MarPro - The Marketing Procurement Podcast

Russel Wohlwerth | Top 2022 Marketing Trends

March 17, 2022 Rusty Pepper & Dana Small & Russel Wohlwerth Episode 19
MarPro - The Marketing Procurement Podcast
Russel Wohlwerth | Top 2022 Marketing Trends
Show Notes Transcript

We're excited to welcome back Russel Wohlwerth to discuss the Top Marketing Trends he's seeing so far in 2022, including...

  • Brand vs. Demand
  • Martech Waste
  • Supply Chain Disruptions (and inflation)
  • Push to reduce marketing spend
  • A tsunami of agency reviews
  • Metaverse, crypto, and NFT's


Russell:

I don't have a lot of detail, but Mars, which is a giant advertiser, in this sea of agency, global media reviews, Mars did, was reported in the press and internal media review and good for them because. I have so many clients who have what I call a statutory review require, which means that it's, every three years or so. And it's based on a lot of old, more standard materials, procurement stuff, rather than for marketing companies. But the know everybody's going out in these three-year cycles and the cost to the industry is millions and millions of dollars. And I thought, wow, that's really interesting. There was somebody who did an internal review and decided that, yes, you always want to be questioning your suppliers to make sure that working harder, that you're getting good rates to get best of class, but you don't need to do necessarily a search to do that. I give a gold star to, tomorrows for having wherewithal to do that.

Rusty:

what led them down that path

Russell:

I have no idea what was the impetus for it, but, again, in the, in this sea of, gigantic media reviews. Yeah. Oh I don't know why they do it, but to me, I've talked to many clients saying, Hey, I know you like your agency. And I know, you're certainly entitled as a marketer. It's good practice to see what's out there, but you don't necessarily need to know. The search cause see these big searches that take nine and 10 months, the cost to the industry is huge. and we're seeing, more retention than we ever have before, which to me means the probably there's, Phoenix association involved in there. But if you have a supplier that you really like, and you just want to make sure to ask the correct questions, make sure you're doing the right corporate diligence. You don't need to open it up to the world. I've talked to many clients. Most of them say, no, we need to do a review. I've told them there's many ways that we can show them who else is out there. We can look at their labor rates, et cetera. But I, this is the only occasion I have heard of somebody doing a big for that large of an advertiser doing an internal review. And what they did is they're retaining, their agency or agencies, I should say so good for them. Good for mark.

Rusty:

I guess what they figured out in this was rates are good creatives.

Russell:

It is only media, but, yeah, I'm not quite sure what they did, but what they did is the proper diligence without having to open it up to the world,

Rusty:

they took on the onus themselves. They took on the expense, the burden, instead of putting it out there to the market, making everybody else go through hoops for something that quite honestly, they didn't even know what they were going to have a need to

Russell:

change or not. Exactly. And they did, I there's no detail in the story, but it's termed in a term review. They did all the due diligence in there. And there's a lot of ways that you can do all that diligence and make sure. If a marketer has a marketing agency supplier, they're really happy with in there. Yeah. I've heard, it's oh, we really liked them, we have to do this review every three years or so. It's difficult. It's, everybody's trying to contain costs and I think agencies are getting burned up, tripping me agencies by the volume of media reviews.

Dana:

I would say on the creative side though, I've seen so not so well intentions for people, why they do go out to market where you ha where you have, they're like, we want new ideas. That's their way. They get new ideas from agencies. They keep them there in common and use something else that they get from creative or

Russell:

strategy pitches. If it's done correctly, people need to signal very quickly upfront whether or not that the marketer wants to own the IP, which tends to put a freeze. I don't get you on the front page or, the lead story on all the ad trades. We want to own the IP. We're not paying everything. So we want you to work for free and we want to own it. But there is a responsible way to when you're dealing, particularly in a speculative creative review, where. If you really want to do this correctly and avoid a lawsuit, there just was a big one. I'm not recalling who it was for, but it was it was in the ad trades about two weeks or so ago, which really want to sign a contract for a number of reasons, because you want to make it clear that if you're paying a stipend to, regardless of who. Your asking them for IP and you want to make it clear that you're not going to own the IP. And not only do you want crystal clear clarity on regard to ownership of the IP, but you want to stop nuisance suits from the marketer perspective, which people which this agency said, Hey, they came up with an idea we had. And when you have three or four agencies working in a very narrow strategic territory, it's not unheard of to come up with similar ideas, particularly when they'd been given the same input. So the right way to do this is to have the right paperwork upfront, to have both parties sign. It keeps out of court, stops the nuisance lawsuits. And if you pay a stipend, most people don't realize that it actually creates even more problems. If you're paying the money, you need to make it very clear in that agreement. So we urge our clients to sign, we have a couple of templates, which we've gotten from the four A's and modified over the years to really get that stuff nailed down.

