Good Decision, Bad Consequences

um [Music] hey what's up everyone welcome to the copywriter podcast my name is tim stoddart as always i'm here with ethan brooks thank you so much for joining me and we'll just jump right into it uh my baby's here so he's not talking about me he's not talking about me no yeah we were every single week here we talked before the show and i just asked him i'm like dude is the baby coming out and he goes yeah i'm like what the hell you didn't say anything so we're gonna this is the first look i haven't seen her yet as well i'm gonna show you yeah and for the people who are on youtube i'm sticking my phone up to the camera so you know having a baby is a very personal experience so i got to be careful with some of these pictures right so this is really cool this is something that i'm like really excited about when julian when my son was born we basically accidentally took a picture that turned out to be really funny he's just a big squoosh bob and when you have babies they it's called like skin to skin like the touch i think is is very important they they like it to be on your skin so i'm always like without a shirt on and everyone's like why the hell aren't you wearing a shirt and so this is why for the people watching on youtube there's a reason why i don't have a shirt on so this is when julian was born this is literally he's a day old he's just a giant tub he's like a hamburger right but it's so cool because willow that's her name i had a daughter we got the same exact picture basically in the same exact oh my god i know isn't that badass congratulations man thank you it was um it was a wild experience nothing went right i wouldn't say there were complications it was just a couple scares my wife had like a fever baby's heart rate was like 200 beats per minute and everyone was saying like let's get the let's at least talk to the c-section team and i mean you know obviously you got to do what you got to do right but there's just reasons why like a natural birth is better you know and so we were like really just sticking to it like no let's stay calm let's stay calm and and we finally figured out uh my life has rhino or had rhinovirus it's basically a cold but it's just like a really contagious severe cold and so once you figure that out she got tylenol and her fever came down and then it was just smooth sailing from there so uh yeah i mean just like julian she's three weeks early and and it's it's great like it's really great i'm really happy i'm very grateful all is well everybody's happy and healthy and i'm excited man congratulations man thank you yeah i was wondering because last week we talked about i'm not sure if we talked about it on air or not but you said you know there was like a close call last week i thought maybe she was coming then and then today right before we recorded and i'm keeping my voice down people listening because i'm in a hotel but right before we recorded i i texted him like oh i just landed in my hotel set my stuff up now he goes hey maybe a few minutes late just finishing up a walk with my dad and i'm thinking to myself is tim in philly and we came on he's not he's in his normal studio which means i'm like up dad's in town so i was like did the baby come and he goes yeah so congratulations man to both of you you and jules and to julian big brother now that's cool yeah it's strange because he he can really recognize that there's a new thing you know like you can't talk yet but he's he's very much more there's a word for it it's kind of escaping my mind right now but he's he's very much like aligned with the fact that there's a new being in our home and like in our like our sphere you know like our little energy orb um and so that's been cool to see he keeps going up to her and uh we we keep her in this like moses basket basically and so he keeps like going up on the table like tippy-toeing and looking into it well we got some cool pictures man this it's adorable so yeah i'm i'm happy life is good i feel great thank you so much for asking yeah so what are we talking about this week we got a couple of things to go through well look i knew you were busy this week you are at what's it called inbound the inbound conference for hubspot huge event might be one of the top three biggest maybe even the biggest one marketing conferences in the world i think it's probably safe to say so i know that you put a lot of work into that i'm sure your presentation went well i can't wait to hear about it we'll talk about it when we're done recording just because we've got a lot of [ __ ] to go through today and so i just took the reins and i've mentioned my friend a few times from eight and nine clothing and his story is actually really really cool and it's full of ups and downs i've personally been involved with the growth of his brand a lot and one it's i don't even want to call it a mistake and when i explain it you'll see why but one of like the harshest lessons and potential failures i've ever had in my life was a decision that i made for his brand an seo decision and i knew at the time it was the right long-term decision however it had very very like immediate consequences to his company like he's a great friend of mine you know and and it was hard man like it really really hurt but knowing if i knew then what i know now i would have approached it a little bit differently i know that like it was the right thing to do and like i got some cool data to show it but um but it's a great story so so this sounds this sounds like it's gonna be awesome just for people who uh are either new to the show or maybe just tuning in for the first time in a little while eight and nine actually even for me too eight this is the brand that you said you really like a lot you've been trying to buy into his company for years right you mentioned this a couple of weeks and there's like a street street where right that's the turn that's the cool kid turn for it yup okay yeah okay i'm gonna show you my screen here we go this is a and i clothing it's street wear for sure and what is so fascinating about fashion is that it's always moving and so 89 has been around for 20 years and i really really mean that it's it's in miami which is how i got involved with it like their impact in miami has been really strong but also new york city l.a i mean all over the country