Sleep Deprivation And Late Caffeine

SPEAKER_00 0:27

Hey everyone, welcome back to Marketing Qualified. I'm Mike Griffin. And I'm running about on two hours of sleep. All hyphenated. Uh I'm running on about two hours of sleep. That is uh why why? What's going on?

SPEAKER_01 0:40

Oh, you know, just uh I think it's the uh the 16 ounce Costco sized uh Mocha Code brew I drank at like eight o'clock last night. So uh um there's other stuff going on as well, but I think that's the the big cause of it.

SPEAKER_00 0:55

That'll do it. That'll get you every single time. Well, way way back in the day I could consume caffeine at like a pretty late hour. We'd do like a a post North End in Boston uh date night cappuccino with Fatima. We'd go and get some uh what what is the oh tier masseux, tier masseux dessert with the cappuccino, dude, and just act like not a care in the world and still sleep like pretty well. I'd like to see me try to do that now. I'd like to see me pull it off. Maybe, maybe I'll try, but yeah, you're out of your mind for having it so late.

SPEAKER_01 1:24

I I still I still think you could pull it off. I mean, I feel like the North End and like Boston in general tends to shut down pretty early. Like if you're out later than nine, there's probably not a ton going on to do.

SPEAKER_00 1:35

Um fair, fair. What time does Mike's pastries close, right? God, we've ever gone there.

SPEAKER_01 1:43

Uh I I feel like uh, you know, the the the tea shuts down for most for the most part at like noon or one. I feel like the tea should shut down whatever time Mike's pastry closes. So if Mike's pastry wants to stay open 24 hours a day, let the tea stay open 24 hours a day. People need to get their goddamn cannolis, Mike.

SPEAKER_00 1:58

For fuck's sake, man, it's not a lot to ask in this day and age. In this economy, a cannoli is a pretty like fiscally responsible dessert, if you ask me.

SPEAKER_01 2:06

Uh I mean, I've heard that uh in addition to Bitcoin and gold, uh, with everyone kind of nervous about the economy uh crashing under the tariffs and everything, uh stocks are no longer a safe place. So I've heard that people are fleeing into uh gold, bitcoin, and cannolis. That uh the big three, if you will.

SPEAKER_00 2:23

Right. Exactly. Uh

Episode 20 And Podcast Attrition

SPEAKER_00 2:25

hey man, speaking of big things, we have uh we have a big milestone, uh big big thing that's happening for marketing qualified today. Uh tell the people what it is and do so with the backdrop of some of these really cool stats. I think we've talked about maybe on a recording before, but yeah, what is it for us?

SPEAKER_01 2:40

Uh we we have, yeah. So um just some some general stats. There's about uh two million um this this sources from Reddit, so take with it as you as you will. Um and then the the the guy on Reddit then links out to a YouTube video, so you know, very high quality stuff, and he's probably sourcing his data from Wikipedia. So who knows if any of this stuff is accurate, but um essentially there's two million podcasts, and uh the breakdown of stats is that 90% of those two million podcasts don't get past episode three. Um that's 1.8 million who quit. Of the 200,000 podcasts left, 90% will quit after 20 episodes. That's another 180,000 gone. So to be in the top 1% of podcasts in the world, you only need to publish 21 episodes of your podcast. Your competition's not the 2 million podcasts, it's the 20,000 podcasters who didn't quit. And this is episode 20 for us, so we actually technically have one more to go to publish to beat to beat the podcast, but we'll at least with this episode, we'll be in the 200,000 that didn't quit in the uh the first 20, if that makes sense.

SPEAKER_00 3:55

Absolutely. A tale of attrition we have overcome.

