Ep 32: The Human Touch in an AI Evolving World

Businesses I speak to find that marketing is just confusing and it's getting more complicated. I did a map, looked at all the different tools that are out there at the moment, and it's, you know, particularly with the launch of AI tools, thousands upon thousands, and people are just confused. The concepts of marketing are staying the same. It's just the tools are changing and people need to kind of ignore that noise and just focus on what really matters, which is the people they're trying to help and the message they're trying to get to them. And then once you keep that focus, the tools kind of make themselves. They generate £160,000 from a Facebook ad that was screenshotted by the client's neighbor. They've screenshotted it going, oh, this is exactly what my friend wants. Shown it to them, and then three months later, they've called our client and gone, oh, can we get the garden done? And that turned into 160 grand.

That is quite a garden renovation.

Also just shows as a marketer so lucky that they actually were candid about how they found out.

Hi, I'm Freya. Welcome to the Skynet Chronicles Business in the AI Age, the podcast that dives deep into the world where artificial intelligence meets business. Join us as we explore the latest trends, challenges and opportunities in this ever evolving landscape. From innovative startups to established enterprises will uncover the secrets behind the successful integration of AI technologies. So grab a cup of coffee, sit back and get ready to unlock the mysteries of business in the AI age.

Good morning, Christian.

Morning, Tim.

So Dao, social marketing, marketing strategy guru and soon to be leader of a wonderful new AI product.

That's right.

So let's start with your event on the 7th of March.

Yeah. So the event on the 7th of March is basically based around this idea that businesses I speak to find that marketing is just confusing and it's getting more complicated. And I did a map, looked at all the different tools that are out there at the moment, and it's particularly with the launch of the AI tools, thousands upon thousands and people are just confused. And the idea behind the event is that the concepts of marketing are staying the same. It's just the tools are changing and people need to ignore that noise and just focus on what really matters, which is the people they're trying to help and the message they're trying to get to them. And then once you keep that focus, the tools kind of make themselves more visible. So it's really about kind of get people focused back in on the core concepts rather than chasing the Shiny object, which I know as business owners we all love to do.

We love shiny things. So it's taking everybody back to the basic concepts of you need to do marketing, you need to do it right. Here are the fundamentals and actually not getting distracted by, look what I can do in this tool, that tool or the other.

Exactly. So we will be looking at the tools and showing kind of, well, if that's the strategy, how do you then go about building your toolkit and the framework that you work with, but making sure you keep back to those fundamentals. Because it's fine to say, oh, well, we're going to do a podcast, a YouTube channel, we're going to do email marketing, we're going to do ads. But if you're not looking at why you're doing it and how that fits with the objectives of the organization, then it's easy to spend a lot of time, effort, money and not have a tangible outcome at the end of it.

So you're taking everybody back to start with why.

Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Start with Simon Sinek and the start with start with why. And just every. Everybody seems to lose. It's easy to do unless you've got that core goal. That one question you can ask yourself, well, what are we trying to get to? Then it's easy to get distracted. So I try and always have that clients have that question of, well, what's the overall goal? And then you can always align what you do with your marketing to what does it help us achieve that? Yeah.

Fantastic. So we're now early 25. Scary time's moving very quick, isn't it? Talk to me about your journey through technology and the foundings of Dao Social.

Yeah, so I started Dao social back in 2012 and it was the kind of the side hustle before side hustles were really a thing. Working that full time job writing, getting more active on social media, personally around sort of hobbies, realizing I'd always kind of wanted to start a business and I had a way of reaching people that my friends who ran businesses because I was fortunate enough to have a few people ran businesses, kind of working with them and kind of, oh, I'll do that, I'll do that for a pint of beer or, you know, whatever and just kind of built from there. And it started off and sounds weird to say now as a Twitter management agency.

Twitter management agency. I'm also going to come back to do things for beer. Do you still work for beer or has it got a bit more expensive over the years?

It still works for beer, but it's a bit more convoluted. There's now an exchange of currency.

Ok, so Twitter management agency.