it's it's so cool to be in airports and see eight night clothing and let up to people and be like yo 89 and they got like a really cool community that they've built through some of their their social media and just some of their what do you call it culture so it's been great can i can i ask you a quick question sure so the founder is a friend right now did you know him before he started it or did you meet him because you became we were a fan of the brand a little bit of both i met him through an old agency that i actually did some freelance work for this guy asked me to come on a sales call just because he was he was like this sales hustler who didn't really know anything about internet marketing but he wanted to start an agency and so he would always take me with him on sales calls when i was like just starting out to actually like say some [ __ ] that made sense right and so i met him through that call but it turned out that me and him just ended up working together because we would just vibe so this is him this is his instagram his name's ray gilbeah and he's he's super cool he was in my wedding i'd really consider him one of my best friends and i i love the fact that like he's in you know he's this company was the number two best seller all time on a website called um karma loop which was just a huge streetwear reselling brand they were seconds of the hundreds only like bobby hundreds was a huge influence on him he's got pictures of like you know 50 cent and p diddy and and just the who's who of hip-hop wearing his [ __ ] so he's he's really been around but i love how he just stays behind the scenes you know like he's not out there on instagram he's not showing his like watches or whatever he just loves to make clothes and do his work and so ray gilbo is his instagram uh if you're on the youtube you can see it right now and we'll link it up at the show notes so this is eight and nine it's gonna be difficult to i'm gonna have to explain the journey a little bit more that i can show the journey because some of the changes we made like don't exist anymore but here's here's the evolution of the brand you know what we should do we're on the wayback machine and we can see what the website was like in uh oh my god eight years ago i can't [ __ ] believe am i turning into one of those guys it's like where's the time go time flies yeah you know so let's see let's check it out in 2014. i'm gonna see what the website looks like and this is getting somewhere because they're marketing and the reason why the whole thing blew up so much was because they had a very very specific okay so this is the perfect example i'm on an old version of the website this is where am i 2014 i think and what they would do is create all of these blog posts that seo'd for keywords for outfits that people would match to sneakers and so this is the evolution of like streetwear fashion because this game doesn't really exist as much anymore so this is an article if i click on this it's not going to go anywhere because what they did is they put their blog on wordpress and then they put their e-commerce functionality on shopify so they had like two different websites kind of so every time they would post these blogs they'd be like man you're not you're missing out because these articles would rank immediately so right here i'm looking at an article it's titled jordan infrared 10 shirt so jordan infrared 10 is a sneaker and as soon as these sneakers would get released they would create shirts that match the sneaker so streetwear at the time was very much about like these sneaker heads and people would buy these t-shirts and build whole outfits around these sneakers right and so like jordans and and foam posits and all these like super gaudy basketball sneakers they'd make a ton of money with these articles because they would time when the sneaker was going to be released and they would write like three articles that put together different outfits for shirts that they came up with and as soon as the sneaker was released they'd be like bam jordan infrared t-shirt and so like i said i can't click on this because blog.89.com was the wordpress site where the articles used to be and it doesn't exist anymore but if i were to click on this article it would be just a whole list of t-shirts and outfits that match the jordan infrared pen shirt so same thing right here jordan 6 infrared 23 shirt and like every time these new sneaker releases will come out it would just be like to change to change the changing chain because everybody was trying to to buy these shirts these sneaker match shirts it was like what you called it sneaker match it was the the style of streetwear i guess that's pretty slick yeah yes crush it okay so what was the change or that's that sounds like the tea up for the change that you had in mind and it sounds like maybe you combined the two sites that's exactly what i did man because shopify so at the time i've had my own little t-shirt company for a long time it's called new life clothing i basically stole all of uh it and i's ideas because of how cool i thought it was ray told me everything you know like he told me how to get blanks he told me how to do screen printing he taught me everything i know so i bought a pretty sweet little i shouldn't say i bought i created a pretty sweet little t-shirt line i was making like 600 bucks a day at the time it was [ __ ] awesome it was so much fun you know like taking pictures and like you know creating a little brand but one of the things that i did is shopify has a functionality that makes it so in the article itself you can embed a product so it's more of like an inline experience as you're reading the article and then the product itself shows and then you click a button and it brings you right to the product so that's what i was doing and i was only ranking new life clothing by the way for the people not watching the video it's it's like a sobriety based line so it's a lifestyle brand that has shirts with like cool sayings kind of about like being sober and living the main lifestyle and so i would rank for like five or six different keywords like sober t-shirts server clothing a couple of different stuff and that's all i did i would write these blog posts and i would embed the product into the article and so i thought to myself right like i got this man i know how