Transcript of Digital Marketing From The Coalface, Episode 139

We've been talking quite a lot in the past few podcasts about this idea that Google is sort of struggling to index.

Well, you've been taxing your brain with it and talking about it quite a bit. What are you driving at?

Google? I think now in a place where the internet is so saturated with content and there's so much new content being produced all the time that they are actually struggling a little bit to keep up with it. There was a thing back on, I think it was December the tenth, where they basically just said like, oh, sorry, we're encountering issues. A small number of websites may experience indexing problems, but then also they've recently released a load of guidelines, which basically says, please make sure that all of the thousands of pages on your website that we don't need to see aren't crawlable anymore.

Are we seeing that Google is now at a point where it's actually going to start to fail because of the sheer volume of content that's out there?

I'll go a step further and and risk the ire of the internet. I think it's been happening for quite a while. I think they've just been dishonest about it.

Okay, welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Um, we've just finished round four of our Christmas quiz. Um, Alex is quite grumpy at the moment because it was, um, stuff that pretty much everybody knows about, but Alex didn't know anything about it because it was actually to do with, um films and, and what was the other one? Film.

The film one was all right. It was the recognising music from recognising music.

Yeah.

But I just suck at recognising music in general.

Yeah. It's. Yeah, it's one of them things. It's usually one of those things where we go, oh I know it, I know it, I know it, I know it. Anyway, good fun. Um final deciding round tomorrow. I think it's, I think it's the leaderboard is quite tight at the top and I think you're probably still amongst it even though you don't think you did very well today. Um so yes, we are kind of getting ready for our Christmas break and for me anyway, much needed. Uh, we kind of pretty much shut the agency down for a couple of weeks and everybody goes off and does their thing. And I'm certainly looking forward to that. I don't know about you.

Yeah, absolutely.

Yeah. Good stuff. And for once, maybe twice. I've come kind of unprepared. And and Alex has got a, um, a festive cornucopia of things he wants to talk about. Actually, none of it was festive. When I glanced through, which you kindly shared with me. I glanced through the, uh, the crib notes for this podcast, and I just thought, does he know it's Christmas?

What's Christmas? Yeah. Bah humbug. You also did kindly say just before we started rolling that, uh, all of my ideas were shit.

So I thought, yeah, that might be a bit strong. Rubbish. He's probably. Yeah, that's probably good enough. I didn't have to go quite as far as I went. Maybe. Yeah. But no, I'm delighted that you've actually, uh, bothered your arse to come up with some questions and some things you want to talk about, not questions, some things you want to talk about, which is lovely. Um, I'll do my best to, uh, look interested, and, uh, let's give it a go.

Cool. So we'll start off with a twenty twenty five trends to watch. Oh. Seriously? No, thankfully, I am joking. Okay, I did, I did sort of like play with the idea of just doing sort of like, you know, top ten marketing hacks for twenty twenty five and seeing how far I could get before you like, shut up.

Yeah, yeah. Or you could maybe add on that you won't believe what Britney Spears looks like now or something like that. And you could talk about that as well. All this, I mean, that.

Britney horrible.

Horrible clickbait stuff. I can't believe it still seems to be a thing. Yeah. You know, I'll be on a social platform. There'll be something that interests me. I'll follow a link and I just get splattered in my screen, gets splattered with this absolute junk, and I just despair. Yeah. Is it working? Is it making money for people? Is it desperation? What the hell is it? Basically, someone put an inappropriate photograph with a headline, which is a blatant lie. Hope somebody clicks it and then try and achieve something at the end of that. I don't.

Know. So the thing that's really interesting about that model is there's one of the key services that people use for it is something called Outbrain, which is like a con, a content sort of aggregation Networky thing. And I remember when it first launched, I remember them ringing me, um, and saying I was head of digital marketing at an agency at the time. They were like, oh, you know, we've got this brilliant, innovative new idea. Basically, we've rented a load of space at the bottom of proper, you know, news websites and stuff like that. And you can use that to promote your good content and people will see your good content listed and they'll click it and you'll get traffic that you wouldn't otherwise get. And to be honest, it sounds like quite a compelling pitch, but for some reason it's just become saturated with absolute garbage. It does. Yeah, it's just a race to the bottom, I suppose.

It seems to be. I saw, um, I don't know if you call it a what's that beeping? Uh, I, uh, I saw, I don't know if you would call it a meme. It was actually, um, the guy that plays, um, uh, the CIA tough guy and the office love interest in the American version of The Office. Uh, plays Jack Ryan. He plays the lead in Jack Ryan, and he was in. He's in the American version of The Office. I can't remember his name. Great actor anyway. Him and it was him. And it was he was basically saying your advert in the middle of a film I'm watching probably YouTube or something. Makes me hate your brand.

Yeah.

Like this interruption marketing. So I get that and don't disagree with that. But if we're not going to do that and this kind of links to what we're just talking about there, if we're not going to do that, then you could argue that without the adverts, the video wouldn't be there in the first place, because how else is it going to be paid for? Unless we subscribe to like a million different channels? We already all probably subscribe to way more channels than we want to. That beeping is really annoying me that some idiot who doesn't know how to turn the alarm off on their car anyway. Go on. I don't think, I don't think anyone listening to this can hear it. They can just hear the idiot talking about the idiot. Go on.

Um. What was I going to say?

Well, I was talking about the, you know, the interruption marketing still seems to be a thing and maybe always will be. And without it, the thing that's being interrupted, the video that you're watching might not even be there in the first place.

Yeah, yeah, it's fair enough. I think there are a lot of platforms that do survive on the back of sort of advertising. Um, it's just a shit model. It's shit for consumers. Um, it's no fun.

