Are You Playing It Too Safe With Your Marketing? – Episode 140

You get little bubbles inside B2B tech, certainly where there's like an orthodoxy around the way marketing is done and the way messaging is done. And what you end up with is a bunch of websites from competitors who all actually have quite different value propositions, but that look identical when they say the same things. And sometimes when I come across them, I think like, how has this happened? I think the only answer can be that there are only like three or four people really marketing these products, and they just copy each other and not deliberately, but you just end up sort of like regurgitating what you see and thinking, oh, that's the way it's done in this industry. Sometimes there's a real value to bringing in somebody who has like a proper outsider's perspective. And yes, it takes time for us to get to know a new industry or whatever, but at least what we're bringing to that is a sort of fresh perspective.

Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. First episode of twenty twenty five. I'm high as a kite because I've just had a drink called trip.

That's not how that works, but it's.

And it's got CBD in it. What? Yeah. I've been. You mean I've been sold a pup?

You know, although there's those really interesting studies out there about drink where if you tell somebody that booze is alcoholic, they will think they.

Kid you not. I drink non alcoholic drinks, um, when I'm out quite often because, you know, living where we live, you're often driving so you just have non alcoholic. And certainly the following day I can feel a bit hungover, which feels like how is that even possible? See how we just start our podcast and some clown's car alarm goes off. That's happened so many times, isn't it? Oh, so we're kind of on Thursday of week two of twenty twenty five. Yep. It's been a bit of a blur because we came back and um, notwithstanding some early finishes in the first week back, because I'm such a great guy. It's been kind of full on, isn't it?

It has. It's been very full on.

Certainly hitting the ground running.

Yeah, absolutely.

As I said to Julie, it feels like we hit the ground running and we were going like the clappers in twenty twenty. Look what look what happened then. So I'm hoping that doesn't happen.

Don't jinx.

It. There's even a little bit of economic good news here in the UK as well, which is, you know, it's marginal. But I mean, it's kind of like, you know, a direction of travel. Great. Um, you know, let's, let's hope that there's more of that. So that's all good as well.

I'm giving you the same look that clients give me when I say, oh, there's been a twenty percent increase in traffic. And they're like, so what? So try again. Yeah.

That's right.

Do better.

So did you bother your ass to.

Actually, I.

Made some notes.

I had a frantic little flurry about an hour ago where I was like, oh, I should really find something and then got completely sidetracked.

So you've got literally nothing.

I've got literally.

Why have you got your laptops out there? So it looks.

Like I've got something.

But nobody cares, honestly, because the stuff I've got is rubbish.

Oh well, there'll be a short episode.

We're gonna have to rely on our witty repartee.

Oh.

Okay. so I've got a few things written down. I think some of them almost like yes no answers, which isn't great for a podcast, but, um, you know, at the coalface, I tried to base some of the stuff that I write down to discuss. And this came up in a conversation this week with a potential customer down in Bridgewater. And it's, have you ever worked with a business who do what we do? I mean, I'm paraphrasing, but basically, you know, they are in a very specific niche of engineering because, you know, we predominantly work with tech and engineering businesses, not exclusively, but predominantly. That's what we pitch ourselves as being the agency who are worth speaking to possibly if you are an engineering or a tech company, but they're in a, they're in a specific sort of bit of, of, of, of the tech or the engineering space. They're in nuclear. So it's engineering and it's nuclear specific and they say, oh, have you worked with any nuclear companies before? We've worked with companies who have serviced the nuclear industry, but we've never worked with a company who specialise in servicing the nuclear industry. But it just got me thinking about whether or not that's important.

Yeah, it's an interesting one because I think there's an element of sort of tunnel vision to this. I think a lot of people that work in very specialist fields think that the problems that affect their field only affect their field. And it's not like a. I don't mean that in an insulting way. I just mean you sort of develop a little bit of tunnel vision. You live in a bubble. You think this is what the you know, the specifics of my industry are so niche and so weird, and nobody else can possibly be going through this. But the thing that I think is interesting is I was having a conversation, um, Stu and I and Karen were having a conversation with a client a couple of weeks ago and he was saying like, oh, you know, these are all the really specific things in my industry that irk me and that we need to respond to in our marketing and we need to sort of address. And they're really specific to the industry that I work in. And he rattled them off and Stu was like, oh, that's exactly like, you know, this thing that this other engineering company had a completely different industry have to deal with. And I think the common problems are common, and they're common because they're about human behavior and the way that people think. And I think a lot of the time, it's really easy to fool yourself into thinking like, oh, you know, our supply chain is really complicated and getting people to engage in, you know, a specific process is really hard. But lots of other people have that exact same problem, for example.