SPEAKER_01 4:00

Didn't look good for a while there, but I uh I was also saying before uh before we started recording here that we must have also set some kind of record for the the num for the podcasters who did make it to the big 2-0, we must have set a record for the lowest number of downloads of any podcast. And that's that's a record I'm I'm happy to uh to accumulate because I know that you know when people first get starting pot started podcasting, the the first sever episodes, unless you're like fucking Travis Kelsey or something, or um sorry, you're not fucking Travis Kelsey. If you are Travis Kelsey, happen to be Travis Kelsey. Uh or if you're Taylor Swift or you're if you're you know somebody famous, it's much easier to get uh um podcast listeners right away because you have much many more promotional uh outlets or whatever, and people obviously know of you and nobody's heard of us. Um I don't even think that my wife listens, so she hears enough of my bitching at home. But right, yeah. Yeah, I mean, it's I I I've definitely heard from other podcasters that you know, some like personal finance podcasts that I listen to, he was putting out podcasts twice a week for like a year. You know, I don't even know how many that would be, like probably close to a hundred episodes, I would imagine. Right. Um and he didn't really start taking off until like a couple years into actually doing it. But once he took off, it was like, you know, it just like shot up from like getting, you know, maybe a handful each episode to getting you know thousands, and then people would go back through the backlog and you know listen to some of his older stuff. Um I'm hoping that happens for us. Uh if not, I'm uh completely fine with just having a friendly chat with you once a week and talking into the echo chamber.

SPEAKER_00 5:41

That's right. Uh completely and totally agree with that. The uh boy, that's a real like serious lag time in terms of uh how long it was actually producing the content for before it took off. And I forget what episode we recently recorded. It was uh listening to some like uh older edits recently, right? But it's like, didn't you say that someone said and it's terrible advice, which we'll get to today, but like if you build it, they will come. This is an example of that actually coming to fruition. Just stay the course with pumping out content.

SPEAKER_01 6:10

Yeah, was that was that something that we talked about with Salty Dan? No, he's no, it was Naomi. Maybe it was Naomi. Naomi's like, if you build it, you they will come. And we're like, no, Naomi.

SPEAKER_00 6:21

That's that is just that is just not right. We probably did talk about it with Salty Dan, and then we circled back, if you will, and talk about it even more in a in a recent episode. So yeah, interesting. Well, listen, we'll stay the course, totally agree with everything you said. It's so funny because we probably have like I don't know, 16, 15, maybe more episodes than we do listeners right now. And I'm not sure, like you said, if that's the best ratio, but this is uh this is therapeutic. So here we are. Uh, what does therapy look like today? We'll tell you.

The New Theme Bad Advice

SPEAKER_00 6:54

We have uh so the idea was to do a little bit of like a rejiggering of the of the podcast, and so try to stick more thematically to things on kind of like a episode by episode basis. One of the things that uh Chris, I know that you are a fan of that some of the other podcasts that you consume do is basically take shitty advice and talk about why it's shitty or react to that. Now we are not yet at the level of sophistication whereby we will be able to view these things together or extract audio. We're we're getting there. So for today, it's essentially things that we have observed, observed that we will share with one another uh in the way of shitty marketing advice, and then just sort of do what we usually do and uh talk about why that sucks.

SPEAKER_01 7:36

So would you anything missing there? Yeah, well what we'll do in the future is we'll definitely have more like audio-based, whether it's uh you know, podcast clips of bad advice or YouTube or Instagram or whatever. Um I'll start making more notes of those. I was saying uh to you before the the recording as well, it's remarkably hard to find bad advice when you're looking for it. Usually it comes when you least expect it. Like like I like I was like looking around on LinkedIn and like trying to find stuff, and like some of the stuff I was seeing was actually decent or like could be helpful. And right, you know, it's always when you when you least expect it that Neil Patel pops up and he's like, hello!

SPEAKER_00 8:15

The boogeyman. What is that? What was that horror movie, like the Baba Duke, right? That was so terrible. Yes, that's what I picture this. I picture this being like, You're right, it is remarkable when I'm just like trying to enjoy my life, like uh going about my business, like boom, this thing is being served to me. But yet when I'm making concerted effort to find it, it just it just isn't the case. It's like trying to find the goddamn pizza cutter when your wife asks you for it. You know it's somewhere in the drawer, but it just like vanishes, and like any other time that you're looking for anything else, it's the first fucking thing that you see. So that's the that's the analogy that comes to mind for me.