Rusty:

How do we actually, this morning, your daily emails. They were talking about the Coinbase Superbowl ad and the fact that they were saying that no agency could have done this, but then the CEO of the market agencies we pitched that to you this summer and literally called them out. Typically you don't see agencies really throwing it out there, but she's you know what, as an industry, we need to stand up for it and be able to protect what's right. And what's wrong. And basically just to.

Russell:

And that's how I saw the headline. I wasn't sure what it was about agencies to protect their IP can put a little copyright, on all the materials, which legally, binds it, that the best way is to have clarity before you're going in. I won't make any value judgements if somebody wants to own the IP, that's fine. You're just not going to get a lot of good agencies to pitch it. But regardless if you're owning it or not, you're doing spec creative, you're paying a stipend that stuff really needs to be taken care of in a real tight legal agreement. And then you avoid situations like this.

Rusty:

What are some of those top trending marketing procurement topics for 2022?

Russell:

I'm not going to go in any particular order, but one of the biggest trends that we're seeing is what I'm calling the performance versus brand marketing, the brand versus demand conundrum. During the last two years during the pandemic, a lot of marketers rightfully went to a lot of performance marketing. It was, it was difficult environment for everybody. And I've had a lot of our clients talk to us this year saying, I think we overdose, we did a little too much of the performance marketing. We've lost our brand in the process. And ideally, if you look at the research and there's reams of research to prove this, the best companies in the world do a combination of both performance and brand marketing, it's not an either or. Conversation. It's an end. The question is how do we get those two things in balance? But during the pandemic, that was really what I call a celebration of the lower funnel. It's easy to measure, it's immediate. But you can only live for so long on tactical brand activations. And as many marketers are discovering, you do that for too long and you become indistinguishable from everybody else. And the debate comes up in just about every project and this, in, in the past, there was always performance. Marketing was a very different sort of segment and it wasn't brought into the brand conversation, but because so many people have moved to performance marketing it comes up in just about all the conversations I have with marketers. And again, the research shows that if you have that long-term branding that sets the stage for growth and then the short-term activations. Prospects and turn that branding into actual revenue.

Rusty:

Brand marketing, should be the foundation for any brand that's out there especially these days you have to be authentic real as a brand and you have to live it. You've got to play the long game., Russell: in the boardroom, Measurement fast ROI. And it is I think part of this in twine with this whole issue is this very big pivot to digital over the last two years, they accelerate, we've always the amount of digital meeting media. You look over the last 20 years has continued to move, but the acceleration during the pandemic was amazing. There was a statistic I saw, I think it was from the Boston consulting group that said during a eight week period in 2020 e-commerce as a percentage of all sales grew more in eight weeks than it had in the previous 10 years. That is a stunning statistic. So a lot of marketers are saying, Hey, it's easier to do performance marketing on a digital platform. So I think the combination of digital. The very difficult ups and downs companies have had have all contributed to this cell. I think it's easier to measure on digital. I think performance, it's definitely easier to measure on digital, but I do think that brand building digitally is where you get a lot of traction and that supports it. It's a cycle, right? You need the wine without yang. You can't have

Russell:

exactly, like I say, the research supports the fact that strong brands didn't get there by doing a bunch of, price, offer promotional performance marketing. So you need both. And the question is, how do you balance them? What's the timing, what's the cadence. But it was very seductive over the last two years or so. And I'm glad to see a lot of marketers are saying, okay, how do we get this into balance? How do we pull from the top of the funnel? And from the bottom of the funnel, maybe the meat midway instead of living at the bottom of the funnel,

Rusty:

how have you seen a tree? Anything that's trending and when it comes to. Percentage split of what? Or is it based on industries? Has there been any insights there?

