Don't Get Fooled by Agency Hype: A Guide to Finding the Right Partner for Your Business

Kelly [00:00:00] when we got a red light instead of a green light- The whole thing broke. The system fell apart and there wasn't the experience and the knowledge and the ability of investment into the account to have someone come in and say, "Here's the idea.

Kelly Here's what we should try. Here's where we go." It is a version of, well, we're gonna tweak this, we need to wait for the learning system here, we need to add that. And again, it's starts to become throwing things at it and hoping.

Intro - Outro Welcome to Contrary to Popular Opinion, a podcast hosted by Bourget 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.

Kelly Hey, everyone. Kelly McGuire with Bourget Digital. Excited to get into today's topic.

Todd Hey, podcast land. Todd here, Kelly's partner, back from the first two-week vacation, surf vacation I've taken [00:01:00] in over 20 years. Kelly, thank you very much for allowing me to do that. that was awesome, but now I'm trying to figure out how to adjust to life back in the United States, and that's not so awesome.

Todd It's a little bit difficult. all right. So today, we had an interesting experience, recently where we got to work with a founder of, a company and, had a chance to talk to them about doing some work for them. Ultimately decided we're not the right fit, but that resulted in that, founding team asking us to give them some advice and some sort of a consultation and, and point of view around agencies that they would want to consider hiring, which was great for us to do because we're not getting paid for anything, so we just have an unbiased position in it.

Todd but what it yielded is sort of this idea that I think we can talk about, it's c- definitely contrary to probably popular opinion about certain things, about w- how people think about hiring an agency and what they're thinking about [00:02:00] that agency being in month one after sort of this rosy honeymoon period about the pitch and all the promises and all the great things that are gonna happen.

Todd And then what life looks like in, say, month 10, where you've had some time, you've started to work together, you know, maybe some things are going good, maybe some things are start to, to show up, and, and, and how is that addressed? So I'm gonna, I'm gonna use that as sort of the jumping-off point for today's discussion, and first talk about what, how we would sort of advise and talk about the easy part and the hard part,and how maybe marketers can think about hiring their agencies around this.

Todd So first things first, we're a media agency. We participate in media RFPs and media pitches and, and we're all things media, digital media, and that's what we've done our whole lives, and we'd argue we probably do it pretty good. One thing's for sure is that the act of buying Google ads or YouTube or what- It's not that [00:03:00] hard.

Todd It's hard, but it's not that hard. and when you have a brand that's doing well and you have sort of momentum, sort of tailwinds and momentum just in general, media can work pretty well, and it can look pretty good on paper and in real numbers. It- everything can be just fine, and you could see growth and everything's hunky-dory.

Todd I thought what was interesting in your point of view to this founding team was to ask them, what happens when it stops working? What do you do then, and what do you expect of your agency at that moment? So can you elaborate on sort of what your thinking was or your advice was around that particular moment, which perhaps in this case we described as being in month 10.

Todd What happens in month 10 when things stop working?

Kelly Yeah, I mean, I think that's ultimately the end of it. But I, I, I, I want to take a step back and just sort of talk about a few illuminating things that [00:04:00] I think it uncovered for me in the process that were... I, I knew, and they're, they're lessons we've learned along the ways, they're things that we've learned to look for and consider, but don't really have the chance to take that step back from a consulting standpoint and really view it from the outside in, and I think that was an interesting way to look at it.

Kelly and I think, I... So, so, and these are a couple of key points to kind of get into the, the answer that you asked from me there, which is the thing that I realized initially is what we struggled with in being able to answer or, or participate in what would work is when we really took a step back and said, "Okay, what, what is it going to require to really give this client what they truly need to control their own destiny and to be able to do the things that is probably needed to generate the growth that they are?"

Kelly And I think it's worth saying that this particular client is in an early stage, right? And so we're not talking about huge [00:05:00] scales of dollars to kind of control the market and, and, and overcome. And it highlighted two paths of thinking that were very interesting for me to try and figure out what we could do as an agency, one of which is

Kelly When does the client have enough overall resources so that when you reach that ceiling or you reach that challenge or that sticking point, you have enough in market at your disposal to do the experimentation or the pivoting or the introduction? So it... I mean, really it's budget. It's working media dollars, right?

Kelly Your monthly spend. Because there's only so much to go around to do Meta and Google and content development and TikTok and, you know, it, it waters down very, very quickly. And all of these systems require some degree of scale to ingest the data, to generate the learnings, to capitalize on the scaling. So you can only spread it out so much.

