switched on, and a lot smarter than me, that's for sure. Not difficult. That bar is quite low. I think the job of the messaging is to persuade people that you're probably not shit.
Yeah.
I mean, and I know that sounds ridiculous, but that's what he talks about that if I, I drive a VW, Karen drives a VW and we bought them because not because we thought VW were the best car in the world, but we were fairly convinced they won't be shit.
Yeah.
Now I won't buy some other brands and I won't name them because that would be unfair. But there are brands of car that I won't buy because it'll probably will be shit. Sure. You know, there's certain Italian brands which look gorgeous, but I would never buy one because it'll probably be shit. Yeah, it probably won't be very good. So, you know, when it comes to messaging, if you kind of condense it down, simplify it to persuading people that you're probably not shit you. You'll do a much better job than coming away with the kind of bullshit that they came away with.
Yeah, but but I think critical to that, like the stage before arriving at a place where you can explain that you're probably not shit is in sort of focusing entirely on your potential customers perception of you. And I think that's what's the real problem is that people are so busy trying to say something about themselves that they've completely missed the fact that people don't care about what you think of yourself or how you position yourself, or, you know, any attempt at positioning has to be subtle and it has to be done cleverly. Because if you just say to somebody, we're an innovator, well, yeah, you know.
It's like people who tell you they're perfectionists, they never are. Um, and thinking about our own website, you know, our website generates tons of great business for us. I mean, like, as I said in my notes, it was the best of times. It was the worst of times. It was like, I mean, we, you know, I've used that before. I know, funny, I've never even read that book. But anyway, um, but this idea, you know, that what we try to do on our website. And it is, you know, without consciously thinking, thinking of it in the terms of persuading people that we're not, that we're probably not shit is what we've done is told a story which would tell most right thinking people that were probably not shit, because we've been around for a long time. We work with some big names. We've got some great examples of the work that we've done, and we've got some lovely soundbites from people that we've done work for who said they weren't shit. So it is kind of what we do without blowing our own trumpet too hard. It tells a fairly cohesive story, presents a fairly cohesive case that we're probably quite good, probably not awful, probably not going to regret engaging with us.
But just to come back to the not saying the quiet part out loud, the critical thing is that we do that, you know, sort of giving people the impression that we're not shit and that we know what we're doing, but we allow them to make that decision for themselves. And nowhere on our website does it say we're pretty good or anything to that effect. And I think that's really key. It's like if you give people the evidence and you don't treat them like idiots, you'll come.
To the conclusion that you're probably not shit.
And then a conclusion that you've arrived at is way more powerful than a conclusion that you've been told to reach. Right? And I think critically, most of the messaging on our website, and increasingly the more we work on it tends to be around like, do you need this? Are you experiencing this difficulty? You know, we talk directly to our audience and we try to understand and, and sort of feed back to them or mirror them, their, their problems so that they get that we're on the same page as them, but we never actually say we're on the same page as you or we understand your challenges. Here's again.
Here's a simple example, right? Um, bear with me on this. Um, as I may have, may have mentioned, Karen and I, uh, back in September, bought a metal detector after years of thinking about becoming detectorist and getting into metal detecting. So we bought a fairly low cost metal detector, a minelab vanquish, whatever it was, three hundred quid or something, which is fairly cheap in the world of metal detectors. By no means the cheapest. You can pay under one hundred quid for a metal detector. And we went down that route because my brother in law uses an expensive minelab and he's always used minelab. The brand loyalty in the detectorist community is off the scale, and I nearly swore there. It's off the scale. It's quite funny and we quite quickly realised we're in. We quite enjoy this. We just had the one detector. We went out with one spade, one detector and worked. That was a little no. So basically I bought a second hand minelab. I then have my own machine. Karen was left with the vanquish, which is a perfectly capable machine, but we've kind of now decided we're into this as a hobby, so we want to upgrade and get her something. So we basically opted for a Deus two, which is a French make a French brand. And in Minelab in detectorist circles, you're either a Minelab person or you're a Deus person. There are lots of others, like Noctua and various other brands, but they're probably the two main brands are two fairly expensive brands that you come up against. And my brother in law has been doing this for years, and he's.
Now won't talk to you.
Honestly, he he was like his, his, his hatred of that brand, all based on the fact that one of his pals bought one, didn't persevere with it, and finished up selling it to somebody and hated it. And it was rubbish. And he was just like, I wouldn't touch one of them with a stick. You've wasted your money. I mean, he was getting quite. Don't buy it. Please tell me you're not gonna buy it. Like get a mind like you'll regret it. You'll sell it, you'll hate yourself. It'll be a waste of money. Sure. He's not like a survivor of the Battle of Agincourt. You know what I mean? And if you go and watch the videos, you'll get like. Which is better than the Minelab equinox nine hundred or. Or the Manticore or the Deus two, you know, which is. And actually we did find, I did find a really honest review. And basically the honest review was they're all pretty good. Yeah. All of those top level detectors when you're paying, you know, north of a thousand quid for a metal detector, they are good. They're not going to let you down. They're gonna you're gonna find stuff. And then it comes down to brand loyalty. But what really swayed us was we watched some videos because we now sit eating our tea, watching people, finding things in fields. Uh, you know, it's fascinating. It really.
Taken a niche podcast and made it even.
I know, I know, right? So we then watched, but what persuaded us was there was there's a guy that we watch, he does a series of videos and he's really entertaining. He's called his YouTube channel, his holes hammer. So he's quite a sort of posh sounding guy. He gets into the detail, he finds things, and then he splits the video up because he takes you back to his office during the when he's in the field. So. Right, let's go back to headquarters. And he does this silly little thing where he looks like he's getting, like sending off like a rocket to go back to headquarters. It's just a little quirky thing he does. And then he talks about what he's found and the history of it. It's fascinating. Now he uses a Deus two. And so just watching him use it, find stuff, talk about it, that that persuaded me that. I mean, it wasn't me. It wasn't my decision. Karen made the decision.
