Fortnite x Lego partnership's success, Building the best recruiting list, and AI being overhyped

So Fortnite, I don't know if you know this, but Lego partnered up with Fortnite and it shows. So Lego is finding new success by going digital. Lego saw its first half operating profit surge 26%, hitting a new record of more than $1.2 billion, thanks in large part to a popular partnership with Fortnite maker Epic Games. Since its release in December, Lego Fortnite has reached 83 million people, according to CEO Niels Christiansen. Despite a downturn in the wider toy market, Lego is seeing strong demand in North America, the company added. Toymaker is set to replace the oil in all of its bricks with recycled plastic by 2032, shift that may cost 70% more. So it just goes to show you again, relevant collaborations go a long way. And as long as it's tasteful and it's done in a good way, it might work out. And I think 26% is insane. So—

26% is really insane. So what did they do? Fortnite has a LEGO version on their game or they created a whole new game that is a Fortnite LEGO game?

Yeah. So I'm staring at this right now. Right now. Um, so I think usually what happens is when they do these collaborations, they make, um, they make these skins, right? And, you know, in Fortnite you can have different characters, like different skins. Um, I haven't looked into it exactly, but it— that has to be the reason, right? Um, because they do a lot of collaborations with like, uh, movies and things like that. So, um, I think that's what it is. And then that probably got more people to, to buy Legos. Yep.

Yeah, no, I— it's a great idea. You know, why not partner?

And marketing— Like, I'm just like thinking about skins back when I used to play first-person shooters. So, if you're using a certain character all the time and you see it at the toy store, yeah, you're going to want it. You're going to want it as like an action figure that you can place in front of your computer. It makes a lot of sense. But go ahead.

In marketing, a lot of people think like, oh, SEO is the best channel or paid advertising is the best channel. There's no one best channel and there's a lot of boring, ugly channels that no one talks about that produce a lot of revenue, like partnerships. If you produce web design and I produce your— if you sell web design and I sell SEO, we can make a great pair in which I can sell everyone design services and you can sell them SEO services.

Yeah.

Or if you do SEO and I do paid advertising, I can sell all my customers your services and you can sell them my services and we can cross-sell. Partnerships can work extremely well. You just have to find someone who is a similar size, has similar types of clients, and figure out how to partner together to cross-sell. Because it's unlikely that you're going to have the Lego Fortnite luck. The reason it works so well for Legos is they're a really massive brand. And most people don't know this, but Lego toys is one of the best investments. If you look over time, the return has been Quite amazing. I read an article on that somewhere around the web, but I never knew that there was an ROI investing in Lego toy sets and just holding them for a while.

Dude, I mean, the other angle with partnerships is you can look at it as a precursor to M&A. So let's say you're starting out, maybe you're not that big right now, but you start partnering up with other agencies. You guys grow, they grow as well. You learn how they work, you learn how their founders are, how their team is, and eventually it might make sense for you guys to partner up. Maybe there's an equity swap component, um, or you might potentially just buy them out, right? Or you can buy like a you know, a minority stake in the company, but it gives you a chance to do due diligence a little bit versus like, you know, doing it afresh. So you get to build up this network of agencies versus having to, and I'm not saying you should not have a process where you just source a bunch of deals, but this is one way of you kind of getting ahead of it. I think that that's a way to look at it as well. And I think, you know, Neil, you do partnerships with other companies. You know, we do partnerships with like, you know, different SaaS tools or marketing tools. I'm probably sure we've done it with with both companies. And then other collaborations would be like, you know, you and I speaking at the HubSpot conference, right? Or like, you know, working with Microsoft sponsoring one of my events or whatever. Like there's so many collaboration is such a partnership, such a broad word. Ultimately what it comes down to is can you help each other out?

Yep. It's that simple. And yeah, you're right. A lot of the M&A deals I know of companies who sold, sold because they were partnering with someone first. And then both parties are like, oh, this is working out really well, let's just buy you.

Mm-hmm. Let's buy.

eBay, PayPal, great example of this. eBay is worth less than PayPal now. Yeah.

And like, isn't that crazy?

Yeah, good for PayPal, or I mean, good for eBay. Smart for the founders.

I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners. And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie, and we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Ollie, and he says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need and the group responds. Great experienced members. Getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members. Getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric. Getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io/agency. This is a group that both Neil and I created, and our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io/agency, and we'll see you inside. So Neil, you want to see something? I'm going to show you a way because you, you're always looking for great people. I'm always looking for great people. And I asked a friend to help me out. Um, and this post, I'm going to share it on my screen over here. This post over here, can you see this? Okay. So this is from Gaetano Di Nardi, right? Good friend. And he's like, look, he leads off with this LinkedIn post. There aren't many people in SEO I respect anymore. Too many fakers, wannabe gurus, and LinkedIn charlatans. But here are 30 people I respect. You should follow them. So it's like Michael King lists all these people, right? You know, blah, blah, Bernard Hoang, Kevin Indig, Tim Soulo, all these people, right? And what happens is this post gets 476 likes, 188 comments, and 10 reposts. And what happens is you look at this list over here, people start tagging other people, right? And so what most people don't know about this post is I messaged Gaetano on the side. I was like, hey, like we're looking for great SEOs. He's like, I was like, do you know anyone? He's like, hey, I got you. So he throws this post up and this is now a post where I'm like, oh, okay, well if we need good SEOs, we're just going to look at this post. But you can do the same for paid. You can do the same for analytics. You can do this for any role. In fact, you and I can do this. Get what I mean?

Yeah, smart.

