Inside the Marketing Lab: Biotech Strategies with Trice Alford, Chief Marketing Officer at Ronawk

So, Karina, remember last week when we spoke to Trice Alford and it was such a good conversation that we forgot to record the intro? Yeah.

Well, in our defense, we went way over time, so yeah, it was a great conversation. So we have been instructed to circle back and give our intro.

Trice was such an interesting guest to have on because Trice is the CMO at Ronok and the co feller of Stella. So those companies are on a mission to revolutionize the cell culture industry and Trice really comes at it from a marketing perspective. So we had a really great conversation about a lot of B2B insight and just kind of scaling a company from the marketing side of things. It was great. Yeah.

And I loved their take on the cell culture industry and he is addressing directly a pain point that I experienced during my graduate school years. So we think you'll really enjoy this podcast. We certainly did.

Welcome to Building Biotechs by Recruitomics Consulting. We've helped over 90 biotech, life sciences and venture capital firms strategize and hire thousands of employees to scale companies that impact human. We speak with those at the forefront of growing biotechs to learn their tactics on building these companies from the ground up. I'm Karina Klingman, founder and principal at Recruitomics Consulting. Enjoy the show.

So we ask all of our guests, what did you want to be when you were 7? What are you now, and how did you get there?

When I was seven, I don't. I would love to tell you. I had goals at seven years old and I had a plan. Truth is, I did not. And I've followed that path of not having a plan for most of my career, honestly. And now I'm chief marketing officer of a startup called Ronok.

That's amazing. Maybe when you were maybe not seven exactly, but you didn't have any plan, any goals. You didn't want to be an astronaut. I wanted to be a horse. So if that puts things in perspective.

It'S funny. So in high school, I read Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas by Hunter S. Thompson, and I'd love to say it changed my life. It did not change my life, but it showed me how involved a. A writer and a journalist could be. And I was going down that path anyway. So I really thought when I went to college, I was like, I'm going to be a writer for Rolling Stone. That's going to be my jam. And I got to college and realized two things. One, I'm not that great of a writer. And so that was a Strong message and two writers talk about things and they observe things and I wanted to do things, something and I'm much more of a doer and I'm very task oriented person. That's where I realized like my path was going to go a different direction than maybe what I thought in high school.

I don't know though. I would make the argument that marketing is just telling a story by doing right. You got to put the story out there and you got to create all the collateral that tells that story. So kind of took the roundabout path, but you got there.

I got there. I think marketing has become that. It wasn't necessarily that when I started and I think that's good. I think it's why maybe I'm better suited to it now than I thought I was.

So interesting. Can I pull that thread a little bit? I'm curious about what has changed in marketing and when you started, what was it? And now what do you do on a daily basis?

Yeah, that's a, that's a great question. I actually was talking to somebody about this the other day. Marketing is so much about storytelling and content and the technical behind the content of SEO or whatever digital work you're doing. And that's not how it was when I started. I started out working for a media company and building messages between people, an audience and an advertiser or a group of advertisers. And marketing was very advertising and promotion driven at the time and, and everybody was focused on that. And then digital came and shifted things a lot and eyeballs went online and that shift continued. And now we can't imagine not doing something on social or writing content or creating stories or video and then all the technical stuff on the back end to host it or stream platforms like this. Right. That didn't even cross my mind five years ago, let alone doing this for a brand. Right. Let alone all the other stuff that goes along with it. And I'm. I'm not a creator traditionally. And so I think for me, working with people and understanding what Brandon's problems were, my. I always called myself a translator. I'm the guy that translates business problems into strategies and ideas. And so my creation comes there. What is the real problem? What is the real goal? And that's where I get in the mix. And so I think for me that's how marketing's changed as well. It's not just let's do a bunch of things and convince a bunch of people to buy something and, and it's Also, I'm in B2B so it's very different. And so now it is very much about storytelling and messaging and trying to target and figure out who my audience is and understanding what are their needs, what are their goals and can we, can we impact that, can we do something about that? And, and that's the fun part about it.