Yeah. So basically managing people's Twitter accounts for them back when X, as I guess would call it now, you can't talk about Twitter and not do that. Really awkward. Now known as X or formerly known as Twitter. So the working with companies and then kind of background in marketing, just developed more of the digital tools, really got into meta ads and the power of basically this idea that you trade time. Like most things at marketing particularly, you've got a choice between either trading time or trading money. And I think social media is a great example of that, where you can either do the organic, you can do lots and lots of posting, kind of it's very time intensive, or you can do the kind of the shortcut route if you want to reach that audience, which is pay money and reach them. They both have their benefits, but really focused in on helping people understand why, what choice they're going to make. And when you start out like I did, it's time, right. It's always time to push those and build it up as you go on. It's more, I want to buy an outcome more than. More than necessarily want to be a YouTube sensation or, you know, social, active on social as many times as you need to be to be successful. Now, I'm a big fan of Gary Vaynerchuk, but his view is that you should be almost posting content incessantly and so many business owners are going to find that market is going to find that tricky because if you spend all your time as a marketer, when do you do the. The other things in the business that you need to do? Unless you're able to build that team, pay money to kind of build that and grow that sustainably.

And so it used to be you wanted to build a big audience, you wanted to post content on a frequent basis in order to hit as many of that audience as possible. How has TikTok changed that paradigm?

So TikTok has kind of sparked kind of a change in the way all of the social media algorithms work. So as you said, it used to be you'd build up followers on a page or on an account and then you'd reach a certain number of those people. So Facebook changed that significantly sort of 10 years ago when they moved to more. As they moved towards more advertising and so on to reach.

You can pay to reach your own audience.

Exactly. But then what we've seen is a shift in the way the graph works. So Facebook always used to have their algorithm that worked in one way that was based around who you followed and the interest and the activity, kind of what you'd shown with your interests. And now it's attention based so you don't have to be. You will now see more stuff in your content of people you don't follow, the more people that you follow or engaging with because they're showing you, based on the algorithm, the content they think you'll like. And always makes me laugh when people talk about. You mentioned TikTok. TikTok's all just this or it's all just that. It's like, no, no, that's what you've trained it to have. So when you see politicians talking about it's all just one thing that may not be that positive. It's like that's just because that's how you're using the platform. And so we're seeing companies having to adapt to this fact that it's not just about building an audience and hoping for the, that you'll reach them organically with content. It's now about having to really spark the interest if you're going to be successful on those channels. And of course, the risk with that, as we saw with TikTok, is you don't own those platforms and they can change the algorithm, they can change, they can decide that you're no longer welcome on that platform with no real countenance or appeal or kind of way of fixing that or solving that. And again, they're all using a lot of the time algorithms. So unless you can get a human to review it and go, oh, well, actually you didn't do anything wrong or we still want you, then you're going to struggle. So it's about, for me, we're seeing the email marketing, which I've heard people predict the death of every year since I've been a marketer. It's really coming back into its own because its own media things that you can control where I want people building their businesses. Because if you're building on Instagram or TikTok or whatever platforms that relate to you, you're always at the mercy of someone else being able to go, not today. And you can't build a business on that, in my opinion.

So there was somebody on Dragon's Den recently and she'd built a business on TikTok and I think over 45% of her revenue is coming from TikTok. And the dragons are like, because there's significant risk to that.

There is. I think what's interesting though, is it's a red flag, but it's also a green flag because the fact that building an audience on TikTok shows that she's able to connect with her audience in a way that her competitors can't. The challenge then becomes how do we make sure that we can future proof the business? By having channels that we control and multiple distribution channels that mean that if one gets banned or taken away, we're not. We're not in trouble. And so I think it is a red flag. It's something you definitely want to have a strategy to manage. But it's also a green flag because I imagine if they can build an audience on TikTok, they could build an audience on Instagram.

They've done something right, haven't they?

Yeah, exactly.