to do it like i know how to level this up here's really really where i screwed up so i'm on new life right now by the way i i haven't written in this like i'm embarrassed at this content don't judge me you know this site this brand is kind of like on it's like automatic right now and there's a dude that i hired that he just created terrible content so don't judge me but you can see here that i'm on newlifeclothing.com and their domain structure is just awful so shopify uses a a code a language that they created it's called liquid and what it does it makes it so that these categories of different products can all like interact with each other like a category isn't static all the categories can kind of bend in and out of each other because when you're creating e-commerce lines you run into weird things like if a product actually belongs to two different categories you know instead of like adding that product individually to each category you can just it's why it's called liquid because if you can read the code it kind of flows like like water you know but the domain structure is terrible so newlifeclothing.com blogs slash articles slash the title of the article and on the original real quick i'm sorry just to pause you for a second but for somebody who doesn't have as much background in seo can you explain why domain structure matters and why that's like why that's a bad one very simply it's bad for two reasons one because you call this a slug so every time you see a slash in a url it's like another layer so think of it like you're walking into a room right and what you need is three rooms deep as opposed to just walking on the front door and exactly what you want is right there so this first slug newlifeclothing.com blogs like this is the first door that google walks through you know and it's it's not it's not quite this straightforward you know there's examples of url structures not mattering quite that much but best practice you want like you want the keyword you want the title of the article as the first slug because the purpose the the user gets what they want as soon as they walk in the front door so slash blogs slash articles slash title of the article and eight and nine at the time had their wordpress site on blog.89.com and so every time they would link back and forth to each other i'd be like wait this doesn't make any sense like if all of your content was on one domain every time you would link back and forth to an article that linked juice would pass and like you'd be doing much better like your site would be way more cohesive and in the eyes of google but there was always this other side of my brain that thought to myself why the hell would anybody do that when as soon as they publish content they instantly rank number one for like shirt to match whatever sneaker they're doing so it was a long term play knowing there was the right thing to do however man when we launched it it was a real plummet so three three major things happened let's say two actually two major things happened all at once one we launched the website and i totally screwed up well i didn't screw it up like i executed it well it was just too much of a change all at once you know and so it was it was me not fully comprehending the potential consequences of such a big change like that so the keyword rankings totally dropped for all those short to match keywords but the second thing that happened is kanye west because all of the sudden like graphic tees weren't that cool anymore and all of a sudden it was about like this fit and it was about the silhouette of the clothing and all of a sudden skinny jeans were in and [ __ ] yeezys were in right and so like the entire brand of the entire culture of streetwear like instantly changed all because of kanye west and all of a sudden these these shirt to match keywords like weren't even getting that much search volume anymore so it's a double whammy of me totally totally blowing up my friend's company um if i could be yeah i'll interject for one second it's not like it sounds like maybe there was one thing in there that you could blame on yourself but kanye west coming in and changing the whole game which by the way i don't know much about streetwear or kanye but i've heard enough to know that like a lot of people in a lot of industries have had their [ __ ] blown up by kanye so you're just like yeah i'm not sure you can take that one as a as a blame but okay so right out of the gate the links drop off because of this change drop off yeah but so here's the thing that comes in okay so now i'm on semrush.com uh there's been a little bit of a slowdown since june of 2021 if you can see the search rankings but the reason is because the marketing for 89.com hasn't been as seo focused especially now that since this time ray has used eight nine and expanded into other markets which is really the point of all this and how much of a [ __ ] badass ray is so i know from the search ranking standpoint so this is when it happened right you see it you see it and then all of a sudden google just says like yes all of the content is on one website this is what we want and then bam so like what hold on sorry can i i i as a non-seo person do not understand what i'm looking at here so for people listening i'm looking at a line looks like a trend line it's going from zero to like 35 000 or so and that runs from like january 2013 all the way up to now and back in 2013 you know it was pretty close to zero so it seems like things were just kind of getting started back then and then rise rise rise around 2017 you guys are around 9k what is that that's organic traffic per yes yes but also remember that i can't remember exactly when we launched the website it was it was 2017. it was it was right about here so this is only eight and nine dot com right because all of the web traffic went to blog.89.com okay it was right around here when google has finally figured out that like all of the traffic is now on 89.com it's all on this one domain as opposed to blog.89.com okay and and for people listening what we're seeing is like basically a hockey stick straight up when that happened so this so that is what you're talking about when you say it was the right move yeah yes that was exactly right it was okay where's the wrong move showed in this data like is it that because i see a drop off maybe what