Yeah. And I suppose if you're looking for. If you're looking for an agency to help you generate business online. Yeah. Digital marketing websites search, all that kind of stuff, stuff that we do. I think the fact that we've niched down into predominantly tech and engineering is as far as I'd really want to niche down. Now, the thing is, not everybody here at Red evolution were were necessarily one hundred percent confident when we talked about niching down into tech and engineering.

No, but.

It's working out really well and it's I think it's been a smart move, but I, I don't know about going further than that.

No. And the thing I sort of realised eventually about the tech and engineering thing is it works really well. I think it works really well. Obviously just an opinion because all of our clients have one thing in common they're trying to sell something quite complicated to people who inherently aren't emotionally invested in buying it. And like, you know what I mean? Like that's common across pretty much all complex B2B sales is you're trying to sell something that people need, but they don't necessarily wouldn't have used.

The word inherently that I just said generally.

Okay. Fair enough. Is this a New Year's resolution? Let it be a massive pedant. Yeah.

See, I wouldn't have called me a pedant.

But you know what I mean? Like, that's a that's a thing that they all have in common. So once we learn to sort of like break that, that problem down into its composite elements and address it and fix it, you can do that for many different people in many different industries. What you'd learn from doing just marketing for lawyers or even like more than that, you know, just marketing for immigration lawyers or something. I don't really know.

There are also, you know, you'd think there would be real issues around conflicts of interest with that as well.

Yeah. But a lot of agencies don't care about that. I think I've told you before about the example of a Leeds based agency, who we definitely won't name, who a decade or so ago had two different forex accounts on their books, two different forex. So foreign exchange, foreign currency exchanging. Um, did.

You say that for my benefit or people listening? Do I look so stupid? I don't know what it looked like.

You were reaching for your special buzzer, your little buzzword buzzer. Um, and they just had two of them on their books and they were just like, oh yeah, you know, your competitors have increased. They've increased their marketing spend because they're above you now in, in SERPs. You should increase yours too. And then they go to the other one and do the same thing. And that was, you know, I think I think a lot of people just don't have any scruples about that sort of thing. Um, so yeah, but yeah, I mean, it doesn't, it seems hard to do that above board.

I wouldn't want to. I certainly wouldn't rather belittle or, um, cast aspersions on a business who were maybe reticent or were a little bit nervous about working with a business like ours, um, who didn't have experience in their specific niche. I would certainly think it would be fairly easy to reassure them, I think.

Yeah. I think there's a sort of like trust thing going on here as well, isn't there? Where like if you've, if you've worked with agencies in the past who are like, oh, it doesn't matter what industry you're in, we'll get to know it. We'll, you know, we'll, we'll spend all the time researching the industry and learning to understand the audience. And then they don't do that. Then the next time you're going to be very skeptical and you're going to go out and say, right, okay, you know, I'm going to find an agency that already understands my industry because I don't want to invest all that time and effort in sort of explaining it to people, um, who are not really going to take interest. I think one of the things that we always do is, is actually spend time sitting normally around this table, um, sort of like researching and drilling right into like really specific industries and learning about what makes people tick and why they buy and what they're looking for and that sort of thing. And I think, I guess maybe you look for a niche specialist, if you don't really believe that agencies are going to do that work and really get to know you, your audience.

So you need them to come ready, prepared, like already understand you. Yeah. Because otherwise the business you're in, sorry, the line of business, you're in the niche that you're in.

But also, I guess maybe if you don't want to spend the time answering annoying questions, right?

So yeah. Okay. So, and I suppose that translates into plenty of other areas as well. I mean, I remember when I worked in the oil industry as a mechanical design engineering draftsman, and it was not easy to get the first gig. I kind of got it accidentally, if I'm honest. I think I've told the story before, and I'm not going to bore people with it again about how I finished up. I was fully qualified, but I'd never worked in the oil industry, and then I kind of tripped up and there I was in the oil industry. But it's not it was notoriously difficult to get in because like, oh, you can't possibly even though you're a fully qualified engineer, you couldn't possibly come and work in our industry because it's so complicated. It isn't complicated. But, you.

Know, pigging is.

Yeah, you know. Exactly. And it's kind of like it was always a bit, um, you know, difficult.

Yeah. For sure.

For people to get in because it was, they needed, there was an expectation that they would hit the ground running because they knew what pigging was. Yeah.