And so even though we've got all of these great technologies around us, we've got the traditional channels of marketing still exist. We've got phone outreach, we've got in person, we've got networking, we've got email, we've got social channels, we've got a wide variety of options. And really, technology hasn't changed that that much. It's just changed how you get the message together and maybe how you distribute the message. I came across a company and I won't directly plug them, but they do something amazing where they will. You choose with them a specific thing you're going to send in the post and you choose your target list. And they got a meeting for a small company with a Fortune 100 company by sending them the right arm of a mannequin with a note saying, I'd give my right arm for a meeting with you. Completely just out there. Postal marketing.

I love Lumpy Metal. Incredibly targeted.

It is Lumpy metal.

Yeah.

But it's just such a fantastic concept.

And that again, shows, I think, an understanding of the audience is that if everybody is doing email or social or things and people are being bombarded on those channels, it creates space in traditional channels. Particularly if you have an audience that can remember dial up Internet and still answers their phone, well, then lumpy mail followed up with traditional outreach might be unique in the sense that puts you ahead of people that are just focusing on other channels. There's that kind of zig when everyone else zags is going to be really powerful. So, yeah, I'm a big fan of mixing it up and not just going, oh, well, I know this one. So I'm not going to try any other platform. And that's why we're Doing live events. Webinars are my comfort zone. But live events are great because you can get, you can see the whites of people's eyes. Get them in a room, get them in a room and you can talk about it again. Event marketing is as much about talking about the event and talking about what you've done than it is actually the event. The event happens, there's a bit of a blur. You build the goodwill and hopefully build some relationships, get the outcome that you want. But the real benefit is for two months beforehand, you're talking about being a real person that's going to be in a room with real people, achieving a goal. And then afterwards you can go, well, look, there were some real people. We did something. You can have those human testimonials that you can't pull out of a webinar, so you wouldn't want to do one every single day of the week. But having that different approach pulls out a different way of getting the attention of the audience and having something to kind of supplement the messaging that you're putting out there.

And it reinforces people by people. So the harmony of humans and technology, be that AI or any other sort of process or system automation, you're still reliant on an interaction between people to close a sale. And so having that human interaction, making it forefront, building that trust in an audience, in person, is incredibly powerful. And even as we move rapidly through the capabilities of artificial intelligence, that's not going to go away. We're still going to love interacting with people, we're still going to buy from people. Sure, a lot of stuff will happen automatically through algorithms and matching, but really getting in front of people, having a conversation, building rapport, and those skills are going to be more important than ever.

Totally agree. And I think again we mentioned about the kind of the lumpy mail and that being a zag because everyone else was going down more modern routes. I think we'll see that as AI is adopted further is that people that can find the gaps to have human connections with people in ways that maybe they're craving but aren't able to get, then they'll be able to find a competitive advantage over those that are purely creating dross blog posts that they're putting, they've created very quickly using a large language model that don't add any value and don't have any humanity or personality to them. Because I think we'll see a slight kickback in people craving that human to human piece, particularly when they're going to start piling with cash.

Yeah, I mean, we'll see waves of mediocre content being pushed out by people who don't know how to use the tools. And then we'll see people who are leaning in far more heavily into how can they continue to appear and be human and present and that difference, even when they're combining it and still producing great content that is in a written form, it can be done with tools, but it's making sure it is authentically human is going to be critical.

Exactly. I see AI as making me faster, not a delegation tool. I think that's the thing at the moment is people are trying to delegate their marketing to a machine and go, create something amazing. Go. And then I don't want to look at it, I don't want to read it. I just want it out there so we can tick the box that says we did a marketing.

Did marketing check next project.

Exactly. And what I see is actually, no, it's taking what you do and what you value and doing it faster. And I've really seen an increase in power of the tools in the last six months to do that and still keep the voice and keep it you because you have to. I see LinkedIn is the place where lazy marketing goes to lives. Basically. You see all the comments and all the posts and stuff, you see the.

Chat, chat emojis everywhere and just standard baker comments are just being thrown in. No human content whatsoever.

And we're seeing that pushback now. People are seeing the emojis or they're seeing the double, double line.

The EM dash.

Yeah, the EM dash. They're seeing that. And even if it's not an AI generated post, we've seen people complain that they've always written that way and now it's kind of being accused of being AI.

Anybody ever really write with an EM dash?