six months later it kind of goes back down this drop-off is is pretty natural honestly the drop-off that we're seeing um again for people not looking at the video from june 2021 there's been a little bit of a drop off but this is different this is because ray and 89 took their marketing dollars a little bit away from seo and invested it into something new which is so freaking cool and which is really where this this story ends you know so from december 2017 up until i mean really it was it was like the beginning of 2021 when they made some of these changes this was a ton of success you know and this was finally the website getting traffic to itself but what you don't see is like from here to here if this was blog.889.com if we were looking at the search traffic for blog.89.com it would have been a huge drop-off because all of those match keywords got disappeared because google was all of a sudden like whoa where'd all this stuff go and they couldn't quite figure out that it was on the root domain instead of the sub domain okay let me let me re-explain that for people who again are like me and don't don't quite get the seo thing so this period of time that we're talking about back in 2017 for people listening to it the traffic line is basically horizontal and it's not really moving and then all of a sudden it shoots straight up and in my head i'm thinking to myself where's the problem here it looks like you changed the website took a little while but all of a sudden google figures it out and now tim's a hero what you're saying is during that time when google was figuring it out like literally all the rest of the traffic that you should be coming in disappeared okay so now i'm on board with you all right put it in and then eventually it started to work out yes but then not to mention the whole game got flipped upside down because they had to change the brand to be a little less like flashy graphic tees and more about silhouettes and and like the fit and the skinny jeans and so they really adapted right so this pair of jeans that they created i mean dude like looks cool they're very cool and they still they've stayed true to their brand like wright is so good at this when you look at this and you compare it to 10 years ago it's gonna be much different but it's still cohesive you can tell like this is still the same company with the same vision and so these jeans that they created man just bonkers in terms of sales and now they've created them in like every single color that they possibly can because ray's smart and he knows like let your winners ride it looks cool it looks like something that i would picture somebody wearing in like a new reboot of the karate kid like yeah but that that's like really accurate i love it they definitely look sweet so you said though that they have reallocated some of their budget to like a new form of marketing talk yes yes yes okay so like i said ray is kind of a silent assassin and so these new companies don't even have websites here's what he did and uh i'm going to keep my screen share and i'm going to exit out of this exactly this here we go when we saw that traffic drop traffic drop off from 2021 like i told you that wasn't necessarily because of something going wrong it was just because they started allocating in in different places so ray started two companies one is called 28-3 consulting it's a homage to the patriots in the super bowl when they were down 28 to 3. rey is originally from massachusetts it's terrible i know but whatever and then he created another company called end to end 28 to 3 consulting is a consulting firm that ray and his team made to work with high-profile artists who want to start their own merch line so over the years ray has just gotten so involved with different manufacturers he just knows how to get the best [ __ ] how to get it fast and how to make it look really pro so for instance one of the badges of honor sort of speak in the clothing line is to make it so on the back of your shirt you don't have a tag you have like an actual screen print because the the tags i mean most people won't notice it but if you're trying to create a real line and if you see one of your competitors and they have like a paper rip-off tag in the back you would be like this brand is a knockoff like they're not even they're not even trying to put sizes on their shirts you know they're not even trying to put a logo behind the neck they got a ripoff pack and so ray knows all of these things and he just hustled he booked a deal with marshmallow he's like a pretty famous dj he sells out festivals all the time plays in front of like i don't even know 50 000 people crowds at coachella and all types of stuff booked a deal a marshmallow book to deal with a couple of other hip-hop artists and created a turnkey manufacturing line that just takes people's brands and creates a high-level merch company for them you know so marshmallow comes to them she's like hey i want to start a clothing line i want a merch line and they do the designs they do the manufacturing they do the printing they do the shipping they poly bagged the whole thing and bam it's like a turnkey merch line it's freaking dope yeah can i just comment on that for a second i think that's such a good idea sure uh especially as we move deeper into what people are calling the creator economy uh one of my co-workers wrote a whole report on this uh how you know more and more influencers are basically going to start monetize right now the big thing is that influencers basically monetize through partnerships ad deals but you know you're selling somebody else's stuff and at a certain point more and more people are gonna catch on to the fact that you make a lot more money if you own the brand and so this whole idea of building basically shops or turnkey solutions to help influencers in different industries crank out their own products uh is pretty cool i think fashion is a huge one i think like makeup would be another huge one just based on some of the what like influencers that are are working in that space right now there's a few but this is really cool so that was um the consulting company we're looking right now though at something called rolling loud what is that yeah well perfect transition the consulting company isn't quite as hands-on as his second company which is called end to end so