Is it persisting because people just don't know what else to do. If you can't flog, like to put your crap in front of people that are doing something else, how do you monetise? Because, because YouTube, for example, how do you monetise YouTube if you don't let people pay to put their crap in front of people who are watching something else and interrupt them?

Well, here's a controversial idea. Does it have to be monetised? I mean, look, all I'll say about it is, yeah, well.

How was it paid for.

YouTube? Well, this is the thing. YouTube didn't have advertising for years. It didn't.

Know. But like, that's just lots of stuff that came along. Internet stuff was, was always free. Like Wikipedia. Wikipedia is still free. But every time you go on it, they're begging for money because it's like the free doesn't work. Yeah. Does it?

I, I think it's challenging because, you know, Amazon, for example, Amazon video have recently done a thing where for the longest time, if you paid an Amazon subscription. You got access to all of their Amazon Prime subscription. You got access to all of the films and TV. That's right. And they've recently started doing this thing where they now just put adverts in. You're still paying the subscription and Netflix are experimenting with the same thing, but they're just they're just trying to make extra revenue on top. And part of the problem is that a lot of these services, people go to them because they're good and, and offer a good user experience. And then once the people, the execs who run these things have got a decent sort of subscriber base, they're like, oh, how can we further leverage this for more money? How can we squeeze more out of them? And then they make the service shit. People migrate away from it. They're like, oh, it's such a shame this service has collapsed. Everyone's gone somewhere.

Else. I think I'm right in thinking because nearly every time I go onto YouTube, it says, you know, special offer, why not subscribe? And I think if you do subscribe, you don't get any adverts.

But the subscription is like ten ninety nine a month just to watch videos without being bombarded with advertising, which.

And I don't know, I mean, I, I'm, I do like YouTube, I like the niche stuff. Like, you know, I recently got into metal detecting. There's loads of great stuff, loads of great stuff on there from people who are actually making pretty much like if it came on the BBC, you would, you wouldn't be surprised. I mean, great quality productions about going on, um, you know, digs and finding stuff and then, and then talking about what they've found and the history of it and everything else. There's some really good stuff. A guy called Holzamer, we watch a lot of his videos and he puts puts a lot of effort into them. Um, you know, I might pay to subscribe to that. But the problem is like for most of us, like I'm subscribing to now TV, I'm subscribing to Netflix, I'm subscribing to Apple TV, I've got to pay my TV licence. And if you actually sit down, you're like, Jesus, I'm spending a lot of money on subscriptions, so I have to really want to subscribe to YouTube or just or just put up with the adverts. But how effective are the adverts anyway?

Because so this is my other thing, and it might sound a bit naive because we're in the sort of, uh, you know, I think we're very lucky in that we sort of like exist in this, this privileged place where we do a lot of sort of inbound marketing is based on producing decent content and attracting eyeballs because it's actually worthwhile. But there is an ecosystem online of sort of producing really rubbish stuff just for the purposes of branding, brand awareness, engagement, getting clicks, getting visits on a website. And I think a lot of YouTube advertising falls into that category. I mean, I find them off putting, I am. I think I am less likely to buy from a well, that's.

What that thing was saying. The meme thing was saying. It was like, you know, it just actually turns me against your brand that you're interrupting me while I'm doing something else. And I don't know how true that is.

And, you know, um, marketing professors, um, with their, their studies and their, uh, their data sets that prove that brand awareness works anyway. And that by being there, Adidas trainers still sort of gain more money in the long term, even though they annoy. Some people will tell me that I'm completely wrong, but I think it's one of those things where if you create these ecosystems where it's actually frustrating and irritating to use stuff, it drives people away from them in the long term. I mean, the same is true of Google, right? I mean, Google ads are becoming more and more sort of hidden or disguised over time. And I think that makes for a more and more frustrating user experience generally. And then Google are constantly trying to do things that make it less annoying and, and trying to make you sort of curate a better experience for people that click on your ads and whatever. But ultimately, the fact remains that most of the time when somebody accidentally clicks on a Google ad, they're quite annoyed by that experience. And, you know, we're just in a place where I think the internet is becoming more frustrating for the average person than it should be. Which, yeah, and I agree with you. I see your point. You know, YouTube have to make money, but doing things like putting thirty second Unskippable ads in front of people isn't engendering goodwill towards your platform in the long term.

I mean, even the language, you know, you can skip this advert in forty five seconds.

Because you know it's.

Gonna annoy you for forty five seconds unless you buy a subscription. Yeah. Um, it's almost like they know. Yeah. You know, they, I guess what YouTube are doing is they don't want to lose you. So they say, look, please just put up with this for forty five seconds, and you can continue doing the thing you want to do.

But imagine, you know, on the one hand they're saying to advertisers, here's a really good opportunity to reach the people you want to reach. And then to the people that these advertisers are paying to reach, they're saying, you can skip this content if you just hang on a few seconds. And it's the whole thing is just massively out of kilter. It's an annoying system. And the other thing on YouTube that really annoys me is the surveys. I don't know if you come across them, but occasionally trying to watch a video and the video won't play until you've answered one of YouTube's burning questions. I have never answered one of those questions. Honestly. I sincerely doubt anyone else has either.

Well that's right, you're just going to do just click anything to get rid of them, aren't you?

Which, you know, from a from a sort of like marketing, from a, an audience research point of view, one of the first things you know is if you put a survey in front of somebody and force them to fill it in, you'll get junk data out of it. So it really surprises me that in twenty twenty four, going on twenty twenty five, platforms like YouTube still think that's a good thing to do. And I'm assuming they're then going back to the brands and saying, oh, look, this is what consumers. But it's all nonsense. That's right.