SPEAKER_01 8:51

Exactly. Yeah, well, um, today's uh advice. So I'll be reading the advice um to you and and have you reacting to it. Like I mentioned, we'll do some more like video and audio based um reactions in the future. But um a lot of today's bad marketing advice is courtesy of Reddit. Um so there's actually several threads of what's the what's the greatest or what's what's the worst marketing advice you've ever had, what's the best marketing advice you've ever received that actually ended up being the worst. Um there's uh greatest marketing blunders of all time. So I'm just gonna go through these and and read some of them out off to you, and then we can kind of chat through them when we see anything that um makes sense. So we're gonna start off with a little rapid fire around. Um so these are just uh short ones that that somebody uh commented on in a post here on Reddit. Um also, too, like if you think of any that you've just heard or you know, any that that you remember from being in the past, like a former coworker or manager or somebody on LinkedIn or whoever has told you to do this advice and you just know it's inherently bad, feel free to share those as well. If uh if anything comes to you off the top of your head that as we uh kind of go through these.

SPEAKER_00 10:09

The dumb smile is because that is exclusively what I prepared for. Maybe I didn't get the assignment for this episode, but I exclusively was like, here's some stupid shit that's been said to me in the past and examples of it. So yeah, I have a uh a bit of a cache ready to go once we're on the other side of this stuff. So that's what do you see?

SPEAKER_01 10:24

Uh I'll be I'll I won't be surprised if any of this overlaps with what you have, but uh let's uh let's kick it off. Yes.

More Content Is Not Better

SPEAKER_01 10:30

All right, number one, uh more content is always better.

SPEAKER_00 10:33

Oh my god. Okay, so uh categorically false. In fact, in a recent episode, you and I talked about we looked at a at a post from uh SparkTora, uh Amanda uh Natvidat, I think her name is that said the exact opposite, right? And especially in the age of AI where you're churning out stuff at like an unprecedented rate, the quantity is just like way less significant because everyone else can do it too. It's the actual quality of the shit that you're producing that really matters. So yeah, that is some dumb shit. That's my take.

SPEAKER_01 11:02

I I 100% agree. And this um this post was written two years ago, so it's it's relatively new-ish. Um I would say that in the age of AI, when you can create, you know, a thousand-page blog posts in like five seconds, more content is not always better. More content just regurgitates a lot of the same old bullshit, and uh, you know, it's not going to do anything to help your business by just doing more and more and more content. You need to make sure it's the right types of content, that it's speaking to your audience, that it's you know adding something of value to them to make them more interested in your business.

SPEAKER_00 11:39

A hundred percent. A hundred percent. Something that sticks with me back from my channel consultant days at HubSpot. There was like an e-book that agency owners could download, and that it's the title that really sticks with me still. It was called Escaping the Sea of Sameness. Okay. And I just feel like the sea of sameness is exactly what you're gonna be swimming in in perpetuity if you're only focused on like again, cranking out a bunch of new content for the sake of doing this is what you're supposed to do, is what the advice says. Um, you don't want to do that, uh, be unique, be authentic.

SPEAKER_01 12:08

Yeah, and it's not just about marketing either. I mean, companies as a whole, like there's so many companies that are afraid to kind of take a stance and do something outside of the beat, you know, the beaten path. I I think we might have even talked about this last time, but you you know, if you're not a leader, you're a follower, and I see so many companies just following the big guys these days, and like what the big guys are doing isn't necessarily right, or even you know what you should be doing. Um I'm trying to think of the quote I I recently read about this, but um it's I'm I can't think of it right now, but it was yeah, it was something along the lines of um how the companies that are that aren't afraid to take a stance or you know aren't willing to you know put something out there and potentially fail, those are the companies that tend to be a lot more successful. And I think that you know, testing new stuff with marketing is a really important part of that. Um I don't know if we talked about this on the podcast. I know that it's relatively old at this point, but um the whole Sydney Sweeney good jeans scandal. Yes, yeah, we're we actually I think AE or uh sorry, American Eagle, I think that they actually just had earnings, and it actually like sales are up pretty substantially because it brought a lot of attention to the brand. And you know, I think personally that the backlash was a little bit ridiculous.

SPEAKER_02 13:27

Um yeah, yeah.

SPEAKER_00 13:29

Um I I follow on the opposite side of that where I was like super into like the media literacy of it and like a lot of the smart people I follow, not on not on LinkedIn, but a lot of like the uh like dog whistle expert kind of folks, uh, I thought made some pretty good points that it was pretty, pretty ridiculous. And I got down a rabbit hole about following like where donations from American Eagle came in and like where they spend their money on like really like racist and kind of like dickhead campaigns.