Russell:

It's still trending to a lot of performance marketing. It's like marketing, heroin, again, you can measure it. It's quick and we see a lot of marketers, looking to maximize their Romy row ass. However you measure that, looking to really increase the effectiveness of their marketing and I'm the CEO of Procter and gamble. John Mueller was the former CFO says what's efficient is effective. I don't necessarily agree with that. But it's a mindset that a lot of people have about, the efficiency of marketing that getting a better ROI and getting a better return on the investment. A lot of people still squarely in that performance account two years from now. I think we're going to be having a very different conversation.

Rusty:

On the brand marketing side, the measurement issue is where you get the executive levels complaining because any great tools to measure. I know that there's some being developed, but with performance it's by leads, conversions, sales, revenue. There's a lot of different ways that you can break down that. that measurement,

Russell:

Rusty sitting in the corporate boardroom. In my opinion, the marketing group marketing CMO is probably sitting in the weakest position because everybody else has pretty strong numbers to support what they're doing, what their investments, what the return on investment is. And marketing is the group that's sitting there with the arrows in their back, for, it's like we're trying to measure it and you can look at this and you can look at that. So marketing doesn't have a lot of it. Doesn't have a lot of firm ground to stand on in the boardroom. And, despite, everybody thought, oh, we're going to go to digital and we'll, we can see everything and, we can convert everything. And what we're seeing is that 50% of the, of the spend goes to waste due to fraud or inefficiency in the digital supply chain. So that Nirvana we were all hoping for is not here yet, but clearly, some companies have done great during this time and some have not done so it's depending on what kind of business you're in. And but everybody's really looking to become financially stronger than they have.

Rusty:

I just think Austin marketers need to become better storytellers. There's been a loss of art when it comes to storytelling on the brand.

Russell:

I agree. I worry. I'm old. I was brought up in an era of branding. Still have a lot of respect for what a brand can do. And I think, yes, you can brand through a social media. Yes. You can browse through all, we've got all these media channels that we didn't have, 10 years ago, maybe 15 years or so ago, but they can be used effectively, but that the argument at the end of the day comes to dollars and cents. And that's why everybody, been so deep in the performance funnel, speaking

Rusty:

of dollars and cents, let's just transition out to MarTech.

Russell:

I'm not an expert in ad tech or MarTech, not even close, but I have been dragged along by some of my clients to accompany them on the buyer's journey. And I've seen a lot of expensive software licenses purchased only seeing those same companies after a year or two, just drop everything. And people the, when you listen to the sales page, it's great. It's one touch marketing. You've got all these analytics. And I think a common mistake that people make, this is Nigel Voss. Who's the CEO of a digital said you went on. One of the biggest mistakes companies make in digital transformation is they make these super large investments in technology, but they don't see the return they're expecting. And digital transformation is not about technology. Technology is enabler it's a. Creating an organization that can change at the speed of light today and constructing, the capability to realize value through digital channels for your customers. That's what digital transformation is all about. It's not about buying a ton of MarTech.

Rusty:

the last estimate I saw was about $120 billion worldwide as well, or MarTech, maybe even more than that now. This was sometime in 20 20, 21 was the last time I saw a number four, but you're talking about that means a massive span. And COVID accelerated that spend because so many companies were trying to get in front of transformation. They're trying to make it easier for their employees to work remotely, to stay engaged and have consumers have these different experiences and say, went deep into MarTech. You're not talking 25%, maybe as the average amount that companies, he leveraged that technology. So if 25% of $120 billion investment worldwide handily, there's a lot of waistline.

Russell:

One of the problems is you get all this disparate data that doesn't necessarily work together. There's a company we were called tracer, which actually came out of VaynerMedia and is now independent and what their specialty is taking these different streams of information and working them together and creating a sort of common language and able to actually read all these different disparate MarTech feeds it and make sense out of it because people, I'm a techie, I love techie. I buy a ton of this stuff. I can see why, chief technology officer or COO, would want to buy all this stuff because you're in love with it at the end of the day. What does it mean? So shiny. Shiny object, but tracers, one of the only companies I've ever seen that specializes in taking these disparate data feeds and making sense out of it. But I'm more buying more. It's not necessarily the, a answer, but it's yeah. It's it's great. Cause I see, I sit in these presentations, I get really excited, but then when you start playing with it, oh, this actually doesn't do what they say it does or something like that. I think there's a lot of smoke and mirrors in that world. This is one of the reasons that the job of the COO, I think it's been. Difficult by modern marketing. And I don't know if we'll have that title in two or three years because the CMO needs to be master of so many things before it was about understanding branding and it was understanding digital. Now it's understanding the technology. As is often discussed. The CMO job encompasses so many disciplines that it no longer requires in my opinion to be a subject matter expert, more an orchestrator, more, a high level management of those functions. And that's, what's making, we're seeing a record amount of CMOs leave. We're seeing all kinds of employees leave companies, but the CMO position in particular is to make difficult. And this, the MarTech is one of the reasons cause if that's an integral part of marketing today, you can't abandon it. Life just continues to get more complex. Can I ask you a question? Yeah, of course. Rusty was asking about, in particularly I know, you work in pharma and I think it's been amazing watching the last two years, what, with Pfizer and what, nobody knows the name of their COVID drug, but everybody knows everybody in the world seems to be able, regardless of what country they live to never be knows who Pfizer is. So it's been an amazing. Opportunity for pharma. Pharma's always lives in this world of it's half good and half bad, for a long time, not one of the favorites of most consumers, because they felt they only worked in their own self-interest, but seeing what they can do in a very short period of time has probably reformed a lot of people's thinking of it. But, to me, the pharma brand and just looking at Pfizer and Madonna, and the fact that people know these companies have the drop of a hat is really amazing. Yeah.

Dana:

It's interesting from a pharmaceutical perspective, because I think there has been, and there always has been a lot of hesitancy of what is, or what are your true intentions? And I think a lot of the times the marketers are just fighting. Oh, you guys are just trying to make a buck and oh, it only costs a dollar to manufacture. Why aren't you charging 300, for it? And so I feel like the brands and, even our corporate communications in any pharma company always are fighting an uphill battle. And I feel like COVID just made it worse. For me personally, you, you see all these people and they're like, oh, we don't trust big pharma. You guys are trying to microchip us or whatever. And we're like,

Russell:

no, we're not, I don't trust in general. It's not big.

Dana:

Yeah. And so COVID, hasn't helped. For me, I'm lucky because now I'm in like an ultra rare disease state. And so nobody knows us, which we're moving a little bit more into that side, the bigger companies they do, they get taken down by things like this. And especially some that are mismanaged and,

Russell:

I dunno. But the people, yeah, it's always They live, as I said earlier in, in two worlds, it's damn you. And thank God for you. But I think people, those that appreciate the benefits of science saw that, how difficult it is and how, with all these latest technologies, how expensive it can be to bring a drug to fruition.

Dana:

It's interesting. Cause even, I was at Gilead at one point in time and they have the cure for Hep C and people would always say, oh, there's a cure for cancer out there, they're not going to do anything about it. And I'm like, no, not really. That said pharma got hit hard. Like Giliad is not doing as well as it should because they found the cure. And there's other people out there who also have I believe competitors for the Hep C market, but it's like, there is, there are cures, it does take a lot of money to get to that. There is a lot of marketing involved in it, but you still get, people are like, oh no, you guys are here to, just take my money. And it's big pharma. And being in the industry for 20 years after a while, I just quit fighting that fight because it happens often. I'm like, listen, believe what you want. It is what it is, but yeah, pharma has been put in the spotlight. I don't, but to me, I still don't think they have really marketed what the true cost is to come up with these things, Cures that said the ones that they had in process, they'd been working on those types of antibodies and things like that. The med programs for, years and years. So it wasn't something new. And I think there's, if you don't know the science, there's a lot to be able to easily misconstrue in pharma and pharma has to deal with that and branding and you try, but yeah, it's interesting that people don't know the names and that they do know the names of the pharma companies, which I think typically it's easier to remember because they have some crazy,

Russell:

I bet you one in a hundred people will know what Pfizer's actual. I don't, I, I heard it. I, it completely unmemorable. Yeah. Yeah. And normally they

Dana:

pay millions of dollars to get those names

Russell:

I did want to talk about the tsunami of agency reviews for a minute, if I could. I don't know if 2022 was a record. It may be too early, but I certainly think the volume was extremely high. If it wasn't a record, it'll be very close. And the bad news is for agencies. I always say in the agency search world. There's good news. For several agencies is bad news for at least one agency who may or may not be there. But 20, 22, based on, the new business, the worst thing is going to be equally busy. It's very rare in the fourth quarter or the first quarter to see a lot of people inquiring. So there's a lot of people hunting to change agencies. I don't know what's causing this. I think it's just again, pandemic related, everybody's sick of what they're stuck with and looking for new and looking to come out of their shells. Let's hear your theory.

