In general, I think marketing has sort of lost its way a little bit.
I don't think you would find many people arguing with that.
But I think recently especially it's become particularly stagnant.
But is this to do with the attention issue where everyone is so busy? You've got like nanoseconds to try and catch them. So if you get something in front of their eyes, you've. You've just got to do something that's safe and hopefully works in ten percent of cases or something.
You know what though? Like you say that instantly my brain is like, yeah, that is what it is. It's not our fault. It's the idiot consumers and their ten second attention spans and we can't help it. But that's pretty crap, isn't it? It's a pretty crap argument because, you know, it's a very shoddy workman who says, oh, I have to produce crap things because people don't like nice things. Like, yeah. And it's also a self-defeating prophecy.
Watching French telly at the moment, watching the last final series of Lupin. It's very good.
Do you watch it in French?
Yeah. Well. Subtitles. Yeah, but yeah, French.
Like art films, that sort of thing.
It isn't really. I mean, it's it's kind of high farce.
Just being racist. I don't know anything about French TV.
It's very good. It's very good. Um. Oh. I'm sorry. Better introduce the show, as usual. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface with me, Dave Robinson, my colleague Alex Bussey.
What were you going to say before, colleague then I saw you pause. You faltered.
My very slappable.
Colleague.
Because you've just been informed by Leslie that you're very, very slappable head.
Yeah, I thought you might say esteemed or something nice.
To anyone watching this in black and white. He isn't actually bald. That's not why his head's slappable. It's just. It's just got one of those faces you'd never get tired of punching.
And that was the end of the podcast.
And that was the end of that beautiful relationship. Yeah. I was just thinking, I was just musing to myself, you know, like on on TV and radio and all that. They have like.
Wireless.
They have the people like, for example, Leslie behind the scenes doing all the clever stuff, all the camera stuff. And then they have the talent. They've referred to the people in front of the camera or the people behind the microphones as the talent. So in this thing we do, which one of us is the talent?
Neither of us.
So it's a talentless podcast that deserves a slurp of tea.
It's an interesting thing, though, isn't it, that, you know, it's sort of with a straight face.
They talk about the.
Talent, the people, the easiest jobs get, all the yeah, all the accolades.
Quite often talentless. Mind you, it's not until I mean, we do this and it's and it's fine and we enjoy it. You know, we've got an audience of one apart from if anyone's listening upstairs and we just babble on, we're not having to follow a script and like, watch the autocue and all the rest of it. We just, we just make stuff up and, and hopefully people find it moderately entertaining, moderately amusing and somewhat a tiny. A tiny amount educational. But it is. I've been fortunate enough, if you like to do little bits of telly. Years ago I got pally with a couple of.
Guys on the.
TV. Yeah, it was a programme that ran here up in North east Scotland called. You know, I can't even remember what it was called. And I did a couple of pieces to camera and I think once or twice I absolutely nailed it. And then this one time I just couldn't stop laughing. I just, I just could not do it. I think we gave up in the end because.
Literally, I guess.
Because I'm not.
Talented.
Yeah. That's right. Yeah. But I've always I've always fancied myself being able to do that, you know, like people that like just can just put a camera in front of them and they'll just do something and it'll be. But you know, the funny thing is, I don't know if you agree, but sometimes if you if you actually listen to what people say on the radio or say when they're in front of a camera, you really listen to it. It's quite often just a stream of consciousness. It's just quite often just utter garbage.
Yeah, absolutely. Said with conviction. Yeah, it's the art of it, isn't it?
It is.
I think being able to speak with conviction about any old waffle.
That's right. I, um, inauthentic unauthentic inauthentic marketing just before we started.
I think it's inauthentic. I think it is. Somebody can correct us in the comments.
I'm sure they won't. I got this thing through which if you if you're watching this on YouTube, you can see it. So it basically looks like looks like a handwritten envelope.
Does.
When you open the. Looks like a handwritten envelope, which isn't, uh, you get what looks to be a paper cutting and not definitely not something that was printed off because it has got some garbage.
On, which is an interesting tactic, isn't it? Because it's sort of not that far away from like being sent a ransom note through the post a little bit.
And then, and then what looks to be a handwritten post-it as if someone's like, oh, I saw this and thought of you. And I thought they've tried really hard there to be authentic, haven't they? And yet, in its inauthenticity, it is wholly ineffective as a piece of marketing.
And a miss.
They might, you know, they probably prove us wrong. They say, oh, well, you think so, do you? We sent it out to ten zero zero zero people. And guess what? Four people responded and that's all we expected. Yeah. You know, but I don't know, I just, I just I'd rather it was all just printed and clearly not personalised and clearly not authentic, but just gave me the message. Then this kind of, you know, it reminds me of it reminds me of, um, um, advertisement where it looks like editorial in a newspaper and you don't really see it anymore, but you used to see what looks to be an authentic newspaper story. But at the top of the page it says advertisement or advertorial. And immediately we've talked about this before, immediately just go, this is inauthentic bullshit, and you just move on. That's what that's like. I think.
Our rants are going inside.
Really hard. And it's and it just.
Yeah. Well, look, I mean, you know, like I say, our rants are gonna intersect because I, I have some stuff around, not authenticity, but, but generally sort of crap marketing. Um, I think the thing with stuff like this is that it's almost worse than just sending somebody something that is obviously printed off because again, you know.
Didn't I just say.
That? Did you? Well, you really have to.
Face it likes to be slapped.
Well get to is that exactly that. Yeah. Well the uncanny valley thing where.
I know Vivian's keeping you up at night and you're really, really tired and everything else, and you've been very irritable with everybody else in.
Here. Do you.
Mind? And and I'm just going to irritate you to see if I can get you to burst and storm out like you did that day when you when.
That.
Thing happened.
one time.
I'm never going to let you forget it. Go on, carry on. I will.
Shut up. An incredibly irritating day. Just that uncanny valley thing that happens a lot in marketing, especially at the moment with AI. So like HubSpot recently, for example, put out this big state of the industry thing, which I've been reading because we're sort of in the process of putting together our own sort of state of the industry, uh, book downloadable thing. And, um, I was reading it and it was talking a lot about content repurposing. You know, this idea that, that you can create one piece of content and then because of the genius of AI, you can actually have created thirty pieces of content instantly.
On my list as.
