Beyond Smoke & Mirrors to Performance Marketing that Achieves Business Outcomes

[00:00:00] LuRae: In this Rewind episode, we address what performance truly means in today's fragmented media landscape. From ROI and campaign performance to the realities of outcome based agency compensation, get ready for some straight talk and insights on how to make your marketing dollars work harder.

[00:00:28] Todd: so speaking of analyzing, let's talk data and analytics. Okay, so every client's got a budget. They've got a product or service or trying to put media impressions out there to convince a buyer to buy, right? Even in limited budget scenarios, there's usually the presence of pretty ample data and pretty capable analytics.

[00:00:48] Todd: Obviously, the more money you spend, the more data or data opportunities are created. So can you talk a little bit about The limitations of smaller budgets and what a lot of these data tools out there, for example, media mix modeling tools are inherently expensive. They're getting cheaper. I was making some things more efficient, cheaper, but generally speaking, these smaller campaigns, smaller funded campaigns have challenges relative to the types of data and analytics that can be created versus big budgets.

[00:01:21] Todd: When you just. Creating massive amounts of data and you can slice and dice it, you know, six ways of Sunday with all kinds of technology, what should the smaller investing brand be thinking about in terms of data and analytics, if they can't buy all the fancy tools out there?

[00:01:38] Kelly: Yeah, that's probably one of the things that frustrates me the most when I hear about it, because You know, the reality of these tools and these models are, they're just that their data exercises and they are models and they rely on large data sets to reach the level of significance to be reliable.

[00:01:53] Kelly: There's a lot of blind spots that people forget about. I mean, Apple phones don't collect information and data. There's opt outs, the cookies going away. There's all these gaps that exist and. It's conveniently not thought about when you're like, okay, I'm going to measure and attribute and do these types of things.

[00:02:09] Kelly: And it's so easy for a big brand to talk about. You should be doing this and do all these models. It's like, yeah, you have hundreds of millions of records with, you know, the ability to develop cohorts and slices and really hit that confidence. If you're talking about a smaller brand, that's either getting started or doesn't have a huge amount of budget or time in market, those data sets.

[00:02:29] Kelly: Just don't allow that level of manipulation and analysis to the same level of competence and simplicity. And then you layer in the fact that it is a heavy lift and often very expensive to put the, either the man powers or the actual tooling in place to be able to do that type of analysis. And now you talk about a percentage of overall investment.

[00:02:51] Kelly: It might be amazing to have that insight. But if 20 percent of your total budget has to go towards what it takes to get there, is the outcome worth the working media sacrifice to get in there? It's one thing if it's two, 5 percent of your budget, because you're talking about huge numbers, but if it costs half a million dollars for the technology and the tool and the time or something, and your total budget is 2 million, I don't know if that's the right ratio of investment to be wanting to go down, but you get people excited.

[00:03:18] Kelly: Hey, I've heard this as possible without the practicality of, is it sensible for my business and my outcomes, no matter how cool it would be to have it, am I at the level of maturity or point where that is the right next dollar to spend, or is it cool for the sake of cool when my dollars ready for that yet.

[00:03:37] Kelly: And it's knowing that balance and knowing if I get that, am I going to get outcomes that improve my reality more than if I spend those dollars in a different way? And, and again, this is resource allocation and balancing that it takes that business acumen versus just. I've got a shiny tool. I'm going to sell it to you because it sounds great.

[00:03:56] Kelly: It's really thinking about each piece in a bigger picture. And that's that consulting side of things that you need your partners to come to the table with, not just saying what could we do, but also presenting a case of what should we do and in what order of priority and what timeline.

[00:04:14] Todd: So a sidebar question to this topic, based on what you were just saying, something that we see often, and I know other agencies that I know would say the same thing, in fact, we probably all say the same thing about each other in the agency business, how in the world does the CMO or the director of marketing for maybe a small startup brand or challenger brand They don't know what you know, they don't spend their working life's passion digging under the hood of all these technology platforms and tools and models and really get, you know, their sleeves rolled up to understand exactly how they work, what is required for them to work effectively, so on and so forth.