SPEAKER_01 13:56

But anyway, it's not uh the the point about is the former marketer from like Abercrombie and Fitch working for them now or something. Like I I I guess I didn't go as deep as you on that whole thing, but yeah.

SPEAKER_00 14:07

Well, you uh you've had other stuff to to focus about. So to be fair, uh I had I had the time. Uh yeah, it's we don't have time to get into it now. We'll talk we'll talk about it another time. But to the the point about like the campaign, it's interesting because I saw something to the opposite, and that is like so foot traffic was down considerably, even given like the shift in recent like years to like an e-comm first model. Um, after on the other side of this controversy, that went down. I hadn't seen anything about like the larger like earnings or like retail sales. It's interesting to see what kind of like seesaw effect that might have had, and like um, what do you call it? What what that says, right? About like how people are shopping in in general. Um, what I wanted to say before I forget is like so the big guys and copying what they're doing, like personal examples from a previous career chapter, and that is like, oh, this major competitor of us of ours that just raised a quadrillion dollars is having a lot of success in here. We need to be where they are, we need to be competing with them, we need to do this kind of thing. Uh, by the way, you have one forty-fifth of the budget to work with that they do. So please go ahead and uh be scrappy and figure it out, dude. Like I it was impossible, is the point I'm trying to make. You gotta be realistic.

SPEAKER_01 15:21

Yeah, I I actually have the the stat that I pulled up here. So um this is what I was referring to. It actually just came out today. Um, that's why it's so top of mind. But um basically the year over year total revenue decreased. You know decreased. Yeah, um, but that being said, they it decreased at a lower rate than analysts were expecting, so that's why the stock kind of popped. And they're saying that it didn't decrease as much because of the whole Sydney Sweeney ad scandal thing.

SPEAKER_00 15:52

It's so funny, man, because like I don't pretend to be like a scientist of any sort, let alone like a data scientist, but like the causation correlation kind of thing is always like so interesting to me, like how much of a lagging indicator like is something like that. It was came out like pretty late into the quarter, if I recall. So, like uh, I don't know. It's just interesting. People that know more about this stuff than us, maybe one of our four listeners can unpack a little bit more, like how exactly that kind of thing is is calculated. But it's so funny because it's like, oh yeah, we got a big ass hole in the ship. Uh, we're taking on a lot of water, but we're losing it, we're taking on less than we were uh at this point last year.

SPEAKER_01 16:27

So great. It's like uh the the Titanic being like, Oh, you know, once they hit the iceberg, oh fuck, we're gonna sink in like half an hour, and everyone's like, Oh no, and then they're like, actually, no, no, no, wait, we're gonna sink in about two hours. And everyone's like, Oh, I think you know, wiping the sweat off their brow. They're like, Oh, we thought it was gonna be a lot faster.

SPEAKER_00 16:42

Another round, uh, but this is completely under well, it's Tinjali related, I guess. I have to find the clip to send you. And it was just like the Titanic is only sad because of the music, and then like there's some Skrillex song or something like that that's put over to like the scene where everyone is like falling down. Is the spoiler alert, the Titanic sinks. Okay, for people that haven't seen the movie, uh, I will find this and I will send it to you to uh waste about 45 seconds of your life.

SPEAKER_01 17:06

Um, I I'll also send you something to waste about 45 seconds of your life. It's a uh somebody did this on YouTube, it's like a Michael Bay rendition of the Titanic. So I I will send this to you after the uh after we get off the recording here. Sounds like an explosive video. Can't wait. Uh very uh very explosive, yeah. Nice. Like there's like people like you know, the the part where they're like jumping off the back of the shit and like one guy hits an uh the propeller explosion. Yeah, like people are like hitting hitting the waters, like explosions and stuff, like you know, kind of fucked up if you think about it, like making fun of a terrible tragedy like that. But um still too soon? Still too soon. Uh yeah, I I I don't know how how soon before you can start uh start doing that kind of stuff, but I don't think anyone like nobody's alive that you know, even like the the infant who was like born on the Titanic or whatever, like they aren't even alive anymore.

