You're not Elon Musk - be careful with what you say, it will affect your marketing, Adidas performance marketing didn’t work, and When will businesses start booming again? What we are seeing in the ad industry

0:00What's funny is, and it's actually not funny, but Elon Musk is going through the opposite right now. he's rich he's created so much marketing content out there on random stuff and he says whatever you want and it's hurting his numbers so many people are stopping to buy tesla overall the business is you know they're still making money hand over fist but yes a ton of price cuts and other things out there and if you look at every single news site out there like even cnbc i was reading article today and it says elon musk you know and i'm paraphrasing here elon musk says it's insane to vote through mail yet records show he's voted in the past through mail and this is what happens in which if you do well and you have some sort of audience and you say whatever you want to say people are just going to use it against you and you should you people in general should be careful with what they say because it can hurt them and i don't think anyone is really too big to fail.

0:58I'll give you a great example of this. Look at the, is it Telegram founder? Yeah, the Telegram founder got arrested by the French police. Supposedly has a net worth of around$15 billion. They said, hey, money laundering, anti or drugs, sex trafficking, all this kind of stuff they're saying is going onto your platform. You're responsible. We're going to throw you in jail. They can do the same to Elon. They can do the same to this Telegram guy. Having money doesn't mean you can do whatever you want or say whatever you want, whether you're right or wrong. And if people don't like you, your life is going to be harder.

1:31Just look at Elon Musk and his comp package. It got taken away. Why? Because someone politically didn't like him. You know, there's a conspiracy theory. So we're, um, yesterday in the first Uber, so my, my Uber broke down, right? So the Uber broke down on the freeway and we're like, you know, we got in the second, second Uber. Um, and then we're kind of just talking about the, The conspiracy theory here is that – so I think what has been said, and you guys can correct us if you want or correct me if I'm wrong more so, but France is usually not going to take an action like that to arrest the Telegram founder unless the U.S.

2:03is okay with it, right? And so because this has happened, right, it means potentially that the U.S. accepted it, meaning that this might be the setup for putting who next in jail. but the when you look at x facebook google or let's talk about even google like gmail you can use these products to do funky stuff i bet you people do use gmail related to sex trafficking and money laundering and so with facebook and same with a lot of other platforms my point is the conspiracy theory here is that they're setting the telegram founder up to set elon up for x next you see what happened with uh in brazil right where um i think they've like froze the funds or the bank accounts of starlink and spacex even though it's not related to x because the brazil president doesn't like elon um and so to your point um yesterday it was interesting so george gammon the so he's great great macro um he was just talking about how he believes that you and i should openly state our opinions more and i said well the reason we don't do that is not even because like, sure, clients is one thing, right?

3:12Clients might not like what we're saying, where they might disagree with some of our opinions, can't agree with everything. But what's more important, you brought this up, is that if you state your opinions openly all the time, you're going to polarize your employee base. And that's going to cause unnecessary drama. And that's going to cause unnecessary division in your company. And that leads to less focus on getting the actual work done. Yeah. And also on a lot of subjects, I don't know about you, but I don't have tons of opinions. Like I don't read a ton on politics or anything like that. No, but I will say that you and I talk about things and we mostly agree on things, but we also know that many people will disagree with these things too, but they're not like crazy things because we're both centrists.

3:52So yeah, I, I, in just the world we're going into, I believe people should be careful with what they say online, offline, anywhere, because it can end up biting you and it can just hurt your marketing in the long run. And I think Elon is a prime example of this. I think if he keeps going like this, I'm not saying he's right or wrong. I'm just trying to state what's happening is he's getting a lot of hate from places and people are going after him politically. And they have been look at how he's losing comp packages, right? It's the government, the system that decides if he's going to get paid a comp package that the shareholders agreed upon.

4:35Yep. So at the end of the day, be smart. If you want to like, sure. We like, I have noticed sometimes when I kind of go outside and test my opinion a little more, it really irritates people. And that's how we get some of the one-star reviews sometimes. And I know if I double down and triple down on that, we'll get way more views, but it's just not worth it at the end of the day. Right. Sometimes I might venture out a little bit, but not that far. I got to take a minute to tell you about the Agency Owners Association. This is a peer group for agency owners. Think YPO or EO, but for agency owners.