Yeah.
The thing about the dais is, is it's modular in construction and it's very, very light. And she wanted something really, really light. So that was a starting point. But she could have had anything. And by watching people use it in the field, find good stuff with it, we were persuaded that was the proof we needed, that credible people were using this piece of kit, finding good stuff, and I didn't really then care about my brother in law, Dave. I didn't really care about his brand loyalty to Mindlab, and I'm using a mindlab, and when I upgrade, I'll probably buy the top of the range mindlab as well. Probably, I don't know, but you know, I don't know. I don't know what that says about brand loyalty. What I needed to know with the dais before Karen and I discussed it and we went and bought one, was that it wouldn't be shit. And the proof was watching people actually use it in the field, find stuff and thought, right. It's clearly not shit because he just dug up that tiny little Roman coin that was and saw him go across the ground. Go beep beep beep boop. Something there. Something there. Dig. Find it. Boom. Yeah.
I think what you're talking about is, is really fundamental to that Rory Sutherland thing. I mean, interestingly, I found myself in a similar situation recently where I was buying a Bluetooth speaker, very similar thing. I went first through a process of like, right, okay, which brands can I actually trust? Yes. Narrowed it down to a pool of about three.
So that was, that was the which brands won't be shit.
Yep. Which. Yeah. What's not gonna let me down. Yeah. And I got it down to three brands. And then I was looking at the features and I got about halfway through reading this exhaustive list of features about all the different ways that this speaker was better than any other speaker. And I just thought to myself, I don't really care. That's not really like you. I want something that functions that I can learn to use. Well, that's credible and that's not going to let me down. And everything after that was just noise. But I think so many marketers are really hung up on like, how can we differentiate ourselves? You know, how is this product better than the competitor's product. What features can we list? And I think it just sort of fundamentally misses that bit of sort of bio psychology where actually, like you say, people don't want to be let down and they want to know that they're buying something that is of good value, that will work. Like you say, that you can take out into a field time and time again and use and it won't be too heavy and it will work. And you can learn to fine tune it.
But I tell you, there are exceptions to this. Probably won't be shit. Yeah, there's the definitely won't be shit. Almost certainly will be the best.
Mhm.
So I had I'm a drummer, but I like to strum guitar. So I had, um, a Squier guitar Stratocaster.
You have to be very careful what you say here, because if there's one thing guitar people are, you think that you're weird sort of nonsense rivalries about Gibson's offenders or well, Jesus Christ.
Well, there you make you make a good point because that was it. I had this Squier, which is a copy, you know, uh, Squier by Fender, i.e. guitars made under license for thirty Bob. It was reasonably okay. It was okay, but I just thought, you know what I mean? I just thought, I want to buy a guitar that will have to get sold when I die because it'll be a guitar. I'll just keep.
Sure.
What did I buy?
Well, I don't know.
I bought an actual fender and I didn't have to. All I did, all I wanted to do was find a decent bike. So I bought it second hand. I bought it locally. It was in mint condition. And you know, when I went to see it, I thought you picked it out. The thing went wrong. Yeah. It's it's a Fender Stratocaster Ultra. You know, it was two thousand quid when it was new. I paid thirteen hundred quid for it. I'm not going to get that home and go, oh, this is a bit rubbish. It's just not going to happen.
You're not. But I do think that what Fender and Gibson both do is a masterclass of exactly what you were just sort of alluding to there with getting people on YouTube to use their equipment. Like you're absolutely right. And I think they are generally very good bits of equipment. People listening to this who are like Fender guitars all the way, or like Gibson guitars all the way. There'll also be an awful lot of people who think, well, you know what? Actually, neither of them are the best at anything. They're just very good at positioning themselves. And, you know, the Fender will produce guitars for celebrities to play, and they'll sort of partner with people. And it's a very effective marketing technique. And they're very good at sort of dominating the the sort of brand head space, if you like, and making sure if you think of guitars, you think of Fender or you think of Gibson, there are a ton of makes that are probably better.
There are.
There's.
A lot there's a lot of guitars.
But bad at marketing. That's the problem.
And there's loads of other guitars.
Even like.
You know, what's really interesting is like talking about guitars. And I was thinking, oh, you know, Gibson may have made an ass of this, but actually Fender have probably done exactly the same. But you can right now buy a brand new Gibson Les Paul, brand new for, I don't know, six or seven hundred quid. You can also buy a brand new Gibson Les Paul for five or six thousand quid.
Mhm.
Mhm. And that's confusing because they do things like they call it, you know, Gibson Les Paul Studio or the Gibson Les Paul Junior or. And it's so confusing because you think, you know, you look through like the second hand dads and you think, oh, it's a Gibson Les Paul. And the guy, the guy or the girl only wants five hundred quid for it. What? That sounds like a great buy. But then you investigate and think, oh, that guitar was only six or seven hundred quid when it was new.
And when you get deeper into.
Our guitarist in our band uses a Gibson gold top, which he paid about three thousand quid for.
Yeah. And when you get into it, a lot of it's to do with like where the pickups were. Hand-wound are they Mexican? Are they Chinese? Yeah.
Well, the fender's the big one with Fender is you've got the really cheap ones like that have got Squier by Fender.
Yeah.
And then you've got actual fenders, but they have the Mexican ones and then they have the somehow the Japanese ones. But then the USA ones which are supposed to be the best. Oh, it's really confusing. But I was buying a USA Strat because I thought I'm not expert enough to know, but I just kind of know it's going to be good. Yeah, it's not gonna be rubbish.
Yeah.
I'm not buying it because it probably won't be shit. I was buying that because I knew it would be good. And by the way, it is. Yes.
Yeah. I think you're right. I think you're talking about a sort of spectrum, aren't you? Really? Where? Yeah. You're either trying to.
Think we sound like we're on the spectrum.
