Duane runs Take Some Risks, a Toronto based agency that helps ecommerce and DTC brands grow through strategy, PPC marketing, and data.
Top 3 things in this episode:
- Moving from delivery to strategy for clients
- Staying nimble in the face of changes by Google and Meta
- Lessons on pricing from the luxury sector
Duane Brown
Duane has been called an international man of mystery and digital nomad by friends. He has lived in 6 cities across 3 continents and visited 50+ countries around the world.
Over the years Duane has had the opportunity to work with brands including LARQ, Birdies, Pela Case, The Lost Co and Tiger Companies.
Book Recommendations
The Luxury Strategy: Break the Rules of Marketing to Build Luxury Brands by Jean-Noel Kapferer and Vincent Bastien
Ashley McDonnell on Luxury Strategy on the first series of the Strategy Sessions
Strategy Sessions Host – Andi Jarvis
If you have any questions or want to talk about anything that was discussed in the show, the best place to get me is on LinkedIn or Instagram.
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Interview Transcription
This transcript has been done automagically using Happy Scribe and hasn’t been checked by a real person, so there may be some hilarious mistakes where the AI can’t work out our accents – I’m sure they’re trained on just the American accent.
Andi J
What one thing do you wish you’d have known 10 years ago?
Duane B
Ten years ago, Andi. That’s a hard question because I got to think, Okay, how old I am now? What was 10 years ago? I had moved to the UK 11 years ago. And so guess what I wish I knew at that point was that it’s easier to move abroad than I thought it would be, especially doing what we do in marketing. And so I’d wish I’d done that sooner, but I didn’t do it sooner because my goal was to pay off my student debt first, which isn’t very much compared to the Americans, but pay off my student debt and then move abroad so that I don’t have the weight of student debt on my ability to succeed in a foreign country that I’ve never been to. That’s the thing I wish I knew sooner.
Andi J
Okay. No, I like that. Eyup, and welcome to the Strategy Sessions. My name is Andi Jarvis. I am the host of the show and the strategy director at Eximo Marketing. I’m here today to welcome you and to introduce you to today’s guest. It’s Duane Brown from an agency called Take Some Risks. But we’re not here to talk about agency stuff so much. I try and avoid the agency podcast thing because there’s a lot of people do that better than I do anyway. I’m here really to talk about Duane’s move from doing delivery into doing strategy. I think it’s really interesting because it’s something that a lot of agency owners try and move into, try and get into at some point in their journey. They often start in digital agencies, at least as subject matter experts doing PPC, SEO, social media, something like that. And then over time, start to move from doing for you to thinking for you and going from delivery into strategy. What’s interesting when I talk to Duane as well is that he wants to move beyond marketing strategy into business strategy as well. So we talk about the different layers of that and how that all works and it’s together.
Andi J
I really enjoyed this conversation with Duane. I love how he thinks about things. I love how he tackles problems. And I hope you enjoy it, too. Any comments, any thoughts? Please let me know. And as always, I know every podcast that says it, but it really does make a massive difference. If you just take your phone out of your pocket or your bag or wherever it is at the minute and go to whatever podcast platform you’re listening on and just leave a little rating, ideally five star rating, or share the episode with your friends. It really does make a difference to the numbers and to the people behind the podcast. Thank you very much for that. I’m going to shut up now and let’s bring Duane in for the interview. Thanks very much. When you got to the UK, was that your first… I did visit it before, it was like a tourist, or was this your first time in this great country and you were like, This not like the movies. Is that what it was like?
Duane B
No, it was actually my second time in the UK. A year earlier, I came to visit a friend who was at London School of Economics for a year, and I made him a promise that I would come visit him before his year was up. So I had to come visit in September, a year earlier. Otherwise, it wouldn’t keep my promise. And I’m mad, it keeps my promise. But I’ll be honest, I didn’t like London when I came to visit it. I found it was too big, I guess, and too smelly. Just wasn’t what I expected. I liked Manchester a lot more. But I moved to London because more jobs were in London. I thought it would be easier to just find a job for advertising.
Andi J
It’s interesting. I hate myself a little bit when I travel to countries and only go to the capital city because I think if people come to the UK and they do London. And I love London. I love it dearly. I’ve never lived there, but I love going to visit. I think it’s a great city. But if you come to England and only go to London, you’re missing out on so much. There’s so many great cities. I’m a Northerner, so Manchester, Liverpool, New Castle, Leeds, maybe not Bradford, where I’m from. But there’s so many great cities, and people come and they do London, Edinburgh, and go home, maybe Dublin, and then leave. I do wish people would get out of the capital cities more. So it’s interesting that you went to Manchester and went, Okay, I like this place. This is cool. And that was your vibe when you got there.
Duane B
Yeah. I think at the time it was cheaper for me to fly to Manchester. I think that’s why I picked it. I didn’t realise there’s actually Pride Weekend, that weekend that I booked to fly in. So as a gay, it was the best weekend in the world because all the gays were in the city and there’s lots of good entertainment and there was lots to do. I really liked Manchester. Then someone told me it was easy to take a train from Manchester to London, which, I mean, it is easy, but it doesn’t run as often as they made it seem because they also diverted my flight to some other cities. I had to go from that city to Manchester. Then we were there for the weekend and then we went to London. Then I also did Berlin and Milan on this two-week trip I had. I liked it. But yeah, I agree. People should leave major cities if they go somewhere and check out the second biggest city. Or if you’re in the Mediterranean, check out the Coast and stuff like that, because the Coast of Mediterranean, they’re always really beautiful, really good food. If you’re into seafood, fish, stuff like that.
Andi J
Well, I’ve spent probably a couple of the last… Well, too long on the last few podcasts talking about trains in Britain. So rather than talking about your painful experience with the British trains, if you’re all right, let’s just talk about pride in Manchester for a minute, because Manchester is renowned for its huge and welcoming gay scene, which probably outside… I don’t know for certain. I’ve never been around and counted, but I think outside of London is probably the biggest in the country, I’m going to say. And it’s a big change, I think, from 30, 40 years ago, and it has a real energy about the city now. And is that what you found when you landed there at Pride Weekend and it was just like, What? Where have I come?
Duane B
Yeah, I guess because before that, I’d always really been to pride in Canada in a few places. I remember Bively, we landed. I was with my friend who was coming with me. And they had… Because in Manchester, they had the village cornered off because you had to pay 30 pounds for the wristband because the wristband went towards the charity that runs pride and stuff like that, which was very different than how we do it in Canada. There was no cornered off section unless it’s a beer garden. Even then, you don’t really pay to get in. You just pay for the beer when you’re in the garden. It was very different to pay for a wristband, but I get where the money was going, so it was fine. But I remember we were walking along the river, and I guess this young person was already way drunk, and it was, well, for me, it’s early. It’s 10 o’clock. You don’t get drunk at 10 o’clock. But they were drunk, and they were down to their underwear, and they had their pants off, and they were in the river and cops were trying to get them out the river.