So yeah, yeah.

I think that shift from tactical to strategic is a hundred percent exactly where marketing has gone. Now there is a strategy behind everything and so much less of the tactical. We just do this because this is what's always been done and I think it makes it for a more interesting experience. Even as a consumer or as a B2B, you're getting a little bit more behind the scenes. You're getting a little bit more of the story of what you're purchasing perhaps or whatever you're investing in. I'm really interested how you got into the biotech sector because marketing and biotech is a very interesting realm in and of itself.

I'd love to tell you I'm an expert at it already, but I'm not. I'm, I'm still learning my way into it I think a little bit. But. So I have a good friend. My, my partner at Ronok is a gentleman by the name of Scott Lee. And Scott's on the sales side. He's our chief revenue officer and I'm on the marketing side. Scott and I go way back. We met in college. He was a consultant for my national fraternity and came to, I went to school at Kansas State and he came to K State and he recruited a bunch of us and helped us form a brand new fraternity. And so he and I had a unique experience from the get go together stayed, we both live in Kansas City. We stayed friends and in contact with each other over the years. And he was making a change in his career path at the same time I was making a change of mine and we got together and we had lunch and talked and he said I've got these, got a few contacts. And he was in the biotech space. He worked for a, a distrib, a distribution company selling equipment, materials, things like that. And, and he said I've got some contacts, maybe we should do something together, sales and marketing and maybe see if we can put something together and see where this goes. So we made some phone calls and one of those calls was to Dr. A.J. milott and Heather Decker, the co founders of Ronok, where I work now. And they were really just starting their go to market planning and understand, trying to understand what go to market looked like. And we went in and we did a project with them for a few months and then both of us made the decision that it was the right place for us and we loved where the technology was going and we knew that there was going to be potentially a lot of disruption in what the technology offered, which was interesting and exciting, a lot of potential. We both said, yeah, we're in. And they agreed and luckily. And so that's my. This is my first stint in biotech and it's been super exciting about a little over a year and a half now. And I'm super lucky and very grateful for working with a bunch of people who are, um, I like to call it where I've never seen a group of heavy hitters like this get together and try to do something. Everybody is in their lane, is really accomplished and having a group of people like that together is really amazing because you get in the room and you're like. It fires on all cylinders and you're like, wow, this is really coming at me fast. It's, it's really exciting. It moves very quickly and like most startups do and no different. But I. This is my first full stint into biotech startup.

So yeah, yeah, you're the average of the five people you spend the most time with. So you get in the room with those heavy hitters and things magic happens. So on that note, give us the 50,000 foot view. What is Rono, how do you, what do you do there?

It is hard. I won't, you. I won't use our corporate spiel which we drafted obviously many times now. But I would like to say. And it's hard. It is an innovation company and that right now we're focused on the cell culture market. We have a product called BioBlox. They are a 3D scaffold that is a tissue memetic platform that will essentially change the way people do cell culture and tissue culture forever. It is a massive shift. And so that's our main product. We also have launched Stella, which is a, a CRO and so a contract research organization here in the Midwest. There aren't a lot of those kinds of groups that are focused on our geographic area. And so we thought that was a good fit for us as well. We have a lot of our own research to be doing obviously as well as research for clients and partners. And so we thought that together those were a really good, a good fit. So we built a lab here in Kansas City. It is a pretty significant upgrade for us honestly. And we're really in the process now we've got the physical space built out and now we just have a lot of new equipment and things like that coming in. So there's a very new experience. But right now we have, I want to say we have 12 or 13 employees people on our team.

Yeah, that was going to be my next question is how big is your actual team? And so that is going to make me jump right ahead to one of the questions that I always find so fascinating. You've got all these people, you've got these 13 people and you're moving really fast. How do you guys handle communication? What's it? We're always asking because we're always hoping someone just has a secret sauce to like oh this is how communication is so well done in our company and it seems like maybe that's not always the case.