I do want, I do want to say something that I think is moderately intelligent about this, actually, although I'm sure you'll tell me it's not in fact, drumroll please. Moderately intelligent at all.

I do think I'll put a drum roll in now when she does the mix down. So you don't normally. But she will.

It's not that sort of podcast.

Put a drum roll in.

It's um. I think there's something important to be said here about fatigue and insular thinking, which is often with these sort of things, you're very tempted to go to people who already know how to solve your problem or who work, you know, predominantly in your very specific niche. They know all about like, I don't know, like missile guidance computers and how to market them. Um, and the problem with this is that you get little bubbles inside B2B tech, certainly where there's like an orthodoxy around the way marketing is done, the way messaging is done and what you end up with is a bunch of websites from competitors who all actually have quite different value propositions, but that look identical. And they say the same things and you get these strange bubbles. And sometimes when I come across them, I think like, how has this happened? And I think the only answer can be that there are only like three or four people really marketing these products, and they just copy each other and end up and not deliberately, but you just end up sort of like regurgitating what you see and thinking, oh, that's the way it's done in this industry. Sometimes there's a real value to bringing in somebody who has like a proper outsider's perspective. And yes, it takes time for us to get to know a new industry or whatever, but at least what we're bringing to that is a sort of fresh perspective. And we do often. I mean, what I'm thinking about here is when we're in discovery, we often end up challenging sort of assertions that people make where they're like, oh, well, it's this kind of person and this is their their sort of key concern. This is what stops them from buying. And we'll say to them, well, are you sure? Like, what makes you think that? And then you unpack it and it turns out to be just sort of based on a truism almost, or just a thing that gets regurgitated over and over again.

Receive wisdom really, isn't it? It's just like, well, that's yeah, I do wonder. I mean, certainly in the oil and gas, um, the fossil fuel industry, you do wonder, I honestly think some of the companies out there, their website should just say, you know, BP. Yeah. Well like that.

And.

That's it. That's all they need on their website, you know, because like everything they say, just substitute our name in because it's all that same utter diatribe and either either it's safe and it works. You know, we value our people. We put safety first. We, we believe in the planet while drilling, you know, drilling big holes in the ground to suck all the oil. Talking about.

Shell, not BP right now, but yeah, probably.

BP have just laid five thousand people off, aren't they? Just today I read.

Is that despite their record breaking profits.

Um, it's probably to actually make them even more record breaking this year, I imagine. But, you know, I don't know where I'm going with it, but it's just this there's so much it's everything's so samey, isn't it? I mean, we're guilty of it. We'll take people on a journey and, you know, and help improve their digital presence, digital footprint, the way they generate business and everything else. You know, we're going to follow some of the norms. We're not we can't reinvent them all.

No, and you shouldn't. But I think it's it's in that process of at least challenging them and at least saying, you know, are we doing this deliberately or are we doing it because we think it's the only way something can be done? And I mean, to your point about, you know, large corporate oil and gas company websites that say something about what they believe in on the, on the first page and have, you know, some pictures of some trees and a windmill and it's like, come on, seriously?

Yeah, I.

Know, but I think what people don't realise is that people on the internet also get fatigued looking at the same website over and over again with a slightly different color scheme. So yeah, you know, I think there is real value in getting outside wisdom and experience sometimes, um, or rather sort of outside.

You're obviously not talking about us though.

Uh, no wisdom experience.

They're not words that associate with us. Not you anyway. Or me. Um. All right. Um. Done that to death?

Probably.

Okay. Okay. Priced based decision making versus value based decision making conversation in the office this week. Um, we're working with some great clients, you know, some smaller, some big, some very big. Um, and in, in amongst that mix, there are customers who are, we're thinking of X. How much will it cost? And there are customers who are, we're thinking of X. Can you do that? So the second one being like, we need some help with this, almost like we understand what it's going to cost. We get it. We're really more interested in whether you can deliver it. But there are also plenty of people that we speak to, not necessarily customers, but certainly people that we speak to. It's almost in the first or second sentence of the initial conversation you have with them. It's like, well, what does this cost and what does that cost? And, you know, I mean, we're always extremely nervous about price based enquiries. We need a website. How much are websites? Yeah. Tell us a price now or don't need don't even bother getting back to us. You know, that kind of bullshit.

Yeah. I mean, I get it from the, the buyer's point of view, right? It's like all you really care about is certainty. And if in your head, like one website development company is very much like the other, and there's, there's fundamentally no difference in the output, then yeah, of course you're price conscious and you're buying on price and that's sensible. You know, some people will say, when I go and shop for cars, well, cars just to get me to A to B, from A to B, so I just want the best.