Duane B
I’m like, Wow, that’s not something you see at Pride every day. But it was a good weekend, so it was good shows. I met some cute boys. Everyone was really friendly when they find out you have an accent. I had a It was a good time. It was unexpected because, again, I didn’t plan to go to Manchester that week because it was Friday. It just happened to be Friday when I had a birthday because it was a cheap weekend, which I didn’t realise. But it was a really good experience. I mean, Pride, I think in general, around the world has gotten a lot better. In a lot of places, obviously, places Some places in Africa and some places in deep Eastern Europe and obviously Russia and stuff like that are still trying to be more accepted in tolerance, which is unfortunate, but other places are getting better. A lot more places have legalised more things in Asia, which that’s taken a long time to get there, but they’ve become a lot better as a continent. So it’s one of those time things. Things are a lot better today than they were 40 years ago before I was even born.
Andi J
Yeah, perfect. And look, I’m welcome to Britain, I suppose. It’s the message for London and Manchester. I’m like, okay, this is different. So what an introduction to the country. Well, listen, let’s also talk, maybe it’s less I don’t know. People are screaming, just keep talking about pride. I don’t know. But let’s talk about marketing a little bit more. That’s why you’re here. That’s how we know each other. So tell us a little bit about what you do in the marketing world and where you do it. You’ve mentioned you’ve got an accent and all that stuff. Tell us a little bit of background about your company and what it is and what you do.
Duane B
We’ve changed a lot over the last seven years. When I left my job originally just to go work for myself, when you go work for your sofa the first year, you probably take work from anyone as long as it’s in your warehouse of what you do. I run paid advertising, so we run ads on Meta and TikTok and Google and Microsoft for clients. Back in 2017, we just take it for anyone and that was good. Then I realised At the end of 2018, there were certain industries or sectors I don’t want to work on. We niche down to e-commerce brands, SaaS brands, and a bit of tech, and that worked out really well. Then the The pandemic hit, and pretty much these days, 99% of our business is e-commerce, and it’s split between D2C, B2C e-commerce. Then we have a number of B2B e-commerce brands, which are interesting because I think B2B e-commerce often gets neglected because it’s not as sexy as you work for a way or one of those big brands that raise lots of money. But B2B often been around longer. They have tonnes of money, they have tonnes of need. There’s not as much competition of people who want to There’s lots of B2B e-commerce brands.
Duane B
There’s lots of B2B SaaS and tech is very well covered in the agency space. But B2B e-com, I don’t know of any agency who just does B2B e-com. It probably exists maybe, but I don’t know it. No, somebody I’ve come across even. Yeah. We focus on mostly e-commerce with a bit of SaaS. Our job is to have clients run better campaigns on Google, Microsoft, Amazon, Meta, TikTok, really at the end of the day. That’s what we’re good at. That’s why clients come to us. But what I want to do I basically want to become a Deloitte in the sense that people come to us for the strategy, and then we just happen to also do the execution. Right now, people come to us for the execution, and we just happen to do strategy. I want to flip it so that we can basically charge more money. That’s my dream. I don’t know how I’m going to make that flip happen because I’ve been saying the same thing for the last three years. But that’s the goal I’m trying to figure out how to make that flip happen. Because I realised as Google and Meta and all the platforms introduce more technology and artificial intelligence and yada, yada, yada, there’s still a need for what we do, but it’s less like pushing buttons and more guiding the machines in the right way.
Duane B
I enjoy strategy a lot more. Before we recorded this, we were talking about clients getting rid of certain products and adding certain products. I enjoy that as a conversation. That’s more strategic of how to run a better business versus like, Change my bid strategy today or pause this ad, which is important because you want to make sure when it goes in the right place, but it doesn’t get you paid as well.
Andi J
I Is any of that driven by the rise of AI and automation in paid advertising across the web? Now, again, we’ll get into this maybe a little bit more in-depth. I have issues and concerns and challenges, but I don’t think AI is ever going to completely replace the person. But if you go back 10, 15 years, big strategies, everything was manually done, wasn’t it? And now almost everything’s automated with a little bit of human oversight. Is that Is that really why you want to get into the strategy or have you been on that road anyway for a little while?
Duane B
Yeah, we’ve been on that road for a while. The first client we charged a strategy fee to was in February 2018. And since then, we’ve always charged a client a strategy fee. So that’s our base fee for the month, and then we charge them our % of ad spend based on what we manage. So we’ve always done it. Clients get it. It’s like, yeah, you want to think about what you’re going to do and make sure the strategy makes sense for when we’re at a million versus when we’re at 5 million or 10 million. That’s great. Or it makes sense when we’re only We’re online and now we’re online and we’ve got retail stores and we’re on Amazon. You want to make sure, again, your strategy makes sense as you go. That makes sense. I think the challenge is sometimes brands and people will be like, Oh, I just want to come up with a strategy. I just want you to execute. I’m like, Why? I’m not a puppy. You’re not just going to tell me what to do because if you could do what I could do, you would have done it and not hired me.
Duane B
I think it’s getting clients to realise strategy is really important. I think there’s different kinds of strategy. You’ve got advertising strategy, you’ve got marketing strategy, and then you’ve got business strategy. Lots of people will sell advertising strategy, but I want to sell business strategy. Let’s connect what we do in marketing with what you do in the business and help you run a better business. Because if you run a better business, ideally, it’d be a long time. We’ve had clients passed in the four and five-year mark this year, and we’re seven years in business. So clearly, we’re doing something right. But how to get more clients to realise that you could hire four people and they all have 10 years experience. But just because you have 10 years experience doesn’t mean you’ve actually learned anything over those 10 years. What knowledge have you acquired in that 10 years that can be applied to that client? But clients don’t view it that way. They just think everyone’s the same as they all have 10 years experience when really you want to understand their knowledge and that experience so that you can apply it to your business. Otherwise, it could be someone who’s just worked on a lot of dentists clients, for example, and has no idea how to run Ecom.
Duane B
Well, you’re You’re going to be up a creek without a panel because that person doesn’t know what they’re going to do.
Andi J
Yeah. No, absolutely. It’s interesting, this demarcation between business strategy, marketing strategy. I often explain it as the three layers. You often need that business strategy to understand that three, five year direction you’re taking it in. I break marketing strategy down into one year increments to help you move towards it because you should have to renew it every year. And then beneath that, like you say, advertising strategy. I call it channel strategies because you might have a influence in marketing or social media strategy, and they all work together. But the number of businesses who don’t have a formal business strategy is frightening and terrifying in fact. But it happens, doesn’t it? And there’s sometimes businesses doing really, really well, and you’re like, oh, so what’s your strategy? And you’re like, I don’t know. We’re just doing it. And sales are coming in and making decisions on an ad hoc basis on the best, what’s the best idea here? So is that the thing you see as well? And you’re thinking, hold on, we can solve this problem for clients.
