Is Marketing Just A Bunch Of Tools Using A Bunch Of Tools? – Episode 146

So an enquiry came in today. I checked the email address which gave me a clue as to what it was about. So with a minute's research, I could see somebody had been on our website at the time the enquiry came in. So you can put two and two together there. I could see what content they were looking at. I then tracked the person down from their email address to a specific website, and the technology used by the website matched the technology they were looking at on our website. So I joined all the dots together and thought, right, this is the situation they're in. This is what they need. What should I have done? Should I have played dumb and pretended I didn't know what they wanted? And please, could you tell me what you wanted or should I have said to them, I know exactly what you're looking for.

I think there's probably a perfect middle ground. I don't.

So the second time in a week, we're back with the Digital marketing From The Coalface podcast. You recording Leslie? Good. Um.

Maybe a bit of harassing if you'd started without that.

Yeah, I know you would. I kind of like the way that we just kind of slide into this rather than, you know, I mean, the music that Leslie uses. I always enjoy listening to that. Diddle diddle diddle diddle diddle diddle.

Diddle dee dee dee dee dee dee dee dee.

Where's it from?

I don't know. Probably nicked it from somewhere. Did you, Leslie? It would be from a royalty free source. A reputable, royalty free source. Of course, of course, of course. I think we should actually, um, change it. And we should. We should compose it and play it, however badly we play it. We should do that. Yeah. Right. Compose it, play it, write the theme tune. Sing the theme tune. This Little Britain was that Little Britain, I think. You can't you can't put that on the telly anymore can they? It's like. So it's so politically incorrect despite only being twenty years old. You know, we're not talking love thy neighbour here. We're talking about like, something that's kind of, you know, quite recent, really. There's like, hardly any of it. You can be Little Britain.

I think Little Britain was right on the cusp, wasn't it? It was like the very end of the, you know, it being okay to do what you like. Yeah. Well, just just being able to, like, punch down like that. It's not really. Yeah. People don't like it anymore, do they?

No. I've got quite a few things on my list. And one of the things just to pick up on, on a, on a thing we discussed last time and possibly even the time before that was we were talking a lot about honesty. So last time, the time before last, I think, you know, Rich popped up. And then last time, um, Rich and Jonathan were talking politics now obviously popped up, um, when it comes to honesty. And it was funny because right after the podcast, um, I was on the BBC website because obviously they have everything on there is honest and true. Uh, and I noticed there was a headline call for food influencers to post more honest in quotes, more honest reviews.

There are degrees of honesty.

Do you think that's what. That's what.

Struck.

Me. I know, I know, I know, you don't think. But that's what struck me as we've just been talking about honesty. And then there this thing was on the BBC website saying like, could could food. What was it? Food influencers. I see the word influencer. It absolutely grinds my gears.

Where have we come as a society when that's like a front page story on the who cares food.

Again on I think it was on the BBC website where a Lake District influencer was, was, was talking was like encouraging people not to go up striding edge in flip flops sort of thing, you know?

They did. Her influence extends to the borders of the Lake District. And when she walks past them, people are like, who are you? Yeah, you've got you've got nothing to say about this. Yeah.

I know, and I suppose like the whole idea of honesty and influencers or dishonesty and influence is all very much intertwined, isn't it? Because is it not the case that a lot of influencers are fundamentally dishonest? Just just basically grifters trying to make a quid?

Do you know, I think it's a really tough one that I do.

Think it is.

Yeah, I do. I really don't know where I sit on it, because I think there's an awful lot of people who are probably very honest in the sense that they will only represent brands or claim to like things that they actually like. Yeah, I think it just gets very muddy and very gray. And I think the important thing is, is the perception of them that they're honest. And I think that is unequivocably. No. Yeah. And I think that's just an unfortunate reality. As soon as you say, oh, I'm getting a kickback from this, people automatically think, well, that's why you're doing it then.

Yeah, I know what you mean.

Yeah.

I, um, I've got a view on it, but before I give you the view, here are some messages. If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, join our club. This podcast is brought to you by Club Biscuits, the chocolatey, minty orangey biscuity biscuit.

You're not gonna get a kickback for that. That was terrible. It's a mug.

Do you even remember that jingle? No. Oh, I didn't think you would. I mean, some people listening to this might say, if you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit, join a club. There's some clubs in the biscuit tin, by the way. I hadn't told you before because if you you normally were there.

They'd all be gone.

No, not necessarily all of them. But you'd have raided it, wouldn't you? You would have had a moment and thought, oh, I could just go for those chocolatey club biscuits.

And the problem, of course, with club biscuits in general is that you can eat it. You can't just eat one.

You can generally eat six.

Yeah. And it sort of seems wrong.

Custard creams are like that.

Yeah.

You can't have one custard cream. No. Right. What's on your list?

Um, I have two things. Really? Oh, God.

I don't know why we bother Leslie. Do you?

You've got a long list.

Yeah, thankfully.

Well, you know, I just. The thing is, David, you're so reliable and so dependable I just assume you'll do the heavy lifting.

You're the only person that would say that about me. Reliable and dependable.

Oh, dear. Um, the first one actually is an interesting one. It's sort of, um, something that came up a little bit today. Um, but it's been coming up a lot over the last few days, which is just this whole idea of attention spans. I can see yours ending now. Um, no, it's just this whole idea that people don't engage with long form content and.

Well, I'll need more.

Well, so this is a thing that gets pedaled all the time at the moment. You know, it's the age of short form video. Yeah. People's attention spans are shrinking. Yeah. Everyone has like digital ADHD. Nobody can concentrate. If you're a good marketer, you'll sort of go along with that and you'll produce thirty second bite sized content. And if you produce anything more than that, then you're an idiot. Is the general sort of, um, you're looking at me like I'm mental, but that is what people say.

Say that again.

Everything.

I'll listen this time because my attention nor genuinely. I was thinking about something, know something related to the podcast, but my mind had wandered off and I didn't actually hear anything that you said.

Successful episode. Just that people keep regurgitating this idea that all content needs to be very short to hold people's attention. And if you are a successful, intelligent marketer, you have to produce short content.

Um, well, that is, that is clearly completely not true.

It is completely not true. Right. And, and it's come up a few times. It came up in a meeting that we were in a couple of weeks ago. What did, uh, the idea that. Granddad. Um, no, I mean, it came up in that meeting, didn't it? Because that meeting, that meeting.

The don't mention that meeting, that meeting.

Um, you know, somebody said, oh, but surely we don't need all these words on the page like people.

Oh yeah. Yeah. But that comes up in every meeting.

Website's.

Got too much content on it. Just about every new client that you talk to until they start to understand how this stuff works, you know, says that.