SPEAKER_00 18:02

Right. Exactly. Well listen, man. I'll tell you what it's too soon for. It's too soon for some of this other shitty advice. What else do you see on the um

SEO Still Matters For Discovery

SPEAKER_00 18:12

all right?

SPEAKER_01 18:12

So the next one is SEO isn't that important, just write for people.

SPEAKER_00 18:19

Your thoughts, sir. I I'm like processing what that what do you what do you mean? Do they do they know nothing about how marketing works? Do they miss the whole like magnet bringing people in to the beginning of the in-bound movement? Now do they think that yeah, that's garbage? That's garbage.

SPEAKER_01 18:35

Yeah, I mean, obviously you should be writing for your ICP. Um that being said, if you're doing it well, like the SEO will follow, but like SEO and like the technical stuff is still important too, because like if you're writing on a blog that has like a robots.txt issue like blocking the the crawlers from finding the blog, you could write for the like you know, the best article for the people all you want, but nobody's gonna find it because it's it's gonna be blocked by some technical issues. So I you know the I'd say that the technical parts of SEO were just as important as the you know the content and the and the writing for the people.

SPEAKER_00 19:10

Yeah, listen, I think that like when I was first coming up in my career, it was very much like, okay, keyword research first, and now let's find a way to talk about or compose an article that includes as many instances of this keyword in the important parts for like indexing as possible. And you really had to like cram it in now. Like everything on SEO geo has evolved so much that you should, to your point, like write about shit that your ICP actually cares about and then make sure that it's optimized in a way that like for semantic search and like you know, broad match, fuzzy match kind of stuff, like it's going to stand a chance at at ranking or like showing up for in these re results. It doesn't have to be as like uh rigid, right, as maybe it once did, but you still just can't like what what the fuck good is it if you're creating all this wonderful content and no one is seeing it. Agreed.

You Cannot Target Everyone

SPEAKER_01 20:03

Um next one is you can target everyone. This this one is near and dear to my heart. I'm sure you've uh you know been talking to you know, if you're in an interview or you know, talking to sales or whoever, and you're like, Well, who's your ICP? And they're like, everyone, everyone could be a potential customer of ours. Your reaction, go.

SPEAKER_00 20:25

My reaction is that is I'm not even gonna that that is asinine, right? That is not even ridiculous or stupid. That is just straight up asinine. And the reason for that is because, like, especially from a marketing standpoint, especially in today's marketing landscape where everything is so heavily scrutinized and you have to be so mindful about every single penny that is being dispersed on acquisition where your resources often on an increasingly lean marketing team is being dispersed. That if you try to please everything about this as a person, like if you try to please everyone, you'll please no one, right? And you'll will you'll attract no one. You can't possibly have messaging that's going to resonate with people across industries. Like, that's the whole point of all these like mutinies and like smart content available and HubSpot Enterprise and all that shit, right? It's like personalizing it to the ICP based on job title, based on industry that they occupy, right? Like, yeah, sure. You could so okay, fine, surface level, sure. Maybe you could sell to everyone. That's probably not accurate. But if you are going to, I think what that's really implying is that you can do it with like one fell swoop and just have like a big bucket of messaging positioning campaigns or whatever. And that is utter nonsense. Like it has to be hyper focused for the people that you're actually trying to bring in. Like, I did that that's ridiculous. I can't believe that someone said that.

SPEAKER_01 21:39

What do you think? I mean, it's it's statistically impossible to have a hundred percent market share. Every company will have competitors, like, even some of the best companies in the world, or like some of the biggest companies of the world, uh, don't have a hundred percent market share. Google, for example, has never had a hundred percent search market share. There's always been that one asshole who uses Bing because he Doesn't know how you know he he doesn't know how to change the default browser on his Windows 11 computer or something. So like even some of the best products out there, like you're never gonna have 100% market share. Like Coca-Cola doesn't have 100% market share. There's always people who will have Pepsi.

SPEAKER_02 22:14

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 22:15

Um, you know, Apple doesn't have 100% market share. There's always people who use the Android, um, and and so on and so forth. So, like saying that you can target everyone, like theoretically, could anyone be a potential customer of Apple? Sure. Does everyone have the means to buy an iPhone? Absolutely not, absolutely not, especially overseas overseas, where you know, like the average income of like some somebody in like Kenya or something is like five bucks a day. Like they're gonna be using an Android phone because it would take them an entire year to save up for an iPhone.

