The Data Fallacy: Why Perfect Marketing Attribution is a Myth – Episode 151

I got into a fight with somebody on LinkedIn. Some of my favorite pastimes about are you wagging him, Centurion? Going to a bit of a fight because they were like, this is how you optimise for traditional search, and this is what you need to know about optimising for generative search. He was giving it all this like, oh, what you need to do if you want your content to rank in the search engines. Automated AI snippets at the top. This is your five steps to doing that. You know, ridiculous things like, oh, use the right keywords like breadcrumb so that the generative AI models can follow what you're saying. And it's like, do you have any evidence for this? And it turned out that, no, he didn't actually have an answer for it. But I see increasingly people pretending to have the answer for this and trying to sell people's solutions to this idea of like, well, soon traditional search is going to be replaced with AI bots. And if you don't know how to optimise your website for AI bots, all the work you've done previous for SEO is rubbish. Throw it away. Yeah.

So um, the, the after party from the one hundred and fiftieth episode recording went on for three days. Was it three days? It was wild. I only remember about picking.

Yourself.

Up off the bit of the first day, and after that it's all a blur. In fact, it's so much of a blur, it feels like we just carried on as normal, went to work and did normal things.

Those days are long behind you.

Yeah. You know, they were never with me. Really. Um, so welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface episode one hundred and fifty one. If you haven't heard the one hundred and fiftieth episode, um, go and check it out. I thought it was quite good. I quite liked it. It wasn't too self-congratulatory, but it was a little bit self-congratulatory, as you'd expect for that. One hundred and forty nine yeah, probably skip that. Yeah. Um, looking at the stats, most people have. Wow. Um, so you've told me that you've come armed with ideas.

I have a few things from the week.

Some assume I've just got a few things. It's been. It's been an interesting week. Um, we landed that gig with the organisation I went down to went to see down in Bridgwater in Somerset. So it was a long old haul.

Regular listeners will remember him moaning about that on three subsequent three previous podcasts.

Yeah. Not getting lunch that bit. Yeah. Um, anyway, that's that's, um, that's over the line and I'm delighted. Um, looking forward to, to working with them. It'd be good.

Definitely.

Um, it's been a, yeah, it's been one or two enquiries this week. Strange one this week you get, you get an enquiry and you respond almost immediately. The enquiry came in I think on Tuesday night. It's about eight o'clock or half past eight at night. Just happened to see it ping up on the phone immediately responded, yeah, it'd be nice to have a chat, you know, let me know when you're free, etc.. It's now Thursday.

Yeah.

I know they opened the email, but they haven't.

Well, you know, it's interesting because anecdotally, one of the things I've been talking to about with clients quite a lot recently It's just that everything, everything seems so slow. Um, it's not necessarily that anybody, you know, isn't getting enquiries or leads, but it just seems to be taking a little bit longer than usual to convert people. There's a lot of stuff that's sort of stalled. I don't know if that's a state of the economy thing. It's well.

It's bound to be isn't it. The world's a strange place. Um tariffs if you've got any money the government want it. And if you haven't you're going to have even less. Yeah. Well in summary I don't know if you'd agree with that synopsis but yeah, there's the street cat. Go for a wander.

I do think that definitely sort of, uh, the international, uh, sort of, you know, the various catastrophes happening around America and trade appear to have brought things to a grinding halt for.

Do you think if we gave that cat milk, it would come into the office and amuse us? Oh, no. We've got a dog in here, aren't we? At the moment? It's probably not a good plan, though, is it?

Ten Downing Street? Have a cat. Why shouldn't we?

I mean, cats can usually beat dogs up. Anyway, we're kind of quite hardy, aren't they?

Send him to the cat gym.

He looks like he goes to the cat gym. Sorry. What did you say?

I can't remember.

I think it's going to be a silly podcast, isn't it?

Global economy. Things are shit at the moment. Everything's slow. Everyone's holding their breath, waiting to see what happens. Nobody really seems to be doing anything. Um. Which. Yeah.

My my hometown's getting, um, a royal warrant or something. Royal. The royal port of Barrow. Barrow in Furness is where I'm from. Um, I think Prince Charles is there. Oh. King Charles. Still calling him Prince Charles. He's kind of stuck with that in my book. He's like, you'll always be Prince Charles to me. Uh, King Charles is there, I think today, as is. Um, yeah. Keir Starmer. Yeah. It's all to do with, you know, basically they're basically, um, thanking the people of Barrow for building submarines. Yeah. And creating the nuclear deterrent and helping to safeguard the country's safety.

Thank you. Thank you for single handedly crafting our nuclear deterrent. Good people of Barrow is a sticker.

That's the bottom line. Yeah. It's, uh. It's the place to be. I mean, I'm from Barrow, and I. And I love Barrow. I don't live there anymore, but I would live there again. Um. I may well live there again one day if I'm lucky enough to live beyond the age of, um, one hundred and three. I think, I think my retirement plan kicks in at about one hundred and three. Something like that. Yeah. Yeah.

That's right. It's quite interesting though, isn't it? Because I mean, BAE systems, all of those companies. Uh, I bet, I bet they were all dead excited when everything kicked off with America. And Macron and the rest of the European Community started talking about moving away from American weapons systems. And then I don't know if you saw yesterday the EU announced that everybody that wasn't in the EU or didn't have a defense pact with the EU would be excluded from all future arms talks. And suddenly all the BAE systems people went home with their sad faces on.

I wonder what the share price did. I never.

Checked it.

I mean, but don't you think the EU is very good at talk and actually probably would struggle without PA systems for that stuff? I would imagine.

It's a really interesting one because they're very heavily reliant on them and Babcock and a few other British arms manufacturers. But weirdly, apparently the stalling point seems to be that the EU won't negotiate a defence pact unless we'll talk about fishing again and fishing rights.

I mean, does that not just show how ridiculous the EU is? I want I wanted to remain in the EU. I mean, I've always made it very clear that I was I was a Remainer, you know, remain and um and not update. What's the word I'm looking reform remain and reform I thought was the was the best way forward. Um but the idea that the EU is, is kind of perfect or even close to it is laughable.

It's just the protectionism isn't it. They're all obsessed with sort of safeguarding and ring fencing their incomes. And that's all it ever seems to really be about.