Yeah, good and bad. I think all companies, especially startups that are moving fast, the communication is constant and that's how we are. We're, we are good at it, but we also fail at it too. And I, I, so I think that there's no secret sauce. I, at least I haven't found it yet. So I think we tend to like most people, I think we are looking at all the variables and doing like analysis on the fly and talking about it and we have a lot of one off conversations about this thing and then this thing and but I would say the thing we do really well is as a, as an executive team we're really trying to as it moves faster and we get more people to be, really get closer and closer as a group and to spend time together socially so that we are not just at work together all the time get our families involved so that we're not like, I'm not talking about my friend Scott Lee and my wife doesn't know him or something like that. So I, I, it's, that's really important to us as part of our culture that everyone really does know each other. It is on a first name basis and we have a lot of one off conversations and a lot of real, very timely, regimented, scheduled meetings as well to just make sure we have enough ground to just cover all the stuff that is going on. And then Scott and I will go off on our own and talk about sales and marketing and then we'll meet with a COO and then we'll we a new idea comes up and we'll create a little task force for that. We'll try to tackle that from a production standpoint as well as sales and marketing standpoint. So We're, I'd say we're getting better at it and as we add more people I think that'll be more important. Obviously for us. We want to make sure people understand the direction we're heading as a company not just because we said so, but why is this a good idea and time for questions and throw curveballs and all the things. But truth of the matter is if we all get into a room, there's six of us on the executive team and we all get into the room, we're going to shoot a lot of holes in every plan and try to figure out how do you really navigate this landscape. And as a young startup I think that's really valuable.

Yeah, absolutely. Too bad you don't have the magic bullet for us though. How do you tailor marketing strategies specifically for biotech startups as compared with other companies that you've worked with? And do you have any advice for our listeners on that?

That is a great question. I, I bet your listeners and people in involved in biotech or pharma or life sciences, right. They all think their customers are unique and they all think scientists are different and as customers that's probably especially true but I as a marketer argue that's not true and that yes the platform, it's being B2B and being science focused, yeah, that's different for sure. The education level potentially could be different but there's a lot of things in there. But they all evaluate things the same way. The way we do that as consumers now and buyers is very driven on what do I know about this thing? What can I find out about this thing? Is this thing interesting? We self fulfill in a lot of ways now right as marketing go anyway. So I think the marketing strategy isn't any different from any other B2B to be honest. But because storytelling and because you are trying to reach a business type customer and because I'm a startup, I don't have a brand and nobody knows me and nobody uses my product. It is an incredible uphill battle and capturing eyeballs and intent and all those things are you're doing it from scratch and that's really, it's, it can be cumbersome honestly. So I really try to balance out like what's really valuable to us and I'm. This is the thing I've really been focusing on maybe the last two months is obviously I'm trying to do as much as I possibly can with a small team of people with as little monetary investment in marketing as I possibly can because that resource obviously is incredibly valuable to us as organizations. So I'm really trying hard to figure out like how do we create content and scale, how do we do our. How does our technology stack shape up? So our strategy is not any different per se. It's really about let's try to create as much. Buzz is a horrible word I don't love, but buzz around visibility, connection with people that might be the right kind of people and trying to do as much as possible. We have a good strategy, but it's, it's very patient. I would say probably the best way to say it. It's a slow progress.

Hey there. Just a quick break. I wanted to let you know that if you're listening to this podcast because you are exploring careers in biotech, which it turns out quite a few of our listeners actually are, you might be interested in the Biotech Career Coach podcast. It is brought to you by our sister company, the Collaboratory Career Hub, which is our career development community. If you would like actionable tips on job seeking and career development, that is the place for you. It is a companion podcast to our Career Coach column that we write monthly in Biospace, but we go a little more in depth and sometimes we have special workshops and all of that good stuff. So if that sounds interesting, click the link in the show notes or search for the Biotech Career Coach on Apple Podcasts or wherever you get your podcasts back to the show.

How are you guys leveraging AI and different data metrics within your marketing strategy? Or are you.