It becomes like a big thing where people and People get mad too. Someone got mad because they didn't, someone didn't tag, or Gaetano didn't tag Neil Patel. He's like, you should tag Neil Patel, blah, blah, blah. But anyway, it causes people to fight each other a little bit in the comments too.

But that's really smart. One, I never saw that post, but two, I look at content like that. If you can use that for recruiting, that's an amazing way to generate more and more, you know, like quality people. And that's the key way to grow a company. Everyone's like, oh, you got to be really good at marketing. Well, to be really good at marketing is you just have to hire people who are good at marketing, good at building amazing products and services, great at sales, great at customer service. You need a whole organization with amazing leaders. Not necessarily every employee needs to be amazing, but at least amazing people at the top, and it'll trickle down, and then the leaders can bring up the B players and the C players.

All right, quick note. This is about my company. It's called Single Grain, and Single Grain is an ad agency where we're focused on driving innovation. I want to talk about a couple of new strategies, And if you need help with marketing, great. If not, here are a couple of new strategies that you should try out. One is programmatic CRO. So we are doing programmatic conversion rate optimization on our site. So it's building products that will automatically optimize your site to increase conversion rates. We're also auto-optimizing, auto-updating from an SEO standpoint, and we're constantly thinking about what else we can do in terms of enriching the visitors that are hitting your website and also tailoring custom messages for them using AI. And so there's a handful of things that we're doing from a marketing standpoint, and our mission is just to drive more innovation. So if you want to learn more, just go to singlegrain.com, grain like rice. So singlegrain.com to learn more, and we'll see you inside. Let's end with this one over here. So you have one over here on how AI is being over-marketed. So you, it says GoDaddy helps entrepreneurs thrive with new AI-powered digital marketing tools.

Yeah, let's just be honest. These tools aren't making someone rank higher, do their paid ads that much better, the tools that GoDaddy's releasing. And I'm not trying to pick on GoDaddy, but a lot of people are guilty of this. They're trying to ride the stock market high or the valuation high, and everything they do now has AI in it. It's just like Facebook. Look at our new AI. Well, try performing a search on Facebook using their AI. It's not that great. I don't care if they have it or not. And most people don't use Facebook for anything AI related. We go to check out people's pictures and videos, like or comment and share and scroll on to the next thing. And the stuff that does the best is usually just pure entertainment and again, has nothing to do with AI. I'm not saying corporations can't use AI to make their product or offering better, but too many people are just hyping up AI like, oh, look at this new AI feature. We're amazing. Everyone should use it now. It does wonders for you. No, it doesn't. It's not going to really move the needle. Most people sign up for GoDaddy, if they use the AI tools, the marketing's still going to be crap and they're not going to generate that much revenue. And I'm not trying to pick on GoDaddy. This has nothing to do with GoDaddy. Most people who own a domain name aren't going to do well. Most businesses fail. There's only so many spots on page 1 of Google. There's only so little money that most new entrepreneurs have to spend on paid ads. It's just hard to succeed. And everyone's talking about how, oh, we're releasing this, it's going to change the world. No, it's not going to change the world. They're just putting a beautiful wrapper on something that's ugly and it's still ugly. You know, it's like saying there's poop and saying it's gold poop. So now that people should wear it as an earring. No, it still smells and is poo.

They call that polishing a turd, Neil. But I think we've talked about this a while back too. It's like If you, you know, in the very beginning, everyone's using the keyword AI, everyone's looking into it, but now it's been like, it's 2022 is when ChatGPT came out, right? It's been 2 years now, right? So it's time to come off the trend. Like, you know, for my event, you know, one of the people in the group was like, we should just make all of these topics about AI. I was like, no, it's becoming more played out now. Just talk about regular things that people care about because, you know, AI will be AI just like the internet. Nobody says, oh, I'm going to go log onto the internet today, right? Just like nobody in the future is going to say, I'm going to go use AI today, right? It's not how it works. Even at this investor talk I'm at, there's not many people talking about AI. In fact, my talk has some AI in it, but I try to emphasize what we're doing from a business standpoint instead of talking about, oh, look at all these features, because that's not what it's about. It's like, what kind of outcomes are you delivering? People are more interested in that at the end of the day.

And people are also getting carried away on the other end too, in which they're saying, Man, this AI is really off. It's so terrible. Like people are complaining that ChatGPT doesn't know how many Rs are in strawberry and there's so many articles around that on the web.

Yeah.

Who cares that it doesn't know that there's 3 Rs in strawberry instead of 2? Or who cares that ChatGPT can't spell Honda in ASCII that well? Like it can still do so many amazing things for you. It's better to have it in your life than not have it. Most things aren't perfect. Just deal with what they are and use them for what they are and don't try to overhype them. And if you do, it may work in the short run, but in the long run, it can bite you in the butt.

Have you heard of Cursor AI?

No.

Okay. So I have my developers using it, right? And they're like, dude, we just doubled our speed. So what Cursor does is it basically autocompletes the code that you're writing. And he's like, yeah. So one of the developers was like, what used to take me 5 hours is now taking me 2.5 hours or so. And this is just the very beginning. So everyone on Twitter is talking about how Cursor plus Claude Sonnet, or you can use ChatGPT for it, but it's helping increase the coding efficiency by quite a bit. But we're not just saying, oh, look at us, we're using AI. It's like, no, we're just using Cursor over here. It's just like any SaaS product. Oh yeah, we're just using this product over here for that. So we're optimistic about this stuff for the long term, but I think in the short term it's been overhyped. And this will probably be the last time we'll talk about this unless it gets more overhyped. That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, review, subscribe, and visit marketingschool.io/agency to apply for the Agency Owners Association. So we're changing it to application only now. And if you're qualified, we'll give you a call. And yeah, we will go from there. We will see you guys tomorrow.