So okay, we'll kick things off with one of my um trivial um kind of rubbish um observations really? Because yours are probably quite cerebral and clever. Probably. Probably everything has changed. Type videos and emails we seen certainly on TikTok and on email. There's a whole raft of everything's changed. Stop what you're doing. What you've been doing up to now doesn't work anymore. Just throw out the, you know, empty the baby with the bathwater. I mean, it just seems like it just seems to me like, you know, the fundamentals don't change the fundamentals of, of marketing and advertising and, and, you know, the whole nine yards really don't change the production of it the way you distribute it. There's lots of things changing. And AI is having a big impact, obviously. And I've got a little thing to say about AI, not surprisingly, given me waxing lyrical about notepad LM or notebook LM earlier. Um, you must get these emails as well and you must see these videos as well where it's just like, oh, just stop what you're doing. Everything's changed. Watch this.

Articles and guides that are in this new digital age. You know all of this nonsense. I mean, to be very cynical.

It's not like you, but go on.

I think marketers absolutely love this. I mean, before AI, it was web three point zero and before that it was the blockchain and how the blockchain is going to transform the way we do business. And before that, it was cryptocurrencies and how that will change the way we do business. I think it's just there's something really nice about, you know, when things get a little bit boring and you start scratching your head and thinking, oh, what on earth can I write about now? And suddenly over the horizon comes AI and it promises to revolutionise everything and self.

Proclaim yourself, proclaim yourself rather self proclaim yourself. Proclaim yourself as a guru as well. Everything's changed. I've got the answers. Don't worry.

And again, you know.

Give me your email address. I won't spam you.

Yeah. And again, going back to the whole, you know, and I guess this ties into politics in a way. There's a real advantage to positioning yourself on the cutting edge of something. Because if it if it turns out to be true, An AI does radically transform the world and Nvidia are right.

And a client calling. And I kind of need to answer that.

You can go and answer.

It falls behind you. Will you pass me it? I always answer, just unplug it. Oh. Hey, Doug. How are you doing? Fine. You? Oh, no. Yeah, I was I was slow getting to the phone. I'm just, uh, just recording one of our fantastic podcasts, which I know you listen to every episode of. What do you. What do you mean you didn't know we did a podcast? How can I help? Yeah. Mhm.

*Unintelligible*

Yeah. So the only thing that she's Karen's requested are pose for the work completed up to the end of February. So I can I can certainly give you a heads up. I can speak to Amy and Amy's been predominantly working on on this one. So I can give you a heads up on where we are this month. Um, but yeah, the, what the polls were asking for are for work completed. It's kind of because it's a bit of a, how long is a piece of string thing? We've been kind of doing it that way just to kind of, but if you know, if we need to change the way we're doing it and just give me a shout. Yeah, I can understand. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. Well, that's what we've been doing, haven't we? Predominantly, uh. Yeah. Okay. That's fine. Um. Yeah. Okay. Whatever you need us to do. We'll we'll we'll do it. With respect to that stuff, I know it's the kind of make your life a bit more difficult than it needs to be, but. So just give us a shout. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Perfect. No problem. Okay. All right. No problem. All right. Cheers, Doug. So it is digital marketing from the coalface. And that was a client call that I needed to take. So I took it. Um, I think that bit will be edited out anyway, so don't worry about it.

So no, it's just saying that, um, with a lot of this stuff with respect to sort of positioning yourself as a guru and ushering in the next big age and being the person that breaks the news about how digital marketing has changed forever. Yeah. There's an enormous advantage, and there's almost no disadvantage to getting it wrong. Nobody remembers all the times that, you know, Search Engine Journal predicted the death of search or some revolutionary change to the way that people were going to use the internet.

Do you think the speed with which information flies around the globe makes us more susceptible to faddism? Yeah, I think.

I do think so. I think we.

Think about some of our clients and think about the oil industry, clients that we work with, some of them, and certainly the oil industry, broadly speaking, has been greenwashing and wind washing and.

And like everything's about hydrogen.

Yeah. Everything hydrogen washing. I mean, they've just all been like jumping on the fads and being scared to be seen as the people that are. And now there's a kind of not quite a voltfast, but there's been a, there's been a kind of changing attitude towards the old dirty energy because they've suddenly realised we, we kind of need it.

Yeah. No, absolutely. And I think this is one of the things, especially in business, that seems to be that, you know, when people start moving in mass and the herd starts sort of migrating towards an idea, everybody is very quick to jump on that bandwagon. And as you say, then equally quick to just sort of discard it and pretend it had never happened. And that is possible, I think, more plausible now because people just won't remember because, as you say, we're inundated with information. Nobody's really holding brands or individuals to account. Nobody says, oh, but hold on a minute. You were just advocating for AI last week and now you hate it? Or do you know what I mean? Like there's no real yeah, collective memory anymore, which I guess in the past there would have been perhaps slightly more.

There's a big fear of missing out, I think, broadly speaking as well.

And more we see it. I mean, I don't know if you remember about threads. Threads is a really good example of this.

But it's still a thing.

It's still kind of is it?

Well, I hear people talking about.

It in the same way that the Teletubbies is still a thing you know, technically exists.

My day isn't complete unless I've watched an episode of the Teletubbies.

Um, but I mean, there's a really good example. I mean, I was talking to somebody about this the other day and, you know, it's like, do you remember when everybody was like, what's your threads strategy? How are you going to leverage threads? You know, have you got are you threads ready? Yeah. And all of this sort of like garbage, you know, really pushing this idea that brands are somehow going to miss out on this huge opportunity as everybody migrated away from Twitter, which is now X, and took up this new social media platform. And, you know, the sort of news reports a million people had signed up in the first day and all of this, and then it just fizzled into nothing.

Well, I'll tell you the last big, um, fad that that confused not just the marketing industry, but predominantly the marketing industry was GDPR and the number of grifters who were trying to make money out of GDPR. Oh, I remember meeting a guy at a networking event in London who basically tried to, like, terrify me. Oh, you know about GDPR? This is going back a good few years. Oh, it's gonna it's gonna. Yeah. Your business. You could well go bust. You, you you get on the wrong side of this and you'll, you'll you'll, you'll just be, you'll, you'll just be bankrupt. And he was just. And he was a bit of an idiot and didn't really know what he was talking about, but he'd seen it as something that maybe he could grift some money out of. And, and he was, you know, he was flat out on it and are just well.