That rumbling in the background, will they hear that? I don't think these microphones pick that up. It's a rumbling. It's actually a BMW M3 starting its engine, so it's not quite as annoying as the alarm that was going off on the.

You like that one? Yeah.

I don't mind it. Yeah, it's kind of mildly irritating, but no, it's quite a nice sound, isn't it? Anyway, enough of that drivel. So you know, I don't know what the answer is. And I and I'm sure the people who own these platforms must, um, spend, you know, countless hours trying to figure out how a more effective way, if you like, because we were always told, like the idea of inbound is you don't interrupt people, you are there when they go looking for you. That's fine. That's one thing. But like this idea, I mean, was it Seth Godin was talking about? Was it Purple Cow or what was it? Which book was he talking about? The whole idea of, you know, the industrial TV industrial complex has gone away. And you're back now with a situation where interruption marketing doesn't work anymore. Yet here we are, headlong into twenty twenty five and interruption marketing is everywhere.

Yeah, it's really interesting. I mean, I think, you know, I've we've mentioned Netflix already. I think that's really the case in point, isn't it? Netflix got big on the back of, you know, providing a really good service, investing heavily in really original, unique, interesting content. And now over time, they've just lapsed back into the exact same habits that you see sort of bad TV networks using.

But they're not new. But there's no adverts.

There will be on Netflix.

I don't think so.

Well, so apparently that's the idea. Apparently it's like with Amazon and all of these streaming services, the idea is that they'll introduce a higher tier of subscription. And if you want to stay out of it free, you have to go up a tier. Okay. And then if you stay on the basic tier, you get bombarded with adverts. Yeah. Um, and I think that just generally that sort of laziness in marketing where we always just sort of like slump back into.

Into the interruption.

Can we get away with how much can we it's back to.

The TV industrial complex as it was called, where, you know, massive companies pay huge amounts of money to get in front of millions of people during, you know, halfway through Coronation Street or whatever it is.

But it's the same on the radio, right? I mean, there's some there's some radio stations that you tune into by accident sometimes, and it's just like three minutes of music, ten minutes of advertising and you like the balance isn't right here.

I'm a big fan of LBC. I'm a big fan of talk radio. And that's that's that's that can be pretty annoying sometimes. I'm trying to think. Um, yeah. Anyway, it's it's it's, it's a conundrum. And, um, it's, you know, it's not our problem to solve. It's not if we could solve it, then we'd make lots of money.

And I think it's very naive to pretend that interruption marketing doesn't work. I think it's just annoying. It's my main complaint, and it makes the internet a sort of demonstrably worse place to, to be, really, to spend time.

Yeah. I don't know if that was, was that like mildly slightly connected rather with one of your things? No, not at all. We just lapsed into it.

Lapsed into it somehow.

As well as like being annoyed by car alarms.

The first thing. Um, well, I guess the first thing on my list is quite a boring one, admittedly, but it's it's about the whole.

And then it's downhill from there.

No, it's uphill from there. Actually, the whole faceted navigation struggle. We've been talking quite a lot in the past few podcasts about this idea that Google is sort of struggling to index. Well, you've.

Been, um, taxing, uh, your brain with it and talking about it quite a bit. I haven't necessarily had my eye on that particular wall. Um, but I know it's something you've, I think you've blogged about it and we've met and you've mentioned it in some of the other podcasts. What are you driving at?

Well, just that really that because of the explosion in AI generated content or, and also, I think.

Driven most of.

It anyway. Yeah. And partly because for a very long time, Google was banging this drum that like to be successful on the internet, you have to produce lots of content, which was always a, a slightly silly thing to say. It didn't really.

Say that it was interpreted as that. They were basically saying, provide the content that people are looking for. Sure. And that's been interpreted into, let's just like spray content on onto the internet and good things will happen.

You're quite right. I don't know where the, the, the nugget or the phrase came from, but for a long time, content is King was like the mantra, right? And every agency would just, produce content. You know, you just need more content on your website. Um, and Google, I think now in a place where the internet is so saturated with content and there's so much new content being produced all the time that they are actually struggling a little bit to keep up with it. There was a thing back on, I think it was December the tenth, where they basically just said like, oh, sorry, we're encountering issues. A small number of websites may experience indexing problems. Um, which is, you know, for Google to admit that I think is significant. Um, but then also they've recently released a load of guidelines, which basically says, you know, how in a lot of websites you can create sort of like, um, filter systems and they generate what's called faceted navigation, as in you'll have a version of a page, but then you'll have a version of the page that's like filtered on X or it's page three of your blog. So it's like forward slash blog slash page three or whatever. Um, and for a long time, obviously Google has said like, oh, if you're doing that and those pages are sort of pointless. Like if you have an e-commerce site and you have t shirts and you have them in fifty different colors, and each filter creates a new page that doesn't really add any value. It's probably best not to to do that. And then now saying specifically.

Best for Google because you can't index it all.

Well, they're now saying specifically that your website will suffer if you have all of this fasted navigation and you're sort of taxing its computing resources, their words. So they're giving advice for people to say, make sure those pages are noindex, make sure they're nofollow, make sure you block them in your robots dot txt file, that sort of thing. And it's again, it's quite interesting because it comes on the back of this idea that Google is sort of struggling to keep up, and they're now turning around and saying, you know, please make sure that all of the thousands of pages on your website that we don't need to see aren't crawlable anymore. And it does just smack of, you know, them slowly waking up to the fact that they've got a real challenge.

They do seem to, I don't know how good are they at listening to reading and taking cognisance of the robots file. And it seems to me that like, do they are they crawling stuff that it should be pretty bloody obvious. Shouldn't be crawling.