Well. Well, but, but it's all part of the same sort of general movement, which is like marketers trying to be lazy, right? He could have whoever sent that out could have spent ten more minutes actually hand-writing a bunch of post-it notes. And it would have. Well, okay, a couple of hours. Ten hours. Yeah. But that's a time investment that would have actually reaped rewards because then you'd have opened that and instead of being instantly turned off by it, you'd have been like, oh, okay. Somebody did. Actually, he felt vaguely flattered that somebody had taken the time to write something to you. You'd have read it.
But that relies on his handwriting or her handwriting being legible. And the reason the reason I say that is, I recently remember I was going to see a client down in potential client down in Somerset. And I have a cousin, two cousins. Yeah, three cousins, in fact, in Weston-super-Mare. I haven't seen them for donkey's years. So I thought I'll write to Susan because that's the only means of communication I had and arranged to meet because I'm going to go down all the way down to Somerset. I'm and going down the day before staying in a hotel. We can meet for dinner. And we did, and it was great. I started to hand-write the letter to her and I gave up and typed it and printed it out instead and signed it like a like a bell end.
Like.
Because my handwriting. My handwriting is just awful. It's just it's gone, it's gone. It's almost gone completely. I mean, look at my notes for today. I scribble them because I've got an iPad and a pencil, but I use all caps.
Oh, I thought you'd.
Write in all.
Caps. I thought you were doing that on purpose, so I couldn't read them. It is indeed illegible. That isn't boys and girls. I can't read it. No, I know exactly what you mean. Um. But. But no, I mean, yeah, it's this whole idea, isn't it, that, like marketing is a numbers game that you should, you know, rush to get whatever you can out as efficiently as possible, as quickly as possible. You know, if you can create something like that, that takes you ten minutes and send it to a thousand people and three of them reply, then fantastic. You know, there's a good conversion rates. Um, and we just seem to have sort of lost sight of the, the whole point of the exercise, which is to engage with actual people. And sometimes that does mean slowing down or doing things the long way. And actually, you know, writing things. But if you want to. Because I remember going to a seminar back in what, twenty fourteen, um, where they were like, oh, we've had this breakthrough idea. Everyone stopped writing. So you can really stand out by writing your prospects handwritten letters. And that was like, you know, that was like a sort of, wow, what a controversial and amazing idea. And that was, you know, over ten years ago. So, I mean, there's certainly nothing sort of novel or interesting about that approach, but I do think it says something about how far we've come from, from what marketing should be, you know, that we're all sort of obsessed with these things that we can do quickly get out the door, get a three percent return on, get a three percent conversion rate rather and model R r r r o I on that. And that's fantastic. That's what marketing is about. You know.
You know, you said there marketing is a numbers game. And certainly B2C marketing is a numbers game. But maybe with B2B it isn't a numbers game.
I don't think so. Oh, I don't think it should be. I think it's become one. Yeah.
And I think I'm saying, you know, it's a numbers game, as in you want a certain number of people to get in touch with you, but you want people who will, who are interested in can benefit from your products and services. So if you if your message hits ten people and, and it's so good that five of those people get in touch with, that would be a phenomenal return on investment, wouldn't it? Well, assuming that you don't sell something that's only worth thirty bob.
A lot of the time, I mean, you're obviously sort of under pressure constantly to deliver leads. And again, that is assessed by volume of leads rather than quality of leads.
Is it is it though.
Well, it often. Yeah, often.
I mean a lot of our clients will, will, will openly admit that, hey, you know, if you get us five or six enquiries a month, we'd be delighted. We know that what we do, what we sell, what we provide isn't, you know, mass market. And so we're only really thinking four or five a month would be good. I mean, I don't know, you know, like the software people in Edinburgh that you work with quite a lot now with Julie as well. Um, they, they're not looking for hundreds of leads a month. Are they? Those leads are not out there.
Well, no. Absolutely. But again, you know, we recently did an exercise for them where we went through their CRM with a fine toothed comb because they were somebody at the company and obviously won't name names or point in a particular direction was saying, oh, you know, the volume of leads isn't as high as I thought it should be. We're not we don't seem to be getting very many of these leads. And then it was a sort of exercise to drill down and say, okay, but like of the leads you do get, the majority of them are actually good quality. They engage with you at least three or four times. Most of them book a demo, you know, you can engage with them and eventually convert them. It takes time to do that. But all of that sort of understanding isn't necessarily available to people at the surface level. Certainly, like people who are busy running a business and sort of depend on their marketing to give them a steady stream of leads, we'll look at it and say, oh, well, what I care about is getting twenty a month, and they don't sort of pause to sit, you know, and think, well, why do I think I need twenty leads a month? Do I really think there are twenty people every month in the market for what I'm selling or any of that piece. So I think people still do get very caught up in this idea that all we need to be seeing leads, we need to be seeing conversions. And like you say, lose sight of the fact that actually, if you spent twice as long being twice as specific and only appealing to four or five people, in the long run, it's probably better for your business. Yeah. Um, but it just all seems to get lost in the, in the sort of buzz of, oh, you know, more numbers, more leads. Yeah. Let's send out a hundred of these instead of ten. I mean, that's the thing about that campaign, isn't it? I mean, who knows how many fake letters he's written, but I reckon if he'd written ten percent as many but done it himself, you know, maybe he'd have actually got, you know.
And I still don't even really know what they want me to buy because I looked at it and immediately I was just struck by the inauthenticity of it rather than like, what is it he wants us to buy? I think it might be a book or.
Something, but isn't that interesting? I mean, we ended the last podcast episode, I think, by talking about gated content and whether it was sort of time to engage it. And I think this whole idea that, you know, you can produce marketing material, you can produce three second YouTube adverts or whatever, you know, just sort of like dash them off and it'll engage people. If you actually think about that, you know, in, in your own life. Have you ever responded to anything like that? No, of course not. This stuff just doesn't work. It's I've never given voluntarily parted with my personal contact information for something that somebody told me I must have, you know, because it's got ten great ideas in it. It's just not going to happen. And yeah, I don't know.
Do you think because one of the things on my list, I don't know if you've exhausted what you, you, you segwayed into something on your list there, didn't you? What? Remind me what it was again before.
It's just that whole idea of sort of lazy marketing and being a numbers game. Really?