You think that's what a car would do, wouldn't you?

Well, buy Land Rover.

I saw something, uh, what was it? Is it either on TikTok or YouTube or something this week? And it was like they were talking about cars that are very unlikely to get to one hundred thousand miles. And the first thing the guy said was, if it's got a little oval green badge on it, chances are nah.

No.

Miles, is your thing done?

Oh, one hundred and forty something. Oh was it. Yeah.

It's it's only on what, his third engine. Yeah.

He kids it's not that bad. Second engine. Um but no, I mean, you know, I think if like fundamentally what you've done is boiled the thing down to like a very basic version of itself and that's all you're getting. I mean, you do hear people say that like, oh, I just wanted a car that could get me from A to B, so I went and shopped on price and you probably end up with like a dacha duster or something. Um, and then people who actually know and understand cars know a huge amount of difference in what you're getting for your money. And then, you know, they're coming to you and saying, well, I need a nice car. What what can you do for me? And I think that's effectively what, what it boils down to, at least in my head, is that people just fundamentally don't want to engage with the fact that you're not buying a commodity, you're buying something of a variable quality. Mhm. But it is difficult. I think it's increasingly difficult to understand the justification for that sort of like priced based approach to marketing, because I don't what surprises me is that we've been marketing. I mean, we've been marketing for a long time, but marketing in general has existed for a long time. And I can't see that there can be many people in business who've taken a sort of price based approach. How cheap can I get my website and that it's paid off for? You'd think everyone would have learnt by now that actually that doesn't work.

I think it's um, I think if you want to talk about like a thing as in a website, um in that um agency Nomics not agency nomics agency hackers, Um, state of the state of the nation state of agencies report. There was one little soundbite in there where an agency owner had said they'd quoted thirty grand for a website, and then a freelancer had taken the work away from them, as in undercut them and said they could do it for fifteen grand. And the company then said, brilliant, great, get on with it. And then the freelancer made a complete ass of it.

Surprise.

And interesting. What I thought was interesting was because if that happened to us, I would sit down with the person and try and figure out how we could help them. Yeah. Um, but this, this other agency owner didn't. And I, and I kind of admired him or her for doing it. And I thought it was quite funny because the guy, the company came back and said, this hasn't worked out. We're in a bit of a pickle now. Can you help us? And he just said, no, get lost. And I must admit, you know, there would be a temptation to do that. But because we've often rescued things that have gone awry, it's kind of in our DNA just to kind of say, okay, right. Let's let's see if we can figure this out for you.

Well, I think also as well, like, not in a horrible way. You see how people have got there. I mean, it's not it's not people being entirely unreasonable. You know, it's easy to see how if you didn't have our experience and our expertise and you were sat in that chair and somebody said, right, you know, you're not going to grow. You're not going to hit your growth target unless you get a new website and you think, oh, for fuck's sake. Right. I'll go and get a new website. Oh, it's not good enough to just get a new website. I need specifically a website made by somebody good and trustworthy, but I don't know who that is or what it looks like or how much it should cost. And I get it. Like they're all at sea. And then somebody comes along and says, oh yeah, mate. Like I'm a, I'm a freelancer. I'll work on your project start to finish like twenty four hours a day and I'll just charge you this. And they think, yeah. MM. I see how people make the mistake. Mhm. I just, I don't really know how to how you avoid that other than to, to sort of let people get repeatedly stung. But one thing that I do think is quite interesting is that, you know, even amongst people who are sort of shopping between different website platforms, I mean, we had a conversation with somebody, um, this week. Well, you spoke to them yesterday, I think, didn't you? But but also last week and they were like, you know, how much does it cost to build a HubSpot website? How much does it cost to build a WordPress website? And we were like, well, there's fundamentally no difference because what you're asking is, how much does it cost to build the right website for our business? And it's not, you know, you're not buying them off a shelf. But again, it comes down to that sort of fundamental misunderstanding of.

Yeah, and HubSpot one's an interesting one because, you know, WordPress is open source software. Yeah. Free as in speech, not as in beer, but I mean, it's free software. Um, and you can build great websites with it apparently. Um, and then HubSpot, like HubSpot content, um, content now is between three and four hundred quid a month. Yeah. There's quite a difference between that and free.

Well, is there, but.

There is, but, but we're a small business. We use HubSpot and we love it said this a million times. Sorry, everybody. Um, and more and more, we're working with businesses who are kind of kind of seeing the benefit of the whole thing's kind of tied up with my sales tool, my CRM, my, um, yeah, operations, uh, requirements, bringing in data from all other places. And it just makes sense for their website to be in there for what it's costing.