They're at it again at the moment. So there's this new EU accessibility legislation coming in for websites. And so everyone, all of those sort of grifters are pouring up out of the woodwork again and saying, oh, are you ready for the next big thing? Don't let it be like GDPR, don't get caught out this time. And it's like, yeah.

We didn't get caught out last time. No, because we're not idiots and we don't abuse people's data and we take care of it. And we do all the things that all the good people were doing anyway. It was always designed just to catch the the people that were abusing people's details and people's information.

The other thing, you know, weirdly this week I've fended off from a couple of clients as well as talk about, you know, Google ads and Bing ads, uh, increasingly sort of like, oh, have you, have you signed our sort of cookie policy to say that you're happy from now on to verify that you've asked people for permission correctly to advertise for them. And all of this stuff around sort of like a cookieless world and how to prepare for it. Again, another massive industry that's grown up around this whole idea of sort of informing people about the future of marketing that may or may not come to pass. And every time I see, you know, these huge news outlets releasing these guides to like how to navigate a cookieless world or how to, you know, when Google inevitably ban third party cookies, what are you going to do? And Google just keeps kicking that can down the road and probably will forever. It's just a sort of grift again, isn't it really?

Like well, yeah. And that goes back to our conversation last last week, I think it was last week or earlier this week in episode one hundred fifty where we were talking about the, um, and the, Google's inability to actually really know where you are and whether you're male or female and what age you are, your interests were.

You know, all of this stuff is a little bit vague, a little bit woolly. I think people and again, maybe this is a little bit unkind and a little bit mean, but I think there are a lot of people out there who don't really want to do the fundamentals and who see marketing as a series of crises as a much easier thing to sort of sell to clients or to talk about, oh, have you prepared for this change? Have you prepared for that change? Oh, Google Core updates coming out. Have you prepared? And it's like fundamentally marketing is not rushing around and reacting to fires. It's plugging away and doing the sort of hard graft of actually sort of building content, telling a story. Um, but I just think a lot of people don't really enjoy that.

Agreed. Um, go on, throw one of your, um, dopey ideas up.

Um, well, weirdly, I mean, we sort of touched on a little bit of it about this whole, the whole AI thing. Okay. And so one of the things I really wanted to raise, um, with the AI thing is I saw I got into a fight with somebody on LinkedIn, as I want to do. It's one of my favorite pastimes, uh.

About AI you wagging him, Centurion.

Um, got into a bit of a fight because they were like, this is how you optimise for traditional search and this is what you need to know about optimising for for generative search. And they'd given it this awful name like g e o and they like generative.

Was he a prompt engineer?

Well, yeah, we're we were we were verging into that territory. I think I asked him at one point whether he considered himself a prompt engineer. Uh, but, uh, no, he was giving it all this like, oh, what you need to do if you want your content to rank, you know, in, in the search engines, automated AI snippets at the top. If you want your web pages to be cited by artificial intelligence, this is your five steps to doing that. And it was these five things like structure your content, use lots of FAQs, you know, you know, ridiculous things like, oh, use the right keywords like breadcrumb so that the generative AI models can follow what you're saying. And it's like, do you have any evidence for this or is this all speculative? And he sort of flannelled around as people want to do. Um, and it turned out that no, he didn't actually have an answer for it. But I see increasingly people pretending to have the answer for this and trying to sell people's solutions to this idea of like, well, soon traditional search is going to be replaced with AI bots. And if you don't know how to optimise your website for AI bots, all the work you've done previous for SEO is now rubbish. Throw it away. You need what I'm selling you instead.

Because Google loves to be manipulated. So so if you if you figure out figure out how to manipulate Google, then you're onto a winner, aren't you? Because Google loves that and it never, ever challenges it and never, ever changes its algorithm to stop you manipulating it.

And there's absolutely no chance that if you learn how to game it and everybody else learns how to game it, they'll they'll just continue doing the same thing. You'll be fine. You'll be onto a winner. No, I mean being cynical. I think the problem is there's an awful lot of charlatans in our industry. The AI thing has given them a huge amount of space to sort of go nuts and sell people a very strange sort of solutions to problems that don't really exist. But interestingly, Search Engine Journal did go away, um, and do a really interesting bit of, of sort of, uh, analysis. Yeah, it is analysis. They've got loads and loads of data about pages that were cited by AI and basically looked for commonalities in them. And interestingly enough, they were sort of saying that when they started out, they thought a lot of it would be about things like, you know, uh, is your domain powerful as in are you trustworthy? Can the AI trust what you're saying? Yeah. Um, things like how.

And how is it figuring that out? Oh, don't tell me links.

Yeah, exactly. Um, and then they, they thought there are other sort of assumption with that would be that the AI would look for things like keywords. And because it's clueless, it's a bit stupid. If you give it the right keywords, it'll think, oh, this is content about that and then start citing you. And interestingly, they sort of found the opposite, which is that in actual fact, the only things that really seem to matter were word count, sentence count, and the amount of context you provided. So really long, detailed articles that the AI thought it could rely on to basically get enough information to not start hallucinating, which is a coded way of saying making shit up. Mhm. And where it wouldn't sort of run out very quickly of sort of useful material to pull from, seemed to perform much, much better, which is sort of, again, we're back to that place where like, you know, good quality, you know, comprehensive content is king. And we've been here before. And that sort of turned out to be a bit, a bit sort of not necessarily the case. But I think, you know, it's interesting that AI does seem to prioritise things that are maybe not necessarily so successful in, in traditional search, but that you would want your content to, to sort of look like anyway. Mhm.

Have you concluded anything that good content should still win the day or something like that?

Long content, long content I think, yeah, I think.

Just to get the AI to write.

Well and, and there's a real risk there, isn't there, that it becomes sort of circular and self-referential. But yeah, no, I mean, it's quite an interesting study. It's basically sort of like profoundly the overwhelming majority of content that gets cited is, is long, has a lot of sentences, has a lot of words.