the consulting company is is exactly what it sounds like it's it's more consulting it's more design it's like helping somebody create a brand for themselves but end to end he bought a warehouse in miami and quite literally built entire merch lines end-to-end that's why it calls it end to end for huge organizations i believe i don't if i say this on air and it's not true i apologize right i'm not trying to say anything that's not true i believe he booked some huge church in atlanta i don't know if you've ever driven through atlanta and you're seeing these like soccer stadium churches it's pretty freaky nonetheless huge budgets with those organizations so he he booked a deal with them and then he booked a deal with rolling loud which is just a really really big hip-hop and music festival and he he built the entire merch line for rolling lounge rolling loud end to end across the whole world so now i'm going to be on his instagram check this [ __ ] out bro look at this holy [ __ ] i know so this is him i'm so proud we're looking at a hacked stadium how many people is that uh i'd say rolling loud has got a i mean there's gotta be it's gotta be 20 000 people i mean sure it's it's it's hard to tell exactly how many but i mean what ohio state football stadium is 80 000 right wembley is 80 000. i mean that looks like a soccer stadium full of people yeah it's a lot of people so he did the merch for this entire event for the entire event and so this is end to end so he okay oh sorry go on let me just unpack this for a second okay so he's got a streetwear brand yeah and it's successful so he knows the space and what you're basically seeing him do is go this would be vertical right yeah he's going vertical so he's getting up and down the supply chain rather than just cranking out the clothes now he owns means production and i'm i'm sure like means of distribution he's expanding into those areas that's rad i don't think we see a lot of case studies of people doing that with like smaller brands that you haven't heard of obviously you think of like big commercial brands like walmart or something they have huge incentives to verticalize but it's cool to see that a streetwear company thought to do that do you have any sense for which is like driving more revenue at this point i would bet that this company would probably be bigger uh yes all right let me take a step back a second because there's definitely a lot to unpack and even like explaining the evolution of this company is kind of difficult because you got to bounce around from a few things can i can i ask one more question that might work into what you're about to say do you know if he uses the infrastructure from end to end to produce oh what is it called six and nine close his company eight and nine sorry eight and nine yep does he use the infrastructure from his other business to do that now exactly yet man exactly so when you say he went vertical he didn't just go vertical he went vertical and then like deep into a pond you know so every single thing that he does it's like the deepest pond you've ever seen we're gonna i think we should trademark that that's like that's going to be the new it went deep into a pond yeah yeah that'll be the new case study format that like hbr works off of is you know let's just be five deep pond dives yeah okay so vertical all the way up and then down into then it went down yeah so what's so cool is that 809 is a fashion brand but it's really a media brand like really he took his his showroom they call it in miami and he turned into a podcast studio so one of the things that you did is a really big hip-hop podcast called drink champs i mean it's huge it's it's it's a really big deal like noriega noriego excuse me is one of the hosts another one of the hosts i forget his name if you've seen a picture of him you definitely recognize him as he's big in the hip-hop space i think he's a producer and so then overnight you know like some of the world's most famous rappers were just coming into his showroom and doing a podcast and then of course in the background it's all the 8-9 [ __ ] you know so i got to meet uh jadakiss through there i got to meet well i got to meet the whole all three of them from blocks lox and uh everybody like you know nipsy hustle would come through and 50 cent will come through and puff daddy will come through i don't care that he wants to be called he did his name's pup daddy and it was great so the show drink champs turned into like a media company that promoted his brand so he's got the leverage of tech and media that we talk about right but underneath the leverage he's got the infrastructure so with 2083 consulting it wasn't end to end as much as we think of it it was more so like hey you're a dj you want to start your own fashion line i'll help you do it and so he took that next step right he took his expertise and productized it and then after doing it for so long he's like you know what i can just build a damn warehouse i can just literally be people's entire infrastructure and so the leverage that he has is is huge because one once he gets like built in to these companies the whole entire thing depends on him you know and so now he went from a tiny little fashion brand in miami to controlling the whole infrastructure of you know one of the world's rolling cloud is probably top 20 biggest festivals i don't know maybe top 30. i don't i don't know for sure but it's huge and it's definitely so proud of them i well okay there's a couple things i love about this one thing i want to try and bring this home for people who are listening to it and thinking about like well how does this apply to what i'm working on right now and there's a lot of ways one of the ones that occurs to me as you're unpacking this is the thinking behind client acquisition for end to end so it sounds like well let's just talk about the brilliance of like taking your storefront and turning that into a hub for content creation it's so cool right something that yeah i don't think a lot of people are really and he would like invite vloggers in and he was just like yeah come on in bring your camera do a show here you want to sit down and do an interview and like he really decorated the whole thing it was so cool that is so cool and think about all the different ways you could do that so if you're i mean like in the