But yeah, broadly speaking, it is just about positioning yourself in a way where you look credible ultimately and not getting too tied down in like, oh, but, you know, a headline doesn't say all the things that we can do or we've written this web page and nowhere on it have we said, oh, but if you actually come to us with like a slightly different problem and it's a Tuesday, we can engineer you a bespoke solution for that. And it's like, you don't need to do all of it.
What you've got to do is persuade people with your messaging that, as we've already said, that you're probably not rubbish. And and then from there, you've got to persuade them, like to have a conversation, to have a chat. Yeah. That's how it works for us. Because, you know, I got caught, I got a call, spam call last week trying to flog me, you know, lists so we could do outreach. How do you do your outreach? I said, well, we kind of don't. We do a bit of networking, but what we do inbound, I mean, we get all our enquiries using inbound. And, um, and I think, you know, one of the crucial parts of inbound is that you need to tell good stories. You need to provide that social proof, you need to persuade people that you're probably not going to be rubbish. And you, you know, and if you think about it from that point of view, what does that person need to read that's going to make them go? Mhm. I might give these guys a call, or I might fill in this form that asked me to fill in because I might be interested in in their services or their products, whatever.
But that is exactly it. It's specifically, what does the person you want to contact, you think while they're reading this page? And that's all that matters.
And you and I agonise over this a lot because we look at, say, I mean, a good place to look at it is when you use paid search. So you've, you've, you've narrowed it down. You think these people who would benefit from this service that we offer are typing these things into Google. We know they are. You see it get typed in, you see it get clicked, you see them spend 10s and then bugger off. Yeah. So, you know, we're thinking, right. What? What are we not saying? What are we playing around with? We've set some a B tests up on a few pages. And I said to you this morning, one of those pages, I think the pages had forty views with the original message and six views with the new message and converted. And the new message has has created a conversion already.
Which is a tiny data set, but.
A tiny data set, which is why I'm not going to do anything about it. We're just going to let the experiment run a bit more because it's not conclusive, but.
It's just that sort of even just that process of sitting and thinking, okay, what would a customer think when they landed on this page? I mean, that's how we with that particular one in question, what we noticed was that a lot of the traffic wasn't spending very long engaging with the page. And it just came down to, you know, if we were in the shoes of somebody buying that service.
So we wanted to make the headline of that page a bit punchier, a bit bolder, a bit more. Yeah, I don't know, a bit more confident maybe, I don't know, I can't remember exactly, but it was, it was certainly, you know, we've given it a name in the experiment, the your website management or whatever. Hyphen punchy because we wanted it to be punchier and that's what we went for with it. And you know, yeah, very early days, but it got a conversion on Friday. Yeah. So, you know, there's nothing to say that we just didn't tick the boxes and they would have converted anyway. I don't we don't know yet. So let's just like I say let that run a bit more.
I absolutely. Okay. Your go.
Oh I don't know about that. I think that was quite good. What you just came up with there. Did I say that out loud. Um, and we already covered one of mine because I had this idea of brand and brand loyalty. Mhm. And this the Rory Sutherland thing, which I mentioned.
Well, actually the brand loyalty thing does bring us onto an interesting one. One of the things that I think we're like sort of, uh, contractually obliged to mention because everybody else, every other digital marketing podcast has been talking about it, this whole Jaguar rebrand thing.
Did you hear? Did you hear what our Lord God Almighty, Rory Sutherland, said about it? No, he said, it's in keeping with Jaguar because they've always stupid tick. Well, he's always they've always pushed the boundary. When they brought the E-Type out, people went. What on earth is that? What on earth have you done? And yet the E-Type is like legendary. I mean, it's a bloody awful car by all accounts, but I mean, its look, its looks were legendary. So I'm like thinking, what on earth have you done, Jaguar? Because I kind of like the original brand, but I'm trying to be generous. And I'd be interested to hear what you've got to say about it.
Well, my objection to it isn't anything to do with how far it departs.
Have you ever had a Jag?
I have not had a Jag.
Well, he's had six and he's not turned off by the new branding, but carry on.
Yeah.
But that's that's.
Sort of misses the point entirely. You see, I'm less about what it will do to a certain degree. One of the takes I have read about it, which I sort of agree with wholeheartedly, is that they didn't really have a choice. They sort of had to try. And I.
Don't think that's.
True. Well, if you look at the stats around their market share and how much how many sales they're losing, and in general, they're sort of declining user base, I sort of think the old brand had. It's sort of had a finite lifespan, shall we say. But I think the main my main objection to the whole thing, apart from the fact that the new logo has an uppercase G and all the rest of that is the lowercase, which is just bullshit, is the fact that it's fundamentally not about cars. You know, Jaguar are a brand first and foremost, I think for people who like cars that they are. They're a brand that has always appealed to car enthusiasts, and here they are launching a brand and talking about artistic direction and bravery and postmodern exuberance. And there are no cars. And it's just it's such a colossal misstep because it completely misses the point they've become or want to become a brand in the way that Apple are a brand and not a car manufacturer. And I just think that's such a strange thing to lose sight of what you actually are and what.
They want to become a premium electric car brand. And you could argue that the old branding didn't fit with that one hundred. They're going one hundred percent electric, aren't they? Which I think is a huge mistake. But anyway.
And I can see a really good, strong argument for bringing out a new line of brand new electric cars under new brand to accompany it. And, you know, if you want to do like postmodern nonsense and have people dress up in cloaks and throw paint around, by all means, knock yourself out. Car adverts have always been a little bit stupid, but to try and do all of that without the actual cars and to just be like this is what Jaguar stands for, is there's just a sort of arrogance about it. Like you think anybody cares what Jaguar stands for? Yeah, they just make cars and you can play with it. You know, within those constraints you can do all sorts of interesting things, but you can't forget what you actually are and what problem you solve. And I think this is a problem with so many brands now. They're like, I want to be a lifestyle brand. We want to position ourselves as like an essential part of modern life. And it's like, but first and foremost, you have to provide something useful.