Duane B
Yes, I would say clients you described, I call them our creative clients. The people who didn’t really run a business or watch run a business, they just had an idea for something a product that scratchs their own itch or a product they saw in the market, and they went and they just figured out as they go. There’s nothing wrong with that. Figuring out as you go could be a good thing if you can make all the right decisions. But having some plan is usually a good idea. That’s the thing we try to help clients is trying to formalise and operationalize things is what we call it, so that there’s systems and processes for things. Because if you’re a creative person, you probably don’t have a lot of systems. You just find by the seat of your pants. People often think that systems and processes are bad. It’s big corporations do, and so it must be a bad thing. But having processes to do things isn’t a bad thing in and of itself, as long as you’re doing the system processes in the right area of the business. Not everything needs a process, but most things that you’re going to repeat day, week, we should have some process so that you can hand off that job to somebody else when you hire them.
Duane B
That means right now, how do we do this job? Here are the steps and here’s the things you need to do, including step number 11, which is proofread all your work to make sure you did the work the right the first time so you can get it done. We help clients try to operationalize Some clients, it means getting rid of apps because sometimes clients will sign up for an app or buy a product, spend $30,000 for the year but never use it. So why do we get rid of this, this, and this and consolidate it with this app? Or why do we do this over here because it’s cheaper? One client spent $400 a month on a customer review app. Why would you spend $400 on a review app? It’s $100 a month for all the competitors. But they wanted to try to be a bigger business than they were. I’m like, Well, you’re a million a year and they’re 10. You don’t need what they have. You need something something down here. So getting clients to realise to maybe get back to Earth is important because if you spend the money you don’t have, you’re going to put yourself in a business you don’t have in a year because you’re not going to have any money.
Duane B
So getting clients to realise, let’s spend money on where it matters and not spend money just to try to be a bigger business than we are. Because being a million dollar business is still a really important business because not everyone can get to a million dollars. It’s really hard.
Andi J
Yeah. This is almost one of the scary things. I don’t know about scary, but it’s one of the interesting things I find when you talk to Americans, and you’re obviously just over the border from America. But in the UK, if you are doing, say, I don’t know, 50 million in revenue, right? If you’re doing 50 million in revenue, you’re probably, I’m going to guess in the top 3%, 5% of companies in the country, maybe even less than that, right? But you’re in a very small percentage. But when you talk to Americans, they’re like, Oh, yeah, I’m working with this tiny dental group. They’re just in, and they give you a place, a name of a place that you’ve never heard of in a state that you didn’t even think existed. And you’re like, Okay, never heard of this place. And go, Yeah, so I’m working with this tiny company there. They’re doing $150 million in revenue. And you’re like, How? How do you get that big? But that’s just the states, isn’t it? And it’s just enormous. And every state is probably about the size of Canada, isn’t it? In terms of people.
Duane B
California is the size of Canada. So it’s about 41 million people. All the other states are usually in the 10 to $20 million range in terms of people, especially New York State and Illinois, Florida and Texas being the next biggest state’s population. But yeah, you can… Depending on what you sell, you could do a really big business just in California. You’ve got four or five clients based somewhere around either San Fran or LA. One client just told us the other day they’re going to open a new store in Berkeley, which is just outside of San Fran, for those who don’t know. You can do big business just in California and do really well. But yeah, it is $100 million might be considered small in America. But when you think about the UK, the UK is what? 60, 67 million people. America is 350, 400 million people. The UK is five times as small as America. It’s easy for them to do that sense of business because they do it at the scale. Whereas if you look at Europe, Europe is the size of America. If you’re across Europe and you’re not doing the same thing as they would do in America, well, the demand isn’t there in Europe or you’re doing something wrong.
Duane B
Yeah.
Andi J
And there’s a lot of companies doing things wrong, which is why we have a job. Well, certainly why I have a job anyway, because a lot of companies making a mess of a lot of things. I think I said to a client just the other day, I was like, Every organisation I work with is a mess. It’s just some of them function better than others. That’s all it is. I don’t think… Have you ever worked with an organisation, you were like, Wow, they’ve got their shit together everywhere?
Duane B
No, not in marketing. Marketing is always a mess. It’s people either don’t know what they’re doing They didn’t want to put in any processes because they’re too busy or they don’t think processes are going to make sense. Or people got hired and they just been in a job for 20 years and no one’s going to fire them because they’ve been there for 20 years, but they also don’t know what they’re doing. So at least in marketing, it’s always a mess. But yeah, that’s why we have a job. It’s why I’m grateful when people make mistakes. I’m like, I can come in and look like a genius and just do the basic stuff that I know is the basics, but the client thinks I’m a genius because I switch things around. I’m like, I’m not a genius. I just did the basics. Sometimes maybe that is considered genius because you did the basics and you did right. Getting the fundamentals right is almost a professional way to run things, but clients don’t realise it between a professional and a nonprofessional because, again, they think everyone with a 10 years experience is the same, when in reality, they’re not.
Andi J
I find 80 % of what I do is surfacing things that have already been said by people in the organisation. Giving them credit for it. I’m not pinching other people Other people has ideas and presenting it back to the senior team, so crediting it. But the two words I try and talk about all the time in most client engagements are focus and momentum. And people think, Oh, this is a marketing strategy. You’re going to throw all these creative ideas at us. The bulk of the time, most of the things I do is like, Here’s a list of five things you need to stop doing right now, which will give you the focus to focus on the things you were doing. There’s nothing new. We’re just going to kill all this stuff that’s not contributing. Focus on this thing that is, and then we’re going to break it down into small steps to create momentum. And that’s it. And they’re like, Yeah, but where’s the creative ideas? Do you see the spreadsheet that shows how much money this will make if you do this thing right? Yes. Let’s do the creative We’ve daph big ideas next.
Andi J
Let’s get focused on momentum first. And yeah, that’s the bulk of the job is trying to create those two things because most organisations are a bit of a mess in one way or another, including my own. I’m no different to anyone else. My organisation is a mess as well. Sorry, go on. There wasn’t a question there, but have you got anything to say?
Duane B
I was going to say it’s good you can admit it. Organisation is not a mess. The team will tell you I’m OCD in organisation processes. We got everything written out in a notion, even things people think we wouldn’t have written out. If we do it daily, weekly, monthly, quarterly, there’s a process for it. It’s written out so that if I get sick, you can easily take over my job and do it. But then it’s also easy because we have who’s on the West Coast of Vancouver. We’ve had people based in South America, based in Africa. We’ve got people on the team right now based in Europe. We’re working times that overlap, but we also work in times where we’re not all online at the same time. Somebody wants to work weekend because their kid is sick during the week or whatever. Having our processes means that people don’t have to ask me questions of things of like, How do I do this? Or what’s the situation for that? Or what’s the process for getting access to an account? It’s all written there. Work hard not to be messy. I’m the organisation people need and want, they just have to realise that sometimes I’m going to drag you kicking and screaming to get this done, whether you like it or not.