SPEAKER_00 22:43

100%. 100%. Yep, that's real. That's real.

SPEAKER_01 22:49

All right, let's uh let's let's shift things up now and we'll go to um worst marketing advice you've ever got.

Send More Emails Is A Trap

SPEAKER_01 22:59

Um odds struggle 3873 says send more emails. Things aren't working, send more emails.

SPEAKER_00 23:07

That's gonna do wonders for your delivery score. That's really that's really gonna help. What is do you remember the threshold? I think in uh in HubSpot, it's like you get 12 attempts at sending to someone. I'm imagining there's something similar in like a mail champ, constant contact, that kind of shit, right? That uh that's like if if someone has not opened or clicked or like engaged on 12 marketing emails that you've sent, they actually get auto-added to the disengage contacts list and they will automatically be suppressed from your next round because you don't want to damage your sender score. Like your reputation, like your domain health actually like makes a difference. And so it's like a proactive opportunity to like stop you from that. You can override that manually if you want to take the risk. But there's a reason that that threshold and like that as a practice exists, and that is because if you're not having success and sending more is not the solution. Maybe email isn't the best channel for you to be engaging with the folks you're trying to reach at that point in their buying stage. Uh, what do you think?

SPEAKER_01 24:05

I I mean, I completely agree. If you're not getting results with email, sending more is just gonna piss off your customers who already aren't engaging even more, in addition to like like I think you mentioned like all the technical potential deliverability issues and all that kind of stuff that comes along with it. Um yeah, it's just it's gonna, you know, if customers weren't already flagging you with spam and you start sending more, that's gonna get you flagged as spam, if not like you know, just an unsubscribe or you know, all that all that kind of stuff. Um yeah, and like as far as I'm concerned, sending more emails never the answer. Sending less better emails is probably a good place to start. Exactly.

SPEAKER_00 24:42

Yep. And I was just gonna say, in like the US, where like let's face it, like GDPR concerns, restriction, a lot of privacy stuff, and like opt-in and consent is just like less uh of a focus, is it's the is the unfortunate truth, right? But if you're an international company or you're marketing to international markets and there is like a much more heavy emphasis on this kind of thing, like you work so hard to get the legal consent to cop to contact someone anyhow, and then you're gonna go and fuck it up by being like overly aggressive with your communication. That's just that that that's a bad like business strategy, is what I was gonna say.

SPEAKER_01 25:18

Yeah, and somebody else uh followed up on this on on Reddit where um a sales guy said to them, we just need to send emails every day, maybe twice a day. And then the sales manager commented, once a consumer applies for this financial product, we should automatically text them every hour until they agree to talk to our financial specialist. Every hour.

SPEAKER_00 25:42

Every hour. Chris, how far across your front lawn would you project your would you hurl your phone if you're being contacted every hour on the hour for something?

SPEAKER_01 25:54

I mean, uh if if I hadn't given them permission to text me in the first place, uh I know we don't really have a ton of like protections and and privacy laws here, but uh I could always claim I was in California, for example. In California, that's uh against the CPC C CPA. Um let's let's uh let's keep moving on here to other ones. Um How about we send that guy a text every hour, like, hey did you follow up in this lead yet? Hey, did you follow up in this lead yet? Like, how the fuck would you like this? Um I mean this is one that I just thought of off the top of my

Rebrands That Burn Brand Equity

SPEAKER_01 26:30

head. Um probably the worst, one of the worst rebranding decisions of all time. HBO Max to Max to HBO Max. And uh I also read an article that I think that McKinsey was like the consulting firm that recommended that change. And they charged them uh you know millions of dollars for that bad advice that like was terrible for their branding. Like everyone knows, you know, everyone that that watches HBO shows know that like that iconic like HBO thing when the show starts, like when Game of Thrones is about to come on or Sopranos or The Wire or something. Yeah, it's one of the best brands in entertainment, in my opinion, and they completely fucked it up. Yes, because some some MBA in a suit from McKinse decided to charge them like seven million dollars for that advice, and then some other suit from McKinsey charged him seven million dollars to be like, actually, no, we need to go back to HBO Max.