Yeah. Well, that does actually dovetail quite nicely because I've put here and I'll just read it out. Following the herd. Do we work hard enough to encourage our clients to dare to be different? Are we saying zag when everyone else is zigging? Are we doing that I don't know.
I don't.
Know. And that kind of dovetails into what you were just talking about vis a vis the inauthenticity. Because this kind of stuff is getting pushed out there because you don't get sacked for recommending IBM. It's that kind of nonsense thinking that means that, you know, we're all just kind of playing it safe.
Yeah. Yeah, I think so. I think so.
There's a we are as well.
Well, I think inevitably some of that is just sort of, um it's moving with the herd isn't it. You see everybody else being very risk averse and you think, well that's because much cleverer people than me have modelled the risks or experimented with it, and they found out that it doesn't work. And this is a safe approach, and it's rarely true. A lot of the time it is just sort of groupthink, isn't it? And people being sort of.
The books I'm reading, which are, you know, around the behavioural science and stuff like that. And it's the Rory Sutherland book. Um, what's it called again?
Alchemy.
Alchemy. And then I'm reading um another book which has a foreword by Rory Sutherland and his mentions Rory Sutherland quite a lot, and he cites the Red bull case study. Case study. So your Red bull came along and they've got this weird drink. I, I actually like it and I know you either like it or you don't. I think I like Red bull, I think.
You think you like Red.
Bull. No, I do, I like I really like I like Red bull. I really, I really do like it. But what I was going to say is I think it's one of those drinks that you either like or you don't like. It's a bit Marmite. Um it, it's, you know, what they did was um, I didn't realise this until it was explained to me because I'm thick as two short planks. But what they did is they decided they were going to be different and to, to come along and challenge Coca-Cola.
Yeah.
Same size can slightly weird drink, same price. I'll just have the coke. Thanks. So what they did is it made it twice the price and the can a lot smaller and created a new category of drink. They just thought out the box with it. So suddenly I am not comparing Red bull with Coca Cola by volume. I'm saying, well, I'll get more Coca Cola right now because I've got a thirst.
Which immediately devalues that.
I'll get more of that, but I want that one and I don't mind paying more for it because look, it's a smaller can. It's a different category of drink. I don't have to compare those two prices.
Yeah. And again, the differentiation around the whole like Red bull gives you wings thing and the whole like really sort of again, benefits, it'll make you feel good if you drink this. Yeah, it's very clever. For sure.
It is. And obviously that's B2C and we're predominantly talking about B2B. And I think in B2B, there is a danger that that you just want to keep playing safe and do more or less what everybody else is doing. Because, you know, if you're, say, a junior person at a B2B brand, you're don't really want to get sacked for making a bad choice. If you're a senior person, you don't really want to have to go and answer to the board as to why you tried this thing and it fell flat on its face. Even though it might not have, it might have done fantastic. Excuse me fantastically well, but you know, we're as bad. I mean, I was thinking at the weekend, I was kind of amusing along, you know, our home page, like we, you know, we build and grow lead generation websites for tech and engineering businesses. Great. It's we do what it says on the tin. Sure. I almost wondered about saying like, you know, play it safe, follow the herd. Don't call us sort of thing to try and say, look, if you if you want us to have a look at what you're doing and try and come up with a way to help you differentiate and help you stand out from the crowd. But I don't know how well that will resonate with B2B.
Well, it's a really interesting thing, isn't it? There's a really, um, sort of interesting article by somebody called Colin Gray on this where he talks about risk aversion. I think he works for McCann. Um, he talks about risk aversion and specifically he talks about risk aversion in the context of like people who are in these companies making procurement decisions or buying decisions about stuff are famously quite risk averse. They don't want to risk their job, they don't want to risk embarrassment. And marketers want.
To risk losing money.
And market well, not really, because it's not their money. Right? So there's a there's this whole thing around, you know, people are making personally motivated decisions. Often they don't want to be shouted at or made to look stupid. And marketers interpret that to mean that if your product or service or solution stands out, risk averse people won't buy it. He sort of talks about the fact that that's actually sort of completely backwards. You know what it means if you know that risk is a major motivator, what you have to do is demonstrate that your product is safer for a reason than anybody else's, or that what you're offering is better and is going to protect them. But just that idea of orthodoxy in marketing, I think, is so catching, you know, people, you know, people talk about solutions and suddenly everybody's calling their their thing a solution. And people talk about, you know, a sort of, uh, oh, it'll, uh, protect you from litigation. And so everybody's writing that and, you know, it just, we're just really bad at this sort of idea of sort of, you know, original thinking, taking risks. I think quite rightly in some ways, because I think a lot of the time we don't want to risk a client's money or risk their reputation. But equally, I don't think you actually get anywhere by just sort of being cookie cutter. Um, and again, you know, harking back to meetings we've been in relatively recently where people are like, right, well, you know, this is how we're going to frame this because this is how everyone else frames it. And, you know, it's that sort of thinking doesn't really get you anywhere, but I don't know how you necessarily break free of it and sort of have the confidence just like, right, let's take a crazy risk.
You must, you must see, um, advertising and marketing that makes you smile and makes you think that was clever. Yeah, quite like that. You think of any examples? I'm not going to put you on the spot. I'll give you time to think, because I was watching the television at the weekend, and I think for once I was watching telly. Telly not not catch up because I was watching the one of the Six Nations games of rugby and their boots have got an advert running where basically two guys are talking and one of the guys keeps reaching behind himself, picking up peanuts. He's eating these peanuts, and then the camera zooms out and there's a little girl at the table and she's getting these chocolate covered peanuts, sucking them to get the chocolate off them, then putting them in a dish. And he, you know, he's oblivious to this and he's reaching around and eating them. And then it pans to him being at boots at the chemist saying, yeah, I've got a really stinking headache and a sore throat, and I haven't a clue where I might have picked it up from. And I just thought, that is so clever. It entertained me. It educated me, sort of, but it kind of amused me as well. And I just thought, that's good. I like that, you know what I mean? And you could argue that some people, when they were looking at the rushes for that might have gone, oh, that's disgusting. We can't possibly do that. We can't associate our brand with somebody eating some food that somebody else has had in their mouth. But the way it was presented, a little girl, you know, made out of sugar and spice and all things nice or whatever it is they say. So that's never going to be disgusting. You're just picking these peanuts innocently eating them. And it's well, I've just I've just related it to you. It's stuck in my mind. And it was clever as opposed to have you got a cold? We can sell you some beechams, you know. Yeah, yeah. You know, it was kind of just different. And we only remember messaging, marketing, advertising that is mostly. Anyway, I think we only remember it when people do dare to be different, yet we tend. And then the adverts that you absolutely never remember are just the, the the cartoon, the also rans. Well car adverts. Yeah, yeah. That's right. It's interesting because again in that, in that book um watch adverts, apparently they always show ten past ten because it's the frames, the branding and so much so that there was a digital watch and the time on it was ten past ten. Yeah. And I think I think they're the right numbers anyway. I just I'd never been aware of it. No. But like, if you're going to do a watch advert, you put the time at ten to ten and then you put the second hand there because it frames the branding and all the rest of it, you know, and it's and it well, it works I guess. But yeah, yeah, I.