Duane B
Because if you want to be successful and really be successful, you’re going to have to put some processes in place and get some focus. Because people try to do too much. I often say it’s a lot with advertising. Let’s say they’ve been doing a lot of email and SEO for a long time or PR influence, or they want to do paid ads. What they often do is they want to be everywhere at once. I want to be on Google and Microsoft and Facebook and LinkedIn and TikTok. I’m like, How about you be on one and focus and scale it up versus trying to be everywhere? Because when you’re trying to be everywhere, you end up spreading yourself so thin that you get no momentum. For those who drive, it’s like having your car stuck in mud. You spin your wheels, but you don’t get anywhere very fast. That’s really something hard for people to understand. Often I say people who tell you to launch in two or three ad platforms at once are often people who are not professionals, are not pros, and have no idea what they’re doing when it comes to advertising. Yes, it sounds great in theory, but in reality, if you’re on three platforms at once, even if you have $20,000 a month to spend, you’re not going to get anywhere because you’re not going to be able to focus on what’s actually working.
Duane B
You’re just going to be trying to watch a bunch of things and see what’s sixth, which is not a good way to run a business.
Andi J
Focus and momentum. I’m telling you, they are the two things you need to get this cracked, isn’t it? Pick the thing you’re going to do and just get it moving. And then once it’s working, it’ll generate the returns that you can use to invest in the next thing and the next thing. Yeah, absolutely. You are one of the best thinkers about paid ads that I see on social media. And I know we’ve talked about this at conferences and offline before as well. So, well, this is the strategy sessions. I’m not having you here. I’m not trying to get you to go deep and geek out a little bit about the future of paid advertising. I have said some fairly critical things about P Max, a Google Performance Max, but I don’t use it every day. I’m only based it on some feedback from some clients who said it was terrible and awful. But when I’ve said that, you’ve been like, Yeah, but here’s some counterpoints. So let’s firstly talk about Google. What changes have happened over the last couple of years and what do you think is coming next and what impacts that had on advertisers?
Duane B
Yeah, I mean, PMX came out three years ago this past October. Whether you like it or not, that’s a change you just have to accept. People often I’m very pragmatic. But as a gay black man, I don’t have time to cry tears about things that I can’t control. I focus on the things I can control, which means, one, I know Google is not going to take back PMX. Why can’t I complain and bitch about it? Or I can figure out how to use it and leverage it when it makes sense. And so When PMAX works, it’s the greatest thing that’s a slice of bread or fresh-cut grass, and I love it. When it doesn’t work, it’s a pain in the ass, and you just want to scream Google’s name. But I’m glad for Google because it’s given me a job for the last 17 years in an industry that I didn’t know existed in high school. And so I don’t hate with PMax, but I don’t love it either. It’s just a tool I need to use when it makes sense for the business. But it’s no different than smart shopping or currently standard shopping still exists.
Duane B
People often don’t realise that beyond Performance Max or PMax, you can still use standard shopping run campaigns. Google only got rid of smart shopping. When someone says you can only use PMax, they’re lying to you, you can use standard shopping as well, which is really important. I think at the end of the day, PMax is a tool, and if it works for you, great. Use it. If it doesn’t work, don’t use it and go to standard shopping. But beyond that, Google obviously had the switch over from UA, Universal Analytics, to GA4 on July first. That was a huge change because the way data is processed and organised in GA4 is very different than the Universal Analytics or UA. That change was very impactful, not just for anyone in paid advertising, but anyone in advertising market in general. We were talking with a UK brand a couple of days ago, and they’re like, We don’t use GA. I don’t trust it. We don’t use GA4. I’m Okay, that’s fair. I appreciate the honesty. You probably want to set it up anyways because unless you’re paying for some other tool like FAB and analytics or something like that, you need something.
Duane B
You just don’t get it. This isn’t a small business. They’re making a few million pounds a year. They’re in an interesting space like four tiles and stuff like that. So it’s a bit weird. But those, I’d say, are the two biggest changes. Obviously, Google this year has third-party cookies going away. People often say cookies are going away, but first-party cookies still exist. Google is not going to try to decimate their whole business overnight. They’re not idiots. They make 99% of their money from advertising. Even though the last two or three years, even the last 18 months, there have been more changes in Google’s books than there have been. In my first 16, 17 years of doing this, I realised that the future of this industry is just more change. Google, much like Amazon, much like TikTok, much like Meta, all want to automate as much as they can so they can just more people on their team. They’ve got hundreds of thousands of employees, and they would like to have tens of thousands of employees, but the technology isn’t there yet where they can fire more people beyond what they’ve all fired in the last six months because they’re trying to cut cost.
Duane B
The future is really about guiding the machines. It’s like Will Smith and I Robot, except the robots don’t have three laws to not kill you. You’ve got to go in there with like, Well, here’s what I want to do. How can I guide the machine to do that? So PMX, you’ve got search themes is the thing you can apply to campaigns. You can apply account-wide for things you don’t want to show for. So for example, if I sold like wooden bookcases, I might want to put the words metal and plastic as account-wide negatives because I don’t sell metal bookcases. I don’t sell plastic bookcases. Really, the future is about guiding the machines in different ways, whether it’s account-wide negatives, add-on-search themes, applying different tools or technology that I’m sure Google is going to launch over the next 12 or 18 months. Then always checking in like, is Google doing what I want? Is Meta doing what I want? Is Amazon doing what I want? Is Microsoft Microsoft doing what I want? Hopefully, you can guide things. I will say all things being equal at times, e-commerce, D2C, retail brands running their campaigns online is a lot easier than if you’re in lead gen, for example.
Duane B
But you’ve all picked what industry you want to work in, so now you just got to deal with it. We were talking to someone in the team the other day, and they were like, I feel bad for the SEO agents for a client. I’m like, Why would I feel bad for them? They chose to be an SEO. Their lives are getting harder. This is not my fault. I’m here here to take the money and make business. If you’re in the industry and you’re thinking about getting a switch, paid ads could always use really smart people, and e-commerce is only going to get bigger. So this is the place to be versus maybe you don’t want to do SEO. Maybe you don’t want to do other things that are only going to get harder because Google just wants to make more money off advertising. No different than Meta. Meta is at, I think, 200 billion a year. Google is at 250. I think Amazon just passed 60 billion a year in revenue. Amazon wants to be the next Meta and the next Google. And so that means Amazon is going to do more and more automation, get more and more people on their platform to advertise.
Duane B
But they’re all watching what Google is going to do, which is basically Google is trying to automate everything, remove cookies as much as they can, and make her lives more difficult. But that’s okay because that’s just part of the job.
Andi J
So one view from a few people I’ve spoken to, and this is my view, but pulled in from talking to people around the industry. Sure. What are the changes that I’ve seen Google make over the last couple of years, and even Facebook and Meta over the years? They last two, three years. I have some people screaming, This isn’t fair. This doesn’t make sense. And when you get into the detail of it. You always get it, but there’s a certain group of people that seem to make the same complaint over and over again. When you get into the detail of it, actually, some of it is fantastic and has huge benefits to certain people. What it seems to be in the conversation has been a conversation I had, every change that has been made on Meta and Google has been to benefit bigger artists. Even the move to GA4, when I looked at it, I was like, What is this platform? And when I started to get my head around it, and I’m like, If I was running a site that was taking 2 million visitors a day, this is the thing I need in my life.