Long form content has generally been seen as a good thing in the world of content marketing, in the world of trying to improve search rankings, etc. because broadly speaking, if something's long and it's been well written, if something's long, it's generally authoritative, comprehensive, uses all of the terms and things that you'd expect a piece of content about a particular subject to cover.

Yeah, I think so. And I think that's back to I mean, the other thing they were flagging in this search engine journal report is, is the whole idea of readability. So there are various ways of measuring that, the whole Flesch-kincaid scores and things like that. But they basically saying the more readable the content is, the more accessible the AI finds it, the more likely it is to cite it in search. So there's lots of things like that. But yeah, I think it does just come back to that point where if you if you write stuff that's detailed, that tells a good story, that provides lots of context and information, you know, and we've seen that with our content, you know, the content that we've produced that gets sort of elevated and used in AI snippets is almost invariably the longer.

It is, more HubSpot, things like that that bounces in and out of the AI. Yeah, but it's been there for quite a while. It's been in and out quite a lot over the last twelve months or so. I suppose you might say something like that. Yeah. Okay. I mean, staying on the subject of AI, I got quite excited this morning because I finally got around to having a play with notebook LM. You did? And, um, yeah, I, um, I think I'm a fan. Yeah. I think I'm a fan because one of the challenges with AI that you've raised many times in the podcast is that it makes shit up. Mhm. Um, and it still could make shit up. But the thing about notebook LM is basically you upload the sources, which might be well, yeah, there could be PDFs, word documents, spreadsheets, I suppose, I don't know. Um, and then give it links to websites and give it links to videos and then tell it like, I want you to go and look at all that information, summarise it with an emphasis on something or other. Like I particularly want to know what this organisation does or something like that. Press a button and it creates an inverted commas podcast. Two AI voices then have a conversation about the content that you give to to the, to the.

Which I think is oddly creepy. And Amy. Amy.

Yeah, particularly, I mean, as soon as she came in and it was playing, she was, she said, oh, you know, I hate AI voices. Um, and I think that's fair enough, but for personal consumption, you know, let's say, for example, as I often have, I've got a long drive and there's some research I want to do kind of really need to read it or watch some videos or whatever. And I can just grab all the research I want, put it into a notebook. LM um, naught document and then get it summarised and then just listen to it while I'm driving. But driving along now. Yeah, it's still and it says at the bottom, you know, check, check for accuracy. But you know, we gave it a couple of tests, didn't we? We asked it to go and look at our website and talk about what we did for our clients. And it did, it did a reasonable job of it. And we said, you know, go and look at a prospect's website and tell us what they do and, and things like that. And it came back with a very sort of conversational style. It presented, um, information to us. And it was. Yeah, I think it's kind of, you know, if that's it in its early stages and you know, you can only get better. I think it's yeah, I think it's a useful tool.

I think it's one of those things where the real promise, I always think for AI is in being able to fill in for sort of like the, the sort of low skilled, not low intelligence, but, but sort of grunt work, you know, things like summarising things, things like repackaging things or, or finding out how to quickly collate information and put it in a, you know, in a format that's easily accessible. And if it can learn not to hallucinate in inverted commas, make shit up and stay within the sort of confines that you give it. I think that is a fantastic thing. It's a really powerful thing.

Well, that's what we did when we asked it to go and look at our website and give us and say like, you know, what does this company do? And how do they help their customers? And it, and it's a subject, obviously, we know you and I particularly know the content on our website intimately. We obviously know what we do and what it fed back to us was accurate.

But I can see another use case, which is, you know, sort of training people internally, you know, if you've got a load of documentation, like all of our ISO nine thousand and one processes, if you don't actually want to sit and trawl through them, you can ask it to summarise them. And then you can give that to people and they can quickly sort of skill up.

And that's because not only does it produce an inverted commas podcast, it will you can just query it the same way you query Gemini or ChatGPT, you know, and it's not that long ago we were somebody in an organisation would try to flog us some software, which was like you said, you know, basically you give it, feed it the information you want it to consume, and then you can ask it questions about it. And, you know, it was going to cost it was quite pricey. And, and we thought, yeah, our clients could use that. And lo and behold, now, you know, this is, I mean, we get it as part of our Google workspace. So I don't know what a subscription to it would cost, but I'd say, you know, for small organisations, like, for example, we could feed it all of our ISO nine thousand and one and then the guys could just query it, query that information, you know, create it as a, as a, as a notebook, LM instance, if you like, and then upload all those documents, give everyone access to it and say, when you need to know, like, how do we do this? Or how do we do that? Or, or some information about that? Just go and query that notebook LM and see what you get back.

Although, again, back to the whole care and attention thing, one of the things I do remember a couple of months ago, I was speaking to somebody who'd basically sold a similar, a similar system to the one you were just talking about, where it was an AI that was generative pre-trained transformer that you trained on your own data, and it would then go and you could use it internally, and it would tell your sales team what to do. And he was telling me a story where basically they'd implemented it for a client who ran an e-commerce store, and then their sales team had started using it, and a new sales person had asked it about delivery terms and conditions, and it had made something completely incorrect up. She told the customer, asking the question some completely nonsensical information. They'd then ordered on the back of that, and they got themselves into a right pickle because actually they couldn't honor the terms and conditions that had given her.

She obviously didn't read the faint gray small print at the bottom saying, this is probably bullshit.

Well, but but then I feel, you know, for people in that situation, if you bring in a system and you say, oh, you can trust this, you can rely on it, use it for this, and it doesn't actually do the job, that's a problem. But this is the first time I've ever seen any AI tool. Um, the notebook LLM thing that actually sort of doesn't randomly start making stuff up. And I think that's really the key to it, isn't it?

Some of the things that came up because we, it was like, what, an eight minute podcast or something that it created some of the things in it were verbatim what's written on the website.

But that's great. That's what you want, isn't it? Much rather, it just regurgitated things in a very dry way than just sort of embellished.

If you were, say, for example, you could use we could use it, we could plug in a competitor's website and say, tell us how this what about this company? Tell us what their clients think about them. Tell us about the key services they offer, and tell us about how they go, about what they do. And then just get a boom, you know, just get a precis of it. And yeah.