So I've heard this quite a few times over the last few weeks. I've read a couple of things being like the only people still producing long form content are idiots, and it's just what it's, what it's done is started to really, um, irritate and also like, uh, I think it's just really obnoxious advice that a lot of people do take to heart because it sounds very reasonable. You can say something like, oh, people's attention spans are getting shorter. You can tell because TikTok's popular, therefore produce less content, produce less things. And people look at that and think, oh, well, that sounds easy and it sounds intelligent. So I'll do that from now on. And it is genuinely terrible advice on so many levels.

Well, you mentioned TikTok and you know, I'm a fan. I think some great educational content on there. And one of the things I found myself doing if I'm on TikTok and a video starts and I can see from the little bar that it's short, I kind of move on because I think, oh, this is interesting, but they can't possibly ever have anything good to say in such a short video, because I can see the bar rocketing across because it's a thirty second clip or something, So I just move on. And if I see something on TikTok and they've got me interested and I can see like, I've been listening for a little while now and the bar's hardly moved, this is going to be a good few minutes, which I know isn't necessarily long form content, but in a TikTok world, it kind of is. Suddenly they've got me and I'm a bit more interested.

Well, that's the thing I find really interesting, right? So like, first of all, you need to feel like you're going to learn something. You need to feel like it's going to be a decent amount of content, right? Nobody thinks, oh, I'm going to settle in and be educated in a minute. It's not going to happen. The other thing I think is really interesting is like TikTok have a ten minute video format now, right? Um, and that was sort of like the antithesis of what they were about to begin with. Everything was very quick, rapid short videos. Podcasts are podcasts are really long. Yeah. Lots of podcasts are really long. Films are getting longer and longer. Yeah. On average. Yeah, absolutely. That's the thing. Like I think.

Did you just make that up.

Know.

To sound authoritative?

No. You did, you did. I sounded authoritative.

Yeah. And that's why I knew it was wrong. It's true.

It's one hundred percent true. Leslie will back me up. She's. She's into films. No. The average length of films is just sort of increased over time. And I think this idea that people have a short attention span just because.

Okay. Can I challenge that? Have they got a shorter extension? A short that's not fire service stuff. Short extension. A type of ladder. Uh, have they got a short. Attention span? Have they got a short attention span for stuff that's boring? So if they're at work and they're trying to solve a problem at work, are they looking for quick, give me the answer. I just want to move on. This is boring. I'm not really interested. And when they're not at work and they want to be entertained, I mean, for example, for entertainment, I'll play golf now. Generally a game of golf on our course. You know, a steady pace in the summer will be three to three and a half hours in the winter, two and a half to three hours. And for that, three hours, I'm not thinking, oh, I wish this was over. Even if I'm playing badly, I'm not thinking, oh, which is usually I'm not thinking, I wish this is all this was over. I'm thoroughly engaged and enjoying the process. I'm going down to Cumbria at the weekend to go walking with with my cousin, possibly cousins, and we'll probably be out walking for five hours and it'll be great that it's five hours, you know? It won't be like, oh, I wish this was over, but like, I'm doing a sponsored walk again in May, which is a long sponsored walk forty miles. And you are by the last sort of.

The last.

fourteen miles, the last ten miles, certainly you are. I just want this to be over. I'm hating every second of this. So I wonder in a content context, if you're enjoying it, you want it to last. If it's just like some utility content that's helping you solve a problem at work, you just want it quick, snappy, get it over with. Cut to the cut to the chase.

See, I sort of agree with you and I get exactly where you're coming from, but I think the distinction between work and leisure is a little arbitrary. I think that part of the problem is that people go out to produce workaday content in a professional context that is very, very boring. And then rightly so. You open an article that, you know, if you got an article tomorrow, if you saw an article pop up in a feed somewhere tomorrow, and it was like, oh, um, you know, ten ways to make sure that you're engaging with your accountants properly to get maximum, maximum value out of the relationship. People are, this is going to be fucking dreadful. And you'll skim it and then you'll close it after five or 10s. Um, but if that article was genuinely engaging, interesting. It had like a personal anecdote at the beginning and it sucked you in and it told you a story. You would probably read it till the end.

Story is the key, isn't it?

Yeah. This is the thing. I don't think it has anything to do with what the content's about. I think it is literally just. Is it actually engaging delivery? Yeah. Is it entertaining? Is it fun? Is it.

Here's the thing. I've got it on my list to talk about the, the HubSpot ecosystem launch yesterday for HubSpot partners like us. And there was some good information in there, but the presenters were all clearly reading off a script.

Right?

It was awful.

Yeah.

I lasted maybe just over an hour of a two hour thing. I just gave up on it. I just thought, this is dreadful. This is predominantly people reading.

Yeah. But there are. This is the thing. And I think this is really what I'm trying to get at. There are, I'm sure, sort of corporate launch events, if you like, like that, that are genuinely good, that people will sit there and be like, wow, that felt really cool. Like I learned something interesting. The presenters were enthusiastic and knowledgeable. And that's the that's the distinction we're making here. What we're talking about is like, shit delivery, excellent delivery. And it doesn't matter what it's about. And this whole idea that like, oh, well, because a lot of people have produced some dreadful nine to twelve minute reads that nobody's engaged with, that means that anything longer than five hundred words is now bullshit or, you know, because people produce some really dreadful sixty minute podcasts, that means that audiences only want a two minute podcast. It's not.

I think our most downloaded podcast is the very is the longest podcast we ever did. It's about an hour and a half with Bob Keeler. Yeah. Now, partly because Bob Keeler's an interesting guy and lots of people like Bob Keeler. So they tuned into it and downloaded it. But yeah, it wasn't, it wasn't, um, a forty minute podcast dragged out to an hour and a half. It was an hour and a half podcast that could have been three hours.

Well, it's an interesting thing as well because it's also a podcast, ironically, about storytelling, where mostly what Bob does is tell stories and it's really engaging. And I think that's the thing. It's just this whole idea that you, you know, the problem is in the length or the format or the style rather than that the problem is with the content itself. Yeah. And I think it's just one of those marketer things where they're sort of looking at something and saying, well, this isn't successful. Oh, it must be that we wrote too much. Not that what we wrote was crap.

You've got to strike the balance, haven't you? If we you know, I play in a band, as you know, if we play a gig and we don't engage with the audience, we just play a song. I wipe the sweat from my brow like most drummers, have to take a sip of water. Put my glass down. Go. One two three four. The guys have got a list of songs one, two, three, four. And we play another song. You know, in some instances you might get away with it. It might be okay. People are not going to come away.

Thinking, oh.

