Seismic Shifts: How Advertising, Agencies, and Value Are Being Rewritten

[00:00:00] Kelly: A lot of times people have to get burned over and over and over again before they're finally ready to be like, okay, maybe something needs to be different in the next engagement I go with,

[00:00:08] Todd: yeah, I know for a fact there are pitches we lost strictly due to our fee that we proposed, and had we proposed a much lower fee, knowing that we could have arbitrage margin on the back end and the client would've never known that would've subsidized that fee to a profitable number.

[00:00:25] Todd: We could have done that. We're too small really to think about those things. I think the bigger agencies, I'm probably gonna get crucified for this, but they have more leverage to do that and probably more places to hide doing things like that. But when you're small like us and you're working on smaller budgets, I think there's less places to hide.

[00:00:43] LuRae: Welcome to, contrary to Popular Opinion, a podcast hosted by IDE Digital. In each episode, we bring you provocative topics and novel perspectives around leadership, business, and marketing that defy the norms, because exponential growth demands unconventional thinking and visionary action. So open your mind and let's get into this week's episode.

[00:01:09] Kelly: Hey everyone. Kelly McGuire, co-founder of Bo Day Digital. Excited to talk about today's topic.

[00:01:13] Todd: Welcome, Todd Juno Kelly's co-founding partner at Jedi Digital. It's summertime. My brain is scrambled, so I'm struggling today, Kelly, to come up with, uh, a lot of energy to, um, keep this going. But today's topic might be one of those ones that ruffles a little feathers out there in the ad industry world and amongst our media agency peers.

[00:01:38] Todd: So we're gonna talk about money and how money is made and how there are some hidden secrets about how money is made. And some of that stuff has been unearthed by a and a and some of those big reports that have come out in years past, but it's still going on. And I think there's still a systemic problem in the value chain of what brands want to pay agencies and what agencies will take work for.

[00:02:03] Todd: And the idea of do you really get what you pay for and how do you know? You're getting what you pay for. So I think there's a lot of things to talk about there. Again, these are slippery slope subjects because we're pretty much pointing out the dark side of our industry and why you and I chose to do our own thing to avoid a lot of those things.

[00:02:22] Todd: So one of the first things that we get asked a lot about, and I remember at times past on really big accounts, having to do staffing plans with the CFOs and the procurement teams of the brands to get down to the literal sort of. Hourly based sort of cost of labor, of doing what we do, factoring in overhead, office expense, electricity, all these things.

[00:02:46] Todd: What's the true cost of labor and well, we haven't had to do that in a long time. Does always weigh into how we model out what we're doing, even though we don't charge that way. There are some metrics that I look at specifically total compensation to revenue in the agency. Revenue per FTE and the percentage of compensation to rev revenue as of sort of a bracket to see how we're doing from the health of the agency.

[00:03:13] Todd: Because we don't track time, we don't have an hourly rate. So a lot of people would ask us, how in the world do we know how well we're doing? How do we know when to hire? How do we manage staff? Things like that. One of the main topics that we get hit with is how we charge. We've had a lot of agency consultants that we've leaned on to sort of help us validate our fee.

[00:03:36] Todd: We thought we charged a lot more. If we were charging say 15 or 20% or above 20% for media and it's cut, we've come to find out that that's not really more because agencies charge in other ways than we do and it all adds up to being in that price range. So at that point it didn't seem to be that unrealistic what we were charging 'cause we just lump it all in into, into one number.

[00:04:00] Todd: And that's typically based off our performance anyway. We don't get paid that number if, if we're not performing, if a client's unhappy. So that's another difference. But I think today I wanna talk about the idea of get what you pay for. Do low fees really make sense or does it make sense to pay more? And what do you get for that?

[00:04:18] Todd: I'd love your opinion on that and your thoughts on that. And then I want to talk about, again, the sort of darker side of the ad tax, which arguably is probably there because of agencies taking a low fee to win an account. Then going, well that doesn't work with our labor costs. So now we have to find other ways to skim margin somewhere and make extra money.