restaurant business right or something like that just having the facility for for content creators to come and like have a professional setup and and do their thing at your location yeah would stand out i mean you and i know this it's funny that you mentioned this now i'm in a hotel doing what i call this sample special which if he hears this he hates that term and people throw it around for like a lot of different reasons but i'm going to use it today my laptop is is balanced on an upside down ottoman balanced on a hotel coffee table so it's like people love doing this content stuff it's not always easy to find a good place to do it and if you have a facility and you can like tap into the content creator dynamic inside your industry i think what he's doing in terms of just drawing people in is totally doable for a lot of people who have some kind of space already so i love that side of this and then just you know like we talked about a little bit earlier thinking about what's next after you have a successful product line which aspects of the rest of the vertical chain that you can integrate or expand control over do you have any idea what the deal looks like between him and the podcast that you mentioned is hosted in his space like did he get equity in that or did he just say hey come on in and use it for free but just bring cool people in you're not like okay cool so that's how he's probably getting clients for end to end is that like all the coolest rap stars are just dropping by his place this is so neat didn't the hundreds do something like this too i know they're their office is supposed to be real cool it's like skate ramps and stuff and they have like an incubator there so is this just like a streetwear thing or are those just two like i said a coincidence that two companies in the same space happen to have done nothing i don't think it's a coincidence because we talked about the hundreds before and how they were like one of the first fashion brands that used high-level content and ray definitely pulled a page from there but what he did is he just got even smaller because the hundreds is definitely streetwear but they're just so big that their their audience is kind of vague you know like i could wear a hundred shirt and i could be walking down the street and like somebody that it's just it's just street wear it really is like the definition of a wide-ranging thing of street wear but eight and nine totally totally got very very small to these sneaker heads and that's how it blew up you know they they found this lane they found this tight little angle that nobody else had an understanding of and they just wrote all of this content and timed it perfectly so that like as the sneakers would be releases all of a sudden it was bam here's like five articles about different outfits and t-shirts and jeans and pants and jewelry you can put together with these sneakers oh and by the way here's the shirt to match and it really worked but then you know they had to transition because the streetwear game really changed it was drastic it happened very very fast where it just like wasn't cool anymore and so that's when he got just more media based and more photography based because like you had to and you know instagram luckily they they rode that wave they got a huge instagram following we started generating more of their sales but ray is smart so you know there's a little bit behind the scenes he learned some hard lessons he had a lot of employees you know he had a whole lot of friends that kind of coming in and it was he he he had to get small and get lean and when he did that he was like okay i'm systematizing this whole [ __ ] and he systematized eight in nine as well as he could so that the sales would come in the product will get shipped the customer service would be handled everything was bam bam bam and now ray the expert is free he's free from the system he's free to do what he want and now all of a sudden all of this attention over the years you know the logo of 89 in the back of the drink chance podcast all the pictures were 50 cent and puff daddy in and you know like 89 life the hashtag starting to go viral and now all of a sudden it's like damn i got a consulting company so he takes his reputation he takes his knowledge and he productizes that and then all of a sudden it's like damn i got the whole entire thing front to back let me buy a warehouse and literally build multi-million dollar brands for huge organizations and that's what he did like i'm just so proud of her man i know the journey he's been on it like we can sit on a podcast and talk about how easy it is and how much success has been it hasn't been like that there's been some real ups and downs for him but he just he got through it and he's doing so good and i love it that's awesome i'm also really glad that you mentioned 50 cent and puff daddy because i recognize those names and you had mentioned some others and i'm like i'm sitting here going oh man someone's gonna be watching the video and they're gonna totally see in my eyes that i have no idea what tim is talking like marshmallow is that a thing is that the person that's an artist yeah yes man i i he was he's one of the best rappers ever i got um i hung it up in my office somewhere no i got a picture of of jadakiss and styles p um and i got their autograph so yeah give me a song what should i check out i'm gonna i'm gonna check them out uh well lox isn't quite as popular but but jadakiss in particular i mean if you just google jadakiss you you've heard him trust me you've heard him he's got a very very very particular like raspy voice that is what's this it's like the one i gotta add to my workout track um i can send you some it's so funny in this like spotify world i hardly even know the names of songs anymore you just find them and put them on playlist what a crazy life yeah yeah send me some man i'm going to check them out um this was cool this was really cool dude there's one thing one other thing that you're reminding me of as we sort of come to the close of this uh you mentioned this pivot in marketing and it ties in with something that uh sam was actually talking about earlier today i mean i mentioned sam we were all at this big hubspot event so we're all kind of like hanging out going to each other's talks and he had said something that i thought was kind