I think that's the thing that's really interesting. Yeah. I mean, you have this whole concept, don't you, of like URL fragments. So Google say in their documentation, if your URL has a hash in it, then they know that everything after the hash isn't really very meaningful, for example. Um, so that helps them, but generally, no, I think they're pretty terrible at it. I mean, there's certainly client websites that we manage where when you look in Search Console, they've crawled to random pages they shouldn't have crawled to through a page that's clearly marked nofollow. So I think, you know, their directives, they're not, you can't force Google to do anything. Um, and they will sort of do whatever they fancy. Um, but yeah, I just think it's really interesting because obviously the, the impact to web owners or web managers is that ultimately the content that you do want to get crawled and indexed isn't being crawled and indexed as much. And I think that's the really big problem that we have now is that for a lot of our clients, it used to be the case that you'd publish something and Google would pick it up in a few days. Now it's weeks, sometimes longer. And that's just a bad experience for everybody, really. Yeah. Um, the content you're producing is much less likely to actually show up in, in search results pages, which.

Yeah. I mean, you're seeing Google is, is talking about this more and, and asking website owners to do not do this, not do that. Make sure you do, do this kind of thing to try and help them. Are we are you shitting me? That thing going off again? Are we saying that, um, Google is now at a point where it's actually going to start to, to, to fail because of the sheer volume, the sheer weight of content that's out there.

I'll go a step further and, and risk the ire of the internet. I think it's been happening for quite a while. I think they've just been dishonest about it. And there's a load of stuff at the beginning of this year, back in May where, um, people were sort of talking about this on search engine journal and, um, various sort of technical SEO blogs. And they were actually saying, look, you can see Google not indexing all of this content because it doesn't have the sort of crawl budget, the resource to get through it all. Look, you can see the number of index pages on my site sort of dropping off a cliff as Google has to sort of try and claw back resource somewhere. I think it's probably been struggling for a little while. They're just not going to come out and say, actually, we can't keep up. Yeah, I mean, it is millions of pages. I think a week potentially even a day that get produced. So yeah, I feel for them. But but also, you know, there's a.

Okay. So where do we think the end game is? It's now it used to be really hard to produce a decent chunky content. It's now very easy. You can talk about the quality of it. Yeah. And I get it. But given that AI will just keep feeding the engine by, you know, where where is the end game? How are we going to make sure that the quality doesn't just fall off a cliff?

I'm I'm not sure we can. I think that's sort of I mean, look, there's a. And we'll touch on this again later because I have a piece in here about why sort of trend related content is nonsense. But there's a really interesting thing. Forbes produced a guide for B2B marketing trends in twenty twenty five, and the seventeen items in that trend list, six of them are about not using AI to generate content anymore. They dressed it up in various ways. You know, one of them is rely less on AI content. One is make your content more human generated. I think a bunch of people are slowly waking up to the fact that actually this sort of torrent of, of AI rubbish is making the internet basically unusable. Um, I just think it's potentially too late. I don't think you can put that genie back in the bottle really well.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of people won't even try and put the genie back in the bottle. They will continue.

They have.

A vested.

Interest in. Yeah. Because it's easy and it's quick and it gets them money and that's right. Um, yeah. I think more and more it'll be about um sort of turning towards things that can't be duped with AI. So YouTube, TikTok, you know, sort of social media platforms where you're putting your face and your your personal brand in front of people more and more to sort of relay information.

Um, but to what extent, how is that going to be also problematic in the now it's already problematic. Now this idea of fake videos and like using AI to generate videos. We've seen AI generated images that look awful. We've also seen images that have been improved by AI that kind of didn't look awful. They kind of they were, okay, what are we saying about videos? I mean, Leslie would have a view on that anyway. But but I mean, we were we got pinged by Google because we use Google Workspace and if anybody else saw it, but we've now got this video tool. So you can actually write a storyboard and Google will create the video for you. Yeah. Now I sort of touched on it. I sort of put a few bits in and pressed a button to see what it did, and it just produced, you know, utter garbage. But but I'm sure.

Well, yeah, worse than that. So Stu was showing me something that a friend of his uses, recently to generate LinkedIn videos. And it basically sort of like give it the script and it generates a little, you know, person standing in front of a screen and the person is entirely AI generated and they present your video for you. They have very realistic hand movements and facial expressions and that sort of thing. And the entire thing is completely fake. Like there is no person. The person doesn't work for the company. Um, I think the only thing I can really say about that sort of thing is a, I don't think, I think a certain number of people will just never buy into it. I think a certain number of people will be able to spot what's AI generated and what's not. Um, but yeah, I don't know, I suspect that.

Is it the case that um, slightly losing my train of thought here, is it the case that there are certain things, certain situations rather where we would tolerate AI, assuming we knew it was AI and certain situations where we wouldn't tolerate AI, would we perhaps not tolerate AI? I, um, if we were looking for a product review, we wanted a real person who's used the product to give us their honest opinion. We would not trust AI to do that for us, or we wouldn't trust something that's produced by AI. But for example, we use AI, if you like, for in some of our blog posts where we get a soundtrack. Um.

Yeah, we do.

We get the thing narrated and it's pretty passable. It's actually, it makes a fist of it, I think. Anyway, it looks pretty good. It reads, it listens pretty, you know, it's good to listen to. And I just wonder whether because I did send it to a potential client, I said, oh, you might find this useful. And they came back to me and said, thanks for that was really useful. A really good listen. And it was, it was the AI.

And they listened.

And they knew it was I told them it was it's AI generated, but it's it makes a good job of it. So that's I'm like, I'd have to read this. So I'm quite happy to listen to this AI generated, um, version of it.