Yeah. But like, like the, the brand boss said, I mean, if you, you're not gonna phone Apple to tell them about the birth of your firstborn, are you? No. But you might form. Tim Cook and tell him if you had access to him or you knew him. I mean, you know, people are what counts. And so why would they think that that Jaguar are going to become like, like front of front of mind in the way that they seem to think they're going to become front of mind? I mean, have we seen any of the cars yet?
They don't have any. This is the worst of it. They paused production for a year so that they could work, so they could focus all their resources on this new lineup of EV vehicles. And they've launched their new brand without launching the new lineup of EV.
For starters, if they created a really, really nice EV that looked that looked exactly like the F type, they'd be onto a winner straight away because the F type is a beautiful looking car.
If they want to design some like weird post-modern bubble that's bright pink and sort of claim that's the new direction, I think that's credible. You can you can back up or justify any of it. But if you when brands sort of become completely detached from the problem they solve, I think there's a real problem there. And if you read all the brand messaging. Well, I'll just read you an excerpt from it now. It's. Jaguar's transformation is defined by exuberant modernism, a creative philosophy that underpins all aspects of the new Jaguar brand world.
Jaguar. A council or a company.
In what world does. As a consumer, I don't care about Jaguar's brand world or about their philosophy. I care about what they produce. I like it, I like.
It, and I particularly like the F type. And, you know, I've been thinking about buying a a silly car. Mhm. Um, why wouldn't I buy an F type. Because inherently jags are not reliable. That's my that's what I think when I think of Jags.
And you would have to I would think not to buy a Jaguar Land Rover car.
I know you've got one I know and um.
Yeah it's not very reliable.
You've had your ups and downs. I know you, I know, but I also know you really like the car and that's what matters. And if you're prepared to maintain it and everything else, I mean, but Jaguar, the Jaguar brand to me conjures up very beautiful looking cars. But I wouldn't have one because they're unreliable and I don't know whether they could have addressed that. I'm not sure whether they could have addressed that. They could have maybe.
I don't actually know if it's true necessarily either. And I'm basing that on a very small sample size. I know a couple of people who've had Jaguars, and they were largely fine, but very expensive to run, as in they guzzled fuel. And when something did go wrong, it was catastrophically expensive. But they were, you know, they lasted for years rather than months. Yeah. But yeah, I mean, I don't know, like I say, it's just for me, the only other thing from here is, you know, the next stage of the transformation of Jaguar will be.
To design some cars.
And we'll know it will be revealed at Miami Art week, including including the debut of its design vision concept, which again, is nothing about actual cars.
Yeah. I mean, I don't know, maybe they're going to knock it out the park and we're all going to eat our words. Like I said, I'm trying to keep an open mind because because of the way my mind works, I'm thinking people a lot cleverer than me have thought this through. They've really workshopped it and thought it through. And they're going somewhere. They're only at the start of that with the big reveal on the questionable rebrand.
So I think it's.
Where are they going?
Yeah, I think it's a big mistake to assume that the people in charge of these things are somehow sort of superhuman, or know something we don't see. The reality of the situation is that they got scared that their brand was increasingly associated with sort of forty to sixty year old businessmen and thought, oh shit, we need to we need to do something radical. And rather than doing something radical but sensible, they just decided to go hard left into whatever that is, sort of Apple territory because Apple do that a lot, don't they? They're all about their vision and their concept and their Apple world, and I get it, but I just think it's very navel gazing.
Yeah.
And I think if you're Apple and you are actually in everybody's pocket and everybody's house, you probably are allowed to do that. But Jaguar.
It's a bit presumptuous of Jaguar to do it maybe a little bit like I'm keeping. I'm trying to keep an open mind and see where it goes. I haven't paid a lot of attention to it other than like, obviously looking at some of the TikToks where people have kind of laid into them over it. And then with the exception, again, I keep mentioning it, but he's kind of kind of said it's in keeping with what Jaguar have always done. They've always kind of gone like, let's do something different. Let's, let's not do what we're expected to do. Yeah.
See, I think marketers in general and, and brand people are far more prone to sort of explaining these things away in their heads and sort of rationalising them. And I sort of agree. I see where he's coming from, but I also just think to the average consumer, it's like, who cares? You know, I don't care that they say they're being bold. I just want to see a car and decide whether I want to buy it or not. But yeah, I dunno, maybe they'll bring.
Out an electric vehicle, which will probably look quite pretty. They'll claim it does four hundred miles, when in reality it does one hundred and fifty. And we'll go all coy and quiet when we talk about where the lithium is coming from for the batteries and all. Just the all the usual bullshit where cars are concerned. Electric cars, false claims. Rachel Reeves oh go on. Nice. Nice segue. Go on. I'm all ears.
We've had a we've had a fun couple of weeks with this, haven't we? So, um, obviously Rachel Reeves, our Chancellor of the Exchequer, has found to have embellished certain things on her CV. Yeah.
And there's two camps aren't there. There's those that like well come on, who hasn't embellished their CV, which.
I think.
Is hilarious, who are like, um, this is not acceptable for somebody who's in the second most important job in the country.
Yeah. Which is where I am. Yeah.
Well, talk to me about that.
Well, I mean, first of all, I think, you know, fair enough.
You are broadly a fan of labour.
Yeah.
Maybe not this particular incarnation, but broadly a fan. You were a huge fan of Tony Blair, weren't you? Yes. You were a fan boy.
Yeah. Literally.
Literally a fan boy. When were you born?
Nineteen ninety one.
Yeah. So you literally were a boy when Tony Blair took over in ninety seven.
Yeah. And it may well just be sort of nostalgia, um, that that does the work for you. But no, I mean broadly, broadly, sort of center, center left, um.
Same.
As me. Uh, I think the issue with lying, well, there's two things embellish is very different from lie. I don't think anybody has claimed to have experience. They just simply don't have before on a CV, certainly not in such a high profile way. I mean, she literally said I was an economist for Halifax, and it turned out that she ran an IT help desk or support admin position. Um, which has nothing to do with setting economic policy, which is.