Guess the received wisdom is that a lot of the time, it's better to sort of entrench your brand in people's mind without taking a risk or risking alienating people. And that is what's driving a lot of this. But yeah, I mean, we're back to that whole sort of idea of, you know, playing, playing a numbers game, you know, oh, if we put this advert out, you know, ten thousand people will see it. Nobody will hate us. So that's great. That's great. But but you're not endearing yourself.
To unpick it from a digital marketing marketing perspective. Right? So we do the research and figure out what our ideal customers, who the ideal customers are for a specific client, we figure out the problems they've got, they figure out where they go looking for solutions. And we try and make sure that when they do all that, um, they find our clients. So it might be Google search, it might be LinkedIn, it might be YouTube, TikTok, whatever. But we get a message in front of them, which encourages them hopefully to somehow engage. And nine times out of ten, that's probably visit a website. And on that website, we've got one chance. We've got hardly any time at all to persuade them that, yep, you've landed in the right place. We understand that problem you've got. We've got a solution. No obligation. Get in touch. Let's have a chat about it. And so are we gonna, like, go through all of that process and land them on a page that says, hey, do you like red bananas? You know, just asking. You know what I mean? It's got nothing to do. Just, I don't know, I'm just being random, you know? But it's like, we don't we say, you know, social proof, we can help you. We've done it before. You know, we do all of the usual stuff, don't we? Really? Yep, yep.
And as a result.
Shut up shop and go and be lorry drivers.
No, I don't think so. I think you raise a really interesting thing, which is that in general, I think marketing has sort of lost its way a little bit. I mean.
I don't think you would find many people arguing with that. Yeah. It's just you and I are relatively new to marketing compared to people who've been in the game for forty, fifty years.
Yeah, absolutely. But I think recently especially, it's become particularly stagnant. There just isn't very much new. Or is this to.
Do with the attention issue where everyone is so busy? You've got like nanoseconds to try and catch them. So if you get something in front of their eyes, you've, you've just got to do something that's safe and hopefully works in ten percent of cases or something, you know, back to, you know.
Circular.
Circular argument.
You know what though, like you say that and instantly my brain is like, yeah, that is what it is. It's not our fault. It's the idiot consumers and their ten second attention spans and we can't help it. But that is pretty crap, isn't it? It's a pretty crap argument because, you know, it's a very shoddy workman who says, oh, I have to produce crap things because people don't like nice things, right? Yeah. And it's also a self-defeating prophecy. I mean, what's happening at the moment, especially with AI. Exacerbated by AI, is that people are just producing more and more and more of the same crap, the same messaging, the same ideas, the same like, you find me a software product that is not sold in adverts by like some happy people sitting around a desk and talking about how easy their lives are. It's like nobody. Do you know what I mean? Like, nobody buys it. Nobody sees.
It. Like I'm thinking of the Monday dot com one Monday. What? You've never heard of Monday dot com? You're an idiot. Yeah.
And like, the HubSpot ones are really bad as well. It's like some quirky people walking into an office and having a quirky conversation about quirky office things. And oh, HubSpot makes your life better. And it's like, oh, get in the sea. You know, it's just this, it's just become sort of hideously circular. And then, you know, because obviously I've been immersing myself in a lot of sort of state of the industry type content and over and over and over again, I read the same thing and it's like, be more personalised, but leverage AI. Yeah. And it's like, okay, well, tautology, but also just like fundamentally, you know, it's just sort of like intellectually bankrupt advice. It's like anybody can say be more personalised. Anyone can say use AI. Anyone can say, oh, short form video content is the next big thing. You should try doing that. None of it really means anything. No, marketing as a whole just seems to have wandered into this place where it's just sort of endlessly regurgitating the same sort of crap while people pay less and less attention to it. And unless something breaks that cycle. And that's the thing, I think what we're really drilling down on here is occasionally something will sort of break through that and you'll, you'll find yourself sitting in front of your TV and you'll think, oh shit, that was an interesting advert. Yeah. And, and that's, you know, it's vanishingly rare. But I think that's where you have to be. You have to be interrupting. You have to be doing something interesting and slightly daring because otherwise you are just getting lost in an increasingly competitive sea of noise, especially in B2B, because I, you know, I can't count the number of times where I've sat down to write a page and I've pulled up, you know, sort of like ten competitor pages and you could literally have copy and pasted the copy of any of them onto any of the other ones. And it would have still made perfect sense. It would have still been the same page. You know, it's not there's nothing sort of brave or bold about what people are offering or saying. It's just, oh, we can also make this pressure vessel.
And you could say that it's all been said. There's nothing original left to say. But but I guarantee you in before we sit down on Thursday or whenever to do another podcast, you will have probably seen something that is original, did make you stop and think, did amuse you, did entertain you, did make you think about maybe a brand you'd never heard of before. Maybe. You know, I think almost certainly.
I think so. It does exist. It does happen. It's just rarer and rarer. And I think what we run the risk of now, especially in agency space, because everybody's sort of terrified of losing clients because the climate is a bit uncertain. They're terrified of sort of breaking the mould and doing something daring, and it's just becoming increasingly sort of dull. It is dull as dishwater at the moment. Marketing as an industry it is. I've not read a single state of the industry and I've read maybe twenty, and I've not read a single one that said, here's something new and novel and interesting. It's all just the same rubbish.
And the tools that we have at our disposal. Yeah. Compared to ten, twenty years ago. Yeah. Uh, phenomenal. Yeah. And yet we're just not using them effectively, not not being as critical. I don't know, I'm going to say not being creative. Every time I go onto TikTok, I see somebody do something and I think to myself, oh, that's, that's, that's really neat. That's cool. That's different. I've never seen anybody do that before.