Kelly And then again, when it does get stuck, it's not always a media answer, right? It's sometimes you need new [00:06:00] creative, sometimes you need to relaunch a campaign, sometimes you go in there. So there, so that was one part, right? Is just, is there enough... let's say we were at, let's set this- the fee- the fee side aside, which I'll get into next as the second path.

Kelly But just in assuming we could get hired, would we be armed with enough budget and resource to bring to bear what we are great at? Our strategy, our thinking, our problem-solving, everything that we do work for on behalf of the client, that only happens if there's enough dollars to materialize into actual work.

Kelly And once you reach that ceiling, once you're like, "Oh, I have, $5,000 a month for TikTok and 10,000 for this," and it starts to diversify, you don't have that much control over the destiny. So you have to really do the analysis of are we being given enough resource to be responsible for to truly achieve what this client needs?

Kelly And empathizing with their side of the fence of, you know, this is a hungry business that every dollar they put [00:07:00] into marketing and media is out of their bank account and growth and other things that grow a company and go in there. And we take that responsibility incredibly seriously. I don't want to just make a fee if I don't know that I really can break through when we get stuck and in there, and I'm gonna have to go back and be like, "We can't do this," or make excuses for it and all of that.

Kelly We've gotten that luxury of learning that and taking some chances with some upstart brands and learning those things and what to look for onto that resource side of things. And so I think that gave us that perspective of being able to say, "Look, we don't have a full enough confidence to believe that even if the fees worked out perfectly fine, that unless everything works just right and the h- every note hits perfectly and you hit every green light along the way, that we're gonna be able to overcome when the friction comes up."

Kelly And I don't like setting ourselves up for that difficulty because again, that relationship means a lot to us. Our reputation means a lot for us on that. And I'll, and put a p- pin in there 'cause that's another big learning on that, that reputation element. If I forget to come back to that, bring that up to me.

Kelly The other side of the path was the fee [00:08:00] side of things. Really where it fell apart for me was- There was a fixed amount of available fee to be assigned to a large list of marketing activities that needed to happen in order for the system to work well. Not just paid media management, right? Not just search and social deployment to media, the thing you said is easy, which I agree, the baseline, the entry le- the barrier of entry is easy.

Kelly The scale of greatness is a spectrum that requires that, which I think Amy was saying there. But let's say the, the baseline is easy. The, if you hit all green lights, yes, it can be easy But that is the l- not the only thing that has to work, right? There was me- paid media management. What wasn't even part of this, but absolutely needed to be, was analytics, which we just, every left-right turn we take with every client, we learn how broken analytics really is across the board, how much lift there is, how much work is in analytics.

Kelly That's just getting left out of everything to a crazy [00:09:00] degree. Every audit we do is wild what we come up with. That wasn't even in it, but obviously we knew that would have to be part of it. Creative production at large scale for a, you know, D2C, e- e-commerce brand, so that's a rapid pace of performance media.

Kelly Creator and UGC management, email management, SEO, all of these things within a fee, and you're like, by the time you actually have all these components diversified, none of these things are going to get the attention and the skill and the, the bandwidth to really work. What it's gonna turn into is either the fee is gonna be to cover that the way it should be done, is gonna far outweigh the ratio to working media to have it make sense.

Kelly That balance is gonna be way out of whack. Or you're going to force a fee and all those things in it where everything's gonna be watered down and it's gonna become a checklist of getting it done versus a operating system of getting it done exactly how it should and giving it the best chance of success.

Kelly And that was a [00:10:00] struggle on there is, in there. And, you know, we got a peek under the curtains that some of the ones we looked there is, you know, we're in the day-to-day of exactly what the economics of doing the work is, what you pay for everyone, all of those things. And sure, there are automated systems, there are processes, there are ways to cut corners and make it in there.

Kelly But at the end of the day, you're relying on everything to work, and that's where it comes into answering your question, which is the month one or two versus month 10, right? If you automate that, if you set it up, if you have a low barrier of starting, it's probably going to, quote-unquote, "look good." You're gonna see gains.

Kelly Anything is going to work better than, kinda where it's at for the most part. But how long does that last? Every conversation we have with every client comes back saying, "I no longer have the strategic direction from my agency." And what that interprets to me is almost always some version of, "It stopped working and no one had any answers, and no one could figure it out.

Kelly No one can explain it." I hear the same version of every conversation, which is [00:11:00] when things got hard, when we got a red light instead of a green light- The whole thing broke. The system fell apart and there wasn't the experience and the knowledge and the ability of investment into the account to have someone come in and say, "Here's the idea.