Yeah, I think so. I think you're right. I think, you know, generally speaking, you get people to buy into the idea that, oh, this is informational content. It's just, you know, AI is going to present it to you. But I think that would still require us marketers in general to be really honest about that and to market and to say, you know, AI generated, click here for an AI generated video or click here for an AI generated voiceover. We're not doing that.

And they won't either.

No, they.

Won't do anything that makes people go, oh, I'm not going to click that because it's AI generated.

So we end up in a place where it becomes harder and harder to distinguish. And unfortunately, from a sort of like behavioral science point of view, back to the Netflix thing, the point at which people start to abandon a platform or a, a source, if you like, like the point at which people will say no more to Google will be far past the point at which you can claw it back and introduce something like that. Start saying, oh, we'll be more honest. We'll start marking up whether it's AI or not, so you can come back and trust it. It'll be too late, be too late, trust will be gone. Yeah. And this is the problem in general, I think, is that the consequence for the bad behavior that marketers engage in is so delayed that we'll spend years doing something until it's completely worn out. And the public opinion of it is, well, that's just garbage. And then we'll be like, oh no, it's not fair. Customers are moving away from the internet.

And there are plenty of case studies of platforms that were dominant that were utterly abandoned.

Yeah, absolutely.

What was it? Um, Myspace.

Yeah.

Uh, friends reunited.

Friends.

Reunited. I mean, they sold that, you know, basically a bit of cord sat on top of a Microsoft Access database, and it was like, it worked. Yeah. And they flogged that for like, one hundred and thirty million or something. And I think ITV, ITV bought it.

Somebody, somebody.

Bought it and probably it's just in a bin now.

Well the same thing happened with yahoo wasn't it.

Yeah. Well Yahoo's still a thing but it was dominant.

And its value tanked. And they tried to do all sorts of different things to it.

But like that's it. That illustrates the point you're making once, once you go past that point where people know Google, Google's just full of AI trash. Yeah, it's too late for Google at that point. I don't I don't know, I don't think we're anywhere near that point at the moment. And I think surely.

Well, I'm not so sure.

All right.

Go on. Well so Ofcom every year um Ofcom being the UK regulator for um well I suppose the internet but it's internet and telecommunications and all that sort of thing. They publish a report every year, it's called Online Nation and it's basically just a bunch of statistics. Um normally pretty boring this year I thought. Quite interesting because what it shows, for example, they, they interviewed something like six thousand or three thousand six hundred, I can't remember the exact number. Seven thousand UK um residents, um, forty eight percent of adult males over sixteen have used generative AI for informational purposes. So gone to Google type something in, got a search snippet or deliberately gone to ChatGPT and asked it something which is also apparently a new sort of behaviour that people do. Don't know why. Um, a third of females, only eighteen percent of people say they trust the results. Um there's also a really interesting statistic where basically Bing, when they introduced their generative AI, saw a sixty percent lift in people visiting Bing and using it, and then it immediately dropped back and is now exactly where it was in the beginning.

So is that not partly because it actually says in the information it gives you first, you know, first thing like don't trust this information. You only have to read that two or three times to think to yourself, don't trust this information to go back and use that source information source because it tells me not to trust it. Never mind. I'm wondering whether I should or not.

I mean, there's other stuff in that Ofcom report that I find really interesting where like people are using Google and saying that they're using it in spite of not because of the AI generated snippets. And I think I think marketers and tech bros and people with a vested interest in promoting this technology are massively overlooking the sort of amount of skepticism and dislike for it that exists, you know, people having it forced upon them a bit like advertising on YouTube, and they really don't like it and they'll put up with it to a certain point. But then suddenly you'll find that you've lost them all and you look back on it and say, well, what happened? And the answer was, well, they never liked it in the first place. It just.

What was quite hilarious when it when we're talking about AI, AI snippets was that we keep bouncing into the AI snippet when people type in what is HubSpot? And I think that's hilarious. And it's quite funny because HubSpot, HubSpot are huge. And it's interesting, uh, when it first started happening, I started seeing traffic from Dublin, um, where HubSpot are based over here in the, in the, in the Europe, in Europe. And, um, they were clearly like doing searches for what is HubSpot seeing little old us in the AI generated snippets and thinking, who the hell are these guys? And how the hell have they managed to be in there? Uh, it's really quite funny. It keeps going in and out, doesn't it? It keeps appearing and then disappearing.

And in some ways it's fine because I, I mean, I wrote that HubSpot article, so I get to say like, it's a good article, right? It's informative. It probably deserves to be a source. But what I think is particularly interesting is things like watering down the definition of a source, for example. I mean, we, we both have an academic background. A source is something trustworthy, something that's more trustworthy than what you're writing, that you reference. And people know for a fact, oh, this is backed up by something real and peer reviewed and useful. And Google just used that sort of like in those AI snippets. They're like, oh, these are our sources. And it's just a bunch of rubbish they found on the internet. And it's like, you can't, you know, all you're doing is diluting the, the meaning of those words and the gravity of them. You know, a source is just something that Google scraped now rather than I.

You're right. I've got several published academic papers, which I was very proud to, to get published at the time. It's quite some number of years ago now. Um, and you always assume that academia is, is all using credible sources and it's credible information backed up by peer review and citation, etc.. It isn't, is it?

Well, no, I mean, you can. Okay, fine.

There's some there's some incredibly bad academic stuff out there which is.

Published in like some weird journal.

Tissue of lies. Just complete bullshit.

Yeah. And you can get anything.

More worrying to me than the AI generating stuff. And then at the end saying, I wouldn't trust if it says this if I were you, because I made it up.