But the question is how many left swipes. And Tinder linger. How many left swipes do you do before you find a good piece of content? You know, how much dreck do you have to wade through?
Well, so much so that I. I am trying now to use that stuff less. I'm trying to go onto TikTok a bit less, maybe a lot less, because it. It gets to the point where you're literally going scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll, scroll. And I just think, look at yourself, you know, look at what you're doing.
This is.
Absolutely nonsensical.
But then put it in a different light. You know, in a world where marketers it's not marketers, is it? In a world where crap marketers are in a world where sort of bandwagon jumping marketers never get Ahold of TikTok, that's potentially one of the most powerful tools in human history. You know, short form educational video content that's really accessible that you can just pick up on your phone.
That's why I'm a fan of it, because it is that it is exactly that.
And now idiots who are desperate for a a cut, a percentage of the share of voice are ruining it for everyone else.
I tell you, the videos that really get me is is this start by going guys. And as soon as I hear the word guys, I just scroll. I don't care who it is, I don't care what they're talking about. They've lost me straight away because that that is like used over and over again. You know, it's like, hey, you know, it's oh, it was an advert running on LBC and it was, um, it was to do. It was about encouraging people to apply for either an LBC scholarship or something. It was to do with getting into digital content and the digital industry. And the advert started with like a obviously young person by the sounds of the voice going, oh, I like that. And I just thought, who thought that was that was all right, you know. Oh, it's like it's like a really rude, ridiculous thing. Doesn't get attention effectively. It irritates immediately, I don't know. And their digital content experts.
Apparently ostensibly, and I'm sure they'd have the stats to back it up. I'm sure they'd be able to prove to you that at twenty four, they would engage.
If you were thinking about mine marketing and advertising off them, they would definitely have the stats to back it up and how effective it's going to be for you one hundred percent. Um, well, I've got a few things. You mentioned AI a few times now. Yeah.
And I think we are contractually obliged to, aren't we?
I think so, yeah. Well, that's exactly what that's the point I'm making. So everything now is like powered by AI. It doesn't matter what it is. Your shoes. It's like, yeah, you know, new toilet roll powered by AI. Do you know what I mean? It's like, it seems like everybody is just kind of bolting on the powered by AI thing. And it is, it is it actually powered by AI? And I'm not, I'm not, I'm not against AI. We're using AI really effectively in lots of practical ways. Okay. The note taking, for example, in meetings, it's actually all right. It's actually okay. It's actually not bad. Um, that's, you know, one example. So this isn't coming from like, oh, you know, AI is going to steal our jobs. We hate AI. We're kind of nervous about it. It's nothing to do with that. It's all to do with the whole AI bandwagon.
Yeah. Well lazy marketing rears its head again, doesn't it? It's like if you if you smack AI powered on the end of your widget or on the end of your toilet roll holder or whatever it is you're trying to sell, suddenly more people will buy it. Ostensibly, that's the received wisdom. Yeah. Um, I think probably the opposite will turn out to be true. I think we'll probably find that people are very skeptical and that people actually purchase things that are AI powered less. But that's just my you.
Saturate me if it hasn't already. And then people were like, well, it'll almost be like, uh, could I have the one that doesn't have the AI, please?
This is the thing with like Gemini, right? I can't, I can't count the number of times I open something in Google. And Gemini was like, oh, your Gemini assistant is here to and this is the paperclip. It's the paperclip from Microsoft Word circa nineteen ninety three. It's horrible and irritating. And mobile phone companies, they're the other ones that were really bad for it. At the moment. It's like every new model is an AI powered model. And it's like, what if I just want to buy a phone?
Well, do you.
See the.
Apple? Apple had actually pulled their AI news aggregator.
Really?
Yeah. Two, two, two things that two examples. Number one, it's I can't remember the second one. First of all, it announced that Luke Littler had won the Darts World Championship before the match started. And then the other one was, oh, I'm really annoyed. I can't remember it. But there was there was another example where it literally just made shit up. And so Apple went, something's not quite right here. Let's, let's pull it. And they've pulled it for the time being anyway. Um, I really wish I could remember the other one because it was hilarious. But anyway.
Yeah, I mean, yeah, AI powered, I mean, a lot of the time as well. Like they're just complicated algorithms. Let's, let's be honest, it's not really artificial intelligence in any, you know, sort of true sense of the word. You are not buying when you buy a sort of brand new Samsung Galaxy or whatever, an actual sort of, you know, artificial intelligence that's going to run your life for you. It is not that it just sort of looks like it.
I'll tell you a good example. Uh, I was writing some content and I was using AI for inspiration. Don't hate me. And I said something along the lines of, because I was, I'm writing a piece I've just written a piece about like, uh, the difference between HubSpot and WordPress for a content management system to manage your website. Um, because you know, people when I'm in meetings sometimes we.
End up talking.
About and we finish and we finish. So I thought, I'll just kind of think about it and write about it. So some of it, I wanted some AI assistance because there was some stuff I wanted to just get out there. Like in the beginning, we used a text editor and crafted pages. Then from Microsoft Front page came along. Then Dreamweaver came along about the same time.
And then we'll as well.
And then WordPress came along. And what I wanted to do, I wanted some AI assistance in writing those bits just to just to get some stuff down. And I said to it, you know, I want this and I want it writing for a UK based business audience. So all it did was say, da da, da, da da in.
The.
UK. And I was like, oh, you know, absolutely, utterly useless.
Try again. Yeah. Oh, Jesus.
So it's it's yeah, it's fair to say it's got a long way to go. I mean, we're both, we both, you know, make use of various bits of it, but I'm just kind of like AI powered X, Y, and Z. Is it hype? Is it cool? Is it a bit of both? Is it actually gonna start to normalise in the not too distant future? And people will just get they'll just won't even hear it when it says powered by AI because they're sick of hearing it.
I think that's the big risk. And then I think ultimately what you invite is people to come along and say, well, this isn't powered by AI, this is an actual telephone or, you know, an actual word processing software that's not going to bother you all the time and frustrating things. And, you know, people are finally, you know, a break from this. I think part of the problem with the AI thing is that because it's become such a big revenue driver for a lot of the big tech companies, they are very wedded to it. There is no way Microsoft can back down now and be like.