Kelly Here's what we should try. Here's where we go." It is a version of, well, we're gonna tweak this, we need to wait for the learning system here, we need to add that. And again, it's starts to become throwing things at it and hoping. And again, that's surprising to me. And look, I, I know what everyone can't necessarily afford it, and there's the realities to it, but like that was the illumination of the engagement.

Kelly When you're at that level, you really have to think about what you're getting into and what, what sounds too good to be true or what isn't practical for when things get hard. And that's why you run into so many agencies that are like, "It was working until it wasn't working, and now I have to make a new choice."

Kelly And that is a painful cycle that people get stuck in, I think

Todd Yeah, well, yeah. so one of the things that you, [00:12:00] you sort of talked about with this founding team was the idea that hiring an agency is, of course, a leap of faith, right? we're all gonna go in there and we're gonna pitch, that the world is rainbows and sprinkles and we're gonna make it that way for them the minute they hire us.

Todd and, and that's a giant leap of faith. So you talked about some, some tells, some signals or some things to ask about or, or maybe look out for, whether it's in month one or month 10. Can you talk a little bit about what you think some of those tells are or should be? What should a, what should a CMO, a founder, a principal, a marketing director, whatever, when they're going through this process of hiring a new agency, what are those tells that you think they should be looking for in the pitch in month one and in month 10?

Kelly Yeah, I mean, I think it brings me back to that, that thing I put a pin in, right, the reputational. The other thing that this really illuminated to me is what I perceive, again, I acknowledge I may not know this perfectly, [00:13:00] but what I perceive is, is there's often a great disconnect between the objectives of the sales team and the execution team that has to fulfill on that, and the disconnect of concern about how well-linked those two things are.

Kelly I've, I've said that in different versions on a lot of these conversations. But you could easily see the optimism and the pitching to the perfect path of what it takes to get to win the account, and a lack of or an avoidance of the honest, hard conversations around what happens if it doesn't work. Let's talk about what is very likely to happen, and I keep re- using this analogy, the red lights and how that- that's gonna go through.

Kelly Because there was very little in what I could see around, hey, this is how we're gonna prepare if we reach a ceiling. This is what's gonna happen if the creative stops working we're gonna go through. It was all, "We're gonna do these li- we're gonna do these tasks. It's gonna work, and we're gonna hit your numbers."

Kelly I would have wanted to see exactly what stopped us from really being [00:14:00] confident in the delivery of a response, which was- You've laid out exactly what your ratio to spend to returns are, and the revenue goals you are. You know exactly what your current revenue run rate is. I can calculate that gap of need, and I can tell you your working media dollars is unlikely to achieve that unless you really get lucky or the, or the winds are really in your favor, which obviously we hope for.

Kelly But I hate the idea of people pitching on the assumption that that's gonna be true when it is the minority likelihood of outcome. I would much rather someone be willing to say, "Look, it's not impossible to get there. Here's the best work we can do, but let's also look at the if it doesn't happen scenarios."

Kelly Where is the preservation? Where is the things? What ... Do we have that reserve of opportunity to address it when those yellow and red lights happen and we go through? And let's war game it out, let's model it out, let's look at all those types of things. Those are the things that acknowledges [00:15:00] that you're not saying what needs to be said just to win the account.

Kelly You are coming and saying, "You are hiring us to do a job that is not an easy job. Let's really talk about it and not just pitch that win." And again, I can't promise that's exactly the conversation in there, but from what I was exposed to, those were the flags that came up. And so that's what I would want to look at is one of the biggest things that I touched on is the relationship that you develop in the pitch phase with the people pitching the business really doesn't matter.

Kelly The value of that evaporates almost right away. Where you should be developing a relationship and that leap of faith should come in, is you should be talking to the account manager and the s- he- the strategist that is going to deeply know your business to bring those answers and that ideation when the time comes, and you should feel comfortable with those personalities of these are who I wanna work with, this is who's gonna stick around, this is who I'm looking forward to having those tough conversations with.

Kelly As best as you can, you should be trying to identify those because that's what's gonna matter when [00:16:00] that month 10 struggle hits. Those are the people that are gonna show up and matter the most. Because the buying of media, like there's ... It should be almost impossible to hire an agency that can genuinely screw up running the media when the data is flowing and working.

Kelly That should be almost impossible to screw up these days. But it's finding solutions when it's not just open fields that is actually the hard work.