[00:04:58] Todd: But yet you put an RFP out. You get three agencies to come tell you how they're going to solve your business problem to the agencies talk about proprietary this or proprietary that and that's their secret sauce and one or one agency talks about, you know, here's all the data and technology we're going to deploy again, maybe knowing and in their mind, the budget that the client has is never going to be enough to adequately fund successful outcomes with those products.

[00:05:28] Todd: And then you get another agency that says, Yeah, none of that's really possible with your budget, but you know, here's what we can do. You're the marketer, your job's on the line to pick the best agency, one's telling you the world's possible, one's telling you, you know, the other part of the world's possible, and another one's telling you, yeah, none of that's possible, but here's what you can do.

[00:05:51] Todd: Could you I guess in a way opine about if I'm a marketer and I'm getting pitched and I'm getting pitched on all these shiny bells and whistles and I know what my budget is and I think everybody should love my product as much as I do, the realities are probably different as you would see them. What might you say?

[00:06:08] Todd: If you could say to a marketer, if you were sitting next to them in an agency review, how do they know? How, how do they actually know what's real, realistic, not real? How do they know? Do you, do you have any thoughts or suggestions on how you could tell somebody, Hey, here's how you should vet these things out so that you actually know if what you're being pitched is actually attainable, achievable, realistic, fundable, you know, within budget, so on and so forth?

[00:06:36] Todd: Cause my fear is that most. of these situations are a lot of things get promised that are never possible to execute.

[00:06:45] Kelly: Yeah, it's not a perfect answer. I think it's not unlike the what's become more and more a gamble of interviewing and hiring a person to work for you. How do you know that that person isn't telling you what you want to hear and interviewing right and telling you all the right things.

[00:07:00] Kelly: And then they come in and they're not what they interviewed. Like there's an inherent risk of that. I think, you know, you have to trust your gut. You have to believe in who is Who's really going to be spending the time on my business? You know, am I hearing everything I want to hear from a new business salesperson who can say whatever they want because they're not ultimately responsible after you sign the dotted line of what's actually going to happen.

[00:07:22] Kelly: They're just going to toss that off to a team that says, this is what I promised. Hopefully you figure it out, right? It's, do you know who's going to be spending time on your business? Do you know what the business structure is around spending time on your business? Are they? Is a company inherently incentivized to cut corners because every hour saved or every level of talent on lower salary applied is more profit off of your business?

[00:07:46] Kelly: Is the only way a company can make more money off of you is by cutting corners and saving money in other ways to your detriment? Or are you aligned in a partnership where You do better. They do better. And there's growth and there's alignment and there's rationale and reason to bring that next thing to the table.

[00:08:02] Kelly: This is why so often we find these experiences where, you know, an agency starts out really, really strong with the client gets comfortable. Things go well, things kind of go on autopilot for a while. Then there's a threat to the business. And then all of a sudden you see everyone come back in to save it again, right?

[00:08:18] Kelly: Because again, it's I'm working to not lose the business versus I'm working to do what's best for the business. And that's going to be a personal motivation. That's going to be the human beings that are coming to the table and saying, I have responsibility or maybe shared upside of this. Or I have some reason to give it my all when this is a client.

[00:08:38] Kelly: And I don't necessarily own the agency. Like you, you have to believe that there's a structure in place where the people. Are truly going to come to the table for the right reasons and the right environments, and you have to get that feel in the room, you have to understand the business structure. You have to basically think about what is the process and methodology?

[00:08:55] Kelly: What's the motivation behind the people that want to work with me? And is there anything other than. This is revenue that I need to extract profit from. And if I land this client, it means X amount of dollars in my pocket and I can move on to the next one. It's, it's a hard balance. It's why I think larger agencies.