Andi J
If I run a florist down the road and they cut down the street, this is absolutely Absolutely useless to me because this platform does not work for me as a small business, a very small store. And 10 years ago, Facebook was the place that you would tell small businesses to advertise. Now you look at some of the changes and you’re going, Do you know what? You’re probably not going to do it unless you’ve got big bucks to get into the game. And I wonder if that’s something you’d agree with. And I also then the second part of that question is, is this where Amazon have an opening? Because their advertising is still very much based around smaller products being able to get in front of customers. Do you see that’s maybe where Amazon can scoop in and win in the next 2-5 years?
Duane B
Yeah, those are two good questions. One about it being unfair is complete bullshit, let’s just be honest. We are paying to be on the advertising platform. If you don’t like the rules of the business, you don’t pay the money. It’s just as simple as that. If I don’t like the coffee shop down the street, I don’t go back and give them money. I just go to a different coffee shop. Now people argue, Well, we don’t have lots of options, but that’s just the way the world works. At the end of the day, automation takes data. If you’re not a big enough business to get the data you need, well, then you can’t use it. I want to ride my bike, but I can’t just put any tyres on my bike. I got to put the tyres that makes sense. People want to complain. I get why they want to complain. But where Google was 15 years ago isn’t where they are today because the industry has changed. When I say the industry, I don’t just mean paid ads. I just means how marketing works, where people spend their time. Yes, it sucks, but the whole point of any business is you need to change your business.
Duane B
That maybe means you need to merge your business with another business. Maybe you need to grow your business more. Maybe you need to just sell your business and go retire. But the reality is you’re paying someone to do something. If you don’t like the way they’re doing it, well, stop paying them money and go somewhere else. If you can’t go somewhere else, then you need to figure out what you’re going to do. I assume at some point I’m not going to have a business because at some point they’re going to automate me out of business, but I accept that as a risk I take in running a business. Now, if people want to use the platform, then use it. If you don’t, stop bitching about it because the idea is that things should be the way they were 12 years ago is completely bolus and doesn’t make any sense. Now, in terms of people going to Amazon, I mean, yes, you could go to Amazon. I mean, Amazon, I think, is where Google was maybe five, six years ago. It’s a very simple platform on the surface. Obviously, the back-end is problematary complex, but on the surface, it’s very similar to where Google was five, six years ago.
Duane B
You’ve got free match types. The match types are the match types they say. Exact, exact. Phrase is phrase, broad is broad. But The way Amazon has grown their ad business over the last three years from basically next to nothing to a $60 billion business. In another two years, they’ll be where Google is now, probably because the rate of acceleration of change is so fast in the industry that things are changing faster than people realise. People used to see few changes 12 years ago. When I lived in London in 2012, 2013, 2014, change was slower. We just launched shopping campaigns. People thought they were weird. These The pictures with the image of the product and the price is like, What is this? These are text ads. When you look at where we are now, 17 years later, it’s a game changer. If there was no shopping ads, I don’t know if I still have a job today because that is where Google makes all their money. The future is going to be a little bit weird. Yes, people can go to Amazon, but I think people need to look at other platforms. Maybe they need to go to next door.
Duane B
Next door, a lot of people spend time in next door. Maybe you need to advertise in next door. Maybe you need to look at doing things like Maybe you need to get increase in your order of math or getting more people to do your reviews on Google. People just need to change how their business is run. Too many people want to run their business today, like how they ran their business five years ago, and you just can’t do that anymore. You’ve got to change. It’s adapt or die. If you don’t want to adapt, you’re going to be out of business. I’ve got to change my business all the time, and it is painful. But that is what you got to do to survive. So either you’re in it to win it or you’re not.
Andi J
So you mentioned Nextdoor. There’s a link in the show notes to an interview I did with Emma Mondolino, who is the… Oh, I forget what her job title is, but she’s in marketing and sales at Nextdoor, and it was a great interview. Actually, one of the best performing podcasts I’ve put out in that season. There’s a link in the show notes if you want to find out more about her at all. Certainly a platform that I’m not trying to get a foothold in the UK, but I think it’s much bigger in North America than it is in the United States. The interesting thing you said about Adapt or Die and spending your money in different places. I am just a couple of years more vintage than you. I started in marketing. People say to me, When I do other people’s podcasts, one of the questions I always get asked is, How did you get into digital marketing? I’m not in digital marketing. I’m in marketing. Two, I’m old enough to have started in marketing, which became digital and many people… The point is, I started off in direct mail. That was one of my first jobs we did.
Andi J
I think more than half of our projects were direct mail, about another 30% in radio, and then the other 20% is just a new page. What really seems to me when you come around and you say, Why is this actually what we’re doing? It’s actually all the
Andi J
Do you see that coming back? Do you think that also tax can make it come back?
Duane B
I guess you could say make it a come back. I guess it’s more of a focus for people. The big thing, I think the last few years is if you use a 3PL, there’s those inserts you can put in packages where it advertises other brands that are not competing. That’s very powerful. That’s direct mail, not 100%. We’ve sometimes pitched ideas around direct mail. They’re more big in Canada, but in Canada and in America, sometimes you walk down the street and the lamppost or whatever will have posters or flyers of business in the area or concerts and stuff. We pitch that idea to clients and like, Why don’t we blanket Vancouver, Canada? It’s a small city, it’s 600,000 people. You blanket the whole city for three months over Christmas or October, November, December, over Christmas and see it does What does people buy from us? Does it get our name out there? So we sometimes suggest those ideas to clients, and obviously, we don’t execute. We just suggest the idea because we think it’s a good idea. But I think more businesses should look at that because at the end of the day, if you can get more More people to leave your reviews and more people know about you.
Duane B
In theory, you should get more business. Obviously, it depends on what business you’re in. If you’re a locksmith, you’re not going to fly your the neighbourhood because you only need a locksmith. You need to be locked out. So maybe getting more reviews on Google would make more sense and running ads would make more sense. But if you’re a bakery or there’s a plant store that opened up last summer around the corner, they blanket the neighbourhood in every flyer pool. That’s how I bought my latest cactus plant. So this stuff does work. It It’s obviously depends on what business, what you sell, is it a business people need to know about? And then do the old-school tack that does work and people do reposter signs and stuff like that. It could be a good way to get your name out there for you, a more localised business. Even if you were a big business and you When you’re in London and you were across London, you could blanket all of London. You could buy some outdoor out-of-home ads. Back in 2017, 2018, I want to say more businesses were doing out-of-home ads. In America, a lot of people in New York and LA were buying lots of subway space.