You're just part of the right wing conspiracy to, to discredit our new government, aren't you? That's all you.
Are. I don't know, and maybe I'll be proved wrong about that. And, you know, maybe there'll be sort of nuance to it. I don't really care. I don't think it matters. Because the other really fundamental point is that Keir Starmer and Rachel Reeves and that entire Labour, which ran on a ticket of, unlike the corrupt conservatives, we're going to tell it like it is, be honest with you and grapple with real problems. And then it turns out that within the first couple of months, Keir Starmer had taken a load of massive backhanders and a couple of free coats and that Rachel Reeves had lied about her experience. And I don't really think that the level of hypocrisy is is something that many people will stomach.
I did worry at the time, but, you know, leading up to the election, I did worry that there was a lack of talent on the Labour benches.
Why the Labour Party couldn't have just found somebody for the role that didn't have a load of demons in their closet, I don't know.
Well, again, I think there was a lack of talent. You look at some of the people who I was. I was listening to Jess Phillips on the radio today, and I've got no axe to grind with Jess Phillips. But, you know, she kept saying, oh yeah, you know, I'm just going to crack on. I'm just going to crack on. I'm just like, oh, for God's sake, you're a minister of state. You know, I mean, I'm a working class bloke, but I'm not going to go on national radio and say, yeah, we're going to crack on. Like, I'm trying to be like a man of the people, you know what I mean? I mean, just like.
No, I level the same sort of criticism that people like Wes Streeting as well, who sort of like people.
Lauded Wes Streeting. I mean, Ian Dale is a right of centre broadcaster. I've got a lot of time for Ian Dale. And I remember him saying, oh yeah, I've got a lot of time for Wes Streeting. You know, despite being a conservative and temporarily running to be a conservative MP, Ian was, you know, applauded Wes Streeting, who he has on his show quite a lot. I struggle to see where Wes Streeting has the experience to do the job he's doing.
I don't really see it. And again, he sort of ran.
He's running against the mainstream thinking on the assisted dying as well, isn't he?
He is. That's his you know, he's allowed to have his private convictions. Absolutely. But what I find quite interesting about it is, again, you know, they sort of run on this ticket of, you know, I'm a great reformer. I'm going to come in and fix the problem. They come in and they say all the problems are insurmountable. I'm not really sure what to do here. And it all falls apart very rapidly.
It ain't that the way with politics.
Well, it doesn't.
When reality punches you in the face, you kind of go, mm, this is way harder than I thought it was going to be. Or it's actually as hard as I thought it was going to be. And I'm feeling like I thought it was going to be, but I needed to tell a pack of lies to get her in the first place.
Partly. And I might make myself sound like a horrible politician now, but I think part of the problem is how you portray it. I was having a conversation, and this is loosely connected to marketing. I was.
None of the rest of what we talked about was.
It? You know, I was having this conversation with somebody the other day and I was saying, one of the things that really interests me, right, is Labour have done a fantastically poor job of positioning themselves in all of this. People like Nigel Farage, Kemi Badenoch, all of these sort of like right wing or right of centre people have absolutely no problem when they're caught in a lie or they're caught doing something really stupid, are just sort of like laughing at it, laughing at themselves, being like, yep, you know, that was wrong. That was messed up. I mean, Keir Starmer had a pop at Farage for never being in the UK the other day at Prime Minister's Question Time and all over TikTok and all over YouTube. Everyone's like, watch Keir Starmer slammed Nigel Farage. Nigel Farage's reaction was to laugh. And you know, they're just they're not bothered by it. So it never becomes an issue. But Labour's sort of faffing and trying to justify it and pretending that they have the moral high ground and acting like, you know, politicians. Yeah, it really does sort of f*ck them because they're constantly on the back foot with it.
And every time they say we inherited. Yeah, I die a little bit inside. I'm sick and tired of hearing it. It's just like they would not give the Tories an inch. When it comes to what the Tories inherited in twenty ten. Yeah. You know, and this you know, politics can't be about the past. It has to be about we are where we are. This is how we're going to fix it. Not leaning into the past to justify your inability to to fix things or to, or to talk meaningfully about what you're going to do.
By the same token, when somebody challenges you at Prime Minister's Question Time and says, as somebody did to Angela Rayner last week, how come Rachel Reeves has lied on her CV, and your response is to turn around and say that's not important at all. Keir Starmer picked an economist that could fix the UK economy, and that's what we should focus on. That's a level of trying to brush things under the rug that just won't do and won't do.
And yeah.
They just don't seem to get the balance right. Yeah. Um, and it's weird though, because I think in general, the sort of point for me is just about credibility and, and people and you lose credibility very quickly when you try and make excuses for yourself. You lose credibility very quickly.
We've all been there. We've all been there in our lives where we think, I just need to say here, I just need to say sorry, because if I just keep talking and not admitting that I've just got this completely wrong, I am just losing credibility by the second.
I'm not pretending that you've got all the answers, because, you know, if Labour had run from a position of like, we don't know what we're going to inherit when we get into power and we don't really know how we're going to solve the problems, but we're pretty confident that we can do a better job than the incumbent party. They'd have still won because they.
Would this time round. But generally you wouldn't win doing that. You wouldn't win taking that approach.
But what I'm saying is they've they've sort of they've built a rod for their own backs by positioning themselves as this sort of like, you know, we're going to come in, we've got all the solutions, got everything lined up.
And there's the whole we're the adults in the room bullshit. I mean, and like, I don't know who they thought they were kidding with that nonsense. I mean, well, the electorate they have got just. Well, yeah, but I mean, like this, um this um um survey or. No, this poll. Yeah. Thing that's gone, it's about three quarters of a million people have said like labour lied. We need another general election, that kind of thing. Um, which is just nonsense. I mean, it's absolute nonsense to even think that something like that could have any impact on politics and should be given any credence whatsoever. But, um.