That's great question. You guys really came prepared. Yeah, Analytics. I would love to say we were really good at this so far, but we're not. I think we have something we're going to grow into over time. We. You. We do utilize HubSpot. There are some basic metrics in there that help us understand a little bit about behavior of people, but there's a lot of stuff inside there that you have to build out and we just haven't gotten that far yet, to be honest. Lead scoring and stuff like that. So it might help us better understand intent. But we'll. I think we'll get there. But AI? Yes, at minimum. Let's just say I think right now AI is disrupting marketing more than anything else. I think everyone will get disrupted by it at some level, either as it's a consumable, it's integrated with some consumable. Right. Or I am utilizing some kind of AI device platform, whatever in my job function, whether that's creative or written word, or even potentially down the Road some kind of automation. So I use ChatGPT a lot. I like to use it as a idea creator, but not a finisher. And so I don't like to just Push content because AI created it and because I know it still doesn't 100% sound like a person and reflect necessarily our language in our business, it can't learn that. No matter how much I try to help it learn that. I have to do that every single time in a lot of cases. But I do like it, Honestly, I like it as a reflection. Tell me how other people do this thing. I was actually doing this with HubSpot yesterday. I was like, tell me what the ideal HubSpot sequence looks like in biotech. And chat spits out this point by point list of stuff. And I'm like, that's really interesting. So I can reflect on that and say, what are we doing right now? Or what on this list could we be doing as well as the actual content itself or SEO terms or whatever. So I, I'm what, Honestly, I find myself and I think this is where it's going to go in a lot of cases. I find it a great search engine. I don't want to go to Google and just one, take whatever thing they feed me and it's the first thing up. But also I don't want to dig through a bunch of stuff. So like just synthesize this for me, tell me what the answer is or give me a bunch of examples and then let me noodle on it myself and come to a. A good idea. So that's how I'm using it right now, at least.

Yeah, I think that's exactly it. It's an awesome, like brainstorming buddy essentially. But I agree. Someone spits it out and it's so obvious when it's just cut and pasted from chat gtp.

Yeah, a hundred percent. My wife calls it Chet and she uses it. She's Chet could be your psychologist if you really wanted it to be. It'll reflect back to you. And I'm like, yeah, I don't know if that's safe. I'm like, I'm not sure if that's the right usage for chit, but you.

May want to upgrade to the paid model for that. If you're going to use a seizure psychology, you should probably be paying for that chat GTP4.7 or whatever.

100%. I'm on the paid model. My wife is not. And I'm like, yeah, you might want to, you might want to go ahead and get the upgrade because it's going to, it's going to do a lot more good.

So come to the doctorate if you do that.

Yeah, exactly, exactly.

So I'm going to steal your HubSpot tip. I'm definitely going to ask ChatGPT how to use HubSpot better.

That's if you have tech real honestly, if you have technical questions, have it summarize those for you. What's the path to the like, I'm no SEO expert, but we don't have anybody else. So as I'm building content, landing page, blog, new page to the site, whatever it is, it's on me. And so I'm like, I know what the basics are, I got it. But what about keyword research? If I wanted to really, I'm on a topic, I'm thinking this is valuable to us. Is it, Is this a keyword that's valuable to me in any way, shape or form? How do I do that research going? There's a lot in there. So that just another example, like how I like to do it because I, I like things giving me like a roadmap and then yes, that works for me. No, that does not work for me. I'm. I'm going to apply this to my situation just the way I would if HubSpot was going to put something out like, hey, that it's about 95% of the way there kind of thing.

Yeah, I've been really looking forward to this conversation. So I could ask you one particular question about ChatGPT. So the word unleashed, every time you ask for any sort of marketing copy, it starts with unleashed. Is that a marketing thing? Was that something you used before?

I think it's just, it's funny, It's a powerful word, obviously. And it's funny if you think, if you've sensed that from chat or from marketers that's deliberately like that way, but I have not seen that. But I would guess it's lack of creativity, frankly. Like there are a million ways to say we did something awesome and unleashing this upon the world is, is a little trite, right? It's a little overused and, but it's, it is powerful and people think that it moves the needle.