Is this not back to what we were saying earlier? Like everybody wanting to be the same? Oh yeah. Yeah, yeah, I was just got AI as well.
Well, I think the AI thing is the classic example of that sort of bandwagoning because do you remember when Microsoft bought OpenAI or invested very heavily in it? Whatever it was.
They bought it. Yeah, I think they bought it.
Symantec's somebody, some idiot in the comments like they want, um, the um, yeah, so they, they acquired it and then very quickly Google like, oh, we've also developed an AI that we're going to stick at the top of search engines. And I don't know if you remember, but they tried to roll it out and.
It was.
Disastrous.
It failed spectacularly.
Yeah. And then they were like, oh, shit. Like, we have to have another go at this. They didn't think, oh shit. Actually. Pause for reflection. This is a terrible idea. Why are we bothering to do this? They sort of pared back and then doubled down. Yeah. Um, and I mean, I don't know, maybe some people enjoy these things. Maybe people enjoy googling something and having AI try to tell you something incorrect every single time. I don't know, but certainly for me, it just seems to make everything a little bit worse. And, and there is no way back because it's like the Emperor's new clothes. As soon as somebody admits, oh, actually like adding AI to this was a disaster and hasn't really helped, they'll look very silly and everyone else will be like, well, our AI is perfect. And, and I guess that's what everyone's afraid of. But again, you know, orthodoxy, isn't it? It's people running in herds rather than saying actually What a pile of bollocks.
Yeah, I suppose so. Um. What have you got? What have you got on your list?
Uh, not an awful lot, actually, to be perfectly honest with you.
Okay, well, one of the things that I scribbled down, um, was, uh, dishonesty. We touched on it last time. We did rather ungraciously mention Rachel from accounts. Um, but since then, we've now got Jonathan from. The solicitors firm, aren't we? You know, who wasn't a solicitor? Oh, I know, I know. And, um, I just wonder if in public life and in business, if I can say that. Join those two together, which I probably can, but I have now. Is it out of control? Is is honesty. Like just.
Do you know.
Is it is it just not important anymore.
In light of what's happened today or yesterday, I suppose, with Trump's appointment for the deputy director of the FBI. Um, I'm going to say that I think we're on the wrong side of this one, actually. Okay. I think not only is it out of control, I think it's something people almost seem to actively want now is a certain degree of dishonesty. You know, people who are very sort of like.
Never mind the quality, feel the width.
Yeah, there's a bit of that going on, man. Like I really confuses me. Rachel Reeves In any other administration, her career would have been over day to, you know, like as soon as it started coming out that she'd overegged her experience slightly, that would have been enough. But the goalpost has moved so far now, and I think probably because of Trump's first term, probably because he got away with a lot of stuff. And Boris, I guess as well, they showed that the public had an appetite for people who were willing to, to ignore the rules and sort of flaunt them. Yeah. And now it seems almost like being more cavalier in public life, lying in more obvious ways. Sort of like build you a more sort of devoted fan base of people who also want to sort of stick it to the man and do whatever they like. And I don't know, it's very confusing. I mean, the guy that Trump's appointed to be his deputy director of the FBI is a podcast host. He was a he was a Secret Service agent for like a couple of years, ten years ago. I can't remember what his name is. But again, you know, it's easy enough to Google, but but yeah, Jack Reacher, he he's like this right wing podcast host. He just sort of has this conspiracy nut sort of podcast where he talks about how the government's full of lizards and vaccines will turn your legs to jelly. It isn't. Um, it's well, it's surely who knows anymore. That's the point. It's post-truth man. Like, you have to embrace it now, apparently. But they just keep getting away with it.
Shed my skin. I'm ready for a fresh skin.
It just seems now, like. Almost like the more outrageous you are with your lies, the more people sort of lap it up. But I don't know.
How do you fix it? How do you fix it? In public life, for example? Is it is it like, you know, one, one one misdemeanor and you're out just like, that's it. Nope. You know, do it. Well, let me just flip it around a second. I don't particularly want the people in charge to be whiter than white, having never put a foot wrong in their lives. I do not want people like that in charge. So I'm quite happy that people have sailed a bit close to the wind, etc.. So where do you draw the line between sailing a bit close to the wind and out and out lying in order to achieve some ends?
I don't think you can. And I think this is this is the problem. This is where we are, right? There are no sort of hard lines in the sand, and rightly so. Like you say, there's no sort of place for sort of moral absolutism in politics and public life, in business. You know, nobody is saying everybody should be held to this incredible standard. But the question is, then what standard are we going to hold people to? And once that becomes a matter for debate, the line is naturally going to wander sort of to and fro. Right? There's an amount of even in business, there's an amount of blagging that's sort of tactically encouraged.
Well, this is where I mean, we're not a political podcast, although we delve and this is where I was, I was making the point of like, you know, Rachel Reeves, Jonathan Reynolds, you know, what about with business? That's, that's what I'm really trying to trying to sort of pick a pick apart. To what extent are I mean, because if you think about advertising and marketing, people have always played a bit fast and loose with the truth. There are the advertising Advertising Standards Association or whatever they're called, who will and do and do pick people up for outrageous claims. Yeah, but there's a term, isn't there, in marketing or advertising. It's just a bit of advertising. Puff. You say something and it's and it's obviously untrue and nobody thinks it's true. And it's just a bit of flim flam in, in the advert or in the marketing piece. But where where's the line and, and how are, how do you think companies are doing with respect to. It's quite a nice car. Is that a That's Subaru. No, it's a Honda. That's very nice.
The new Hondas are really nice.
Nice shape.
Also outrageously expensive for what they are. But never mind.
Yeah. So. So how do we, um.
Well, I don't know if it's the mood I'm in today or what. No, I'm just sick of. Sick of idiots. Well, to be honest with you.
In the.
Office. No, just in life in general.
I just tell everybody that you call them all idiots in the podcast, so you don't go back upstairs, just go home and finish recording.