Rusty:

So you've got all this change that's happening with people are leaving. CMOs are moving, marketers are moving. One of the very first thing somebody does when they go into a new organization from a leadership role is they want to wheel change. They want to try and make an impact. And a lot of times that is looked at is how I'm going to bring in my guys, my team, people I'm comfortable with and regardless of how good the existing agency or partner might be, they're looking to make a change kind of stake put a stake in the ground saying we're going to organize and make things different. We're going to change what the other crew did.

Dana:

I, you know what, rusty, I've seen that so many times too, right? Where you're like the agency was doing great, but somebody new comes in the role and they're like, I'm bringing my people with. And it's really frustrating from a sourcing standpoint of view. Cause even if you go through the RFP, in the back of their heads, the choices already made, it's not even worth, going through the process and wasting everybody's time because it's going to be, oh, we're bringing this person in and this, whether it makes sense or not, whether they have the right disease, state experience or not. And it's, I think one of the most frustrating things from a procurement stand point of view is let me bring my agency with me.

Russell:

Right, The other thing I hope is that this is the, this may sound very Pollyannish, but I do hope that there's some more humanity been injecting, just we've gone through, this has been fascinating to see how my clients at their homes and the agencies at their homes. I feel like I've gotten a new glimpse and I, I love the element of humanity. People were saying, oh, what a pain in the ass people are working from home. How are we ever going to do it? It worked out pretty damn well from my perspective, but it was great. This additional sort of push of humanity that I never expected to see seeing people in their homes, seeing their kids interrupt their dogs, et cetera, gave me a new view on a lot of people. I felt, wow, this is so much better of an experience than seeing another faceless corporate boardroom,

Rusty:

A hundred percent. Yeah. How many blood panel walls know dark tray tables.

Russell:

Exactly. So what I'm hoping is a lot of people have not forgotten this. Put under, again, these terribly difficult circumstances, hopefully that's some more humanity to our business, both with, from the procurement standpoint, from the CMOs standpoint, et cetera, I hopefully will those lessons that we learn will stick with us at least for a couple of years. That's all I ask is not much,

Rusty:

So what are some of the other trends that you're seeing out there?

Russell:

What we're seeing is, again, I thought we ran out of reviews, but we're seeing this high velocity and one of the problems has been marketers whose businesses have been around. Bye bye. Supplying chain problems. And that's, I thought it was getting better and it seems to be just getting worse. And now, between the supply chain and then the war going on and energy prices. And the fact that, inflation is a place that we never saw before. I think it's going to have a pretty widespread impact. And it's such a, it's a night and day world of fewer and, transportation, or if you're in hospitality, those were not great categories. But if you're in fast food that had a good app and in a drive-thru line or e-commerce making lot of money, but I worry about the cloud of the supply chain disruptions in inflation, what it's doing to everybody's psyche, and then the cherry on top, which could make it all collapsed is, this Russia Ukraine thing, which is clearly sending shockwaves through businesses around the world, stock markets, supply chain, energy prices. We continue with a third year in a very in stable world or unstable world. And I know it's, to me, that's a prescription for a lot of crazy things are going to have.

Rusty:

Well, Definitely the war that's actually pushing oil over a hundred dollars a barrel pretty soon. So it feels good to search, which is going to affect freight, travel, all those areas. Actually right before we recorded this episode, I put a post out on LinkedIn about the latest inflation prices, a commodity prices, and how much has increased year over year. It's truly, jaw-dropping when you look at the numbers and percentages, it is it's scary and it's not going to get better. I'd like to think that it is, but for these remaining of this year, the commodities that affect our business. paper, raw materials. Good luck, you better order quick and order now and try to secure it because there's very little and there's just not enough. Coming back online and envelopes.