Maybe a couple of high, highfaluting copywriters, but not you, or I wouldn't have.

Said no, definitely not me.

But now people pushing back against that and saying, you know, stop it.

So nice segue into a product that you'll shortly be launching.

Yes.

So tell us about your journey with that tool. What's made you to want to make it and what are you hoping it's going to achieve?

So the reason I wanted to create is because I saw so much mediocre content out there and I saw so many people unsure of how to use the tools properly and I wanted to create a tool that you didn't have to do that you didn't have to really understand how the tool works. You Just had it kind of pre baked, set up ready to go with the culmination of human knowledge, which is from the business owner and the AI large language model to sort that and create that in an effective way. So I want it to be, you just log in, it's pre trained and you can just, with your information, it knows who you are, it knows your objectives and you can just go. So I know that because I'd spent time using GPTs and kind of doing that, but I was like, I never felt 100% about putting my entire business story onto a, into a large language model that we didn't control. So those were the two driving factors for knowing I control the data. Because who really reads the T's and C's of these open source platforms, right? And they change and then they go, it's changed. Here's a hundred page document tells you all the things we've changed. Yeah. So knowing that we had control over the privacy and then also that we could get people to actually fine tune these so that they know their business, they understand them and so they can just plug it in and go every single time with something that knows the vision, knows the goals, knows the customers and can create them content that's actually going to be usable and apply to them. So it's not just, it's about that for me it was about making sure we can pull that out. So we came up with that guided interview concept of the idea that well, if we're going to have something that sounds like you, we better make it like you. So a kind of a 30 question open conversation, a bit like almost in a podcast style, if you like, of saying, you know, letting people talk, understanding the competitors, their marketing positioning, what values they have and what they're trying to achieve so that we can then ask it. Well, if I want to achieve this goal, create me a content plan, create me a marketing strategy to start from again, I would never recommend anyone just copies and paste something they create from a large language model and go, you know, to their, to their stakeholders, go, look, we've come up with this plan, let's go. But gives them a much stronger starting point that's anchored in who they are and what they're about than just asking ChatGPT, how do I, how do I get, how do I do marketing?

And so that. Have you got a product name yet? Because I know there was one and it might have changed.

So for the moment it is the DAO Social Marketing Assistant. Okay. Concept being basically we are looking to develop a new Brand but the name that we had didn't quite work with kind of the messaging that we were working from. But for me the key bit is I know name, brand names are important but for me it's having something that works, that people can use and then we can, once it's out there and it's in the world then we can worry about the kind of the name. For me I see it as a really key strategic tool for when we work with clients on their marketing strategies and go great. So we've come up with a strategy now we fine tuned the tool that allows you to be, as I mentioned, the objective AI to be faster, be more accurate and keep the essence of you stay on brand, stay on that brand and we can kind of fine tune the branding and the name. Unfortunately again there's so many tools, there's so few names out there.

Could just put an ly on things. Seems to be a bit of a trend at the moment.

Christianly, there you go.

Why not?

Done.

Fantastic. So where do you see AI moving over the next year or so?

Wow, what a loaded question that one is. I think it's difficult to predict because as a layman, relative layman, there's a lot of black swans out there that you just can't see coming. So for example, before deep seat dropped I didn't, I had no notion that there was an open source Chinese large language model that was, that was imminently about to hit. So I think it's going to be difficult to kind of give you a this is how I see the world in 12 months. But I think we're going to see a lot more drive towards automation of tasks. The kind of the agent type functionality is going to really hit and we can see with the tools that are out there. I think that, I think this year is going to be the year where the real disruption happens to people with the way they work, the job roles that are out there and how people view where AI sits within their organization. I think last year was the year when people woke up to these tools having incredible power. I think this year and the year after is going to be well, how do we embed these deep within organizations and fundamentally change the way that people work, market and how they interact with technology on a day to day basis. But I would defer to you to the black swans that I haven't seen coming yet.