Yeah, no, that's fine. It's it's more that like often in the AI generated snippets that Google creates, I will see things where it's like it says something very wrong very authoritatively. And then it's got that little list of sources. And one of the sources will be something that, you know, Marge down the road, knocked up on a WordPress website in like five minutes and it's wrong. It's bollocks. And it's like, that's not fact checking, you know, just just going and saying, well, someone on the internet once said, this doesn't suddenly make it sort of defensible or right.

That is reflective of the age in which we live. Yeah. Like why, why do you think X well, somebody on Facebook said so it must be true. But but that's not new either. You know, I've told the story before that, you know, my dear old dad who's no longer with us, he used to buy the sun newspaper and, you know, a.

Trustworthy and.

Bring it on. And I used to read it obviously, page three, then the rest. And, and, and it was like, you know, I as a kid was didn't think like if it was in the newspaper, it had to be true because it's in a newspaper. I totally trusted it. It was nearly all made up, probably.

Yeah, absolutely. And same with encyclopedias, right? Mistakes in encyclopedias. And they used to be the gold.

Standard and the quality press as well. I mean I picked the sun as an example because that's, you know, but the quality press as well.

But there have always been mistakes is sort of, I think not really. It's important, but it's not really the point, is it? The point is that we live in an age where increasingly, people are very skeptical about the things they read.

And I hope so.

I hope so too. But also where there's sort of like, it's easier. The barrier to entry is lower for producing things in general, telling lies, saying whatever you want to say. And then, you know, in the one breath we have that reality to wrestle with. And then in the other breath, we're here telling businesses that sharing your sort of insights, your knowledge, your wisdom with the public is, is the best way to sort of get people to buy into your brand. And that's a difficult thing to wrestle with. I think, you know, like we live in an age where, you know, it's probably the worst possible time to be doing that. But also, you know, you have to keep doing it anyway. And I think that's quite a difficult thing to balance.

I mean, look at all the hot water that the Labour government are currently in. First of all, like, well, not first of all, but one, one, one clear example is the WASPI women. Yes. So they you know, Raina et al stood there. When we're in power, we will make sure these women get their compensation. And now they're in power, you know? Yeah. We can't afford it. We're not going to do it.

Yeah. It's interesting, isn't it?

Because what blatantly lied to get voted in and then turn around and did the exact opposite to what they said they would do.

And here's the proof that we live in a disinformation age is that, you know, their response to that was to say, well, we didn't have all the facts and figures then, to which the correct answer is, why on earth did you make promises that you didn't know you'd be able to keep? But everybody just gets lost at that bit and it's like, oh, well, actually, to be fair to them, like, well, they.

Never expected to get into power. And if Covid hadn't come along then and Johnson hadn't come along, they wouldn't have got in power. They wouldn't. I mean, you know, they're accidentally in government and it's and it's plain as day that they're accidentally in government because they haven't got a clue.

Look at them being bitten by all the the false promises that they made in the past.

But I thought to myself, and I said to you in, in a previous podcast, when we were just talking in the office, that that Labour have never been in power during this new information age, disinformation age, if you want this age of like social media, they've never been in power when social media has been a thing and they will struggle with it. And boy, are they struggling with it because they're getting attacked right, left and centre. Starmer is probably the most unpopular prime minister ever, and he's managed to do that in like five or six months. And you know, it's just a shit show, isn't it?

It's a really odd thing. And I think being honest online is now sort of like almost a faux pas. It's like it's almost just a bit stupid, really, which I find really.

You should start putting that stuff at the, at the bottom of all our stuff, you know, like this. This is actually true.

This is actually true. The little green tick verified by someone. Yeah. I mean, yeah, I mean, it's funny actually. I mean, we're going a little bit off topic, but I was ranting today to a friend because I woke up at sort of six half six, um, uh, got um, Vivienne woke me up, dragged me downstairs. I was like scrolling through my phone while trying to wake up, drink some coffee. Um, and I saw sort of two things in about two minutes that were just like ridiculously stupid. The first was Ben Shapiro, you know, American sort of right wing media pundit saying, um, it's misleading that people with doctorates call themselves doctor because if you're at a dinner party and you're speaking to somebody called doctor, you would expect them to have a medical background. To which I thought, no, that's just you being stupid. And then I saw Russell Brand posting a picture of Venus and saying, there's an orb in the sky, and literally nobody knows what it is. And I was like, mhm, That's Venus, you're a moron.

But the irony is, where the doctor thinks is concerned is that doctors, medical Doctors is an honorary title. They get awarded an honorary title of doctor and the Real doctors are the ones with PhDs.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Ben Shapiro stupid. You heard it here first. You heard it here first. But but you know, what I was saying to my friend is like, it's really interesting that, like, there is no shame in being this ignorant anymore. You can post stuff like that online that is just like, you know, it's just like a fourteen or fifteen year old sort of like take on the universe, you know, just the sort of idiot, ostensibly highbrow rubbish that teenagers come up with. And you just think to yourself, like, those are grown men who are not ashamed to be seen as stupid. They're perfectly comfortable because a rabid army of their sort of fans will flock to them, like it and amplify it and say like, oh, God must have told you this Russell Brand.

And we do this podcast, but I'm, I'm less prolific on social media than I'd like to be because every time I think I'm going to write something or shoot a video or do something, I think to myself, I'm not sure if that's actually the case and I need to do some research right. I'll do it later, and I never do. Yeah. You know, whereas you're right, I think a lot of people just go on there. They record themselves saying, you know, the moon is made of cheese and they don't care if people then say, well, it probably isn't, you know.

Yeah.

You know, it's kind of they just kind of and then they go, oh, I actually never said the moon was made of cheese, but you literally did. No I didn't. And that's it. Moving on, you know.

Isn't it? Yeah, absolutely. But it just seems like we live in an age where just sort of like being loud and having an opinion is actually the best thing to do. And it's true in marketing too. I mean, I say it all the time, people being very confidently incorrect about very basic things on tick tock.