See the gig where we're engaged with people, we tell a little story about the song. We say, somebody want to come play a tambourine, come up, come on the stage, come and join in and get and get involved in this. Involve the people and have a kind of a really good narrative, a really good dialogue, rather not narrative dialogue with with them. And suddenly it's, it turns into something way better even. And we can play the songs just as well in either, in either of those two scenarios. But the one where we're engaging with people and delivering in a, delivering everything in a, in a kind of inclusive, interesting way. It's always going to work and it works. I've seen some bands who are in this area who are truly awful, but actually quite good at engaging with people, and people go, oh, such and such a band. They're so good and I like not their rubbish, but I can see why. Why they get away with it. Because naturally they do it. They engage really well.

Yeah, yeah. Well that's kiss his whole career in a nutshell. Fireworks, explosions, fire. Don't listen to the crap music, but no.

Shiny thing.

Yeah, actually, music's a really good point of comparison because one of my favourite bands is Blue Oyster Cult. I've seen Blue Oyster Cult live. They were terrible.

I haven't I haven't seen them live. One of the first LPs I ever got was a Blue Oyster cult album that didn't have Don't Fear the Reaper on it.

I've seen the remnants of them live. I don't know who's still in the band or what.

The guy that used to tune the guitars, probably.

But they were terrible. Like objectively, they stood on stage and played their music and it was boring. You'll see loads of bands like that where the music is brilliant, the presentation is terrible. And so you come away from the concert thinking, that was a bad concert. Does that mean they should go and knock three songs off their set list? No. You know, fundamentally there's a much deeper underlying problem. The problem is that whatever you're writing just isn't landing with people. And I think more and more brands are sort of doing this thing where they just experiment with different types of content. You know, they're like, oh, well, nobody reads our blog, so we should make videos instead. Oh, nobody's watching our videos. So we'll make podcasts instead. And it's like, you can't jump from thing to thing. You actually have to sit down and work out what.

Consistency is the key isn't it to a lot of these things.

And.

Keep doing.

It? Yeah. What it is that's going to work. I mean, it's not to bang our own drum, but you know, you look at the engagement rates on some of the content that we put out. And it's sort of nine, twelve minute average time on page. And you think, well, there's no way that there's a general attention span problem. And some of it's also about really boring stuff like how to clean oil pipes. So, so it's not the subject matter either. It does literally just come down to like how engaging you make it. I think a lot of the time. So yeah.

So what was the underlying question or the thing that you put forward for discussion?

Just this idea that.

Short form content is not the be all and end all and long form content is not dead.

Yeah, absolutely. And just the idea that people's attention spans are not actually shrinking, I think people are just being more selective about what they engage with because like you say, you'll spend five hours doing something, but if it's not interesting, you'll spend 20s because you know, there's something more interesting to jump onto. Yeah. And I think maybe in the past, you know, if you had a, I don't know, like a oil and gas industry catalog and it was all terribly boring. But you had an alternative, you would sit and read it. But nowadays there's a million and one better things to do with your time.

Okay, so the takeaway from that long form content is not dead.

Yeah.

Okay. Um, swapping around a little bit, I did mention this in the last podcast because I had it on my list, but, um, I just thought it was, we'd already sort of been hanging on for quite a while, so I stopped. Um, and.

I do love that word hanging.

Yeah. Evocative hanging on for a while. So I moved it. I did mention it, but I moved it. So we are constantly, as are probably people listening to this bombarded with, you know, the cold call, the cold calls and the cold emails, we'll get you leads, um, in, in our, in our case, in a digital agency, you know, we'll get you leads. Yeah, we're a lead gen agency. We've kind of got that covered and then we, we'll do the work for you, you know, in other words, they can't get work. They can't win work. They can't tell a good story. They can't get, um, good search rankings. They can't tell good stories. And so they basically pester companies like us who are and say like, like, give us the work to do. We'll do it for cheaper, you know, get rid of all your people and, and pay us to do it instead and you'll make more money. Um, we also get, well, I don't know if you do as well. Probably we get these, a lot of these, you know, we help agency leaders, you know, make their agency more profitable, yada, yada, yada. There's a lot of that stuff going around. So basically that was it. It was like, you know, we'll get you loads of leads, um, stuff. and we'll do all your work for you. Stuff. And again, I think that's kind of specific to probably specific to the kind of thing that we do or because of the kind of thing that we do. But then the whole kind of, you know, somebody who, who, you know, started an agency and got it to ten million and sold it. And now flogs their expertise.

To.

Help you do whatever with your agency, because.

Everyone knows that running one successful company immediately qualifies you to run any number of companies in any industry. Mhm.

And they may well be good at what they do, but there's a lot of them. I think it's like, you know, there was it still is, but there was certainly a, um, a preponderance of life coaches at networking events. I used to go to people set themselves up as life coaches.

And like career coaching.

Yeah. All that kind of thing. And I feel like there's a whole there's a massive movement now. I think there were some pioneers of the whole kind of agency growth mentoring type thing. Um, I mean, I worked with Mike Lieberman, who was, who was with square two marketing for a long time. Got a lot of time for Mike. Um, and he helped us a lot. Uh, very practical, down to earth, no fluff. He was still in in amongst it at the time. He was still growing his own agency. But, you know, it's the usual thing, like someone could probably be, could, could possibly be a good piano teacher if they were two months ahead of you in the process of learning to play the piano, because they know how hard it is. And they can relate in very simple language because that's all they understand.

They've just gone through the breakthrough and they know how to recreate it.

Yeah, that sort of thing.

Yeah, absolutely.

I've always found that I've learned something. Like my, my learning has, has accelerated if I'm teaching somebody else as well. Yeah. Even, you know, even though they're, they're maybe not far behind where I am with whatever skill it is. So I don't know, I, I, it's not really a kind of, there's not much to discuss about it. I was just really interested to see whether you've noticed all of these kind of, we get you leads, we do your work, we'll help you grow your agency type outreach going on at the moment, and lots of it.

There's a lot of it. I think it's quite interesting because I think it's very similar to like scam emails, like private scam emails, you know, people being like, oh, I'm a Nigerian prince. Yeah, you can trust me. I've definitely got a million pounds worth of gold in a bank account somewhere. Um, it is very much the same thing. I mean, I think the one thing I'll say is that all of this generally, what it comes down to is that they're going to outsource to a, a low cost economy, um, somewhere overseas. And, uh.

It's not my phone ringing.

It is your phone ringing. Yeah.

Um, it's not ringing on my watch, which is odd.

What I find particularly confusing about it is that nobody with a decent idea of how business works thinks that's a good idea. Like, I don't understand who the target market for those emails are. Like, who is sat there thinking, oh yeah, do you know what? Actually, I could fire all of my team, employ somebody who I have no control over and no visibility over in a different country to do my work for me. And then like, what's the end game there? Like you make a bit of cash in the short term until people realise that the work's crap. And then yeah, I know, I know, I just the whole thing just smacks of, I don't know, a very desperate sort of early nineties email scam tactic. I don't know.