[00:09:13] Kelly: are a struggle because of it's too easy as a really talented employee in a big agency to get lost in the shuffle. You, you get too good at what you do on the platform, then you're going to get hired and you're no longer pulling the levers, or you're going to get poached away. And then you have to backfill and It's really, I would imagine it'd be really hard to, to work in a bigger agency, unless you are one of their top three clients where you are going to get all of the attention.

[00:09:37] Kelly: If you're not in that top three and in a big agency, I mean, imagine what happens when the big client that's above you has a fire drill. If your resources can help that fire drill, you're losing them for that period of time, right? Like you just cannot be the priority. So. If it was me picking an agency, I would want to know the people that I'm truly going to work with day in and day out.

[00:09:58] Kelly: I'd want to understand the structure of the company and why they do things and how they come to the table and how they've set something up to truly have my best interest in heart. I'd want to make sure that there's a way for them to profit off of me. Other than just cutting corners, but actually if they do better work for me, there's a way for them to benefit from that, to give them a reason to do it.

[00:10:18] Kelly: And I would ultimately want to know that I am a priority to them, that my business is going to make a difference in their reality enough so that it's not going well, I'm going to get the attention and the care versus, uh, we'll just get another client or replace them if they decide to leave.

[00:10:33] Todd: Well, I think that's a great answer and I think if there's any marketers that are listening to this and they want to ask Kelly or hire Kelly to help them that their agency search out, hopefully Kelly is going to be the mean guy in the room.

[00:10:46] Todd: No doubt the tough guy in the room to impress, you know, look, it's going to be hard for small brands to cut through, but there are creative ways we've talked about. Some of them today, they're very practical. There's no magic sort of unicorns or magic buttons that, you know, can help these brands that have to just get started.

[00:11:05] Todd: You just got to get started, but you have to do it in a very methodically smart way. There's a lot of stuff out there that can distract brands, shiny bells and whistles, as we've talked about, that can distract a marketer and distract an effort from achieving, you know, more realistic success. So. It takes a lot to vet through that.

[00:11:24] Todd: Hopefully today's conversation will help some of you listening, think through how to that's through some of these things, because none of us have enough money to do everything in the world, but sometimes there's really creative ways and good people that can help you do things that will ultimately result in a success.

[00:11:46] Todd: another thing we've encountered that probably be good to talk about. What's the minimum data that's required, because I know we've talked about this in several situations where it'd be nice to have, but we don't have, or we need certain types of data. So if you had to advise people listening, like if you're thinking about getting into these more advanced correlation, causation, MMM modeling type environments, what's the minimum barrier to entry that a brand, a product, a service has to have out in market, even for this to work?

[00:12:17] Kelly: Yeah, I mean, your best starting point is you benefit best when you have about two years of trailing data, give or take. Doesn't mean you can't do it. I mean, if you don't have that, you can start from now. It just won't be as accurate until you get further out and can smooth out some of that seasonality.

[00:12:31] Kelly: But you usually want about two years of trailing data. And you want to be able to break down with some level of granularity, the dollar investment and the market presence. So impressions, any sort of existence of presence of any marketing factor that impacts about 5 percent or more of the outcome. So anything that you feel makes up about 5 percent or more of what is leading to your outcomes, whether that's PR at a home, TV, digital meta, anything like that.

[00:12:59] Kelly: You need to be able to say, okay, I can isolate this variable and say how much I spent and how much exposure or presence in market I created from this thing that led to whatever the outcome data I'm measuring this to. And when I say outcome data, that's going to be sales, customers, whatever the thing driving your business and your revenue is, that's what you're correlating it to.

[00:13:20] Kelly: This investment leads to this business outcome. And when this business outcome goes up or down. I want to know what factors are driving it. And that's the relationship that you have to really be able to define and look at large data sets. And it has to be consistent, right? You can't have one year where you ran connected to TV and then the other one, you ran it in totally different ways and environments where if you use that data set, the outcomes and the relationship between those things to the business outcome don't equal the outcome you want because there was too big of a shift that happens.