I'll tell you, when I brainstorm with ChatGPT, it's. I say give me 10 powerful headlines for. For XYZ and five of them have unleashed in it.

Yeah, that is really funny. One of the things I found with chat, as well as we rabbit hole in this topic a little bit, there are a Lot of forums out there that have other people's prompts that they've been writing and getting. So I found one and it's this gigantic prompt, like 25 lines of be this, do this, be this, do that. And what it does is it sets up the idea that you want chat to be one. First, you want it to be an expert in writing its own prompts, and second, you want it to assume roles based on whatever your problem is. And so it comes right outta the gate with, okay, what are you trying to do? And you're like, okay, I'm trying to do this. And then it says, okay, I would like to one, write a prompt that says, boom. And then two, I think I should assume these four different roles. And I'm like, yes, agree, go, proceed. And so it sets itself up for being an expert in whatever is that you're challenging it with. And I, I'm like, it. That is much more advanced than I probably would have started off with. I would have like anybody. I'm like, help me do the thing and just start writing with the question as opposed to setting it up to be the smartest thing in the room that can actually give me good advice about something. And so that prompt that has set this up for me is worth its weight in gold. It's fantastic.

Do you care to share that prompt?

I'll be happy to send it to you guys. Yeah. And I'm 100%, like copying, pasting it every time. I'm definitely not like, I've got it saved for sure.

So I would love to explore that. And in return, I will share a prompt that I got yesterday from a marketing seminar where it helps ideate all of the questions that your customers might have about a certain topic. And then it creates, it creates like the scaffolding for posts that you can write about those. It's just. But it'll give you like 20 questions. Sorry, this is an aside that probably will get cut, but I will. We'll exchange prompts. Yeah, we think a lot about what do people want to know?

That's exactly what we're talking about. People want to know. I think this is the good stuff. People are like, yes, tell me more about these little tips and tricks you guys know. Because everyone wants to use these and.

Leverage it over here. Volume two. Is this rabbit hole on GPT?

Yeah, I'm going to start calling it Chet now too.

Yeah, I'll go full circle with this. Right. If you're a young startup or you're a young biotech, you do not Know your customers. You do, you assume you know them. I call this in marketing, a survey of one because it's a anecdotal reference to what I believe our customer believes versus what you believe our customer believes. And guess what? Neither one of us are right. And how do we figure all those things out and figure out what kind of questions our customers would have? Figure out how to answer those questions, how to research those things. Right. That's exactly the major problem with most marketing is they just dive in without asking any questions about what do people want? Honest truth. Like one of the things we face with Ronak is changing cell culture, which has been done the same way for 70 years, is difficult. People don't inherently just want to change. And yes, there are a whole bunch of new mechanisms in there to do it differently and not do it in the traditional 2D kind of way. But people are stuck on those too. They believe that whatever way they're doing it is the way. And so you we, I don't know what questions they ask of themselves, if they're open to change, if they're open to this kind of innovation. And so things like that, using chat to help me understand those things, the questions, not necessarily the answers because I don't know if chat can give me that, but the questions, it probably can. And I think that's really valuable to me because now I'm starting to think like the customer and understand from their perspective and that's really valuable. And along the way we realized we thought we were a commodity. We really thought we got a block. We, these things are fantastic. Everybody's going to get it and it's going to be a commodity product off the shelf where there's going to be on E Commerce and the whole thing. We quickly realized that was not the case and that one, people were not going to change. Two, the disruption in the innovation was much bigger than we thought. And three, that meant much more consulting and understanding their problems, understanding their cell types, understanding if they're looking for biologics or growing cells, whatever that. And then getting into a question, a conversation with him about why the bioblock has the ability to do what it does and how that can help them. And our conversations are completely different with people now than they were a year ago because of that. And it's really valuable and frankly we miss it in our own, in the first year we were, oh yeah, this will be super easy. Like the non scientist guy gets it. It can't be that hard. And now we're like, oh, it's not that hard to understand. But that doesn't necessarily mean everybody wants to just adopt it, see it as the way things are done now and move forward. There's a lot more that goes into it than that.