It does feel spammy, scammy. And there probably are some good people behind some of these messages that come in. I get a lot of LinkedIn requests from coaches and we I'll help you grow your agency types.

I think it's a really, it's a really difficult thing as well, isn't it? Because we're sort of. I think we're on the cusp of this sort of. I think people out with digital digital marketing look at digital marketers like this as well. You know, they're like, oh, well, if you can grow your own business, you know, if you're, if you're so good at selling product, why don't you sell your own product? Or do you know what I mean? Like that sort of logic. Yeah. And so like, it's, and it's a really tricky.

Short answer to that is we are good at it. We do.

Yeah. But but but and, you know, it's interesting too, because there are some very legitimate, um, services in our industry, Sales enablement tools. I'm thinking of something that somebody that we spoke to quite recently that set some stuff up for us on a, I don't know if I can mention brand names on here.

Can I lead forensics?

Yeah, lead forensics. There we go. So tools like lead forensics where it's like it is a legitimate service. And to some people it's a very useful service, but it feels scammy as hell. It feels like some sort of weird sort of scheme. Yeah. Oh, you know, you give us access to all of your, you know, we'll put some code on your website and then we can tell you exactly who's visited it and when they visited. And that feels horrible. Um, but that's a legitimate service that does occasionally work for people. Yeah. I think it's often really difficult for people outside the industry to see where that line is and to sort of separate us from the scammers. It's tricky, and I think it's not helped by the fact that an awful lot of agencies do outsource to low cost economies and just not tell the client.

Yeah, I guess so. It's a model that some use. Um, certainly some send like, um, maybe some of the lower value work like, like the team in the UK will do the high value work, but they won't turn other work away. They'll have a team in the low cost economy who will churn out the low value work for them, and they make a couple of quid on that as well.

Maybe one of the things I remember when I first started freelancing, one of the first clients that I sort of won randomly through a platform, it was Upwork, I think was this guy who he was in Pakistan, and he owned a decent web development business. And he was like, basically, I am desperate to penetrate the UK market because I have this team of really great developers. We churn out really good websites. We can do it much cheaper than a UK agency could. Can you help us? And I remember having a very frank discussion with him. He was like, oh, Alex, I'm ringing you from the back of my car. You know, he's sort of being driven around in his Rolls-Royce or whatever. And I just remember having a really frank and slightly awkward discussion with him where I was like, look, it doesn't really matter how good you developers are, because the perception is always going to be that by outsourcing the work overseas, you're going to get low quality work back and there's nothing you can really do to combat that. I think it's quite an interesting thing. You know, it's just the story there about low cost economies is everyone just assumes the work will be shit. Mhm. Um, and whether that's true or not, I don't know, but it's. Yeah, it's an interesting one. Is it?

Well, I mean, I brought it up because it was, it was on my list and I'd mentioned it last time. And it just, it felt feels like it's kind of reaching like a tsunami of this stuff.

It's just I mean, do you think it is something to do with like where we are economically or but the beginning of the year maybe do do they all come out of hibernation like the scammers?

Maybe. Um, I don't know. I think, you know, when they're doing outreach, they're obviously looking for work and that's fine. All power to them. You know.

I do think one of the things I have noticed is that it does seem to be sort of correlated with our search rankings. I will say that, you know, when our search rankings are generally pretty good, but occasionally, for whatever reason, we'll sort of like jump up a little bit on something that's quite high traffic. And then suddenly, like the next day, you'll just get loads of spam. And it's, I do think there's some a weird relationship there where like, if you become visible for the right.

Certainly the requests for, you know, we'd love to put some content on your website with a link back to our website. Can we have a conversation about that? Those kind of requests, lots of them coming through now. And that is probably to do with visibility and our own authority sort of gradually improving, um, etc.. But um, yeah, I suppose.

There we go. Maybe the volume of spam is a success metric. Maybe if you're getting lots, you're doing well. Who knows?

I think, I think there is an element of, of, uh, of that if you're, if you're getting attention, even if it's attention from spammers, you're obviously being found. So yeah, there is an element of that. Um, go on, what have you got? You said you had a couple of things on your list.

Um, well, the other one I think is probably going to cross over with yours. All right.

Have you been reading my notes upside down like I know you do?

You sort of told me what you wanted to talk about AI in this podcast, did I? Yeah. You did. Don't play dumb.

Uh oh well, yeah, maybe I yeah, Because I'd said that AI is at the, you know, front and center of the HubSpot ecosystem upgrades. What's wrong? Oh. That cat. Yeah. That cat. Sorry. He's a streetwise cat.

Good cat. He knows to look.

He just went over there like, nearly got run over. So thought I better wash my face. Like cats do.

Like as a cat.

Yeah.

It was just, it was quite an interesting thing. Sort of a little bit meta. Um, I basically asked Gemini to come up with a, um, podcast topics. I thought, this will be funny, this will be a laugh. And the first one that came up with were exactly what you'd expect it to be. It was like short form video domination, creating engaging content in on TikTok and the death of third party cookies. And I was, like I said to Gemini, this is dreadful. Please try to be a little bit more original. And then it was like, oh.

Did it apologise? It did. Yeah.

They said, I'm sorry. I'll dig deeper. And then it and then it said, um, you could talk about the algorithmic echo chamber and decentralised marketing and the attention recession. And I was like, this all sounds a bit wanky. Can you can you, can you come up with something that's like, actually interesting? And then I made the mistake of saying to it, I want something really off the wall.

Go on then.

Just the digital archaeology of forgotten platforms. And it suggests in bullet points underneath that you should forget mainstream platforms and take to posting on abandoned forums and defunct social networks.

Why would you do that, exactly?

Absolute nonsense. Uh, sensory marketing about how we should leverage, uh, how do you say that word smells awful.

Factory or a factory?

Is it go maybe, uh, in digital marketing?

I don't think I said that. Right, but anyway, go on.

Impossible. And then my absolute favorite one, the marketing of silence. What about the power of absence? What if you didn't market? What if the best marketing is no marketing at all? And then I closed.

That's a fairly exclusive brand, isn't it, that we do that, you know, we don't market. We don't actually sell anything.

You won't see our logo anywhere.

Um, and you'll see all our stuff at the job center. Yeah.

Um, I don't know, it's just a funny thing though, isn't it? Because I've had some funny experiences with AI over the last week. For example, in the last podcast, you said that one of the most useful things about it was for note taking. And I broadly agree, I think it's great that we can go into a meeting and you can sort.