[00:13:50] Kelly: You need length of data. and you need the ability to show investment or presence in market against a business outcome at a granular level for everything that's about 5 percent or more. And then you can get a pretty good picture of what those relationships equal.

[00:14:05] Todd: So I guess for lack of better terms, okay, so a new brand couldn't do this, right?

[00:14:09] Todd: Cause you're saying, Hey, we need a year or two worth of data. So this isn't really applicable for anything new to market.

[00:14:15] Kelly: A new business couldn't necessarily get the full predictive. What should I be doing with Strong levels of confidence, but a new brand certainly can start the process now and start to learn and start to fill in and build those models out for future proofing their business.

[00:14:30] Kelly: I wouldn't wait until I have that. I would start because there's value in the short term. You just can't get the confident. What should I do next? What's my point in diminishing returns? You may not have a 95 percent level of confidence. It may start at 70, 75, 80. You may have to grow into that full picture of everything that you want to do.

[00:14:47] Todd: Well, yeah, I guess you could start it, but right, you're not going to have, probably not going to have enough data to make it worthwhile. It's also a tough sell because in a lot of cases, there's a pretty big expense behind running these programs. If you were in charge of a product or service today and had an ad budget and you were the marketing person who was in charge of growing said brand, product or service, what argument would you make to say the C Suite?

[00:15:14] Todd: To get them to approve buying this by investing in a tool like this, because we talked to a lot of marketers and they don't invest in this and they struggle to make the argument internally for how to get the money to invest in this. So I guess, how do you validate the return on investment for something like this?

[00:15:30] Todd: Like to me, there's not a scenario where I would not put this into play. I can't imagine why you wouldn't want to have this, but it seems incredibly rare that we come across somebody that's already got it in place. And normally we're the ones. Charged with putting it in place. But even there, there's a tough argument to make, right.

[00:15:46] Todd: To get the investment for it. So how do you validate this?

[00:15:49] Kelly: I think anyone could benefit from it. That being said, there are certain factors that would make it more valuable, more important, and more viable than I would look at first and foremost, if I was involved in any kind of business that didn't have a short user journey or user cycle, or wasn't.

[00:16:05] Kelly: Strictly online with really strong digital conversion signals, anything that relied on retailers or third party or external actions or offline actions or anything where that digital conversion, a digital outcome signal is not as strong and collectible. That's one of the first ways that this becomes really important because connecting those dots becomes a lot harder.

[00:16:26] Kelly: And then I would start to look at size of investment data outcomes. Again, I think any brand in any size could benefit from it, but It can be a considerable expense because it's not just the technology and the tool that allows the modeling to be done, but again, you need the personnel that can do the good work that can create those levels of confidence and then can actually make use of the outcomes in an effective way to make it worthwhile.

[00:16:49] Kelly: And so the investments that's going to go both both into the tools and the labor behind using the tool does need to properly be ratioed against. How much it's going to influence, right? You don't want to do a one to one, right? You don't want to spend 100, 000 on this tool to inform 100, 000 worth of spend, right?

[00:17:07] Kelly: You probably want the ratio of how much this is going to allow me to spend more efficiently after I do the work. To be a decent ratio. You might want to do a 10 to one spend to cost of tool ratio or something like that. It could be any number of things. I mean, there's a scenario where maybe two to one does make sense, but I would start to look at making sure that if I'm going to make this investment, I'm going to deploy it on some level of resource.

[00:17:30] Kelly: It's going to make sense versus those dollars just going into getting more presence in market from that perspective, because I'm already so low. I kind of touched on one of the important things. Do you have the personnel to make use of it? I would not invest in this if it was just meant to be interesting or informative For me, I would need to have a plan and a path to make it actionable and to do something If i'm going to make that investment.

[00:17:52] Kelly: I want it to mean that the next dollars I Spend after I develop this platform will perform better than the dollars I was spending before I made this investment and built this tool in this technology. So I would want to make sure that it's not just, Oh, that's interesting. Or I feel good that my dollars did work, but more of a, okay, now that I know this, I feel good that they did work and I know how to make them work better moving forward, and then it's going to continue to grow and improve over time.

