Welcome to episode 80. It's really 80 this week of the Clarity Compressed podcast. Last week I know I said it was episode 80 and then if you go back and watch the video, my team did something funny, even if you watched the first five seconds, I don't get away with anything. But today is really episode 80 and we're going to talk about getting nerdy with branding and marketing. And I might get myself in a little bit of trouble. Clarity can only really exist in the light of truth. Branding just isn't a tactic. It's a lifestyle change. So first, this week, I hate... I don't hate the brag. People just say humble brag. It's really just a brag. So if we're going to do just a brag, we're doing just a brag today. This is this week's edition of Automotive News magazine. They published a response to an article they had about Subaru's Sharing Love campaign or Love campaign. They published a response to the article in there. It was written by... Hey, so I thought it was cool. I've never done a letter to the editor, but the button was there and I clicked it. So basically Subaru is the manufacturer, is starting to launch a campaign with their featuring not vehicles. So they are not featuring vehicles, not featuring new models, not featuring price or payment. But instead, they're talking about branded brand first content. What it means to be a Subaru driver. What is going on in the community around the brand of Subaru? And I frankly haven't seen that come from a manufacturer yet. So I thought I would write an article. Automotive News this week thought I'd share because I think it's really cool that they published something I wrote. Today's moment of clarity is you are greedy. Now, I'm not being accusatory. I'm greedy too. As humans, we're all greedy with something. I don't consider myself to be a greedy person, but that's overall. There are things that I am greedy about. For some people, it's their time, for some people, it's their money. Whatever it is, it's just a bad way to be. Nobody wants to be greedy. And when you're not greedy, when you're giving, when you serve other people, guess what? Life gets a lot better. So whatever it is that you're greedy about, try giving some of that away today. Or this week. That's it. It's moment of clarity. I'm so excited for a wedding's gonna show me. Hurry up and show me Paul's video. Okay, today for Paul's pics, we're gonna talk about Honda CB motorcycles. Now, specifically, this isn't vintage, but it's modeled after a vintage. But vintage Honda motorcycles are amazing, especially. When they're done in the fashion, it's called a cafe racer. Google it, we'll show some here. A cafe racer is a motorcycle that really has the opportunity to express the style of the rider. You do all kinds of crazy stuff to him and turn something that's old into something that's new by putting your flair on it, by putting some style on it. And they're really fun to ride. And that's why it's my pic for the week. That's where I can clear my mind. Now, the reason I'm going to be doing this is because I'm going to be doing this. The reason I wanted to make episode 80, what we're actually going to talk about is continuation from last week's podcast when I started talking about the problem with the current agency model. And this week, I'm gonna get into it a little bit deeper. I'm gonna get a little nerdy. I had Pat's help to get nerdy because he understands these things more than I do. So I was able to draw some good knowledge and wisdom out of him. So if you're not in the marketing world, you might not follow along with some of the stuff. I'll try to break it down because my goal is that even if you're not in the marketing world, you understand because let's face it, like as a consumer, these are the things that are being deployed against your attention day in and day out. And for me, I think it's cool to understand why companies care what I think and how, you know, what happens behind the curtain. So we have a few metrics that I want to talk about. I learned that you can make numbers say whatever you want them to say. Is five a good number? I don't know. Right? If it's like the number of M&Ms, I can eat. It's a bad number. But if it's the number of millions I'm gonna make, then it's a great number. Right? So like five doesn't mean anything objectively. So numbers can be incredibly deceiving because metrics can say or look like something is really good when it's not good. And metrics could say something is bad when it actually, it's good. I mean, how many people, if you're in marketing advertising, if you have an agency, how many people have decided on a KPI key performance indicator, like what you're actually measuring going into an ad spend? What are we looking for? If you're looking for a low cost per click, okay, you might get it. Are you looking at more car sold? Are you looking at X amount of car sold? Are you looking at be able to attribute sales back to the spend directly? So that makes me to my next point. What's the real conversion measured? If you're in marketing, you know what a quality score is. If you're not, Google gives advertising's quality scores based on how their algorithm ranks your ad for relevance. So I searched something on Google. It pops up stuff that it thinks that I care about or I'm paying attention based to what I when I searched and I click on something. The problem is that doesn't measure it through the rest of the process. So I could celebrate, I have the best quality score and I have a low pay per click rate. But guess what? That doesn't really matter if it's like that doesn't translate to an actual business objective other than getting the person to click. I think you need to take a really hard look if you're working with an agency that says, oh, what is your ad spend? Great. We're going to take that ad spend and we're going to market up 20 or 30% and that's going to be our fee that 20 to 30% fee. There's an inherent conflict of interest. These aren't bad people that run these agencies. I know them. They're good people. But I'm saying the model is broken because there's a built-in conflict of interest that I can never really want to help you reduce your ad spend. Because by that, I'd be signing the death warrant of my own company. The more you spend in ads, my opinion is the more tax you're paying because your brand isn't strong. You have to spend more in ads to get people in the door because you haven't done the brand work to make it attractive. You haven't done the good creative that connects pivot to something that I find a little bit more relevant. Facebook advertising instead of a quality score. So if you're following along quality score, Google relevance score, Facebook. Now, Facebook's relevance score, in my opinion, is way more valuable than Google's quality score and a paper click metric. Now, Facebook's relevance score is awesome because the only deciding factor in how relevant that ad is to that person is whether or not me as the consumer decided it was good. So the relevant score goes up. If I dwell, if I look on it longer, it goes up. If I like it, if it goes up, if I share it, it goes up. If I comment on it. So if I just keep scrolling past it, I ignore it. Guess what? Quality score down. So the Facebook relevance score, however, at least shows you how in tune your brand is and your creative is to who you're trying to run ads to. Does that make sense? This is why I'm talking about the agency model being broken because we're paying attention to the wrong things. Let me give you an example. If you're a car dealer, you know what metric really matters? Number of cars sold. I know I'm picking some fights here. I don't intend to talk down on the people who have agency models that charge a percentage of ad spend. Like good, hardworking people. I'm saying the agency's broken. We need another solution. Brand, first, marketing, connection with other human beings is part of that solution. Measuring the right things is part of the solution. Next week, we're going to talk about the solution. We're going to talk about how I believe we start to fix these things. What I believe we start to pay attention to so that we can start to pivot from this old model to a way that isn't bound on a percentage of ad spend. It's the way that we execute things at my agency. But we measure them to objectives. We measure them to personas. We measure them in brand connection. And again, your business has to be growing. You have to be able to tie it back. So we're going to talk about those things next week in the meantime. Thanks for bearing with me through the nerdy stuff today. It's good to get nerdy every once in a while. I appreciate the fact that you're spending any time and attention here. If you haven't, if you didn't hear it at the beginning of the podcast, or actually I told that. I said I wouldn't tell the video people. So if you're watching this on video, I'm not going to say you have to listen to the first like 10 seconds of the audio version to get what we're doing next. But that's it. Thank you for spending some time. I appreciate it so much. I know that you have so much stuff going on. So if you tune in or you listen when you're walking the dog or driving to work or whatever it is. Man, I appreciate it. This community is building is pretty awesome. And they're people that just want to make good decisions, want to connect with people. And want to kind of be nice on the way to it. So if you take any of those things away, I hope it's that. I hope you have a great week looking forward to episode 81 next week, because we're going to give you the third part of the series. Until then, pursue clarity. And that's an episode.