How'd you find Keir Starmer's response to it? Pretty funny.
I don't know.
What did he say? He said basically, well, of course, lots of people don't want us to be here.
Yeah.
So he's like, yeah, we know that like sort of half the electorate hate us. So what sort of thing? Which is a valid.
More than half now. But anyway, I mean, they had a very difficult job to do when they came in and. But for me, there's two things like it's a difficult job. We all appreciate that. And we need you to be the be the grown ups in the room, not just pretend you're going to be the grown ups in the room, but I just wish they would stop pretending that we had fourteen years of Tory chaos.
Or because that is just.
Completely and totally untrue. So they're basing everything that they're doing on a fundamental lie. Yeah. This idea that the Tories are all white cat stroking maniacs who want to hurt people and did things to benefit their mates, and it's just complete bullshit.
And you'll notice that Labour are perfectly happy to sort of hold on to a lot of the things that the Tories did that were apparently horrible and won't be reversing them.
Well, I mean, you mentioned, you know, like, you know, with Ikea's suits and these football tickets and all the rest of it, I mean, they kind of I mean, that's such an own goal in it, you know. And this is football match. There was no pun intended there. But it's such an own goal. All that.
Stuff. Well, this is my point, really. I mean, I don't, you know, I'm sat here sort of berating them. I don't actually fundamentally think they're incapable of doing a good job. I think in three years time we may well be sat here being like, wow, look, they really pulled it out of the park. There are fundamentally some very capable people behind the scenes.
They are one term. They are a one term party. You heard it here first. I guarantee you they will not win the next election. They will. They will continue to to flounder. They will continue to try and blame the Tories. They will continue to make really bad decisions.
Like the whole national.
Insurance thing. You know, the CBI are talking to Rachel Reeves this afternoon, or Rachel Reeves is going into the CBI this afternoon to talk about, you know, the economy and what she's doing and everything else. He's going to get a pretty rough ride. They've already this morning. Um, I think the head of the CBI had basically said like, this is reckless what you're actually doing. And um, you know, we're a small business, we'll be fine. We're doing quite well and we'll ride through it and we'll pay our taxes and we'll, and we'll contribute.
I might not get quite such a nice pay rise?
But yeah, that is how it ultimately with small businesses because, you know, this whole debate has been around, oh, Tesco made three billion profit. They can afford it. Yeah. But most people work for small businesses, you know, businesses with two or three people, maybe ten people, maybe fifteen people, whatever. And we've already been through the wringer when it comes to Covid and all the rest of it that we've been through. You notice how Covid is never mentioned in the mainstream media when it comes to politics these days, like it never happened. It's very odd, very odd. Anyway, do you want to go back to digital marketing?
Well, no, it was.
Just.
It was just to say that ultimately this is just a failure of messaging. And it all comes from this idea that if you.
See what you tenuously how you tenuously linked it back to marketing.
If you make claims that you can't justify, people will see through it very, very quickly. Yeah.
Whether you're a business saying we're, we can do X, Y, and Z for your business and this will happen, or whether you're a government saying or a government in waiting saying like, we need the keys, we're the grown ups in the room. We've got all the answers.
Yeah. This is the thing, isn't it? It's about sophistication, and it's about trusting your audience. And it's about saying, okay, if I claim to be the world leading or the world expert in something, is somebody going to read that and think, yep, that that rings true to me? Or are they going to think, oh, they're at it? And I think as soon as you start making.
Bold claims, we'll definitely think you're.
At it. But marketing dude, marketing agencies are the worst for it. Like the UK's leading SEO supplier is something I read on someone's website unironically the other day. And I was like, by what metric? Like, but you know, I don't think people realise the damage they do to their credibility by making sort of wild claims or easily disprovable claims. You know, if you're honest, if you sort of know your niche, if you speak to them, if you evidence what you're saying, fine people will take you at face value. But as soon as you start with that sort of, yeah, I was an economist for the Halifax thing. And as soon as somebody picks that thread and it turns out not to be true, and it turns out you haven't actually provided.
Did you think that wasn't eventually going to come out? It is something I said quite a long time ago. Was that like when it was pretty obvious that we were going to get a Labour government, which, you know, I'm fairly, fairly neutral about. Um, I spoiled my ballot paper in the general election. I didn't vote for anybody.
I don't think he meant to say that. I don't think he meant to tell people.
It's not illegal to do it. It's perfectly legit to do it. Yeah. Um, um, I, I said we're before the general election that Labour have never been in power when we have had the level of scrutiny available to everybody through social media that we have. Now, let's face it, twenty ten, when the Tories came in. Even Twitter was quite new in them days. And Facebook was, you know, you had you still had things like Myspace and God knows what else. What I'm saying is that the level of scrutiny wasn't anything like it is now fourteen years ago. And I did wonder how they would cope with it. And I think the short answer is not.
Well, it's an interesting thing, because the real sort of flag for this coming up was when Rachel Reeves got caught out, if you remember, um, she basically copy and pasted a load of stuff from Wikipedia into a book.
Oh that's right.
So she wrote this book about great women in business or like, you know, the progress made by women. Noble, worthy, interesting thing to write about. Obviously hadn't written it herself. And then her excuse was sort of that, well, some of my researchers must have copied stuff from the internet and I didn't know about it, which sort of is a giant can of worms because like, did you not read your own book? Yeah. And like, did you not double check? But, you know, whatever it meant. Like you say, it meant that they were very ill equipped to, to sort of understand scrutiny. And to be fair, I think a lot of businesses are now as well. I think a lot of businesses think they can get away with making sort of weirdly outrageous claims.