Well, the other thing I think that's quite interesting is, you know, to your point about using it on our own website, it flagged up a lot of things about our products and services and our sort of we don't really have products, um, and our sort of attitude to work and the way that we work, um, that we wouldn't, wouldn't necessarily, I would not necessarily have guessed that it would pull those things out. And I think what it is also quite interesting for is thinking about how other AI tools will potentially be sort of viewing your content. Yeah. Because you can't.

That's a good idea. That's a good thought.

Rather going back to the whole thing where like, we don't really know why certain AI models like to site certain websites, but at least if we're, if we're using our own AI models to sort of interrogate our content and say, you know, what do you think this content's about? What do you think the value of it is? We'll get a feel for how similar models might analyse it.

Agreed. Agreed.

Useful tool.

Okay. Go ahead. Next.

What else? Um. Um. Well, actually, one of the things I wanted to talk about was just about the whole authorship and trust thing. Okay. While we're talking about web content, because one of the other things I've seen people talking about a lot recently is this whole idea that in an increasingly in an increasingly AI driven paradigm, um, what people are really starting to care about is knowing who has written content. Do they though? Well, I don't know. This is the sort of received wisdom. So I've seen a lot of stuff about how you actually, if you.

Were a guru, you would say, yes, I absolutely.

Know confidently.

Confidently incorrect. Like AI is.

Um, I don't know. I mean, what I've seen a lot of people saying is like, oh, you really need author pages. You know, if you're producing blog posts, insights, articles, you need to anchor those to a person. You need to say this was written by X, Y, and Z. And then you need to be able to click that name and go through to a page that says, This is Sophie, a real life actual writer who read a book once and can actually write with her fingers. Um, and that that's all sort of pulling from this idea of, you know, I used to do a bit of health writing. Uh, it's a very heavily regulated space. So if you go on to like WebMD or anything like that, every single article has an author, and you can go and look at that author's credentials and what they've written before. And I think the idea is that everybody should be doing that in order to sort of enhance trust and prove that there are people behind it. Whether that actually matters or means anything, I don't know, but that seems to be the sort of.

It's not going to hurt.

Surely you wouldn't think it would hurt. My only question is, how would you ever prove any of it? You know what I mean? It's back to that whole thing of like, just saying, you know, I mean, you use AI to generate an article and you claim that you've written it. Well, who's going to be able to say definitively that you have or haven't? So it's a little bit smoke and mirrors.

But we've spoken about this before, haven't we? And I guess the problem is what, you know, will AI eventually be able to, you know, fake the sincerity which makes people start to believe it's real?

Yeah. Well, this is the problem at the moment. All the received wisdom about.

Humans mastered that years ago.

Yeah, well, it was her job. No, I mean, you know, a lot of what I see, the advice that's given is like, oh, the one thing AI can't do is tell anecdotes or like draw on personal experience. So you should make sure that your writing is littered with, you know, I experienced this and, you know, sort of.

Which.

Is.

Back to storytelling, which is back to compelling content. Compelling content generally is telling a story because as humans, we love stories, which we've said many times on this podcast.

And I think that's the really interesting thing about AI content. One of the only ways I can really tell, and I am occasionally tricked, but one of the things that I think is really telling about AI content is it is always terribly vague and superficial. It never really gets into sort of nitty gritty details. And I think that's probably one of the few places where, as you say, storytelling, it's not very good at it produces content, but it doesn't necessarily tell convincing or compelling stories yet. But surely that's only a matter of time. It can't be that difficult to fake sincerity.

I don't know, one of the things that the, um, notebook LM did in the podcast it created was it gave the female presenter the vocal fry that I kind of that I find irritating.

But didn't she sound so real?

Well, I don't know. I mean, I think if you suspend belief a little bit, if you can do it a little bit and just listen to it, you can be kind of drawn in and think it's just, I mean, I've heard worse conversations by actual people. I mean, you know, a lot of people conversation's not their strong suit, is it? Let's face it, you know? So yeah, it's a bit wooden. And you can see how the model has been told to sort of like interject with it. Really? Yeah. You know, that kind of response. That's right. Call and response. Yeah. That's it.

There were bits of it that were a bit like that. It was oh, do you like, what does that mean and what does that tell us? And it's like, oh Jesus Christ.

I mean, something that Leslie picked up was you could hear the voices going. La da da da da, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. You know, so and so they've, they're really trying to make this stuff sound as realistic and convincing?

Yeah, absolutely.

So Zimbabwe's Kirsty Coventry can't be a real name. Kirsty Coventry becomes first woman to be elected president of the International Olympic Committee.

Very good, very good.

Just that just flashed up on my watch. And I thought people will want to know.

Yeah, because they're listening to this for breaking news.

They do? Yeah. Five days after the breaking news came out. Um, okay. So yeah, I think we have touched on that before, but I think it was, you know, it's worth revisiting this idea of authenticity, authorship. Um, I think any, any signals that you can put into your content, which provides, um, some kind of proof that somebody sat down and thought about this and wrote it. It's not churned out by AI to try and get a search ranking. I think it's a good thing.

Yeah, absolutely. I think a lot of it, I mean, a lot of the work I've been doing this week has been around how you sort of position the storytelling that you're doing. So, you know, producing blogs or white papers or resources instead of just sort of splatting them on your website thoughtlessly, which we've all been guilty of, you know, I mean, we just have a blog and everything's just in one can and you go away and you look at the people who are really on top of this sort of stuff like McKinsey or, you know, big consultancies that sort of live or die based on their ability to be seen as thought leaders. And they're doing really interesting things, like everything's framed as an insight. Everything has like an author and a byline. Everything's organised into topics and all the topics change all the time and it's trending and it looks like somebody's curating something really meaningful. And, and they're, you know, there's a huge strength because if you see that sort of thing, you think, right, these guys are on it. They care about this. Um, and I think, you know, like you say, it's anything you can do to make it seem like the content that you're producing is worthwhile, that you're investing in it, that you care about it, and that it's not just sort of like a, yeah, we produce a blog because we were told to once by Neil Patel or somebody like that. Um, yeah. I mean, there's a few clients we're currently sort of going through that process of reconciling all of their various resources and company news and blogs and sort of turning them into something slightly more meaningful. And I think that's an exercise that's well worth, well worth doing.

Something we should consider for sure.

Potentially.