Todd that's what this whole opinion piece was about, which was it's all rainbows and sprinkles when it is, but what happens when it isn't, and who comes to the rescue?

Todd And in a lot of cases, you know, we- We hear, and it's sort of industry-wide slang that's thrown around that, you know, agencies go in and pitch with the A team and then in a lot of cases if you're not the agency's top three accounts from a billable size, you're gonna get a B, C, D team operating your business.

Todd And so that's sort of widely known in our industry. so if you are a B, C, [00:17:00] D team client, and like you said, in month one to six maybe everything's working okay, but then all of a sudden a competitor enters the market with significant spend or, you know, there's a material change in something else in, in the consumer landscape.

Todd Maybe, you know, there's a ... Maybe it's a food brand and there's some new lawsuit or something that comes about an ingredient that's terrible for us, and your brand happens to be flagged for one of those ingre- something, some headwind comes along and just knocks you down Then does the C or D team come to the table to figure that out, or are you, are you wishing the A team person was there on your side?

Todd But of course, because you're in the bottom third or, or below that in terms of tier of client for that agency, what, why do you think marketers don't factor that in A- and then why do you think they don't factor that in [00:18:00] any of the other realities that you're pointing out in when they're selecting an agency, and that generally speaking, all they really have to go on is the rainbows and sprinkles picture that the agencies are presenting?

Todd Like, if you're the CMO, you have three finalists pitching you, obviously you're gonna see three amazing viewpoints of how they're going to service and grow your business, right? how do you take a step back from that and then force sort of the uncomfortable look at things? Like, that's not normal in a pitch.

Todd We've never-

Kelly Again, the client shouldn't have to do that. That, that, that's the flag that I'd be looking at, is I would want to hear someone talking about the what if scenarios, the, the you've been in the trenches before, you know not everything goes well. Let's talk about that. Who am I gonna talk to? How do you address that?

Kelly What are the not... There's only so many dials and levers on the media side. There's only s- only so much budget reallocation, channel activation, bid management that you can do. At some [00:19:00] point, you're working on the fringes of whether or not that's gonna do a breakthrough, and if you're running 20, 30, 40% behind goal, that's not gonna be the singular answer that breaks through, right?

Kelly So you wanna hear from someone, how do you think of things that are beyond your control but part of your purview and knowledge so that you can- Guide and consult me, right? 'Cause I come from the perspective of your agency shouldn't be your service provider, it should be your consultant. It should be the one that can help you figure out answers, ideate solutions, problem solve, bring solutions in, in there

Todd But who, who's doing that in the agency if you're, if you're a low rung client in terms of, in terms of billable value to the agency and you have the B, C or D team m- buying and optimizing your Google ads, when things don't go right, who's stepping up to the table to think about the business the way the founders or the owners do?

Kelly Yeah, and, and that's what I'm saying is, is look, I'm not naive enough to think that every client can have full [00:20:00] access to a full strategist, but that has to be a component of the team. You have to have some consistency of someone who has the visibility and the skillset to be involved and to bring to bear when the time comes and that consistency in there.

Todd How do you know the strategist is smart enough to know your business and, and-

Kelly That's what you should be vetting in the process ...

Todd diagnose and plan for your business? How do you know?

Kelly That's what you should be vetting in your pr- business. That's truly who you should be hiring. 'Cause you've got to assume if you find someone who is smart enough to believe and to take the leap of faith and be like, "Look, this is the person who I want solving my problems when those problems appear," if that is checked, then that same person is picking the right people to run the media and to do the things when they're working well, right?

Kelly Like, you need that guidance and that leadership in there, and that's, that's who you should feel the best... Again, at the end of the day, I think the two people, especially at this size of client, you're primarily hiring your account manager and your strategist access. Everything else is just making sure the work gets done.

Kelly And again, in that world is also I [00:21:00] do think there's too much bundling- in the services that are provided, right? One single fee structure is meant to cover far too many things that are individualized disciplines, right? Like, I don't think that a single flat fee is realistic to cover multiple channel management because I firmly believe in channel specialists, not generalists running everything.

Kelly I know that that, you know, there's a debate about that, but I'm firmly in the camp that when you are the best at social, that's your focus. When you're the best at search, that's your focus, not the same person trying to run all these different things, 'cause it's hard enough to be incredible at one of them, let alone really great at lots of them.

Kelly That's really hard to do.

Todd You realize the entire industry is going the opposite direction of, of that belief.

Kelly And I understand that the floor is being raised in terms of being able to do it. I don't run to the floor, I run to the ceiling, and so I also believe the ceiling's being raised, which requires even more specialists.