I mean, what I'm saying is when you're building a sort of, um, company website from the ground up, the cost of the CMS is a rounding error. Really. Yeah.

But it's in perpetuity. Remember, if you, if you go down the HubSpot route, then it's going to cost you whatever it is, five thousand quid a year for the rest of your company's existence. If you use, say, HubSpot content hub.

I mean, I would also challenge the assertion that that's actually any different to what it would cost you to maintain a WordPress website. I'm not.

Yeah, I know where you're coming from and I don't disagree. Um, you know, I'm a fan of SaaS based, not just HubSpot, but SaaS based systems and broadly speaking, a fan of them. So yeah, increasingly kind of, yeah, not really that excited by the whole open source, whether it's Joomla or WordPress or anything else, because ultimately what we're really interested in is having a tool that we can use and it's reliable and we can forget about the tech because it's all taken care of and we can focus on the ad bit.

And, and it is the hard bit, I guess, that we're talking about here, isn't it? And that's the bit that it is very difficult to price, but that the pricing is never really sort of commoditised. It's not like we do ten grand WordPress websites, fifty grand HubSpot websites, is it? It's all.

Know.

It's the right.

Website goes in the content management system is a delivery mechanism at the end of the day. Yeah. Um, talking about delivery mechanisms, a few conversations and you had, you had a conversation with one of our favorite clients, if you want to call them that. But anyway.

We don't have favorites.

We won't mention who they are. Well, a client we enjoy working with very receptive in the values as opposed to some of the other clients where it's more transactional. And we can talk about transactional relationships as well. Um, but I think an AI generated podcast had been created and it was.

Yeah.

Did you listen to it?

Did you? No, I haven't actually listened to the podcast.

On this subject. Forget that it was a client that brought that up because this subject has come up with with who else was I talking? I can't remember who it was, and it was one. It's a conversation with somebody who I think, who isn't a customer yet. And so, you know, I was, I was kind of trying to be diplomatic and there was no yes. I mean, you know, we can basically use, you know, it's amazing. I mean, I wrote this blog post and, and we gave it to the AI tool and, and it turned it into a podcast and not, not as in not the way HubSpot, um, dropping the HubSpot name again, like HubSpot, you put a blog into HubSpot, you can press a button and, um, a narration is generated and it's actually, it's actually, you know, if you just rather listen than read, it's a great thing. But the thing about AI generated podcasts is it's two entities that are not actually people pretending, not pretending, having this conversation in inverted commas and I don't know where I stand on it, because I can see the attraction for people that struggle to switch a microphone on and, and do what we do and can see that people are shy. And if they think, well, I can write all the information down, then I can get somebody else to present it. It's almost like, um, you know, it's like, I'll write the screenplay and then I'll get the actors to deliver it and actually do the film. Except the actors are too expensive. So I'll use these virtual actors, these.

Right. And also, I don't actually want to write the screenplay, so I'll have to write that. Yeah.

You tell a story and it will create the screenplay for you. Now, where I am, without wanting to sound like a Luddite, is if I was fooled into listening to a podcast, but then found out that it was AI generated, as in they weren't real people, it was just AI. I would not want to listen to it anymore.

You're going to be really annoyed when you find out that I'm just like a stack of roombas.

I could have been really rude then. I'm not gonna.

I think I know where you're gonna go. Um. Yeah, I one hundred percent agree with you. Look, I think it's really interesting as well, isn't it? Because, like, you know, if I'd said to you five years ago, I really want to be a famous artist, but I can't paint. So I've outsourced the painting of the pictures to China. And, you know, somebody in Hong Kong is gonna paint them for me, and then I'm just gonna say I'm the artist.

As if that's never happened.

You would. You would say you are a con merchant, but it's somehow acceptable now to be like, well, I really wanted to do a podcast, but I couldn't be bothered. I couldn't actually do it, and I didn't have any friends.

I think that's the aspect of AI, and you've hit the nail on the head that that really grinds my gears. And I know it grinds your gears as well. It's the it's the phoning it in couldn't be arsed element. I just got AI to do it and that'll do.

Yeah. And it's one of those things as well, isn't it? Because like, why are you creating a podcast if you're creating a podcast to get listens and, and grow your brand and stuff like that? Well, you're on.

Entertain and.