SPEAKER_00 27:19

The McKinsey memes make themselves in a lot of instances, don't they? Like, it's so it's so outrageous. Yeah, that was terrible marketing advice. They could have tried anything else, they touched like the one like bread and butter kind of thing.

SPEAKER_01 27:35

How do you do such a big rebrand like that and not like do you think that they did talk to their like loyal HBO subscribers? And I'm assuming the majority of them were like, no, don't fucking touch my my brand. I love HBO. And they're just like, you know what, they they they don't even know what they want. Like, nobody knew that they wanted an iPhone until Steve Jobs made one. So nobody knows that they want max until we just shove it down their fucking throats.

SPEAKER_00 27:58

I genuinely believe that's how the conversation went. They probably got like pretty negative feedback when they stress tested in. They're like, Yeah, but what do these guys know?

SPEAKER_01 28:06

We went to we went to Harvard, so we know better than all these people who uh you know just like to watch TV. That's right. The plebes don't get much of an opinion, do they?

unknown 28:15

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 28:16

One of my favorite quotes from Bill Maher, uh, I don't know if you're uh you're a Bill Maher guy, if you like real time or anything. Um love him or hate him. Uh, I think one of his best quotes is Harvard is an asshole factory.

SPEAKER_00 28:27

An asshole factory, yeah. Yeah. Uh um Harvard produced then produced, but notable uh Harvard attendee, Ted Cruz. So yeah, look no further than that for an example of the type of person that comes out.

SPEAKER_01 28:40

Uh amongst many others. I'm uh I'm a proud uh non-graduate of Harvard. That's right.

SPEAKER_00 28:47

That's right. And look at us building a media empire, that's just that, Harvard, folks.

SPEAKER_01 28:56

Uh okay. Fair. All right, you ready for another one? We have uh oh yeah, let's see. We have about 10 minutes left in the free Zoom here. Not because we can't afford the paid for Zoom, but because I think that the 40-minute limit is a feature, not a bug. Exactly. Um, all right, so I I'm gonna switch it up a little bit

ChatGPT Bad Advice Speed Round

SPEAKER_01 29:14

here. I just asked uh ChatGPT to give me some hilariously bad marketing advice. So we're gonna go through these quickly. Uh limit the reaction to maybe just like a thought or two if if you can. I know that you're you're pretty passionate about some of these. I'll I'll try to do the same because I could talk for a while about some of these. Yeah, fair. Um insult your customers, let them know they're stupid for not already buying your product. Bonus points of your slogan is for people who finally grew a brain. Uh I love it. Really embraces the challenger mentality. Um this one here, I I feel like is something that I would have seen in the previous company. Hold a giveaway, but never pick a winner. It builds suspense forever. Hard to argue the logic.

SPEAKER_00 29:57

Yeah. Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 29:59

Uh uh pop-ups on pop-ups. So if people close your pop-up, immediately pop open another one and ask them if they were they meant to do that. I mean, it's the same as double opt-in, right? You just gotta apply it to a pop-up. Make your brand mascot deeply unsettling. A haunted clown, a sentient sock, a tax preparation goblin. Anything that screams, I'll visit you in your dreams.

SPEAKER_00 30:25

It would definitely be attention grabbing. You're kind of like a no press or all press is good press kind of move. We talked about Duolingo in the past and some of the disturbing like faces that that motherfucker puts on for me to go in and do my lesson.

SPEAKER_01 30:36

Yeah, sure, try it. I feel like Chat GPG is getting into some territory where I think that this is actually stuff that I feel like I would read about on LinkedIn. Uh, launch before the product exists. Why wait? Start selling now and figure out how to make the thing later. Future you will handle it. Okay. I feel like companies actually do that. Like, I feel like they, you know, that's like part of like the lean startup.

SPEAKER_00 30:56

Yeah, dude, exactly. I was gonna say, hey, give me a trigger warning next time, won't you? That's exactly it. And they don't even have the decency to be like coming soon.