5:03And I just wanted to read you a couple of testimonials. So this first one comes from Carrie. And we asked her, what do you like most about the group? She said, having a group of people to discuss and bounce ideas. The leads are great too. Yes, we share leads in this group as well. This one from Alian. He says, the ability to really post whatever I want and need. And the group responds. Great experienced members. Getting a lot of insights from conversations with other members. getting a lot of value from sessions from Eric, getting advice from others as well. And so if you want to grow your agency faster and you want a peer group to do so, just go to marketingschool.io slash agency.

5:35This is a group that both Neil and I created. And our hope here is to create a vibrant community of agency owners and do a lot more with it in the future. So again, marketingschool.io slash agency, and we'll see you inside. Dude, speaking of deploy, we had talked about this a little bit in the past, but so I'm going to share my screen again. Let me know if you can see this. So here's what it says. It says, Adidas CMO came to the same conclusion back in 2019. So here it is. So you know how recently we talked about how Adidas was like, what brand marketer was like, we overspent too much on performance marketing.

6:11So this was Nike. Yeah, that was Nike. So Adidas said this in 2019. We overinvested in digital advertising. So Adidas admits that a focus on efficiency rather than effectiveness led it to over-focus on ROI and over-invest in performance and digital at the expense of brand building. So I know we had a take on this a couple weeks ago, but this gives us a chance to talk about it a little more because both Adidas and Nike, or at least a representative from Nike, said that. Yeah. I think you need to have a mix. Performance, and dude, I talked about this here in Brazil. People are getting a lot of things wrong about performance marketing.

6:47Branding and performance marketing don't have to be separate. Performance can help you generate a brand. If you're running AdWords everywhere and people are seeing it and it's profitable, at the same time, they're clicking on your website and they're seeing a brand, right? It's helping build your brand. I get some of the brand style campaigns are done very differently, but running ads, doing SEO, email marketing, CRO, et cetera, It all can help with getting your brand out there and getting people to know about it. Some of the biggest brands that we see like Lumi, for example, or Dollar Shave Club, a lot of these guys ran performance marketing campaigns through Facebook ads, Instagram ads, Google ads, and it was very effective and they've had great outcomes from it.

7:33where I think people are getting things wrong is they did a ton of branding. A lot of them may over index in performance and stop the brand building because in the category that Adidas and Nike are in, what really helps sales is sexy. If you're not innovating and doing something sexy, you just don't sell as many shoes or as many shirts or jackets or, you know, tracksuit pants or whatever they're called. And they're in a category where you have to continually innovate. If you look at Lululemon, they've recently been disappointing with their earnings. At least that was a recent CNBC article I read.

8:12It's just people weren't happy with their recent product launches. It comes down to you can have the biggest brand in the world, and Adidas, Nike, Lululemon all have amazing global brands. But if you can't keep releasing amazing hit products that are the new in-thing when it comes to fashion, because that's the sector I would say they're in, it would be tough to do well. And I think that's a bigger problem than just the, hey, we over-index. Well, if you look at Adidas, what really put Adidas on the map was, what is the Kanye West shoes called? Yeezy? Did I say it right? Yeezy? Yeah, Yeezy. Yeah, yeah.

8:49What put Adidas on the map was Yeezy shoes back again, right? It made Adidas sexy again, and so many people lined up and were buying them. and then some stuff happened and then Adidas no longer supported Yeezy, right? And I'm not saying that's a wrong or right decision, but that really hurt them brand-wise. I think, and I'll just keep my part very simple because I don't have much to add with what Neil said, but it's not or, a lot of times it's and. And I think when people try to fight each other over it, it just creates this animosity that's stupid. It ends up not being productive when you should all just be aligned and working together.

9:29Yeah, and I look at Adidas and Nike. Their biggest problem in the last few years has been products. I used to wear Adidas. Yeah. Yeah, I used to wear Nike jogging pants or whatever they're called, like the cotton ones, right? Same ones that used to get like Champion or whatever that they used to sell at Target back in the day. And the biggest reason I stopped buying them is they didn't innovate and their products started sucking compared to like aloe and a few of the other brands so i was like wait there's other products that are similar similar price they're just made way better quality they last longer they look better and people started shifting on what they're buying but everyone used to buy a lot of those nike jogging pants but then what did they do they stopped innovating that's their fault whether you do branding campaigns or performance you're still going to struggle because you're not spending enough time and energy on products yeah you know it's interesting.