Yeah, I can definitely see that. You as a non scientist were a captive audience learning about this and learning the value from the founder. Right from. So that's the energy behind that. But how do you capture that? How do you get that out? I can tell you as a cell culture veteran, you have a very cool platform. I wish we did it this way for all of the many years that I slaved away under in cell culture.

Hudson how came, to be honest is AJ was like, I'm tired of doing it this way, there's gotta be a better way. And started noodling on it. And that noodling became something so. And then we partnered with Heather, who is somebody he'd worked with before during his, his graduate school and PhD. And she's, she's somebody that really does a great job evaluating the execution of things and she's a gifted microscopist. And now we've got technology that allows us to 3D print these BioBlocks and it's amazing, right Clay? Yeah.

So I love it. Sounds like you guys really tailored the message and you figured out how to get the message to land. What have you found to be the most effective way to deliver the message? Is it via social media, is it going to the conferences, how you're selling B2B, which is really difficult. What's where, how are you getting your message out?

We're doing all those things, to be honest, as well as email to a database of ours. But to be honest, truth, the two things for our actual customer base to date, we literally just did this analysis the other day. 1 of 20 came in because of pure marketing, meaning we don't know how they heard of us. We do not know what incentivized them to come to us. They called us and said, hey, we think this is interesting, let's pursue this. Everyone else was either an existing relationship that somebody on our team had, somebody at another organization, former colleague, whatever. We made phone calls, we made contacts, we did a lot of presentations, got into pilot projects and did proof of concept. So half of them were like that and the other half were from trade shows. We had an opportunity to show people. We have. So we have, we have four peer reviewed published papers right now. So when we go to a conference, we really like to lean into those. We have a lot of white papers, obviously, as well, but which is done by my team. But we really like to showcase the papers because they're very focused on a very narrow type of work. It's got four or five outcomes, those typically, and they've been connected to each other. We did this and then we did that and then we did this and they've built a story. And so the conferences we've gone to for the most part have been tissue related, tissue engineering related types of conferences, and not a ton to be honest, but we've generated a solid amount of, of contacts from that and just good conversations. I think those are really good platforms. They're difficult, they're expensive, but they do allow for people that are interested in something to have some depth of conversation. It's not artificial and like email or social would be, and it's not one dimensional, I guess to say it so they can really dig in and then they're intrigued, then they can, you can pursue it. So for us it's been really our own word of mouth and then conferences that are the most efficient. But to be honest, that will change as the brand and visibility of the company grow, as the platform gets adopted more, as more papers come out the machine, I call it the flywheel, right? The, the marketing flywheel will keep rotating and it'll get faster and faster and social and email and our website and whatever other content or things like this or public relations, those things will spin it faster and the core conversation and face to face will be cornerstone types of things that we do where people are like, oh, I know of you guys, and they're at an event and they've already some of the barriers we've broken down because of all that other activity. So my guesstimation, Ronox is going to have a lot of opportunities. We've already got a subsidiary that's focused on contract research. We've got other things down on paper that we like to do as well. So there's a lot of feature in that and it could be as the CEO of my own company, it could be as the sort of global CMO for Ronok as we have different organizations and teams that they're doing things and it could be board work and that kind of stuff. So I, I think that's probably, I, I, I love the idea of getting to a place where I don't necessarily have to work every day, but you still have a lot of opportunity to engage and influence and help other people that are building something.

So yeah, I love that, that sharing that experience along the lines of sharing experience would you be willing to share with us your favorite fiction or nonfiction book.