Especially when you're rubbish at taking notes like I am, because I'd rather listen than take notes.

And it promises you that what it will do is it will faithfully transcribe the notes, and then it will summarise them neatly for you. And you think, yeah, that's great. You know, I've glanced at the summaries a few times. They seem right. They broadly sort of detail what was discussed in the meeting. I thought, fantastic, this is really useful. Now, I don't have to do it until I actually sat down to use the transcript from a conversation to write some actual content. And what I found is that the the huge middle section, i.e. the important detail where the subject matter expert had been explaining in great detail how is very complicated. Um, plugging yeah thing worked, and the AI had just sort of fabricated some random details about something completely different. And it didn't make any sense. It wasn't accurate, it wasn't right. And it's just that whole, I mean, those AI prompts are sort of a joke, but I think they also point to like a really underlying problem with this stuff, which is just that beneath the sort of guise of sensible, normal, useful content, it's absolute garbage. The actual detail is shit. And it's, you know.

You and I have, you know, we've spoken about AI a lot and we've, we've, we've, you know, we've been quite candid that we, we think, you know, some of the tools that we use, you know, the AI is adding a lot of value. It's good. Um, but there is this danger, very simple example. And I did relate this to you earlier. I was working on a content template, and I need to be careful about about the number of words in each section. Because although the content's got to be good, it's also got to sit inside a pre-described. Very nice design. So there's no point in me writing three hundred words when in this has to be has to fit where, you know, for seventy words sort of thing. So I was, I was kind of doing that and, and I was using a, you know, one of the counter websites, you know, word counter websites. And until I discovered that, you know, we can do all that now inside of Google Docs, obviously. Um, yeah, I know I'm an idiot. Um, right. So I thought, oh, I'll ask Gemini. So I put a paragraph into Gemini and I said, tell me how many words are in this paragraph. Gemini came back very quickly, very confidently, which is the point you often make. There are thirty two words in there. It's like, I don't think there are. And I used the word counter. And sure enough, there's like forty words in there. So I went, I, I went back to Gemini. I said, I don't think that's right. Is it? And Gemini said something like, oh, I'll just go and check. And they put every single word in quotes on a separate line and came up with, oh, actually, no, there are forty. I'm really sorry about that. I got that wrong, but I am still learning. I was like, I asked you to count how many words were in a forty word paragraph and you got it considerably wrong.

Which is my favorite point about it because everyone, everyone does this weird thing with AI where they give it the benefit of the doubt, just like a hilarious degree. You know, if you had a coworker in this space and you were like, oh, can you just really quickly count how many words are here? And they got it wrong. You would be like, hmm, maybe I shouldn't ever trust you again to do it. Maybe just go home and don't come back. But, but when it's AI well, oh, well, you know, it's we can work alongside it. It's like a member of the team. You just have to understand its limitations. It's like if a member of your team was that limited, you would absolutely fire them. Like it's just ridiculous, the whole thing. But you know, people love it. I mean, like you say that HubSpot thing. I mean, they're all in on this idea that AI is the sort of.

And they might be right. I mean, I'll be careful what I say because HubSpot, when it was it was the rollout of the ecosystem to partners and HubSpot. Yeah. I think it might be a bit tongue in cheek, but HubSpot are like, oh, please don't share this information with anybody else. This is just for the partner ecosystem and all the rest of it. Fair enough. Whatever. I'm sure if Sharpspring really want to know what's going on inside HubSpot, they'll be getting exactly the same information as me, you know, and, and Pardo and all the rest of them. So, you know, but being somewhat respectful, if you like, of them saying that. But the overriding thing I got from that was, yes, the AI is, is front and center for every aspect of Hubspot's ecosystem across all of the different hubs, whether it be the CRM, the sales hub, the content hub, or anything else. But that isn't really what my takeaway from that session was. My takeaway from that session was more about how excited the the partners, we're HubSpot partners. And as you know, um, as listeners know, I think, um, how excited the partners were about these announcements that HubSpot were making. You know, we've got a situation where HubSpot, like free of charge until we sell something and get a little bit of commission, we basically sell HubSpot for HubSpot. We're not employed by HubSpot. We sell, we sell these tools to, to some of our clients, uh, because we believe that they are the right tools for the job, etc.. But what, what it felt like, and I wondered if there's, um, there's a danger that the tools themselves become the purpose, you know, the tools themselves are, are what the whole thing's about instead of like what it's really all about. Now you said something interesting and I won't steal your thunder. Can you remember what you said?

I can't remember.

It was to do with. It was to do with and it may I think it was HubSpot Spot on the one hand saying, like, we're going to leverage AI and on the other hand saying, but we need to be authentic. Yeah. It's like, what do you want to be? Do you want, do you want to fauna in by getting AI to do everything? Or do you want to be authentic and actually be human?

Yeah.

Which is.

It? There's a weird thing at play here as well where like I was reading, um, you know, the drum magazine, um, you do know the drum magazine. Everybody knows drum magazine. Um, so they recently had a piece in there by, uh, Disney's head of marketing and she, as you'd expect her to, if I say to you, the, the Disney's head of marketing wrote an opinion piece. You're right. All right. It's going to be something about warm storytelling and engaging audiences and that sort of thing. I do think there's a real danger that as an industry, we sort of commoditise this idea of, you know, warmth, personalisation, authenticity and turn it into a sort of bullet point list and then say, okay, now AI can do that for us. Like those are just buzzwords, all that stuff that people talk about on, on, you know, the kind of slick marketing and advertising magazines and warmth. Engage your audience, tell them a story that really resonates. Like none of that really means anything unless you go and actually apply it and dig out those stories and tell them and, you know, HubSpot are really guilty of this as well. They're like, well, the number one way to get more leads is to tell authentic stories. Oh, and by the way, here's a tool that tells really inauthentic stories, and we'd really like you to start using that. And it's like, well, you know, people are just regurgitating soundbites for the sake of it instead of actually digging in and thinking about what they're saying. And this whole idea that marketing can be both this sort of like deeply personal thing, but also heavily commoditised, really quick, efficient, uh, can deliver good ROI. I just, yeah, I really struggle with it. I do, and I think the, the way that people like HubSpot talk about it, like you say, I mean, sometimes HubSpot, I like HubSpot. It's a great tool. Sometimes their brand feels a little bit like Herbalife or one of those like multilevel marketing. It's like, if you're not drinking the Kool-Aid and like giving them big thumbs up and saying, oh, this Kool-Aid is delicious. HubSpot, there's something wrong.