But look, I mean, if I came into the office every day and I said something that was sort of the truth, but slightly hard to believe every day I came in with a wild statement or a wacky claim, and you were like, oh, that's just a bit of a bit of Alex. Just like, you know, uh, he likes to puff things up. He likes to overexaggerate. We all know people who fit into that category universally. We also all know that we don't trust them. You would never, if you know somebody who is prone to doing that, sort of like they stretch the truth, they over embellish, they big themselves up. You would never actually buy into anything that they were saying, because very quickly, the human brain recognises that people are doing that. And I think the idea that that can't be applied to business, too, is just it's sort of idiocy. It's like you're saying, oh, well, people will overlook this obviously sort of puffed claim and they'll, they'll buy the ninety percent of people that buy our product. Love it. Maybe. And if they don't, it doesn't really matter that much. But I think it does. I think everything like that just sort of like slightly damages your credibility and slightly damages your integrity.
I think here's a story from when I was serving my apprenticeship in the shipyard back in the day, and there was a quality control, quality and quality assurance guy. I think he was called Peter.
I think this story had better not be about him over embellishing.
And he, um, he sat me on his knee nor he he with a straight face, very straight faced, told you all manner of stories. So exactly what you were saying. And he said them with such conviction and everybody thought he was an idiot and everybody was laughing behind his back, but he was deadly serious. But he was no threat because everybody thought he was an idiot. Oh, I believe. Yeah. You know, green grass, I might say. Oh, Peter was telling me about the time. And people were like, oh, and you believed him and you believed him. One of the stories was hilarious because there used to be, or there is a ferry that runs from Heysham to the Isle of Man. So you can think it's quite a substantial vessel. That's the that's the Irish Sea. And it gets quite rough out there. One day he was coming from the Isle of Man into Heysham, and everybody, including the captain, was so sick because of the rough weather that he brought the ferry into each with a straight face. There were other, more subtle ones, like he had a triumph three hundred fifty like a bathtub. T three a t t one hundred, I think. No, not even that t ninety. Anyway, it doesn't matter. People. People who know about motorbikes or know three fifty triumph. Right? And he tuned this thing so it would do one hundred and forty miles an hour. Now, the only way that vehicle would do one hundred and forty miles an hour would be if you threw it off a cliff. I mean, flat out it would do about ninety if that. And he and he had a whole raft of these stories. But again, just to reiterate, everybody thought he was an idiot. The problem we've got now is, like you were saying, people with a straight face are saying, I'm making claims. Um, you know, and Trump and Johnson and all of these people have kind of popularised it, if you like. And are people doing it in business as well?
I think so, and I think people are doing it all the time. And I think the problem is, you know, when you, um, I made this a very boring podcast for a few minutes when you're parenting, for example, what you learn very quickly is that if you don't nip bad behavior in the bud, there is very little biting like biting. Yeah, there is very little opportunity for the child to ever understand what they've done wrong, because you can punish them later, but they're never going to make that connection. And it's true in business too. The amount of times you sit down with people.
Number of.
Times, the number of times that you sit down with people who have allowed their sort of reputation to get in the bin, you know, it's trash. They've made all these sort of ludicrous claims. People stop believing them. People stop buying what they're selling and they're like, oh, we have a conversion problem because of X other thing that they've identified like that, that thing where like.
Are we talking Gerald Ratner here? Do you remember that story?
No.
Gerald Ratner. Well, you know, Ratner is the jewellers. Yeah. He completely trashed their brand with with one speech.
Right.
Because he said, and this this the reason I'm saying this, it came up on TikTok. So a business big, you know, big do he stood up and he thought he was the man and he he like.
A.
Very successful businesses. And he said something like, I'm paraphrasing, you know, people ask me how we can possibly sell this engagement ring for one hundred quid. And he said, it's because it's absolute crap. He said that and I kid you not, he had to resign and Ratners went bust because of one thing that he said the hubris got the better of him and he just thought he'd get away with it. And this is this is years ago. So this is like, I think it is hubris and a belief that you can say whatever you want and people will believe you and they won't challenge you. It's the problem in business.
But in that example, there's very obvious feedback loop. You know, you did the bad thing and you went bust as a result of it. I think the problem is that what a lot of business people will do is, is sort of make these ludicrous claims, mis sell themselves constantly, underdeliver, underperform and then be, but they never actually get the immediate feedback. So when they when things start to decline, they attribute it's something completely different. They never realise that they were the problem in the first place. And I think this is the. The thing is that these things are. It's like Boris Johnson, you know, it's death by a thousand cuts. He genuinely thought that he was getting away with it until he wasn't. And that's the whole problem, isn't it? It's like he didn't realise that he was slowly sabotaging his own reputation. He probably thought, oh, people like me more the more outrageous I am until it stopped. And I think that is the real rub. It's that there is no immediate negative feedback for making these woolly claims and doing these sort of slightly silly things that put people off. You'll only know about it ten years down the line when you're on the brink of bankruptcy. And that's the it's very easy to make the mistake, I think.
Okay, so flipping that on its head for a minute, I've had some meetings in the last few weeks, various places around the country with potential customers. And I think certainly one in one of the conversations I suggested to this potential customer, um, who I don't think is going to be a customer, I think we'd have heard from them by now, which is a shame because I think we could have done some great work with them and it would have been fun. Anyway, um, I said, do you think some of the problems that you've had, I mean, their marketing is abysmal by their own admission. They don't put themselves out there. And I said, do you think there's a lack of confidence? Yeah. And they kind of paused and went, that's an interesting point. You might be right. I like we're really good at what we do. And they clearly were we produce fantastic products. They clearly do, but they're just a bit timid about shouting about it. Yet the, for want of a better expression, gobshites who make an inferior product but shout about it are thriving.
Well, as a rule.
Is that the real issue with dishonesty is that there's a potential.
Short term.
Good guys are like, they listen to what the other people are saying, like, well, we don't do that. We're not as good as that. But guess what? Neither do they.
Well, you know, it's interesting because you expose a sort of contradiction in what we've said here today because we started out talking about being braver, being bolder, doing things that are not just following the herd. And in the next breath, we're saying, by the way, you're sort of kill your brand slowly if you make outrageous claims. But I think there is a middle ground between those two sort of competing ideas. Mhm. To your point, I think the crime is in in being so worried about being a gobshite that you don't say anything. Mhm. And that what you really need to do is spend a lot of time thinking about what the real sort of value. What are you good at? What can you genuinely put your hand on your heart and say, we do this better than anyone else? Yeah. And then go after that and not sort of trying. Yeah. Don't don't get in the gobshite camp and be like, this will solve all your problems. I see that all the time. People are like, yeah, we've heard we should do benefits oriented copy. So, uh, our marketing software can cure cancer. And it's like, no, yeah, too, too far. But but if you actually sort of. Yeah, what you can't do is paralyse yourself. And I think sometimes we're guilty of this too. We're sort of like, oh, we can't do this thing. We can't prove that we've done this thing. We're not confident that we've done this thing, so we won't shout about it. And so we don't get the opportunity to do the thing. And, and that, you know, equally lying about how good we are at it is a bad idea. You have to sort of strike a middle ground.