Kelly But again, that's a difference in what you're hiring and going after. And so to go back around to it is, look, I [00:22:00] do acknowledge that a certain size of client needs to be able to go in there, and that's why ultimately the recommendation that I landed on is if you cannot necessarily afford a, a fee that is going to cover everything exactly how you want it, I at least believe that you need to have a mechanism to allow who you're hiring to go above and beyond on your behalf.

Kelly If there's a flat, rigid system in place where there's no way to earn, then you start to become a math problem to that agency, where they're gonna sit there and be like, I can't burn more hours on this. I can't put more into it because even if it works, I'm gonna be underwater on it," right? So that's where performance bonuses and upsides and things of, hey, if you go the extra mile, there is in fact a way to co- make up that ground other than just not getting fired, 'cause who wants to hire someone whose whole motivation is not to just get fired, right?

Kelly You want someone to say, "Look, I'll go the extra mile. I'll get creative. I'll push all the boundaries, 'cause if I do and I create growth, I get to [00:23:00] participate in that growth." And that was the main thing that I went through. There was a lot of concerns on, you know, there was a lot of opportunities within the proposals that I recommended where, again, if it doesn't go right, my worries is that the costs and, and the excuses/reasons, whatever you wanna say, would be too present.

Kelly It'd be too easy for someone to say, "Well, we're doing a great job on the media, but we're not getting enough creative. You gotta give us more for creative," or, we don't have enough resources to get a creative to create." And you start to create these excuses of you're setting yourself up for being pushed back on when it, again, when it doesn't work.

Kelly Hopefully, it doesn't. So yeah, so it's, it's all about trying to think about the practical outcomes, think about all the levers that go into it, and align yourself with someone who at the very least can grow with you and benefit with you on that side. And I would, I personally would never hire an agency that wasn't at least pointing out the areas that tend to create struggle and how they address it.

Kelly I would ... I want to hear the realistic scenario, not tell me what I want to hear assuming everything goes perfectly. I want to know what's, [00:24:00] what it's gonna be like when it's not working, when we're 30% behind goal, when my organic traffic has crashed, when no one's responding to my thing. How do you go with that?

Kelly How do you help me solve those problems? 'Cause an agency should be a problem solver. Everyone says, "I want you to be an extension of my team." That doesn't mean buying media. That means anticipating my needs, thinking about things I didn't think about, solving problems when no one has an answer, not throwing up our hands and being like, "Well, it's in learning phase.

Kelly We just have to wait," or, "It's doing the best we can," or, "We got lots of traffic, the conversion rate, it's the website's fault." That may be true, but what do we always say? Don't bring a problem without some kind of a solution, right? Bring it in and say, "Yeah, the, the, we're getting great traffic. The website's not converting well, and here's what we think should be done about it.

Kelly Here's what we think the next step is. Here's where we think we should go that is the right thing to do." That's the consulting side that to me, I would never hire an agency that's just doing a service. I want a consultant who's gonna help me build my business.

Todd okay, one last thing before we wrap. in the [00:25:00] reviews that you looked at, just being very generic here in our, in our talk about this, in, in what you looked at, did any of the work that was being presented go down the, the path of Here's what would ha- here's what we would do, or here's how we would look at things if things weren't going well?

Todd Or did, did none of them broach that subject?

Kelly I didn't get exposure to the entire element, so I can't necessarily say if it came up in a call or things I wasn't involved in, right? But again, the, what I was able to see purely in the cost structures and the compositions of everything in there, there wasn't anything that I would've expected or hoped to have seen that would've addressed it.

Kelly Doesn't mean it couldn't have been in another way, but every single ... Basically what I ended up providing was a pros and cons, right? 'Cause I could look at every proposal, and I could pretty easily see where it would go wrong and where problems would come up. I could [00:26:00] understand what would happen and where the pushback would end up being or where the excuses would be, whether it was, again, not having a performance upside to participate.

Kelly So when the work went up and the fee didn't, you're gonna get less attention. I could see where it was, there's wasn't enough attention or resource put into the creative development. So again, if performance suffered, I could easily say, "Someone's gonna point to we don't have enough creative, and there's gonna be excuse on there."

Kelly I could also see an area where there was a variable investment on certain things, and I could easily s- 'cause it was the closest to how I would've priced it if I was twisted my arm and really did it, and I could see exactly all of the things are like, again, if it's green-light, this is gonna go great, but as soon as it goes off the rails, I can tell you exactly where you're gonna run into problems with that.