No, I don't think you're far off. I think I'm really intrigued as to whether we will see mass market adoption this year or not. I'M not sure that we will. I think the companies that are generally leaning in hard are very early adopters. And if you look at the population of companies across the country or the world, the vast majority aren't taking it seriously yet. And so there is a huge potential in terms of advantage that can be made by deploying these capabilities now and getting familiar with what's possible, even as the increasing in reasoning and agentification comes along so that you can have better thinking and do more things. That's going to open up all sorts of avenues for the deployment of capabilities that we can't even imagine yet. But generally companies are still very, very early on in that adoption journey, whereas ChatGPT has got this feeling of mass adoption in the populace. But even that isn't actually being used on a regular basis by the volume of people you'd think it is.

I would agree. I think it's as it was the same when we went through the social media and digital revolution of 10, 15, 20 years ago. However far you want to go back, we're getting old. We are getting old. You feel that because you're in it and you're using it every day, you assume that everybody else is in it and is using it every day. I have an AI tool that practically helps me with every single task that I do, whether it's making sure my emails sound appropriate or because I am prone to a bit of keyboard warrior in my time. So making sure they're appropriate to helping come up with variations of ad content we're creating for people to analyzing or solving problems and just using it as a genuine assistant and nobody else really, I know that isn't in the space is doing it to that level of depth and they're not looking at all these tools in the same way. And it's when I go to events, the training on AI that we do to the general public, you realize how much of the gap there is between kind of people that are using these tools every day, even if they're not using them in a highly tech savvy way, if they're just using them and people that maybe know they exist but using them almost like search engines.

Like a search engine or to write a poem about a cat.

Exactly. Or their pitch a networking event or something like that. And I always forget that because I still do kind of digital skills events and have successful business owners turn up that haven't got that digital savvy that I would have assumed 95% of the population has. But they're running very large successful businesses and you're like, just because it feels like the way to us doesn't mean that it's the way for everyone. And I guess that does create huge opportunity because as I said, I'm able to do more with less. And I think that's on the first thing is if you can make yourself faster then more productive. And that's the starting point.

Yeah, absolutely. And I don't think the rate of technology progress is going to slow down. We've had Moore's law since the 60s which was the doubling of transistors every two years. If we'd had the same advance in the speed of airplanes, our passenger jets would be doing more than the speed of light. In the advances since the 60s and since 2017 we're seeing scaling laws that are doubling every six months. So AI is moving faster than Moore's Law. And if we'd had Moore's Law and any of the other traditional technologies around us, it would be amazing. So the impact that that increase in thinking, increasing capability and reduction of cost of thinking will have is going to be huge, breathtaking times.

It's staggering. And you look back at mention we're getting old. But what you know, when I was a teenager and I was in the Nokia 3310 was the thing you had to have as a 13, 14 year old, you know, and then dial up to broadband being something that just is a. They've called it human. Right. You know, and suddenly that's to being able to do what you can do on your phone sat on the side of the, you know, lay by on the side of the A1 schedule. What you can do on a mobile phone is staggering. And then look where we're going to be in. You say, you said 12 months. I think you can't think much beyond that because if you say where are you going to be in 10 years? I don't think anyone truly knows and I don't think there's truly an objective that people are pushing towards. It's just coming up with new stuff and it's just, just running with it.

There are definitely different objectives out there at the moment. So I mean us are definitely pitching to be the leaders of AGI. There are some futurists who are saying, hold on, wait a minute, do we really want computers that are better than people at every conceivable task? Maybe not. And so there are balancing acts and trade offs, but generally we're a capitalist society. And so the race is for building the best thing that can make the most money For a company, it's a bit scary that most of that money may end up within the hands of a few tech companies.

Well, again, it shows the geopolitical stuff that we see in the news every day. And without dating this too much, what you see, and you see the different approaches, the kind of the various, you said capitalist American viewpoint and then the kind of more protection, kind of consumer user driven European as just one example. And then you kind of see us somewhere in the middle, somewhere obviously more leaning towards the kind of the liberalist view of America when it comes to AI, but then trying to chart a course and it's like I can't see which way it's necessarily going to, going to go because that's a very dynamic environment at the moment. But I think there's got to be a balance between where it is. But we saw what happened with the Internet. The regulation takes a long time to do properly.