Duane B
Especially if you’re a D2C brand, you had raised VC money, you’d buy the New York subway and just plaster your ad everywhere. That stuff is very trendy when you’ve got VC money to burn, but I think it’s trendy now with people who maybe don’t have VC money to burn, but they’ve got a target audience they want to advertise to.
Andi J
Has my microphone gone off? Because it does sometimes when the… There you go. Right. Sorry. Let me try that again so I can just edit that last bit out. It’s felt a little bit like 2007 in my business recently. The client I’ve been working with a lot over the last couple of months, when you look at the budget split, it has been probably 50 % on radio, 25 % on outdoor, and 25 % on meta. Now, it’s a very particular target market in a very particular set of areas, quite low income customers as well for numerous reasons. But it’s actually some of the old school tactics when we’ve done the research, have just come through time and time again. And I have been loving it, Duane. I was like, I haven’t been involved in a radio campaign forever. This has been amazing. It’s been great. I used to do like a dozen radio campaigns a year in 2005, and now I haven’t done one for like 10 years. So it’s been It’s fantastic to be involved in.
Duane B
Yeah, I think it does work. Back when I started the agency, our first client was a Fintech brand in Canada. And so we bought transit ads, they bought newspaper, they did in-person events, they did radio because at the start, we’re going after everyone in Canada. Then we switched to going after people basically 40, 50 plus who are about to retire or retire, so we can manage their money through our fintech brand. That was our target market. Going after newspapers, radio, transit made a lot of sense. Then I still hand out just obviously the Google, Meta, and Microsoft, and they had all the outdoor traditional Buff and Line stuff. But yeah, if your target audience is an audience that listens to the radio, it’s good. Back in the day, this is maybe 2012. I bought podcast ads, which were very new back then, and that did really well. But obviously, there was only a handful of podcasts out there, and only a handful of podcasts around tech. So this stuff, I think, does work. It just depends on who your target audience is and do they watch or listen to the radio, or do they watch videos and things on a subway, or watch the ads in the subway.
Duane B
But it’s a very cost-effective way to advertise if you want to make a splash.
Andi J
Yeah, Definitely. I have podcasting ads back in the day. Hey, that would have been great to do. Anyway, let’s move on. Let’s move on from talking about the good old days because I could quite easily just sit and reminisce forever. We met in person at conferences. That’s where we met. And you speak at a number of conferences, and so do I. So you’ve done, I don’t know, dozens and dozens of conferences over the years. Yeah. What’s the What’s the secret, I suppose? People often ask me, Oh, how do you get so many speaking gigs and what do you do? I never really know how to answer that question. I mean, I’ve got some thoughts, but what’s the secret? A, why did you start doing it? And B, how did you manage to keep picking up more and more and Yeah, I think those are two questions.
Duane B
I actually don’t think there’s a secret per se. I think for most conferences, you just need a pitch. The rule I always say, if a conference says you can pitch up to three ideas, then you should pitch two or three ideas. Because if you only pitch one idea, there’s a good chance they’re not going to take your idea because someone else already pitched it or it doesn’t make sense for the conference theme. So a lot of conferences, they just got pitched. I think it’s rare that I get asked to speak anywhere. There’s a couple of conferences like Brett and Siel, they’ll ask me to speak because I’ve spoken so much and they know I’ll say yes and I help promote it and stuff like that. But most conferences, I just filled out a form and gave up my ideas. The other day, I pitched a couple of conferences in Spain because we have a team member in Spain and like, Oh, this would be a great way to see the teammate go to Spain because he doesn’t love Spain, meet some people maybe in the local Spanish market potentially because there’s lots of e-commerce in Spain and Portugal.
Duane B
Then I think if people want to get picked up at more and more conferences, I think it’s just pitching Pitching good ideas, but pitching good ideas that maybe other people also don’t talk about. At lots of conferences, I talk about shopping feeds and Google shopping campaigns. I also talk about things that people don’t think are true. I think ad creative in your PMX campaign is really important. I think having an amazing shopping feed is really important. I’ve been saying about shopping feeds for the last six years of people while they think I’m sick of me talking about it. But day in and day out with a client, sometimes the only change we make on a client’s account is just build a better shopping feed. Yes, we’ve changed some campaigns and changed some big strategies, and that all matters, don’t get me wrong. But if we did all of that but didn’t change the feed, it wouldn’t matter one bit. I think people just need to pick their thing they want to talk about at every conference and have it be their thing. My thing is Shopify, CRO, Google Shopping Campaign, Shopping Feats, that’s all I talk about.
Duane B
I talk about those three things. I just talk about it over and over and over and what we’re thinking, what we’re seeing. I think the thing I’ll start pitching, not this year, but maybe next year is like B2B Ecom. We’re picking up more and more B2B Ecom. I think talking about that could be super interesting because you often don’t see as many B2B Ecom people there, but it could be a good way to niche out even more conferences. You just got to pitch if you want to speak at a conference, pitch two or three ideas that you want to talk about. The more fleshed out and detailed you can be with those ideas, that’s helpful. Then you won’t get every conference. There are lots of conferences I pitch that I don’t get into because they already have tonnes of people for that topic. They don’t want to have that session. My goal these days is get into two or three conferences, and that’s it because A, it’s expensive to five places. Not every conference is going to pay you. I don’t want to spend more time with our team and our clients and not spend so much time on the road.
Andi J
It’s So how do you construct a story for your presentations? And what I mean by that is you talk about very different things to me. I talk about marketing strategy almost everywhere, sometimes a bit about how you craft communications, but mostly, almost always marketing strategy, which allows me to tell stories, look at big concepts, and use a lot of examples of clients and companies do it well, companies do it badly, that type of thing. When you’re talking about shopping feeds, people want you get into the weeds, don’t they? They want to get into the detail, like how do you do it? And there’s a whole raft of presentations I see at conferences of people who do detail on things like that, technical detail. And I couldn’t do it. I just not… If you give me all the time, I go and present that. I wouldn’t know where to start because I couldn’t build a story around it that would keep people engaged throughout the whole presentation. So what’s your creative process when it comes to that? And you go, right, okay, I’ve got to talk about this technical thing. How am I going to do it?
Andi J
What’s your creative process?
Duane B
Yeah, I wouldn’t say I’ve got a creative process per se, and I definitely don’t tell a story. I also don’t tell jokes. I realise that the jokes I think are funny on stage, people don’t think are funny.
Andi J
There is nothing better than telling a joke, is there, on stage? And when you stop and you’re like, Nobody’s laughing. Okay, just move on. Just move on.
Duane B
I’ve had that happen. That’s why I don’t tell jokes anymore. I mean, at Brightness CEO, once I said something, everyone laughed. I’m like, Well, that wasn’t a joke, but I’m going to move on now because you all are finding that very funny. So I don’t tell jokes. But I think for me, it starts as my pitch. My pitch is like, Here’s my opening line and problem. Here are the four or five things I’m going to talk about in my talk. And here’s my closing line why I think it’s really important. Then I crack my picture around that. Line one is things you need to know or things that are important or why the market is changing. Here’s how you need to do what you do. Maybe there’s a setup section. Here’s how you set it up. Shopping feeds, you’ve got do it yourself with a Google Sheet. You’ve got technology, you’ve got apps you can use. Okay, we talked about how you can set it up. Well, here’s the things you want to do when you build your Sheet. Here’s some examples. Sometimes we use clients, sometimes we use big brands like Netgeek, so it’s easier for people to understand.