10:22I, um, I wrote on threads or yeah, threads, which is tends to be skewed more liberal, I would say. And I wrote something about, you know, we should stop vilifying, um, you know, rich people at the end of the day, because in order to be rich, you have to be successful. And in order to be successful, you have to add a lot of value to the world and adding value means creating quality products and services. Um, and that's how eventually people, most people become rich. Sure. You can inherit, but like most people build their wealth up. Right. Um, I got so much hate on that one. It was like 116 comments.

10:53People calling me an idiot. It's like I'm oversimplifying it, blah, blah, blah. I'm like, man, this is just how capitalism works. It's not perfect, but it's like if you build products and services that people like, they get to vote with their wallets. And the size of the company just depends on the amount of value that they add. The number one challenge for businesses is hiring. And more specifically, the number one thing I get asked for all the time is Eric, where can I go find an amazing marketer? And the reality is right now, when you think about the world, we have inflation that also means wage inflation right now.

11:24And it means that when it comes to hiring talent, you can't spend as much as you would have in the last couple of years because it's just become too cost prohibitive. And so we've partnered with one of the best offshore recruiting firms when it comes to marketing, they've been a great asset for us. And I believe that they will be a great asset for you. All you have to do is go to marketing school.io slash hire. Again, it's marketing school.io slash hire to learn more. You can fill out the form there and we're going to place you with the best marketing hires that we can help you find. Um, and then you have a topic here and when will businesses start booming again?

11:57What are we seeing in the ad industry? So I basically asked him again, like, um, do you guys think a recession is going to hit in the next 12 months or so? Cause they look at all these indicators. Right. Um, and so, you know, Mark's response was he, he doesn't think we're going to to see a recession for 36 months. And then, sorry, he thinks it's going to happen in like maybe a year, 12 months or so. And then George Gammon thinks it might happen in 36 months, but they both agreed that no matter what, asset prices will be inflating no matter what. That's something they both agreed on. They've debated on a lot of things.

12:26And I think the things we're talking about here relate to the business cycle a little bit. So your topic over here is about when will businesses start booming again? Yeah. Before I get into that, why do they think asset prices will keep going up? Because no matter, okay. The reasoning is because if what happens is, oh, economy goes into like, it doesn't do as well, then the money printer needs to turn on again. When a money printer turns on again, the asset prices inflate. And so that's the only solution. That's not the only solution, but you should own assets. That's what I'm saying. Yeah, like real estate and stuff like that.

13:06Bitcoin, whatever. The Black Friday Cyber Monday weekend is where systems get stress tested. Traffic surges, inventory moves fast, and every second counts. You need a platform built for the moment. That's Shopify, the commerce platform behind millions of businesses and 10 % of all US e-commerce. With Shopify, you can launch fast with thousands of templates and tools that make your site not just beautiful, but conversion ready. Shopify is packed with helpful tools that write product descriptions, page headlines, and even enhance your product photography to increase your reach during the busiest time of the year.

13:35You can also stress less knowing that Shopify's award-winning customer support team is on standby 24-7 to help with any issues that arise, allowing you to get back to business as fast as possible. This Black Friday, join the thousands of new entrepreneurs hearing for the first time with Shopify. Sign up for your free trial today at shopify.com slash marketing school. That's shopify.com slash marketing school. Go to shopify.com slash marketing tool and make this Black Friday one to remember. Yeah. So I think the economy, I can't tell you if we're going to be in a recession or not. I don't know any of those kinds of things.

14:14I'm not an economist, but in a bad economy, advertising is the first thing that gets cut. It's easier to cut your marketing and your ads than it is to cut people. In a good economy, when things start recovering or start getting great, it takes a long time to recruit a ton of people. You can't snap your fingers and overnight just hire a ton of people. But what companies do when things start getting great again is the first thing they do, they start turning on their ads. They cut back when times are bad, but you can literally click some buttons and turn on ads. And no joke, you can do it in a matter of minutes.