Yeah. Yeah, I think so. We'll get one of the team to look at that. Speaking about teams we had a long conversation yesterday scrum didn't we. About team pages about how you present to the world that your people because ultimately people do business with people. Anyone interested, anyone who's found content, you know, found you online or whatever, doesn't know who you are. Get to the next stage of thinking. Actually, these guys might well fit the bill. They're going to start finding out they want to go to you. You're sorry. They're going to go to your about page, find out all about you. Where did you come from? How long have you been around that kind of thing? And they're going to look at the team page. Well, you know, what does your team look like? How qualified are they? Do they look credible? Are they you know, are they based in your office? Do you outsource everything? Trying to understand that. And you know, we've got a situation where I think a lot of the team are in the office here today upstairs. Leslie's just over there, obviously. Um, Rob is very rarely in the office. He's down in Newcastle. Um, Stu is very rarely in the office. In fact, he's never been in the office. He's got no good excuse. He's down in Annan. Um and Diana is, um, in San Diego. Interestingly, she's been in the office more than Rob who's in Newcastle in the last twelve months, considerably more. But she lives in San Diego. So we're kind of spread out. So this idea of like, you know, coming together for a photo shoot is difficult. So we've been trying to lean into like, like our situation and think about how we do that. And we've been looking at the way some of the businesses do that as well. But you know, it really got us thinking about the purpose of a team page. And when you're looking at the whole inbound cycle, you know, your about page and your team page. If all you're doing is paying lip service to them and chucking up a couple of mug shots. And like, you know, John has been in accounting for twenty years. I mean, it's just like it's not good enough. No, it really isn't. You need I mean, our individual team pages tell a nice story about where we came from, what our qualifications are, what we like to do when we're not doing this shit. Yeah. So they're quite good. Yeah. You know, I think they could be better. I think I certainly mine could be better, but it's broadly speaking, quite good. But if all you do is you point it out is go to the team page where there's a gallery of people and you just get a snippet of text and a picture then that we need to do better, don't we? And we're certainly, you know, it's like a project for us to improve our team page. And I think it's something any organisation that, you know, predominantly that sell services, I think I.

Think.

People, businesses, you know, I think they should take a long, hard look at.

Well, it's an interesting point because I think, you know, first of all, one thing I will say about it is that I don't think that many businesses outside of agency land actually have a proper team page at all. Um, I.

Don't know, I.

Don't agree. Well.

What do you mean by property?

Well, as in that lists more than like the senior management team. Okay. That actually gets into the detail of like, who works at an organisation who's behind the technology.

Plenty of examples where you'll get thirty or forty people on the on the team page and, you know, often regionalised in our London office here we have in our Birmingham office.

Fair enough. And maybe that's true. I certainly see an awful lot of websites where like.

I'm gonna say really confidently, lots of companies do this and have these pictures of all this stuff on the website.

You're the guru. So I'll leave it at that.

Just decided.

You see people who don't who think it's okay to just put the senior management team up and something vague about the business, and they never actually get into like, who's going to be delivering your product or service. And I think that's always a massive mistake because the people who are actually going to be delivering the people that people are going to be working with, interfacing with, that's really important. But the other thing, to your point about sort of this, this trend for having very generic information and sort of like people's qualifications and how long they've been doing a job or the job title is and that's it is just, again, it's back to that whole like, what story are you trying to tell? You know, what do you want people to think about when they go away from their website. Because make no mistake, I don't know if there's a particular name for it, but that search that people do where they'll come to a product or service page and they'll go from there to your homepage to your about page and then leave. That has to be one of the most common sort of journeys, if you like. Everybody, every day on our website, you'll see people doing that exact thing. And it's the same on clients websites. They are absolutely going to go there and have a look. And it's like, what do you want them to take away from this? That you're a bunch of very boring people who live to work or and it's not to say that you have to be silly or you all have to be quirky, because that's annoying too. When people are like forced.

Especially when it's forced. Yeah. It's absolutely.

Oh, I'm a citizen of the world. And it's like, oh, you went on holiday twice to Bali? Yeah, yeah.

Um, I'm a keen runner. You went running once.

Once. Yeah. Absolutely. Tried to do like a half marathon and was like, yeah, no, but he got the picture right. Exactly.

Yeah. I mean, you get a lot of that. I mean, social media is full of people pretending to be something they're not. So it's quite common. But I think authenticity for a team page is important. I think it's fine to talk about the things that you do when you're not at work. Yeah, you know, I tend to I tend to do it in a sort of self-deprecating kind of way, broadly speaking. But, you know, it's, um, it's something that we're having, we're going to have to look at and get it right.

Well, I think, and I think just to be like slightly reassuring because there will be people who, you know, like, for example, lawyers or whatever, where it really isn't an option to be like, oh yeah, when I'm not at work, I sit and watch Netflix for eight hours a day or whatever, you know, where you can't necessarily be brutally honest. You don't have to be, you know, sort of searingly honest or funny or any of those things. You can literally just sort of breathe a little bit of life into things by showing people that there is a world beyond this website. And I think a lot trying.

To be funny when you're not funny is a bad idea.

And some of the best ones I've seen, to be honest, have just been like, you know, this is this person. These are his interests. This is, you know, it's very matter of fact, but it still allows you to say, okay, well, that's a real person, not a yeah, not a picture that someone's stolen from.

Back in the day before you were born, you'd often go into an office and you'd have a thing on the wall that says, you don't have to be mad to work here, but it helps. And that was then being zany at.

Work.

You know what I mean? And it's like, yeah, that's what I'm keen for.

Observational cat.

Posters.

That was a big thing for a while, wasn't it? People with zero personality trying to.

There were some good characters on the Fast Show that were like that. It was a character called Colin who was into sci fi stuff and all that kind of stuff. And yeah, just yeah, their idea of being zany was to wear a tie that didn't quite go with the shirt that they had on or something like that. Um, so I suppose what I'm trying to say is what kind of information should you be sharing with potential customers? You know, what sort of things should, should the team be saying, you know, is it, is it, is it a just, just in a professional capacity? Or do you think it's okay to sort of pepper it with some stuff around, you know, hobbies and interests and you know, what, what, what makes you smile when you're not? Like I say, when you're not doing this shit.