[00:18:18] Kelly: So again, I think who and how it's being used becomes really important, the ratio of the dollars that it informs, and whether or not you realistically need it at that journey level that you have to have that confidence of, is my dollar investments. If I know that I'm building a lot of awareness and I have to create my market and I have a lot of competition, I'm going to want to know how that middle and upper funnel investment is resulting in that end result.

[00:18:42] Kelly: Whereas if I have a very simple D to C product, where if I invest in Facebook ads and I get purchases, that signals really clear anyway, it may not be as important if that journey is really short.

[00:19:01] Todd: so there was a comment about procurement led accounts and marketing. Let accounts we've come across this in our journeys where the selection process, oftentimes for the agency procurement has a significant waiting in that decision.

[00:19:16] Todd: And, of course, their job is to manage on the P and L, you know, the most efficient spend of their money that they can get the most value. They can get the most bang for their buck. They can get and that is. I would argue almost always in direct conflict with what the CMO is probably hoping for out of the selection.

[00:19:36] Todd: And I don't know how often those two things. I don't know. Maybe recently we've had an account that's come on board where it feels like procurement and marketing actually talk and align on business goals, which I think has been a refreshing experience. But those two things are generally at odds. And this comment was about putting them, putting procurement and the marketing team in a room and letting them cage fight it.

[00:19:58] Todd: Out to see like, what do they actually want? And I think that segues into this conversation around can agencies should agencies at that, maybe even at that early stage, should we force the tough conversation of, Hey, procurement, Hey, CMO, you guys go cage, fight this out. Because. It's, it's really up to you to determine what the business needs and, and how the business is going to be best be served.

[00:20:25] Todd: But I was thinking about the idea of owning an agency and paranoia and fear sort of always being what drives us owners. I don't think we should be afraid of that. I don't think we should have fear of forcing that conversation. I don't think we should be afraid. to force procurement and marketing to come to the table and align on objectives.

[00:20:46] Todd: But it seems like something agencies, maybe we don't do a good enough job at.

[00:20:51] Kelly: I think the industry creates its own problem in this way, because again, this is where you have to have a good relationship with your client and be able to have a formulation of trust there. Because I think what creates that paranoia and that fear is.

[00:21:04] Kelly: There's not a shortage of agencies out there, and a lot of them don't always have the scruples that you want them to have necessarily, and it's something I always operate from, which is there's always someone out there who's willing to stretch the truth and promise and over promise and undercut and promise to do things at a cheaper cost just to get signed on the bottom line.

[00:21:27] Kelly: And the problem with that and what you always like to point out to me in certain ways is. We know that it's not going to result in what they want. They're not, it's going to be an over promise. They're going to be underwhelmed, but it doesn't matter to us. Cause once we lose the business, it's gone for us.

[00:21:40] Kelly: And yeah, we might be able to take the moral high ground and say, told you. So guess you didn't like that experience. Did you, but that doesn't help us, right? That doesn't help us be able to continue to grow and off and fulfill on that. So that's the problem, right? Is how do you show up and compete in a unbalanced marketplace where it's not easy to understand?

[00:21:59] Kelly: What you really will get and what's just being promised and said until you experience it. And that experience can come too late. And so it's this really fine balance. And it makes me think about, it's a funny analogy when we talk about procurement and the idea of when is a win, not a win when you sort of get your way, but you don't really like the outcome that comes with it.

[00:22:18] Kelly: And I'm going to come up with a funny analogy because, you know, it's football season and I participate in fantasy football and I'm kind of in trade season right now a little bit. And it kind of came to mind, you know, I'll send out these trades and I explore it and there's this realization that. You start out by offering something that you'd feel really good about.

[00:22:36] Kelly: And unless someone's not paying attention, there's generally some back and forth. And the other day I came to this realization, I was like a good outcome of a trade in my mind. And this is an old business adage is when both sides are a little unhappy, a little uncomfortable with the outcomes that feels like if one side is just.