of or he had done something that i posted about on twitter and i wanted to talk about here because i thought it was really interesting he was up on stage doing a q a and he just mentioned offhand he goes like who here is spending a lot of money on facebook right now there's probably two or three hundred people in the audience and i saw two maybe three hands go up wow and yeah and the reason i mean marketers will know why that's weird most other people probably wouldn't but like there was a time not that long ago probably what a year and a half ago two years ago where like literally every hand in that audience would have gone up in terms of where they were allocating most of their ad budget now not so much and so i just wanted to call that out because i thought that was a really interesting you know it was just a it was a quick second it didn't really take much time i don't think much people paid attention to it but you talk about shifts and pivots and i think there's something big coming man where that many marketers can be sitting in a room and that few of them even bother to call out that they're on facebook yeah what do you think that is what do you think is the change i think well we've seen facebook prices go up a lot it's way more expensive to to acquire users there these days that's true but i wonder about that because it's still very cheap in comparison to the rest of history like facebook is still a freaking deal you know that's yeah that's true i i think there's a part of it too i mean you and i have talked about different stats related to this and i think part of it uh comes down to what type of acquisition you're looking for right is it a free email sign up or is it a paid customer because i think maybe it's harder to get paid customers by those channels these days yeah but for media and stuff there's still opportunity there maybe there is for econ too i don't know but the other thing the bigger thing i think is that there's these other platforms that are just they're trying to eat facebook's lunch right so tick tock is specifically going after facebook and they're trying to make it way more attractive to advertise on tick tock linkedin dude linkedin just sucks their content game on linkedin sucks and so there's all these people who are just professional attention getters now and they've mostly avoided linkedin and i think there's you're going to see a huge title wave of people going to linkedin for content because they're just so hungry for good storytelling over there and then direct mail i mean this is something another colleague of mine was talking about at the conference there's like i'm gonna forget all the statistics so i didn't want to try and quote them but direct mail is performing really well right now because it's been like there's new technology that ties it to online campaigns much more quickly than it used to be able to be than used to be possible so attribution's much more accurate delivery is quicker if there's a lot less friction involved in buying so direct mail's going to be huge right now too and i think all those trends will continue to play out of course the next like one to two years those are my thoughts what do you think i mean are are you seeing the same thing in terms of facebook spend and what do you think about it i have two thoughts on this one i think mark zuckerberg is probably the most competent ceo in the last hundred years and i am very apprehensive to bet against him seriously like look at their stock look at their revenues they're still just a cash cow money flowing machine um i do think that the ios stuff does have a significant effect on them because they lose so much of the targeting and like that does hurt you know i i can think of specifically one real high level ecommerce brand that just lost all of their targeting and it really really hurt them um so that sucks i don't think tiktok is gonna build the ecosystem for good advertising because the whole entire structure of tick tock is designed around what's next what's next what's next right like i bet the time spent on each video the average time spent is probably like three or four seconds and they don't have a mechanism that creates pattern interrupt that makes people stop long enough like you you would do that on facebook especially on desktop because all the real estate for the facebook ads is really important on desktop you you could be scrolling and then like you would see something like oh that's interesting but on tick tock like everything is interesting like everything is a is a dopamine hit and there's nothing that actually takes you back to be like huh what's this you know so we'll see how that plays out like i don't have any skin in the game on that i don't i don't really care either way it's just my personal my personal viewpoint on the personalities of the platforms let's call it so but here's the question where's it gonna go right where's all that money gonna go i think that it's hard to quantify specifically because it's a little bit of a shift in thinking but i think it's going to the long tail you know i think that everybody has their own podcast and everybody has their own email list and the same message that we've talked about over and over and over again like before you could dump a hundred grand a month into facebook and talk to everybody and it would work and i just think that it's working less and less now and you have to have a hundred grand a month and put it into you know 50 newsletters and 50 podcasts and find your actual audience because because the the money is very very long tail now because people are like people aren't as emotionally invested in a facebook page as they are in like their favorite person's podcast you know i mean and so i think the money isn't it's it's difficult to really measure because you can't say like oh i went from facebook to tick-tock right i think it's going from facebook and i think it's going everywhere just spread out on the long tail and i don't know how you would ever measure that that's super interesting yeah i feel like we'll have to have a longer conversation about this but they're they're uh yeah there definitely seems to be quite a flight from facebook so i think you're right yeah and i don't know how you would track it but that's going to be very interesting for the next couple of years as marketers figure