Yeah, seatbelt laws only came in in cars after an awful lot of people died on motorways. Hopefully we don't have to die.

Well, I hope not. I mean this is called the Skynet Chronicles after all.

So no, I have no fears of that. I think we are, we're still incredibly early in this wave of AI technologies, but the rate of improvement is rapid and what you can do this week you couldn't do three weeks ago. And that's, that's amazing. Just a model, an agent coming out of OpenAI and being cloned by hugging face within 24 hours and then being available on X a couple of weeks later. You're just seeing this concept of something new coming out, being open sourced and cloned, replicated, improved, advanced upon and happening in so many different labs in so many parts of the world. It's an amazing time to be in technology.

And that's why I think that pace of change is why I think the future proof idea has really come from, about making sure that the tools are going to change, the platforms are going to change, what we do might change, but the fundamentals of what we're trying to achieve as businesses stays the same. So it's making sure that we always have that kind of question. We can ask ourselves, well, does having an AI agent that does X or Y help me achieve my goal, whatever that goal may be? Does it, I think there's an Olympian that rode Deadlante had that. Does it make, does it make the boat go faster? So every decision they made was like, you know, ask the question, well, would it make the boat go faster? And I think we've got to keep doing that. Very. I think it's a great question. It's like, does it, does it make the business go faster and achieve the goals, not just chasing the tech? Because you could. What. Have certainly gone down a few rabbit holes doing that myself.

Yeah. So what's the goal of DAO social marketing?

The goal for me is to help as many businesses as possible know the pathway that works for them so that they can grow their businesses and not get left behind. So for me, it's about impacting as many businesses as possible, giving them that toolkit, that skill set, that mindset. Really. I think it is more of a mindset than anything else to do that. So then they can empower other people either in their business or outsource to help them achieve and do that. The biggest weakness in my industry at the moment is nobody knows what good looks like until they've had bad. So if you're getting a website done, you don't know what a good website looks like until you've had a bad website or you, or you've been, you know, you might get incredibly lucky. But most people that we speak to that you know, are looking for help with their marketing have either struggled internally to do it or they've, they've tried to seek help and it's not, it's not worked. It's helping them understand what good looks like so they can, they can chase that and they can, they can invest in that. Because there's lots, with every technological boom, there's also lots of false dawns and fake promises that can't be delivered. Whether it be the AI sales tools that claim to be able to bring you X number of leads via LinkedIn but torture account in the way, or the tools that, of course it's legal. Why would we sell you something that's not legal? And then you look at it and it's, it's got horrific privacy and data policies that are sat behind that. So for me, I guess if you looked at the mission is to help businesses understand what good marketing looks like.

And quite often marketing is difficult to attribute to sale conversion. And so in times when businesses are struggling or economies are looking in a darker place, quite often marketing budgets get cut because the owners go, well, I'm not getting anything from marketing when actually that's probably the time you should lean in more. So what do you think the current economic climate and how businesses should adapt to that? Is marketing attributable? How do you ensure that business owners understand the value of marketing?

So unfortunately the golden age of digital marketing, I think, has passed in the sense of being able to take an action, track that action, and then attribute the sum of those actions to a revenue. What we're seeing is with kind of privacy laws, the change in attributions, things like iOS 14.5, which really kicked off this idea of not being able to track every person that visits your digital channels, particularly your website. We're seeing. Actually, it's becoming harder to attribute, even if you have all of the. Even if you have linear sales processes and marketing funnels. But then combine that with the fact that consumers are changing their behaviors to be. They're not just seeing one thing and taking action. You know, you might have. You know, I saw a stat that's like 97% of customer journeys have more than 30 touch points before the sale, which creates so many different pathways and ways of doing it. And what tends to happen is the person that does the last touch, whether that be a Google Ad or a social media post or an email, they get the tick, when actually it's a sum of all parts. We speak to B2B people and go, are people coming up to us about the marketing we're doing saying, they see us everywhere? I said, yeah, but you can't attribute that. So when we have our marketing meeting, you might tell me, is the marketing working? But you're telling me people in your industry are coming up to you and telling you that they see you everywhere and they really know what you're doing and they're aware of your products and services that you've only just launched. So that shows us the marketing's working.