[00:04:43] Todd: And that's sort of the dark side because we accepted this job with a far too low fee to pay for the talent. So we'll talk about that stuff today and I'm interested to get your opinion. So let's talk about how agencies charge. The low fee idea and getting what you pay for. Share your comments on that.

[00:05:02] Kelly: Yeah, I mean, I think that this is a really interesting, and as you said, slippery slope topic to go into. We're gonna pull back the curtain a little bit and talk about things that admittedly not everyone's guilty of, but it definitely is the reality across the board and something that. We have to contend with a lot from a higher level.

[00:05:19] Kelly: It's an interesting topic to me because we've touched on the idea that media, for whatever reason, doesn't always get looked at like other industries or jobs or, or areas that you make investments in where we've used this term zero sum game, right? It's either you buy it or you don't. And there's not this scale or spectrum of quality within it, like you would say anything else.

[00:05:39] Kelly: You and I have always had these analogies that we've used where. Why is one lawyer worth a thousand dollars an hour and another's worth $200 an hour? Right? Why is one contractor worth a certain price and another's not? Like, these are scales and spectrums of quality and outcomes, and what we do is, is really no different than that if it's being done the right way.

[00:05:59] Kelly: Now, of course, I'm talking about the more holistic client agency engagement in relationship, not literally just buying ads as a media buying service, but I would argue that. Just doing a media buying service is pretty much not the right way to engage for just about anybody. You want a partner and you want someone that's really understanding your business and critically thinking about and all of that.

[00:06:21] Kelly: And so where it gets really interesting is when, if you start to think of it as you're hiring someone to work on your behalf, you are hiring a team to work on your behalf. You are looking for the best and the brightest and the engagement. And just like if you are bringing on an employee, you want someone who's qualified and skilled, someone who's motivated and passionate.

[00:06:40] Kelly: Generally, when you hire an employee, you give them an upsided package. This is why there's bonuses, this is why there's raises. This is why there's upward mobility. This is what you do to get work out of people that you want. Suddenly when you hire an agency as a vendor or as a service provider, it becomes this singular, locked in contract.

[00:07:01] Kelly: You are gonna give me X for Y, and there's no engagement beyond that. It's this transactional element, and I think that's why you get so many. Clients. Clients that don't like what they get, because you've essentially started out the relationship by handicapping and handcuffing that engagement right out of the gate, that agency, they get what they get no matter what they deliver, and so now they're working to not get fired because there's no upside to work beyond that because you don't get anything more Like as long as you don't get fired, you get paid what you get paid.

[00:07:31] Todd: Let me ask you a quick question about that. Sorry to interrupt. Yeah. I think we've had this conversation about this particular topic. Don't lose your train of thought on the other stuff, but the idea, we've had this conversation, the idea of the client paying less fee to the agency is often paired up with the idea that less fee means more dollars going to working media.

[00:07:53] Todd: I can buy more ads if I pay the agency less, which means. I'll get more because I'm getting more eyeballs out there. Like, do we think that rings true? If the media's not working

[00:08:03] Kelly: well enough as it is, if you're not getting what you want, the answer's rarely gonna be more of a network working thing, right?

[00:08:08] Kelly: You need better of what you're doing and to get better, you need creativity and thought and analytics and, and what to go in. So yeah, technically you have working non-working media, but. Is another 5% into media that's not working well enough as it is going to all of a sudden make it magically work.

[00:08:24] Kelly: That's probably not gonna be the answer in there. So again, you go back to setting up your agency to. The only way that they can do any better and have any upside is they have to start to cut corners on your behalf. They have to pay their talent less. They have to cut hours. They have to go outside and and put less tools and time and energy because every dollar they save on the operational expense is a little bit more margin that they get to keep in profit from the cap you've put on them and they have no upside on it.