that out i think there's something generational about it too like me too there's a whole new generation of buyers coming online and my suspicion is like you know in general in nature i think systems seem to sort of follow the same patterns where there's like an aggregation and then this dispersal and aggregate it's almost like you know waves in the ocean and you know google ads were one of the aggregators facebook was one of the aggregators and then maybe we are just in a cycle where all the money runs out until you find something new that really really works yeah right until it goes somewhere right yeah and then somebody's going to do that really well and it's always the one that you don't expect right because that's i mean that's kind of the law of marketing it's the one that nobody's talking about right now so that's what's going to start delivering i'm calling it usps us postal service is going to be the biggest startup of the next 10 years i'm telling you man i'm calling amazon ad network you think so for sure what about hours apple just announced one well and that's cool because i guess apple could run ads on like the app store like that's that's basically their social media platform right is the app store um and yeah that would i mean that would definitely make money no question like apple executes really well but uh i think that it'll be even just more long tail like i'm surprised shopify hasn't created their own ad network yet yeah you know we joke about it a lot what was that i was just gonna say we joke a lot here about how all businesses eventually become ad networks so it'll be like right you know it'll be uh the uber ad network or like exactly yeah that's gonna be the next one like why wouldn't ubereats have a ad network where like local restaurants or airbnb so perfect example when i was on my honeymoon in norway really funny my wife and i just have an inside joke about alpacas i don't know if you ever found one or seen one they're hysterical i've never found an elk well we did and we were wild yeah we did um and so we're in norway and we're on airbnb and an alpaca farm comes up on airbnb it's like a local business it's just like hey looking for something to do with norway come to our alpaca farm and so i yeah like that's that's the car right every distribution channel becomes its own ad network but it becomes an ad network for people very specific right because i'm when i'm in norway and airbnb serves me an ad i don't give a [ __ ] about a clothing company in australia you know what i mean like i want to go to this alpaca farm and so i think it just gets very very very long tail where all the ads are going to be served to all the people that are like really really into whatever it is that platform is doing yeah i agree with you i think there's also a black swan element to it too like i i don't know what it's going to be that's kind of the purpose of the black swan but you know i've lived through enough cycles now to come to expect that whatever the next big thing is i don't actually think anybody's equipped to predict it because i think there's there's almost always some element that's completely unseen unforeseen right so some new technology comes into play or something like the pandemic i mean nobody would have been predicting that newsletters would have been a huge advertising you know vehicle three years ago just wasn't gonna happen right the whole story three years ago is nobody pays for content yeah now like new york times has proved that wrong so there's always some black swan element and i guess we're just waiting for that shoe to drop and see what it ends up being but i i agree with you dude it's definitely a change in the air so this was really interesting man is there anything else that you wanted to call out for people they were kind of listening to the close of this episode oh man this was a fun episode i i know that it was a little bit back and forth i'm a little bit sleep deprived um [Music] so it's been a wild week for me um check out eight and nine they're my favorite clothing company ever and ray is just he's he's someone that really inspires me and so if you follow him on instagram and like check him out i'm sure he'll inspire you as well but i think one thing that we should think about for next week maybe maybe we should do a little bit of research on what the last 10 years has been like for like the average spend on all of these platforms and let's let's if we can figure out where it's going you know if we take like 20 of them and we just split them like is airbnb an actual ad network now right is uber an actual ad network now i don't know that could be really cool yeah yeah it could be really interesting and like what are the unexpected ones you know like like like you said with airbnb and uber because i think you know everybody knows about facebook and google it would be really interesting to see what the overall spend is there because you know the other thing is like you hear all these doomsday things about how people are like you know we're going into a recession potentially or you know sort of noise type of ad is dying that type well yeah hopefully it doesn't annoy you too much because we did a whole episode on it but the the fact remains like nobody knows if if we're actually not that's not what i was going to say the fact remains sometimes even though public sentiment is one way like hey we're going for a recession or this type of advertising is dead or whatever the data doesn't back it up right and we saw this pretty much right after we recorded that session about you know looming recession and then there's all this data that came out that said yeah a lot of people are talking about a recession but like if you look at the data the economy's still doing great so i don't know it would be really interesting to pull data on some of these different ad networks and see like what is actually going up what's going down let's do that let's do it all right brother well congratulations again thank you and the family yeah i'm gonna go chill on my pop and it's just i can't believe i have two kids like i really can't i'm a daughter too which is [ __ ] a trip yeah yeah life is good man thank you so much for the kind words really appreciate it thank you for jumping on i'm glad that your conference was good you uh you made it happen goodbye [Music] you