This is this is what we're talking about. It's all about it's all about the role. It's all about the fact that that Rachel Reeves is the Chancellor of the Exchequer. This is nothing about her because by all accounts, she's lovely and clever and funny. And I mean, if she was sat here now, I think she would be great, great conversation. But that's you know, that aside, it does seem like this is this is not the. As you rightly pointed out, this isn't the only instance of. I don't know how you would. You know something being not what it seems. Deceitful, deceitful, probably the the right word.
And it's a funny thing, isn't it? Because in a world where like your personal brand, like you said about the whole Tim Cook and Apple thing is like increasingly important, like social media, LinkedIn, all of those platforms that she's been caught out on. They make such a heavy emphasis of who you are as a person that there's really nowhere for her to hide. Now, I don't see any way that she can come back from this really. I think inevitably the next reshuffle, she's out. And I think inevitably it sort of torpedoes her political career. And that's a shame. But I think it's also a sort of really, you know, stark thing, isn't it? You can't lie.
Yeah. I think when it comes to personal brand because I do watch stuff again on Tick Tock, I watch like people talking about videos about how to develop your, your, your personal brand. I think authenticity. Yeah. Is it the key? Is it the heart of it? If I, if I think about some of the people who I. Non-Mainstream people who I will regularly consume their content. It's because they're authentic. They come across as authentic.
It's not only because they're authentic. I mean, that's one thing I would flag is that's a trend on on LinkedIn at the moment that I really hate. It's like, just be authentic. It's like, you have to be authentic and interesting.
Yeah, yeah. For sure.
Yeah. A lot of people are out there that sort of peddle on this idea.
You might not find them interesting, but because the subject matter interests me, I find them authentic and interesting.
Yeah. And it's, it's a tricky thing because a lot of people, I think are just like, oh, well, I'll just go and be myself. But they've got nothing to say. So that doesn't work. But yeah, you just don't try and be deceptive. I think people just see through that stuff straight away.
So yeah, yeah I'm sure. Which famous entertainer said, yeah, all you have to be is sincere. Once you learn to fake that, you've got it made. It was like Sammy Davis or somebody. It was a very famous entertainer. Said that a long, long time ago. Um, okay. So talking about authenticity, Sincerity, honesty, whatever you want to talk about. We had an enquiry, came in on Friday. Really exciting looking business and we'd love to help them. And in essence, they said like, um, when they need to make changes to their website, they have to keep going back to the agency. And it's becoming unsustainable. And I think by that they meant it's becoming very expensive. Right? So the agency who I don't know who they are. I'm not interested in who they are. They'd used some technology to build a website using what's called the view JavaScript framework. And I won't go into it because I can't, because it's not my area of expertise. But it seems that they've built this website for them using not using a mainstream content management system like WordPress or HubSpot or Wix or Webflow or Squarespace or craft, etc., etc.. So this website's been built not with, um, a kind of what you might call a tried and tested, proven, simple content management system which makes owning the website easy. Which means you can make sure the website delivers value into your business. Sadly, I mean, I've had to go back to them and say, we don't have the expertise that you're looking for. We could almost certainly develop that expertise. But what what do we think about this idea? Where in in days of yore, when, you know, when you were still at school, like there was a big trend for agencies to build their own content management systems, you know, hands up. I did it working for one of the agencies I worked for before I started Red evolution. But in our defense, content management systems were in their infancy. And some of the ones that you could buy were pretty rubbish. There were still plenty of websites being built with, you know, not with content management systems using tools like Dreamweaver and stuff like that. And Microsoft FrontPage really. I'm dating myself now. So you had a lot of stuff floating around here before that.
I just painted on cave walls.
Basically, cave paintings was where I started. Um, but you've got you had this situation where um, agencies built like there was an agency in, in Aberdeen called, what were they called? Uh, it wasn't hot chili, but it was the guy left Hot Chili to go and work for this bigger agency. And let's just say they were called, you know, Acme. And then at the bottom, they'd have the website powered by Acme CMS as a content management system developed by that. Now it's clearly that was clearly a terrible idea because even then there were there were readily available off the shelf content management systems that were open source. They were, you know, you didn't have to rely on one company who may or may not be around in a year's time, you know, to, to, to maintain your website. Um, but it seems that there is still today opportunities for agencies to build websites using probably technology that they want to go play with rather than technology, which will provide a great solution.
Yeah.
Do you have something to say?
I think that's pretty much it in a nutshell. I mean, one of the things I think just to relate this to my personal lives, as we often do with a little anecdote, I ran into a similar situation with my boiler recently. It was a fantastically complicated.
Very complicated biomass boiler. Haven't you? Yeah.
Yes. Didn't choose it. Wouldn't choose.
It. Well, don't hate the house. And the house already had it.
And you know what? I don't hate it. It's not that bad. But, you know, there's one company in the area that can service it, don't you? No. Not really. You do? It's actually sort of fine when it's working. You know. It's a you know, it does its job.
Even Leslie.
Realises.
How funny that is, for God's sake. It's fine when it's working, I mean. Yeah. Um, but to Jaguar cars.
Yeah. There's one company in the area that can service it. They're great, but sometimes they're a little bit flaky. Yeah. So I thought I'll ring round and I'll find another biomass boiler specialist and I'll ask if they do it. And the guy was like nope, don't work on them. Never have. But we're willing to learn. You just have to understand that you'll be paying for us to learn.
Yeah. That's good, I like that, that's honest.
It's really nice. It was really up front. Yeah. I turned him down on his offer ultimately, because I'm like, I'm not made of money.
But I wouldn't of. No, I think, I think I would have at least said, look, come round, you can see it. We can have a chat and tell me what you think.
Yeah.
Yeah.
But you know, he was very honest and upfront about it and I thought, you know what? Like that's, you know, I felt sort of respect about that. I would I wouldn't sort of hesitate to recommend him to somebody else in a slightly different situation and may have been tempted to take him up on his offer. Yeah. It was the right way to, to sort of go about it. I think people who don't do that and try and sort of learn on the clients time without telling the client that that's what they're doing. You just you're just, again, in a very sticky situation if they realise what's happening. Yeah. And it will come out at some point because they'll just say, why can't you just do this? And you'll be like.