[00:08:54] Kelly: Then you cross over into what I think is the more controversial dark side is. The other way that they do better is they start to look for ways to make more money outside of the agreed contract. So yes, maybe they're technically not going to take more fee out of the working non-working media. There's plenty of ways that you can creatively make extra money.

[00:09:14] Kelly: There's everything from absorbing the rebates and the kickback's, not the right wording where that doesn't really happen as much as you would think, but it's really

[00:09:22] Todd: So describe, describe this though. What, when you say

[00:09:23] Kelly: this, what are you talking about exactly, so, so on a, on a very small scale, if you go into Google and Google goes through and they identify some fraud clicks or low value clicks, they will refund you some of that in there.

[00:09:35] Kelly: A lot of times that's something that's just gonna get swept onto the bottom line versus put back into working media or gone back in. There's gonna be beta programs that an agency can get into where they don't actually have to pay for the media, and sometimes, rather than passing that along, they'll add in the standard charge, they'll run it for their client, and then they'll take a portion of cost on it.

[00:09:53] Kelly: There's. All kinds of ways to do like the actual rebate, the things that don't have the same hard cost, that doesn't get passed to the client. That kind of gets passed on the bottom line. That's getting less and less common. That's not the biggest thing, but that's an example of one way an agency can operate not in the best interest of their client, but really find out a way of.

[00:10:11] Kelly: We're not making enough money in this relationship, so every chance we get, we're gonna sweep a little bit more onto our bottom line. As long as you know it doesn't risk anything. And then you get into the more sort of upfront things where you can start to pad your CPMs. You can add in costs that aren't really in there, that are on that side.

[00:10:28] Kelly: You can start to pre-buy certain media and then resell it at a higher cost and arbitrage it a little bit. You can pat in your amortized cost of your tools and get that charged for and pat in costs on that front. There's all kinds of ways that an agency, again, if they have to squeeze a little bit more blood out of the stone, you can get in there and do it.

[00:10:48] Kelly: And the problem with that is that again. At a base level, if you've got a relationship where the agency is thinking in the best interest of the client because you're aligned, you win together, you grow together. When you do better, I do better. We both have motivated upside. There's no need to do that because not sweeping that under the rug, not adding in the cbms, all of that doesn't mean you have no chance to make more.

[00:11:10] Kelly: It means that if that does better, guess what? We all do better. So it's in our interest to give to you. But if I can't make anymore. I squeeze those things out. You start to think about, well, they're never gonna know that that rebate happened. They're never gonna know that what this real cost is, I can make a little bit more, I can get a little bit more profitability.

[00:11:28] Kelly: I can squeeze that a little bit more hours. If I don't hire that senior person. If I go with the more junior person and put 'em on the account and save 20% on that salary, they're not gonna know the difference between those two. They don't know who I could have hired. Again, you, you instantly create this motivation to not do the absolute best for your client.

[00:11:46] Kelly: Versus a situation where you, you get what you pay for, you put yourself as a priority to in the relationship, and you give the agency to say, you know what, let's always pick the very best option because if it works, we have side to that. We benefit from doing that. If it does what we want it to do, and it, it just inherently aligns that, and it's so strange to me.

[00:12:08] Kelly: That concept gets lost in the ca agent, Larissa, when it doesn't really get lost in almost anything else you hire and consider on that front. We always make this joke. You wouldn't go hire some incredibly seasoned CMO with a huge resume that wanted a hundred thousand dollars a year salary. You'd be like, Hmm, if I'm paying that person.

[00:12:27] Kelly: Half of what the market going rate is or some ridiculously low cost. I don't really think I'm gonna get the entire work focus that I would get from paying that person what they earn and what I expect them to bring to the table.

[00:12:41] Todd: Well said. But yeah, there's a lot of shady, shady commentary in there, right?