14:48Now, big corporations don't do it in a matter of minutes. They do it in a matter of days or weeks or months in some cases, but they can turn up the dial for ad spend really, really fast. You know, if they have, they're running their ads internally or they just call their agency and say, hey, we got additional spend, go spend more money. And what we're seeing is over the last few years, people started cutting back on their ad spend, their advertising, their marketing purposes. Forget Google's earning calls or Facebook's earning calls. you have to remember, right? If a few players spend a lot more like the Amazons of the world, it can really affect Google's numbers.

15:25But a lot of SMBs and mid-sized businesses were just struggling and they're still struggling today. And what we're seeing is a real slow ramp up in which when we look at quarter over quarter, more businesses are inquiring, larger corporations. They're interested in spending money on a marketing, but, and here's a big but, They're still taking time to make the purchasing decision. They're still easing into it slowly, but we're starting to see the demand slowly increase. and it's not like a rocket ship like COVID where everything went online or anything near that. But I believe based on the data we're seeing from our own business, we think within a year, unless something happens crazy economically, that businesses will start spending quite a bit more money within a year and a half from now.

16:20And I shared the data that, I mean, what we've seen is like, there kind of has been a recession, you know second or second quarter of 2022 into 2023 uh 2024 like things are ramping up right it's it's you know i think the word i'd use is uh the vibe feels cautiously optimistic at least for for kind of what we're seeing um and so that's one data point i share with them and i also say so i have a a friend of a friend okay there's neil have you heard of the stripper index before no what the heck is a stripper index so the stripper index that's when um people can see like strippers can see when, when the consumers are spending less, less people, less customers are coming to the club.

16:56Right. Um, and so when that starts to come down, that's like a huge sign that the economy is softening. Right. Um, and you know, the friend of a friend said, you know, that their, their, their sex worker friends, like, yeah, you know, it seems like the clients aren't coming in as much. So that's another data point, right? So it's like, there's, we can share what we've seen with our businesses. Um, but then there's other indexes. You can look at the unemployment rate. You can look at inflation. You can look at all these things. Um, and then And ultimately, it doesn't matter what Neil says, I say, or like what George Gammon says or what Mark Moss says.

17:24You should listen to different viewpoints and then decide for yourself. That way you think for yourself. So with the stripper index, the friend of a friend said it's softening, correct? Yes. Have they? And was that recent or was that like a year ago? No, that's called that like two weeks ago. Okay, so they're not seeing a recovery in this quote unquote stripper index. Yeah. Well, I hope it does recover. We're starting to see corporations starting to spend a little bit more and more of them willing to. Yeah. On the single grain side, we're seeing more account expansion. And then I would say that our lead flow is continuing to go up.

18:04And so August usually, like in the past, it might be slower, but it's not the case for us. Our August was brutally slow. Really? Yeah, we have a lot of European offices and Europe shuts down pretty much in August, sadly. Got it. Got it. Got it. On a side note, let me tell you a funny story. I forgot to pack underwear. So I had to go buy underwear today. That is a funny story. That is a funny story. I opened my suitcase and I was like, something's missing. And I was like, oh, underwear. Very good. And so I had to go get lunch with my VP of ops before I went, had to go to Lululemon and make it stop.

18:38But yeah. One, I didn't know Lululemon sells underwear. Oh my God. It's the best underwear. Okay, see guys, this is word of mouth marketing right here. So they have this mesh underwear that feels really good. Our mutual friend, Yaniv, recommended it. And since then, I've been buying it. So you should buy it. It's very comfortable. I never knew that. And what's interesting about what you said is I usually am the one who say I have a funny story and it's never funny. And Eric, for the first time, used it and actually has something funnier to say. So yeah, use it correctly. On our personality test, it says Neil's not very funny.

19:10Actually, Neil's funny, but it shows I'm funnier than Neil. But anyway. He is. That is it for today. Please don't forget to rate, view, subscribe, and visit marketingschool.io slash agency to apply for the Agency Owners Association. So we're changing it to application only now. And if you're qualified, we'll give you a call. And yeah, we will go from there. We will see you guys tomorrow.

19:40Thank you.