I'm going, I'm gonna have a go at Libra again. I think that's, that's the one of the mistakes they've made as well is they've, they've positioned themselves. And by the way, I don't vote Tory either, um or Lib Dem. I'm narrowing it down.

You're a Green Party voter.

Definitely not them clowns. No. But you know, I'm kind of I'm one of these people that realises how difficult it is to, you know, being a politician is one of the hardest jobs in the world, I think.

Unless you're Nigel Farage.

But Labour positioned themselves weirdly as the adults in the room, and they are being shown to not be those adults that they thought they were. And, and, and that is like, it's ridiculous. And they didn't need to, they didn't need to over play, which they have, in my opinion, the, oh, we inherited a shit show. They didn't need to overplay that. They could have been the adults in the room without telling us they were going to be the adults in the room, and then clearly not being the adults in the room.

Yeah. One of the things I find quite interesting, and I don't really know necessarily how to sort of explain or articulate this, but when it comes to the way that people are held to account on the internet, I do think that the public are very selective. And I guess this plays to marketing. Yes. It's like if you position yourself as like, because the Democrats fall foul of this in America too, if you position yourself as the sensible, reasonable party for the the working class or the common man, the second you do something wrong, everyone will be like fraudster. You know you are secretly. But if you position yourself as a nasty party that doesn't really mind about whether the truth is told or not. Like reform, for example. And then you tell outrageous lies. People are like, oh, well, that's them behaving as they said they would. So I don't mind that. And then when they say something that you do like, you're like, oh, well, they're right this time.

But if the adults in the room are lying to us as well, that only fuels the fire if you like, or, you know, the reform fire, I think, you know, if you want to call it that, doesn't it?

One thing that I think that the Republican Party in America and reform and to be fair, a few brands that I can think of as well have done really well is embraced this idea that like, we're post-truth and they almost lean into it. They're like, sometimes we'll tell you outrageous lies and sometimes we'll, we'll tell you the truth. And people, you know, because people are sort of, uh, you know, positioned to accept that they will, they'll just sort of say, okay, cool. Well, of course Trump runs his mouth. That's his persona. Yeah. Um, but this time he's telling the truth. And I do think that's something that I don't know, like whether you want people to learn from that or lean into it. But that is the answer, isn't it? If you just tell people, well, sometimes I'm wrong, Then suddenly you have a sort of hall pass to tell giant fibs.

That's right.

Yeah. Yeah.

Just wondering if the guys are gonna. Are you guys heading over? Yeah. Yeah. I guess it'll be a bit of noise in the background while we continue to podcast soldiering on.

Oh, we could.

Just pull the troops all file out and go for our Christmas meal, but we will be joining them as they. Don't worry. Carry on anyway.

Yeah.

Subject have we got a subject?

Yeah, I've got a.

We've been rattling on for quite a while actually, so we're doing okay.

My main thing and it's, it's a, it's a big thing. Um, the, this, this proliferation of twenty twenty five trends in marketing, right? Everywhere, absolutely everybody over the last week has published one. Yeah. They are universally awful. Yeah. And I will I will sort of stick to my guns on that. I just think it's amazing that in a field where oh look.

It's all right.

Carry on. In a field where, you know, the fundamentals of marketing never really change. Well, you know, it's quite a straightforward exercise, you know, find your audience, find out where they hang out, talk to them in a way that resonates. Tell them that you exist and persuade them to buy things.

Convince them that you're worth talking to.

It's a very simple problem. It's a solved problem. Yes, there are various sort of tactics you can use and things that might be useful, but they're almost all very conditional in the sense that like, you know, it might be that more and more people are using threads now than ever before, but if your specific audience isn't using it, it's not useful for you as a marketer to be like, oh, everyone else is jumping on the threads bandwagon.

And are you saying some of these trends are suggesting otherwise? They're kind of.

I'm suggesting that almost all of these these, these articles with seventeen trends or seven trends to watch are giving broad brush advice is just not applicable to the majority of people. It's things like that.

Specifically for us because we're dealing with, you know, we're working with companies in a B2B environment predominantly or generally.

Well, like sort of that. I mean, that's, that's sort of like, I guess the overarching point, but also just in general, it's not useful as a marketer to know that lots of other marketing companies are going to spend three times as much on threads next year. It's not because unless my audience is on.

There.

Why would I give a monkeys? Yeah, yeah. And it's just bandwagoning. But the awful thing is it gets repeated and amplified over and over and over again, and people do listen to it. You know, there will be marketing managers who open the Forbes list of twenty twenty five marketing trends to watch. And next year, I think, oh, like, should I be on threads? Should I be using TikTok? And the answer is always.

A thing for ages. You're saying it's still a thing.

Yeah. Yeah. Well, it gets better. So search engine lands um, twenty twenty five trends list has such nuggets on it as write authoritative content. I mean that is a growing trend.

I think for the past ten years. Good advice isn't it.

It's not a trend though is it? I mean this is the thing that annoys me so much. And then the other one that I saw in Search Engine Journal that made me quite angry was optimised for the buyer's journey. And they were selling this soundbite of like, if you create your content and your sort of nurturing and everything around the way that your customers actually shop. You will be miles ahead of the competition. And I'm like, this is just like such a fundamental basic part of marketing. And they dress it up as this like wonderful insight. And I don't know, man, it's just we're back to the whole just sort of like, you know, Google shitting up the internet. And yeah, there's just a bunch of people that are sort of ostensibly marketing experts that give really, really, really poor advice.