[00:12:45] Todd: I know. We've been fortunate enough to not have to do. Any of those things because we have only been able to work with clients that have agreed to our compensation model, which I think is fair and gives us the incentive and the motivation you're talking about where we're not underbidding work just for the sake of trying to win the work.

[00:13:08] Todd: Now it's my turn to

[00:13:09] Kelly: interrupt you 'cause I. What you just said is true, but it's not been an easy path. It hasn't just been easy to tell this story, like we've had to trod that and we've probably not won business because of not the confusing layer, but having to try and explain this out and why we charge it with ours, and it's hard to make an apples to apples comparison, and people aren't always ready to make that leap and fully buy into that idea.

[00:13:34] Kelly: A lot of times people have to get burned over and over and over again before they're finally ready to be like, okay, maybe something needs to be different in the next engagement I go with,

[00:13:42] Todd: yeah, I know for a fact there are pitches we lost strictly due to our fee that we proposed, and had we proposed a much lower fee knowing that we could have arbitrage margin on the back end and the client would've never known that would've subsidized that feed to a profitable number.

[00:13:59] Todd: We could have done that. We're too small really to think about those things. I think the bigger agencies, I'm probably gonna get crucified for this, but they have more leverage to do that and probably more places to hide doing things like that. But when you're small like us and you're working on smaller budgets, I think there's less places to hide.

[00:14:15] Todd: But the, you have both worked for these big agencies. We've run these big

[00:14:19] Kelly: agencies. There are literally people. Whose job it is to sit there and oversee the hours and utilization and profitability and tell you, you are outta hours. You can't work anymore, you can't hire anymore. This is your salary structure.

[00:14:32] Kelly: You can't bring on that person. There are literally people whose whole job is to tap and limit. What can actually be done on an account based on profitability components?

[00:14:42] Todd: Yeah, I mean, it's simple. You take the fee and divide it by the average hourly rate, the blended rate that most agencies work off of, and you come up with a number of hours that a team can work on work.

[00:14:52] Todd: And yeah, if you have a controller and a business model profit. Utilization model that works that way. That's what you govern your engine by, if you will. That's all you get as a client out of that engine. You don't get to get anymore, which is why we're doing what we're doing the way we're doing it, because clients get out of us whatever they need and want, and we deliver whatever we need and want to make the objective as successful as possible because we just think that's the right way to do things.

[00:15:15] Todd: But we do struggle to get compensated for that. I think it's getting tougher to get compensated. For doing premium work with expensive talents because there's a lot of pressure on CMOs to cut costs to get more out of a dollar. I would argue though, still, if you pay for that smarter talent, while it might cost a little bit more at a point in time, I think we'll get you more for that dollar over a longer period of time and you'll net out on top versus taking the cheap route upfront.

[00:15:41] Kelly: I've also heard you make a very important shift in, in the semantics that you and I have have argued about here as well. You started out earlier in the saying fee. You just switched over to compensation, and I think those are two very important different words. And what they mean and because to me, in the context of which we're talking about it, fee is what's put in a contract.

[00:16:01] Kelly: It's kind of what is touted, what is sold on, that's the race to the bottom number that kind of sets your baseline that says, okay, is this enough? What do I hire against this with versus compensation is. More of that value exchange. The, if I'm getting that value and if we're getting what we need and reaching those goals, uh, I'm willing to compensate you the same way I would any employee.

[00:16:20] Kelly: And, and I, it's silly semantics, but if you really structure what you mean by them, I think it makes a very distinct difference in the way that you approach that engagement in that relationship and how one should be thinking about it, how you should know what you're getting. And as a way to think about it, one of the other things that kind of drives me crazy when we really, when we get some of our RFPs or some of the requests or some of the.

[00:16:41] Kelly: Insight into the fees that we are going up against or that we believe has been quoted in business we're going after that we're not comparing apples to apples for is when it's a number that is so low that when you actually do the math, and I don't think most people actually do the math to figure out what.