Absolutely, it does.

But when I write you a report that's intangible and I can't be. Well, you had. I'm probably not in those discussions anyway, so it's. Unless you tell me that's there. We had one just last week. One of our clients told us that they generated £160,000 from a Facebook ad that was screenshotted by the client's neighbor. So they'd been chatting to their neighbor about wanting to get their garden done and this big project they wanted to have done, big, massive rebuild, the whole nine yards. And then the neighbor saw the advert of our client on Meta, I think it was on Facebook. They've screenshotted it going, oh, this is exactly what my friend wants, shown it to them. And then three months later, they've called our client and gone, oh, can we get the garden done? And that turned into 160 grand in revenue.

That is quite a garden renovation.

That is one quite a garden renovation. I believe they're getting some outbuildings and all that kind of stuff. But it also just shows as a marketer, it's so lucky that they actually were candid about how they found out, because otherwise pulling my hair out because the client just goes, we made 160 grand from Finnair. I'm a genius. It's kind of we're amazing and we don't get the marketing wouldn't get that attribution, even though it's been a marketing activity that's generated that opportunity. So yeah, there's no easy. Again, this comes down to what good marketing looks like. It's helping people measure whether something's working or not based on a sum of parts rather than just what can we show. Last Touch was what channel that was and increasingly helping them understand that. I think for particularly businesses under kind of 50 employees, you want to have a manager that's managing specialists rather than a generalist that is expected to be responsible for all the multiple channels. Because it's impossible, in my opinion, to be a great web designer, SEO specialist, graphic designer, email marketer, social media, content creator, social media strategist, copywriter, list goes on. And if you found that person and you put that job out there and you expert, that person would be worth their weight in literal gold. But we see those adverts. I want a Marketing executive for 26K that has 5 years experience in all these disciplines and I want them now and I want to pay them just a hair over minimum wage and then they expect there to be tangible, ongoing results.

I'm not sure whether you've loaded this as a position to me or not, but what happens when those specialists aren't people? Because could you have a specialist agent that was specializing in building websites, a specialist that was copywriting, a specialist that was designing graphics, and actually all of those roles that you've described are just agents within an organization.

I think that's a possible scenario. Obviously, I'd have to see what that fits. But that still fits with my model in the sense that you still have the manager that is defining what good looks like and is defining the overall strategy and activity, and then it's signing.

Off on all of the content before it goes out. So human is still in the loop.

Exactly. And I think that's a great way for smaller businesses to compete because rather than having a team of 10 internal specialists that are doing all these tasks, you look at the big companies that have fully rounded out marketing teams they might have 10, 15, 15, 20 people that are performing specialist roles and that as a business owner of a small business that under 50 employees is just not, not tenable. Whereas if you can have a generalist that understands what good looks like, that is then managing, I'm going to say people for now, but people or processes to, to then achieve that, then that for me gives them a competitive advantage over people that are still hiring that exec and expecting them to work miracles. And the other thing, just because it's an obvious bugbear of mine is that person is being thrown under the bus because what happens, they've been hired and the first question they ask normally is to the business owner is what marketing do you want me to do? What's the marketing strategy? And it's like because they're not being given that direction and that support. So I think that's the hardest role in marketing is that that's why they.

Should talk to you.

Exactly. And that is a lot of what we do is kind of defining what good looks like and helping managers manage rather than feel they need to be working being experts in all these different fields. And the irony is you hire the specialists to some of those parts generally the same cost if not cheaper than having one person that's at that kind of mid to high level range that you're expecting to do everything. To do everything. So you can probably hire a manager and five specialists on a fractional or part time project or task based element rather than just hiring one person expecting them to be good at everything and having to pay them to acknowledge the skills that they obviously will have to be able to get even close to that.

Fantastic. And a perfect place to end the podcast. Lovely chat, thank you very much Christian.

Fantastic. Thanks for having us Tim.