Russell:

Forget about. Yeah. I know it's ma I think what's going to happen with marketers is, for the most part, they've tried to delay cost increases. They've done some very creative packaging, but I think now they, they can't delay it anymore. And I think what you're going to see is a new push for value Browns are, if this keeps on going up like it does it's, if we're on track, what happened in January for the rest of the year, it's going to be crazy. Now, I'm old. I went through this in the seventies and the eighties. So to me it's a reminder, but it's been so long since we've been in an inflationary environment. So I think that's going to change the tune of a lot of marketers needy to remark it, or to talk about value Browns or to get consumers and their, to understand why their brand is worth a premium. It's going to really upset the apple cart. And I'm not an economist, but I don't see this changing really quick. Again, particularly with this instability with Russia and Ukraine, Nobody knows what's going to happen. So that could set off it's its own other mini chain of agency reviews and things like that. So w we can't say we live in boring times, I guess that's the best that you have.

Dana:

We should be looking for a secondary and tertiary sources and looking down, second tier suppliers and trying to, negate that. And but you can only do so much SharePoint, right? When it gets to a point where like at the shipments, aren't getting here, they're not getting here. Like when you go to, I've gone into target or CVS. And you're like, is this place going out of business? And they're like, no, we're just not getting shipments. And it's literally, there's empty shelves and you're like, this place looks like what is going on. And I think consumers are finally starting to see that. And it'll be interesting to see what the brands do about that and see if they do lean on procurement or not to try to help them find alternative sources or, look at, bring it in house, whatever it is.

Russell:

That's so funny you say that. Cause I was interrogate yesterday afternoon and I'm looking at all these wide open shelves and I'm thinking this is a very scary feeling of March of 2020 going to a supermarket and seeing empty shelves for miles. It's clearly having an impact. So consumer psyche is being affected, but it's gonna, it's gonna affect all our jobs. I don't know where it's going to go. I have one other topic too in, in marketing. Can I just throw it out here now? So to me, the faddish nature of marketing is driven so much by fads. We're on a flavor of the month, it was it's NFTs now it's the metaverse I don't know at times to either laugh or to take it seriously. I think the metaverse has a very serious side to it, but it's not being taken seriously, but marketing has become so trending. Everybody wants to jump on the next thing. And it's scary. I think, cryptocurrency metaverse NFTs who, tick tock who knows, but it's a very strange environment. It's like a trend.

Rusty:

Well, do think there's a lot of trends out there, but they all have relevance to them we live in a world now where everything progress is so much faster. that's, I think a massive challenge for marketers is to be able to keep up. And then that's what then dovetails into marketing procurement because they also have to keep up. Where is the market moving? I'm actually a big believer in Anaptys because the way you're accessing and your ticketing for events and conferences, it's going to be NFTE based. It's the merging of digital with the physical world. Look at all the brands that are moving and building product for those platforms, you'd be amazed. How many of them are mainstream because they do believe in it and they're investing heavily because they want to be there first. but I don't think they're going to be fast. I think there's going to be trends and there's going to be just more places to be able to

Russell:

market and the speed of business. I agree. It is scary. And that's a lot of when I have conversations with our clients, the request is we need somebody who can move at the speed of business and the speed of this. This, again, this to me, these are all interrelated, the pandemic, the huge pivot to digital, the speed of business. And then underneath all this stuff, there's like a huge technology bed of blockchain and all these new things. A lot of marketers are not aware of, but that's what enables a lot of these trends. So it's fast. You can either be threatened. Or you can be fascinated. I take the fascinating, I just, it's amazing. It's interesting to wake up and see, what's going to be new today, but I do think, you can't throw everything in there because that is a fad. A trend is one thing a fad tends to be short-term. It goes as very meteoric. It goes up, then it crashes. I think that marketers need to take a look at, there's still a lot of there's conventional media. There's offline media, there's online media. We live in a multi-channel world. And as I like to tell people, if you just talk in one channel, chances are you're going to miss somebody because nobody or very few people I think are listening in a single channel. But the digital acceleration again, is I find just fascinating. The impact is we're just beginning to feel it. And there's going to be other waves. Fasten your seatbelts, ladies and gentlemen.

Rusty:

I would agree with that a hundred percent. It is a roller coaster, especially right now. So put your mouthpiece in, get your helmet strapped off.