I guess one of the things, I mean, there are some clever people who work at work at HubSpot, you know, or, or Marquette or any of these organisations. But, you know, I'm sat opposite a young man, and these organisations are predominantly populated by young people who've never grown a business, never done the hard yards. They've just been indoctrinated by the big corp that owns these organisations, told to go out and evangelise and sell it. And by the way, if you manage to flog it, you will pay you handsomely for doing it. Yeah, I, I just worry that it's like I'm going back to the idea. It's like, it's like tools for the tools sake sort of thing instead of because let's face it, we are working with some fantastic organisations who've been around since God was in short pants. They're, they're great companies. They do great things. They make lots of money and they don't use any of these tools. Now, the argument might be, oh yeah, but if they were, they'd make even more money. Well, maybe, maybe not, you know, but but these tools are there to help make our life easier. And, you know, we love these things. We use a lot of the marketing automation tools and tools that are, you know, HubSpot because we're HubSpot partners, we use HubSpot tools. Uh, you know, we like all this stuff, but we're not, we don't like it to the exclusion of all common sense and think that it's, it's like, because I think that's a problem that HubSpot had in the early days is that it promised to automate your marketing and everything else. And forgot to mention that you still need some clever people to do the clever bit. All the tool does is deliver the stuff.

And that's exactly where.

And I wonder, like, are they trying to get to the point now where you don't even need the clever people anymore? Because the AI will do the clever bit. And that's where there's a danger that we come unstuck.

There's a I think that is genuinely the desire. Yeah. I think what people realised is that, like you say, you can create very clever tools. It still needs human input. It it still needs somebody to tell a good story. And now they're desperately scrambling. And let's be honest, like LLMs, you know, when you dig under the bonnet and I won't get into the nitty gritty detail of it here, but it's predictive text. It's predictive text with a lot of computational power behind it. And the idea that predictive text could tell a fantastic story about a brand that really lands and resonates with people is farcical, but they are desperate to push this narrative because it neatly cuts out the need for people to actually take time out of their busy day and sit down and think, what does my business really mean? You know, why do people care about buying from us? What are my values? And well, just type a prompt into HubSpot and it'll tell me what, what should my mission vision value statement be? And the day that AI writes your mission vision value statement for you, utterly fucked. Just walk out and walk out and throw the keys down the drain like forget about it.

So the ability to use the tools still isn't the clever bit. And I think there's a danger that that people think learning to use the tools is the clever bit. Yeah. It's not. I don't think it is.

You see that a lot people you know, there are agencies out there that are experts at HubSpot onboarding. And they'll help you configure very complicated workflows and they'll automate a bunch of stuff. And then they'll be like, yeah, like we've, we've modernised, we've digitised your marketing and it's like, well, you've made some, some basic tasks more efficient and that's great. But like the actual overarching strategy and the ideas still have to come from somewhere. And I think, yeah, I think people have got very wrapped up, but I think it's because it's very easy. It's very easy to become an expert in a tool. It's very difficult to become an expert at marketing. And, you know, there's a nice sort of like inroad there where you're like, well, I feel dead clever because I know how this I mean, I've been there too. I mean, when I first learned to use AdWords and I was like, wow, you know, I'm really clever. I can use this very complicated platform that other people find baffling. And then you realise that actually, you know, the ability to like, know how a campaign is structured or how to build an ad does not equate to success at all. And I think some people just don't either don't want to grapple with that or find it easier not to. Mhm.

Mhm.

I mean, back to the car analogy, though. One thing I will say is it's a little bit it reminds me a little bit of how, uh, people are with Ferrari, for example. You know, people will tell you that they love Ferraris having never owned one. People will wear Ferrari hats and tell you all the wonderful things about Ferrari. They've never sat in and never driven. And if you talk to an actual Ferrari driver, they're like, uh, it's a pain in the ass. Yeah, right. You know, the thing I want it to do? Take me from A to B, never really happens. So.

But like Land Rover drivers.

Well, you know, only an idiot would buy a Land Rover. Yeah.

I'm reading a great book just now, which you'd enjoy if you haven't already read it, called the, uh, there's Doug and Kathy, um, called, uh, the Choice Factory.

I have not read it.

So I think you'd enjoy it. Um, it's I say ready? I'm listening to it because I like, I like audiobooks.

I can't read, I'm sorry.

I can't read. I can only listen. Yeah. Uh, but it kind of was the was. One of the points I was going to make was, you know, relating to your. Well, I think you were kind of saying about like received wisdom and, you know, people sort of drinking the Kool-Aid sort of thing. And, and that book has got some absolutely stonking examples of that. I'm not, I'm not going to kind of steal the thunder of the book and claim these are anything like my ideas or there's a, there was a really good piece around. Um. Oh, no, what did the made up a word and I can't I wish I'd written it down. I can't really it's basically people see what they want to see. So I can't remember the word they used, but it. Someone will listen to that.

Sort of selective blindness thing.

Yeah. Well, he was talking about confirmation bias and then they were talking about selective seeing. He might have even been selective seeing. I don't know, I can't remember something like that. But there was, um, there was a researcher who had basically come up with this theory that um, companies with purpose succeed, whereas companies who haven't got purpose don't succeed and backed it all up with a bunch of statistics and everything else. And one of the things that the choice factor does, it just completely picks it apart. But what was interesting was people like, I think it was like Martin Sorrell and like really well known gurus completely bought into this thing, you know, but when, when you actually pick apart the data that the guy used to support his thesis, it was complete horseshit. They never absolutely didn't exist at all. And this again, it's almost like full, full circle back to our honesty, dishonesty, etc.. You know, it's almost like because, because I'm reading, um, I'm reading another book, uh, you're listening to another book, um, called um, or May contain lies, which is, uh, by Alex Edmunds, uh, which is about data and, and how people manipulate data to support their thirty bob theories and, and tell lies basically. So, you know, between that and the choice factory and that, you know, it's kind of like it just makes you question everything. Yeah. And like what we were talking about, you know, honesty, whether it's politics or business and everything else. And like the stuff we were talking about around HubSpot where, you know, these very young people who have been completely indoctrinated by these big companies are telling us how wonderful HubSpot is and how they're going to support us on our journey to make to sell their products and make money from HubSpot and all the rest of it. And I don't know, I mean, it's just I was, you know, what was quite surprising was the actual number of users or companies using HubSpot. I'm not going to quote the actual numbers in case I get it wrong, but it wasn't as big as you might think.

No.

You know, it was, it was, um, I was quite surprised. You know, there's still obviously you could argue there's a lot of growth potential, I don't know. But, um.

Yeah, I think it's.

All been, it's also kind of turned into a bit of a ramble that's probably.