[00:16:59] Kelly: 8% of X amount of dollars is on an actual dollars. And then you break it down and you try and figure out, okay, is my couple hundred thousand dollars in fee going to pay for six figure salaries across four different departments across all of the new business effort it took to win this across all of the tools that have to be deployed to it across all of the reporting.

[00:17:20] Kelly: Like if you actually did the math. It just wouldn't make any sense. And, and I see this joke, you'll see these funny posts. That'll be like someone posting for a babysitter and they'll say, oh, I want to pay $50 for a whole weekend's worth of, and it's like, oh, if you break that down, it works out to 75 cents an hour.

[00:17:36] Kelly: And that's insane. But this is the equivalency at a business level of what that would break down to. And then you take it even further with the logic test, and you look at some of these agencies and you're like, okay, they're quoting 8, 9, 10, 12% fees, whatever it is, against the scale of it. And then they're going and spending $500,000 to sponsor this event and they're sending all these things over there and they've got X share price or any scale of it.

[00:17:58] Kelly: And you're like, that money comes from somewhere. Like they're not, it's not, they're not a charity like clients are paying for that. But then you do the math and you're like, that sponsorship cost as much as. One of the entire client's, 8% fee would've equaled out to for a year. Like of course they're making more money somewhere.

[00:18:15] Kelly: It like, literally, logic doesn't even make any sense if you really stop and and actually put some logic towards it.

[00:18:21] Todd: Well, yeah. When we've done the math, taking a revenue number divided by the amount of people that are gonna work on something, divided by, if we do use a blended, average hourly rate, just to come up with, well, theoretically, how many hours a week should each person be working on this clients?

[00:18:36] Todd: Business. And if you take those low numbers, it, if you said to a client, Hey, our team's only gonna work on your business this many hours a week at that number, I don't think anybody would agree to that in principle. I think they would say, well, that's not enough time to do the work. And we, well, yeah, it's not, but we can't do the work.

[00:18:54] Todd: We have been hired in the past and I actually have a friend's agency that just got hired to do this. We have been hired in the past to audit to really get into some deep forensic auditing of other media agencies. Executions where we've been able to get under the hood to some degree and analyze things.

[00:19:14] Todd: If you're a marketer and you're hiring an agency, can you sort of point out maybe some of the key tactical things or labels of types of things that you would say to a marketer? Hey, like if you're gonna hire a media agency, probably wanna. Audit their work every so often and these are the things you should be looking for as, I mean, are there ev, can they even see the things that you would tell them?

[00:19:39] Todd: I, I don't even know. Like there's thing, there's certain things that I think a marketer could never see, but there are certain things they could, so of the things that they could see, what would you recommend?

[00:19:48] Kelly: Yeah, there's two that come to mind and I would say the one that is the most egregious example, uh, of an agency working not to get fired, which is what I see most often is, and there's been iterations, this has evolved over time, is basically you'll go in and you'll see the campaign structure and you'll see the media strategy built around taking credit for as much as possible paper numbers, things that look good, the the lowest green arrows up.

[00:20:12] Kelly: What is best to allow me to report and say I'm doing a great job. I don't know about the business side of things, but my numbers are all up. This can be everything from over investment in branded search to cookie bombing, to taking credit across multi-touch, to looking at the way that they set up KPIs in their favor.

[00:20:30] Kelly: So again. Right out of the gate being set up to say, as long as I'm always showing progress for a positive story, no matter what, I will continue to collect my fee versus being set up to say that didn't work and what did we learn from it and what can we get better and how do we get incremental and should we be spending more or is.

[00:20:48] Kelly: Is the next cheapest, highest volume thing, the right next dollar to spend for the true goal of the business.

[00:20:55] Todd: Yeah, but if you're the marketer, hold, but hold on. If you're the marketer, I wanna know how does the marketer know the truth behind the dollar being spent? Maybe a better way to frame this up is if you were coaching a marketer to ask their agency questions to verify or validate.