This agency, I guess, would be able to robustly defend their decision to use the technology. But looking at the website, the website is, is just pages of information and an opportunity to fill a form and get in touch. It's not an app. It's not doing anything really funky. In which case you might use the view framework because it's good for building one page apps and doing all kinds of really clever stuff. What they needed was what most businesses need. You need a mechanism, a tool that lets them put content out there, which then results in people wanting to do business with them.
And on and on that front, there's fundamentally something very sort of, um, I think, frightening about the type of agency who, uh, I don't know how to phrase this delicately. Look, there's a certain type of agency that is very expensive and that trades off that sort of like, um, inherited air of superiority to sell people solutions that are way overengineered, way too complicated. And a lot of very large, very expensive agencies do have a model whereby they will try and trap you on proprietary software so that they basically have your retainer, you know, for infinity, because you can't afford to sort of redevelop the tool. And fundamentally, most websites are very simple. You do not need a complicated CMS. I would I would go so far as to say you could make ninety percent of the websites on the internet with any CMS. It's all HTML and most of it's just text and images. And you know, beyond that you get fine detail. But I mean, even, you know, look at what Wix can do nowadays with sort of special layering masks and video and stuff like that. You don't need a very specialist piece of kit, but there are people out there who will sell you on the idea of having a very, very special. Yeah.
There'll be probably very good at telling a story back to messaging whereby you will stand out from the crowd, because the technology we're going to use to build your website is only used by two percent of the internet. And that's a good thing. Whereas, you know, I don't want to sound like, uh, you know, tedious, but you really want something that if the agency that you're working with go out of business, there's a, there's a thousand other agencies could pick it up and run with it and keep everything moving nicely along.
A really good example of this in action is like cars again, isn't it? It's like you would buy if you were very wealthy. Probably a Rolls Royce maybe, and you probably.
Wouldn't need to be wealthy to buy a Rolls Royce these days. Have you seen the price you can get like Rolls Royce, like the content? Oh no. Bentleys are similar. I don't like continental AutoTrader. You can get a Bentley Continental for ten grand a hundred.
David.
Come on. It's much better. It's like one hundred and seventy thousand quid when it was new. And you can get it for ten grand. Now you don't mind spending ten grand a month running it, right? I'm sorry. I'm not going to go off on a car.
No. Well, no, you probably wouldn't buy a Maybach, because where on earth are you going to take it when it breaks down? And I think the same thing is true of websites. You know, by all means, push the boat out, buy an expensive CMS, but for Christ's sake, buy one where another mechanic can step in if yours disappears. Because wedding yourself to something proprietary is just so dangerous in the long run.
No, you're absolutely right in that respect. Um, yeah, the car analogy stands stands quite well. You know, it's, it's, I've thought like, oh, you know, maybe finally I'll get myself a Porsche nine hundred eleven, a car I've liked since I was a kid. And I thought, well, I will, I get one, but I was like, no, there's no Porsche specialists around here. You're getting somebody to look after it. I'd be in the realms of like, your boiler guy, like the brilliant garage at dinner would probably say, well, it's just a car with four wheels and an engine. We'll be here to do it. We'll be out to look after it for you, no problem. Whereas the specialist would know exactly knows.
If you don't loosen all the nuts on the carbon ceramic brakes at the right time, they'll just shatter.
Yeah, that's right, that sort of thing. So you just think, oh, no, you know what? I'm not going to bother.
But no one hundred percent. Um, yeah, I do think as well with CMS, I just think nowadays the cheap ones are just as good as the expensive ones quite often.
Yeah. I mean my advice would always be use something mainstream, use webflow, use HubSpot, use WordPress, use Joomla, use craft. All of these tools are pretty good. I do like the SaaS ones. I do like the ones where you've got no server to worry about. It's just provided as a service that's like HubSpot, webflow, etc. Wix, I suppose you know, and focus all your energies on producing great content and getting found and telling, you know, having great messaging and convincing people to get in touch with you and all that stuff. It's how you, rather than like, it's built with some weird and wonderful framework that makes you feel special.
Because I mean, fundamentally, I think one thing that people just don't understand, if they don't, if they're not sort of embedded in this industry, is that the look and feel of your website has nothing to do with the architecture. It's built on all of that.
I think you're right. I think people still would be concerned, oh, I would quite like HubSpot, but all HubSpot sites look the same. Well, that's not for any reason. I mean, you can make a website look however you want it to look using pretty much any technology.
It's also the opposite of what Wix do, which is sort of market on this idea that if you sign up for Wix, you'll get this beautiful looking website just like this one, but you can make a Wix website look shit. You can make it look brilliant. It all just depends on the code that you squirt out. So yeah.
I've got one other thing on my list, but I'm not going to go there because we've already been talking for ages and I'm actually four minutes late for a meeting.
Is that a cliffhanger?
It's not really a cliffhanger. No. I mean, once again, we've been approached by somebody who wants to buy red evolution and and they're asking all sorts of questions and, and I just think, oh, here we go again. Yawn. But I thought it's a subject like other agency people that might listen to this might be interested in. Because we all go through it where people approach us and, and then try and convince you that your agency is only worth thirty or thirty five.
Beans.
Worth thirty bob and a fried fish or whatever. Yeah. I mean, it's just something, but I'll leave it. I'll leave it out there. Maybe we'll cover it next time. Or maybe we won't, I don't know. Definitely. Have you covered stuff that you wanted to cover?
Pretty much. Yeah. I had one last thing, which was just about Chrome and Google selling it off, but we can cover that next time.
Yeah, we've actually got subjects left over for the next. We've actually started the prep for the next podcast already. That'll do for now. Have you are you happy you've been listening to Dave and Alex talk about politics, a little bit of digital marketing and messaging and all signs of all kinds of things on Digital Marketing From The Coalface, and we'll have more of this drivel next time.