Interestingly, talking about trends and things, I got an email in from Ian Harris at Agency Hackers, which is an organisation which brings agency owners and agency people who work in agencies together. And he has conferences, you know, a really cool thing that he's that he's built up and he's, he's, he, he sent an email. I think there's a, there's an event featuring a guy called Steve Parks who's been, who's known as the agency prophet. And if you read it, it's quite good. But he basically, you know, he foretold lots of things. Um, so he's kind of backed up by, I mean, in January twenty twenty, he was, he was talking like, if your pandemic preparedness plan has been gathering dust and it might be time to update it. And, you know, I've got to be honest, in January, I don't think any of us were foreseeing lockdown and the chaos that ensued. But, um, what he's saying is, um, that, um, Steve brings only good tidings for twenty twenty five and he's saying we're heading towards, I'm quoting as well from Ian's email, we're heading towards another golden age for creative agencies, much like the nineteen sixties, says Steve, there's been a multisystem shock to the world and we're now emerging into a new future. This is when clients need agencies most. It's a boom time for the right kind of agencies. Now that's you know, I want to believe that because we benefit from it.

But absolutely.

It's kind of borne out because we're having we've got some really good new clients. We're having some really good conversations with potential clients. It seems to me that the that people have woken up to the value that agencies are bringing, which means they must have woken up to the possibilities that a better, more credible, more useful digital presence has a really has a really significant part to play in their future growth.

A load of people, marketing managers, business owners are going to be sort of, like you say, coming around to the idea that, oh, I should invest in marketing next year. And it is my opinion that they are walking into a giant bear trap. The industry is just sort of primed to rip people off at the moment and that sort of thing where it's like, oh, I've got a revolutionary insight. You pay me and I'll tell you to put some content on TikTok is exactly the problem. You say all these people have their, you know, they're having their marketing budgets expanded. They've got more money to play with. They're going out to market. They're looking for agencies. And what's actually out there is a bunch of people who are dressing up things like, oh, optimised for the buyer journey. As a fresh and original insight, state of the industry is the worst it's ever been. And I genuinely do think so. Yeah. I mean, well, I mean, case in point, I mean, we have a client, obviously we won't name any names who have been going through a bit of a process.

Name names. What will you name? Uh, colors. Colors of the.

Colors of the rainbow. Yeah. Blue. Um, okay.

We'll call this client blue.

They've gone through a bit of a process where they've basically taken on a load of investment funding. And I think as part of that investment funding process, um, the investors have brought in some sort of outside experts to assess and analyse various things and some of the advice that they got back from one of those quote unquote experts was there's too much content on your website. Um, and that's the sort of thing I'm talking about. There's so much bad advice out there and it's so difficult to navigate that advice and to know what we listen.

To, you know, we, we, we, we obviously often wander into politics and we talked about like the bullshitters in politics who just tell barefaced lies, but do it confidently. That's, you know, agency land is full of people like that.

And increasingly so.

And these people, but they do it with such confidence that people buy into it.

And it's easier than ever before for, for them to generate content. It's easy for them to syndicate that content across YouTube, TikTok, and to reach into your life and just sort of shower you in bullshit. And I don't know where the horrible thing is. I just thought the horrible thing is, I just don't know where it goes. I mean, it's a funny thing because it's a Christmas podcast and I'm feeling quite upbeat. We're going into the holiday season, but I feel quite pessimistic about this industry in general. It's just like, I just don't see it shaping out the way that it should be.

Yeah. But I, I've got to be honest. I mean, I do see a sort of gangbusters year ahead for us twenty twenty five. You know, it feels like going into January twenty twenty, it was like, wow, things are amazing. And then the pandemic, you know, obviously, you know, kicked us in the teeth. It's a bit like that. It feels a bit like, you know, this time around maybe, you know.

I think things are warming up. Yeah. It's just like I say, I just what I worry about is that we, you know, quite often we talk to clients who've had a very bad experience with marketing in the past, and they've wasted tens, if not hundreds of thousands of pounds on tactics that just don't work. And I just, you know, I envision a lot more of those conversations in the future. And I think that's.

Well, as a rescue agency, I suppose we'll benefit from it because we'll go in there. I mean, there's always an issue going in there and rescuing companies because like they've already spent the budget. Um, and that's, we've found ourselves in that situation quite a lot. But, you know, I think maybe it's a good time to be a good agency.

Yeah, I think so. Yeah, I think so. How you sort of demonstrate that is a growing problem? Well, yeah.

I suppose, I mean, you have conversations with people. Yeah. You know, I think so.

Well and isn't that interesting though? You know, we're a web marketing agency heavily reliant on the internet to generate business. I mean, all of our all of our business is generated via inbound marketing. Um, but increasingly we know that the differentiator is actually building a human relationship with somebody and actually taking things offline. And I think that's, you know, telling.

Okay, um, I'm conscious that we need to go and have our Christmas meal because it's twelve thirty for one and it's currently ten to one. So I think we better just wrap up for now, wrap for twenty twenty four, in fact, and we've enjoyed doing these podcasts. We don't have a massive listenership. I mean, we have we've clearly got people that log in fairly regularly because as soon as it goes up, there's a few downloads happen automatically. So people are listening to it. You know, we are not fazed by the fact that we don't have thousands of listeners. Um.

Um, we do it mainly so we can insult each other. We do it in an environment.

That gets involved then. Yeah. If you think of us as like looking into it, hopefully an interesting conversation while you're in the pub on your own and the table next to you, there's a two or three people having a really interesting conversation and you're thinking, who are these twats? Yeah. That's right. Um, huge thanks to to Leslie, who stands behind the camera, pressing buttons, doing whatever she does and puts up with listening to this bullshit. And, uh, hopefully we can continue to inform and entertain in 2025.

Indeed.