Kelly And again, maybe there's a good conversation on it, but there wasn't anything that could've been there that I would've wanted to see, and that's kind of the best I could go with on that front.

Todd All right. you mentioned you have some sort of anecdotal subject to, [00:27:00] to close this up on, wrap this up on.

Kelly Yeah. I, I, you know, I have a variation of something we've said a lot, which is it's always interesting to me because of these new business pitches that we talk to and these new clients that we talk to, the, the theme of some variation of, "My agency no longer has answers to me," right? "It was going well. It stopped going well, and I don't like the answers or the explanations.

Kelly No one's making it clear or easy for me to understand. We're just stuck." Or it's almost always some version of, "I, we're looking for more strategy." And I always contextualize that in my mind of- Who, of course, the idea of strategy and, and great attention and all those things, that had to have been in the pitch when that agency got hired, right?

Kelly So there's a disconnect between what was promised and what's being experienced. Like, that's what I think. And I think it comes to me really funny, as I've had a few experiences recently in the audits that we've looked at, it, of, I have a behind-the-scenes look at the real client outcomes and the agencies that are doing work that I'm looking at and [00:28:00] comparing to, and then you'll go on their website or you'll go somewhere and there'll be an incredible case study about their work on this client.

Kelly And I'm in the system, and I can see the disconnect of what they're claiming happened and what's really going on with the business in the background. I've had multiple experiences in this that is crazy, and it just underlines what I've always said, which is case studies are very cherry-picked. And c- I, I understand the need of them, but who- I always joke, whoever presented a mediocre case study, right?

Kelly Like, you're painting your best picture. And even if it is true, even if you don't have a disconnect between what happened, is anyone, is any of the people who are responsible for those outcomes even at the agency anymore? Will they ever touch the account? Does it even matter on that? I'm not saying they're worthless.

Kelly Obviously, they're not. We present case studies that I'm very proud of. You just have to take them with a grain of salt, and it has to be a reinforcement of a feeling and an exposure you're already getting, right? I, you certainly can't hire someone on a case study thinking you're gonna be replicated. What it should be [00:29:00] is an example of what you're already hearing and being presented and saying, "Look, this team's really good.

Kelly I really like what they're hearing. They're telling me what I hear. I feel like this is a team I'd wanna work with. And oh, by the way, they can point to some things that make me believe it, they're not pitching me theory, but practical experience." Like, to me, case studies should be a reinforcement of you've actually done this or done something close enough to it to where I'm not your guinea pig, but that's about all it should do, right?

Kelly Because again, I have seen more than enough case studies that have painted the best picture of the world, and I've watched numbers going down on the business side of things that make no sense.

Todd Yeah, I think m- what they should do is just instill confidence that you know the client's business. You have some reference or, or some knowledge of their type of business, I think, is what I hear from CMOs most of why case studies are important to them, is they wanna know that you know their business and that you've maybe worked in their business before.

Kelly Yeah, it's gonna tell you y- you're not gonna get shocked by an unexpected regulation. You know what, you know the right data provi- providers to be looking at. You [00:30:00] understand the user flows and, like, it should, it's a baseline of knowledge, but every client... You should be trying to say, what is uniquely going to understand my business and that I wanna work with d- every day?

Kelly Something that happened two years ago, sure, that means someone has a knowledge base that I can tap into, but that should be a very small piece of what decides whether or not this is the right fit for you

Todd I agree. Well, on that we'll wrap. thanks for sharing that background information and, this project that we went through, recently.

Todd I think it's interesting, and hopefully there's some marketing folks or agency folks out there that can glean a little bit of insight from what an unbiased look, is at, a bunch of pitches and reviews, from another agency's perspective. I think it's interesting. I'm sure people have looked at us and said similar things probably.

Todd who knows? all right, we will reconvene for our next show. I think I'm gonna tee some stuff up around analytics, as you mentioned, and get one of our senior engineers, on the show here soon with some [00:31:00] topics that we can, we can discuss about how the world of GTM and GA4 and consent management is a giant rat's nest for most brands out there, and it's a very dangerous and slippery slope that is seemingly being proliferated everywhere.

Todd and there's a lot of brands that probably have no idea how bad and how much at risk they probably are. we're gonna be talking about that coming up soon.

Kelly That'll be a great episode, yeah. That is a, the shocking reality the more you get exposed to it.

Todd It sure is. all right, good to see you, and I'll talk to you on the next show.

Kelly Thanks, everyone.

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