People love a compelling story. That's the thing. They want to know context. They want to know background. They want to know details. And I think that the more you can give people, the better. I do think to your point about what information you do share professionally, you land on something quite interesting though, which is that a lot of the time, you know, a business will have a particular problem getting things over the line, whether that's that they have to try and build credibility or that they have to try and look affordable or, you know, they're trying to position themselves in a specific way. All of that you can feed through into your About Us page. There is no reason why, you know, if you know for a fact that I mean, we've done it to a certain degree, um, you know, you'll position members of the team that are better qualified or that have more impressive qualifications or more like a more impressive CV to the top of the page. That's natural. Everyone's doing that, but you can.

We didn't do that by design.

Did we not.

Know we at one point we had basically we were kind of showing the younger members of the team first. Sure. And then then we thought, well, you know, given our ideal customer profile, Should we be showing some of the gray hair first? And we've experimented with that.

That's why I.

Mean, like some kind of seniority from a quals point of view.

But you can sort of pull different levers to tell a slightly different story based on on who you're trying to target. And I think being thoughtful about it and thinking, you know, who am I actually trying to appeal to? And what do they want to see, you know? Yeah, it's probably useful. I mean, we were having this discussion the other day, weren't we, about whether, you know, um, somebody raised the point that, you know, if we're selling to engineers and tech people, maybe we should all be wearing shirts and ties.

Well, it was Stu and he was making the points. I mean, Stu's got a very corporate background and he was making the point that, oh, you know, the people that you're selling to will expect to see X. And I, I push back on that because I said, I don't think that's true. I mean, you know, why are they not going to come to a creative agency that looked like a bunch of accountants? Sorry, accountants. I know there are some nice accountants, creative accountants, certainly creative accountants. Um, you know, but if you, you know, if you, if you work in some, you know, dreadfully dull industry and, you know, it's kind of maybe, you know, it might be tricky to try and communicate anything other than, you know, boring and dependable. But, you know, we're we're an agency or a digital agency. You're kind of, I think we're, I think we're comfortable in our skin. And I do think as a team page and the about page is an opportunity to, to be confident as well. Yeah. You know, there's no sort of need to be shy and retiring. You know, you don't have to be bolshy. You don't have to be kind of, you know, a knob about it. You can just kind of, you know, I think getting that across, you know, getting the safe pair of hands concept across, which a lot of marketing is, isn't it? A lot of the stuff we do in the B2B world is like trying to communicate a safe pair of hands, social proof, you know, trusted by others. You're not going to make a tit out yourself if you employ us to do this work for you.

And also to your point earlier, that we're not sort of like twelve years old and fresh out of school because.

You're only thirteen, aren't.

You? Yes. Let's stick with that. I think I'm about to turn thirty four. Oh yeah. I can't. I think it's either thirty three or thirty four.

But you look older, so it's all right.

All right. Thanks. I needed that.

There's been some stuff going around on social media. Media about Russell, the comedian brand. No, not Russell Brand. God, you can't even say his name anymore.

You know.

You have to edit that out. Um. For real? I can't remember his name. I can't remember his name anyway. And he was on, um, Virgin Radio with Chris Evans and he said, oh, I'm forty eight years of age. And we were like gasps around the studio like, what's your secret? So I think he just, he was talking about healthy eating diet. And he did talk about something else as well. Um, he's very funny. He does, he does social media really well. Um, I don't know where I'm going with that.

Neither do I. Healthy eating.

Healthy eating. Yeah. And age and stuff.

We weren't talking about that.

Um, let's pick something else. I think that was mine. Was it the whole team pages thing? Yeah. I'm looking. You know, we're playing roulette with the battery in the in the in the Zoom h6 handy recorder and we're down to one battery. But I just decided that we should make full use of the batteries that are in there, because that's because we're heading towards B Corp, we can't possibly throw any electricity into landfill.

Would that go into the B Corp application? Yeah. Proof that you've been.

How much electricity gets thrown into landfill? Oh, those batteries are nearly out. I better throw them away and put new ones in. Yeah, but there's a lot of electricity gets thrown into landfill anyway. Go on.

Pat yourself on the back. Uh, well, the last thing is really, um.

Well, that's the battery gone out.

Uh, just the whole, like, sort of reporting and data fallacy. So, so I've been sort of grappling with this quite a lot this week.

Okay.

A couple of clients have asked us to pull together really comprehensive reports.

It's a good point to go and make a cup of tea, everybody.

You're not very nice to me. I don't know why I do this. Um, come back every week just to be beaten down. They said, you know, go away, create reports and we create reports and then they say, well, let's do something. Or can we go a step further? And can we bring in reports that bring in data from various sources and tell us really interesting things? One of the clients we're working together to create a sort of funnel report that shows everything from sort of impressions across five or six different channels, and then clicks from all five or six of those channels. And then, you know, how many of them turn into demos and how many of them turn into sales. So you can actually see the whole picture, which obviously means bringing in data from sort of Facebook, Bing, Google ads, all of these places, squirting it into one place and sort of mashing it all together. And it's been interesting and well, it's been it's been an interesting exercise, but one of the things that you do with looker.

Yeah.

Looker studio. Yeah. And one of the things that's been really interesting about it is that it's actually been very, very difficult because it's incredibly hard to get reliable data out of all of these tools. And when you start mashing them all together, the data just becomes steadily less and less reliable. And we particularly had this around HubSpot because we were trying to get information out of HubSpot about how many demos had been booked, just, just blank it for the month, how many demos have actually been booked? And then to try and refine that and say which of them actually turned into actual calls and that sort of thing, and getting all of that information out and into one place accurately is really hard. And I guess the reason I wanted to raise it is because I think I see in digital marketing consistently this push for the idea that in the in the year of twenty twenty five, in the in the twenty first century, it should be very easy. And you're a bit of an idiot if you don't have all of the data you need to make decisions. You know, if you don't have access to all of this information and you can't see the big picture, you're missing out. And all you need to do is sort of get somebody.

Back to the first thing. The first question I was on, I or the first topic I brought up about, it's all changed. You're missing out. You've got to do this.