Educate, right? This is the thing you're on a hiding to nothing because you've put the outputs first. And guess what? It's never going to happen. If you go out to create a podcast because like you say, you want to entertain and educate, well, AI is not the tool for that. It doesn't do that. So, you know, straight away, people who are relying on these tools are doing it because they've got the wrong objective in mind. I think, um, yeah, you just want the outputs without actually, I'm.

Actually listening to a blink just now and I can't remember the name of it. Um, about basically it's like, you know, filling in the gaps and trying to understand the fundamentals of AI. And I'm not going to talk about it just now. I might talk about it in future podcasts. Um, but it's fascinating.

Yeah, it's.

Really, is it Markov statistical modeling? Yeah, yeah. Very complex, very complicated.

It is, but it is effectively just a numbers game. Yeah, yeah. That's what makes the whole thing.

So we're not against AI per se. There are, there are there are. Well, you know, the creatives have used it to help out with various things, whether it's filling in some gaps on a photograph or whatever you like making a photograph bigger or I don't know. There's lots of things that we're doing. There's generative AI, which has perhaps has a part to play if it's being created and edited and actually made into something sensible by a human being. And, you know, that's only one aspect of AI. There's lots I mean, you know, AI, um, is just bolted on to everything these days. It's almost like you can't sell anything unless you say and it's got AI.

Well, and I think that's an important thing to note is that AI has become marketing shorthand for uses an algorithm of some description. Right? And I think that's like a really important thing to bear in mind is that three years ago, all of these systems still existed. They just nobody was calling them AI. I mean, I think that's.

Way before that. I mean, you think about expert systems that were that were basically if else statements, you know, if this has happened and this has happened and this has happened and this is probably, you know, Cumulatively has been going on here sort of thing. Or if you've got this symptom, this symptom and this symptom, chances are you've got pneumonia or whatever, you know what I mean? It's kind of like these expert systems were there to replace experts basically by using like, you know, um.

The same logic that the expert would use to make decisions.

Kind of. Yeah, yeah. That's right. But, but going back to what, where I, where I was going with this, this, this idea that like you can produce, uh, write down an idea, feed it into a machine. And then, and then two robots will have a conversation and, and it will be something that, that other human, that human beings, rather not other human beings, human beings will enjoy consuming. I don't know, will they enjoy consuming it if they don't realise it's been generated by AI?

Will you ever listen to any AI generated.

Well, I've only listened to. I've obviously listened to AI generated narrations of blog posts and they are very listenable.

But we're not as good.

It's all. It's all good.

That's the problem, isn't it? The intonation. But the content is sort of like profoundly bad and very artificial. Mhm. Um, you should listen to some. They're quite funny. There's a, there's a subreddit dedicated to them on Reddit that's like, you know, just all this like wacky AI bullshit that people have produced. And it's quite funny. Um, but no, I mean, it's sad. I mean, like, like, you know, I've got a keen interest in literature. Um, again on Reddit, I'm part of a lot of subreddits for like, um, self-published authors and the amount of people you see come into there and be like, oh, you know, I spent ages getting AI to write a novel and like one person's downloaded it and they said they hated it. And like, now my dream is dead. And it's like, yeah, no shit, man. Because like, fundamentally you try to take a shortcut.

There was a guy, um, I listened to LBC quite a lot as you know, I like talk radio and there was a guy had phoned in and, you know, I think I'll be diplomatic. He was as thick as two short planks. Um, and he was basically saying that he discovered AI and he was now basically a businessman because he was going to get AI to do the stuff that he couldn't do, as in string, two words together. And I thought that was yeah, I just thought, bless you.

That's the only thing that I'm like sort of slightly because you said earlier, I'm not, you're not really against AI. We're not collectively really against AI. Of course we're not the only bit where my like sort of perception is starting to change on this is that I do think that people like Sam Altman and OpenAI, very effective marketers, but I think they have there is a sort of emperor's new clothes situation going on here where they've sold this idea to a lot of people, life will be easy and convenient. Now you can be a businessman, you can be an author. You can, in Keir Starmer's case, rejuvenate the economy somehow with the magic of AI.

Crazy.

But they're all doing it. You know, Nvidia CEO being like, oh, the future of the future of Nvidia is well, yeah, all based on this and, and meta being like, oh, we're going to do away with mid-level software developers entirely because AI will do everything for me. And there is an element of like just mis selling going on here where like when that bubble bursts and people are like, oh, actually, I can't be a businessman just because I got open AI or, you know, the people on the internet that think they've like downloaded their own version of it and trained it to do something specific and are somehow going to make their fortune doing it. And it's just all a bit, I don't know, it's a bit of a con really, and people are gonna get hurt by it when it when it does turn out to be a big old nothing.