Duane B
We go through some examples, and then at the end, I do a summary. Here’s the things I want you to take away. Then sometimes with summaries where people tend to ask them questions, like Brightness CEO in April last year, I made a comment how you should refresh your creative on your a next campaign more often than we would have in the past when you think about how often you used to refresh search ads. I had no less than four people come up to me after the talk and ask about that one comment I made as an off-cough remark because I need an extra slide on my deck to get to 20 minutes. And so I don’t necessarily tell a story as much as I stick to the facts. Here’s what I think, here’s how we think, here’s how we do it, here’s what you should do, here’s why you should do it. And then some people like it, some people don’t. I mean, most people like it, but if you don’t, you do, you do. I don’t really care either way. I’m just telling you what I think, and that’s just the way it is.
Andi J
Unhucking yourself from bothering… When you realise that you can’t make everybody happy, that’s actually a really nice place to get to, isn’t it? It’s like some people aren’t going to like what I’ve got to say, and that’s perfect That’s perfectly fine. And that’s a great place to get to. But I like where you started there. You said about what’s the problem you’re trying to solve? And you said you don’t have a creative process. But if you start very much with a clear statement of intent, that is, here’s the problem I want to solve in this, and I’m going to tell you how we do it in this presentation. That is a creative process, isn’t it? You start with a problem and you take people through a solution to a solution.
Duane B
Isn’t that okay? I guess I think because that’s the way I always pitch my conference, I don’t think of it as a creative process. It’s just my opening paragraph, five bullet points, closing paragraph, pitch it and see if they like it or not. I guess the other difference, say, if people pitch in conferences, I’d also pitch the same thing in every conference. That way you can reuse your deck throughout the year. Trying to make a custom deck for every conference is just the worst. I know conferences want that, but unless you’re pitching… Well, you don’t pitch, but unless you got to speak at like Mausconn where they ask you to speak, you shouldn’t be making a custom deck for every conference. If they’re not paying you to be in the conference, you shouldn’t be making them a custom deck. That’s just nonsense.
Andi J
Will Reynolds from Seer Interactive was talking on social media not long ago about this, about how he sees it as it keeps his creative juices flowing, doing something different at every conference he goes to. I think I went in the comments, I was like, Are you mad? Every year I come up with a new presentation, and then I will halk that around for the year. I’ve got three or four that I’m really happy with from over the years. Some of them were just didn’t work for whatever reason. So now I’ve got a little bit of a back catalogue, too. And people are like, What would you talk about? I’m like, I’ve got these three. Pick one. And I know they work. I know how they work. There is a little bit of refining for the audience. So next week, although it’ll be in the past by the time anyone hears this, but next week I’m speaking at Disney World for a conference about higher education. So some of the examples in that presentation, the same one I used at Mozz, but some of the examples have changed because it’s not an SEO audience, it’s a higher education audience.
Andi J
So there’s a bit of a tweak to it. It’s only about 10, 15% that’s changed. Everything else is staying the same.
Duane B
It just makes life much easier. It does make life easier. I got two presentations that will be my go-to presentation at a conference. I’ve done it lots of times. I know it very well. The deck gets updated throughout the year as Google makes changes to shop and beats and Google campaigns. But the structure is basically the same, how to make a better shop and beat. I update it based on our internal processes as a team. It just makes life a lot easier. Will speaks at tonnes of conferences a year. I wouldn’t be shocked if he’s told us he spoke at 35 conferences a year. He probably has a really good process to make a new deck for each conference. I don’t know what that process is, but I imagine he’s got a really good process to do that. I also imagine he probably has a team to maybe potentially help him. Maybe there’s a designer that helps him with some stuff. I imagine he doesn’t do everything on his own, whereas I do everything on my own, so I don’t really have a designer potentially to help me or someone else who might help me on the team because Will’s got a bigger agency than us.
Duane B
He’s got 200 people. I’m sure he’s got a designer that helps him with something like that, but he’s got a process to do that. And I respect him for being on a plane that much, even if it’s just like flying there and flying back on the same day, it’s still fine around to a lot of cities and countries, giving a lot of presentations. So I respect whatever his process is to make that happen, because I’m exhausted just thinking about it.
Andi J
People say to you, oh, it must be great doing all this. And I am not I’m asking for sympathy, but nobody likes that 3:30 AM alarm call. Nobody likes the jet lag when you fly from the UK to the West Coast and you’re like, Oh, you’re waking up at 2:00 AM or you’re falling asleep at 3:00 PM. Nobody likes that. But listen, I chose this life. Nobody forced me into it. I enjoy it. So I’m not complaining.
Duane B
I tell friends, it’s always not climbers. Sometimes we’re working in a hotel room and you’re getting work done and eating whatever takeout you got from whatever restaurant. It’s not all So be on the beach when you’re done a speaking gig and stuff. But I’d rather this than looking for someone else.
Andi J
Definitely. But I do have one complaint about the speaking world. And this is, to be honest, it’s entirely your fault. So you’re going to You’re going to have to take the blame for this because you are in Toronto, therefore this must make it your fault. Why aren’t there any good or any digital marketing events? Marketing events. Why is there no big conference in Toronto? It’s a huge It’s a huge city. It’s an amazing city. It’s a fantastic city. Where’s the marketing event? I’ve got family there. I want an invite to come and speak at the conference. Why hasn’t it happened? This is your fault, Duane. What are you going to do about it?
Duane B
Well, not a few years ago. In 2011, 2012, I ran a conference for a couple of years. It was called Eat Strategy. It was a strategy conference. I put it on myself and I paid for it myself and it was really expensive. I think there’s a couple of things at play. I think it’s one, we’re a big landmass, like America, but unlike America, we only have 40 million people. So convincing enough people to come to the conference is not really that easy. You can convince people in America, but then you’ve got to have the budget to spend on ads to let people know there’s a conference when Americans have so many conferences south of the border they go to, why spend more money crossing the border, going through customs just to come to Canada? There are a couple social media type conferences in Calgary and in Vancouver on the West Coast, but I think it’s just because it’s expensive to put on a conference in Toronto. It is not cheap. The conference Hall is a little bit expensive. The place I found the conference was cheap, and it was in one of the museums here.