So my two favorite books I already talked about, one of them is Fear and Loathing. I loved Hunter S. Thompson's book. I probably read it like four or five times now over the years. I love Dune. The book Dune is a masterpiece as far as I'm concerned. I've probably read or listened to Dune a dozen times over the course of the last 30 years. So those are by far my favorites. I've got others. I can't remember Phil's last name, but the guy who wrote Fight Club, the actual book is brilliant. He's wrote, he's written other things that are fantastic and they're very fiction. More fiction than Fight Club probably. It's an amazing book because it speaks to. Not really about the fight club movie part, but more of the fall of Western civilization as we know it mentality and why that's why that's a good thing in there, in, in the book's mind. So it's a very interesting, a very interesting book. But on a, on a science front, I'm actually reading right now the, I'm going to get the name of the title wrong, but it's about the life of Henrietta.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. That's a great book.

This is our. We try to read a book as a group, as a, as an executive team every quarter. So this is what we're reading right now. And for the non scientists in me, especially the marketer with all the privacy laws and all the things going on right now, and excuse my language, but it blows my fucking mind. I can't believe this happened in real life. This is the thing. And following its path is amazing.

It's an incredible story and it's still in the news. We're still. The family just won that lawsuit. It's amazing.

It's.

Yeah, it's one of. It's one of my top favorite science related books as well. For sure.

Yeah.

Yeah. Very, very topical too for your company, I'm sure with the HeLa. Cell cell culture. Important question. I'm also a big Dune fan. Did you feel that the movie stacked up to the book and why?

Different trap question. Visually, yes and no. I thought it was a little grand. But also I can't ever say Dennis Villanueva, his three or four movies that I've seen are insane. They're intense and crazy and I'm a movie nerd. She really hit a chord with me on this one. But so yes, I think it did the book justice. It Interpreted a book that was written 40 or 50 years ago and that's a scientific masterpiece in my mind, and interpreted it in a really modern way. And I think that's interesting. Whether people love it or hate it, it's really interesting. And I'm super excited about the second chapter. There are people in it that I really think are amazing in the movie. Batista is fantastic as his character in the movie, but Josh Brolin, eh, I'm like, I don't know if he was the right fit for his character. Momoa, who I love, added comic relief to a movie that didn't have comic relief. That was funny for me. But he's also. They did a really good job of including some scenes that other. The other movies had never done where he. Spoiler alert for everybody out there who haven't seen it or he, his character is going to give his life up for this young person. And that. It is a really powerful part of the book, I thought. And the fact that they included it was. I thought was really great. So it's a mixed bag for me. There are parts of it I just absolutely love and there are other parts of it I'm like a little over the top, but I love that somebody took a modern approach to telling that story. And also, I will say this Austin Butler is amazing as Elvis, right? Probably should have won the Grammy, right? But. Or Emmy or whatever the hell his thing is, but. Oh, it's brilliant. He's so good. My wife and I are both huge Elvis fans. My wife's seen the movie now a dozen times and he's, he's a good looking kid, obviously, so that's not lost on anybody. But he's got a great character in Dune and I don't know if he's the right person for the character, but I also think what a great move for him. Don't get pigeonholed as the guy that played Elvis. Go and do something really radical and different. So I'm super excited to see him play Fade Rafa.

So, Trice, I would listen to you.

Do a movie podcast. You didn't know that? Yes. Yeah.

This is so fascinating. I'm so bummed that I have a hard stop here because I could talk all day and I want to know your opinion on foundation and all of the things now, but we can't get into that now.

That's fine. We can do this again. I'm more than happy. I love talking about marketing and I think it's a never ending topic for people in this space doing the things that we all are talking about doing every day.

So where can people find you if they want to connect? Is LinkedIn a great place?

LinkedIn by far is the best choice. Trice Alford is my name.

Yep. We'll link you in the show notes so people can click right through.

Yeah.

Yeah. Thank you so much.

All I was going to say is thank you so much, Trice. This has been just fantastic chatting with you. Maybe in a few months we can do it all again and we can see where AI has taken us and catch up on all things marketing. In six months it'll be totally different.

Probably.

Yeah, I. I'd love to do it again. You guys are awesome. So thanks for coming with great questions. I appreciate it.

Awesome.

Thank you, Trice.

Thank you so much.

Take care.

See you soon.

Yeah.

Bye.

Bye.

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