[00:21:11] Todd: I'm talking about like the actual media expense, if you will, if that's a fair thing to ask, which I think it is. What would you tell 'em to ask? What would you tell them to look for?

[00:21:21] Kelly: I mean, there, there's plenty of ways to add it in and, and trying to truly forensically audit and go down. I, I don't think that's a worthwhile time.

[00:21:27] Kelly: I. That's not the way that I would go about it. Again, I would do it more across what are the conversations that you're having? What are you hearing? Is all you're ever being told how great the media is doing? Or is anyone ever asking you, how is our media results translating to your business outcomes? Are you ever hearing a challenging, creative idea or effort?

[00:21:47] Kelly: Has anyone ever talked to you about. Hey, we want to try this. It's not gonna be the best CPA, but we feel like it'll benefit your business because of this or this. Or we're worried that this isn't driving incremental value and we maybe want to increase this cost, but we think it'll bring in net new customers.

[00:22:03] Kelly: Whereas the other, like, are you ever hearing anything that is thinking about the business reality? Or is it always, we are doing a great job, we are getting you big numbers, green arrow's up, we're killing it. Is it always just this defensive, me, me, me? How great am I doing versus. Let's talk about your business.

[00:22:20] Kelly: Let's dive in. Let's ask the hard questions. Let me learn more. Let me think more. Again, I would wanna hear someone that is challenging the efficacy of media investments to outcomes and asking me questions about my business, and is that lining up with what they're seeing? Does that make sense? Is there anything that's being missed?

[00:22:38] Kelly: If it's all just about my media buying and, and we're great, that would be my biggest red flag in totality.

[00:22:46] Todd: That's still not uncovering. And again, I'm sort of backing up to the ad tax thing, and this was a big topic back maybe five or six years ago. It's probably less now, but still when you think about agencies taking a piece of business for a very low fee, the marketer could still ask all those questions.

[00:23:02] Todd: Maybe the agency's got some pretty good answers for that. Still not telling the marketer. There's no evidence at that point in time that they can really look at and know for sure unless the media costs are being paid by the client, if the client's credit card is on the meta platform or the Google platform, so they know what the true net costs are, which we see.

[00:23:21] Todd: And, and promote that to be a thing, to do a good, best practice to do. 'cause that way the, the advertiser does know what the true hard cost of the media is, but sometimes they don't wanna do that, especially on the smaller side. They want the agency to float the, the media by, on the programmatic side, it's very different.

[00:23:36] Todd: There's a lot of ways, we've talked to agencies that are programmatic services, managed services, white label services that sell media on a CPM. And there's no fee. They're just, or compensation. They're just selling media on a CPM 'cause they've got a markup on the CPM and the client has no idea. I guess the question is, is there really any way anymore, other than the client having the billing, the net media billing, going directly to them, is there any way to really have visibility or line of sight into the ad tax, the hidden ad tax?

[00:24:07] Kelly: There is, but if you're gonna do that, you might as well just in-house it anyway instead of outsourcing. Again, I don't think that's the answer. I don't think going line item and going to that level of scrutiny is the, the most efficient way to go about it. I think it is more considering I. Are you getting what you want out of the relationship?

[00:24:24] Kelly: And if the answer is no, that very much may be a strong reason why. And again, when I say what you're getting, what you want is, do you like the team that's working on your business? Is it the same team? Do they think about your business? Again, it's a value exchange. You don't need to see every line item to someone building your house.

[00:24:40] Kelly: If they built you a beautiful house at the quote you gave them, that's great, but if they. Give you kind of a crappy house, or if they're taking three times as long to build it, you're gonna start to ask questions and start to understand why is this right? So again, so is your business going the direction you want?

[00:24:53] Kelly: Do you let, I think it's very relationship based and it, and it's built into that, and I think it should be based on the people and the conversations and the way someone's showing up. And again, if you're not getting what you want, I think a lot of it is built around the compensation structure and the way that these agency relationships are built to be.