Well, I don't know. I think there's something quite interesting there. And I think a lot of it is about this whole idea that if things sound intuitive or they sound correct, you just sort of automatically buy into them. And I think some very clever and quite sinister people understand how to leverage that very well. If you can make something sound common sense, and then you can back it up with some data that realistically nobody's going to dig into because nobody's got time to do that. You can sort of wing it. And I think there is a real danger. I think it's really hard to spot when that's happening, but I see it all the time in our industry, especially because tools are almost always sold on the back of some sort of percentage increase, you know, or.

Making your life easier or it'll make like, you know, you'll be able. I mean, one of the ones I saw something to do with AI and Wix, and they more or less said, you could just have like the website of your dreams up and running in like five minutes.

Five minutes. Yeah, absolutely.

And you're like, okay. Yeah, really? Yeah. Okay. Maybe.

And people will do this all the time. They'll make some sort of like really broad brush claim that yeah, if you say it confidently, people will take it at face value and think, oh, there must be some statistics behind that. There must be some sort of like, backup for it, but it's all just absolute garbage when you dig into it. Yeah. Thing is, you can't tell. And like you say, it leaves you in a place where you're sort of going through life hearing things and thinking, well, is that true? Isn't it? And then you sound like a bit of a conspiracy nut, which I know.

Um, here's one for you, a little conundrum. So an enquiry came in today.

Um.

I'll, I'll anonymise it to protect the innocent. So an enquiry came in today and I checked the email address, which gave me a clue as to what it was about. Um so with like a minute's research I established I could see somebody had been on our website at the time the enquiry came in. So you can put two and two together there. I could see what content they were looking at. Um I then tracked the person down from their email address to a, to a specific website. All the dots joined up Dope, and the technology used by the website matched the technology they were inquiring about or looking at on our website. The particular piece of software that we're experts with. So I joined all the dots together and thought, right, this person, this is the situation they're in, this is what they need. So I wrote an email which kind of said, I could see you were on our website looking at X, you know, at least I'm assuming you were. And I think you probably need help with why would you like to have a conversation? Or I meant.

To say they said, you creepy mother.

Well, before that, sorry, they booked a meeting. You know, without. You can either fill a form or just book a meeting to have a chat. So they'd actually booked a meeting and then and I thought.

Stalked.

Them. Yeah. I thought, do I, do I let them know that I know what they're, that they're looking for a solution to a particular problem. And in the end, I didn't, I just backed down. I just, I just wrote an email with, thanks for your enquiry. Could you give me a heads up on what you'd like to discuss at the meeting? You book next week, and then I can get the right people together for the meeting to, to make sure that the times, you know, is used well for you and right enough, You know, got back to me. Yeah. We've got a such and such a problem. Absolutely. Completely and utterly perfect. So what should I have done? Should I have played dumb and pretended I didn't know what they wanted? And police, could you tell me what you wanted or should I have said to them, I know exactly what you're looking for.

I think there's probably a perfect middle ground. I don't know, I don't know, I think you can probably, because I think the problem is people don't like to feel seen, do they? They don't like to feel like you've sort of watching them. Um, but I think certainly like there you can demonstrate some value. I think it's an interesting thing in our industry because I think that sometimes it's quite compelling for people to see that you can do that and to be like, how do you do that? I want to be able to do that. I mean, maybe not somebody who's working for the nominal hoovering service.

I think, but I think, um, I think you're right. I think because of the organisation that had booked the meeting, then I took the view that.

They, they're not interested.

They're not interested in that. Whereas if it had been a commercial organisation, they might have gone, oh, okay, that's a bit creepy, but I.

Also I really.

Mean, I could do that as well. You could show me how to do.

My sales guys. Yeah. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. I think it is a really powerful thing when you can join the, the dots up like that. Um, I think it's quite interesting as well because we do it in quite an unsophisticated way. We use very simple tools to do it. Yeah. And a little bit of common sense.

There's nothing sinister there at all. We don't know who they are. We don't, we're not actually identify them until somebody makes an enquiry. And then you join all the dots and and then that makes a bit more sense. But yeah, we're not it's, it's, you know, it's just freely available. Well, not free, but it's, you know, it's available software that anybody can use. And it's just kind of, it just sort of informs you, you know, about what somebody is almost certainly looking for.

Um, absolutely. And knowledge is power.

So yeah, yeah, yeah. That's right. It's an interesting thing. I mean, we, we do get some interesting, um, opportunities in this, in this line of work that we're in. So this, uh, this week, Yesterday, in fact, I spent a couple of hours or more learning about nuclear fission because we've got a potential client who works in the nuclear industry. And I was looking through the through the stuff that they've shared with me, which I'm going to share with you as well. I was looking through the stuff they'd shared with me and I was coming across, you know, I'm an engineer by profession, but I was coming across things. Well, what does what does a CO2 injection system do? So I just thought, you know, rather than just kind of seeing it, like in, in abstract, I thought, well, I'll put it into context. So I spent some time. It was fascinating.

The fission thing, especially because you'll have seen the thing about the reactor in Paris running for however long it was twenty minutes last week or.

Oh, no, that's fusion, isn't it?

Oh is it. Yeah.

Fishing's what we're doing now.

Right, right.

Fusion fusions. The hard one. That's the one where. Yeah. Basically it's fusion what the sun does or fishing what the sun does. I don't know, I don't know, I'm.

Just outing us.

As idiots. Now. Stuart, does.

It speak.

To you about it anyway. Yeah. So but you know in in simple terms, it was like it wasn't difficult to actually understand it. But the idea was like, because we may be working with these guys, I just wanted to sort of inform myself. And it was a fascinating time. And I, and then I obviously me being me, I got on to like, okay, so I can see how these, these fission reactors work. And so what went wrong at Chernobyl? Now watch the Chernobyl series on TV or whatever it was. And it is very good.

Very.

Good. But then I found I found more and more information about actually about what actually went wrong with that. And if you're not familiar with it, it's a fascinating thing to look into. It really is.

But I do think that's the curse of marketing, not to bitch about marketing on a podcast about marketing. Okay. But we're experts in stuff. I feel like I'm often an expert and stuff for like two weeks. Yeah, like really deep expert in something weird and then like pressure vessel manufacturing standards. And I can tell you anything about them. And then in two weeks time, it's all gone and it will never be recovered. Yeah. And I think it's a really weird thing. It's like you are very briefly sort of like.

You said, we're kind of superficial.

Well, I'm just saying, you can't retain it all. You can't possibly retain it all. Like the breadth and the depth of the information you have to sort of digest and then regurgitate. And then when you move on to the next sort of project or you're done with that bit, then you have to sort of chop it out of your brain. Mhm.

Yeah. I mean, I didn't say any of that to try and portray myself as being, being anything like intellectual or clever, because I'm absolutely not.

But I think I probably are because you're an engineer.