Well, maybe a little bit, a little bit of that. I mean, I think people have been beating this data driven drum for a very long time. There's this sort of idea now that, you know, you just all you need to do to sort your business out is get the data, the detail, and then you'll be able to see where to make the decisions. And I think it's just quite interesting that, you know, on the really sticky end of that, it doesn't actually work like that. There is no world in which you can have a clear picture without any nuance and say definitively, five hundred thousand people saw my website and three thousand of them clicked it. And of those three thousand, forty of them were engaged and ten of them booked a demo and one of them converted it does it. You're never gonna get that really clean, nice, trustworthy, reliable data. But we keep pedaling this myth in marketing. I say we other people keep pedaling this myth in marketing that that's what we should all strive for. And I don't know, it's just a weird sort of disconnect thing, isn't it? It's like when you're actually trying to do this stuff, you realise that it's all sort of nonsensical. It's never going to work. Mhm. Um, but yeah.

I mean, I don't think I could add any value to that very eloquent, eloquently put point. Um, I think you're absolutely right that we can look at data and try and extract something from it that just isn't there. Yeah. And I don't I don't really know where we go with that because it's obviously it's obviously, you know, with the whole cookie thing, we were talking about the whole thing about Google, not really knowing who you are, where you are or anything else. And then if you mix that in with this, um, this idea that the attribution, which is kind of where we are with this, you know, what we're talking about is very difficult. Um, in order to isolate like.

Mismatched figures and, you know, one platform will say, oh, well, you've had three thousand visitors from Facebook this month. And then another platform will say, oh, we drove one thousand five hundred visitors. And you're like, well, yeah, hang on a minute. Who's right? Where do I go with that? Um, and everybody's familiar with these problems. You know, nobody who works in marketing hasn't wrestled with this, but I just think, yeah.

And I think this that's my phone ringing again. I'm not going to answer it. Um, this, this is something that we've been wrestling with. I'm desperately trying to get back on track because that phone call has just diverted me away. But this this idea around attribution that, you know, has been going round and round in circles is there's always somebody there who's gonna claim that they can do it.

Fix it.

And fix it. And, you know, we can't, we just accept that. Like, just like the old days, we, we don't know everything about what's working and what isn't working.

And I think you hit the nail on the head, which is that the data.

Surprises me because I had no idea what I was talking about.

Yeah, the data is useful. You can see patterns in it one hundred percent. Some of those patterns are true and some of them are very useful. But if you stop listening to your gut, if you stop sort of thinking a little bit, if you sort of accept blindly that all of these models and this data is correct, you will run into trouble because it's only good to a certain point. I think it's.

Easier for companies like us. I mean, we don't get hundreds of enquiries. We're not a volume business. We're a quality business. So, you know, generally speaking, if an enquiry comes in to the CRM. As in they find us online, they go to a web page, they fill in a form on the web page and give us their details. Then we can see the camp, the website, this is what they looked at. This is where they came from, as in organic search, paid search, TikTok, Facebook, whatever. And we know what they were looking at. So we know what they're interested in. And we've got a really clear picture before we have a conversation with them about what you know, about how we might be able to help them. But equally, um, as we've spoken before, you know, that often is just too blurry. It's, it's just not the information just isn't there. But I think with small volume, it's better. I think it must be with big volume, you know, like, you know, beta beta, see maybe where it's like hundreds of thousands or even more visits, you're just going to say like there's a huge number coming from this platform or that platform.

Well, I think, I mean, to your point, I think the part of the problem is when you've got very small numbers and a small amount of data, any error will be magnified massively if. If six people come to your website one day and and three of those visits are misattributed and you don't really know where they've come from, that's sort of fifty percent of your your your guesswork is wrong. And I think with broader data, with bigger data sets, you just get a sort of a slightly more reliable but vague picture, I suppose. Um, but yeah, for sure, I think it's all we can do is like you say, look at the sort of vague patterns and take something from them without sort of clinging to them.

Yeah. There might be, for example, like something where, you know, a page is getting lots of traffic, but it's not getting any enquiries at all. So that's giving you all the information you need. Like whatever we're doing on that page is not what those people coming to it are expecting. It's not telling a good enough story.

It tells you that, but it doesn't tell you the opposite, which is what to actually do about it. That bit, you sort of have to figure out yourself.

You have to experiment, which is what CRO is all about.

And people are very angry when you tell them this. And I think this is sort of like stomach rumbling. One last point on it is It's just that it's very much like the way people are with science. You know, you learn about atoms in physics and you learn that atoms are made up of neutrons and protons and electrons. And then somebody comes along five years later and says, that's all absolute nonsense. We just tell you that because it's simple and your tiny mind can accept it. And you say, oh, I feel so betrayed. And that's how people feel about marketing too, right? It's like, oh, but you told me six thousand people came to my website. I know you can't even tell me how many people actually came. Like, what's real, what isn't. And I get that. But I think at a certain point, you just have to accept, as with science, that everything is a little woolly and not necessarily definite.

Yeah. And I guess that's where we we add value. Yeah. Because we have to interpret that. Woolliness. Listen, I've got a few more things on, on my, uh, on my list, but I'm conscious that we've been babbling away now for, you know.

Your battery's gonna.

Die almost fifty four minutes. And I've been anxiously looking at the one cell left in the mine. It's one of those. It only has three anyway, and it had two when we started. So surely, you know, it's got. Yeah. Yeah.

But you don't get that with your car, with your fuel gauge where it's like, oh, you're three quarters of the way through the tank, you're halfway through the tank. There's nothing left in your tank. What are you doing, you idiot?

I have people that do that. I have people that put fuel in my car. I wish, I wish.

I don't think anybody does that in this country, do they?

I don't know, I'm sure there are people that never have to worry about getting their car serviced or putting fuel in it, or making sure the tire pressures are right or anything else.

Because that's right. Because Rishi Sunak didn't know how did he didn't.

Know how put fuel in a car, that's for sure. Yeah. That didn't go down very well, did it? I personally didn't really care. I was more interested in whether he could run a country. Anyway, that's enough for this. Of this for now. Um, you've been listening to Alex Dave on the, um, Digital Marketing From The Coalface podcast episode one five one. Indeed. MM. I wonder if we'll get to two hundred. I think we'll just get fed up by then.

I think I killed you by then.

Yeah. I don't blame you. I would, I would kill me. Thanks for listening. Bye.