[00:25:10] Kelly: And the last thing that really comes to mind on this is this whole idea of transparency has been this buzzword for a long time now. Yep. And the, the idea of transparency is kind of ridiculous to me because. You know, the transparency thing is about you're gonna see visibility. Well, but the reality is, is no one's seeing that, no one's diving in.

[00:25:25] Kelly: Like you don't have a whole person who's forensically going through this and understanding and going through it. Like the transparency should be inherent if, again, if the motivations are aligned and there's every reason to explain, here's this great thing I did for you, and here's what I expect for it.

[00:25:40] Kelly: And if and when it works, your business is gonna go up. You're gonna spend more money with me, and guess what? I'm gonna earn more because of it. I have. Again, shared upside in that, and you're gonna get what you pay for on it. But again, if you're charging single digit percentages and no retainers and all these other things, and you just do the math and it's not on there, and it becomes crazy to me to expect what you're gonna get out of it.

[00:26:02] Kelly: And then the other thing that comes to mind is percentages work on a scaled basis. If you are a hundred million dollars spending client. Maybe 5, 6, 7, 8% is a great number, but that same apple to apples, 5, 6, 7, 8% on 50 million, 10 million, 1 million, those are wildly different numbers. So just going off of the percentage itself versus the reality of the outcome, the percentage and what it unlocks.

[00:26:26] Kelly: It's just wild to me, and this is where I always talk about priority of client. If you are someone's 30th client in line and then you do your math, if you become a rounding error from these bigger relationships, like why would you ever think you're getting the A, b, C talent of that, of this agency? Like you're gonna be the training client.

[00:26:44] Kelly: The difference between five 50 and $500 million is incredibly different realities and outcomes and what you go with. So. It's not the direct answer you want. It's not a checklist of look at these things, and if it's not going, it's in there. But again, this is the thing that I think people forget about when they say, I'll get a cheaper fee.

[00:27:01] Kelly: I'll grind them down, I'll get a lower number. And honestly buying into, okay, well this agency told me 10% and this agency told me 20%. I'm gonna go with 10% and expect somehow that agency is going to just be happy with either not being as profitable or applying just as good a resources as the other thing that just wants to get paid what you want.

[00:27:22] Kelly: It it, it'd be like lining it up and saying, Hey, I'm on a murder trial and I want. A thousand dollars a lawyer, or I want a hundred dollars lawyer, like you're probably not gonna get the same outcome with those two resources being deployed, even though they do the same thing. They probably talk about the great law firm they went to and their experience and how they have this great plan for you.

[00:27:40] Kelly: But if my life's on the line, I'm probably going for the one that values themselves and has said, I'm, I'm gonna do that for you. And that usually works out in your favor. It's a silly analogy, but I mean, it's the way that people forget to think about these things.

[00:27:52] Todd: It's not because I think most CMOs probably think their life is on the line.

[00:27:55] Todd: It's an interesting just way you describe it that I would think most CMOs would maybe think that way, but again, they're under pressure to cut costs and manage within a budget, and they've got their own marching orders that we know we're not sitting in their seats, so we don't always know what.

[00:28:09] Todd: Pressures are under to, to make the decisions that they have to make and the reasons why we speculate based on what we've learned over many, many years doing this. Um, alright, well this is a hotly debated topic. I know you can get fired up on this one. I love this. There's probably agencies out there that would hate us for talking about this, sorry.

[00:28:26] Todd: But it's the reality of the business. It's worth talking about. We should talk about it. Clients wanna know about it. So I'm gonna wrap up. I'm gonna ask you the same question I always ask you, and I wonder if you're any more prepared today than you were the last time we talked. I know the last ad, so I'll start.