Well, no, I'm not. I'm really not. But I just I wanted to just kind of like, you know, digital marketing from the coalface. And sometimes being at the coalface means, just as you've illustrated, that we have to learn about some really dull, dry stuff because we're fundamentally engineering and tech companies, B2B type stuff. And other times like you're allowed. You know, you're allowed to indulge and learn about something that is actually really interesting. Yeah, definitely.

Although it's interesting how quickly they stop being interesting, those subjects. Like I was, there's one particular gig where I'm always really excited to write the content until I start writing it. And then I'm like, oh.

Yeah, you know, and the weirdest thing or maybe isn't weird, but I was, I was, I was looking at Rory Sutherland, a little. Rory. Rory. Rory Sutherland clip on TikTok. And he was talking about the worst marketed best idea ever. And it was nuclear power because he said, like, why would you call it nuclear power? Why call it something that everybody else relates to being a bomb? Nuclear bomb? You know, why didn't you call it kitten power or something like that?

Or even just like fission power? Yeah.

Like, yeah, that's abstract because it's um. Yeah. Well, as it turns out, it was, it was quite possible to create an explosion even though you were only trying to generate electricity, as we found out in Chernobyl. But it's quite rare.

Yeah, definitely.

Yeah. It's um in, you know, in all the brouhaha around net zero and everything else, you know, it's interesting to see that, um, you know, that we are now turning back to nuclear and going, oh, especially in this country, in the UK, because we led the world in developing nuclear, nuclear power. You know, you know, electricity generated using nuclear means, if you like. And we've kind of let that expertise slip away. And now we're kind of going, oh, actually, this is actually really clean, isn't it? Yep. And it's kind of limitless. Yep. And it's cheap. Yep. It's kind of all of those things.

I remember I did an A-level in geography because I needed a, a subject, at least one easy subject, and I.

Got a C at A-level in geography.

And um they spent ages. I mean when was I going through this like two thousand and eight, two thousand and seven, two thousand and eight. And a big part of the curriculum was about renewable energy and renewables in general. And a big chunk of that was all the reasons that nuclear power was bad. And I do remember being quite heavily indoctrinated and feeling indoctrinated at the time, you know, being like, well, it's really clean and great except for the waste and the waste will kill people. And it's like, all right, just chill out. Uh, yeah. And, um, I think it's quite interesting how these things sort of spin and it is just spin. Ultimately, it's just the spin that people put on these things. You know, it's a dirty technology. I mean, you know, in Germany, for example, they're Green Party. Um, a couple of years ago were basically pushing to have coal power stations reopened in order to stop or reduce reliance on nuclear energy because they hate nuclear so much that they're willing to burn coal just to stop it from becoming a thing. And I do think it's really interesting how people build really sort of strong emotional reactions. I mean, that was a whole thing during the sixties, wasn't it?

Reactions. I like it.

Nuclear disarmament and people getting very irate about this idea that, you know, there should be like a nuclear reactor somewhere in Britain. And I do just think an awful lot of it is just marketing. Um, you know, people are very good at whipping people into a frenzy about things.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting because basically he was saying that that is one of the worst marketed, brilliant ideas of all time was nuclear power, and I thought it was interesting. After I'd just been spending a little bit of time learning at a very superficial level how it all works.

I will say as well. As a marketer, I have a vast amount of respect for how quickly he's colonised TikTok. Rory Sutherland you can't go anywhere. I mean, I was on YouTube the other day.

If you look at some Rory Sutherland stuff on TikTok, it'll just keep showing you.

Rory Sutherland. Of course, the algorithm. But but what I mean is, like even across various platforms, like I was on YouTube for the first time in a while the other day and it was like, oh, Rory Sutherland again. And I'm like, all right. But you know, I don't know. I think he has done a very good job of sort of cementing himself in that space.

Yeah. And it's probably it's mostly on the back of the rather brilliant book alchemy, which I know you've either read or you're reading.

Yeah. No, I've read it. It is. But it's also just because he's very good at telling stories.

He's very good at telling stories. Yeah. Very listenable, isn't he? Yeah, absolutely. Okay. Um, I did notice that search Engine journal was suggesting that Google was actually starting to get a bit better again at indexing. Yeah, because I'm only bringing that up because you mentioned it in one of the previous podcasts about, um, you know, why is Google so bad at indexing stuff? I did notice, however, that a blog post that I wrote and published about two days ago is still not indexed. And that's odd because in the past, anything we put on our website was generally indexed the same day. You often within an hour. Yeah. And that one hasn't been indexed. And, and so it's, it's only one, you know, one example of, of maybe Google either choosing to ignore or not being able to fully index back to AI and the volume of content that's getting created. And it's kind of like filling up the swamp.

I think when the dust settles on this, as in when inevitably people get a little bit tired of churning out rubbish AI content that nobody's reading, and I can finally stop seeing people posting on the marketing subreddits being like, oh, I've gone from like zero to ten thousand views a day just by using AI, which makes me want to carve my eyes out every time I see it. When the dust settles and people look back at this, they will look back at it and say, Jesus, that was an unbelievable amount of bollocks that got published in a very short space of time. I think people are absolutely hammering it. I mean, anecdotally, because obviously like marketing subreddits are not a good litmus test, but the amount of time people spend talking about how much content they're producing using AI and how quickly they're publishing it. And you just think like, Google must be absolutely, yeah, overburdened with that stuff. I don't know how it's. I honestly don't know how it operates at the moment, because I don't know how much content people must be publishing a day, but I imagine it's a lot. Mhm. Mhm.

Okay. Well, um, I think we've kind of covered a lot. One or two bits of it might have been moderately interesting.

You never.

Know. Not much of it, really.

That's Leslie's job to dig out the gold now, isn't it?

Thanks for listening. Um, yeah. Um, I'm probably not here to record on Monday afternoon? Probably not. I haven't put one in the calendar, you might have noticed. So it might be a week until we get like the uncertainty.

There's something sort of almost spiritual about it, like.

Well, what it is, I'm going down to Cumbria walking of course, with my cousin.

You might.

Not thinking.

I might.

Go walking and then choose to drive back Sunday evening when the roads are really quiet. But I will be quite tired. Yeah. Um, so I might leave it till Monday and drive back up on Monday and give myself a day off.

Can you do the pedals if your legs are that tired?

Um cruise control. So it's really just the thumbs for most of the journey. It's a long way. It's like a five, six hour drive. So it's.

Yeah, it's quite a nice drive though. I like that.

Drive. Yeah. I don't mind it.

Not fun.

Yeah. Everyone's turned off now so we can just ramble on. Can't we.

Talk about whatever you like.

Or we could just stop recording. Yeah, let's do that.

I'm gonna get a club.

If you like a lot of chocolate on your biscuit.

Join our.

Club.