Russell:

Let's go. That's good. So, those to me are the major trends that, that I'm saying. Yeah, no,

Rusty:

You've got performance versus brand marketing. You've got tsunamis of agency reviews. I think we did on supply chain disruptions the waste and MarTech the speed of business. And then obviously I think the last way might be Corporate push to cut costs and marketing, everybody's been talking about that, but with inflation and everything else, I'm not sure companies can afford to cut too

Russell:

much. But the mentality again, in a very unstable world is gotta really, the chief financial officer's keeping a close look, where can we economize where is waste? And because you don't know where that next threat is going to be coming from it. And, again, looking asking for two things, want to see more efficiency on the advertising, spend a better ROI, but want to cut our costs to our marketing suppliers. And those are, difficult to do, but I think we're going to see more of that this year. That's my guess. That's my prediction. And more than a guest, so

Dana:

I have a question. So I think maybe this, you might have some insight on, and was talking with my husband earlier and we were talking about marketing and media and there are shortages, of things, whether it's in target or chips for cars. And he's like, why are they advertising? It's not go out and buy new car. And I tried to explain to him what I thought, my perspective on, the way media is managed and buying your year ahead of time and stuff. How do you think those shortages are going to affect market? You think they're going to pull back into their budgets because like, why are we up? He's got a very valid point, right? If there's no chips available, there's no cars on the lot you drive past. Why are we still, spending a ton of money? Should we be, thinking of other avenues?

Rusty:

I tend to think that you're continuing to build that brand. You're still building awareness. Cause you got new products, you still got new innovation. That's rolling out your, and you've got to keep those consumers engaged. And just because they can't buy it from you, they can't buy it from anybody. So you've got to keep them on the hook so that when they are ready to buy a new car, Because that means there'll be a holding off because there hasn't been any inventory when they're ready.

Dana:

Yeah, but still it's procurement. I want to say this is demand management time. If you can't sell it, maybe you back off a little bit and actually save some money, right?

Russell:

I think the messaging is changing because it's a great question, Dana, because what you don't want to do is stimulate demand for what you can't sell, but I've seen some great case studies recently from agencies about I won't mention the brands, but car that's been delayed 12, 16 months in doing email to the hand raisers and yeah, exactly. Just letting people know and communicating with them. It doesn't make sense to do demand gen when you can't sell things. But I think there's other messaging chicken. We have ticked off customer. So I've seen some amazing, great case studies for people that, you know, w how Mar automakers are innovating. Here's the progress of your car. You can watch it on the assembly line. Unfortunately, there was a Volkswagen had a, I don't know if you've heard about the ship that had 1100 Porsches and other luxury vehicles for Volkswagen off the coast of Denmark, which is on fire and going to 4,000 vehicles are probably going to go. I dunno if that ship has sunk yet, but. I know Porsche happens to be one of our clients and I know I just had a friend buy one. I think we waited two or three months for a car. So luckily he has his but there are ways you got to, to your husband's questions, you've got to keep up the brand loyalty. You just can't go silent. So I would spend less. And it's a different messaging in my mind. Yeah.

Rusty:

Would you spend this or just change while you're spinning?

Russell:

It depends, cars, automotive advertising uses it's a little different there is a lot of TV, but it ultimately digitals what, the ideas is not to get somebody to show them to buy it. Chances are they're either going to sell it digitally or pre-sell it. I, I don't know if you can argue for the, if you need the same awareness because most automotive advertisements waiting for somebody to come into market. And then, Hey, I want one, I'm going to go to the dealership this weekend. So I would argue that maybe the volume comes down, but the messaging changes and it's time for, I think more branding work because if you can't sell stuff, I have a situation. I have a car coming off lease, and the in fact I'm calling it a dealer after our call. He wants to know what's going on. It's I'm going to, they're going to buy my car. I've never done that before because you have one on the lot and it's orange and I don't want that. And I, my car has 13,000 miles on it after three years. So I, and I looked, I could buy it, buy out my lease and make $20,000 selling the car tomorrow. I'm not going to do it. I'm going to hang on to it. It's a really screamed market. But it's not the only thing, it's I worry, every time I have to buy something, it's is it going to be in stock? So it's a new mentality, but it's the siege mentality. We've got, inflation, it's going to be more expensive as in, to be there. And I think a lot of people are buying stuff now and not necessarily hoarding in the case of cars, certainly not hoarding. But in the case of other goods I, it's funny, you said about envelopes. I have a box of 400 envelopes with security envelopes that I got, because I don't want to run out on envelopes. I need. Yeah. It's like gold

Rusty:

right now.

Russell:

Everything is like gold. It's buy it when you see it. You're never going to see it again. So I don't know when this is going to end. That's why I think it's going to be really topsy turvy year. And these are things that none of us can control.