SPEAKER_01 31:06

Just like this this is another one that I feel like some companies probably do. Uh, you know, if not intentionally, then definitely unintentionally. Uh forget to translate ads properly. Your campaigns for in an example, your campaign says delicious and refreshing in English, but bite the soap coward in Spanish, perfect. Um, that was one of the things that we talked about in an earlier. We talked about, yeah, it was uh, I think Pepsi, like they they did like a poor translation for like China where it's like Yes, uh Pepsi, like it'll revive your dad ancestors or something. Yes, exactly. Exactly. That one, nice, nice, nailed it. Um, sponsor the most inappropriate events possible. And then the example that Chat GPG gives is children's yogurt sponsoring a cage fight, pet cremate crep pet cremation service at a wedding expo. Now that's brand awareness.

SPEAKER_00 31:58

That is I feel the same way I do about that. I feel the same way about that as when in wedding crashers will ferrell starts like crashing funerals instead of weddings, it just maybe, maybe there's something to it, but it's definitely fucked up.

SPEAKER_01 32:14

Alright, we'll go to we'll do two uh two more here. Use QR codes that go nowhere. Everyone loves a scavenger hunt that ends in a disappointment in a 4-4 error.

SPEAKER_00 32:24

I I can't even like facetiously condone that one. That would absolutely make me want to tear my hair around.

SPEAKER_01 32:32

Uh, and then let's do this as the last one. Replace customer service with an escape room puzzle. If they can't solve a riddle, they don't deserve a refund. Hashtag survival of the fittest. A hashtag indeed. Well, that's all I got for you. From straight from the minds of Reddit and ChatGPT, which uh I think are actually one and the same now.

SPEAKER_00 32:54

Yeah, there's a lot of overlap in that Venn diagram, isn't there?

Gating A Commercial Behind A Form

SPEAKER_00 32:58

Uh I will I will I will leave you with a uh with a personal example for for this one. For this uh this theme, and that is I was once told there was essentially like a it was a commercial, right? You know, they have the paid actors and they're like typing on their laptops and enter the voiceover actor that's talking about oh, the struggle of such and such in their day-to-day, and then enter this person. It was like it was a commercial that you would see on the classic TV, right? I was told it was dictated to me that this video must be uh only available after form submission. Maybe we've talked about this on the air before or not. Uh would you fill out a form to watch a commercial? No, maybe nervous research.

SPEAKER_01 33:41

I can't believe I can't believe that's even even advice. Like the whole point of a commercial is to get your message out so that people want to engage.

SPEAKER_00 33:48

Yeah, oh no, no, you gotta earn the message first by giving us your contact information, knowing damn well you're gonna be aggressively followed up with afterwards. It was advice that I was uh again like given to me and that I had to adhere to. Dude, I had to grin and bear this for a month before finally there was enough like baseline data to come out and be like, we're losing. Like, look at the look at the drop-off ray of like sessions. This why don't we just make the fucking video? And then what do you know? Because I'm a psycho like this, I like to go back and look at previous employers to see if they're still implementing some of the things that I fought for. They actually did in this instance, and that is like on the solution page, the commercial video now across like multiple product lines. It's available for consumption without a form submission, right in the hero section where you get like your whole pitch. And then if you are so inclined, you may reach out for an actual high-intent conversation via demo requests. Amazing, amazing stuff.

SPEAKER_01 34:41

Sometimes I I like with all these like digital marketing tactics that we talked about, and like you know, QR codes and landing pages and gated commercials and all this, all this other type of stuff. I try to like think back of like what's the traditional marketing version of this. So, like, this would be like if in the 90s you're watching TV, like you're watching, I don't know, like SpongeBob SquarePants on Nickelodeon or something, and something pops up and it's like, do you want to stop watching what you're watching right now so that you can watch this commercial about like Huggy's diapers instead? Right. And you're just like, sure. And oh yeah, oh, by the way, you need to call this number and then we'll, you know, we'll then we'll give you the the commercial.

SPEAKER_00 35:22

Right. Yeah, it's uh it's not a good, not a good give and take. Uh that's it for the takes that we have time to react to today. This was fun. We'll come back with another theme for next time. Uh, Chris, enjoy that Costco Mocha when you have it later on today, despite knowing better at this point. Uh everyone else, thanks for coming along the ride. We appreciate you. We'll talk to you soon. Thanks all the time.