Yeah. I suppose it's it's, it's the old adage, you know, fake it till you make it. And you just wonder, I don't know. It's with, you know, I know, you know, like the two or three people that listen to this, one of them might be thinking, oh, listen to them. Couple of Luddites. Um, but we are, we are embracing AI. But if you embrace it, it doesn't mean that you, that you, um, buy everything you drink all of the drink down, all of the utter bullshit that surrounds it. You have to try and pick through it, you know, you have to try and pick through and try and find out. Well, you know how you know what, what should I believe and which bits of it. But yeah, again, once again, going back to the idea of just like writing some stuff down and then getting AI to publish a podcast apart from anything else, is that really what you would want the face or voice of your business to be a robot? That's a pretend conversation. I mean, be authentic, surely.

I think so, yeah. I think there's there's more and more stuff around this. Isn't there popping up on the internet about, you know, sort of like human centric and human written content and. Yeah.

Okay.

Twenty twenty five um, do you want to do some predictions?

No.

Top ten. Do you think ideas.

Do you think we live in interesting times in a good way or interesting times in a, in a, in a, in an unpredictable bad way?

No, I'm, I'm feeling quite pessimistic about this year. Surprise, surprise.

One why.

Wait? I mean, like, I think, um, I buy into the idea that the sort of geopolitical situation, especially in the West, where we have democracies is sort of broadly reflective of how people are feeling generally. Mhm. Um, and there's just a lot of a lot of very hateful, very negative sort of ideas out there at the moment. And I just think that sort of has a, it has a trickle down effect on society, but B, it reflects a society that's very much sort of at war with itself, just malaise. People are angry, they're grumpy, they're sad.

Don't you think that's a throwback to Covid, though? Maybe a lot of the anger twenty twenty five now.

I don't know.

You don't just kind of I'm always amazed, you know, how little Covid comes into the, um, general discourse, talking about politics, talking about society, talking about some of the problems, whether they're economical problems or societal problems. And is there a, you know, are there usually one of the same thing anyway? But I'm surprised how little it comes up in conversation.

I suppose people are scared of being seen to blame something on it, I don't know. I don't know, I don't have a good answer for that. I feel the same way about the Brexit thing though. Interestingly, just very rarely gets brought up anymore. Everyone's just sort of like pretending.

You don't listen to LBC. Obviously it's brought up in everyone that phones in blames, either blames it on Brexit or talks about the fact that Brexit wasn't delivered properly or whatever. It's just they never stopped talking about it, especially if you listen to the likes.

But this is sort of what I mean about just like negativity infecting everything. Like I can't remember the last time anyone was being optimistic about anything.

Yeah, but isn't that because and Karen and I talk about this, isn't that because the media and by by that I mean, like, you know, the BBC, LBC, the broadsheets, even even I suppose the um, the, um whatever they called the, the, what do they call them, the orange tops or whatever they're called, what do they call them like the Daily Mirror and the sun and stuff like that. Red tops, red tops, uh, toilet paper. But don't you, they're only really interested in bad news. It's like, you know, we've had some we've had some situations with the weather and it's like, ah, the temperatures got up again, but it looks like it might get cold again, you know, oh, that storm's blowing through now. But there's another storm coming. Right. The fire's out in Los Angeles, but the winds are getting up. The fire might get going again. Don't worry. We'll have some bad news for you.

You see the journalists like sitting behind the desk?

I mean, literally.

I.

Mean, but there's a reason for that. If I put LBC on in the morning and I will, and it was just nothing but good news stories. I just I think as humans, we're pro, you know, I probably wouldn't buy into it. And by and I think that's because as humans, we're kind of more programmed to like wanting to hear about people who are worse off than us than wanting to hear about people who've nailed it. And they're way better off than we are.

Yeah.

Sorry, am I keeping, you.

Know, um, you reminded me of a study that I read once about exactly this where I think it was, I.

Think, yeah.

It was somewhere in the.

Middle.

It was somewhere in Eastern Europe where they tried it, and they basically did nothing but positive news stories for a week, and they found that their viewership had halved. Basically everyone was like, what's this nonsense? Yeah, I mean, this is the problem, isn't it? Journalists and the media, it's really easy to do that thing where you're like, oh, the the mainstream media are evil. I mean, it's a business. And the thing is, if you walk past a cupcake shop and it's only selling purple cupcakes, what you assume is that people really like buying purple cupcakes. Not that the cupcake owner has got an agenda to push, and they're selling purple cupcakes for a reason. And I think this is part of the problem. It's just that the media will just peddle what people want to hear. And unfortunately, people are just really enjoy reveling in.