I think we've certainly suffered from and probably because I've been the leader of the agency, a lack of confidence and and we've maybe not now, maybe. But certainly in the past, I think we haven't shouted loud enough about the great stuff that we do.
Well, we've talked we.
Felt inferior to people who have, I guess what gone bust and disappeared.
Absolutely. Well, I think we've talked about imposter syndrome a lot on this podcast before, haven't we? I think both of us are sort of struggled with it. Um, I think probably an awful lot of people do, especially intelligent people that evaluate what's going on around them, because it's impossible not to see Gobshites running their mouths about, you know, oh, we give all of our clients like nine thousand percent ROI. Yeah. You know, and be like, oh, shit. Yeah.
I'm failing miserably.
Here. Yeah. I've only managed like ninety. But, you know, it's one of those awful things where I think, you know, at the end of the day, you sort of just have to push yourself through it and be like, right, I'm gonna be bold and I'm gonna tell the truth, but I'm gonna do it in a way that is sort of, you know, promoting me instead of because, yeah, sitting on your hands isn't gonna help.
So being truthful has got mileage. We don't have to fall into the trap that our politicians are falling into. And some businesses are falling into and trying to just overegg it, bullshit their way through and not worry about actually delivering, being truthful and honest. I think being truthful and honest will always find the right audience.
I think so, yeah.
I might be being naive, I don't.
Know. Well, I don't think so. I think you'll find a much smaller audience for sure. But I think that is ultimately the better audience. Absolutely. I was just trying to think, I don't know if I want to make this comment. I'll probably regret this afterwards, but but I think actually one of the people who's really, really, really good at this, and he's a snake and I hate him, but Nigel Farage is weirdly good at doing this. He never actually says anything demonstrably untrue. He draws the wrong conclusions all the time, and he completely fails to offer workable solutions. But he only ever points out things that that land, you know, like he'll say, this is a problem and you'll be like, ah, you know, that is a problem. Do you know what I mean? And I think, you know, people who stick to the truth, not I'm not saying that what he says is, is true in the round, but people who don't go off making wild claims unfortunately, do sort of develop naturally a bit of sort of, I don't know, like gravitas authority, I suppose. Quite quickly you're like, oh, you know, they open their mouth and they speak and you might not agree with them, but you know that there's a kernel of truth in it. And so you listen. And I think that's the real power of that approach, where it's like, if you're never caught out lying outright, you can get away with all sorts of things because people will still listen to you.
Okay. I've, uh, I've got one or two other things on the list, but I think I might just leave them. It's actually something that was on the list last time, which I never got around to. It just doesn't segue with anything we've been talking about today, so I don't think I'll bother.
What is it?
I'm not. I'm not going to tell you.
I'll do it next time.
Well, I'll mention it. I mean, you know, we're getting bombarded by. We can get you leads. We can do your work for you. We help agency leaders, you know, blah, blah, blah. In other words, a lot of bullshit, which is kind of what we've just been talking about. But I think it warrants maybe being included in it does.
And I think unpicking the fact that a lot of clients are getting those same emails is very worthwhile. Yeah.
That's right. Okay, cool. Um, I'll tell you. I'll just end with a little, you know, obviously I'm active in the fixer Boyne Bridge campaign.
Active is an understatement.
Well, uh.
Have you blown anything up yet?
Further down? Not yet. Further down the road. That's me. Arrested now. Police. Police!
You don't get.
Arrested. You use the word blow up. Well, you didn't, but your colleague did in that podcast.
So I think under, uh, under good old child. Starver. It's just a bag over the head, so.
Okay. Is that something Dickensian, I assume? Um, so just down the road from where we live, um, the road was completely flooded right across it because of a blocked drain.
Right.
Okay. It's got nothing to do with digital marketing. So you can switch off now if you want, but it's quite funny. So it's completely blocked. Blocked. So the council came along, put traffic lights up and endeavoured to clear the blockage failed. Um so the, the traffic lights were there for about a week. They failed to fix the blocked drain and left. And, and this, we had a lot of rain at the weekend and and the whole road was flooded right across again. So the farmer, Graham, and his wife Karen, rocked up. And in half an hour, not only did they, um, um, unstick the council's rods that they put up the drain and jammed into the drain and couldn't get them out. He managed to turn them, clear the drain, get the rods out. And while he did that, his wife managed the traffic and it took half an hour. I just thought that was hilarious. Just so funny.
I love the idea that, you know, there were how many council workers?
Oh, quite a few.
So like six.
Traffic lights plus everything.
But I love the idea that they all just sort of like gathered around, got the rods stuck, and then were like, oh, do you know what? We'll just go home. We'll just leave it there.
I know, I know.
Put a pin in it.
I thought it was quite funny.
What is it? I mean, it's funny though, isn't it, because you don't like to. I think people in these jobs, uh, work very hard and are probably quite underappreciated in their own right. I don't know, I don't know the benefit of the doubt.
Or Binmen do. They're great.
But what I find really puzzling about the whole thing is just that there's sort of like general culture of like shoddiness, you know, it's just like, it's sort of okay. It's sort of expected. It's like somebody comes and does a pothole repair and they do it all the time near us. They'll repair a pothole. And within like literally a month, it will be back because they're not a month.
They last that.
Long.
We dream about pothole fixes that last a month. I was last about three days.
And it's just like, why? Yeah, but it's like, you don't even bother complaining about it because that's just the norm now. And I think that's the problem, isn't it? We've just sort of become accustomed to crap like that. I know six people, four hours or half an hour, a farmer and his wife.
Farmer and his wife half an hour and a bit of determination. Anyway, that's enough of this nonsense. Thanks for listening. You've been listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface where we've talked about digital marketing a little bit. A little politics, a little bit stuff. Anyway, if you enjoyed it, tell your friends. And if not, not to listen to it.
Um, if not, sorry.
And we'll be back with another episode quite soon. Bye.