[00:28:42] Todd: I, it wasn't really an ad, but I saw a post on LinkedIn today that somebody shared, and I love the brand and I love this collaboration. They did. So I don't know if you've heard of the brand, Dr. Squat. Oh yeah. Um, they make. Natural deodorants and things like that. And I'm actually trying their natural deodorant, although it's hot right now, so it's, I don't know if it's working as good as it's supposed to, but I do love their product.

[00:29:05] Todd: It comes up as one of the best recommended products on an app called Yucca. I'm just name dropping here 'cause these are things I love. Anyway, Dr. Squash did a collaboration with SpongeBob. For a soap, and I think it sold out as soon as it went up for sale. It was like gone. 'cause there's SpongeBob fanatics out there.

[00:29:23] Todd: But anyway, that was the thing that I remember seeing the most today was the SpongeBob doctor squash soap collaboration, which I thought was brilliant. So whatever agency is doing their work, well done.

[00:29:36] Kelly: Yeah, I mean, it's always nice when you have something that. Has every reason in the world to work and you just gotta not screw it up.

[00:29:42] Kelly: What comes to mind as you go through it isn't a specific ad, but it is an ad experience that I just recently had, and this was, as you know, the Olympics are now going on and, and I watch a lot of my TV via streaming, and my wife was asking me about, oh, these commercials that were on and how much they cost, and how much peacock paid for the right to stream the Olympics and all of that.

[00:30:03] Kelly: And I just recalled going through the process of being like, yeah, look, we had proposals for streaming Olympic packages that we talked to clients about and potentially pitched 'em and some wanted it and, and had a cost to it and some didn't. And she was explaining to me like, why, why would peacock change their logo on their streaming?

[00:30:19] Kelly: I. Add to the Olympics and I was like, they probably paid an unbelievable amount of money of money and trying to recoup it in the cost and the reselling it. It was just this interesting experience of explaining to my wife about how that it's customized ads in streaming that's different than broadcast and how it's targeted to people versus not targeted, and it's eaten up by huge advertisers that can afford to take that swing versus smaller advertisers where it might benefit it, but it's a bigger risk for them.

[00:30:45] Kelly: It really highlighted the level of sophistication and consideration and creative thought that can or cannot go into what you do and don't buy and spend money on. And telling her that story I thought was, was reinforcing of that idea.

[00:30:59] Todd: Yeah, well I get asked why we're getting served Spanish T-Mobile ads and things like that while we're streaming TV all the time now.

[00:31:07] Todd: Recently, in fact, a neighbor of mine mentioned this the other day saying, I keep getting Spanish ads, so I don't know what's going on in my neighborhood. But for some reason we're all now getting served Spanish ads, so we must have somehow fallen into some demographic zoning that says we're Spanish.

[00:31:21] Todd: 'cause it's funny. Alright, I'll leave it at that. I love talking about this subject. I do hope there's some marketing people out there that do hear this because there's a lot to learn about how to hire agencies, third party services, and how to get them to be motivated to perform and provide the best possible services to you.

[00:31:40] Todd: We've had a lot of experience on both sides of that coin and the auditing side of that coin, so we're always happy to talk about it. Thanks for sharing your passionate opinion today about this topic. I love it.

[00:31:50] Kelly: No, my pleasure. I like talking about it and there's a trust factor to it, but trust, but verify.

[00:31:55] Kelly: Pass the logic test. Just think about what makes sense and what doesn't when you make these decisions and, and go with your gut, but put yourself in the shoes of, of where you're at and, and what would you do and, and what would make sense. I think that's always a good first step versus just. Apples to apples expecting everyone to just do exactly what they're saying they're gonna do without thinking about it much beyond that.

[00:32:15] Kelly: I agree so long. For now,

[00:32:18] LuRae: thanks for listening to contrary to Popular Opinion where we challenge you to think independently, push the limits, and take uncommon action so you can achieve game game-changing results in your business and your life. To stay up to date with our latest episodes, be sure to click the follow or subscribe button now.

[00:32:36] LuRae: Thanks again for listening. See you next time.