Duane B
But it’s hard to put in a conference here because I think it’s just the cost if you do one of the traditional venues. Then you got to get speakers, and then all your speakers are all going to be Canadian. They’re all going to be Canadian. It might be harder to get people to come to the conference because they want to hear bigger name people, i. E. Americans or even some people over in Europe. I flew half the people from America to Canada to do the conference. It’s hard, I think, just from a logistics of getting speakers who are going to get people to come. I had Marco to come from New York. He’s really popular. He’s really popular on Twitter. That got a lot of people to come to the conference because it was like, Oh, it’s Mark. I have to come because this was 2011 when he was starting to blow up. I think it’s hard to do it from, Yes, we’re in North America, but we’re not America. Convincent people and speakers to come is harder than people think. Then we don’t have enough people really within Toronto to fill a conference. It’s so expensive that you have to sell tickets prices at a high rate.
Duane B
I mean, I’d like to put on the conference in theory, but in reality, it’d just be a full-time job and a nightmare.
Andi J
Do you know what that sounds like, Duane? It sounds like you Making excuses is what it sounds like. What I really want is I just want an invite. I’ll do it for a sake, a couple of thousand bucks and flights. I don’t even need a hotel. I’ll stay with a family, right? But just… Look, it sounds like you’re making an excuse. 2024, make it the year of, Fly me over to Toronto to speak at a conference. That’s really what we’re looking for here. It’s what the audience want. It’s what the listeners want. Everyone’s screaming at the handset going, Duane, just put the conference on or find somebody to do it. I think that’s what’s happening, really. Don’t you think?
Duane B
You’re not the first person to ask that question. It gets asked all the time about why we don’t have a bigger conference. You see tonnes of stuff in New York as a closing example. You got inbound, obviously in Boston, which is obviously put on by HubSpot. You think there would be more. You got tonnes of conferences off in Chicago as well, which is so underrated as a city for conferences, but not a lot in Toronto. It’s probably never going to change.
Andi J
Are you almost too close to other cities. When I went to Philadelphia for Search Love, I flew to Toronto to see my family afterwards. And I met a couple of attendees from Toronto there and they were like, Yeah, it’s easy. It’s only an hour and a half flight or whatever to get there. And you’re just almost too close to all those great northeastern cities in the US. Whereas if you’re in Calgary, you’ve got to fly a long way from Calgary to go and find something good to happen, haven’t you? So maybe that’s it. Maybe it’s geography.
Duane B
Yeah, that was a role.
Andi J
I’ll let you off. When you become mayor of Toronto, which will be your next job, I’m assuming, and you can’t be worse than some of the previous mayors we’ve had. But when you become mayor of Toronto, maybe we can make this happen.
Duane B
Maybe. Our current new mayor, Olivia Chou, is a Mazin. I’m glad she won mayorship. Our past mayors are mediocre white men who should have been fired long ago from their job, but weren’t, unfortunately. But our current mayor, Olivia Chou, amazing. We love her. If you want someone who’s going to invest in the city and invest in the people.
Andi J
Fantastic. Now, I’m not going to say anything liable us. That’s going to get me into trouble. But if you don’t know anything about the mayors of Toronto, the words Mafia might come to mind. Just Google mayors of Toronto. There’s a family business going on there and some great, hilarious stories, as long as you don’t live in Toronto and pay taxes there and what stuff doing. But it’s quite interesting stories. Anyway, moving on quickly. Look, we’ve got time for one more question to ask you, Duane. And that’s really simple, yet also really difficult. Give us a book recommendation for people who are listening. What would you suggest they read to become better at some form marketing or just anything, really?
Duane B
This is going to sound really weird, and I’m actually not going to give a book recommendation. What I’m going to recommend people is just read in general, but read things that actually aren’t related to marketing or business. My best ideas often come to be when I’m not doing work. We have a great public library system here in Toronto, so I tend to read a lot of mystery thrower-type books. Sometimes I read a biography book. I say just read in general. There’s a book I read a year ago called The Luxury Strategy Book, I want to say. It was basically all about how to price things to make them more expensive, basically. I talked about difference between something that is expensive and something that’s a luxury. Apple would be expensive, but Apple isn’t a luxury. And it talked about some of those old work brands, Gucci and stuff from Europe, and how they’re luxury but not expensive. And it was interesting to read. It’s very academic. So if you’re not into reading things that are very academic, I’d say don’t read it. And I’m definitely getting the title wrong, but it definitely has the words the luxury strategy in there.
Andi J
It is. I’ve just googled it. Let’s have a look. So there’s an author, but there’s also a sub-author of it. Yeah, because luxury works in a really weird way because in most industries, you would basically increase demand to meet supply. But in luxury, you do the opposite. You throttle demand to keep pricing This is high. By Jean-Noël Capfe and Vincent Bastien. Vincent. Vincent Bastien. Not Vincent. Vincent. Bastien. There you go. Apologies for my pronunciation. The luxury strategy. It is in the show notes. As is a link to another podcast I did with a girl from Dublin who works for one of the big luxury houses and now has launched her own podcast, Tech Powered Luxury, Ashley McDonald. Tech Powered Luxury is fantastic. And her podcast from the very first series, actually, she recommended that book. So I’ll put all of that in the show notes, too. But yeah, great book. So brilliant.
Duane B
Yeah, I can make a minute on it. Sorry. I just wanted to make a minute on Twitter. And it was on my list for a year, and then I read it when I was on vacation in the Dominican a year ago. And it had me think about how we priced things. And I just raised her fee and said, This is what it is. So if you’re thinking about trying to raise your fees, become more expensive, thinking about your position as a business, I think it’s worthy you read to think about it because I want to be Gucci or Prada and charge more money. I just have people realise that you can buy cheaper models of things, but if you want the best, you’re going to pay more money for better quality. It’s definitely a harder thing to do, but it’s definitely a good book to read. And I read it end-to-end. I was glad I read it end-to-end. You just have to get past the first two chapters I would say, are really tough. But after that, it’s a pretty good read. Cool.
Andi J
Excellent. I sent a copy of that to a client once who was in that end of the world, and he loved it. He was raving about it. So yeah, okay. I might even read it one day. Duane, we’ve got a time difference. It’s getting dark and cold here. It’s lunchtime for you. So I’m going to let you go and grab your lunch. And thank you very much for your time. How do people find you? What’s the best platform to get you on?
Duane B
Yeah, so I spend a fair bit of time on LinkedIn. So just Duane Brown is my username, quote unquote, on LinkedIn. Also, just take some risk. So agency website. You can always send us an email if you want to chat about a problem or an issue you’re having. And then I spend a lot of time on Reddit, but if you don’t know my handle on Reddit, you would know who I am. But I’m fathomed 53 on Reddit, so that’s where I spend most of my time is Reddit, LinkedIn. And then otherwise, I’m trying to not think about work, and I like to read books, I go for walks, I ride my bike a lot, I cook a fair bit. Because like I said, when I recommend the book, most of my best ideas happen when I’m not actually at my desk or at work.
Andi J
Yeah. Amazing that that’s the case, isn’t it? When you stop thinking about it, that’s when they come to you. Brilliant. Well look, Duane, thank you for your time. It’s been a brilliant time chatting with you, and we shall see you soon at another conference somewhere.
Duane B
Thanks, Andi. I appreciate it.