Oh, they've realised that if they peddle bad news, then then they sell more advertising and the likes for the likes of LBC, obviously not the BBC, but the BBC, although they don't sell advertising, will very much be looking at their market share and whether it's growing or, or, or falling. Um and um yeah, I mean it's, it's, I think it's just what we as humans want to consume.

It's very strange because I think, you know, like thoughtful, um, in-depth radio where they bring in like a multitude of voices and give people space to talk like it does exist, but it's really niche and it's really hard to find and it's generally listened to by very few people. And it's just one of those weird things, isn't it, where, I mean, you know, you can apply the same thing to like the sale of novels, right? It's like you go into Asda or Tesco and all you see is like romance or like just just genre fiction nonsense. It's like there are a few people out there that like reading sort of like modern literature, I suppose, but they're few and far between, and there's no real market selling to them, so people don't do it.

How did you get to that from like, whether you think twenty twenty five is going to be good or not?

Doom and gloom.

To talking about romance novels in Asda.

Uh, dunno. Well, I think romance novels in Asda pretty much encapsulates how I feel about modern society in a lot of ways. It's a bit naff, really.

Mhm. I think I think twenty twenty five is going to be good. I think, you know, we're going to continue to bump our gun gums about our politicians and about the economy and everything else. But I think as we, you know, move further away from Covid, um, not being a fan of Trump at least once he's in the white House. We're not talking about whether he'll get in the white House. Um, at least.

We'll be able to talk about him shitting himself on live TV or whatever weird thing he does next.

Yeah, well, that's right, I suppose. And, you know, and, you know, whether whether you're a supporter or not of the of the government in this country, at least we've now got a government till twenty twenty nine or whatever, unless they implode. Um, which is like, you know, that again, is, is kind of stability different in France, different in Germany, different in Austria, probably Italy, albeit they've got a right wing government in place. But you know, for Italy it's, it's somewhat stable. So I don't know. I think the economic news that came out just before we recorded this, you know, slight improvement in GDP, a slight reduction in inflation. You know, the enquiries that we're getting in the business, having some good conversations with businesses who are who seem to be confident enough to.

Well, I do think to invest.

And, you know.

That was one interesting thing, wasn't it, because you linked in general chat in our in our work Google chat the other day, somebody sort of like state of the nation report agency hackers. It was agency hackers. And it was quite interesting because they were talking in there.

They've already referenced it in this podcast. You were asleep at that.

Point, evidently. So they were talking in there, weren't they, about like this sort of like decline in confidence and the fact that lots of stuff stalled and that people were nervous about spending money. I do think certainly anecdotally, from our end, we're sort of coming out of that. Certainly come back to like quite a busy pipeline. Um, but yeah, whether or not that sustains, I don't know.

Yes. Busy. I mean, I actually kicked a couple of things off the pipeline today. Companies that we had good conversations with produced some information. They were interested. They've then gone quiet and I I'm too busy. I've got plenty of other things to do, so I've just booted them off. I don't mean contacted them and booted them off, just removed them from our deals dashboard from the pipeline, assumed that they've gone elsewhere kind of thing, but they may well come back. But I think we still have that slight issue. And I'm speaking to other business owners. They've reported the same where decisions are taking a while to make. But I've put some of that down, certainly through November onwards to like, well, it's nearly Christmas, you know, we'll do it in January or we'll do it in February or whatever. We'll leave it till till next year. But um, we've got enough going on with existing customers, um that the new business is nice and there's some really interesting ones coming through for us, but we're kind of busy as with the, with the customers that we've got, which is good. So I just, yeah, I think generally quite positive for twenty twenty five. I did read somewhere and I did share it with everybody that I can't remember where it was. Was it was it in that report as well, or was it in another report that I read where, you know, they were basically saying that businesses are going to need agencies more than ever?

Mhm. Yeah.

And I don't know quite what the angle was or what they were basing that on. But, you know, I think, um, I think I've got to feel reasonably reasonably hopeful. Yeah. Really reasonably optimistic about it all anyway. I've got a few other things on the list, but I think I'll leave them for now because we've been rambling on for ages and um, that'll do I think. Yeah. Very good. So you've been listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface, where we talk about digital marketing from the coalface, from the agency's coalface, and then lots of other stuff as well. Um, a bit of politics and a bit of, um, bit of piss taking. But um, if you do enjoy this podcast, um, whatever you do, don't share it with anybody else. Don't encourage us. All right. Thanks.