[00:22:52] Kelly: Throw in a parade, it's probably not going to end in a good thing. No one's going to ever want to do that with you again. But if you're both like, I don't know if I want this deal to go through, but I can live with it. And you go through, you're probably in a good place in that because. That's where there's give and take on both sides.

[00:23:07] Kelly: And that's the partnership side of things. One side should not be so imbalanced that the other can't move appropriately. And this goes back to another thing we've said a lot when I work on side projects and development things. And I've had instances where, you know, I've worked on some mobile games and things, and I've had artists that are just kind of looking for the work and they'll come to me and they'll say, Hey, I'll do this work for this price.

[00:23:28] Kelly: And I recognize that's not fair price for what I want from them. And I will offer to pay more if there's value because I want that person's a hundred percent. I want them to be bought into the project. I want them to give it their all. I want them to go that extra mile for me. I'd rather get the good outcome for a little bit more.

[00:23:48] Kelly: Then literally be the I'm going to do the bare minimum and move on because I'm getting ripped off here kind of thing that always sticks with me when I go through negotiations is if I feel like it's not fair, I look, I'm not saying I don't want a good deal, but I think there's a limit to what's reasonable on that front and where you go and.

[00:24:07] Kelly: I think you being aware of the other side of what that creates is really important. And this comes through in procurement. When is a win, not a win. You can get your way, but again, you are giving your partner who you are hoping helps drive your business board every reason in the world to look for every opportunity to cut a corner for you, hire cheaper talent, outsource it, use a tool, automate it, spend less hours, cut more meetings, not give as much thought, why would you motivate your partner?

[00:24:36] Kelly: To do those things. It just

[00:24:38] Todd: doesn't make sense. Yeah, maybe we should buy some advertising to get more people to listen to what you just said, because I think that's That's universally true. I don't know how many more generations or decades of agency and marketing people need to sort of go through the world of marketing to get to a point to understand that what you just said is what makes sense.

[00:24:59] Todd: I mean, we're a service or service based industry. And so this article went on to talk about service based industries like us being afraid to ask these really tough. Hard questions, you know, you said, well, you have to earn the truck. Well, you can't, you don't have trust of procurement in the RFP pitch process.

[00:25:15] Todd: There's no trust there yet, right? Like

[00:25:17] Kelly: there's promises. There's promises that you

[00:25:19] Todd: don't know what's really going to happen. So you can't really do that. You don't have that trust at that point, but that's also a point where we could still pose really tough, challenging questions to procurement and marketing.

[00:25:33] Todd: But in that pitch phase, what do we all do? We're just trying to win the business, right? And so I think. For us. Yeah, we've lost a lot of pitches because we just simply won't budge on price and we just simply say this is the value that you get for what you pay. And if that's not what you're looking for, we're fine with that.

[00:25:51] Todd: Go somewhere else. I still hate it, but I think it's important to note

[00:25:54] Kelly: there, right? When we say yes, it is definitely a value. And again, I This is the problem is, is everyone's going to say they're valuable. Everyone's going to say they have the best people. Everyone's going to say they're going to go above and beyond, right?

[00:26:04] Kelly: This is where it's like an interview. Most people don't sit in an interview and be like, I'm going to be mediocre at this job. I'm slightly qualified for it, right? You have to be able to use your gut and really feel someone out and understand. And especially in a pitch process where it's not even the, the person like, am I even talking to the person who's going to fulfill these promises?

[00:26:25] Kelly: Or am I talking to someone who's. Literally commission motivated to get me to sign the dotted line and not even caring about who is now going to inherit those problems and those promises to actually matter. Does the team that is going to fulfill these promises even work at this company yet, or are they going to go randomly higher and hopefully they get good talent on those things, right?

[00:26:46] Kelly: It's so interesting when you think about you do, this is where that relationship and that gut feel and that process and really understanding and going through that becomes so important because. If you just hire on an agency's past experiences or their case studies or their, like most case studies, I would be willing to bet the majority of agencies.

[00:27:05] Kelly: This is probably on the bigger side of things. The people that played into that case study probably don't even work at that agency anymore. I would say the most of those are in there that move on. I mean, look, we've seen case studies of clients we've taken over and we know the results and we'll see a case study saying how great they are.

[00:27:20] Kelly: Yet we have the client coming up being like. Our business is down. It's not working. We're firing them. And it's like, this is wild. It's so wild when you put it in perspective in that way. But yeah, I mean, look, it's all about the practicality and the motivations and that, that gut feel. It's also why I think sometimes it's not always quantitative.

[00:27:38] Kelly: You can't directly say, you know, not everything on marketing is going to be so linear. A lot of it is just, am I getting the experience with my, I'm going to keep using this word partner. Do I feel like they are passionate about my business? Are they, Going the extra mile to come up with ideas. If, if something's not working, are they just throwing their hands up and saying, it's not this, or it's you?

[00:27:58] Kelly: Are they, are they making excuses? Are they brainstorming ideas with me? Are they thinking about things? Are they digging in? This is that going beyond the media understanding. Are they asking about my business operations or my competitive pressure? If my pricing can change or what works, am I getting a conversation and an engagement that makes me believe that this person is bought in and cares beyond just whether or not they lose my business or not.

[00:28:21] Todd: Well, that is one of the other comments in this article that I thought was interesting, which was, it talked a little bit about the importance of QBRs to align on strategy and goals and probably more macro level financial performance and output relative to a P& L. But it also went on to talk about that's too long to wait.

[00:28:41] Todd: A QBR is way too long to wait because there's stuff happening in most cases every week. And a lot of agencies to scope having weekly meetings, weekly standup meetings with their clients is probably doesn't look right on a utilization and staffing plan and a margin plan for the agency. But it certainly is probably the right thing to do.

[00:29:04] Todd: In many cases, we have weekly strategy. Reporting standup status check ins all the above with our clients. And so many things get discovered in just that short period of time. Other things take longer to marinate before you can have a statistical sort of relevance or numbers you can rely on, but. This article talked about that should happen more and more.

[00:29:30] Todd: And I said, again, I went back to like, well, doesn't that always happen? We can't be the only ones that are doing it. I

[00:29:35] Kelly: think it's different things, right? Because there's a balance here. Not every client needs weekly reporting, but I think where it gets conflated is I don't think you need to report to your clients weekly or even biweekly, but I do think that you should have strategic discussions at whatever cadence the business needs.

[00:29:53] Kelly: If things are going well, if the team understands the business and the motivations and what's happening in market and things like that, great. But if campaigns aren't going the way that you want, or there's some element of the business where things are shifting and a more real time element, this is the, again, the difference between if you're buying a service with just simple hours basis, applying those hours, just to simply tell you we're doing great, we're fine is a waste.

[00:30:19] Kelly: But if you're hiring a partner to move the business forward, and there's enough. Things to discuss and engage with that will actually make meaningful changes to the decisions. We make the audiences, the data points, all of that, that we can interact strategically. That's what should happen more often. If there's a reason, if there's a strategic reason, that's going to yield value to what we're doing on behalf of a client that should happen more often.

[00:30:44] Kelly: We have clients where. Things are moving in such a way that having at least those weekly check ins of how is the call center doing? What's the volume up and down? What are the conversion rates? What's the promo calendar coming up? I can't learn that on a quarterly basis if I need to make decisions on a weekly or bi weekly because it's changing that often.

[00:31:01] Kelly: But there's other clients where if we try and do a weekly or bi weekly, every call is like, yep, pretty much things are the same. Not changing that much because we've reached equilibrium. Things aren't in there. And it's a waste. So it's just understanding where do you get value. But this is the mentality shift between buying a service and a block of hours on my behalf versus Partnering to get outcomes and what goes into getting those outcomes.